The Rebels of Ireland (126 page)

As he grew older, Father Brendan MacGowan did not curtail his many kindly visits around the city. But he became a better navigator. As he came westwards along Mary Street, therefore, he kept his plump back turned at a slight angle to the east wind, so that it should gently propel him along without pushing him off balance. He was moving along nicely at a couple of knots or more when he caught sight of Willy O'Byrne coming towards him. Willy was accompanied by a young woman. At the sight of the young man, the priest frowned.

He wasn't sure what he felt about Willy. He'd been glad, of course, to have started him upon his way. And Sheridan Smith seemed perfectly happy with him. Young Willy had his own territory now; he brought in advertising rather successfully. People seemed to like him. He'd got his own lodgings nowadays, up near Mountjoy Square, Father Brendan had heard. No harm in all that. Nor did the priest mind that Willy spent so much time in the book
shop of his anticlerical brother. Willy probably didn't know that he knew all about these activities. He hoped it hadn't turned the young man against his faith, but in his own experience, even when people did turn away from the Church, it only took some small crisis in their lives, often as not, to bring them back.

No, his objection to Willy was altogether more practical and down to earth. It seemed to the kindly priest that he detected signs that Willy was becoming callous.

It had been a single event that had put him on his guard: a story that he had heard from another source. Not long after Willy had moved to his own lodgings, his uncle had died. There had been friction between them while he was still living in his uncle's house, it seemed. Willy had said some things, of a political nature, that his uncle did not like. It may have been this disagreement which encouraged Willy to leave. But there had not been a major split in the family, as far as Father Brendan was aware. Yet when his uncle had died, Willy had not bothered to go to the wake or the funeral. He had not gone to see the family at all. And by all accounts, his aunt had been very hurt.

Some weeks afterwards, meeting Willy one day, he had tackled him about it. Surely, he had suggested, it had not been a very kind thing to do. Willy had not been annoyed, but had appeared puzzled.

“I never really liked him,” he said.

“That may be. But should you not have considered the feelings of your aunt and your cousins?”

“The girls didn't mind. I couldn't see the point of being dishonest, I suppose.” He had shrugged. “He wasn't a very nice man.”

“That is not for you to judge. Can you not see that your action was cruel?”

It had seemed to Father Brendan that, if he did see, and it was inconceivable that he did not, Willy did not greatly care.

He was glad to observe that the young woman accompanying Willy now was one of his aunt's three daughters. Perhaps the young man was making amends. In answer to his greeting, and his general
enquiry as to what they were doing that afternoon, Willy informed him that he had just taken his cousin to see the moving pictures at the little theatre that had recently opened for the purpose.

“It's called the Volta, Father, just behind us. Have you been in there?”

“I haven't,” the priest said. “Was it well attended?”

“Only a few people, besides ourselves. I tried to sell Joyce some advertising, but he couldn't afford it. The business isn't prospering, I'm afraid.”

Father Brendan had heard about the venture. Joyce: Gogarty's protégé. Whatever Oliver St. John Gogarty liked to say, from all the priest had heard, young Joyce had not turned out too well at all. For a start, he'd run off with a servant girl and never married her, so far as he had heard. That was both an immoral and a foolish thing to do. He might have tried for a profession of some kind, perhaps, or at least sought regular employment; but he hadn't the application of Gogarty, who was already well on the way to becoming a surgeon of repute. But Joyce wasn't solid enough. He'd never make his mark. Father Brendan corrected himself. One mustn't judge, of course. God's grace might be bestowed in unseen ways. The fellow had gone off to the continent anyway; been living in Trieste, for reasons unknown. And now he'd come back to Dublin to open a movie theatre in Mary Street. Backed by some investors from Trieste, apparently. Though what the men from Trieste would know about the appetite of Dubliners for moving pictures, the priest couldn't guess. He'd noticed the young man's tall, slim figure lounging by the entrance of the place, looking disconsolate, but had not chosen to speak with him.

“They say it's catching on everywhere,” Willy said. “But not in Dublin. Not yet, anyway. I think Joyce is too early with it myself.”

“No doubt,” said Father MacGowan. “Well, I've a lady to see in the Rotunda Hospital, so I must be going along.”

“He thinks me cruel,” said Willy, after the priest had gone.

“You are not always kind,” his cousin Rita replied.

Willy shrugged.

“Besides,” said Rita, “you did not answer the question I asked you before Father MacGowan came along. I don't believe,” she added, “that you care.”

Willy considered. He didn't care, in fact. But he would not say that to Rita. She was the one member of her family with whom he had always got on rather well. And he could see her point.

Why was it, she had asked, that working at Jacobs Biscuit factory, the older men could earn over a pound a week, while she earned less than a third of that? They have families to support, he had answered. It had always been so. Nobody had ever complained before. “We are complaining now,” she had said. Some of the young men—who did better than the women, of course, but still got far less than their seniors for the same work—had been complaining, too. “There's a union now, at least,” Rita had pointed out.

An Irish trade union had been set up recently by James Larkin. The membership was growing rapidly. But whether they would do much for women remained to be seen. “They say that the union favours equality for women. But I should guess,” Willy told her truthfully, “that most of the union men won't be anxious to see women paid the same, any more than the employers would be. You'd need a women's union for that.”

“There isn't one.”

“I know.” He considered. “Are you just complaining, or do you want to do something about these things yourself?”

“I might.”

“It's dangerous.” Employers usually dismissed troublemakers. He waited for her to respond, but as she didn't, he went on. “You know, there are women on the executive of Sinn Fein.”

It had been Arthur Griffith, after starting
The United Irishman
newspaper, who had started the Sinn Fein movement. “Ourselves Alone” the name meant, and his idea was to boycott English goods
wherever it was possible to produce the same in Ireland. “We need economic self-sufficiency,” his supporters declared, “to show Ireland how to stand up for herself as a free and independent nation.” Since then, Sinn Fein had grown into an amalgam of groups dedicated to a general, but nonviolent resistance to England's rule.

“You're in Sinn Fein, aren't you?”

He nodded.

“What made you join?”

“Many reasons. I suppose it was MacGowan the bookseller—he's Father MacGowan's brother, you know—who encouraged me in that direction. It was natural, really. I wanted the English out of Ireland.”

“Well, I might consider it.” She nodded. “Do they also want votes for women?”

“You're turning into a suffragist as well? I didn't know you were such a radical.”

“I never was. But when I started thinking about the wages, then I wondered why women shouldn't vote, as well. The movement is well-developed in England.”

“Leave it alone, Rita. For the present.”

“Why?”

“Two reasons. Firstly, it's better to do one thing at a time. Secondly, we don't want votes for women in Ireland yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because we don't want them coming from the British. That's something that should come from Ireland.”

She considered this.

“I'm not sure you really care about for votes for women, Willy,” she said after a while.

“So you say.”

“But I'll think about Sinn Fein, all the same. Thank you for taking me to the movies.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“Not much. But it was interesting.”

“Well, at least you've seen them while they're here. I don't think Joyce can keep the Volta going much longer. I'll walk you home.”

“Will you come in when we get there?”

“No.”

It was getting late when Father Brendan MacGowan set out from the Rotunda Hospital. His visit had been a success. But as he considered what course to set, he frowned. His best way would be along Parnell Street. It was a busy street. It ran across this part of the city, cutting at an angle, from north-east to south-west across the top of Sackville Street where it met the Rotunda. It was, for Father MacGowan, rather a convenient street. Yet for the last two years, Parnell Street had no longer found favour with the priest, and he had tended to avoid it. He had done so ever since Tom Clarke had opened a tobacconist's shop there.

Father MacGowan didn't like Tom Clarke.

His brother the bookseller had known Clarke, been quite friendly with him, even, years ago in America. That was before Tom Clarke went over to plant bombs in England and got himself thrown in jail. He'd come back to Ireland now.

The long years in an English jail had transformed him physically. Gaunt, with thinning hair, he looked twenty years older than he was. Deceptive. It made him all the more dangerous. Behind his metal-rimmed spectacles there was a cold passion and intensity that the priest did not like at all. The bookseller didn't care for Clarke, either. Their friendship had ended. And his tobacconist's shop had become a meeting place for the Fenians. The IRB: the Irish Republican Brotherhood. God knows what those fellows were plotting. You never knew because they were so secretive you didn't even know who they were. You could probably identify quite a few of them if you watched to see who was hanging around with Tom Clarke in his shop. But Father MacGowan didn't care to know; and he preferred not to pass by the tobacconist's at all. He normally set a different course.

But this evening the wind had veered, and his quickest journey would take him past that dangerous and infernal establishment. And so, like a sailor strapped to the mast to protect himself from the sirens, he prepared to slip past as quick as he could. He drew close, sailed by, and glanced in, just for an instant. The store was small but brightly lit. In the window, also brightly illuminated, was a cardboard figure of a Round Tower, advertising Banba Irish Tobacco. Through the glass of the door, he could see several figures standing in the narrow space in front of the counter, behind which Clarke presided. And as he looked, Father MacGowan uttered a groan.

One of the men standing there was a figure he had seen only a couple of hours before. It was Willy O'Byrne.

 

1916