Give Us This Day (49 page)

She made the most of these few intimate hours, taking her cue, unconsciously perhaps, from her sister Joanna and after, at her gentle prompting, they had made love, she would talk to him about her adventures beyond the seas, native customs, her happy-go-lucky girlhood under the tolerant Adam at Tryst, all manner of things that were unlikely, she would have thought, to interest a man whose outward life was dedicated to a fiery crusade. It was impossible, however, after rubbing shoulders with so many fervent converts, to avoid mild infection of the fever, and Helen perforce absorbed some of the legends of Ireland’s frenzied obsession with the English quarrel. As to forming some conclusions as to how that quarrel should be resolved she soon abandoned that pursuit, for everyone in Rory’s circle had an individual solution and she lost herself in the maze of theory and practice they debated one with the other. Alone among their visitors, the more mature of the Irish M.P.s seemed bent on maintaining their political alliance with the British Liberal Party and thus obtaining for Ireland a measure of Home Rule. For the rest, methods of ending Ireland’s servitude depended on a wide range of offensive measures, all the way from the setting up of an unofficial parliament and refusing to pay taxes, to plots to kidnap ministers of the Crown and hold them to ransom.

In the quiet hours, when he was lying in her arms, she would sometimes coax him to discuss his own theories, but he did not seem to have any beyond a vaguely defined dream of becoming the first president of an Irish Republic. He saw this a kind of latter-day Eden from which poverty and injustice had been banished, where everybody talked Gaelic and national business was confined to celebrations and the exchange of mutual congratulations.

She would think, in moments such as these, of the tremendous gulf existing between men like her father, her brother George, and even her brother-in-law, Clint, whose energies centred on money-making, and this charming boy, besotted by his own extravagant dreams and so steeped in the legends of Irish greatness (past and potential but never, she noticed, affiliated to the present) that noble orations replaced ideas and poetry, laced with pathos and humour, the writ of government.

Listening to him, the age gap between them widened from five years to fifty, so that he seemed no more than a child, endowed with a rich and colourful imagination fed by tales of giants, dwarfs, magicians, knights, and the distressed damsel that was Ireland awaiting deliverance from the fire-breathing dragon across the sea. And yet, coming to know the Irish, she understood very well why they responded to his speeches and pamphlets, and why they identified him as a champion in Westminster.

His voice, musical and infinitely persuasive, had something to do with it, and his boyish good looks, too, with soft brown hair falling over a Byronic forehead and eyes that were always full of laughter, even when he was launched upon one of his tirades against centuries of English oppression. It made her wonder, sometimes, why he had singled her out from all the pretty girls of his constituency. She did not find a satisfactory answer until, one night, she put the question directly to him, expecting one of his prolix or jocular replies, but getting, instead, an answer as close to the truth as she was ever likely to get. He said, “Because you’re real. Because you’ve suffered and survived and that’s rare, much rarer than you realise. For what happened to you wasn’t something out of a book or a ballad. You experienced it, horror—bloodshed, the rattle of gunfire in your ears and the fear of death in your heart. I
live
these things, but at a remove. How can I be sure I would show your kind of steadfastness if it happened? Knowing you, holding you, makes me believe I might.”

“But does it
have
to happen, Rory? I mean, do your people expect to have to battle your way to independence, the way the whites fought to survive out there in China?”

“It’s in the cards, Helen. We’ll never get real independence without a fight. Oh, the real radicals, like your brother Giles, believe we should and will, but I know otherwise. How do I know? I feel it, here and here,” and he tapped his heart and belly. And then he sat up and looked down at her in the early morning half-light, and she noticed there was no laughter in the eyes and that he was wearing what she called his “climax-of-oration expression” as he said, “
When
that happens,
if
it happens, will you be with me or against me?”

“I’m your wife, Rory. Why do you ask me a question like that?”

“Because you’re English and your folks are English, and think like the English.”

“How do the English think?”

“Arrogantly, overbearingly, and inflexibly.”

“Could any people be more inflexible than the Irish?”

“Concerning their right to govern themselves? No, they couldn’t. But the English take it as their God-given right to govern everybody.”

“Yet you married an Englishwoman, Rory.”

“I fell in love with one and that’s my good fortune right now. But if it ever became a choice I’d turn my back on you, Helen.”

The laughter had come back into his eyes as he said this, and he capped it by kissing her and running his fingers through her hair, so that she dismissed it as banter at the time. She was to remember it, however, when they returned to Crumlin for the summer recess, and the tone of his house parties changed so abruptly that it seemed to her someone had turned out the lights on all that gaiety, bubble-talk, and vainglory at the London soirees.

The hangers-on dropped out of sight, along with the sportive ladies, the balladmakers, and the foreign elements, leaving only a hard core of ex-Fenians and poets, some of the former coarse, unsmiling men, heavy drinkers who never got drunk and some younger men who were teachers and journalists, with the ascetic bearing of young priests obsessed with the sins of the world. And these were quite unlike Rory in that they listened more than they talked. The social climate of Dublin was changing, too, she noticed, and certain people—among them the older, more sober element among the Irish members at Westminster— were seldom seen at functions where only the previous season they and their wives had played leading roles.

She asked Rory about it when he was on the point of leaving to attend a meeting in the city one fine summer evening, and he told her briefly that the party had undergone a severe shake-up and some of the moderates, who still trusted in the promises of the English radicals, had refused to enlist under the banner of Sinn Fein. It was the first time she had ever heard the phrase and she asked him what it meant. “The nearest translation is ‘ourselves alone’,” he said, and told her the story of the Irish servant who, sent to a fair to sell a horse, was absent several days and returned in a happy frame of mind, replying to every question about his absence and the money by repeating, over and over again, “Sinn fein, sinn fein.”

“But what’s the difference between a member of the Sinn Fein movement and a dedicated Irish Home Ruler?” she demanded. “You’re all after the same thing, aren’t you?”

“Not quite the same, my dear. And certainly not by the same road when it comes to the crunch. Some of us won’t settle for Home Rule as they want it on the Statute Book, with limitations of one sort or another, and most of us are near done with talk. We’ve been talking, off and on, since ‘ninety-eight—a hundred and seven years of talk! What Sinn Fein means to get is an independent republic, entirely separated from Britain.”

“I take it you already belong?”

“My love,” he said, “I’m a founding member.”

She heard herself say, without consciously framing the words, “Is it an exclusively male society, Rory? Are any women enlisted?” and he cocked his head, giving her a humorously searching glance.

“I’d sooner have you with me than against me. Or neutral.”

“But I couldn’t be neutral, could I?”

“No, my love. Not if those people up north try and block Home Rule and it comes to a fight. No, you couldn’t be neutral.”

“Then I want you to know I wouldn’t care to be, Rory. I was too long finding happiness to risk playing the fool with it.”

The statement seemed to release some inner tension in him and he threw his arms round her, ignoring the presence of the coachman, who stood awaiting him on the steps just out of earshot. He kissed her twice on the mouth and stalked out, swinging his suede gloves in that characteristically jaunty manner of his and whistling a bar or two of one of Tom Moore’s airs. She stood watching the gig bowl away down the incline of the drive, feeling at once disturbed and released, the way she sometimes felt after he had made love to her. Then, very thoughtfully, she turned back into the house and closed the door.

3

There were establishments less than a hundred miles to the east, on the other side of the Irish Sea, where lords and masters were not disposed to show as much confidence in wives and daughters. Social bastions of one sort or another had been under attack ever since Adam Swann sent his first waggons rolling, and in almost every sphere cracks were showing in the facade of mid-nineteenth-century felicity. One such bastion, however, resisted every attack, the determination of its male garrison hardening with the fury of each successive assault. Unrepentant reactionary or avowed radical, Philistine or enlightened, the inheritors of the tradition of male supremacy closed their ranks against any disposition on the part of their helpmeets to challenge the tribal doctrine in the chambers of the legislature, for here, it was sensed, was the citadel of paternalism. In the home, still so occasional as to be all but unnoticeable, random burrs had stuck in the hedge of Victorian whiskers. A few privileged women, with private means or impressive reserves of stamina and resource, had secured for themselves a good education, and a handful of women doctors, still regarded as oddities, had won the right to practise. Most other professions remained closed to them and even in the fields of commerce, where their services could be secured for pennies, they were mostly confined to repetitive tasks, requiring no particular skills or training. Yet even these trifling advances were regarded, by men as a whole, as straws in the wind promising a gale of frightful proportions if the vents were opened another half-inch. The doctors might waver. The educationalists might preen themselves on a mild display of tolerance. The city gents, with one eye on profit margins, might yield a little here and there. But in the ranks of the lawgivers there was no sign of weakening, if one discounted the lonely voice of the Socialist Keir Hardie (he who had arrived at Westminster a few years ago wearing a cloth cap as the badge of egality) who had astounded the legislators by proposing that the franchise should be extended to women.

It was as far as he got. The parties might hurl challenges and insults at one another on the future of Ireland, on the importation of Chinese indentured labour into South Africa, on workmen’s compensation acts, indeed upon any other topic aired, at regular intervals, beside the indifferent Thames. On this one thing there was solidarity. A woman, no doubt, was capable of rising to impressive heights as an individual. One could not entirely discount Boadicea, Nell Gwyn, Grace Darling, Florence Nightingale, and, of course, the dead Queen, now reunited with Albert at Frogmore. But no man in or out of his cups could advance the proposition that women, as a sex, possessed the wits to make an unprejudiced decision at the polling booth. They were not intended by nature to shoulder such a responsibility, and that, praise God and John Knox, was that! A few recalcitrants might deem themselves so endowed, might even venture to point out that a woman doctor with an Edinburgh degree was capable of exercising the same degree of judgment at the hustings as, say, an illiterate stonebreaker with ten pints of ballotbox beer in his belly, but not even the progressive Mr. Asquith would endorse such a heresy. However, King Teddy himself, an experienced judge of woman’s capabilities, would have smiled on the proposition and switched the conversation to the season’s prospects at Ascot.

All this being so, it was predictable, when one such harpy founded a crackpot pressure group known as the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903, and opened her campaign of militancy aimed at securing women’s suffrage, that a growl of anger rose from bearded lips in Highland croft and South Country mansion, followed by a smart redressing of male ranks in every city, town, and hamlet of the nation. For this, they seemed to be saying to one another in suburban railway carriages, in horse and motor omnibus, at factory bench and behind a thousand counters—this was the first rumblings of a servile war and would be ignored at the peril of men in possession. This was an issue that cut clear across lines of party, church, and rival schools of philosophy, and must be attended to with the despatch of a three-decker captain hearing murmurs of mutiny in the forecastle. The spark must be extinguished, preferably by persuasion, but, if this failed, by the majesty of the law. If it were not, who could tell where it might end, and how long it would be before a man came home to find his dinner congealing on the kitchen stove and his slippers unwarmed, while his wife drew up a Bill of Rights in the front parlour? It was something too grotesque to be contemplated by anyone who used a razor. It had about it a horrid abnormality, like a black man commanding white troops in action, or the birth of a child with two heads capable of disputing one with the other, and contempt for those who propagated such a proposition was not enough. In the face of further defiance on the part of Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst and her handsome daughters, the law must act and the doors of Holloway open, offering the missionaries of misrule time to recant, to be forgiven and received back into an ordered society.

* * *

This view, crystallised in many a leading article, and expressed in terms of the ironic or the outraged on many a political platform during the period leading up to the radical landslide of 1906, had little effect upon the handful of militants grouped under their W.S.P.U. banner. Indeed, it was soon clear that the vanguard of the movement—“suffragettes” as they were dubbed by some playful male journalist—had hit upon a means of self-advertisement that would have doubled the turnover of businessmen following a trail blazed by the vendors of Bryant and May Matches, Pears’ Soap, or Mazawattee Tea.