At Swim, Two Boys

  Then Doyler said, “I think I’m going to ask for a kiss.”

  And Jim said, “I think I hoped if you would.”

  They neither of them moved. Until they heard voices approaching, and Jim quickly pulled away.

  Butler, Courtney, Pigott. Butler had the cigarette, for his father had the tobacconist’s.

  “Clear off,” Doyler said. “Yous aren’t let in here.”

  “Sure, boys, we’re after interrupting the lovebirds.”

  “Fuck off, Courtney.”

  “Who’re you telling—who’s he telling to eff off?”

  “Hark the college boy. Can’t even fuck like a man.”

  Butler said something about the ineffable Doyle. Courtney still looked shocked. Pigott leant against the wall. He had paper and tobacco for making a cigarette. He rolled it, watching Doyler. He licked the paper and said, “Where’s your badge?”

  “Never you mind me badge.”

  “You was sporting it earlier. Mighty proud you looked. Never had known we had a Larkinite in our midst.”

  “Larrikinite,” said Butler.

  “Stick it, Butler. You know where and all.”

  “Had it whipped off pretty fly, all the same, when the priest was there.”

  “You want to make something of that, Pigott?”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t want a certain somebody finding you out,” said Butler.

  “Go on and smoke your gasper. We’ll see about badges.”

  “We’ll see about feathers.”

  “Butler, do you really want me to wallop you?”

  “I’m a reasonable chap,” said Pigott, “and I don’t go for this baiting fellows less fortunate than meself. But you need to know I won’t have a buttonman in my company. You need to understand that, Doyle.”

  “It’s a shame you’ll be leaving the band so.”

  “You make him see reason,” Pigott said to Jim. “Tell your pal don’t be making a parade of himself. Tell him I’m afraid he’ll be properly licked else.”

  “Aye will I,” said Doyler. Pigott raised a cautioning finger. He beckoned the others to follow him, and lumbered off. “And if you lick me all over you won’t miss me arse. Mawgabraw!” Doyler shouted. He turned to Jim. “Do you mind the cheek of that?”

  Jim said, “He means what he says. His da’s something in the Hibernians.”

  “He looks the bully neck would have a da that way.”

  He was panting a bit, out of his breath with anger. Jim said, “We should go,” but Doyler paid no regard, just slumped in the grass. Jim knelt down. He felt jiddery in his legs and he had to hunker back on his heels. He was intimidated by the boys in a way he had not felt before. They had brought this on themselves and it was only right the boys should menace them. Through his fallen hair he stole a view of Doyler’s face. There was doubt in his eyes, the way they squinted back at him. His forehead was frowning and his jaw chewed, ruminating, like he had trouble thinking. Some calculation, on the tip of Jim’s nose, that would not add up.

  He said, “I seen them fists you had in your hands. You’re a good pal. You was ready there to back me.”

  “We’ll go,” said Jim.

  “Is that what they call us, the lovebirds?”

  “No.”

  “Why did he say it?”

  “That’s just Courtney.”

  It was nearly chilly in the grass. The shadows of the trees reached beyond them and made crazy jags along the wall. From up the lawns came the groan of a warpipes.

  “Lie down a moment.”

  “No,” said Jim, “we should go back.”

  “A moment just.”

  He pulled Jim down by the hands. Jim was looking about him, and Doyler said, “They’re gone. They won’t be back. There’s no one to see us here.” He pushed Jim’s shoulders down, not roughly but firmly, and kept his hands there till Jim settled. “It’s all right,” he said. He lay beside, leaning over a little. He put his hand on Jim’s leg.

  The grass had nearly a smoky smell. Midges were rising. Jim felt a swamp of heat, though the sun was way behind the trees. His neck was straining as he tried to watch the hand. The saffron of his kilt creased and contoured. The hand was moving upward. The saffron flower, he told himself, is either purple or white. It is the stigmas that are used for dye.

  It didn’t seem to be Doyler’s hand at all, merely one of those things with which the world was furnished. It shifted the hem of Jim’s kilt so that his thigh was revealed, gooselike and pale. The passage of the hand was mesmerizing. Doyler too watched it, darting betweenwhiles glances at Jim’s face. Then very quietly he said, “Did you ever hear tell of a place called Sparta?”

  Jim felt the strain in his neck and a stiffening in his throat, and the impossible strangeness of moving things. The saffron flower is not yellow at all. It is the stigmas that give the dye. He swallowed. “It was in ancient Greece. They fought Athens in the Peloponnesian War.”

  “Did they win?”

  “In the end they did.”

  “I’m glad of that. Can I hold it now?”

  “No,” said Jim, but he was already holding it.

  “It’s all right,” Doyler told him. “You wanted this. It’s what you wanted me to do.”

  “No, I didn’t. I don’t.”

  “Ask me to stop so, and I will.”

  “Stop it, Doyler.”

  He looked into Jim’s face. Jim had to blink his eyes deep shut. The hand came away from his kilt but Jim couldn’t look at it for fear of its being disfigured or discolored some way. He couldn’t look at Doyler at all, and he turned his head on the grass.

  “We have to go now,” he said. “They’ll be wondering what’s happened.”

  “Won’t you kiss me, Jim, even?”

  “No.”

  For a moment or two they lay side by side. Side by side they lay, then Doyler got up and walked away.

  * * *

  The shadows of evening were closing in and gathering about the sycamores, while MacMurrough wandered the fête’s periphery, waiting for the drama to begin. He was thinking of Kettle. He was thinking of truth. The good and the true and that other one, the beautiful, whose presence in the triad, like the Holy Ghost’s in the Trinity, he could never quite account for. It had always appeared a sop to the virtuous, those who had endured the joyless good and the starched truth and now, bless them, were entitled to a little entertainment. Bring on the beauty.

  But as regards Kettle: why had MacMurrough spoken out in the library? It had seemed a manifesto. This is the truth and I will have it said. He had forced Kettle to an open repulse. The eyes had unhazed and for that moment MacMurrough stood revealed for the ugly sod he was. Tom-tom Kettle-drum. All the Home Rule in the world would not tarry that gentleman in the library then. Nor French brandy nor Spanish ale nor wine from the royal Pope.

  MacMurrough, sneering, smiled. He found, flicked open, his grandfather’s cigar-case. He viewed the contents as might a bully considering his victims. In a trice, the cigar-case was his aunt’s traveling-glass, and he inquired of his brazen image, Am I truly such an ugly sod?

  Yes, there was something altogether tantalizing about truth. One burnt to tell it, for it to be known. Dreaded it, too, that someone else should say it, their saying making it true, the truth true, unalterable. He thought of that phrase from Wilde: What one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry on the housetop. Wilde had meant in confession. Was it conceivable to cry out with pride? When Kettle had asked was there a flaw in his character, he had replied that he did not think it a flaw.

  —Braggadocio is nothing to the point, said Scrotes.

  No, agreed MacMurrough. He hadn’t thought it would be.

  Now warpipes summonsed the fugitive crowd; and rounding a shrubbery MacMurrough saw the declining sun had set the stage. Antic forms waited in the wings, but first, yes, of course—“But first, my lords, reverend sirs, ladies and gentlemen”—the schoolmaster had words of introduction.

  A cresc
ent enclosure had been roped in front whereout the tophats poked; birettas, a red among the black, peaked cowls of mendicants; ferny feathery whiskery toques. MacMurrough waited with the poor people at the back, bare-headed, his topper in his hand, wafting misty alps from a ripe maduro. The mobility muttered among themselves and he heard an old woman whisper, God bless your work, alannah. He turned, thinking absurdly of himself, but no, it was the schoolmaster she blessed.

  “We of Na Fianna Eireann,” said he, “address ourselves to the boys of Ireland.”

  MacMurrough watched the tall rather awkward man who gazed with a calm unexpected confidence upon his audience. He was costumed in a uniform of heather green, military cap tucked under his elbow, a sword dangling at his thigh. Earlier, when they had met on the terrace, he had worn a frock-coat, old-fashioned, skirted. He had looked a minister then, something temperance or the Society of Friends. Now, for all his martial trappings, he presented the conscientious padre. His slight lisp his practiced lips suppressed, as in measured cadences he addressed the nation’s youth.

  “We believe that the highest thing that a young man can do is to serve well and truly, and we purpose to serve Ireland with all our fealty and with all our strength.”

  He had come with his own blush of boys. All afternoon they had shimmered upon the lawns. MacMurrough had been attracted to them, naturally, but he found he hesitated to approach. How aloof they were, discrete from the mass. He had known the camaraderie of those who boarded together, the braggart bonds of public schoolboys. These were different. Their aloofness seemed not of their keeping but as though of their nature, unalloyable.

  Now, they watched from the wings while their master spoke, they mantled in untutored cloth, in leather sandals shod, leaning on spears and broadswords, each boy with upturned face as he waited his part in the coming drama. And it seemed to MacMurrough their gaze would enray their master’s face, that face the sun itself would glory, as it tipped in magnificent burst the darkling sycamores behind.

  It was love, of course, that separated them. So clear it shone it hurt to see. A dozen boys who loved their master. In loving they became extraordinary. Embodiments of unattainable desire, fantastic as the man they served.

  For the schoolmaster, MacMurrough had found, was indeed fantastic. His aunt’s priest had made their introduction—Happy to, Servant, Yours to command—and shortly after had been called away. There was the least inquisition of a smile on the schoolmaster’s face. Hair glistened with oil against a broad white forehead. Deep-set eyes, one of which had something of a cast, occasioning MacMurrough to avert his glance and peer at his shoes instead.

  Might he help the schoolmaster to wine? The schoolmaster thanked him, but he would not. MacMurrough understood the schoolmaster was to give an oration on the morrow. The schoolmaster had that honor, it was true. Was the departed a particular friend of the schoolmaster’s? They were not personally acquainted, but the deceased had worked long in the public arena.

  It was pinch and cramp to get any conversation at all. MacMurrough scraped his bals on the gravel. He had heard the schoolmaster was recently returned from Connemara. Gravely nodded the high-walled forehead. Was MacMurrough familiar with the west of Ireland? MacMurrough was ashamed to say, no; however, he entertained a notion of its being picturesque. The schoolmaster would assure him of that. And had the schoolmaster enjoyed his holiday? For his sins, the schoolmaster had been much engaged in the penning of his oration.

  Which rather had them back where they’d started. And that, on the face of it, was that. Save there had been an undertone quite the obverse of these mundanities. There could not be so very much in their ages, but the schoolmaster had made MacMurrough feel himself a schoolboy.

  Or, rather, he had not quelled the feeling. For MacMurrough often had a sense of his being younger. This was not a fancy, certainly it was not deliberate. His unconscious mind had not kept pace with the years. He did not know why and he had given up wondering, but just on that threshold before thought or action his sense of himself was of a burgeoning youth. He was on the verge of manhood, always the verge. So persistent was this notion that strangers he encountered, ontologically his junior, he would often consider his psychological senior. His immediate disposition was to defer to such were they of his caste, be fucked by them were they not. This notion could not survive the liminal step into consciousness. Consciousness pulled him up, sharp as a looking-glass, and told out his proper years. But there it was. Before he thought or he acted, MacMurrough was a boy on the verge of manhood. Always, just.

  And the schoolmaster, in his halting way, had not addressed himself ad hominem to MacMurrough. He had found out this youth, had found him out and drawn him on. For that little while on the terrace together, MacMurrough had consciously been a boy in the presence of his master. He had a schoolboy’s itch to play practical jokes on this reverent character. Even more, a schoolboy’s sense of fairness that it would be shabby to deceive so patently unworldly a man. He rather felt he wanted to please him. He wanted to overhear him say to another, Young MacMurrough is coming along well. We may expect great things of young MacMurrough.

  It was all quite confusing and MacMurrough had been relieved to get away, to find Kettle in the library, and drink whiskey and soda with his urbane kind. Now, listening to the schoolmaster’s speech from the stage, he wondered had many of us this child inside. It would explain the appeal of this curious man. For his sentiments, though he spoke them with dignity and with some passion, were commonplace enough: the local expression of a continental theme: Boy Scout mores and muscular worship, the Christ-like sacrifice of youth. The same had sung half Europe to the trenches. As ideal he proffered a legendary band of Gaels who had fought and died, as he put it, in the beauty of their boyhood. It was all very speech-day at school or any recruiting-meet where the cloth attended. Had the fellow been English, MacMurrough should have mocked him for the type of by-jingo bourgeois.

  Yet he did appeal. And there was more to this appeal than the novelty of kilts and Gaelic. He found out the child in all who listened, and all who heard became their younger selves. MacMurrough could feel it now when he told of the Fianna of yore. How did they win their battles? Strength that was in their hands, Truth that was on their lips, Purity that was in their hearts.

  Aye, there is manhood. MacMurrough closed his eyes. I am that boy on that manhood’s verge. I yearn for magnificence, and my heart heaves for a tale of courage and high deeds. My face has not set, I know not yet what I have become. Precious is life, in my limbs, in my soul. Gladly will I spill it to a noble end.

  MacMurrough took a step back. He blinked in the red of the sun. This man is dangerous.

  But this man had finished. The speech was done. Applause clip-clapped from the crescent enclosure. The poor unknitted their brows and shuffled their feet, muttering once more among themselves. Behind the trees a bauble glowed whose rays were tinsel. Again a warpipe droned. Boys traversed the thumping boards. A torchlit tableau was formed. From the steps to the stage the schoolmaster watched. One saw his receding hairline, that he was a touch overweight, his somewhat of a stoop. The schoolmaster might have sensed MacMurrough’s scrutiny, for his face turned to profile. The marred eye was concealed.

  —A fascinating character, said Scrotes.

  —Truly, agreed MacMurrough.

  —In propinquity or while he orates, quite potent.

  —Then how soon afterwards his words dissolve. Viewed dispassionately he becomes ridiculous.

  Indeed, he presented an easy target for scoffing. His sword of rank adangle oddly, his puttees immaculately wound the wrong way round, was that a whistle he had hanging? Who hadn’t known his ilk at school? Cadets, college OTC—adore the fandangles of soldiering, equipped with every last accoutrement, all things spruce and shiny. Two left feet when it comes to parade. The type who can’t look at a gun without the thing blasting off, lethal near anything live. This man will take on the British Empire.

  —Will he win? he
asked Scrotes.

  —He will certainly venture his life. The only doubt is the cause he will venture it in.

  —Why, his country’s freedom, I should think.

  —Ah, said Scrotes, but which is his country? It is scarcely the tired old hag of the songs, nor yet the beautiful woman of the prophecies.

  No, thought MacMurrough, that is not his Ireland.

  —See, said Scrotes, his Ireland is on the stage.

  Yes, there it was in the boys, those gossamery boys who thumped the stage. The soft barbarish Gaelic chanted his love to heaven and earth. By flaming torch the garden told it. A queer music hummed it to the sea. His steadfast gaze from the wings, their glances to him. Here was his Ireland, his drama his love.

  MacMurrough thought of his own boys on their benches in the summerhouse. He dared not reach to them and they sensed his reserve. Their faces quickened if the priest or his aunt came, quickened if only in trepidation. Then sullened anew when those personages had left, giving back MacMurrough’s distrust.

  How did this schoolteacher do this? How did he make these boys love him so? Every glint of their eyes shot defiance to the world. Stooping stumbling fellow: he has shorn the curtains and entered the land of youth. See him reign, king of boys, master of all his desires.

  And it seemed to MacMurrough that he, too, would make such love. And not a breath of a lip nor a hair of a brow should know of it. His gaze lifted to the purpling sky. May the heart be redeemed by renunciation? Are they not truly the good who, desiring evil, renounce their desires? Am I not also to love and be loved?

  —Hush now, said Scrotes.

  —Don’t you get it, old man? I want to feel good. I never have that feeling. It’s tiresome knowing oneself evil always. That man up there drips goodness like a sweat. I should just like a feel of it myself for once.