t wanted to go to the party, who had
wanted to go on playing with himself, afraid of nothing so much as of
forgetting "pieces of himself that he wanted to remember." He was
Michael who refused to stay at school another term, and who talked about
shooting himself because he had to go with his class and do what the
other fellows were doing. He objected to being suddenly required to feel
patriotic because other people were feeling patriotic, to think that
Germany was in the wrong because other people thought that Germany was
in the wrong, to fight because other people were fighting.

Why should he? He saw no earthly reason why.

He said to himself that it was the blasted cheek of the assumption that
he resented. There was a peculiarly British hypocrisy and unfairness and
tyranny about it all.

It wasn't--as they all seemed to think--that he was afraid to fight. He
had wanted to go and fight for Ireland. He would fight any day in a
cleaner cause. By a cleaner cause Michael meant a cause that had not
been messed about so much by other people. Other people had not put
pressure on him to fight for Ireland; in fact they had tried to stop
him. Michael was also aware that in the matter of Ireland his emotions,
though shared by considerable numbers of the Irish people, were not
shared by his family or by many people whom he knew; to all intents and
purposes he had them to himself.

It was no use trying to explain all this to his father and mother, for
they wouldn't understand it. The more he explained the more he would
seem to them to be a shirker.

He could see what they thought of him. He saw it in their stiff,
reticent faces, in his mother's strained smile, in his sister's silence
when he asked her what she had been doing all day. Their eyes--his
mother's and his sister's eyes--pursued him with the unspoken question:
"Why don't you go and get killed--for England--like other people?"

Still, he could bear these things, for they were visible, palpable; he
knew where he was with them. What he could not stand was that empty
spiritual space between him and Nicky. That hurt him where he was most
vulnerable--in his imagination.

* * * * *

And again, his imagination healed the wound it made.

It was all very well, but if you happened to have a religion, and your
religion was what mattered to you most; if you adored Beauty as the
supreme form of Life; if you cared for nothing else; if you lived,