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By Root 1011 0

them...Foch or Fritz? Collie or Flash? They were too far away, in a sense (thought the Major) they were too particular now...only a generality like the circling of the planets could hold her attention now. But at twelve minutes past eleven the doctor came and he and Angela had a long chat which, for all that, didn’t prevent her noticing and recording that one of his waistcoat buttons was dangling by a thread and that there was a copious spot of what was undoubtedly porridge on his jacket...(Meanwhile the doctor muttered in the querulous tones of a tired old man: “There’s a new spirit in Ireland; I can feel it, you know, and see it everywhere. The British are finished here. The issue is no longer in doubt, hasn’t been for the last twenty years. There’s nothing now except a huge army that’ll keep Ireland under the British yoke. If you take my advice, Edward, you’ll give in gracefully now while you still can, you’ll give them the land they’re asking for, because, if you don’t, they’ll take it anyway...Parnell was the last man who could have preserved some sort of life for the British in Ireland but the damn fools didn’t realize it, thought he was their enemy! Serves ’em right. I’ve no sympathy for them, they’ve lived here for generations like cocks in pastry without a thought for the sufferings of the people. Now it’s their turn and I’ll shed no tears for them...Ach, things have changed since I was a boy...they have a different look to them, the people, it would take a fool not to see it.”)

“But this is an enormous letter,” thought the Major, appalled, hefting the wad of crinkly paper in his hand. “It would take a prodigious effort even to write such a letter if one were weakened by illness, if one were unable to take proper nourishment (he thought with a pang of the untouched trays of food ferried up and down the stairs) and...and the detail in it is intolerable.”

(“Of course, I was a child then, too young to remember those days, but my father had seen it and my uncles too, God rest them, they were old men before thirty with the worry and the trouble...and I remember the way people talked of it, you know. It must be God’s will, they’d say. He sent it to punish us, d’ye see? so what is there for a man to do? Sure we’ll have to go to another country, says he, to America on a ship because in Ireland we’ll never do any good; we’ll die for sure and there’ll be no help for it...Man, I’d say, what need is there to leave? The hunger is over and there’s food enough. But sure it’ll come again, says he, you’d never know...’tis best to leave Ireland. B’the Lord Harry, in those days they were leaving so quick they were even starving there on the quays of New York. There’s no luck in Ireland, they’d tell you...”)

“There’s no luck in Ireland,” agreed Edward, winking at the Major, who was thinking: “Such detail is intolerable,”—the design of the carpet over which the shrinking white feet of the patient still continued to patter day after day, morning and evening, to perform her ablutions...till the day inevitably came (he had been waiting for it with despair), till the page inevitably came when the pitcher and the bowl and the sponge came to her over the carpet and the carpet dropped out of her world and she too prepared to drop out of her world. “Such detail is quite obviously intolerable,” thought the Major as Edward reached out in the gloom to feel whether the teapot’s plump belly was still warm, at the same time absent-mindedly handing the sugar-bowl to the doctor, who did not need it and was muttering incoherent words to the effect that if Edward or anyone else laughed at what he was saying it was because he or they, was or were, British black-guards and fools (some part of the Major’s brain had remained on duty to straighten out the grammar while he thought: “Really, when I arrived and attempted to kiss her hand she flinched away from me as she might have flinched from some uncouth stranger.”).

“Those were the days,” declared Edward absently, perhaps still thinking of the day he had bowled a cricket-ball up Dawson Street.

“They