Mac’s Masterpiece

Two or three times a year Mac, a teacher in the monks’ school, took to
his bed for four or five days. That was understood. But when he gave up
taking food his landlady thought it was getting serious. She told his
friends she wanted to have him certified. Not another day would she
keep him in the house after the abominable language he had used to her.

His friends, Boyd, Devane and Corbett, came. Mac refused to open the
bedroom door. He asked to be allowed to die in peace. It was only when
Boyd took a hatchet to the lock that he appeared in his nightshirt,
haggard and distraught, a big, melancholy mountain of a man, dribbling,
his hair in tumult.

‘Almighty God!’ he cried. ‘Won’t I even be allowed that one little
comfort?’

They wrapped him in blankets and set him by the fire among his
discarded toys, his dumb-bells, chest-developers, Indian clubs,
sabres, shot-guns, camera, cinema, gramophone and piano, while
Corbett, the bright young man from the local newspaper, heated the
water for the punch. At this Mac came to himself a little and insulted
Boyd. Boyd was his foil; a narrow-chested, consumptive-looking chemist
with a loud voice and a yapping laugh like a fox’s bark. He wore a
bowler-hat at various extraordinary angles and was very disputatious.

‘Bad luck to you!’ growled Boyd. ‘I don’t believe there’s anything up
with you.’

‘Nothing up with me!’ jeered Mac. ‘Devane, did you hear that? You know,
Devane, that hog, unless you had a broken neck or a broken bottom, he’d
say there was nothing up with you. He’d say there was nothing up with
Othello or Hamlet. “Nothing up with you!” Did anybody ever hear such a
barbarous locution?’

‘Come on away, Corbett,’ said Boyd angrily. ‘We might have know the old
cod was only play-acting as usual.’

‘Don’t rouse me now,’ said Mac with quiet scorn.

‘Like an old actress when she’s going off, pretending her jewellery is
stolen.’

‘I won’t be roused,’ said Mac earnestly. ‘What’s that Lear says—“No,
I’ll not weep, this heart shall crack...” You Philistine, you Christian
Brothers’ brat, you low, porter-drinking sot,’ he snarled with sudden
violence, ‘I have a soul above disputing with you....Devane,’ he added
mournfully, ‘you understand me. You have a grand Byronian soul.’

‘I have nervous dyspepsia,’ groaned Devane, who was organist in the
parish church. He felt himself in two or three places. ‘I get terrible
pains here and here.’

‘I see you now as I saw you twenty years ago with the fire of genius in
your eyes,’ Mac went on. ‘And now, God help you, you go about the
streets as though you were making a living by collecting lost
hairpins.’

Devane refused punch. It made his stomach worse, he said.

‘You’re better off,’ said Mac, falling serious once more. ‘I say you’re
better off. You see your misery plain. You’re only a little maggot
yourself now, a measly little maggot of a man, hoping the Almighty God
won’t crush you too soon, but you’re a consistent maggot, a maggot by
night and by day. But in my dreams I’m still a king, and then comes the
awakening, the horror, the gray dawn.’ 

He shuddered, wrapped in his blanket. Corbett rose and began to fiddle
with the gramophone.

‘Don’t break that machine,’ said Mac irritably. ‘It cost a lot.’

‘What you want is a wife,’ said Corbett. ‘All those gadgets are only
substitute wives. Did you ever get an hour’s real pleasure out of any
of them? I bet you never play that gramophone.’

‘You have a low mind, Corbett,’ snarled Mac. ‘You impute the basest
motives to everyone.’

At that very moment Corbett placed the needle on the record. There was
a startling series of cracks and then it began to give off _La Donna e
Mobile_. Mac jumped up as though he had been shot.

‘Oh God, not that, not that! Turn it off! There, you’ve done it now.’

‘What?’ asked Corbett innocently.

‘Sunlight on the Mediterranean, moonlight on the Swiss lakes, the
glowworms in the grass, young love, hope, passion.’

He began to stride up and down the room, swinging his blanket like a
toga.

‘The last time I heard that’—he stretched out his arm in a wild
gesture—‘’twas in Galway on a rainy night. Galway in the rain and the
statue of O’Conaire in the Park and the long western faces like—like
bullocks. There they were over the roulette-tables, counting out their
coppers; they had big cloth purses. Then suddenly, the
way-you-may-call-it organ began...Magic, by God, magic! It mounted and
mounted and you knew by the shudder down your spine that ’twas all on
fire; a sort of—a sort of pyramid—that’s it!—a pyramid of light
over your head. Turning and turning, faster and faster, the pyramid, I
mean, and the lights crackling and changing; blue, red, orange. Man, I
rushed back to the hotel, fearing something would spoil it on me. The
last light was setting over the church tower, woodbine-coloured light
and a black knot of weeping cloud.’

‘Bravo, Mac!’ said Boyd with his coarse laugh. He stuck his thumbs
into the armholes of his waistcoat. ‘The old warrior is himself
again. Haw?’

‘Until the next time,’ said Corbett with a sneer.

‘There’ll be no next time,’ said Mac solemnly. ‘I’m after being down to
hell and coming back. I see it all now. The Celtic mist is gone. I see
it all clear before me in the Latin light.’


And sure enough there was a change in Mac’s behaviour. He almost gave
up drink and began to talk of the necessity for solitude. Solitude, he
said, was the mind’s true home. Solitude filled the cistern; company
emptied it. He would stay at home and read or think. He began to talk
of a vast novel on the subject of the clash between idealism and
materialism in the Irish soul.

But the discipline was a hard one. Though he told the maid to say he
was out, he hated to hear the voices of Boyd or Corbett as they went
off together down the quay. One evening as they were moving away he
knocked at the window and raised the blind, looking out at them and
nodding. He tried to assume a superior, amused air, but there was
wistfulness in his eyes. Finally he raised the window.

‘Come on out, man!’ said Boyd scornfully.

‘No, no, I couldn’t,’ replied Mac weakly.

‘’Tis a lovely night.’

‘What way did ye come?’

‘Down High Street. All the shawlies were out singing. Look, ’tis a
gorgeous night. Stars! Millions of them!’

Softly in a wheezy tenor Boyd sang _Night of Stars and Night of Love_
with declamatory gestures. Mac’s resolution wavered.

‘Gome on in for a minute.’

They climbed over the low sill, Boyd still simging and gesturing. As
usual, he had an interesting item of news for Mac. The latest scandal;
piping hot; another piece of jobbery perpetrated by a religious secret
society. Mac groaned.

‘My God, ’tis awful,’ he agreed. ‘’Tis, do you know what it is, ’tis
scandalous.’

‘Well, isn’t that what we were always looking for?’ exclaimed Boyd,
shaking his fist truculently. ‘Government by our own? Now we have
it. Government by the gunmen and the priests and the secret societies.’

‘’Tis our own fault,’ said Mac gloomily.

‘How so-a?’

‘’Tis our own fault. We’re the intellect of the country and what good
are we? None. Do we ever protest? No. All we do is live in burrows and
growl at all the things we find wrong.’

‘And what else can we do? A handful of us?’

‘Thousands of us.’

‘A handful! How long would I keep me business if I said or did what I
thought was right? I make two hundred a year out of parish priests with
indigestion. Man, dear, is there one man, one man in this whole town
can call his soul his own?’

“You’re all wrong,’ said Mac crossly, his face going into a thousand
wrinkles.

‘Is there one man?’ shouted Boyd with lifted finger.

‘Bogy men!’ said Mac, ‘that’s all that frightens ye. Bogy men! If we
were in earnest all that tangle of circumstance would melt away.’

‘Oh, melt away, melt away? Would it, indeed?’

‘Of course it would. The human will can achieve anything. The will is
the divine faculty in man.’

‘This is a new theology.’

‘’Tisn’t theology at all; ’tis common sense. Let me alone now; I
thought all this out long ago. The only obstacles we ever see are in
ourselves.’

‘Ah, what nonsense are you talking? How are they in ourselves?’

‘When the will is diseased, it creates obstacles where they never
existed.’

‘Answer me,’ bawled Boyd, spitting into the fire. ‘Answer my
question. Answer it now and let Corbett hear you. How are the obstacles
in ourselves? Can a blind man paint a picture, can he? Can a cripple
run the thousand yards? Haw?’

‘Boyd,’ said Mac with a fastidious shudder, ‘you have a very coarse
mind.’

‘I have a very realistic mind.’

‘You have a very coarse mind; you have the mind of a Christian
Brothers’ boy. But if you persist in that—that unpleasant strain, I’m
more ready to believe that a blind man can paint a picture than that a
normal, healthy man can be crippled from birth by a tangle of
irrelevant circumstances.’

‘Circumstances are never irrelevant.’

‘Between the conception and the achievement all circumstances are
irrelevant.’

‘You don’t believe in matther? Isn’t that what it all comes to?’

‘That has nothing to do with it.’

‘Do you or do you not believe in matther?’ repeated Boyd, throwing his
bowler viciously onto the floor.

‘I believe in the human will,’ snapped Mac.

‘That means you don’t believe in life.’

‘Not as you see it.’

‘Because I believe in life,’ said Boyd, his lantern jaw working
sideways. ‘I believe that in all the life about me a divine purpose is
working itself out.’

‘Oh, God,’ groaned Mac. ‘Animal stagnation! Chewing the cud! The City
Council! Wolfe Tone Street! Divine purpose, my sweet God! Don’t you
see, you maggot, you clodhopper, you corner boy, that life can’t be
directed from outside? If there is a divine purpose—I don’t know
whether there is or not—it can only express itself through some human
agency; and how the devil can you have a human agency if you haven’t
the individual soul, the man representing humanity? Do you think
institutions, poetry, painting, the Roman Empire, were created by
maggots and clodhoppers? Do you? Do you? Do you?’

Just then there was a ring at the door and Devane came in, looking more
than ever like a collector of lost hairpins.

‘How are you, Devane?’ asked Corbett.

‘Rotten,’ said Devane.

‘I never saw you any other way,’ growled Mac.

‘I never am any other way,’ replied Devane.

‘You’re just in time,’ said Corbett.

‘How so-a?’

‘We’re getting the will versus determinism; ’tis gorgeous. Go on,
Mac. You were talking about the Roman Empire.’

Mac suddenly threw himself into a chair, covering his face with his
hands.

‘My God, my God,’ he groaned softly between his fingers. ‘I’m at it
again. I’m fifty-four years of age and I’m talking about the human
will. A man whose life is over talking about the will. Go away and let
me write me novel. For God’s sake let me do one little thing before I
die.’

After that night Mac worked harder than ever. He talked a great deal
about his novel. The secret of the Irish soul, he had discovered, was
the conflict between the ideal and the reality.

Boyd, with whom he discussed it one night when they met accidentally,
disputed this as he disputed everything.

‘Idealism, my eye!’ he said scornfully. ‘The secret is bloody
hypocrisy.’

‘No, Boyd,’ protested Mac. ‘You have a mind utterly without
refinement. Hypocrisy is a noble and enlightened vice; ’tis far beyond
the capacity of the people of this country. The English have been
called hypocritical. Now, nobody could ever talk about the
hypocritical Gael. The English had their walled cities, their castles,
their artillery, as the price of their hypocrisy; all the unfortunate
gulls of Irishmen ever got out of their self-deception was a ragged
cloak and a bed in a wood.’

‘And is that what you’re going to say in your novel?’

‘I’m going to say lots of things in my novel.’

‘You’d better mind yourself.’

‘I’m going to tell the truth at last. I’m going to show that what’s
wrong with all of you people is your inability to reconcile the
debauched sentimentalism of your ideals with the disorderly materialism
of your lives.’

‘What?’ Boyd stopped dead, hands in his pockets, head forward. ‘Are you
calling me a sentimentalist?’

‘I’m only speaking generally.’

‘Are you calling me a sentimentalist?’

‘I’m not referring to you at all.’

‘Because I’m no sentimentalist. I’m a realist.’

‘You’re a disappointed idealist like all the rest, that’s what you
are.’

‘A disappointed idealist? How do you make that out?’

‘Boyd, I see ye all now quite clearly. I see ye as if I was looking at
ye from eternity. I see what’s wrong with ye. Ye aim too high. Ye hitch
yeer wagon to too many bloody stars at the one time. Then comes the
first snag and the first compromise. After that ye begin to sink, sink,
sink, till ye’re tied hand and foot, till ye even deny the human soul.’

‘Are you back to that again? Are you denying the existence of matther
again?’

‘Materialist! Shabby little materialist, with your sentimental
dreams. I see ye all there with yeer heads tied to yeer knees,
pretending ’tis circumstance and ’tis nothing only the ropes ye spin
out of yeer own guts.’

Boyd was furious. It was bad enough to have Mac dodging him, telling
the maid to say he was out, forcing him to spend long, lonely evenings;
but then to call him a sentimentalist, a materialist, a disappointed
idealist! In fact, all Mac’s friends resented the new state of
things. They jeered at the tidy way he now dressed himself. They jeered
at the young woman with whom he was seen taking tea at the
Ambassadors’.

Elsie Deignan was a pretty young woman of thirty-two or three. She was
a teacher in the nuns’ school in the South Parish and had literary
leanings. As a result of her experiences with the nuns, she was
slightly tinged with anticlericalism. For the first time in his life
Mac felt he had met a woman whose conversation he might conceivably
tolerate over an extended period. He fell badly in love.

The resentment of Mac’s friends grew when he was seen walking out with
her. And there were strange stories in circulation about the things he
was saying in his novel. They were all going into it, and in a
ridiculous fashion. They were pleased when Corbett told them that
Mac’s employers, the monks, were getting uneasy, too. Mac knew far too
much about the Order. He had often referred scornfully to the
disparity between their professions and their practice; was it
possible that he was revealing all this? Corbett swore he was; he also
said that one chapter described the initiation of a young man into the
Knights of Columbanus, skulls, cowls, blindfolding, oaths and all.

‘I suppose he thinks he’ll be able to retire on the proceeds of it,’
said Boyd in disgust. ‘The English will lap that up. I hate a man that
fouls his own nest.’

‘Well, don’t we all?’ groaned Devane, who alone of the gang was
disposed to be merciful.

‘That’s different,’ said Boyd. ‘We can say things like that among
ourselves, in the family, so to speak, but we don’t want everyone to
know about it.’

‘He showed me a couple of chapters,’ said Devane mournfully. ‘I didn’t
see anything at all in it. Sentimental stuff, that’s how it looked to
me.’

‘Ah, but you didn’t see the big scenes,’ said Corbett. ‘And for a good
reason.’

‘What reason?’

‘There are several nasty things about you in it.’

‘He couldn’t say anything about me,’ said Devane.

‘That’s all you know.’

‘By God,’ said Boyd, ‘he deserves all he gets. If there’s anything
worse than a man using his friends for copy, I don’t know what it is.’

Devane, perturbed, slipped away. After a good deal of thought he went
along the quays to Mac’s lodgings, his head down, his umbrella hanging
over his joined hands, a picture of misery. Mac was busy and cheerful.
Sheets of foolscap littered the table. He had been drinking tea.

‘So you’re still at it,’ said Devane.

‘Still at it.’

“You’re a brave man.’

‘How so?’

‘All the dovecots you’re after putting a flutter.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘I hear the monks are very uneasy.’ 

‘About my novel?’ asked Mac with a start.

‘Yes.’

‘How did they get to hear of it?’

‘How do I know? Corbett says they were talking to the Canon about you.’

Mac grew pale.

‘Who’s spreading stories about me?’

‘I don’t know, I tell you. What did you say about me?’

‘I said nothing about you.’

“You’d better not. You’ll cause trouble enough.’

‘Sure, I’m not saying anything about anybody,’ said Mac, his face
beginning to twitch.

‘Well, they think you are.’

‘My God, there’s a hole to work in.’ Mac suddenly sat back, haggard,
his hands spread wide before him. ‘By God, I have a good mind to roast
them all. And I didn’t get to the serious part at all yet. That’s only
a description of his childhood.’

‘I didn’t see anything wrong with it—what you showed me,’ said
Devane, rubbing his nose.

‘By God, I have,’ repeated Mac passionately, ‘a thorough good mind to
roast them.’

‘You’re too old,’ said Devane, and his metallic voice sounded like the
spinning of a rattle. ‘Why don’t you have sense? I used to want to be a
musician one time. I don’t want anything now only to live till I get me
pension. You ought to have sense,’ he went on in a still crankier
tone. ‘Don’t you know they’ll all round on you, like they did on me the
time I got the organ?’

‘’Tis the curse of the tribe,’ declared Mac despairingly. ‘They hate
to see anyone separating himself from the tribe.’

‘I don’t know what it is,’ said Devane, ‘and I don’t give a damn. I
used to be trying to think out explanations, too, one time, but I gave
it up. What’s the use when you can read Jane Austen? Read Jane Austen,
MacCarthy, she’s grand and consoling, and there isn’t a line in her
that would remind you of anything at all. I like Jane Austen and
Trollope, and I like Rameau and Lully and Scarlatti, and I’d like Bach
too if he was satisfied with writing nice little dance-tunes instead
of bloody big elephants of Masses that put you in mind of your last
end.’

Devane left Mac very depressed. The news about the novel had
spread. People discussed it everywhere; his enemies said they had never
expected anything else from him; his friends were uneasy and went about
asking if they shouldn’t, as old friends of Mac’s, advise him. They
didn’t, and as a result the scandal only spread farther.

With Elsie, Mac permitted himself to rage.

‘By God, I will roast them now,’ he said. ‘I’m going to change the
whole centre part of the book. I see now where I went wrong. My idea
was to show the struggle in a man’s soul between idealism and
materialism; you know, the Celtic streak, soaring dreams, ‘the singing
masons building roofs of gold’, the quest of the absolute; and then
show how ’tis dragged down by the mean little everyday nature of the
Celt; the mean, vain, money-grubbing, twisty little nature that kept
him from ever doing anything in the world only suffer and twist and
whine. But now I see a bigger theme emerging; the struggle with the
primitive world—colossal!’

‘You’re marvellous,’ said Elsie. ‘How do you think of it all?’

‘Because I’m it,’ said Mac vehemently. ‘I am the Celt. I feel it im my
blood. The Celts are only emerging into civilization. I and people like
me are the forerunners. We feel the whole conflict of the nation in
ourselves; the individual soul and at the same time the sense of the
tribe; the Latin pride and the primitive desire to merge ourselves in
the crowd. I can see how ’twill go. My fellow will have to sink himself
time and time again, and then at last the trumpet call! His great
moment has come. He must say farewell to the old world and stand up,
erect and defiant.’

Still, Mac found his novel heavy going. It wasn’t that ideas didn’t
come to him; he had too many, but always there was the sense of a
hundred malicious faces peering over his shoulder; the Canon and
Corbett; Devane, Cronin, Boyd; the headmaster.

Then one evening the maid came to his room. 

‘Oh, by the way, Mr. MacCarthy, the Canon called looking for you.’

‘Oh, did he?’ said Mac, but his heart missed a beat.

‘He said he’d call back another time.’

‘Did he say what he wanted?’

‘No, Mr. MacCarthy, but he seemed a bit worried.’

The pages he had written formed a blur before Mac’s eyes. He could not
write. Instead he put on his hat and went up to Elsie’s.

‘’Tis all up,’ he said.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Everything. Turned out on the roadside at my age to earn my living
what way I can.’

‘Do you mean you’re sacked?’

‘No, but I will be. ’Tis only a matter of days. The Canon called to see
me. He never called to see me before. But I don’t care. Let them throw
me out. I’ll starve, but I’ll show them up.’

‘You’re exaggerating, Dan. Sure, you didn’t do anything at all yet.’

‘No, but they know what I can do. They’re afraid of me. They see the
end of their world is coming.’

‘But did anything else happen? Are you guessing all this or did
somebody tell you?’

‘I only wish to God I did it thirty years ago,’ said Mac, striding
moodily about the room. ‘That was the time when I was young and strong
and passionate. But I’m not afraid of them. I may be a fallen giant,
but I’m still a giant. They can destroy me, but I’ll pull their damn’
temple about their ears, the way Samson did. It’s you I’m sorry for,
girl. I didn’t know I was bringing you into this.’

‘I’m not afraid,’ she said.

‘Ah, I’m a broken man, a broken man. Ten years ago I could have given
you something to be proud of. I had genius then.’

After leaving her he called at Dolan’s for a drink. Corbett and some of
the others were there and Mac felt the necessity for further
information. He resolved to get it by bluff. He’d show them just what
he thought of all the pother. 

‘I hear the church is going to strike,’ he said with a cynical laugh.

‘Did you hear that, too?’ exclaimed Corbett.

‘So you know?’

‘Only that old Brother Reilly was supposed to be up complaining of you
to the Canon.’

‘Aha! So that’s it, is it?’

‘I hope to goodness it won’t be anything serious,’ said Corbett
despondently.

‘Oh, I don’t care. I won’t starve.’

‘You’re a bloody fool,’ said Cronin, the fat painter who had done the
Stations of the Cross for the new parish church. ‘Don’t you know damn’
well you won’t get another job?’

‘I won’t. I know quite well I won’t.’

‘And what are you going to do? I declare to God I thought you had more
sense. At your age, too! You have a fine cushy job and you won’t mind
it.’

‘Not at that price.’

‘What price? What are talking about? Haven’t we all to stand it and put
the best face we can on it?’

‘And damn’ well you paid for it, Cronin!’

‘How so?’

‘You’re—how long are you painting?—twenty-five years? And worse and
worse you’re getting till now you’re doing Stations of the Cross in the
best Bavarian style. Twenty-five years ago you looked as though you
might have had the makings of a painter in you, but now what are you? A
maggot like the rest of us, a measly little maggot! Oh, you can puff
out your chest and eat your moustache as much as you like, but that’s
what you are. A maggot, a five-bob-an-hour drawing master.’

‘MacCarthy,’ said Boyd, ‘you want your backside kicked, and you’re
damn’ well going to get it kicked.’

‘And who’s going to do it, pray?’ asked Mac coolly.

‘You wait till you get the Canon down on you; he won’t be long about
it.’

‘Aha,’ said Mac. ‘So the Canon is our new hero! The Deliverer! This,
as I always guessed, is what all the old talk was worth. Ye gas and
gas about liberty of conscience, but at the first whiff of powder ye
run and hide under the Canon’s soutane. Well, here’s to the Canon!
Anyway, he’s a man.’

“Are you accusing me of turning me coat?’ bawled Boyd.

‘Quiet now, Boyd, quiet!’

‘Are you?’

‘Boyd, I won’t even take the trouble to quarrel with you,’ said Mac
gravely. ‘You’ve lost even the memory of a man. I suppose when you were
twenty-five or so you did hear the clock, but you don’t hear it any
longer.’ He sipped his pint and suddenly grew passionate. ‘Or do you?
Do you? Do you hear the inexorable hour when all your wasted years
spring out like little toy soldiers from the clock and present arms?
And does it never occur to you that one of these days they’ll step out
and present arms and say “Be off now you bloody old cod! We’re going
back to barracks!”.’

It was late when he left the pub. He was very pleased with himself. He
had squelched Cronin, made Boyd ridiculous, reinstated himself with the
gang, proved he was still the master of them all. As he came through
the side streets he began to feel lonely. When he came to the bridge he
leaned over it and watched the river flowing by beneath.

‘Christ, what a fool I am! What a fool!’ he groaned.

For a long time he stood on the quay outside his own lodgings, afraid
to go in. The shapes of human beings began to crowd round him,
malevolent and fierce, the Canon, the head, Cronin, Boyd, Devane. They
all hated him, all wished him ill, would stop at nothing to destroy
him.

In the early morning he went downstairs, made a bonfire of his novel,
and sobbed himself to sleep. 


(1938)