EVERY SUNDAY morning, at a time when the rest of the city was at church, a few of us met down the quays. We ranged from a clerical student with scruples to a roaring atheist. The atheist, Dan Turner, was the one I liked best. He was a well-built, fresh-coloured man who looked like a sailor or farmer, but was really a County Council official. Part of my sympathy for him was due to the way he was penalized for his opinions. Long before, at the age of eighteen, he had had to give evidence in a taxation case and refused to take the oath. That finished him. Though he was easily the cleverest man in the Courthouse, he would never be secretary or anything approaching it. And knowing that, and knowing the constant intriguing to keep him from promotion, only made him more positive and truculent. Not that he thought of himself as either; in his own opinion he was a perfect example of the English genius for compromise, but the nearest thing he ever got to ignoring some remark he disagreed with was to raise his eyebrows into his hair, turn his blue eyes the other way, and whistle.
‘You take things to the fair, Dan,’ I said to him once.
‘All I ask,’ he replied reasonably enough, ‘is that bloody idiots will keep their opinions to themselves and not be working them off on me.’
‘If you want bloody idiots to do anything of the kind,’ I said, ‘you should go somewhere you won’t be a target for them.’
‘And if we all do that, this country will never be anything, only a home for idiots,’ he said.
‘Oh, of course, if you want to make a martyr of yourself in the interests of the country, that’s a different thing,’ I said. ‘But it seems to me very queer conduct for a man that calls himself a rationalist. I call that sentimentality.’
He nearly struck me over calling it sentimentality, but, of course, that’s what it was. For all the man’s brains, he was as emotional as a child. He was cut to the heart by all the intrigues against him. He lived in an old house on the quays with a pious maiden sister called Madge who adored him, cluck-clucked and tut-tutted his most extravagant statements, and went to Mass every morning to pray for his conversion. Though it hurt him that she called in outside aid (even if it was purely imaginary), he was too big a man to hold it against her, and according to his lights he did his best to bring her to some sense of proportion.
‘That’s not religion at all,’ he would shout, slapping the arm of his chair in vexation. ‘That’s damn superstition,’ but Madge only pitied and loved him the more for it, and went on in her own way believing in God, ghosts, fairies and nutmegs for lumbago.
It wasn’t until well on in his thirties that Dan fell in love, and then he did it in a way that no rationalist could approve of. Tessa Bridie wasn’t very young either, but, as with many another fine girl in the provinces, she found the fellows that wanted to marry her were not always those she wanted to marry. As a last resort she was holding on to a clerk in an insurance office, called MacGuinness, with jet-black curly hair, nationalist sentiments, and great aspirations after the religious life, which, I suppose, is the only sort of life a clerk in an insurance office can aspire to.
In spite of the way he had been spoiled by Madge, Tessa was convinced for a long time that Dan was the answer to her prayers. But Dan in his simple, straightforward way wouldn’t let her be. He explained that he couldn’t be the answer to anyone’s prayer, because there was no one to answer prayers, and it was foolishness, foolishness and madness, to imagine they were answered. Now, Tessa wasn’t by any means a bigoted girl; she had several brothers and she knew that in the matter of religion and politics every man without exception had some deficiency, but this cut at the very roots of her existence. Because if Dan wasn’t the answer to her prayers, what was he? She quietly started a novena for enlightenment, hoping to bring in a verdict in his favour, but so acute was her awareness of his view that there was no enlightenment either, only whatever you wanted to believe yourself, that it ended by convincing her that it was her duty to give him up. He begged and prayed, he cursed and blinded; he assured her he was the most tolerant man in the world and she could believe in any damn nonsense she liked if only she’d marry him, but he had no chance against a direct revelation from heaven. She got engaged to MacGuinness.
I thought it a pity, because she was a really nice girl, and MacGuinness was only a poor dishcloth of a man.
Then I heard through my sister that Dan was behaving very queerly. It seemed he had deserted all his old haunts (he no longer came down the quays on Sundays), refused to eat or talk, and didn’t stir out at night until after dark, when he went for long, lonesome walks in the country. People who had met him talked about the way he passed them without looking or the brief nod he gave them. I knew the symptoms. I felt it was up to me to do something. So one fine spring evening I called. Madge opened the door, and I could see that she had been crying.
‘I didn’t see Dan this long time, Madge,’ said I. ‘How is he?’
‘Come in, Michael John,’ she said, taking out her handkerchief. ‘He’s upstairs. He didn’t stir out this last couple of days. Sure, you know the County Council will never stand it.’
I followed her up the stairs. Dan was lying on the bed, dressed but without collar and tie, his two hands under his head, apparently studying the ceiling. When I came in he raised his brows with his usual look of blank astonishment as much as to say: ‘What the hell do you want?’
‘Would you like a cup of tea, Dan?’ Madge asked anxiously.
‘If ’tis for me you needn’t mind,’ said Dan with a patient, long-suffering air that made it only too plain what he thought of the suggestion that he could be snatched back from the gates of the grave by a cup of tea.
‘Wisha, I’m sure Michael John would like one,’ said Madge.
‘You’re not feeling well, I hear?’ I said.
‘I don’t know how you heard anything of the kind,’ said Dan, rolling his blue eyes to the other side of the room, ‘because I’m sure I didn’t say anything about it.’
‘Wisha, Michael John,’ Madge burst out, ‘did you ever in all your life hear of a grown man carrying on like that on account of a woman?’
‘Now,’ Dan said, raising his voice and turning the flat of his hand in her direction like a partition wall, ‘I told you I wasn’t going to discuss my business with you.’
‘Why then, indeed, she discussed it enough,’ said Madge, not realizing how every word hurt. ‘There wasn’t much about you that she didn’t repeat. How well I could hear it all from a woman in the market.’
‘Well, go back and discuss it with the woman in the market,’ he retorted brutally. She gave me a tearful smile and went out.
‘You have a grand view,’ I said, looking down on the quays and the three-master below the bridge in the dusk.
‘Yes,’ he said grudgingly, ‘but there isn’t the traffic there used to be.’
‘You never wanted to be a sailor?’ I asked.
‘I was never asked,’ he replied as if this was a grievance that hadn’t occurred to him before. ‘No one ever consulted me about what I wanted to be.’
‘What you need is a holiday,’ I said.
‘How can I take a holiday?’ he asked, turning his blue eyes wonderingly on me as if he had discovered that I, too, had come with a view to persecuting him further.
‘If you go on like this you’ll take a holiday whether you like it or not,’ I said, ‘and it won’t be by the seaside. We’ll go to Ballybunion for a week.’
The eyebrows went up again.
‘Parish priests!’
‘All right,’ I said to humour him. ‘We’ll go where there are no parish priests.’
‘I’d like to see London again,’ he admitted. ‘I wasn’t there for ten years.’
The idea of that almost got him into good humour, and when I was leaving he put on a collar and tie and walked home with me. I could see that Madge was well pleased with the result of my intervention, and I wasn’t altogether dissatisfied myself.
But the pleasure didn’t last long. Next morning I was in the yard when she called. She could scarcely speak for terror.
‘Michael John, something awful is after happening,’ she said.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘ ’Tis Dan. I don’t know what to do with him. He tried to commit suicide.’
‘He what?’ I said, aghast.
‘He did, Michael John. After he came home last night. He turned on the gas-tap before he went to bed. I know because I could still smell it this morning. He’s in bed now with a terrible headache.’ Then she began to cry. ‘Sure, anyone could have told him you couldn’t commit suicide with the gas we have in our house.’
‘I’ll be down this evening,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to get him away by Saturday without fail.’
I spoke with a good deal more confidence than I felt. Suicide was a thing I had no experience of, because in our class a man’s family or friends would never let him go so far. It was only with a freak of nature like Dan that the thing became possible at all, and, knowing the man’s obstinacy, I wasn’t sure but that he might try the same thing again. I didn’t know what was the best thing to do. I bought a bottle of whiskey and a few lively gramophone records to bring him, because whenever I feel like committing suicide myself, I usually go out and buy whatever takes my fancy. After such a tribute of respect to myself, I never feel so inclined to deprive the community of my services.
He was sitting in the front room when I went in, still without his collar and tie, and he barely lifted his head to salute me. With the dusk coming down on the river outside, the man seemed so lonesome, so shut away in his own doubt and gloom, that my heart bled for him.
‘Well,’ I said, trying to make my voice sound as cheerful and out of doors as possible, ‘I got leave from Saturday if you’re ready to start.’
‘I don’t know that I’ll be able,’ he replied in a dead voice as though the words were merely a momentary interruption of the train of thought that went on in his head.
‘You’ll have to,’ I said. ‘You can’t go on like this much longer.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of going on much longer,’ he said in the same tone. It was exactly as if there was a wall of cotton-wool between us.
‘Why?’ I said, raising my voice and trying to make a joke of it. ‘You weren’t thinking of chucking yourself in the river or anything?’
‘I suppose a man might as well do that as anything else,’ he said.
‘Ah, look here, Dan,’ I said, opening the bottle of whiskey, ‘we all feel like that at times, and it’s only a mug’s game. In a week’s time you’ll be laughing at it.’
‘Of course, if you’re not there in a week’s time, you won’t have an opportunity of laughing at it,’ he said, positive even in despair.
‘That’s why it’s a mug’s game,’ I said, filling him out a stiff one. Doing something permanent about something temporary is always a mug’s game, like burning the house to get rid of a leak in the roof.’
‘Temporary?’ he said, raising his brows at me and becoming more like himself. ‘Is old age a temporary state?’
‘Old age?’ I said. ‘Merciful God, how old are you? Thirty-five?’
‘Thirty-eight,’ he said in the tone of some old paralytic telling you he’s eighty-three and that he wished the Lord would take him soon. ‘And what has a man of thirty-eight to look forward to in this country, Mr Dunphy?’
‘Being thirty-nine,’ said I.
‘It’s hardly likely to be much pleasanter than being thirty-eight,’ he said. ‘And that, let me tell you, is no sinecure.’
I took my whiskey and sat opposite him, while he still continued to look at me moodily, a big powerful red-faced man, his hands over the arms of his chair, his head lowered, his eyebrows raised, his blue, smouldering eyes in ambush beneath them.
‘The trouble with you, Dan,’ I said, ‘is that you’re under two illusions. One is that everyone except yourself is having a lovely time; the other is that when you’re dead your troubles are at an end.’
That roused him.
‘That’s not an illusion,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘That’s a scientific fact.’
‘Fact, my nanny!’ I said. ‘How could it be a fact?’
‘ ’Tis a fact that anyone can see with his own two eyes,’ he said, getting angrier and more positive.
‘Well, I can’t see it for one,’ I said.
‘You can see it, but you don’t want to see it,’ he said, tossing his big head at me. ‘It doesn’t suit you to see it. You’re like all the other gentlemen who pretend they can’t see it. My God,’ he said, beginning to explode on me, ‘the vanity and conceit of people, imagining that their own miserable little existence is too valuable to be wiped out!’
Then I began to get angry too. Forgetting the fellow was a sick man, I wanted to take it out of him for his unmannerly arrogance and complacency.
‘And who the hell are you?’ I said. ‘Who told you you were alive in the first place?’
‘Who told me?’ he asked, a bit shaken. ‘No one told me. I am alive. If I didn’t know that I wouldn’t know anything.’
‘And who the blazes said you do know anything?’ I shouted. ‘As long as you can’t tell me who you really are, or what you’re doing in this room at this moment, you have no right to tell me in that impudent tone that when you die there’s no more about you.’
He thought about that for a moment. I fancy it had never occurred to him in his life before that a man with his strong character mightn’t be as real as he thought himself and that he didn’t quite know how to answer it.
‘I admit there are some things you can’t explain yet,’ he admitted grudgingly.
‘Nor never will be able to explain,’ said I.
‘Everything can be explained,’ he said, getting indignant again.
‘Not things that are deliberately intended not to be explained,’ said I. ‘There are things we don’t know, because if we knew them, whatever the answer was, we couldn’t go on living.’
‘Plenty of people think they know them.’
‘They have faith,’ said I. ‘But faith, without doubt, can’t exist.’
‘They have more than faith, Mr Dunphy,’ he said saucily. ‘They have actual knowledge, according to themselves.’
‘They pretend to,’ I said. ‘But they know as little about it as I do. Doubt is the first principle of existence, and you and they go round as if ye had special information trying to destroy it. Yeer own lives prove the opposite. If you really knew what you pretend to know, you wouldn’t be planning to go to England on Saturday.’
‘I’m not so sure that I’m going to England on Saturday,’ he said with sudden despondency, all his load of troubles coming back to his mind.
But the argument did him good. It did me good as well. It was the first time I had stood up to him and if I hadn’t exactly floored him, I had at least held my own. The only mistake I made was in thinking it was the argument that impressed him. I should have known that communists and atheists are never impressed by arguments. I continued the treatment with the records; Madge came in to listen, and it was quite like old times. He came to the door to see me off. It was a lovely starlit night, and he leaned against the jamb of the door, talking and listening to the voices of girls and sailors from away down the river.
But next morning I was only in to work when a couple of the men came up to tell me about the body that had been fished out of the river a quarter of an hour before. I didn’t need anyone to tell me whose it was. I knew my confounded complacency had put me astray again.
‘Below the bridge was this, Jack?’ I asked.
‘Yes, Mr Dunphy. Why?’
‘I’m the man that’s responsible, Jack,’ I said. ‘Tell the boss I probably won’t be back this morning.’
I rushed off down the quays. They were very quiet, and the church and the trees were reflected in the water, it was so still. I was blaming myself terribly for the whole thing, for not realizing that a man as headstrong as that would never be diverted from anything he made up his mind to by arguments. When I reached the bridge I saw plainly that it was all as Jack Delea had described it; the knot of women outside the door, and the still undried trail from the quayside to the hall door.
Madge opened the door, and at once she put her finger to her lips. Surprised not to see her looking more concerned, I tiptoed in the hall and up the stairs after her. They were wet too, and there was a shocking smell of gas. She opened the door of Dan’s bedroom, but he wasn’t there. The window was wide open; the bed had not been slept in; there was a tea-chest in the middle of the floor.
‘What did they do with him, Madge?’ I whispered, wondering if he had been removed to the morgue.
‘Dan?’ she said in surprise. ‘Oh, he’s downstairs, at his breakfast.’
‘You mean he’s all right?’ I gasped.
‘It was the mercy of God that the sailor saw him,’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘I didn’t want you to say anything till you knew what happened.’
‘But what did happen?’ I asked, with an enormous feeling of relief that there wouldn’t be any inquest.
‘Don’t you see?’ she said, pointing to the tea-chest. ‘He had a length of tubing running through this and a tap at the end.’
She lifted the tea-chest, which had a hole drilled in the side of it for the tubing to go through. Beneath it was a pillow and a rug.
‘What in hell is that for?’ I asked.
‘He bought the tubing and the tap so that he could turn on the gas when he was inside the tea-chest,’ said Madge with a smile at the man’s innocence. ‘The notion of him being kept down by a tea-chest, that two men couldn’t control when he had the pneumonia! He must have been lifting it off him the whole time. You can see where he got sick through the window.’
‘And was it after that he threw himself in the river?’ I said, marvelling at the pertinacity of the man.
‘Ah, that was afterwards, Michael John,’ said Madge. ‘Then he saw a great light.’
‘A great what?’ said I.
‘A great light,’ said Madge. ‘He saw life was good.’
‘He saw a lot,’ said I.
‘He said he saw everything quite plain at last,’ said Madge. ‘So to put temptation away from him he took the tube and the tap to throw them in the river. It was while he was doing that that he tripped over the rope.’
‘I see,’ said I. ‘He saw the light, but he didn’t see the rope. I hope you don’t take that nonsense seriously.’
‘Oh, I do, Michael John,’ she said, beginning to cry. ‘I’m sure ’tis the answer to my prayers. Whatever you do, you mustn’t upset him now. He’s the best brother in the world only for the misfortunate books he reads. ’Tis them I’d like to throw in the river.’
And she gave a heart-scalded look at the shelf of books by Dan’s bed.
I went downstairs in a sort of stupor, and there, in the kitchen, in his best suit with a collar and tie on, was Dan, eating his breakfast and reading the paper at the same time.
‘Hullo,’ he said, quite friendly.
‘Oughtn’t you to be damn well ashamed of yourself?’ I said, losing all control of myself.
‘Ashamed of myself?’ he asked, raising his brows and getting on his usual high horse. ‘What would I be ashamed of? I suppose an accident can happen to anyone?’
‘Accident?’ I said. ‘Wasn’t I sitting in the front room with you last night, trying to keep you away from any more accidents? What sort of way is this to treat your unfortunate sister that has her heart broken trying to look after you in your kimeens?’
Suddenly a strange look came into his face. He bowed his head and nodded.
‘I admit that,’ he said meekly. ‘I admit I was headstrong.’
‘Headstrong,’ I said, refusing to be curbed, ‘and conceited and thinking you were the only one in the world that knew anything.’
‘I know, I know,’ he said, ‘I was very egotistical.’ And it was only then it struck me that for the first time in his life he had agreed with me. It was an accident all right.
Of course, Madge wouldn’t agree with that. He’s a reformed character now. And the funny thing is, he’ll run through a keyhole to avoid me. He says I’m a man without any proper faith.