At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [171]
And prettily they paraded. Up and down College Green, round and about the Grattan monument. The stiff face of Trinity was unmoved. The old parliament house turned its cold shoulder. If ever a building looked for a way out, that was it. Some fellow MacMurrough could not see took the salute. Pikes glistened like a song.
MacMurrough thought of that other toyland up behind them, the Castle, seat of British administration, with its toy turrets and its toy court. This morning tin soldiers had trooped a Color and this evening at the ball a toy lieutenant would play lords and ladies. It was a toy country.
He looked about at the buildings and streets and the people who crowded to see—good-humoredly now, while the spectacle recompensed the inconvenience it caused. The universality of things abstracted him. That, for instance, there should be smoothened surfaces for the use of traffic, and that these roads should come from the country and, meeting the city, should turn into streets. On both sides of these streets let there be pavings, set aside for the convenience of pedestrians, these pavings to be separated from the street by curbing, ideally raised three inches from the surface, thus providing a gutter, which, through the street’s cambering and a provident furnishing of drains, shall effect the disposal of rain and running sewage. But come, sir, enough of the paving: what of the people? Let the people be classified into sexes, of which there shall be two, male and female. The criterion shall be generative function, though please to note, this function is ideal and not actual: the prepubescent, the celibate, the emasculate, the nulli-parous, the non-generative for whatever reason, shall yet be classified by sex. They shall be male or female. Female or male shall they be, though the greater shall be male. Come come, sir, enough about gender. The people shall further be graded according to wealth, and—humorous touch this—the more obviously a man labor, the more stinting shall be his reward; the more he work in the out-of-doors, the thinner his clothing shall be; the more his labor filthy him, the less water shall he have to wash. Typically, a home will consist of one male and one female, of roughly commensurate age, their immature offspring, other parasites, a peg from which to hang one’s hat. Entry and exit are to be afforded by hinged arrangements in the walls, conventionally of wood. Let these arrangements be known as doors, whereof if one close, another shall open.
Given such overwhelming agreement, it was only natural that such quarrels as arose should hang on the color of postboxes.
“I wonder,” said his aunt, “if Casement has found shamrock for today.”
“Casement?”
She looked at him surprised, and he knew she had not intended to speak aloud. “Sir Roger,” she said. “He is in Germany, the soul.”
A definite note of romance in her voice. Casement. Kettle had mentioned that name. “Is Sir Roger a prisoner of war?”
“How can you know so little?” she said with a quivering of irritation. “He is raising an Irish Brigade from the Irish prisoners of war to fight not in England’s but in Ireland’s cause. When the time comes that brigade will sail to Ireland. With it he will raise the West and the South.”
“I see. Sir Roger is an attachment of yours?”
“He is an acquaintance.”
“Of long standing?” She did not care to answer. “When may we expect Sir Roger?”
“Soon, I trust. Every day we delay brings the war closer to its end. And what is the use of a German victory if we have not risen to help it? These men before us will take Dublin and hold her in readiness for Casement’s coming. Yes, dear old dirty Dublin, city of the foreigner, the Pale, the Castle city: she was ever the curse of Irish hopes. Now comes the time when she must redeem herself. Only these Dublin battalions may help her to that. Of their Irish blood they will make an Irish capital. But that is none of our concern.