"I'm helping to keep Ireland Irish, Henry!" He paused for a few moments, and then, laughing a little self-consciously, he proceeded. "Do you know that poem of Yeats's?"
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone.
Henry nodded his head.
"Well, we're going to see whether we can't make Yeats re-write it. Good-night, Henry!"
2
He stayed in Dublin for a few weeks, gathering up old threads and working on his novel; but the book made slow progress, and so, thinking that if he were in a quieter, less social place, he could work more quickly, he went home to Ballymartin, and here, soon after he arrived, he received a letter from Roger, announcing that he intended to enter the artillery almost at once. "I can get a commission," he wrote, "and so I shall go in. You said something about wanting to join at the same time as me, but perhaps as you are going to be married to Mary shortly, you'll want to wait until afterwards. If I were you I should apply for a commission in an Irish regiment."
He put the letter down abruptly. Ever since the death of Ninian, he had felt convinced that the four friends were to be killed in battle. Gilbert had been the first to join, and Gilbert was the first to be killed. Then Ninian joined ... and Ninian died. Roger, too, would be killed, and so would he, when he joined. The death of Gilbert had seemed to him to be a casual thing, a tragic accident, but when Ninian had been killed, it had seemed to him that here was no fortuity, that Gilbert and Ninian had died inevitably, that Roger and he, when they went out, would be unable to escape this destiny ... and everything that he had done since Ninian's death had been done in that belief. He would finish a book, he would marry Mary, he would settle his estate as best he could ... and then he would make the end that Gilbert and Ninian had made....
But now, as he put Roger's letter down, he had a swift, compelling desire to dodge his destiny, to elude death, to alter the course of things. Why should he die? Why should he yield himself up, his youth, his work, his love, his hope of happiness and renown and honour ... to this consuming thing! He could look to years of happiness with Mary, years of work on his books, years of enjoyment of things won and earned ... and he was to give up all that promise and go to a bloody death in war? Not every man who went was killed or even wounded ... one knew that ... but he would be killed ... he knew that, he told himself, as well as he knew that he was then alive. Sensitive-natured men, such as he, were bound to be killed ... they had not the phlegm of men with blunter natures ... they would not be able to keep still when stillness meant safety ... their nerves would go, and in that hideous hell of noise and battering, of men killing or being killed, his mind might be destroyed....
That seemed to him to be the worst thing of all. He might not be killed ... he might be made mad....
"I can do other work," he said to himself. "I can work for Ireland. I can try to make things friendlier here!..."