It seemed possible to procure almost any amount of leave from the Curragh, and the yeomen delighted to spend it in promenading the fashionable streets of the metropolis. The tea-shops reaped a rich harvest from the regal way in which they treated their female relatives and friends. Indeed, their presence must have seriously disorganized the occupations by which young women earn their living. It was difficult to imagine that the sick in the hospitals could have been properly looked after, or the letters of solicitors typewritten, so great was the number of damsels who attached themselves to these attractive heroes. The philosophic observer found another curious subject for speculation in the fact that this parade of military splendour took place in a city whose population sympathized intensely with the Boer cause, and was accustomed to receive the news of a British defeat with delight. The Dublin artisan viewed the yeomen much as the French in Paris must have looked upon the allied troops who entered their city after Waterloo. The very name by which they were called had an anti-national sound, and suggested the performance of other amateur horse-soldiers in Wexford a century earlier.
The little band whose writings filled the pages of the Croppy were more than anyone else enraged at the flaunting of Imperialism in their streets. They had rejoiced quite openly after Christmas, and called attention every week in prose and poetry to the moribund condition of the British Empire, even boasting as if they themselves had borne a part in its humiliation. They were still in a position to assert that the Boers were victorious, and that the volunteers were likely to do no more than exhaust the prison accommodation at Pretoria. They could and did compose biting jests, but their very bitterness witnessed to a deep disappointment. It was not possible to deny that the despised English garrison in Ireland was displaying a wholly unlooked-for spirit. No one could have expected that West Britons and ‘Seonini’ would have wanted to fight. Very likely, when the time came, they would run away; but in the meanwhile here they were, swaggering through the streets of Dublin, outward and visible signs of a force in the country hostile to the hopes of the Croppy, a force that some day Republican Ireland would have to reckon with.
Augusta Goold herself was more tolerant and more philosophic than her friends. She looked at the yeomen with a certain admiration. Their exuberant youthfulness, their strutting, and their obvious belief in themselves, made a strong appeal to her imagination.
‘Look at that young man,’ she said to Hyacinth, pointing out a volunteer who passed them in the street. ‘I happen to know who he is. In fact, I knew his people very well indeed at one time, and spent a fortnight with them once when that young man was a toddler, and sometimes sat on my knee—at least, he may have sat on my knee. There were a good many children, and at this distance of time I can’t be certain which of them it was that used to worry me most during the hour before dinner. The father is a landlord in the North, and comes of a fine old family. He’s a strong Protestant, and English, of course, in all his sympathies. Well, a hundred years or so ago that boy’s great-grandfather was swaggering about these same streets in a uniform, just as his descendant is doing now. He helped to drag a cannon into the Phoenix Park one day with a large placard tied over its muzzle—“Our rights or——” Who do you think he was threatening? Just the same England that this boy is so keen to fight for to-day!’
‘Ah,’ said Hyacinth, ‘you are thinking of the volunteer movement of 1780.’
‘Afterwards,’ she went on, ‘he was one of the incorruptibles. You’ll see his name on Jonah Barrington’s red list. He stood out to the last against the Union, wouldn’t be bribed, and fought two duels with Castlereagh’s bravoes. The curious thing is that the present man is quite proud of that ancestor in a queer, inconsistent sort of way. Says the only mark of distinction his family can boast of is that they didn’t get a Union peerage. Strange, isn’t it?’
‘It is strange,’ said Hyacinth. ‘The Irish gentry of 1782 were men to be proud of; yet look at their descendants to-day.’
‘It is very sad. Do you know, I sometimes think that Ireland will never get her freedom till those men take it for her. Almost every struggle that Ireland ever made was captained by her aristocracy. Think of the Geraldines and the O’Neills. Think of Sarsfield and the Wild Geese. Think of the men who wrenched a measure of independence from England in 1782. Think of Lord Edward and Smith O’Brien. No, we may talk and write and agitate, but we’ll do nothing till we get the old families with us.’
Hyacinth laughed. It seemed to him that Miss Goold was deliberately talking nonsense, rejoicing in a paradox.
‘We are likely to wait, if we wait for them. Look at those.’ He waved his hand towards a group of yeomen who were chatting at the street corner. ‘They are going to stamp out a nation in South Africa. Is it likely that they will create one here?’