At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [218]
The Lancers had charged here too, it was told. There was a dead horse down the way. All about the steps, flowers were strewn and trampled, where the flower-sellers’ stalls had been toppled. Barricades blocked the side streets, erected of particular things: bicycles jumbled and piled in one, hunks of marble for another, bales of newsprint—the work of disparate guilds whimsically chosen. Trams had been overturned. There were no trams running. No juice, the tram-man told him. Even trains: the Sinn Feiners had dug up the lines. And no polis. No polis anywhere. Withdrawn to barracks. Every last pigeon-hearted lily-livered chicken-gutted sneak of them. It was pandemonium. It was Donnybrook Fair. It was all ballyhooly let loose.
Naming calls: and he did not dare put words to his fear. But he knew the green uniform Doyler would always be wearing; and he had seen the wish of that Sinn Feiner boy’s face. Jim’s age, no older. He must get home.
He lurched down the steps and plunged into the push. He shoved carelessly, in a dream nearly—he had long since lost his hat. The rebels had shot three priests in their vestments. The British had hung the Archbishop. The South was up. The West was up. The Germans had landed in Tralee. Carson was marching on Dublin with forty thousand Orangemen. The Lord Lieutenant was raising the Curragh. The Lord Lieutenant was dead.
The unaccustomed whiskey dulled his intelligence. He felt the golden shine of the sun that had not diminished all afternoon: it seemed a timeless day. And it was tiring, all this excitement and the rumors that bandied about, the all of it a strain on his dignity. He looked at the grinning chomping children’s faces. Down this end it was the sweet shops that had been looted, and each slum-boy and girl had a sudden rich child’s Lenten hoard.
The Liffey breeze revived him a somewhat, and he asked of a respectable man in spats was there any news of Kingstown, was it held for the King yet? To be told the German High Seas fleet was this moment shelling the harbor. Zeppelins were traveling up the Wicklow coast and two U-boats had been spotted in the mouth of the Liffey. Mr. Mack nodded his head. But worse news than this, the rebels had fired on the old gentlemen of the Georgius Rex. The Georgius Rex, Mr. Mack repeated. Mown down in the street they were. Marching home off an exercise, down by the canal this was: murdered. This was shocking altogether, and Mr. Mack said, “I only thought to join them myself. Matter of weeks back, I’m only waiting to hear.” The gentleman viewed him, and under his lidded gaze Mr. Mack was acutely aware of his hatless undress and the drink on his breath. “Indeed,” said the gentleman. And the poor Pope has committed suicide, a young lady added in all earnestness.
Mr. Mack went with the tram-lines, following where the shamrock tram-stops led. The general confluence was against him, but enough were walking his direction for him not to feel entirely lunatic. Musketry could still be heard. Nothing dangerous or anything, only spurts of it that he took to be the military. Mausers growled then in response, two or three streets away always. At the canal he spoke with a whey-faced man, who gripped a child by the wrist and pointed out the different houses held by the rebels. They had shot at a man in his own motor. In his own motor they had shot at him. And was it here they killed the Georgius Rex? asked Mr. Mack. The whey-faced man didn’t know about that, indeed by his quizzical look he found Mr. Mack disappointing. His own motor, he repeated. Shot at a man in his very own motor. “And this gallows here”—pulling the boy round—“was seen to be talking to them.”
“Did you talk with the Sinn Feiners now?” asked Mr. Mack. The boy wore a crabby adult expression that disguised a little the hurt of the man’s grip. “Don’t you know that’s aiding and abetting the King’s enemies?”
“But it’s Mr. Ronan from the two-pair back,” the boy insisted in a squeaking breaking voice.
“You’re only digging your grave,” the whey-faced man told him. “I’m waiting on a constable