LOFTY Lofty Flanagan was born in the good last years of the reign of Victoria, and was still a young man during the great Edwardian enlightenment, when high jinks were the fashion. Dances at the Castle, trips down the bay, champagne and carriages and champing horses, fashionable ladies like bouquets of flowers—the centuried Saxon colony going out in a blaze of glory. The imagination creates us in its image and likeness. So it created Lofty, bit by bit, in the image of a horse-guard; a handsome, big-boned boy acutely conscious of his humble station, yet puffed up to the gills with an extravagant sense of his own importance. After some great day, such as that of the Viceroy’s reception, he would stride up and down the bedroom (six steps by four), pull an imaginary moustache and say ‘Damnation!’ ‘Fool!’ ‘Your Majesty, permit me!’ and other suitable phrases. His father beat the devil out of him, because he was a wayward boy who did no good at school. But in other ways he was docile and over-yielding. He had a certain whining, soft, insinuating manner, and a certain look, broadly and angelically innocent, which he could summon up at will and which made his whole face shine with super-celestial light, even when he told the most infernal lies. As a companion he was unreliable, because sometimes when lies failed and punishment seemed imminent he split. He was a great braggart, who could never be brought to admit that he was wrong, and was forever setting up to know things he knew nothing of. Naturally, he remained, till the end of his days, unteachable. Soldiering was Lofty’s secret delight and sorrow. He began with toy soldiers and went on to gangs and wooden swords and water pistols, but by the time he was fifteen he could recognise almost any regiment by its uniform, and every symbol of the intricate craft had significance for him. At the same time, like a true connoisseur, he was bitterly critical. He liked a soldier to look a soldier. His mother, who was insanely proud of her only child, loved to draw him out. ‘And what are the fellows in Portobello like, son?’ ‘The Sherwood Foresters? Gnats! Gnats!’ Lofty shovelled sugar in his tea with a preoccupied air as though he could not be bothered thinking further of them: even at that age he had taken to doing things in a grandiose, emphatic way as if his whole nature revolted against moderation. ‘As good as the Lincolns?’ ‘Oh, much of a muchness, much of a muchness. One or two good men, of course, but the rest of them—pshah! No more soldiers than Hop o’ me Thumb!’ His father died, and his mother apprenticed him to a plumber. This was the last straw. Lofty had always tyrannised over her. Now he made her life a hell. He lay on the floor and threw fits. He screamed and kicked and danced, and swore he would go down to the river and drown himself rather than be a bloody plumber. He threatened to be a boozer and beat her up and break her bloody heart. He promised faithfully to kick her about the floor and smash every bone in her body. But he had to give in. They were nakedly poor and lived in a riverside slum, in a hovel the door of which was sheltered by the roof, it was so low. After a year of it he ran away and joined the army. And then, for the first time, Lofty, who was at heart a kind, decent, good-natured boy, realised how much he loved his mother. He could not sleep for thinking of her. He was consumed with remorse. Lying on his bed his mind formed the most fantastic pictures of her, alone in the little house and dying, and weeping for the ungrateful son who had deserted her. He saw the neighbours come and take away the coffin, nodding to one another and saying in hushed voices ‘Ah yes, dear God rest her poor soul, ’twas her own son killed her.’ From such daydreams he started up, sweating with misery and fear. So he wrote and asked her forgiveness, and promised never, never to hurt her kind heart again, and to eat cakes of soap until they sent him home. ‘Dead or alive!’ he declared dramatically. Fortunately, it was not necessary to eat more than half a cake of the rather inferior soap supplied for other purposes by the army contractors. In the goodness of his heart, Lofty’s employer, Mr Harding, a Quaker of the old school, gave Mrs Flanagan the money to buy him out. No one could deny that Lofty kept his promises, and kept them handsomely. After that escapade he showed himself a devoted son, and one any mother might have been proud of, even if he had been otherwise. He was splendidly built, his few months in the army had given him a military bearing he never afterwards lost, a vocabulary of military phrases and a certain worldly poise which enabled him to look down on full-blown plumbers, while, with his marvellous imagination, he spun yarns about England and English ways, a soldier’s life, and the devil knows what else, that were calculated to stagger these simple artisans. Off the job he dressed with finicking care in a spotless navy-blue suit, a bowler, a coloured handkerchief, a nosegay and a silver-mounted walking-stick. He developed a black moustache and shaggy black eyebrows. There was a long mirror over the fireplace in the kitchen, and when he had nothing else to do he spent hours admiring himself in it. In the mirror he practised looking severe, stern, calm, critical, passionate and tender. He practised putting on his coat, and taking it off, straightening his tie, winking, bowing, raising his hat; even blowing his nose, so that when he performed any of those simple actions in public it was somehow entirely and indefinably different from the same action performed by anyone else in the world. It seemed rather the divine prototype of the gesture than the gesture itself, it was the gesture in abstract, the gesture _für sich_ as a German professor would put it. When, as frequently happened, his heart overflowed with filial emotion, he drew his stumpy little mother into the middle of the kitchen, placed one arm about her and gathered her to his breast with her back to the mirror; then with his free hand he tenderly stroked her white hair. ‘Mammy,’ he said in a low and dreamy voice, ‘you love me, don’t you?’ This, as he knew quite well, was always enough to reduce his mother to tears. ‘You love your bold bad son, don’t you? I haven’t been a good son to you. I ran away and left you all by yourself. I’m always cranky with you, I don’t look after you as I should, but still you forgive me, don’t you?’ ‘Oh, Murt, Murt,’ his mother would say crossly, ‘how can you be talking like that?’ She didn’t know, poor woman, the delightful and touching picture she made when Murt looked over her shoulder and gazed into the mirror. ‘Sure, no mother born ever had a better son, or a kinder or more thoughtful son.’ ‘No, no, no,’ Murt protested vigorously in a voice choked with emotion as he drew her closer to him. ‘I’m not, I’m not. I’m no substitute for my poor father, God rest him! I know it well.’ And as he said this he would admire the way his face worked, his mouth drooped and his dark eyes shone. He loved her to tell him again and again that he was a good son, the best son a mother ever had, and when at last he was satiated to the point of tears, he would rush hastily to the mirror, blow his nose, straighten his tie, look at himself sideways and go off for a walk, radiantly happy. In a way it was a pity Lofty had to leave the army. It left an ache for romance and glory in him. He was a terrible dandy and ladies’ man, but it was all in a curious way rendered perfectly innocent by his colossal vanity which seemed to have swallowed up all other evil in him. He needed women’s adulation, sighs, tears and kisses; he revelled in romantic scenes and protestations; but he had no use for or tolerance of anything else; he was a puritan, and in marriage he was after much bigger game than those early days afforded. Yet there was one girl who touched his heart. Her name was Margaret and she worked in a florist’s shop in the centre of the city. On her account he almost forswore ambition; he loved her as purely and faithfully as he could love anyone after his mother. After a terrible parting scene during which he beat his breast, and, weeping bitterly, swore to breathe her name with his dying lips he went off and proposed to Josephine Harding, his employer’s plain but decent daughter, whom he had, to use his own words, been ‘keeping warm’ all along. She accepted him like a shot. There was an awful row, but he got the girl and she turned Catholic with him. For a year or two her father kept up the pretence that he had cut her off and would leave her without a ha’penny unless she threw over that ‘snake in the grass’ as he called Lofty. Lofty had to get another job. But everyone knew it was only a matter of time till old Harding came round—no one better than Lofty himself. His new boss had to treat him practically as an equal; he bullied the workmen, came to work smoking an expensive cigar, and at shows or fétes appeared with his wife on his arm, demanding attention with a regal air that told you it would be better to oblige or he would take it out of you some day. Most sensible people did oblige, because it was made so easy for them. Lofty had such noble manners, his smile was extraordinarily genial and his bow an object lesson in behaviour. (It has been remarked that he practised it, day in, day out, wherever he found a mirror.) On a job he affected the most elaborate mannerisms, rolled his dark, twinkling eyes, tugged his moustache, put on a tap he already knew to be burst and stood back to admire the result, attitudinising with an air of profound scientific interest: sometimes he flooded a place for sheer effect. If you were so wrong-headed as to hurry him, he shrugged his shoulders, spread out his hairy-black hands and looked at you with eyes as pure and innocent as an angel’s. ‘But, madam, I can’t do the impossible, can I? he would whisper. ‘I’m not a fairy, am I? What? Do I look like a fairy?’ Then he went off into a loud laugh that sounded as if he had studied it for months. At last old Harding received them back. He made Lofty a foreman, but he might as well have tried to make a foreman of the Pope. ‘Foreman!’ exclaimed Lofty to all his acquaintances, shaking his head in commiseration. ‘Ah, the poor old man! He must think I’m someone else!’ And he tapped his forehead significantly. At last his lofty nature had room to breathe and expand in; at last his fine bass voice could send men running or bring them to heel, and it was no mere plumber but a Marshal of France in disguise you saw when Lofty came on the job. And that voice of his! Good Lord, that voice! He was every bit as conscious of it as of his appearance, and played with it like a virtuoso. It was a joy to him to demonstrate it in all its stops and registers. Sometimes he used all day long nothing but a thin, clear, almost falsetto head voice, marked at long intervals by a single syllable that orchestrated it, giving just a hint of its true quality. Sometimes he let it run on for a full quarter of an hour in a dreamy, expressionless monotone, scarcely more than a whisper, that for all the world resembled a leaking tap, and the words he used, though they might have been interpreted as having some relation to the workaday world, seemed to have been really chosen for nothing else but to display this particular style—so much wind to fill its sails. ‘Paddy, Paddy, oh, Paddy, like a good man get off that washer there; it’s a bit rusty. And if you don’t mind, Paddy, will you hurry up about it like a decent fellow, because I haven’t a minute to spare? I have to go up to Berkeley Road immediately on a most important job. Mrs Enright will have my sacred life if I’m not there by three —she’s a terrible stickler for punctuality, poor old lady, and in my opinion ’tis worse she’s getting since her husband died on her; an awful shock it must have been too, and he such a fine cut of a man. Oh yes, an awful shock. ...’ And then, just when he had bated his voice to a wistful silky pianissimo, when it seemed almost to die upon the air, he would suddenly bark with the precision of a whip-crack and the volume of a band of trumpets ‘Donovan! Did you hear me? I said hurry, man!’ At the same moment the shaggy black curtains of his eyes swooped down from a brow of thunder, the moustache bristled and twitched with rage, and before you stood a Balkan chief, a hairy, wicked devil of a man, a monster in human shape. It was an astounding transition. In the few glorious years before he came in for the business he developed another mannerism. It was a gesture with his two hands that somehow gave the final expression to certain things: bad form, no class, a social or business gaff (particularly the former), or a bad dinner; and the gesture was accompanied by a contraction of the eyes and a low groan that seemed to well up from deep down in him. Even as a workman he had always inclined to deprecation rather than praise; pursing his lips and shaking his head over someone else’s work; saying in one shocked breath, ‘Oh, my! my! my! my! my!’; but in those days there had been a world of luxury and culture from which he was excluded. Now he was as good as the best, and even when he was praising someone, there was a brooding melancholy in his voice that went through you like a judgment. He set up as a connoisseur of food and wine. If he was lunching at a hotel it was, ‘My God, how can they expect us to eat muck like this? What do they think we are? Costermongers?’ If in a private house: ‘Tell me, Dwyer, where do you get that sherry? Wonderful stuff, isn’t it? That scoundrel McFadden, I pay him ten bob a bottle for mine and I can’t drink it. Cold tea, that’s all it is.’ But if by any chance you were to praise the same sherry to him on the following day the brooding note would come into his voice. ‘Ah yes, not bad, not bad stuff at all, really—passable for a cheap wine. Of course, Dwyer, poor fellow, has no palate.’ II During the War he made pots of money. Old Harding was dead and the business was his. He was the father of four handsome daughters, handsome with something that promised to resemble his own diabolical charm; black hair, jet-black eyes and wild romantic looks. But then—in some extraordinarily muddleheaded fashion—he got mixed up with revolutionary politics. He lunched, dined and slept with gunmen, and the more bloodthirsty their reputation the more did Lofty enjoy it. Never was there anyone less suited for it. He should have been Lord Mayor and given extravagant banquets; received royalty and been knighted, and for the rest of his life called Josephine ‘Lady Flanagan.’ But he had been born too late. The great days of the colony were over. Before the Civil War broke out he wavered. They were all doing the wrong thing, every man jack of them; none of them asking his advice. It was impossible to decide between them. What could you do with men like Collins and Griffith, ploughboys, counter-jumpers?—good fellows, of course; fine sincere fellows, but no class! Oh, God, no class! Imagine a fellow like Griffith discussing the finances of a nation—a poor devil that wouldn’t know the colour of a five-pound note! For months it was uncertain which way he would jump, but on the day fighting broke out, Lofty drove off in his brand-new car, wearing a bandolier and Sam Browne belt and a sombrero pinned up at one side by a tri-coloured rosette. He had turned up the two ends of his moustache at right angles. In the back of the car sat Paddy Donovan and Jim Roche, two of the plumbers, with Service rifles between their knees. He refused to be associated with the irregulars, ‘Lead me into a trap, those fellows would,’ he declared. ‘They have no real military experience.’ So he went to a retreat of his own in the Wicklow mountains, twenty miles from anywhere, commandeered a house and set up his general headquarters. The first thing General Flanagan did was to examine the beds. He groaned; a heart-rending groan that chilled the blood of his raw troops. Next day he dispatched a lorry to the city to bring back a new spring bed and mattress for himself. On the third day he said he was going clean mad. ‘Cabbage! Cabbage! Cabbage!’ he shrieked. ‘Is it any wonder the Irish people are split like Moses’ rock? People with minds that never rise above salt meat and cabbage! Merciful God, what sort of misfortunate bloody race are we at all?’ Eventually he had to send back the lorry to bring out his cook and a comfortable armchair. ‘There isn’t a chair fit to sit on in this confounded house. ... No wonder we Irish are the world’s laughing-stock. ... And listen, my dear good fellow, as you’re about it call into Mcladden’s and bring out a couple of bottles of their best sherry.’ The people of the house were so overawed that they went to the home of a relative to eat their meals in peace, but it turned out later that they thought he was the Kaiser. Then for two or three weeks he had nothing to complain of. Every day he went out on the hill, his sombrero cocked on one side of his head, and with a powerful pair of field-glasses surveyed the country round. ‘Movement of some sort to the west,’ he would announce with bloodless calm whenever a herd of cattle raised a dust on the distant highways. ‘But all the same,’ Donovan declared, ‘he wasn’t himself at all, the poor man. He was lost and kilt entirely for want of the bit of company.’ As he was. Whenever he thought of the city he felt as if he were being rent asunder. There were the bleak mountainsides to right and left of him, and behind him, up the valley, a precipice with water tumbling down its face—sheer waste, as the plumber in him went on remarking; and forty miles away was the city street, half-sunshine, half-shadow, and the church bells ringing, and the striped sun-blinds out; and down every lane were vistas of towers and ships and washing out to dry. And in the sun, their bowler hats over their eyes, sauntered the city worthies, to or from their morning coffee, discussing this and that, and all without his aid. When it rained he thought of winter evenings in the city and the half-dusk when shop-lights merged their pallor in the withering daylight. Slowly he strode up the hill and down again, his hand in the breast of his coat, in a pose that was intended to remind his followers of Napoleon on St. Helena. Never since he had been in love with Margaret of the florist’s had he known such anguish. ‘Kilt and lost entirely,’ he was, as Paddy Donovan truthfully remarked. Then one morning some soldiers passed by in a lorry and fired a shot at Paddy, who was gazing at them dreamily through the field-glass, forgetting the rifle slung across his shoulder. It is unknown which got the greater fright, Paddy or the troops, for both fled precipitately. Paddy was for arguing it out with his employer that the soldiers’ action had been against the laws of war and should be reported to the League of Nations, but Lofty, waiting for no arguments, took to his heels and, followed closely by his little army, ran for dear life up the mountain. When they reached the top he addressed them, accusing his allies, the irregulars, of cowardice, but in the middle of his speech a thick mist closed round them and Lofty rolled under a bush gasping, and groaning that he was going to get his death of double pneumonia. Next morning the car stood outside the cottage, and beside it were two men in dirty overalls. There came rushing out to them a tall man, also in overalls, with a great moustache. In one hand he carried scissors, in the other a mirror. ‘Quick! Quick! Donovan!’ he cried. ‘Do you think they’ll know me? Will I cut it off?’ ‘Erra, no sir, not at all,’ replied Donovan. ‘They’ll never know you in the dark.’ ‘I dunno, sir, all the same,’ added the other, ‘’tis remarkably conspicious, God bless it!’ ‘Christ Almighty!’ shouted the big man, dashing mirror and scissors on the ground in his fury, ‘will Irishmen never agree? Or are we always going to be cursed with misfortunate yahoos that can’t make up their minds?’ He picked up the mirror and glanced at himself once more, writhing this way and that in anguish. ‘I’ll cut the bloody thing,’ he whined, and flung himself headlong into the cottage. A moment later he was out again, this time with a dirty cap pulled sideways over his face. ‘I won’t,’ he said in a cold ethereal voice, as he took his place at the wheel. ‘Better men have died.’ The moustache had been combed meekly down at either side of his mouth. III Lofty’s revolution had so far passed unnoticed that he escaped with a mere invitation to come and explain himself. Lofty went, prepared for the last extreme of conciliation. Two hundred yards from the barrack gate the smile of celestial innocence became as it were fixed on his face. He smiled at women in shawls and patted babies on the head. Walking across the barrack square he stopped every soldier he met, took him by the arm, told him a funny story, and gave him a cigarette. He blew into the C.O.’s office with a breezy ‘Good morning, General,’ that would have dispelled certainty, let alone suspicion. But the General, a fat red man with fat black moustaches waxed to a mathematical point, sat behind his desk and glowered arrogantly at Lofty whose breeziness rapidly evaporated. His voice grew hushed, melancholy and even tearful with the sense of wrong as he offered the third variation on his reason for leaving the city in all the panoply of war: that the nuns in Keel had begged him by all he held sacred to come and mend their drains, that he had promised, and that as everyone knew he was a man of his word, and had taken the only possible way of leaving the city during the battle, by disguising himself and his plumbers as rebels. ‘Mr Flanagan,’ hissed the General, leaning forward, his two fat fists clenched before him on the desk, ‘I want you to realise that you are dealing with a determined man, a man who will stand no nonsense.’ ‘General,’ said Lofty, on the verge of tears, ‘I understand it perfectly. I see you’re a man after my own heart.’ ‘The last words of Michael Collins to me,’ said the General, somewhat mollified by Lofty’s tone, ‘were “Dan, I rely on you to clear up the mess,” and by God, sir, I’m going to clear it up.’ Lofty drew a deep breath. Raising his head he looked at the General with a slow smile. All at once he was a different man. ‘Ah,’ he sighed dreamily, ‘so you knew poor Michael?’ ‘Michael Collins, sir, was my best friend.’ ‘Poor Michael! Poor Michael!’ Lofty shook his head. ‘He was a good friend, a very good friend. No one knows that better than myself,’ ‘And,’ added the General, sitting back, ‘I knew him in the days before it was fashionable to know him.’ ‘Yes, indeed; yes, indeed. Do you know, there are people who’ll scarcely believe me when I tell them that I lent Mick many a pound note on the quiet.’ ‘And for your further information,’ hissed the General wrathfully, ‘we were at school together. Yes, sir, I’m a Cork man. I knew Michael Collins when he wasn’t the height of that table.’ ‘You didn’t know, I suppose,’ asked Lofty with quiet firmness, ‘that he and I were related?’ He fixed the General with a challenging stare, tweaking his moustache, now right, now left. His hand dropped suddenly to his side when he saw that the General was also tweaking his. At the same moment the General became aware of the coincidence, and took to brushing back his hair by way of a change. A solemn silence reigned as the two men looked at one another, Lofty’s great black eyes, the General’s beady blue ones, uttering the same message of challenge. ‘No, sir,’ said the General at last, ‘I did not. I did not come here to discuss your family tree. I’m a soldier, not a genealogist.’ ‘You mightn’t think it,’ pursued Lofty, ‘but I have also some military experience. What regiment were you in, may I ask?’ ‘I was in no regiment, sir. My duties have taken me all over the world, and I have been frequently called in in a consultative capacity.’ ‘My experience covers half a dozen of the most famous regiments in the British Army,’ said Lofty modestly, pursing his lips and shaking his head. ‘In organisation,’ said the General, ‘the British Army was always far below the German.’ ‘Oh no,’ said Lofty in gentle reproof, ‘oh no. ‘Excuse me, sir, I happen to know what I’m talking about. I can say without boasting that I was consulted by the German High Command.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ said Lofty. ‘I know one or two things myself; inside information, so to speak, but my lips are sealed. But——the German organisation better than ours! Why, the thing is absurd. We licked you all over the place.’ ‘Licked us!’ spluttered the General. ‘You licked us! Why, damn it man, tactically speaking, we won the war twenty times over.’ ‘Really,’ said Lofty in a weary voice, his face taking on a distraught and melancholy expression, ‘really, I don’t know how you can say such things. Honestly, I don’t. You knew we weren’t prepared for war, you knew we had only a tiny army compared with yours, you said you’d wipe the floor with us in a week, and look at what happened! We made smithereens of you.’ For a moment it looked as if the General would burst. Then he rose and gave his fat moustache a final tweak—it seemed as if he couldn’t resist it—and when he spoke it was in a cold and distant voice. ‘I mixed with English, French, Germans, Montenegrins and Abyssinians,’ he said, ‘even with royalty (as I did in fact) and I don’t propose to make a damn fool of myself with a man who brooks no contradiction. Good morning.’ Lofty raised himself to his full height—and a fine figure he made—and looked at the General over the tip of his nose. ‘I have as much experience as most men of soldiering,’ he said in a haughty tone, ‘I have served under some of the greatest military geniuses the world has ever known, and I certainly did not expect to be lectured on military science by the officers of an untrained militia corps. Good morning.’ IV After the War, everyone, looking back on the politicians of pre-revolution days, thought of Lofty. But the first time he stepped on a platform—! Mind you, it wasn’t only that his speech was naturally queer; that Lofty seemed to listen separately to each and every sentence he pronounced, and become so lost in admiration of its beauty and eloquence that he couldn’t be bothered relating it to anything that had gone before or might be expected to follow—just as though there were within the speech some centrifugal fan bursting its framework and divorcing it so far as possible from any imaginable core of sense. It wasn’t that, not that at all! ‘People of this ancient city,’ he began, ‘we are here to-night. Some of us are, at any rate. The important people, I mean to say. We can snap our fingers at the others. I suppose they think they’re very clever. I don’t, of course. But then, my opinion doesn’t matter very much. I’m not a politician. I’m a plumber in case ye’re in any doubt about it. And my father was a plumber before me. They call us sanitary engineers nowadays, but the old word is good enough for me.’ Of course the man hadn’t a stitch of sense. But all that would have made no difference ten years before; ten years before a man could have stood on his head and the audience would have cheered; but those ten fatal years had passed, and when Lofty began to bellow over the edge of the platform, the listeners realised—some of them for the first time—that the days of Edwardian high-jinks were over and done with for ever; and Lofty, enchanted by the sound of his own voice, aware of the flickering of torches on his dark, handsome face and his fine black rolling eyes; Lofty produced nothing in the way of emotion but an unrelieved gloom, as if the crowd, packed and silent and helpless before him, had suddenly felt upon its massed bodies the trampling of time. Gone were the Viceroys, gone the guards and the hussars, gone the feeling of faith in the security of houses and families and investments, gone the light and flowery ladies! No more champagne, no more military dances, no more string orchestras in the Park, no more carriages or judicial pomps! And Lofty up there, ranting away, a magnificent ghost! They didn’t ask him to speak again in a hurry, nor did they refer so frequently to his chances of election as this, that or the other. At the same time they needed him, and sponged on him whenever occasion arose. Lofty couldn’t back out. He wanted a public position and knew he must pay for it. Sometimes he did grow restive and wave his arms and sulk; sometimes the craftiness of the one-time street arab came out in him and he laughed in their faces, but, angry or crafty, he could always be called to heel by a little flattery. Then his melancholy eyes softened till they became like the eyes of a pet dog, and he embraced his parasites, saying in a husky voice, ‘It’s all for the Old Land, what?’ But even if he had known he would never be President Flanagan, Lofty was the sort who would have paid and nursed a grievance. The grievance at least magnified him in his own eyes. Time passed. When the party chose candidates, new converts were selected, trimmers of the old and new régimes, people Lofty hated. Yet he presided at their election meetings, canvassed for them, brought their voters in his car to the polls, and paid more than his share of their expenses. The politicians soon discovered that if any dirty job was to be done, Lofty would do it, and they naturally left it for him to do. His business went to the deuce, and as his bank balance diminished, and he lost contract after contract (not always through his own fault either, for he was an excellent contractor) he began to develop a permanent tragic expression and another little gesture: a slow shake of the head that signified entire resignation to the mysterious will of God. One day he employed a new clerk. ‘This clerk, Paul Driscoll by name, though little more than a boy had a history. It is enough to say that Lofty had first made his acquaintance when he was aged ten or so. Mr Driscoll, a shrewd man, somewhat too fond of drink, had one day stopped Lofty in the street and held a little conversation with him. The same evening when Lofty was at dinner a knock came to the door, and there entered a boy in short trousers and a blue jersey. Standing in the doorway he had begun to read from a slip of paper when Lofty hurriedly stopped him. The boy, young Driscoll, was put sitting at table, and, since he refused shyly to take food, was provided with a cup of coffee (most of which he spilled) and some sweet biscuits. Then after dinner while Lofty sat on an easy chair smoking a big and expensive cigar, the boy stood on the hearthrug with his back to the fire and in a shrill treble recited: Here’s to Mr Flanagan, The man we all admire; He is a good and holy man, For him we do perspire. ... Lofty listened attentively, nodding his head in delight and wonder. ‘Great talent!’ he proclaimed. ‘Amazing talent! That boy will be a genius.’ Seeing the genius to the door, Lofty, in his grandiose way, slipped a pound note into his hand. The child went straight to the nearest sweet-shop and demanded a pound’s worth of sweets. He was told to wait until they got change. A few minutes later he was arrested. It took some explanation on his father’s part to get him released, for which Mr Driscoll rewarded himself by keeping the pound note and giving Paul twopence. Paul Driscoll had never forgiven Lofty the humiliation of that ridiculous scene or its ill-timed reward. As a clerk he proved himself bright, vague and quite incompetent, his only previous experience having been as a messenger boy and learner in a large store locally known as ‘The Orphans’ Home.’ But Lofty preferred an incompetent he could rail at to a good man with whom he would be compelled to be polite, and Paul Driscoll was duly impressed by four or five displays of fireworks which his employer staged for him. Lofty, however, couldn’t keep it up; the inevitable reaction came when he needed someone he could brag to, someone to whom he could decry his rivals, and all the good effect of the fireworks was lost. One day, feeling bored, Lofty fell to discussing politics with him. Paul, a youth of many and extreme and rather contradictory convictions, had quite a lot to say on the subject. Lofty listened with an expression of pensiveness underlined by an outward thrust of the lips. ‘Listen,’ he said at last in a far-away voice, his thick brows raised in an expression of intense weariness and indifference. ‘I have to make a speech about the War Memorial business tonight. I’m a bit busy now, so if you’ve nothing else to do you might jot down a few points for me. ‘Against it?’ asked Driscoll eagerly. ‘Yes, yes. Or for it. Just as you like, just as you like.’ A few days later he returned with a similar request. ‘That little speech you wrote—it went down well, quite well, considering,’ he added blankly. Driscoll began to pay less and less attention to his work as he was set to writing more speeches, sent to see about tar barrels or bunting, or to interview the bandmaster of the Mother Erin Brass and Reed Band or the Secretary of the Young Ireland Literary and Scientific Debating Society. Lofty ceased to call him ‘Driscoll,’ ceased to shout and tug his moustaches at him. Instead he called him ‘Paul,’ and that in a soothing, coaxing, caressing, even timid voice. Instead of ‘Driscoll, take that letter to Callaghan’s immediately!’ it was ‘Oh, Paul, boy, I wonder, by the way, could I trouble you? Are you busy? Ah, I see you are—never mind, never mind, I’ll do it myself. ... Well, are you quite sure you’re not busy now? I don’t like disturbing you.’ After that he invited him to dinner. Lofty lived outside the city in a big detached old-world house chock-full of fine furniture and pictures. ‘Soup is rather good, I think,’ he said. ‘Don’t you agree, Paul?’ Paul, embarrassed by the handsome daughters, agreed. ‘Do you notice anything wrong with the meat?’ his employer asked shortly after, laying down his napkin with a puzzled air. ‘Do you, Josephine?’ ‘You’re too critical,’ replied his wife. ‘I am, I am, I suppose I am,’ he laughed delightedly and went on with his dinner. ‘Paul, drink up your wine, man.’ Paul obediently lifted his glass, which began to play in a sweet tinkle some airs from a forgotten opera. Lofty roared at the look, first of wonder, then of delight, on the youth’s face. He raised his own glass, which played a companion piece. ‘Joan,’ he asked of his younger daughter, ‘what are you doing at the University now? Are you still at Anglo-Saxon?’ ‘Of course I am.’ ‘Oh, well, well, I don’t know, I don’t know.’ Lofty, his brows knitted, sat back and shook his head in disapproval. ‘What do you say, Paul? Is it right, do you think? She’s only nineteen.’ Paul was new to the house and didn’t catch the long-suffering expression on Joan’s face. Neither did he understand Lofty’s diabolical ingenuity in twisting every sentence to show off his food, wine, house, pictures, plate or family. True, Lofty had his difficulties too. Driscoll was not always reliable. There had been some bad slips in the office. After months of complete indiscipline he had developed an acute temperament. Lofty had to wheedle and cajole still further. But the day he was elected on to the Library Committee he felt it was worth it all. He smiled at himself in the mirror, pulled his moustache, brushed up his eyebrows. ‘Our limit is the stars,’ he murmured to himself. Yet even he knew that the stars were a matter of urgency. Sometime or other he would have to work. He consoled himself with the thought that after his first taste of power he would settle down to organise his decrepit business, canvass convents and monasteries instead of tenements, interview bishops, reverend mothers and parish priests instead of the bandmaster of the Mother Erin Brass and Reed Band, who prefaced every demand for cash with the words: ‘Mr Flanagan, me lovely man, ’tisn’t the money, *tisn’t the money at all. ’Tis the insult to the art.’ As the date of nomination drew nearer he redoubled his efforts. He kept Driscoll busy from morning till night and barely allowed himself time for sleep and food. He almost drove the family mad. And then—well then, a theatrical company came to the city. Their advertisements announced that since Ibsen’s _Ghosts_ in its original form had ceased to attract the great Irish public they were now playing it as an amusing social comedy which would be greeted with roars of laughter. One day Lofty found that Driscoll had disappeared. He drove to the Driscolls’ house. No, the weeping mother had no knowledge of her son’s whereabouts. Lofty closed the shop for the day, and threw himself face downwards on the table in absolute despair. Weeks passed. Morning after morning he reappeared on the Driscolls’ threshold and went away dejected. Then one afternoon Mrs Driscoll rushed down to him with a letter that bore the postmark of a seaside town some seventy miles away. ‘I see,’ said Lofty grimly, ‘I see. Don’t worry, Mrs Driscoll, I’ll bring your son back to you, dead or alive.’ A few hours later he strolled into the Town Hall at Cushlan. The play was already in progress. He took his seat almost immediately in front of the stage. His heart gave a great leap when in the young man who played second lead, he recognised his missing acolyte. ‘To the young man’s first spoken words he murmured a discreet approval. When Driscoll concluded an impassioned speech Lofty clapped. Then he threw his arm over the back of the seat and began to talk backwards to his nearest neighbours who were several rows away. ‘Who is that young fellow?’ he asked in a voice loud enough to be heard at the back of the hall. ‘Splendid, what? Isn’t he now?’ Once more the silence was broken by a hearty guffaw—Lofty’s response to some rejoinder of Paul’s. He followed it up with a loud clap. ‘Astonishing talent!’ he commented backwards to his neighbours. The provincial audience was too stupefied to protest. A whisper went round the hall that a man from Hollywood was there, looking for Irish actors, and that he was about to give a contract to Paul (one bold spirit said confidently at £100 a week). ‘Magnificent!’ shouted Lofty a moment later. ‘Bravo! Bravo! Oh, hang it all, the rest are nowhere!’ When Paul made his first exit he excelled himself, clapping and shouting and stamping his feet. Then he rose, and in the same all-subduing voice announced that he couldn’t be bothered listening to the rest of them, and stamped out, pulling his tie and straightening his coat. To his surprise he found Driscoll only too pleased to come with him. Acting, it appeared, had its drawbacks. The fences wound up like coloured ribbons into the mouths of the headlights as Lofty, high-hearted again, tore back to Dublin through a score of villages, sleeping in blinding rain. ‘Paul,’ he asked huskily, ‘that daughter of mine—she’s a nice girl, isn’t she?’ ‘Joan, Mr Flanagan?’ ‘Yes, Joan.’ ‘She is, very nice.’ ‘And a brainy girl?’ ‘Oh yes, very.’ ‘I think she’s fond of you too,’ added Lofty dreamily, his great black eyes fixed on the road ahead. V At first it appeared as if Paul’s experience of acting had cured him of any desire to go further with it. To his proper business of politics—Lofty’s politics—he settled down with becoming zeal, and even displayed a touching desire to learn more about it, which Lofty was charmed to gratify. He brought Paul from meeting to meeting in order to introduce him to the political chiefs. And then came the day of the nominations and the shock he was never to recover from. At the back of the hall a man stood up and proposed the name of Paul Driscoll. Someone else seconded it. Lofty laughed. It was obviously a mistake. But the proceedings for voting went on just the same. He looked round. No, there was no sign of his assistant. For a moment he thought of rising and withdrawing Paul’s name. But suppose it turned out to be someone else. As of course it was! Bewildered he sat and watched the ballot in progress. When it concluded he merely sat on as before. He had been defeated again. And among the names to be sent to the executive for confirmation was that of the mysterious Paul Driscoll. He left the hall shivering like a man in fever. He reserved a substantial measure of doubt to save him from going mad. ‘It couldn’t be Driscoll,’ he repeated dully to himself. ‘He’ll turn up in the morning and explain. Certainly he will, At nine o’clock too. If he’s as much as five minutes late, I’ll sack him on the spot. On the spot! What? Does he think I’d keep him for a day if he played a dirty trick like that on me? But ’tisn’t Paul, of course, ’tisn’t Paul. What? Go and tell those fellows he was writing my speeches for me? He’d never do it. I’d like to see him try it.’ He arrived home to find the house in darkness. On the table was a letter in the handwriting of his wife. ‘After last night’s scene,’ he read, ‘unable to stand any more of your abominable behaviour, and leaving you in the gutter at last, thank God, what I ought to have done twenty-five years ago when I had my youth and my strength and my money and my father to protect me against coarse and ignorant brutes like you. I say no more, though if I liked I could say a lot about the way you squandered my fortune and treated me and my helpless children like dirt under your big feet. No, I say nothing, as I said nothing all the sorrowful nights you filled my lovely home with dirty Boy Scouts and drunken election agents spitting on the carpets, and kept me and my poor family sewing disloyal rebel badges till all hours of the morning, so that we couldn’t call our souls our own on account of you; you dirty, cantankerous bully you. Of all this I say nothing, as of the way you deceived me pretending you would be made M.P. and Lord Mayor. They are mad, but they’re not mad enough for that, Mr Lofty Flanagan, as everyone calls you—oh, sorrowful day that ever I heard the cursed name and sorrowful, sorrowful day that ever I took it, deserting my respectable father and home and religion for it to be dragged down among the lowest of the low. But it was nothing till the past few weeks and particularly last night till I wished many and many a time I was dead with your dancing and prancing and rearing and roaring and lepping till one would think it was a Lunatic we had in the house instead of a Man. About all this also I say nothing, but what I will never, never forgive you is flinging your fine educated daughter at the head of a shop-boy, a dirty, ill-mannered, impertinent little shop-boy! To think of it! No, no, no, Mr Flanagan, that mistake was made once before by a simple, trusting female, but never, never again. However, even of this I say nothing, and close in silence as I began, a broken-hearted wife and mother.’ After reading this Lofty took to his bed. He remained there without food or sleep until the following evening. Then he rose and dressed himself anyhow, not even bothering to put on an overcoat, though the day was chill and damp. Trembling with passion, bewildered, feverish, he rushed through the crowded streets. He’d tell them! He’d show them all what he was capable of! Ruined, deserted, fleeced, betrayed, he still had strength enough to tell the rascals what he thought of them and bring their headquarters about their ears in the biggest scandal it had ever known. He knew a few things editors would like to get hold of. He’d show them! As he passed a chemist’s shop he forgot himself for a moment and paused to jerk his tie straight. Then he plunged on again, shaken as with an ague, clenching and unclenching his fists, cutting his palms with his nails. Revenge! He paused again outside a confectioner’s shop and examined his profile, squaring his jaw and compressing his lips into a narrow line. Rain began to fall. He stopped again to look into another window, and caught a glimpse of himself, tall, dark and tragic. He drew himself erect and pulled his moustaches with a melancholy dignity. People jostled him, tugged him by the coat, saluted him and then looked after him in astonishment. He paid attention to no one; he who ordinarily couldn’t walk a step without glancing round to invite a greeting. As once again he caught himself looking into a mirror he cursed. It was as if the whole city had come alive with mirrors, all reflecting him in different ways, all deflecting him from his purpose. The hall-way was lit by a streaky gas-flare. He paused for the last time to straighten himself before the mirror on the decrepit bamboo hallstand. Then as he mounted the stair it seemed to burst within him. How many times he had climbed it on trivial, menial errands! But it served him right. He had been a silly, vain, feckless creature, and they had fooled him, fooled him up to his bent. He saw it all so clearly. They were sitting inside about a bare table, a group of them. They were smiling. Perhaps at him, he thought distractedly. As he stood in the doorway looking down on them the smile faded and he saw something else take its place —doubt! And after that, fear. Yes, fear! ‘They were afraid of him, and he knew he had them at last, ready to cringe before him. ‘Well?’ he asked in a voice that was strangely unlike his own in any of its moods, dry and harsh and creakine. ‘Well, dirt?’ They said nothing, only looked at one another in dismay. ‘Dirt!’ he repeated. ‘Here I am now. You can laugh at me now if you want to. Laugh at me as you’ve been doing for ten years. I’m a fool, amn’t I? That’s what you think of me? What? A shaper, a bragger, an old gull?’ Then he raised his eyes for a moment, only for a moment, and they fell upon a cracked mirror above the mantelpiece, a mirror advertising somebody’s whiskey or ale. It was dusty and fly-spotted, but he saw himself in it, and instantly his face twitched and altered. Without recognising how the change had come, yet knowing it was there, someone broke in upon him, a smooth oily voice, sympathetic and deprecatory. He felt as if he were being torn asunder. He tried to lower his eyes, to focus them upon his enemies, to see through their smiling faces into their cunning hearts, but as if by magic they returned to the mirror. His voice took on a deep, familiar, tragic ring. He was in great trouble, his wife had left him, they knew why. Of course they knew why, they said. Once more he listened to them and once more their flattery rang true to his ears, refreshing him, buoying him up. His personality was being reintegrated like a jig-saw puzzle. He saw quite clearly how he must behave to his runaway family. And, still as if by magic, he was being led downstairs by the man who would be Member of Parliament in his place, and the man who would be Member of Parliament had a grip on his arm, and Lofty was saying in a broken voice, ‘But I served the Old Land, didn’t I, Joe? I served the Cause?’ ‘You did, Murt, you did indeed, me old friend, no wan better. Ireland owes you something, indeed she does, Murt, and wan of those days you’ll see ’twill be paid.’