The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [113]
But while the ladies gossiped cheerfully and playing-cards continued to snow down on the green baize tables the Major was at his most despondent. Above all, he took a gloomy view of the reprisals at Balbriggan and elsewhere. The result of this degeneration of British justice could only be chaotic. Once an impartial and objective justice was abandoned every faction in Ireland, every person in Ireland, was free to invent his own version of it. A man one met in the street in Kilnalough might with equal justification (provided it fitted into his own private view of things) offer you a piece of apple pie or slit your throat. But given the way things were going (the Major could not help feeling) he would be more likely to slit your throat.
If no throats were actually slit in Kilnalough in the first days after the disturbances, there were, nevertheless, some ugly incidents. Miss Archer was rudely barged into the gutter by two mountainous Irishwomen clad in black and wearing men’s boots. She then dropped her muff, which was trampled on and kicked around like a football by a group of urchins. Wisely she left it to them and fled before anything worse happened. Not long afterwards a young hooligan in Kilnalough put his stick through the spokes of Charity’s bicycle, causing her to fall and graze her knees and palms. Stones were thrown at the people from the Majestic but without causing any great harm. Viola O’Neill, while buying buttons in the haberdashery (Boy O’Neill informed the Major), had had some obscene words spoken into her innocent ears which, naturally, she had failed to comprehend.
But presently the Major’s sense of shock and dismay over the degeneration of British justice evaporated, leaving only a sediment of contempt and indifference. After all, if one lot was as bad as the other why should anyone care? “Let them sort it out for themselves.”
He was bored, he was lonely, and one day he realized that Edward was getting on his nerves. The more the Major thought about this, the stronger his aversion grew. Strange that he had never noticed before how he disliked the fellow. These days the mere sight of Edward was enough to set him grinding his teeth. Everything about him was capable of awakening the Major’s irritation: his overbearing manner; the way he always insisted on being right, flatly stating his opinions in a loud and abusive tone without paying any attention to what the other fellow was saying; and the unjust way in which he dealt with the twins, locking them up for telling lies when he himself was in the process of telling them, tyrannizing them unmercifully whenever the whim crossed his mind. But no less offensive were Edward’s demonstrations of tenderness towards these same twins, the mildness and self-mockery that cohabited uneasily with his ferocity and conviction of always being in the right. “He’s weak and sentimental,” the Major would think on these occasions. “How can I have ever liked the chap?” Even Edward’s clothes, the impeccable cut of his suits and the creases in his trousers, became an affront. “Don’t you think that Edward looks like a tailor’s dummy?” he remarked one day to Miss Archer as Edward sauntered past. Indeed, the only satisfactory thing about Edward was his evident liking for the Major. “He can’t help but admire me because I did what his wash-out of a son should have done. What a joke!”
Perhaps it was inevitable that sooner or later the Major and Edward should have a row.
“The Black and Tans who sacked Balbriggan should be punished,” the Major said one day after he had glimpsed Edward and Sarah walking together on the terrace outside the dining-room. Edward looked at him, irritated and surprised—it had obviously