Free The Dream of the Celt: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa Page A

papers. Personal letters, manuscripts. I hope they return them. I don’t think the papers will do them any good,” she said with a sigh, distressed. “Compared to what they’ve suffered in Ireland, what happened to me was nothing.”
    Would the harsh repression continue? Roger made an effort not to think about the shootings, the dead, the aftermath of that tragic week. But Alice must have read in his eyes his curiosity to know about it.
    “The executions have stopped, apparently,” she murmured, looking quickly at the guard’s back. “We estimate there are thirty-five hundred prisoners. Most have been brought here and are distributed in prisons all across England. We’ve found eighty women among them. Several associations are helping us. Many English lawyers have offered to take their cases, free of charge.”
    Questions pounded in Roger’s head. How many of his friends were among the dead, the wounded, the imprisoned? But he controlled himself. Why find out things he could do nothing about that would only increase his bitterness?
    “Do you know something, Alice? One of the reasons I’d like them to commute my sentence is because if they don’t, I’ll die without having learned Irish. If they do commute it, I’ll delve deep into it and I promise that in this very visitors’ room you and I will talk one day in Gaelic.”
    She nodded with a little smile that was only half there.
    “Gaelic is a difficult language,” she said, patting his arm. “You need a good deal of time and patience to learn it. You’ve had a very agitated life, my dear. But take comfort, few Irishmen have done as much for Ireland as you.”
    “Thanks to you, my dear Alice. I owe you so much. Your friendship, hospitality, intelligence, and culture, those Tuesday get-togethers on Grosvenor Road, the extraordinary people, the pleasant atmosphere, are the best memories of my life. Now I can tell you this and thank you, dear friend. You taught me to love the past and the culture of Ireland. You were a generous teacher, who enriched my life enormously.”
    He said what he had always felt but kept silent about because of shyness. Ever since he met her he had admired and loved the historian and writer Alice Stopford Green, whose books and studies about the historical past and legends and myths of Ireland, and on Gaelic, had contributed more than anything else to giving Roger the “Celtic pride” he boasted of so vigorously that at times it unleashed the ridicule even of his nationalist friends. He had met Alice eleven or twelve years earlier, when he asked for her help in the Congo Reform Association that he had founded with Edmund D. Morel. The public struggle of these new friends against Leopold II and his Machiavellian creation, the Congo Free State, had begun. The enthusiasm with which Alice Stopford Green devoted herself to their campaign to denounce the horrors in the Congo was decisive in having the many writers and politicians who were her friends join as well. Alice became Roger’s intellectual tutor and guide, and he, whenever he was in London, attended her weekly salon. These gatherings were attended by professors, journalists, poets, painters, musicians, and politicians who generally, like her, were critics of imperialism and colonialism and supporters of Home Rule for Ireland, and even radical nationalists who demanded total independence for Ireland. In the elegant, book-lined rooms of the house on Grosvenor Road, where Alice preserved the library of her late husband, the historian John Richard Green, Roger met W. B. Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Robert Cunninghame Graham, and many other writers.
    “I have a question I almost asked Gee yesterday but didn’t have the courage. Did Conrad sign the petition? My lawyer and Gee haven’t mentioned his name.”
    Alice shook her head.
    “I wrote to him myself, asking for his signature,” she added with annoyance. “His reasons