The Red and the Green (Vintage Classics)

by Iris Murdoch

  He looked at Frances. She seemed to feel as he did, looking down with a puckered alarmed face at the huge waves which were rushing in in quick succession to destroy themselves upon the rocks with a deafening ferocity of foam. It was impossible to speak here. A mist of spray, picked up by the wind, was carried rainily into their faces. Frances shivered and turned back through the opening. Over her shoulder as he came through Barney saw that the mail boat was just entering the harbour.

  Back again on the inside of the pier he realized that it was in fact raining. The sky above was hazily grey and thick bunches of ebony cloud were coming up from behind Dublin. The waters of the harbour were black now.

  ‘Come on,’ said Frances. ‘Oh, it’s so cold !’ She sounded almost tearful. Lifting her skirt well up, she set off at a smart pace along the pier. For a while, not trying to catch up, he followed her. The Hibernia had docked. It had turned its lights on dimly and stood out strangely vivid in the darkened scene. The people were coming off it now, hundreds of people streaming off it and streaming away in all directions into rainy Ireland.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘“Charge it again, boys, charge it again,

  Pardonnez moi je vous en prie,

  As long as you have any ink in your pen,

  With never a penny of money!”’

  ‘Don’t sing that song, Cathal.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘Why don’t you like it?’

  ‘I don’t like that sort of song.’

  ‘Why don’t you like that sort of song?’

  ‘Do you want your ears boxed?’

  ‘You’re in a nice friendly mood today, I don’t think. All right, I’ll sing another sort of song.

  “Sure ‘twas for this Lord Edward died and Wolfe Tone sunk serene,

  Because they could not bear to leave the red above the green.”’

  ‘If you sing that song you ought to sing it seriously.’

  ‘Sure I am singing it seriously. How does one sing a song seriously or not seriously? One just sings it. Anyway, you know I love Wolfe Tone and I wouldn’t—’

  ‘Your head is full of bad poetry. “Sunk serene” is rotten. And it’s not grammar either. Dying isn’t “sinking serene”. Bad poetry is lies.’

  ‘Well, it’s better than no poetry at all and no one has told us about Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone in good poetry yet. I wish I’d been called after him. Wolfe Tone Dumay.’

  “As I lay on the sod that lay over Wolfe Tone

  And thought how he perished in prison alone —”

  I did that, too,’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Lay on the sod. Last time we went out to Bodenstown. When you and the others went off to the meeting, I lay down there and thought about him. Not right on top but near by.’

  ‘You’re too young to go lying on people’s graves.’

  ‘I’m going to die young, so I’m really older. Like cats and dogs, you have to reckon my age differently.’

  ‘You’re a tiresome little brat now and you’ll live to be a tiresome old fellow with a grey beard spouting bad verse.’

  It was Tuesday evening and the ceremony of Pat’s bath was in progress. This ritual had started long ago when the boys shared a cabin in Connemara for part of a summer and Pat had trained his young brother to heat the water in iron pots on the range and then to pour it for him into the big tin bath and to stand by with warm towels while Pat washed off the mud of the bogs and the ferocious coldness of the sea. Although he complained ceaselessly of being ‘enslaved’, Cathal enjoyed this ritual which had somehow continued in the less primitive surroundings of Blessington Street, a piece of religious drama surviving in a modified form perhaps because it represented for the participants some half-conscious, half-forgotten spiritual need.

  So Cathal always attended Pat’s bath, his role as acolyte now limited to the handing over of the towels. It was a time, traditionally, of communication between the two brothers, or at least a time when Pat made himself more than usually approachable, so that advice could be covertly asked or misdemeanours defiantly owned to. Sometimes thinking himself rather ridiculous in the role of a steamy oracle, Pat had been inclined to discontinue the custom, but Cathal now claimed his attendance as a right, attaching himself like a small child to ‘the way things had always been’.

  Now while Pat meditated or splashed gently Cathal sat opposite to him on the large wooden cover of the lavatory, on top of Pat’s clothes. The lavatory, in an arched recess, fitted discreetly inside a long chest of reddish highly polished mahogany, one section of which lifted on a hinge. The wall behind was papered with a design of ivy and blue cabbage roses upon which Cathal’s head, inclined always in the same place, had made a blurred brown mark. Lazily relaxed, one leg tucked under, the other crooked at the knee, Cathal displayed the long brown trousers of Irish tweed to which he had lately been promoted. Self-consciously he smoothed them and leaned forward from time to time to smell them appreciatively. He seemed, since the trousers, taller, a very slim boy with a narrow intent face, smooth and straight as a piece of ivory, rather close eyes and longish blackish straight hair. The long-nosed crested head resembled that of a bird, and he had too a bird’s capacity for alternating between darting speed and stillness. He sat now perfectly still watching Pat.

  At such moments Pat was conscious of resembling his younger brother, though usually they were held to be unlike. Pat’s face, which he shaved clean twice a day, was broader and more ruggedly bony, and his eyes were cold blue while Cathal’s were brown. Cathal laughed oftener. But his mouth in repose was harder than Pat’s. Yet at times when Cathal looked at him Pat saw his brother’s face as a mirror, the mask of expression, something poised and fierce, as of a head glimpsed inside a helmet, seeming the image of a grimness which he felt to flow outwards from himself.

  Pat turned on the hot tap again. He had noticed lately that he was a little troubled at being seen naked by Cathal. He would not of course have let any other person see him bare. But the brothers had never troubled themselves about this. What had changed? Perhaps it was simply that Cathal was growing up; and Pat perceived this growing up as something very purely, sharply painful, like the touch of a clean knife or a flame. Something here, he scarcely knew what, hurt him and made him wish to withdraw and to hide. Was it this which made him suddenly conscious of his body, which though it was so supple and hard was also white, white as an underground defenceless thing? Or perhaps this whiteness seemed to him now so especially shameful and pathetic since, as he touched his warm limbs in the sticky water, he apprehended himself in an entirely new and urgent way as destructible and mortal. Since the news about Sunday every cell in his body announced itself as precious.

  After a pause Cathal said, reverting to a topic which they had in fact been discussing almost continually since the arrival of the afternoon papers, ‘So you think it’s a forgery?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  The papers had carried the text of a most alarming document, which had just ‘come into somebody’s hands’, which purported to be a British military plan for a concerted swoop upon the Citizen Army and the Volunteers. All ‘nationalists’ in arms were to be disarmed and all ‘disaffected’ premises seized. The places which were to be occupied, including Liberty Hall, the Volunteer headquarters in Dawson Street and a number of other institutions and private houses, were listed in the document, which had many, perhaps too many, marks of authenticity. Dublin was outraged. And the British authorities had at once declared the thing to be forged.

  ‘Well, they say so, but of course they would. What makes you think it’s not genuine?’

  ‘The bit about the Archbishop’s house at Drumcondra. The English wouldn’t be so stupid as to interfere with the Archbishop. He’s not an extremist, he’s well known to be against violence. He’s useful to the English. Besides, if they were to touch him Dublin would go mad with rage.’

  In fact Pat, who had been startled
by the document, had rapidly formed his own theory about its provenance. He attributed it to the Machiavellian pen of the romantic and devious Joseph Plunkett, and when he had taken in its purpose he paid homage to the ingenuity of his comrade. Patriotic indignation spiced with fear, this was just the stimulant which Dublin needed now on the eve of her trial. All the same, it was just possible that the document was genuine, and it was just possible that its publication might lead the authorities to carry out their plan quickly before the threatened persons could take counter-measures.

  ‘But the English are stupid,’ said Cathal. ‘Well, let them try! Then there’ll be ructions. General Friend will get a pretty hot reception if he tries to walk into Liberty Hall.’

  That was what Pat had for some time feared. If the English had been a little less stupid and a little more callous they would long ago have attempted to disarm their potential foes, and when resisted would have used machine guns. Such a very excusable ‘incident’ might well be overlooked in the midst of a war where casualties on an astronomic scale were happening elsewhere. A scheme like that could have destroyed the whole movement overnight. Pat wondered if it had been mooted. Fortunately one could rely upon the English, who were certainly not intelligent, to be also less than ruthless. Against a ruthless enemy there would have been no chance at all.

  ‘Do you know what happened at Liberty Hall last Sunday?’ said Cathal, pursuing his own line of thought.

  ‘I neither know nor care what happened at Liberty Hall last Sunday.’

  ‘Connolly said anyone who didn’t want to fight was to drop out of the ranks. He said it was better for them to go now than later on when they might be needed. He said there’d be no reproaches. No one dropped out.’

  ‘Of course no one dropped out! That theatre business has gone to Connolly’s head. He thinks he’s the great dramatist of the Irish nation. He’s on the stage all the time. It doesn’t mean those fellows will actually fight. It’s all moonshine anyway.’

  ‘Fight? Of course they’ll fight. It’s the Volunteers that’ll be hiding their heads when the day comes. And the Volunteers are beastly to the Citizen Army. They keep trying to prevent them from having halls and—’

  ‘You shouldn’t be surprised. Isn’t it the Class Struggle? And I thought I told you to keep away from Liberty Hall.’

  ‘Well, I was there on Sunday and I heard a jolly good lecture on street fighting.’

  ‘Cathal—’

  ‘And I saw those pictures of the civil war in Cuba. One’s got to pick up tips. Did you know that you ought to learn to shoot with your left hand? Tom Clarke was telling me—’

  ‘I told you not to be hanging round Tom Clarke’s shop either.’

  ‘Think of Tom Clarke being fifteen years in prison. He was in prison longer than my whole life. If I’d been fifteen years in prison I’d hate everybody. But he doesn’t seem to hate anyone, not even the English.’

  ‘Sure he’s a great man.’

  ‘Then why don’t you want me to go and see him?’

  ‘You’re too young for this, Cathal. Your turn will come. This isn’t for you.’

  ‘So there is a plan?’ Cathal was rigid with attention. His body, scarcely moving, became taut.

  Pat cursed his incautious words. Almost anything he said to Cathal now could be dangerous. ‘Of course there’s no plan! I just don’t want you to be wasting your time romancing with a lot of old Fenians when you ought to be working for your exams.’

  ‘Exams! Connolly says that the failure to take the offensive is the death of all revolutions.’

  ‘How can you take the offensive when you’re armed with broken bottles and old shot-guns tied together with twine?’

  ‘If I were Connolly I’d bring the I.C.A. out and that’d force the Volunteers to follow.’

  ‘Well, thank God you’re not Connolly so maybe we’ll have a bit of peace.’

  ‘Anyway, the Germans will be coming soon.’

  ‘Oh, will they? I see you know all about it!’

  ‘Yes. I don’t much like the Germans, but I’m quite prepared to use them.’

  ‘Listen who’s talking!’

  ‘Yes, and then we’ll carry out Robert Emmett’s plan. Take Dublin Castle, while the Germans will be landing in Kerry and arming all the south and the west, and they’ll advance, and Roger Casement’s Irish Brigade will come—’

  ‘All three of them.’

  ‘And at the same time the Germans will attack all along the front in France, and they’ll bombard the English coast and there’ll be Zeppelin raids on London—’

  ‘All to set the Irish free.’

  ‘And the U-boats will come streaming up the Irish Sea and cut off the English in Ireland so no more troops can come over and no one will feed the English and they’ll have to surrender.’

  ‘The British Navy seems to have been pretty successful so far at keeping the U-boats out of the Irish Sea. The mail boat arrives every day, doesn’t it?’

  ‘But there are secret U-boat bases all round Ireland now and wireless transmitters—’

  ‘Besides, even if we did maroon the English troops, which we couldn’t, they’re still armed to the teeth, aren’t they? What about all those field guns?’

  ‘The Irish regiments wouldn’t fight against their own people. The Dublin Fusiliers—’

  ‘They’d fight. They’d fight, not “against their own people”, but against a little gang of terrorists. And when one of them was killed they’d fight with hatred.’

  ‘Besides, Connolly says a capitalist power will never use artillery against capitalist property.’

  ‘That’s the stupidest argument I ever heard. The French used artillery against the Paris workers in eighteen seventy-one. Your great hero ought to read some history.’

  ‘Well, and then the Americans—’

  ‘The Americans! The only sensible thing your hero ever said was that the snakes that St Patrick drove out of Ireland swam the Atlantic and became Irish Americans.’

  ‘It may interest you to know that the Americans are going to make a special treaty with Germany because of the submarines and declare war on England because of the blockade.’

  ‘Why not the other way round? The Americans will never fight the English. It’s inconceivable.’

  ‘Well, they don’t like the British Empire, do they? A blow in Ireland against the British Empire has a hundred times more political significance than an equal blow struck in Asia or Africa. A child may stick a pin in a giant’s heart.’

  ‘Who said that, as if I didn’t know.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t. It was someone called Lenin, he’s a Russian and I bet you’ve never heard of him.’

  ‘Well, I have so.’

  ‘The eyes of the world are upon us—’

  ‘That’s what the poor Irish always think.’

  ‘Whenever it’s the turn of a country, however small, to rise against its tyrants it represents the oppressed peoples of the whole world.’

  ‘I thought William Martin Murphy and the Dublin employers were the tyrants your friends hated, more than the English.’

  ‘Have you heard that Murphy has persuaded all the employers to sack all the able-bodied workers to force them to enlist?’

  ‘If I were your schoolmaster I’d beat a bit of accuracy into you. The employers would do no such thing, it would hit their pockets.’

  ‘Well, there’s no call for you to sneer—’

  ‘I’m not sneering.’

  ‘You are so.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘The Irish worker is the worst fed and the worst housed in the British Isles, and that’s saying something. And it was a Government Commission said that, not James Connolly. Have you been over to Jinny’s place ever and seen how she lives? Do you know that they’re living six in a room all over Dublin? Do you know how cold they are in winter? Do you know what they have to eat? Do you know what happens to them when they’re ill?’

  ‘I know these things, Cathal, don’t sh
out.’

  ‘Well, once we get started we’ll shift the whole lot. We’ll shift the bloody English and William Martin Murphy all at the same time. And they can put the Home Rule Bill where the monkey put the nuts.’

  ‘Haven’t I told you not to be using that bad language.’