1921

by Morgan Llywelyn

  In September the ban against the Clare Champion expired. Sarsfield Maguire immediately sent a letter to Henry. “The presses are rolling again,” he wrote. “Come back to us.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  THAT evening, Henry sat at the dining table with Maguire’s letter burning a hole in his pocket.

  “You’re not eating, Henry,” Síle remarked. “I made that bread sauce myself—Louise taught me. Is something wrong?”

  “Not at all—the sauce is grand. Sometimes I just go off my feed. Like a horse,” he added with a wink at Precious.

  “Will my horse go off its feed, Uncle Henry?”

  “You needn’t worry about that, Little Business—you don’t have a horse.”

  “I don’t,” the child agreed. “But Ursula Jervis Halloran will.”

  Louise sputtered in her tea. Síle raised her eyebrows. Louise made a negligible gesture with her hand, the signal by which one woman says to another, “I’ll tell you later.”

  There was something more pressing on Síle’s mind, however. When Henry went to his room later, he found her waiting for him outside the door. “May I speak with you in private?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Please.”

  He opened the door and stood aside for her to enter, then left the door conspicuously ajar.

  Thank God I have two chairs, so neither of us must sit on the bed.

  Síle perched stiffly on the edge of her chair, as aware as he was that this was the first time they had been alone in a bedroom together. She went straight to the point. “If something’s happened to Ned, you have to tell me, Henry. You do me no favors by keeping things from me. I always want to know the truth, no matter what.”

  So that’s where Precious gets it from. “I give you my oath, Síle, there’s no bad news of Ned. If there ever is, I promise I’ll tell you straightaway.”

  “I’ll rely on that. And thank you.” She stood up and started for the door. He stood too…just as she swayed and almost fell.

  With one long stride he caught her in his arms. When she sagged against him, he could smell the white lilac scent Ned had given her at Christmas.

  “It’s all right, Síle,” he murmured, awkwardly patting her back. “Everything will be all right.”

  “Oh, Henry, nothing’s all right.”

  “I was afraid you were going to faint. Are you ill?”

  She tried to push away from him, but the strength had gone out of her. “Just ill with worry over Ned. The British abuse our lads, everyone knows that, and he’s not well anyway. I go to bed terrified for him and I don’t sleep and I get up still terrified for him. The mornings are worse than the nights. He always kissed me awake in the morning.” A dry sob burst from her throat.

  I should not be hearing this. “Here, sit back down,” Henry urged.

  He watched helplessly while she buried her face in her hands. None of the phrases that came to his mind were of any use. She reminded him of a bird huddled on a branch in a rainstorm. When she finally took her hands away and looked up at him, her eyes were dry but naked with pain, and she spoke as if the words were being dragged out of her. “Ned didn’t have to marry me, you know. But he loves me. Truly loves me. Can you understand what that means? What I was…what I did…doesn’t matter to him.”

  I wonder if that’s true, Henry thought. “Ned’s a good man.”

  Síle swallowed hard. “The only decent man I’ve ever known.”

  There’s me. I try to be decent. “Do you need my handkerchief?”

  “I don’t, but thank you. I never cry, Henry. If you cry, they can break you.”

  “Can I get you anything else then? A glass of water? Or…there’s an old saying in Limerick: ‘What butter or whiskey does not cure cannot be cured.’ I’ve a bottle of Jamesons in my locker. You’re welcome to some if you can drink it from a tooth glass.”

  “I could lick it off the floor,” Síle assured him gratefully.

  He poured half a tumblerful and watched while she tossed it back like a man. Women did not drink whiskey. But this was Síle, and as Ned had so often said of her, none of the rules applied.

  Her breathing steadied. “I’m sorry, Henry, I didn’t mean to lose the run of myself like that.” As she handed him the empty glass her eyes became guarded. She had re-erected the wall behind which no one was allowed but Ned.

  “Don’t apologize for being human,” Henry told her. “Do you feel any better now?”

  “I suppose I do.”

  “That’s good then. Go on up to Precious, I’m sure she’s waiting for you.”

  At the door she turned and looked back at him. “I know another old saying: ‘It is a lonely washing that has no man’s shirt in it.’ ”

  “I’M afraid I cannot come back to Clare right now,” Henry wrote to Sarsfield Maguire. “I am needed here. But I should be happy to function as a sort of roving correspondent for the Champion and send you material from here. I would not expect full salary, of course. You can pay me by the piece.”

  When Maguire agreed, Henry contacted other newspapers and periodicals and established enough freelance arrangements to make him confident he could support himself and maintain the Limerick tithe. The mood in the country had indeed changed; both his straight news stories and his feature articles now had a market. With a sense of relief he gave up the advertising business.

  Aside from Irish politics, there was a lot to write about that autumn. In America fourteen million men had registered for the draft. An influenza epidemic sweeping across Europe was killing tens of thousands. In the Irish Sea more than five hundred civilians died when the Germans torpedoed the mailboat Leinster. The dead were brought back to Kingstown, where they lay in long rows under tarpaulins, waiting to be identified. As the sinking of the Lusitania had been to America, so was the destruction of the Leinster to Ireland. The mailboats were sacrosanct; the Irish would never forgive this act of treachery. People had felt a certain sympathy with the Germans because they were fighting Ireland’s ancient enemy England, but that sympathy was blown away with the Leinster. New angers were born.

  It seemed the Great War would never end.

  At her insistence, Henry read newspaper accounts of the conflict to Precious and discussed them with her afterward. They disturbed and repelled her, but nothing could dampen her need to know, her effort to try to understand the world around her.

  “Why, Uncle Henry? Why do so many men have to die?”

  “They don’t have to, Little Business. They could be safely home with their families if it weren’t for the kings and kaisers who command them to fight.”

  “What reason do the kings and kaisers have?”

  He hesitated a long moment before answering. “They invent any number of reasons. But in truth, there is an element in men…in some men…that requires a battle. Combat is how they define themselves, and when such men rise to leadership they can indulge their passion. If they didn’t have this war, they would manufacture another one. Do you understand what I’m saying at all?”

  She nodded. “I think so. I’ve seen dogs fighting in the street just for the sake of fighting. It seems stupid, though.”

  “Don’t mistake stupid behavior for stupidity. The other day I saw a copy of a letter that a very intelligent man called Winston Churchill wrote in 1915. He told a friend, and I can quote it exactly, ‘I think a curse should rest on me—because I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment—and yet—I can’t help it—I enjoy every second of it.’ ”1

  THEN, as if between one day and the next, the tide of war turned in favor of the Allies. There was a general lifting of spirits among the journalistic fraternity. “Even the darkest cloud must blow away sometime,” Henry wrote in Young Ireland. “The world is awaiting a new dawn that may see better things for us all.”

  ON the second of November, Lloyd George stated that Britain had the right to solve “the Irish question” by partition, giving control of six north-ea
stern counties to the Unionists.

  Henry did not go to bed that night. He sat hunched over his writing table until morning light streamed through the windows, then proofread the final draft of a feature article he hoped to sell to the Enniscorthy Echo.

  “Partition, if implemented, will divide us where there was no division before,” his article concluded. “Catholic or Protestant, the inhabitants of this country have always had one thing in common: an Irish identity. Some of Ireland’s greatest patriots have been Protestant. In the Rising of 1798, Scots Presbyterian and Roman Catholic fought together against English injustice. This is such a small island. We have always seen our destinies as intertwined.

  “If Ireland is partitioned, two discrete identities will develop. Two fragments of a mutilated country will face one another across an artificial border, with mistrust and hatred encouraged between them by politicians seeking to manipulate the situation to their own advantage.”

  The next morning Henry posted the article to Enniscorthy from the temporary GPO at number 14 O’Connell Street.2 Then he went for a solitary walk through a city dense with history. Dust bins clanging; bullet holes in shopfronts. Grubby corner-boys shouting at one another; a memory of machine-gun fire rattling through the streets.

  A Catholic church on one corner and a Protestant church on the other, their working-class congregations lifelong friends.

  An occasional motorcar in spite of wartime shortages, but many more horse-drawn vehicles. Dung steaming on the cobblestones; men in rags scooping it up to dry and sell for fuel in the tenements. Dog feces provided another source of income. Known as “pure,” the substance was sold to tanners for darkening leather.

  Eventually Henry made his way to the Liffey. He strolled along the quays, staring down at the murky water.

  The river Lifé, in Irish. Carrier of life and death. Fecund mud and stinking sewage.

  Irish soldiers dead in the trenches of Europe. Rotting into a soil not theirs.

  Henry made himself look at the sky instead.

  Above the Liffey, gulls were wind-planing on currents of air. Free sky. No borders.

  Chapter Eighteen

  November 11, 1918

  VICTORY! GERMANY SIGNS THE ARMISTICE!

  THE Kaiser fled Germany. France was saved, Belgium was liberated.

  Rudyard Kipling, whose son John had died on the first day of his first battle, wrote of the Great War:

  If any ask why we died,

  Tell them,

  Because our fathers lied.

  The ruin of the sprawling empire of the Hapsburgs, constructed through war and marriage over a thousand years, was carved into new polities: Austria, Hungary, and Czecho-Slovakia. In a reverse action, a Serbo-Croatian kingdom was established by amalgamating a number of formerly separate kingdoms and territories. Born from the womb of opportunity, these new nations were gifted with independence.

  Forty-nine thousand Irishmen had died while serving with the British army in the Great War. Not one drop of their sacrificed blood had won independence for Ireland.

  DUBLIN celebrated the Armistice with near hysteria. The city was over a thousand years old and had seen many wars and many truces, but this had been the War to End All Wars. It was a hell of an excuse for a party.

  “You can’t sit around the house on an occasion like this,” Henry told Síle the morning after Armistice was announced. “I’m going to take the day off. Put on your best frock and let’s go celebrate.”

  “I don’t feel like celebrating, not without Ned. You and Louise go, and take Precious with you. She’s busy upstairs now, cutting out the newspaper headlines for her scrapbook. Ned would say an event like this is part of her education, and I refuse to spoil it for her by being a damp squib. I’ll stay here and,” she smiled faintly, “keep the home fires burning.”

  There was no arguing with Síle. She was like Ned in that respect.

  The streets of Dublin were thronged with revelers holding a festival at every crossroads, but Henry feared the crowds might bring back memories of the Bachelor’s Walk Massacre for Precious. He decided they would go to one of the hotels instead. To make the occasion even more memorable, he chose Dublin’s grandest, the Shelbourne, though he did not tell the others. He wanted to surprise them with a special treat.

  Because there were no motorcabs to be hired at any price, he ordered a brougham to transport his little party through the riotous streets in the afternoon. Louise agonized over her limited wardrobe, trying on different dresses and bonnets while Precious ran up and down the stairs, trailing ribbons. “Mama said we could plait green ones into my hair, but I want these blue ones too. Or the gold ones…or maybe red? What do you think, Uncle Henry?”

  He solemnly adjudicated; they finally settled on green and gold. For himself Henry selected his best suit and waistcoat, with a boiled shirt and a collar so stiffly starched it rubbed his neck. His looking-glass assured him he looked very dapper.

  Síle bade them goodbye at the door.

  The horse, a mettlesome bay gelding, shouldered through milling crowds while Precious leaned out the window and bombarded the driver with questions about the animal. As they clattered onto O’Connell Bridge, Louise said rather nervously, “You didn’t tell me we were going across the river, Henry.”

  “Thought you’d enjoy a change of scenery.”

  “But it’s so…posh.”

  He laughed. “Hardly. Different, yes—every part of Dublin is different from every other part. But south of the river isn’t all posh by any means. There are people here no better off than you are, and a lot who are much poorer.”

  Circling around the front of Trinity College, the brougham headed up Grafton Street with its expensive shops. Jubilant crowds were even thicker here: voices shouting, hats tossed in the air, banners waving, total strangers throwing their arms around one another. All of Saint Stephen’s Green was one vast party, and someone was setting off fireworks. At the first loud bang, the horse shied and Precious flinched. Then she looked at Henry and made herself laugh.

  When the brougham pulled up in front of the ornate Victorian porch of the Shelbourne, Louise let out a gasp and pressed back against the seat. “I can’t go in there, Henry.”

  “You can, of course.”

  “But the gentry stay at the Shelbourne. Protestants,” she added in a whisper.

  “Aren’t you just as good as any of them? Ireland’s going to be a republic, Louise, just as Pearse wanted. A nonsectarian republic that treats everybody equally. Might as well start now!” Without giving her a chance to refuse he maneuvered her out of the carriage, then lifted Precious down. “You both look grand entirely. In you go now. Heads high!”

  The doorman in his tall silk hat winked at Precious as he ushered her through the double doors. “You’re very welcome, Miss.”

  She beamed back at him. “I’m going to stay here when I’m grown,” she confided.

  Louise was plainly uncomfortable, but Precious, child of the slums, swept into the Shelbourne Hotel as if she owned the place.

  In spite of the hour, electrified chandeliers were blazing in the entrance hall.1 Their diamantine brilliance added to the air of festivity. Accustomed to the gentler gaslight of number 16, Precious asked in a stage whisper, “Uncle Henry, does the same electricity that runs the trams run those lights?”

  “It does, Little Business.”

  “Is electricity only for trams and hotels?”

  “Not at all. Electricity’s a form of power, and power’s like water, it can go anywhere. The first cables were laid in Dublin in 1881,”2 Henry elaborated, happy to display a newspaperman’s general knowledge. “Most large commercial firms here use electricity these days.”

  “Then why don’t we have electric lights at home?”

  “There simply is not enough power available.”

  “Do they use electricity down the country?”

  “A couple of towns have it on a very limited basis, but nothing like here.”

  Pre
cious cocked her head to one side. “Why? Is Dublin better than the rest of Ireland?”

  Their conversation was overheard by a tall woman swathed in a coat of Mongolian blue fox. She interjected, “Of course it is, my dear. Dublin is the second capital of the empire.”

  “What empire?”

  “Why, the British Empire.”

  Precious stared up into the woman’s face, which was concealed from Henry by the deep brim of her hat. “We’re not part of any old empire,” the little girl asserted. “We’re a republic and that’s a lot better. My Uncle Henry said so.”

  Louise caught the child’s arm and hurried her into the formal room beyond the lobby. Biting the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing, Henry followed.

  The room faced south, offering drapery-framed views of Saint Stephen’s Green. Within the Green deciduous trees stood leafless, but around their skeletal forms clustered the evergreens that made the park luxuriant in every season—though some of these were still recovering from the damage done by fusillades of bullets during Easter Week 1916.

  Pale sunlight streamed through tall windows, revealing a slightly dusty elegance. Hospitality was more important than housekeeping at the Shelbourne. A certain artless dishevelment made the Anglo-Irish gentry feel more at home, while visitors from England considered it local color. The room was crowded with celebrants. Class distinctions were set aside in the general euphoria. Some of the hotel staff had so forgot themselves they were mingling with the guests, but no one seemed to mind.

  Henry wedged his womenfolk onto a tufted-velvet banquette whose prior occupants moved over without interrupting their own conversation. From a nearby table he borrowed a chair for himself. Coal fires were roaring in the marble fireplaces at either end of the room. “That’s terrible wasteful,” Louise commented. “So many people in this room, they don’t need any fire at all.”

  “Would you like a cup of tea?”