‘Let’s hope they confine their search to the side streets,’ was all he said.
Then he came over to finish his brandy and order another.
In the streets behind them, Pat, trying to return to Nolan & Keyes after delivering a late load, ran into the thick of the trouble. It caught him unawares. The unusual quietness of the street puzzled him. The metal-shod dray made more noise than usual. He drove on into a section of complete darkness and heard the splintering of glass under the wheels. As he reined in to investigate, a piece of iron crashed against the wooden side of the dray. He looked behind him and there was nobody; he peered ahead and made out at last the glint of police helmets about a hundred yards away. Something thudded beside him, then the air became thick with missiles. He jerked the reins to make a turn away from the police and found dark figures surrounding him. Voices shouted obscenities. From the windows on either side stones and broken bottles descended on the advancing police. They began to retreat. The rioters, crushed about the dray, dragged the reins from his hands. When he tried to resist he was pulled from his seat and went down struggling. The horse and dray moved up the street, a new piece of equipment in the onslaught. People loaded it with the ammunition that lay scattered about. Pat, fighting and swearing, struggled to his feet and tried to follow it. Somebody struck him from behind with a bottle and he went down once more. He felt warm blood on his head and neck. The noise of the rioting receded to a distance although legs and bodies still milled about him. He felt behind him and touched a low stone step. Guessing a doorway, he dragged himself backwards and crouched between the pillars. He remained there, unable to see or hear anything now except a roaring noise that he knew was in his own head.
When he became conscious again the ambulances were clearing the street. They searched the darkness with their lamps while the running motors echoed against the dark houses. Pat tried to call out but found it made the pain in his head unbearable. After a while he saw the lamps go out one by one, heard feet receding and the slam of ambulance doors and the revving of engines. The cars lumbered away one by one.
‘They’ll never get here,’ Father O’Connor said, ‘the whole city must be in chaos.’
Yearling looked at his watch.
‘Not time yet,’ he said, ‘they are still watching Mr. Yeats.’
Once again the rioters had invaded Sackville Street. The sounds of fighting could be heard distinctly. Father O’Connor refused to look. Yearling, although he would have liked to indulge in a balcony-seat view, remained in his armchair out of sympathy.
‘We were talking earlier about love,’ he remembered. Father O’Connor, unsure of the absolute propriety of the theme, acknowledged uneasily.
‘Have you seen the Parnell statue, Father?’
Father O’Connor, wondering what that could have to do with it, confessed that he had not.
‘It was put in place a few weeks ago, and I went specially to see it.’
‘You were a follower of Parnell?’
‘Not at all. It amused me to see our principal street dedicated so entirely to love.’
Father O’Connor’s pale eyebrows shot up.
‘Parnell at the top—an adulterer,’ Yearling explained. ‘Nelson in the middle—another adulterer. And at the end O’Connell—a notorious wencher.’
The thought amused Yearling afresh. He chuckled agreeably to himself. Father O’Connor indicated polite disapproval by shaking his head and assuming a deliberately unamused expression. Parnell’s sin had split the Irish Party. Nelson was English—an outsider and unrepresentative. O’Connell may have been all Yearling said—a young man given to wenching and duelling. But in maturity he had become the instrument of Catholic emancipation. Yet it did seem odd. Three of them—all solemnly pedestalled. Trust Yearling to remark the coincidence. Frowning, Father O’Connor said:
‘They are honoured for their worthy acts, not for their human frailty.’
‘A pity it’s not the other way round,’ Yearling speculated.
‘The inscriptions would make more interesting reading.’
Father O’Connor, feeling the limit had now been reached, held up his hand and begged him not to pursue the subject.
Yearling apologised. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘I meant no disrespect to your office.’
They fell silent. For Father O’Connor it was difficult. Beside him a man made light of a sacred matter, refusing the distinction between lust and love. Love was capable of being blessed, a stimulus, the natural end of which was to produce souls for Christ, souls that would fill in heaven the places left vacant by the angels who had fallen from grace and were now among the legions of the devil. Lust led also to hell. It was the flesh; lewd flesh, lascivious flesh, unbridled, passionate, self-destroying flesh. Love too, if unsanctified. Paolo and Francesca, betrayed by a book.
Having stopped the conversation, he felt obliged to introduce the next topic. But nothing occurred. The room became oppressive. Outside the shouting seemed to have died away.
‘I must look through the window,’ he said.
‘You’ll distress yourself.’
But he rose. From the window nothing could be seen and from the balcony only the occasional patches of the street, where the few lamps not quenched by the rioters threw their weak circles of light. Was somebody lying down there in the darkness, dying? There had been so much tumult.
‘I feel I should go down.’
‘Nonsense. Everything is over.’
Yearling was now at his side. The breeze from the river was cool and came fitfully. Peaceful. No more dreadful oaths, thuds of stones and sticks, that black milling tide tossing and shrieking. Had they fought to exhaustion or was it still going on in the side streets, in the smelling alleyways, men and women and little children transformed into obscene beasts?
‘What a dreadful night,’ he said. His distress was so obvious that it moved Yearling.
‘I am sorry if my remarks have upset you,’ he said.
‘Not at all. I meant the fighting and the looting.’
Yearling knew that. But his broadness on the subject of love had not helped.
‘What I said was prompted by a very genuine and beautiful memory,’ he explained. ‘May I tell you?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’ve met many women in my time—and the least said now the better. But there was one in London—I mentioned this before.’
‘I remember,’ Father O’Connor said. ‘You met her at the first performance of The Yeoman of the Guard.’
Yearling smiled. It was Father O’Connor’s tone, meticulously interested. It was his face, so young, gravely composed, moulded to convey sympathy. He remembered clearly and wanted to tell about it, realising that indeed there was nothing to tell.
‘Yes. Or rather afterwards, while at supper with some friends.’
Father O’Connor nodded, waiting.
Now—what was there to say. That she was beautiful? That she had golden hair? There were millions with golden hair. That she turned to him frequently during the meal, smiling, sympathetic, favouring him? He could remember the face so well, bending towards him in the light of the table lamps, the clear eyes and delicately toned skin. And her first question: ‘You are Irish—aren’t you?’ put flatteringly, as though to be Irish was to be special and exclusive. That had been in October 1888, and yet he could remember vividly, with a sensation that was like the throbbing of an old wound.
‘For some months we went about together. We got on like a house on fire, except on the subject of drink. She had a set against drink, I think because her father had been an alcoholic, and we used to argue about that. Or, rather, we used to talk about it—the English are too polite to argue. To tell you the truth, I was always pretty expert at hitting the bottle, and I never tried to hide it from her. She cared enough for me to try like the devil to be tolerant about it, but it was no use. Drink frightened her—she couldn’t help it. We had good fun, just the same. We went three or four times to the Yeoman, we liked it so much, and when we were together we sang it for one another. We did rather more serious things too, of course—but I won’t distress you with the details. Then, on the evening I was leaving, quite suddenly she told me she was engaged—some chap on foreign service. She hadn’t mentioned this before and it was quite a shock. I asked her to break it off and marry me and she said she’d let me know. I was sure she would, because she wept a lot. She even pleaded with me to stay on longer while she thought about it, but that was impossible. Anyway, I got a letter some weeks later to say she was going to marry this other chap after all. And that was the end of it.’ Yearling smiled. ‘I wonder why I should tell you such a remote little piece of autobiography.’