Word: dev
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...Dev and Cuff have had a fight...
...they say Dev put out the light...
...Dev is Diarmuid Devine, B.A., English master at Saint Michan's and Cuff (socalled for his swift classroom rabbit punch) is his seedy senior colleague, Timothy Stanislaus Heron, M.A., whose raveled gown flaps behind him "like broken black wings." According to Novelist Brian Moore, many moral Waterloos are lost on the playing fields of Saint Michan's. It is not a progressive school; in fact it is the most distressful college that has been seen since Dotheboys Hall. By confession and the cane, the clerical masters rule a cowed proletariat of boys and a middle class...
These circumstances, and the great grey circumstance of Belfast itself, where the Catholic Irish tread with resentful circumspection amid the Protestant majority, compose the theater for Dev's tragedy. He is more vulnerable to scandal than an English princess when Cuff's young niece arrives from Dublin. Soon there is talk about Una and Dev. Love leads him to desperate measures: he buys a Tattersall waistcoat and takes dancing lessons. One awful night the high-spirited Una finds the answer to the question: "Where can we go on Sunday in Belfast?" She goes with Dev to his basement...
...ruined. She has slept the night on his floor. He has bought her drinks, and "a man who'd let a young girl get stocious drunk is almost as bad as a fornicator.'' Soon, the school knows, and the writing is on the jakes wall for Dev. Yet-most horrible touch of all-Dev is forgiven, and it is put about that "nothing" has happened. "If it wasn't so pitiful, it would be funny," says Una in an exact summary of the book itself. It is Dev's tragedy to remain a man among...