Part 7 (1/2)
1. Whereas the spies and traitors known as the Royal Irish Constabulary are holding this country for the enemy, and whereas said spies and bloodhounds are conspiring with the enemy to bomb and bayonet and otherwise outrage a peaceful, law-abiding and liberty-loving people;2. Wherefore we do hereby proclaim and suppress said spies and traitors, and do hereby solemnly warn prospective recruits that they join the R.I.C. at their own peril. All nations are agreed as to the fate of traitors. It has the sanction of G.o.d and man.By order of the G.O.C.
Irish Republican Army The Major had read of these posters in the newspapers but this was the first he had seen with his own eyes.
”The ruffians slip in during the night when they think they're safe. Murphy should be here in a minute; I told him to bring along something to sc.r.a.pe it off with.”
”But what I don't see,” said the Major with a smile, ”is why they should think that 'said spies and bloodhounds' are anxious to conspire in your drive. After all, they could surely have found a more visible spot.”
”We have a few young chaps staying at the hotel at the moment,” Edward told him. ”Ex-army officers brought over from England to give a hand to the R.I.C. They're supposed to be the first of a new auxiliary force they've started recruiting. You won't have seen them about yet, I expect, because I've quartered them in the Prince Consort wing by themselves. They didn't get on with the old ladies. The Prince Consort wing is over the stables, can't see it from here, of course. They have their own mess there and so forth. We had them in the main building at first but they were rather boisterous, just schoolboys, really (though they've done their bit, mind you, they've been in the trenches)...Trouble was they kept teasing the old girls; one of them kept on whipping out a bayonet and pretending to cut their throats...But they're not a bad lot of chaps. Expect you'll run into them round about. They use the tennis courts a bit. Ah, there's Murphy.”
Murphy had appeared, carrying a hoe. Edward directed him to sc.r.a.pe off the notice and the old manservant advanced on the lodge feebly brandis.h.i.+ng his implement. But the notice had been stuck well up on the wall and was out of his reach.
”We need something to stand on,” the Major said.
”Right you are,” said Edward. ”Come here, Murphy. Major, you hand me the hoe and I'll climb on Murphy's shoulders.” He gave the hoe to the Major. ”Come on, man, we haven't got all day,” he added to the decrepit manservant, who was shuffling forward with every sign of reluctance. The Major looked dubiously at Murphy's frail shoulders.
”Maybe we'd better get a ladder from somewhere.”
”Nonsense. Now hold still, Murphy. Hang on to the trunk of this tree while I'm getting up. For G.o.d's sake, man, we're never going to get anywhere if you're going to wilt like that every time I touch you.”
But time and time again, just as Edward seemed on the point of throwing his glistening shoe and beautifully trousered leg over the old servant's thin shoulders, he would begin to wilt in antic.i.p.ation. Edward stormed at him for having no backbone and ordered him not to be so faint-hearted-all to no avail. In the end they had to leave the notice where it was. Edward stalked angrily up the drive. Murphy, relief written all over his cadaverous features, vanished into the trees. And the Major was left to his own devices.
He spent the afternoon in the company of the twins. There was a row going on between them and Edward; he did not know what it was all about but suspected it had something to do with their being sent home from school. In any event, Edward was taking a firm line with them (or so he told the Major). Any disobedience or lack of respect should be instantly reported to him and they would be dealt with. Part of their punishment, it seemed, was to spend the afternoon with the Major (who was offended by the idea); they were to go with him in the Daimler and show him the whereabouts of a remarkable trout stream. These days the Major was only faintly interested in fis.h.i.+ng, but he had nothing better to do. Though Faith and Charity had a chastened air they looked remarkably pretty in their navy-blue dresses with white lace collars encircling their slender necks. The Major felt sorry for them.
”Which is which, and how can I tell?”
”I'm Charity and she's Faith,” one of them said. ”Faith is bigger there,” she added, pointing at Faith's chest. Both girls smiled wanly.
Throughout the afternoon, as they motored through the low rolling hills, the twins sat on the back seat in att.i.tudes of meek dejection, slim fingers lifted to entwine the braided velvet straps, each the mirror-image of the other. ”What charming girls! Edward is being much too hard on them.”
He modified this opinion a day or two later, however. As an additional punishment a daily lesson with Evans, the tutor, had been ordained by Edward to take place in the writing-room. Pa.s.sing the open door one afternoon, the Major paused to listen.
”How do you say in French, Mr Evans, 'The b.u.t.tons are falling off my jacket and I need a clean collar'?” one of the twins was asking innocently.
”How do you say, 'I've got boils on my neck because I never wash it'?”
”How do you say, 'I have ideas beyond my station'?”
”What does 'amavi puellam' mean?”
”How do you say in Latin, Mr Evans, 'My pasty white face is blus.h.i.+ng all over'?”
”Sharpen my pencil, Evans, 'fraid I've just broken it again.”
”Any more of this and I'll report you to your father.”
”Any more of what? We're only asking questions.”
”Aren't we even allowed to ask questions?”
The Major moved on. He had heard enough.
Later that same afternoon, while taking a stroll with old Miss Johnston in the Chinese Garden (”If you ask me it's an Irish Chinese Garden,” Miss Johnston said with a sniff, looking round at the thick beds of tangled weeds and seeded flowers), their path crossed that of a young man in khaki tunic, breeches and puttees, wearing on his head a tam o'shanter with the crowned-harp badge of the R.I.C. The Major's eyes were drawn to the bandolier he wore across his chest and the black leather belt holding a bayonet scabbard; on his right thigh rested an open revolver holster. It was shocking, somehow, to meet this man in the peaceful wilderness of the garden, a sharp and unpleasant reminder of the incidents the Major had read about in the newspapers but could never quite visualize, any more than he could now visualize the shooting of the old man in b.a.l.l.sbridge that he had witnessed. As they pa.s.sed, the young man grinned sardonically and, winking at the Major, drew a finger across his throat from ear to ear.
”Gutter-snipe!” hissed Miss Johnston indignantly. ”To think the R.I.C. is taking on young men like that!”
And it took all the Major's considerate inquiries about her nephews, her nieces and the state of her health (”Chilblains even in midsummer in this hotel, Major. I've never known such draughts...”) to smooth her ruffled plumage.
And yet they were all ex-officers, these men, so Edward a.s.sured him later. One had to remember, though, that to be an officer in 1920 was not the same thing as being an officer in 1914. A lot of the older sort (their very qualities of bravery, steadfast obedience to the call of duty, chivalry and so forth acting as so many banana skins on the road to survival) had disappeared in the holocaust and had had to be replaced. It was also true that these new men, and the great number who would soon be following them to a meagre six weeks of police training at the Curragh, were among the least favourably placed of the countless demobilized officers who now found themselves having to earn a living once more. All the same, though one made allowances (and Edward was always ready to make allowances for men who had served in the trenches), there were were limits. The old kind, the officer who was also a gentleman, would never have gone about frightening old ladies. So thought Edward. What did the Major think? limits. The old kind, the officer who was also a gentleman, would never have gone about frightening old ladies. So thought Edward. What did the Major think?
The Major agreed, but thought to himself that these ”men from the trenches” who were being paid a pound a day to keep a few wild Irishmen in order might well have trouble taking anything very seriously-whether the Irish, the old ladies, or their own selves.
At the same time he was disturbed by their presence. These men (individually they were charming, Edward told him) were unpredictable and still estranged from the accepted standards of life in peacetime-not that one could call Ireland very peaceful these days. As he was pa.s.sing the Prince Consort wing a day or two later a window exploded in a sparkling burst of splinters, a laughing head appeared and a hand was held out to see if it was raining. Occasionally too one heard pistol shots and laughter in the long summer evenings; Edward had laid out a pistol-range in the clearing behind the lodge where the I.R.A. notice had been posted. In no time at all the notice had melted away under a hail of bullets and hung in unrecognizable shreds. One day the Major picked up a dead rabbit on the edge of the lawn. Its body was riddled with bullets.
This rabbit, as it happened, had been a favourite of the Major's. Old and fat, it had been partly tamed by the twins when they were small children. They had lost interest, of course, as they grew older, and no longer remembered to feed it. The rabbit, however, had not forgotten the halcyon days of carrots and dandelion leaves. Thinner and thinner as time went by, it had nevertheless continued to haunt the fringes of the wood like a forsaken lover. Poor rabbit! Moved and angry (but the ”men from the trenches” were not to know that this was not a wild rabbit), the Major went to break the news to the twins, who were down by the tennis courts trying to persuade Sean Murphy to teach them how to drive the Standard (though Edward had forbidden this until they were older). The twins were not as upset as the Major expected them to be.
”Can we eat him?” they wanted to know.
”He's already buried.”
”We could dig him up,” Faith suggested. ”Aren't rabbits' feet supposed to be lucky?”
But the Major said he had forgotten where the grave was.
”Were the bullet-holes bad?”
”How d'you mean? They were bad for the rabbit.”
”No, I was just thinking we could have made a fur hat,” said Charity, ”if there weren't too many holes in him.”
”I say, Brendan, you aren't any good at arithmetic, are you? Daddy has set that dreadful tutor person on us and now he's threatening to look at our homework when it's been corrected.”
”Try Mr Norton. He's supposed to be good at that sort of thing.”
Mr Norton was a man in his seventies, a recent arrival at the Majestic; he had the reputation, fostered by himself, of having been a mathematical genius, drained in his youth, however, of energy and fortune by a weakness for beautiful women.
”We asked him...”
”But he always wants us to sit on his knee as if we were children.”
”And his breath smells horrid.”
Now that the Imperial Bar had been rendered uninhabitable by the colony of cats the Major sometimes took one of Edward's motor cars into Kilnalough in the evening for a drink at the Golf Club. There one evening he met Boy O'Neill, the solicitor, who greeted him like an old friend, although it was almost a year since the Peace Day parade when they had last met. O'Neill's appearance had changed dramatically and the Major could now scarcely recognize the timid, bony invalid he had first met at Angela's tea-party. Dressed in a baggy tweed jacket with bulging pockets, O'Neill appeared more swollen and aggressive than ever. There was a subdued irritation about the man which made one ill at ease when talking to him; one had the feeling that O'Neill was capable at any moment of abandoning reason altogether and finis.h.i.+ng the argument with an uppercut. The Major sat watching the wads of jaw-muscle thickening as he talked: he had just finished eighteen holes, he declared, and had never felt better in his life. A hot shower, a drink, and now he was off home for a good meal. He unslung the clinking golf-bag from his shoulder and heaved it into an armchair, showing no impatience to depart. Eyeing the golf-bag, the Major noticed nestling between a mas.h.i.+e niblick, a jigger and the bulging wooden head of a driver what he at first thought was a club without a head-but no, it was the barrel of a rifle.
”No half measures, eh?”
”I can see you haven't been reading the papers, Major. Couple of army chaps were shot down on a links in Tipperary the other day...unarmed men. Didn't have a chance out there with no shelter, n.o.body pa.s.sing by. The s.h.i.+nners are brave enough when the other fella doesn't have a gun. They'll run like rabbits if they know you're armed.”