The Red And The Green (18 page)

‘No, no nonsense like that. You see in a way we are like brother and sister.'

‘I don't feel we are like brother and sister at this moment,' said Andrew. He had never found Frances more ferociously attractive. She looked up at him quickly. ‘And neither do you,' he added.

She gazed at him, her fiercely controlled face relaxing a little. ‘Yes. Odd. Well, not odd. But, Andrew, I'm sorry. I've given you a rotten answer.'

‘You've given me an incomprehensible answer. But I do understand about—how it's all been taken for granted. As if we weren't private people. I've felt funny about that too. But that can't have spoilt everything. Suppose we were to start again at the beginning as if we'd never met?'

‘But we can't—'

‘I don't know. For the last five minutes I've been talking to a most exciting stranger.'

‘I feel like that too. But it's just that our friendship has had a shock. Oh, dearest Andrew, I do love you—'

‘In that case—Frances, is there somebody else?'

‘No, of course not,'

‘Well, then—is it just that you'd like to wait a bit? We may have known each other since childhood, but we haven't seen a lot of each other lately. Maybe we need time to get used to each other again.'

‘There's been so much sort of—quiet pressure—'

‘Of course, of course. I know, all these people expecting us to get married next week—it's awful—and I know—for a girl —Oh, Frances, I'm sorry I've been so stupid. What you're really saying to me is yes, only let's wait a longer time before getting married. That's it, isn't it?'

‘Well, no it isn't quite. I'm not saying that.'

‘Then you're saying no?'

‘Not exactly—but I have to be fair—I can't tie you—'

‘But I am tied—I love you. You mean you
are
saying no?'

‘You're forcing me to say no!'

‘No, I'm not. I'm just trying to understand,' he said, miserably.

‘I can't tie you,' she repeated, ‘so if you force me to say something I've got to say no.'

‘I'm not forcing you to say anything. I'm just asking you to marry me. I would have asked you much sooner if I'd thought you'd changed.'

‘But I haven't changed.'

‘You must have. I just want to know what your feelings are. Do you want me to wait a while and ask you again?'

‘Perhaps I do—but this is so unfair, so unfair. I should only say no again. It's that I don't want to hurt you and I want everything to be happy like it was.' She closed her eyes and a great many tears streamed down her cheeks. She took a large white handkerchief smelling of tobacco out of the pocket of Christopher's jacket and blew her nose. It was beginning to rain.

‘Well,' said Andrew, ‘I'll ask you again later.'

‘I should only say no again,' she said in a frantic tone.

‘I'll ask you all the same.'

They stood for a moment silently in the light rain, each looking down at the other's feet. Frances said, ‘Please don't say anything about this to anyone just yet, not for a few days. I'll have to break it to my father first—and I'll have somehow to find the right moment.'

‘All right. But I can't hold out very long. My mother will be so upset—and I'm not very good at telling lies.'

‘Oh, Andrew, forgive me. Oh dear, I must think, I must think. Won't you come in and have some coffee? It's really going to rain hard.'

‘No,' said Andrew, ‘I won't come in. I suppose I won't be able to come here any more.'

‘But of course you must come here—'

‘I don't think I'll want to, with everything different.'

They looked at each other suddenly terrified. Even the most dreadful words can be treated as a bad dream through which one reels with a kind of intoxication of horror. But the cold touch of action awakens the spirit to a world where what is dreadful has slowly and minutely to be lived.

For a second Andrew felt it all beyond his strength. He reached out clumsily to Frances as if to seize her arm, perhaps embrace her. But she drew back. They faced each other for a moment. Then she whispered, ‘I am sorry, I am so very sorry,' and turned and ran into the house.

Andrew went out of the garden gate, turning up the collar of his greatcoat against the rain. He walked down the road to the sea. The very calm sea was lazily washing the rocks and for miles and miles over its level grey surface the heavy rain was falling.

Chapter Twelve

P
AT was giddy with impatience. It was still only Thursday morning. Sunday rose up in front of him like a black cliff. The mountain must open to admit him, how he knew not. He could foresee nothing except that he would be fighting. This time next week he would have been fighting. Perhaps he would be dead. His first startled fear was diffused now into an aching desire for action, and his body was weary of the interim. In the two days since he had been told he had grimly lived the reality of it into himself. To the mystery of Sunday he was dedicated and resigned, become in every cell of his being a taut extension of that violent future. When it came he would enter upon it coldly. It was only the waiting which was an agony and a fever. He could hardly sleep at night but lay telling himself vividly and lucidly how much he needed sleep. His flesh twitched and ached with expectation.

There was much to do each day. He had attended a staff conference at Liberty Hall about the dovetailing of plans between the Citizen Army and the Volunteers, and had been impressed, as always, by the efficiency of Connolly's men. He had visited a quarry at Brittas where some gelignite was hidden which was to be rushed into Dublin on Sunday morning. He had checked over all the ammunition allotted to his own company, which was hidden, often in small quantities, in various places throughout the city, and made arrangements for it to be moved at short notice. He had made a point of seeing individually all the men under his command, and, without revealing anything, satisfying himself that they were equipped and ready.

Pat was one of the most junior officers to have been told of the plan. The great majority of the Volunteers, including some officers, knew nothing except that ‘very important manoeuvres' were to take place on Sunday and that ‘the absence of any Volunteer would be treated as a serious breach of discipline'. Of course, the men had been told, from long ago, that they must be prepared for anything on any occasion when they marched out in arms. But they had marched out in arms so often and returned afterwards to their tea. There was a ferment in Dublin all the same, which it was to be hoped was not attracting the attention of the Castle. Visiting Lawlor's gun shop in Fownes Street, Pat had found it almost emptied of stock. Streams of people had been in to buy bandoliers and water bottles and even sheath knives; and it was said that you could not get hold of a bayonet from one end of Dublin to the other. Perhaps the men were simply ‘stocking up', for the ‘important manoeuvres'. Or perhaps the news was gradually leaking out to the rank and file. If so, this was dangerous. It was still only Thursday.

To most of us at most times past history seems like a brightly lit and faintly clamorous procession, while the present is a dark rumbling corridor off which, in hidden shafts and private rooms, our personal stories are enacted. Elsewhere in that obscure continuum, and out of quite other stuff, history is manufactured. Rarely are we able to be the intelligent spectators of an historical event, more rarely still its actors. At such times the darkness lightens and the space contracts until we apprehend the rhythm of our daily actions as the rhythm of a much larger scheme which has included us within its composition. Pat felt for the first time this nearness of history, this almost physical sense of a connection with it, when he learnt that on the previous day at a secret meeting Patrick Pearse had been appointed President of the Irish Republic.

At the same meeting James Connolly had been appointed commandant general of the Dublin district and MacDonagh commandant of the Dublin brigade. Final decisions had also been taken about what points of the city should be occupied. There was argument about where the military headquarters should be. Connolly had favoured the ready-made fortress of the Bank of Ireland. But eventually the choice fell upon the General Post Office in Sackville Street. The fate of Dublin Castle was then debated. Pearse had been for attacking the Castle, but Connolly had opposed this. The ‘Castle' in fact consisted of a straggle of buildings which would be hard to defend, and there was also a Red Cross hospital inside it. A full attack on the Castle seemed to present too many problems, and it was resolved instead to isolate it by occupying the City Hall and the offices of the
Evening Mail
opposite the gates.

Pat, who had thought long and soberly about the shortage of arms, had food now for further gloomy reflection as he reviewed the gratuitous folly of his leaders. It was surely essential that Dublin Castle should be attacked and preferably burnt. It was the Bastille of the regime, the symbol of its brutality. The Post Office was an insane choice as headquarters: a building hemmed in by others and quite unsuitable for a prolonged defence. In any case, the whole scheme of establishing fixed strong points inside the city was ill-considered. Faced with an enemy who possessed and would use artillery, some degree of mobility was essential. Mobile troops could also make more use of the good will of the civilian population. A number of flying columns, able to retire rapidly out of the city if necessary, would do the enemy more damage, and baffle and scare him far more than a number of isolated strongholds, however bravely defended. There were two thousand five hundred British troops in the city itself and more at the Curragh. The joint forces of the I.C.A. and the Volunteers might reach twelve or fifteen hundred at a good turn-out. Mobile forces could seem more numerous than they were. Static forces could be studied and counted. But revolutionary leaders can be just as childish and old-fashioned and romantic as the most reactionary of regular soldiers. There was even a plan to occupy Stephen's Green and dig trenches there, although it was agreed that there were not enough men to take the Shelbourne Hotel; and this particular ‘strong point' could be dealt with in a matter of minutes by a Lewis gun on top of the Shelbourne.

Pat reflected coolly on the folly of it all, the shortage of arms, the absence of sensible plans, the lack of elementary medical supplies and medical skill. He thought that he could accept death now, for himself and others, a death for Ireland. But driving his imagination on to savour the worst that was possible he pictured himself, unaided and horribly wounded, unable to stop from moaning and crying out, lying in the back of some wrecked blood-spattered room, while his comrades knelt at the window returning the enemy fire. At that time he would be empty of destiny. History would exist no more. Even Ireland would exist no more. There would be just a half-crushed animal screaming to be allowed to live: screaming perhaps to be allowed to die. He wanted now to be beyond prayer, to ask nothing more for himself as if he had already ceased to be. But he could not help clasping to him, as an amulet, the hope that if he were to die he might die quickly.

Yet in spite of all these reasons for a steady pessimism Pat could not, at the same time, at the back of his blackest arguments, help feeling a most tremendous glow of hope. He had heard Pearse say that the armed rising was to be thought of simply as a sacrifice of blood, after which Ireland would be spiritually reborn. Pearse said that Ireland needed martyrs. Pat agreed that Ireland needed martyrs. But he felt, felt within his own body, as if it came up out of the old tortured soil, the great angry strength of Ireland. At one with this power he felt superhumanly strong; and if there were but a few others like him they would make an irresistible tide. These were feelings rather than thoughts and did not belong to his rational part. Eamonn Ceannt, who had given him the news of the secret council, had said, ‘If we can last a month the British will come to terms,' and Pat had replied, ‘We won't last a week!' But he had not judged this with his heart. He could not stop imagining that as soon as the first shot was fired the whole of Ireland would rise.

It was only Thursday and between now and Sunday much could happen for good or ill. There were the persistent rumours about German arms, constantly revived from some mysterious source, to which Pat gave little credit. There was, more seriously, the possibility that the Castle might strike first. The document giving details of the planned military ‘swoop' was, he was still sure, a clever provocative forgery by some such genius as Joseph Plunkett. But it was just possible that it was not, and it was always possible that with so many men in Dublin in the secret the news of the rising would leak out and the military would act quickly. If that happened, Pat knew that he would resist, he would fight, even if he were alone. To be, at this last moment, tamely disarmed would break his heart forever.

There was also the problem of MacNeill and Hobson, nominal leaders of the Volunteers, indeed in the eyes of the innocent rank and file the true leaders: MacNeill and Hobson, the ‘moderates', who viewed the idea of fighting with horror and who were entirely unaware that the organization which they headed had been hollowed out by a secret hierarchy of power which left them at the top, isolated. At some point before Sunday they would be told, or would find out. At some point, somehow, the real leaders had got to sweep the nominal leaders aside. Pat felt uneasily that his masters had not got the answer to this problem: that they were waiting to see and hoping for the best. They would act on the spur of the moment. He also, with a pain that never left his consciousness, knew that there was a personal problem to which he himself had not found the solution and which he too would perhaps have to solve, when it came up, on the spur of the moment.

Pat was about to leave Millie's house in Upper Mount Street. He had detailed men to remove the arms and ammunition from the cellar on Saturday night and take it to a house in Ballybough Road which was being used as an arsenal. Dublin would be full of mysterious horses and carts on that night. But these risks had to be run, and Pat, who had often performed such operations under the noses of the British, did not regard them very seriously. He had just now, with the help of his sergeant, packed the goods up into manageable bundles, and the man had left unobtrusively by the side door. Millie's servants were, happily, creatures of habit. For Millie herself Pat had invented a good enough story about why the arms had to be moved. In any case she might well be at Rathblane for the weekend.

Pat had been frequently questioned by his superior officers concerning Millie, initially concerning her reliability. He had on one occasion been disgusted to detect an assumption that his relationship with Millie must be of a sentimental kind. He had satisfied others, as he had satisfied Himself, concerning her trustworthiness. Millie was a very silly woman; in a word, she was a woman. But she was capable of a strength of discretion which Pat somehow connected with her undoubted physical courage. More lately his superiors had asked him different questions. Millie had been trained as a nurse. She was also a good shot. Should she not simply be enlisted? To this Pat had said curtly no. It was not that he was not prepared to trust Millie all the way or that he thought she would necessarily draw back if asked. She was reckless enough for anything and might well embrace the project simply as an adventure. But he just did not want, at this sacred and holy crisis of his life, to have to bother about Millie at all. When Sunday came Millie and all she stood for would be left behind.

‘Pat!'

He stopped in the hallway and cursed. In another minute he would have been clear of the house.

‘Pat, come up here. I've got something important to tell you.'

He looked up through the dim cage of the stairs and saw her somewhere farther up sitting on a step and peering down. He hesitated and decided he had better hear what she had to say. He came slowly up.

When she saw him coming she jumped up, enticingly, like a dog, and ran ahead of him. He noticed with repulsion that she was wearing trousers.

The door of Millie's ‘shooting gallery' stood open and it was grey and murky within. A light rain rapped the skylight and ran steadily down the big window at the near end of the room where the small satiny chairs, thickly fringed down to the carpet, stood grouped about Millie's white dressing-table. The mirror was leaden, reflecting nothing, like a dull slab of metal behind the altar-like table. There was a faint unpleasant smell of flowers. In the dim light the scene had the air of a derelict chapel which had been perverted to some other purpose.

Pat came in reluctantly and Millie at once whisked round behind him to close the door. She returned to the dressing-table and stood there posed, as if at attention, her prominent eyes glistening with appetite. In the black tight trousers she looked like a principal boy in an operetta, vivacious, vulgar and about to become extremely noisy.

‘Well?' He wondered if she had heard something. If she had, this was going to be awkward.

‘Pat, do sit down.'

He looked round for a hard chair. There wasn't one. ‘I'll stand, thank you.'

‘Have some madeira. I've got some awfully good madeira here and some cake. See, it's all set out.'

‘No, thank you. You had something to say?'

‘It's so dark in here. It always gets so dark when it rains. I wonder if I should light the gas? One might as well draw the curtains really, it's like the night time.'

‘I've only got a minute.'

‘Do you like these white daffodils? They're rather unusual, aren't they? They're from Rathblane. I think it's so uncanny when flowers don't have their proper colours. How late the spring is this year. Well, I suppose one says that every year. Do you mind if I have some madeira?'

Pat watched her silently. Her hand shook as she poured out the madeira and the decanter struck the rim of the class with a loud ring.

Millie examined the glass to see if it was cracked. ‘How clumsy I am. Pat, do sit down.'

‘I can't, I'm in a hurry.'

‘Don't be. I do wish you'd come down to Rathblane now and again. You haven't been there since you were a boy, have you. And I've got such a fine grand horse for you to ride, he's called Owen Roe, and you could have him any time.'