THE GENIUS

Some kids are sissies by nature but I was a sissy by conviction. Mother
had told me about geniuses; I wanted to be one, and I could see for
myself that fighting, as well as being sinful, was dangerous. The kids
round the Barrack where I lived were always fighting. Mother said they
were savages, that I needed proper friends, and that once I was old
enough to go to school I would meet them.

My way, when someone wanted to fight and I could not get away, was to
climb on the nearest wall and argue like hell in a shrill voice about
Our Blessed Lord and good manners. This was a way of attracting
attention, and it usually worked because the enemy, having stared
incredulously at me for several minutes, wondering if he would have time
to hammer my head on the pavement before someone came out to him, yelled
something like . “blooming sissy” and went away in disgust. I didn’t
like being called a sissy but I preferred it to fighting. I felt very
like one of those poor mongrels who slunk through our neighbourhood and
took to their heels when anyone came near them, and I always tried to
make friends with them.

I toyed with games, and enjoyed kicking a ball gently before me along
the pavement till I discovered that any boy who joined me grew violent
and started to shoulder me out of the way. I preferred little girls
because they didn’t fight so much, but otherwise I found them insipid
and lacking in any solid basis of information. The only women I cared
for were grown-ups, and my most intimate friend was an old washerwoman
called Miss Cooney who had been in the lunatic asylum and was very
religious. It was she who had told me all about dogs. She would run a
mile after anyone she saw hurting an animal and even went to the police
about them, but the police knew she was mad and paid no attention.

She was a sad-looking woman with grey hair, high cheekbones, and
toothless gums. While she ironed, I would sit for hours in the steaming,
damp kitchen, turning over the pages of her religious books. She was
fond of me, too, and told me she was sure I would be a priest. I agreed
that I might be a Bishop, but she didn’t seem to think so highly of
Bishops. I told her there were so many other things I might be that I
couldn’t make up my mind but she only smiled at this. Miss Cooney
thought there was only one thing a genius could be and that was a
priest.

On the whole, I thought an explorer was what I would be. Our house was
in a square between two roads, one terraced above the other, and I
could leave home, follow the upper road for a mile past the Barrack,
turn left on any of the intervening roads and lanes, and-return almost
without leaving the pavement. It was astonishing what valuable
information you could pick up on a trip like that. When I came home I
wrote down my adventures in a book called _The Voyages of Johnson
Martin_, with Many Maps and Illustrations, Irishtown University Press,
3_s_.6_d_. nett. I was also compiling The _Irishtown University Song
Book for Use in Schools and Institutions_, by Johnson Martin, which
had the words and music of my favourite songs. I could not read music
yet but I copied it from anything that came handy, preferring staff to
solfa because it looked better on the page. But I still wasn’t sure
what I would be. All I knew was that I intended to be famous and have
a statue put up to me near that of Father Matthew in Patrick
Street. Father Matthew was called the Apostle of Temperance, but I
didn’t think much of temperance. So far our town hadn’t a proper
genius and I intended to supply the deficiency.

But my work continued to bring home to me the great gaps in my
knowledge. Mother understood my difficulty and worried herself endlessly
finding answers to my questions, but neither she nor Miss Cooney had a
great store of the sort of information I needed, and Father was more a
hindrance than a help. He was talkative enough about subjects that
interested himself but they did not greatly interest me. “Ballybeg,” he
would say brightly. “Market Town. Population 648. Nearest station,
Rathkeale.” He was also forthcoming enough about other things, but later
Mother would take me aside and explain that he was only joking
again. This made me mad because I never knew when he was joking and when
he wasn’t.

I can see now, of course, that he didn’t really like me. It was not the
poor man’s fault. He had never expected to be the father of a genius and
it filled him with forebodings. He looked round him at all his
contemporaries who
had normal, bloodthirsty, illiterate children, and shuddered at the
thought that I would never be good for anything but being a genius. To
give him his due, it wasn’t himself he worried about, but there had
never been anything like it in the family before and he dreaded the
shame of it. He would come in from the front door with his cap over his
eyes and his hands in his trousers pockets and stare moodily at me while
I sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by papers, producing fresh maps
and illustrations for my book of voyages or copying the music of “The
Minstrel Boy.”

“Why can’t you go out and play with the Horgans?” he would ask
wheedlingly, trying to make it sound attractive.

“I don’t like the Horgans, Daddy,” I would reply politely.

“But what’s wrong with them?” he would ask testily. “They're fine, manly
young fellows.”

“They’re always fighting, Daddy.”

“And what harm is fighting? Can’t you fight them back?”

“I don’t like fighting, Daddy, thank you,” I would say, still with
perfect politeness.

“The dear knows, the child is right,” Mother would say, coming to my
defence. “I don’t know what sort those children are.”

“Ah, you have him as bad as yourself,” Father would snort and stalk to
the front door again, to scald his heart with thoughts of the nice
natural son he might have had if only he hadn’t married the wrong
woman. Granny had always said Mother was the wrong woman for him and now
she was being proved right.

She was being proved so right that the poor
man couldn’t keep his eyes off me, waiting for the insanity to break
out. One of the things he didn’t like was my Opera House. The Opera
House was a cardboard box I had mounted on two chairs in the dark
hallway. It had a proscenium cut in it, and I had painted some backdrops
of mountain and sea with wings that represented trees and rocks. The
characters were pictures cut out, mounted and coloured and moved on bits
of stick. It was lit with candles for which I had made coloured screens,
greased so that they were transparent, and I made up operas from
story-books and bits of songs. I was singing a passionate duet for two
of the characters while twiddling the screens to produce the effect of
moonlight when one of the screens caught fire and everything went up in
a mass of flames. I screamed and Father came to stamp out the blaze, and
he cursed me till even Mother lost her temper with him and told him he
was worse than six children, after which he wouldn’t speak to her for a
week.

Another time I was so impressed with a lame teacher I knew that I
decided to have a lame leg myself, and there was hell in the home for
days because Mother had no difficulty at all in seeing that my foot was
already out of shape while Father only looked at it and sniffed
contemptuously. I was furious with him, and Mother decided he wasn’t
much better than a monster. They quarrelled for days over that until it
became quite an embarrassment to me because, though I was bored stiff
with limping, I felt I should be letting her down by getting
better. When I went down the Square, lurching from side to side, Father
stood at the gate, looking after me with a malicious knowing
smile, and when I had discarded my limp, the way he mocked Mother
was positively disgusting.


II

As I say, they squabbled endlessly about what I should be told. Father
was for telling me nothing.

“But, Mick,” Mother would say earnestly, “the child must learn.”

“He'll learn soon enough when he goes to school,” he snarled. “Why do
you be always at him, putting ideas into his head? Isn’t he bad enough?
I’d sooner the boy would grow up a bit natural.”

But either Mother didn’t like children to be natural or she thought I
was natural enough as I was. Women, of course, don’t object to geniuses
half as much as men do. I suppose they find them a relief.

Now, one of the things I wanted badly to know was where babies came from
but this was something that no one seemed to be able to explain to
me. When I asked Mother she got upset and talked about birds and
flowers, and I decided that if she had ever known she must have
forgotten it and was ashamed to say so. Miss Cooney when I asked her
only smiled wistfully and said: “You'll know all about it soon enough,
child.”

“But, Miss Cooney,” I said with great dignity, “I have to know now. It’s
for my work, you see.”

“Keep your innocence while you can, child,” she said in the same
tone. “Soon enough the world will rob you of it, and once ’tis gone ’tis
gone forever.

”But whatever the world wanted to rob me of, it was welcome
to it from my point of view, if only I could get a few facts to work
on. I appealed to Father and he told me that babies were dropped out of
aeroplanes and if you caught one you could keep it. “By parachute?” I
asked, but he only looked pained and said: “Oh, no, you don’t want to
begin by spoiling them.” Afterwards, Mother took me aside again and
explained that he was only joking. I went quite dotty with rage and told
her that one of these days he would go too far with his jokes.

All the same, it was a great worry to Mother. It wasn’t every mother who
had a genius for a son, and she dreaded that she might be wronging
me. She suggested timidly to Father that he should tell me something
about it, and he danced with rage. I heard them because I was supposed
to be playing with the Opera House upstairs at the time. He said she was
going out of her mind, and that she was driving me out of my mind as
well. She was very upset because she had considerable respect for his
judgement.

At the same time when it was a matter of duty she could be very, very
obstinate. It was a heavy responsibility, and she disliked it
intensely—a deeply pious woman who never mentioned the subject at all to
anybody if she could avoid it—but it had to be done. She took an awful
long time over it—it was a summer day, and we were sitting on the bank
of a stream in the Glen—but at last I managed to detach the fact that
mummies had an engine in their tummies and daddies had a starting handle
that made it work, and once it started it went on until it made a
baby. That certainly explained an awful lot
I had not understood up to this—for instance, why fathers were necessary
and why Mother had buffers on her chest while Father had none. It made
her almost as interesting as a locomotive, and for days I went round
deploring my own rotten luck that I wasn’t a girl and couldn’t have an
engine and buffers instead of a measly old starting handle like Father.

Soon afterwards I went to school and disliked it intensely. I was too
small to be moved up to the big boys, and the other “infants” were still
at the stage of spelling “cat” and “dog.” I tried to tell the old
teacher about my work, but she only smiled and said: “Hush, Larry!” I
hated being told to hush. Father was always saying it to me.

One day I was standing at the playground gate, feeling very lonely and
dissatisfied, when a tall girl from the Senior Girls’ School spoke to
me. She had a plump, dark face and black pigtails.

“What’s your name, little boy?” she asked.

I told her.

“Is this your first time at school?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And do you like it?”

“No, I hate it,” I replied gravely. “The children can’t spell and the
old woman talks too much.”

Then I talked myself, for a change, and she listened attentively while I
told her about myself, my voyages, my books, and the time of the trains
from all the city stations. As she seemed so interested I told her I
would meet her after school and tell her some more.

I was as good as my word. When I had eaten my lunch,instead of going on
further voyages I went back to the Girls’ School and waited for her to
come out. She seemed pleased to see me because she took my hand and
brought me home with her. She lived up Gardiner’s Hill, a steep, demure
suburban road with trees that overhung the walls at either side. She
lived in a small house on top of the hill and was one of a family of
three girls. Her little brother, John Joe, had been killed the previous
year by a car. “Look at what I brought home with me!” she said when we
went into the kitchen, and her mother, a tall, thin woman, made a great
fuss of me and wanted me to have my dinner with Una. That was the girl’s
name. I didn’t take anything but while she ate I sat by the range and
told her mother about myself. She seemed to like it as much as Una, and
when dinner was over Una took me out in the fields behind the house for
a walk.

When I went home at teatime, Mother was delighted.

“Ah,” she said, “I knew you wouldn’t be long making nice friends at
school. It’s about time for you, the dear knows.”

I felt much the same about it, and every fine day at three I waited for
Una outside the school. When it rained and Mother would not let me out I
was miserable.

One day while I was waiting for her there were two senior girls outside
the gate.

“Your girl isn’t out yet, Larry,” said one with a giggle.

“And do you mean to tell me Larry has a girl?” the other asked with a
shocked air.

“Oh, yes,” said the first. “Una Dwyer is Larry’s girl. He goes with Una,
don’t you, Larry?”

I replied politely that I did, but in fact I was seriously
alarmed. I had not realized that Una would be considered my girl. It had
never happened to me before, and I had not understood that my waiting
for her would be regarded in such a grave light. Now, I think the girls
were probably right anyhow, for that is always the way it has been with
me. A woman has only to shut up and let me talk long enough for me to
fall head and ears in love with her. But then I did not recognize the
symptoms. All I knew was that going with somebody meant you intended to
marry them. I had always planned on marrying Mother; now it seemed as if
I was expected to marry someone else, and I wasn’t sure if I should like
it or if, like football, it would prove to be one of those games that
two people could not play without pushing.

A couple of weeks later I went to a party at Una’s house. By this time
it was almost as much mine as theirs. All the girls liked me and
Mrs. Dwyer talked to me by the hour. I saw nothing unusual about this
except a proper appreciation of geniuses. Una had warned me that I
should be expected to sing, so I was ready for the occasion. I sang the
Gregorian _Credo_, and some of the little girls laughed but Mrs. Dwyer
only looked at me fondly.

“I suppose you'll be a priest when you grow up, Larry?” she asked.

“No, Mrs. Dwyer,” I replied firmly. “As a matter of fact, I intend to be
a composer. Priests can’t marry, you see, and I want to get married.”

That seemed to surprise her quite a bit. I was quite prepared to
continue discussing my plans for the future, but all the children talked
together. I was used to planning discussions so that they went on for a
long time, but I found that whenever I began one in the Dwyers’, it was
immediately interrupted so that I found it hard to concentrate. Besides,
all the children shouted, and Mrs. Dwyer, for all her gentleness,
shouted with them and at them. At first, I was somewhat alarmed, but I
soon saw that they meant no particular harm, and when the party ended I
was jumping up and down on the sofa, shrieking louder than anyone, while
Una, in hysterics of giggling, encouraged me. She seemed to think I was
the funniest thing ever.

It was a moonlit November night, and lights were burning in the little
cottages along the road when Una brought me home. On the road outside
she stopped uncertainly and said: “This is where little John Joe was
killed.”

There was nothing remarkable about the spot, and I saw no chance of
acquiring any useful information.

“Was it a Ford or a Morris?” I asked, more out of politeness than
anything else.

“I don’t know,” she replied with smouldering anger. “It was Donegans’
old car. They can never look where they’re going, the old shows!”

“Our Lord probably wanted him,” I said perfunctorily.

“I dare say He did,” Una replied, though she showed no particular
conviction. “That old fool Donegan—I could kill him whenever I think of
it.”

“You should get your mother to make you another,” I suggested helpfully.

“Make me a what?” Una exclaimed in consternation.

“Make you another brother,” I repeated earnestly. “It’s quite easy,
really. She has an engine in her tummy, and
all your daddy has to do is to start it with his starting handle.”

“Cripes!” Una said and clapped her hand over her mouth in an explosion
of giggles. “Imagine me telling her that!”

“But it’s true, Una,” I said obstinately. “It only takes nine
months. She could make you another little brother by next summer.”

“Oh, Jay!” exclaimed Una in another fit of giggles. “Who told you all
that?”

“Mummy did. Didn’t you mother tell you?”

“Oh, she says you buy them from Nurse Daly,” said Una. and began to
giggle again.

“I wouldn’t really believe that,” I said with as much dignity as I could
muster.

But the truth was I felt I had made a fool of myself again. I realized
now that I had never been convinced by Mother’s explanation. It was too
simple. If there was anything that woman could get wrong she did so
without fail. And it upset me, because for the first time I found myself
wanting to make a really good impression. The Dwyers had managed to
convince me that, whatever else I wanted to be, I did not want to be a
priest. I didn’t even want to be an explorer, a career which would take
me away for long periods from my wife and family. I was prepared to be a
composer and nothing but a composer.

That night in bed I sounded Mother on the subject of marriage. I tried
to be tactful because it had always been agreed between us that I should
marry her and I did not wish her to see that my feelings had
changed.

“Mummy,” I asked, “if a gentleman asks a lady to marry him, what
does he say?”

“Oh,” she replied shortly, “some of them say a lot. They say more than
they mean.”

She was so irritable that I guessed she had divined my secret and I felt
really sorry for her.

“If a gentleman said ‘Excuse me, will you marry me?’ would that be all
right?” I persisted.

“Ah, well, he’d have to tell her first that he was fond of her,” said
Mother, who, no matter what she felt, could never bring herself to
deceive me on any major issue.

But about the other matter I saw that it was hopeless to ask her any
more. For days I made the most pertinacious inquiries at school and
received some startling information. One boy had actually come floating
down on a snowflake, wearing a bright blue dress, but, to his chagrin
and mine, the dress had been given away to a poor child in the North
Main Street. I grieved long and deeply over this wanton destruction of
evidence. The balance of opinion favoured Mrs. Dwyer’s solution, but of
the theory of engines and starting handles no one in the school had ever
heard. That theory might have been all right when Mother was a girl but
it was now definitely out of fashion.

And because of it I had been exposed to ridicule before the family whose
good opinion I valued most! It was hard enough to keep up my dignity
with a girl who was doing algebra while I hadn’t got beyond long
division without falling into childish errors that made her laugh. That
is another thing I still cannot stand, being made fun of by women. Once
they begin they never stop.

Once when we were going up Gardiner’s Hill together after school she
stopped to look at a baby in a pram. The baby grinned at her and she
gave him her finger to suck. He waved his fists and sucked like mad and
she went off into giggles again.

“I suppose that was another engine?” she said.

Four times at least she mentioned my silliness, twice in front of other
girls, and each time, though I pretended to ignore it, I was pierced to
the heart. It made me determined not to be exposed again. Once Mother
asked Una and her younger sister, Joan, to tea and all the time I was in
an agony of self-consciousness, dreading what she would say next. I felt
that a woman who had said such things about babies was capable of
anything. Then the talk turned on the death of little John Joe, and it
all flowed back into my mind on a wave of mortification. I made two
efforts to change the conversation, but Mother returned to it. She was
full of pity for the Dwyers, full of sympathy for the little boy, and
had almost reduced herself to tears. Finally, I got up and ordered Una
and Joan to play with me. Then Mother got angry.

“For goodness’ sake, Larry, let the children finish their tea!” she
snapped.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Delaney,” Una said good-naturedly. “I’ll go with
him.”

“Nonsense, Una!” Mother said sharply. “Finish your tea and go on with
what you were saying. It’s a wonder to me your poor mother didn’t go out
of her mind. How can they let people like that drive cars?”

At this I set up a loud wail. At any moment now, I felt, she was going to
get on to babies and advise Una about what her mother ought to do.

“Will you behave yourself, Larry!” Mother said in a quivering voice. “Or
what’s come over you in the past few weeks? You used to have such nice
manners, and now look at you! A little corner boy! I’m ashamed of you!”

How could she know what had come over me? How could she realize that I
was imagining the family circle in the Dwyers’ house and Una, between
fits of laughter, describing my old-fashioned mother who still talked
about babies coming out of people’s stomachs? It must have been real
love, for I have never known true love in which I wasn’t ashamed of
Mother.

And she knew it and was hurt. I still enjoyed going home with Una in the
afternoons and, while she ate her dinner, I sat at the piano and
pretended to play my own compositions, but whenever she called at our
house for me I grabbed her by the hand and tried to drag her away so
that she and Mother shouldn’t start talking.

“Ah, I’m disgusted with you,” Mother said one day. “One would think you
were ashamed of me in front of that little girl. I'll engage she doesn’t
treat her mother like that.”

Then one day I was waiting for Una at the school gate as usual. Another
boy was waiting there as well—one of the seniors. When he heard the
screams of the school breaking up he strolled away and stationed himself
at the foot of the hill by the crossroads. Then Una herself came rushing
out in her wide-brimmed felt hat, swinging her satchel, and approached
me with a conspiratorial air.

“Oh, Larry, guess what’s happened!” she whispered. “I can’t bring you
home with me today. I'll come down and see you during the week,
though. Will that do?”

“Yes, thank you,” I said in a dead cold voice. Even at the most tragic
moment of my life I could be nothing but polite. I watched her scamper
down the hill to where the big boy was waiting. He looked over his
shoulder with a grin, and then the two of them went off together.

Instead of following them, I went back up the hill alone and stood
leaning over the quarry wall, looking at the roadway and the valley of
the city beneath me. I knew this was the end. I was too young to marry
Una. I didn’t know where babies came from and I didn’t understand
algebra. The fellow she had gone home with probably knew everything
about both. I was full of gloom and revengeful thoughts. I, who had
considered it sinful and dangerous to fight, was now regretting that I
hadn’t gone after him to batter his teeth in and jump on his face. It
wouldn’t even have mattered to me that I was too young and weak and that
he would have done all the battering. I saw that love was a game that
two people couldn’t play at without pushing, just like football.

I went home and without saying a word took out the work I had been
neglecting so long. That, too, seemed to have lost its appeal. Moodily,
I ruled five lines and began to trace the difficult sign of the treble
clef.

“Didn’t you see Una, Larry?” Mother asked in surprise, looking up from
her sewing.

“No, mummy,” I said, too full for speech.

“Wisha, ‘twasn’t a falling-out ye had?” she asked in dismay, coming
towards me. I put my head on my hands and sobbed. “Wisha, never mind,
childeen!” she murmured, running her hand through my hair. “She was a
bit old for you. You reminded her of her little brother that was killed,
of course—that was why. You'll soon make new friends, take my word for
it.”

But I did not believe her. That evening there was no comfort for me. My
great work meant nothing to me and I knew it was all I would ever
have. For all the difference it made, I might as well become a priest. I
felt it was a poor, sad, lonesome thing being nothing but a genius.