Janice Nugent
On the last Friday in November, 1921, Christopher and I made a night of it—an early meal at Creveney’s, and then Shaw’s Heartbreak House, and then a party that Kitty Blackett was giving, and then to Patrick Prentiss’s rooms in Pump Court, which Christopher had been using.
“Are you armed, Mr. Blake?” a girl at Kitty’s asked Christopher. “Are you carrying your revolver with you?” And she patted Christopher’s dinner jacket, and let her hand trail for a moment along the velvet shawl of the collar. Christopher did not seem to mind.
All that autumn and as winter approached, the Irish delegation to the Treaty talks were considered a rare social catch, and not by Liberal hostesses only; even the Conservatives, who thought of Sinn Féin and the Republican Army as murderers, bloody and cowardly, were eager for a look at one of them, but for the most part without much luck, most of the delegation kept to itself or else met with other Irishmen. But Christopher, of course, was different, he had lived in London before the Troubles, before Easter Week, and then, more recently, he had been all over London on behalf of his cause. The great catch of all, though, would have been Michael Collins, who was always described, in the newspapers and in conversation, as “the commander in chief of the Sinn Féin Army,” and was credited with having ordered all the savage ambushes and assassinations. It was assumed by everyone that Collins was with the delegation to make certain that the demands of the extremists were heard. And that if negotiations broke down, he would resume the warfare. By rumor, at least, there was a chartered airplane kept ready and fueled for him at Croydon. When he would go out, to a discreet party or to the theater or to a walk through the streets or along the Embankment, there would always be, at a distance, two men in raincoats. It was that aura of danger, of course, which made him such an attraction, and it was undeniable. I was getting to know him a little, because he and Christopher were friends, and I was not the only one surprised by him, by the range of his reading and the quickness of his wit, but there is no denying that never, not once, did I forget what he had done, what he had ordered done, what even now he could order done by giving a shout to those two men. That damned girl at Kitty’s would not have been likely to run her hands along Collins’s coat nor ask him if he was armed.
“He is not a brute, you know,” Christopher said to me that night. “He is quite civilized.”
“No doubt,” I said.
The newspapers were all full of chat about the Seven Tragic Centuries, the seven hundred years of misunderstanding and ill will and now a possibility of bringing it all to a peaceful resolution, and everything depending upon young men, young Irishmen, without experience of government and given, some of them, to violent ways. And if the talks should fail! Behind the delegates with their secretaries and their briefcases were men with guns and Mills bombs and grenades.
“What the hell do they think brought England to the conference table,” Christopher asked me that evening in Creveney’s, and he plunged a knife to cut open a grilled sole as though the poor creature were Field Marshal Wilson. “A century or so of talk did nothing. They were bombed and shot and burned to the conference table.”
“Not these people,” I said, and placed a warning hand on his forearm, looking toward the other tables. Not that he had raised his voice, but he was speaking with intensity.
“These people,” Christopher said, and his glance chanced to fall on a harmless-looking baldhead of middle years and the beginning of a paunch, and his rather younger wife, who had been blessed or cursed with too much bosom, far too much now that bosoms had gone out of fashion. “These people,” he said again, “If they are decent sorts, they will tell you that the Black and Tans have gone too far, gone on a rampage, have to be curbed.”
For months he had been dragging me to meetings in dreary parish halls, dusty seats and scraps of orange peel on unswept floors, while he described the atrocities inflicted on the Irish by the armed police and the Auxiliaries and the Cadets and even by regiments of regulars; but the Black and Tans were the worst. One regular officer, resigning his command, had said that they treated parts of Munster and Connaught as their private shooting preserve, with full hunting rights. Once, at one of these meetings, Christopher had quoted from a letter my father had written to me, describing him as an Irishman who had given long years of his life to the British Army, had retired from it full of honors and memories, and with the rank of colonel. Lieutenant Colonel, I reminded him later. You are a colonel’s daughter when all is said and done, he said, the daughter of a British colonel. And the widow of a British captain, I said. In the letter, Father had said that things were being done in Galway that made him ashamed of the uniform he had worn, and he described what a friend had written to him of the Tans at work in West Cork, where matters were far worse. “You will not learn of this in its full horror in the newspapers in this country, you must look for it in letters written by old soldiers to their daughters,” Christopher told his audience. On the platform, there were no tricks of oratory to which he would not descend. “You should tell them,” I said to him later, “that the old soldier’s daughter passed along the letter to an Irishman with whom she is having an affair.” Sometimes he was preaching to the converted, to Irishmen living in London, but at other times to decent, dim, scant audiences of liberals with a small L.
“The Black and Tans are serving their purpose,” he answered me, that evening in Creveney’s. “The Black and Tans are what imperialism is about. Scrape away parliaments and regiments and rolls of honor and flags and Unknown Warriors and all the rest, and what you get, in the heel of the hunt, are men in ill-matched uniforms, black tunics and tan britches, armored cars, and torture rooms. There is a torture room in Dublin Castle itself, did you know that? Not the wing where your friend the civil servant spends his days. A far less pleasant room. There are friends of mine who were beaten and clubbed to death in that room. And that is what empire is about.”
And all this in a wonderfully restrained voice, and in the midst of it a brief, social smile, so that anyone would think we were talking about Mr. Shaw and the play of his which we were to see that evening. You never know anyone, not really, not even when you are locked together breast to breast, sealed by the sweat of passion. Underneath all there was this passion in Christopher, a rage which condoned men shot from ambush, old houses set ablaze.
He had fallen into the way of describing people as “toughies” and “softies.” Collins, of course, was a toughie, the supreme of them, and some of the gunmen who led the flying columns. Christopher had come to admire them, and to think himself one of them, but by virtue of what exploits he was reticent, save for a few things he had told me about.
Christopher could change mood and manner in the twinkling of an eye: it was part of being a toughie.
“How is your sole?” he asked. “Mine is very good.”
“When you were taking out the bone,” I said, “I thought that you were murdering Field Marshal Wilson.”
“He could do with a bit of murdering,” Christopher said. “He’s the worst.” Later I was to remember him saying that.
And Wilson was, even I could see that. The worst, and he looked it, had a shark’s look, wide, thin, cruel mouth, an Irishman from County Longford, a ferocious hater of Sinn Féin, nationalists, Catholics, the whole lot of us.
There were so many other things we might have been talking of that evening: after all, the meetings of the Irish and the English in Downing Street were filling the newspapers, and Christopher’s work brought him to the plenary sessions, in the Cabinet Room, and across the table, Lloyd George of course and Winston Churchill and Birkenhead. What are they like, I asked Christopher, and he was wonderful in his descriptions of them, being careful in his own mind to sort out his feelings, that he was talking about the other side, but he was fascinated by them and perhaps a bit frightened although he would never admit that to himself, all of our people were a bit frightened, except Griffith of course with his terrier courage, and the other secretary, Childers, who knew the English well, was English himself really if the truth be told, and who had served in the House of Commons before the war and in the Royal Navy during the war, a commander doing something in intelligence.
There was precious little socializing between the two sides of the table. They did not even shake hands with each other on that first morning in October, and they were all, Christopher thought, like the crowds in the streets and the journalists, they were all curious about one man, as though the others were clerks, or petty theorists or civil servants or what have you. They were curious about Collins, all of them, but Churchill and Birkenhead in particular. His hands, someone had quoted Churchill as saying of Collins, his hands have touched the springs of murder.
“A fine lot they are, those bastards,” Collins said one night to Christopher, in a taxi driving back from Downing Street to Cadogan Gardens. “Lloyd George, with that bloody twinkle in his eyes, forever fluffing up his mustache like a foxy grandpa, and reminding us that we are all Celts together, himself and the Irish. Did you notice that when he and his chum Jones have something to tell each other, they tell it in Welsh, that none of us can understand, neither the Irish nor the English.”
Beyond the windows of the taxi, London’s autumnal darkness.
“The worst of the lot,” Christopher said, “the one for you to keep your eye on.”
“Worst of the lot, is he?” Collins asked impatiently. “Where would you put F. E. Smith, Galloper Smith, Lord Birkenhead we are now to call him, Carson’s right-hand man when they raised up Ulster against us in the days before the war, the man who presented the Crown case against Roger Casement, and sent him on his way to the gallows. Mind you, I have a bit of a soft spot for Birkenhead, he’s a tough one, you will see that for yourself at the end of the day. And his chum Churchill, I have the measure of that lad, a Tory and then a Liberal and trying to decide now which way to jump.”
“What do you think of them yourself?” I had asked Christopher, and he answered me as though he had not heard me quite properly, as if I had asked him only about Churchill.
“ ‘Winston,’ ” Christopher said, “you can hear them calling down the table to him from one side or the other. ‘Winston!’ And he will turn his head to his left or his right, scowling one time and grinning the next. He has a stammer.”
For months and months and months after Charlie had died, I hated that man as I would never have thought possible, because everyone said that Gallipoli was all his idea, and the generals had tried to argue against it, but Churchill had won the day, and all those poor fellows and Charlie among them had been thrown there on the beach, with the great Turkish guns pointing down at them, Australian boys and Irish boys and even a few English fellows. And all of them blown away or dead of dysentery. But they said later and still say that it had not been his fault at all, that the generals had not understood his plan and distrusted him anyway and they had let him down. But by then, I did not care whether it was his fault or not. I detested the look of him in uniform for a while and then in overcoats with fur collars and tall silk hat, grinning, and you would see him in some of the news photographs swinging a stick, swinging a stick and grinning.
How strange, I often thought, ordinary fellows, even Collins was an ordinary fellow when all was said and done, a post office clerk and then a bank clerk here in London, and now they are sitting across from the men who plotted wars and peace, who had sent great flotillas to Gallipoli and put them in the trenches of Flanders and the Somme, millions of them, to be shot down. What, besides that, were a few hundred soldiers and rebels shot down in the laneways of Cork and Galway?
But when I said that once to Christopher, he knew at once what I meant, and veered away from the point. “Do you know the one that they don’t think is ordinary? Not ordinary in the least. They don’t think Childers is ordinary, they hate him like poison, they don’t even talk to him if they can help it, save in the way of business. Churchill doesn’t look at him really, he studies him, as you would study something in a tank.”
And he was a rare one, all right, from all that I could learn about him, an Englishman with Irish connections on his mother’s side, the cousin of Robert Barton, who was one of the Irish envoys, but everyone, Irish and English, accepted Barton as Irish, Anglo-Irish and Protestant, a landowner, an English officer in the war, but Irish, like Parnell. Childers was a different matter, summers in Ireland with his cousin in Wicklow, service in South Africa in the Boer War, by occupation, for years, a committee clerk in the House of Commons, which now made him valuable to our side, a devoted Republican now, and for two years he had been living in Ireland, editing one of the underground papers, like Christopher and Desmond FitzGerald and Elizabeth Keating. I had never met him, but there he is, in the official photograph of the delegation, standing beside Christopher, and looking very pale and recessive, as though he wanted to fade out of the photograph entirely.
“He is invaluable to us,” Christopher said, “he knows Parliament inside out, he knows the kinds of things we may be up against, the kinds of tricks. He has the training for that, none of us do.”
“You must be great chums,” I said.
There were plenary sessions and meetings of committee and all the rest of it, and Christopher would have told me all that I wanted to know, whether he should have told me or not, but it had little enough interest for me, even though, as he kept reminding me, the future of Ireland was at stake. For one thing, I did not really believe that. There were actually subcommittees meeting about fisheries and postal services, all of which seemed less than fascinating. “Mr. Collins must be of inestimable value in the subcommittee on posts and telegraphs,” I said. “After all, he was a postal clerk, he has the necessary experience.” Christopher had the courtesy to smile at that, but he did not like it, I could tell. “The colonel’s daughter,” he said, “you will always be the British colonel’s daughter.” “Perhaps they will make you a colonel, pet, an Irish colonel, and I can be the Irish colonel’s wife.” “Not me,” he said, “once the Treaty is signed and things are sorted out, that will all be over for me.” “For you,” I said, “but what of Mr. Collins?”
During the Truce, Christopher told me, there were marriages all over Ireland, even some of the legendary commandants of the flying columns were married that magical summer as later we all spoke of it. Christopher was at Tom Barry’s wedding in Dublin, which was a very proper and respectable one, although a few others were a bit, shall we say, hurried. It was a very romantic summer, and the heroes of the war were down from the hills and looking splendid, no doubt. It was a strange summer, because as Christopher told me, the soldiers on neither side were certain that the Truce would hold and they were making their preparations. Even in the final weeks of negotiations, there were photographs in the London newspapers of De Valera reviewing Republican Army soldiers at a small place in Limerick called Six Mile Bridge. He is standing on a platform, Cathal Brugha on one side of him, Richard Mulcahy on the other, he is a tall, gaunt man seen in full profile, dark overcoat, dark wide-brimmed hat, the president of the Republic, hand held, stiff-fingered, to hat brim. At the foot of the platform, soldiers in full Volunteer uniform are at attention, and the commandant of the troops marching past is in uniform, dark-eyed, a fierce mustache, but the soldiers behind him are in work clothes, cloth-capped, a bandolier or a blanket roll slung across their shoulders in token of military status. Because of the terms of the Truce, they are not carrying weapons.
“Damned fortunate,” Christopher said, as we stood looking down at one of the newspapers. “If the Mid-Limerick Brigade were to muster fully armed, you would see Mausers and Lee-Enfields, a few shotguns, and there you are.”
But despite the terms of the Truce, negotiations for arms purchases were under way on the Continent and in England itself. The rumor, heard everywhere in London, was that Collins was heading an armament and intelligence operation, which was why he needed separate headquarters.
Now, as we finished our meal in Creveney’s, I asked Christopher the only question which mattered to me. “Could it all start over again, the guns and the ambushes, and the towns burned by soldiers?”
“Oh yes,” he said, as he nodded to the waiter for the bill, “it could start again. If there are no terms on which the two sides can come to agreement, everything will break down, there will be nothing for it but to fight it out.”
There were two real issues, and everyone knew what they were, and they had little to do with the fisheries and the posts and telegraphs on which the committees wasted their mornings. The Irish demanded a unified country, from the center to the sea, as the song had it, but the English, before entering into negotiations at all, had made certain that the Protestant North was provided for, with a statelet of its own, and no need to become a part of the Free State, unless it chose to do so, which seemed unlikely in the extreme, its Parliament having been opened by the King himself, with a grandeur and ceremony worthy of India or some other far-flung outpost of empire. And that was the other issue, the question of Ireland remaining inside the British Empire, and acknowledging King George as our sovereign. The true negotiations lay between these two poles, like iron filings caught between contending magnets. The Tories, on the one hand, were disinclined to sell out their Unionist henchmen in the North, and far less were they willing to let Ireland remove itself from the Empire, dissolve its supposed bond of loyalty and allegiance to the Crown. As for the Irish, they had won from the British an offer of far more than had ever been hoped for by O’Connell or Young Ireland or the Fenians or the Land League or Parnell himself. But it was not the Republic; and it was for the Republic that the gunmen had been fighting in the hills of Cork and Donegal, it was for the Republic that men had died on hunger strike and on the gallows and against rain-streaked brick walls.
Two irreconcilables were facing each other across the table in Downing Street, and the idea, as I gathered it from Christopher, was that there would be a bend here with regard to Ulster and a bulge there with regard to the oath of allegiance, and somehow things would work themselves out in a way that would satisfy the ferocious Tories and the fierce Republicans. But it was nasty work, and exhausting work. More than once, the Coalition government almost fell, and survived only because of what was always described in the newspapers as Lloyd George’s “Welsh wizardry” but by Christopher in less genial terms.
It was astonishing to go from that meal in Creveney’s, with its talk of cabinets and guns and loyalty to the Crown and oaths sworn to the Republic and all the rest of it, to go from that to the Haymarket, Mr. Shaw’s Heartbreak House. Charlie had been very fond of Shaw and so too was Christopher, but I have always found him too clever by half, endlessly clever.
Michael Collins, so Christopher had told me, months before, was a great Shaw fan, during his years in London he was in the stalls every week and Shaw was one of his favorites. I tested that out, one of the first times I talked with him, at an evening party. Christopher, like most of the other men, was in evening coat, but Collins was wearing a very dark blue suit, so dark that there was almost a black to it, and a dark necktie with bits of red. He always made a great fuss when we met, because I was “Christopher’s young woman, a fine young woman from Galway, from outside Loughrea,” as he introduced me once to someone. He would always hold my hand a bit longer than need be, absentmindedly no doubt.
“Tell me this now, Mr. Collins,” I said on that occasion, “Christopher tells me that you’re a great fan of Mr. Shaw. What is your favorite Shaw play?”
He answered not my question, but my motive for asking it.
“Am I being examined?” he asked. “Put to the test?” He spoke in the quick, inflected accents of West Cork, the London years had done nothing to smooth them out, a country man’s voice, Father would have called it. “Now then, Janice”—it must have been our third meeting, when first he called me Janice and not Mrs. Nugent—“now then, I will disappoint you, I do not think I have a favorite. But I will tell you my favorite line, and should anyone in London ask you, what is Mick Collins’s favorite line in the dramatic works of George Bernard Shaw, you tell it to them. It is when Undershaft, the munitions maker, says, ‘Nothing is ever done in this world unless men are prepared to kill each other, if it is not done.’ ”
He knew exactly what he was saying, and what its effect upon me would be. All of a sudden what I knew came to me with a fresh vividness, frightening, that the man to whom I was talking had done just that, and was ready to do it again, if need be.
He was still smiling at me, and holding a glass of red wine in his hand. “I have never seen Major Barbara, would you believe that? I read it in Frongoch, the prison camp in Mr. Lloyd George’s Wales, in 1917.”
He had a way of leaping from one subject to another when he was at ease or when he was bantering as he was now, but when he was serious, so Christopher told me, he was blunt and unyielding.
“Prison is wonderful,” he said, “for serious reading, there is a kind of quiet in the center of a prison, for all its hubbub.”
“Yes, I am sure of that,” I said. “Christopher seldom talks about it. It must have been dreadful.”
“Not at all,” he said, “far from it. We had time for games, and singing and recitations, and there were parcels from home.”
“No doubt,” I said skeptically.
It was an evening party in Kedleston Place, and we were standing beside a tall curtained window which lodged along a crescent toward the small railed park, toward autumnal mists upon which the yellow light from streetlamps fell.
“They made a great mistake in the way they dealt with us after the Rising, after Easter Week.” It was as though he was talking in Dublin or home in Cork, and not in a London drawing room.
“Yes,” I said, “I know. Even here people say that those men should not have been executed, that they should not have killed your leaders.”
“That was their small mistake,” he said, “their great mistake was not to have killed all of us. It was a great training ground for us, Frognach and the other British prison camps. We came out of them knowing what kind of war would have to be fought and won.”
•
In the theater that night, sitting with Christopher as we watched Heartbreak House, I took his hand and held it. It all seemed odd to me, that Irishmen were making a new nation in Ireland, and Poles in Warsaw, Czechs in what once had been a part of that old empire, and at the same time so many other things were falling apart, and Shaw making a design of it. We had taken seats far too close, so that I could see the makeup on the actors, the lip-rouge and the coloring on the cheeks and Captain Shotover’s false beard.
That night, we were very happy, and lay close together. I was awake longer than Christopher, who lay beside me with his hand on my breast, and I put my hand on his hand, and then ran it down the length of his sleeping body. We would be married of course, but far more than that, I wanted everything to be over, settled, and a bit of peace for us and for other people. I was always a terrible disgrace to my sex, so Jennie Hunter would have said, who had been a VAD in France during the war, and so would have said Elizabeth Keating and Con Markievicz and all those. Good for them, but it was not what I wanted.
In the morning, I stood there by the window in Pump Court until it was full light, until I knew that in half an hour at most, Christopher would have to ring for a cab and set off for Cadogan Gardens. “All very respectable at Cadogan Gardens, I daresay,” I said once to Christopher, “decent Irish chaps, and very respectable. Whatever would they think if they knew about us?”
“They know about us,” he said. We were walking through the Green Park. “How could they not? You have met most of them, you have met Collins and Barton, and Griffith, I think, yes, you met Griffith once. Of course they know about us.”
“Do they know that we make love?” I asked, “to give it no coarser name. They jolly well do not know that. They would be shocked to death. Mr. Griffith would be shocked.”
Christopher laughed, and without turning toward me, said, “He would indeed. Very shocked.” “But not Mick Collins,” I said, and suddenly I wanted to know what he would say, “not Mick Collins.” You can tell about some men, is a theory Hazel Lockhart and I used to have before we had had any experience at all with men, you can tell about some men. Men have the same notion about women. Well, I think there is some truth to it, and I could tell about Michael Collins.
“Mick Collins would not be shocked,” Christopher said. “How could he be? He knows everything about us. I told him.”
“Told him!” I said, and stopped stock-still. “Why in God’s name?” I had always supposed that it was the sort of thing that men did not do, like cheating at cards.
“We were talking once,” he said, “late one night. As friends will.”
“As men will,” I said, with a nasty edge to my voice, but even as I spoke, I thought that there was very little about me that Hazel did not know. But Hazel was different, Hazel was someone I had known forever, it seemed, and Collins was this almost opaque gunman, the head of the murder gang, as the newspapers in London were forever calling him. Collins, so all the newspapers said, was going to go home one day, if he wasn’t killed, and marry a young woman from somewhere in our midlands, Longford, I think, whose people had a hotel.
Which shows, of course, how little I knew. The young woman from the hotel in County Longford was to have her photograph in the newspapers before many months had passed, a brisk, handsome, pleasant young woman with an engaging smile, but she was not the beginning and end of Collins’s romantic life, if that is the word I want. Far from it. But Christopher, although he knew more than he was telling me, perhaps did not know everything, and I am not certain that even Collins’s bodyguard knew everything, although I will wager that Scotland Yard did.
By the time Christopher had rung for the cab, I had his tea for him, and watched him with the wonder that I have always had when people slip out from love into the world, their voices taking on a different timbre, alien and strange, their smiles toward you a kind of negotiation. It is true of all of us, I saw myself in the tall looking glass above the fireplace, in Patrick’s dressing gown trailing the floor and my hair disordered. I put my hand to my hair, and smiled at Christopher in the mirror, at myself in the mirror, and thought how lucky we were.