Discretion about money had somehow cast a veil of secrecy over their whole relationship. It was not generally known that they were fond of each other or that they met so often; and Christopher kept up for the benefit of some of his relations the fiction that he found Millie "trying". He did this partly out of an innate taste for the clandestine, partly because of the money question, and partly because Millie wanted it that way. Christopher was realistic and resigned about Millie"s desire for secrecy. A popular woman who enjoys her admirers and is also kind-hearted will naturally want to keep her friendships strictly sealed off from each other. To each man Millie seemed available with an undivided attention and a full heart. Christopher was consoled by being more in her confidence than most. He at least knew about the others; and he was fairly certain that, at present at any rate, these "relationships" which Millie cultivated remained at a level of innocuous flirtation, although hearts other than hers were sometimes cracked in the process.
There was, however, yet another and graver reason for Christopher"s secrecy, and that was the att.i.tude of Frances. Frances disliked Millie, perhaps because, although Christopher had always, and quite automatically, concealed it from her, she sensed her father"s interest and was jealous, or perhaps out of a strong temperamental disparity. "I don"t like being bounced at," Frances had once said coldly after some demonstration of Millie"s. And Millie indeed, who was always made nervous by the presence of Frances, whom she felt as a critic, had made various effusive but vain attempts to win the girl round. Christopher loved Frances dearly, though he had always treated her, even as a child, in the cool ironical manner which he used to the world at large. In this respect, he and his daughter, early left to each other"s company by the vanishing of Heather, perfectly understood one another, and made no display of a strong affection which pa.s.sed freely between them under a guise of such calmness that not everyone realized that they loved each other at all.
Before Christopher had formulated the idea of asking Millie to marry him he had not too much troubled about the hostility of Frances. It had merely provided another motive for a total discretion. But when the notion of such a marriage had appeared in the background the view which Frances might take of it became an appalling source of anxiety. That Frances disliked Millie was of course in itself a serious impediment; and there was also the possibility that a projected match between her father and "that woman" might produce in Frances some unprecedented reaction of violence. Christopher was aware that in some respects which were relevant to this problem he did not know his daughter very well. Their relations had been, in a sense, too perfectly organized. Being so much in each other"s company they had early developed an adult language of understatement, and their feelings, just because they were so harmonious, had been tacit. But Christopher divined in his daughter the presence of an as yet unpractised stubbornness, the presence of ferocious will.
The marriage question, for some time hovering in the background, had now suddenly and automatically been brought into the foreground by the almost complete collapse of Millie"s fortunes. This collapse was not yet known to the world. At Upper Mount Street the maids with the white streamers still tripped confidently about the house and under the windows of Rathblane the hunters still strolled and nibbled the green gra.s.s. The chauffeur still polished the bra.s.s fitments of the Panhard. But all this must shortly vanish like a dream, dissolve like Aladdin"s palace, unless...
Christopher, faced with the supreme temptation, did not attempt to resist it, did not even formulate the idea of it as a temptation, so confident did he now suddenly feel in his G.o.ds. He would save Millie, he would save her by marrying her. The idea that he was in effect proposing to buy Millie was perfectly clear in his mind, but seemed in the context entirely innocuous. The one who is in love has the significant destiny and Christopher felt that, beyond his hopes, a path had been made, a door had been opened, especially for him. His significance would felicitously espouse Millie"s misfortune. There was indeed an inevitability about it, the other side of which was that it was somehow clearly "impossible" for Christopher to save Millie without marrying her.
Although the idea that there was only one solution had been taking shape over a period of months, as Millie"s financial affairs went into the final phases of collapse, it was only in the last four weeks or so that Christopher had used explicitly the words which named his intention. This had happened during scenes in which Millie would say desperately, "I"ll sell this house and Rathblane and go into lodgings," and Christopher would say, "Don"t be foolish. You know you can"t face it. You"ll marry me and everything will be all right." Then Millie would laugh loudly, say, "It looks as if I"ll have to!" and change the subject. It was true that Millie could not face it, that she would in the end do anything rather than face it; and meanwhile she played a little for time.
This period of their relationship had had, for Christopher, a special rather sad charm. Millie had been of late, even in the last year, more subdued, less boisterous. It was not that she seemed older or positively melancholy, but her beauty wore a sort of gauzy veil which perhaps only he could see. She was less rowdy and her gaiety sometimes seemed "switched on", an effort, and she was often thoughtful. Christopher had her cornered, and she knew it. She used now her resources of irony and humour to cover the loss of her dignity as a free being. She seemed without resentment. There was something beautiful and sad in this loss of power which made him feel very tenderly towards her. It was like a stage in taming a wild beast when it becomes suddenly gentle and puss-like. It plunges far off, but feels the rope that draws and draws it. Now it trots more soberly near by. Soon it will come to the hand. It will have to.
This was how Christopher saw it most of the time; but there were moments of uneasiness when he felt that the closer he came to her the more likely it was that Millie might suddenly bolt. He would have been prepared to let her decide very slowly indeed. He rather enjoyed his state of undeclared sovereignty. But financial pressures set the pace and Millie herself seemed increasingly anxious to settle her fate although she still avoided any clear commitment; while Christopher, who had intended not to press her, could not now prevent himself from advancing upon her as the situation itself relentlessly advanced. No, he did not really think that she could escape him. Yet with a woman like Millie one never knew. She was used to doing things on the hunting field which seemed equivalent to suicide; and although she was probably incapable of facing poverty, she was not incapable of pulling the house down, of provoking some total catastrophe on the a.s.sumption that the world was going to end immediately.
"Have some of your special cider and sherry mixture," said Millie. "I"ve got some here in a jug."
"Thanks." Christopher was partial to a mixture of two parts of Tio Pepe to one part of dry cider.
She released the gla.s.s into his fingers, but kept her hand lightly resting against his, looking down at him. The purple silk brushed his knee.
"You look Chinese today, Millie. It must be the dress."
"Good. I shall need all my inscrutability for dealing with you."
She suddenly laughed and moved away. "Do you know, poor dear Hilda, I was watching her at tea. I think she thinks she"s got you hooked."
Christopher laughed too. "Not hooked, no. She pictures us as two ancient craft driven by the storms of fortune into the selfsame anchorage!"
"When is Frances getting married?"
Christopher drew a quiet breath. Millie"s jumpy nervy mood both frightened and exhilarated him. How endlessly she must have thought about Frances. Yet the name was rarely mentioned between them. "Soon."
"How soon?"
"I don"t know. That foolish boy still hasn"t fixed it. But he will directly. I"ll make him."
It was a sad thing to Christopher, and perhaps the only thing about which he really felt guilt, that he was now actually impatient for Frances to be married. Indeed she must be married before anything else could happen. He feared that will of hers, roaming unoccupied and uncaged.
"Christopher-"
"Yes, dear?"
"Do you think I"m getting old and ugly?"
"You know perfectly well what I think."
"I must be getting old. I need to hear somebody saying that I am gorgeously attractive. Once I didn"t need to be told, except by my looking-gla.s.s."
"You are gorgeously attractive, Millie."
She paused by the tall mirror and with a large gesture lit the candles on either side of it. Like a new ghost in the flickering light her reflection gazed at Christopher, and the reflection had suddenly the remote distinction of a work of art, and something too of the eternal sadness of art.
"Well, it"s not true, but bless you for saying it. This soft light suits me, don"t you think? It makes me hazy. One mustn"t look too close. I am getting old. I"m nearly ready to retire. Perhaps I"ll retire with you and we"ll go and live in the hotel at Greystones and become a well-known old couple taking a turn on the front."
"I wish you would! You know how much I wish-"
"Sssh, Christopher."
"Yes?"
"I like you because you are so clever."
"Oh, Millie, do stop tormenting me." He had not meant to strike this note, but suddenly it was unbearable, the enclosed scene and her proximity. The straight silk dress moved upon her body as if she were naked beneath. She was very close and it was an agony not to touch her.
"I"m sorry," she said in a suddenly desolate tone, and moved out of the soft aura of the candles.
After a pause she said, "I don"t want to sell Rathblane."
"I know you don"t."
"I like being Lady Kinnard of Rathblane."
Christopher gripped his gla.s.s. Millie was now going to say something which he had long guessed to be in her mind although she had never explicitly uttered it. "Yes?"
"Yes. Christopher-would we have to change things altogether? You know you could have anything that you wanted. I am that sort of girl. Or rather I could be for you."
"But I am not that sort of man. Besides-"
"Besides?"
"I should require-shall we say moderate faithfulness."
Millie laughed but became tense again the next moment. "You are modest! I would be faithful to you-moderately."
"That is what you will be with marriage, my dear. Without marriage you would be nothing."
Millie sat down on the stool, smoothing the purple silk over her thighs and gathering it tightly with one hand behind her knees. "Yes, you are clever. I could say that I might find someone else more accommodating. But unfortunately you know quite well that I could only tolerate an arrangement of this sort with a very old friend and a highly intelligent one at that."
They were silent for a moment.
Christopher said with emotion, "Millie, I want you to be Mrs Bellman. I want Mrs Bellman to be you."
"It doesn"t sound so good," she said with a sigh. "Well, you are my last temptation, the devil come to buy my soul."
"Hardly your last temptation, darling Millie. But sell, please sell!"
"I"ll think about it!" said Millie, jumping up. "Or perhaps I shall shoot myself instead. Do you think I have the temperament for suicide?"
"No. You love yourself far too dearly. We are not suicidal types, my darling."
"I"m afraid you"re right. And now I"m going to turn you out because I"ve got another visitor coming."
"Who?" said Christopher. He got up, trembling with irritation and jealousy.
"Barney. He"s coming for his evening bowl of milk. And he"s to help me sort some papers. He"s so devoted and useful."
Christopher could not understand how Millie could encourage the futile crawling homage of someone like Barnabas Drumm. For many years now Barney had had, unknown, Christopher suspected, to Kathleen, a sort of position as a lackey, or serviceable buffoon in Millie"s household. How this curious relationship had started, or why it continued, Christopher did not know. He supposed that Millie was simply incapable of refusing a devotion however absurd. He was hurt by this lack of dignity in her, and he was a little affronted too on behalf of Kathleen whom he respected. This little game of Millie"s, he felt, would have to stop. It had of course never occurred to him to be jealous of Barney.
Millie had gone to the door. "Barney"ll take a knock," she said thoughtfully.
"How do you mean?"
"If I say yes."
"If you say yes. Dearest Millie-"
"All right, all right. Come to me on Wednesday. Come before luncheon, about midday. Or no, I"ll come to you. Isn"t that the day when Hilda and Frances go to town? I"d like to come to Sandycove. It would feel so dangerous! I"ll give you your answer then. Now please go, I"m so tired."
They moved out on to the dark landing. There was a stirring down below and Millie looked over. "Why, I think that"s Barney coming up. Come, boy, come, boy!" She whistled shrilly as if for a dog. "Good boy, good boy, come, come!"
Chapter Six.
WHEN Cathal had asked his question, "When is it to be?" Pat Dumay had not known the answer. He knew the answer now. The armed rising was to begin on Easter Sunday at six o"clock in the evening.
Pat had known for some long time that it would happen, that it would come. He had long felt it as inevitable, had taken it as it were into his own body. It was as if he were fixed to a steel chain the other end of which was hidden in that imagined mystery of violence, and he could feel it almost as a physical pain, a physical pleasure, drawing him towards it. But it was one thing to know, however certainly, that it would come; it was quite another to be given a date and a definite diminishing final interim of five days. What had been imagined had entered time and now the pattern of the hours lay under its authority. The news, which Pat had received this very morning, Tuesday the eighteenth of April, had been itself like a moment of violence, a blow which spread out through his flesh like a red rosette of anguish and delight. He was afraid. But such fear was a glorious decoration. He was afraid, but he knew himself too to be a brave man. He had not enjoyed the spectacle of others suffering in a war which he could not join, and he had not liked it either when they distinguished themselves. There had been moments when his own war had seemed an unreal sham. But there had been for him no alternative to that war.
It seemed to Pat that he had been born to a vision of fighting for Ireland. His parents had had little Irish patriotism and this lack was for him a part of their utter commonplaceness. His own recognition of himself as far from commonplace came with his early sense of his Irish destiny, his sense of belonging not to himself but to some design of history. He knew himself, even as a boy, as one chosen and already under orders. His first vivid memories were of the South African war, Dublin decked out in Transvaal flags, Boer songs sung in the streets, and the crowd at the Irish Times office to cheer a victory over the English. He had seen the Union Jack burnt and plumed troopers charging a crowd. The shock, the experience of subjection, the knowledge of belonging to a subject race, came into him with his first consciousness, together with a cold fierce will to freedom. And when, at George the Fifth"s coronation visit, the town had been decked with hostile streamers declaring "Thou art not conquered, yet, dear land", Pat had felt himself come of age for Ireland. The enormity of the insult laid upon his people, matched with his own unshaken sense of his worth, produced in him such a charge of power and resentment that at times he felt himself almost capable of acting and succeeding alone.
His patriotism was not of the diffuse and talkative kind, and though it was certainly romantic it was with some distilled essence of romanticism, something bitter and dark and pure. He had small use for "Cathleen ni Houlihan", nor was he interested in Patrick Pea.r.s.e"s archaistic visions of a virtuous manly society whose manners were somehow to be restored. He had never joined the Gaelic League, and though he had attempted to learn Irish he did not think the language important. He was himself a matter-of-fact practising Catholic, but the pattern of his religion, though it remained secure, did not enter into the chief pa.s.sion of his life. He was not one of those who made their Catholicism into nationalism. He was unmoved by the Holy Ireland affected by his stepfather, nor was he, like his younger brother, an ardent theorist. His Ireland was nameless, a pure Ireland of the mind, to be relentlessly served by a naked sense of justice and a naked self-a.s.sertion. There were in his drama only these two characters, Ireland and himself.
When the Irish Volunteers were founded in nineteen thirteen Pat joined them at once. He was in fact at the time on the point of attaching himself to James Connolly"s Irish Citizen Army. He had been much affected by the Labour troubles and much impressed by the great strike earlier that year. The courage and discipline of the unions stirred him deeply. Here again he had seen uniformed men attacking a crowd and had digested a violence of anger which nearly choked him. He had taken young Cathal to hear Jim Larkin speak, and had received certain new complexities into his concept of justice. So there were two kinds of masters to be reckoned with; and he listened, and his young brother listened even more avidly, to the words of those who said that the fight for freedom was a single fight and that the capitalist tyrant and the English tyrant must be driven out in the self-same battle.
However, when it came to it he joined the Volunteers. Without calling himself a Socialist, for he would never have called himself anything, he had no doubt at all that the capitalist system was irrational, tyrannical and wicked. The sense of being a subject, a serf, which his sensitive awareness of his nationality had brought home to his pride at such an early age made him ready to identify himself with the Dublin workers. But whereas he envisaged the liberation of Ireland as something singularly simple and pure, he could not picture the liberation of the working cla.s.s without becoming entangled in ambiguous speculations and theories. He was not convinced that the two fights could be fought at once and he was sure that the affair of Ireland came first.
He joined the Volunteers also out of a sense that here was his place. He despised the genteel sn.o.bbery of many of the Volunteer supporters and their "employer"s Ireland"; but he felt that the hour of bloodshed would sufficiently separate the sheep from the goats. The men who were prepared to shoot and kill would be men of the right kind, and when the day came they and the Citizen Army would form one brotherhood. Meanwhile there was of course much less nonsense about the Citizen Army, whose discipline and fanaticism Pat observed with respect; and when he learnt that Connolly had lately interviewed each Citizen Army man individually and asked him if he would be willing to fight if the Army had to act without the Volunteers, and that each man had said yes, Pat felt something very like envy. But for just this reason, that the Volunteers represented something less compact and clearheaded, Pat had decided that his task lay with them. He conceived that the Volunteers needed backbone: he proposed himself as a stiffening agent; and he was influenced too by the idea that, in the Volunteer organization where there were fewer enthusiasts, he would receive a more rapid promotion.
Soon after joining the Volunteers, however, he discovered two things, first that the desired backbone was already present in the guise of an extensive secret group of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and secondly, that he was not destined to shoot rapidly to the top of the military hierarchy. He was, he was never quite sure why, a little looked askance at. He overheard himself referred to as "Hotspur" and "that mad boy". He felt the unfairness of this, as he knew that in matters of action he was cold, all cold with a chilly clarity which even surprised him. But he hid his disappointment as he hid everything else. After the beginning of the war, when the Volunteers had divided in two and the traitors had shuffled away into the British Army, Pat rose to the rank of captain. He still felt himself misjudged by those above and he did not seek their friendship. Equally he did not encourage the personal loyalty of his men, though when it sometimes seemed to him that they idolized him he was not displeased. He lived privately, going to his work each day at the solicitor"s office, but conceiving of himself entirely as a soldier.
There was another reason why Pat had not joined the Citizen Army. He could not have served under James Connolly. He admired and respected Connolly, and there had been a time when, holding Cathal by the hand, he had followed often in the procession while the great man marched dourly, followed by a supporter with an orange box, to some chosen street corner. Connolly would mount his box and the two boys would listen spellbound, though Pat was always the first one to want to go. But Connolly was both too human and too theoretical to command the devotion which Pat wanted to offer; and given the structure and temper of the Citizen Army it would have been impossible to be in it without feeling an intense emotional loyalty to its leader. Pat was a man of savage independence and yet it often seemed to him that he would have brooked a limitless discipline from a perfect master. He felt himself as a person surrounded on the whole by second-rate men and dangerous to his surroundings. He would gladly have given up his dangerous will to one who should have been worthy to use him as an instrument. For someone truly great and ruthless he would have embraced both slavery and suffering. But there was no such person. It had once seemed to him that he might so have served Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt. But he had only met Cas.e.m.e.nt twice and Cas.e.m.e.nt was now in Berlin. There were men in Dublin, such as Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett, whom he could respect. But the only one who really moved him was Patrick Pea.r.s.e.
Pea.r.s.e troubled Pat, attracted, annoyed and disturbed him. He had first met Pea.r.s.e in connection with the Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee, and he had heard him speak at the funeral of O"Donovan Rossa. He recognized there the power of a pure spirit, the sheer selfless strength which was in the end the only thing that Pat bowed to. Hundreds of things about Pea.r.s.e irritated him. The man was given to all kinds of infantile nonsense. He romanticized Ireland"s heroic past, which he peopled not only with Red Branch Knights, but also with ghosts and fairies and leprechauns in which he himself seemed half to believe. He was a blatant admirer of Napoleon, an alleged lock of whose hair he fatuously displayed to his friends. He also romanticized war in a way which Pat found alien and undignified, babbling about "the red wine of the battlefields warming the heart of the earth" and other rubbish of this sort. But nevertheless he was something like a great man and Pat was emotionally troubled by him in a way he could not entirely understand and would often have been glad to be rid of.
Admirable too was Pea.r.s.e"s chast.i.ty, his abstemiousness and his solitariness. He never smoked or drank or went to parties; and Pat approved of the absence from his life of women and all that they represented. In a way it made a barrier between them that Pat apprehended in Pea.r.s.e a man in some ways rather like himself. He sensed in him, too, a sort of generalized tenderness, a sort of sweetness, something which Pat had long ago recognized in his own bosom as an enemy and attempted to destroy. Pea.r.s.e was not the iron man who could have made of Pat a slavish tool. But Pat was prepared to accept him as his remote leader, and although Pea.r.s.e was not officially the head of the Volunteers Pat regarded him as his chief. More near at hand he could perhaps not have brooked him. Pat detested his work in the solicitor"s office and it had once been suggested by some friends that he might apply for a post as a teacher at St Enda"s, the school of which Pea.r.s.e was headmaster. Pat liked boys and he admired what he knew of St Enda"s, but he could not have had, at such close quarters, Pea.r.s.e in authority over him. Pat was glad too that circ.u.mstances had not taken his brother Cathal to St Enda"s. He would not have wished Pea.r.s.e to be Cathal"s teacher.
Pat had little use for women. He connected them with the part of himself which disgusted him. He found them somehow muddled and unclean, representative of the frailty and incompleteness of human life. He despised the stupidity and frivolity which characterized their talk, and he was positively nervous of being touched by one. He did not, in fact, like being touched by anybody. The human touch reminded him of a fact which he preferred to forget, that he was incarnate. The desires, the disturbances, consequent upon being a s.e.xual being he either suffered with a bitter consciousness or else disposed of by his own means, despising himself for this servitude. In a spirit of pure enquiry, or perhaps to kill within himself a troublesome demon of curiosity, he had made his explorations in the world, both lurid and pathetic, of the Dublin prost.i.tutes. He had discovered there exactly what he sought and took the filth of the sport into which he was initiated as a symbol of what he had in his more respectable surroundings already divined. He avoided married people.
His experience with the prost.i.tutes had been in some ways his most momentous experience so far. It was something to which he had had to bring himself with violence. What seemed the greater part of him had felt such extreme nausea at the mere proximity of these grotesque animals: to force himself to seek their company and actually to embrace their atrocious bodies had been both a supreme degradation and a triumph of pure will. These two conceptions remained for Pat very close together. There was a satisfaction and a certainty in forcing himself to go down to the very bottom, to feel as it were the absolute floor of the world and know there was nothing under it.
Of the regions above him he did not very well know how to think. The pure perfection which he somehow knew about and from which he derived his steel-hard absolutes, his sense of justice, his love of Ireland, remained itself veiled and beyond experience. He did not call it G.o.d, nor did he connect it with the simplicities of his Catholic practice. He did not, as it were, even trouble to doubt his religion, but took from it quietly only those disciplines which suited his temperament. What served Pat, perhaps exclusively, as spiritual experience was the ripping apart of his will from the rest of his being. When he had been a boy he had pictured himself as a monk in one of the more ferociously austere religious orders, envisaging this as a supreme triumph of the will: the will riding alone, naked, over the trembling mediocre human desires. Pat had long ceased to dream of the cloister and he did not any more visit the dark doorways off the Dublin quays, but he found in a systematic thwarting of the flesh a partial remedy for the self-loathing which came over him so often. On manoeuvres with the Volunteers in the mountains he would set himself almost impossible physical endurance tests. He avoided all regularity in his eating and sleeping, and would, in the midst of his most ordinary working days, harden himself with hunger and fatigue. He would have welcomed a military discipline more ruthless than anything he had yet encountered: he would gladly have accepted, and also inflicted, corporal punishment. It would have pleased him to have his flesh beside him, like a beaten subject animal, entirely cowed by his will.
Yet physical suffering was merely the symbol of what he wanted. If he could have believed himself a poet, a creator of any kind, capable of lifting out of the muck and mess of life some self-contained perfect object, this would have seemed to him a goal worthy of his powers. But he knew, bitterly, that this salvation was not given to him. He could put no name to what he wanted: it was certainly not love. There was in his life only one piece or fragment or strand of ordinary human love, one place where he needed and was needed, and he regarded this, and his inability to erase it, with the utmost dismay. His aim was something very much more like freedom. He despised the ordinary imperfect mechanics of the human personality, wherein the command of the pure Mentor was never obeyed until the impure ma.s.s of tissue, the gross living Self, was ready to obey it with ease. The Mentor"s command would be only half listened to, half heard, and the gross Self might then slowly, lazily, begin to adjust. This could be suffering, but mild, confused, scarcely conscious, dim. There would be no direct relation between the Mentor and the Self until the moment of easy obedience was reached, and the two could be related emotionally, indulgently, in the making intelligible of an act of coercion now almost completed. This method of operation enabled the gross Self to remain fat and healthy however often it might be forced to change direction. Whereas, so it seemed to Pat, in perfect life the command would be obeyed immediately, and the Mentor would not be a consoling though reproachful friend, but would be more like an executioner, bringing about a real loss of tissue in the Self and causing extreme pain.
This was the freedom Pat desired for himself in the purest inner recesses of his intent. But in his more ordinary being this desire was almost entirely fused with his resolve to free Ireland and his sense of having been born as a liberator. The Ireland which he loved was not personified or described, it was the refined purified counterpart of his own Irishness, the necessary magnetic pole of his own resentment of the bondage which he saw about him and most of all within him. For this he would fight, and the fight could only be a b.l.o.o.d.y one. He agreed with those who said that, after all that had pa.s.sed, Ireland"s freedom must be bought with blood. So it was that for Pat the idea of the rising in arms, now suddenly imminent, had come to be the target of his whole existence.
At this moment, on Tuesday, April the eighteenth, Pat was down in the cellar of Millie Kinnard"s house in Upper Mount Street. The cellar, which was lit now by two candles, was big, low ceilinged, and vaulted like a crypt. Thick blankets of cobwebs, stirred by the warm air rising from the two flames, undulated rhythmically overhead like vegetation in a stream, and cobwebby streaks shivered a little upon the dull white walls. There was a cool, rather pleasant, musty earthy smell, as of a comfortable well-cared for tomb. In a row of domed side chapels at the far end the round bottoms of bottles glinted greenly under long draperies of dust. In the centre, ranged neatly in piles and covering almost the whole floor, was a large collection of miscellaneous weapons.
Pat had been very uneasy, and was still uneasy, about trusting Millie with this secret. He did not greatly like Millie, and although he knew that she was brave, he thought her incurably frivolous. He saw her as merely playing at politics, enjoying the excitement and the secrecy and the spice of danger. She had observed an impeccable discretion about the contents of her cellar and had also been conveniently discreet about her patriotism, so that hardly anyone knew her for a sympathizer. But Pat did not like having this frail link in the chain, and there had been much speculation and misgivings about Millie"s loyalty. However, it had been necessary, on an initial occasion two years ago, very rapidly to find a hiding place for a quant.i.ty of arms, and Pat had made the quick decision, for which he still felt entirely responsible, to trust her. The occasion of his originally trusting Millie had also been the occasion of his first bit of active service with the Volunteers, when Erskine Childers had landed a load of rifles at Howth. That was a summer Sunday of two years before when, in a contingent of eight hundred unarmed and unsuspecting Volunteers, Pat had marched down to Howth harbour. As they came on to the quay and saw the yacht waiting there was a sudden thrilling suspicion, and then they were told to advance at the double. They unloaded the yacht in ten minutes, taking possession of more than nine hundred German Mausers. As they pa.s.sed the guns from hand to hand, so happy was each man to hold a real weapon at last that he kept the first gun he touched and pa.s.sed on the second. Marching back with his rifle on his shoulder, Pat could have wept with emotion, and several of his comrades actually did. Now they were armed men. Nor did they have to wait long before confronting their enemy. A company of the King"s Own Scottish Borderers awaited them at Clontarf. Happily perhaps, the newly acquired Mausers were not loaded. Cunning prevailed over force, and while the leaders on both sides were parleying, the Volunteers melted away into the gardens at the side of the road. The British soldiers marched back to Dublin and later that day fired upon a hostile crowd. Three people were killed, and Pat"s next public appearance with his rifle was when he carried it reversed in the slow march at the funeral.
But these seemed old childish days now. Then they had been clumsy recruits. Now they were hard well-trained troops, real soldiers as good as their enemy and better. They had felt their power. This year on St Patrick"s day they had taken the city over. They had marched straight from ma.s.s, two thousand strong, to College Green to be inspected by MacNeill. Traffic came to a standstill, police were swept aside, as they marched, disciplined and armed, to the sound of their pipe bands. Dublin stood and watched them like a breathless enchanted girl. Pat felt they could have taken Dublin that day.
Not that he had any illusions about either the difficulty or the sheer ugliness of the kind of struggle he was engaged in. He felt a detached envy of the simple open public war which he could not join. Although in a curious way he was not really a man of action, he knew himself to be brave, and if he had any ident.i.ty now he had the ident.i.ty of a soldier. He would have liked a cleaner, straighter fight, "a steed, a rushing steed, on the Curragh of Kildare, a hundred yards and English guards...." The sort of song that Cathal sang. As it was, his choice and his justification would be lonely and secret, and the killing he would do would look like murder. But that was how it had to be.
He had no illusions about the difficulties. Bernard Shaw had justly likened their struggle to an encounter between a pram and a Pickford"s van. Nor was Pat at all rea.s.sured by the military strategy of his superior officers. There had been a long controversy about uniforms. Pat had been opposed to a uniformed force. He envisaged nebulous mobile irregular columns which could strike and disappear. He had studied the methods of the Boers who, with a much larger army, had preferred guerrilla tactics. In the face of heavy artillery, mobility seemed an obvious essential. But the military mind in the Volunteers, and even in the I.C.A. seemed old-fashioned in cast. There was much talk of esprit de corps, and other even wilder talk of status under International Law. It was imagined that the green puttees, the slouch hats and the Sam Brownes would bestow on their wearers the status of belligerents, and ent.i.tle them to the privileges of the International Code in battle and as prisoners. Whereas Pat knew perfectly well that if they failed they would be treated as murderers and traitors.
Although the troops were tough and the discipline good, the training was not always very rational. There had been some excellent courses in street fighting, but there were still too many textbook exercises out of old British Army drill manuals. The chief difficulty always, of course, was arms. Here again many illusions were cherished. There were those who spoke of the imminent arrival of fifty thousand German troops with Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt at their head. Pat neither believed in these men nor wanted them on Irish soil. He disliked the Germans as much as he disliked the English, and echoed Cas.e.m.e.nt"s own bitter cry: the Germans want cheap Irish blood. German arms, German technicians even, that was another thing. Give the Irish the weapons and they could do the job themselves. But though there were frequent rumours of German arms ships that were to slip through the blockade, nothing came of it and Pat dismissed this too as a myth.
On the other hand, he did not hold with Connolly that they should "start first and get the rifles afterwards". It was a matter of sc.r.a.ping together a minimum armament. Every week brought in, from various sources, fresh rifles. But what was chiefly needed was machine guns, machine guns, machine guns. James Connolly had hopefully set his engineers to devise a simplified Lewis gun, which was then to be ma.s.s-produced in the bas.e.m.e.nts of Liberty Hall, but the men had been simply unable to do it. There had also been some experiments with bombs, but these instruments turned out to be far more dangerous to their inventors than to the British. Pat cursed them all for incompetent oafs. He felt that if he had been an engineer he could have solved the problems involved by sheer will-power.
In the flickering light of the two candles Pat surveyed his a.r.s.enal. It was extremely miscellaneous. Besides the Howth Mausers, there were old big-game guns, German sporting rifles, old Italian weapons, British rifles stolen from soldiers on leave, or bought from their drunken owners outside pubs for the price of a drink. There were a good many bayonets, mainly slim Italian ones, but these would not always fit the guns for which they were intended. There were also a number of old Fenian pikes, a weapon much favoured by Eamon de Valera, a young man of whom Pat was emulous. Ammunition was plentiful, not all of it very straightforward. This was a subject which caused Pat a good deal of doubt and anxiety. There were a lot of sporting cartridges with heavy slugs and leaden blunt-nosed big-game bullets. These would make terrible wounds, and Pat felt almost persuaded that it would be improper to use them. Yet bayonets and sh.e.l.ls could make terrible wounds too, and no one thought that they were unsporting. He recalled his mother"s view that warfare was all right when it was bows and arrows. Then he bitterly concluded that bows and arrows were just about what they had.
But the shortage of weapons and even the fallibility of the men were not the last difficulties. Pat knew of another and yet more demoralizing problem which concerned the leadership. The apparent structure of the Volunteers was not its real structure. The actual power in the movement, together with the plans for the rising and for co-operation with the Irish Citizen Army, lay with a group of militants, mainly men of the Republican Brotherhood, who had kept these plans secret from the more moderate nominal leaders such as Eoin MacNeill and Bulmer Hobson. The soldiers would obey their militants, at least they would in Dublin. But the divided leadership was a possible source of confusion; and Pat had been dismayed to hear of a speech made by Hobson at the weekend in which he had said that the duty of the Volunteers was "to influence the Peace Conference" and that no one should "take the responsibility for shedding blood". This suggested both that Hobson had heard a certain rumour, and that he might be prepared to act vigorously upon his own beliefs. There was no doubt that the situation was tricky. If Pat had had his way he would have ordered Hobson, MacNeill and several other persons to be taken into immediate custody. It was not safe, at this stage, to let their voices be heard at all.
Pat had now completed his survey and checked his list. He let the strange blue daylight in through the heavy cellar door and then returned to blow out the candles. He locked the door behind him. He hoped that he would not meet Millie on the way out. She was often hanging about to accost him after his visits to the cellar, hiding in doorways or leaning over bannisters. As a precaution Pat had acquired copies of the keys of the Upper Mount Street house and of Rathblane, where various other items were in store. He had not mentioned this fact to Millie. He did not like women playing at soldiers, and Millie must be regarded as dispensable. He mistrusted her curiosity and abhorred her almost s.e.xual excitement about the possibility of bloodshed. He saw her as depraved and frivolous, a mixture of prost.i.tute and adolescent boy.
As Pat reached the dark hallway there was the tap of a shoe and a pale flurry as Millie appeared from the direction of the garden where she had evidently been waiting. He saw her plump eager face thrust forward in the half light, her big rather damp eyes glistening and bulging with interest.
"Oh, Pat-any news?"
"News? No. I"ve just been looking things over as usual."
Millie swept round him and the stiffish satin of her skirt ran rat-like over his foot. She leaned her back against the hall door, her hands spread out, breathing hard, barring his way. "There must be some news."
"I don"t know what you mean. There"s nothing particular."
""Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know, and thus far will I trust thee, gentle Millie." Is that it?"
"I must be getting along."