The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [57]
The poet replied: “I understand your words, General. You will order your men to fire on my soldiers, their brothers. But before you do so, order them to fire on me. Here I am. Let them first fire on me.”
Saying this he moved towards the soldiers, exposing his breast adorned with the medal of military honour. There was a movement among the troops, who approached the poet and cheered him. The general saw that his opposition was useless. He walked up to the poet and complimented him. The soldiers on both sides immediately cheered the poet and the general, and without further orders they crossed the road which divides Fiume from the suburbs and entered the town. General Pittaluga withdrew alone and the soldiers opened a way for him.
* * *
Mr Noonan, though a miller by profession, was an admirer of the military life and liked to wear clothes that gave him a soldierly air. He arrived at the Majestic wearing his most severe garb, a suit of khaki material garnished with black epaulettes. He unwisely parted company with his chauffeur at the gates of the Majestic (he had never visited the place before) and started to walk up the drive. He had been delayed on some business matter and Edward, who had long since ceased to expect him, had changed into his gardening clothes and was digging a flower-bed, thinking that some exercise might benefit his liver. Since he had never met Mr Noonan, he assumed that this was merely a somewhat elderly and irascible telegraph boy and told him to go on up to the house. Mr Noonan, believing he had just had an encounter with a particularly insolent gardener, did so but with bad grace. Pausing for a moment to acknowledge the statue of Queen Victoria, he then proceeded to climb the steps and be swallowed up by the front door of the Majestic, in whose various tracts and organs he wandered, increasingly furious, while Edward dug peacefully in the garden and wondered whether he would lose face (and establish Ripon’s guilt) by going to pay a visit on Mr Noonan at his home.
Edward and Mr Noonan probably had more in common than they ever had a chance to realize. Neither, at this stage, was the least enthusiastic about a union of their respective children. Mr Noonan, looking round the mouldering caverns of the Majestic, no doubt saw immediately that only a massive transfusion of money could keep the place habitable for a few years longer; in a material sense it was a poor match for the daughter of Noonan’s Flour. As for the quality which Mr Noonan had once found faintly appetizing when he considered the prospect of having Ripon Spencer for a son-in-law, the quality of “breeding” (and with it automatic entry into the ruling class in Ireland from which Mr Noonan, in spite of his wealth and influence in business matters, was virtu-ally excluded), he had now become extremely dubious as to whether Ripon possessed it in adequate quantities. Besides, by the autumn of 1919 it had become clear to everyone in Ireland with the possible exception of the Unionists themselves that the Unionist cause had fallen into a decline. Add to that Ripon’s taint of Protestantism (which in Mr Noonan’s view no amount of “instruction” could scrub off) and the lad was a truly unsavoury prospect.
Edward’s feelings were virtually a mirror-image of Mr Noonan’s. He had a profound lack of interest in money, never having been sufficiently short of it, and was positively chilled by the idea that his daughter-in-law (buxom and rosy-cheeked) should be represented on packets of flour available to the grubby fingers of the populace for a penny or two. He was by no means anxious to dissolve the “breeding” of the Spencers in a solution of Irish “bog Catholicism” (a daughter of Cardinal Newman might have been another matter). In these troubled times one clearly had to close the ranks, not open them...or so he thought as he set off to wander around the corridors of the Majestic in search of the “dratted” elderly telegraph boy (he supposed it was a telegraph