At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [172]
“Aunt Eva, will any of this help the poor, do you think?”
“The poor are patriotic as any other in Ireland.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I mean there was a turn in the London halls, I can’t remember who it was, but he got his great laugh when he said he never knew what the London beggars did with their castoffs till he came to Dublin. But it isn’t a joke really, is it. When you see boys without any trousers to wear and girls walking about in flour-sacks, you wonder what on earth is going on. I just wonder is any of this going to change that. Or is it just repainting the postboxes?”
“Postboxes?” she said. “Yes, green—an inspired idea.”
“But my question, Aunt Eva.”
“Your question answers itself. That you should ask it is precisely why we must be to the fore. People of our standing have nothing to gain and all to give. If we leave it to the usual place-hunters and gombeen-men, we know already what a shambles the place will be. We need only look to the Parliamentary Party and any county council in the land.”
Now the march-past had ended. Notables came down to tour the ranks, among them, MacMurrough saw, the gentleman Pearse. Careful now, don’t knock that sword.
Who does he remind me of? I really can’t say. Or is it that others remind me of him? Someone in contemplation before a sculpture. A man bending to a child. The maiden curate greets his flock. Moments from other lives. A most unprepossessing vehicle for enthusiasm—until he speaks. At that Fenian’s funeral, the day after Aunt Eva’s fête, his command and suasion: in all the thousands listening not a face unstirred.
And here he is now, here is my boy. Pearse has found him out. This man Pearse has found him for me. He stops to talk. He blushes, my boy, the only red in all that green. I can feel them as he looks, the lashes on his eyes, the shave of his hair on the back of his head, the very edge of soft, like brick-dust. I MacMurrough am part of his country. Pearse passes on, his light with him, losing my boy in the green again. And I’m not sure now have I seen him at all.
The crowd was growing restive. MacMurrough heard calls of Shirkers! Slackers! Avenge the Lusitania! The plight of poor little Belgium was widely bemoaned. Tram-men were banging their gongs, ever more insistently. An hour now they’d been stopped in their tracks. From his pedestal in Trinity, Burke raised his hand. It is no inconsiderable part of wisdom, he declared, to know how much of an evil ought to be tolerated. The guard at the bank, in their scarlet and busbies, looked impassively on. The police spies numbered in their notebooks. The Castle was right. Let the Volunteers make buffoons of themselves, pikes and all.
“Aunt Eva, may I ask what is to be done with the band?”
“I thought signaling,” she said. “Signaling, I have heard, is an invaluable skill for boys.”
“You know I do not mean that.”
“You mean will they be sent to fight.” She stood very sternly, staring at the men and the women too with their Red Cross brassards. “They will not. They will fight of their own will.”
“What little is left them. And you understand I will not be here?”
“I understand,” she said, “that you have an appointment at Easter.”
They returned up Grafton Street. “It’s early yet for lunch,” Aunt Eva observed. “Shall we take a turn in the Green?”
“Certainly,” said MacMurrough.
Young boys rambled along, touching what they passed with little-fingered hands. MacMurrough touched the bollards, as Dr. Johnson was said to have done, for luck. They entered Stephen’s Green and the withdrawn world of laid-out gardens fell upon them. Voluminous ladies frou-frou’d past, titanics warded by tender husbands, each click of whose canes proclaimed, Behold the woman I fuck. A kid pushed a toddler in some box on wheels, wildly over the lawn. The doubtful fun on the toddler’s face, the fierce joy on the boy’s. Then the Dublin girls, their pale faces and glossy hair, the dark and the light, like fresh-poured stout, the leucomelanous complexion of Ireland.
“Do you know,” said his aunt, “it really is a delightful