Land

by Liam O'Flaherty

  “By all means,” Raoul said.

  The priest went to the window, opened it wide, leaned out and whistled softly. There was an answering whistle almost at once. Then the priest went out to open the hall door.

  “This is all very fortunate,” Raoul said, caressing his beard. “I feel that I’m on the verge of finally becoming involved in something decisive.”

  O’Dwyer seemed to be in great spirits when he came into the room, contrary to what Father Francis had said about his temper. He was wearing a well-fitting suit of blue serge that made him look very smart. With his face lighted by a gay smile, he came over to Raoul, shook hands and began to apologise for the trouble he had caused on their previous meeting.

  “How is the cut?” Raoul interrupted. “Upon my soul! I see no trace of it.”

  “It was only a scratch,” O’Dwyer said with a shrug of his shoulders. “It has been healed for weeks.”

  “Do sit down,” Raoul said. “I envy your strength. One moment you were lying unconscious on the kitchen table, dead to the world, as Annie Fitzpatrick would say. The next moment you were gone. I was very impressed by your vitality. I wanted terribly to know why a man of your great energy and courage could behave in such a stupid fashion.”

  O’Dwyer had sat down in front of the fire between Raoul and Father Francis. His gaiety of expression changed suddenly as Raoul uttered the word “stupid.” His face became frightening. Now it was apparent that Father Francis had not exaggerated when he said that the young man was in a bad state of mind.

  “What do you mean by that remark?” O’Dwyer said slowly, clasping his laced fingers so tightly that the blood went out of them.

  His cruel blue eyes were staring fixedly at Raoul, who was unable to prevent himself from feeling a little nervous.

  “You are the living image of your father,” Raoul said. “I recognised you that day in my kitchen. Your father was the bosom friend of my youth. He was some years older than I, but similarity of ideas brought us together. Had he lived, he might have done great things. He had a brilliant intellect, together with indomitable courage and a natural capacity for leadership. His death was a great blow, not only to his friends, but to his country.”

  “Thank you, sir,” O’Dwyer said in an angry tone, as he bowed jerkily.

  “I had an idea,” Raoul continued, putting the tips of his fingers to his beard, “that you were trying to revenge your father’s death.”

  O’Dwyer remained silent. He continued to stare fixedly at Raoul.

  “Next to love,” said Raoul, “revenge is possibly the most exalted emotion. However, it must be subtle in order to be completely satisfying.”

  He paused for a moment, smiled and then added in a lower tone:

  “If Butcher had not been wearing a metal vest, where would he be now?”

  “In hell,” O’Dwyer said curtly.

  Raoul shrugged his shoulders.

  “If such a place really exists, which I doubt,” he said, “we have no guarantee that Butcher would now be there. He is a clever fellow, and a famous man has said that God is always on the side of the big battalions. One simply does not know. All one knows is that he would be dead and out of mortal pain. Death by gunfire must be a pleasant sort of death, sudden and rather exciting. If I wanted to revenge myself on an enemy, I’d choose a much more subtle and lingering method.”

  He paused, smiled once more and added:

  “I’d torture him.”

  Father Francis took his clay pipe out of his mouth, stared at Raoul in horror and then got to his feet.

  “That’s a terrible thing you have said,” he cried angrily. “Let me tell you that the Irish people would never tolerate such methods. They are gentle and good people. What you are advocating is paganism.”

  O’Dwyer put his hand on the priest’s arm and said curtly, like a man speaking to a subordinate:

  “Sit down.”

  The priest winced on feeling the rough touch of O’Dwyer’s arm. He looked at the young man reproachfully, as he resumed his seat.

  “What kind of torture do you mean?” O’Dwyer said to Raoul.

  “The torture of isolation,” Raoul said.

  “Isolation?” said O’Dwyer.

  “To isolate an enemy in the military sense,” Raoul said, “means cutting him off from all means of supply, reinforcement and escape. In this instance, I give a different meaning to the word. The isolation of Captain Butcher would not need to be physically complete, in order to be effective and bring about his destruction. He would merely require to be deprived of his power little by little, until he was alone and utterly helpless.”

  “Horrible!” Father Francis said.

  Raoul looked at the priest haughtily and said:

  “To isolate a priest, for instance, one denies him access to the performance of certain rites, by means of which he renews his belief in God and the immortality of the soul.”

  Father Francis jumped to his feet once more.

  “All that is paganism,” he cried. “It’s inspired by the Devil.”

  “How many times more do I have to tell you to keep quiet?” O’Dwyer said in the same curt tone. “Sit down at once.”

  “Michael,” said the priest in a humiliated voice, “I didn’t think your father’s son would say a thing like that to me.”

  O’Dwyer flushed a little and glanced towards Raoul.

  “All right,” he said gruffly, looking once more at the priest. “Forget about it.”

  “I went out with the Fenians in ’67,” Father Francis cried, with a note of arrogant defiance in his voice. “For that act of rebellion against my vow of obedience, I have since been deprived of the right to administer the sacraments. For twelve years I have followed my fate, the most miserable of God’s creatures, an anointed priest that is denied the right to perform the miracle of all miracles.”

  “That’s enough now,” O’Dwyer said.

  “I thought so,” Raoul said to himself. “An isolated priest. The torture of the Vatican.”

  He got to his feet and bowed to Father Francis with great ceremony.

  “I apologise,” he said, “for failing to realise that you are a great poet, until you spoke just now. Won’t you shake hands and forgive me for my discourtesy?”

  The priest hesitated for a moment, while he looked at Raoul critically. Then he suddenly grasped Raoul’s extended hand.

  “Forgive me, too,” he said with deep emotion, “for failing to realise that you are a good man. Even though you say queer things, that no good man should say, you are still a good man. We all have our foolish vanities. I see that giving voice to queer ideas is your pet vanity. God will forgive you for that. God forgives everything to the good. I want to be friends with you.”

  “Splendid!” said Raoul. “I know that I’m going to value your friendship highly. The soldier, the poet and the monk represent what is finest in man. They represent man’s will to power, to beauty and to immortality. They alone among men are capable of complete love, because they love the unattainable. Their love is never tarnished by possession. Before all three of them, I always bow low. When I bowed to you, I bowed to all three.”

  Father Francis sat down, took out a large red handkerchief and blew his nose violently to conceal his emotion. Raoul also sat down.

  “How would you go about destroying an enemy by means of isolation?” said O’Dwyer, who had been staring intently at the fire during this interlude.

  “For that,” said Raoul, “the efforts of a single man, or even a group of picked men like the Fenian Society, would be useless. The help of the whole people would be necessary.”

  “The whole people?” O’Dwyer said excitedly, now fixing his gaze on Raoul.

  “The whole people,” Raoul said, “disciplined and acting in obedience to a single will.”

  There was silence for a few moments. Then O’Dwyer’s face suddenly lit with enthusiasm.

  “I see that you now understand me,” Raoul said, touching his beard
with his finger-tips.

  “Maybe I do,” O’Dwyer said. “I want to hear your plan.”

  “So do I,” Father Francis said.

  “Then you are no longer opposed to the idea of torture?” Raoul said to the priest.

  “Who am I to condemn the methods of such a wise man as you?” Father Francis said. “Great ideas are more powerful than an army with banners.”

  “Thank you,” Raoul said, getting to his feet. “I’ll tell you about my plan, as soon as I have notified my daughter that she has two guests for supper. You can both stay, I trust.”

  The two men accepted the invitation.

  “Good,” said Raoul. “I hope that we have laid plans for setting the wheel of Irish destiny spinning by supper-time. I’m not a mystic, but I believe in destiny. A vice of some sort is necessary to maintain sanity.”

  Chapter VII

  Lettice looked frightened when Raoul came into the living-room and told her that O’Dwyer was staying to supper. Raoul put his arm around her shoulders and kissed her on the forehead.

  “You mustn’t be nervous of him, child,” he said. “He is by no means savage. Quite the contrary. After all, you should be used to entertaining revolutionaries. The most famous of them came to our house in Paris. You should know by now that idealists, even those who resort to violence, are usually the most gentle among human beings.”

  “I know that, Father,” Lettice said, blushing still more deeply.

  “I like O’Dwyer,” Raoul said as he walked out of the room. “Father Kelly is also a person of extraordinary quality.”

  He was too preoccupied with his ideas to notice that it was not fear of again meeting O’Dwyer that startled his daughter and made her blush. Elizabeth had been just as insensitive to the first tender throbbing of a young girl’s heart, when Lettice had entered the living-room after leaving the empty jug in the kitchen on the day of the shooting. It was shyness of a new and strange emotion within her own breast that had startled Lettice, now as on that other day.

  During the past month, she had experienced this emotion many times. It came upon her suddenly, unassociated with an image or memory of any sort, in her room, walking by the river among the wild daffodils, watching the waves rise and fall by the lighthouse rock. It had come to her in Elizabeth’s room, while she was looking at the rainbow. It had no name, no voice, no substance. It was the awareness of beauty still in the womb, at whose door life is waiting with a key for the moment of birth.

  Yet she looked perfectly composed when she sat opposite her father at table in their little dining-room, with O’Dwyer on her left and Father Francis on her right. Raoul maintained that one of the greatest achievements of French culture was its success in teaching women the art of entertaining guests. He had taken great pains with his daughter’s education in that respect. So that she had been already an accomplished hostess at sixteen. Since conversation was her father’s chief delight in life, she got plenty of practice in the years that intervened. That was why she was now able to look so composed, even while her heart fluttered because of the young man’s presence.

  When the meal got under way, she began to examine him shyly. She realized at once that he was entirely different from all the revolutionaries that came to their house in Paris. All those other men did not seem at all dangerous; not even a man with such a reputation for violence as the Russian Bakunin. On the contrary, she found them pathetic, especially when they boasted of their sufferings. This young man’s very presence in the room was frightening in some mysterious way. Even when his face lit up in a smile he still looked dangerous.

  Everything he did fascinated her. Yet he did most outrageous things. He interrupted the conversation of the older men whenever he felt inclined. He would stop speaking suddenly and stare at the ceiling. His gestures were brusque. A sudden movement of his muscular body would put his clothes out of shape, as if a savage impulse in him sought to tear off their constraint.

  What interested her most was the fact that he completely dominated the two other men. She had never before seen her father submit to the power of another man’s personality.

  When he finally spoke to her, her composure vanished and she had to lean far back out of the lamp-light, in order to hide her blushes.

  “ I remember you,” he said.

  As she bowed in answer to his remark, she felt thrilled by the tenderness of his voice. When speaking to the others, his voice sounded harsh. Now it was tender.

  “I hope I didn’t frighten you that day,” he continued.

  “Not in the least,” she said.

  “You must have thought I was a disgusting fellow,” he said, “when you saw me stagger into your kitchen, with blood streaming down my face and a revolver in my hand.”

  “Disgusting?” said Lettice seriously. “Why should I think so?”

  Instead of answering her, he turned away suddenly, looked at the ceiling for a few moments and then spoke to Raoul. If another person had behaved like that towards her, she would have felt extremely hurt. Yet his rudeness merely increased the peculiar feeling of elation that his presence inspired in her. Later, when he again spoke to her, although twenty minutes had passed, she was unaware of any interruption to their conversation.

  “Your voice is like music,” he whispered, bending close to her. “Do all French women speak like you?”

  “But I am not French,” Lettice said. “I was merely born in France. I am Irish.”

  He laughed, looking her straight in the eyes.

  “Of course,” he said, “you couldn’t be anything else with that light in your eyes. It was your French accent that led me astray. I had an American accent myself when I came home.”

  “Were you long in America?” Lettice said.

  “Five years,” he said. “I went to look for gold in Nevada and California.”

  “Did you find any?” said Lettice.

  “Enough for my purpose, I hope,” he said.

  “I have heard that California is beautiful,” said Lettice.

  He stared at her in silence for a little while.

  “Beautiful?” he said at length. “Cape Horn is beautiful. I went from San Francisco around Cape Horn on a sailing ship, when I was coming back to Ireland. We ran into icebergs. Then there was a storm that lasted three weeks. Eight men of the crew were killed. We had only a foremast left on our ship. Do you like the sea?”

  “Yes,” said Lettice.

  “When the fine weather comes,” he said, “I’ll take you sailing in my boat. I must go now.”

  Lettice and Raoul went into the living-room after the two guests had gone. Lettice threw herself down in a corner of the sofa and put her hands behind her neck. Raoul paced the floor. They were silent for some time. Then he halted in front of his daughter and stared at her.

  “What do you think of O’Dwyer?” he said.

  “Why do you ask, Father?” Lettice said.

  “Because I value your opinion,” Raoul said. “I have made an important decision. I want to know what you think of him, simply because you are less decadent than I am. You are closer to the earth, with a clearer understanding of a primitive creature like O’Dwyer.”

  “Primitive?” said Lettice. “I don’t think him at all primitive. He gives that impression superficially, simply because he is unique, judged by our standards. I mean that he creates his own world and his own laws.”

  “Very good,” said Raoul, touching his beard. “I am delighted to hear you say that.”

  “He sees beauty only in danger,” Lettice said.

  “How did you arrive at that conclusion?” Raoul said.

  “I asked him if he thought California beautiful,” Lettice said, “and he looked astonished, as if the word ‘beautiful’ were unknown to him until that moment. Then he said that Cape Horn was beautiful, simply because his ship nearly foundered there in a storm.”

  “Excellent,” said Raoul. “Danger is to him what tragedy is to a poet, the ultimate beauty. You have convinced me that I w
as right in thinking that he is a born leader of men.”

  His expression, which ordinarily looked cynical, now became humble and even tender.

  “Tell me, Lettice,” he said, “if you are angry with me for bringing you to Manister.”

  “I couldn’t possibly be angry with you, Father,” Lettice said. “I love you.”

  “Yes, yes, child,” Raoul said irritably, as he began to pace the floor once more. “In spite of that, you could regret being forced to live in this dreary and remote village.”

  “I’m very happy here,” said Lettice.

  “I’ve reached an age at which the intelligent man eschews the external world as much as possible,” Raoul said, “but you are a flower opening its petals to the beautiful warmth of emotional life. I’ve had qualms of conscience about dragging you to this barbarous place.”

  “You needn’t have,” said Lettice passionately. “Not in the least. I feel that I’m taking part in life for the first time, since coming to Manister. Life in Paris was artificial, in spite of its exquisite culture. It was foreign to me. It was like staring at life through the window of a very expensive shop. Here I feel among my own people. I walk on my own earth and breathe my own air.”

  Raoul halted again and stared at her anxiously from a distance.

  “Lettice,” he said, “I have decided to join in this struggle against the landlords.”

  “How wonderful!” Lettice cried, sitting forward on the sofa and clasping her hands like a delighted child. “To free humble people from oppression is the most noble of all tasks.”

  “I can hardly claim that sort of nobility,” Raoul said. “One must be honest with one’s own conscience, in order to maintain clarity of thought. It is terrible to have lost faith. It is really terrible to be an educated man in our age of transition. For thousands of years, the human intellect had remained at the same level, in so far as knowledge of the universe was concerned. Then suddenly, in this astounding century of ours, fantastic discoveries are made. The steam engine, the internal combustion machine, the telegraph, the telephone and other startling innovations radically change our relation to the earth and to universal space. To-morrow, even more fantastic inventions will appear. The whole structure of our morality has come toppling about our ears as a result of this new knowledge. Our gods, who seemed omnipotent yesterday, are to-day no better than abandoned scarecrows. To-day, any street urchin with a loaded pistol can make thunder like Jove. We are all at a loss, all of us who are capable of abstract thought, overwhelmed by the avalanche of scientific discoveries. While we hysterically re-examine the idea of God, with the object of making it conform to our changed conception of the universe, our moral conscience flounders about in the vacuum created by our genius. We cry out desperately for authority, even while we smash all authority. Poor suffering humanity can endure just so much iconoclasm and anarchy. Then reason cracks. Or else, one returns to the womb for protection. What womb? The earth is the common womb of all humanity. I have returned to the womb of my ancestors. It is the land I seek and not the people. I am afraid and I seek refuge in the earth, just as a sick man climbs into his bed and draws the blankets up about his ears.”