Chapter Three: Kerry/Dublin July 1909

‘Hey you, Paddy!’

The shout came from up the steep and winding valley towards Muckross House. The tall, spare redheaded man in farming clothes paid it no mind, but rather pushed back his hat, squinting, and adjusted his angling line minutely to the prevailing wind. The trout here in the bottomless black lake were fierce altogether, and he wouldn't be going home to face the woman of the house without the supper. It was as fine a Kerry day as he remembered from childhood, with a warm and brilliant sun and a light wind dancing to ruffle the surface of the lake. He knew this valley and these mountains like a lover's form, having tramped them from the time he could walk itself and now they were his peace and solace in the midst of cares and toil.

The shout came again. ‘Hey you, Paidín!’ And still he paid no heed, feeling the merest tug on his line from the depths of the lake. Working the fish, teasing, enjoying the game of contest, he was absorbed in the immediacy of man and nature, determined that skill and brains would prevail over brute instinct. He had the creature nearly to the surface of the water, pulling hard now, and was lifting and turning the reel of line with alacrity when the cry came again to distract him now,

‘Hey you, Paddy Leary, you deaf bastard! You're wanted in the town!’ He looked up quickly, struggling to maintain his advantage, to see John Joe Millane striding towards him and a face on him like thunder, having hiked the long way into the valley from the big house in search of his errant comrade.

‘Pisoige,’ he muttered, his attention divided now and the fish winning ground. He waved his arm briefly at John Joe in a gesture of annoyance. ‘Yerra,’ he muttered, ‘you'd wake the dead...’ and to the fish, ‘come up, come up me beauty, yes yes, there's a fine wee girdle waiting on you...’ He played the line a little more, not enough to lose the trout, but to entice it grasp harder. Once this was done, with a grin of triumph he yanked the line from the water, reeling in quickly and expertly, and threw the fish to the shore where it joined a small pile of others in the creel. Smiling now, he squinted up from where he crouched, unhooking the wriggling trout to where John Joe stomped up in his great boots.

‘Yerra, will ye look at the fine professor this day!’ John Joe snorted in derision. ‘Ye look as poor a tinker in them trous as was ever shifted off the dungheap of a Kerry road.... Why the hell didn't you answer me? I've been shouting for you this mile gone.’

Pushing his glasses farther up on his nose, Paddy stood up and wiped his hands on the scorned trousers, smiling, ‘Because I had to catch that wee beauty there, and whatever was wanted could wait. Are you on fire, it is?’ He asked in amusement, looking levelly into the eyes of his boyhood friend.

‘Bugger off,’ John Joe grinned, his humour returning now that he had a breath of air into him. He mopped his face with a handkerchief. ‘You wouldn't have a drop about you, would you?’ he asked hopefully.
Paddy shook his head. ‘You know I don't drink that poison as a rule.’
‘Nah,’ John Joe agreed, ‘only champagne at Trinity garden parties.’ He gave a fair imitation of the big house accent, and Paddy shoved him good naturedly, grinning, but John Joe hardly moved. He was a burly ox of a man who could pull down the roof beam of a house single--handedly.

‘So,’ said Paddy, taking a cigarette out of his pocket case and lighting it, ‘If there's not a riot in the town what did you want me for?’ He handed Millane a cigarette, which was accepted. It was a small but telling mark of the difference between them that Paddy could buy cigarettes by the packetsful at no hardship and strew them about without a thought; whatever he might play at being here home on his holidays -- turf cutter, farmer, fisherman -- he could not escape what he had become since leaving: the university lecturer. And they never let him forget it, sometimes cheerfully, sometimes not, but his success amid their poverty always lurked just beneath the surface of every transaction. He began methodically to gather up his gear in preparation for the walk out, as he knew well that John Joe was not a man to come himself on such an errand unless it was extremely sensitive. If it were merely to catch an errant cow Paddy was wanted, he'd have sent one of his sons.

Together they began to walk, arms full of tackle, the creel slung over Paddy's left shoulder, alive with fish.
‘You're wanted in Dublin,’ John Joe murmured, glancing about as if there might be a shoneen lurking even in this lonely place. ‘A telegraph came from HQ there last night and was delivered to Murphy this morning. They went to Shay's but you'd gone.’ Seamus Halloran was his uncle, at whose house he stopped.

‘Shite,’ Paddy muttered briefly, spitting out a loose piece of tobacco. ‘What do they want?’
‘By the code, some person from America is arriving and they want to make a good impression.’
‘For this they call me back to dear dirty Dublin from my first holiday in six years?’ Paddy asked of the cloud--wisped blue skies. ‘Never mind,’ he said to John Joe. ‘Do you have any idea who it is?’
‘Not from the telegraph,’ Millane said judiciously, drawing on the cigarette. ‘But the word is it's John Devoy.’

‘Oh.’ Then, ‘shite!’ he whistled. John Devoy was the head of the IRB’s American branch, the Clan na Gael. He was now a quite wealthy and respectable man in America.... ‘Why do they want me?’
John Joe looked startled. ‘Because he's friends wit' that uncle of yours!’
Oh yes. That would his namesake, to whom he literally owed everything in his life --education, job, and place in the Brotherhood. Yer man Patch, who bollixed up a local job and ended it by killing a constable in his misspent youth so was shunted off to Americkey, where he made his money dubiously under the watchful eye of New York Irish district Bosses... ‘Go te Big Jim Kahane, he'll do ye right...’ He had been the mainstay of the family for years, you had to give him that. It was Patch who put in a wee word in Dublin when Da went there looking for work, dragging his starving family with him in 1897, when in Kerry there was famine and rackrenting and they were starving in the scores in the road, and the National Land League had yet to reach them.

Those were times! They had Michael Davitt and John godalmighty O'Leary himself here and Willie Yeats' beauty, Maud Gonne. He saw her once, standing on a makeshift platform of scantling boards that frigid February; the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, with skin like alabaster and hair like amber. Tall as a goddess she was, round and graceful, simply dressed in a dark skirt and heavy coat, her low, cultured voice ringing out in the crackling cold air like a song from heaven. No better contrast he, huddling starveling and half--naked, dirty as a tinker, with his brother Earnan, stopped on their way to the baker's in town to beg meal -- even Indian meal -- for the wee'ans. It was during that time that John Joe had first approached him -- a boy of fifteen -- with work in the Brotherhood. He had acted as a messengerboy for a few halfpennies a go, and was grateful for it. He was in from that time.

Yes, thank god for Patch, for Da soon had work in Dublin at Jacobs' and they were on the train with pence in their pockets for the bread and tea, away from all the misery while their neighbours starved and died, or were put out by the landlords for non--payment of rent. ‘That uncle’ of his, to whom they had but to say, ‘the boy needs glasses’, or ‘the master wants the boy to sit the college examinations’, or ‘Cathleen wants for a Communion dress,’ or ‘Earnan is getting married’, and money, cloth, or a fine set of house furniture would arrive. Patch. Paddy loved and hated him all at once.

Who could not be grateful for the opportunities Patch and his money had afforded him -- the hallowed halls of Trinity College, both as a student and a lecturer; though in truth he would have preferred University College, but neither Patch nor the master would hear of it; it was Trinity begod, or nowt -- and resented the strictures under which he had laboured because of it: mistrusted by his own people for selling out to the toffs, and looked down upon as bog Irish by those with whom he presumed in their eyes to call himself equal; he fit nowhere. Except in the Brotherhood. There, they delighted in the fact that he was a respectable Don at Trinity for it made him the perfect mole. No one, if he was careful -- and he was nothing if not careful -- would suspect him of nationalist activities. The rub was the conflict it caused within him. He genuinely loved literature of all kinds and could not deny that Britain had produced some of the best in the world; but admitting this even to himself was to give room in his heart to the West Britons who had nearly destroyed his family, to say nothing of the more general 700 years of misrule over the country.

And yet... some of those he admired most in the world were Anglo--Irish: Miss Gonne, John Butler and Willie Yeats, John Synge, Tyrell, J.P. Mahaffy -- his mentor and the current Vice--Provost (‘...yclept Mahouf by those of heavenly birth, but plain Mahaffy by the race of earth...’ someone had rhymed of him in the student paper.) This said nothing of Wolfe Tone and Fitzgerald and others of '98, Ascendancy all. Sometimes he felt as if he were walking in a rabbit--snare: in whichever direction he moved, the spancell would pull taut and he would be caught. It had made him a closed and cautious young man, ever mindful -- not to say suspicious -- of the connections he formed and what he revealed even in seeming casual conversation.

‘When am I wanted to go?’ He asked John Joe at last.
‘Next week, I'm thinking,’ came the reply. ‘He's due this fortnight yesterday.’
‘Well,’ Paddy said, tossing the fag--end away, ‘I'll be able to get some fishing in, so.’ He grinned at John Joe and tugged at the heavy creel on his shoulder. But he was far from happy.

They stopped in at Millane's farm, and gave the fish creel and the tackle to John Joe's eldest boy Shane, to take home to Paddy's Aunt Rose over the hill.
‘Tell her I'll be home for the supper, and not to fret,’ he grinned at John Joe, ‘but that there's a Gaelic football meeting in the town, Cork versus Kerry...’ Shane looked at the pair of them as if they were mad, but was too well--brought--up to say so; his father would have cuffed him.

They walked into Killarney together from the Cloghereen road, coming into the narrow neck of streets that branched open suddenly into the town square where he had seen the National Land Leaguers all those years ago. They went into O’Keeffe’s licenced premises where they found Murphy in the back saloon, where he was usually to be found, resting on an ancient hair sofa with half--a--dozen men, farmers all, about him. Murphy was an old man, old even when Paddy first met him as a boy twelve years before, afflicted with palsy. But his mind was sharp. Oh, how sharp! He could remember a fleeting incident thirty years before and your merit in it. He could not be duped. He looked up now at their entrance.
‘Eh,’ he said to John Joe,’ you found him, so.’ Murphy squinted at Paddy appraisingly.
‘Fishing,’ John Joe said, but did not grin. Here he was as sober as in church.
‘And the five pounds sent a month do your uncle Shay the world of good,’ Murphy said approvingly.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Sit, if you please.’ Murphy waved at Kennedy. ‘Duncan, fetch the lad a chair.’ Duncan, a narrow--faced brown weasel of a man, brought a chair and Paddy took it, thanking him in an undertone. The old man had been waiting all day for him to be fetched and it was now past noon. There was no good to be had in dawdling. The tension in the room was stiff already. He waited for the old man to speak.

‘As John Joe would have told you, we received yestere'en a telegraph from Tom Clarke in Dublin, informing us that a visitor was expected from New York. This went out to all branches. Included with that to me was a message from Tom concerning the identity and a request that you return for further instructions as soon as possible.’ The watery blue eyes regarded him piercingly. ‘Are you willing to it?’
Paddy nodded once silently, and returned Murphy's gaze steadily.
‘When will you leave?’
‘I will leave tonight, sir. I have a car with me. I will be in Dublin by morning, and will go to Tom Clarke's first thing.’
Murphy nodded. ‘Good lad.’ And to John Joe, ‘Send a telegraph.’ He dug in his pocket for the fee, handing it over to John Joe, who went out immediately.
Something pricked at Paddy's consciousness. There were far too many men here for this simple transaction, and the tension was too great. Something was afoot. ‘May I ask you something, sir?’ He enquired to Murphy. Murphy nodded impassively. ‘Why is the visitor coming?’

The tension in the room erupted like an earthquake although not a single man made a sound. He could feel the hearts racing, smell the sweat suddenly pouring. Oh, something was up, indeed! Murphy gazed at him steadily for a moment, and as their eyes met, Paddy no longer saw an infirm old man, but the young, hale, noble captain he had been, his hair thick and black then, on the packet boat to England six months before the Manchester campaign, every nerve alive to the hopes of what they would accomplish by capturing the Government's attention in this way. What moved that otherwise peaceable man to consent to such an act, but the spirit of freedom. He knew it now. Holy Mother of God, they wanted to stage a rising. Devoy wanted to pay for guns. He knew it.... Murphy was smiling gently, just smiling.
‘I can see that you know why, lad,’ he said into the long silence. ‘Are you for it?’
Paddy could hardly speak. ‘Aye sir,’ he managed through his constricted throat. ‘I'm for it.’

He drove through the long night to Dublin, after brief explanations to his family. He would not lie to them, but told them he had been called back to meet someone and that it was impossible that he do otherwise. Shay and Rose bid him Godspeed from the door, expressing again their regret that his holiday had been cut short. It was yet full daylight as he drove away, though it was nearly ten o'clock. It would not be dark at this time of year until almost midnight. He took the Tipp road north, through Mitchelstown, beside the Galtee Mountains, Thurles, and Roscrea until finally he came to Laois and Kildare, and then went up to Dublin by Naas. He drove past Kilmainham Jail at half--two in the morning, parked the car in Nassau Street by three and was abed in his flat in Anne Street above the booksellers by four. By nine o'clock in the morning, he had breakfasted at Bewley's and taken the tram from College Green across the Liffey, down the long stretch of O'Connell Street to Tom Clarke's tobacco shop in Parnell Square, to all intents to buy cigarettes.

‘You're abroad early,’ Tom said cheerfully to him as he stepped in the door. Clarke's wife Kate was busy nearby writing up the ledger.
‘Yes.’
‘I have that shipment in you ordered,’ Tom said, as a matter of form, though there was no--one present but Kate. ‘Come,’ he said, lifting the side of the green baize curtain that led into the back rooms, ‘I'll unwrap it for you.’

Old Tom Clarke was the mildest of men. A more upright man you could not hope to find, and it would hardly be guessed by his mild exterior that within beat the heart of a rebel, an enemy of the Government. Of middle height, a wiry man with a balding head and large pale eyes made larger by glasses, he was not the poster--boy picture of a former Fenian rebel. Yet he had been one of the Manchester men, endured starvation, torture, and years of solitary confinement as a result of that activity. He was literally--minded, practical, not given to romanticism or high--flown rhetoric, so that when he had once said that he would as gladly have died for Ireland in Portland Jail, but would be happy again to go out for her should the occasion arise, the words had impact; he knew better than any what they meant and what they cost. Such words made unsentimental men wonder if, so tested, their mettle would be proved as true.
‘You will have heard,’ Tom said as he took down four packets of cigarettes from an upper shelf, ‘that it is John Devoy himself who is coming.’
‘I have.’
‘He is coming this fortnight, stopping to visit his people in Monaghan first. You are to meet him at the tea tent at the Portmarnock Races at half--two in the afternoon and bring him to Griffith, who has lodgings for him. You understand?’
‘Yes sir.’ This would only be said once, all information committed to memory, never to leave the room. He knew well that he had not received all the information on Devoy's visit, only that which pertained to him. ‘If you please...?’

Clarke looked up from wrapping the cigarettes at the small table that stood in the middle of the crowded, neat, dark storeroom.
‘Might I ask why I was chosen for this venture? There are a dozen others I can think of who could have the use of a motor, use my motor if needs be, to ferry Devoy from the races. I hope you know I'm not asking out of false modesty.’
Clarke smiled, handing him the packets of cigarettes, neatly wrapped and tied up with string. The pale eyes behind his glasses were merry. ‘Didn't they tell you?’ He asked with an elfin grin. ‘Your uncle is with him in his train.’

He went home that night to his parents' house in Hanbury Lane. He walked the distance, up Dame street and past City Hall and Dublin Castle to where to street narrowed past Christ Church in the High Street and the tenements began in earnest. Rotting buildings whose continuance in existence was a sin of omission by the Dublin Corporation, housing thousands of families crowding into one or two rooms or worse, for families had been known to inhabit the halls of these once grand houses of the 18th century; they had no indoor plumbing, often no heat or kitchen facilities, and were by consequence breeding grounds for tuberculosis and various other plagues of the extreme poor. The infant mortality rate here was a scandal even by comparison to the rest of Dublin, let alone the rest of the country or the Empire. And while there were no whorehouses here as up in the Monto, there were plenty of streetwalkers, poor dispirited drabs, even as the old song went,

‘I wandered by Thomas street down to the Liffey,
the sunlight was gone and the evening grew dark.
It was down by King's Church and by God, in a jiffy
my arm was around her beyond in the Park....’

He knew enough about that; his very first experience with a girl here had been with such a person, a pretty young dark--haired thing with a fine complexion who let him feel her up in the back alleys after dark for sixpence. It was the beginning of a fascination. He was lucky that he hadn't managed to catch a VD; going down the kips was a common enough pastime at Trinity, and he had been no saint.

In Thomas Street he met a group of boys about eight or ten years old playing stickball with a grey homemade ball of some unidentifiable sticky stuff. The repulsive ball came his way and he picked it up and threw it back to them. They crowded round him.
‘Hey, mister--’
‘Thanks, mister--’
‘Ya play ball, mister--?’
‘Ya have penny, mister--?’
He dug in his pocket and scooped out all the change he had, giving it to the eldest boy, a tall, brown--haired fellow with a cowlick, saying, ‘Share it 'round, so,’ and walked on. Down Meath Street then, and the smell of the brewery fierce in the air, turning into grim and dreary Hanbury Lane, and Guinness' yard just beyond. Two of his brothers---- both Ernie and Rory ---- worked there, as draymen, but Da still had his indoor job with Jacobs'.

However cramped and inadequate the parents' house, at least it was not a tenement. It was better than some had. He knocked at the door and walked in. Da and Rory were sitting at the table in the parlour, which the street door opened immediately into. Down the narrow passage was the back room -- now the kitchen -- where he could hear his mother and sisters at the washing up. Danny was probably upstairs or out with the lads at this hour. They were astonished to see him.
‘Padge!’
‘What're you doing here, we thought ye was at home!’
He came into the room properly, closing the door and taking off his hat, which he laid on the table.
‘Rory, go tell your ma that Paddy's back!’ Dan said, poking him. Rory went, skirting the table, and sprinted off down the hall, aware that something was up. He was a short, dark slender young man two years younger than Paddy, wiry and athletic, an excellent boxer, for which he sometimes earned a bit of money, though Mammy didn't like it.
‘I had a telegraph that Patch was expected, so I came home,’ Paddy said to his father as he settled into a straight chair, stretching out his legs before him. But Dan was not so innocent as that.

‘Aye we had a letter from him, the first in a long while. Ernie fetched it from the GPO,’ he said lightly, then squinted at his son. ‘But why should that be concerning you, that you should interrupt your holiday?’
‘Business,’ Paddy said shortly, as Rory came back with Mammy and Cate. He rose and kissed his mother. ‘Hello, Mammy. Rose sends her love,’ he murmured. Rose Halloran was his mother's sister.
‘She's well, so?’ Catherine nodded.
‘Aye.’ His sister Mo came in from the back, wiping her hands on a towel.
‘You heard that Patch is coming home?’ His mother asked.
Paddy went to sit down again. ‘Yes, Mammy. That's why I'm here.’ Dan and Rory looked at him cautiously. But he would not say anything before his mother or the girls.

‘Mo, fetch the letter,’ Da said, and Maureen went out again, up the narrow stairs to the garret rooms above. They all sat down and in a moment Mo was back with the letter in hand which she gave to Da, who opened it and read it out. It had probably been read out thus for all the neighbours at least half a dozen times since its arrival. As Da began to read, Paddy reached for the envelope and read the postmark. It had been sent nearly a fortnight ago, that its arrival might coincide with the notification of the Brotherhood.

‘Dear Danny, Trina, and all --’ Da read, ‘I hope it will be a pleasant surprise to hear that I am at last coming home for a visit. This is thanks to a bit of business --’ Dan glanced up briefly at Paddy here, ‘that will take me to Dublin and Belfast in the early part of August. I am travelling with a couple of the Ancient Order of Hibernians men who are investors in the venture, and will be having accommodation of them, so there's no need to fret yourselves on that score. But I look forward to seeing you all very soon. I swore I would never set foot in the country again, but I admit that it will be good to be home. Trina, I miss your tripe and bacon.
‘Elizabeth sends her regards. She is in good health, and the boys are both well. John is now established in his own practice in Manhattan. It is small, but it is a good start for him. Roger is still with the Post Office, and Nancy is to make me a grandfather before I return. Quite a change from when I left, eh? You won't recognise the old man.
‘Warm regards to all -- Your brother Patrick.’

It was an unctous letter, full of bluff good humour, reminding them forcibly that the Kerry lad who left was now an American businessman. But it struck Paddy as a false sort of cheer, even had he not known that Patch was coming for reasons other than those stated, and he suspected that he wasn't the only one to have noticed. Rory was looking at him sharply from under his eyebrows where he sat the edge of a chair on the opposite side of the table.
‘We'll have to have him for tea at the DBC, he'll like that,’ Paddy said suddenly, to cover his unease. Mo worked there as a waitress in the afternoons.
‘Yes, the DBC,’ Catherine said, clasping her hands. ‘Oh, but it will be very strange to have him home. I suppose he talks American now -- he writes like a gent. Oh, Padge, you'd do best to show him around, take him out to Kingstown and such! I wouldn't want him to be shamed to be seen with us.’
‘Mammy --’ Paddy began, appalled to hear such words from his mother's lips.
‘Ma, if he thinks that way, we want none of him,’ Rory exclaimed.
‘Aha, none of that!’ Dan scowled. ‘You'll not be speaking ill of the brother who's kept us from the Union, Mr. Fancy--boots!’ He reproved. Rory had bought a dandified pair of boots last month when his old Sunday shoes finally wore out too far to be repaired again and had endured much ribbing for it.

‘If he's come to lord it over us, splashing his Yankee money around, he can stay there, if you ask me,’ Rory continued, undaunted. He folded his arms, scowling. ‘We know where he came from even if his rich friends don't.’ He looked at Paddy, who picked up the trick and said to mollify his hot--headed brother,
‘I'm sure his rich friends weren't always so, and maybe even had it worse than he.’ They were terribly close to the verge, judging by the looks of confusion on the faces of the women. Rory was not IRB; his inclinations lay more toward labour agitation. He was not keen on managers or landlords of any stripe.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ Rory acceded.
‘So, Padge,’ Dan said, leaning back in his chair as the women settled themselves with the mending work from the laundry -- Cate and Mammy's contribution to the household fund -- ‘how is it at home, with Rosie and Shay and all the neighbours?’

He told them of his home news, which consisted of this one put a new tin roof on the byre, and that one had a grandchild, the other's auld wan finally passed on, so she's gone to live with the daughter. The tenor of life had changed very little from the time they had left home; a dozen years would not make such a mark. From the time of the Famine until the present day the story had run the same: subsistence farming, an uneasy peace with the land agent which erupted into entrenchment on both sides when the crops were bad, send the younger children to Dublin or America for work, keep the eldest at home on the land and hope you don't end it in the union in Tralee.

There was very little upward movement in society, for there was no incentive or real opportunity; Paddy's case was exceptional. For the most part small tenant farmers remained so, as did the publicans, shopkeepers, and minor professional classes. The tourist trade in Killarney and the Lakes brought some work, but it was highly seasonal, mostly confined to summer hotel and carting jobs; in the winter the town was deserted. The difficulty lay in the fact that they were a people without anchor, hope or direction.

The great famine had all but killed traditional society except in the far mountain fastness where the people had always kept to themselves. Gaelic was in use, but the shanachies and hedge--school masters had died or fled so there was no new poetry being made in the language, and the survival of the remnant of knowledge was contingent upon the memory of local people, whose interests were naturally parochial; they would forget Fionn and Ossian and the Fianna, all the old tales, though they had happened here. Hyde's Gaelic League was but a curiosity for Dubliners; it would have no real effect here. Their vast store of cultural heritage would be reduced --as their lives were reduced -- to a dreary round of folk superstitions suitable only for study by antiquarians on summer holidays. It was happening already. When Paddy was home, the stories round the evening fire were no more the old tales, as they had been in his childhood, but gossip of the day--to--day doings of the small lives of those in their small circle. Their world had shrunk, no matter that they almost daily sent children to America. For him, whose world had grown from that tiny place to encompass not only Europe and the ancient world but the twentieth century, it was heartbreaking.

When he was home these last few weeks, he knew that he was watching the walking dead. They were dead because they had lost their soul. Motorcars, the telegraph, the telephone ---- English society and English values ---- had already made their encroachment in his part of Kerry, and having nothing combat it they would engulf what was once a rich and marvellous heritage. It was where he disagreed with Yeats, who touted the Irish Literary Renaissance as a new birth; Paddy saw it rather as a death--knell, the last bright flowering before it was gone forever.

Such grim thoughts absorbed him as he walked home that evening. With the homecoming of his wayward uncle, the arrival of Devoy, and the faint, glimmering hope of a rising, he wondered just what they thought they were doing. What did it mean to be Irish? There seemed to be as many answers to that as people to ask. He chain--smoked cigarettes as he walked, wandering head--down through the deepening twilight. He could hardly answer that question for himself; it seemed absurd to ask the diversity of the country to forge a national image. Had they been invaded and subject too long and too often to have a truly national character? Epochs were clearer, shifting from one into another from the time of the Gael. But what was the sum total? He refused to believe the English propaganda about them. What did it mean, now and in the future, to be Irish? It was a question he could not answer, which he found profoundly disturbing.

Finding himself in College Green and disinclined to go home, he walked instead up to O'Connell Bridge and stood leaning against the railings looking up the length of the street, arms crossed while the last trams rattled by for the suburbs. The statuary confronted him implacably. Daniel O'Connell at the bottom of the street, Nelson arrogant on his Pillar in front of the GPO, the base for the new Parnell monument far up the top of the street, an image in his mind rather than an actuality. The three of them typified the last two hundred years, the confusion and shortsightedness that had hamstrung the country. O'Connell was a fellow Kerryman, Catholic, his people once landlords. A shoneen in the end. Nelson. There was not much to be said in favour of Nelson. He stood in the middle of the street as a blatant reminder of the garrison to its subject people. Ah, but Parnell! The great hope.

He remembered the funeral of the Chief. All of Dublin had turned out and then some. Small minds of short sight had broken his heart. But once he was dead, they revered his memory with a monument. Ireland had been so often her own worst enemy that they hardly needed the garrison to foster woes.

And now the Yanks wanted to pay for arms for an uprising. Did they even know what they were doing? It was easy for them to say from New York or Boston, ‘freedom!’ They hadn't their fingers on the pulse of the country. Why didn't they let those at home tell them when the time was right, instead of interfering in their brash, Yankee way? Paddy tossed the cigarette he held over his shoulder and into the brown murmuring waters of the Liffey, his unspoken irritation surfacing at last. He had to agree with Rory there; it was too easy for Patch or any Yank to throw money at them to solve the daily problems, never understanding that it wasn't money precisely that they needed. The troubles would go on until they rooted out the causes -- landlordism, the Church, the garrison. Where was the man to take on those behemoths? There was no one, and the hope of the country could not be founded on daydreams of dead heroes or they would be lost. They needed a leader with vision to carry them forward into the twentieth century without losing the best of the past.

He turned and leant his elbows on the balustrade, looking into the river, feeling the tide of frustration rising within him. At home he had been content, happy amid even the smallness of that life so long as he had his books and a bit of coin about him; happy in the slow quiet of that vestige of traditional life, for there was rootedness in it. There he could look on hills unchanged in a thousand years and know who he was and how he belonged, but here... Here he parcelled himself out like an old farm -- a bit here, a bit there, never whole. Here he felt the push of modern times, the push that would propel this country out of its state of arrest, whether it was prepared or not.

A Dia! He ran a hand through his hair. He wanted freedom more than anything else in his life, freedom from the landlordism that bound them to a feudal existence, and he was willing to die for Ireland’s freedom, but what if it made them merely some strange sort of Englishmen, like the Scots or the Welsh?

It had been his idea, since his own undergraduate days, to formulate a group of the brightest young men and women, literary and scientific types, to push beyond the boundaries of the so--called literary renaissance, to propel Ireland into the 20th century, into the European community, to make her a modern nation. It was to this end that he trained his young people, encouraged the avante guard, and explored every avenue, via their chats, of possibilities for the country. If this one or that were interested in Dostoyevsky, canals, or suffragism, he would push them to the limits of their thinking on the topic just to watch the mental fireworks. And then, the inescapable question: how does this apply to us?

Some of his disciples had quite remarkable ideas, the bulk of them leaning towards engineering or industry, socialised medicine and welfare programmes, and stark, realistic literature quite at variance with the misty thrall of the Celtic Twilight. This hard--edged realism of theirs in such matters was not matched by their experience of life; it was all theory. They were, almost exclusively, idealistic, religious, and conscientious. Most of them had never been out of the country, even to England. He at least had been to London a few times, in the course of IRB work. This, this parochialism was what had to go, and he would do his part to see that it did, that the young people of Ireland who came under his sway were made citizens of the world. But, having achieved that, what then? How were they to hammer out an Irish identity that was not mired in the past? Where was it all to come from? What if they failed? What if it made them merely some strange sort of Englishmen, like the Scots or the Welsh? There was no answer forthcoming from Anna Livia, so he walked back to his flat in Anne Street, discontented.

He spent his time the next week trawling the bookstalls of his favourite shops, working on his lecture notes for the fall term, reading in Stephen's Green or Bewley's, and visiting friends. He met with Tom MacDonagh at a meeting of the Gaelic League. Tom was a Lecturer at UCD in English, and IRB as well. Being in public, they did not discuss what had drawn Paddy back to Dublin, but conferred on their reading lists for the coming term. They were both teaching Mallory that fall and wondered to each other jocularly choosing to expound on the life and death of a Celtic king fighting the Saxon hordes. A small, dark but pugnacious man of fantastic energy, Tom was brilliantly insightful, with a deep poetic understanding of symbolism both in life and art. He was a breath of air, and one of the real friends that Paddy had who knew all the facets of his life. They had met five years before, when Tom had joined the GL. Not long after they had been friendly rivals for the same position at UCD, which Tom aced because he was an alumnus. They parted cheerfully in the Gaelic League’s rooms in Nassau Street, knowing they would meet again the next evening at Tom Clarke's.

In contrast to this was his courtesy visit to the Mahaffys. It was the sherry hour when he arrived at the black iron gates that surrounded the Vice--Provost's house in North Great George's Street. He had plans to attend the concert at the Rotunda later, so was dressed in a dark serge suit rather than casual summer linens. The maid in her rustling black and starched organdie frills let him in the portal of the ivy--covered Georgian brick house, bobbing a curtsey. She was used to him here from his student days and the formality was as stiff as her apron. There must be posh visitors in the parlour for her to be so correct.
‘Good evenin' Mr. Leary,’ she said.
‘Quit that, girl,’ he said to her in an undertone as he gave her his hat. ‘Or I'll tell your brother you're a spy.’ He smiled. Her brother John Connaught was a man in his cell in the Brotherhood.

He sauntered past her, down the hall beside the dining--room door and the stairs to the left to the sun--filled parlour at the back of the house where Mahaffy and his wife Frances and half--a--dozen others sat or stood drinking and chatting decorously. Mrs. Mahaffy approached him immediately. She was moderately tall, brown--haired and slender, very warm and sympathetic, perfectly suited to her role in life as a don's wife. She had made his student days when Mahaffy was his master much easier by her kindliness, for J.P. could be bitingly sarcastic, if subtle, in his scorn -- a habit which, he was told in the tutor's lounge, Paddy had picked up. ‘You have 'the Provost's boy' written all over you,’ Dan Oliver had said. It had taken all of Paddy's restraint not to bloody his nose.
‘Pat, my dear boy, how good to see you! We thought you were on your angling holiday in the wild west. John,’ she said to her husband, ‘look who's turned up!’ She turned to him again. ‘Oh, have a drink, won't you? I think you know everyone here...’ He took a seltzer from the tray Mary Connaught offered him.

Mahaffy left off his conversation with Tyrrell and Wilkins, members of the board of Regents, in the corner of the room by the French doors to wave him over genially. ‘Come come,’ he said in vulgar Latin, ‘the soldier home from the provinces!’ Switching to English, he continued, ‘how are you, dear boy? Tyrrell, didn't I tell you he'd grow weary of fish and rustication ere long?’ He clapped Paddy on the arm. ‘Good to have you back! You will stay to dinner of course.’
‘No, thank you sir, ‘ Paddy said, nodding in thanks. ‘I have a ticket to the Rotunda concert this evening.’
‘God knows, the outpost of civilisation!’ Tyrrell complained good--naturedly. ‘Eh! I saw your article on the use of colour in symbolist poetry, Pat. It was very good!’ This was an essay he had written for the school rag before the end of term. He had intended it as an introduction for first--year students to his lectures, as most of the Entrance examinees whose essays he had read were dead ignorant literalists without a scrap of poetry in their souls.
‘Thank you.’ Paddy took a drink of the seltzer. ‘I hope it will spare me tedium at the beginning of term.’
‘Don't count on it,’ Tyrrell murmured darkly. ‘Mundanity is ubiquitous. Which is why I refuse to teach first--years any more. I'd rather wait until they've some sense knocked into them. Eh?’ Tyrrell drank his scotch and squinted at him.
‘I enjoy watching their minds blossom,’ Paddy conceded, ‘so long as they come with a genuine interest in the subject. It's the vacant minds I object to. If they have no interest in literature, they should be studying physiology or something else useful.’
‘I had always thought the trouble sprang from their studying physiognomy,’ said Wilkins, who was the head of the Philosophy department. ‘The whole curriculum has been damned complicated since the induction of lady students.’ He was a bachelor who preferred pure study to the tangle of human relationships.

Paddy glanced at Mahaffy, who visibly suppressed a smile.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I agree that the presence of lady students has affected the application levels in my tutorials. Concentration has been reduced.’
‘And for the undergraduates as well,’ Mahaffy smiled openly now. ‘I always said that those in the liberal arts should marry. It improves the understanding immeasurably. You have not taken sights on any prospects that way this summer?’
Paddy grinned. J.P. had been very kind in his quietening of an unfortunate episode with a lady student in his undergraduate days. Her parents had threatened to press charges, but Mahaffy mollified them, saying to Paddy privately, ‘I won't lose my best student to the altar and an office. Damned saucy girl, anyway....’
‘No, sir. Although the summer is not over yet.’
‘Oh to be a young man again!’ Tyrrell sighed in mock--nostalgia. ‘For the rush of the spring tide and summer's bounty.... It's the work of the harvest that puts one off it, eh what?’
Wilkins looked sour.
‘Oh really, old man, do try to have a sense of humour, we're not all desiccated!’ Tyrrell exclaimed.
‘No,’ Wilkins retorted, scowling. ‘Some are Greek through and through.’
‘Touché,’ Mahaffy murmured, smiling silkily, for Tyrrell was the head of Greek Studies, unmarried, and irritable. The accusation of his being confirmed bachelor was waspishly amusing, coming from Wilkins, about whom there had been rumours in years long since.

Paddy left the Mahaffys' after an hour, striding in jaunty good humour up the distance to Parnell Square. At the Rotunda he mounted the stairs to the Ancient Concert Rooms on the top floor, whose walls were painted a wonderfully soothing shade of seafoam green edged in gilt rococo splendour. The skylights of the rotunda greeted his view encrusted in garlands and cherubs. The rooms were lit with soft--shaded electric lamps and thickly carpeted, soothing to the senses. He was late, which meant that there were no seats left, so took a programme from the usher and stood against the west wall about half--way down, in hopes that seats would clear at the interval as they sometimes did. He wished he had stayed out to smoke a cigarette beforehand, and fiddled agitatedly with the programme, finally opening it to read the concert notes.

A string quartet, a harper, a piano soloist. Baroque, classical, German and Italian, with a few Irish pieces, mostly Moore. Standard fare. The quartet was somnolent. Leaning with arms crossed against the wall, he found himself fighting to stay awake and longing for the interval. When it came, after a blessed hour, he went out into the balmy night for a smoke and considered walking up to the Abbey, though he had seen the current offering twice before. No, if he did that he might as well go home or to Bewley's. No. No, better to go back and make the best of it. There was no point in wasting the money; he would get on the subscriber's list, so to have advance warning of what to avoid.

He went back inside and found a seat at the far end nearby to where he had been standing. The harper was better, and his mood improved as he gazed into the middle distance above the dais, listening to the rendition of Pucini and Boccherini under the sensitive fingers. Technically brilliant, with some actual feeling for the music, the harper -- a middle-aged blonde woman of large girth in a pale blue dress-- was a pleasant antidote to the deadly string ensemble previous. He did not play himself, but nevertheless understood that there was more to music than the mere execution of notes, and was affronted by half--hearted offerings.

The next on the programme was the piano soloist. He was busy searching the text notes for the subscription rates, so did not look up until polite applause heralded her appearance, for it was a woman, a Northerner by the name, MacLenaghan. When he did, he started involuntarily and the programme fluttered from his nerveless fingers into his lap.

He felt as if he'd touched a live wire. His pulse danced and his attention was riveted. His heart hammered suddenly and the blood roared in his ears. The room dimmed before his vision and he had to grip the arms of the chair to get hold of himself.

It was not simply that the girl before him was beautiful, although she was: very young, very tall and thin, with black hair and grey eyes in a narrow face, one of the Danaan tribe sprung to life; it was a quality about her that struck him so profoundly. A mythic elusiveness attached to that otherworldly beauty, as if her soul were held reserved from the prying eyes of common folk. She walked regally, in an evening dress of violet gossamer, narrow and fashionable.

But she walked.... she walks in beauty like the night.… He shook his head. His mind was whirling with half--formed images and snatches of verse and he could not think straight. In her eyes all the fantasies of her fashion/Show her sad stupor, her sensuality…you are an autumnal sky the spirit knows!… Oh, it may come, the time of love/the time we’d be enamoured of…It is recovered! What? Eternity/It is the sea mixed with the sun… Thus ye live on high, and then on earth ye live again…

He leant back in the chair as she began to play the piece by Chopin, disoriented. What was happening to him? He was shaking, running chills, then began to feel leaden, heavy, as if he could sink into the floor. His shifting consciousness halted suddenly, riveting on the image of the girl before him at the piano, everything else shadowed, unreal. He felt violently ill and wanted to leave but could not summon the strength to stand. He leaned forward again in the chair, his hands on his knees, feeling sick but transfixed. In a cold sweat he watched her play, his heart racing, becoming absorbed by the music, by the strange power emanating from her. He could feel what she felt as she played though he could not see her face except in profile. The sense of merging was very strong, and he was assailed by a tremendous feeling of sorrow, as if the weight of the ages had descended upon him. It was hers.

She was playing Beethoven now, a deep, heavy piece -- the Moonlight Sonata. Why would a girl like that be so aggrieved? He was assailed by dark fleeting images of Gothic terror and splendour, punctuated by green fields, sunshine, running horses, a laughing girl; all were jumbled and sickening. The lightness brought no relief, the darkness no denouement and he felt trapped in a nightmare. It was beyond anything in his experience, for while his life had been difficult, the hardships had been real, material, lacking anything of this nightmare quality. He was not given to fantasies, or even bad dreams. It was as if he had stepped into a dark, occult poem or painting. But as much as he tried to tell himself that it was not real, a delusion brought on by something bad eaten at the Mahaffys’, he couldn’t shake free of the nausea, the compulsion, or the bizarre images that assaulted his mind’s eye.

She played another Chopin piece, and Liszt. Passionate, soaring music. She was beyond them all, enrapt in a world of feeling that flowed out from her fingers through the keys and into the room, encompassing them all like a high tide. Paddy’s pulse throbbed with deep crimson imagery, a desire that went beyond desire. She would be magnificent as a lover, elemental. She was elemental, in her passion and her sorrow and her unearthly beauty. He loved possessing women, but this one possessed him, wholly and unutterably, without so much as a glance.

He picked up the programme again, searching for her name and history. Mary. Mary MacLenaghan. Innocuous enough. No history. But a girl that young would not be married. She could not be twenty. He looked up just when she turned her head towards the room and the raw and vivid passion in her face -- unseeing of the room itself -- brought him up and he was stricken again with that violent cold shuddering.

He could not stand when she ended the piece to more than polite applause. He was drained, exhausted. He could only watch her bow decorously and sit again to play a brief Irish medley of old traditional airs: The Derry Air, Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms, and Dark Rosaleen.

That is what she was. The Dark Rosaleen. Striding regally in her royal mourning, young and old at once, composed of passion, fitful joy, and sorrow. The flash of identification was as stunning as her advent, and he told himself that he was mad, that people did not literally embody an archetype, especially young Northern girls. He told himself that his imagination had run away with him. But it was no good. As she rose again from the bench for the last time, he could not deny that something had happened, even if he had no understanding of what it was.

The room was crowded with departing concert--goers, and by the time he came to the dais, she was gone. He searched, he asked an usher, but she was gone. The next day he enquired at the offices but could gain no information about her other than that last night was the third time she had performed there. He put up the phone with regret, and shuddered.