Passport to Peril

Three

As she had expected, there was no trouble about her room. The woman at The White House, slender, with a heart-shaped face and a soft Dublin brogue, led her up a flight of stairs to a spacious room with a window facing out on Amiens Street. The price was a pound a day, with breakfast included. Ellen said that the room was fine and signed the guest register in the hall downstairs. She glanced over the other entries in the old ledger. Most of the guests were English, with a few Canadians and some Irish from cities like Cork and Galway. She was the first American to stay at The White House in almost three months.

She went to her room, unpacked, and took her guitar from its case. She struck a few chords, then went through the laborious process of tuning the instrument by ear. In the course of this her high E-string broke, and she had to replace it. Fortunately she had half a dozen spares for each of the six strings of the guitar. She had heard enough horror stories of performers stranded in out-of-the-way spots with a broken guitar string, and she was not likely to forget to carry a spare. A blues singer had told her of one such time, a nightclub date in East St. Louis. His G-string broke, and he replaced it, and the replacement snapped while he was tuning up. “And every store in town closed, and I didn’t know another guitar player within fifty miles.” He had wound up playing the entire evening with five strings on the guitar.

“Ellen,” he had told her, “I was about as good without that G-string as a stripper would have been. Everybody in the place got too drunk to know whether I was good or not, but I was stone sober, and I heard everything I played, and you better believe it was bad.” So she had brought plenty of spares. She might make her raincoat double in brass as a bathrobe, and she might make do with only two purses and two dresses and three skirt-and-sweater combinations, but her guitar was going to stay in good shape.

She replaced the broken string, tuned it, kicked off her shoes, sat on the very soft bed, and began to play. She closed her eyes and let her fingers work on the strings without consciously selecting a tune. She had been playing the guitar for almost ten years, and for almost half that time the instrument had functioned as an extension of her own self. She had heard all the jokes about folk musicians who took their instruments to bed with them, about musicians who felt literally naked when they left their guitars or banjos at home, and she knew now that the jokes had a very real truth to them. She did feel incomplete without the guitar. It was a part of her, one of her private voices, and the thought of losing it at the airport, of being forcibly parted from it, had held an almost surgical terror for her.

Her fingers picked out chords and melodies. She did not select songs consciously but sat with her eyes closed and let the guitar speak for her. She was in Dublin, and she thought about the songs that had come out of Dublin, songs of the Easter Rising of 1916, songs of an earlier rising in Dublin, when a Dublin boy named Robert Emmet tried to start an insurrection in 1803, just five years after the glorious rebellion of ’98. Spies and informers infiltrated his movement, and the British let it gather just enough momentum so that they could have an excuse to crush it once and for all, and hang Emmet in the bargain.

She remembered his speech from the dock. “I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world; it is the charity of silence. Let no man write my epitaph, for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice nor ignorance disperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times and other men do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not until then, let my epitaph be written. I have done!”

And her fingers found the right notes, and she sang.

Later she changed her shoes and went downstairs for a walk and a bite of lunch. The woman with the heart-shaped face was dusting the tables in the parlor. “I heard you singing ‘Robert Emmet,’” she said shyly. “I did not know that they knew our old songs in America.”

“I know a few of them. I hope I didn’t disturb you...”

“Surely you did not. And how would a song so sweetly sung disturb a person? He was a Dublin boy, Robert Emmet was. It was in Thomas Street that he rallied his men and in Thomas Street that they hanged him, and you could walk from here to there in half an hour. My father used to sing that very song, him and my uncles. And ‘Kevin Barry,’ but of course you know that one, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And doesn’t everyone know ‘Kevin Barry’? There was a time you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing it, unless it was the BBC you were listening to. Not likely you’d hear it there!” She laughed. “And the song for Sean Treacy? Him it was who fired the first shots of the Troubles, him and Dan Breen, and then rescued his friend Sean Hogan at the railroad station of Knocklong. Sean Hogan was taken by the Auxiliaries, and Sean Treacy took him right from the train, out from under their eyes. Tipperary boys they were, all of them, but Sean Treacy was shot down in the streets of Dublin, shot dead by the Tans, and not far from this very house, either. Do you know the song?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, if I had half a voice I would sing it for you.”

“I’d love to learn it.”

“Oh, but I’m no singer. I’ve an agreement with the Clancy Brothers, don’t you know. They don’t rent out rooms and I don’t sing songs, and it’s a sight better for everyone that way.”

“Could you teach me the song?”

“You’ll be laughing at my voice.”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t. Let me get my tape recorder so that I don’t miss any of it. Please?”

“You wouldn’t be sending me up, would you?”

“No, I mean it.”

“Well...”

Ellen hurried to her room, got her tape recorder, and threaded a roll of tape onto the spool. She brought it downstairs and sat in the parlor, and the woman put down her dust cloth and perched on the edge of a massive armchair with a timid smile on her lips. She led into the old ballad gradually, talking of Sean Treacy and just where he had been killed and by whom. When she finally worked into the song itself she sang it beautifully. Her voice was thin, and she missed occasional high notes, but the tune carried sweet and clear, and the words were delivered with an air of conviction that brought the spirit of the Black and Tan days sharply into focus. The woman sang as she spoke, in a soft and gentle Dublin accent that was as far removed from the tones of the rest of Ireland as it was from the stage-Irish brogue of a Barry Fitzgerald movie.

Ellen sat very still, absorbed in the song, caught up in the dying lament of Sean Treacy for “Tipperary so far away.” This was an extraordinary country, she thought, where a woman could sing for the pure joy of singing, where patriotism came from the heart rather than being summoned up perfunctorily at American Legion clambakes and Fourth of July picnics.

“That was beautiful,” she said when the song had ended. “That was truly beautiful.”

“Oh, now.”

“I mean it.”

“Ah, you must have been to Blarney Castle on your way to Dublin. And listen to me singing with a whole house to clean! But if it’s songs you want, you’ll find them in Ireland. Though there’s few who’ll sing them as sweetly as you.”

Back in her room, Ellen put the tape recorder away, then took up the guitar for a moment and picked out the melody line of “Sean Treacy.” She would learn the words later, from the tape. It wasn’t a song she expected to sing often. It was more a man’s song and less the sort of thing she could put over effectively, and she did not expect to record it. But she might sing it now and then in concert, and she would certainly enjoy learning it and singing it herself.

Reluctantly, she returned the guitar to the case and walked down the stairs and out of the house. It was still raining, but not heavily enough to make her want her raincoat. She walked on Amiens Street as far as Talbot Street, then turned right and walked half a block to a small café. She had fish and chips and a pot of strong tea. The fish was whiting, very fresh and fried to a turn. She finished it all and drank two cups of tea, and when she left the café the sun was shining and the rain had halted.

She spent the afternoon walking until her feet ached. She began on O’Connell Street, the main artery of Dublin, and stood for a moment in front of the General Post Office where Padraig Pearse proclaimed the Irish Republic on Easter Monday in 1916. She walked on, past old hotels and new office buildings, airline ticket offices and travel bureaus, shops and cinemas and restaurants. She paused in the middle of the O’Connell Street Bridge — the bridge was wider than it was long — and watched the gulls sweeping over the Liffey. She walked on the quays along the southern bank of the Liffey, looked in the windows of antique shops, passed workmen’s pubs where laborers sat with their pints of stout. She found Christ Church Cathedral, thinking at first that it was where Jonathan Swift had presided for so many years, then remembering that he had been Dean of St. Patrick’s instead. But she entered the cathedral anyway and stood at the tomb of Strongbow, the Norman earl who had led the first English invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century.

The cathedral was empty. She stood quite alone by Strongbow’s tomb and looked from it to the altar and back again. Not even in London, at the Tower or at the Abbey, had she felt herself so forcibly gripped by the presence of History. The bones of great men, she thought.

She walked for hours. Now and again it would begin raining. Then the rain would cease, only to resume again before long. She walked on through it, oblivious to it. She had bought a small tourist’s map of Dublin, and from time to time she would dig it out of her purse and try to figure out where she was and what landmark she could search out next. But each time she quickly let herself get lost, wandering down whatever old street appealed to her, trying to immerse herself entirely in the city. It was as though she were trying to swallow the city whole, to gulp it all down at once and digest it at her leisure.

She passed St. Stephen’s Green and the fine shops on Dawson and Molesworth Streets. She walked through the gates and onto the campus of Trinity College. She passed a few minutes in the Long Room of the library, saw the busts of a hundred great men, glanced hurriedly at The Book of Kells and other ancient illuminated manuscripts, magnificently detailed volumes dating from the eighth and ninth centuries. Christianity had come to Ireland long before it took root in the rest of the British Isles, and with its coming the Irish had grown as a nation of saints and scholars, missionaries to the whole of Europe. She thought of St. Patrick and St. Columba and of the song that boasted the Irish claim to a civilization older than England’s.

Her feet refused to carry her all the way back to The White House. She got as far as the bridge over the Liffey and gave up, hailing a taxi and sinking gratefully into her seat. Back in her room, she drew the curtains shut and stretched out on the soft bed. She had stopped at the Abbey Theatre for a ticket for the evening performance and didn’t know if she would have the strength to go. Maybe a nap would help; if necessary, she could skip dinner and get something to eat after the show.

She set her alarm clock for seven-thirty, kicked off her shoes, and settled her head on her pillow. She was asleep before she knew it, and she slept quite without moving until the alarm sounded.

The Abbey Theatre had just recently reopened in new quarters on the original Abbey Street site. Fifteen years earlier the building had burned to the ground, and the players had undergone a long period of exile in the old Queen’s Theatre. Now, in the impressive modern building, Ellen sat watching a performance of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. The play had had its premiere at the Abbey, and she read in the theater program how an early audience had rioted over the scene in which the Republican flag was carried into a pub, seeing the scene as an insult to Ireland.

She looked at the crowd around her. Many members of the audience were tourists like herself who wouldn’t think of visiting Dublin without spending a night at the historic theater. But many of the others were just as obviously native Dubliners who still drew excitement from the city’s traditional drama. There would be no riots now, she knew; the play had become accepted as a classic of the Irish stage, and it was impossible to imagine anyone’s becoming incensed by it.

She sat absorbed in the drama of the Easter Rising as reflected in the lives of a handful of Dublin slum dwellers. O’Casey’s characters lent a deeply human touch to the harsh facts of the rebellion. And her thoughts went to the streets through which she had passed that afternoon, the buildings she had seen that had played out their parts in the Rising. The Post Office on O’Connell Street, where Pearse proclaimed the Republic and where he and a handful of men held out against the British Army for almost a week. St. Stephen’s Green, where the Countess Markievicz commanded a detachment of rebels and strode through a hail of bullets, giving orders like a man. The unity of past and present in the city was overwhelming. Every stimulus touched her in a different way. The songs she had learned to sing, the history she had read, the play she watched now, the very streets of the city — all combined to give her a sense of involvement that was novel and exciting to her.

After the final curtain, the audience rose for “The Soldier’s Song,” Ireland’s national anthem. Even the anthem itself was a sort of folk song, she thought, written by the rebel balladeer Peader Kearney as a marching song for the Volunteers in the days before the Rising. She left the theater hungry for more singing, hungrier for it in fact than she was for food. She had not had time to eat dinner before the play, but she decided that dinner could wait.

She walked up Abbey Street to O’Connell and hailed a taxi. “I’d like to go to a pub where there’s singing,” she said. “Is there a place you could take me to?”

The driver turned and studied her. “You’re all alone, Miss?”

“Yes.”

“American, are you?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, there’s many pubs that have singing but not all of them that you’d care to go to by yourself. Shall I take you to O‘Donoghue’s? Your Ted Kennedy went there when he wanted to hear good Irish singing, and that should be recommendation enough. And it’s in a decent neighborhood, such as you wouldn’t mind setting foot in late at night.”

“Will it be all right that I’m alone?”

“Oh, some may give you the disapproving eye, but don’t pay it no mind. And as soon as they find you’re American they’ll take no heed of you. They’ll just think that you’re a bit daft to go out alone but that all Americans are a bit daft anyway, so what matter?”