At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [122]
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The shadows of evening were closing in and gathering about the sycamores, while MacMurrough wandered the fête’s periphery, waiting for the drama to begin. He was thinking of Kettle. He was thinking of truth. The good and the true and that other one, the beautiful, whose presence in the triad, like the Holy Ghost’s in the Trinity, he could never quite account for. It had always appeared a sop to the virtuous, those who had endured the joyless good and the starched truth and now, bless them, were entitled to a little entertainment. Bring on the beauty.
But as regards Kettle: why had MacMurrough spoken out in the library? It had seemed a manifesto. This is the truth and I will have it said. He had forced Kettle to an open repulse. The eyes had unhazed and for that moment MacMurrough stood revealed for the ugly sod he was. Tom-tom Kettle-drum. All the Home Rule in the world would not tarry that gentleman in the library then. Nor French brandy nor Spanish ale nor wine from the royal Pope.
MacMurrough, sneering, smiled. He found, flicked open, his grandfather’s cigar-case. He viewed the contents as might a bully considering his victims. In a trice, the cigar-case was his aunt’s traveling-glass, and he inquired of his brazen image, Am I truly such an ugly sod?
Yes, there was something altogether tantalizing about truth. One burnt to tell it, for it to be known. Dreaded it, too, that someone else should say it, their saying making it true, the truth true, unalterable. He thought of that phrase from Wilde: What one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry on the housetop. Wilde had meant in confession. Was it conceivable to cry out with pride? When Kettle had asked was there a flaw in his character, he had replied that he did not think it a flaw.
—Braggadocio is nothing to the point, said Scrotes.
No, agreed MacMurrough. He hadn’t thought it would be.
Now warpipes summonsed the fugitive crowd; and rounding a shrubbery MacMurrough saw the declining sun had set the stage. Antic forms waited in the wings, but first, yes, of course—“But first, my lords, reverend sirs, ladies and gentlemen”—the schoolmaster had words of introduction.
A crescent enclosure had been roped in front whereout the tophats poked; birettas, a red among the black, peaked cowls of mendicants; ferny feathery whiskery toques. MacMurrough waited with the poor people at the back, bare-headed, his topper in his hand, wafting misty alps from a ripe maduro. The mobility muttered among themselves and he heard an old woman whisper, God bless your work, alannah. He turned, thinking absurdly of himself, but no, it was the schoolmaster she blessed.
“We of Na Fianna Eireann,” said he, “address ourselves to the boys of Ireland.”
MacMurrough watched the tall rather awkward man who gazed with a calm unexpected confidence upon his audience. He was costumed in a uniform of heather green, military cap tucked under his elbow, a sword dangling at his thigh. Earlier, when they had met on the terrace, he had worn a frock-coat, old-fashioned, skirted. He had looked a minister then, something temperance or the Society of Friends. Now, for all his martial trappings, he presented the conscientious padre. His slight lisp his practiced lips suppressed, as in measured cadences he addressed the nation’s youth.
“We believe that the highest thing that a young man can do is to serve well and truly, and we purpose to serve Ireland with all our fealty and with all our strength.”
He had come with his own blush of boys. All afternoon they had shimmered upon the lawns. MacMurrough had been attracted to them, naturally, but he found he hesitated to approach. How aloof they were, discrete from the mass. He had known the camaraderie of those who boarded together, the braggart bonds of public schoolboys. These were different. Their aloofness seemed not of their keeping but as though of their nature, unalloyable.
Now, they watched from the wings while their master spoke, they mantled in untutored cloth, in leather sandals shod, leaning on spears and