The Dream of the Celt: A Novel Read online

  But even more than walks through the countryside, Roger liked summer vacations. He spent them in Liverpool with his aunt Grace, his mother’s sister, in whose house he felt loved and welcomed, by Aunt Grace, of course, but also by her husband, Uncle Edward Bannister, who had traveled much of the world and made business trips to Africa. He worked for the shipping company the Elder Dempster Line, which transported cargo and passengers between Great Britain and West Africa. Aunt Grace and Uncle Edward’s children, his cousins, were better playmates to Roger than his own siblings, especially Gertrude Bannister, or Gee, with whom, from the time he was very young, he had an intimacy never dimmed by any quarrel. They were so close that Nina once joked, “You’ll end up marrying each other.” Gee laughed but Roger blushed to the roots of his hair. He didn’t dare look up and stammered, “No, no, why are you talking nonsense?”

  When he was in Liverpool with his cousins, Roger sometimes conquered his timidity and asked Uncle Edward about Africa, a continent whose mere mention filled his head with jungles, wild animals, adventures, and intrepid men. Thanks to Uncle Edward Bannister he heard for the first time of Dr. David Livingstone, the Scots physician and evangelist who had explored the African continent for years, traveling rivers such as the Zambezi and the Shire, naming mountains and unknown places, and bringing Christianity to tribes of savages. He had been the first European to cross Africa coast to coast, the first to traverse the Kalahari Desert, and he had become the most popular hero in the British Empire. Roger dreamed about him, read the pamphlets that described his exploits, and longed to be part of his expeditions, facing dangers at his side, helping to bring the Christian faith to pagans who had not left the Stone Age. When Dr. Livingstone, looking for the sources of the Nile, disappeared, swallowed up by the African jungles, Roger was two years old. When, in 1872, another legendary adventurer and explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, a reporter of Welsh origin employed by a New York newspaper, emerged from the jungle and announced to the world that he had found Dr. Livingstone alive, Roger was almost eight. The boy followed the heroic story with astonishment and envy. And when, a year later, he learned that Dr. Livingstone, who never wanted to leave African soil or return to Britain, had died, Roger felt he had lost a beloved friend. When he grew up, he too would be an explorer like those titans, Livingstone and Stanley, who were expanding the frontiers of the West and living such extraordinary lives.

  When he turned fifteen, Great-Uncle John Casement advised Roger to abandon his studies and look for work, since he and his brothers and sister had no income to live on. He happily accepted the advice. By mutual agreement they decided Roger would go to Liverpool, where there were more possibilities for work than in Northern Ireland. Shortly after he arrived at the Bannisters’, Uncle Edward obtained a position for him in the same company where he had worked for so many years. He began as an apprentice in the shipping firm soon after his fifteenth birthday. He looked older. He was very tall and slim, with deep gray eyes, curly black hair, very light skin, even teeth, and he was temperate, discreet, neat, amiable, and obliging. He spoke English with an Irish accent, the cause of jokes among his cousins.

  He was a serious boy, tenacious and laconic, not very well prepared intellectually but hardworking. He took his duties in the company very seriously, determined to learn. He was placed in the Department of Administration and Accounting. At first, his tasks were those of a messenger. He fetched and carried documents from one office to another and went to the port to take care of formalities regarding ships, customs, and warehouses. His superiors treated him with consideration. In the four years he worked at the Elder Dempster Line, he did not become intimate with anyone, due to his retiring manner and austere habits: opposed to carousing, he practically did not drink and was never seen frequenting the bars and brothels in the port. He did become an inveterate smoker. His passion for Africa and his commitment to doing well in the company led him to read carefully, and fill with notes, the pamphlets and publications dealing with maritime trade between the British Empire and West Africa that made the rounds of the offices. Then he would repeat with conviction the ideas that permeated those texts. Bringing European products to Africa and importing the raw materials that African soil produced was, more than a commercial operation, an enterprise in favor of the progress of peoples caught in prehistory, sunk in cannibalism and the slave trade. Commerce brought religion, morality, law, the values of a modern, educated, free, and democratic Europe, progress that would eventually transform tribal unfortunates into men and women of our time. In this enterprise, the British Empire was in the vanguard of Europe, and one had to feel proud of being part of it and the work accomplished at the Elder Dempster Line. His office colleagues exchanged mocking looks and wondered whether young Roger Casement was a fool or a smart aleck, whether he believed that nonsense or declaimed it in order to look good to his superiors.

  For the four years he worked in Liverpool, Roger continued to live with Aunt Grace and Uncle Edward, to whom he gave part of his salary and who treated him like a son. He got on well with his cousins, especially Gertrude, with whom on Sundays and holidays he would go boating and fishing if the weather was good, or stay home reading aloud in front of the fire if it rained. Their relationship was fraternal, without a hint of guile or flirtatiousness. Gertrude was the first person to whom he showed the poems he wrote in secret. Roger came to know the company’s activities thoroughly, and without ever having set foot in African ports spoke about them as if he had spent his whole life among their offices, businesses, procedures, customs, and those who populated them.

  He made three trips to West Africa on the S.S. Bounny, and the experience filled him with so much enthusiasm that after the third voyage he gave up his job and announced to his siblings, aunt, uncle, and cousins that he had decided to go to Africa. He did this in an exalted way, and as his uncle Edward said to him, “like those crusaders in the Middle Ages who left for the East to liberate Jerusalem.” The family went to the port to see him off, and Gee and Nina shed some tears. Roger had just turned twenty.

  III

  When the sheriff opened the door to the cell Roger was thinking in shame that he had always been in favor of the death penalty. He had made it public a few years earlier, in his “Report on Putumayo” for the Foreign Office, the Blue Book, demanding exemplary punishment for the Peruvian Julio César Arana, the rubber king of Putumayo: “If we could at least achieve his being hanged for those atrocious crimes, it would be the beginning of the end of the interminable martyrdom and infernal persecution of the unfortunate indigenous population.” He would not write those same words now. And he recalled the discomfort he would feel when he entered a house and saw a birdcage. Imprisoned canaries, goldfinches, or parrots had always seemed to him the victims of useless cruelty.

  “Visitor,” muttered the sheriff, looking at him with contempt in his eyes and voice. While Roger stood and dusted off his prisoner’s uniform with his hands, he added sarcastically: “You’re in the papers again today, Mr. Casement. Not for being a traitor to your country …”

  “My country is Ireland,” Roger interrupted.

  “ … but because of your perversions.” The sheriff made a noise with his tongue as if he were going to spit. “A traitor and pervert at the same time. What garbage! It will be a pleasure to see you dancing at the end of a rope, ex–Sir Roger.”

  “The cabinet turned down my petition for clemency?”

  “Not yet.” The sheriff hesitated before answering. “But it will. And so will His Majesty the king, of course.”

  “I won’t petition him for clemency. He’s your king, not mine.”

  “Ireland is British,” muttered the sheriff. “Now more than ever after crushing that cowardly Easter Rising in Dublin. A stab in the back of a country at war. I wouldn’t have shot your leaders, I would’ve hanged them.”

  He fell silent because they had reached the visitors’ room.

  It wasn’t Father Carey, the Catholic chaplain at Pentonville Pris
on, who had come to see him but Gertrude, Gee, his cousin. She embraced him tightly and Roger felt her trembling in his arms. He thought of a little bird numb with cold. How Gee had aged since his imprisonment and trial. He recalled the mischievous, lively girl in Liverpool, the attractive woman in love with the life of London, whom her friends affectionately called Hoppy because of her damaged leg. Now she was a shrunken, sickly old lady, not the healthy, strong, self-confident woman of a few years earlier. The clear light of her eyes had gone out, and there were wrinkles on her face, neck, and hands. She dressed in dark, worn clothing.

  “I must stink like all the rubbish in the world,” Roger joked, pointing at his coarse blue uniform. “They took away my right to bathe. They’ll give it back only once, if I’m to be executed.”

  “You won’t be, the Council of Ministers will grant clemency,” Gertrude asserted, nodding to give more force to her words. “President Wilson will intercede with the British government on your behalf, Roger. He’s promised to send a telegram. They’ll grant it, there won’t be an execution, believe me.”

  The way she said this was so strained, her voice broke so much, that Roger felt sorry for her, for all his friends who, like Gee, suffered these days from the same anguish and uncertainty. He wanted to ask about the attacks in the papers the jailer had mentioned but controlled himself. The president of the United States would intercede for him? That must be an initiative of John Devoy and other friends from the Clan na Gael. If he did, his action would have an effect. There was still a possibility the cabinet would commute his sentence.

  There was no place to sit, and Roger and Gertrude remained standing, very close together, their backs to the sheriff and the guard. The four presences transformed the small visitors’ room into a claustrophobic place.

  “Gavan Duffy told me they had dismissed you from Queen Anne’s Academy,” Roger said apologetically. “I know it was on account of me. A thousand pardons, my dear Gee. Causing you harm is the last thing I would have wanted.”

  “They didn’t dismiss me, they asked me to accept the cancelation of my contract. And gave me compensation of forty pounds. I don’t care. I’ve had more time to help Alice in the measures she’s taken to save your life. That’s the most important thing now.”

  She took her cousin’s hand and squeezed it tenderly. Gee had taught for many years in the school of Queen Anne’s Hospital, in Caversham, where she had become assistant director. She always liked her job and told amusing anecdotes about it in her letters to Roger. And now, because of her kinship to an outcast, she would be unemployed. Did she have enough to live on, or who would help her?

  “No one believes the vile things they’re publishing about you,” said Gertrude, lowering her voice a great deal, as if the two men standing there might not hear her. “Every decent person is indignant that the government is using this kind of slander to weaken the manifesto so many important people have signed in your favor, Roger.”

  Her voice broke, as if she were going to sob. Roger embraced her again.

  “I’ve loved you so much, Gee, dearest Gee,” he whispered in her ear. “And now more than ever. I will always be grateful for how loyal you’ve been in good times and bad. That’s why your opinion is one of the few that matters to me. You know that everything I’ve done has been for Ireland, don’t you? For a noble, generous cause, like the Irish cause. Isn’t that true, Gee?”

  She had started to sob, very quietly, her face pressed against his chest.

  “You had ten minutes and five have passed,” the sheriff reminded them without turning around to look at them. “You have five left.”

  “Now, with so much time to think,” said Roger in his cousin’s ear, “I think a great deal about those years in Liverpool, when we were so young and life smiled on us, Gee.”

  “Everybody thought we were in love and would marry one day,” murmured Gee. “I, too, remember that time with nostalgia, Roger.”

  “We were more than lovers, Gee. Brother and sister, accomplices. The two sides of a coin. That close. You were many things to me. The mother I lost when I was nine. The friends I never had. I always felt better with you than with my own siblings. You gave me confidence, security in life, joy. Later, during all my years in Africa, your letters were my only bridge to the rest of the world. You don’t know how happy I was to receive your letters and how I read them over and over, dear Gee.”

  He fell silent. He didn’t want his cousin to know he was about to cry too. No doubt because of his Puritan upbringing, since childhood he had despised public displays of sentiment, but in recent months he had sometimes indulged certain weaknesses that had once annoyed him so much in others. Gee said nothing. She still embraced him, and Roger felt her agitated respiration raising and lowering her chest.

  “You were the only person I showed my poems to. Do you remember?”

  “I remember they were dreadful,” said Gertrude. “But I loved you so much I told you they were wonderful. I even memorized one or two.”

  “I knew very well you didn’t like them, Gee. It was lucky I never published them. I almost did, you know.”

  They looked at each other and began to laugh.

  “We’re doing everything, everything to help you, Roger,” said Gee, becoming very serious again. Her voice had aged too; firm and pleasant once, it was hesitant and cracked now. “We who love you, and there are many of us. Alice the first, naturally. Moving heaven and earth. Writing letters, visiting politicians, officials, diplomats. Explaining, pleading. Knocking at every door. She’s doing what she can to see you. It’s difficult. Only kin are permitted. But Alice is well known, she has influence. She’ll obtain permission and will come, you’ll see. Did you know that when the Dublin Rising broke out, Scotland Yard searched her house from top to bottom? They took a good number of papers. She loves and admires you so much, Roger.”

  I know, Roger thought. He, too, loved and admired Alice Stopford Green. The Irish historian, like Casement from an Anglican family, whose house was one of the most crowded intellectual salons in London, the center for discussions and meetings of all the nationalists and Home Rulers from Ireland, had been more than a friend and adviser to him in political matters. She had educated him and obliged him to discover and love Ireland’s past, her long history and flourishing culture before she was absorbed by a powerful neighbor. Alice had recommended books, enlightened him in impassioned conversations, urged him to continue his lessons in the Irish language that, unfortunately, he never succeeded in mastering. I’ll die not speaking Gaelic, he thought. And later, when he became a radical nationalist, Alice was the first person in London who began calling him by the nickname Herbert Ward had given him that pleased him so much: “the Celt.”

  “Ten minutes,” decreed the sheriff. “Time to say goodbye.”

  He felt his cousin embrace him, her mouth trying unsuccessfully to reach his ear, since he was much taller. She spoke, thinning her voice so much it was almost inaudible:

  “All those horrible things the papers are saying are slanders, wretched lies. Aren’t they, Roger?”

  The question was so unexpected he hesitated a few seconds before answering.

  “I don’t know what the press is saying about me, dear Gee. We don’t get papers here. But,” and he searched carefully for his words, “I’m sure they are. I want you to keep just one thing in mind, Gee. And believe what I say. Of course I’ve made many mistakes. But I have nothing to be ashamed of. You and my friends, none of you have to be ashamed of me. You believe me, don’t you, Gee?”

  “Of course I believe you.” His cousin sobbed, covering her mouth with both hands.

  On his way back to his cell, Roger felt his eyes filling with tears. He made a great effort to keep the sheriff from noticing. He rarely felt like crying. As far as he could recall, he hadn’t cried in all these months since his capture. Not during his questioning at Scotland Yard, or during the hearings at his trial, or listening to the sentence that condemned him to be hanged. Why now?
Because of Gertrude. Because of Gee. Seeing her suffer in that way, doubt in that way, meant at the very least that for her, his person and life were precious. He was not, after all, as alone as he felt.

  IV

  The journey of the British consul, Roger Casement, up the Congo River, which began on June 5, 1903, and would change his life forever, had been scheduled to begin the previous year. He had been suggesting this expedition to the Foreign Office since 1900 when, after serving in Old Calabar (Nigeria), Lourenço Marques (Mozambique), and São Paulo de Luanda (Angola), he officially took up residence as consul of Great Britain in Boma—a misbegotten village—claiming that the best way to prepare a report on the situation of the natives in the Congo Free State was to leave this remote capital for the forests and tribes of the Middle and Upper Congo. That was where the exploitation was occurring that he had been reporting to the Ministry of Foreign Relations since his arrival in these territories. Finally, after weighing those reasons of state that never failed to turn the consul’s stomach, even though he understood them—Great Britain was an ally of Belgium and did not want to push her into Germany’s arms—the Foreign Office authorized him to undertake the journey to the villages, stations, missions, posts, encampments, and factories where the extraction of rubber took place, the black gold avidly coveted now all over the world for tires and bumpers on trucks and cars and countless other industrial and household uses. He had to verify on the ground how much truth there was in the denunciations of atrocities committed against natives in the Congo of His Majesty Leopold II, king of the Belgians, made by the Aborigines’ Protection Society in London, and some Baptist churches and Catholic missions in Europe and the United States.