IRELAND IN TRAVAIL

TO
E. A. N.
AND
G. M. L.

IRELAND IN TRAVAIL

BY JOICE M. NANKIVELL
AUTHOR OF “THE SOLITARY PEDESTRIAN”

AND SYDNEY LOCH
AUTHOR OF “THE STRAITS IMPREGNABLE”

LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1922

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

IRELAND IN TRAVAIL

CHAPTER I
47—AGENT

In the wonderful August weather of 1920, my wife and I were in our London flat sighing for cooler places. The season had come to an end with less than its usual glory, and for days taxis and growlers, topheavy with luggage, had been carrying fleeing Londoners to country and to sea. The holidays had begun; but England, still limping from the late war, had lost the holiday spirit: indeed the world was restless as if it had come through painful convulsions to kick spasmodically for a while. We were restless too.

Ireland was one of the world’s sores. It was near at hand. Should we go and see for ourselves? The middle of August had come, and we could not make up our minds.

On the hottest of those mornings I wandered into Hyde Park, and where the riders turn their horses about, on the very last chair of the row, leaning forward, rubbing his chin on his stick, I came across 47—Agent of the secret service. He had seen me coming along, and patted the next seat in invitation as if we had met yesterday.

“I thought you were at the other end of the world.”

He answered, “I’m here.”

How I met 47; how it came about that he revealed his secret to me; how it was that we became friends, has nothing to do with this story. Sometimes I saw a lot of him; sometimes he passed out of my life for a year.

Before I had known 47 six months I had learned this, that a secret service agent, if he is to be more than a common spy, what the French term a mouchard, a fellow who gleans his news among servant girls and the like, must have something of a statesman’s vision to carry him on his way. He must have that sense of the future which lifts him beyond the individual and the matter of the moment to think in nations and down centuries. Thus is lessened the pang he feels as he bruises the individual, as the vivisectionist tortures the beast that beasts and men shall be freed of pain.

“Come to dinner to-night,” I said. “We are always talking of you.”

“I’m crossing to Ireland to-night.”

“Ireland? Are you working there?”

He nodded. “I’m going to make a beginning. All the fellows who are resting have been called up. Things are going from bad to worse.”

“Are they worse than the papers make out?”

“They are bad enough. I’ve not seen for myself yet; but the Irish Republican Army has grown into a moderately disciplined and fairly numerous fighting affair, and seems to be getting bolder. Thousands of the young men belong to it. They don’t wear uniform, and those who aren’t known to the military and police, and so aren’t on the run, live as ordinary citizens until they are called on for some stunt. They’re a secret organisation, and we ought to be the people for them.”

“Are you glad to be off?” I said.

“Damn glad,” he answered. “I’ll be able to see for myself. One man tells you the country is in the clutches of a murder gang, and the next that some nobler spasm convulses it. All the same I hear work in Ireland is trickier than Continental stunts. On the Continent you have the majority of the nation indifferent to you, and only the official part to circumvent; but in Ireland they say half the nation is waiting to give a man away.”

“Why didn’t you come and say you were off?”

“I got orders this morning.”

“We have been thinking of having a look at Ireland. My wife’s interested in adoption work, and wants to start it over there. We can’t make up our minds.”

He looked round. “You?”

“Both of us. D’you think we’d find it worth while?”

“Probably. Why not come over? You’re people with nothing to do.”

“If we do, we’re going to be strictly neutral,” I said. “We want to meet the other side.”

He nodded. “It’s not always easy. That’s what a good many want to do. You may do it if you stay neutral.”

“We’re going to do it.”

“Then make up your minds. You’re sure to run across me if you come to Dublin.” He looked at the watch on his wrist and said, “I must go.” But he did not get up.

“You’ve got the pip,” I said.

“I’m glad to be on the road,” he answered, rubbing his chin on his stick again; “but it’s a solemn business.” He became suddenly very stern. “An agent requires a better courage than a soldier’s. Once he enters enemy country he does not hear a word in favour of his cause. The very newspapers he must read denounce the Government whose servant he is. Day after day he wages his lonely war.

“The man I meet at the Hibernian Hotel at twelve o’clock to-morrow is to be my ‘cousin,’ as we call it. It is my privilege to pour into his ears all my troubles, and he will do his best for me. Once a day, once or twice a week as may be arranged, he will appear at this place or that place at such and such an hour to take my information. This information he will pass on to another man, and this third man is the link with Dublin Castle.

“My wife and I will have no other loyal acquaintances, no other person in sympathy with us. While the Irish situation stays as it is we shall have only each other to lean on. Now and again we may pass an acquaintance in the street, and we shall go by without a word, without a nod. How many times must we join in the laugh against us? How many times must we sneer when we love? How many times must we applaud when we scorn?”

He looked in front of him and said in a low voice, “Betray once more, 47, that a traitor may be destroyed. Deny once again, 47, that a liar’s mouth may be stopped. Listen this time, 47, that some one else shall listen no more. Stifle your humanity. Fight your lonely fight.”

He got up, nodded, and departed.

I returned to lunch and told my wife I had come across 47. She was thrilled now at the idea of Ireland, and when lunch was over we had nearly made up our minds. I had to leave her in the evening, it was the case of a theatre, and as I walked out of that same theatre, somebody was at my side. He was the only other secret service man I knew; the introduction had come through 47. Such is life.

He was resplendent. The background of lights and women and motors purring at the kerb was just what he wanted. We strolled back together along Piccadilly, and he was in his best vein. He asked after my wife, and from her he got on to women in general. He began to philosophise presently and said:

“You can’t beat a really good woman.” Then he shook his head. “But most women are the devil.”

“Not all.”

“Most.”

He drew up his lip like a dog.

“I remember once in Vienna there was an actress, an agent of the Austrian Government, who was so dangerous that one after another of our fellows had to pull out half-way because they were losing their heads.” He nodded and went on showing his eye-tooth. “But one day there came along an agent less susceptible than the others and—he broke her neck.”

“One of her unlucky days?”

“Yes, he broke her neck.”

There was a pause.

“The clock was over there. This agent looked at it, and it had long gone midnight. She had been home from the theatre some time. The supper things were on the table: supper was over. She was standing in the middle of the room, and when she heard him coming up behind, she leaned back bored for an embrace. She was unused to a refusal. She had in mind to suck this man dry and afterwards toss him away like an empty wine bottle. She put her head back, smiling. He slipped his arm round her neck and—it’s not difficult if you know the way.”

This man had the most wonderful personality in the world. He grew more and more splendid all the time.

“He who runs may read. In our service a man receives certain payments for his harassing life. The agent lives two lives at one and the same time. He lives the life of the citizen, pays his milk bill, shops with his women friends, breakfasts, lunches, dines, and all the time he is living a second life below the surface. He sees the moves in the war raging about him; he remarks man after man go down. There is no cry. These are the deaths that never get into the papers. If recorded at all they are recorded as accidents or found dead. He sees the messages passed at the street corners, and the friend strolling at his side sees one man giving another a light. He sees this wanted man go by, he sees that sign put up, he asks himself why is this man here, what is that woman doing there? And his friend recognises only the beggar girl whining on the doorstep, and the cabman flourishing his whip.”

We were passing under a street lamp. He had become magnificent. His eyes were shining. He had swollen like a pouter pigeon.

“When the time comes for us to leave the service we cannot. We are offered rest, we are offered peace; at last has come opportunity for our stretched nerves to recover. But we must continue to be au courant with affairs. So nearly every agent dies in harness.

“But, of course, besides receiving payment, an agent pays for this life. He makes payment in several ways. One way is that he finally comes to believe nothing, to trust nobody. He weighs up what his best friend says. And another payment is that the life brings a man in the end to neutral feelings. He is cold sometimes—yes. Wet—yes. Tired—yes. Even a little depressed sometimes. But not elated. Never surprised.

“It’s fifteen years since I was surprised.”

And then at Hyde Park Corner, the place where I had last seen 47, he was gone, and I was left to stroll home alone.

My wife was still up.

“I’ve just met our other friend,” I said, shutting the door.

“What does he say?”

“He’s going over in a day or two. He was at the top of his form.”

Then I gave out what I had been given, and she listened with her eyes jumping out of her head. Her mind, and accordingly my mind, was made up half-way through. At the end she jerked upright in the armchair and cried—

“But let’s go and see for ourselves, and I’ll try and get my ‘Baby Exchange’ going. Let’s.”

“By all means.”

This was very late at night or very early in the morning.

Now it is time to ask if the world possesses one true history book. History can only be approximate, for events are without limit, and man is limited. Each observer of Irish affairs has been watching Ireland through the windows of his temperament and his opportunities, and where a man has seen this thing, his neighbour has seen another.

Humbly, then, we put down what we have to tell, endeavouring to fill these pages with the spirit of the times rather than with a tedious list of events.

CHAPTER II
WE CROSS TO DUBLIN

“Any firearms?” A lamp flashed on a pair of khaki legs. “Any firearms?” asked the man with the lamp again in a feeble attempt at cheerfulness.

I was trying to be cheerful too; but it was the middle of the night and very cold, and I had lost a husband.

A soft cloud of steam rose from the engine of the train that had just disgorged me.

All along the platform were weary passengers and flashing lamps. A silk stocking slid to the platform from my suitcase. The stooping Customs man bumped his finger on a darning-needle and muttered under his breath. A little farther along the platform I could see a woman burdened with a baby struggling to shut an over full portmanteau.

“Why are you going to Ireland?” grumbled the man with the lamp. “Last place to live in. Right. Next, please. One minute, Paddy. What’s in that parcel?”

A youth who was trying to slip through the crowd stood sullenly.

I was jostled up a gangway by the moving people, still clutching my keys.

The boat was crowded. It seemed impossible that any one else could get on, and there were hundreds to come.

My belated husband had deserted me in the confusion. I picked him up presently on the boat.

“Have you seen about a berth?” he asked.

I shook my head and penetrated to the women’s cabin. It was the most uncomfortable place I had ever seen. I struggled past heaps of rugs and luggage, and stumbled over legs as far as the stewardess, an overworked woman, who answered me impolitely. There was no berth left, and I struggled up to the deck again through the descending people with my heart in my boots. There was nothing but a cold, hard seat and the whistling wind.

Scraps of conversation reached us in between the noises. People who had fared as badly as we had stood about in sulky groups. Dour Northerners clustered together and eyed a party of priests. On the hatches some Tommies lifted up their voices in song, and round the deck paced military officers with suffering faces.

It was an evil night.

In the early morning I, who had never thought to see a dawn again, caught a glimpse of Dublin Bay.

The shattered boatload poured along the platform. I stood by the small luggage while my husband went to pounce on the rest from the hold. A long-lipped porter weighed up my wealth.

“What time does the train go?”

“Half-seven.”

“It’s been a choppy night.”

“It has.” An Irishman never says yes or no. I learned that quickly. “Here’s himself coming back.”

My husband turned up. “You’ve been christened Himself,” I said. “I’m going to call you that while we’re in Ireland.”

“Do you feel pretty bad?” he answered.

“Awful.” I subsided on an unknown person’s luggage. Himself wandered about, and the long-lipped porter, having decided we were worth while, wandered after him doing as little as possible.

I was put into a train, and from that train we emerged at last. Himself went to get a garry, and once more I did sentinel duty over the luggage.

A youth with a dirty grey cap pulled over his eyes and a trench coat on eyed me from behind a pillar-box. I stared back and he seemed to retire. Presently I saw his head round the other side of the pillar-box. He chewed a small green leaf.

We piled our things up on the garry. The soft clean air curled round my face and I breathed contentedly.

The jarvey was a cheerful soul, and was prepared to be talkative as we balanced ourselves on the side of his swaying car. The youth who was chewing a leaf propped himself against a lamp-post and watched our departure. I wondered why we fascinated him.

“Sure,” said the jarvey, “I don’t know how I stand at all, at all, not from one minute to another. It’s this way, mum. First a Shinner comes along and sez he, ‘Jarvey, did ye drive a military man home last night?’ ‘Faith,’ sez I, ‘and how should I be after knowing if he was military or not?’ ‘It’s up to you, jarvey,’ sez he, ‘and mighty quick, too,’ and out he pulls a bit iv a gun and sticks it in my stomach. And, mum, what is a poor jarvey to do? Then up comes another man. ‘Jarvey,’ sez he, ‘that was a Shinner you was talking to. What were you after telling him?’ ‘He was no Shinner,’ sez I. ‘Glory be, how am I to know his persuasion?’ ‘It’s lies,’ he sez quick like, ‘all lies, jarvey, and you find the damn truth or it’ll be worse for ye,’ and out comes another gun and into the stomach of me. Och, it’s bad days, and it’s not I who be caring how soon peace comes.”

“You don’t like either side, then?”

“Like thim? Now what I’m telling you is true. It was half-twelve the other night, and I was coming home——”

“After curfew?”

“It was. They let jarveys through. It was half-twelve and I was coming home, when up runs a man with a gun and on to my car. ‘Drive, jarvey,’ he sez, ‘back along the road you’ve come.’ So I whips me horse and away we go. We had gone a goodish bit when we sees the light of an armoured car. Out skips the man. ‘Your life if ye split,’ he sez, and disappears in the dark.

“The car spotted me at once. ‘What are ye doing at this time iv night?’ sez the officer. ‘I’m going back to me stables,’ sez I. ‘Where are your stables?’ sez he. ‘Leeson Lane,’ sez I. ‘Then it do be away from your stables you are going,’ sez he. ‘Get out iv that car, jarvey,’ and all the guns in the armoured car poked round at me.

“Sure it was two lorry loads iv military by this time. ‘Take him home,’ sez one, ‘and let him go. He’s only a poor old jarvey.’ ‘Poor old jarvey be damned,’ sez the other, ‘it’s Mike Collins himself maybe.’ ‘Have ye seen Mike Collins, jarvey?’ sez the other. ‘How should I be after knowing him?’ sez I. ‘Who was the fare you put down?’ ‘There was no fare,’ I sez. ‘I took a party home and was going back to stables and I fell asleep. The old mare must have turned herself round.’

“They laughed at that, and the Black-and-Tans was all for running me into the Castle; but the military, God save them, was for me being just a poor old jarvey, and they stood by me and jumped me into the car and drove me back to stables to see who I was, and then they took me back to the old mare and let me go. Och, but it was a night what with one and another, and it was after curfew when I was home, I was that tormented with them all. They pulled me up every short way and jumped me into a car to see who I was and then back again to the old mare. It’s no time for a jarvey, mum.”

We were rattling along the Liffey. The tide was out and the few seagulls were investigating the city’s discarded biscuit tins in the mud on either side of the water. All along the embankment were men—old men, young men, boys. They propped the walls, they dozed upon the bridges, they watched the Guinness brewery carts rumbling backwards and forwards. Some looked at us with blank faces; but the majority looked into the mud that the tide had left.

Finally we reached the hotel just as I was beginning to understand the jarvey’s speech.

“How much?” Himself let the coins in his pocket jingle.

“Four shillings.” The reply was given unblushingly. I could see the hotel porter reckoning his tip.

We had a large room looking down on the main street. A stream of people passed.

“Give a poor old woman a penny, sir,” I heard a beggar woman whine. “Mother iv God! a penny for the poor old woman.” She headed a man off, running in front of him and jerking the head of a wretched baby as she ran. “A penny for the love of God!”

The man escaped to be waylaid by two others.

“What a lot of fat beggars!” I exclaimed.

The chambermaid walked listlessly to the window and looked out. A man in well cut clothes had tossed a penny to the ground, and the beggars had fallen upon it.

“Those men do be spotters,” said the chambermaid for my benefit.

“Spotters? What do you mean?”

“Spies,” she answered briefly.

“How can you tell?”

She sniffed. “They’re not Dublin. They’re military. Will you be taking your breakfast here or downstairs?”

“Here, thanks. And get me a bath ready. I’ll go to bed for a bit.”

The stream of people increased as I watched. It was a listless stream. The only thing in a hurry was a lorry of armed soldiers jostling at breakneck speed through the traffic.

“For the Lord’s sake, let’s get some breakfast!” Himself exclaimed in the middle of my watch.

CHAPTER III
I COME ACROSS 47

It was past eleven o’clock when I left my wife and wandered out of the hotel and across O’Connell Bridge. The tide was high, and something about the lights that lay upon the Liffey waters, and something about the numerous bridges spanning the river, brought me dreams of Venice.

It is said there is truth in first impressions. I had a first impression of Dublin then. In that shining summer weather the city, which was at once so pleasantly conceived and so down at heels, impressed me as some likeable person fallen upon a sick bed.

Was it that I was reading into the face of the city what I expected to see? I had wondered at the suspicion of the guests in the hotel, who sat surly and apart. Now against the embankment of the river shabby men and youths leaned, cooling their heels. They smoked and spat and contemplated the traffic, which was controlled by magnificent policemen as tall as trees. There appeared to be a barbers’ strike in progress, as outside the barber’s shop loitered sundry young men who would have been the better for a shave. These people displayed a board with “Strike on Here” printed in big letters, and whenever some customer, maddened by a two months’ growth of hair, vanished into the shop, they would shout after him in raucous tones, “Strike on there!”

The crowd looked worried and suspicious of itself, and surely it was evident to him who had eyes to see that war, none the less real because waged below the surface, was going on, and nobody knew who was for this side and who for the other.

Yes, war—rumbling through the streets in the guise of heavy military waggons, tramping round the corners in parties of tin-hatted soldiers, flying up and down the quays in lorries choked with dapper-looking men wearing Balmoral bonnets, rushing up this road and that in Crossley tenders, filled with less romantic men in black uniforms and peaked caps.

I passed over O’Connell Bridge, up Westmoreland Street, and out of it between two grave stone buildings; that across the way an eloquent curving place, once a parliament, and now suffering from a changed greatness as the Bank of Ireland; this, to my left, the grave grey face of Trinity, with its arch like a mouth, through which could be seen cobbled walks removed from the wear and tear of the rest of the city.

Then to the left and up Dawson Street, past the Mansion House, an uninspired building, into one of the noble squares that the city possesses. The heart of this square was a public garden called Stephen’s Green. I crossed the road, which was wide and straight, and entered the park by a little gate in the iron railings.

The sun poured out of the sky, and the place was full of nurses and babies. Two lakes, divided by a bridge, filled all the centre of the place, and ducks and seagulls and small children disputed for bits of bread round the edges. It was the scene one meets in all city parks; but it was specially charming owing to the sun and the twisting walks.

I was looking for a chair when I discovered 47 strolling down the path. He had seen me; he always saw me first. He looked just the same as when we had said good-bye at Hyde Park Corner.

“So you came over?” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’ll find it worth while.”

The place was the best in the gardens for a talk. Two chairs were beside us. We sat down with mutual consent.

“I have been over a week,” he said. “I put up at the Gresham. That’s in Sackville Street. I had to get in touch first thing. I was to meet my ‘cousin’ in the lounge of the Hibernian Hotel, Dawson Street, at a quarter to twelve. After a talk with him I would know the lie of the land better, and be in a position to set to work at once. A fellow learns from experience how to cast the net as quickly and as widely as possible.”

“How do you mean?”

“The commercial traveller bustles from business house to business house, finds his way into the different billiard saloons, tests the merits of the bars. The other people get going in their own ways.”

“I’ve never seen you in a hurry.”

“Never be in a hurry. Don’t delay in preparing the ground; but when that is done the experienced fellow sits like a man beneath a tree, waiting for the ripe fruit to drop into his lap. He has a golden rule, which he never breaks. It is, do not ask a direct question. What he must know must be found out indirectly while he is yawning and showing at best a polite interest. So it follows his informant forgets what has been said; but he does not forget.”

“Well,” I said, “what happened?”

“I found the hotel, which has a sort of Moorish lounge, and got a seat where I could see everybody, the door among other things. It was twenty minutes to twelve, five minutes to the time. I asked for nobody, I did not even ask for a drink, as I did not want my voice to proclaim me an Englishman and a stranger. I knew my ‘cousin’ would be on time, for time with us is sacred.”

He leant forward in his old way, and began rubbing his chin on his stick. It meant he was going to hold forth.

“Time, exact time, is sacred. On Tuesday morning, at twelve o’clock by the nearest public time, Agent 1 will push his barrow round a certain corner. At the same time Agent 2, who is cycling round the same corner at the same moment but from an opposite direction, collides with Agent 1, and in the fracas which ensues they are hemmed in by the crowd. Agent 3, who has been detailed to do a little business on the other side of the road at two minutes past twelve, is agreeably surprised to find everybody occupied on the opposite pavement and nobody watching him. At four minutes past twelve a motor car numbered with a certain number slows up at a certain bit of kerb, and Agent 3, who has transacted his little business, gets in. But if Agent 1 is late, Agent 2 has no man to collide with, no crowd is drawn to look on, Agent 3 finds it impossible to transact his bit of business, and Agent 4 slows his car up in vain. Somebody is going to get into trouble.

“The few people in the lounge seemed the tag ends of Horse Show week. There were three or four women and half a dozen men, and they sat over cocktails and coffee. Nobody was interested in me.

“At one minute to the hour I sat back and put up the sign, and a minute later a man stalked through the door from the street. He took in the room in a single aimless glance, and, still walking forward, answered my sign. He smiled, I rose, and we met as if we were friends expecting each other. We made the third sign, the one that is made with the foot, and he asked the passwords and I answered. This was while we were sitting down. He asked me to have a drink; but I wasn’t having any.

“‘Then come out,’ he said, ‘for a walk about.’ He made a motion of his finger in the air like a man walking about. He spoke very quietly, and asked questions with his eyebrows.

“We left the lounge and went down the hotel steps.

“My ‘cousin’ was between thirty and thirty-five. He was tall and very lean. His chest was narrow, and sometimes he looked delicate, and at other times as tough as whipcord. His face was as keen as a wild animal’s. His black hair grew backwards. He was inclined to walk on his toes, and he trod like a cat. You never heard him coming and going.

“He brought me here, and we walked and talked.” 47 jerked his thumb to the left. “Up that end is a waterfall which feeds the lakes, and all the time we seemed to be getting to that or leaving it. We watched the children if we were disturbed, or talked about the birds, and my ‘cousin’—I can’t give you his name or number—was mad on them, and had a cupboard at home full of pot plants.”

“Did he tell you how things are going?” I broke in.

47 pondered this. “He thought there was a lot of work to be done; but the situation was getting fairly well in hand. The people over here are fearfully hampered by the powers that be.” 47 looked carefully round the gardens without turning his head. “Listen to this,” he said, pulling some papers out of his pocket. “Here are one or two choice little extracts from the rules of the Cumann na mBan, the woman’s branch of the Irish Republican Army, of which Countess Markievicz is the head. The Countess is said to go about with an armed escort, and to carry a bag with a gun inside. The spring of the bag fires the gun. It may be a legend. Here we are.

“As a start, members have to subscribe to the following declaration: ‘I, mindful of my high responsibilities as an Irishwoman, am resolved to do my part in the service of the Republic. I enrol myself as a member of the Cumann na mBan. I bind myself by personal attention to duty as a member of this branch to aim at the highest degree of efficiency which alone will make us a valuable unit in the Republican Army. I pledge myself to keep perfectly secret all matters connected with the Irish Volunteers and Cumann na mBan,’ etc.

“This is what I am after: Rule 11. ‘That Cumann na mBan should be instructed in the use of firearms.’ Rule 12. ‘That Cumann na mBan include detective work and the acquiring of information about the enemy among its activities.’

“Dublin Castle has in its possession a full list of the executive of the Cumann na mBan—this organisation of enemy spies—yet none of these women are touched, but they are left to go about their work as freely as they like. The Irish Republican Army states that it is at war with Britain; the penalty for spies is death. These women could quite logically be executed; they most certainly should be interned. But no, not a finger must be lifted against them.”

“What else did you glean?” I urged.

“That these gardens were much used by the Sinn Feiners. My ‘cousin’ pointed out a man loitering on a little switchback path over there near the waterfall. He warned me most of us were shadowed now and again, but in most cases it was clumsily done. He warned me Sinn Fein was everywhere, that one could trust nobody, that the rot was even in the army and the police. The question was dividing fathers against sons, and husbands against wives. He urged me to believe in nobody who was not of the brotherhood: he need not have worried on that score.

“I was told to look out for men and women sitting together on the park benches—the man dictating, the woman taking shorthand notes. That’s how they often dictate their dispatches.

“My ‘cousin’ went on to say that after dark motor cyclists carried the Sinn Fein dispatches through the empty streets. One passed his house at great speed at a certain hour every evening, almost to the minute. He meant to get him.

“He told me, as I had guessed, that the bars were the great places for passing information. Important meetings were held in the houses of trusted people and in the private rooms of hotels with good escapes.

“He ended by announcing the Irish could breed horses, grow flowers, and conspire, and that was the sum total of their qualifications.”

47 came to the end of his oration. He had told everything in a level voice, rubbing his chin on the top of his stick all the time.

“That’s amusing,” I owned. “You must keep me posted.”

“You’ll be wise not to see too much of us, though we’d both like to have a talk with friends. They may start shadowing me at any time, and it won’t be worth your while to be seen in bad company. I’ll tell you where I hang out; but don’t turn up often. We’ll run across each other now and then like this.”

“I don’t want a bullet into me on your account,” I assured him. “Besides, I want to see as much of the other side as I can. Remember, I’m going to keep strictly neutral. Do you hear?”

He grunted something, and did not seem much interested. Then he said—

“What are you doing now?”

“Looking for a flat, I suppose,” I answered.

“This is a good part of the town. The flats are very dirty, but you may find something. We were tied to a top floor.”

“How’s that?”

“The top floor has many advantages, including the fact that it can be defended better than another floor, and also that nobody has any business on your stairs.”

He was getting up as he said this. He waited a moment, said, “We’ll run across each other in a day or two. Good luck with your flat.”

He nodded, and was gone.

CHAPTER IV
FINDING A ROOF

Next morning Himself and I breakfasted early and went flat hunting. We went light-heartedly, not knowing what was before us. I had started with some idea of comfort and cleanliness: I had made up my mind that my life should be comfortable as well as interesting. But that dream was soon dispelled. The flats we saw had never seen brooms since the days of Cuchulan, a man the Irish are very fond of. We were eyed up and down by frowsy maids and dilapidated landladies.

“God knows where we’ll end if we get into any of these!” Himself exclaimed, in the middle of the hunt.

“Now, look here, my poor husband, we must get a flat. It’s the basements that have put us off. Don’t let’s look at basements, let’s just see the possibility of soap and water.”

“That’s a good idea; but what shall we let ourselves in for?”

“We’ve got to die somehow some day.”

We walked along a street in the neighbourhood of Stephen’s Green. Somewhere about the middle, on the right-hand side, a cab was drawn up, and luggage was being brought out by a bibulous-looking cabman.

“That looks hopeful,” Himself said. “Some one is clearing out.”

We mounted the steps before the door was shut.

A middle-aged servant stood on the top step, directing the cabman with his last load. She had black hair, an apron, sand-shoes—they had started life white—and her sleeves were rolled up.

“Are there any flats to let here?” I asked hurriedly.

Before replying, she looked us up and down in the Irish way.

“There are,” she said, at last. “There do be two, and some one’s just after leaving now.”

“Can we see any one?”

“You can. Mrs. Slaney’s upstairs.”

We went inside.

The hall floor was depressing. The stair rods endangered our ascent. The stair carpet had once been red.

“I’ve not been able to sweep to-day,” said the servant. “The mistress was after giving the loan of the broom next door, and it hasn’t come back yet.”

“Mrs. O’Grady! Mrs. O’Grady!” screamed some one below us. “When do I put the pudden in?”

“Such a girl!” exclaimed Mrs. O’Grady. “She is like a headless cock! It’s half-four now,” she answered. “Use your head! That girl!” she exclaimed to me indignantly, “she doesn’t know the clock. Here you are, mum, a party to see the rooms.”

Mrs. Slaney sat with her back to the door, trimming a hat. Her mouth was full of pins. There were drying bulbs spread out on newspapers over the floor.

“Have you a flat to let?” I asked, as she got up from the chair and came towards us.

“Rooms to let,” she corrected with a smile. “Yes, I have rooms to let.” She eyed the creases in Himself’s trousers. “You’re English? What are you doing in Ireland?” She tried to question us pleasantly. “You’re army, of course? I don’t know that I’d care to let my rooms to army people.”

“We are not army people,” I assured her. “Nothing to do with it.”

“You can’t be too careful,” declared Mrs. Slaney. “I’m sure you’ll understand that. Most of the army people are doing spy work now. At one time they were all right; but that was before the war. They were gentlemen then.”

“I can give you references,” I said.

We sat down.

She returned to her chair and faced us. Himself’s hand strayed to a book, and he picked it up.

“The Evolution of Sinn Fein?” he read. “You’re interested in Sinn Fein, Mrs. Slaney?”

“I am,” she said emphatically. “Everybody in Ireland is since we were terrorised by the English army. I’m a Sinn Feiner, and I have been for some time. It is monstrous what England is doing! Monstrous! Ireland will never forget it. Look at all those young fellows that England is murdering. The flower of Ireland! Look at what she’s doing to-day!”

“I’m English, as much as I’m anything else,” said Himself slowly. “I’m full-blooded British anyway. But I’m interested in Sinn Fein, genuinely interested.”

“Then you’ll see things here that will make your blood boil. Thank God, my son didn’t die in France! How England clamoured about the rights of small nations.”

“It’s a great pity that there is this feeling,” said Himself lamely. “After all, the British Isles are one geographically. They should be friends.”

Mrs. Slaney snorted.

“Friends! Ireland can never be friendly. Ireland can’t forget. Look how she has been treated. Look what Cromwell did. Look at last Thursday. They arrest the Lord Mayor of Cork—a perfectly innocent man. I suppose they’ll treat him the same as Lord Mayor MacCurtain.”

“I thought the papers said the Lord Mayor was presiding over an illegal court, and that a stolen police cypher was found, and—oh, lots of other things,” I ventured.

“Nonsense! That’s Hamar Greenwood and his lie factory. I was talking to Father Murphy, who tells me the Lord Mayor is a perfectly innocent man. And, look, only the other night those soldiers ran amok on the quays. They’re here to terrorise the citizens. But you want to see the rooms?”

“I would like to.”

We went downstairs. Mrs. Slaney trotted busily a pace or two ahead.

“This is the flat.” She opened a door leading into a sitting-room.

“Nice and airy,” she declared, bustling towards a window, and vainly trying to put it up. “I must get that sash fixed. There’s a bedroom at the back, and the use of a bathroom.”

“How much?” I asked, in a faltering voice.

“Three guineas. I give services for that, too. It’s cheaper than most flats, and the best situation in Dublin. So near the Green.”

“What are the services?”

“Mrs. O’Grady is a very good cook—that goes without saying; and there is a housemaid as well. You dine at night, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t like dinner served much after seven. There’s Mrs. O’Grady to consider.”

“It’s early,” I said dubiously, “but I see you must consider the servants. We might think about these rooms.”

“I’m afraid you must make up your minds about them soon. I have several people after them. Rooms are scarce now.”

“I vote we take them,” said Himself. “You’ll have them properly cleaned up for us?”

“Of course,” smiled Mrs. Slaney. “I am always most particular about cleanliness. You’ll want them in a few days, I suppose? I can set Mrs. O’Grady to work to-morrow, and I’ll have the curtains taken down and the windows cleaned. You could come in the day after.”

Himself tried the door.

“The locks are out of order,” he said.

“They are,” Mrs. Slaney agreed; “but no one bothers about locks here. We’re all friends. I’ve always tried to keep that atmosphere in the house. We need no locks. Until this trouble began, there was not a more crimeless country than Ireland. The front door has never been locked at night since I came into the house.”

“I should like these doors to lock,” I said sharply. “After all, I understand that the Black-and-Tans raid frequently. It’s not nice to feel that they can walk in without warning.”

“We can find you keys, of course.” She soothed me like a child. “You’ll come, then, the day after to-morrow?”

“I’ll look in to-morrow, probably, to see what I shall want in the way of odds and ends, and perhaps some of the luggage could come. The heavy stuff has been at the station all this time.”

“You’ll like Ireland,” said Mrs. Slaney to Himself, ignoring my suggestion about the luggage. “You’ll find nothing but kindness in the South. You must go to the North for bitterness. It’s wonderful, the patience of the Southerners; they’ve suffered so much and so long. Eight hundred years! But at last it has burst out. It couldn’t be bottled up any longer. Your blood must boil at the wrongs of Ireland.”

“I must hear all you’ve got to say later.”

“Yes. I expect you’ll be more Irish than the Irish after a few months. It is always like that with the English who come here. Are you passing a pillar-box? I’ll get you to post a letter as you go out. It will save me a journey. I haven’t a stamp in the house, by the way; but you might perhaps put one on, and we’ll make it right next time.”

CHAPTER V
WE SETTLE IN

Three days later we took up our abode with Mrs. Slaney.

She directed our arrival. She was like a busy bird on several twigs. She did not seem able to keep away.

The flat had been imperfectly cleaned; the curtains had been imperfectly put up; the window-cleaner had not come, but was coming at some date known only to himself; the door locks had not been mended.

“There are one or two little items I’ve overlooked,” Mrs. Slaney said. “I make a small charge for cleaning the front hall. I allow Mrs. O’Grady a little extra for that; and there’s coal and light.”

She looked at me uncertainly; but I was not prepared to do battle.

“Mrs. O’Grady hadn’t time to clean the fireplace to-day,” she said. “She’ll do it to-morrow. I’ve had the walls brushed down. Well,” she next said regretfully, “I mustn’t disturb you. Let me know if you want anything.”

She got as far as the door, then she burst out—

“Look at what the blackguards are doing to the Lord Mayor of Cork! What do you think now of Lloyd George and Hamar Greenwood and their lie factory, starving all those splendid young Irishmen to death in Brixton and in Cork? What must decent Englishmen think?”

I quailed under her eye.

“It’s deliberate, cold-blooded murder. I was a loyalist before 1916. The murder of those splendid young fellows by the British Government after the rebellion caused a thrill of horror through the whole country. Why can’t England leave Ireland alone?”

“It’s a long story,” said Himself.

“A long story! It’s shameful! And all the talk of the rights of small nations.” She quieted a little, and said, “We must have some little talks in the evening. I’ll get Father Murphy to come round. He’s just had Father O’Hara from Cork staying with him, and he’ll be able to give us a little of the truth of what’s going on. Now I must say good-bye.”

This time Mrs. Slaney was as good as her word. I looked round, and found Himself in a trance.

“I wish the doors would lock,” I said bleakly. “Mrs. O’Grady tells me the house is full. I hate the idea of people being able to come in and out as they please. Especially when we’re in bed.”

“No one will hurt you.”

“I hate the feeling that they can prowl in and out. It’s not much to ask that the doors are fixed up.”

There was a timid knock. “Come in,” I said.

A spikey little girl of fourteen or fifteen came in.

“Who are you?”

“Please, mum, I’m Polly, the housemaid. Mrs. O’Grady wants to know if you want your dinner at half seven.”

“Yes, Polly.”

“Well, it’s half six now, and it’s done, and Mrs. O’Grady wants to know what she’ll do with it.”

“Let it go for to-night,” said Himself.

“Bring it in now. But do remember half-past seven in future.”

“We’ll go for a long walk afterwards,” said Himself, trying to cheer me up. “It looks rather interesting along the canal.”

We moved mournfully towards the room where our meals were to be served.

“You’ll have all you want,” Mrs. O’Grady said, cheerfully dusting a small plate with her apron. “The little bell’s lost, but you may call from the top of the stairs.”

“It’s very early for dinner,” I said severely.

Mrs. O’Grady sniffed. “It’s this way,” she said. “That girl’s bad with her feet. It comes from running up and down all day for the woman upstairs and wearing fashionable boots. I sez to her, it do be to bed you should be going, and it is the lady who has just moved into the drawing-room flat is the grand lady, and will not be after keeping you.’”

“She should stay away until she’s better,” I said decidedly.

“It’d be a charity,” declared Mrs. O’Grady, earnestly, but with no sincerity. “But these stairs do be terrible on my legs.”

She threw up her hands and withdrew.

Himself was gazing into the soup like Mélisande. I, being a philosopher, started on mine at once.

CHAPTER VI
WE MAKE ACQUAINTANCES

Himself and I had got a grip of Dublin at the end of a week by using a map and doing a lot of walking.

All this time Mrs. Slaney was becoming more friendly. She swallowed rebuffs as an ostrich swallows stones.

We began to know by sight the people in the neighbourhood. A number of officers lived in one of the houses. Sometimes they were in uniform, and sometimes in mufti. They went out at night very late, returning during or after curfew as they felt inclined. Usually a car called for them, driven by a soldier, and it brought them back again with a great clatter, when the street was doing its best to sleep. These men carried guns in their pockets.

“Those men are spies,” Mrs. Slaney said, coming in to borrow a little butter. “Look at them going out in mufti. Do they think our people are fools? Absurd! The Government lets them go about like that, and expects them to get information.”

“They must get information, I suppose,” I said. “After all, if they were no good they wouldn’t be kept on.”

She threw up her hands.

“The Government pours out money like water!”

The men in this particular house fascinated me. They came and went so often it seemed as if they never slept. There was one individual I found more absorbing than the others. He was about forty, tall and immaculate. His ties and socks were wonderful, his shoes the most beautiful suède, his collar fitted as no other collar I have seen fitted a man, and I am sure he wore stays. On his head was a bowler at an extreme angle. He looked a “wrong un,” the sort of person you would not introduce to your daughter. He usually made a first sortie about eleven, and tottered towards the Shelbourne for a cocktail.

Dublin intrigued me. The people are grubby and intellectual, and crafty and philosophic, and sublime and material all at the same time. The fat beggars whine their piteous stories at every corner, and the children tell the tale as glibly as the mothers. Each person is more droll than the next, and nobody really believes anybody else.

Every day provided a new excitement. I have forgotten half of them now; but one I remember clearly. It happened during one of my first walks.

I was coming home across one of the bridges over the canal on the south side of the city. Men, women, and children were peering over into the water, and I peered too. All I saw were four big, important policemen, who seemed to be guarding the canal.

Then, in the middle of the canal, I discovered a large oil drum floating with the Sinn Fein flag on top. Below the flag was a placard—“Spies and Informers, beware.”

While I was still gaping, as was everybody else, a lorry load of troops, with tin hats and rifles, rattled up.

“This is thrilling!” I exclaimed.

At every window was a head, at most two, in some there were half a dozen heads, and the crowd, which had fallen back before the troops, drifted as near as it dared.

The capture of the bridge and the bank of the canal was the matter of moments, and then there was an armistice while two officers, displaying many ribbons, discussed the next stage of the attack.

“Certain to be mined,” I heard one declare. “What would be the sense of the Shinners putting a thing like that there if it wasn’t?”

“There may be a dead body attached. Some poor devil gone west,” answered the other. He scratched his head. “Let’s put a shot into it to make sure.”

“Blow the bally canal to bits, what?” declared the first man, gaily. Then he became depressed.

“There must be a catch in it,” declared the second man. “Some one’ll have to go out and see to it. Where the devil’s a boat?”

“There’s a boat the other side,” said a policeman, heavily.

“Bring her across, what!” cried the officer.

The policeman suddenly lost all joy in the day; but he got the boat. He gave it over to the officers, who clambered in.

Some girls giggled.

The senior of the officers reached out his hand and carefully drew the oil drum towards him. He fell upon the notice and destroyed it, and captured the Sinn Fein flag.

“Empty!” he said, as he cleared the drum from its moorings and they lifted it into the boat.

“It’ll be full next time,” I couldn’t help saying.

Everybody looked at me with one accord as if I had done it. I started to depart, and the good example set the soldiers scrambling into the lorry, the policemen stalking off on their beat, and the crowd drifting on its way.

Such adventures as this might be met with at any street corner.

Himself speaks.

Everywhere there were signs of the times. All day long the military lorries rumbled about the city—great brutal concerns crowded with armed soldiers in tin hats, so that they looked like mouths bristling with teeth. And faster than they rolled the armoured cars like little forts on wheels. And faster still and more furious, lighter lorries choked with Auxiliary police and Black-and-Tans.

At any hour of the day one might walk on top of a raid, though night was the more chosen time for such things. There was generally a small crowd of errand boys, beggars, and telegraph boys, and other people with nothing important on hand, kept at rifle’s length by a line of Tommies drawn across the streets; and a hundred yards beyond was the fatal house with lorries like empty mouths before it—the teeth having got out and gone inside. These raids had a fascination for the passerby, although, nine cases out of ten, nothing was to be seen, and the tenth time there was a chance of being shot, as some one would try and escape, or something would happen inside the house.

There would be days of special military activity, when the bridges over the canals were held up, and motorists had their cars searched for arms and documents, and drivers their carts. At nights, when dark fell and the cold crept through the city, there came occasional cracking shots, which were more frequent as the weeks went on.

Every morning a flaring poster of the Freeman’s Journal, the most violent organ of the National Press, shouted out some fresh Government atrocity. Yes, signs of the times everywhere, and most eloquent where least was said, as in the public places where never a word of politics was spoken.

But for a day the humblest person could get out of it all. On Howth Head he could wander in solitude. Up Killiney Hill he could climb and feast his eyes on peace.

One afternoon, in the lounge of the Shelbourne Hotel, we were introduced to our acquaintance of the wonderful waistcoats and socks. His clothes were still as perfectly put on; but he seemed less at his ease than usual. Whenever some one came in, he pivoted round, turning the whole of his body in the movement, and every now and then he beat his forehead with a beautiful silk handkerchief.

“Oh, I’m rocky to-day, very rocky,” he declared, swallowing the last of the whiskey. “It’s a terrible place for a man to find himself in. I was in uniform the other day, on the step out there, trying to get inside. Suddenly a dear old lady trotted up to me and grasped me by the hand. ‘Let me thank you,’ she said, ‘thank you in the name of all the loyal women of Ireland, for coming over here to defend us from those murderous Sinn Feiners.’ ‘Yes, madam, that’s all very well, that’s all very nice,’ I answered, trying to get her to let go of my hand; ‘but if I don’t get inside there with this uniform on there’ll be a bit of daylight let into me.’” He mopped his brow, and exclaimed, “Oh, my God, my God!”

“Would you sooner deal with the women on the other side?” I asked.

“Oh no; oh, not at all. Oh, nothing like that about me. I know the other sort, too well I know them. You meet ’em at the top of the landing when you and your merry men dash into a house full of beans. Oh, I know the sort. They’d bite a man in the tonsils before he had his collar on in the morning.”

“D’you raid houses?”

“That’s me. That’s me in the cold dark night. That’s unfortunately me. I’m always getting myself into some trouble or other. As soon as I’ve done with one stunt I say, Never again. But I get rested; I get full of beans; I grow full of joy. On a fatal day, six months ago, I met a pal. ‘What are you doin’, old bean?’ he said. ‘Come to Ireland. Come and chase Shinners. Wonderful people, Shinners. All believe in the soap boycott. It’s money for nothing.’

“Money for nothing! I felt full of joy. And here I am up all night and all day, and feeling like death.”

“As bad as that?”

“Oh, terrible! Out every night, out all night long, hail and rain and frost. Rushing up stairs, expecting a bullet on every landing. Tearing into terrible slums where men and women and children all sleep in the same bed, and you come away with the itch, and where you have to crawl about with your hand to your nose looking for patriots. And they told me it was money for nothing. And then, in the small hours, you stagger back to bed and find an Irish patriot leaning against the door, and you dodge by with your gun under your coat pointing at him, and he swings about with his gun under his coat, and neither of you has the nerve to shoot the other. Oh, it’s money for nothing, and the life fills a man full of joy!” He beat his mouth with his handkerchief, and muttered, “My God, my God, my God!”

“Poor man,” said my wife.

He pivoted round. “And the Castle people expect such wonderful things. Last night, oh, last night!”

“What happened last night?”

“Last night they said to me, ‘Old bean, just paddle down to Irishtown and watch a house there for half an hour. Watch it from ten to ten-thirty, and see if anything happens. We think it’s a meeting-place. Just watch for half an hour. It’s quite simple. Money for nothing!’

“Terrible place, Irishtown. Have you been there? Then don’t. Home of dock labourers and navvies. I found my house, and in two minutes a patriot who believed in the soap boycott came and breathed in my face. And in five minutes a dear old lady came and looked at me as if she wanted to bite me in the tonsils. I began to feel hot and bothered. It was cold, cold, cold, and there was one lamp, which I seemed to be getting under all the time. In ten minutes I was feeling like death. Then, as the dear old bean at the Castle suggested, something did happen. All the doors in Irishtown opened at the same moment, and people came rushing out. And one man shouted, in a terrible voice, ‘There he goes, the C.I.D.!’

“The C.I.D. did go. Oh yes, the C.I.D. went. I butted into an old beggar lady, and knocked her spinning. I rushed down one street and up the next, and bowled over two or three children, and a dear old girl who was trotting out of church full of beans at having saved her soul. I trod on a blind man and his dog, and the dog bit the blind man, and all the other dogs barked, and all the boys whistled, and the married women hitched up their stockings, and the old men and the cripples joined in the chase, shouting, ‘There goes the C.I.D.’ And if I couldn’t have heard ’em, I could have smelt they were after me.

“And then I began to get a stitch, a terrible stitch, and every yard I went it got worse. Money for nothing! Yes! What? I couldn’t go another yard, and I pulled out my gun and came about under a lamp and waved it at them.

“It was money for nothing the first time since I came over. They pulled up like a tide coming against a wall—the old girls, and the boys, and the cripples, and the dogs, all treading on one another’s toes. And while I waved I tried to get rid of my damned stitch. ‘Now you stop where you are,’ I said, giving my gun a final shake, ‘or you’ll find it the worse for you!’ And round I went, and started to run again. And all the dogs barked, and all the beggars picked up their crutches, and all the married women hitched their garters, and came after me again. And I didn’t know where I’d got, and I charged over a few more blind men, and I got the damned stitch again, and I stopped and shook my gun at ’em, and we all lined up again, and then we started off once more. And then, when the stitch was killing me, a tram came by, and I made a running jump on to the step, and dug my gun into the conductor’s ribs. ‘No funny business with the bell,’ I said. ‘You let her rip.’

“And I waved my gun all round the tram, and everybody tried to get off at once, and two or three dear old ladies spread themselves on the floor, and I said to one, ‘Yes, madam, that’s very nice, and we’ll bring you to at the other end; but we’re letting this old tram rip just now.’”

He sank back in his seat, mopping his forehead with his handkerchief, muttering, “Money for nothing!” Then he saw the clock, and beat his mouth with his handkerchief, and cried, “My God, my God, my God! I was due somewhere else half an hour ago,” and seized his hat and stick and hurried through the swing doors of the Shelbourne into the street.

We found Dublin more interesting every day.

CHAPTER VII
THE BIRTH OF SINN FEIN

During our first months, September, October, and November, Ireland passed into a state of war. The country had been going there step by step, by way of raid and arrest on the one hand, and hedge and ditch shooting on the other; but the walk turned to a run and the run to a slide when the system of reprisals began. As summer turned into autumn, and autumn wore out, the hate and terror engendered by the deeds of either side were to beget the shameful happenings of the winter, so that Ireland, like a woman frightened during her time, produced a monster when her hour came.

The three months saw the mellow sunshine of an Indian summer exchanged for dreary autumn skies, saw the tender mauves and lavenders of the flowers in Phœnix Park—flowers which for delicacy of hue I have not seen exceeded in any part of the world—decay and change for hardier blooms; witnessed the soft starlight nights become the early evenings and the discourteous hours when, through the curfew—at this time from twelve to three—wind swept the desolate streets. The months witnessed the fear, which had been gathering over the land in clouds, come down upon the country in rain.

To what page shall one turn in the book of history, on what paragraph shall one put a finger and say—“Here was the beginning! Here ended Ireland’s golden age.”

Was it fifty years ago, was it a hundred years ago, was the beginning made when Strongbow and his knights crossed the Irish Sea? Centuries before an English foot had trodden Irish soil, Irish kings had been perishing as soon as the crown was settled on their brows. Then who shall place a finger upon any page? There is no place; there was no clean cut beginning.

Never have the gods been kind enough to Ireland to give her a united national opinion, which might have knit her together; nor has Ireland succeeded in absorbing her successive waves of invaders and making them one people. The Celt with his hoary tradition passes through the mists of long ago, driving westward before him the Firbolg, the inarticulate aboriginal of the country. In turn follow other more masculine peoples, sweeping after the Celt, sweeping to the west and the south the melancholy Celt with his age-long memory.

You must go south and west to find the Celt, and to-day you are not likely to find him pure anywhere. But his mark is in many places. This Celtic blood, when blended with other more masculine bloods, makes a rich mixture.

As a result Ireland has become a house with three tenants who are constantly calling upon the landlord—the first to tell him that he requires no repairs to the house and is willing for it to be left as it is; the second declaring that the house is in sad disrepair and that something must be done; the third announcing he will have nothing more to do with such a shameful landlord. Thus the Unionists, the Nationalists, and the Republicans.

The landlord all this while, hearing several opinions and pleading inability to distinguish the right one, does what is easiest and suits him best, and leaves things as they are. It is small excuse that Britain should have been so tardy with justice; but it is probable that she would have been swifter righting Ireland’s wrongs had she heard a united voice in place of many.

The illustration of landlord and tenant suits better than any other; but it smacks unpleasantly of possessor and possessed. Let us be clear. The landlord of Ireland is that single people made out of the four separate peoples of the British Isles.

Let us turn to a more profitable question. When were the beginnings of Sinn Fein?

Who shall say so late in the day what might have checked the growth of this movement? May Sinn Fein have been a distemper which, contracted, must be gone through with? May it have been something altogether different, a coming to rebirth of a people, as the nearly drowned man is brought back to life with pain and tears? Is it that the gods decide such and such a thing shall befall and determine when it shall take place? The Gaelic League went before Sinn Fein like John of old. “After me shall come another mightier than I.” It is sufficient that the movement had a beginning, and like an avalanche gained way as it moved.

First, in 1893, the language movement and talk of a Celtic revival. A Dublin professor becomes inspired, and disciples gather about him to master an antique tongue. Dr. Douglas Hyde, in everyday life a pleasant sociable man, is touched with the geist when he pleads for the Gaelic tongue. The movement grows, pen and pencil are snatched up, and the remotest country-side is explored for folklore and fairy tales. There arrives the Celtic illuminator with his paintbrush and his parchment, and the Celtic jeweller, hammering out his brooches old fashioned a thousand years ago. The prophets awaken—the seers of visions, the dreamers of dreams. One dreams of the avatar that is to come, and sees a phantom drummer drumming about the land. A second, reading a telegram of the Russo-Japanese war, receives the intuition that Japan is the masculine pole of the earth and Ireland is the feminine pole, and that some mystic union of the two peoples will bring order into disorder. A third, on Howth Hill, sees bloody giant figures moving across the sky. A fourth, on the top of a tram, sees letters of fire in the heavens.

The national fire burning more brightly and more steadily. All the while Arthur Griffith’s paper, The United Irishman, calling to the nation to come together.

Then, about 1906, the birth of Sinn Fein, in those days not a thing of the sword; but a mild and respectable movement claiming Ireland’s right to develop along her own lines to nationhood. Half a dozen years and this movement making little headway, then 1914, Ulster thwarting Home Rule and the Citizen Army getting itself together; next 1916 and the Easter Week rising. A thousand romantic men strike at Britain in her extremity and rouse her at last.

Was that week which followed the Easter rising the time when a pitiless policy might have brought this movement to an end? The general who could ably have struck the blow was in Ireland at the time. The movement was not yet a national matter. A thousand men had stood together in what they believed was a splendid burst of chivalry; but the nation was still impatient of them, thought them a little ridiculous. A hammer was at hand to be used. Had the blow fallen, would this live thing called Sinn Fein have been killed outright?

The hammer did not fall; it gave a tap or two. Sixteen men were executed, and numerous restrictions followed; restrictions which did not affect considerably the law-abiding citizen, but were intended to fetter the growth of a distinctively national spirit. Once again Britain was loth to cripple, discovering a quality for which her enemies refuse her credit; but for which she may receive credit some day when national bitternesses have gone out of fashion. She tapped here, she tapped there; and she succeeded in rousing to a renewed courage that live thing, Sinn Fein.

Two years of repression, and the Irish Republican Party coming to life again like the Phœnix under the flag of Sinn Fein. Here a policeman shot, there a house burned. The British Government replying with a new repressive measure. Other houses levelled, and in answer sterner repressive measures; other policemen murdered, and still sterner repressive measures. So the descent into war.

It is understandable that the youth of Ireland, represented by the Irish Republican Army and the Cumann na mBan, should throw in their lot with a movement which had a gentle beginning as a Celtic revival. First of all the great European war had passed most of Ireland by; and the spirit of combat and sacrifice, which had bred giants on the Continent, must have trailed the fringe of its garments into all corners of the British Isles. There was the great Capital and Labour unrest, which must have rippled across the Irish Sea in course of time. The Irish peasant boy, with his plough and his pigs as a horizon, with America as an ultimate limit of vision, was in a state to welcome any change in the procession of his days; and along comes the patriot with his splendid story.

The unprejudiced person admits that the British Government passed by first challenges and insults, and in the beginning the task of Irish Volunteer was more exhilarating than onerous. It presented itself to the gaping ploughboy as a great adventure at little cost. Here was opportunity to defy authority, to expand into something more eloquent than a cowherd. So a beginning was made.

But in time the duties of a volunteer spelt more than an inspiring game. They called ever and anon for a man’s whole courage. But there was come a new thing to take the place of the bait of splendour which had sufficed in the beginning. The flame of a national being had burst alight. The prize of sacrifice for an ideal was now offered to the dazzled feeder of swine.

This burst of nationalism, which had been lighted and fanned quite falsely by the first enthusiasts, penetrated from the cities to the villages; and the laggard to join the I.R.A. became inspired by example. Thus the army swelled its ranks, thus the national spirit was fanned as if by a bellows. And a third agent went to work in intimidation. The village lout who hesitated to enlist found it the worse for him. That youths joined the I.R.A. in haste to repent at leisure is borne out by orders issued by Republican authorities concerning deserters. But every wide movement of necessity gathers a certain scum, and there is no denying this national awakening was to turn many a village clown into a staunch soldier of the Irish Republic.

A fact to be examined at this point is the surprising absence of people of breeding in the ranks of Sinn Fein. The rank and file of the movement was drawn from the working classes, while the leaders for the most part belonged to the lower middle classes. It would seem as if the Sinn Fein movement was a peculiar national expression of the world-wide conflict between servant and master. Europe as a whole, the world indeed, was in the throes of the Capital versus Labour question, and the Sinn Fein movement was Ireland’s personal expression of the revolt of the humble person against authority.

There was, of course, a sprinkling of gentry in the movement.

The Dublin universities illustrated how opinion and class went together. The students of Trinity as a rule are gentlemen of birth, and as a body they were loyal to the Crown; the students of the National University, who are drawn from the middle classes, to a man declared for Sinn Fein.

I have tried to be free of prejudice as I tramped the Dublin streets, yet I say out of my heart if one met a prosperous person, a spruce person, such person, nine times out of ten, proved a loyalist.

After a month in Ireland I could pick out the Irish Volunteer. He wore a dirty velour hat, a shabby raincoat, and generally had his hands in his pockets. There was a youthful, cheeky type, belonging to the National University, and there was a dirtier, rather more prepossessing type, drawn from the errand boy and working classes. There was a better type still, which came from the country.

One had only to notice the Republican Volunteer rubbing shoulders in the street with the British officer, to comprehend these people belonged to two poles, which could never meet. Barriers of class, education, and standards were between them—it was Capital and Labour over again. The British officer, from his stupendous height, regarded the Sinn Feiner through the big end of the telescope, classed all connected with Sinn Fein as “Shinners” and valued them as such.

The Irish struggle did not develop along the lines of an ordinary war. It was not the late European war on a smaller scale. It was the case of an immensely powerful man fighting the shadow of a man.

The Republican Army had no uniform, or more correctly found it impolitic to wear uniform, and the volunteers were on and off active service as a man puts on and off a coat according to the change in weather. Your butcher, your baker, the man who cleaned your boots might be an Irish Volunteer, and when orders came, and opportunity, might make an end of you. A franc-tireur I understand this type of soldier to be; but in reality the I.R.A. had many of the strengths and weaknesses of a numerous and hastily built up secret service.

The British Government had to contend with another difficulty—it could not make a straight ahead attack, it could not level every house in a row. The Government had the power to do this; but not the opportunity. They were fighting only the shadow of a man. In every row half the houses might be friendly ones, and who could say which were which? For it was only in the winter of 1920-21 that the nation became welded, and that one could count on most people in the street being followers of Sinn Fein.

On the one point of uniform the British Government was able to stigmatise the Irish Volunteers as murderers, and this stand it took up, applying the phrase “murder gang” to them. The Irish Volunteers had to pay the penalty of being termed murderers, of being hanged as murderers when caught red-handed instead of getting the treatment of prisoners of war; but more than balancing these disadvantages was the boon of becoming this shadowy foe, which could not be brought to bay.

Unless the country was flooded with troops and artillery—and such a plan had many difficulties in the peculiar circumstances—the affair was likely to be long drawn out. A long-drawn-out campaign was all to the advantage of Sinn Fein. In the first place the world must gradually come to notice the Irish resistance, and the “murder gang” cry of the British Government would hardly ring true if operations were drawn out to the length of a war. Again, time was to the advantage of Sinn Fein in recruiting its strength. As, month after month, raid and arrest went on, and the cities and country places were patrolled by troops not of the country, and wrongs and injustices followed one upon another—wrong houses were raided, wrong arrests were made—friend after friend, neutral after neutral became foe. The impartial observer could see the nation laid on an anvil as it were and welded into a blade of defence.

The shoot-and-run murders continued in the country places, from the country murder found its way into the cities; and the phantom enemy continued to move round and about but would not come into the open. I heard an exasperated soldier cry out, “Let us give them ten days to get uniform and then declare war properly. Let us treat every man taken in uniform as a prisoner of war, and let us shoot out of hand every armed man caught out of uniform. Their war, as they call it, will be over in a week.”

There was truth in this. As a fighting machine the I.R.A. was outnumbered and so ill equipped that had pitched battles taken place, it would not have existed on the seventh day. Consequently the disadvantages of no uniform were far outweighed by the advantages.

I have no doubt the Republican leaders weighed up things and decided on the course of action they considered most profitable, and though for propaganda purposes an outcry was made when a volunteer, caught red-handed, was hanged, yet I believe the Irish leaders saw the logic of this, and looked upon the event as one of the misfortunes of war. I have always found the leaders to take a more professional view of things and to be less emotional than the follower on the skirts of the movement.

As matters went from bad to worse the British Government proceeded to wage the war in the only way that was possible. In the beginning, increasing difficulties had been met by arming the established police, and by drafting more troops into the country. The police of the cities took to carrying revolvers on duty; but these very arms were to prove a source of danger. One gun or ten guns were equally useless to a man standing up all day as a target. What use are arms to a man when any person in a crowd may step up to him and shoot him? The man who shoots first lives longest in this type of struggle.

The I.R.A. was, on the whole, systematic in its plan of aggression. It dealt with its avowed enemies and did not meddle with those who left it alone. It regarded such people as the Dublin Metropolitan Police as passive rather than active enemies, until the constables came on duty armed.

The police perceived their new danger and presently petitioned the authorities to relieve them of their arms, which petition was granted.

The city police did not show up in a courageous light; but undoubtedly their position was a difficult one. A certain sympathy for their own countrymen may have been at work; but in the main the negative attitude they adopted came from an appreciation of the British Government’s inability to protect them.

The situation during the winter of 1920-21 was a striking illustration of the manner in which a small organised body can intimidate a far larger disorganised body. The fear created in the country by this struggle below the surface was incredible; the boldest seemed numbed. A man might have been murdered in broad day in the Dublin streets, and not a policeman have lifted a finger. The uniformed men on point duty would have gone on waving the traffic this way and that.

The attitude of the police was reasonable. While they stayed neutral they were safe; as soon as they interfered they became marked men. And once they were marked men they stood up in the streets as a target until somebody stepped out of the crowd and shot them dead.

A similar spell had fallen upon the civilian population. Most people desired nothing better than to be let go about their business in peace. They might have loyalist sympathies, they might have Sinn Fein sympathies; they kept their sympathies to themselves and such friends as they were sure of.

And nobody was sure of anybody.

Thus it was the British Government could get no support in Ireland.

The following illustrates the condition of affairs.

A stone flew through a Dublin shop window, and the shopkeeper came running out and demanded what the stone thrower meant. The man retorted he had thrown the stone because he felt like it, that he was a Sinn Feiner, and he defied the shopkeeper to touch him. He demanded for his services a cigarette, which he was given. A policeman on point duty was close by, a crowd was looking on, and nobody moved in the matter. The shopkeeper returned to his shop. The stone thrower was unlikely to have been an Irish Volunteer, probably he was a hooligan; but the announcement was sufficient to place everybody under a spell.

As matters went from bad to worse the British Government found it necessary to supplement the troops in the country, and an auxiliary body of police was recruited to reinforce the country police, who were dotted about in isolated barracks. The recruits, many of whom were Irishmen and ex-service men, wore black uniforms and tan bandoliers and so earned the name of Black-and-Tans. They were armed with rifles, they rode in lorries, and they swept about the roads at breakneck speed.

In addition to the Black-and-Tans, the Government recruited a second auxiliary police force, which came to be known as the Auxiliary Cadets. The recruits were all ex-officers and wore a most dashing uniform, which culminated in a Balmoral bonnet perched at a jaunty angle. These people were also armed with rifles, and rode in lorries. They were more in evidence in the cities than the Black-and-Tans.

These reinforcements were to assist the search for active members of the I.R.A. and to raid suspected houses for arms and documents. But before you can arrest your man it is necessary to know his whereabouts and if he be guilty or not. This work could not be undertaken by such military and police forces as were in commission, and the British Government met the situation by extending the operations of the secret service. The Sinn Fein organisation was one gigantic secret service, and only another secret service could cope with it.

This strange situation of an immensely powerful man fighting the shadow of a man continued. Justice was ready with the prison and the hangman; but there was no murderer for the scaffold. But the secret service was bringing in all the time little bits of information—that Paddy Murphy was responsible for this, that Denny Burke had done that. It was useless to arrest Paddy or Denny as there was no concrete proof, for no witness would come forward because of intimidation or out of sympathy, and until the courts martial sat, should a man be brought to trial, no civil jury would convict for like reasons.

The police were scattered through the countryside in isolated barracks. In course of time these barracks were roughly fortified with barbed wire and sandbags. In the undisturbed districts as often as not the police found themselves cut off from social amenities through the villagers regarding them with suspicion and fearing to hold communication with them lest they fell under suspicion of being sympathisers and informers. The police waited month after month, never venturing far from barracks, in a state of siege by an invisible enemy.

In the disturbed areas the life of the Crown forces was unbearable. Not a man, woman, or child but had been taught to look on them with contempt and hatred. They found themselves picked off as opportunity availed, and they were powerless to say whose hand had pulled the trigger, though probably every villager knew, and knew the road the gunman had taken.

They were out in all weathers patrolling the roads and scouring the country for the phantom army, which never materialised, though it left frequent marks of its presence in trenches dug at the turn of roads, in trees felled across the path, and in walls torn down for an obstruction. Indeed, at any hour, at any favourable spot, it might materialise, round a sudden corner, over the shoulder of a hill, from some wooded height above the road. A volley of shots would pour down, and the gunmen would make away across country, of which they knew every inch of ground. The nerves of the police must have been stretched to the breaking point during those patrols, so that hate was breeding in them like maggots in meat.

The recognised policy of the I.R.A. was to harass the Government forces continuously; orders were issued to that effect, and in cases of isolated barracks it was the practice to fire occasional shots at the windows night after night with the idea of keeping the inmates on the qui vive for an attack, which was never to take place. Occasionally, if sufficient volunteers were in the neighbourhood, a barracks would be attacked, the attackers bringing with them the materials for setting the place on fire, and so forcing the garrison to capitulate. When it is borne in mind that the attackers frequently arrived in force, it is strange they met so seldom with success; but the hit and run policy must have been on the whole demoralising to the volunteers. I do not think, when their number and equipment are taken into account, any other policy could have been adopted, nor do I wish to suggest that the volunteers had a lesser share of courage than other men. They are part of the British nation, and many fine soldiers have come from Ireland. But when a soldier goes to battle in the belief that in nine chances out of ten he will come away without a scratch, in fact that all he will be asked to do will be to fire one or two shots and then away, he gets that sense of safety before all which is likely to be fatal to his daring.

The phantom enemy continued to fail to materialise; but little by little Government agents, swimming up and down in the sea of Sinn Fein, found out who were the responsible Republican leaders in their districts, captured documents gave further evidence, and the police came to know in time whether the butcher standing politely behind his counter was always a butcher; whether the baker gave up kneading bread on occasion and produced a gun from under the floor, and so on. They came to know whether the grocer held meetings at the back of his shop after the shutters were up.

Then one day some constable—in most cases a marked man who had been shifted from another part of the country—strolling through the village to buy a stick of tobacco, would get fired on by half a dozen men round a corner. The chances were the assassins belonged to another district, as it was a policy to send volunteers to work in a district where they were not known. The men who fired the shots were gone when the police arrived to their murdered comrade; but the butcher, the baker, and the grocer were behind their counters like worthy tradesmen. These very men, guiltless of this crime, had possibly done similar work in another neighbourhood; it was known they were members of the detested phantom army. The police, filled with hate, fear, and worn out with weeks of vigil, turned upon these people and their shops for their just revenge.

Up went the town.

These were the circumstances which brought about the reprisals.

CHAPTER VIII
AUTUMN WEARS OUT

September wore out; October wore out; November arrived. The long, unkind evenings of those months seemed a forcing ground for the terror, which was going about like a disease that one person after another catches. The private citizen, who asked only for peace, seemed to pass to and fro looking neither to right nor left, as if he feared above anything else to stir the curiosity of some partisan of the British Government or of Sinn Fein.

Some evening walks I took through the chilly streets, seeing the lights and the shining mud, hearing the clamour of the paper boys shouting of other policemen shot, of other homes gone up in flames, have fixed those days for ever in my mind.

And still the shaking, groaning lorries, crammed with troops, rumbled round the corners, and still the lighter flying police cars fled up one street and down another. In alleyway and shadowy doorway stood waiting figures to be seen by him with eyes—pickets posted to give the alarm to the meeting not far away; and in the bars and the coffee-houses the man with eyes saw the messages passed, and might occasionally hear passwords exchanged.

My French barber says one day, as his razor wanders round my Adam’s apple, “I go. Zees country is no good to me.”

“What’s up?” I ask, speaking like a ventriloquist.

“I go out zees morning. I go by Merrion Square, and a young man come up to me and look into my face, and he say, ‘Life is sweet.’ ‘It ees,’ I sez, and turn round and come back home. He have mistook me for some one else. I take no more reesks. I stay here with ze door locked until I can sell ze beesness.”

An acquaintance of mine is rung up on the telephone. “Who’s there?” he asks.

“Irish Republican Army Headquarters speaking. You have been observed going about with Captain Jones. This acquaintance must cease.”

“Captain Jones is——”

“The conversation is closed.”

Captain Jones wonders why he has lost a friend.

Some one else receives with his breakfast egg the following warning. “You are ordered by the Republican Authorities to leave the country within thirty-six hours. If this order is not complied with, you will be suitably dealt with. By Order.—I.R.A.”

But threat and intimidation were not the privilege of one faction. The following reminder was received by a number of the members of Dail Eireann, the Republican Parliament, which met when it could in secret session—

“An eye for an eye,

A tooth for a tooth,

Therefore a life for a life.”

The worthy burghers of Drogheda were startled one morning by the following poster—

“Drogheda, Beware!

“If in the vicinity a policeman is shot, five of the leading Sinn Feiners will be shot. It is not coercion. It is an eye for an eye. We are not ‘drink maddened savages’ as we have been described in the Dublin rags. We are not out for loot. We are inoffensive to women. We are as humane as other Christians, but we have restrained ourselves too long. Are we to lie down while our comrades are shot by the cornerboys and raggamuffins of Ireland? We say, ‘never,’ and all the inquiries in the world will not stop our desire of revenge. Stop the shooting of the police, or we will lay low every house that smells Sinn Fein, and remember Balbriggan.

“(By Order) Black-and-Tans.”

These shorter days of sharper winds I would cut across Stephen’s Green to the top of Grafton Street, finding the gardens a more desolate place than on the brilliant August morning I had strolled in them first. One’s travels seldom took one into the arms of the Sinn Fein leaders, who were “on the run,” and moved about as opportunity allowed, sleeping nightly in different houses; but one did meet prominent women now and then, for the British Government, fatherly and sentimental in this to the end, continued to leave women severely alone, except in one or two exceptional cases.

Round about the Green one would come upon the tall black figure of Madam Gonne MacBride, looking like a cypress tree, or get a glimpse of what one believed to be the Countess Markievicz, muffled up in mediæval fashion. In the distance, with firm tread and firmer aspect, a dispatch case always in her hand, would appear Mrs. Sheehy Skeffington; round a corner, at her tireless trot, Mrs. Desmond FitzGerald in her green dress; occasionally the charming figure of Mrs. Despard, the Lord Lieutenant’s sister, slowly pacing with her stick, like a fairy godmother in a Christmas story.

Once in a blue moon one did come upon some badly wanted man. Three times, during the most violent spasm of the struggle, I passed the most wanted man in Ireland. In each case he had an escort of eleven.

One of these escorts I met coming up Grafton Street, and two moving parallel with Stephen’s Green. The men walked in pairs, their hands in their pockets on their guns and their bombs. In the crowd each pair kept a few yards apart, when the streets were empty they increased the distance, to lose the appearance of a military formation. But the man who knew what to look for could still pick them up. How was it these escorts could move about unchallenged in the face of troops, and police, and spies?

In the first place, most of the Sinn Fein leaders were not known by sight to the Government agents. This, more than any other reason, gave them immunity during those final two years. Secondly, these men, with their armed escort, only appeared abroad on rare occasions, for a few minutes, perhaps, when they left one meeting-place to reach another. The ordinary Dublin Metropolitan policeman, who might recognise them, was of no more consideration than a lamp-post. If necessary, he would have waved the traffic back while they marched across the road.

There was more danger from some Government agent, swimming up and down in the crowd like a predatory fish; but a solitary man could not arrest twelve men, and he could do no more than shadow them to their destination, and then was the difficulty of getting back to Dublin Castle with the news. The telephone exchanges were full of Sinn Fein spies who would give warning.

In the course of their travels these escorts would be passed by constant flying lorries, choked with Auxiliary police. A Government man, theoretically, could call upon these people for assistance; but he himself was much more likely to meet his end than the men he was shadowing. The Auxiliaries always travelled at breakneck speed, sweeping round corners like a train. The slower the pace, the better the target they made for ambushers. The only way our man could have halted them would be by walking into the middle of the road and holding up a hand. The Auxiliaries would not have pulled up; but, with one accord, believing he was about to hurl a bomb, they would have arisen and shot him to bits.

The Sinn Fein escort would have gone on its way rejoicing.

Occasionally, these wanted men went about without escorts, trusting in fate. In such cases they would be unarmed, for occasionally pedestrians were searched for arms. There were always rumours that in this street or that street some well-known man had been seen cycling along, perhaps Michael Collins (Minister of Finance), Richard Mulcahy (Chief of Staff), or Charles Burgess (Minister of Defence), the three most wanted men in the land—men whom fate and a Celtic renaissance had placed astride a bicycle and set higher than a king.

Time and again military and police united in their efforts to get hold of the Republican leaders; but generally without result. Extraordinary precautions were taken for their safety. If a meeting was to be held in a certain house, the streets would be picketed for a great distance round by peaceful citizens leaning smoking against doorposts, and other worthy townspeople propped up against lamp-posts, spitting. Not a fly could have got through the final cordon without the agreed-on signs and passwords. 47 told me once it was necessary to produce a tram ticket of a certain value, dated the previous day, and folded in a certain fashion. It was said on occasions street musicians were posted with orders to play certain tunes in certain events. Many of these stories were true, some legendary, no doubt. 47 was an instructor who taught me well, and tramping Dublin streets, I saw much that was not given to ordinary passers to see, and was told much that must not be repeated.

In the midst of this strange time, while the new movement was aiming to push Ireland into the van of progressive nations, there occurred one of those mediæval happenings which only take place to-day in Ireland, of all parts of the British Isles.

The statues of Templemore began to bleed.

The story goes that on a Friday evening statues of the Blessed Virgin, the Crucifixion, the Blessed Virgin with the child Jesus, and St. Joseph with the Holy Child, belonging to a newsagent at Templemore, began to ooze blood from heart and mouth. At the same time the statues in a nephew’s house also started to ooze blood, and the nephew, a young man of nineteen, had a vision of the Blessed Virgin. The Blessed Virgin ordered the young man to make a depression in the floor of his room, and immediately after there was a miraculous flow of water.

At once cures were effected, the first being that of a little girl in the last stages of consumption, who was carried into the house and restored to perfect health. The elders of the town gathered about the statues and offered loud prayers, giving their thanks to God that the town had been saved from the rage of the Black-and-Tans on the previous Monday night, and that none of the innocent citizens had been destroyed.

The local clergy, as a whole, were chary of expressing their opinions; but in spite of their silence a great pilgrimage began from all parts of Ireland, travelling to Templemore on horse, on foot, on bicycle, in gig, in dray, in dogcart, in jaunting car, bringing the sick in body and the sick in soul. There was an amazing scene in the yard at the back of the house, where the statues were placed upon a table covered with a white cloth. Townspeople and countrypeople, grandmothers, and their grandchildren, husbands, wives, knelt in a crowd about the table, murmuring their prayers, and touching the statues with beads and prayer-books.

This miraculous bleeding, which caused Ireland momentarily to hold her breath, as if supernatural intervention was coming, became a nine days’ wonder, and then was no more. This week it was: next week it was not. Perhaps it could not survive the arrival of the Daily Sketch reporter with his gimlet eye, his notebook, and his camera.

Once or twice I passed 47 in the street, but he took no notice of me, and I let him go in case he had business on hand. He would not come to see us, as the acquaintance might be unhealthy, and we did not like to look him up without an invitation.

Finally, I dropped him a line telling him to meet me in the Botanical Gardens if he were free. I wandered down to the water in the hollow, and there he was coming across the little bridge. A yard or two off he waved a hand in salute; we joined up and strolled down a sheltered walk. He took a cigarette from me, and started to smoke without saying a word.

“How do you like life?” I said.

“It’s interesting,” he admitted. Looking up, he added grimly, “Are you finding your way about?”

I agreed Dublin was interesting.

“What have you seen?” he said.

“Plenty of your chaps about. At least everybody says they’re in your line. Every man serving the Government seems to be called a Black-and-Tan, but now and then some more exact person than the rest hisses into your ear, ‘Those men are secret service.’”

47 said quietly, “Those fellows you see aren’t the old secret service. They’ve been got together to meet this emergency.”

He proceeded to wind up. He was not a talkative fellow; but he could be communicative when he liked. I have no doubt I was the only audience he had had for many a day.

“A secret service isn’t built up in a day. An agent should be chosen after long, long observation. After courage—more important than courage, really—your man should possess the power of holding his tongue.

“Our service has always been limited, and it was a good deal chopped up in the war. Then we were faced with this business. We had to be reinforced holus bolus. The men had to be trustworthy, and the authorities decided to enrol ex-army officers. I dare say this was as good a choice as any other. But it has its drawbacks. We work in all strata of society, and we should belong to all classes of society. The military man is limited. He is likely to be loyal and courageous; but his caste prejudices are his ruin. He calls his enemies Shinners, and smiles at their efforts.”

47 stopped, looked round suddenly and said, “Have you seen our mutual friend since you came over?”

“Not once,” I told him.

“I have passed him a couple of times. A fellow I know told me he bewitches them at the Castle of an evening with his piano. Well, he told me once that when he was working in Germany during the war, before putting a foot over the frontier he turned over what he would be, and he decided to be a farmer. Accordingly, hour after hour, he practised a farmer’s slouch. He sat down and invented his farm. Hour after hour he lived in imagination on that place, until he saw it so clearly that he could walk over every inch of it, discuss every foot of it, and he said he had only to close his eyes to see it all again—the chestnut mare with the wall eye, the duck with rheumatics. He tried to sell the place to me.”

“Did you buy?”

“He knew his job; but what is happening now is pathetic. These ready-made sleuths, who are the best-dressed men in Dublin, have been arriving in batches. Men with eyeglasses appear suddenly to sell bootblacking. Men in spats turn up to explain they hold an agency in condensed milk. These people fill the lounges of the best hotels, drink together, and talk confidently together.”

“And,” said I, breaking in, “the barmaids ogling them explore their inmost souls, and the waiters bearing them cocktails pass on to Sinn Fein headquarters the pearls that drop from their lips.”

He smiled. “Not as bad as that. I don’t suppose they give much away apart from themselves; but wherever there is a decent lounge they can be found gobbling like turkeys in a farmyard—turkeys that have not heard of a Christmas dinner. I have seen one of those peaceful commercial travellers drop an automatic pistol in the lounge of the Shelbourne Hotel, and I slunk into the lift in horror. I have seen a commercial traveller in spats leaning over a bar talking to a dimpled barmaid, while a gentleman at his elbow, in a shabby black velour hat and a dirty trench coat, took down his particulars. Even my ‘cousin,’ who has many of the best qualities of an agent, the keenness, the tirelessness, and so on, is attacked with this autumn madness, and any of these evenings if you care to hang outside his house, you will see a Government car rattle and bang up to the door, you will see half a dozen sleuths file up into his house, and presently they will come down again with him. These merry gentlemen get into the car and rattle away on some raiding expedition. And, of course, in the shadows on the other pavement, is a gentleman in a black velour hat and a dirty trench coat.”

“Do you think some of them are going to be done in soon?”

47 shrugged his shoulders. “Most of these chaps are doomed by the Castle people to a double life. By day they pass as peaceable citizens. At night they disappear into the Castle, rig themselves out in military clothes, and turn out again to raid and arrest. By Gad! they work for their living all right! There’s a legend that Sinn Fein agents watch the Castle gates all day to get descriptions of all who go regularly in and out. There are spies inside the Castle too, and officials in high places in whom the Sinn Fein rot has set as a fungus attacks a tree.”

“You’re fed up,” I said.

“A bit. I’m a bit fed up. It’s a nervy game. We’re getting in a lot of stuff; but we’re up against a pretty big thing. Half the nation are ready to help the Sinn Fein intelligence. The joke is the women one meets never cease singing the praises of their own intelligence people, and in the same breath they damn us for spies.”

“What’s the opposite show like?”

“They’re not better than us—I don’t think they’re as good; but they have the pull of working in their own country and having the backing of three parts of the nation. They all look the same; but most of our fellows are another caste.”

“You’d think your chaps would get no information. People would know them and tell them nothing.”

“It’s not easy to get hold of good stuff; but man suffers from the inability to keep his secrets. People with a little bit of news burst to tell it, and sometimes the least thing is worth a lot. It may be the link that was wanted to complete the chain.”

47 broke a leafless twig off a bush and began bending it in his fingers.

“Agent 1 reports that at 10.25 he found a dead man at such and such a spot, and a hatless man with a smoking gun running away. Agent 2 reports at 10.30, five minutes away from Agent 1, he saw a hatless man, panting hard, jump on a tram going to the station. Like Agent 1, who found the body, he was not able to get a description of him.

“Agent 3 reports that as he left the station by the 10.50 train, a hatless man jumped into his compartment. He was able to get a full description of this man, which was, etc., etc. The man got out at such and such a station.

“In a certain room in Dublin Castle a man sits putting together the reports, which come in helter-skelter. He finds these three make up an interesting story. Records are looked up, the description tallies with a certain man, in whom Dublin Castle has been mildly interested for some time. Inquiries are made where the gentleman in question left the train; the gentleman in question is secured, and he finds himself asked a number of questions that—but there’s no need to go on with the story.”

47 shrugged his shoulders. “What’s the time?” he said next, and looked at his watch.

“You’re not going yet,” I said. “I haven’t seen you for a month. The tram fare here and back is sixpence. I want my money’s worth. What’s your wife doing nowadays? Tell her we sent all sorts of good wishes.”

47 frowned. “It’s a lonely life for a woman,” he said, “and a nervy one, too. Of course, one always is meeting new people, always going from door to door; but in his heart a man is as lonely as a desert islander. Never a word spoken in favour of his beliefs. Never, never, never!”

A fish moved in the running water which was the boundary of this side of the gardens. It brought 47 out of the brown study into which he was falling.

“They’re trout,” I said. “I saw them earlier in the year, when the sun was about. We’ll come and give your wife a look up.”

“Not yet,” he answered. “I expect it would be all right; but wait a bit.”

“Don’t be too long, or we’ll come along in spite of you. Do you mean you are shadowed?”

“Not as far as I know. Did you ever hear our mutual friend’s receipt for getting rid of a follower?”

“No.”

“When you look behind and find what you suspected is a fact, and the man in the dirty velour hat and shabby raincoat is still hanging a hundred yards behind, saunter to a shop window. In a minute your friend will follow suit a few doors down. Directly he has chosen his window, you find you have seen all you want in your window, and you go along and look in at his window. There you both stay. But sooner or later somebody has to move, and you make sure that he does. Directly he moves off you follow him. By the time he has gone down two streets and found you at his heels he wonders what has happened. At the end of another two streets he makes a bolt for a passing tram. He won’t come on any more expeditions with you.”

“That sounds simple.”

“It wouldn’t do you much good if you stayed all the time in the same place. You’d soon get picked up by somebody else. I’m off.”

“I wanted to hear how you think things are going.”

“I’ve not made up my own mind yet. I’ll tell you next time.”

Without any more fuss he started to walk away down the path, and I let him go. It was some weeks before we saw him again.

CHAPTER IX
THE HUNGER STRIKE

I took the tram back to College Green, and found the paper boys raising a great clamour there. The first of the Cork hunger strikers had died. As I left the tram and threaded through the crowd towards Grafton Street, I felt that, like myself, all these people I was rubbing shoulders with were fearful this was an augury of more terrible events.

For more than two months the incredible fast of fifty Irishmen had been capturing the public imagination, and, according to the Nationalist Press, the imagination of half the world. Interest in the fasting men had lasted through eight weeks of fierce events—violent deed followed daily by violent reprisal.

On August 12th, Terence MacSwiney, who had succeeded to the office of Lord Mayor of Cork on the assassination of Lord Mayor MacCurtain, was arrested, and with other prisoners to the number of fifty-one, went on hunger strike.

This represented a definite battle—it had a beginning, it had an end—between the British Government and Sinn Fein; and as the Cabinet acted with a consistency it had seldom shown before and was not often to show after, Sinn Fein suffered a defeat. There had been many previous hunger strikes; and the authorities had invariably given way at the eleventh hour.

It is curious to look over Dublin newspapers of that date and see the black headlines, which announced, morning after morning, the straits of the Irish “martyrs.” Back come those gloomy weeks when days were shortening and cold and damp were returning to the land again.

I find what seems to be one of the first entries. “Lord Mayor, Terence MacSwiney, arrested Thursday night in the City Hall. The (Republican) Arbitration Courts were sitting, and about fifteen persons were arrested with the Lord Mayor.”

At his trial the Lord Mayor, as chief magistrate of the city, declared illegal a court martial which sat to try him in Cork, and those taking part in it were liable to arrest under the laws of the Irish Republic.

He was charged with (a) having a police cypher under his control; (b) having in his possession a document likely to cause disaffection; (c) having made a seditious speech on the occasion of his election as successor to the late Lord Mayor MacCurtain.

“A perfectly innocent man!” as Mrs. Slaney had declared.

Throughout his trial the Lord Mayor behaved with dignity, and at the end said, “I wish to state that I will put a limit to any term of imprisonment you may impose. I have taken no food since Thursday, therefore I shall be free in a month. I shall be free, dead or alive, within a month.”

But the Lord Mayor was to be alive two months after that.

The National Press began a campaign for the release of the hunger strikers. Before the fast was many days old the following headlines had appeared:—

“Lord Mayor unable to speak. Signs of the end. Deathbed message.” “Sinking very rapidly.” In smaller type, “Cork captives dying.” “Just fading away. Deathbed scenes.”

But to the embarrassment of the Press, which as usual lacked restraint, the strikers delayed dying, and week after week passed, until all fasting records were broken. Little by little the fury of the Press abated, and presently the “martyrs” were shifted from the leading columns to less important places.

A cloud gathered over the affair. Then threats were tried. The Medical Officer at Cork Prison received the following letter:—

“As your professional attendance upon the eleven hunger strikers in Cork Jail gives a tinge of legality to the slow murder being perpetrated upon them, you are hereby ordered to leave the jail at once, and the country within twenty-four hours of this date—3 p.m. 6th Sept. ’20.

“Failure to comply with this order will incur drastic punishment.

“O.C. No. 1 Brigade, I.R.A.”

With the majority of the nation the strikers remained national heroes, “martyr” was the word most commonly used in connection with them; but as the fast became more and more incredible, a section of the public began to experience doubt. All sorts of rumours were afloat—that the Lord Mayor could not return to Cork owing to the rage of his friends—that the Catholic Church was troubled and divided whether this decision to starve should be considered as suicide or not. In the meantime prayers were offered for the strikers in thousands of homes, and tears stole down thousands of cheeks at thought of the men suffering for Ireland.

“One of God’s miracles!” frequently declared Mrs. Slaney, as the fast passed from fifty days to sixty days, and went on towards seventy. And this belief in Divine intervention was common to many hearts.

What would happen if the Lord Mayor died? It was hinted there would be some terrible reply from the Irish Volunteers.

Now, when the strikers were becoming legendary, one of them had died, and crisis had returned like a thunderbolt.

“Monstrous!” Mrs. Slaney exclaimed, meeting me at the top of the stairs. “Monstrous! So at last they have murdered that splendid young Irishman! They’ll murder the others before they have finished their bloody work!”

The British Government murdered two others, or two others decided to murder themselves, according to one’s politics, and it looked as though the British Government had the strength of mind to murder the lot; but before this could be done Sinn Fein gave up the battle, and Arthur Griffith, the acting President, called off the strikers. Victory went to the British Government, and there were no more hunger strikes.

Did these men, who had suffered a long illness and a painful death, die for nothing? No. In spite of doubts as to the strictness of the fast, the sacrifice made by them helped in the hardening process the nation was undergoing.

It had been intended to bring the dead Lord Mayor to Dublin; but this was forbidden, and the coffin was taken by ship to Cork. Sinn Fein replied by ordering a day of mourning, and presented Dublin with the shadow of a funeral, flowers taking the place of the coffin in the hearse. Citizens were ordered to close their shops, and those whom sentiment for the Lord Mayor did not persuade to renounce a day’s trade, put up their shutters upon warnings that they would be wise to show visible marks of respect.

I went down to O’Connell Bridge to see this funeral without a corpse. The day had turned into a Sunday, and the streets were filled with the proletariat. The Mass, which I had listened to at the pro-cathedral, had been a stupendous experience. Every inch of the stone pavement of the great church had been covered with kneeling humanity crying out dolorous Latin cries to the chanting of the priests, and fingering countless rosaries. The flood of feeling flowed this way and that like waves heaving in a sea. I did not know whether to marvel at this spectacle or to sneer at it. Were we in this mourning church wrapped in a flame of sorrow, which was going to weld the nation into a metal out of which an everlasting sword could be forged: or more truly were a few tricksters playing on the easily wrought feelings of a not quite adult nation, which, childlike, weeps as easily as it laughs? Labour and Capital over again! Look right, look left—who here was not drawn from the working or shop assistant classes? As I heard these people calling out the sounding Latin phrases, I shook my head.

The press upon O’Connell Bridge was tremendous, and presently the hearse came round a corner. It was filled with flowers. After it rolled a Dublin funeral, only there went by a greater line of shabby carriages than even Dublin usually gets together. One looked and looked, and still more horses came round the distant corner.

In the following of this funeral marched Irish Volunteers and Cumann na mBan. They left no impression on me other than being dusty and riding on the top of a wave of emotion, which might set them down as quickly as it had lifted them up. Again it was Labour versus Capital, the servant against the master. These people were the same as the kneeling congregation, and the majority of them were growing up.

But this demonstration was a manifestation of that resolution which was affecting the nation as new blood poured into the veins of an anæmic man. Whether the exaltation was enduring enough to carry the nation to a renaissance, to a splendid rebirth, or whether it was sufficient and no more to take this people through a struggle with Britain, was a matter for a prophet. A temporary state or a lasting state, its existence could not be denied.

One of these nights a man started signalling from a house which looked upon the back of our own. We watched him from our beds. He had a lamp, and lived in a top story. The signalling continued at intervals over a period of several weeks, and what came of it all I do not know; but it made these nights more mysterious watching this lonely man and his lamp high up in the attic.

Then, one evening, Mrs. Slaney started to act in a peculiar manner. About ten o’clock she began fluttering up and down the stairs, and when I suggested locking the front door as usual, she said she would do it. A quarter of an hour later I caught her fluttering on the stairs, and this time she was unable to contain herself. She took me into the half dark of one of the landings.

“I am putting up a friend for a night or two,” she said, avoiding my glance. “He’s a Sinn Feiner, and he doesn’t want to go home. I’m giving him the little spare room at the top of the house. He has to come after dark, as he doesn’t want it known where he is. I don’t want a word said to anybody.”

“Is he on the run?” I asked brutally.

“Well, not exactly that; but he has a little work on hand, and he doesn’t want to be disturbed. He thought it was safer to come round here in case they should think of raiding his flat during the next day or two. Ah!”

A gentle knock had come to the front door. Mrs. Slaney fluttered down to the hall, where, as usual, no light was burning.

She managed successfully to manœuvre our mysterious caller into the upper reaches of the house; I heard no more of them, and nobody seemed to have noticed his incoming or his out-going next morning. But the following night Mrs. Slaney, who made the journey to the hall shorter by drifting into our rooms early in the evening, began to fidget as soon as the clock had turned ten. The gentle knock came at last, and she bustled down to the hall.

Somebody had to make the visitor’s bed, and on the morrow Mrs. O’Grady, on her knees on a piece of newspaper raking out our fire, sniffed, and said, “Terrible times!”

“What’s up, Mrs. O’Grady?” we inquired.

“Ah,” said Mrs. O’Grady, sniffing again, “the woman upstairs is always up to something or other. She’s always after keeping in with somebody.”

“Who’s it now?”

“God forgive her for having a man like that in the house these times. Risking us all! There’s my man downstairs, he says the Black-and-Tans have only got to know there’s some one here, and they’ll come and take every man in the house off to the Castle, and perhaps burn the house down.”

“If that’s the case, Mrs. O’Grady, these do indeed be terrible times.”

“That woman doesn’t know how to treat decent people when she do get them in the house,” went on Mrs. O’Grady, passing over my wit. “Now, what right has she got to have a man like that with you here? Now you’re what I call class. I said to himself downstairs, I said those new people that have taken the drawing-room flat, they’re class. They’re the nicest lady and gentleman we’ve ever had here. They’re class.”

We changed the conversation.

But I was in some part to solve the mystery that evening, for this time Mrs. Slaney had arranged to leave the hall door on the latch. Our visitor must have come in unheard and gone upstairs. Mrs. Slaney, strangely enough, was spending the evening in our rooms, and had brought down, as far as I remember, a tray with coffee things on. When she proposed retiring, I carried this up for her, and going ahead into the sitting-room, found there, in a corner by the fire as if he had been warming his hands at it, and still with his overcoat on, the mysterious visitor. He looked round like an animal caught in a trap, and then he said good night in answer to my good night. I was only a moment putting the tray down and going.

I tell this story because this man’s advent was to be my downfall later on. I did not then know who he was; but his identity leaked out in time.

He bore the most picturesque name in Ireland—Darrel Figgis—and he wore the most romantic beard. He looked like some mediæval personage stepped out of a picture. He was a novelist, a poet, a dramatic critic, and other things. Not very long before he had been nearly hanged at a drumhead court-martial held by some irresponsible, and it was whispered among the philistines that he went about the country afterwards selling pieces of the true rope. He was not one of the recognised Sinn Fein leaders; but he had been fairly prominent in the cause, doing propaganda work, and he had been imprisoned. There was only one such beard as his in Dublin—his own—and it was said he refused to part with it, even when he went on the run, although by so doing he added materially to the chances of capture.

He visited us three or four nights, and then departed as unostentatiously as he came.

So every day brought its new event, and the weeks stalked by in grim procession.

Early in November, the execution of Kevin Barry caused another of those demonstrations, which revealed the national temper. On the bleak morning a vast crowd gathered in the yard of Mountjoy Prison and recited the Rosary, standing and kneeling together some time before the execution, and continuing in prayer until the hour of execution was passed, when they quietly withdrew.

Since his capture in the skirmish outside the King Street bakery, Kevin Barry, who was a medical student, eighteen years old, had joined the number of national heroes. He was young, he was a soldier of the Republic, it was repeated everywhere that he had been tortured by the British military authorities, and in spite of his treatment he had refused to speak. The nation set itself with a will to the making of this new hero.

“Splendid!” declared Mrs. Slaney, returning from her baby club. “You should have been there this afternoon to hear those mites singing of Kevin Barry. We all helped to teach them, and they picked up music and words at once. Where, but in Ireland, would you find such quick children?”

Poor little devils! Taught their prejudices before they know what they are doing. As soon as they can stand put into the strait-jacket of a narrow national patriotism—that thing which has had its uses, but now should be out of date.

There is every reason to suppose that Kevin Barry met his death as a soldier would wish to meet it; but that is no reason why one should not look sternly at the facts of the case. The scrimmage outside the bakery was not a glorious affair. The Irish Volunteers, guns in their pockets, posed as civilians until the chosen moment, and Kevin Barry alone did not make good his escape. A woman said, in my hearing, “Was there ever a country like Ireland for the number of patriots and martyrs? Look at Kevin Barry—a boy of eighteen!”

What of the two British soldiers who were killed in that skirmish, one of whom was said to be sixteen? Did they not give their lives for their country as surely as did Kevin Barry? What of the men who have perished in every corner of the Empire for generations back? Their numbers must be as the sands of the seashore. But some peoples use words more easily than others, and those who work for the inarticulate must expect their epitaph short and sharp.

Before the anguish of that tragedy was over there came a new shout from the Nationalist Press: “Expectant Mother Shot Dead.”

A countrywoman was killed at her cottage door by a stray bullet fired from a lorry passing along the road. “Expectant Mother Shot Dead!” The headlines struck one like a blow in the face.

And all this while increasing ruin and arrest. Tales of girls’ hair cut off because they talked to the police. Tales of the police stripping men, beating them, and sending them home naked. Tales of men tied to chairs and thrown into the river. Tales of men who waited in ambush hour after hour for their quarry to come round the curve with an insatiable lust of hate. Tales of ferocious reprisals when homes were looted and the inhabitants driven into the fields to couch with fox and hare. Who dare give the story in detail: one would never be done. Deed of terror replied to by deed of terror, and never an attempt by the partisans of one side or other to reach the truth, and give that exact truth to the world, and tell that exact truth to themselves.

Three furious November weeks passed away.

CHAPTER X
BLOODY SUNDAY

Sunday, November 21st, Himself and I went to Howth, and spent all day by the sea on that wild bit of foreland, which Dublin City has not managed to tame. It was getting dusk as we came back on the tram. The ride is long, and it was too late in the year for the tops of trams. We were soon shivering and wanting to be back home. Then something happened to make us forget the wind. As we came among the houses the reflection of a great fire caught our eyes. It was on the far side of the water, a strong, clear blaze, as if a ship were on fire.

“We must get along and see it,” said Himself. “What the deuce is it?”

“Government supplies, I bet. The Auxiliaries got bored and went to sleep, and the Sinn Feiners came along.” But I was not joking in my heart. I was feeling uneasy.

We did not go to the fire when the tram stopped at Nelson’s Pillar. It was too late and too cold. We climbed down into the middle of an ugly-looking crowd. A lorry passed quite close to us.

“Hello!” Himself exclaimed, “there’s a dead man!”

We stared after the lorry. The booted feet of a dead man poked out of one end. The crowd stirred unpleasantly. What had happened? More lorries, full of armed men, were following the first one. An armoured car rolled by. They all passed over O’Connell Bridge and fled down the quays towards the Castle. From the Castle another stream of lorries passed towards the fire.

A newsboy came quite close calling out something, and we got a paper. There, in great lines across the page, we read, “British Officers Murdered In Bed.” We went home astounded.

The flat seemed unusually still. Mrs. Slaney heard us and came down the stairs before we had shut the door. She looked a little shaken.

“Have you heard the news? Dreadful! Horrible! But I have no doubt they deserved it.”

“You can’t approve of this?”

“No, I don’t approve of it. I don’t approve of shooting at all; but you must remember how the Irish people are goaded.”

Without warning there was the sound of firing outside. We crowded to the window in time to see an armoured car rolling by at the end of the road, and people flying in all directions. A Lewis gun on top of the car was firing shots into the air at intervals.

“That’s blank cartridge,” Himself said. “It’s to clear the streets.”

“There!” Mrs. Slaney exclaimed. “Why do they terrify innocent people like that? No wonder the people of Ireland are bitter. Ireland is the most crimeless country in the world when she is left alone.”

Mrs. O’Grady came in with our teapot.

“You’ll feel the better, mum, iv a cup of tea,” she declared. “It do be dreadful, and all those beautiful young men.”

“I can’t understand why we didn’t hear the shooting this morning,” I said. “It must have been all round.”

“I’ll leave you to your tea,” said Mrs. Slaney, who wanted to stay. “You won’t be going out to-night. Perhaps you’ll come up and see me.”

“I’ll probably go and see what the fire is,” Himself answered. He turned to me. “It’ll do you good to get out.”

Mrs. Slaney retreated, and Mrs. O’Grady nodded her head. “It’d be a charity to leave her alone. She’s that frightened it would do her good.” Then she went out.

“Well?”

“What a haul,” Himself exclaimed.

“How about poor 47?” I cried.

“He must be all right. His name’s not in the paper. We must look him up.”

“Look his poor wife up.” And then I said, “Let’s have tea and get out for a bit. I hate the feeling of this house.”

“We’d better get back before it’s late. It’s sure to be a disturbed night. I expect they’ll make curfew earlier after this.”

As soon as I got into the street I felt better. The moving people gave me confidence, although all through the city there was a feeling of fear such as I cannot describe. Rumours of the Croke Park affair, where a dozen people had been shot by the police at a football match, were being whispered abroad; but nobody seemed to know much. We remembered the dead man in the lorry.

The fire was burning out. We saw it now and then through the openings of the streets; but we never got as far as it. It had long been dark, and I soon found the night was getting colder and colder. Presently I began to think a fire at home would be less dismal than this tramping about in the dark. After half an hour everybody seemed to have gone indoors, and there was danger of being curfewed if a sudden change was made in the time.

We went back.

When we were indoors again shooting began all through the city. Patrols were probably firing more blank cartridge to clear the streets. Down the roads tramped soldiers in tin hats, and armoured cars rolled by. We put out the light and leaned from the window watching. Now and then some passing officer, fearful of a bomb, would shout, “Keep your heads in.”

In the middle of it all Mrs. Slaney hustled into the room, giving us no time to answer her knock.

“I have just been talking to a leading Sinn Feiner,” she announced, “and those men who were shot this morning were all spies. I told you that our boys must have had something definite against them.”

“I don’t think it makes it a bit better,” I declared. “A life is a life, and it’s frightful to sneak into a man’s bedroom while he’s asleep, and kill him in front of his wife.”

“It’s disgusting,” exclaimed Mrs. Slaney, “to think that English officers and gentlemen will descend to such things. Monstrous! Before the war such a thing was never heard of.”

“I think it a pity the Sinn Feiners murdered them.” I stuck to my guns stoutly.

Mrs. Slaney borrowed the paper and departed.

“Her Sinn Feiners are all spies too,” I said, as soon as she had gone. “What’s she talking about?”

Himself nodded. “In any case I take off my hat to spies, Sinn Feiners or British. They have to be brave men. I should think a spy wants all the qualities of a soldier, and many more besides.”

That was all I got out of him. We went to bed soon after, but not to sleep, at least I did not. Desultory shooting and bombing went on all night.

After “Bloody Sunday” as it came to be called, the world drew a horrified breath over the men who were shot in bed. “Poor So-and-so shot asleep. Frightful!” What of his wife who was not shot, but who lost her reason three days after, and three weeks after lost her life and her baby’s life; his wife, who for the rest of her brief life saw men filing into the room, heard the sound of shooting, heard the raiders laugh, saw them wash their hands after the killing?

What of the other wife who cried out to her husband and tried to help him escape through the window, and saw his broken body on the windowsill?

What of the wife, coming from her bath, who was confronted with five men with revolvers? Pausing outside the bedroom door where her husband was sleeping, she faced them, appearing not to notice their revolvers. “Do you want my husband?” she asked, smiling. “He has just gone out, but do come in and wait.” Her face was untroubled. “Or perhaps you can leave a message,” she said. “I always take my husband’s messages, you can trust me.”

The man mumbled something, and the party filed away.

What of the wife who was held by two men while her husband was shot in front of her? When the raiders had left she found her husband still alive. She rushed into the street, looking wildly for a doctor, praying no doubt as she ran. She found a man and ran up to him.

“My husband has just been shot,” she gasped, “but he is alive. Will you get a doctor, quick!”

“Alive! My God, I’ll finish him!” He went up the steps pulling out his gun.

The Sinn Fein women fought and suffered for their men equally well, lied for them, fetched and carried for them. The men had the limelight; but with few exceptions the women were unknown, and were content to be unknown. There was no reward for their services. I wonder how far a national movement would go if there was no public recognition for any one. A man unable to read about himself and his hunted companions would cut a sorry figure. A man hanged for his cause would go far less steadily to the scaffold without the support of the newspapers and the crowd. But I fancy a woman would acquit herself in all circumstances because her greatest instinct is service.

CHAPTER XI
AFTERMATH

The officers met their ends in their beds, in their baths, at shaving. One and all were shot in cold blood, and, extraordinary to relate, no defence seems to have been made. In every case the victim was taken unawares. This veritable Slaughter of the Innocents could only have occurred to such a race as the British. These officers, on a par with their behaviour in the hotels, went to bed in an enemy country with unlocked doors and locked-up guns. That supreme British contempt for the enemy—at once the making and the undoing of Britain—limited the imagination of these people to such an extent that though they were engaged upon what is allowed to be most dangerous work, they could not conceive calamity falling upon themselves.

Some time afterwards I spoke to a Dutchman, and he held up his hands and cried, “Here am I who would not go into a strange house without making inquiries and locking my door; and these men come into an enemy country and go openly about their work; and at night lock up their guns and go to sleep with the door open. Ach!”

The Sunday death roll in no way represents the magnitude of the plan. There were several escapes—people were not at home, wives tricked the raiders; but more far-reaching than these things was the fact that there seems to have been a serious miscarriage in the Sinn Fein plans. One story goes to relate that a list of eighty victims was prepared, and a number of Irish Volunteers gathered on Baggot Street Bridge, or one of those bridges over the canal, waiting for guides who did not turn up.

The men detailed to carry out the work of assassination took no more risk than was essential to the undertaking. In every case they called in overwhelming numbers on their victims.

The task was not glorious; but when one examines the circumstances, what other means had Sinn Fein of getting rid of such dangerous enemies? Man for man, an agent of the secret service should greatly exceed the value of a soldier. His power lies in his secrecy.

The penalty of secrecy has always been death. An agent knows this, and is reconciled to the law. It is just enough. But the men who carried out the work of assassination wore no uniform, they too worked under a civilian cloak. The pot came to destroy the kettle.

It was now towards the end of November, and getting dusk soon after the middle of the afternoon.

There were long damp depressing evenings and interminable nights. That extraordinary terror, which had been coming in puffs, was at last sweeping through Ireland like a wind.

It is curious what one recalls looking back over a troubled time. It is an atmosphere rather than events. There come back to me those early darkening afternoons when people passed sullenly with bent heads, and the paper-boys raced through the mire, bearing their printed aprons which told of fresh ruin. I remember meeting on successive days three carts fallen over on their sides because a wheel had run away.

I do not remember in any other city, great or small, this kind of accident, and I asked myself were these errant wheels, which had run away because somebody had forgotten to screw them up, a sign, a portent that Ireland was not quite an adult nation?

On one of these evening walks, in Dawson Street I think it was, I saw a horse that had jumped into an area, and was standing down there unhurt, eating hay and oats, unable to be got out. For a minute or two I joined the crowd, which was gaping through the railings at this accident. But while we all gaped we were gloomy and suspicious of one another.

For with greater fury than before, the Crossley tenders, choked with police, raced up and down the streets; searching, searching, searching for those butchers, those bakers, those candlestick makers who laid aside their aprons now and then when the hour was propitious and grasped a pistol in their hands; those candlestick makers, those bakers, those butchers who never seemed to leave their counters and untie their aprons from their middles. By day, by night; in storm, in calm, the flying wheels splashed through the mire. Knock, knock, knock. “Open! The military!” Knock, knock knock. “In the King’s name!” Up rattle windows. Out poke heads. “Open, open, or we break in the door.”

The butcher’s wife, the baker’s mother, the candlestick maker’s aunt open the door as slowly as they dare, and the stream of police sweep in like a tide—down into the cellar, out into the garden, up into the attic, through the skylight, everywhere in an instant that the hunted man may not escape; peering into grates for ashes of burned papers, pulling out mantleshelves for hidden arms, examining picture frames for secret documents; and when all is done clattering down from attic and up from basement, pouring down the steps and climbing into the tender, and then at breakneck speed to the next house on the list. Bang, bang, bang! “Open! The military!”

In the week that followed the murders of the officers, the British Government made the supreme effort of this tremendous police hunt—operations in Ireland never assumed the proportions of a war—and in three or four days the prisons were filled. The British Government was altering its tactics, and finding a solution for dealing with this will-o’-the-wisp enemy by arresting all suspects, in preparation for lodging them in one or other of the internment camps under construction. In Dublin the arrests of that week numbered hundreds, and among the prisoners was Arthur Griffith, the father of Sinn Fein.

The funeral of the officers passed along the Liffey, and all the world and his wife went down to the quays to see. Shops were shut, sometimes after a little persuasion by mourning Black-and-Tans, and the streets were left empty. The crowd was reverent; and cases of lack of feeling were rectified by Black-and-Tans posted in lorries at points of vantage. Hats that did not come off as the gun carriages went by were helped off, and three young men who were disrespectful were thrown into the Liffey.

A Mr. Goodbody, of Cork, who was jammed against me, said to a friend, “Michael Collins himself is in the crowd. He do be a profitable man to look at. Indade, and he would have made a good king in a sporty country. But he is headstrong, headstrong.”

Said an old woman, striking me in the stomach with her elbow, to a friend, “Och, ’tis a beautiful sight this, and sure it’s a pity they had to kill those beautiful young men.”

“Indade,” said the friend, poking me over the appendix, “it’s our boys I would like to see dressed out like this. Give me the military, I sez, and not they Black-and-Tans. It will be a grey day for Ireland whan she sees the last iv the military.”

“Sure,” said the first dame, “it is our boys will be all in green then, and that’ll be a grander sight for ye.”

“Och!” exclaimed a second friend, making use of my toes to see better, “the Black-and-Tans came to us the other day, and I was sitting over the fire. ‘Who’s there?’ I sez at the bang on the door. ‘Open, the military!’ sez they. ‘I will not,’ I sez. ‘We’ll have to break in,’ sez they. ‘Break away,’ I sez, ‘I don’t have to pay for it,’ I sez. ‘It’s the landlord as does,’ I sez.”

The funeral passed, the crowd dissolved; for some reason I wandered about the streets without going home. In course of time I was surprised to find it had got dark. I came across College Green, sauntered up Grafton Street, which was crowded. The mud was shining as usual, and the paper boys were shouting some catastrophe. I had come to the corner of Wicklow Street when a man turned quickly into it from Grafton Street. He was in the shadow, but I knew him anywhere. I overtook him in a stride or two.

“Good night,” I said.

“I saw you,” 47 answered, “but I was in a hurry. Come my way a little.” He slowed up.

The street was dark and nearly empty.

“They didn’t get you?”

“We saw no sign of them.”

“How’s your wife taking it?”

“She’s right enough. She’s been a bit jumpy because we’ve no arms. I’m off to the Central Hotel now to see my ‘cousin.’ Most of our lot have been called into the Central. My wife says she won’t stick it any longer unless I have a gun, so I’m off to see about one.”

“I don’t wonder at her.”

He nodded. “The last few days have been pretty worrying.”

“You people aren’t going into the Central?”

“We’re banking on the chance we aren’t suspected. If we go into the Central it won’t do us any good when we come out.”

“I see that.”

I think 47 was rattled that evening in spite of his matter-of-fact words. At this time a man had to cope not only with his own fear, but with the national fear that was suffocating everybody, so that each man had to bear more than his own share. There was a touch of bitterness, a touch of philosophy, and more than a touch of pathos in 47’s voice as we walked along the gloomy street.

“We chaps last just as long as we are undiscovered. Discovery may take place to-day, to-morrow. A man may make a slip; but if he makes a slip he probably knows what he has done. But somebody else may have made the slip. He may leave his Sinn Fein friends in smiles; he may go back to cold faces. This state of things plays the devil with the nerves.

“A soldier, after the battle, lies down among his companions, safe, secure, knowing no harm can come; but an agent is never safe, never secure. This minute, next minute the ground may have opened under his feet, his secret may be out, and he standing alone against a nation. The curtain may hold an assassin, the street corner may conceal the bullet. While he eats the foe may be drawing near; while he sleeps they may be coming. Shall he take this road? Shall he take that?

“After some time in the service he becomes like a beast of the field. Danger comes on the breeze, in the rustle of the grass, in the shadows of the trees. While he eats he listens. While he sleeps he plans.”

I interrupted him. “I’ve got to get home now. Tell your wife we’ll be along to see her to-night.”

“She’d like it,” he admitted.

“We’ll be there quite soon.”

“I don’t think it will matter. We haven’t been shadowed as far as I know.”

“So long,” I said, pulling up.

“So long,” he said, going on.

I turned round and went back to Grafton Street.

CHAPTER XII
VISIT TO A TOP STORY

As soon as Himself and I had had dinner, we went to look up 47’s wife. There was no time to waste if we were to get back before curfew. I was longing to see her after all this time.

They lived in a top story. A dilapidated servant opened the door, and gave us a peculiar, sidelong look. She did not know us, but she stood aside and made no effort to show the way up.

The house seemed grubby in the dim light of the hall. The windows showed the city’s dust and fog; in the better light the curtains would have revealed the dirty hands of maids who had tended the fires and then pulled the curtains across the windows. How well I knew it all! And then the house grew more and more dilapidated as we mounted. There was an ancient meat safe at the foot of the last lot of stairs with a cat asleep on top of it.

The final flight of stairs was bare, and we made the steps creak as we went up.

Her ears were ever atune to footsteps, and the sound of ours brought her out on the landing.

“You!” There was relief in her voice.

“Hallo! All well? My dear, you look seedy.”

She laughed, but her laughter did not ring true.

“It was nice of you to come.” She shut the door behind us.

“You are seedy,” I said, looking at her carefully.

“I’m all right,” she answered. “This is funk; pure, unadulterated funk has brought me to this. I’m behaving in a beastly manner, really. The only thing I haven’t done is run away. Some day I’m afraid I will.”

“But your husband’s all right?”

“For how long? To-day? To-morrow? There’s not a door that will lock. You know Irish doors. He’s out now. I made him go and get a gun. I said if he didn’t I wouldn’t stay another day. One man against a dozen hasn’t much chance; but an armed man can do more than a man with nothing.”

Himself nodded.

“It’s terrible—terrible,” 47’s wife went on. “There is no one to talk to about the risks. My husband won’t talk. He thinks it’s bad for me. But it’s driving everything in, it’s strangling me. I can’t sleep. I’m always afraid. Sometimes I hear noises and footsteps, I am afraid of the noises; sometimes there is silence, I am afraid of the silence. People come to see me. I laugh and talk, and try to show I am listening, and really every sound outside is more important to me. Even up here I can hear the front door bell ring. I haven’t felt so bad this afternoon because I’m alone, and if they called it wouldn’t matter.”

“You’re safe in this house for a time, anyway,” Himself declared. “Sinn Fein isn’t going to repeat the dose just yet. Every one is lying pretty low. No one wants to come into the limelight.”

“I realise all that in the day; but at night it’s so different.”

“Night’s really the safe time,” said Himself. “I should think it’s not much of a job trying to get about during curfew.”

She laughed shakily. “My husband has said all that before. I know I’m a coward; but I shall be better if we have the gun. I’m thinking, thinking what we’ll do if they come—all night long I’m thinking. We’ve only one heavy stick, which I hang on the end of the bed. I’ve planned it out. When they knock at the door, my husband will open it, and as the first man comes in I will throw the water jug at him, and my husband will hit his wrist with the stick. He may drop his gun, and we can get hold of it. My husband says assassins bore him, and won’t talk about it, and so I have to keep my feelings to myself, and they are going in—in all the time.”

“Talk to us now,” I said.

“I’ll put on the kettle,” she answered, getting up. “It won’t take long boiling. What’s that?”

I had heard nothing. She leaned out of the window.

“Well?”

“There’s a car,” she said slowly. “It looks like a Government car. There are five or six men.”

I looked out. “I know that front man,” I cried. “He lives near us. We met him at the Shelbourne once.” I beckoned to Himself to look.

“I know him,” she admitted. “What does he want? He would never be sent here with a message. We told him to keep away.”

The men descended from the car and came into the house.

“He’ll bring in every Sinn Feiner in Dublin at his heels,” I suggested.

“My dear, he’s not important enough, though he thinks so himself.”

In a minute there was the sound of single footsteps coming up the stairs.

“He’s alone, anyway.”

The next moment the man of the beautiful waistcoats and socks came into the room. He was subtly changed. His hair was less sleek, his clothes were not so well brushed, and the silk handkerchief, which he used to beat his brow and mouth, had got crumpled.

“Oh, my God!” he exclaimed, as he appeared. “What a lot of stairs!” He saw us, hesitated, and said to 47’s wife, “How’s our friend?”

“He’s all right,” she answered coldly.

“Good! Went up to the Castle on Sunday. Saw them there safe—by Gad! so safe. Lots of fellows, well fed fellows, happy, cheery fellows. They had a long list of names, all the brotherhood, and they were ticking off the chaps who were killed. ‘How’s 47?’ I asked. ‘All right,’ said one chap, after a glance at the list; ‘at least, we’ve had no word through about him.’ ‘My God!’ I said, ‘I must get along and see for myself.’”

“Who are your five friends?”

“An armed guard. You couldn’t expect me to go about without an armed guard. Every Shinner in Dublin is at my heels.”

“My dear fellow, didn’t it strike you that by bringing an armed guard clattering into the hall you would be likely to turn the Sinn Fein attention to us?”

Our friend laid a soothing hand on 47’s wife.

“Have you been out much since the affair?” she asked abruptly.

“Every day and every night. No peace. Nothing like that about me. But it doesn’t matter, for I can’t sleep. My God! and I was told this was money for nothing! Money for nothing, and the life filled a man full of joy!”

“You’ve got nerves.”

“Nerves! By Gad, nerves! Hear her.” He pivoted round towards us, showed he had recognised us, and smiling, said, “How are you?” He came across and laid a hand on my shoulder. He was the type of man who touches women. Then he jerked round again to 47’s wife.

“Pitchforked in, I was. Never knew a thing. Didn’t know enough to keep my mouth shut, or to change my clothes when I went down the slums. Looked on all men as brothers. Thought they loved me as I loved them. I haven’t slept for months. Let me talk. Let me get it off my chest. I’m all for peace, I am. I always have been, and somehow I always seem to get flung into some beastly mess. Some one said, ‘Come and chase Shinners, old bean.’ And here I am, but the beastly Shinner’s always chasing me. Every time I go out some one follows me, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman. The life’s killing me. Watkins—you know old Watkins—he and I got digs together at last, and took it in turn to keep watch while the other slept. I got wind up in case he dropped off. I didn’t dare go to bed without my guns in case some one came in, and I always had the feeling that I’d shoot Watkins by mistake some night, or get the old woman in the stomach when she came in with the hot water in the morning.”

“Hush, old man,” said 47’s wife.

“Hush! That’s it. Hush! If I don’t talk, I’ll go mad! None of the fellows at the Central will talk. We’re all in the Central Hotel now. They hang in corners brooding on their sorrows. They don’t care about mine. The chaps at the Castle don’t talk. They don’t know what it is to be out and alone.”

“It’s what you’re here for.”

“Splendid! What I’m here for!” our friend exclaimed. “I’ll be killed next! Mark my words. No; don’t let’s talk of death. It makes me feel all hot and bothered.”

“Hush,” said she, again.

He put a hand on her arm. “I must be on the move. I’ll tell the fellows at the Castle 47 is all right.” He came across and patted my shoulder, and waved to Himself. And then he clattered down the stairs to his escort in the hall. A minute later we heard the engine throb and the lorry drove away.

The kettle was boiling, and we drew our chairs up to the fire.

CHAPTER XIII
FROM THE HOUSETOP

Tea was over when 47 came in. He was out of breath from climbing up the stairs; but he seemed satisfied with life and pleased to see us.

“So you got here?” he said.

My wife made room for him beside her. “Come over and get warm,” his wife said. When he came across she said eagerly, “What luck?”

His answer was to put a hand into a pocket and pull out an automatic pistol.

“That’s better,” she exclaimed, almost happily. “Now I’ll stop worrying. Have you plenty of bullets?”

“Enough,” he answered. “I hope you’ve got something left over there. I’m devilish hungry. I’ll hide this thing in the mattress for the present.”

He went off, and when he came back he had left his coat and hat behind. He was given the best place by the fire, and was soon busy eating everything that was left.

“Did you bring any news back?” she presently demanded impatiently. “You never tell me anything. What did your ‘cousin’ say? Did you see him?”

“I did. It was dark when I got to the Central. There were any quantity of loafers in the opposite doorways; but I think it was too dark to be recognised. There was a bit of a delay while the sentry unchained the gate. I had to give my ‘cousin’s’ name before he let me in. The hall was full of soldiers. They look after themselves all right there. It was a damned relief to be somewhere safe at last. I haven’t felt as well off for months.

“My ‘cousin,’ who was away at the Castle, came in in a few minutes, and we pushed a way up the crowded stairs, went past the out-of-work sleuths at the bar, and into his bedroom. I told him what I wanted. He produced a number of guns from sundry portmanteaux; but these were not for me. One was as long as his arm. He told me he’d take me to the Castle and get me something.

“He wouldn’t do anything until he had had something to eat. We went into the dining-room. Depressed sleuths were at tea. My ‘cousin’ was the same as usual, making a gesture do for a word.

“‘That was a bad show on Sunday,’ I said. ‘What are all the fellows in here going to do?’

“‘They’ll stay here a bit until we’re re-sorted.’

“‘I suppose most of them are known to the opposition show now?’

“He nodded. ‘Several of the chaps were getting warning letters before the Sunday show took place. We’ll have to shift ourselves about a bit.’

“‘Very busy?’

“‘Going all day. We’ve got two or three big fish in the net lately.’

“Presently, we left the depressed sleuths at tea, passed the out-of-work sleuths at the bar, and pushed a way down the stairs, which were full of men going up and down. It was pitch dark outside.

“The last thing my ‘cousin’ did, as we stepped into the dark, was to raise his eyebrows for me to follow. He stalked like a great cat down an alley, which is one of the ways to the Castle. There were sundry loafers in the lane, of course. Two policemen, who touched their hats to us, let us through the gate.

“It was too dark to see anything. We seemed to be crossing a great yard. We skirted the lower edge of this, and the ghost of a charming chapel moved past us, as foggy land goes past a steamer. We stalked along a line of dreary buildings into a doorway among many other doorways, and up a dirty wooden stairway. There were landings, and doors which had not seen paint for years, and on the door was the word ‘Intelligence.’ We mounted turn after turn, and came presently to a shabby room with packing cases and odds and ends of ammunition in it and nothing else. With a lift of his eyebrows and a wave of his hand, my ‘cousin’ went off on his toes, and I sat on a packing case cooling my heels. The electric light burned through a smeary globe, there was nothing to look at—odds and ends of uniform, odds and ends of ammunition. Outside the windows the dark was curling like a fog, and there were occasional shouts from the yard. I waited a full ten minutes, tapping my heels and feeling wonderfully safe.

“I seemed on land, and you”—he nodded to his wife—“out in the city, a waif swimming in a friendless sea. Here were people ready to defend my beliefs. Here were people who upheld my traditions. That profound loneliness, which is the tragedy of an agent’s life, for a brief space was no longer mine.”

47 had dropped his chin in his hands, and was looking into the fire. He threw up his head.

“My ‘cousin’ came back. He was standing in the doorway before I heard him. He lifted his eyebrows, and I slid off my packing case, and we passed down the passage into another room with a cheerful fire and people at work. This room was crowded with papers and typewriters, and though the people there sat in glum silence and went on with their work, nevertheless it seemed the best room I had ever been in.

“The fire was burning up, and in a box to the right was a mongrel bitch with a litter of blind pups. They were never still, and tugged at her all the time, rolling over with warmth and pleasure. A man sat on a stool gazing at the coals, and now and then he would put his hand among those rolling things, and the bitch would lick it. I envied that family.

“Another man smoked on the edge of a table, and a third man, a man who worked so furiously that he never raised his head, was standing with his back to a window, leaning over a high desk overwhelmed with papers. On a sheet he had an endless list of names, down which he was running a finger. With another hand he opened a directory and looked up addresses, and constantly he referred to the stack of papers.

“This great round-up was bringing in a mass of information, and each new bit of news opened up fresh avenues. I soon gathered from this man’s exclamations that he was going through the latest batch of information, and arranging fresh raids.

“He mentioned some name or other. ‘I am going to get the blighter to-night, I think,’ he said. All the while we were there he continued to run his finger up and down the pages and give instructions; and one could visualise the lower end of the Castle yard and the great gates through which we had come near which lorries, shaking with armed men, waited to be loosed in torrents down the streets.

“My ‘cousin’ went to something, which was half a desk and half a table, and opening it with an effort, for there was a great weight of books and papers on top, he pulled out an automatic pistol somewhat the worse for wear, took it to pieces, put it together again, loaded it, and fumbling among debris at the bottom of the desk, he rescued a spare magazine and a handful of nickel bullets. All these things were presently handed over to me.”

His wife interrupted him. “Don’t tell me what you have brought back is no good?”

“No; it’s tip-top,” answered 47, hastily. “It wants a good clean, that’s all. I’ll fix it up to-morrow. Anyhow, I stuck it into a pocket, and we went back to the Central for my ‘cousin’s’ guns, for he was going to look up his wife in her flat. The one which was as long as his arm he thrust into a tremendous pocket, and a second he kept in another pocket, with his hand on it. So we sallied forth, and I have no doubt on the way passed many a citizen of one persuasion or the other prepared for eventualities like ourselves.

“In Grafton Street our ways parted. My ‘cousin’ lifted his eyebrows and disappeared.”

“Are you still hungry?” his wife asked, as soon as 47 had done speaking. “I’ll cook you something presently.”

“That’ll do me,” he answered, nodding his head. “This early curfew is the devil. You people haven’t got too much time.”

“There’s an hour,” I retorted, looking at my watch. “It wasn’t much of a pilgrimage here. You’re pretty snug. Up in the roof isn’t as bad as it sounds.”

“No place like a top story,” 47 said. “No one has any right on your stairs then. And there’s usually a skylight; and a man can put up a good show through the skylight. The skylight here is pretty handy. Come and look.”

“You’re not taking him on the roof?” his wife remonstrated.

“He can put on a coat. We won’t be a minute.”

“He’ll freeze.”

“Not me,” I said, getting up.

“Stick on something,” 47 suggested, getting up too. “It isn’t a bad night.”

“You’re off your heads!” his wife retorted, from her chair by the fire.

We wrapped up, and 47 led the way through the skylight on to the roof. The ascent was tricky, but no worse than that. One had to mount on the banisters and haul oneself through the skylight, and one day the affair would give way, and the escaping sleuth would be precipitated among the advancing assassins. However, this did not happen this time.

“Don’t show yourself!” 47 ordered, as we shinned up. “People creeping about roofs at night aren’t popular in this city.”

He bent double and crept behind a chimney stack, and waved me to follow. I glanced through the skylight before I went. One could see down half a flight of stairs. From here a man really could put up a show, as he had said.

We were among the chimneys, like birds in a nest. We were in a forest of chimneys, in a mountainous country of roofs. The house was on a hill, the house was tall; we could see everywhere. The night was sharp, and as a consequence the sky was filled with stars. And below, all over the place, were the city lights. The roar of life came faintly up from down there, and here we seemed removed and secure, as if this perch were a rock which the sea of terror could not submerge. Yet, now and again, some drops of spray seemed to outleap the waters and dash against our mouths, as, with headlights which tore great holes in the dark, the Crossley tenders, filled with armed men, raced through the streets, and on their heels rolled armoured cars from which poked the Lewis guns I could not see. We followed these grim processions as they fled. Presently it was as if the city had become a pot, and we up here were intoxicated by the rising vapours.

On 47 it acted as a drug. His tongue was loosened, he became prophetic.

“Can you feel it?” he said, cupping his hand as if it held water. “Can you feel it coming up to us? Of course you can. I mean the terror, the rage, the hate. Can’t you see through the dark to the police on their way? Can’t you see through the houses as if they were glass, to the hunted men? Loyalist and Republican—in all those hearts the same passions—hate, and fortitude, and cruelty, and loyalty to their beliefs, and terror. In this whirlpool of passion can the spiritual endure?”

He peered between the chimneys. His face was a blur; but he began to permeate the atmosphere with the feeling which he left out of his lowered voice.

“Sometimes I think,” I put in, “that in the evolution of man the gods choose certain people to develop by trial certain qualities. Courage, fortitude, idealism—has Ireland been chosen for a year or two as the forcing ground for these?”

“Who knows?” he answered vaguely. “These qualities are being bred here; and treachery and cruelty and hate.”

“Don’t you feel the quality of this struggle is spiritual? Don’t you feel something hard and pointed like a sword blade there, though covered with the rust of every vile passion?”

“If there was nothing of the spirit here, could men be brought to contend so long and so furiously?” he answered. “But what are we to do with these passions, evil as well as good, that we have raised in the name of idealism? Nothing that has been created can die.” He peered out between the chimneys.

“Look down there,” I said. “Fear and hate and a certain exaltation. Of course, in this struggle Sinn Fein has the exhilaration of the small man against the big man. However right the big man may be, he cannot have much zest in an unequal show.”

Then it was that 47 became like a prophet on the housetops.

“Truth! Truth! Who shall find truth in all this untruth? One begs and begs for bread, and receives always a stone. Lies, lies, lies! Who can get at the truth now? Can it ever be found? I am tired of stones. Who will give me bread?

“No man down there wants the truth; no man down there would listen to the truth; one wishes to shout his case louder than the other, that is all. The people lie, the papers lie—it is lies, all lies!”

“And this thing which makes men mad is called patriotism,” I said.

He turned round from gazing at the city. “There you have it. There is one voice speaking the truth. Patriotism, how it limits a man, in judgment, in sincerity, in his horizon.

“Nowadays, can nationalism be other than a rather poor thing? It was useful in the past, but it was only a stepping stone to better things. First individual against individual, then family against family, then tribe warring against tribe, nation striving against nation. Only to-day the inspiration that all nations may be bound together. Has man been deceived? Can nationalism and patriotism after all be false gods?”

I, harking back to his cry of “lies, all lies,” interjected: “Here is the truth spoken by Loyalist and Republican in the golden age before all men were liars:

“‘You started it,’ the Republican says. ‘For generations we asked you for more generous legislation, and you made promises and broke them. Then we took up arms.’

“‘My dear fellow, you have hit the nail on the head. We were continuously unjust,’ the Loyalist answers; ‘but listen to the excuses. Either the peoples of the British Isles are one nation, or else they are several nations, of which more than one resides in Ireland. We have to listen to so many opinions. You Sinn Feiners want to break right away, the Nationalists want Home Rule, and the Ulster people want things to stay as they are. Naturally, this decision does not help us to do what we are disinclined to do.’

“‘The majority want a republic; the majority should rule,’ answers the Republican.

“‘My dear sir, might I suggest the argument is illogical out of your mouth?’ answers the Loyalist. ‘If the part, Ulster, must be given to the whole, Ireland, then the part, Ireland, must be given to the whole, the United Kingdom. And only a few who cry “Up the Republic earnestly” and intelligently want that same republic. After the rising of 1916 you had few friends, and the people have only been bludgeoned into desire for a republic by the cries of the leaders, by the presence of British troops, by the repression and the personal injustices attendant on the political situation. This feeling is false, and would quickly pass on a return of normal conditions.’

“‘There is a great deal in what you say,’ the Republican admits; ‘but what of the atrocities committed by your people? How can we forget those?’

“‘I cannot deny the atrocities,’ answers the Unionist; ‘but are you not to blame? What is your army other than a collection of people who, while it suits them, masquerade as peaceful citizens?’

“The Republican answers, ‘Your accuracy and penetration are extraordinary. As a military unit we are corner boys and assassins; but in the circumstances, how can we be otherwise?’

“‘True, very true,’ the Loyalist assures him, ‘on that last point I see with you eye to eye. Against such odds there is no other method you can adopt, unless you went in for passive resistance and boycotted England on a grand scale; but, of course, a nation cannot be organised to that type of cold-blooded resistance—it must have the stimulus of war. As things are, if you were to come out into the open, your army would be no more in a week. But if I give you that point you must give me this. The excesses of the military and the police have been caused by the type of war you wage. Our men don’t know friends from enemies, there are no rules of warfare, consequently they take justice into their own hands.’

“The Republican winks. ‘The intelligent among us realise this. The outcry we raise is for propaganda.’

“‘Ah!’ cries the Loyalist, winking back, ‘it is the same with us, and our shout of murder gang. We use it to stimulate our followers and justify ourselves. Your leaders know and our leaders know that we are both out to win, and we must use every trick and shift. For, of course, we both have a contempt for the mob, haven’t we? The mob is necessary to us, but its opinion is worth nothing. Once the mob enthusiasm is raised, it will swallow any lie, it will shout any slogan.’”

My oration appeared to have sent 47 to sleep. I came to a full stop. When he began, it was on a line of his own.

“An empire, an imperfect instrument, is nearer the co-operative ideal than separate states watching one another. Therefore, when Ireland, a part, demands to break away from the whole, it is an effort towards old tribal days, and I am out of sympathy. And if the whole feel they are endangered, in justice to themselves they are at liberty to deny the demands of the part.”

“You grudge Ireland independence?”

He passed over my interruption. “But, of course, a vigorous national life and a noble national ideal are undeniable advantages. Then how reconcile these two things—the liberty of the nation with the safety of all nations? It is the old difficulty of reconciling anarchy with socialism, those poles with equally strong claims.” He paused and said, “Yes, there is a way out.”

“Dominion status?”

He nodded. “That will allow Ireland internal development, and that will keep her within the Empire, and there will be no breach made in the nations.”

“Do you expect that to be the end?”

“I hope so.” He switched his mind elsewhere again. “It’s in bigger things than Ireland I’m interested at bottom. It is in world questions—the class wars and that kind of thing.”

“Would you regret working against Communism, if you were ordered to?”

“Not necessarily, for one can sympathise with a thing, and yet find it unworkable, and a menace. In the van of all these movements march men with the seed of truth, who are so far ahead of time that if they leapt, and the world leapt after them, the world would fall into the ditch. It is evolution which alone will bring the masses after these people. And so these prophets must be destroyed that the world may not fall into the ditch. I do not hate what I kill. I have nothing against the body that collapses at my feet. I thrust with the sword of my mind. My victim and myself, may we not both be honest men caught in the toils of life?” 47 moved. “Here, I’m freezing. We must get inside.”

Herself speaking.

I was sorry for 47’s wife as Himself and I left her at the top of the uncarpeted stairs. She looked small and tired, and very much alone, and I have no doubt she felt all those things.

But I must hurry on. That night witnessed our first raid.

It was four in the morning, and bitterly cold. The knock at the door, or rather the crash on the door, was shattering, and brought me straight up in bed.

“Go back.” It was Himself on the landing. “Don’t be frightened. It seems to be the Auxiliaries.”

I continued to sit up, shivering. There was the rush of many feet, like the rush of hundreds of sheep after being penned up. The house filled at once.

“Hands up!” somebody shouted. I visualised Himself shivering on the landing with his hands above his head.

“Unarmed. Right. Put ’em down. What’s your name?”

Himself gave his name.

“Who’s in the house? Who’s in that room?”

“My wife.”

The door burst open, and armed men raced through into the room beyond. They appeared to look at nothing, but I suppose they took everything in. They had guns strapped up and down their legs and round their bodies, and balmoral bonnets on the backs of their heads. One immense specimen was left to guard me. He stood by the empty fireplace and eyed me. I eyed him back again. Presently he smiled.

“You look cold,” I said, for he was shaking under his heavy coat.

“More tired than cold. Been at this without a break for three days and nights. It’s——!” He left the rest to me.

A series of heavy thuds overhead made me look up.

“It’s all right,” he said soothingly. “Only the chaps searching. The lady upstairs is a bad lot.”

“What?”

“I advise you to clear out. She’s coming into the limelight soon. Oh, we know all about her.”

“She’s harmless enough,” I said. “She talks rather.”

“Some people blow too hard.” He pulled off a glove and breathed on his fingers. “What a country! What a country! What brought you here? The Irish are mean enough to pick the flesh off the bones of a flea.”

“Curiosity.”

“Well, it’s curious enough; but it will never be anything more than England’s market garden, whether it’s a republic or part of the Empire.”

“There are some fine men in the movement.”

“Fine!” There was contempt in his voice. “And you an English woman!”

“Not English—Australian,” I corrected gently. “Therefore I may be counted neutral, more or less.”

He laughed. “More or less. But which?”

I shook my head.

“All the same,” I said, “you do make a mistake in thinking the Sinn Feiners are inferior.”

He caught me up, and refused to let me continue.

“Inferior! Of course they’re inferior! Look at them skulking round corners; look at them hiding behind women. They can’t conduct an ambush in a decent manner. Oh no; they must wait until the kids are coming out of school, then they chuck their bomb. We can’t hit them then. Oh no, they’re not a decent race. The German is honourable. The Turk is honourable. The nigger is honourable. But not a Shinner. Stick up for any mongrel race you like, but not the Irish.”

His torrent of words left me gasping.

“I’ve just come up from Cork,” he said, after a few moments’ pause. “If you want to see the Irish patriot in all his glory, go to Cork.”

Himself came into the room. He had managed to seize a coat from somewhere; but he was shaking with cold.

“I think they’re nearly through,” he said. “I hear sounds of going.”

“We have just been discussing the Irish,” I said weakly.

The sound of many feet clattering down the stairs cut my remarks short. My new acquaintance joined the ebbing tide and was gone.

CHAPTER XIV
AN AT HOME

“You were able to come. I’m glad,” my hostess exclaimed. “You know every one.”

Himself drifted to a far corner, where I lost him.

I made my way across the great warm room towards the fireplace. Tea was progressing merrily, and I was soon seated with a cup in my hand, eating potato cakes hot from the kitchen.

There were about thirty people present—grave professors, elderly people who might have been doctors or lawyers, one or two who looked like decadent poets, and lots of wives. Everybody was talking. This man had been in the post office during the Rebellion, that woman had carried the Sinn Fein flag somewhere else on that occasion. They told racy stories against themselves and against the British Government.

“The other day,” a priest next door to me began, “I was in Talbot Street at the time of that shooting. You remember?”

“I remember,” said a woman, dropping her cigarette into her saucer. “Yes, do go on.”

“I was in the pork butcher’s shop. As a matter of fact, a bullet nearly got me in there. Quite near enough. I haven’t got the sawdust out of my pants yet, I hugged the floor so close. I went out as soon as it was safe. The D.M.Ps. had gone; you know the way they go. One of the boys was stretched in the middle of the road. There wasn’t much life left in him, not enough to suffer. I knelt down beside him, and the crowd drifted back. A Tommy was standing near, with his hands on his rifle and his tin hat on his head. He wasn’t taking any notice of me. There were other wounded people. All of a sudden an old beggar woman shouldered her way through the crowd to the Tommy. ‘Och,’ sez she, ‘take that tin lid off iv ye while his riverince is saying his prayers.’”

Some one leant above me with a jug of cream.

“Cream?” He poured cream into my cup and sat down by my side with the jug in his hand. “What a life we lead,” he said. “Have you been raided yet?”

“Yes, not so very long ago.”

“Did they take anything?”

“Our breakfast, and a copy of Balzac’s ‘Droll Stories.’ But they were a very decent lot.”

“You were lucky. They are light-fingered gentlemen as a rule.”

“I expect some of those stories aren’t true.”

“Not true!” exclaimed another man. “My dear lady, I know a family near Cork who are constantly raided by the Black-and-Tans. The same man is always in charge. Just before Christmas he called upon them with a revolver in each hand and said, ‘I’ve called for my Christmas box. Make the cheque a decent one, as I’ve had a lot of trouble with this house.’”

Everybody laughed.

“I know two old ladies,” said somebody else, “Unionists by the way. One night at dinner time a party of officers arrived and captured the house. The man in charge told them there was a man on the roof; but he told them not to be disturbed, and to go on with dinner. He came back after a little, apologised, and said he’d made a mistake. They discovered afterwards that he had cleared the house of everything valuable.”

“They’ve got splendid opportunities, of course,” said my friend, balancing the cream jug on the end of the sofa. “I don’t mind looting so much as man-handling. I can tell you some of the boys get a bad time when they are interrogated.”

I swallowed my tea reflectively.

“There are cases of torture that we never hear of,” said a new woman, drawing close. “I know of several cases in the country where the boys were caught, rolled in barbed wire, then flung on the ground, and the Black-and-Tans jumped on them!”

“They must have got sore feet,” I suggested.

“I know of a policeman in Limerick,” the woman went on, “who beats every third woman he meets. He kicked a crippled child from one side of the road to the other in one kick. And then the English people are surprised that the Irish people hold out. The Irish are the most peace-loving and spiritual people in the world, and they must overcome wrong.”

“We know the men who do these things,” said the man beside me. “Twenty years will make no difference. We’ll get them.”

“Well, I’m all for peace,” I declared. “But then I’m not Irish.”

He laughed. “Do you think we’d have got very far if we hadn’t let a little blood?”

“I think it might have taken longer to wake up the Government; but it could have been done. Women got suffrage; no blood was shed. The woman’s war was the only clean one waged, I think. Why not be satisfied now with the bloodshed you’ve had, and try something else?”

“No; the lion’s tail must be twisted. It will be twisted before we’ve finished. Ireland’s only a pin point; but she’s pushing right into the heart of the Empire.”

There was a pause, and a snatch of conversation came from somewhere else.

“I saw Mrs.”—I couldn’t catch the name—“yesterday,” a woman said. “She’s working very hard, and, of course, her husband will kill himself one day.”

“Who is that?” I asked.

“She’s an American; but she always calls the Irish ‘my own dear people.’ Her husband is an Englishman; but he has an Irish soul.”

Our hostess advanced.

“Has any one heard of the Minister of Propaganda lately? I love that man. He’s the only man among you with wit. Tell me, somebody, what is going to happen.”

There was a general shrugging of shoulders as she settled in a chair.

“The British Government will give in.”

“But what of poor Ireland in the meantime?”

“Things have been quiet for a few days,” I ventured.

“An unnatural quiet,” said a second priest. “Something is brewing for the Black-and-Tans. How our boys can gull them!”

People came towards us attracted by our laughter, and an old lady whose name I could not catch, and whom I never saw after that evening, drew into the circle.

“Things are getting worse,” said our hostess. “I can’t go down the street without danger of being run over by armoured cars, and the soldiers just look as if they are going to stand up in the lorries and fire into the crowd.”

“We weren’t talking of Curfew,” said a pallid youth; “but let us, because I want to tell you the story of old Meg.”

“Old Meg? Who’s old Meg?” our hostess demanded.

“You must know her. The dirtiest beggar woman in Dublin.”

“I know her,” a woman exclaimed, “a dreadful old creature. She tore her dress open in front of me the other day in Wicklow Street, and said, ‘For the love iv Heaven, lady, buy me some combinations. It’s after perishing with cold I am this minute, and you in furs. Look at me poor bare body. It’s you have the good heart, lady, and you’ve never felt the cold.’ ‘Indeed,’ I said indignantly, ‘I have. I feel the cold very much. Cover yourself at once, you disgusting old woman. Do you see the policeman looking at you?’ ‘Him!’ she said scornfully, ‘I take no notice iv him. It’s a son I have in the I.R.A. Give me the price of the combinations, lady, and I’ll let you go.’ ‘I’ll do no such thing; but I’ll give you a shilling if you promise not to go near the public-house with it.’ ‘Indade, an’ shame on ye, lady, why would a poor old woman like me be going near a public-house?’”

“That’s Meg,” said the youth. “She’s a great character, and her mother and grandmother begged on the streets. She was curfewed outside my house the other night. Must have been the night you gave her the shilling. Drunk? I heard a commotion and leaned out of window, and there she was defying the British Army. But they collared her. ‘What’re you doing out now?’ asked a Black-and-Tan, sticking a revolver where her belt should have been. ‘It’s going home, I am,’ said Meg. ‘For the love iv Heaven give me a copper.’ ‘It’s a bullet I’ll give you, you old vermin. Get into that lorry quick.’ ‘That,’ says Meg, ‘that! I’m after being a lady now. Och, and it’s me great-grandfather who was after being a king.’ ‘You’ll be after being a corpse if you don’t get a move on.’ They made a start, and suddenly she saw me. ‘Hallo, dearie,’ called out the descendant of kings, ‘I’m curlewed!’”

“The Irish beggars are priceless,” exclaimed the second priest, who had rolled and twisted with laughter until the tears ran down his cheeks. “You heard about the flower-women the day Lord French was attacked?”

“No,” said our hostess. “Tell us, father.”

“Two old flower-women watched the whole thing. ‘Did ye see the bullets flying?’ said one. ‘I did, indeed, and a grand sight it was. Did ye see the boys all standing there cool and steady, firing at Lord French? And a lady with him. “Let me get out,” sez she to he, “let me get out,” sez she. “This is no place for me,” sez she. “Let me get out,” sez she. “You will not,” sez he to she, “and you will not,” sez he.’”

“And now for a last story,” said the second priest, getting up. “The other day a friend in Cork was searched by the Black-and-Tans just before Curfew, for arms, of course. As usual after going through his pockets, the gentleman went through his pocket-book, took all he had, which was five pounds, and also took his silver watch. My friend, who isn’t a man to sit down under things, went over to the officer in charge and said what had happened. The officer came up and told the Black-and-Tan to return the loot. The man grumbled and hauled out of his pocket a dozen watches, and a bundle of notes. ‘Take which is yours,’ he said, swinging the watches, and he held out a handful of notes. It was quite dark, and when my friend got under a light, he found he had got a gold watch for his silver one, and ten pounds for his five.”

In the middle of the laughter that followed the story, the priest made his exit.

We followed suit, and we were not many steps on the way when the old lady I had noticed came up behind us.

“I have something to say,” she said. “I hope you won’t be influenced by what you hear over here. When I see strangers like you I am always so afraid of what will happen to them. The Irish are such good pleaders. But it’s all lamentable. I am as Irish as anybody; but I wish this was over, with all my heart I wish it. It’s not a clean war. It’s having a frightful effect on the young men. Kill, kill, kill is all they think of now, it’s all they talk of, and what will they have at the end of their lives, what battles can they fight over again? I can’t sleep at night, I hear them talking as old men. ‘I got him in his bath,’ one will say. Another, ‘I got him in bed.’ And another, ‘He was visiting his wife. I shot him at tea.’ They have dirtied Ireland’s name, say what they will, they have done that. Doesn’t the most sympathetic American squirm when you compare this to the American War of Independence? I think so. I read the other day of the Poles objecting to the comparison with the Polish struggle for freedom. People who hate England pretend to sympathise with us for their own ends; but there is not a nation that, at heart, does not hold our methods in contempt. We are called ditch murderers, and the expression is justified.”

Her face was working with emotion. We had come to a corner. She said good night and was gone.

CHAPTER XV
HEIGHT OF THE TERROR

Passing from bad to worse, the year drew to an end.

As if the fury of those days were breeding them and putting them upon the streets, the shaking lorries increased in number; and the flying Crossley tenders swept by in the hunt—hunting, hunting, hunting for the elusive foe, which was everywhere and nowhere—which was on the pavements, which was behind the counters of the shops, which was wrapped in the uniforms of tram conductor, of railway porter, of postman, which made use of any refuge that it might help the infant Republic to take a place among the nations.

Terrible tales were whispered in those final weeks of the dying year. Tales of frenzied men hunted by bloodhounds. Tales of pitiless ambushes, of police slaughtered to a man, and the bodies hacked to pieces with axes. Tales of savage reprisal following on shameful deed, of burned shops, of deserted farms, of peasants gone to couch with fox and hare. Tales of new proclamations and new restrictions falling alike on guilty and innocent.

“Auxiliary Division, R.I.C., the Castle, Macroom.”

“Whereas foul murders of servants of the Crown have been carried out by disaffected persons, and whereas such persons immediately before the said murders appeared to be peaceful and loyal people, but have produced pistols from their pockets; it is hereby ordered that all male inhabitants of Macroom, and all males passing through Macroom, shall not appear in public with their hands in their pockets. Any male infringing this order is liable to be shot at sight.”

Tales of bridges destroyed in the country places to impede the movement of Government troops, and other bridges leading to the market towns blown up as reprisal by forces of the Crown. Tales of gross murder of isolated police replied to by tales of blindfolded prisoners taken at dead of night to lonely places and there told they were to die, made to kneel praying and listen while a grave was dug, and this play-acting done, the victim promised life if he would say was his neighbour, the butcher, a peaceful citizen or a follower of Sinn Fein, did his friend, the bootmaker, who so amiably dusted his shop of a morning also in the dark of night dust a gun which came up from under the boards. And could the kneeling man rise to meet this fierce hour and refuse the information, his thwarted captors returned him to his cell.

Tales that the golden age of robbery had come. Criminals in all countries hear of the anarchy abroad and take tickets to the distressed country. Armed men emerge from the lanes and the alley ways and rob by night and by day. It is whispered some of the robberies of the Ulster banks are carried out by Irish Volunteers acting under orders, it is shouted that some of the highway robberies are conducted by out-at-elbow Black-and-Tans, acting without orders and trying to turn an honest penny in an unfriendly land.

Then, in the midst of war, rumours of peace. The dove flutters a moment into sight, and takes wing again. Father O’Flanagan, Acting President of the Irish Republic, telegraphs to the British Prime Minister:—

“You state that you are willing to make peace at once without waiting for Christmas. Ireland also is willing. What first steps do you propose?”

The telegram was sent when Sinn Fein was hard pressed. Many of the leaders were in prison, the rest were hunted day and night. It was imperative to keep a tight hold on supporters if the movement were to hold together. A sudden gesture of this kind might be taken as a sign of panic and begin a general rout. There was a day or two of heart-searching in the Republican camp, and ‘Watchman,’ in one of the Nationalist journals, came forward with the warning that if the nation was not to be stampeded it must remain as cold as ice, calm as a summer lake, and wary as a fox going on all its toes. The mysterious Michael Collins emerged from his obscurity with a second letter in which he thanked nobody for refraining from murdering him, and told the nation to “stop talking, and get on with the work.”

The dove clapped its wings and fled away, and ere the sound of its flight was lost news came that as reprisal for an ambush in the public thoroughfare, the City of Cork was in flames. The machinery of war was in motion again.

Deed of terror following deed of terror, the days wore out, Christmas came and went, and the year came to an end.

Hampered but still free, fettered but not completely bound, finding the draught of difficulty as a sick man finds a strengthening medicine, through all that came and went, Sinn Fein continued with the building up of the Republic. Republican Courts, which had been suppressed, continued in existence, sitting when and where they could, judges, lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants, and all the following of law, flitting from place to place like birds bereft of a nesting ground, against all legal tradition taught to be sparing of argument, as at the very moment of judgment, they might have to snatch up bag and baggage, and judge, lawyer, plaintiff, and defendant make tracks to the hills. Yet in the face of opposition, because of it, these courts met with considerable success. Clients arrived in the hope that the judgments given would be more lenient than in the established British Courts, clients came from patriotic motives, from motives of adventure, and not least because they dared not stay away. Intimidation was present here as elsewhere.

For both parties in the struggle had great belief in the weapon of intimidation, and there was taking place one long competition in intimidation between the Crown Forces and the Republican Volunteers. The strange situation had arisen of two Governments claiming to rule the country, and neither one able to protect its adherents from the other, nor able to control its own extremists.

The inner circle of Sinn Fein held council when it could, framed its policy and issued its edicts. Cabinet Ministers might sleep each night in a new bed, those of them who were not sleeping night after night in one of his Britannic Majesty’s prisons; but their words were not without weight. In their offices in attics and in cellars, they built up the infant Republic.

It was told that the Minister of Finance found time to acknowledge all funds, although the very rumour of his name sent the gates of Dublin Castle back upon their hinges and a host of armed men abroad. Again and again his offices were captured, and his very signature found damp upon some cheque, yet with the choicest of his correspondence he was gone to some new attic, to some new cellar, there to begin again.

The Minister of Commerce, passing from place to place like any Ishmaelite, issued his edicts that such and such British goods should be boycotted, and the unwilling shopkeepers dared not disobey.

The Minister of Propaganda, pedalling, pedalling his ubiquitous bicycle, interviewed foreign journalists, got together his facts for the day’s issue of the Irish Bulletin, all the while thanking the dark for its cloak, thanking the cold for an excuse to muffle up.

So the work of the Departments was done, nor was it probable that it would be undone, for man thrives on difficulty. The danger to this national awakening was not then, it was going to be later on in the easy days of peace.

The old year came to an end, and the first day of the new year brought Sinn Fein Ireland a happy augury. It went from mouth to mouth that President De Valera had returned from America. Everywhere the question was put, “Is he come?” “Where has he landed?”

47, whom I ran across about this time, told me he received reliable information of the President’s whereabouts within a few hours of the landing, and he had passed on the news to Headquarters. It was decided that no steps should be taken to arrest the President, and henceforward to the truce in June, the difficulty for the agents of the Crown was to avoid coming in contact with him.

This was not the story told by Sinn Fein, who made it known that the astute President, aided by the Republican secret service, was making ridiculous the clumsy efforts of the Crown Forces to capture him, and patriots chuckled over their teacups. The awakening was a rude one. Auxiliary police, raiding the grounds of a house in the Blackrock district, found digging potatoes a mysterious person with side whiskers, who was possessed of important papers. He was escorted to the nearest barracks, where it transpired he was no less a man than the President of the Irish Republic. He received an apology and was released.

The patriots of the teatables were thunderstruck, and more insulted than if their President had been maltreated. Some there were who received a shock from which they never recovered.

It was in these dark days my wife and I first made acquaintance with A. E., first saw presiding over a circle interested in mysticism and the occult this benevolent and rather giant person, wrapped up in an ancient greatcoat, and all crowded into a chair. There was not a wrinkle to speak of in his face, as if a serene mind had allowed him to pass trouble by, and through his spectacles looked out eyes as blue as the sky.

On the wall were two pictures by his hand of visions he had seen in some uncommon hour. For this man, who is gaining an international reputation, was many-sided, and each side exceeded the stature of an average man.

He was a painter of some ability, and better than his painting was his poetry, and better than his poetry was his prose, and better than his prose were his ideas; and more astonishing than his ideas was the facility for expressing them. He seemed informed on half the subjects in the world, and a question would start the stream of eloquence flowing. Never was there such an example of rich payment received from trained concentration and years of clear thinking.

The new year started as the old year had ended in fury and ruin.

One of the dreariest of those afternoons, when evening was sweeping up out of the Liffey in the guise of a river fog, I found myself upon O’Connell Bridge watching a line of soldiers holding up traffic and searching motor cars. Standing there as chilly of thought as I was chilly of body, I became intuitive like a prophet, so that I was ready to open my mouth and prophesy.

Militant Sinn Fein had reached the limit of its popularity with the nation, the swing of the pendulum had got to its end and would come back again. It had been a melancholy task for loyal people watching the Republican ideal spreading through the country like a disease, finding week by week the British Empire losing the Irish nation, first by tens, then by hundreds, then by thousands, and for this reason above others, that Irishmen—be their opinions wrong, be their deeds wrong—were being hunted down in Ireland. The case of the deserting Unionists was the case of the man who is willing to beat his own wife, but who takes her part when an outsider appears to do the business.

Waiting on the bridge this evening, watching the fog rise off the river and the soldiers search the cars as they drove up, I knew the Sinn Fein militant policy had reached the limit of national sympathy and patience. As restrictions grew worse, as trade grew worse, that numerically greatest portion of the population to whom ideals are a consideration secondary to material prosperity, would look more and more askance at the people who were bringing them to ruin.

The Republican cry was a false cry as far as the Irish nation was concerned. Only a minority of the people were genuine in a desire for the Republic, and many who shouted “Up the Republic” had no idea what they meant. A band of enthusiasts had struck a spark, and now the country was wrapped in the flames of a national passion; but the majority of the people had been caught in the conflagration through circumstance. The psychology of the crowd had operated, the spirit of the herd.

Now that the youth of Ireland, who had been cheated of the European war, had had a fill of struggle, the time was at hand when the wise fireman, dragging his hose after him, might get into position to put the fire out.

Ireland suffered under a genuine grievance. The taxation was unjust; there were other injustices. But if a truce could be called and an offer made which put right what had before been wrong, the dream of a Republic would pass away as a man’s dream passes away in the morning. Let the tension be slackened and life find its true values again, and all the shouts left in the throats of the true Republicans would not trouble the nation again. The effort had been used up, and the gods do not give such passion twice in a generation. They are chary of their gifts.

Thinking this, I waited on the bridge, wondering how long would go by before some one in the crowd fired at the soldiers, whereupon the soldiers would return the compliment, and there would follow a stampede, and I would be offered the choice of being shot to death or crushed to death. But nobody drew a gun on this occasion, though another time, very soon afterwards, I was on the same spot, and somebody in the crowd threw a bomb or fired a shot, somebody who was well down a side street a moment afterwards, and the soldiers fired into the brown as I expected, and a woman was killed.

But the dove of peace, which had fluttered into sight for a day or two before Christmas, had fled away, and was not yet to be seen back again, and during these first weeks of the new year it became evident that spirit was to descend yet farther into matter.

I take the following quotations haphazard from issues of the Irish Bulletin (the Republican organ) of that date. Such remedies as these were tried to cope with the situation.

“On Saturday night, January 1st, Auxiliary Police raided a dance hall in Lisduff, co. Leitrim. The dance was interrupted, and the dancers questioned and searched. They were then compelled to sing ‘God save the King’ and denounce President De Valera, after which they were ordered out of the dance hall, shots being fired after them.”

“A Proclamation has been issued by Major-General Strickland, English Military Governor in Cork, prohibiting the use of motor-cars, motor-cycles, and pedal cycles between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. in the Martial Law area, which now extends over one-third of Ireland. This order comes into force on the 20th inst.”

“On the afternoon of Friday, January 14th, 1921, Auxiliary Police arrested So-and-so. All the men were prominent merchants in the town.... The men were taken to the local barracks and were then formed into a procession and compelled to march through the town carrying Union Jacks and trailing the Republican flag in the dust. An itinerant musician was compelled to head the procession playing a banjo. At the rear of the procession a large party of Black-and-Tan Constabulary drove in a motor lorry cheering and shouting. After they had marched through the town the merchants were forced to kneel down in the public street and kiss the Union Jack, whilst the Constabulary burned the Republican flag.”

“On Wednesday, January 26th, Constabulary rounded up many of the prominent residents of Fermoy, co. Cork, marched them to the bridge in the centre of the town, where they were compelled to paint on the walls such inscriptions as ‘God save the King.’ ‘God bless the Black-and-Tans.’”

“On Friday, January 28th, at Leitrim, men of all ages and classes were commandeered by Constabulary and marched to parts of the road where ‘ambushes might occur.’ There they were compelled to fell trees and cut down hedges on both sides of the roads.”

“On Wednesday, February 2nd, a number of the residents of Glanworth, co. Cork, were commandeered and were marched out of the village. They were then compelled to remove trees which had been felled across the roads (by the I.R.A.) some time previously.”

“On February 4th military and constabulary rounded up over a hundred men in Listowel, co. Kerry, including elected representatives, merchants, professional men, etc., formed them up into parties and marched them out of the town to various country roads across which trenches had some time previously been dug. There the parties were given picks and spades and compelled under threats of being shot to fill in the trenches. The weather was very inclement, and no discrimination was made in selecting the victims—age or illness being no protection. Mr. John W. Galvin, proprietor of the Central Hotel, who was suffering from heart affection and asthma, was among those forced to fill the trenches. During the work he complained of heart trouble, but was compelled to continue. While being marched back to town he fell dead.”

From the Irish Independent of January 1st.

“Martin Conway, one of the victims near Bruff, is stated to have crawled four miles after he had been wounded, while he was acting as a sentry near Caherguillamore House. He was tracked by a bloodhound, which had accompanied the police party, and he immediately fired at the hound, killing him; but was himself killed by the return fire. Mr. Conway was a prominent Sinn Feiner, and had been on the run.”

Independent of January 4th.

“Afterwards, it was stated, a bloodhound was employed in a search for Tobin, and a pool of blood was found on the mountain where the wounded man had evidently rested. On Sunday morning his dead body was found within a hundred yards of his mother’s house, whither he had evidently crawled from some place of hiding during the night. He had his coat under his head, and had evidently lain down to die.”

Tragic to read? Yes. Regrettable to read? Yes. But the Crown Forces were victims of circumstances no less than were the Irish Volunteers. The trouble began by Britain refusing to concede certain Irish claims; this led to outrage, and outrage to reprisals, and reprisals to a state of civil war. The reprisals were carried out to intimidate (and to a certain extent the reprisals did justify themselves), to satisfy thwarted effort, out of contempt. I have spoken to several Auxiliary Police, humane men, men who had taken part in the European War, and not one of them spoke of the Sinn Feiner as an enemy and an equal, as he might have spoken of a Frenchman or a German. If it were suggested the reprisals were unworthy, the answer would be, “Good enough for them, the swine!”

Yet the Irish Volunteer believed himself to be serving an ideal. I quote an extract from General Lawson’s report, dated December 30th.

“The captains ... appear to have been ... as a class, transparently sincere and single-minded, idealists, highly religious for the most part, and often with an almost religious sense of their duty to their country.... They fought against drunkenness and self-indulgence, and it is no exaggeration to say that as a class they represented all that was best in the countryside.... They and their volunteers were trained to discipline, they imbibed the military spirit, and then as now they looked upon their army as one in a very real sense, an organisation demanding implicit obedience and self-abnegation from rank to rank.... They stood for much that is best in human nature.... There is a spirit of a nation behind the organisation ... sympathising with and believing that those who belong to the I.R.A. are fighting for the cause of the Irish people.”

The Irish Volunteers, lacking numbers and equipment, were forced to conduct the fight by any method they could, and the Crown Forces, if they were to get in a blow at all, had frequently to get down on hands and knees, and meet the enemy on their own level. Such are the humours of life.

Surely the gods must laugh as they watch, or, indeed, are they wiser than man believes, and order these complex events that he, weary of reading from the old lesson book, may have his attention caught by old truths put in a new way, and learn again the lessons of fortitude and restraint.

January came to an end, February came to an end, and the disastrous tale of deeds continued; but the days were getting longer, and the cold was going out of the air, and a man felt when the sun came back again, peace also might return.

CHAPTER XVI
THE MINISTER OF PROPAGANDA

One March morning Mrs. Slaney rapped at the door. Himself was out. I put down my pen with a sigh.

“I see you have ‘engaged’ on the door,” she said cheerfully, “but I must come in for a moment to tell you something. It’s very bad for you to sit writing like this, you should be out in the sun. We don’t get much sunshine as a rule at this time of the year.”

She shut the door, walked over to the sofa, and lowered her voice.

“I’ve let the hall flat,” she said. “I had to come and tell you.”

“But you let it yesterday?”

“I know ... but”—she rustled with excitement—“but I am writing at once to put those people off. On second consideration, it is most unsuitable. They are so young and only just married, later on it might mean a baby, and I have to consider my other tenants, you and your husband, for instance. You remember I asked you before I took that musical man upstairs. There’s a great art in making a household run on oiled wheels.”

“You’re pleased with the people coming to-day, then?”

She hesitated, and then she said, “I must tell you. I trust you. I know you won’t talk.” She must have thought I looked puzzled, for she went on nervously, “I’ve let the hall flat to Mrs. Fitzgerald.” She paused to see the effect of her words. “Mrs. Desmond Fitzgerald. Her husband is Minister of Propaganda. Now I feel that I’ve done something for Ireland! No one will take her, they are so afraid of raids; but I made up my mind at once.”

“Mr. Darrel Figgis has made this place rather popular with the Black-and-Tans. Is it wise from Mrs. Fitzgerald’s point of view?”

“Of course it is. I met Mr. Figgis only yesterday, and he told me he was sure the house wouldn’t be raided again.”

“How on earth can he tell?”

“Mr. Figgis has a wonderful brain. I think he’s the brains of the movement myself. Besides, I’m not afraid of the Black-and-Tans. I’m an Irishwoman. Look at the sacrifices Irishwomen have made. Mr. Fitzgerald isn’t going to live here. He’s coming sometimes after dark for meals. Mrs. Fitzgerald and the baby will be here. I don’t want the people upstairs to know who she is. After all, Fitzgerald is a common enough name. They can think she’s a widow.”

“There’s a baby. I thought you wouldn’t have a baby?”

“But this baby is a grown baby. It’s eleven months old, and its mother says it’s a very good baby, it makes no noise at all.”

“Of course, one can only prove that.”

“There’s one other thing.” Mrs. Slaney moved uneasily. “It’s about the baths. You and your husband have always had as many baths as you wanted. We must make a little difference in that rule now, and treat you like the others. This weather you can’t want more than two baths a week. Perhaps in summer we can make some other arrangement.” She went on to the Minister of Propaganda. “Poor man, he will be delighted to get a flat where he can have his meals in comfort. He’s been on the run for a long time now. It’s shameful an Irishman should have to live like that. I shall soon get to know Mrs. Fitzgerald, the baby will be the link; and I shall hear everything that is going on. I must go and write my letter.”

When I spoke to Himself about it afterwards, he said, “I suppose those people will be all right here. I wouldn’t like to go bail. Since the last raid men always seem hanging about. I suppose they give the house a look up now and then. The less we know about things the better.”

But we were not the only people in the house with forebodings.

A week later, when Mrs. Fitzgerald had already been settled in a day or two, the door opened cautiously and Mrs. O’Grady, dustpan in hand, came in with the air of a conspirator.

“The mistress is after setting the hall flat,” she said mysteriously.

“I know. I thought they had been in a day or two.”

“It’s bad luck she’s bringing on everybody. She’s always that frightened she’ll not be noticed. She’ll be noticed now. Never fear, the Black-and-Tans will be burning the place down one night.”

“Mrs. O’Grady, what do you mean?”

“She’s not telling you who’s in the house, not she. She’s a mean, mean woman, and it’s black trouble she’s bringing on us all. Well I know it. I do say to O’Grady of a night that your husband, mum, is the only gentleman as has been in this house since the Captain left as had these rooms before you, and he wasn’t any great gentleman so as to speak. She doesn’t know how to treat nice people when she does get them. She’s set her flat to Desmond Fitzgerald, that’s what she’s after doing.”

“Mrs. O’Grady!”

“I do be going blind, but not so blind; and it’s himself as had his pictures in the papers not long ago. God help him. It’s on the run he’s been ever since the Sunday shootings, though a more innocent man never drew breath I’m hearing those who know say. It’s the mistress will bring trouble on him if he sets a foot in this house. It’s ‘Mrs. O’Grady,’ she’ll be saying, ‘hold your tongue or I’ll get shot iv ye.’ But she’ll tell. There’s not one person she’ll meet that she won’t tell, she’ll be that swollen with pride.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“Indeed and I have. He comes on his bicycle after dark, and he knocks and she lets him in. Did ye hear the set-to with the mistress and Mrs. Fitzgerald over the key last night? Now she won’t give Mrs. Fitzgerald a second latchkey, and himself there standing on the steps of a night with all the Black-and-Tans in Dublin looking at him. I’ve seen him indeed; but I wouldn’t know him, for he’s that quiet he won’t look at ye, and he’s muffled up round the neck that ye can’t say what’s his eyes and what’s his chin.”

“Well, let’s do our parts and not talk.”

“And who should I be talking to? There’s only O’Grady and Polly, who’s sharp enough herself for a young girl, God save her, and on Sundays I go to my sister regular, and she so full of her own troubles that she’s no time for mine. Will you be wanting your tea now?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. O’Grady; I’ll make it myself later.”

“And what would you be doing that for at all? I’ll be wetting my own tea when I do go down, and I’ll do yours at the same time and send it up by Polly.”

Mrs. O’Grady was about to withdraw when she waxed enthusiastic.

“The baby, he’s a dote!” she exclaimed, “a dote, and exactly like his father, and there are two beautiful boys away at school, real dotes. There’s a photo of them on the mantelpiece. My legs are run off me this minute what with the mistress upstairs and Mrs. Fitzgerald downstairs, and it’s extra she’s after charging for the flat; but it’s no extra she’s after giving me.”

“Well, I hope they’ll be all right.”

“Indeed, mum, and I don’t like it, not at all, at all. Only the other morning, when the luggage was outside the door, three men passed and looked down into the area, and Polly says they were Black-and-Tans in civies.”

“Rubbish, Mrs. O’Grady, they couldn’t know already.”

“Couldn’t they?” She tossed her head. “Couldn’t they?” she repeated darkly. “There’s trouble coming to this house, and don’t you forget it.”

She gave a sniff and departed.

CHAPTER XVII
CAPTURE OF A CABINET MINISTER

Himself was out; but I was not alone. Mrs. Slaney sat upon my sofa, and Mrs. Slaney smoked a cigarette, and once again Mrs. Slaney poured into my dulled ears the story of Ireland’s martyrdom.

“It’s going to be a cold night,” she said, in the middle of a fiery sentence.

“Cold?” My voice was like the night. “I must take my bulbs in from the window; I don’t want them frost nipped now.” I rose and went to the window and opened it with difficulty, for the sash had never been mended.

“I really mustn’t stay long,” said Mrs. Slaney, staying where she was. “I have letters to write. Are those tulips? They have come on.”

“Yes.” I carefully placed the last pot on the floor, shut the window carefully, and crawled up from my lowly position on the floor. There was silence for a moment after that. Mrs. Slaney smoked thoughtfully, and I returned to my seat.

Suddenly the silence was broken by a shrill whistle. It made us start.

“I wonder if Mr. Fitzgerald is in?” said Mrs. Slaney suddenly.

“I don’t know,” I said, staring from the lighted room into the dark outside.

“You hear him come and go, I suppose?”

“I seldom hear people come and go. I don’t listen. After all, it doesn’t interest me.”

“I always feel so uneasy when he’s in the house. Poor hunted man! You’ve not seen him, I suppose?”

I shook my head. “Never.”

“Awful for Mrs. Fitzgerald! Those brutes might shoot him at any moment. But I suppose she’s used to it.”

“Perhaps he gets a certain amount of fun out of the life. No man can call it dull eluding the Black-and-Tans.”

“Fun! Being hunted to death like the vermin of the fields. Fun! Battered from pillar to post. The military are getting more and more audacious. I often wonder where they will stop. Women are frightened to have a bath now in case they come in, and they raided a convent the other day. Thank goodness, there was an outcry at that! A convent which had never admitted a man inside it. And at night. I heard the Mother Superior said the nuns behaved magnificently, there was no outcry from them, and when it was all over they went to the Chapel and tendered thanks to the Blessed Virgin that they had come to no harm.”

“I heard it said that the raid was conducted with great civility.”

“Yes. I believe those special raiders were not a bad lot of men. But the indignity of it! Would nuns intrigue and be interested in politics?”

“I really couldn’t say. You know best, of course. But there must have been some reason for the raid.”

“None whatever. It was simply to show their power. The love of terrifying people. But they didn’t terrify the nuns.”

“A Unionist told me the other day that the Irish question would be settled only when education was taken completely out of the Church’s hands and no religion was taught in the schools. I believe he’s right.”

“Every man and woman worth the name in Ireland would die before they consented to such a thing.”

“It’ll come to pass. What’s really wrong with Ireland is religion. You can say what you like. The religion is distorted, people aren’t balanced about it. I’d like to see a wave of agnosticism pass through the country, and after that people might take up religion at its true value.”

“Of course we both think so differently. But I tell you that such a thing can never happen in this country.”

A blaze of light shone suddenly into the room. There were loud sounds of throbbing engines. We both started to our feet when a knock, which should have roused all the dead in Ireland, shook the front door.

Mrs. Slaney’s hand flew to her heart.

“What’s that?” I hardly heard her voice above the noise.

She moved towards the door and then back again. Again the house was shaken with the knocking.

Mrs. Slaney put out the light.

“Don’t do that,” I said sharply. “You’ll draw fire.”

She put it up again, and ran out of the room and halfway up the stairs, as if she remembered something. Then she turned and came back.

I went out on the landing. By this time Polly had opened the front door, and figures in uniform poured into the hall. “Open that door,” the first man ordered, pointing at the Fitzgeralds’ sitting-room. “Wide.” Polly obeyed, and the stream poured in. Others were coming up the stairs when a shout, “Got him!” halted them. “It’s all right, boys!” The people on the stairs went down into the hall again, and began to go through the pockets of the coats hanging there.

“His bicycle!” exclaimed the officer in charge. “Put her on board, some one.”

Mrs. Slaney and I leant over the stairs. I wondered if Mrs. Fitzgerald felt as upset as I did.

The murmur of voices mounted all the time from the flat below. There was an occasional laugh. Through the half-opened door, which showed us the sitting-room, we could see the baby laughing and being handed round by the Auxiliaries. The infant Fergus created a good atmosphere, and seemed delighted with his new friends, who had wakened him to search the cot. Finally Mrs. Slaney gathered herself together for the attack.

The Auxiliaries seemed delighted with their capture, and were obviously ready to be amiable. Mrs. Slaney descended upon them, her wooden heels tapping as she walked, and the light from the hall lamp glinted on a tortoiseshell comb that rose from her hair.

“Who is the officer in command of the raid?” she demanded.

A youthful Auxiliary turned towards her, the baby kicking in his arms. His revolvers rested peacefully round his waist and in holsters on his legs.

“The officer in charge.” He beamed upon her as a friend.

A tall gaunt man, with a face like a red Indian, appeared in the doorway.

“Who wants me?”