The Red And The Green (14 page)

‘I thought William Martin Murphy and the Dublin employers were the tyrants your friends hated, more than the English.'

‘Have you heard that Murphy has persuaded all the employers to sack all the able-bodied workers to force them to enlist?'

‘If I were your schoolmaster I'd beat a bit of accuracy into you. The employers would do no such thing, it would hit their pockets.'

‘Well, there's no call for you to sneer—'

‘I'm not sneering.'

‘You are so.'

‘I am not.'

‘The Irish worker is the worst fed and the worst housed in the British Isles, and that's saying something. And it was a Government Commission said that, not James Connolly. Have you been over to Jinny's place ever and seen how she lives? Do you know that they're living six in a room all over Dublin? Do you know how cold they are in winter? Do you know what they have to eat? Do you know what happens to them when they're ill?'

‘I know these things, Cathal, don't shout.'

‘Well, once we get started we'll shift the whole lot. We'll shift the bloody English and William Martin Murphy all at the same time. And they can put the Home Rule Bill where the monkey put the nuts.'

‘Haven't I told you not to be using that bad language.'

‘We'll hail the English workers as our brothers. And all over Europe the workers will rise to stop the war. We'll ride on top of the workers' movement like Toomai on the elephant. “Kala Nag, Kala Nag, take me with you—”'

‘I'm surprised to hear you quoting that Imperialist writer!'

Cathal was silent for a moment. Then as if deliberately putting his exaltation from him he lifted his other knee and began with wrinkled nostrils to sniff the tweed of his trouser leg. He massaged his ankles and then slowly lowered his feet to the ground, leaning far forward so that his straight heavy sheet of hair fell down over his brow. With face hidden he said, ‘So you think it is—impossible—to fight?'

Pat stared at the bowed head. Then he answered slowly. ‘Yes, impossible.'

Impossible. That was what all his arguments had proved it to be. But on Sunday they were going to do the impossible.

‘Pass me the towel, Cathal.'

The boy jumped up quickly and then laughed. ‘Why are you covering yourself up like that, like a girl? Patrick Pearse says the Red Branch heroes went naked into battle. He says shame of nakedness is a modern English thing—'

‘Pearse talks almost as much nonsense as your friend at Liberty Hall. Shove over the bath mat, would you.'

For a while Cathal watched Pat drying himself. Then he said, almost under his breath, ‘When you go, I am going with you—'

Pat said nothing. His fierce love for his younger brother had expressed itself in a tyranny which had deceived many outsiders. He loved Cathal, and only Cathal, with all the intensity of that place of weakness which he called his heart; and he had always known and knew it now with an especial terror, that Cathal was his vulnerable point, his Achilles heel. Though he were to make himself into a man of iron, here he would always be naked and totally without defence. When Sunday came, what could he do about Cathal?

Chapter Nine

O
N Wednesday, at about five o'clock in the morning, Christopher Bellman, who had been unable to sleep, arose from his bed. It was today that Millie was to give him her momentous answer. Since last meeting her he had pursued an inward dialogue of great length and complexity. He could not clearly remember doing anything else, though in fact he must somehow have conversed with Frances, Andrew and Hilda, and gone about a semblance of his daily work. In fact he had sat for long hours in his study, staring out of the window and listening to the uproar of his thoughts which rattled away in his ears, sounding now like schoolmen and now like fishwives.

He was chiefly troubled by two things. First and most fundamentally he was afraid that Millie might say no. His view of her as ‘cornered' depended upon an assumption about her rationality which could very well prove false. Of course Millie did not want to sell Rathblane and the house in Upper Mount Street and go into cheap lodgings. But was Millie rational enough to keep this prospect steadily before her face? Might she not prefer to drift vaguely on, trusting that her luck would change? This might result, indeed would certainly soon result, in her ruin, the dissolution of her empire: and at that moment, or on the brink of it, she might well turn to him again. Yet if things went that far, and especially if her situation were to become public, would she in fact turn to him? She might, when really faced with it, positively prefer the catastrophe and feel that it was now too late to buy back the continuity and the splendour of her previous existence. He could negotiate with an unrealistic, comfort-loving, imperial Millie who simply wanted the preservation of her advantages provided she was just rational enough to know what must be done to ensure this. But Millie was also capable of enjoying disaster. A desperate, exposed Millie would be an entirely different person, and one who might well find the strength within herself to prefer her freedom. He must see to it that this person did not come into existence.

The other thing that troubled him was the plain thought that he was acting wrongly. Of course, he had had this thought before, but in a different form. He had been ruthless with a certain dash. It seemed to him that after a lifetime of quiet decency this sudden act of selfishness had some elegance about it. For once, and in a wonderful cause, he was going to go straight for what he wanted. Millie was a rich prize, and he would take her in spite of the demon of morality. He had pictured his wrong-doing entirely in terms of himself, in terms of a really rather brave, and certainly rather stylish overthrowing of moral barriers which perhaps his timidity rather than his virtue had previously respected. Now he began to think more closely about Millie.

Of course, if he pressed her too much against her will to marry him she might well resent it in ways which would later make his own life a misery, so there were clear self-interested motives for caution. But Christopher somehow did not fear this. He knew Millie very well and knew the sturdy cheerfulness of her temperament. She would make the best of a bad job. But if it was indeed such a bad job why force it upon her at all? Ought he not simply to rescue her financially, which he could fairly easily do, and expect no reward? The trouble was, he would probably get no reward. He had been exact in saying that moderate faithfulness was all he could expect from a Millie married. Not that he anticipated positive love affairs, though that was possible too, but Millie would never be able to resist a conquest or to contain her roving affections and he could not reasonably, in all the circumstances, ask her, if she became Mrs Bellman, to do so. From a Millie unmarried, however greatly indebted, he knew he could expect very little. Millie would, in a short while, almost literally
forget
what had happened.

Nevertheless, it now appeared before him more precisely, like an alien tablet held up before his face, that his duty was to make the money available and lightly and generously to drop the other idea which would never, except in this graceless context, have occurred to him as in the least feasible or to Millie as in the least interesting. When the argument reached this point the question promptly arose in a new form: was he going to do his duty? He had been prepared to perform the stylish act. Was he equally prepared to perform the ugly act? But here his desire for Millie, the sheer dazzling image of her, like a miraculous icon suddenly laid open before him, struck him dumb with a comforting sense of the inevitable. He simply could not resist her. Then almost at once the whisper of the argument would begin again from the beginning. And now on the morning of Wednesday he was still unresolved, weakly inclined to wait for Millie's words to bring about some new mood in him. With a supreme frailty, of which he was thoroughly conscious, he handed the moral decision over to his future self.

These matters had occupied Christopher for a greater part of the night, in the intervals of storms of nightmare which had departed from memory leaving only a dark stain behind. Unable now to lie still, he got up into the twilight, rather shakily pushing himself out of bed and lowering his feet which curled stiffly and reluctantly on contact with the floor. Sleep still buzzed and swarmed about him. Drooping his head, he noticed how extremely thin his legs were. He sat on the edge of the bed and contemplated his bony knees and ankles and the narrow white shaft in between sparsely scattered with long spidery black hairs. The flesh seemed like a kind of solidified paste, rigidly tubular yet without significant shape or colour. With this came a disagreeable intuition of his whole body as stiff and old and flaky. Unclothed he would be found to be a stick-like puppet, something so crude and primitive that its connection with the human form was merely conjectural. He could ask nothing of Millie. But at that moment it was not even the thought of her that appalled him: it was some old fear of death which had not visited him now for many years.

He got up and mixed himself a little chlorodyne in some water. Then, holding the glass, he went over to the window. The garden was very still, hazily present in a bluish twilight which only just allowed the eyes to see. It seemed to him now an alien scene, something reflected in an old dim looking-glass, a strangely altered mirror garden. Never by day did the trees and plants look so monumentally quiet and abstractedly aware, as in a wide-eyed trance. He shivered and then found that he was listening, perhaps for the sound of the dew dripping from the spikey tips of the palm trees. But the blue air was silent, no sound diffused in it even of the sea, an opaque and sterile air. He was about to turn away to the comfort of his room when he became aware of something unusual in the dim space before him. He saw, or thought he saw, a human figure standing in the garden. He stared, trying in vain to make his eyes see clearly. The bewitchment had shifted, the diffused menace of the blue twilight concentrated in this motionless intruder, quieter and more intent than the waiting trees. Christopher drew in his breath slowly; then suddenly his vision shifted again and he recognized the figure. It was his daughter Frances.

Frances began to move slowly across the lawn. She was wearing a long dressing-gown of a whitish colour which dragged behind her leaving a dark trail in the dew. She came as far as the swing. She was now, underneath the chestnut tree, barely visible. Her pale gown moved behind the leaves and for a moment she seemed to be kneeling on the seat of the swing. Then she emerged and stood looking up at the tree. She touched one of the lower branches and made it sway as if to be sure that something other than herself could move. Her gestures had the dreadful completeness and self-absorption of those who do not think they are observed. Then she swung slowly away and began to drift across the grass, abruptly pausing from time to time to think or listen. She moved heavily, in a way quite unlike her normal gait, as if her entry into the mirror world had weighed her down, powdered her over with some resistant silvery stuff; and indeed her figure seemed now to shimmer slightly, perhaps in the increasing light, like something metallic. Then when she stood still she was very still, fading a little, gathered into the dim morning silence where not even a bird was stirring.

Christopher was extremely troubled. There was something distraught about the quiet figure with its heavy menaced gait. He would have been unwilling now to see her face. She seemed like a person deliberately frightening herself, trying perhaps to still one fear by another. Yet what was so appalling about the garden? It was the girl's own fear which he had seen in the twilit garden, diffused in the blue grains of the dawn light. With a quick horror of being seen by her he moved back from the window. The figure watching from inside could only seem a terrible demon to the figure wandering without. He sat down shuddering upon his bed. How did he so certainly know that she was afraid? And what was it that she was afraid of?

* * * *

‘Oh, what fun, you've had the old swing mended!'

‘Yes, Andrew mended it.'

The sun was shining brightly and the birds were singing. It had been raining in the earlier part of the morning, but now the sun shone upon the sparkling wet garden which smelt and looked a sort of light salty green.

‘Has the dear boy popped the question?'

‘Not yet.'

Christopher followed Millie down the garden. He was uneasy at her presence here, uneasy at her insistence on coming to his house, although he knew that Hilda and Frances were safely in Dublin. He would have kept her indoors, but she had, on her arrival, walked straight through the house into the garden.

‘Have Andrew and Hilda moved yet?'

‘They slept last night at Claresville, just camping out. The furniture from England arrives tomorrow.'

‘I must go down and inspect. Do you approve of Hilda's new place?'

‘I don't like a sloping garden, but the house is pretty enough. Millie—'

‘Your gardener hasn't pruned the roses properly. Look at all those spindly branches.'

‘I know. His mind hasn't been on his job lately. Millie—'

‘How early the roses are in bud here. But the buds won't open, will they, for nearly another month.'

‘More than that. Millie—'

‘Isn't it funny the way one
forgets
every year the way things happen in the spring? I never know what order the flowers come in, do you?'

‘I envy you all those surprises. Dearest Millie—'

‘Is the Castle going to raid all those Sinn Feiners and take their guns away? Did you see that thing in the paper yesterday?'

‘No, of course not. That order was obviously a fake. I rang up MacNeill's brother about it and he just laughed. Mr Birrell has gone off to England for Easter as usual. This country's the same on both sides of the fence. All talk and no action.'

‘And you think the others won't do anything beyond their usual playing at soldiers?'

‘No, they'll sit about waiting for the peace conference. They can't lose by waiting. Now, please—'

‘It's so sad. I always thought something wonderful would come out of Ireland. Some great glittering event that would change everything, some great act. But no, it's all toy, it's tiny and provincial after all.'

‘There could be no great event, Millie, there aren't the historical conditions for a great event. A few people might commit a few murders—'

‘Well, perhaps it was just something in my own life I was waiting for, some golden thing which never came.'

‘Millie, I do wish you'd come inside.'

‘No, I like it out here. It's so gorgeously wet. It keeps my ankles cool.'

‘Dearest, there was something you were going to tell me today.'

‘Oh, the future, the future! I keep on consulting the cards but I draw nothing but the Queen of Spades.'

‘You ought to be consulting your heart.'

‘My
what?'

‘Millie, please don't torture me.'

‘You refer to your suggestion that we should get married?'

‘Of course—'

‘Well, naturally the answer's yes.'

Christopher stared at Millie, who was now retreating from him across the grass. She was still wearing her grey outdoor coat with its militaristic trimmings in red velvet. Beneath it her silk skirt was visible, patchily darkened by the rain water, and her neat little boots. Christopher watched her plump, slightly swaying figure moving away and now leaning a little over the roses. For a moment it all seemed a picture, as if a golden light had shone upon a stage and made uncertain random things into a beautiful tableau. The relief he felt made him quite dazed with joy. He wanted to kneel down on the wet grass. Instead he stooped and touched it and drew his wet rainy hand across his brow. He followed her.

‘Oh, Millie, I'm so glad.'

‘Yes, I give in, I surrender. I'm coming out with the white flag. You have all the big guns.'

‘Is it as bad as that?'

‘Oh, worse—But no, I'm only jesting! Here, I've picked you a lovely green rosebud. Mind the thorns.'

‘May there be no thorns in our life together.'

‘Nothing sharp with which we can hurt each other. Oh, if you knew how frightened I am of being hurt by you, Christopher.'

‘Millie! As if I could ever hurt you. I worship you.'

The unexpectedness of her cry pierced him, causing a little sweet pain which became a warm glow of power. As he spoke he knew still that he ought to be saying something very different to her, he ought to be using all the intelligence he could command to make her, at this last minute, feel utterly free of him. He should be offering her his help and her freedom too. But already, loaded deep with joy and absolutism, the new situation had gained its own historical momentum.

‘You think Frances won't mind really?'

‘No, no,' said Christopher. ‘When she's married, when she's got her man and her own place, she won't be troubled about this.' He recalled the haunted figure that he had seen that morning. But that was a ghost, and this sunny garden and its certainties were the real world.