The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (53 page)

“Aren’t you afraid of death?”

Monteith shrugged.

“I’ve seen it up close many times. In South Africa, during the Boer War, it was very close. We’re all afraid of death, I imagine. But there are deaths and then there are deaths, Sir Roger. To die fighting for your homeland is a death as honorable as dying for your family or your faith. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes, I do,” Roger said. “I hope if it comes to it, we die like that and not by swallowing this Amazonian potion that must be indigestible.”

On the eve of their departure, Roger went to Zossen for a few hours to say goodbye to Father Crotty. He didn’t go into the camp. He sent for the Dominican, and they took a long walk through a wood of firs and birches beginning to turn green. Father Crotty was distraught as he listened to Roger’s confidences, not interrupting him once. When he finished speaking, the priest crossed himself. He was silent for a long time.

“To go to Ireland thinking the uprising is doomed to failure is a form of suicide,” he said, as if thinking aloud.

“I’m going with the intention of stopping it, Father. I’ll talk to Tom Clarke, Joseph Plunkett, Patrick Pearse, all the leaders. I’ll make them see the reasons why this sacrifice seems useless to me. Instead of accelerating independence, it will delay it. And …”

He felt his throat closing and he stopped speaking.

“What is it, Roger? We’re friends, and I’m here to help you. You can trust me.”

“I have a vision I can’t get out of my head, Father Crotty. Those idealists and patriots who are going to be mangled, leaving their families destroyed and indigent, subject to terrible reprisals, at least are conscious of what they are doing. But do you know who I think about all the time?”

He told him that in 1910 he had gone to give a talk at the Hermitage, the place in Rathfarnham, in the outskirts of Dublin, where St. Enda’s, Patrick Pearse’s bilingual school, was located. After speaking to the students, he gave them an object he had brought from his trip through Amazonia—a Huitoto blowgun—as a prize for the best composition in Gaelic by a final-year student. He had been enormously moved by these dozens of young men exulting in the idea of Ireland, the militant love with which they recalled its history, its heroes, its saints, its culture, the state of religious ecstasy in which they sang the ancient Celtic songs. And, too, the profoundly Catholic spirit that reigned in the school along with their fervent patriotism: Pearse had succeeded in having both things fuse and become one in those young people, as they had in him and his brother and sister, Willie and Margaret, who also taught at St. Enda’s.

“All those young men will be killed, they’re going to be cannon fodder, Father Crotty. With rifles and revolvers they won’t even know how to fire. Hundreds, thousands of innocents like them facing cannon, machine guns, the officers and soldiers of the most powerful army in the world. And they’ll achieve nothing. Isn’t it terrible?”

“Of course it’s terrible, Roger,” the cleric agreed. “But perhaps it’s not accurate to say they’ll achieve nothing.”

He paused again for a long time and then began to speak slowly, distressed and moved.

“Ireland is a profoundly Christian country, as you know. Perhaps because of its particular situation as an occupied country, it was more receptive than others to Christ’s message. Or because we had enormously persuasive missionaries and apostles like Saint Patrick, the faith took deeper root there than in other places. Ours is a religion above all for those who suffer. The humiliated, the hungry, the defeated. That faith has prevented us from disintegrating as a country in spite of the force crushing us. In our religion martyrdom is central. To sacrifice oneself, immolate oneself. Didn’t Christ do that? He became flesh and subjected himself to the most awful cruelty. Betrayal, torture, death on the cross. Didn’t it do any good, Roger?”

Roger thought of those convinced the struggle for liberty was both mystic and civic.

“I understand what you mean, Father Crotty. I know that people like Pearse, Plunkett, even Tom Clarke, who’s thought of as realistic and practical, are aware the uprising is a sacrifice. And they’re certain their death can create a symbol that will move all the energies of the Irish. I understand their will to sacrifice. But do they have the right to bring in people who lack their experience and lucidity, young people who don’t know they’re going to the slaughter only to set an example?”

“I don’t admire what they’re doing, Roger. I’ve already told you that,” Father Crotty murmured. “Martyrdom is something a Christian resigns himself to, not an end he seeks out. But hasn’t history perhaps made humanity progress in this way, with gestures and sacrifices? In any case, the person who concerns me now is you. If you’re captured, you won’t have the chance to fight. You’ll be tried for high treason.”

“I became involved in this, Father Crotty, and my obligation is to be consistent and follow through to the end. I’ll never be able to thank you for everything you’ve done for me. Can I ask for your blessing?”

He kneeled, Father Crotty blessed him, and they said goodbye with an embrace.

XV

When Fathers Carey and MacCarroll entered his cell, Roger had already received the paper, pen, and ink he had asked for and with a steady hand and no hesitation had written two brief letters in succession, one to his cousin Gertrude and another open letter to his friends. The two letters were very similar. To Gee, along with some deeply felt phrases telling her how much he had loved her and the good memories he had of her, he said: “Tomorrow, St. Stephen’s Day, I’ll have the death I’ve looked for. I hope God forgives my errors and accepts my prayers.” The letter to his friends showed the same tragic fortitude: “My final message for everyone is a
sursum corda
. I wish the best to those who will take my life and those who have tried to save it. All of you are now my brothers.”

John Ellis, the hangman, dressed as always in dark colors and accompanied by his assistant, a young man who introduced himself as Robert Baxter and seemed nervous and frightened, came to take his measurements—height, weight, and neck size—in order, he explained without constraint, to determine the height of the gallows and the thickness of the rope. As he measured him with a yardstick and wrote in a notebook, he told him that in addition to this job, he continued to practice his profession as a barber in Rochdale, where his clients tried to draw out the secrets of his work, but with respect to that subject, he was a sphinx. Roger was glad when they left.

A short while later, a guard brought the last delivery of letters and telegrams already reviewed by the censors. They were from people he didn’t know: they wished him luck or insulted him and called him traitor. He barely looked through them, but a long telegram caught his attention. It was from the rubber king Julio C. Arana. It was dated in Manaus and written in a Spanish even Roger could tell was filled with mistakes. He exhorted him “to be just by confessing his guilt, known only by Divine Justice, to a human court, with regard to his behavior in Putumayo.” He accused him of having “invented facts and influenced the Barbadians to confirm irresponsible acts that never happened” with the sole purpose of “obtaining titles and a fortune.” It ended this way: “I forgive you, but it is necessary for you to be just and declare now in a total and truthful way the real facts that nobody knows better than you.” Roger thought:
His lawyers didn’t write this telegram: he did
.

He felt calm. The fear that in the previous days and weeks would produce sudden shudders and send chills down his spine had completely disappeared. He was certain he would go to his death with the same serenity as Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke, Joseph Plunkett, James Connolly, and all the valiant men who had sacrificed themselves in Dublin during that week in April so Ireland would be free. He felt detached from problems and distress and ready to make his peace with God.

Father Carey and Father MacCarroll were very serious when they came in and shook his hand with affection. He had seen Father MacCarroll three or four times but had not spoken much to him. He was a Scot and had a small tic of the nose that gave his expression a comic slant. On the other hand, with Father Carey he felt fully confident. He returned the copy of the
Imitation of Christ
by Thomas à Kempis.

“I don’t know what to do with it, please give it to someone. It’s the only book they’ve allowed me to read in Pentonville Prison. I don’t regret it. It has been good company. If you ever communicate with Father Crotty, tell him he was right. Thomas à Kempis was, as he told me, a saintly man, simple and filled with wisdom.”

Father MacCarroll told him the sheriff was taking care of his civilian clothes and would bring them in soon. In the prison storeroom they had become wrinkled and dirty, and Mr. Stacey himself was having them cleaned and pressed.

“He’s a good man,” said Roger. “He lost his only son in the war and he, too, has been half dead with grief.”

After a pause, he asked them to concentrate now on his conversion to Catholicism.

“Reincorporation, not conversion,” Father Carey reminded him again. “You were always a Catholic, Roger, by the decision of your mother you loved so much and whom you’ll soon see again.”

The narrow cell seemed even more cramped with three people in it. They barely had room to kneel. For twenty or thirty minutes they prayed, at first silently and then aloud, Our Fathers and Hail Marys, the clerics at the beginning of the prayer and Roger at the end.

Then Father MacCarroll withdrew so that Father Carey could hear Roger’s confession. The priest sat on the edge of the bed and Roger remained on his knees at the beginning of his long, very long enumeration of real or presumed sins. When he first burst into tears in spite of the efforts he made to contain them, Father Carey had him sit beside him. This was how the final rite proceeded, in which, as he spoke, explained, remembered, asked, Roger felt that in fact he was coming closer and closer to his mother. For moments he had the fleeting impression that Anne Jephson’s slim silhouette appeared and disappeared on the redbrick wall of the prison.

He cried often, as he didn’t recall ever having cried, no longer trying to hold back his tears, because with them he felt unburdened of tension and bitterness and it seemed to him not only his spirit but also his body became much lighter. Father Carey, silent and unmoving, let him speak. At times he asked a question, made an observation, a brief, calming comment. After telling him his penance and giving him absolution, he embraced him: “Welcome again to what was always your home, Roger.”

A very short while later the cell door opened again and Father MacCarroll came in, followed by the sheriff. Mr. Stacey carried Roger’s dark suit and white shirt and collar, his tie and his vest, and Father MacCarroll had his high shoes and socks. It was the clothing Roger had worn on the day the court at the Old Bailey had condemned him to death by hanging. The articles were immaculately cleaned and pressed, and his shoes had just been blackened and polished.

“I’m very grateful for your kindness, Sheriff.”

Mr. Stacey nodded. His face, as usual, was chubby and sad. But now he avoided looking him in the eye.

“Could I shower before putting on these clothes, Sheriff? It would be a shame to dirty them with this disgusting body of mine.”

Mr. Stacey agreed, this time with a complicit little half smile. Then he left the cell.

Squeezing together, the three men managed to sit on the cot. They sat there, at times silent, at times praying, at times conversing. Roger spoke to them of his childhood, his early years in Dublin, in Jersey, of the vacations he and his brothers and sister had spent with his maternal uncles in Scotland. Father MacCarroll was happy to hear him say the Scottish vacations had been for him as a boy an experience of paradise, that is, of purity and joy. In a low voice Roger softly sang some of the children’s songs his mother and uncles had taught him, and also recalled how the great deeds of the Light Dragoons in India, which Captain Roger Casement recounted to him and his siblings when he was in a good mood, made him dream.

Then he let them speak, asking them to tell him how they became priests. Had they entered the seminary led by a vocation or forced by circumstances, hunger, poverty, the desire to receive an education, as was the case with so many Irish clerics? Father MacCarroll had been orphaned when very young. He was taken in by aged relatives, who enrolled him in a parish school where the priest, who was fond of him, convinced him the Church was his vocation.

“What could I do but believe him?” Father MacCarroll reflected. “The truth is, I entered the seminary without much conviction. The call from God came afterward, during my later years of study. I became very interested in theology. I would have liked to devote myself to studying and teaching. But as we know, man proposes and God disposes.”

Father Carey’s case had been very different. His family, well-to-do merchants in Limerick, were Catholic in name more than in deed, so he did not grow up in a religious environment. In spite of this he had heard the call very young and could even point out the event that perhaps had been decisive: a eucharistic congress, when he was thirteen or fourteen years old, where he heard a missionary priest, Father Aloysius, recount the work carried out in the jungles of Mexico and Guatemala by the male and female religious with whom he had spent twenty years of his life.

“He was so good a speaker he overwhelmed me,” said Father Carey. “It’s his fault I’m still doing this. I never saw him again or heard anything about him. But I’ve always remembered his voice, his fervor, his rhetoric, his long beard. And his name: Father Aloysius.”

When the cell door was opened and his usual frugal supper brought in—broth, salad, and bread—Roger realized they had spent several hours talking. The afternoon was dying and night beginning, though some sun still shone through the bars on the small window. He refused the supper and kept only the bottle of water.

And then he recalled that on one of his first expeditions in Africa, in the first year of his stay on the Dark Continent, he had spent a few days in the small village of a tribe whose name he had forgotten (the Bangui, perhaps?). With the help of an interpreter he talked with several villagers. In this way he learned that the community elders, when they felt they were going to die, made a small bundle of their few possessions, and discreetly, without saying goodbye to anyone, trying to pass unnoticed, went into the jungle. They looked for a tranquil place, a small beach on the shore of a lake or river, the shade of a large tree, a rocky knoll. There they lay down to wait for death without disturbing anyone. A wise, elegant way to depart.