The Red and The Green

by Iris Murdoch

  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 en
ough 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.’

  ‘If you’ve got something to say, say it.’

  ‘Well, it’s nothing special really. I just wanted to talk to you. We never seem to meet and talk to each other properly and that seems such a shame.’

  ‘I have very little time for social conversation, you must excuse me.’ Pat began to make the movements of departure. He did not think now that Millie knew anything about Sunday.

  There was a sudden noisy flurry in the dark room and Millie moved quickly, plunging forward as if she were going to pick something up from the floor. She half fell, half darted forward, grunting like an animal, and blundered past him, butting him with her shoulder. In a moment she was leaning back against the closed door holding something in her hand. He saw her mouth open, moist and almost round as she drew breath, and saw that what she held in her hand was a revolver pointed at him.

  For about two seconds Pat speculated. He had once, at the start, put it to himself that Millie might be or might become anything. She was an irresponsible, a person without a centre. She could be a spy in the pay of the Castle. Now suddenly and vividly he saw her as a traitor. In the third second he realized that of course this was only a piece of play-acting, a piece of Millie’s usual tomfoolery. He stepped towards her and took the gun out of her hand. She held it lightly, scarcely resisting his fingers. He laid it down on the dressing-table, and as he turned back to her he inhaled the sweet disagreeable odour of the white daffodils.

  Millie was still leaning against the door, but her body which had been taut and fierce was now quite limp. She seemed like a figure made of soft wax which might bend or sag slowly to the floor, at any moment. Her face was vague and dazed, her eyes half closed. She said very softly, ‘Just for a second you were afraid of me. Oh, oh, oh—’

  ‘You shouldn’t play with those things,’ said Pat. Of course he had not been afraid of her, but he was angry that she should have seen his mind, and disgusted at the way she had suddenly transformed herself into an animal.

  ‘I was in earnest, you know—for a moment anyway. You were so rude. Why can’t you be ordinarily polite to me? I’ve stored all that stuff for you and never questioned you or bothered you. And you know I’ve told nobody.’

  ‘If I’ve been rude I apologize.’

  ‘You can’t apologize just by saying “I apologize”, not in that tone of voice. Of course you’ve been rude. But it’s not that I mind. Sit down.’

  Pat sat down.

  He felt Millie lean heavily on the back of his chair, and then she had sat down close opposite to him, staring. Her face resembled a Roman mask, huge-eyed and open-mouthed, strained and painful and yet at the same time lewd. The rain seemed to have stopped and there was a little more light and colour in the room. Beyond her head the daffodils were a white blur against the wet silvery window pane. Near to him Millie’s features trembled for a moment, quivered all over like something seen through disturbed water. ‘You don’t like me very much, do you, Pat?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘And yet in a way too you do like me, I feel it.’

  ‘I don’t know you at all—’

  ‘That’s just it. But you will get to know me, you will. I wish we could meet sometimes and talk, just talk of anything at all, that’s in our minds. It would be good, wouldn’t it? I feel we have so much to give each other. I wish you’d come sometimes, here or to Rathblane. Just to talk. I so much want to know you better. I need to.’

  ‘I doubt if we’d have much to say to each other.’

  ‘Please, Pat, please, please, please. I beg you to come and see me.’

  ‘Really—I have no time for visiting—I shall have to go directly.’

  ‘I beg you.’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’ He got up hastily and kicked the soft chair aside, shuffling backwards.

  ‘Pat, I’m so useless, my life is so useless, so empty. You could help me. You could tell me what to do to be of use. I would obey you.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do—’

  ‘I might really have shot you just now. Shot you first and myself after. Do you know how often I think of killing myself? Every day, every hour.’

  Pat had got to the door. Fumbling behind him he found the handle, opened the door an inch and closed it again. He had been almost prepared to find it locked.

  ‘I can’t help you.’

  ‘How can you be so cruel? You can help me with your little finger, with any look, any word. Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? I love you.’

  Pat’s immediate feeling was simply of an embarrassed shock. Then there was something darker, like intense anger. He said at once, ‘That’s a foul lie.’

  There was a pause in which he heard Millie’s indrawn breath, a gasp like a gasp of triumph. She rose and circled behind her chair, keeping her distance from him. He curled with loathing, but his hand upon the door-handle seemed paralysed. The directness of his response to her seemed to have flung out a taut tingling connection between t
hem and they were, as never before, present to each other.

  Millie breathed slowly and deeply. Her face, clear in the brightening light from the window, wore an intense expression of happy cunning. She said softly, coaxingly, argumentatively, ‘Well, it may be that it is not love. Yet it is fierce enough, deep enough to be love. Will you not test it? I want you.’