Across the high street, at a spot where a hill began and went winding up, was an archway, which seemed to be the holiest ground. From the arch dangled all sorts of symbols, most of which I have forgotten: one was a wooden ladder; these same symbols the stout Orangemen wore in silver upon their sashes.
I stood beside this arch, and fifty-seven lodges went drumming up the hill. Ha, drummer, whip those parchment faces! Where are your long canes? Whip and whip again, until the veins at your wrists swell and the blood spouts forth. Was ever Protestant wrist made that grew tired, for is not the Pope himself within your drum? As the new lodge approached the arch, the pike men ran before, lifted their pikes on high, put the heads together, and the rest of the company, lifting their hats in deference to the arch, passed through. Ha, you, big drummer, need not lift your hat! Are you not doing enough whipping and whipping and whipping those two parchment faces between which writhes His Holiness?
The last lodge went up the hill, the squeal of fifes and the roar of drums were on ahead. I fell in with the great following which followed after.
We went up, and up, and up, and so did the sun in the sky. There was lemonade to buy, but that was not for me. There was beer in the town behind, and that was for all who fell by the wayside. We licked our parched lips. Mothers herding small children before them cried as they came to water, “Hi, Willie, come out of that! There’s a wee Pope in that pond!”
The ascent was done, we flowed into a large field where people had rested their banners against the trees, had put their fifes and drums upon the grass, and were drinking ginger-beer and eating bananas. On a wooden stand certain speakers were collected, and round there the press was greatest.
What, is the wound so deep? One after another you stand upon that rough wooden platform in the fiery sun, and speak as if all old ties were broken now that Britain holds out a hand to the enemy, and offers it equality and respectability.
In good time I had had my fill of the speakers, and wandered away, turning over the history of the last seven years. Surely humour was its chief ingredient? Ulster had been Celtic Ireland’s best friend. Had Ulster not made difficulties in the beginning, Ireland would gladly have accepted a limited measure of self-government, and there would have been no Sinn Fein to sweep the country like a wind. Seven years of external and internal difficulties, of irresolution and changing opinion on the part of the British Government, the steadfast following of an ideal on the Irish side, had brought two-thirds of Ireland a wider measure of self-government than it had previously conceived, and had left Ulster as she was in the beginning, but soured alike with friend and foe. A story like all human stories—muddled and painful and ludicrous, and with its patches of splendour.
As I came to the lower end of the field on the way to the railway station, nine drummers stood drumming in a row. All the exasperation of those seven years of British half-measures had passed into those eighteen arms, into the swelling veins of those wrists, into the eighteen hands which grasped the long canes that whipped so passionately the eighteen great parchment drumheads. Nine Popes writhed in those drums as eighteen canes beat on and on and on, lest if they stopped a moment His Holiness would step from out the Vatican, his triple crown upon his head, and hearing of Britain’s apostasy and Ulster’s loneliness, would then and there put out a hand, and gather every Orangeman upon that green to Rome.