Christopher Blake
In the spring of 1919, Christopher Blake was living in a flat in Fitzwilliam Square. His afternoons were spent in an office in Harcourt Street, and his evenings and early nights in the Mansion House, where an assembly calling itself Dáil Éireann had come into being, and his late nights, several nights of the week, in the back rooms of public houses, in flats scattered across the city north and south of the river, in suburban houses, and on occasion in remote farms of County Dublin or Wicklow. In these last, in these late-night meetings, he assisted in the reorganization of the Irish Volunteers, as for a year longer they would be called although gradually that name was replaced by another, the Irish Republican Army.
From his top-floor flat, two windows opened upon the small, closed park. Spring slipped week by week into the park, touched branches, flower beds. By April, he could stand by his window with his morning tea and cigarette, imagining the force which would drive itself, green, imperious, seductive, through close-curled buds. From the square, a ten minutes’ walk, at the most, down Pembroke Street and then the south side of Stephen’s Green. He had not been near to the Green during the week of fighting. In Dartmoor Gaol its comely image had several times returned to him, an orderly world of small, secure bourgeois satisfactions, sun-dappled; in imagination, he had heard the music the band, in their Graustarkian uniforms, would play in summer, selections from Maritana and The Pirates of Penzance.
Dartmoor he remembered by music of a different kind. In his cell, in black night, lying sleepless, hands folded, patient, hopeless across his chest, he would hear, from a distant cell, a clear voice raised in a song in Irish, “Sean O’Dwyer” or “Slievenamon,” or, in harsher voice perhaps, firm Dublin accent, a Fenian ballad or one of the ballads of the 1798 Rising. Other voices would join in. The warders, a decent lot most of them save for the occasional bastard, would let them sing away, and the voices would echo and re-echo down corridors of iron, steel, stone. The Fenian ballads in English were sorry stuff, boastful or lachrymose with sudden dips into bathos, but the voices sometimes gave them, for the moment of their utterance, a thrilling intensity. The songs in Irish were a different matter. They would be sung, however badly, with an almost sacramental reverence, telling, like Mass Latin, truths which lay couched within secret sounds, gestures.
•
He had returned to Ireland in June of 1917, with the final batch of convicted rebels and on the same boat with their leader in Dartmoor, Eamon De Valera, who had commanded the garrison at Boland’s Mill, a tall, bespectacled teacher of mathematics. Like the larger group who had been released five months before, in time for Christmas, they were welcomed as heroes, with immense crowds to cheer them at the dock and to escort them into the city. But they had been expecting this: news had been smuggled into Dartmoor. The Easter Rising had become a legacy, a political gift of incalculable power, but there was no certainty as to how it might best be put to use.
At first, before finding his rooms in Fitzwilliam Square, Blake had lived with his mother in Sandycove, in a trim house of Victorian brick, suitable to the widow of a Dublin surgeon. From his bedroom window, he could see the bay, and, in the far distance, the lighthouse at Howth. In the evenings, when he was visited by one or another of his “associates,” as his mother called them, she would leave the front parlor to them. But often they had the evening together, the two of them. They would leave the drapes undrawn: she liked the feel of the sea that close to hand, the salt-heavy fog pressing against the windows. Blake would read and so too would his mother, although at times, because she knew he liked it, she would play the piano, tunes that he remembered from his father’s day, Gounod and Massenet.
“He is out of fashion with your London friends, no doubt,” she said, “poor Gounod.” “Oh, entirely,” Blake said. It was a reminder of how strange life had managed to become for him, that he had left England and his English friends to take up arms against them. In “armed rebellion,” as the words in the indictment had it. And stranger still that he should have been sentenced to life imprisonment and yet, a year later, be back in Sandycove, with his mother.
“It is a pity,” she said, “that you were not here at Christmas. It was a lonely enough time without either Owen or yourself. But the O’Riordans were very thoughtful. I was in Dalkey with them for Christmas dinner.”
“I remember, Mother,” he said. “You wrote to me.” Owen was his brother, a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, in France. He had been with the Fourth Dublin at the landing at Sedd el Barr in Gallipoli.
“It must be terrible over there in the trenches,” his mother said, “as terrible as anything that has yet happened to man.” She was standing by the piano, and rested a hand, a feather, upon the keyboard, as though summoning back some earlier scene. “But his letters make light of it, all jokes and school days remembered, times here. You are as bad yourself, nothing but good fun reported in your letters from that dreadful prison. It has an evil reputation, Dartmoor. Men take great pride in holding things back, it is childish of them. Your father would have been the same.”
Her own final schooling had been in a Benedictine convent in Louvain, close to the great library which the Germans were to destroy in 1914. An innocent vanity, she prided herself upon her delicacy of feeling. The nuns of Louvain, she liked to say, can give a polish to the dullest of us. Which she was not, by clear implication. Solid upper-middle-class Catholic nationalist stock. Eleanor Catherine Ronayne, daughter and granddaughter of lawyers. Sometime in the past, generations earlier, the Ronaynes, like the Blakes, had moved into Dublin from Galway. Beyond the piano was a pier glass, in which Blake saw her reflection, a slender woman, dark hair untouched yet by gray.
“Not bad for me there,” Blake said. “Really not. Nothing like poor Owen off there in France. They were severe to be sure, but not savage.”
Above the gate at Dartmoor was an inscription from Virgil. Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos. Spare the submissive and wear down the proud. One morning, as Blake and the other rebels were lined up for morning exercise, they encountered a new convict, Eoin MacNeill, the scholar who had commanded the Volunteers and who had managed, with fatal half-success, to countermand the orders for the Rising. Now he had to face the men who had rebelled in spite of him. It was an awkward moment. De Valera broke the tension. He stepped forward, said, “Eyes left,” and saluted MacNeill. He was marched back to his cell, but he had made his point, a complicated one.
Much later, on the boat back to Dublin, released prisoners, Blake had asked De Valera about it. He was a tall, thin man, awkward of gesture and movement, self-contained. He paused before answering. “The Volunteers are still in existence, Mr. Blake. And Professor MacNeill is still our commander. I have heard nothing that would contradict that.” De Valera, thanks to his American birth, was almost the only commandant to have escaped execution.
“They set us to work making bags,” Blake said to his mother. “Dull work, but nothing to wear down the proud. Better than pulling oakum, like poor Wilde at Reading.”
“Poor Wilde indeed!” Eleanor Blake said.
Framed photographs of both sons stood on the piano, a recent one of Owen, in uniform, and one of Christopher on the occasion of his degree conferral at University College, gowned and holding the diploma like a baton. Slightly behind them, a photograph of their father, bearded, formally dressed, a glossy silk hat resting on his knee. On the night table in Eleanor Blake’s bedroom was a photograph of Bernard Blake and herself in Venice, taken on their honeymoon, in a pigeon-littered Saint Mark’s Square, a café out of focus in the background, the sunlight brilliant. As a boy, his father still alive, distant and formidable, Blake had studied it, astonished at the openness of that version of his father, beardless, tentative smile, his eyes half-shut against the sun. He wore a white shirt and held a soft white hat by his side. Eleanor Blake was dressed in the stiff fashion of the day, and yet seemed to Blake soft, vulnerable; she was looking not into the camera but toward her new husband.
She had said to him, “It is wonderful that all of you have been sent home to us, after all the terrible sentences that were passed out upon you all. It must surely have been Mr. Dillon’s doing.”
John Redmond was still leader of the party of constitutional nationalists, but the Rising had been a dreadful blow to him, and John Dillon was more and more the spokesman.
“Very likely,” Blake had said, hoping that the matter would drift away, but his mother was quick to catch tones, reservations.
“Do you not think so?” she asked.
He sighed. “No,” he said. “I do not. I think that the English government is desperate to keep Ireland quiet for so long as the war goes on. And I think they are desperate to extend conscription to Ireland. They are setting up a convention to solve the Irish question, and it would never do to have us locked up in English prisons in our hundreds. Not as ordinary people have come to feel about the rebellion.”
Ordinary people. And others as well. While the executions were still under way, Dillon himself had traveled from Dublin to Parliament to speak to an infuriated House. These were men, he said of the rebels, who had fought a clean fight, a good fight. There were now photographs of the executed men from one end of Ireland to the other. It would never be possible to discuss Ireland while pretending that 1916 had not happened.
“No doubt,” Eleanor Blake said, “no doubt. But you will find, when all has been said and done, that Mr. Dillon and Mr. Redmond and Mr. Devlin and all the others have the best interests of Ireland at heart. That has long been the case.”
Long indeed. She was speaking sensibly enough, speaking as his father would have spoken. There were some seventy-odd of them in the English House of Commons, the Irish Party, the watchdogs of Home Rule. For her generation, for most of those in his own, that was political reality—brass bands, bunting-bedecked platforms, small favors, small deals arranged, party of farmers, auctioneers, publicans, clerks, solicitors, minor civil servants, surgeons. Across Blake’s childhood had floated the emblems of nationalism: statues of rebel pikemen, speeches, an iconography of martyrdom, Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone, the Fenians; tunes heard so often that they had become wedded to nerves.
All this had ended, been burned down in Dublin, shot down against the wall at Kilmainham Gaol. Or earlier perhaps. Blake had been present, in civilian clothes, when Pearse, in the uniform of a Volunteer officer, spoke to an immense crowd at Glasnevin, at the burial of O’Donovan Rossa, the old, battered, hard-drinking Fenian, bitter and unrepentant, who had died in New York. But when Pearse spoke, in the calm of a Dublin August midday, his language had lifted the crowd above that: “Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have pacified half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools!—they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”
•
In those first June and July weeks of 1917, living with his mother in Sandycove, Christopher Blake had fallen into the habit of walking, late at night, along the coast road, to the abandoned Martello tower beside the bay. In the far distance, across water, the last lights of Howth, the lighthouse, on occasion the running lights of ships. They were already in the long nights of the Irish summer. Until ten, the scene was held in changing, diffuse light. Soft, beyond him, the hill of Killiney, suburban villas, gardens tumbling steeply down, artful splashes of purple, crimson, pale blue. Impossible to hold within single scales of the imagination that tranquil scene and the final violent Saturday hours a year ago in Moore Street, beside the burning Post Office, the air heavy with black, choking smoke; before him the barricade at Great Britain Street, rifles and machine guns, bodies in the rubble-littered streets, laneways, in one of them O’Rahilly’s bullet-ridden body.
Now, standing by the tower at Sandycove, Blake was filled with a sense that all had changed and yet he had no sense of the new forms which would rise up. The great sheet of water close at hand, the pinpoint light of the distant lighthouse, darkness upon the water—it was like stone awaiting its inscription, paper its tracery.
He would feel it when he walked into town, if he felt brisk, or else took the train. He had volunteered a day a week to the National Aid Fund with offices at 10 Exchequer Street, a few turnings away from Dublin Castle. A most proper and respectable organization, devoted to the families of those who had died in the Rising, and to the hundreds who were returning from the prisons. They were poor enough, most of them, whether Volunteers or Citizens’ Army men, and for most of them their jobs in offices and shops had not been kept waiting. It was becoming fashionable to contribute to the Fund—bishops did it, nationalist members of Parliament, journalists, barristers and doctors, farmers, a few country gentlemen, priests. It signaled a sympathy with Easter Week, discreet, legal. Mrs. Clarke, Tom Clarke’s widow, had founded it, and an alderman was its president, but its secretary, at a salary, so he later told Blake, of two pounds ten shillings the week, was Collins, Michael Collins, the captain of Volunteers who had stood beside Blake on the lawn of the Rotunda after the Post Office garrison had surrendered.
Late one July evening, waning light in the Exchequer Street offices, a Volunteer with too much whiskey inside him appeared with a revolver, waving it dangerously in the air. “Boland’s Mill,” he said, “I’m a fucking veteran of Boland’s Mill. I fought for fucking Ireland.” Blake stared at him. The three Volunteer girls in charge of the canteen were still as death. Blake caught the eye of one of them, a plain-featured girl with blond hair done up in braids; her mouth was half-opened. Blake could not judge the scene, whether the man was idly threatening, half-drunk, but the revolver was real. Collins, at his desk at the far end of the room, stood up and walked to the man, brisk, businesslike, cuffed him across the face with the flat of a hand, twisted the gun away from him, and said, roughly, “Get the hell out of this.” The man looked at him, not frightened, but surprised and angry. “Who the hell are you?” he asked; “where the hell were you when you were needed?” “None of your bloody business,” Collins said. “Will you walk through that door, or will I kick you out of it?”
On his way back to his desk, Collins paused beside Blake and broke the cylinder of the revolver. It was empty. “A lovely great Webley,” he said. “’Tis an ill-wind that blows no one good.” “How will you enter that in your accounts?” Blake said. “Goods contributed,” Collins said. “Value uncertain.” “That should satisfy Mrs. Clarke,” Blake said. Collins had an extraordinary skill with account books and ledgers. From 1906 almost until the Rising he had been a clerk in London, with the Post Office, with a stock-brokering firm, with a Labor Exchange in Whitehall. But he had the look and manner of a young countryman, footballer’s trunk, wrestler’s shoulders, a handsome, heavy face, light, fierce eyes. Blake thought he had him pegged—West Cork accent, at once coarse and musical, Irish-language enthusiast, Sinn Féin enthusiast. A capable fellow, quick, decisive, uncomplicated.
That evening, after they left the office in Exchequer Street, Collins took him to a public house near the quays. “I have never been in here before,” he said, “but I pass it each day, walking to the office or from it. It seems a pleasant enough place.” An ordinary sort of pub. Dark, dirt-stained wood, posters for race-meetings; the framed oval photographs of the men executed the year before. Behind the bar, above the rows of whiskey bottles, hung a colored print of Croagh Patrick, the colors garish and improbable. Collins carried the two pints, Blake’s and his own, to a table at the far end, near the door which led to the toilet. There was no one sitting nearer to them than an old man, neatly dressed, shabby, nursing a glass of what looked like port. “Pleasant enough place,” Collins said again. “Small-fry drink in here, you notice? Elderly clerks in the insurance companies, bookkeepers, old fellows who do this or that in Dublin Castle or for the Corporation.” His heavy face, massy-boned, turned suddenly from the room to Blake, who noticed, almost with a shock, the gray, challenging eyes.
“Good luck,” Collins said, and lifted the shell of ale. “It must be more convenient for you, to have a small place of your own here in Fitzwilliam Square. Sandycove would have been a long haul for you, although ’tis pleasant there, with the great sea air, and good places to walk.”
“You are well informed,” Blake said, and let the faint annoyance creep into his voice.
“No, no,” Collins said. “I chanced to hear one of the girls talking in the office. You’re a rare one, you know. Posh accent and the years in London and a book published.”
“Published,” Blake said. “But left unnoticed.”
“On Ireland is it?” Collins asked. Two men, bowler-hatted, came into the pub. Collins’s eyes flickered toward them, lingered, then returned to Blake.
“On Connaught in the eighteenth century,” Blake said. “What happened to the last of the Gaelic gentry after the Boyne and Aughrim.”
“By God, that’s a fine subject,” Collins said, with sudden, fierce delight. “The MacDermotts and the O’Connors and the O’Malleys. By God it is. And poor O’Conor of Belnagare stripped by the heel of the hunt to a few hundred acres and his books. A man who had corresponded with the great Dean Swift.”
“As I was saying,” Blake said, “you are well informed. Professor MacNeill wants to have a look at it. I saw him last week. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘A pity Pearse won’t have a chance to see it.’ A strange man.”
“Pearse was strange enough to satisfy my tastes for the odd,” Collins said. “You were in Dartmoor, were you not? I was in Frongoch. I got off easy.”
Blake sat facing the framed photographs, but they were too far off for him to see them clearly. Pearse was in half-profile, a handsome puzzling face.
“If I had the management of the universe in my hands,” Collins said, “I would keep poets and scholars safely away from the levers of power. They have made a terrible hames of things through the centuries.”
“Plato was much of your opinion,” Blake said.
“Ach, that one. He would have banished them entirely. No, they are the best that the human race produced, the poets and artists. But they shouldn’t be let loose. When poor Ireland is free, we will ask Mr. Yeats to build an Olympus on Croagh Patrick, for Æ and Colum and the rest of them.”
“Without poets,” Blake said, “there would never have been a Rising. Pearse and MacDonagh and Plunkett.”
“True enough,” Collins said. “It takes poets to stage an armed rebellion in the middle of a city with no lines of communication or retreat.”
“They had no need for them,” Blake said. “They did not intend to retreat.”
Collins moved his glass in circles on the oak surface of the table. “They intended to die there,” he said. “There or by firing squad. And they intended us to die along with them. They didn’t explain that to me. Was it explained to you?”
“Don’t cite me,” Blake said. “I came late, you will recall. I asked myself in, like poor O’Rahilly.”
“There was a man,” Collins said. “That O’Rahilly. It was O’Rahilly gave me a hand trying to put out that damned fire. And when he made the final rush, I was proud to back him up. Do you know what Pearse did when we made that rush into Moore Street, O’Rahilly on one side of Moore Street and myself on the other? He made a speech to us. His reservoir of speeches was inexhaustible. He told us that we were saving the soul of the Gael. ‘You’re dead right,’ O’Rahilly said, ‘Gaelic speakers to the rear.’ ” Collins laughed and flung his head back, shaking a long strand of hair from his eyes.
“You seem sadly disillusioned,” Blake said.
“Not a bit of it,” Collins said. “Not a bit of it. And if I were, I would not say so. Look at those photographs. And walk up and down the length of Grafton Street. You will see no more Union Jacks, nor posters telling us to go off to Gallipoli or to die for Belgium. There has not been such a fine morale in this country since the days of Parnell. I don’t know how I feel about the Rising, to tell you the truth, Christopher. It made a clearing, it made a possibility. And that is what they intended, perhaps—the fellows on the wall there.”
He sat with his chair pushed back from the table, hands upon heavy knees.
A bit later, Blake went up to the counter, and bought the other half, two pints. When he had put them down on the table, Collins said, “I’ll be gone after this. I am meeting a few fellows in Clontarf.”
•
In a year’s time, most of Collins’s conversations with Blake would end that way—he would be off to meet a fellow here, a few fellows there, or he would tell you that he would be at “the other place” later on, or he would tell you to be at “the other place” yourself, and he would send a fellow along to you with a message. His own years in London had given him a few Anglicisms, “a bloke you haven’t met yet,” he might say, the word dropped like an alien raisin into his West Cork accent. In a year’s time—but already, Blake knew, Collins was busy with several things at once, that he was one of the men reorganizing the IRB, reorganizing the Volunteers, that he would come late to meetings of the Gaelic League. He moved from place to place by tram or bicycle, and, once in a great while, by taxi.
“’Tis very good of you,” Collins said to Blake, “to give us an evening of your time each week, without fail.”
“It is very little,” Blake said, “those fellows are having a hard time of it, no jobs open, and some of them with families.”
“But you will have your own job waiting for you back there, once you’ve rested up,” Collins said. “They won’t hold your little adventure against you. A very chivalrous people, the English, when they can afford to be.”
“Like most people,” Blake said.
“Ha!” Collins said. “You have the right of it there. And am I right about yourself?”
“No,” Blake said, “not really. Like yourself, I have a sense that there has been a clearing, a pause in time. There are people who praise the Easter Week thing now because it has the shrouds of time upon it, a mist. But I don’t at all. I think that something is beginning to happen. I will wait around for a bit.”
Collins drank a measure from his glass, then rested it on the table.
Suddenly he smiled. It was the smile of a footballer who has discerned his path, a huntsman’s smile, a smile of pure pleasure. “By God, Chris, it is indeed. Something is about to happen. You can smell it upon the air. It will not be like the carry-on at Easter, nor the Fenians, nor those fellows in 1848. The cards have been dealt to us at last, Chris. ’Tis up to us to play them.”
“We,” Blake said, “us,” and he let the monosyllables drift upon the air as questions.
“You are a Volunteer, Chris,” Collins said, “dues paid up and all, and Gaelic League, and you are close enough to Sinn Féin.”
“Oh yes,” Blake said, “I have done all the proper things.” And things done easily enough, in those years before the war, before the Rising.
“And a bit more. You were there when you were needed, as the lads say in the pubs. You were in the GPO for the whole of the bloody week—”
“Barring the first few hours,” Blake said.
“Granted,” Collins said. “Granted, but sure, that could redound to your credit. Yourself and poor O’Rahilly. You came in and joined us once you were certain we would lose. That has a nice reckless air to it. And you did your time in Dartmoor. You have all the credentials needed for a career in Irish public life.”
Now the public house door opened again, and Blake felt the city close at hand, waiting outside. Cobblestones. The oily, foul-smelling river.
“A failed uprising and a spell in an English prison,” he said.
“Classical,” Collins said. “Classical.” He smiled again, and as he smiled his eyes moved to the wall clock.
“And yourself?” Blake said.
•
It was in those summer and early autumn months of 1917 that the political life of the country was transformed, and Collins was everywhere at once, as Blake was to learn. Already, that February, at a by-election in Roscommon, Joe Plunkett’s father, a theatrically patriarchal Papal count, had defeated the Irish Party candidate, and Collins had been a campaign worker on the dusty roads. In May, he had helped Joe MacGuiness, a prisoner in England, win the seat for Sinn Féin at another election in South Longford. When the Supreme Council for the IRB was reestablished, Collins became its secretary. In October, when Sinn Féin met to draft a new constitution and choose a president, Collins used the IRB to back Eamon De Valera against Arthur Griffith, and in the Volunteer convention that followed, he would use the IRB to take the presidency of that for De Valera as well. In those months, he must surely have seemed to most as he did to Blake that evening on the quays, a hurler bursting with energy, with initiatives, with enthusiasm, ready to serve the purposes of men with cooler heads, longer experience, a country fellow with some useful training in the civil service.
“You keep your dues paid up, Chris. You might do a bit more. Report to one of the companies. They have begun training again.”
Blake shrugged.
“Waiting around to see what happens isn’t good enough, boy,” Collins said. “There has been enough of that. I’ll tell you now what you should do.” He took a small notebook and a fountain pen from his pocket and wrote. “This is a company not far off from where you live, Chris. ‘Twill be no inconvenience to go and march up and down for an hour or two once a week. And more to the point, the commander is a chum of mine. I will tell him to be expecting you.” Neatly, one hand pressed down firmly, he tore the page from the book and handed it to Blake.
Blake read it before folding it and placing it in a waistcoat pocket.
“You be certain to do that, Chris,” Collins said. He tilted back and finished off his pint. “I will be depending on you.”
“You will?” Blake asked, half-amused, half-puzzled.
“I may need someone like yourself from time to time,” Collins said, “and you won’t be there if you don’t keep your medals polished, keep your ticket punched. Mind what I’ve said now.” He pushed back his chair and stood up, settled his gray respectable hat on his heavy head. But at that moment, Blake saw an entirely different man, wary and resourceful behind the barricades of good fellowship, the bluff banter. He sat quietly as he watched Collins make his way to the door. By the entrance, a fellow with one too many under his belt, a tall beanpole of a man in fawn waterproof, tweed cap, collided with Collins, and Collins, once again the farmer’s boy in the city, laughed, steadied him with an absentminded arm, and then walked out.
A year or two later, Blake would be in the habit, almost in exaggeration, in self-parody, of imagining that evening as the occasion of his recruitment not only into the movement but into Collins’s private army, an army which would swell to include policemen, civil servants, gunmen, spies, taxi drivers, importers, country bank managers, fishermen, curates, publicans, librarians, innkeepers. Once, one autumn night, a gaunt fellow in a mud-streaked trench coat turned up at Blake’s door with a note: “Keep this fellow for a few days, and then I’ll take him off your hands. The coppers want him.” The note was unsigned. Blake and the fellow liked each other; he was an ex-seminarian from Waterford named Grimes. “I’m damned if I know,” Grimes said one night over tea; “I was training recruits at Enniscorthy in Wexford, and I got a note that I was to pack it in and come up here. I spent a night or two in a miserable kip off Dorset Street, and then he sent me along to you. But in Dorset Street I heard that the cops had come round to my lodgings in Enniscorthy.” When Blake came home the next day, Grimes was gone, his blanket and sheet neatly folded and no sign of him in the flat.
By then, Collins had moved—to an office in Bachelors Walk, to Cullenswood House in Rathfarnham, which had once been Pearse’s school, to two small rooms in Capel Street. At times, late evening, night, he would meet men in a hotel near the Rotunda or, more often, in a public house near the Four Courts, patronized by solicitors, court attendants, neat, self-consciously respectable men. It was there that once, by arrangement, Blake met with him. Collins looked much like the others, suit of blue serge, white shirt with stiff collar, somber tie. “There is a house that can be let, Chris, in Arklow, right on the strand, an elegant house, and it can be let furnished. You would oblige me were you to take it. It will not be costly, but there will be money paid into your account to cover it.” There was less of the fellow up from the country about him now, a mannerism shed because no longer needed. “Why do we need it?” Blake asked, but Collins shrugged.
“You need not stay in the damned place,” Collins said. “Spend a week or so there, and get the locals to know you. Tell them you have a brother will be coming over from England, and you are renting it for him.” “What is my brother like?” Blake asked. “I don’t know,” Collins said, “I haven’t picked him out yet.” He laughed and nudged his elbow into Blake’s ribs. “I have a brother,” Blake said, “a doctor with the army. On the Somme.” “Poor bastard,” Collins said. Blake paid regularly into a Dublin bank the rent on the Arklow house until the day in 1921 when detectives from the G Division and a squad of Black and Tans raided it and arrested two Volunteer officers and a German arms dealer.
•
September 1917: Crowds waiting in the streets outside Mountjoy Prison in early-autumn rain while jailers—enraged, embarrassed, clumsy—forced gruel and warm milk into Thomas Ashe, and contrived to smother him. In the rains of early autumn, women knelt upon the stones, said rosaries. London would never understand Ireland, London nor Dublin Castle. Ashe, tall, light-haired, handsome, had been one of the heroes of Easter Week. At Ashbourne, north of Dublin, with fifty Volunteers at his back, he had captured four barracks, and was still in command of the field when Pearse’s order of surrender came to him. Imprisoned he had been butchered in ignominy, choking on his own vomit. Ashe, butchered, would weigh more upon Ireland than Home Rule bills or debates in Westminster. Thousands had filed past the open coffin in which he lay in Volunteer uniform, and the government did not dare to deny the presence at his burial of the Volunteers, uniformed and in arms. A volley was fired, and then Collins stepped forward, although few in Ireland would have known who he was, as powerful in build as Ashe had been, but a different order of strength. His speech was brief: “Nothing additional remains to be said. The volley which we have just heard is the only speech which it is proper to make above the grave of a Fenian.”
But it was a speech which said much. By calling Ashe a Fenian, Collins had quietly but pointedly reminded some of those present that he had been a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, that with Collins, Ashe had been working to reorganize the Brotherhood. But, equally, Collins had reminded the crowd in the sprawling graveyard that two years before, at the burial of O’Donovan Rossa, Pearse had warned a larger crowd that there would be no peace for Ireland so long as it held the graves of the Fenian dead. Living nations, Pearse had said that day, a day of clear sunlight, sprang from the graves of the dead.
Blake, by now a company commander of Volunteers, but only half-uniformed, leggings fastened around tweed trousers, Volunteer’s slouch hat of green felt, had been at Glasnevin that day, facing Collins’s back, his company forming part of what the grandiloquent new table of organization called “the Dublin Brigade.”
Months later, he had said to Collins, “It is fortunate that the Volunteers were allowed to march armed to Glasnevin. You would not otherwise have had a speech.” “I had a Webley buttoned up inside my tunic,” Collins said. “One revolver shot would have done the trick. The trick is to let them know that we are not fooling. Let all of them know, let England know and let the Irish know. Speeches are all well and good, we all love a lovely speech. But without steel behind it, it is breath upon the wind.” “Pearse was not armed when he stood at the grave of Rossa,” Blake said. “Pearse is dead and gone,” Collins said.
They were walking along Bachelors Walk. By now, Collins was known by sight to many; their eyes would move across his features, a flicker of recognition. The streetlamps had been lighted, but the Liffey beside them was black, with the bone-chilling cold of winter upon it.
“A wonderful man,” Collins said, “very eloquent. ’Tis not enough.” Suddenly, he gave one of his explosions of laughter. “But you never know. We have gone far on eloquence, speeches, puff in newspapers. We are an eloquent people. Even the English grant us that.” He nodded across the river, toward Dublin Castle. “But those lads over there have managed to rule us without need for eloquence. Policemen and police spies and packed juries and carbines and cavalry in the Curragh. It was artillery that they used against us at the end of the day.”
“Artillery is in short supply on our side,” Blake said mildly.
“Webley revolvers are in short supply,” Collins said. “What we must contrive for ourselves is a different kind of army, without parades and without artillery. A gunman with a Webley can be as good as a battalion, if he knows who to kill and where the fellow can be found.” He laughed again and jabbed Blake with his elbow. Now he was the young rowdy from West Cork, ready to turn everything into sport, but Blake had come to know the metal, hard as a Webley, behind the soft country manner.