My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  “Well, cheers, captain.”

  “All the best, old son.”

  There was the smack of tumblers on the table-top.

  “Don’t forget,” said Newbiggin’s friend, “send us a line. I don’t say I won’t join you myself.”

  “You’re a b.f. if you don’t, laddie. Think of it: an officer and a gentleman once more, with a quid a day guaranteed. Are you making that?”

  “Am I hell-as-like.”

  “There you are then. And that’s only the half of it. I’ve had it on the strict Q.T. that the pay’s nothing to the pickings. Had a letter yesterday from that young brother of mine. He’s joined the Black and Tans. Them’s the rankers. My lot—the Auxiliaries—all officers and gentlemen. But these Black and Tans, you never saw such a bloody lot. Khaki coats, with black trousers and caps. Well, this kid of ours wrote to me. Half a tick; here’s his letter. ‘Thumbs up. Went into a pub yesterday for a drink with Johnny Buckle. When it came to paying we hadn’t got a brass farthing between us. “What now?” says I. “Watch your uncle,” says Johnny. He went out into the street and was back inside five minutes. He slaps a pound note down on the counter, and I notice that he strips this off a wad of three or four. “Christ, Johnny!” I said. “That’s all right, kid,” he said, “it grows on the citizens. You just go out and pick it.” I haven’t tried this yet, but perhaps I shall.’”

  Newbiggin’s voice had dropped to a conspirator’s whisper as he read this letter. In a louder voice he said: “The Black and Tans only get ten bob a day, so p’r’aps you can’t blame ’em.”

  “And, of course,” rejoined his companion, “you officers and gentlemen in these—er—”

  “Auxiliaries.”

  “You’d never be naughty boys like that.”

  “Well, laddie, it’s a case of exploring possibilities. Anything’s better than this lousy town and the lousy life I’ve been having in it. Just to have a whack at the bloody Irish will be something. Christ! It’ll be fun to have my fingers on a gun again.”

  “You won’t be sorry to see the Major, either.”

  “Sorry! Boy, we’re life partners. If he hadn’t been in this, I don’t suppose I should have been either. God, he’s a card. Says he’s going to win a few more medals shooting the eyes out of Irish potatoes.”

  “Well, I think it’s a pity.”

  “A pity? What the hell d’you mean?”

  “Essex could be doing something better, if he wasn’t just a cat on hot bricks with his nerves all shot to bits.”

  “D’you know anything better than money for jam?” Newbiggin demanded.

  The bell buzzed, cutting off the answer. The bar slowly cleared, and at last I was able to get a drink. I felt I needed it. I didn’t want to see the rest of the show. I slowly drank the whisky in the empty, smoke-fouled bar; then claimed my hat and coat from the cloakroom and went back to my hotel through the mirk and drizzle and tramway clamour of the streets.

  When I got back to town, I rang up Dermot and asked him: “Do you know anything about these Black and Tans and Auxiliaries that are going to Ireland?”

  “What’s the matter with you, Bill? Are you developing a political conscience?”

  “No, tell me: d’you know anything about them?”

  “Yes, Bill, I can tell you in a nutshell: they’re the last nail in the English coffin over there. They’re the dirty scum and off-scouring of England sent to demonstrate what this government thinks of the rights of small nations, and by the time the demonstration’s ended there’ll be no need for any more Irish Martyrs. Not foreign imports, anyway. We’ll start making our own. We’re like that. But what’s our damned distressful country got to do with you?”

  “Oliver’s joined the Auxiliaries.”

  Dermot didn’t answer that. There was a silence; then I heard the receiver click back on to its hook.

  34

  I had been writing for an hour. The room was full of the extraordinary silence that accompanies a fall of snow. The scratch of the pen over the paper, the flames in the grate flapping like little blown banners; that was all I could hear. I laid down my pen, crossed the room, and drew the curtains. The snow was still falling. It was deep in the street, and every corner and crevice on the face of the building opposite held its small white burden. I watched a taxicab crawl by soundlessly and foot passengers with coat-collars round their necks, hands thrust into pockets, breasts whitened, boring head-down into the eddying fall.

  The old childish picture of fairyland; but, letting the curtain fall back, I thought of Rory and Oliver.

  Was the weather being cruel like this in Ireland? Were they lying out in the hills, pursuing and pursued? And who the pursuer, who pursued?

  Now, indeed, for a year I had been taking an interest in the old feud, blown in those days to so hot a flame, that Dermot for many years would have liked to impose upon my notice. No need to impose it now. I could not take up a newspaper without tidings of slaughter and atrocity. We had seen “Bloody Sunday,” when fourteen British officers were shot in their beds in Dublin, and by way of reprisal machine-guns had that same day been fired into a crowd at a football match. The war had crossed to England. Warehouses blazed in Liverpool. In the environs of Manchester burning haystacks lit the night.

  In the south and west of Ireland no man could close his eyes at night in the certainty that he would open them in the morning. The midnight gun-butt thudding on the door, the masked face, pistol, petrol, crowbar, bomb, the frantic rushing of lorries through the dark with cargoes of down-crouched desperate men, finger on trigger, ever alert for the down-crouched men in the ditch whose finger might be first; the swift ambush, desperate mêlée, unpitying death, and the eye of morning opening on the smoke going up from homes made desolate: these were the way of life and death in Ireland then.

  For the most part, it was a nameless warfare, a warfare of nameless heroes and nameless villainies. But here and there names percolated into the newspapers, attached to the leaders of wild guerrilla bands. And so once, and then again, and then more often, appeared the name of Rory O’Riorden, a man to reckon with in the parts about Cork.

  He had written once to Dermot:

  “MY DEAR FATHER,—This is a restless and unsettled life, but for the most part I am in and about Ballybar. You perhaps know the reason for that and think it sentimental enough. But I have never forgotten the story you told me of how your father and my great-uncle Con were trundled on a barrow from Ballybar to Cork, their father and mother being left dead in a ditch, in the time of the great famine. This little Ballybar, then, is the place we hail from; and I took some trouble to be appointed to help the operations in those parts. I don’t know that I need this association to strengthen my arm against the bloody tyrants who are now exposing themselves in their true colours for all the world to see; but I do know that I cannot pass a cottage without thinking ‘Perhaps from that very cottage they crawled out to die’ or lie ambushed in a ditch without the thought that the parapet on which my rifle rests perhaps rested the head of those two poor people who were starved to fatten a landlord’s belly.

  Well, I suppose you think that’s enough Fenian jargon, and so it is. I only wanted you to know that I am up to the neck in the good work and enjoying every day and every moment of my life. I rarely sleep in a bed, but the weather’s dry and the stars are lovely, and the boys I have with me here are all I could wish them to be. God give us Ireland soon. The dear boys deserve to live in peace in their own land under their own flag.”

  Tonight, the weather would not be dry and the stars would not be lovely. I paced the room, thinking of Rory, transferring the scene here to the countryside of Cork, imagining an immobile figure, with snow on the drawn-down peak of his cap, standing in the sheltering angle of a building, a cold revolver held in a cold hand. Waiting for the rumble of the expected lorry, knowing that the man out there, lying in the snow with his ear to the ground, would catch its farthest rumour; knowing that men like himself, tough and reliable, were
immobile shadows behind tree and telegraph post and barn-end; hearing then the rumble grow to a roar, the roar to a shriek as the headlights thrust their yellow swords into the dithering snow, as the first revolvers cracked, and the sawn-through tree crashed in the lorry’s path, and a machine-gun opened its deathly stutter.

  And from Dermot in his cold poor bedroom in Gibraltar Street, gloating upon the names he had carved of the Manchester Martyrs, through the incursion of Flynn and the coming of Donnelly, step by step a doomful lunatic logic seemed to run right up to this imagined moment when the firing dies down and some figures spill red upon the road and others are black running dots disappearing upon the white face of the land. Perhaps from farther back than that; perhaps to some unimagined future.

  *

  The telephone bell shrilled, bringing me back with a heart-thump to the moment: to nine of a snowy March night in 1921. It was young Guy Langdale. He had married Eileen in the autumn and they had a small house at Richmond. He was speaking from there in great agitation. Could I come at once? Yes, he knew it was a foul night and an unusual thing to ask; but could I pack a bag? They could give me a bed for the night.

  “But what is it, man? What’s it all about? Is Eileen ill?”

  “No,” he said testily. “I’d be ringing up a doctor, not you. It’s not Eileen—it’s Maggie.”

  “Maggie? Is she with you? You mean Rory’s wife?”

  “Yes. Rory’s dead. Now will you come?”

  I put down the receiver and looked dazedly about my familiar room. Just there Maeve had stood that day, confronting Dermot.

  You’ve killed Rory!... You’ve killed Rory!

  God help you, Dermot, now.

  *

  I went by Underground from Charing Cross. The chill and hideous station, my fellow passengers steaming and smelling of damp clothes, the glimpses when we came above ground of the white and desolate country, deepened the mood of dejection in which at last I arrived at Langdale’s house.

  Guy himself opened the door and led me to a small room at the back which he used as a study. I took the slippers from my bag and put them on. A scared-looking maid bore away my wet shoes and snowy overcoat.

  “That girl looks frightened to death,” I said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Guy answered. He poured me a drink. “It was she who opened the door. Maggie collapsed on top of her. She crossed to Holyhead on last night’s boat and travelled south today. How she managed it all I don’t know. This poor girl was alone in the house. She had no idea who Maggie was, and Maggie was in no condition to explain. She just staggered into the hall, sat in a chair, and fainted.”

  Guy went on to tell me that he and Eileen had luckily returned home at that moment. They brought Maggie round and put her to bed, talking wildly. It was some time before they gathered from her broken and desperate words that Rory was dead.

  “Strange creatures,” I said. “Rory himself told me how stoical she was about her father’s death. She saw him in prison just before they shot him, and they seem to have talked like a pair of Romans. And now—”

  Guy looked very tired. He took a drink himself before he answered. “You know what these people are—forgive me, I’m speaking dispassionately. I’ve never seen Rory or Donnelly, and this is the first time I’ve set eyes on Maggie—you know what they are when for years they’ve been sleeping and waking for a cause. I think I can understand it. I can understand that anyone dying as Donnelly did would leave a feeling of exaltation behind him. ‘O Death, where is thy sting?’ But this time it isn’t like that. We don’t know yet what it is, but there’s something terrible on that girl’s mind. She’s haunted.”

  “Had I better see her now?”

  “In a moment. Let me finish. We sent for the doctor, but he was a longish time coming. She was delirious. She kept shouting ‘I betrayed him!’ and then your name began to come into it. There was a lot of babble about Essex. That’s why Eileen wanted you to come. We thought there was something she wanted to tell you, and that if you were here and she became sensible it might help. But now she’s asleep. The doctor’s been and seen to that. He says she should sleep till morning. There’s another thing. We gathered that she came to Eileen because she dared not go to Rory’s father. She couldn’t face that. So you see,” said Guy, his knuckles white as he clutched his glass, “someone has to tell O’Riorden that his son is dead.” He added after a while: “Eileen and I agreed that it would be hateful to telephone the news. And she’s in no condition to see his father. And frankly I loathe the job. Will you do it? Will you see him in the morning?”

  It was on a March morning four years ago that I had rung up Dermot to tell him that Maeve was dead. I looked bleakly at young Langdale who loathed the job. Well, young fellow, you haven’t known Dermot since he was a pale lanky red-headed youth with sawdust on the fine hairs of his wrists. “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell him. Now let me see Maggie.”

  There was a fire burning in the bedroom and one dim lamp. Eileen sat in an easy chair at the bed’s head, her eyes red, her face crumpled by weeping. She was leaning forward, a ball of handkerchief grasped in her hand. Maggie looked the calmer of the two, all the stress eased out of her face by sleep. There were black smudges under the eyes and the cheeks were more hollow than I remembered. Both hands were lying out over the counterpane, folded very peacefully one upon the other. She was wearing a wedding-ring.

  I took Eileen by the hand, led her out on to the landing, and shut the bedroom door. “Go to bed, my dear,” I said. “It’s past eleven.”

  She turned and clung to Guy and began to cry afresh.

  “Get her to bed,” I said, “and go yourself. I’ll call you if Maggie needs you. I’m used to sitting up all night.”

  Guy took her away, her body shaken by sobs. I went down to his study to get a book I had left there. Presently he joined me, put the decanter, a soda siphon and a tin of biscuits on a tray, and carried them up to the bedroom. Then he went, the door closed softly, and I was left alone with Maggie.

  I made up the fire and sat in the easy chair by the bedside, looking at the peaceful folded hands with the wedding-ring: the ring upon the hand of the little girl who had tumbled out of the car with Rory at the gates of Heronwater so long ago. Soon every sound died in the house, and I nodded a little in my chair, and then I slept. It was two o’clock when I woke. Maggie still slept on, but she had changed her position and now lay on her side, with one hand under her cheek, her face towards me. She stirred, and smiled, and then muttered “Ach, Father!” as though deprecating some playful nonsense. Back, now, beyond her present terrors; back beyond her father’s death, in some happy return.

  I watched her intently, but she did not speak or move again. I did not sleep any more, but put on my spectacles and read the book I had brought with me—brought with me, indeed, so far, for it belonged to the days of Gibraltar Street, to the youth of my friendship with Dermot. And so my mind wandered to Dermot, sleeping, no doubt, and unaware that already he was in a day of darkness.

  At three o’clock I pulled back the curtain and looked out of the window. The snow no longer fell. The garden glimmered in the night, cold and pallid under a few stars. Standing there with the small warm room behind me and the inimical expanse of night reaching endlessly out, my mind murmured the words I had been reading.

  Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;

  For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

  Not the nightingales... Donnelly, Maeve, Rory... Oh, not the nightingales!

  I wonder.

  *

  I was travelling back to Richmond with Dermot and Sheila. After a day and night of snow, the sun was shining; the sky was tenderly blue. But the roads were dreadful and so we were travelling, as I had travelled the night before, by Underground. Sheila sat between me and Dermot, not speaking, perfectly still, her gloved hands lying in her lap, her eyes fixed on the window opposite. The train ground and screeched over the rails.

/>   There was nothing dramatic in the moment: it was just misery: black, hopeless misery. Dermot, when I called upon him, had been surprised to see me so early. He was busy at his desk, opening letters with a paper-knife.

  “Why, Bill, what’s dug you out at this godless hour?”

  “Rory is dead,” I said. “He has been killed in Ireland.”

  The paper-knife tinkled to the smooth parquet of the floor. For a moment Dermot said nothing. He sat there examining the backs of his long white fingers extended on the desk. Then he said, as if speaking to himself: “God damn England. And God damn Ireland. And God damn every country that thinks its dreams are worth one young man’s blood.”

  In my heart I said “Amen,” and say it still; but I said nothing to Dermot.

  He got up stiffly and came and stood with his hands resting on my shoulders. I looked into his eyes. There were no green flecks in them now. There was only a great depth of misery.

  “That leaves Eileen,” he said. “Just Eileen.”

  “Yes. You’d better come and see her. I’ve been at her house all night. Maggie is there. She brought the news.”

  “I must tell Sheila.”

  “Yes.”

  “Come with me, Bill.”

  So we jolted and jerked by Underground to Hampstead, and when we reached the house he said in the hall: “Just sit here by the fire. I’ll see her alone. Can you come on with us to Richmond?”

  I nodded, and he went on up the stairs.

  I sat there for perhaps a quarter of an hour, and then he came back with Sheila, who was already dressed for going out. She was white and stricken. She looked at me as though to say that she would speak if she could, but she couldn’t; and so, with no word spoken, we filed out of the house.

  *

  Maggie was sitting up in bed. She was alone when Dermot and Sheila and I went in—sitting up with a white shawl cowled over her head, held at the breast by her thin ringed hand. She was in possession of herself; her hysteria was ended; but a world of woe looked from her grey eyes.