Willie Mulhall was one of them and already a veteran of a number of engagements. The hurling stick on his shoulder, which had the shape and feel of a rifle, filled him with pride. So did the huge turn-out of workers and the fact that a detachment of police followed the procession all the way to the church. It showed that his father had been recognised as a leader by the authorities too. The police followed but kept their distance. The procession was big, but orderly. There was no band and there were no speeches. But there were blazing torches to carry which filled the air with the smell of pitch. Streamers of sparks were plucked from these by the wind and went scattering above the heads of the marchers. As Willie Mulhall watched them pride and grief struggled for supremacy in his heart. Fitz watched them too. Love, he thought, was better than prudence. The flaming torches were telling the city that the people of his class would not be starved for ever.
CHAPTER EIGHT
There had been a time, Yearling remembered, and it did not seem to be so long ago, when he had wished to be forty again. Now, re-lathering the face that stared back at him from the mirror, he would have settled cheerfully enough for fifty. But the morning sun which had found a chink in his bedroom curtains had announced it and the calendar in his pocket diary had confirmed it; another birthday was upon him. He was fifty-three. If he ever saw fifty again, he told himself (pouting the under lip and removing an area of lather and hair with a deft upward stoke of the open razor) it would be on a hall door. That was the way life went. You closed your eyes a while. You opened them and the thief had been and gone. What could one do, except go on shaving. There was a time when he had intended to grow a beard because it seemed a pity not to give expression to one’s total potentiality. He would never do so now. It was too late for revolutionary changes. Procrastination had undone him. If, in the next life, the Master chided him for burying one of his talents, he would point to the moustache as an earnest of his good intentions.
With his fingers he explored minutely his face for areas that might have been skimped, but the job was satisfactory. He emptied the shaving mug (the water had grown tepid) cleaned his razor, stropped it, put it away. As he did so he whistled ‘Is Life A Boon?’
The sun sent a finger of light into the hallway and the house smelled agreeably of bacon and eggs. The barometer, an habitual liar, declared for wet and windy. Like the barber’s cat, Yearling decided, tapping it from habit. A solitary postcard on the breakfast table had a basket of flowers worked in crochet on the front and on the back it said: ‘Many happy returns—Florence Bradshaw’. She had not forgotton. There was no address but the stamp was Italian.
‘Robert,’ he said to his servant, ‘you may wish me a happy birthday.’
‘Many happy returns, sir.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Will there be anything else?’
‘Nothing that you could provide, Robert. Isn’t that unfortunate?’
‘Indeed it is, sir.’
‘You’ll find some envelopes on my dressing table, Robert, with something for each of you. I’ve also ordered some refreshment which will arrive in the evening. It’s addressed to you. Share it out and drink my health.’
‘You’re very generous, sir.’
‘But please watch Mrs. Lambert. Last year she wanted to come up and play the piano.’
‘I’ll certainly guard against any repetition, sir.’
‘Thank you—you could bring me the marmalade.’
‘I’m sorry, sir—I thought you had made a ruling against marmalade.’
‘It gives me indigestion. But it’s my birthday and I’ll risk it.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Sunshine gleamed on the roofs of the town and the sea lapping on the rocks was as gentle as summer. A gull on the wall stared intently at the horizon, as though expecting a ship. In the streets women with empty shopping bags were hurrying to ten o’clock mass. The Pope’s green island. Carson was fearful of it. No Home Rule for Signor Carsoni. Home Rule is Rome Rule. Ulster will fight. And Ulster will be Right. A Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People.
The poet William Mathews met him as arranged at the Merrion Row gate of the Green. They lunched in the Shelbourne. Yearling drove his new motor car and found comfort in being rich. It was a Straker-Squire 15.9 horse power, price four hundred and sixty-eight pounds. It took them afterwards by Bray and Kilmacanogue, where Parnell had changed horses and sometimes slept on his way from Avondale to Dublin, then across the brown expanse of Calary bog and eventually to Glendalough. They parked and entered the ruined monastic city on foot. An ancient gate gave them access. The Round Tower rose into a clear sky. Beyond it the lake was a mirror for blue, precipitous mountains.
‘Very lovely,’ Mathews remarked.
‘I was here with my father exactly forty years ago,’ Yearling said. ‘It was my thirteenth birthday. That day, too, was sunny and beautiful.’
‘Were you fond of him?’ Mathews asked.
‘Very,’ Yearling said. ‘He was one of the few human beings I have ever loved. This is a little pilgrimage to honour the past. I hope it doesn’t bore you.’
‘On the contrary, I am surrounded not by the past but by the literature of the immediate present. Round towers, seventh-century saints, harps, legends and shamrocks.’
‘Mother Erin,’ Yearling suggested.
‘Two divine persons in one,’ Mathews said. ‘A mother lamenting her children in bondage. A girl ravished by the Saxon, who weeps over her stringless harp. But her young champions keep watch in the mountains, awaiting the dawn of the bright sun of Freedom. They will gather around her with pikes and swords.’
‘I thought they were waiting to do that at the rising of the moon.’
‘There are two schools—the nocturnal and the matutinal,’ Mathews conceded, ‘but one basic thought. Arm. Rise. Cast off the Saxon yoke.’
‘We are great dreamers,’ Yearling said. Pensive, indulgent, he poked with his stick the grass about the base of a gravestone. Monastic Ireland lay broken about him. St. Kevin’s kitchen, St. Kevin’s cell, St. Kieran’s church, a Celtic cross. Beyond the wall was the deer stone, in the hollow of which by command of the saint, a deer had shed its milk each day to nourish a baby whose mother had died in childbirth. Illuminated manuscripts of the tonsured saints, bronze bell and tallow candle, latin text and colloquy in the soft tongue of the Gael, these upon the rising of a mysterious sun or in a night of full moon would all be restored. A shepherd walking in the dew of morning would find milk again in the hollow of the stone. Young men, taught by old men, believed it.
On the gravestone a horseman and Roman soldiers followed Christ to his Crucifixion. The horseman, he noticed, wore a cocked hat and eighteenth-century costume. He looked closer. The Roman soldiers carried guns. He drew Mathews’ attention.
‘Do you notice anything?’
Mathews peered for some time.
‘Ah,’ he said at last, ‘a latter-day Saviour.’
‘The stone is by Cullen,’ Yearling told him, ‘a local mason, if I remember rightly. There should be other examples.’
They went searching. At the end of half an hour they had located three. It was quite enough.
The path took them by the shores of the lake, with the forest on their left. The day remained calm and beautiful. As they walked Yearling returned to an earlier thought.