The Dream of the Celt: A Novel Page 11

  Since his arrival he had asked the Foreign Office for authorization to have an interview with Morel. He gave as a pretext his desire to check some of his data with the journalist. He received its authorization on December 9. And the next day, Roger Casement and Edmund D. Morel saw each other’s face for the first time. Instead of shaking hands, they embraced. They talked, had dinner together at the Comedy, went to Roger’s apartment in Philbeach Gardens where they spent the rest of the night drinking cognac, chatting, smoking, and debating until they saw through the blinds that it was the next day. They had spent twelve hours in uninterrupted dialogue. Afterward they both would say this meeting had been the most important of their lives.

  They couldn’t have been more different. Roger was tall and very thin, and Morel was rather short and husky, with a tendency to put on weight. Every time he saw him, Roger had the impression that his friend’s suits were too tight. Roger was thirty-nine, but in spite of the physical effects of the African climate and malaria, he looked, perhaps because of how carefully he dressed, younger than Morel, who was only thirty-two; Morel had been good-looking when younger but now had aged, with badly cut hair that was already gray, like his handlebar mustache, and burning, somewhat bulging eyes. Seeing the other man was enough for them to like and—they would not have thought the word exaggerated—love each other.

  What did they talk about for those twelve uninterrupted hours? A great deal about Africa, of course, but also about their families, their childhoods, their adolescent dreams, ideals, and longings, and about how, without their intending it, the Congo had established itself at the center of their lives and transformed them completely. Roger was amazed that someone who had never been there knew the country so well: its geography, history, people, and problems. He listened in fascination to how, many years ago now, Morel, an obscure employee of the Elder Dempster Line (the same company Roger had worked for as a young man in Liverpool), responsible in the port of Antwerp for inspecting the ships and making an audit of their cargos, began to be suspicious when he noticed that the free trade His Majesty Leopold II had supposedly opened between Europe and the Congo Free State was not merely asymmetrical but a farce. What kind of free trade was it when the ships that came from the Congo to the great Flemish port unloaded tons of rubber and quantities of ivory, palm oil, minerals, and skins, and to go there carried only rifles, chicotes, and cases of colored glass?

  This was how Morel began to be interested in the Congo, to investigate, to ask those who went there or returned to Europe, merchants, functionaries, travelers, pastors, priests, adventurers, soldiers, police officers, and to read everything he could lay his hands on about that immense country whose misfortunes he came to know thoroughly, as if he had undertaken dozens of inspection tours like the ones Roger had made to the Middle and Upper Congo. Then, without giving up his position in the company yet, he began to write letters and articles in magazines and newspapers in Belgium and Britain, at first under a pseudonym and later using his own name, denouncing what he had discovered and disproving with facts and testimonies the idyllic image of the Congo that hacks in the service of Leopold II offered to the world. He had been doing this for many years, publishing articles, pamphlets, and books, speaking in churches, cultural centers, and political organizations. His campaign had caught fire. Many people now supported him. This is Europe too, Roger often thought, not only the colonists, police, and criminals we send to Africa. Europe is also this clear, exemplary spirit: Edmund D. Morel.

  From then on they saw each other often and continued the dialogues that excited both of them. They began to call each other by affectionate pseudonyms: Roger was Tiger and Edmund Bulldog. During one of these conversations the idea emerged of creating a foundation, the Congo Reform Association. Both were surprised by the vast support they received in their efforts to obtain sponsors and adherents. The truth is that very few of the politicians, journalists, writers, clergy, and well-known figures they asked to help the association refused. This was how Roger met Alice Stopford Green. Herbert Ward introduced them. Alice was one of the first to give her money, her name, and her time to the association. Joseph Conrad did as well, and many intellectuals and artists followed his lead. They gathered funds and respectable names and very soon began their public activities in churches and cultural and humanitarian centers, presenting testimonies, promoting debates and publications to open the public’s eyes to the true situation in the Congo. Even though Roger, as a diplomat, could not appear officially on the association’s board of directors, he dedicated all his free time to it once he had finally turned in his report to the Foreign Office. He donated a portion of his savings and salary to the association and wrote letters, visited many people, and succeeded in persuading a good number of diplomats and politicians to become promoters of the cause Morel and he defended.

  Many years later, when Roger thought about those feverish weeks at the end of 1903 and the beginning of 1904, he would tell himself that most important for him had not been the popularity he achieved even before His Majesty’s government published his Report, or much later, when agents in the service of Leopold II began to attack him in the press as an enemy and slanderer of Belgium, but, thanks to Morel, the association, and Herbert, his meeting Alice Stopford Green, whose intimate friend and, as he boasted, disciple he would be from that time on. From the first moment there sprang up between them an understanding and affection that time would only make more profound.

  The second or third time they were alone, Roger opened his heart to his new friend, as a believer would have done with his confessor. He dared tell her, like him from an Irish Protestant family, what he hadn’t told anyone yet: there in the Congo, living with injustice and violence, he had discovered the great lie of colonialism and begun to feel “Irish,” that is, like the citizen of a country occupied and exploited by the Empire that had bled and weakened Ireland. He was ashamed of so many things he had said and believed, repeating his father’s teachings. And he vowed to make amends. Now that he had discovered Ireland, thanks to the Congo, he wanted to be a real Irishman, know his country, take possession of her tradition, history, and culture.

  Affectionate, somewhat maternal—Alice was nineteen years older—she reprimanded him at times for having childish bouts of enthusiasm when he was a man of forty, but helped him with advice, books, talks that were for him master classes, while they had tea with biscuits or scones with cream and marmalade. In those early months of 1904, Alice Stopford Green was his friend, his teacher, the woman who introduced him to an ancient past where history, myth, and legend—reality, religion, and fiction—blended together to create the tradition of a people who, in spite of the denationalizing drive of the Empire, continued to maintain their language, their way of being, their customs, something about which any Irish man or woman, Protestant or Catholic, believer or doubter, liberal or conservative, had to feel proud and obliged to defend. Nothing helped so much to calm Roger’s spirit, cure him of the moral wounds caused by his trip to the Upper Congo, as having established a friendship with Morel and with Alice. One day as she was saying goodbye to Roger, who, having requested a three-month leave from the Foreign Office, was about to leave for Dublin, the historian said: “Do you realize you’ve become a celebrity, Roger? Everybody is talking about you here, in London.”

  It wasn’t something that pleased him, since he had never been vain. But Alice was telling him the truth. The publication of his Report by the British government had enormous repercussions in the press, parliament, the political class, and public opinion. The attacks aimed at him in Belgium in official publications, and by English gossip columnists who were propagandists for Leopold II, served only to strengthen his image as a great humanitarian fighter for justice. He was interviewed in the press, invited to speak at public meetings and at private clubs, showered with invitations from liberal and anticolonialist salons, and leaflets and articles appeared praising to the skies his Report and his commitment to the cause of justice and freedom. The
Congo campaign took on a new impetus. The press, the churches, the most advanced sectors of British society, horrified at the revelations in the Report, demanded that Great Britain ask her allies to revoke the decision by the Western countries to hand the Congo to the king of the Belgians.

  Overwhelmed by this sudden fame—people recognized him in theaters and restaurants and pointed him out with interest on the street—Roger left for Ireland. He spent a few days in Dublin but soon continued on to Ulster, North Antrim, and Magherintemple House, the family home of his childhood and adolescence. His uncle and namesake Roger, the son of Great-Uncle John, who had died in 1902, had inherited it. Aunt Charlotte was still alive. She received him with great affection, as did his other family members, cousins and nieces and nephews. But he felt that an invisible distance had grown up between him and his paternal family, who were still committed Anglophiles. Yet the Magherintemple countryside, the big old house of gray stone, surrounded by sycamores resistant to salt and wind, many of them smothered in ivy, the poplars, elms, and beech trees dominating the meadows where sheep lay, and beyond that the sea, the view of the island of Rathlin and the small town of Ballycastle with its snow-white cottages, moved him deeply. Walking though the stables, the orchard at the back of the house, the large rooms with deer antlers on the walls, or the ancient villages of Cushendun and Cushendall, where several generations of ancestors were buried, brought back memories of his childhood and filled him with nostalgia. But new ideas and feelings about his country meant that this visit, of several months’ duration, would become another great adventure for him. An adventure, unlike his journey to the Upper Congo, that was pleasant and stimulating and which would also give him the sensation as he lived it that he was shedding his skin.

  He had brought a pile of books, grammars, and essays, recommended by Alice, and he spent many hours reading about Irish traditions and legends. He tried to learn Gaelic, first on his own and, when he realized he never would, with the help of a teacher from whom he took lessons several times a week.

  But, above all, he began to spend time with new people from County Antrim who were Protestant like him but were not unionists. On the contrary, they wanted to preserve the personality of ancient Ireland, fought against the Anglicization of the country, defended the return to old Irish, traditional songs and customs, and opposed the recruitment of Irishmen into the British Army. They dreamed of a separate Ireland, safe from destructive modern industrialism, living a bucolic, rural life, liberated from the British Empire. This was how Roger became connected to the Gaelic League, which promoted Irish and the culture of Ireland and from which Sinn Féin (“Ourselves Alone”) would emerge. When it was founded in Dublin, in 1893, its president, Douglas Hyde, reminded the audience in his speech that until then, “only six books had been published in Gaelic.” Roger met Hyde’s successor, Eoin MacNeill, professor of ancient and medieval Irish history at University College, and they became friends. He began to attend readings, lectures, recitals, marches, academic assemblies, and the raising of monuments to nationalist heroes, sponsored by the Gaelic League and the new Sinn Féin party. And he began to write political articles defending Irish culture in its publications under the pseudonym Shan van Vocht (“The Poor Old Woman”), taken from an old Irish ballad he was in the habit of humming. At the same time he grew very close to a group of women, among them Maud Young, the chatelaine of Galgorm Rose; Ada McNeill; and Margaret Dobbs, who traveled the villages of Antrim collecting old legends from Irish folklore. Thanks to them he heard a seanchaí, or traveling storyteller, at a popular fair, though he barely could understand more than a word or two of what he said.

  During an argument in Magherintemple House with his uncle one night, Roger declared excitedly, “Like the Irishman I am, I hate the British Empire.”

  The next day he received a letter from the Duke of Argyll informing him that His Majesty’s government had decided to honor him with the decoration Companion of St. Michael and St. George for his excellent service in the Congo. Roger excused himself from attending the investiture ceremony by claiming that a knee problem would not allow him to kneel before the king.

  VII

  “You hate me and can’t hide it,” Roger Casement said. The sheriff, after a moment’s surprise, agreed with a grimace that for an instant transformed his bloated face.

  “I have no reason to hide it,” he murmured. “But you’re wrong. I don’t feel hatred for you. I feel contempt. That’s all traitors deserve.”

  They were walking along the corridor of soot-stained bricks toward the visitors’ room, where the Catholic chaplain, Father Carey, was waiting for the prisoner. Through the narrow barred windows, Roger could see large patches of dark, swollen clouds. Was it raining there, outside, on the Caledonian Road and the Roman Way, where centuries ago the first Roman legionnaires marched through forests filled with bears? He imagined the stalls and stands at the nearby market, in the middle of Islington’s large park, soaked and shaken by the storm. He felt a sting of envy, thinking about the people who were buying and selling, protected by raincoats and umbrellas.

  “You had everything,” the sheriff grumbled behind him. “Diplomatic posts. Decorations. The king knighted you. And you went and sold yourself to the Germans. How vile. How ungrateful.”

  He fell silent and Roger thought the sheriff was sighing.

  “Whenever I think about my poor son killed over there in the trenches, I tell myself you’re one of his killers, Mr. Casement.”

  “I’m very sorry you lost a son,” Roger replied, not turning around. “I know you won’t believe me, but I haven’t killed anyone yet.”

  “You won’t have time left to do that now,” was the sheriff’s judgment. “Thank God.”

  They had reached the door of the visitors’ room. The sheriff stayed outside, next to the jailer on guard. Only visits from chaplains were private. In all the others the sheriff or a guard always remained, and sometimes both. Roger was happy to see the stylized silhouette of the cleric. Father Carey came forward to meet him and took his hand.

  “I made inquiries and have the reply,” he announced, smiling. “Your memory was exact. In effect, you were baptized as a child in the parish of Rhyl, in Wales. Your name is in the register. Your mother and two of your maternal aunts were present. You don’t need to be received again into the Catholic Church. You’ve always been in it.”

  Roger agreed. The very distant impression that had accompanied him his whole life was, in fact, correct. His mother had baptized him, hiding it from his father, on one of their trips to Wales. He was glad because of the complicity the secret established between him and Anne Jephson. And because in this way he felt more in tune with himself, his mother, and Ireland. As if his approach to Catholicism were a natural consequence of everything he had done and attempted in these last few years, including his mistakes and failures.

  “I’ve been reading Thomas à Kempis, Father Carey,” he said. “Earlier, I could barely manage to concentrate on reading. But recently I’ve been able to. Several hours a day. The Imitation of Christ is a very beautiful book.”

  “When I was in the seminary we read a good deal of Thomas à Kempis,” the priest agreed. “Especially The Imitation of Christ.”

  “I feel calmer when I can manage to become involved in those pages,” said Roger. “As if I had cut free from this world and entered another one with no preoccupations, a purely spiritual reality. Father Crotty was right to recommend it to me so often in Germany. He never imagined under what circumstances I’d read the book he admired so much.”

  Not long before, a small bench had been installed in the visitors’ room. They sat on it, their knees touching. Father Carey had been a chaplain in London prisons for more than twenty years and accompanied many men condemned to death on their final journey. His constant dealings with prison populations had not hardened his character. He was considerate and attentive, and Roger liked him from their first encounter. He did not recall ever having heard him say anythin
g that might wound him; on the contrary, when it was time to ask questions or talk to him he showed extreme delicacy. He always felt good with him. Father Carey was tall, bony, almost skeletal, with very white skin and a graying, pointed beard that covered only part of his chin. His eyes were always damp, as if he had just cried, even though he was laughing.

  “What was Father Crotty like?” he asked. “I can see you two got along very well in Germany.”

  “If it hadn’t been for Father Crotty I would have gone mad during those months in the Limburg camp,” Roger agreed. “He was very different from you, physically. Shorter, more robust, and instead of your pallor he had a red face that grew even redder with the first glass of beer. But from another point of view, he did resemble you. In his generosity, I mean.”

  Father Crotty was an Irish Dominican sent from Rome by the Vatican to the prisoner-of-war camp the Germans had set up in Limburg. His friendship had been a life raft for Roger during those months in 1915 and 1916 when he was trying to recruit volunteers for the Irish Brigade from among the prisoners.

  “He was a man immune to discouragement,” said Roger. “I went with him to visit the sick, administer the sacraments, pray the rosary with the prisoners at Limburg. A nationalist as well. Though less impassioned than me, Father Carey.”

  The priest smiled.

  “Don’t think that Father Crotty tried to bring me closer to Catholicism,” Roger added. “He was very careful in our conversations so I wouldn’t feel he wanted to convert me. That was happening to me on my own, here inside,” he said, touching his breast. “I was never very religious, as I’ve told you. Ever since my mother died, religion for me had been something mechanical and secondary. Only after 1903, after that trip of three months and ten days into the interior of the Congo that I told you about, did I pray again. When I thought I would lose my mind in the face of so much suffering. That was how I discovered that a human being can’t live without believing.”