The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [53]
The news from Ireland was dull and dispiriting: an occasional attack on a lonely policeman or a raid for arms on some half-baked barracks. If one was not actually living in Ireland (as the lucky Major no longer was) how could one possibly take an interest when, for instance, at the same time Negroes and white men were fighting it out in the streets of Chicago? Now that gripped the Major’s imagination much more forcibly. Unlike the Irish troubles one knew instantly which side everyone was on. In the Chicago race-riots people were using their skins like uniforms. And there were none of the devious tactics employed by the Shinners, the pettifogging ambushes and assassinations. In Chicago the violence was naked, a direct expression of feeling, not of some remote and dubious patriotic heritage. White men dragged Negroes off streetcars; Negroes fired rifles from housetops and alleyways; an automobile full of Negroes raced through the streets of a white district with its occupants promiscuously firing rifles. And Chicago was only a fragment of the competition that Ireland had to face. What about the dire behaviour of the Bolshevists? The gruesome murders, the rapes, the humiliations of respectable ladies and gentlemen? In late 1919 hardly a day went by without an eye-witness account of such horrors being confided to the press by some returned traveller who had managed to escape with his skin. And India: the North-West Frontier...Amritsar? No wonder that by the time the Major’s eye had reached the news from Ireland his palate had been sated with brighter, bloodier meat. Usually he turned to the cricket to see whether Hobbs had made another century. Presently the cricket season came to an end. A rainy, discouraging autumn took its place. Soon it would be Christmas.
One day the Major received a telegram. To his surprise it was signed SARAH. It said: DON’T READ LETTER RETURN UNOPENED. The Major had not yet received any letter and waited with impatience for it to arrive. Next morning he was holding it in one hand and tapping it against the fingertips of the other. After a brief debate with himself he opened it.
She had no reason for sending him a letter (she wrote) and he didn’t have to read it if he didn’t want to. But she was in bed again with “an unmentionable illness” and bored to tears, literally (“I sometimes burst into tears for no reason at all”) and, besides, her face was so covered in spots that she looked “like a leopard” and she had become so ugly that little children fled wailing if they saw her at the window and nobody ever came to see her these days and she had no friends now that poor Angela had died and (that reminded her) why had he not come over to say hello to her on the day of Angela’s funeral...after all, she (Sarah) didn’t bite, but then she supposed that he was too high and mighty to be seen talking to the likes of her and he probably, anyway, couldn’t read her writing because she was scribbling away in bed, her fingers “half frozen off” and surrounded by stone hot-water jars against which she kept cracking her “poor toes” and which were practically freezing anyway...and besides, besides, she was positively bored to distraction with everything and there was simply nothing to do in Kilnalough, nothing at all, and she would certainly run away if she could (which, of course, she couldn’t, being a “poor, miserable cripple” into the bargain... and full of self-pity, he would surely be thinking)...
But enough of that, about herself there was nothing of interest to say. The Major must be wanting to hear what was happening in Kilnalough and at the Majestic and the answer to that was...ructions!!! Edward Spencer challenging Father O’Meara (practically) to a duel for improper association with Ripon. Old Mr Noonan threatening to horsewhip the young pup (Ripon, that was) if he didn’t stop playing fast and loose with Máire (did the Major remember the fat pudding of a girl they had met one day in the street?) and show whether he