The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [199]
It had been damaged but not completely destroyed. Although a gaping hole had appeared in the horse’s flanks, the august cavalier had managed to remain in the saddle, leaning acutely sideways in the manner of a bareback rider in a circus ring. The blast had immodestly lifted her steel skirts a few inches, he noticed.
“Gelignite and a coffee tin,” explained Murdoch at his elbow. “A temperamental explosive which kills the Shinners and British with perfect impartiality. In Irish they call the stuff ‘Bas gan Sagart’—‘Death without the priest.’” And while one half of Murdoch’s face remained smooth and solemn, the other half lit up with wrinkled glee.
Later again the Major sat for a long time in the room of the priest, Father O’Byrne, sometimes talking, sometimes in silence. The room was very small, dark and cluttered with books. The Major was abominably tired. He frequently looked at his watch, but the hours of the morning refused to pass.
“Edward Spencer is a coward and a murderer, Major... You’re a poor sort of man that you’d take it on yourself to make excuses for him.”
The Major was abominably tired. Yet he was fascinated by the priest’s threadbare cassock and by the hatred in his eyes. At length he lifted his eyes from the Major’s face to the crucifix on the wall. To the Major the steadiness of this gaze on the crucifix seemed blind, inhuman, fanatical. The yellowish naked body, the straining ribs, the rolling eyes and parted lips, the languorously draped arms and long trailing fingers, the feet crossed to economize on nails, the cherry splash of blood from the side...
“That boy got what he deserved,” he said harshly. “I only hope it may serve as an example to some of the other young cut-throats who are laying Ireland to waste!”
And with that he turned and strode out of the house, slamming the door with a crash.
In the weeks which had elapsed since the night of the ball the health of Mr Norton had declined steadily. It was hard to say whether this was because the poor man had over-exerted himself on the dance-floor or whether it was merely a natural and inevitable decline of the faculties. In any event, he was now confined to bed, his mind wandering indiscriminately between mathematics and the boudoir, sometimes chuckling to himself, sometimes in tears, but constantly demanding company and attention.
Their sense of duty overcoming their distaste, the ladies would sometimes take their knitting and climb the stairs to the first floor to sit with him. And while they knitted he would gabble long, incomprehensible equations interlarded with scarcely more intelligible descriptions of his encounters with that sex to which, all his life, he had devotedly attempted to unite himself (only to finish his days, old and alone, between these chilly, rumpled sheets). The Major was sorry for him but glad, on the whole, that his reminiscences were so difficult to fathom...The snatches that one could understand were extraordinarily indecent, even to the Major’s hardened military ears.
One day, afraid lest Mr Norton’s ramblings should offend the ladies (particularly those whose honour had remained unimpaired by marriage), the Major brought him an arithmetic textbook belonging to the twins which he had happened to come across in a waste-paper basket unemptied since the previous winter. Mr Norton seized it with delight and in the few days that remained to him (before his rela-tions whisked him away to a more suitable institution) recited mathematical problems without pausing for breath, answering each one promptly before proceeding to the next. The Major sometimes paused to listen to this litany, and one of the problems, in particular, remained in his mind. It concerned a man who was unable to swim and found himself in a leaking rowing-boat so many hundreds of yards from