Mr. Mack saw them kneel and ready their aim. He crossed himself. “If them fellows know to shoot at all them Lancers’ll be slaughtered,” said his neighbor, “King’s men and all.” Mother of God, we’ll all be slaughtered. Some in the crowd yelled a warning, but no horseman would hope to hear above those cobbles. The troopers came. The rebel guns fired. Snarling they fired. The troopers slumped from their saddles, thumped in the road.
The people stood stunned. Murderers! someone called, but the cry was not taken up. Stunned, disbelieving, appalled—and fearful. Slowly the people moved back, separating from the deed-doers. A Sinn Feiner lad ran down the road waving a trooper’s lance. In the quiet of the fading hooves he waved it. He had a flag attached. A queer flag, in equal divisions, green white and orange. He lodged the lance in a manhole plate in the middle of the street, and there the flag flew, green white and orange. “Murderers, murderers,” came that voice again, all alone in the quiet. The lad’s face flushed with a ferocious courage. He raised his rifle and fired in the air. Only then did his comrades cheer, and they too fired off their guns, that furious joy of blooding.
Mr. Mack turned and blundered through the crowd. He blundered by the dead child and the woman who Murderers! Murderers! wailed. Along the lively inquisitive streets he lurched. He must find his tram. He must be home.
Nelson’s Pillar fingered from out the housetops. He fixed its direction in his eye, and for once his eye did not deceive his feet. Indeed, a hard push and a scrape it would be, avoiding O’Connell Street that holiday afternoon. Every tenement, every fever-nest, every rookery in Dublin was spilling its contents in the road and it seemed to Mr. Mack all slumdom must reel its way to his tram-stop. Every shawlie and shabaroon, every larrikin and scut, every slut, daggle-tail, trollop and streel, frowsy old bowsies and loitering corner-boy sprawlers in caps, every farthing-face and ha’penny-boy, every gutty, gouger, louser, glugger, nudger, sharper, shloother, head, every whore’s melt of them, mister-me-friend and go-by-the-wall, the dogs in the street themself—all rascaldom was making for Mr. Mack’s tram-stop; and he must pinch and shove to gain any headway at all.
At last he stood on the Pillar steps. The great wide splendid thoroughfare—O’Connell Street was you a Catholic, Sackville Street was you at all in the Protestant way (was it any wonder if a man went astray in this town?)—swarmed with a wild ree-raw mindless throng. Every now and then the shout would go up: Troopers! or The military! or The polis is coming! or They’s shooting wild! and the crowd would stampede him by, leaving Mr. Mack to cling to the pedestal, as to a cliff, to keep any footing. Tricksters was all, hoaxsters, for no polis came, no military. Loot was master. By him sailed the most fanciful apparitions. A slum-boy in three top-hats swinging golf-clubs. Dirty-faced girls with boas and high-heeled shoes on. The mess of life veered and shifted. Another plate window crashed.
Across the way where the crowd thinned was the General Post Office. The Sinn Feiners held it. He could see nothing of the Sinn Feiners themself bar the muzzles of guns that poked from the windows and crouching forms behind the parapet on the roof. That same strange unaccountable flag, green white and orange, flapped above them. What on earth would Sinn Feiners want with a post office? It crossed his mind in a daft way that they, like him before, had mistook it for a bank.
Handbills were posted all about. Slap-dash affairs with shoddy spacing and type. Something in Erse. Some further flim-flam in English. The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic. To the People of Ireland. Signed then by a poweration of names nor he nor anyone else had heard of.
The Lancers had charged here too, it was told. There was a dead horse down the way. All about the steps, flowers were strewn and trampled, where the flower-sellers’ stalls had been toppled. Barricades blocked the side streets, erected of particular things: bicycles jumbled and piled in one, hunks of marble for another, bales of newsprint—the work of disparate guilds whimsically chosen. Trams had been overturned. There were no trams running. No juice, the tram-man told him. Even trains: the Sinn Feiners had dug up the lines. And no polis. No polis anywhere. Withdrawn to barracks. Every last pigeon-hearted lily-livered chicken-gutted sneak of them. It was pandemonium. It was Donnybrook Fair. It was all ballyhooly let loose.
Naming calls: and he did not dare put words to his fear. But he knew the green uniform Doyler would always be wearing; and he had seen the wish of that Sinn Feiner boy’s face. Jim’s age, no older. He must get home.
He lurched down the steps and plunged into the push. He shoved carelessly, in a dream nearly—he had long since lost his hat. The rebels had shot three priests in their vestments. The British had hung the Archbishop. The South was up. The West was up. The Germans had landed in Tralee. Carson was marching on Dublin with forty thousand Orangemen. The Lord Lieutenant was raising the Curragh. The Lord Lieutenant was dead.
The unaccustomed whiskey dulled his intelligence. He felt the golden shine of the sun that had not diminished all afternoon: it seemed a timeless day. And it was tiring, all this excitement and the rumors that bandied about, the all of it a strain on his dignity. He looked at the grinning chomping children’s faces. Down this end it was the sweet shops that had been looted, and each slum-boy and girl had a sudden rich child’s Lenten hoard.
The Liffey breeze revived him a somewhat, and he asked of a respectable man in spats was there any news of Kingstown, was it held for the King yet? To be told the German High Seas fleet was this moment shelling the harbor. Zeppelins were traveling up the Wicklow coast and two U-boats had been spotted in the mouth of the Liffey. Mr. Mack nodded his head. But worse news than this, the rebels had fired on the old gentlemen of the Georgius Rex. The Georgius Rex, Mr. Mack repeated. Mown down in the street they were. Marching home off an exercise, down by the canal this was: murdered. This was shocking altogether, and Mr. Mack said, “I only thought to join them myself. Matter of weeks back, I’m only waiting to hear.” The gentleman viewed him, and under his lidded gaze Mr. Mack was acutely aware of his hatless undress and the drink on his breath. “Indeed,” said the gentleman. And the poor Pope has committed suicide, a young lady added in all earnestness.
Mr. Mack went with the tram-lines, following where the shamrock tram-stops led. The general confluence was against him, but enough were walking his direction for him not to feel entirely lunatic. Musketry could still be heard. Nothing dangerous or anything, only spurts of it that he took to be the military. Mausers growled then in response, two or three streets away always. At the canal he spoke with a whey-faced man, who gripped a child by the wrist and pointed out the different houses held by the rebels. They had shot at a man in his own motor. In his own motor they had shot at him. And was it here they killed the Georgius Rex? asked Mr. Mack. The whey-faced man didn’t know about that, indeed by his quizzical look he found Mr. Mack disappointing. His own motor, he repeated. Shot at a man in his very own motor. “And this gallows here”—pulling the boy round—“was seen to be talking to them.”
“Did you talk with the Sinn Feiners now?” asked Mr. Mack. The boy wore a crabby adult expression that disguised a little the hurt of the man’s grip. “Don’t you know that’s aiding and abetting the King’s enemies?”
“But it’s Mr. Ronan from the two-pair back,” the boy insisted in a squeaking breaking voice.
“You’re only digging your grave,” the whey-faced man told him. “I’m waiting on a constable coming by for to take him in charge.”
Begod, you’ll be waiting, thought Mr. Mack. Then of all people, strolling along the canal, his shadow rolling on the low canal wall, came Father O’Toiler. “Father, Father,” called Mr. Mack advancing across the bridge. He felt exposed there with the Sinn Feiners watching from the houses, and concerned for the curate’s dignity, he said, “Holy be, is it safe at all, your reverence?”
“Safe?” repeated the priest. “As to that, Mr. Mack, we are not out of the woods yet, not by a chalk long as my ashplant here. A day delayed, nevertheless a start has been made which is
half the answer and I believe we may venture a small halloo.”
“Oh indeed,” said Mr. Mack, “hello.” A curious gruntling noise the priest was making, not at all dissimilar to a certain domestic animal, and an expression slipped about his face that might conceivably be smiling—a transformation of his habitual austerity shocking as any of the day’s events.
“Safe, that is, for any Irishman,” he said.
He stepped along, and Mr. Mack stepped beside and a little behind him, along the tended imperturbable terraced street. The lawns in the gardens had been mown; a slight tingling sensation irritated Mr. Mack’s nose. Last week’s blossom drifted in the gutters, this week’s fluttered above them. Mr. Mack hemmed. He did not wish to importune his reverence, but his reverence would understand it was his son he was worried for. Was there anything with the flute band in this terrible business? The Father would understand he did not mean to be casting astertions of any type or any sort. The Father had only the boys’ best interest at heart. But boys would often be getting the wrong end of the stick. The Father would understand he spoke as a father himself. It was with a parent’s concern he spoke, all considerations aside.
“Mr. Mack,” the priest replied, “if but one of my boys be out this glorious day, my labor with that band is well done.”
“But Father dear, you cannot intend what you say. These are ruffians. There’s talk of Larkinites with them—Germans, I don’t know what else. It’s murder and mayhem it is. And there’s worse will come of it, I know that, I know.”
There were no Germans, the curate was pleased to inform him, Germany being second only to England for the cradle of heresy. And what Larkinites there were were not Larkinites now, but good brave Catholic sons of Ireland, who in this final hour had repented their former impieties. Together they stood now, the staunch and the prodigal returned, as the Army of the Irish Republic. Mr. Mack might remark the republican flag which was a third of it orange in generous acknowledgment to the Protestant north. Mr. Mack might consider that generosity misplaced and an unfortunate lapse in so Catholic a cause. But Father O’Toiler would assure him that a little Irish weather would soon fade that orange to Vatican yellow. For Mr. Mack was to consider this was indeed a Catholic rising and therefore a blessed one too. Holy Mother Church, despairing at last of the English recanting, turned to her first-loved children. The Saxon tide must trouble no more the sacred shore. Again must Ireland rise, isle of saints and scholars, to shine a lamp among the nations. And her spiritual empire, that empire of the soul, which stretched to the world’s imagined corners, wherever had preached her missionary sons or wandered in exile her children lamenting, this empire she would lay at the feet of the Cross, the humblest fief, and the jewel in the crown, of the Holy Father of the Holy See.
“But the people,” said Mr. Mack, “they’re not for this carry-on at all.”
The Irish people, Father O’Toiler assured him, most happily assured him, had not the right to be wrong. The people might quibble and fiddle with Home Rule. But it was written: “the Erne shall rise rude in torrents and the hills be rent and the sea in red waves shall roll.” And it was scarcely to be supposed the poet of the Roisín Dubh had in mind the coming of a shoneen talking-house, a gombeen legislature scrounged and cadged for by whiskey-swilling fixers in the imperial Parliament across the sea. No, the curate continued, drawing breath and swinging his ashplant before him, freedom was never to be given or argued for: it might only be taken. And so it was, in fulfillment of the prophecies, the few Irish men and boys had risen this day.
“Blood and death and tears,” he said. “Who don’t fall in battle will hang from the Saxon tree. Many the mother will mourn and many the hearth will be lonely. And they will be reviled, Mr. Mack, as was Our Savior. But Ireland will rise again, as did Our Lord. She will waken and look upon herself as one from a dream. And she will wonder at the magnificence of her sons. Pray, Mr. Mack, pray God your son may so be exalted as with these joyful martyrs to die. For already in heaven the saints prepare the welcoming feast.
“And now, Mr. Mack, I believe I must leave you. I am on a mission of mercy to the sisters at St. Mary’s. I was at Boland’s mills with Commandant de Valera, a rigorous man and pious, and would you believe we ran plumb out of the Holy Sacrament.”
It would scarce have surprised Mr. Mack now if the priest had lifted his frock-coat and floated across the road, so strange and elated his countenance. Mr. Mack shook his head; and he was shaking it still when he traipsed at last into Kingstown. The sleepy town was sleepy yet. Invalids and convalescents pushed in their chairs. Weary children walked with balloons. The mailboat siren wailed, dead to its time by the Findlater’s clock. Constables stood their point immemorial. The gunfire, wild rumors, all that riot and rumpus lay far behind, a rumor itself. Perhaps there was more of a crowd in the streets than was normal, and they remonstrating against the trains and the trams, the qualified things, never on time and the least sign of trouble, banjaxed. Respectable people; and their indignation worked on Mr. Mack till he wondered might it not be true, that it was all a little local madness, nothing strange in Ireland, every second week sure, hotheads and firebrands, demonstrations in the streets, parading with arms, an imitation of violence, a longing even, but never realized, shrunk from at the brink.
Then at the cab-rank he watched two gentlemen come to blows, bidding for the sole jarvey. And it was eerie the streets with so little traffic, only people walking, trudging, their jaded faces; entire families, well-to-do and with their maids some of them, who had been bathing at Killiney or taking the ozone down in Bray. He felt the truth had not made up its mind: the signs were contrary everywhere.
At the People’s Park, would you credit it, that runt of a newsboy latched on to him, and he was dogging Mr. Mack all along Glasthule Road, piping out his little news or his want of news, making a holy show of Mr. Mack in the street. Until Mr. Mack turned, flailing at him, not intending to strike, but striking nonetheless his nails on his lip so that it bled.
It bled, and Mr. Mack said, “Oh dear me, no.” The boy took no more regard of his cut than of a fly, and he was still piping away his idiotic questions. Mr. Mack had his handkerchief out, and he wet the corner to dab it on the boy’s chin. “You’re not hurt,” he told him.
“But mister, what about the papers, mister?”
“Well, what about them?” said Mr. Mack, still dabbing.
“The even papers. What’s happened the even papers, mister?”
“There are no evening papers,” Mr. Mack explained. “Don’t you know now there’s a rising in Dublin?”
“But what am I to sell so?”
“You won’t be selling anything sure.”
“But they can’t do that, mister. I’ll be bate now.”
“No you won’t now.”
“I’ll be bate, mister, and I don’t have nothing brung home.”
“Is it your da you mean?” The boy nodded. “Sure he’ll know it’s not your fault.” Mr. Mack put away his handkerchief. Where he had dabbed was the only clean in the wee scrap’s face. He stood wobble kneed and his toes turned in. His squinting eyes, misbelieving, peered up at Mr. Mack. Terrible slight he looked. “Don’t you see now,” Mr. Mack told him, not unkindly, “where your talk of Fenians and fighting and nation-once-again has got you?”
“Nobody never said about the even papers, mister.”
“Here now,” said Mr. Mack. Here we go again, he thought. “Sixpence, that’s all I have. Off you go. It’ll all be over tomorrow, never fear, and you’ll be back with your Herald and Mail.”
And now who was this only Mary Nights. Mary Nights not to her hour and her direction into Dublin, a thing never known in weal nor woe, come wind nor weather, in hail rain nor shine. Her determined old head bent to her course. “They’s drawing out,” said she, “the nights.”
The bell clinked. Lord save us, he was home at last. Nancy was at the kitchen door. She had a bowl in her elbow, mixing something. “Why, Mr. Mack, you haven’
t your hat.”
Mr. Mack wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. “Never mind that. Is Jim about?”
“Sure he was moping about the shop till I told him go out and play.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know now. He was back again then and he called out to me. He’s to eat his dinner at MacMurrough’s.”
“Mr. MacMurrough’s? Was Doyler with him?”
“Doyler’s in his bed still, poorly. You look took yourself, Mr. Mack. Is there anything the matter?”
“Oh sure Nancy, the most terrible thing has happened, you wouldn’t believe.”
“Don’t I know, Mr. Mack. And where would you find another hat the size of you?”
Before Mr. Mack had left for town that morning, he had told Jim—not to keep shop, exactly: it was a holiday and the shop was firmly shut for the holiday—but to keep by, with an ear for the bell, in case of a customer would be caught sudden and they’d need a goods in an emergency. For a corner-grocery, he said, his hand braced in the air against any contraposition, was as much a service to the community as a shop in the strict sense. Jim had mentioned Doyler above at MacMurrough’s. Tush, his father had replied. Hadn’t Jim only now told him that Doyler was right as rain? Was he saying now there was any imminent danger of a relax? Was Doyler about to be drownded in his bed, was he? Fine bobbish fellow likes of Doyler, he didn’t want Jim to be mollycoddling. Let Jim read a book at home, hadn’t he examinations this summer? His father might wish he had leisure for reading a book, so he might.
His father was gone then, and Jim settled with his tome, From Crécy to Tel el-Kebir, the very article for a blue sky in the morning. Mollycoddle, he thought—milksop too: he had fed Doyler bread dipped in milk when he woke. There were other names he could think of: miss boy, molly mop, molly maguire—though the Molly Maguires were agrarian banditti who had dressed, he did not know why, in women’s clothing. By noon, the brightness outside had deepened nearly to night the apparent evening within. Drake had circumnavigated the globe and Spain approached her acme; while Nancy up in Aunt Sawney’s room was calling for him to fetch water. He made his noisy tread on the stairs and waited in the door.
At Swim, Two Boys Page 51