John McGahern - The Dark

“What’ll happen if you do walk away with the exams?”

“I could get a Scholarship.”

“How many are there?”

“Two for the County.”

“But there’ll be a lot in for them?”

“Some hundreds.”

“That’s a lot to have to trounce. But say, say if you got it, what could you do?”

“You could go to the University, study for whatever you’d want.”

“What do you think you’d go for?”

You didn’t know. The University was a dream: not this slavish push in and out through wind and rain on a bicycle, this dry constant cramming to pass the exam, no time to pause to know and enjoy anything, just this horrid cram into the brain to be forgotten the minute the exam was over. Though there were mornings, the hawthorns becoming green and no one on the early road and you could shout The Ode to Virgil for joy as you pedalled: evenings after football, the delicious weariness and warmth, but nothing seemed to have anything much got to do with school.

The University would be different, you’d seen pictures, all stone with turrets surrounded by trees, walks between the lawns and trees, long golden evenings in the boats on the Corrib. You’d be initiated into mystery. If you went for medicine, the parts of the body you’d know, the functions, the structure of the mystery. All day you could pore over the marvel and delight of the books of the world if you chose the arts. You could walk under trees and talk with men and women who were initiates with you too, men your own age, and walk with a girl of your own who was studying the same as you.

“I don’t know. There are too many things.”

“You might even do medicine?”

“I might,” it was growing disturbing, too real in the other mind, and it was so far away and unlikely.

“If you kept passing the exams you’d get more scholarships. You could be a specialist or surgeon then. You could wind up in Harley Street. That’s what’d be a big shake-up for some around here — if you wound up in Harley Street!”

“I got no Scholarship yet. It’s a chance just.”

“A chance, hundreds in for it,” he repeated glumly, the castles fallen. “You’ve no pull.”

“It’s not the pull, it’s the marks, if I get high enough of marks I’ll get it.”

“Are you soft enough to think the marks can’t be fiddled if you’ve got the pull. You’re very young in the world, you’ll learn a sore thing or two yet. I could tell you a thing or two for the amount of schooling I got and that’s one of them,” it had to come to some end.

Trouble about the fire and light was gone, Mahoney’s interference changed to concern over the relentless studying.

“You’re burning the midnight oil too low, I’m telling you. Enough is as good as a feast. You’ll do harm to yourself.”

“It’s only for another few months.”

The bones stood out clear in the face in the mirror, a sunken glow in the eyes.

“They broke stronger men than you, the same books,” atavistic fear was in the eyes that looked on the quiet books on the table in the lamplight. “Far stronger men than you the books broke. And if you haven’t your health what good will it all do you?”

“I feel alright.”

“You’ll feel alright when you’re in a brown box too, not a care in the world on you, let others do the worrying and the burying.”

The best was to stand there and say nothing, the less his idea was opposed the more quickly it’d wear itself out.

“You’ll probably wind up with nothing in the heel of the hunt anyhow. You’ll look a right eejit then, won’t you? And don’t say I didn’t warn you. But I suppose there’s people dying that never died before,” and he went muttering out of the house.

SCHOOL WENT IN GRINDING CONCENTRATION ON JUNE, WHAT questions were most likely to be asked and how to answer, practice at the papers of previous years, ideal answers from Caffrey’s Correspondence College in Dublin.

The only interruptions were the priests from the various orders in search of vocations. Once or twice in these appeals they phrased your own torment too close for comfort.

“My dear boys, you are on the threshold of life, a life that’ll end in death. Then the Judgment. All the joys and pleasures of life you yearn for now will have been just a passing bauble then. If you clutch at these now will they avail you anything in the only important moment in life, moment of death? On the other hand, if you give your life to God, and surely the priesthood is the gift outright, you can say you kept nothing back. As your whole life was in God, so will your life be in death, and in the hereafter.”

That was it simply, and you had set your face the other way from it, towards the bauble. You were heading out into an uncertain life, sacrificing the certainty of a life based on death; for what you didn’t know, windblown excitements and imaginings that in the humdrum of their actuality might soon get stripped of their sensual marvel.

How easy it would be to go downstairs to the community room where the priest interviewed anyone interested afterwards and say: “I want to become a priest, father.” Everything would be taken care of. You’d go on to the Seminary at the end of the year. You’d be cut loose from your father. You’d not have to worry about a job or what people thought. In your death you’d be a priest, a priest of God, the death already accepted in life, the life already given into His keeping before it was required, years before, in your youth.

You’d be almost afraid to look at the leaflet handouts the priest took from the black leather case afterwards, photos of the Seminary life, on the football pitch and in the oratory, happily eating in the refectory, bent in the peace of books at study, walking with companions through grounds filled with evergreens.

There was a fierce drag to go down to the community room and give your life into that death, but no, you’d set your face another direction, and you knew if you did go down that the drag would be back to where you were now. No way was easy.

The other appeals — comradeship, the sharing of mysterious power, working in exotic countries where oranges and lemons grew along the roadside, walking with the great of the land — never moved you much. In the reality your life moved in the shade of a woman or death. Only the lifeless or blind fell for the lesser than these. This was just the destruction of entering the dream around delight of the woman or the disciplined waiting in the priesthood of Christ.

Mahoney’s violence was turning more on himself. He came reeking with Guinness from the April market. When they’d given him his meal, answered his inquiries about the pigs and milking, and he could find nothing to fault, he let himself slump before the heat of the fire. It seemed he’d doze quietly there. Then suddenly he jumped up, the face red and bloated, dramatic arm outstretched, to do a half-circle swing on the floor and shout, “I went to school too.”

“This is my life, and this kitchen in the townland of Cloone is my stage, and I am playing my life out here on,” and he stood, the eyes wild, as if grappling for his lines.

“And nobody sees me except a crowd of childer,” the voice trailed bitterly, and then burst out again.

“But it’s important, it’s important to me, it’s the only life I’ve got, it’s more important than anything else in the world to me. I went to school too,” and he started to sob drunkenly till he grew aware of the still eyes of the children watching him, when he began to shout again.

“What are ye gaping at? Have you nothing to do but stand with your mouths open? Such a useless pack,” and they instinctively scattered, years of habit, before he could single any one of them out.