Patrick Prentiss
If I were to compose a “secret history” of the Treaty and the Civil War which issued from it, it is with Christopher that I would begin it, and at no place better than his visit to Dublin in November, when he spent the weekend with me. The delegation, all of them or some of them, made several visits back to Dublin, to report to the cabinet, and Collins was back more often than that, that much at least was common knowledge, because there were frequent photographs of him in the newspapers, heavy overcoat, pale hat. By Dublin rumor, Collins was over on matters that concerned the army, which was being kept in readiness lest the talks break down, to consult with Mulcahy and O’Sullivan and the rest of HQ, and to report, over the heads of the cabinet, as it were, to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, one of the several chains of power which he kept in his hands.
But on that occasion in November, it was the full delegation that had come over to Dublin, with both Christopher and Collins accompanying them, for meetings which went on all of the Thursday and the Friday until darkness had come to Dublin’s autumnal streets, and the electric lights had been turned on in the Cabinet Room in the Mansion House. They adjourned then, and were to go back to London on Sunday’s night boat. They had, most of them, houses or flats to go to, families, but Collins, as they all said goodbye to each other in Dawson Street, nodded and walked down Kildare Street, quickly, hands shoved in pockets. “There are a dozen places he could be going to,” Christopher said, “safe houses that he used when he was on the run, but tonight he will be on the town with the lads, you may be certain of that.” Christopher, though, did not go to the flat which he kept in Fitzwilliam Square, but instead came out to stay with me in Palmerston Park.
We had a long talk that night, and an even longer one the next day, when Christopher borrowed a car for us, one of those motorcars which were always being made mysteriously available to cabinets and headquarters staff in those days, and we drove across the Dublin mountains and down into Wicklow, and walked for hours, stopping for a meal at an old Wicklow coaching hotel, and then circling back, along the shores of Lough Dan.
“It seems likely,” he said to me, “that on Sunday we will be traveling back separately, Collins and Griffith and Duggan and myself from Kingstown, and the other lads from the North Wall, things are that strained.”
“Myles Keough tells me,” I began, but Christopher stopped me with a burst of angry laughter.
“Keough knows gossip he has picked up at dinner parties or in the Four Courts.”
“He is Arthur Griffith’s great friend,” I said.
“He is,” Christopher said, “he is, and a more ill-matched pair you could not imagine. But there is not a more tight-lipped man in Ireland than Griffith is. Even though at this very moment, you may depend upon it, he is having a few quiet malts in the snug of the Bailey, and with Myles as likely as not.”
Poor Arthur Griffith, with the small house in Clontarf, the modest house for which his friends had taken up a subscription, traveling into town each morning in the years before the Troubles on the tram to the shabby office of his newspaper, seated in the tram with neatly pressed suit, the trousers pulled up a bit to save the serge, short, compact man, compact of face, heavy mustache, polished pince-nez. When he heard of the 1916 rebellion, which he had opposed, he was stranded in Clontarf, minding the children; Mrs. Griffith had taken advantage of a cheap Easter excursion fare to Cork, but he had found his way to the post office. Never a Republican, but by accident he had given his name to what followed, sinn féin, ourselves alone. No, they would have seemed ill-matched, Griffith and Keough, but there was another Griffith who could relax over a few whiskies, sing ballads, warm himself before flashing wit, but never so warm, so relaxed, as to speak out of school. A small, stern patriot, bred in the school of John Mitchel and John O’Leary. “This is all a terrible strain for Arthur, poor fellow,” Myles would tell me. “His doctor prescribed powders for him, and veronal, but he refuses to touch them. Decent Arthur Griffith, sitting there in Downing Street facing up to that gang of imperial ruffians, Lloyd George, Churchill, Birkenhead with his monocle and his drawl. And then, when he comes back for a few days to report to our crowd, what a crowd, De Valera the mathematics teacher and Brugha the fanatic and Austin Stack the fanatic held in reserve. And there are worse terrors beyond that Cabinet Room, the gunmen who will not be satisfied with any treaty, the lads in the hills and the back streets.”
“Whether he heard that from Griffith or not,” Christopher said, “that about sums matters up.” And Christopher picked up the tale where he had left it off the night before in Palmerston Park, as we sat together in Father’s study.
It is an extraordinary county, Wicklow, so small and so various. That morning, we had driven out from Rathfarnham, past the Yellow House, past Pearse’s school in the Hermitage, through Stepaside and over the Scalp, with Wicklow lying before us, but first the barren boglands, red-brown that November day, an even stillness, not even a snipe, the distant mountains, a glimpse of sea, and then the long valley.
“We come close to a formula of words that we can accept,” Christopher said, “the two lots of us, their lot and ours, and the centuries of battering away at each other could come to their close, a formula which the two crowds would accept, and then, there we are, up against two abstractions, the Republic for us, and the Crown for them. We could break down into a quarrel about two words.”
“You forget that I am a lawyer,” I said. “We live by abstractions. So do writers, priests.”
“And other people die by them,” Christopher said, “are killed by them.”
It seemed a curious reflection on the part of a man who held officer’s rank in the Irish Republican Army, and, as he would one day tell me, had helped in the planning of Bloody Sunday.
The men on the two sides of the table at Ten Downing Street, it seemed, were interested in some kind of accommodation, in some formula of words, but beyond the table, in London and Dublin, in England and Ireland, words like “Republic” and “Crown” held magic, power, claimed loyalty, lives. Never, never conceivably, would the men on one side of that table surrender the Crown’s right to claim Irish loyalty and allegiance. And as for the Irish . . .
On the day that De Valera appointed Christopher to his position as a secretary to the delegation, he reminded him that the negotiations would at best be torturous.
“I have my own long session with Mr. Lloyd George,” De Valera said. “He is as wily as some creature out of Welsh mythology, some sort of sea serpent. And the others are adept, to be sure, in the arts of diplomacy. We are not. We are plainspoken country people, the most of us. And none the worse for that, mind you, but it is a different way of doing things, we have not their training, nor their wiliness.”
In the Mansion House’s small committee room, De Valera sat with his back to a window. Dark suit, dark necktie, a long face beginning to line, features almost mournful in repose, but his smile could be disarming, direct. “Michael Collins asked expressly that you should be added to the delegation, and I am delighted by the suggestion. My own suggestion is Erskine Childers, as you know. And I trust and am certain that the two of you will work well together. You have been working on similar tasks for the past several years, doing fine work with your two periodicals, and informing the journalists from France and America.” They had been working well together, Christopher said, but De Valera caught a faint reservation, and the eyes behind the thick spectacles glinted a moment with curiosity, but he said nothing.
It was a conversation which lasted twenty minutes or longer, but it had not yet reached its point.
De Valera looked again into Christopher’s eyes, and then toward the closed door, and then back again to Christopher.
“You are going to be present at some of the discussions in London, Christopher, and at others you will not. It is well that you should understand the problem as I understand it. We are pledged to the Republic, but no bargaining in the world will get us one. I am racking my brains for something that will get me out of this straitjacket of a Republic.” As he was to tell the story later, it was while sitting on his bed, lacing his boots, that he came upon the idea of “external association,” one of a dozen, two dozen, catchphrases which were to be invented in the weeks ahead, by the Irish, by the English. But for the British, it was unthinkable that some sequence of words would place Ireland outside the Empire, and for the Irish, it was intolerable that they should accept a formula that placed her within the Empire. “Association with the British Commonwealth” was countered by “association within the British Commonwealth.”
“Each new version,” Christopher told me, “is carried back to Hans Place to be argued over, and every week or two it is carried over here and amended and redrafted. Griffith is beginning to show his age. One night, it must have been after midnight, and Childers had been at him all night, with that precise, public-school voice, that House of Commons voice, analyzing for him every adverb, every semicolon, and poor Griffith fortifying himself with double whiskies, at last he pulled himself away, and walked up to bed none too steadily. ‘Poor Griffith,’ Childers said to me, ‘a bit too fond of the native elixir, eh?’ I did not answer him, and Childers sniffed. He has the most maddening sniff, the entire history of British imperialism is inscribed upon the air in that sniff. Someday, you will see, Ireland will be free, and Erskine Childers will be shot for his sniff.”
I laughed, and Christopher turned his head away from the wheel to look at me, and the two of us were laughing. Brown bog stretched before us, and bare mountain.
The odd thing, Christopher said, is that of all the fellows on their side of the table and ours, the only two who have struck up a measure of friendship are, can you believe it, Birkenhead and Collins. Do you remember before the war, Carson and Galloper Birkenhead, Smith he was then, reviewing the Orangemen? “I like that fellow,” Collins said to Christopher once, “he has a respect for the facts. Tough as a bludgeon, no Welsh charm, none of Churchill’s blather, cuts straight to the point, a tough Tory and he lets you know it.”
But Childers, for all that he was on the Irish team was a different kind of Englishman, Griffith couldn’t stand him, “that damned Englishman,” he called him, and whenever Childers walked in the room, you could see Griffith stiffen, more than once he changed the subject. Collins did not go quite that far but there was no love lost between them. Collins would bait Griffith about him. “Dev’s little mouse, is that it?” Collins would say to Griffith, “pick up the stray remark and carry it over to Dev? You could be right.” Until at last, one night, with two large whiskies inside him, Griffith took off his pince-nez and polished them and settled them back on the bridge of his nose, and said, “If it is only to Dev that he is making his report, then that is not the worst of the matter.” Griffith had called in at Cadogan Gardens to talk over the subcommittee meeting that he and Collins would be going to in the morning, and they sat together in the drawing room. Collins saw at once, of course, the point which had been made, as Christopher did himself, but for a moment Collins said nothing, and in that moment, it seemed clear that Griffith would have drawn back the words if he could.
“That is as serious a charge as might be made against a man.”
“I know it is,” Griffith said, “I know that. And I would not for all the world . . .” But then he broke off, and said, the words falling out quickly, “Have you never thought it yourself, Mick, never at all?”
“I have been working with him for two years,” Collins said, “since he came over here, and you have yourself, so has Chris here. Chris more than either of us, they ran Information as a team, the two of them. He has never been anything with me save forthright and candid. What about yourself, Chris?” But before Christopher could answer, Griffith said, “That is not what I asked you, Mick. I asked you had you never thought it yourself?”
Collins had been holding his own glass of whiskey, but he put it down, stood up, and walked to where the tall window looked out upon the darkened garden. He shrugged the heavy shoulders, and did not answer Griffith’s question.
“They are getting round our chaps,” Childers told Christopher once. “They are clever, the pack of them, Churchill and Lloyd George and that appalling Birkenhead and the rest of them. They are flattering our crowd one day and frightening them the next. There in that bloody Cabinet Room, with the map of the Empire on the wall. Breaking our chaps up into subcommittees, and working their charms upon them. What do our chaps know of such matters?”
There was something to what he said. The English had seen from the first that the two members of the Irish team who were worth reckoning with were Griffith and Collins, and they were discovering that Collins was far from being the bloodthirsty gunman they had thought him. The others were makeweights more or less, Barton, a decent Protestant landowner of nationalist sentiments, Childers’s cousin as it happened, Gavan Duffy and Eamonn Duggan, solicitors—Duggan a member, as Christopher had himself been for a time, of Collins’s intelligence team.
•
Once Childers and Christopher found themselves standing on the Embankment, and looking up toward the Houses of Parliament, crisp October weather, and a stream of traffic across Westminster Bridge. “For their chaps, you know,” Childers said, “this is the center of the world, not the Empire only, mind, but the world. They are all grave and polite, courteous as they sit facing us, but they think us a pack of mutinous gunmen.” His accent was Haileybury and Cambridge, its vowels and diphthongs pure and unadulterated by rebellion, and when he spoke about “our chaps” and “their chaps,” as he did incessantly, you had to remember who was who.
•
Long after Christopher and I had had this talk, in the late 1920s, I found myself in conversation, in London, with Eddie Marsh, who had been Churchill’s secretary, and who remembered the Treaty negotiations. “We had been at Trinity together, at Cambridge, Childers and myself,” Eddie said. “A goodhearted, simple fellow, full of jokes. Once, he and Bertrand Russell and I took a reading holiday in Wales. He almost turned Bertie into a trout fisherman, can you imagine? Whatever happened to turn him the way he went? He took first class honors, you know, and placed third in the Civil Service examination, and he chose his clerkship in the Commons. And then, in 1921, there he was, at the council table, and when I looked at him, there was no recognition in his eyes. He had one of the sweetest natures in the world. What is it that that Ireland of yours does to people, Patrick? Look at poor Casement. Your Christopher Blake, now, he was a different sort entirely, would you not say? But of course, Blake was really Irish, not one of your hobbledehoys, like Casement and Childers.”
And what of Collins, I asked Eddie Marsh. What did you think of Collins, as he sat there at the council table, what did Churchill think of him? “Ah, now Collins, there is a different matter entirely. ‘I will not shake his hands,’ Winston said to me at the outset, ‘his hands are sticky with blood, his hands have touched the springs of murder.’ And of course Winston never forgot that about Collins, if for no other reason than that Winston never forgets a vivid phrase, especially if it is a phrase of his own contriving. But he came to be very impressed with Collins, a formidable young thug, he called him once to me, and at the end, of course, he quite admired him, bloody hands and all.”
“And yourself, Eddie?” I asked, and my curiosity was genuine, because Eddie Marsh could see people freshly and shrewdly when he chose. “Formidable,” Eddie said, “Winston had the mot juste, a formidable young man. A bit rough about the edges, of course. Well, more than a bit, a boy from West Cork come to London to work in the post office, fond of the theater, reading books, becoming cultured as he would have called it, and now here he was, at Number Ten.”
“He earned his road to that table,” I said to Eddie.
“Shot his way to it, more likely,” Eddie said. “London was dying to meet him, even when it looked as though negotiations would break off, even though it seemed as though the whole sordid mess would begin again, ambushes and those bullies in uniform that we had sent over. At the end, of course, Winston and Collins had come to know each other very well indeed, better, my dear, than history is likely to record.” And at that moment, Eddie reminded me of no one so much as Myles Keough, dropping his half-hints, but Eddie Marsh’s half-hints had genuine history in them, Churchill’s secretary and Churchill had no secrets from him, so everyone said.
“The Irish delegation had a very cozy house that they had taken, in Hans Place, but Collins had his own establishment, not far away, now, where was it . . .?”
“Cadogan Gardens,” I said.
“Of course!” Eddie said. “Cadogan Gardens, and Christopher was staying there with him. I have read reports from Scotland Yard about Cadogan Gardens, that Collins was running his own intelligence operation, that he was buying up rifles and revolvers in total violation of the Truce, and that your friend Christopher was hand in glove with him. But Christopher did not spend every night there, as we both know. Christopher had that lovely young woman. I knew her a bit, you know, from before the war, Janice, that was it, a lovely name, and she was married to a nice young fellow, Charlie Nugent, and I met her in 1921, with Christopher. Poor Charlie was killed in the war, of course.”
“Yes,” I said, “at Gallipoli.”
There was a moment’s flickering, Churchillian hesitation at the sound of the word.
“He was killed that first morning,” I said, without remorse. “They waded ashore onto the beach, and were wiped out by the Turkish guns firing down on them.”
Later, Eddie said, “Winston was certain, almost from the first, that we could do business with Collins and with Griffith, that is why we proposed breaking up and meeting in subcommittees. Winston was certain of it, and so was Freddie Birkenhead, and so after a bit was Lloyd George.”
For Eddie, it was an afternoon’s gossip about a chapter in the thick volume that was the chronicled life of Winston, his great hero, but for us, it was our meager history, the war of independence, as the newspapers have come to call it, and the Truce and the Treaty, the fierce fighting about the Treaty, and then the Civil War, which still, as I talked with Eddie that day in the twenties, was an open sore. To him, it was moving into a past of committees and subcommittees, recollections perhaps of Winston sweeping into Downing Street in his fur-collared coat, of Collins and Griffith at the table; behind them, Childers and Christopher.
“Dear me, yes,” Eddie said, “we would have every week our report from Scotland Yard, and I seem to recall that on occasion, when Christopher was not at Cadogan Gardens, he would be spending the night in rooms lent to him in Pump Court by a certain Irish barrister.”
“Your memory is prodigious,” I said.
“For gossip, my dear,” he said. “A fair memory for business, an excellent memory for poetry, a prodigious memory for gossip.” But for Eddie, as for Myles, gossip was a kind of poetry, poised between legend and brute fact, always with its lingering reticences.
“It was of far greater interest to the Yard, and to us, of course, that neither did Collins spend every night at Cadogan Gardens.” Eddie was also a prodigious smoker of cigarettes, and now he extracted yet another one from his gunmetal case, and fitted it into its holder of onyx and amber. And, although I said nothing, he knew that he had my attention. “When we first met, Patrick,” he said, “you were in the throes of your discovery that history can never really be written, the book you wanted yourself to write lying about you in shambles. It seemed to me then that you were suffering an Oxford plague, part of Oxford’s lethal seriousness. Of course it cannot be written, not even if you read the minutes of every meeting, not even if you read every report by Scotland Yard. Is it true, by the way, that Collins had his spies inside Dublin Castle itself? Never mind, no need for me to know. But where Collins was when he was not in Cadogan Gardens, not sitting at the table of polished walnut, who he was seeing and why, that might be a part of history.”
His eyes brimmed with mischief, but there was a faint tremor of caution about his lips, as though he were wondering how much might safely be hinted at. But he had my attention, and he knew it; it delighted him.
“Winston and Collins met more often than appears on paper,” Eddie said, “and they met in unlikely places. An unlikely place, to be more exact. A certain painter and his lovely wife. Did you know that, Patrick?”
“I have heard the stories before this,” I said, “there were many stories going the rounds in Dublin in 1922.”
“To be sure,” Eddie said, and he stroked a flame from his elaborate lighter. “Stories put about by his enemies. Absurd stories. What of his friends, though? What did you hear from Christopher?”
And I did in fact hear a bit of the story from Christopher that weekend in November, and a bit more in the few hours we had together on the last evening before they sailed back from Dublin a week or two later, and of course in the months that followed. But I best remember Christopher talking to me as we walked beside the November lake in Wicklow, the reeds dry, rattling in their faint breeze, and a rime of ice upon the lake shore.
“What a discreet fellow you are, Patrick,” Eddie Marsh said. “You should have been a solicitor, not a barrister. Family solicitor, grave family secrets locked away.”
I smiled without answering, because there was no need to. Eddie’s love of gossip was genuine, but he could never have remained Winston’s private secretary if he had been truly indiscreet. Eddie was a professional blurter, a font of carefully chosen indiscretions.
“In those weeks while the negotiations were going on in London,” I said, “Christopher was a very busy man indeed, he was being a secretary, like yourself. He was not greatly concerned, I should think, about where Collins and your Winston were meeting, if they did.”
“Oh, they did,” Eddie said, “you may depend upon that. And it was I who arranged those meetings, at a certain house in Cromwell Place. Most appropriate name, Cromwell!”
•
“It is very difficult entirely to blame Childers,” Christopher said to me that afternoon, as we walked along the dry woodland path which skirted the Wicklow lake. Childers once took Christopher to a Lyons Corner House, and bought tea and buns for them. That would have been before they went back to Dublin for that final consultation with the cabinet. Childers was stretched almost to the breaking point, his skin tight across his cheekbones, and he was quick, too quick, with his reproaches.
“I have spent a good part of my life with these people,” he said to Christopher, “and I think I understand them. It is their world, it is the lake in which they swim.” Westminster, he meant, Whitehall, government offices and, beyond the offices, beyond Whitehall and Westminster, a web, a network of schools, Oxford or Cambridge or Sandhurst, nicknames, house parties, shooting parties, grouse and trout streams. “We are a burden to them at the moment,” Childers said, “a serious burden, they want to deal with us, make us happy, send us away. We are a problem to them. But it is quite different for us, it is our freedom, not something which we are at liberty to bargain away.”
Christopher said it was always curious to hear Childers talk about “them” while using their very accents. A friend of Roger Casement’s had told Christopher once that most people had the wrong idea of him, years in the consular service, the knighthood, that romantic appearance, bearded and handsome. In fact, the friend said, he had never been to university, you know, not especially well read, and a strong north of Ireland accent. Perhaps so, but Childers, unlike Casement, was the real thing, a member of the English governing class who had drifted over to our side. And what he had to say was, Christopher knew, worth hearing.
“Mind you,” Childers said, “I have the greatest respect for them, for Griffith and for Mick Collins. I mean, where would we be today without Mick Collins, but his field of action is over there, back home in Dublin. You know why Dev insisted on sending Mick over here, because they were bloody well horrified by him, Collins the gunman, Collins the murderer, the man they would have to mollify, but it is not working out that way, Collins is being far too accommodating, he is awed to think that he is sitting in Number Ten, bargaining with a prime minister, with Winston and Birkenhead and Austen Chamberlain.”
“Perhaps Dev should not have sent him over here,” Christopher said, keeping his tone as mild as he could. “Perhaps Dev should have come over himself.”
“You know perfectly well why he did not,” Childers said. “Dev is more than president of the Republic. He is our conscience. Whatever we can work out here, hammer out here, must be referred back to Dev.”
“The Republic,” Christopher said in a questioning tone.
The Corner House was crowded, shoppers, clerks, people in town for the day. The women, many of them, had string bags resting on the floor beside their chairs. It was not yet December, but there was already a Christmas feel in the air. What would the word “Republic” mean to them, Christopher thought, what would it mean to most of the shoppers in Grafton Street or Sackville Street, the ladies from Rathmines and Rathgar having tea in Switzer’s. For Childers more than for Christopher, the word was sanctified.
“Lloyd George is delighted that he does not have Dev to deal with, you may be certain of that,” Christopher said.
“It was a bad move,” Childers said, “to agree to meet in subcommittees. It is an old trick of theirs, divide and conquer.” His words flung out a historical tapestry stretching back to the Tudors, Cecil and Walsingham dazzling visiting tribesmen. And as though he read Christopher’s smile, he said, “I know them. I have seen them at work. I have worked for them.”
Once, in Downing Street, Christopher looked up to see Churchill studying Childers with undisguised loathing, and I was myself to hear that he spoke of him as “an unnatural creature, a vile and loathsome renegade,” much as Griffith spoke of him as “that treacherous Englishman,” but Childers, who must surely have been aware of all this, soldiered on, working twice as hard as anyone, obsessed by his certainty that Winston and Birkenhead and their gang would swindle them out of their Republic.
“I have been preparing a report for Mick and Mr. Griffith to read at their leisure,” Childers said, “it bears upon what the English are prepared to concede with regard to fisheries and coastal defenses.” As he spoke, he carefully smoothed strawberry preserve across half a scone, alert that it did not spread beyond the edge. He did everything with careful precision, his handwriting, trained by his writing of minutes, small and shapely. But he had managed to bring the Asgard, with its cargo of rifles, through stormy seas, in 1914.
Childers could not get it through his head that he and Christopher were not deputies but secretaries. And of course he was more than merely a secretary, he was De Valera’s eyes and ears, everyone accepted that. De Valera would have made him a delegate, but Griffith would never have agreed.
“He’s all right,” Collins said once about Childers, “perhaps Arthur does not trust him, but I do. He’s an odd sort, but sure he’s not the only odd fellow we have working with us.” Throughout all of the Troubles, the only weapon that Childers carried, so far as anyone knew, was a small automatic which Collins had given him, so small that he would carry it pinned to his braces by the trigger guard, and he wore it less from a wish for protection than out of affection and admiration for Collins.
“They are not Mick’s sort,” Childers said to Christopher. “They know how to get round him.” He shook his head.
The last day of all, there in London, Christopher would later tell me, began in the Cabinet Room at three in the afternoon—Lloyd George, Chamberlain, Birkenhead, Churchill; Collins, Griffith, and Barton for the Irish. It was a closed meeting, and lasted until after seven. At its conclusion, Lloyd George held up two envelopes. “There are two letters here,” he said, and he held one in each hand, “and they go tonight, one of them, to Sir James Craig in Belfast. One letter will tell him that articles of agreement have been signed between Sinn Féin and the British government. The other letter will tell him that Sinn Féin refuses allegiance to the British Crown, refuses to come within the British Empire. It is the final breaking of the ways. If I send this letter it is war, and war within three days. Which letter do you want me to send? It is for you to decide.”
“And how long have we to decide?” Griffith asked.
Lloyd George looked down at the watch which lay on the table before him, bedded on the coiled gold links of its chain. “You have less now than three hours. Mr. Shakespeare is waiting outside in the Special Lobby. At ten o’clock, there will be a special train to take him to Holyhead, and there is a destroyer at Holyhead to take him to Belfast. It is the end of the road, gentlemen, one way or the other.”
Young Shakespeare was waiting there with Christopher and Erskine Childers. He made a decent effort at conversation. “This is quite as exciting as The Riddle of the Sands, Mr. Childers.” Childers looked at him blankly. “You know, do you not,” he asked Christopher and Childers, “you know, do you not, what is going on in there, you are going to know soon enough, I will be carrying a letter from the PM to Craig, special train, destroyer getting up steam at Holyhead.” “What sort of letter?” Childers asked.
“Ah, they would not tell that to a humble junior like myself, you know that as well as I do, Mr. Childers.” Childers looked across at Christopher. Geoffrey Shakespeare had a nicely polished face, and his hands, as he rested them on striped flannel, were pale and shapely. Christopher returned Childers’s look, and went back to reading the Tatler, the account of a dinner dance, with photographs of a ballroom, dancers. When he looked up again, Childers was looking into space, one hand was squeezing the other tightly.
When the Irishmen came out of the Cabinet Room, Lloyd George walked with them, the courteous host; as he walked, slipping the links of his watch chain through a waistcoat buttonhole, he looked grave and preoccupied. Griffith’s face was impassive; Barton, to Christopher, seemed agitated; Collins looked murderous. “A few hours yet,” Lloyd George said to Shakespeare. “We are having a light meal here at Number Ten while we wait for our friends. You must join us.” Shakespeare beamed; it was becoming a most exciting evening.
London’s early winter night had fallen. Across the road, two bobbies walked quietly, in pace with each other; it might have been Kensington or Hampstead. The air was chill; moonlight shone through ragged clouds moved by a brisk wind.
“Well for them,” Griffith said suddenly, “so securely set in their empire that two unarmed policemen is all they need for their safety.”
“While the Truce lasts, at any rate,” Christopher said.
“Two unarmed policemen,” Collins said. “Do you really believe that, Arthur? Give a shout or better yet pull out a revolver, and see what will happen.” He gave a smile over toward Childers. “Am I right?” But Childers seemed not to have heard him, and Collins’s moment of levity flickered, faded.
Collins, Blake and Barton shared one of the taxis, Collins sitting behind the driver, his head turned toward darkened streets, the yellow lights, traffic. Presently, he said, “I am going to sign.” For a minute or two, Barton said nothing, as though first astonished and then fumbling for a response. “Can you talk to me about that, Michael? This is the first I have heard of this.”
“We have gone as far as we can go,” Collins said. “We have got as much from them as we can get.”
“It was bluff and theatricals,” Barton said. “There may be war around the corner, but Lloyd George will not let it rest on a letter to James Craig.”
“I know that,” Collins said. “Special trains and destroyers with the steam up. Do they think we are children? Well, so far as I am concerned, little Shakespeare can carry word over that the Irish have signed.”
“That some of them have signed,” Barton said quietly.
“Some of them or none,” Collins said. “They want the whole bloody roster. They want the lot of us. They have gone so far that they have put their own necks on the chopping block; their full delegation is prepared to sign, and they will require the same from us.”
“Steamer?” Blake asked from the far side. “Special train?” And Barton described the final minutes in the Cabinet Room, and Lloyd George holding the two envelopes. Collins did not interrupt him. His heavy head was still turned toward the window, and his hat jammed down over his eyes. “He is a master of oratory,” Barton said, speaking of Lloyd George, “whatever can be done by gesture and word, all of those resources by which the mind of one man oppresses the mind of another.”
“Bloody Welsh dodger,” Collins said at last, “but he is impressive right enough, Bob. You have the right of it there.”
Blake remembered Geoffrey Shakespeare in the Special Lobby. A special train waited to carry him to Holyhead, a destroyer, gray metal, guns, against a dark sky.
“What do you think, Chris?” Collins said, but without turning his head.
“Theater,” Christopher said, “I think about that as Bob does and yourself. Scare the Paddies.”
“We can get no more from them than this,” Collins said. “Do you agree, Chris?”
Christopher paused before answering, paused a moment too long.
“Well?” Collins said. “You know damned well what you think. Let’s have it.”
The unheated taxi was cold in the December night.
“Thank God that I am not a delegate,” Christopher said.
“You are a member of the Dáil,” Collins said. “If we sign you will have to vote upon what we have done. And you are not here as a secretary merely, neither Childers nor yourself. You have a voice. Let’s hear it.”
Christopher could almost feel the tenseness of the two men sitting beside him.
“If the delegates sign,” he said, “I will support them.”
“But should we sign, Chris?” Barton said. “That is the question Mick put to you. A fair question.”
“You have been thrashing this out with them since three this afternoon,” Christopher said, “and you have all the ins and outs of it.”
“We know where Erskine will stand,” Barton said. Pure Rugby and Christchurch in his voice, no Irish at all. In easier moments, it had amused Christopher that the two cousins, Barton and Childers, Rugby and Christchurch, the one Haileybury and the other Trinity, British officers the two of them during the war, should have been, in the delegation, the voices of the Republican conscience.
“Oh, to be sure,” Collins said. “We know where Erskine will stand. Erskine will stand wherever Dev wants him to stand. That is why Dev sent him over, Dev’s man with the delegation. And Dev believes that we are empowered to sign nothing until it has been referred back to him.”
“Until it has been referred back to the cabinet,” Barton said.
“To be sure,” Collins said, “Dev and Austin Stack and Cathal Brugha, the Republican red-hots. Austin and Cathal would accept nothing short of some sort of total and abject surrender.” As he talked, he turned his head, but his face was obscured by the winter darkness.
“Arthur Griffith and yourself are members of the cabinet as well,” Barton said. “You have tongues in your heads, God knows. The rights and wrongs should be argued out, before any names are set to that document.”
“There is no bloody time,” Collins said, “can you not bloody well see that? We are at the end of the day. We can have that bloody Treaty, or we can have war. Now which will it be?” Before Barton could answer, Collins put a hand on Christopher’s arm. “’Tis your answer we have been waiting for, Chris,” he said.
“You got nowhere with the draft treaty we carried over with us from Dublin?”
“Nowhere at all,” Barton said. “What we are left with is what we had last week, which the cabinet in Dublin would not accept.”
“If you sign that thing,” Cathal Brugha had shouted suddenly to Griffith, “you will split Ireland from top to bottom.”
“No,” Christopher said, in the darkness of the London night. “I would not sign it.”
“We are not signing away Ireland,” Collins said, “we are not signing away anything. The decision does not rest with the cabinet, it rests with the Irish people. It will be for them to decide if they want war. And that is by God what we will have.”
“You asked for my answer, Mick,” Christopher said. “You have it.”
The light of a streetlamp fell suddenly upon them, and in its brief glare, Collins’s face was dark and lowering, the jaw firm.
“Dear Jesus,” he said, partway between a sigh and a snarl. He turned away from them again, looking out upon darkness, as they made their way from Whitehall to Knightsbridge. Neither Barton nor Christopher spoke again, until they had reached Hans Place. They were beneath its streetlamp as Christopher paid off the driver. Christopher looked at his watch: it was almost eight.
“This could be one for the history books, Mick,” he said, “matters of state talked out in a taxicab.”
But Collins had brushed past him, and was walking to the door. “This is very bad,” Barton said, in his mild, even voice as they followed him. “Mick is very certain as to what must be done.”
“But you are not?” Christopher asked. “You seemed certain enough a few minutes ago.”
•
What happened that night, between eight and two the next morning, would bring Ireland, within months, into civil war, and in the years which have followed, its events have passed into documents, records, arguments and charges and insults on the floor of the Dáil, into the remembrances of men, into the histories of families. Once, in Annamoe, late at night, Barton talked with me, and once, most extraordinary of all, late on a night in the winter of 1922, I listened to a man who had not been there with them in London at all, a Republican with a price on his head, moving out of Dublin to join desperate men in the hills of Cork, but who imagined those hours with fierce, murderous anger. “They were the traitors,” the Republican told me, “they were the ones who bargained and sold, they were the ones, the British were too clever for them, or perhaps they were willing to be hoodwinked.” And of course, Christopher told me and at length as much as he could remember, not arguments alone, but gestures, tones of voice, memory, not once but several times, and would remember fragments of phrase, a look, everything enacted in those hours before and after midnight of the fifth and sixth of December. And yet, oddly, what stays most vividly with me is the account which Janice was to give to me of what Christopher had told her, how he had looked, when he came to her flat at almost three in the morning.
He had phoned her, and she was waiting for him by the window, saw the taxi pull up and Christopher get out, still black night, but by the lamplight from the taxi she could see that a light rain was falling. At that hour, the world seemed empty, save for the taxi and the silvery rain and herself at the window in her red dressing gown and Christopher coming to see her.
He brushed her lips lightly with his, and as she took his coat, he ran his fingers lightly along her throat, touched collarbone. His fingers had the cold of winter upon them.
“What is it?” she asked. “What has happened?”
“It is signed,” he said. “Signed by every man on our delegation, and every man on theirs.”
“And that is what you wanted,” she said, “what we wanted. That is the treaty you were working for?”
She poured whiskies, and when he had taken his glass, she touched hers to it.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “It cannot be called a treaty, ‘Articles of Agreement’ is what the document is headed. But it is a treaty, right enough.”
He walked over to the thick chair which stood beside the fireplace and sat down heavily in it. He took a long sip of the unwatered whiskey.
“And that is what you wanted,” she said, her voice making it a question.
“Part of it,” he said, “the most of it, perhaps, as much of it as we could get.”
“Shouldn’t you be celebrating—isn’t that what we Irish do?”
“We Irish,” he said, and smiled. “Perhaps we should have celebrated. After the signing, and for the very first time in these months, the English came round to our side of the table, and there were handshakes.”
“You shook hands with that awful Churchill, did you? Really and truly? The things you chaps will do for Ireland.”
“We were all of us exhausted,” he said, “their lot as well as ours.”
As they were leaving the Cabinet Room, Birkenhead said to Collins, “This could be the end of my political life.”
“Your political life,” Collins said, with a savage weight upon the adjective. “It could very well be the end of my life.”
“Most of us went back to Hans Place,” Christopher said, “and Collins took a cab to Cadogan Gardens, I expect, God knows where Collins goes, and I came here.”
By seven-thirty, the three taxis had reached Hans Place, and the arguments began in the conference room one floor above the drawing room. The typists brought in pots of scalding tea, and plates of sandwiches. At nine, copies of the Treaty, freshly typed to incorporate a few minor details, were brought over from Downing Street and spread out on the long table. Griffith, who was firm for signing, sat at the head of the table, and Collins, who was almost as firm, sat at his right, and beside him sat Duggan, who had come round early to signing, and across from those two, Duffy, who was against signing, and Barton. At the far end, facing each other, sat Childers and Christopher. In the hours that followed, Childers, so far as Christopher could recall, did not touch the food, although he had a cup of tea before him which he sipped from. He had taken one of the Treaty copies, and sat staring down at it, making notes from time to time on a pad. But he never lost track of the argument, and, from time to time, would break in upon the argument in his precise, dry voice, which held in control a fierceness of feeling that his pale blue eyes revealed.
“You cannot sign that thing,” he cried out at last, “you cannot sign it. You have not the authority to sign it.”
Griffith glared down the length of the table at him. “By God,” he said, “I will bargain with the English at their table up there in Downing Street, but I will take no hectoring from the Englishman who sits here at our table.”
Childers began to answer, but bit his lip, and Collins, although the Treaty was putting them on opposite sides, gave him a wink, as though to say that they were all of them nervous and overheated. Certainly Collins himself was, and at one point, he shoved back his chair, stood up, and paced the room back and forth.
“It is well for you,” he said, wheeling suddenly, and speaking to Duffy and Barton, “it is well for you to say, let the war commence up again if it must. What the hell do you know about it, either of you?”
“I know a bit about it, Mick,” Barton said, “and I’d know more without your help.” In 1919, when Barton was in Mountjoy Gaol, Collins had organized his escape, smuggling in a file and a rope, and posting a squad outside the walls to carry him to safety.
“What the hell do you know about supplying it and fighting it?” Collins said, ignoring the pleasantry. “There are columns in the field in Cork and Limerick and Clare and Longford without proper weapons, without the ammo you would need to rob a bank. We are close to the end of the day when it comes to fighting, and you are asking us to begin afresh.”
“It is the men in those columns,” Childers said, “who are looking to us to bring back to Ireland the Republic that they have been fighting for, and not—” He paused to look for a noun, and then said, “and not this.” He gestured toward the papers which lay before him.
Collins was still standing, and when he looked down the table at Childers he seemed for a moment blind with fury. “It will be for them to decide,” Collins said, “the Dáil and the fellows in the columns and the Irish people. The Treaty will be wastepaper if the people do not want it.”
“The people have given trust to their leaders,” Childers said. “Yourself and Mr. Griffith here, but Dev as well and Cathal Brugha and there are others. It is monstrous that the English should hold a three-hour club over our heads. Peace or war by ten P.M., is that not what Lloyd George gave you? Decide war or peace for our country in three hours.”
“It is already past ten,” Collins said, “and we are here still arguing and it does not matter that it is past ten. Lloyd George is running a bluff, I know that as well as you do, Erskine. But I also know that this is a final offer. There is nothing more that we can get from them.”
“Why?” Childers asked. “Why must it be now? Unless you know something, Mick, that some of the rest of us do not.”
From his chair at the end of the table: “Are you suggesting, Mr. Childers,” Griffith asked, “that Mr. Collins and myself have private knowledge, have had private dealings with the enemy that we have not disclosed to the delegation?”
There had been a time, in October, when Griffith had regarded Childers with a weary, puzzled exasperation. “Where is Erskine?” he said once to Christopher. “We are looking for fellows to take the typists to the Gilbert and Sullivan. They are doing Iolanthe.” But Childers would be locked away in his room, or in the library of the House of Commons, where once, in another time, another world almost, he had worked, a promising civil servant, bright and eager, a veteran of the war in South Africa, decorated, mentioned in dispatches. But it was “Mr. Childers” now, and “that damned Englishman.”
“Of course he is not suggesting that,” Collins said impatiently. His coat was unbuttoned, and he hooked his thumbs into the band of his trousers. It was at Childers that he was looking, and not at Griffith. “Erskine knows damned well that he is not properly speaking a member of the delegation. He is a secretary to it, as Christopher here is.”
“Erskine was made a secretary,” Barton said mildly, “because he knows far more than all of us put together about the House of Commons and English politicians, and their ways of thinking and doing. His advice I have always found helpful.”
“It is not advice that he is giving us at the moment,” Griffith said. “He is—”
“We have other matters before us,” Collins said. “It is late in the bloody night, and how do we stand? Arthur stands ready to sign whether anyone else does or not, and so do I. And so does Eamonn Duggan. That leaves yourself, Bob,” he said to Barton, “and Gavan here. Where do you stand, Gavan? Are you still holding back from us?”
In that time long afterwards, in that time a few years ago, Eddie Marsh passed to me a copy of the aide-mémoire, the dossier on the Irish delegates, which had been prepared by Whitehall. “Gavan Duffy, Catholic,” it read. “Son of the late Sir Charles Gavan Duffy. Practiced for about ten years as a solicitor in London. Vain and self-sufficient. Likes to hear himself talk; will try to score points, even small ones; will attempt arguments in a legal manner.” The stale odor of English condescension clung to the single typed page. “They are leaders in Dáil Éireann,” it says by way of general comment, “which is a very nondescript assembly. They are absolutely without world experience, and considerable allowance will have to be made on this score. In overcoming their nervousness they may be a bit rude and extravagant in speech. . . . The two so-called secretaries,” it notes, “although not delegates, are of consequence in the party and should not be underestimated. Christopher Blake spent several years in London as an editor and tried to make his way as a writer. Author of a book on early Irish history, over-lyrical, extravagant, not without charm. Took part in 1916 rebellion. Sinn Féin propagandist and intelligence officer. Friend of Michael Collins, and under his influence. The other ‘secretary’ is very different. Haileybury, Trinity Cambridge, civil servant, served with distinction in the Army in African War, Royal Navy in recent war. Holds reserve rank of Major. Skilled yachtsman. By now, a hardened fanatic and renegade. Close to De Valera. . . . Childers must not be underestimated, will operate in the background, demure civil servant. Watch him.” Of Collins, it noted, “ ‘Minister of Finance’ in Dáil Éireann, Chief of Intelligence in Irish Republican Army, so styled. Full of physical energy, quick thinker, impetuous, excitable. Strongest personality of party, capable of dominating all of them, save, perhaps, Childers and Griffith. A very dangerous man. He has murdered and has had murders done.” In the margin of the copy which Eddie lent to me, his master had written, “His hands have touched the springs of murder. W.S.C.”
Now, Christopher told Janice, there were two holdouts, Gavan Duffy and Bob Barton.
“Die for what?” Collins asked them. “Die for bloody what? By Jesus, if there is a new war in Ireland because the two of yez have refused to sign, there are lampposts in Dublin that the two of yez will be swinging from.”
“That is a disgraceful argument to make, Mick,” Childers said to him, “disgraceful.”
“It is the truth of the matter,” Collins said, “and we have no time to waste on Cambridge good manners. ‘Twill not be our lads that will hang them, ‘twill be the plain people of Dublin, the plain people of Ireland. We have hauled them along a long hard road, but we have come to its proper place.”
“That,” Childers said, his voice soft, held by iron control, “that agreement they have sent over to be signed. It was toward that that we have been leading the people?”
And in the end, Christopher told Janice, it was Duggan, not Collins, who turned the tide, Duggan whom the aide-mémoire dismissed with “Fought in 1916 rebellion; solicitor; completely under influence of Michael Collins. Neglible, and he knows it.” First Duffy broke under the passion of Collins, under Griffith’s arguments, and then, suddenly, as if a word by Collins had triggered it, Duggan cried to Barton, “You have served your time in Mountjoy, Bob, and so have I. I remember when Moran and Flood and the others were taken out and hanged. I saw the hangman. Will you send out more of our lads to be hanged because you don’t like phrases on a piece of paper?”
“Phrases which time can change, boy,” Collins said, “nothing is forever.”
Dark night beyond the drawn curtains. During all this, Griffith had sat resolute and composed, certain in his feeling. “The signatures of the entire delegation are required, Bob.”
“We are divided here,” Childers said, “and so will the cabinet be and the Dáil and the nation.”
But Barton shook his head. “I am sorry about this, I am not persuaded, but I will sign, let us sign the thing.”
There may perhaps have been but the two policemen on point duty when they left Downing Street, but when they returned, close upon midnight, a half-dozen plain clothesmen came to the doors of the two taxis. Lloyd George and Birkenhead walked with them to the Cabinet Room.
“We are delighted to see you here,” Lloyd George said to Griffith, “we were giving up hope. You are doing the proper thing, Mr. Griffith.”
“There are some details of language which will require some redrafting,” Griffith said. “An hour’s work, perhaps.”
“May we offer you something?” Birkenhead said. Griffith did not reply, but Collins shook his head.
It was after two before the redrafting was completed, a mechanical matter, and while they waited, there was polite talk, in bursts, across the table. “A wonderful night,” Birkenhead said, speaking directly to Collins, “a wonderful night for our two nations.”
“As much for this kingdom as for your own people,” Sir Hamar Greenwood said, and he beamed across the table at all of the delegates who sat facing him. At two, they heard Big Ben strike, and ten minutes after that, the clear copies were brought in.
He could remember the words upon which the first paragraph closed, Christopher told Janice, “an executive responsible to that Parliament and shall be styled and known as the Irish Free State.” They signed on the final page, the English delegates to the left of the page, and the Irish delegates to the right. After they had signed, the English delegates walked round the table and for the first time, officially at any rate, there were handshakes. Churchill shook Griffith’s hand and then Collins’s, the hand which had touched the springs of murder.
The air was cold, clear. Childers was standing by himself on the footpath, and Barton began to walk toward him and then paused. It was clear to all of them, to some of them at least, to Barton and to Christopher, that he was now standing alone, that he walked in silence with his grief and his anger.
“And that,” Christopher said to Janice, “is how the Treaty was signed between Ireland and England.” He looked down into his empty glass but when she reached for it, he shook his head.
•
The mailboat which carried Collins and Griffith back to Dublin docked at Kingstown on the morning of Thursday, December 8. There was a thin, chill wind in the air, stirring thin-branched winter trees. At Euston Station crowds, who had read of the Treaty in the papers, had followed the two men, and Christopher, who was accompanying them, jostling and shouting. Collins’s hat, a trilby, was knocked off and left somewhere on the station platform, to be claimed as a souvenir. One of the press photographs shows him triumphant, an arm flung about Griffith, but in the others he appears preoccupied. One lingers over a photograph of Collins smiling at an elderly, heavyset man, broad smile of triumph, overcoat and jacket unbuttoned despite what must have been the cold, who is waving what might be a handkerchief, and perhaps shouting. There are other waving arms, grins, and toward the rear of the crowd a banner whose blurred letters are illegible.
In streaky dawn, Collins and Christopher had stood together at the railing looking toward a coast just visible. “PEACE IN IRELAND,” one of the evening papers had said, in immense letters, “TREATY SIGNED.” A newspaper hoarding, just visible at the edge of the crowd at Euston, carried a single word, illegible, which might have been “PEACE” or “IRELAND.”
“An immense city,” Collins said, “a labyrinth. But we hammered something out there, Chris. ’Tis done, signed and done.”
Christopher waited for him to say more. They had spent the night like that, a few drinks in the bar, and another one, much later, in the cabin which they shared. For a few hours, they may have slept, or at least Christopher did, and when he woke to find Collins gone he went up on deck to join him.
“What is it that we are bringing back with us, they will ask. I can tell you this, we are bringing back with us something that Ireland needs and needs now.”
“The Treaty is signed,” Christopher said, “and you stand by it, Mick, and I stand by you.”
“That is not much of a formula Chris, if you will excuse the bluntness. You are not a solicitor, Chris, but you are talking like one.”
“We drove as hard a bargain as we could,” Christopher said, “or rather, yourself and Mr. Griffith did. We brought the country back from the edge of war, and then moved off with the most that we could get.”
“Not in Erskine’s view,” Collins said. “By God, I used to have a great fondness for that fellow, but he is like a field under water. Useless.”
“You heard the crowd at Euston,” Christopher said, “you saw them.”
“London Irish,” said Collins. “I know them through and through. I was London Irish myself for ten years or more. Whatever gives them a chance to wave the green banner.”
“You are a hard man, Mick,” Christopher said. “The Treaty went back to Dublin before us. We will know soon enough.”
“Poor Duggan and poor FitzGerald,” Collins said, and for once in the dawn light he smiled. “We shoved them into the line of fire.” They had carried the Treaty with them to Dublin on the sixth, on the day of its signing, and delivered it that night to De Valera. In the morning, Duggan cabled Collins, “Document delivered, cabinet summoned by President.” De Valera’s wire reached Hans Place an hour later: “Urgent. Members of cabinet in London to report at once. Meeting fixed for December 8, noon.”
“We know already,” Collins said. “That was not a bouquet that Dev sent us.”
“He is a frugal man when it comes to telegrams,” Christopher said.
“The future has been put in our hand,” Collins said. “We can stand now on our own two feet, develop our own civilization. After struggling for centuries.” The words had a hollow echo, as though he were rehearsing them, but when Christopher said nothing, he burst out, in a more familiar manner, “We know damned well what they want, some of them, Brugha and O’Connor and Stack and those. They want a Republic, but a Republic is not on offer.”
The coast was clear now, with mist drifting away, the town in view, a hotel, and along the seafront prim houses of the middle class, pastels, white, pale green.
“You live here, do you not?” Collins said.
“In Sandycove,” Christopher said. “My mother lives there.”
“Does she stand behind what you have been about, what we have been about?”
“More or less,” Christopher said. “She is alone now, save for myself and a housekeeper. My father was a Redmond man, a friend of Redmond’s, in fact. My brother was a medical man, he was killed in France a few weeks before the Armistice.”
“By God,” Collins said, “do you know, I cannot even be certain that my own family will stand behind me over this. West Cork people are fierce people, great tradition of patriotism there.” Collins’s family home, the farm at Sam’s Cross, had been burned by the Black and Tans. Hatless, hat left behind on a train platform, he ran his hand through his hair.
Later, they had tea carried to them, and stood holding the warm cups against the morning chill.
“There is no great crowd there,” Griffith said as he joined them. His face was expressionless, morning light glittered upon his eyeglasses. “This is not Euston Station, is it?”
People were gathered in knots, perhaps twenty of them or thirty, and the most of them were perhaps waiting for other passengers.
“ ‘Tumultuous ovation greets returning warriors,’ ” Collins said. “ ‘A grateful nation goes wild with gratitude.’ ”
“A bit early in the morning for tumult,” Griffith said.
In the event, there were three old friends waiting for Griffith, and, for Collins and Christopher, three members of Collins’s Squad, and Bill Sinnott, who had worked with Christopher in the intelligence bureau at the time of Bloody Sunday. Tom Cullen, of the Squad, was first up the gangway, and Collins seized him. “What is the country saying, Tom, what are our own lads saying?”
“The lads are with you, Mick,” Cullen said. “If it is good enough for you, by God, it is good enough for them.”
“But the country, Tom, have you a sense of the country?”
Cullen, it seemed to Christopher, was uncertain how he should answer: an urban fighter, a good man with a revolver. “Sure, why shouldn’t they be for you everywhere, Mick. Haven’t we won the war, the Treaty signed and all.”
But on the pier, Christopher talked with Sinnott and Bob Bennett. “The fat’s in the fire,” Sinnott said. “That mean-spirited bastard, and his chums, Stack and Brugha. What the bloody hell did they want?” Christopher looked over at Collins, who was listening to Charlie Robinson; his hands were jammed into his overcoat pocket, and he had a sullen look.
“There is a cabinet meeting this noon,” Christopher said. “Nothing could be so bad, so soon.” He remembered the crowd at Euston.
“They won’t take what the Big Fellow signed,” Sinnott said.
“Mick did not sign on his own, for God’s sake,” Christopher said, “the entire delegation signed.”
Mrs. Griffith’s hand rested on her husband’s arm; she wore a heavy coat which she had bought in London, her one extravagance, dark wool, with a fur collar.
“The country will be quartered,” Sinnott said. “Neither the Big Fellow nor Dick Mulcahy nor the two of them together will be able to hold the Army.”
“It will not be that bad,” Christopher said.
“Mind you,” Sinnott said, “I stand by Collins.”
But at noon, when the delegates and the members of the cabinet came to the Mansion House, it was a different matter. De Valera had given orders that there was to be no mention made in the press of Collins’s and Griffith’s arrival that morning, but by noon, Dublin knew of it in the papers, and knew that a cabinet meeting had been called. Not Dawson Street alone was jammed with people, but the streets leading off from it as well, and the delegates had to fight their way through cheers, and when Collins and Griffith arrived, together, someone in the crowd began singing, and other voices, hundreds of them, took up the words. “A nation once again, a nation once again.”
Neither Griffith nor Collins gave any acknowledgment of either the song or the cheers. “Up Dev!” someone shouted. “Up Dev, up Mick, up the Republic.”