8

Jane sat in the darkness watching Dan and Nora as Naisi and Deirdre for the hundredth time, and still the play enthralled her. Not still, but more. The longer she’d been at the Abbey the more the power of Synge’s work and the marvel of theater itself affected her. Every night she’d found herself pulled deeper and deeper into the mystery of suffering. Deirdre’s, of course, and, somehow, her own; but also Ireland’s. Curry had been right to underscore that meaning, and Jane had not been immune to the entire company’s passionate reading of the play as a national lament. They’d been trained as Irish actors and, as such, to seize hold of their misfortune and by simultaneously protesting it and accepting it, to turn it into the source of their art. With Synge, because his perfectly tuned rendition of their experience matched their passion perfectly, the Abbey players accomplished the rare miracle—what brings people into the theater in every age—every time the curtain rose.

In her six weeks at the Abbey, so many things had been quickened in her—her sense of freedom, of womanhood, her feeling for dramatic expression—it was hard to single one out as dominant. True, the Abbey had sharpened her perception of Ireland’s plight as more than an abstraction, more than the myth of Charles Parnell, more than the stale, rehearsed complaints against England, and more even than a losing cause her father had embraced when he was young. Her sense of it as her plight had begun to take hold. But of course, if she was honest, the Abbey meant so much to her, first, because this was where she could see Dan.

He had not made himself available to her exactly. On days the theater was dark she rarely saw him, and the other days he rarely came in before noon. But when he was at the Abbey he seemed to make a point to find ways to be with her, surprising her by bringing tea to her at her desk, for example, then boosting himself onto the large oak cabinet to sprawl above her, talking. “Here’s something you should read,” he’d say, and she never knew whether what he pulled from his pocket was going to be a United Irishman political pamphlet or an essay written by Cardinal Newman or the copy of a new play he wanted for the Abbey. Then, a day later, he would question her at length about it. He seemed to value what she thought. She was sure he held her in more than casual regard, but she was also aware that he kept himself somewhat in check. He’d never troubled to make explicit exactly how he felt. He’d made such a strong impression on her that first day, particularly in their spontaneous recitation on the naked stage, but he hadn’t been that expansive or direct with her again. Thus, with Curry she was always more expectant than fulfilled, and of course that sharpened the edge of her attraction to him. She had concluded that he was inexhaustible, and she sensed that if she had come to occupy a place of even slight importance in his life—why else that constant tea?—she shared it with other things and people. That was his advantage, of course. Dublin was his city, and its causes, crises, charms, oddities, and occupations were his in a way they would never be hers. For all her happiness at having come here, she was alone, still a newcomer at the Abbey, a stranger on the streets and a visitor in her own rooms at Merrion Square.

And that was why when her father had arrived at the theater unannounced this very afternoon, she’d felt at once that a terrible pain was being soothed. It didn’t matter that she’d barely acknowledged having it, even to herself.

She was so pleased that he’d relented. She’d pleaded with him to visit her in Dublin and had even asked Lady Gregory to encourage him to do so. That at last he had was a great relief to her. Wasn’t part of her pain the guilt she felt at defying him, and wasn’t her loneliness at bottom the result of her estrangement from him? Apparently he felt those things too.

Now he was sitting next to her, watching the play. She wanted him to approve it as if she’d written it or mounted it, and that feeling alone made her realize how attached she’d become to the Abbey. However tangential her contribution to the players’ effort was, and no one was more aware of the modesty of her role than she, Deirdre and Naisi were still what she had to show for herself. And, she felt, if they didn’t justify the breach of her having left Cragside—only youth under the spell of theater would feel this—nothing she ever did would.

Jane watched him for his reaction. Perhaps the half-light of the theater was what made it difficult, but she was unable to read what was written in his face. Even at those moments when audiences, including this one, invariably gasped or laughed or even wept, Sir Hugh sat immobile and unresponsive. She did not understand how he could be unmoved, particularly by what to her was the infinitely masculine struggle of Dan Curry’s Naisi. How could any man resist it? Her father was in no way like Curry, lacking utterly that raw, unpolished energy, but his reserve now, in the face of the tragedy unfolding before him, seemed like a failure of character to Jane. What a rare thought for her! And then she realized that where her father’s response as a young man to such a conflict as Naisi’s had been to withdraw from it, Curry’s would be to stay to the end, even if that meant dying.

Her father had seemed aloof on first arriving this afternoon, but Jane had assumed he shared the awkwardness she felt to have him for the first time ever on what amounted to her side of the island. But he hadn’t relaxed. When she walked with him to the places in Dublin she’d come to treasure, he seemed distracted. She’d hoped to hear his stories about his days in Dublin, but his remarks had been offhand and trivial. When she suggested his seeing Deirdre of the Sorrows with her he’d demurred, but she insisted. This was the last performance of the play; she simply had to be here for it. His coming today had seemed like a reward for all her work—the accounts at the Abbey had been terribly neglected and she’d been at her desk constantly—and it was inconceivable to her that he not see it.

But now, as the play was drawing to its stunning conclusion—“Deirdre is dead and Naisi is dead; and if the oaks and stars could die for sorrow, it’s a dark sky and naked earth we’d have this night in Emain”—Jane sensed with distress that it really had left him unmoved. That this was the last performance made it seem doubly like death to her. They each sat fixed to their chairs even as the applause faded and the audience members around them rose to leave.

She forced a certain cheer into her voice to say, “Will you come with me to meet the actors?” The audience filed out, many still folding their handkerchiefs. Jane and her father were sitting in the very part of the balcony where she’d sat, transfixed, that first morning; it was where she always sat. They were the last seats sold in any case, but Jane felt the magic more powerfully from there than any place, and now, from there, she felt the loss.

“Certainly,” he said.

She was afraid to ask him what he thought, so they sat in silence until the theater emptied. Then Jane led the way down through the main part of the theater, up the short flight of stairs, through the curtain, across the dark stage, and down the winding metal steps to the greenroom. The actors and various crew members, a dozen or fifteen people, were sprawled about on the couches and chairs or on the floor. They were smoking and passing glasses of wine and plates of sponge cake in ritual observation of the play’s closing. Nora had already changed into her trousers, and she was the first to greet Jane. When Jane introduced her father, everyone stood. The men shook his hand and Sir Hugh found it possible to compliment them graciously, but still it was awkward. Jane realized she’d breached an etiquette by bringing her father back on that night. Only Dan Curry could have dispelled the unease—he’d have done it with a gesture, a toast, a reference to Lady Gregory’s own well-known affection for Sir Hugh, or perhaps even a pointed but ingratiating joke about a night to meet a knight. But Dan Curry, Jane realized with surprise, wasn’t there.

“Where’s Dan?”

Nora and the actress who played Deirdre’s nurse exchanged a quick look. “He had to hurry off. Probably has a meeting.” The edge in Nora’s voice seemed unkind.

“At ten o’clock at night?” Jane checked herself. She’d scrupulously avoided displaying exceptional interest in Curry. She hadn’t realized until now how very much she wanted her father to meet him. It was why she’d brought him to the greenroom.

Their exit—it was unthinkable that they should stay—was as awkward as their entrance, and by the time Jane and her father left the theater, she felt devastated.

The city streets were nearly deserted. A light rain was falling, but it was the end of July. These were the weeks in which the soft Dublin rain was not bone-chilling, but warm. Sir Hugh took his daughter’s arm as they crossed Abbey Street. “Come on, we’ll go to my hotel.” Sir Hugh was thinking that Merrion Square was too far to walk, and there would be taxis at the Gresham.

Neither would have minded the rain, actually, and at Cragside they’d have thought nothing of being out in it. But pressed by their mutual unspoken disappointment, they hurried with lowered heads as if it were the weather that curdled their mood. Jane felt defensive and found herself rehearsing her explanation. “I am twenty-two years old and for the first time in my life I have felt real passion and I have inspired the interest of admirable people and I can imagine growing old without being dependent, yet at the same time alone. At Cragside I’d have become a hard, disappointed woman, and eventually even you would have made me feel unwelcome.” She imagined saying all this with great heat, fists clenched, the way Nora would have.

She said nothing, of course, but she was certain that her father’s continuing resentment of her desertion was what caused his unhappiness.

But for once, Jane was wrong, and finally at the hotel, sitting next to her in the empty lobby, having been served tea by the night porter, he found it possible to tell her. “When you asked about Douglas this afternoon, I wasn’t able to be honest with you. I mean, I wasn’t quite prepared to be, and I’m sorry.”

She froze, her teacup halfway to her mouth. “What do you mean, father?”

“I came from London this morning, Jane, not Cragside. I’ve been there a week, I was there a week last month.”

“In London!” Her father hadn’t been to London since Douglas’s wedding. Even more than Dublin, London represented the life he’d turned his back on.

“Douglas is missing, darling. I’ve been haunting them at Whitehall and at Westminster to make the army find him.”

Jane lowered her cup, channeling her emotion into the act. “I scan the lists every day, the dead and missing list in the Irish Times. I never saw his name.”

“Those lists are far from complete, Jane. We don’t get the half of it.”

She placed the cup in its saucer without making a sound, and then she put the cup and saucer on the end table by her corner of the settee.

“When?”

“Mid-June at Ypres. The Connaught lads were handed a hard acre to plow. Only half of them came through it. The Germans took a sizable group prisoner, but they haven’t released the names. Douglas could have been captured. If he was killed, no one survived who saw it, and they haven’t found his remains.” Sir Hugh took his daughter’s hand. He made a conscious decision not to refer to the reports of chlorine gas. “I’m sure he’s alive.”

The shudder that went through Jane at his words could easily have become an earthquake, toppling the rigid structure of her defenses, but she shook it off at once. She insisted, “There would have been news of this, father. The papers say everything’s been going well at the Front. There’s been nothing about Irish losses, about the Connaught—” As she spoke she pressed his hand with both of hers, and her tremors grew back toward that earthquake.

Her father interrupted. “The newspapers aren’t telling us anything, Jane. What I’m telling you is true.” He said it with his old authority, and it stopped her.

As she exhaled deeply, she sank against him, her face upon his shoulder. “But you’re not telling me what it is. Douglas is dead, isn’t he?”

He held her away and said, too fiercely, “We mustn’t say that!”

Jane heard his reaction as pure denial, but understood. Their saying it could make it true. Like the newspapers: if they didn’t report the carnage, had it really happened?

Jane stopped thinking of herself. She couldn’t imagine—literally could not picture—anything of Douglas’s situation. A German prison? A hidden grave in Belgium?

Slowly she realized what pain this was for her father. Like all daughters of her class and time, she accepted, or thought she did, the primacy of sons. Douglas’s death was simply the worst thing that could happen to her father, worse than anything to do with her. She shifted slightly, altering her posture so that he was as much in her embrace as she was in his, and she held him tightly to let him know that of course she understood and that of course, now, she would do anything he asked.

But then her thoughts flew to Pamela, to Timothy and Anne. She drew her face back. “Does Pamela know?”

Sir Hugh nodded. “I stayed with her. She’s quite . . . distressed.”

Only months before, that woman had lost her father, and now Douglas, who was the center of Pamela’s life, was gone too. What had seemed the infinite grief of Deirdre for Naisi now paled, for this death was real, and Jane discovered that her capacity for feeling the pain of Synge’s doomed lovers was nothing compared to what she felt now for her brother’s wife. “I should go to her,” she said, yielding again to the pull of what she’d been raised to. Women went to each other at these moments, the way fathers went to Whitehall. Grief and worry—real grief and worry—implied a role she knew by heart, and it was unthinkable that she would not play it.

At eleven o’clock the Gresham bar emptied and a dozen men filed across the lobby, several of them unsteadily. They ignored Sir Hugh and Jane as they crossed in front of them toward the hotel door.

“I should be seeing you back to Merrion Square.”

“Just show me to the taxi.”

Sir Hugh smiled at his daughter, though her instinctive reassertion of independence saddened him. It wasn’t to dominate that he’d offered the traditional courtesy, what he’d have done for any woman in his company. But he sensed how inappropriate it would be to push it. They’d agreed to meet for the midday meal the next day before his train to Gort. They stood to go.

“Jane!”

The sound of her name abruptly called out startled her, and when she turned to see Curry crossing toward her from the bar, two men trailing behind him, she thought of the war cry of a Gaelic chieftain. His beard and hair had never seemed wilder. The pleasure she felt at the sight of him—and at the obvious enthusiasm of his greeting—pushed hard against the gloom she felt about Douglas. But the gloom didn’t budge and her pleasure fell away.

Curry overrode her mood to take her hand. “I wanted to see you.”

His companions stood awkwardly back.

Jane said, “Dan, this is my father.”

Curry was thrown by her announcement. In point of fact, he had barely noticed that she was accompanied, and now his mind refused to work its way past that word father. He knew Jane was the daughter of one of Lady Gregory’s blueblood friends, but he had never really allowed the fact to register, underscoring, as it would have, the enormous differences between them.

Sir Hugh offered his hand, but spoke coldly. “I admired your performance tonight very much.”

“Thank you, sir,” Curry said, still flustered. “I had to leave immediately after . . .” He glanced awkwardly at his companions, one of whom was Pádraic Pearse. He turned to introduce them, but to his further surprise Jane Tyrrell’s father preempted him.

“Hello, Casement,” he said to the other.

“Sir Hugh!” The gaunt bearded man shook off his surprise to take Tyrrell’s hand. He was older than Pearse and Curry, though somewhat younger than Sir Hugh. That they had a history with each other was obvious, but there was also more than a hint of a recognition that they’d gone their separate ways.

Tyrrell indicated Jane. “This is my daughter. Jane, this is Sir Roger Casement, late of the Foreign Office, like myself.” Tyrrell smiled briefly at Casement. “We shared the honor.”

Casement bowed over Jane’s hand and kissed it. She did not attempt to mask her confusion—a titled former colleague of her father’s in a Dublin pub with Dan Curry—which was then compounded when Curry introduced Pádraic Pearse. When Curry had pressed his poems on her, they had seemed rather too pious to her, and his anti-English essays had seemed quite shrill.

After a stilted handshake with Pearse, Jane’s father turned to Casement and spoke with scarcely veiled irony. “Or have you renounced the honor yet?”

“No, Sir Hugh, I haven’t.”

“I find that strange, frankly, given your views.”

“My views, Sir Hugh, are widely discussed but little understood.”

“You actively collaborate with Germany. You and Childers trade with them for arms.”

“If you’re referring to the paltry cache of antiquated muskets we brought in on Erskine’s yacht last summer, that was before hostilities commenced between His Majesty and the Kaiser. As you must know, sir.”

“German guns nevertheless, Casement. To use against the Crown to which you, unlike your colleagues, swore allegiance.”

Casement reddened and tried to cover the embarrassment he felt by waving his hand dismissively. “It’s not force we want, Sir Hugh, but only the threat of force. Nothing more than what Carson and our Orange cousins in the north intend. You, better than any, should understand how the game is played. We want what Parnell wanted. You should be with us. Men of our stamp . . .” Casement hesitated. It was a gaffe to acknowledge the common bonds of class, background, religion, and profession that he shared with Tyrrell—with the late Parnell, with Childers—because he lacked such bonds with Pearse and Curry. It wouldn’t do now to quicken their feelings of inferiority. “. . . Well, we could use you, Sir Hugh. Many of us have often wished you’d join the fray again.”

“My mind, frankly, is on a larger fray right now.”

“What, the war to save defenseless Belgium? Forgive me, Sir Hugh. I did my service in the Belgian Congo, as you no doubt recall. I saw in particular detail how defenseless that little nation is. The Belgians are colonial murderers even beyond what the British are, and Leopold is himself a monster. Don’t talk to me about poor Belgium. Let them fight their own battles, I say. And the same for England. Let her arm and drill the sickly population of her slums—” Casement had begun a speech and even he heard it as such. He stopped.

Pádraic Pearse twirled his hat casually, as if he’d not noticed the tension, and smiled ingratiatingly. “Mr. Tyrrell,” he said, “I’ve been hoping to set up a meeting with a few of the Galway Cope fellows”—Cope was the informal word for the Agricultural Cooperative movement—“and I was thinking you and some of your Burren dairy boys might like to come. We have a common cause, you know.”

“Talk to me when the war’s over, Pearse.”

Jane wanted to look up at Dan Curry, but she couldn’t. Why didn’t he say something witty and charming to end this nightmare scene? She had never before sensed helplessness in him; perhaps that was why she felt so devastated now.

“And, Casement,” Tyrrell said, “as an old friend I feel bound to warn you. It is one thing to oppose Ireland’s participation in the war, quite another to take up the part of His Majesty’s enemy. You are still liable to be called to serve. The Foreign Office has a hold on you.”

Casement bristled. “Not for long. I’m off to America.”

Tyrrell eyed him skeptically. “Why?”

Casement leaned toward him confidentially. “Because the fate of Ireland will be decided there.”

Pearse took Casement’s elbow. “That’s enough.” Pearse, it was suddenly clear, was the man with authority. He put his hat on, doffing it to Jane. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, miss.” Without a further look at Tyrrell, he walked away from the group.

Curry waited for Jane to look at him. When she didn’t, he glanced at her father and was undone by his unkind stare. He nodded awkwardly, then left to catch up with Pearse.

Casement hesitated, and Sir Hugh said quietly, “Roger, be careful of your associates. They are not wise men.”

Casement’s eyes were sad. “They’re what’s left, Sir Hugh, because men like you stay home.” He put his hat on and grinned. “And, Christ, they love having a Protestant along!” After a pause during which Tyrrell made no move to shake his hand, he said, “Good-bye,” and turned.

“Before you go . . .” Sir Hugh hadn’t intended to say this, but the impulse overwhelmed him.

Casement waited.

“My son is a German prisoner or else he’s dead.”

Casement stared rigidly at Tyrrell, saying nothing for a moment. Then his shoulders sagged. “Good God, Hugh. I had no idea. I’m sorry.”

“Just think of him now and then, will you? It isn’t all Belgians, Germans, or English over there. It’s an Irish war too, Roger, like it or not. When you’re meeting the German ambassador in Washington, think of my son. Think of the thousands of Irish boys who want nothing now but to live through this damned war.”

Casement blushed. The second time in five minutes.

And that told Tyrrell he’d guessed right; he did know how this game was played. “You want a treaty with them, don’t you? And the Germans no doubt want one with you. ‘The IRB loves Fritz.’ If Germany commits itself to the liberation of Ireland, then goggle-eyed Irish-Americans will rally round. Isn’t that the thought? What will Germany give you to keep America out of the war?”

“Since you raise the issue, Sir Hugh, they’ll give us special treatment of Irish prisoners, for one thing. They already do.”

Tyrrell’s emotion flared and he half stepped toward Casement. “Don’t you dare barter for Irish prisoners, you faithless—”

“Father.” Jane took his arm.

“Casement!” Pearse called from the doorway, an officer summoning his dallying subordinate.

Casement turned at once and walked away. He and Pearse left the hotel together. Curry hesitated long enough for Jane, finally, to show him what was in her eyes, so that when he went out into the rainy night, it felt like shelter.

Under the awning of a shop a block away the three men stopped. Pearse turned on Casement. “What did you tell him?”

“He guessed it. I didn’t tell him.”

“About Washington?”

“Yes. But that’s all. He has no idea I’ll be going on to Germany.” Casement looked awkwardly at Curry. They hadn’t discussed Germany in front of him.

But Curry was impassive and Pearse seemed unconcerned about him.

Casement shrugged. “If Tyrrell knew, he’d have asked me to find his son.”

“What do you mean?”

“His son’s been captured, if he’s alive.”

“Christ, man, that gives him all the more reason to oppose us!”

Casement shook his head. “The man was trained, Pearse. But he’s only thinking of our agenda for Irish-Americans. He thinks we’re merely waging a campaign for popular opinion. Let him.”

“You fool. That’s enough to take him to Dublin Castle in the morning, and by afternoon you’re detained.”

“Not if I leave tonight. There’s a ship out of Cork in the morning. Murray can get me on it.”

Pearse stared at him for a moment. “All right, I’ll cable Devoy in New York and have him meet you. And if von Bernstorff accepts the terms of our proposal, let me know at once. I’ll want someone from the council to meet you in Germany, to help with arrangements there.”

“Who?”

“It isn’t decided yet. I’ll keep Devoy informed.”

“I didn’t need help in Germany last year, Patrick.” Casement refused to address Pearse by his Gaelic name, the way Pearse refused to use the prefix sir.

“You were making a few purchases, not negotiating an alliance. It’s more than guns we’re after now, the way it’s more than popular opinion.” Pearse slammed his fist into his palm. “It’s an honest-to-God Irish army!”

“I know what it is we’re after, and I can get it.”

“Not alone.”

The two men stared at each other for a moment, their grim silence a tacit recognition of the impasse they’d come to.

Given what he’d done for the cause, Casement resented the fact that the men of the IRB still refused to trust him. He was an Ulster Protestant who had repudiated the provincialism of his own people, but he equally abhorred the sectarian impulses of the Gaelic Catholics. It was everything he could do to keep the likes of Pearse from lumping him in with Redmond.

Casement looked out into the darkness. The rain was falling heavily now, and Sackville Street glistened. He remembered the Russian maxim “Faith in the peasants in proportion to one’s distance from them.” He would never have accepted the humiliation of such treatment, but peasants like Pearse controlled the movement now, and the Germans knew it as well as he did. Casement was nothing without the endorsement of the IRB, and he would undercut his own good opinion of himself to keep it. He had no choice. Having already lost the good opinion of his family, his oldest friends, his former colleagues, he had nothing left but his will to work for Ireland and his dream of leading her through nights like this to freedom.

“Good luck,” Pearse said finally, and offered his hand. Casement took it. Then he shook hands with Curry and hurried off into the rain.

Curry and Pearse watched him go.

After a long time Pearse said, “You knew her.”

It took Curry a moment to understand. “Jane Tyrrell?” He looked at Pearse, who only continued staring down Sackville Street. Not far from there was the place where the recruiting tram had gathered its crowd the day he’d met her. “I know her from the Abbey. She’s the bookkeeper.”

Now Pearse looked at him. “I wondered if there wasn’t more to it than that?”

Curry shook his head. But at once he felt a pang of guilt. Of course there was more to it than that. Curry felt as if he’d spent this summer sleeping in a stranger’s bed, dreaming his dreams. If he’d been in his own bed, he’d have wanted Jane Tyrrell with him.

“And did you know her father?”

“No, I never met him.”

“He was one of Parnell’s people.”

Curry smiled. “I don’t remember Parnell, Pádraic.”

“You make me feel old, Dan. I’m only thirty-six.” Pearse laughed. Then he lit a cigarette. For the first time he was letting down, relaxing. He looked at Curry with a rare show of affection. “You’re new to the movement and you’re still wet behind the ears. What can you do but stand on stages and rant at mobs? You don’t remember Parnell!” He shook his head in disbelief. “Why do I trust you so?”

Curry shrugged. But he was pleased at the admission.

“I trust no one, Dan. You know that. Not Connolly, Larkin, Clarke, or Murphy. Not labor, not the hurley boys of the GAA, not your literary chums of the Gaelic Revival, not Redmond and not Casement either. They’re all my allies, but I never let them behind me. Men I’ve known for years. Men who’ve given everything for Ireland. And I don’t trust them. But I trust you, Dan. Why is that, do you suppose?”

Was there something sinister in the question? Curry tried to focus on Pearse’s implications, while saying easily, “Because we’ve become friends, Pádraic. I’ve been at your side. And you know me.”

“But not so well. Perhaps there’s the key.” Pearse took a deep drag on the cigarette, eyeing Curry through the smoke. “I think it’s that you’ve a gift for the truth, Dan. It’s why we believe you when you’re up on stage. But what if you had to play a role that wasn’t so noble?”

“I wouldn’t do it.”

“Not even for Ireland?”

“What are you driving at, Pádraic?”

“I want you to go to Germany.”

Curry, though stunned, said nothing.

“I’ve brought you into the secret now, Dan. We’ve a new William the Conqueror on our side, only he calls himself Wilhelm.”

“What’s that to do with me, Pádraic?” Curry was hardly breathing.

“If Casement gets the agreement with von Bernstorff, you’ll meet him in Germany. Everything hinges on the Irish prisoners. If we can convince a sizable group of them to come over to us, then we have”—he ticked points off on his fingers—“leaders to train our recruits, officers and sergeants to staff our army, experts to show us what to do with what the Germans are already committed to give us—heavy cannons, rifles, pistols, and hundreds of thousands of rounds for them. Weapons, Dan! Real guns! More than we can use. And beyond that, not least, we have a bold manifestation of Germany’s goodwill toward the Irish Republic. We have an army instead of a boy’s club, America has a reason to stay at home, and England has a fight on her hands here.”

“Christ, Pádraic . . .” Curry shook his head. “. . . I prefer taking England on one to one.”

Pearse snorted. “One to one they’ve killed us for a thousand years.”

“Maybe, but there’s something rotten about throwing in with Germans and you know it.”

Pearse stared at him. “Like I said, you’ve a gift for what’s true. I’ve a gift for what’s necessary. We won’t be shoulder to shoulder with Germans, Dan, shooting at our cousins. Don’t you see? England won’t fight us. She can’t bring an army to Ireland now. All we have to do is make the show. You know, Dan—Irish National Theater. The Irish Brigade of former prisoners, the German guns, the German troop ships landing our lads on Kerry Strand. We declare our independence and England, under pressure to demonstrate goodwill, accepts at once. And we therefore declare ourselves nonbelligerent and neutral. Germany expects a U-boat base in Cork harbor, but we don’t give it to her, although Casement thinks we’re making a solemn commitment to it. Casement is ready to trade his English master for a German one, and that’s why we must rein him. It may be that we’ll decide as free men—but only then—to do what we can for England. If we won’t be John Bull’s lackeys, we certainly won’t be Jerry’s. But, short of that, Casement is right. We play them off each other. It’s the perfect moment, the perfect plan.”

“Then let Casement carry it through, Pádraic. Rein him afterward. He’ll run better for us, given his head. He doesn’t want me clucking him.”

Pearse poked Curry’s chest. “Dan, if you were in the British army now sitting in a German camp in Hamburg or somewhere, what would you think when Kraut guards showed Casement in? He’s the ghost of all the landlords and all the constables and all the rent collectors who ever stood with their boots on your mother’s throat. If you did harbor doubts about fighting for England, would they be appealed to by a man who’s so confused about the meaning of being Irish he still calls himself ‘Sir’? Would your highest virtue be summoned forth by a man who’s betrayed an oath? Wouldn’t you wonder if it wasn’t the old Protestant Ascendancy cleverly looking for yet one more way to dominate the mass of the Irish people? How does Sir Roger Casement stir up a Dublin butcher’s boy’s longing for an independent Irish nation? For a Catholic nation united by the old faith? What they need, Dan, is the true gospel preached to them by one of their own.”

“I’m no preacher, Pádraic.” The slightest reference to his status as a spoiled priest made Curry bristle.

“But you know what I mean. You’ve a gift for making people see the truth of Ireland’s need. That’s all I’m talking about.”

“But I’ve no gift for asking men to condemn themselves in the sight of God. You talk about Casement. What about the soldiers? They took oaths too, you know, when they joined the army. Oaths to the Crown, solemn ones.”

Pearse had had to face this question himself, and he responded at once. “But were they valid oaths? Didn’t they teach you at Maynooth that oaths, to be binding, have to be sworn to freely? Is it free when a man’s motive is to put a crust of daily bread on his children’s table? Is it free when he thinks he’s joining an army to defend Irish shores, but then is sent to fight a nation far away with whom Ireland has no quarrel?”

“You sound like a Jesuit. There were no Jesuits at Maynooth, Pádraic.”

“This is what I asked you before. Would you play a role even if it wasn’t noble? Are you so accustomed to being a hero? Perhaps it’s not only our lives we must be prepared to sacrifice, but the purity of our consciences.”

Curry stared out at the night. “I’ve got to express my reservations, that’s all.” He tried to picture himself making speeches at German camps, but couldn’t.

“Is it because of her brother?”

“Whose?”

“The girl’s. Tyrrell.”

Her brother! The connection hadn’t registered. This was why Pearse wondered about his feeling for Jane. But he hadn’t even known she had a brother in the army. The war and her family were things they’d steered clear of. But what did he make of her brother? Pearse had made it sound as if the prisoners were all butchers’ boys.

Jane Tyrrell’s brother was neither here nor there, but was Jane? The pain he’d seen in her face as he left the Gresham had made him miserable, but that pain had to do with more than her brother’s plight. She was caught between walls that weren’t of her building. If the walls were closing in on her, still he did not know if she wanted out from them. He did not know nearly enough to justify the rush of guilt he felt. He’d taken no oaths. They’d avoided all of this, except in the large sweeping arcs of talk that everyone around the Abbey mastered. If politics and religion and family were kept to the margins, no wonder what held sway between Dan and Jane were the simple facts of themselves. But wasn’t the charged air between them, the fact that each inhaled it and thrived upon it and had come to need it like a personal form of oxygen—wasn’t that a kind of commitment? There is a baptism of desire; are there such oaths?

“If you have a thing for her, it wouldn’t do for you to cross paths with her brother, as you could if Casement gets the agreement. The Irish prisoners will all be brought together.”

“Her brother’s not the issue.”

“What is?”

“You’ve asked me at last to leave the ranks of the melancholy sentimentalists who have an excess of patriotic fervor, but also of domestic obligations. They thrill at the talk of risings and at the risings of their elbows. They drift from meeting to meeting like atoms of fog that cover the fact that nothing ever happens.” He grinned. “As for me, I like my revolutions on the stage. You want me to leave it for the real world in which to do something real for Ireland. Of course I’m reluctant.”

“But you’ll go?”

“My play closed tonight, Pádraic. I need the job.”

“And as for the qualm of your conscience?”

“I didn’t have Jesuits at Maynooth, but I had them at the university. My conscience will come along.”

Pearse flicked his cigarette into the night. When it hit the wet pavement, it sizzled. He said, “Will you tell me, man, without irreverence that you’ll do this and that I’m right to trust you?”

Curry took Pearse by the shoulders, a rare act of familiarity. “I love Ireland, Pádraic. Let me make my solemn oath to her through you.”

They parted after midnight, at the Liffey. Curry was walking back to his lodgings near Christ Church Cathedral, feeling agitated, but also relieved. The elements of his life—his hard tenement boyhood, the long seminary apprenticeship that led to nowhere, the ruthless, self-imposed regimen of study at university, and the exhilarating but finally unsatisfying work of theater—had always seemed jarringly discontinuous to him. But now they had fallen together into what seemed a wholly woven pattern of preparation. Preparation for this. Preparation for a serious, potentially decisive role in the birth of a new Ireland. His relief was what a man feels when he discovers that without knowing it he has already become what he’d always hoped to be.

At College Green he was crossing the street toward Cork Hill. Because of the rain he hurried with his head lowered, and because his mind reworked furiously what Pearse had told him, he did not notice the hired carriage bearing down on him until the horse veered. The driver shouted.

Curry would have ignored the carriage and gone on his way, but it stopped. He felt a rush of energy. Was the driver going to challenge him? The man, having spent his evening waiting by a call box, would be drunk, and Curry would have the devil’s time turning aside his insults.

He faced the carriage, ready. But the driver didn’t move from his perch.

Curry waited in the middle of the street, rain dripping from his beard. On one side of him was the black, pillared hulk of the Bank of Ireland and on the other were the gates of Trinity College, graceful but also—to a Catholic—forbidding.

The door of the carriage opened. That was all. It simply opened. No one alighted and no one leaned out. The curtains were drawn and it was impossible to see in.

Curry approached the cab slowly. The rough cobbles beneath his feet made him feel unsteady.

At the carriage door he looked in. The sole figure in the far corner was wrapped in darkness, but he knew at once it was Jane.

The horse reared, the carriage rolled roughly back, and the driver cursed while struggling to control it.

Curry imagined himself saying to her, I’m not the man I was before. Not even that.

But he felt a current coming from the corner of such pain and such longing that he was forced, at last, to recognize his own. He climbed into the carriage. When he closed the door behind him, the horse heard its slam as the signal to bolt.