At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [217]
“Who are they supposed to be?” said Mr. Mack.
“Them’re the Sinn Feiners,” said his neighbor.
“Oh, they’re Sinn Feiners,” said Mr. Mack, peering the better to see these queer near-fabled specimens.
“They’ll be thinking to cut the troopers off at the corner.”
Mr. Mack saw them kneel and ready their aim. He crossed himself. “If them fellows know to shoot at all them Lancers’ll be slaughtered,” said his neighbor, “King’s men and all.” Mother of God, we’ll all be slaughtered. Some in the crowd yelled a warning, but no horseman would hope to hear above those cobbles. The troopers came. The rebel guns fired. Snarling they fired. The troopers slumped from their saddles, thumped in the road.
The people stood stunned. Murderers! someone called, but the cry was not taken up. Stunned, disbelieving, appalled—and fearful. Slowly the people moved back, separating from the deed-doers. A Sinn Feiner lad ran down the road waving a trooper’s lance. In the quiet of the fading hooves he waved it. He had a flag attached. A queer flag, in equal divisions, green white and orange. He lodged the lance in a manhole plate in the middle of the street, and there the flag flew, green white and orange. “Murderers, murderers,” came that voice again, all alone in the quiet. The lad’s face flushed with a ferocious courage. He raised his rifle and fired in the air. Only then did his comrades cheer, and they too fired off their guns, that furious joy of blooding.
Mr. Mack turned and blundered through the crowd. He blundered by the dead child and the woman who Murderers! Murderers! wailed. Along the lively inquisitive streets he lurched. He must find his tram. He must be home.
Nelson’s Pillar fingered from out the housetops. He fixed its direction in his eye, and for once his eye did not deceive his feet. Indeed, a hard push and a scrape it would be, avoiding O’Connell Street that holiday afternoon. Every tenement, every fever-nest, every rookery in Dublin was spilling its contents in the road and it seemed to Mr. Mack all slumdom must reel its way to his tram-stop. Every shawlie and shabaroon, every larrikin and scut, every slut, daggle-tail, trollop and streel, frowsy old bowsies and loitering corner-boy sprawlers in caps, every farthing-face and ha’penny-boy, every gutty, gouger, louser, glugger, nudger, sharper, shloother, head, every whore’s melt of them, mister-me-friend and go-by-the-wall, the dogs in the street themself—all rascaldom was making for Mr. Mack’s tram-stop; and he must pinch and shove to gain any headway at all.
At last he stood on the Pillar steps. The great wide splendid thoroughfare—O’Connell Street was you a Catholic, Sackville Street was you at all in the Protestant way (was it any wonder if a man went astray in this town?)—swarmed with a wild ree-raw mindless throng. Every now and then the shout would go up: Troopers! or The military! or The polis is coming! or They’s shooting wild! and the crowd would stampede him by, leaving Mr. Mack to cling to the pedestal, as to a cliff, to keep any footing. Tricksters was all, hoaxsters, for no polis came, no military. Loot was master. By him sailed the most fanciful apparitions. A slum-boy in three top-hats swinging golf-clubs. Dirty-faced girls with boas and high-heeled shoes on. The mess of life veered and shifted. Another plate window crashed.
Across the way where the crowd thinned was the General Post Office. The Sinn Feiners held it. He could see nothing of the Sinn Feiners themself bar the muzzles of guns that poked from the windows and crouching forms behind the parapet on the roof. That same strange unaccountable flag, green white and orange, flapped above them. What on earth would Sinn Feiners want with a post office? It crossed his mind in a daft way that they, like him before, had mistook it for a bank.
Handbills were posted all about. Slap-dash affairs with shoddy spacing and type. Something in Erse. Some further flim-flam in English. The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic. To the People of Ireland. Signed then by a poweration of names nor he nor anyone else