At length, with a low exclamation he got to his feet, releasing himself hurriedly from her embrace. He clenched his fists.
“Mary,” he said without looking at her, “you see how I need you. I need somebody to talk to, somebody to trust. There is nobody else but you I can trust, Mary. And I don’t know why I trust you.”
He paused. She was not listening. She was suffering a reaction from her exaltation. Why was he talking like this? A lover did not talk like this. He was only thinking of himself.
“But since the first time I saw you, standing in the crowd with another girl, while I was addressing a strike meeting, I knew I could trust you. I remember thinking as I saw your face, that you were the woman for me. It was queer and I can’t explain it. Something in your face told me that you were my woman. It’s very queer, that. You see thousands of faces every day. There is something queer and mysterious in them all, something suspicious and hostile. Then you see one face that you have been looking for all your life as it were. There is nothing hidden or mysterious in that face. It can hold nothing hidden from you. It’s queer. I haven’t worked it out yet. It’s in the eyes, I think. The eyes are the doors of the mind. But I haven’t worked it out yet. But what am I talking about? It’s a sure sign that I’m worried when I ramble off like this. I talk to myself in my room, for want of a listener, when I’m up against it. I talk all night, sitting up in bed, with a pistol in my hand.” He lowered his voice and smiled with his lips, while his eyes glittered. He looked at her for a moment. “If the boys knew that I get the wind up now and again, they wouldn’t be afraid of me. And then. …” He drew his hand across his windpipe. “Sure. That’s what keeps me safe. They are afraid of me. That’s all it is. It’s not love. Oh no. I wouldn’t have it, anyway. There’s nothing like fear. Nobody loves me. Not even that slobber of a fellow Hackett, who stooped down one day on the quays to tie my shoelace. He’d die for me, but only because he believes I’m cold and hard and callous and that I could shoot him dead without a quiver of an eyelid. You see … he’s the opposite from … There you are, Mary. Good God! I must be very bad tonight. I’m wandering. Mary, does your right knee tremble and you can’t stop it?”
“Dan, Dan,” cried Mary, seizing his right knee in both her hands, “don’t worry. Don’t worry, Dan.” She began to rub the knee. “That’s nothing. My father often gets it. It’s only nerve tension. A nurse out of the Mater Hospital told me all about it. You can live to be a hundred with it. She says it’s due to tea drinking. But … Dan, why are you so hard and cynical all of a sudden about everything? Can’t you give it all up and settle down? You said you—”
“Settle down?” cried Gallagher, jumping to his feet and looking at her fiercely, as if she had suggested a heinous crime. “Give it up! How do you mean? Pooh! Women, women, women! You don’t understand that it’s my life. It’s my life, I say. You might as well tell me stop breathing and … After all …” He seemed to think of something startlingly unexpected, for he looked at her with open lips. He continued, shyly almost, in a scarcely audible voice, as if he were soliloquizing. “After all, you weren’t affected the way I expected you would be. You would never understand. You would never join me in the way … Hm! I see.”
“Now what have I said, Dan?” she whispered nervously, biting her fingers.
She was terrified that she had lost him … yes, in a way, strangely enough, she was terrified at losing his love, as if she had him securely in her possession, as a loving husband for a long time … that she had lost him by some foolish phrase.
“Nothing,” he muttered solidly.
He crossed his hands on his chest and began to pace up and down once more. It was a long time until he spoke. She tried to get enraged with him and could not do so. She began to pity herself.
“It’s waiting like this that’s hard,” he said suddenly in a whisper. “I don’t mind dying. It’s not that I mind. It’s waiting without a chance of knowing what’s going to happen. They talk of the bravery of those louts that get the V.C. What are they but stupid carrot-heads? Theirs is the bravery of the dull-witted ox. A man must be intelligent to be brave. It’s only the intelligent man that can visualize danger. If he is brave he never seeks danger, but he seeks dangerous methods of life. You see the difference? Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. I had this all worked out a long time ago so I don’t need to discuss it very much. But this is the point I have to explain now. There is no danger in open warfare. There’s merely death, and death is not dangerous. The Russians proved that. Not recently, but in Bielinsky’s time. That is, of course, they proved it in relation to their own needs. But according to my own calculations and discoveries, death brings us back into the great consciousness of the Universe, which is eternal. Therefore death, properly speaking, is not death. It is a second stage of birth. No, that’s quite wrong. I can see where that would lead me. There is neither birth nor death. But … All that’s out of the count. We have to tackle a minor question. Obviously it’s a minor question. Now that’s better. Now we see death is not
