Adventure

1

When adventure came to me first, it came in a form I was not
expecting. I was living in Cork; I was turned twenty, and I felt my
life was at an end. I knew it could only be renewed by some impossible
female, preferably foreign and experienced in love, though not so
experienced as not to be converted overnight to the ideal of absolute
fidelity, which was all I felt strong enough for. I was sure there must
be such women in the world. Meanwhile I neglected no opportunity of
searching for them in quarters where you might have expected them to
appear, like the Operatic Society, but the only woman I got to know
there was a nice little girl called Doris Beirne who sang in the chorus
and lived not far away from me in Gardiner’s Hill, a quarter of
unexceptionable respectability.

If I had been trying to elude adventure instead of seeking it. I
should have seen the hand of Divine Providence in that. Even for Cork
Protestants the Beirnes were astonishingly placid. The old man, who
didn’t seem to have an enemy in the world, was musical, and his wife’s
sister, Miss Adams, who kept house for him, though anything but
musical and playing Doris’s accompaniments in the style of a retired
drum major, was equally inoffensive. Doris herself was so sweet and
earnest that she either waded or jumped the jokes you made to her, as
if they were part of an obstacle race.

She was being courted in a family manner by a young shopkeeper called
Tom Diamond. Tom was a good fellow, a cricketer, and fond of his
glass. Miss Adams, who admired him enormously, explained to me that he
had inherited an excellent business bled white by his family, and that
it might be years before he could settle down. Obviously, she hoped
Doris could wait. He and I saw a good deal of one another at the house
but never became friends. At first I thought this was due to jealousy
on his part, but it wasn’t. Miss Adams’ notions of his circumstances
were all second-hand, and the family knew little more of him than I did,
and that, according to my standards of the time, was not enough to base
a friendship on.

Very different was my response to Martin Holmes. Holmes was English; a
businessman, loud-voiced and blustering like one who had begun on the
road, but very different from other commercials I had met. He was a
powerfully built man, rather fat, fond of his food, and all curves
like a prima donna. It was an experience to walk behind him down the
road, for he seemed to move downwards as well as forward; he cocked
his head right and left, and with each step a wiggle seemed to start
at the nape of his neck and travel down all his curves to his
ankles. It gave him a slight suggestion of levitation, as though he
wore pneumatic shoes. I think now I liked him for his own sake, but I
find it hard to be sure because I liked him so much for the incidental
excitements he brought with him, gaiety, recklessness, unrest. He gave
you an impression of extroverted infallibility, of knowing the answers
to everything. He drove unerringly at reckless speeds, taking chances
that made you jump.  When he entertained it was in lavish style, and
he talked of things that nobody in Cork even mentioned, that I
sometimes thought were known only to myself.

Holmes had the gift of intimacy, the gift of calling you by your
Christain name at the first meeting and, when he got to know you, of
treating you as father confessor and pouring out on you his past
humilations and weaknesses. He had done about everything, and that was
informative: a man could do these things and yet remain attractive and
sensitive. He was obviously not easy in his mind about them, and that
was equally satisfactory: whether or not you wanted to be on the right
side, you were. You could advise and admonish. You could help. You
could even make it easier for him by confessing your own troubles, and
that was a great relief.

In spite of all these attractions, Doris’s aunt didn’t really like
him. Perhaps she hadn’t so much to confess. She was a lively, gossipy
little woman with a snub nose, so that the reading glasses never came
really in front of her eyes, and she usually talked with her head
down. She was lively, even jolly, but she thought dinner in the
Imperial extravagant and anything stronger than lemonade sinful. Holmes
laid himself out to capture her; he brought her presents; he pretended
it was really on her account that he came to the house, and reserved
for her the deep, charmer’s voice which he assumed to difficult women
customers.

‘Miss Adams,’ he would say, putting his arm fondly about her shoulder,
‘don’t you realize what a holiday it is for me to get you out? Don’t
you realize what a favour you are doing me?’

‘Favour?’ she exclaimed. ‘Spending your money? I would do you a greater
favour by frying a couple of rashers for you.’

He knew it was all no good. In spite of his bounce and brag he was far
from complacent, and with feminine curves had a sort of feminine
sensibility. Actually he sized it up far better than I.

“You know, Dick,’ he said one night when he was driving me home,
‘Doris’s aunt hates the sight of me.’

He spoke without resentment, even with amusement, as though he thought
it was one up for the old lady.

‘I wouldn’t say she hated you,’ I said doubtfully. What makes you think
that, Martin?’

‘She doesn’t trust me ‘with Doris,’ he said. ‘She thinks the world of
Diamond. You can’t blame her, of course.’

I could, and did. Diamond was a very nice, quiet fellow, if it was
nice, quiet fellows you wanted, but Holmes, whatever his faults, was an
exceptional man. Doris knew that. So did Diamond, though he didn’t let
it appear. He came weekly to the house, just as before, and even when
Doris was out with Holmes stayed on, chattering to her father and aunt,
sucking his pipe and apparently not in the least disturbed. Holmes
appeared to be quite touched by Diamond’s devotion, and went out of his
way to do little bits of business for him when he went to England.

‘You know, Dick,’ Holmes said to me one night when we were having a
drink at his hotel, ‘if I ever behaved badly to Doris, Tom would stick
a knife in me.’

‘A knife?’ I said incredulously. ‘Tom Diamond? You’re a blooming
romantic, man! Diamond wouldn’t stick a knife in anybody.’

‘Not even somebody who’d injured Doris?’

‘Not even somebody who’d murdered his grandmother.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure,’ Holmes said thoughtfully. ‘He thinks Doris is
marvellous, and the funny part of it is, he’s right.’

That astonished me equally, because you don’t usually think the girl up
the road is marvellous, especially in a provincial town where the least
adventurous has to keep half his mind free for fantasy, and where you
could easily grow up next door to a future international celebrity
without seeing him as anything but a joke. To understand what Holmes
meant, I had to imagine myself a stranger from Mars and try to look at
familiar things with strange eyes, but even then I had to justify
Holmes more by reason than faith.

Looked at like that, Doris was unusual all right; unusual, not for any
particular quality, but for an accumulation of apparently unimportant
details: the way she remembered little things her father and aunt
liked, the way she deferred to other people’s wishes, the way she
called at the hospital to inquire for a neighbour and remembered to
ask about another’s son who was in the Civic Guards in Dublin. I had
known other girls who did these things, but what in them were little
spots of colour applied hap-hazard, in Doris formed a design. They
came to her not from outside and from the copying of good models, but
from an interior core of spirituality which might equally well express
itself in other ways.

Of course, Holmes, coming from outside, could see that design as I
couldn’t, but there was more than that in it. As I have said, the man
had a feminine sensibility, and could relate some trifling action of
Doris’s to a wider conception of her character. I was grateful to him
for that, because I still have a large, muddled masculine myopia which
makes it possible for me to see generalizations but remain all the time
blind to the minute tensions of which ordinary daily life is made up.

At the same time I retained a slight suspicion of Holmes, though this
didn’t argue any particular perspicacity in me and was merely the
normal attitude of the provincial in rebellion, who while flouting the
conventions of provincial life retains a lot of the astuteness on which
they are based. That, at first, meant nothing: just that I felt
ungenerously that in this life one gets nothing for nothing, and if
Holmes was kind to me it was because in some way he found, or hoped to
find, me useful. But I soon had other reasons for suspicion. 

2

One particular evening is very vivid in my mind. In the usual Cork way
it built itself up out of nothing. I went for a boring walk up the
tree-shaded Western Road, where the crowds coming towards me threw
long straight shadows along the pavement, and the girls who passed me
out had their faces lit with the setting sun. I ran into Diamond, who
having failed to keep an appointment with some of his cricketing and
boozing pals, was also at a loose end. We strolled on together. As
usual I found him pleasant enough, though as unforthcoming as at
Beirne’s. It was all noncommittal; amusing anecdotes of matches and
sprees and praise of his friends. Not a note of malice. At an age when
intimacy implies malice, it remained like a barrier between us. I got
more and more depressed.

Suddenly a car halted, and we were hailed. Holmes and Doris were
inside, and we crossed the road.

‘Hop in,’ Holmes said commandingly, throwing open the back door for us.

‘We’re going for a walk,’ protested Diamond.

“You’re coming for a drink,’ said Holmes, looking straight out in front
of him. ‘Hop in.’

‘You know, I think you’ve had enough, Martin,’ Doris said with a gentle
smile.

‘Nonsense, dear, I haven’t begun,’ he replied in a lordly way.

I was delighted, I won’t say I was actually bored stiff with Tom
Diamond’s conversation, but at least I felt I should have real
conversation—fireworks!

‘Don’t do that, Martin!’ Doris said sharply as, within a minute of
starting up, Holmes cut out a car which was sleepwalking up the middle
of the road.

‘Silly beggar!’ Holmes said with a contemptuous backward glance and put
on speed.

It wasn’t a pleasant spin. He was showing off like mad at the wheel.
His talk was all of what his eye caught—a new-model car wrongly
designed, a newly built house badly planned: he sang; he passed every
blasted thing on the road by inches, and then threw back some
withering comment at the driver. After a complete circle in the middle
of a busy highway, taken at full speed, he stopped the car dead in
front of a pub near the river. He ordered double whiskeys for himself
and me, beer for Tom Diamond, who seemed to have taken a sudden
aversion to anything stronger, and sherry for Doris. Then he had a
long and knowing talk with the publican about distilleries and their
managements. He was very queer, frighteningly queer. I still couldn’t
make up my mind whether or not he was drunk, I’ve seen drunks in every
stage from fuddlesomeness to fight, but I’ve never really seen anyone
else like that. For a real drunk he was far too quick on the draw, far
too observant of every shade in our quickly changing attitudes to him,
far too alert in the way he pounced on them. He was more like a
lunatic. He shouted; he let his voice grow shrill; he told indecent
stories with an atrocious laugh which would have taken all the
fun out of them even if they had been funny.

Doris grew white. She didn’t protest, but once she said in the pained
tone of a kid, ‘Oh, dear, Martin!’ I knew that what was hurting her was
not what Holmes said, for she had already accepted him, and Doris was
the sort who accepts people entire; nor even that I was listening, for
she knew I liked him and would make excuses. It was Tom Diamond’s
presence that really cut her to the heart, because he represented her
family, her upbringing, her childhood. Diamond sank into a deeper and
deeper gloom, and between them they performed a dumb duet of misery
that almost made me scream.

I wanted Diamond to put a stop to it, but he didn’t, and even then I
think I half understood that he couldn’t. At last Holmes got up to go
to the lavatory and told us as much in an infantile way. He didn’t even
appear to be drunk then; he was too alert, too agile. In a fury I
dashed after him and caught him outside the door.

‘Do you realize what you’re doing?’ I asked savagely.

I was astonished at his response. He suddenly smiled, a frank, boyish,
good-natured smile, and took my two hands in his.

‘Do you think I’m drunk, Dick?’ he asked in a quiet voice.

‘Do you expect me to believe you’re hurting that girl deliberately?’ I
asked.

‘You’re a good pal, Dick,’ he said emotionally. ‘A very good
pal. You’re not afraid to speak your mind to people you like. You do
like me, don’t you?’

‘I also like Doris, if you want to know,’ I said.

‘I don’t, Dick. I knew it, and she knew it. She trusts you as she
trusts nobody else. Don’t mind me, Dick, I swear I’m not really
drunk. Just playing the fool. Sometimes, I have to do it.’

At that moment I could have sworn Holmes was as sober as I was. But
when he returned to the room he went on worse than ever. This time I
forced him out to the car, where he immediately showed his real
condition by falling asleep in the back. Doris drove, I sat beside her,
and she and Diamond chattered lightly and amiably all the way home. I
couldn’t talk. I could think of nothing but the stupefied man whose
head was lolling over on to Diamond’s back. I was bewildered by his
apparent sobriety of a short while before. Not until long afterwards
did I realize that he hadn’t been sober; it had been an improvisation
such as he would have put up if a cop had stopped us on the way back,
the last reserve of a man whose whole life was an act.

Diamond surprised me. When we parted after leaving the others, he
suddenly held out his hand, a thing he never did.

‘Thanks, Dick,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what we’d have done without
you.’

I was startled and moved by the sudden intimacy of his tone.

‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’ I asked in bewilderment.

‘Never,’ he replied with a slight shake of his head. ‘I’ll take care
that I never run the risk of it again either.’

His quietness and gravity were almost over-whelming. I knew that he
meant it. I had a sudden flash of perception into the mind of that
apparently good-natured and superficial young man, and realized that
even if he was not the sort who went about sticking knives into people,
his judgements could be equally final and annihilating. It really was
an extrordinary evening. I went home and didn’t sleep. To see
unexpected depths in one person is upsetting enough; to see them in two
people at the same time makes you doubt if you are really as wise as
you imagine yourself to be at the age of twenty. 


3

Next morning Holmes called at my office, quite himself again and with
no trace of a hangover. The typist was with me, and he diverted himself
by studying the joinery in my stationery cabinet.

‘Shocking!’ he said. “You must let me get you a proper one sometime.’
Then he sat in the chair at the other side of my desk. ‘I called to
apologize,’ he went on in a deep voice with a slight trace of parson’s
unction in it. ‘I don’t quite know what for, but Doris said I should.
Was I awful?’

‘Pretty bad.’

‘I don’t remember,’ he said gravely, shaking his head. ‘I’ve promised
Doris to give up spirits for good. We got engaged this morning.
Sometimes things get too much for you. I can’t live without that girl,
Dick.’

First he put his face in his hands, then leaned on the desk, his head
buried in his arms, and sobbed. I was dreadfully embarrassed. Intimacy
is all very well, but only when you know how to take it, and this was
well beyond my experience. I got up and put my hand awkwardly on his
shoulder.

‘Did you come for congratulations or sympathy?’ I asked with a
lightness I didn’t feel.

‘That’s what I’d like to know myself,’ he replied, straightening
himself and wiping the tears from his face. ‘Shall I make a success of
it?’

‘If you don’t, Doris will,’ I said.

‘That’s just what I’m afraid of,’ he said gravely. ‘I don’t want her to
make all the sacrifices. I’ve lived a hard life, but I know the decent
thing when I see it.’

We went out for coffee, and, brightening up, he told me again about his
life and its empty temptations. They didn’t sound so empty as he told
them, but I could see that he coveted the permanence and seriousness of
Doris. I could almost sympathize with him. That morning I felt closer
to him than I had ever felt before.

But Diamond kept his word. He ceased altogether to go to the Beirnes’,
and Miss Adams, who had been told of the engagement, attributed it to
that. I let her. Holmes now stayed at the house whenever he was in
Ireland, and Doris and he went off together on his rounds. They rented
a house some miles from the city, an old house with a big garden.
Holmes intended to make his home in Ireland, and visit England only on
business.

In odd ways he continued to disturb me, though I shan’t pretend it was
altogether unpleasant. He told me, for instance, that Doris and he were
lovers, and I am afraid the impropriety of this was lost in the wonder
of knowing that such things could be, a subject on which I was glad to
be reassured. But he also told me intimate details of Doris’s
behaviour, and I didn’t altogether like that. It wasn’t that these
things vulgarized her in my mind; on the contrary, it was beginning to
dawn on me that it was people like Doris and Tom Diamond who really
knew what passion meant. It was not on her account I was troubled but
on his. I was embarrassed for him as a friend, to think that at his age
and with his experience he could not distinguish between the things one
says and the things one doesn’t say. As I write, I blush for my own
ingenuousness. It wasn’t until years after that it struck me that he
distinguished perfectly; that he played on my ingenuousness as he
played on Doris’s inexperience, for his own amusement, and that he used
that standard method of seduction to seduce me as well as her. What did
he want of me? Did he expect I should go and tell Tom Diamond? There
was a slight suggestion of it in the ominous conversation that
followed.

‘I shouldn’t repeat that to anyone else,’ I said a bit gruffly.

‘I wasn’t criticizing her, Dick,’ he replied in a reproachful tone.

‘Others mightn’t think so,’ I said, still embarrassed by the memory of
his disturbing confidences.

‘You mean Tom?’ he asked wonderingly.

‘He certainly wouldn’t consider it a compliment.’

‘And might stick a knife in me?’

‘No,’ I said sharply. ‘Doris would do that.’

It was a strange conversation, superficially friendly on both sides,
certamly innocent enough on mine, but with mysterious undertones which
kept on sounding in my head for weeks. I didn’t know whether I was
imagining them or not. Sometimes the provincial astuteness came
uppermost in me, and I felt that this was a totally impossible
marriage which was bound to result in disaster; sometimes the romantic
came on top, and I realized that I was a mere raw provincial boy and
envied Doris the world of real experience which I might never even
touch the frontiers.


4

The wedding was fixed for a Saturday in September, and the whole Beirne
family was in a state of convulsions about it. Holmes came over the
week before to make the final arrangements. He seemed to be in high
spirits, but the evening before he left he asked me to dinner with the
family at the hotel, and when I arrived I found him in an unusually
despondent mood. I didn’t pay much heed to that, because he grew
despondent very easily, particularly when business was bad, and then
soared out of it instantaneously at the first diversion, like a
kid. When he and I were outside in the hall for a few minutes, he took
me by the arm.

“You’ve been a very good friend to Doris and me,’ he said gravely. ‘If
anything happens to me, I hope you’ll help her.’

‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Bankruptcy or just t.b.?’

‘It’s not a joke, Dick,’ he said with sombre reproach.

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘everybody goes through these hysterics a week before the
show. You’re not the first.’

Next evening, Doris and I saw him off from Glanmire Station, and he
leaned drearily out of the carriage window, scarcely raising his
voice. Doris was alarmed but too well trained to give expression to her
fears till the pair of us were climbing the tunnel steps in the evening
light. Then she leaned her arms on the railings and looked down at the
red-brick station at the foot of its cliff, surrounded by empty yards,
and with the masts of ships beyond it.

‘You don’t think Martin looked funny, Dick?’ she said in an anxious
little voice.

‘He probably feels funny,’ I said gently. ‘Don’t you?’

‘I do,’ she said as usual taking up the joke as though it were part of
the conversation. ‘But not that way. He frightened me, Dick.’

‘He’s probably frightened himself,’ I replied.

Early next morning a knock came to our door. Mother heard it and
answered it. Then she came upstairs to me.

‘A Mr. Diamond, I think his name is,’ she said with a look of alarm.

I pulled on a dressing gown and ran downstairs. It was still
dark. Diamond was sitting smoking in the front room by gaslight when I
came in. Of course, he had to begin with apologies for disturbing
Mother—as if it mattered!

‘I wonder if you’d mind coming up to Beirne’s,’ he said. “It’s about
Holmes. Mr. Bernie had better tell you.’

‘Drunk?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he replied,’ dead. He blew his brains out in the hotel at
Dunleary.’

I could see he was keeping his even tone only with the greatest
difficulty. I dressed and went with him in a daze. The dawn was
breaking. A group of trees and an old whitewashed farmhouse stood out
quite clearly on the crest of Gardiner’s Hill. The unreal light
emphasized the unreal errand. I could have broken down and
wept. Doris’s father opened the door. Doris herself was sitting over
the fire, tearless. Against her wishes we agreed that Diamond and I
should go to Dunleary together. She clung to Diamond’s coat, saying in
a low voice, ‘No, Tom, please! please! you must let me come too.’

‘I can’t, Doris,’ he said with something like anguish. ‘I can’t go
unless you stay here. You must understand that.’

I wondered later if he hadn’t even then some glimmering of the truth,
because shortly after we reached Dunleary, Holmes’s wife arrived off
the boat. She was a good-looking, hard-faced, capable woman, and her
only emotion seemed to be one of disgust. We got on remarkably well,
considering. Considering, I mean, that poor devil in the morgue with
half his fat head blown away, and the life of Doris and Tom Diamond’s
life blown to blazes with it.

Still, I was glad when the two of us were able to go for a walk on the
pier. The mail boat went out with all her lights on; the stars came out
over the sea, and I realized that adventure had come to me at last,
though, as I have said before, in a form I wasn’t expecting.


(1953)