Supply of heroes, p.11
Supply of Heroes, page 11
Curry felt that when she went into the office he would lose her again. He stopped her. “In the second act she kills herself rather than go off with the king, who killed her lover.”
Jane looked at him blankly.
“She’s a figure for Ireland, don’t you see? That’s why this play is so important. She would rather die than give herself to England.”
Jane shook her head, shocked at this interpretation. “I don’t know the play, but I know the story of Deirdre. Every girl in the west of Ireland knows it. She and her lover fled the king, yes. But Conchubar is based on Conor, king of Ulster, and where they fled was to Scotland. When her lover dies and Conor takes her, she kills herself because she hates life without her lover, even if it’s in Ireland with an Irish king. It has nothing to do with England.”
“You’re being literal. Synge, thank God, was not. Deirdre of the Sorrows is about Ireland’s rejection of England. Believe me, Jane, it is.”
“One rejects England by killing oneself. Some rejection.”
Curry shrugged. “That’s Synge for you. All his plays are about the same thing. First you get free, then you die. But that’s because he was dying when he wrote his plays.”
Jane knew they couldn’t stand in the lobby and continue this. She had to get into the office and meet the ticket seller and learn about her duties. But Curry clearly was going to go on as long as she let him. She was not oblivious of the fact of his attraction to her, nor was she indifferent to it. But she was far from knowing what to do about it. And equally far from knowing how to handle her attraction to him. The man was simply overwhelming.
Having decided that she had to get away from him, she made no move to do so. Instead she said, “What moved me was Deirdre and Naisi. I don’t care about the larger meaning.” Jane said this as if she was admitting something. And to herself she was. If she identified with the mythic figure of Deirdre, it was not in the obvious way—a girl who must for her own reason desert the beloved realm in which she was raised, no matter the consequences. Jane was not a dramatizing girl, but she had often walked along the cliff’s edge at Cragside watching the sea crashing onto the rocks below and feeling the forlorn piquancy of her fate. In the Druid legend, Deirdre is doomed from birth to be alone, and nothing she does changes that.
Loneliness came as a great surprise in Jane’s life; it came not with birth but womanhood. It was a new role, one written just for her—Cragside, her father, the loss of Douglas and Pamela, the few men of her own background whom she might have befriended gone to the war, a life of resigned but pleasant spin-sterhood—but she refused to play it. Deirdre may have been born to sorrow but Jane wasn’t. No daggers by her own hand into her breast, thank you. She regarded her situation as unique, but in fact all over Europe, women of her generation were coming of age in a whole new way, because no matter how widely their circumstances varied otherwise, they all had one crucial fact in common: they were women without men. Most of them always would be. Their adjustments to that given, carried out instinctively, bravely, and often, by necessity, rebelliously, were beginning to accomplish the twentieth century sea change in the place of women in society. The irony was breathtaking: the liberation of that generation of women presupposed the obliteration of that generation of men.
So of course the story of the tragic lovers—Deirdre is the primordial European love story; “Tristan and Isolde” is based on it—would be what moved Jane. That did not make her sentimental. Like women everywhere in Europe, she knew already, though not consciously, that what had been forever the tragedy of pairs was now becoming the tragedy of an entire race. That was larger meaning enough for her, however far she was from being able to give expression to it. As for Dan Curry’s larger meaning, it seemed frankly trivial. Jane sensed that this big red-bearded Catholic found the theme of Ireland in material the way his peasant forebears found crosses in the trees and apparitions in sunlight filtered through the clouds.
Jane turned away. Peasant forebears? What had just happened? An unwilled visceral disdain for Curry gripped her. For Curry as a Catholic, as a Gael, as the son of peasants. She felt ashamed. He was looking at her the way he had when they’d stood together on the stage, when she’d encouraged that way of looking by seeming to return it. She had welcomed that emotional storming of their differences. The thrill of their enactment had been wonderful. But that moment was artificial and it had passed. Now she wished he would look away. She knew that she was blushing and she knew that he would take that as yet another sign of her being girlishly overwhelmed. But what she wanted was to get away from him. This was a mistake. He had thrown stones into her reflection and she had disappeared. She stood there, blood in her skin, unable to move, like a frightened doe.
A long moment passed in which the only sound in the bright lobby was of their breathing. Even the voices in the office had been quelled.
As she feared, Curry had completely misunderstood her silence and her obvious confusion, as she knew by the soft, caressing tone of his voice when he said, “The only truth the wave knows is that . . .” He paused meaningfully.
Jane forced herself to make his theatrical hesitation into her opportunity. She turned on him, feigning playfulness, pointing her finger at him. “Are you testing me?”
“What?”
“You want to see if I can finish the line. That’s why you paused.”
“Well, can you?”
She composed herself dramatically, then wryly imitated him, even to his Dublin accent. “The only truth the wave knows is that it’s going to”—now she paused—“get all wet!”
“No, no, no! Going to break!”
When Jane smiled mischievously, Curry saw that he’d been had.
“You knew it,” he said. He laughed, realizing he’d made a fool of himself. “Well, at least you’ve read Playboy. I’d begun to fear for your literacy.”
“The only truth I know is that I’d better get into the office.”
“But you can’t.” He almost touched her. “You haven’t called me Dan.”
“Do I know you that well?”
He opened his arms; no secrets.
Suddenly he seemed completely harmless. Jane felt herself relax. “Good-bye, Dan.”
As if she had granted a rare wish, he folded his arms and bowed.
He was just an actor. She was foolish to let him put her in a state.
But when he straightened, he took her by surprise again, now by breaking into song. “Magnificent life,” he sang, and began to dance happily about the lobby. He repeated the phrase. “Magnificent life . . .” He had a rich bass voice and he played each word out elaborately with great musical flare. He was a rough-hewn man, but now, instead of either her previous disdain or her fear of being overwhelmed, Jane felt awed by his large-spirited exuberance. The people she knew well were trim and self-possessed to the point of clenching compared to this. “Magnificent life . . .” again and again. Curry was the size of a longshoreman and carried himself like one, but at that moment he moved across the polished lobby floor with the lithe grace of a waltzing prince. “Magnificent life, the fruit . . .” She had thought him insensitive, but now remembered those moments on the stage, the ones she’d watched from the balcony and the ones she’d shared. As an actor and singer he possessed an elegance he had no right to. She had resolved to dismiss him because he was so unlike her. But what she saw in him now was a delicacy of character, a vulnerability, she thought, exactly like her own. That, not his studied charm, seemed irresistible.
“. . . the fruit of some frenzy of the earth.” He looked over his shoulder slyly and said deadpan, “I’m singing Synge.” Then he danced, humming grandly, toward the door. At the last moment he turned and waved his cap at her, and then he was gone.
6
On Sackville Street a crowd had gathered around a stalled tram and Curry pushed closer to see. But the tram was draped with large-lettered posters and bunting, not the usual advertisements for Pears Soap or the Guinness Brewery. A large banner ringing the top, like a crown, read, irishmen enlist today! The tram wasn’t stalled, in fact, but was positioned on a stretch of lesser-used track. Across the front of the car, below the headlight, were huge red letters reading, recruiting office. And on the side below the windows another banner read, for the small nations and for ireland, how can you say no?
Dark-suited men were lined up, waiting their turn, and others, like Curry, had pushed in close to watch them file onto the tram to stand before the British soldiers for their interview. The observers were passive, almost sullen, but they looked on without jeering. What shocked Curry wasn’t the recruiting—for weeks posters had been appearing all over Dublin saying, kitchener wants you—bad teeth no bar—or even the willingness of Irishmen to enlist. Many befuddled boyos had done so and many more would. What surprised Curry and, in a way, offended him more, was the British appropriation of an ordinary Dublin streetcar. Was nothing immune from their impressment? It was a simple reminder, of course, that trollies, belonging to the city, belonging to the county, belonging to the nation, belonged like everything on that damn island first and foremost to bloody England. His resentment bubbled, and Curry suddenly thought, To hell with working on Naisi’s lines; and he turned, pushed back through the crowd to the sidewalk, and went into Mc-Mahon’s, a Sackville Street pub.
At first the darkness blinded him. The pub was jammed with the last of the lunch crowd, and it took Curry a few moments to make his way to the bar. “P.P.,” he called, a Dublin joke, not about urine but about parish priests, and the bartender served him a pint of porter. He raised his glass to the man next to him. “To the bloody fools outside,” he said and drank thirstily.
His neighbor lifted his own glass, removing a blackthorn pipe from his mouth to drink. Then he looked quizzically at Curry. “Where’s your patriotism, man?”
The man’s sarcasm registered. He had a familiar face, with its heavy nose, sensitive mouth, skin even paler than most Irishmen, thinning hair carefully combed, but Curry couldn’t place him. He guessed he was thirty-five, ten years older than he was himself. The man chomped down on his pipestem again.
Curry concentrated on his pint, trying to shut out the feelings stirred up by the permanent British insult, but also by the noise of the boisterous drinkers around him. Naturally the tram—recruiting office outside was the subject of the heated talk. Everyone in the pub had his opinion about it and everyone seemed determined to state it at one and the same time. Curry closed his eyes. This wasn’t what he needed, not at all. He hadn’t had five minutes to collect himself since leaving the Abbey. He hadn’t been affected like this by a girl in a long time and he wanted to think about her, to hold her image in his mind, turning it this way and that, like a precious stone, eyeing facets, appraising, deciding, as it were, whether to cut or polish.
But wasn’t that a pompous, self-aggrandizing metaphor? Curry’s rejection of it cost him his ability to remember Jane Tyrrell with any precision. He’d loved the way the wisps of her otherwise tightly pinned hair framed her face, but now he couldn’t quite conjure the face itself. But if he fancied himself a jeweler, that was as it should be. The thought of holding her up to the light embarrassed him. Was that lithe, lovely girl only an object to be examined? And anyway, was he even remotely a connoisseur? On the contrary, like most of his kind when it came to women, he was a man without much to admit to. Furtive encounters with Tyrone Street prostitutes—they were naked under their coats so no time was lost fumbling with clothes—only compounded a fellow’s insecurities with what one soon came to think of as the other women, as the normal women, or, in good Irish fashion, as the good women, the ones with clothes. But Jane, he sensed, fitted neither category, and that, perhaps, was why she fascinated him.
But wasn’t he an actor and a rakish one at that? In his year at the Abbey and, before that, as a member of the drama club at the university, where he’d gone after quitting the Catholic seminary in Maynooth, Curry’s reserve had evaporated in every aspect except one. His ill-chosen and unhappy stint in training for the priesthood had brought him to the threshold of manhood even more confused about the female than other Irish boys. Where the others threw sullenness or impassivity over their confusion, he threw the cloak of his great personality. With women, particularly the lovelies who were actresses, he played the role of the Gaelic extrovert and it never failed to charm them, but only to a point—the point at which, as if by prior agreement, they always withdrew from one another. Nora Guinan, for example, the actress playing Deirdre. His passionate flirtation with her for a few months early in the year had been wonderfully circumscribed by the fact of her marriage. The truth was that big Dan Curry, though he could not admit it—hell, he could hardly believe it!—was afraid of women. He thought it was because he’d been stunted in the seminary, but he was just like most other men of his class and background. If chastity didn’t stunt them, poverty or obedience did. Ireland itself was their seminary.
Curry knew all of this, of course. And that was why it horrified and humiliated him that, despite the public and personal triumph of his success at the Abbey—he was a professional actor, by God!—and despite his own steadfast refusal to accept it as a spoiled priest’s inevitable lot, he had not overcome this one unreferred-to but monumental inhibition. When he’d quit the seminary he’d adopted the pose of the gregarious but also mysterious, even ascetic loner. At twenty that had had its charm. But at twenty-five he was just another Irish bachelor waiting for Ma to die before taking up with someone else.
He looked around the pub: a roomful of them! Even the married ones were bachelors! Curry had to stifle a sudden repugnance for the coarse, argumentative, brew-swilling men. Men like him.
Someone yelled in the heat of an exchange, “They’ll give us our nation six feet at a time!”
Curry turned to the fellow next to him. “But they’ll still want their rent.”
A bantam Irishman leapt up onto a chair and sang, “Full steam ahead John Redmond said / that everything was well, chum; / Home Rule will come when we are dead / and buried out in Belgium.”
The drinkers cheered, and so the little man sang it again.
The man with the blackthorn pipe looked around at them, saying quietly to Curry, “We either stand in line to join their army or we stand on chairs to sing drunken songs against them. How King George must shiver at the thought of us.”
The man’s eyes met Curry’s, and their weighty sobriety, in that context, prompted Curry to ask, almost despite himself—why should he take Ireland’s bondage seriously when the others didn’t?—“What else are we to do?”
The man answered with a long stare. When at last he spoke, his words were like a footnote to what his expression had conveyed. “Stop playacting.”
“What?” Curry felt defensive at once. He hadn’t expected to have his profession attacked.
“We must stop playacting. It’s become our national pastime. Redmond with his Irish regiments in the King’s army plays the role of an English lackey so they’ll give him Home Rule as his reward. Carson with his Orange bullyboys plays the role of the snarling villain who keeps the maid of Ulster tied to the tracks. James Connolly has his Irish Citizen’s Army and a home-grown honest-to-God militant class struggle, but what the lads really want are those fancy Australian bush hats, Sam Browne belts, and trousers with stripes down the leg. Eoin MacNeill is the C-in-C of the Irish Volunteers and what is their duty? Why, begorra, to defend the shores of Ireland from foreign invasion!” He laughed bitterly but didn’t stop. “And then there’s Arthur Griffith and the Sinn Fein, who claim the name Ourselves Alone but want a dual monarchy like they have in Hungary. And there’s Pádraic Pearse, who’s he, then? Why, he’s the unrepentant poet of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, bloody phantom revolutionaries, heard but never seen. And lo, Doug Hyde of the venerable Gaelic League still parading about in the native Irish kilt, blathering jibberish, and the GAA still handing out hurley sticks behind the nation’s hedges. Oh, how they must quake at Dublin Castle! And never forget the Irish National Literary Society, which gives us the sacraments of our new religion, and its cathedral, the Abbey Theatre, where at least they have the grace to admit that all they do is pretend that the freedom of Ireland means a damn.” The man stopped now, his eyes burning at Curry.
Curry’s impulse was to slink away from him. Instead he said, “I’m with the Abbey.”
The man nodded. “You’re Daniel Curry.”
Ordinarily such recognition would have flattered the actor, but in that context it made him realize that the man had a purpose in speaking to him like this. “Who are you?”
“Pearse.”
Hadn’t he just mentioned Pearse? Pádraic Pearse of the IRB? But Curry recognized him then. The high forehead and pale skin of a schoolteacher. Yes, Pearse. In true Irish fashion his scathing contempt for the competing movements of Irish nationalism, as impotent as they were flamboyant, was self-contempt. Pearse’s writing appeared regularly in Irish Freedom.
Curry deflected the awkwardness he felt with an easy but pointed comment. “I must say, Mr. Pearse, you do spread the blame around fairly, including yourself, I mean.”
Pearse was staring out of the pub window toward the tram-recruiting office, toward the line of men waiting to sign up. He shook his head. “I don’t blame them. Their children are ill-fed. Black tea and dry bread are what they feed their families. They’ll sign the paper in the streetcar there, and at once their kippers are on the royal payroll and they’ll go home tonight with milk and butter. With luck, they’ll die in France and their families will get the pension and have milk and butter for as long as Ireland is part of England.” Pearse laughed and raised his drink, gesturing around the pub. “A damn long time, if these blokes have anything to say about it. These are the ones I blame.” He let his eyes drift back to Curry while he drank. Then he wiped his mouth with his hand. “But you’re right. What’s the point of blame? Aren’t the priests always telling us it’s hopeless? And if it’s hopeless, then we sin if we do something real about it. It’s a perfect system when Dublin Castle joins hands with the Pro-Cathedral.”
