The Red and The Green Part 13

It sounded easy. Barney liked reading things like that in the Volunteer and feeling that they were meant for men like himself. 'Know your left-hand shots and where to place them.' He would know. 'Practise shooting with your left hand.' Left-hand shooting was child's play to him. Being an expert marksman had always made him feel himself to be an honorary soldier. Yet he had never in fact joined the Territorials nor had he been distinguished either for zeal or performance in the Volunteers, although he was respected as a crack shot by the younger men. Perhaps after all he had not got a soldier's temperament. He read the instructions for the ambush over again. Could he really imagine himself there? 'Hold your fire.... Let your pike men charge...then another volley.' He had seen men training with pikes though he had never handled one himself. What would it be like to thrust one of those things into a human body? 'Then another volley.' He pictured the men lying in the road, some lying still, some twisting and crying out. Could he be there? He closed the Volunteer with a shudder. The Irish spent so much of their time imagining what they would do to the English once they got hold of them. Perhaps these fancies really were, as Kathleen thought them, a poison of the imagination, a corruption of the heart.

He next opened the Irish Times and started reading an article, reprinted from the New York Times, by Bernard Shaw called 'Irish Nonsense about Ireland'. Shaw was at his usual game of deriding Irish nationalism. 'I invite America to contemplate the spectacle of a few manifesto-writing stalwarts from the decimated population of a tiny green island at the back of G.o.dspeed, claiming its national right to confront the world with its own army, its own fleet, its own tariff, and its own language which not five per cent of its population could speak or read or write even if they wanted to.... If Ireland were cut loose from the British fleet and army to-morrow she would have to make a present of herself the day after to the United States, or France, or Germany, or any big Power that would condescend to accept her: England for preference.'

Of course, Shaw was right. Could Ireland stand alone? No, of course she couldn't. No little nation could stand alone in these days. And it was true, as Shaw said later in the article, that Ireland's first natural ally was England. Barney had heard the exalted talk of his stepsons, had heard Pat speak of a transfigured Ireland that would shine in the eyes of the nations, had heard Cathal tell how a magnanimous Ireland would raise a defeated England from the dust. But these were dreams. Ireland would always be the half potty second-rate provincial dump which it had always been, with its stupid clergy and its stupid poor. It was not worth shedding men's blood, sticking them through with pikes or knocking them off with shot-guns at country cross-roads, to try to change what could never really be changed.

And yet was Shaw entirely right? All over Europe men had fought savagely for their freedom in scenes just as petty and hopeless as the Irish scene. Was it a bad thing that they had done this, and not chaffered rationally with their local tyrants for a slightly better bargain? Like almost all the Anglo-Irish, Barney had a strong peppering of Irish patriotism in his blood. He felt what it was like to belong to the persecuted and the broken though he himself had never suffered hunger or blows. The history of Ireland was such a tale of misery and wretchedness, enough to make the angels howl and stamp their golden feet. England had destroyed Ireland slowly and casually, without malice, without mercy, practically without thought, like someone who treads upon an insect, forgets it, then sees it quivering and treads upon it again. Was there under heaven no tribunal where such a wrong could be set right and where the voices of the starved dead could mount into a mighty tempest at last? Were the young men wrong to imagine that an Ireland set free by its own righteous anger would be an unimaginably different place?

What could he do? As his thoughts returned to himself, taking him unawares, he felt a familiar pain which was his timeless a.s.sumption that he was a priest and then the quick jolt of the truth. He might, for all the horrors of the crossroads, endorse the fighting of others. He could not fight himself. His battles were battles of the spirit, his only task his own regeneration. And then as he remembered again the pure yet untranslatable summons of the little light which shone so withdrawn and self-contained in the thickness of the dark, he suddenly realized what the thing was which he could do for Kathleen. He could sacrifice his rifle.

The one clear idea which had remained with Barney from his spiritual half-hour in the Dominican chapel was that he ought to act. He ought to do something. He ought to lift his finger. He ought, as he put it to himself, to give G.o.d a chance. He should shake himself into performing some movement which might be just violent enough to let loose the avalanche of goodness which he had, in that dazed but indubitable encounter, apprehended as reserved in especial for his own address. But there seemed after all to be no action which he could perform. He had decided that at least he could go and visit poor Jinny at the 'little h.e.l.l' and bring her a present. But Kathleen had told him that Jinny had gone back to her parents in County Meath. So even that little decent act was taken from him. There was nothing left except lighting a candle in a church and resolving to be more polite to his wife. Was that all that had come of such an overwhelming sense of the presence of the Almighty?

The idea of sacrificing his Lee Enfield suddenly seemed the perfect solution. It was something that would cause him pain. It was something that would please Kathleen and win her approval. She had said that she wanted that rifle out of the house. It was a gesture that would symbolize a return to a purer and simpler life. Guns and uniforms were all very well for young ones like Pat and Cathal who were not dedicated men, but he had much better stay away and purge his imagination utterly of these pictures of violence. He must become a man of peace, asking little, harming no one. And he felt in an almost superst.i.tious way that if he could undertake this positive penance this might indeed be the lifting of the finger, the joining of action to good intent from which a whole sequence of improvement might follow.

But how was he to get rid of the rifle? It seemed improper and insufficiently dramatic to sell it or give it away, he could not destroy it bodily and could scarcely leave it on a tram. Again the answer came to him as if from a divine source: he must take it to Kingstown Pier and cast it down a hole in the rocks! Feeling himself once more a man guided and inspired, he ate a hearty meal of sausages at the Red Bank Restaurant and then returned to Blessington Street and tied up the Lee Enfield into a brown-paper parcel.

It was an extremely cold day and there was n.o.body about on the front at Kingstown. Holding his parcel cradled in front of him like a child, Barney began to walk along the pier. The sharpened wind blew into his face and brought tears. He felt, with his strange burden, like a man dressed for a part, one garbed for a Pa.s.sion-tide procession who by back streets makes his way toward the Cathedral. Yesterday Christ had been crucified. Today He lay in the tomb. Tomorrow He would rise victorious over death. Barney felt, as never before, that he was a part of that mystery. His instinct had been right. An action, even a mad arbitrary action, was needed to break the spell of his despair and set free the promised grace. Penance, sacrifice, these were symbolic movements whose effects were incommensurable in the world of the spirit. His single act would bring the full circle of his reconciliation. G.o.d who had asked for Isaac had also sent the ram.

He had gone about a third of the way along the pier on the upper terrace. There was n.o.body about. He approached one of the gaps in the wall through which one could pa.s.s to the other side. The wind screamed in the aperture. In a drenching of spray Barney went through and shuffled sideways with his back to the wall facing the open sea. The sea was extremely rough. It roared into the mountainous random rocks in a break-neck surge which creamed almost as far as Barney's feet and was withdrawn with an equal ferocity, sucked back through holes and creva.s.ses to howl in chambers far below, vanishing in boiling foam under the high dissolving front of the next wave. In a mist of spray Barney gazed, wondering which was more horrible, the huge savage sea or the piled rocks with their shapeless crannies. He found suddenly that he had to sit down against the wall.

A veil of rain farther out concealed Howth and even Sandycove from view. There was nothing ahead of him except that line of great glistening light yellow rocks stretching away on either side on which a sort of diffused sunshine fell, and the rolling backs of the waves, dark grey, almost black, coming steadily towards him out of the wall of rain. Barney sat with the salt trickling upon his face and stared, stared at a manifestation of something far older and more primitive than the G.o.d who today lay sleeping in the quiet tomb and tomorrow would rise out of a casket of daffodils and lilies.

He could not think why he was so affected by the sea. After all he had seen rough seas before. Or perhaps it was something to do with the rocks. He had always hated and feared those rocks; and now perhaps catching him in this rarefied, this spiritual condition they were suddenly able to get at him. He closed his eyes to blot them out for a moment and to collect his strength. The din of the sea inside his head, the clatter of Chaos and Old Night, dulled into a ghastly replica of silence and he almost feared to fall into a drugged perilous slumber. He opened his eyes quickly and began to look about for a suitable hole or crevice down which to drop the Lee Enfield. There were plenty of huge triangles of blackness between the rocks into which the broken waves drained and echoed away. Once thrust in there and released from the hand the rifle would slip away into some other world. It would not just disappear, it would cease to be. Barney sat still for a while. Then he began to wipe the spray slowly off his face with a handkerchief. He had realized that he could not do it.

He had known that the surrender of the rifle would be painful for him, but he had not foreseen that it would be like a mutilation. At that moment the Lee Enfield seemed like an extension of himself. He could not sever it, he could not thrust it into one of those appalling caves and let it go. He felt that he might perish himself at the moment of release. The prospect was like a descent into madness. He pitied the rifle, he loved it. He could not surrender a part of himself to that evil howling power. He got up hastily and went through the gap and began to run back along the pier clasping the rifle against his chest.

He went on running with occasional gasping pauses until he got as far as the Crock's Garden. The misty rain had receded momentarily and the sea was a blackish blue scattered with points of light. There was a luminous pallor at the horizon. Overhead the sky was suddenly clear and a weak yellow sun shone on to the Crock's Garden. Barney had again that sense of dream, of belonging to another dimension from the people about him, of taking part in a ritual. Only before he had felt himself the glad master of his steps. Now, in some mysterious enactment into which he had not been initiated, he was being conveyed along.

There were a few people sitting gloomily in their mackintoshes upon the wet seats of the garden looking at the sea. Barney took one of the labyrinthine paths which wound uphill between the thick round veronica bushes. He felt now that he must get rid of the rifle as quickly as possible. If he kept the thing in his hands much longer some doom would fall upon him. He looked quickly about. There was no one to be seen. He thrust the long brown paper parcel far in under one of the bushes and out of sight. Then he walked quickly on till he came to a seat at the top of the hill and sat down.

He was panting with exertion and excitement. He stared at the Martello tower at Sandycove, caught in a grey luminous shaft of sunny rainy light. After a few minutes he thought he would go again and look at where the rifle was. Perhaps after all he should now simply pick it up and go back to Dublin on the tram. He had performed the movements of an act of penance. It was all symbolic anyhow. It's all in my mind, he said to himself. Could he remember under which bush he had put the gun? He started off down the hill, panting again. But several elderly ladies were now coming up the winding path. He returned to the seat at the top. It was raining now in Sandycove and the Martello tower was almost obscured. He waited three minutes and then began to descend the hill again.

He turned the corner of the path and saw a group of people beside a bush. Some children had already found the rifle and pulled it out on to the path. The paper was being unwrapped. Someone was saying confusedly to someone else that hadn't a policeman better be called. Barney pushed quickly past and went down the hill. He expected at any moment to be called back and accused of something. Then it suddenly began to rain extremely hard. Everyone started to run. Barney ran.

He ran toward the nearest of the big Egyptian temples, the concrete shelter upon the near end of the pier. The rain was spilling down, beating violently upon the heads of the running people. It stretched away in front of him like a series of bright metal curtains. Just as he reached the shelter he heard somebody call his name. An umbrella jerked against his shoulder. Underneath the umbrella he saw the pale face of Kathleen.

Barney slithered into the damp gloom of the shelter. There were a lot of people already there and others arriving in haste. Kathleen followed him in, closing her umbrella. They made their way into a corner.

The sudden appearance of his wife did not surprise Barney very much. In his present weird state of mind it seemed to him natural that Kathleen should materialize since she had been in a sense the spiritual agent of whatever it was that had just been happening to him. She was a performer in the same ritual and perhaps its directing genius. However, he asked her, 'How did you know I was here?' It seemed natural too that she should have been out looking for him.

'I asked you when you were leaving the house where you were going and you said Kingstown Pier.'

'Oh. I'd forgotten.'

'I came to look for Christopher really, but there was no one at Finglas, so I came down here in case you might be here with Frances and she might know where Christopher was.'

'It's not my day for Frances.' So Kathleen had not been looking for him after all. 'Would you like to sit down? It's terribly wet.'

Kathleen spread out a newspaper on the rough concrete seat at the back of the shelter and they sat down. Behind them out of holes in the wall a little water trickled over the pebbly surface. The dreary damp smell of wet concrete mingled with a human smell of wet tweed. A large number of persons were standing up just in front of them, hemming them in, and steaming slightly in the sudden closeness. Their voices echoed in the hollow s.p.a.ce.

Barney suddenly felt that he and Kathleen were very private here at the back of the crowd, sitting together in the dark. He felt a desire to touch her, to pat her knee, but felt too shy to do so. A moment later he decided that he must make his confession. The sacrifice of the rifle had worked. 'Kathleen-'

'Barney, I'm so worried-'

'Listen, Kathleen, I must tell you something. I've got to tell you now and it'll make everything all right again between us. I know it'll upset you, but it's right to tell the truth isn't it and won't you forgive me for it? It's about Millie, well it's about me really, but there are two things and one of them is about Millie, that I've been going to see Millie still. You didn't know that, did you? Well, for ages now I've been going to see her at her house, just to talk like, but it was very wrong and I'm very sorry and I won't go there any more at all. And the other thing is about Saint Brigid, I mean about the early church that I'm supposed to be writing. I haven't been writing it at all but I've been writing another thing a sort of autobiography thing about you and me in a way I shouldn't but I'll stop doing that too and-'

'Saint Brigid?' said Kathleen. Perhaps she could not hear very well in the crowded echoing shelter.

'I say I'm not writing about Saint Brigid but about you and me in a sort of Memoir like I shouldn't have been. But did you hear what I said about Millie?'

'Don't talk so loudly. I can hear you quite well. You mustn't talk like that here.'

'But did you hear?'

'Yes. I knew you went to see Millie.'

'Oh. Well and wasn't it wrong of me to?'

'I still don't understand what it has to do with Saint Brigid.'

'That's another thing, I'm doing two wrong things but they're not connected, forget about Saint Brigid, it's just that all the time I've been at the National Library I've been writing that thing about you and me, and-'

'Sure, why shouldn't you?'

Barney had often imagined himself making this confession to Kathleen, but it had been in a scene quite unlike this one. He had pictured himself shaken by emotion, the words rent from his breast. He had pictured Kathleen's stricken face, perhaps her tears, her bitter reproaches, and then the great reconciliation. But this was as random and senseless as the sea roaring through the rocks.

'Barney, I'm so worried-'

The people in front of them suddenly surged forward. There were exclamations, 'It's stopped.' The sun was shining outside. Everyone started to troop out of the shelter.

Barney and Kathleen got up automatically. Kathleen began to pull pieces of damp newspaper off her coat, and Barney pawed at the seat of his trousers which felt very uncomfortable indeed. Automatically they walked out towards the sun.

The sunshine was warm and fragrant after the chill atmosphere of the shelter. The wind had dropped and the sea below them was a thick gla.s.sy green. The people dispersed along the promenade whose drenched surface steamed in the sun. Kathleen started to speak again, but before Barney could hear what she was saying they both saw, with a sudden dismayed premonition, someone running towards them. There was a sort of explosion and Cathal arrived, cannoning into Barney and saving himself by grasping him violently round the waist. The boy was in a state of incoherent excitement.

'Pat wants you,' he said to Barney, and had to say it twice because the words got all mixed up.

'Whatever is it, Cathal?' said Kathleen, her hands at her mouth with fright.

'I knew you were coming down here and I told Pat I could find you at once and he says you're to report to him directly so come now.'

'Cathal, what is it?'

Cathal turned to his mother. He was almost tearful with emotion. 'We're going to fight them now. We're going to take over Dublin tomorrow.'

He darted away, receding along the wet promenade, dodging the people who were standing about enjoying the sunshine. Kathleen ran after him awkwardly, her half-closed umbrella underneath her arm. Barney ran after Kathleen.

Chapter Seventeen.

'PAT, Pat, let me in!'

Pat groaned. He had hoped to avoid seeing his mother. He had intended indeed to be out of the house entirely that day, but it had been necessary to come back to destroy some doc.u.ments and to remove a copy of his will which he wished to leave with a solicitor. He had also wanted to interview Barney about a particular matter. And now he was caught.

When he had noticed on the previous day that the door of his room had been forced he had immediately thought of the police, but Cathal had then appeared and told him what had happened. Kathleen, after searching his room, had gone away in great agitation saying she was going to see Christopher, and had returned rather more calm later in the afternoon. She had said nothing to either of her sons.

Pat, who had jammed a tilted chair against the door handle so that the door could not be opened from the outside, said, 'All right, Mother, I'll come down in a moment.' Her steps receded.

Pat stamped on the smouldering ash in the grate and thrust the copy of the will into the pocket of his green jacket. The other copy was in the unlocked drawer of his desk. All his papers were neat and in order, the room bared and tidied, already unfamiliar. He looked about him. He would not come back that night. Perhaps he would not come back at all.

The authority of tomorrow had made him by now utterly hard and quiet. He had received his final orders and now knew as much as he would know until the firing of the first shot. To his profound joy he had been appointed to be at the centre of the conflict at headquarters, with Pea.r.s.e and MacDonagh in the General Post Office. He closed the door and went down to his mother.

'Pat, what is this about tomorrow?'

He looked at his mother coldly down the length of the long narrow drawing-room. It seemed to be raining again outside and he could not see her face very well. 'Do sit down, Mother, and take your coat off. You seem to have got soaked.'

'Pat, what are you going to do? They've planned an armed rising for tomorrow, I know it, so don't pretend. What are you going to do?'

Pat decided there was no point in a denial. 'How did you find out?'

'Cathal told me.'

'd.a.m.n Cathal.' Pat had of course not told his brother anything of the plan. Cathal must have found it out from someone at Liberty Hall. The Citizen Army men had always encouraged Cathal, treating him as if he were grown up.

'So it is true. And you are going to be in it.'

'I'm going to be where every decent Irishman will be on that day.'

'I would do anything to stop you,' said Kathleen in a low gruff voice, uttering every word with an effort.

'Fortunately there is nothing you can do.'

'I could reveal everything to the Castle.'

'That would not stop us from fighting. It would merely increase our chances of defeat. It's too late. There is nothing whatever that you can do, Mother.'

Kathleen slowly took off her wet coat and let it fall to the floor. 'And if I beg and implore you not to-'

'My dear mother, your disapproval is not likely to weigh with me very much at this stage.'

'Not my disapproval, my misery-'

'Or your misery either. I thought of all these things long ago. Be sensible now. Would you really be pleased to have a son who kept out of danger for the sake of his mother's tears? I'm sorry to cause you pain, but I know where my duty lies.'

'It can't be your duty,' she said. 'It can't be. What's wrong can't be your duty.'

'It's not wrong to fight to free your country.'

'But you won't be doing that. You'll just be killing people pointlessly. You'll have innocent blood on your hands. And you may be killed yourself or maimed for life. That's what it will be. And what for? Think about later on, think when people will look back and see that nothing has been changed. You cannot change Ireland by firing a few shots. Don't you see? Nothing can be done in this way at all. All that great action is in your mind only. You'll commit crimes and you'll destroy yourself utterly and break my heart, and for nothing. Can't you see it all from that place in the future and see that it's for nothing?'

'I don't inhabit that place in the future, Mother, and neither do you. This is the moment when Ireland has got to fight and she's come to it over a long road.'

'She! She! Who is Ireland indeed? Are you and your friends Ireland? You use these grand jumped-up words, but they mean nothing at all. They're empty words. You're caught all of you in the tangle of your dreams and it just needs a few sane men to halt you. Have you not the courage to stop this thing?'

'It's too late to argue.'

'And what about Cathal?'

Pat was silent.

'Have you thought about your young brother in this? Have you the right to destroy him too?'

'We'll keep Cathal out of it.'

'And how will you do that? You know he'll go wherever you go. Are we to tie him up or what?'

'No one will let him do anything, he's too young.'

'Who'll trouble about his age? Those fellows of James Connolly's he's always about with will take him with them if you don't.'

'I'll manage about Cathal.'

'Pat, child, please don't go. You must have some influence with these men. Put it off at any rate, think a little longer. You know you haven't got a chance against the English, sure you all know you haven't a chance. MacNeill must know that. He's not a madman.'

'It's not the point whether we have a chance.'

'You're going out there to be killed for nothing, to die for nothing.'

'It won't be for nothing. If I die I shall die for Ireland.'

'There is no such thing as dying for Ireland,' she said.

There was a heavy sound of running feet upon the stairs and along the landing, and as they both turned quickly towards the door it burst open and Christopher Bellman rushed into the room.

'Kathleen, would you mind leaving me alone with Pat for a few minutes?'

Kathleen said, 'They are going to fight tomorrow.' She went to the door.

'Tomorrow is it?' Christopher stared at Pat. He waited for Kathleen to be gone and then strode forward and gripped Pat's arms above the elbow. He shook Pat with a violence which was half affection and half anger and then suddenly, closing his eyes and baring his teeth, he dropped his hands and turned away. 'Tomorrow? Oh G.o.d, you fools, you fools, you fools. You haven't heard what's happened down in Kerry?'