“And now I have a uniform?”
“What sort of an officer would you present without a uniform? Really, you have the most modern ideas. You will find it in your dressing-room. In the pocket there is a membership card, which you might sign. The dues have been paid. Your commission will arrive by the post.”
“Might I just ask what it is I am a captain of?”
“Why, the Irish Volunteers.”
And that was how it came to be, on St. Patrick’s day morning, in the spring of 1916, MacMurrough walked his aunt through Dublin, in the three-starred tunic of a Volunteer captain. Of course, he was quite well aware the men had not elected him, no more than he had volunteered. But there was something pathetic about those men that Sunday morning. The awe in their faces when he aimed the rifle, the fragile way they touched it when given it to hold; he saw their shuffling looks when they took up their pikes afterwards to go home in the dark. A rifle—a thing that to any English countryman was familiar as vermin. It was not militarism and it was not nationalism: he did not know what it was, and he was sure he surprised his aunt even: but soon MacMurrough was training every weekend to Ferns, and looking forward to his visits.
He had little hope of any real musketry: ammunition was too precious. But he thought he might accustom the men to the handling of a weapon. Gradually, his OTC training was recalled, the pokey-drills and evolutions he had learnt as a boy. He had the men sight and fire, sight and fire, a spent cartridge-case in the bolt to guard the hammer, until they got some notion of a rifle’s weight and balance. He taught its cleaning and oiling, gave lectures on deliquescent substances. He held little sergeant-major competitions in stripping and reassembling the action. Prizes he awarded of smiles and encouragement. That these serious-faced laborers and sons of small farmers, who God knows had toiled all day and all week, should give up their Sundays to him increased, according to their willingness to give, the value of what knowledge he could return. But he was not deceived. If patriotism had brought these men together, he doubted but it would leak under an enemy’s fire: when they saw it was not their flag the enemy fired at, but their person. What is that thing which makes men go forward when every reason shrills their retreat? Not courage, but a kind of love, a bonding of disparate souls to the one company. He could not impart this. He had never felt it himself. I am not a trooper, he told himself. I am a sniper in the tree, a lone wolf.
But it was good to feel a rifle in his hands again, a good old Smellie too. He asked his aunt did she expect to procure many more.
“Perhaps not the same. Would that matter?”
“I don’t know. I should think anything was better than pikes.”
“But you will be able to teach them?”
They were in the garden room in Ballygihen at the time. MacMurrough stood by the open doors, smoking and gazing at the lawns. He said, “I don’t know if I shall be here.”
“Where should you be?”
“You surely know I cannot delay in Ireland much longer. There is military compulsion now.”
“Not in Ireland there isn’t. They would not dare introduce conscription into Ireland.”
“I am normally resident in England. Therefore I am liable.”
“I see. I had not thought.”
“Aunt Eva, I do not intend to sit in Ballygihen waiting for the knock. And I will not have my conduct raked over by some jumped-up tribunal.”
“No, that would not do.”
“I have an appointment at Easter. After that, I shall cross to England and enlist at the first kiosk I find.”
“You have an appointment at Easter?”
“That is what I said.”
“And then you will cross to England?”
“Do not ask me to join an Irish regiment. I shall go some place where I know nothing and nobody knows anything of me.”
“But not till Easter?”
“Aunt Eva, what does it matter about Easter?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. This martial spirit, it is all so sudden.”
“You hardly supposed I lacked conduct?”
“I should as well suppose you were a Smith or a Brown. But you will stay till Easter. And who knows what that may bring?”
MacMurrough smiled wanly, for he knew very well what Easter would bring. It would bring two boys to the Muglins and there would be nothing left in this country for him. He tossed his cigarette away. The war, which had seemed so tiresome with its petty news and thuggish holler, which all along had seemed the concern of other people, lesser people, stupider people, the exigencies of which seemed spiteful, and nowhere less spiteful than in the difficulty he began to experience in finding Turkish cigarettes—this war had opened its arms one night to him, one night as he lay in bed not sleeping, opened its arms like a warm night, inviting him through the doors and into the garden, but a garden where the paths did not lead to the sea, that aimless expanse, but led purposefully onward, marching onward, marching with a thousand men and each with a face and no name. There was, after all, something he could do. And he could not think, for the life of him, why he had not thought of it before.
In the meantime, it was St. Patrick’s day, a rare spring-blue morning. Through holiday crowds down Grafton Street he strolled, his aunt upon his elbow. Soldiers on leave wore shamrock in their lapels, officers too, some of them—a liberty granted by Queen Victoria, if he remembered, in gratitude for the Irish killed by the Boer. A constable on point wore a sprig in his helmet. MacMurrough saw the eyes that narrowly followed him. I know every law and by-law you ever broke or thought of breaking. I have all your crimes, me bucko. Bloody great brutes, where do they find them? Must breed them special, pig’s fry three times daily. MacMurrough had had an interesting brush with one of Dublin’s finest, just up there in the lavatory in Stephen’s Green.
“The constable saluted me,” he said in surprise to his aunt. “And I a captain of the Volunteers.”
“Yes,” she replied, “you will find them full of pleasantries this morning. The Irish constabulary has a keen appreciation of rifle and gun, as many of our men today will carry. It is that which has kept it so fond of the English.”
“We got some fine looks in the Shelbourne.”
“Didn’t we indeed? We shall get them again over lunch.”
A flower-seller waved daffodils from a lane and Eveline paused to admire the display. “Daffydillies for the lady?” said the flower-seller.
Behind her a younger woman, her hair matted and leaking from her shawl, was staring at his aunt, and MacMurrough had a feeling of tables being turned in her thoughts. Something very sinister in her face. A boy too, maybe ten years old, in assorted oversize and feminine rags. More than hunger in their eyes, something like massacre, if ever the Church should lose its grip, massacre only a prayer away.
His aunt smiled kindly. “You should be selling shamrock,” she told the weazen old face.
From alleyways the benisons of beggars came, from lanes they waved their precatory hands. Grafton Street sailed like a galleon between. In a sudden lull he heard the creak of his leather.
“I do so like Grafton Street,” his aunt said. “There is nothing in Ferns the equal of it.”
And now they were coming into College Green and they must worm their way between stopped trams—trams delayed in Dublin, I ask you—motor-wagons, cabs with huffing horses and the cabbies standing up and calling to each other in consternation. Constables with whistles blew their faces red trying to make sense of the jam. The crowds were thick and MacMurrough felt the uncomfortable adjacency of the mob. He suggested a tram might afford their best vantage. But his aunt wished to press on. She tapped her umbrella on the setts, calling haughtily for way, and way miraculously appeared. At last they came through to the William III statue, where a reviewing stand had been raised, cunningly contrived to obscure his view, should ever King Billy choose to glance behind. “Are we invited?” asked MacMurrough. “Oh yes, I’m sure that we are.” He helped her up and willing hands above recei
ved her. She brushed herself down and he thought how handsome she looked amid the black and the green. Before them, in rank upon rank, stood the Dublin battalions of the Irish Volunteers. For that hour, on that day, Dublin was theirs.
And prettily they paraded. Up and down College Green, round and about the Grattan monument. The stiff face of Trinity was unmoved. The old parliament house turned its cold shoulder. If ever a building looked for a way out, that was it. Some fellow MacMurrough could not see took the salute. Pikes glistened like a song.
MacMurrough thought of that other toyland up behind them, the Castle, seat of British administration, with its toy turrets and its toy court. This morning tin soldiers had trooped a Color and this evening at the ball a toy lieutenant would play lords and ladies. It was a toy country.
He looked about at the buildings and streets and the people who crowded to see—good-humoredly now, while the spectacle recompensed the inconvenience it caused. The universality of things abstracted him. That, for instance, there should be smoothened surfaces for the use of traffic, and that these roads should come from the country and, meeting the city, should turn into streets. On both sides of these streets let there be pavings, set aside for the convenience of pedestrians, these pavings to be separated from the street by curbing, ideally raised three inches from the surface, thus providing a gutter, which, through the street’s cambering and a provident furnishing of drains, shall effect the disposal of rain and running sewage. But come, sir, enough of the paving: what of the people? Let the people be classified into sexes, of which there shall be two, male and female. The criterion shall be generative function, though please to note, this function is ideal and not actual: the prepubescent, the celibate, the emasculate, the nulli-parous, the non-generative for whatever reason, shall yet be classified by sex. They shall be male or female. Female or male shall they be, though the greater shall be male. Come come, sir, enough about gender. The people shall further be graded according to wealth, and—humorous touch this—the more obviously a man labor, the more stinting shall be his reward; the more he work in the out-of-doors, the thinner his clothing shall be; the more his labor filthy him, the less water shall he have to wash. Typically, a home will consist of one male and one female, of roughly commensurate age, their immature offspring, other parasites, a peg from which to hang one’s hat. Entry and exit are to be afforded by hinged arrangements in the walls, conventionally of wood. Let these arrangements be known as doors, whereof if one close, another shall open.
Given such overwhelming agreement, it was only natural that such quarrels as arose should hang on the color of postboxes.
“I wonder,” said his aunt, “if Casement has found shamrock for today.”
“Casement?”
She looked at him surprised, and he knew she had not intended to speak aloud. “Sir Roger,” she said. “He is in Germany, the soul.”
A definite note of romance in her voice. Casement. Kettle had mentioned that name. “Is Sir Roger a prisoner of war?”
“How can you know so little?” she said with a quivering of irritation. “He is raising an Irish Brigade from the Irish prisoners of war to fight not in England’s but in Ireland’s cause. When the time comes that brigade will sail to Ireland. With it he will raise the West and the South.”
“I see. Sir Roger is an attachment of yours?”
“He is an acquaintance.”
“Of long standing?” She did not care to answer. “When may we expect Sir Roger?”
“Soon, I trust. Every day we delay brings the war closer to its end. And what is the use of a German victory if we have not risen to help it? These men before us will take Dublin and hold her in readiness for Casement’s coming. Yes, dear old dirty Dublin, city of the foreigner, the Pale, the Castle city: she was ever the curse of Irish hopes. Now comes the time when she must redeem herself. Only these Dublin battalions may help her to that. Of their Irish blood they will make an Irish capital. But that is none of our concern. Our concern is with Ferns.”
“Aunt Eva, will any of this help the poor, do you think?”
“The poor are patriotic as any other in Ireland.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I mean there was a turn in the London halls, I can’t remember who it was, but he got his great laugh when he said he never knew what the London beggars did with their castoffs till he came to Dublin. But it isn’t a joke really, is it. When you see boys without any trousers to wear and girls walking about in flour-sacks, you wonder what on earth is going on. I just wonder is any of this going to change that. Or is it just repainting the postboxes?”
“Postboxes?” she said. “Yes, green—an inspired idea.”
“But my question, Aunt Eva.”
“Your question answers itself. That you should ask it is precisely why we must be to the fore. People of our standing have nothing to gain and all to give. If we leave it to the usual place-hunters and gombeen-men, we know already what a shambles the place will be. We need only look to the Parliamentary Party and any county council in the land.”
Now the march-past had ended. Notables came down to tour the ranks, among them, MacMurrough saw, the gentleman Pearse. Careful now, don’t knock that sword.
Who does he remind me of? I really can’t say. Or is it that others remind me of him? Someone in contemplation before a sculpture. A man bending to a child. The maiden curate greets his flock. Moments from other lives. A most unprepossessing vehicle for enthusiasm—until he speaks. At that Fenian’s funeral, the day after Aunt Eva’s fête, his command and suasion: in all the thousands listening not a face unstirred.
And here he is now, here is my boy. Pearse has found him out. This man Pearse has found him for me. He stops to talk. He blushes, my boy, the only red in all that green. I can feel them as he looks, the lashes on his eyes, the shave of his hair on the back of his head, the very edge of soft, like brick-dust. I MacMurrough am part of his country. Pearse passes on, his light with him, losing my boy in the green again. And I’m not sure now have I seen him at all.
The crowd was growing restive. MacMurrough heard calls of Shirkers! Slackers! Avenge the Lusitania! The plight of poor little Belgium was widely bemoaned. Tram-men were banging their gongs, ever more insistently. An hour now they’d been stopped in their tracks. From his pedestal in Trinity, Burke raised his hand. It is no inconsiderable part of wisdom, he declared, to know how much of an evil ought to be tolerated. The guard at the bank, in their scarlet and busbies, looked impassively on. The police spies numbered in their notebooks. The Castle was right. Let the Volunteers make buffoons of themselves, pikes and all.
“Aunt Eva, may I ask what is to be done with the band?”
“I thought signaling,” she said. “Signaling, I have heard, is an invaluable skill for boys.”
“You know I do not mean that.”
“You mean will they be sent to fight.” She stood very sternly, staring at the men and the women too with their Red Cross brassards. “They will not. They will fight of their own will.”
“What little is left them. And you understand I will not be here?”
“I understand,” she said, “that you have an appointment at Easter.”
They returned up Grafton Street. “It’s early yet for lunch,” Aunt Eva observed. “Shall we take a turn in the Green?”
“Certainly,” said MacMurrough.
Young boys rambled along, touching what they passed with little-fingered hands. MacMurrough touched the bollards, as Dr. Johnson was said to have done, for luck. They entered Stephen’s Green and the withdrawn world of laid-out gardens fell upon them. Voluminous ladies frou-frou’d past, titanics warded by tender husbands, each click of whose canes proclaimed, Behold the woman I fuck. A kid pushed a toddler in some box on wheels, wildly over the lawn. The doubtful fun on the toddler’s face, the fierce joy on the boy’s. Then the Dublin girls, their pale faces and glossy hair, the dark and the light, like fresh-poured stout, the leucomelanous complexion of Ireland.
“Do you kn
ow,” said his aunt, “it really is a delightful day.”
And it was too. The daffodils opened in lakes of yellow beneath the trees. The japonica was coming to blossom, laburnum splashed in corners. A powdery blue sky sailed above the branches. The branches conceived the very merest imagining of green.
They crossed the lake by the humped bridge and rounded the George II block. “Monumentally misplaced,” his aunt sniffed. Novices, a hush of them, hurried from the park to wait in the doorway to Newman’s church. Something about Newman. Buried beside his life-long friend. Friend’s name? Can’t remember. The novices waited for their director, who came, his arms wide, herding them in, their bowed heads deprecating. Male hairy, bull of grace, the lard is with thee.
“Shall we sit?”
“We will.”
Though MacMurrough did not sit. He handed his aunt to the seat and stood beside. A few months back, he had stalked a likely-looking thing to this very bench. Chatted a while, then the thing had got up, gone on to the lavatory, just down the path there. MacMurrough had followed, only a big burly bumpkin of a policeman had come in and frightened the chase away. MacMurrough was still at the urinal when midnight blue bashed against him and he was propelled inside the closet. His trousers were down before he was scarcely aware of his buttons, his head thrust by the bowl. It was a brutish rutting, more of a flogging than a fuck, great baton of a dick poling his innards, his forehead chilling and bruising against the porcelain. Not the pleasantest of experiences, though in recall it did own a certain collywobbly titillation. When the bobby had done, he bade MacMurrough hitch his unmentionables. He yanked him by the hair and told him in his ear: “And if I catch ya anywheres at it agin, y’ill be on tha boat ta England.”
“Not too cold, Aunt Eva?”
“Perhaps,” she replied. “Let you finish your cigarette and we shall go in to lunch.”
Hello, what have we here? Rather a likely-looking thing himself. Fetching little bumfreezer, waiter or something. Do waiters have a lunch hour? I know you. Where do I know you from? Arseless thing, all legs, out of the bottomless pit where Dublin breeds. Got you. Clerk out of Lee’s in Kingstown. Had fondled Doyler’s flowers and frolics. There he goes, straight into the lats. And out again. Unforgivable to let it go waste.