The Red and The Green Part 17

Chapter Twenty-two.

PAT DUMAY began to mount the dark stairs to the attic. A lamp placed on the floor at the top cast thick shadows down beneath each stair and illuminated the figure of a man in Volunteer uniform who had just come to attention. Pat swayed with fatigue. He had been unceasingly active since the news had reached him on Sunday afternoon that the rebellion was to take place after all. Now it was already after midnight, it was already Easter Monday morning.

On Sunday morning MacNeill's countermanding order had appeared in the Sunday Independent. At the same time, Pea.r.s.e, Connolly, MacDonagh and all the chief militants came together for a meeting at Liberty Hall. At this meeting it was decided that in spite of MacNeill they must act. The rising was fixed again for twelve noon on Monday. Couriers were sent out to all parts of Ireland with the new order.

They all knew, and Pat knew perfectly well, that MacNeill's action had damaged the project perhaps irrevocably. The men, who had been keyed up, had relaxed. Some of them had gone away. A few had even destroyed their uniforms in disgust. There was an atmosphere of detente and disappointment and irresponsibility. Monday was the day of the Fairyhouse races, the Irish Grand National. Even if the messengers could, in time, reach every part of the organization, would the order be obeyed? Faint-hearts would find an excuse in the obvious confusion of the leadership. The first plan had administered a fright. Those who had learnt with relief of its cancellation would be in no mood to start again. They would say that they knew not whom to believe and they would go off to the races.

On Sunday Pea.r.s.e and Connolly could have been sure of their numbers. On Monday it was anybody's guess how many men would turn up. This meant that a lot of quite new arrangements had to be made in a hurry, and crucial projects had to be abandoned: such as the cutting of all telephone contact with England, since there would now not be enough men to occupy the Dublin telephone exchange. An elaborate plan, the product of weeks and months of work, had to be sc.r.a.pped in favour of a congeries of last-minute improvisations.

However, it was necessary to fight. The English might be slow-witted, but they were capable of reflection upon the events in Kerry; and since so many people in Dublin now knew what had been intended an informer would soon find his way to the Castle. It was surprising that he had not already done so. Then the English would have to act, they would have to disarm the whole movement: and the Irish would have the choice of firing a few disorganized shots or submitting tamely. These were compelling reasons for fighting. But they were haunted by another reason which n.o.body mentioned. History now required of them that they should shed their blood. They had planned and schemed and hoped for so long, and set going a train of events which now seemed to have a momentum of its own. On the morning of Sunday, April the twenty-third, at Liberty Hall they could, in some quite ordinary sense of could, have decided otherwise. But everyone present felt their decision to be inevitable.

Pat reached the top of the stairs and the uniformed man saluted.

'How is my prisoner?'

'All safe, sir.'

'You may go now.'

The guard unlocked the door and stepped aside and Pat entered the room. The prisoner was Cathal.

Pat had decided to spend the night of Sunday to Monday at Blessington Street. This had been made possible by the timely departure of his mother to the country. Because of anxiety about Pat she had been putting off a visit to an ailing elderly cousin. Now her mind had been entirely set at rest. Pat thought that what had impressed his mother most was reading MacNeill's notice in the Sunday Independent. After a Sunday paper had said that all was well Kathleen was entirely rea.s.sured. Her joy took form immediately as an extreme concern for her ailing cousin and she left Dublin by train after ma.s.s on Sunday.

Late on Sunday afternoon Pat had made the decision to detain Cathal. He knew that this was only a temporary solution, but he did not want a repet.i.tion of Sat.u.r.day's drama. He had of course not told Cathal that the rebellion was going to take place after all, but Cathal might at any moment find this out and decide to hide himself from his brother. Hurrying back from the other end of Dublin, Pat was extremely relieved to find the boy in the house and decoyed him upstairs and locked him in an attic, setting one of his own men there to guard him. He informed Cathal briefly about the renewed plan and told him that he would let him know later what his own part in it might be. Pat said this out of prudence so that Cathal might not be driven into a frenzy and attempt to climb out of the window. Pat was in fact determined that Cathal should have no part at all in the coming events.

But how on earth was he to bring this about? Pat was now more certain than ever that if his brother were exposed to danger he himself would become totally ineffective. He realized, realized it only perhaps now on Sunday with absolute clarity, that Cathal was as important to him as Ireland: was conceivably more important. When he knew this he was appalled. If this were so then anything might happen, anything might be decided. Only then slowly he moved again in automatic performance of his tasks, for he knew that there was something else which would always weigh down the balance on the side of Ireland, and that was his own honour. He could not conceivably in any last or smallest particular fail the cause to which he was engaged. But he could not put it to himself that he must be ready to sacrifice Cathal. If anything happened to Cathal he would become incapable, blind, a mad man. He had got to save Cathal, not only because of Cathal but because of Ireland. But how?

When he had seen this problem, as of course he had seen it, from further back, it had seemed to Pat that he would manage either by arranging for his brother to be out of Ireland at the crucial moment, or else by somehow incarcerating him. Pat had had too short a warning to adopt the former plan: he now saw at the last moment the difficulties of the latter. It was not realistic to imagine that Cathal could simply be imprisoned until the rising was either successful or was crushed. This might take weeks, months. All that could possibly be achieved would be to keep him prisoner until the fighting had started and hope that it would then be physically impossible for him to reach any of the places where the rebels were. If he could prevent Cathal from marching with Connolly's men he would have done all that he could. But even this was difficult since, and Pat did not fully understand this until Sunday night, it was not just a matter of ropes or handcuffs or a locked door. Cathal would have to be guarded.

Cathal would have to be guarded or else he would do himself some serious damage. The problem of imprisoning him was like the problem of restraining, without an adequate cage, a strong and desperate animal. Obviously a locked door was not enough; and it is not so very simple to tie someone up in such a way that he cannot escape and also cannot hurt himself seriously in trying to. If Pat was to march away on Monday morning without the most crippling anxiety he must find somebody to stay with Cathal: but who? It was after all unfortunate that his mother had gone away and could not now be reached. He could not honourably spare one of his own soldiers for this odd entirely personal task. He had thought first of his stepfather. But when Barney had so simply and so unexpectedly elected to fight, Pat, taken aback, had felt unable to deny him what was, after all, every Irishman's right. To keep his stepfather well out of his own way he had arranged for him to join the contingent at Boland's Mill, and Barney had already gone to spend the night with a comrade in the vicinity. Pat telephoned Christopher several times but got no reply. He even thought of Millie, but she was presumably still at Rathblane, which was not on the telephone. He continued with his duties, acting as courier between Dawson Street and Liberty Hall, without solving the problem. Would it be all right just to tie Cathal up and lock the door? He visited the store room at Dawson Street and came away with a pair of handcuffs. The problem obsessed and paralysed him; and now late at night and almost unconscious with tiredness he had still not resolved it.

There was a small lamp burning inside the room. Cathal was huddled on the bed in a rather unnatural position and did not stir when Pat came in. He seemed to have been sitting thus for a long time staring at the door.

Pat was now in full uniform. He had left his rifle and knapsack downstairs but was wearing his bandolier and revolver. The handcuffs were in his pocket. He closed the door and sat down on the floor, leaning against it.

The attic had once been a maid's bedroom in the days when there were maids at the house in Blessington Street, and it still contained an iron bedstead and mattress, a washstand and an upright chair and a coloured picture representing the Sacred Heart. The little lamp, which was on the floor, showed the underside of innumerable cobwebs upon the yellow stained walls. Close pattering rain enclosed the room, the roof, the window, made of rain. Pat looked at the picture and thought, but the heart is not there in the middle of the body, it is on the left. Then he recalled someone saying that in fact it was really in the middle though it was popularly said to be on the left. What would it be like to be shot in the heart? He realized that on sitting down he had almost fallen asleep and that Cathal had said something.

'What did you say, Cathal?'

'I said what are you going to do with me?'

What, what, what? Pat saw from the outline of Cathal's shadow on the wall that the boy was trembling. He could not see his face clearly through the rain and the sleep.

'That mattress must be damp,' said Pat. 'You shouldn't be sitting on it.' He simply must not fall asleep. He got up, half staggering, opened the door, transferred the key to the inside, locked the door and put the key in his pocket. He sagged down again to the floor.

'What are you going to do?'

'I don't know,' said Pat. 'You're a problem. Let's start at the beginning.' He felt that there was some sort of logic here, some sort of consequential procedure which if he could go through it step by step he might keep awake and reach a conclusion with independent authority. 'Logic,' he said aloud.

'What?'

'I said logic. Listen. Let's start at the beginning. I don't want you to take part in this business, you're too young.'

'You can skip that bit,' said Cathal. He began to uncurl his legs which were obviously very stiff. He grimaced and rubbed his ankles and then knelt up on the mattress. 'You're right about the damp.'

'You're too young,' said Pat, 'and you must simply obey me and promise me that you'll stay at home tomorrow and not put yourself in danger. This is a job for professionals. You're not trained and you would only be a hindrance. Someone would have to look after you and you would do harm and not good to the cause. I know this is very hard, but you must be old enough and brave enough to understand it.'

'I'm old enough and brave enough to fight,' said Cathal. 'You may still treat me as a child, but other people don't. And I can use a rifle, one of the I.C.A. fellows taught me. And-'

'I'm not arguing. I'm telling you what you are going to do.'

'You're not my da. You used to beat me when you were stronger, but I'm just as strong now, and if I decide to go out of that door you can't stop me.'

'You know perfectly well I can stop you with one hand. Cathal, be sensible-'

'I'm not going to obey you and I am going to fight tomorrow. Imagine you were me. Would you stay at home because your elder brother told you you were a little boy?'

Pat was silent. His head swayed. He must keep on talking. What was the next step? Logic. 'In that case,' said Pat, 'you'll have to stay a prisoner.' He touched the handcuffs in his pocket.

'Just you try and cage me.'

It was evident to Pat that Cathal had thought just as hard on this subject as he had. 'I can easily cage you. I'll lock the door.'

'I'll kick the door to bits or get out of the window.'

'I'll tie you up. I've got some handcuffs too.'

'I'll scream the place down and drum on the wall with my feet. There are people in these rooms on either side. The whole street would come and rescue me.'

'I'd have to gag you.'

'I'd swallow my gag and choke or else get a scream out somehow.'

Pat knew that he could not gag Cathal. It is very difficult to gag a desperate person with safety. Pat's head swayed again. He was beginning to feel almost tearful with self-pity. He must sleep tonight and soon. He must make himself ready for tomorrow. Oh G.o.d, tomorrow. There must be some way out of this agony. Logic.

'Pat,' said Cathal. His face was indistinct among the cobwebs and the clatter of the rain. 'Understand that it is no use trying to tie me up. I'd be like a wild animal in a trap that would bite its own leg off to get away. I'd get out or kill myself doing it. Imagine yourself-'

'I'll leave someone with you.'

'There's no one you can spare. Everyone who knows will be out tomorrow and you can't trust anyone else. Besides, I'd get away whoever you left with me. It's too late now to keep me out of it. Let me come with you, Pat, I want to be with you, see that you've got to let me be with you.'

Cathal's voice now was strained and childish and Pat realized that Cathal too was in the last stages of exhaustion. Something had got to be decided and he must not go to sleep. If he went to sleep now he would wake to find Cathal gone.

Pat moved, trying to keep himself conscious, and his arm brushed the holster of his revolver. He opened his eyes wide. It was perfectly simple after all. He had only to shoot his brother in the leg.

Pat saw the room very clearly, as if it had only now been lighted up, the cobwebs slightly swaying in the air from the lamp, the blotched sloping walls where the rain tapped, Christ displaying His Sacred Heart. Cathal was crouched on the bed underneath his shadow, moving himself about slightly, stiff and chilled upon the damp mattress. Pat saw his face sharply defined, pinched together about his long nose with tiredness and anxiety. There was a pathetic exhausted defiance about the pouting mouth. Cathal's dark hair kept falling forward as if it were wearily trying to draw his head down.

Does he know what I am thinking, thought Pat as he stared. He fingered the revolver. Then somehow out of the dream he was almost in, out of the Sacred Heart, came the thought that he would kill Cathal. That would be simpler still. That would make him entirely safe. If Cathal were dead he would be beyond harm and tomorrow Pat would be free to die himself. Was that not after all the best thing? He loved Cathal too much to allow him to be hurt by anyone else. Only Pat should hurt him, and that would be no hurt but simply to lay him to sleep. He loved Cathal too much.

Pat grunted and tried to get up and lurched to his knees. He had been thinking something that was insane or else he had been in a dream. He groaned and said, 'Cathal, I've got to sleep, I've got to rest. Have some mercy on me.'

'Promise that you'll let me go tomorrow.'

'I can't, I can't.'

'Promise, and then we can both sleep.'

'I shall be lying here on my face in a minute,' said Pat. He was not sure whether he had said the words aloud. Cathal would soon get the key out of his pocket. The room was indistinct again as if it were full of fumes.

'Promise.'

'I promise,' said Pat. 'All right, I promise.'

It was a lie. But what else could he do? He groaned, leaning against the door, trying to get up. He had to sleep. He would solve the problem tomorrow.

'You do really promise, you do?'

'Yes, yes. Where's the key? Here. Come down from here. You must go to your own room. We've both got to sleep now. Come.'

The stairway opened and the lamp still burning at the top of it. It was dark below like a pit. Pat held on to the banisters. 'Can you carry that lamp, Cathal.'

He pushed open the door of Cathal's room and the light showed it. The lamp jolted down on to the table. Cathal, his head drooping, took off his shoes and his trousers and got into bed. He started to say something but it turned into a drowsy mumble and in a moment he was fast asleep.

Pat looked about the familiar little room: the bookcase with Cathal's books staggering upon the shelves, the pictures of birds pinned to the wall, Cathal's model yacht. It seemed his own childhood that was present here. He had had indeed, with Cathal, a second boyhood, a second innocence. For the first time he grasped what was going to happen tomorrow as a nightmare, as something terrible. He had so often seen his brother lie down to sleep like that on holidays, when they were as tired as they were tonight; and they slept and in the early morning went swimming in the cold sea. Would it never be like that again? Tomorrow he would be killing men. Could the nightmare not pa.s.s away and leave them innocent and free in the morning? He leaned over his brother, thrusting back the dark lock of hair from his face, and touching that place upon his temple where the muzzle of a revolver might be pressed. Had Cathal got to die? Had he got to die? They were so young. He suddenly recalled and understood his mother's words: there is no such thing as dying for Ireland.

Chapter Twenty-one.

'THE movement of renewal with which I had hoped to a.s.sociate my wife failed largely because of a complete lack of response on her part. I appreciated later that it was of course foolish of me to expect from her any understanding of the symbolic nature of my action and its sheer difficulty, or even any conceptual grasp of what I had to tell her. A being devoid of theory, living almost entirely at the level of intuition, she condemned me for what I was, but when I positively desired, even needed, her judgment upon what I had done, she withheld it, and seemed incapable of censuring, even of perceiving, anything as definite as an act. Absolution requires a definition of sin. My wife was unable to give me absolution.'

Barney inhaled the fragrance of this paragraph and returned refreshed to consider the pad of paper on which, earlier that day, he had several times begun to compose a letter. It was Sunday afternoon.

Dear Frances, I feel it is my duty to pa.s.s on to you a piece of information which has lately come into my possession. I know for a positive fact that your fiance has been having a love affair with Lady Kinnard. I am sorry to be a bringer of bad news, but I feel it is my duty ...

He thrust the sheet aside and picked up a second version.

My dear Frances, It is sad to be a bringer of bad news to one one loves-and I think you do, you must, know the sincerity of my attachment to you. But there are moments when it is one's tragic duty to shatter a peace of mind which rests upon a misconception.

He studied this for some time, altered 'sincerity of my attachment' to 'warmth of my affection', and then put the paper down again.

Was it really his tragic duty to shatter a peace of mind which rested upon a misconception? Barney was in a state of excited distress with which his experience that morning at the Easter Ma.s.s had mingled to produce a turmoil of emotions, now dark, now singularly light and glittering. The crowded church, the high exultation of the choir, the unveiled images, the heaped-up flowers: these impressions, as of emergence into a place of dazzling brightness, contrasted strangely and yet significantly with the sinister, dangerous, thief-like adventures of the night.

Barney had yielded to the temptation to go to Rathblane knowing quite well that he was doing something idiotic and improper. He was increasingly aware of all his activities as a mode of warfare against his wife, and the very fact that it was not altogether for Millie that he wanted to go made the action seem at first even more a wrong one. If Kathleen had only co-operated with him and entered into the drama of his change of heart she could, he felt, really have changed him. He would have given up seeing Millie. But in order to be able to do what he so pure-heartedly intended he needed a motive which only Kathleen could give him. Her inability to see the mechanics, as it were, of his good intentions he read as a condemnation of him far deeper than any he had ever before experienced. He felt suddenly that Kathleen regarded him as hopeless. All right, he would behave accordingly.

This was what he thought at first. But as he cycled toward Rathblane in the evening and breathed the mountain air and saw the quick fugitive sun on distant green fields and watched a rainbow grow slowly from the lower slopes of Kippure he experienced a youthful sensation of pleasure at being a man going toward a woman he loved. He no longer felt that this was part of his fight with Kathleen or had anything to do with Kathleen at all. In thus obeying his heart he was doing something essentially innocent. He needed to see Millie and there was a redeeming simplicity in satisfying the need. Perhaps his whole moral scheme had become too complicated? If he could only get out of the old familiar web of guilt and justification and back to the things he just wanted to do and the doing of them, then he might become innocent and harmless as he had once been. As the sun went down behind Kippure and the fields glowed a luminous dusty gold before becoming dark it began to seem to Barney that his wants and his needs were very simple and without corruption.

He had obeyed the impulse to go where Millie was without having any special plan about what he would do when he arrived. He hoped of course to find Millie alone, to come to her as at their happiest times and be received by that especial laughter which she reserved for him, to be called to her joyously like an animal. The thought that this could still happen made him smile happily as he pushed his bicycle up the steeper parts of the road. If, however, he was unlucky and Millie had company he would have to decide whether to let her know that he had come or whether to remain concealed. At various times in the past Barney had observed Millie without revealing his presence. These experiences, invariably painful, yet gave him a guilty thrill and a pleasure even more obscure and profound. It was something that took him straight back to certain pleasures of childhood. And more reflectively he could treat this pleasure-pain as a gift which he gave to Millie, as a form of homage.

The thought that someone else might be there brought back again to his mind the melancholy prospect of her marriage to Christopher. Since what now seemed to him his mystical experience on Thursday Barney had set aside the whole problem of Christopher and had ceased to feel the temptation to tell Frances her father's intentions. Now the problem and the temptation had reappeared, and const.i.tuted in fact an extra motive for going at once to see Millie. Unable in certain moods to believe in his misfortune, Barney felt that perhaps after all it was unlikely that Millie would really marry Christopher. Nothing was fixed, the future was still uncertain. And although he did not really think that he could positively ask Millie what she intended to do, he needed to see her as a sort of rea.s.surance. He felt that when he actually saw her he would be quite sure that everything between him and her was going to be all right and indeed better than ever.

On arriving at Rathblane in the darkness Barney had noticed a bicycle which he knew not to be Christopher's leaning against the wall. On penetrating into the house by methods well known to him he had heard voices. With the thrilled curiosity which caused him such painful pleasure he had crept closer. He had then learnt first the ident.i.ty, and then the errand, of Millie's visitor. This discovery caused him at first simply an intense moral shock. Millie and Andrew were both quite suddenly revealed to him as wicked, and wicked with a blackness which faded his own moral frailty to the palest grey. After the first shock he felt amazed indignant jealousy, sheer fright at being the possessor of so potent a secret, and finally a childish misery that his Millie, who had played such harmless, pretty games with him, should elect to play this game with another. These reflections were interrupted by the arrival of Pat. Barney, who had been standing in the dark on the landing, heard someone enter below and hid himself quickly in one of the rooms opposite. Later he heard Pat's voice in the dressing-room.

Barney, who had been feeling scared before, was now terrified. He was in a state of total confusion concerning the nature and consequences of his discovery, and he had just made a colossal moral judgment which he was still entirely unable to a.s.similate. With Pat's arrival Barney became suddenly sensitive to another aspect of the matter, his own guilt as an eavesdropper, a guilt vastly potentiated by the magnitude of what he had overheard. If they were to find him there listening to them in the dark there could be no forgiveness then. Pat, moreover, was the last person in the world before whom Barney could have endured to feel that particular shame.

He did not speculate about Pat's visit or attempt to overhear any more. He tiptoed down the stairs and stood at the back of the hall wondering if it was safe to leave the house. As he was still hesitating Pat came running down the stairs and out of the front door. A moment later the door reopened and Pat, as it seemed to Barney, came back into the house again. Barney waited no longer but slid away into the kitchen quarters and out into the paved yard, where he waited a while until the moon was again obscured and then went to rejoin his bicycle.

The next morning the pattern of his feelings had shifted. His indignation against Andrew was more extreme, while his indignation against Millie was tempered by a kind of pity which made him feel for the first time superior to her. He felt also a kind of triumphant relief at having found out so much and escaped with impunity. His jealousy had diminished, merging into a tender sense of responsibility for Millie, and a sober recognition that he now held a very powerful weapon against her. His previous temptation, to reveal Christopher's intentions to Frances, now seemed a feeble pointless affair. It was, it remained, unclear what could be the result of this revelation. But now Barney had at his disposal an infallible method of achieving both his objects, the separation of Millie from Christopher and the separation of Frances from Andrew. Would he employ this method?

Perhaps it was better not to meddle. Since that had happened and would presumably be happening again it was unlikely that the two marriages that he feared would come off anyway. The apple cart was sure to be upset without his intervention. If by any chance, however, Frances or Millie did marry, not only would Barney never be able to forgive himself for not having spoken sooner, he knew that he would be irresistibly impelled to make the revelation later on when it was too late to do anything but damage. So was it not, considering all the facts including his own weakness, his plain duty to write to Frances?

Barney went to the Easter Ma.s.s like a sleep walker. He had decided on the previous day to go and now went automatically. Then quite suddenly, as if someone had come into the room and lightly touched him as he sat absent-mindedly, he was reminded of where he was and what occasion was being honoured. He recalled his good resolutions of three days ago when he had decided to simplify his life and make peace with Kathleen. Had that been mere meaningless emotion or had it been truly the pressure of another world upon his darkness? He remembered how he had felt sunk in himself beyond the possibility of change. Then when this freedom had suddenly been breathed upon him he had jerked up, he had certainly moved; but he had moved still in the old way, projecting his stale self in a new direction; and as soon as there was any check to his fantasy he had despaired at once. He had wanted a formal punishment. But perhaps his penance was simply informality. The terrible thought occurred to him that possibly he ought simply to act rightly and expect no one even to notice it.

The ma.s.s impressed him with the notion of an event, a change. Attending to it, he began to feel an obscure distress, a pang as at the loss of something. He never really liked the ending of Lent. He was never quite ready to finish with mourning when the great peal of joy rang out. Suddenly now it occurred to him why.

Dic n.o.bis, Maria, Quid vidisti in via?

Sepulcrum Christi viventis Et gloriam vidi resurgentis.

Mary Magdalene might indeed have glimpsed Him in the garden somewhere, but for the rest of us there remained only the empty tomb. 'He is not here.' The Christ who travels towards Jerusalem and suffers there can be made into a familiar. The risen Christ is something suddenly unknown. This metamorphosis had always in the past represented for Barney simply a disappointment, like the ending of a play. He had never thought of it as a starting point. He thought of it so now for the first time; and, with this shift of view, it became clear to him, with a sudden authoritative clarity, that it was the risen Christ and not the suffering Christ who must be his saviour: the absent Christ hidden in G.o.d and not that all too recognizable victim. He was too horribly, too intimately connected with his own degraded image of the Christ of Good Friday. Easter must purge that imagery now. The scourged tormented flesh appealed to something in him that was too grossly human since he had not the gift of compa.s.sion. These sufferings ended for him in self-pity and further on and shamefully in pleasure. This could not alter him a jot though he contemplated it forever. What was required of him was something which lay quite outside the deeply worked pattern of suffering, the plain possibility of change without drama and even without punishment. Perhaps after all that was the message of Easter. Absence not pain would be the rite of his salvation.

As Barney walked home from ma.s.s he also recalled to his mind events of yesterday which his visit to Rathblane had made him totally forget. For a short time, a period perhaps of two hours, he had believed that the Volunteers were about to start an armed rising. Even though he had so incomprehensibly, and it now seemed to him stupidly, surrendered his rifle, a sacrifice not to G.o.d but to his own vanity, he was nevertheless an Irish Volunteer. He was a careless, lax, muddle-headed one, but still he was a Volunteer, and he had pledged himself to fight for Ireland should the moment ever come. Then by a connection of thought which led him back through what seemed to him the best moments of his life, he recalled Clonmacnoise, and the little roofless chapel and the abandoned stones and the great empty sweep of the Shannon. Numen inerat. And the presence there had been not only G.o.d but Ireland. Tears sprang into his eyes.

Barney had joined the Volunteers partly but not entirely to please Pat. He had joined too because he loved Ireland and pitied that history of suffering and because he knew that it might in the end be necessary to fight for rights which had been too long withheld. Barney had a strong sense of history but very little sense of politics, and he acted here by intuition. He had expected everything from Ireland, from her darkness and her beauty, he had run to her as to a mother and a place of shriving. And although his life had been a disappointment and a muddle, it did not occur to him to blame Ireland for this. He had abandoned his book on the saints. It was he who was the traitor. That dark perfection remained near him and untouched, and he loved it. He owed Ireland that service. He had thought so when he joined the Volunteers and he had ineluctably thought so again during the dreadful two hours of yesterday. He had been intensely relieved to learn that he had not got to fight after all.

Barney now sat in his room and looked at the letters to Frances which he had begun earlier in the morning before he went to ma.s.s. He could still not think quite clearly about the problem, but it seemed to him that the letters were unworthy. Perhaps Frances ought to know, and perhaps Christopher ought to know, what had happened, but this did not yield the result that he ought to tell them. Any meddling of his here would be evil. He could not, just automatically could not, act with a pure interest, and he ought not to cause fear, misery and hatred without one. Andrew, Millie, Frances and Christopher must take their chance and work out the design of their fate without interference from him. It must be as if he had never known, never seen, that which he knew and saw, or as if he must for ever admit that he could not understand it. Inaction, agnosticism were for him the lessons of the empty tomb. And then it had come to him that with Kathleen too it must be the same. He must not expect to understand Kathleen or to be understood by her. He must not expect her to help him to make a tidy drama out of his infidelities or to make him suffer in exactly the way he wanted. He must just do the right thing simply, even surrept.i.tiously, and let what would follow follow mechanically.

Barney, having come through this maze of speculation, now felt himself brought up with a jerk like a horse that has browsed its way to the end of its tether. So he had come to the same conclusion again but by a different route. Now that the working out was different could the act be done? Could he really surrender Millie? He leaned his head forward on the table, closing his eyes, resting, and then realized that he was praying.

'Barney, I'm so sorry, I've wakened you up. There was no answer when I knocked so I just came in to leave a note.'

Frances was there.

Barney sat up abruptly.

'Oh, Frances, come in. I must have been asleep for a moment. I'm so glad to see you. I've been so wanting to see you.'

He got up, fussing round about her, murmuring, touching her, and her presence in the room made him intensely happy. He felt as if somehow while he slept a problem had been solved, a burden lifted.