Chapter 1

I. LADY BOUNTIFUL

Society in the west of Ireland is beautifully tolerant. A man may do many things there, things frowned on elsewhere, without losing caste. He may, for instance, drink heavily, appearing in public when plainly intoxicated, and no one thinks much the worse of him. He may be in debt up to the verge of bankruptcy and yet retain his position in society. But he may not marry his cook. When old Sir Tony Corless did that, he lost caste. He was a baronet of long descent, being, in fact, the fifth Corless who held the title.

Castle Affey was a fine old place, one of the best houses in the county, but people stopped going there and stopped asking Sir Tony to dinner. They could not stand the cook.

Bridie Malone was her name before she became Lady Corless. She was the daughter of the blacksmith in the village at the gates of Castle Affey, and she was at least forty years younger than Sir Tony. People shook their heads when they heard of the marriage and said that the old gentleman must be doting.

“It isn’t even as if she was a reasonably good-looking girl,” said Captain Corless, pathetically. “If she had been a beauty I could have understood it, but--the poor old dad!”

Captain Corless was the son of another, a very different Lady Corless, and some day he in his turn would become Sir Tony. Meanwhile, having suffered a disabling wound early in the war, he had secured a pleasant and fairly well-paid post as inspector under the Irish Government. No one, not even Captain Corless himself, knew exactly what he inspected, but there was no uncertainty about the salary. It was paid quarterly.

Bridie Malone was not good-looking. Captain Corless was perfectly right about that. She was very imperfectly educated. She could sign her name, but the writing of anything except her name was a difficulty to her. She could read, though only if the print were large and the words were not too long.

But she possessed certain qualities not very common in any class. She had, for instance, quite enough common sense to save her from posing as a great lady. Sir Tony lost caste by his marriage. Bridie Malone did not sacrifice a single friend when she became Lady Corless. She remained on excellent terms with her father, her six younger sisters, and her four brothers. She remained on excellent terms with everyone in the village.

In the big house of which she became mistress she had her difficulties at first. The other servants, especially the butler and the upper housemaid, resented her promotion and sought new situations. Bridie replaced them, replaced the whole staff with relatives of her own.

Castle Affey was run by the Malone family. Danny, a young man who helped his father in the forge, became butler. Sarah Malone, Susy Malone, and Mollie Malone swept the floors, made the beds, and lit the fires. Bridie taught them their duties and saw that they did them thoroughly. Though she was Lady Corless, she took her meals with her family in the servants’ hall and made it her business to see that Sir Tony was thoroughly comfortable and well-fed. The old gentleman had never been so comfortable in his life, or better fed.

He had never been so free from worry. Bridie took over the management of the garden and farm. She employed her own relatives. There was an ample supply of them, for almost everyone in the village was related to the Malones. She paid good wages, but she insisted on getting good work, and she never allowed her husband to trouble about anything.

Old Sir Tony found life a much easier business than he had ever found it before. He chuckled when Captain Corless, who paid an occasional visit to Castle Affey, pitied him.

“You think I’m a doddering old fool,” he said, “but, by gad, Tony, the most sensible thing I ever did in my life was to marry Bridie Malone! If you’re wise you’ll take on your stepmother as housekeeper here and general manager after I’m gone. Not that I’m thinking of going. I’m seventy-two. You know that, Tony. But living as I do now, without a single thing to bother me, I’m good for another twenty years--or thirty. In fact, I don’t see why the deuce I should ever die at all! It’s worry and work which kill men, and I’ve neither one nor the other.”

It was Lady Corless’ custom to spend the evenings with her husband in the smoking-room. When he had dined--and he always dined well--he settled down in a large armchair with a decanter of whisky and a box of cigars beside him.

There was always, summer and winter, a fire burning on the open hearth. There was a good supply of newspapers and magazines, for Sir Tony, though he lived apart from the world, liked to keep in touch with politics and the questions of the day. Lady Corless sat opposite him on a much less comfortable chair and knitted stockings. If there was any news in the village, she told it to him, and he listened, for, like many old men, he took a deep interest in his neighbour’s affairs.

If there was anything important or curious in the papers, he read it out to her. But she very seldom listened. Her strong common sense saved her from taking any interest in the war while it lasted, the peace, when it was discussed, or politics, which gurgle on through war and peace alike.

With the care of a great house, a garden, and eighty acres of land on her shoulders, she had no mental energy to spare for public affairs of any kind. Between half-past ten and eleven Sir Tony went to bed. He was an old gentleman of regular habits, and by that time the whisky-decanter was always empty. Lady Cor-less helped him upstairs, saw to it that his fire was burning and his pyjamas warm. She dealt with buttons and collar-studs, which are sometimes troublesome to old gentlemen who have drunk port at dinner and whisky afterwards. She wound his watch for him, and left him warm and sleeping comfortably.

One evening Sir Tony read from an English paper a paragraph which caught Lady Corless’ attention. It was an account of the means by which the Government hoped to mitigate the evils of the unemployment likely to follow demobilisation and the closing of munition works. An out-of-work benefit of twenty-five shillings a week struck her as a capital thing, likely to become very popular. For the first time in her life she became slightly interested in politics.

Sir Tony passed from that paragraph to another, which dealt with the future of Dantzig. Lady Corless at once stopped listening to what he read. She went on knitting her stocking; but instead of letting her thoughts work on the problems of the eggs laid by her hens, and the fish for Sir Tony’s dinner the next day, she turned over in her mind the astonishing news that the Government actually proposed to pay people, and to pay them well, for not working. The thing struck her as too good to be true, and she suspected that there must be some saving clause, some hidden trap which would destroy the value of the whole scheme.

After she had put Sir Tony to bed she went back to the smoking-room and opened the paper from which the news had been read. It took her some time to find the paragraph. Her search was rendered difficult by the fact that the editor, much interested, apparently, in a subject called the League of Nations, had tucked this really important piece of news into a corner of a back page. In the end, when she discovered what she wanted, she was not much better off. The print was small. The words were long and of a very unusual kind. Lady Corless could not satisfy herself about their meaning. She folded the paper up and put it safely into a drawer in the kitchen dresser before she went to bed.

Next day, rising early, as she always did, she fed her fowls and set the morning’s milk in the dairy. She got Sir Tony’s breakfast ready at nine o’clock and took it up to him. She saw to it that Danny, who was inclined to be lazy, was in his pantry polishing silver. She made it clear to Sarah, Susy, and Molly that she really meant the library to be thoroughly cleaned. It was a room which was never occupied, and the three girls saw no sense in sweeping the floor and dusting the backs of several thousand books. But their sister was firm and they had learnt to obey her.

Without troubling to put on a hat or to take off her working apron, Lady Corless got on her bicycle and rode down to her father’s forge. She had in her pocket the newspaper which contained the important paragraph.

Old Malone laid aside a cart-wheel to which he was fitting a new rim and followed his daughter into the house. He was much better educated than she was and had been for many years a keen and active politician. He took in the meaning of the paragraph at once.

“Gosh!” he said. “If that’s true--and I’m not saying it is true; but, if it is, it’s the best yet. It’s what’s been wanted in Ireland this long time.”

He read the paragraph through again, slowly and carefully.

“Didn’t I tell you?” he said, “didn’t I tell everyone when the election was on, that the Sinn Feiners was the lads to do the trick for us? Didn’t I say that without we’d get a republic in Ireland the country would do no good? And there’s the proof of it.”

He slapped the paper heartily with his hand. To Lady Corless, whose mind was working rapidly, his reasoning seemed a little inconclusive. It even struck her that an Irish republic, had such a thing really come into being, might not have been able to offer the citizens the glorious chance of a weekly pension of twenty-five shillings. But she was aware that politics is a complex business in which she was not trained. She said nothing. Her father explained his line of thought.

“If them fellows over in England,” he said, “weren’t terrible frightened of the Sinn Feiners, would they be offering us the likes of that to keep us quiet? Bedamn, but they would not. Nobody ever got a penny out of an Englishman yet, without he’d frightened him first. And it’s the Sinn Feiners done that. There’s the why and the wherefore of it to you. Twenty-five shillings a week! It ought to be thirty shillings, so it ought. But sure, twenty-five shillings is something, and I’d be in favour of taking it, so I would. Let the people of Ireland take it, I say, as an instalment of what’s due to them, and what they’ll get in the latter end, please God!”

“Can you make out how a man’s to get it?” said Lady Corless.

“Man!” said old Malone. “Man! No, but man and woman. There isn’t a girl in the country, let alone a boy, but what’s entitled to it, and I’d like to see the police or anyone else interfering with them getting it.”

“Will it be paid out of the post office like the Old Age Pensions?” said Lady Corless.

“I don’t know will it,” said her father, “but that way or some other way it’s bound to be paid, and all anyone has to do is to go over to what they call the Labour Exchange, at Dunbeg, and say there’s no work for him where he lives. Then he’ll get the money. It’s what the young fellow in that office is there for, is to give the money, and by damn if he doesn’t do it there’ll be more heard about the matter!”

Old Malone, anxious to spread the good news, left the room and walked down to the public house at the corner of the village street. Lady Corless went into the kitchen and found her three youngest sisters drinking tea. They sat on low stools before the fire and had a black teapot with a broken spout standing on the hearth at their feet. The tea in the pot was very black and strong. Lady Corless addressed them solemnly.

“Katey-Ann,” she said, “listen to me now, and let you be listening too, Onnie, and let Honoria stop scratching her head and attend to what I’m saying to the whole of you. I’m taking you on up at the big house as upper house-maid, Katey-Ann.”

“And what’s come over Sarah,” said Katey-Ann. “Is she going to be married?”

“Never mind you about Sarah,” said Lady Corless, “but attend to me. You’re the under-housemaid, Onnie, so you are, in place of your sister Susy, and Honoria here is kitchen-maid. If anyone comes asking you questions that’s what you are and that’s what you’re to say. Do you understand me now? But mind this. I don’t want you up at the house, ne’er a one of you. You’ll stay where you are and you’ll do what you’re doing, looking after your father and drinking tea, the same as before, only your wages will be paid regular to you. Where’s Thady?”

Thady Malone was the youngest of the family.

Since Dan became butler at Castle Affey, Thady had given his father such help as he could at the forge. Lady Corless found him seated beside the bellows smoking a cigarette. His red hair was a tangled shock. His face and hands were extraordinarily dirty. He was enjoying a leisure hour or two while his father was at the public house. To his amazement he found himself engaged as butler and valet to Sir Tony Corless of Castle Affey.

“But you’ll not be coming up to the house,” said Lady Corless, “neither by day nor night. Mind that. I’d be ashamed for anyone to see you, so I would, for if you washed your face for the Christmas it’s the last time you did it.”

That afternoon, after Sir Tony’s luncheon had been served, Danny, Sarah, Susy and Molly were formally dismissed. Their insurance cards were stamped and their wages were paid up to date. It was explained to them at some length, with many repetitions but quite clearly, that though dismissed they were to continue to do their work as before. The only difference in their position was that their wages would no longer be paid by Sir Tony. They would receive much larger wages, the almost incredible sum of twenty-five shillings a week, from the Government. Next day the four Malones drove over to Dunbeg and applied for out-of-work pay at the Labour Exchange. After due inquiries and the signing of some papers by Lady Cor-less, their claims were admitted. Four farm labourers, two gardeners, and a groom, all cousins of Lady Corless, were dismissed in the course of the following week. Seven young men from the village, all of them related to Lady Corless, were formally engaged. The insurance cards of the dismissed men were properly stamped. They were indubitably out of work. They received unemployment pay.

After that, the dismissal of servants, indoor and out, became a regular feature of life at Castle Affey. On Monday morning, Lady Corless went down to the village and dismissed everyone whom she had engaged the week before. Her expenditure in insurance stamps was considerable, for she thought it desirable to stamp all cards for at least a month back. Otherwise her philanthropy did not cost her much and she had very little trouble. The original staff went on doing the work at Castle Affey. After three months every man and woman in the village had passed in and out of Sir Tony’s service, and everyone was drawing unemployment pay.

The village became extremely prosperous. New hats, blouses, and entire costumes of the most fashionable kind were to be seen in the streets every Sunday. Large sums of money were lost and won at coursing matches. Nearly everyone had a bicycle, and old Malone bought, second hand, a rather dilapidated motor-car. Work of almost every kind ceased entirely, except in the big house, and nobody got out of bed before ten o’clock. In mere gratitude, rents of houses were paid to Sir Tony which had not been paid for many years before.

Lady Corless finally dismissed herself. She did not, of course, resign the position of Lady Corless. It is doubtful whether she could have got twenty-five shillings a week if she had. The Government does not seem to have contemplated the case of unemployed wives. What she did was to dismiss Bridie Malone, cook at Castle Affey before her marriage. She had been married, and therefore, technically speaking, unemployed for nearly two years, but that did not seem to matter. She secured the twenty-five shillings a week and only just failed to get another five shillings which she claimed on the ground that her husband was very old and entirely dependent on her. She felt the rejection of this claim to be an injustice.

Captain Corless, after a long period of pleasant leisure, found himself suddenly called on to write a report on the working of the Unemployment-Pay Scheme in Ireland. With a view to doing his work thoroughly he hired a motorcar and made a tour of some of the more picturesque parts of the country. He so arranged his journeys that he was able to stop each night at a place where there was a fairly good hotel. He made careful inquiries everywhere, and noted facts for the enlightenment of the Treasury, for whose benefit his report was to be drawn up. He also made notes, in a private book, of some of the more amusing and unexpected ways in which the scheme worked. He found himself, in the course of his tour, close to Castle Affey, and, being a dutiful son, called on his father.

He found old Sir Tony in a particularly good humour. He also found matter enough to fill his private note-book.

“No telling tales, Tony, now,” said the old man. “No reports about Castle Affey to the Government. Do you hear me now? Unless you give me your word of honour not to breathe what I’m going to tell you to anybody except your friends, I won’t say a word.”

“I promise, of course,” said Captain Corless.

“Your step-mother’s a wonderful woman,” said Sir Tony, “a regular lady bountiful, by Jove! You wouldn’t believe how rich everybody round here is now, and all through her. I give you my word, Tony, if the whisky was to be got--which, of course, it isn’t now-a-days--there isn’t a man in the place need go to bed sober from one week’s end to another. They could all afford it. And it’s your step-mother who put the money into their pockets. Nobody else would have thought of it. Look here, you’ve heard of this unemployment-pay business, I suppose?”

“I’m conducting an inquiry about it at the present moment.”

“Then I won’t say another word,” said Sir Tony. “But it’s a pity. You’d have enjoyed the story.”

“I needn’t put everything I’m told into my report,” said Captain Corless. “A good deal of what I hear isn’t true.”

“Well, then, you can just consider my story to be an invention,” said Sir Tony.

Captain Corless listened to the story. When it was finished he shook hands with his father.

“Dad,” he said, “I apologise to you. I said--There’s no harm in telling you now that I said you were an old fool when you married the blacksmith’s daughter. I see now that I was wrong. You married the only woman in Ireland who understands how to make the most of the new law. Why, everybody else in your position is cursing this scheme as the ruin of the country, and Lady Corless is the only one who’s tumbled to the idea of using it to make the people happy and contented. She’s a great woman.”

“But don’t tell on us, Tony,” said the old man. “Honour bright, now, don’t tell!”

“My dear Dad, of course not. Anyway, they wouldn’t believe me if I did.”

II. THE STRIKE BREAKER

The train was an hour-and-a-quarter late at Finnabeg. Sir James McClaren, alone in a first-class smoking compartment, was not surprised. He had never travelled in Ireland before, but he held a belief that time is very little accounted of west of the Shannon. He looked out of the window at the rain-swept platform. It seemed to him that every passenger except himself was leaving the train at Finnabeg. This did not surprise him much. There was only one more station, Dunadea, the terminus of the branch line on which Sir James was travelling. It lay fifteen miles further on, across a desolate stretch of bog. It was not to be supposed that many people wanted to go to Dunadea.

Sir James looking out of his window, noticed that the passengers who alighted did not leave the station. They stood in groups on the platform and talked to each other. They took no notice of the rain, though it was very heavy.

Now and then one or two of them came to Sir James’ carriage and peered in through the window. They seemed interested in him. A tall young priest stared at him for a long time. Two commercial travellers joined the priest and looked at Sir James. A number of women took the place of the priest and the commercial travellers when they went away. Finally, the guard, the engine driver, and the station master came and looked in through the window. They withdrew together and sat on a barrow at the far end of the platform. They lit their pipes and consulted together. The priest joined them and offered advice. Sir James became a little impatient.

Half an hour passed. The engine driver, the station master, and the guard knocked the ashes out of their pipes and walked over to Sir James’ compartment. The guard opened the door.

“Is it Dunadea you’re for, your honour?” he said.

“Yes,” said Sir James. “When are you going on?”

The guard turned to the engine driver.

“It’s what I’m after telling you,” he said, “it’s Dunadea the gentleman’s for.”

“It might be better for him,” said the engine driver, “if he was to content himself with Finnabeg for this day at any rate.”

“Do you hear that, your honour?” said the guard. “Michael here, says it would be better for you to stay in Finnabeg.”

“There’s a grand hotel, so there is,” said the station master, “the same that’s kept by Mrs. Mulcahy, and devil the better you’ll find between this and Dublin.”

Sir James looked from one man to the other in astonishment. Nowadays the public is accustomed to large demands from railway workers, demands for higher wages and shorter hours. But Sir James had never before heard of an engine driver who tried to induce a passenger to get out of his train fifteen miles short of his destination.

“I insist,” he said abruptly, “on your taking me on to Dunadea.”

“It’s what I told you all along, Michael,” said the guard. “He’s a mighty determined gentleman, so he is. I knew that the moment I set eyes on him.”

The guard was perfectly right. Sir James was a man of most determined character. His career proved it. Before the war he had been professor of economics in a Scottish University, lecturing to a class of ten or twelve students for a salary of £250 a year. When peace came he was the head of a newly-created Ministry of Strikes, controlling a staff of a thousand or twelve hundred men and women, drawing a salary of £2,500 a year. Only a man of immense determination can achieve such results. He had garnered in a knighthood as he advanced. It was the reward of signal service to the State when he held the position of Chief Controller of Information and Statistics.

“Let him not be saying afterwards that he didn’t get a proper warning,” said the engine driver.

He walked towards his engine as he spoke. The guard and the station master followed him.

“I suppose now, Michael,” said the guard, “that you’ll not be wanting me.”

“I will not,” said the engine driver. “The train will do nicely without you for as far as I’m going to take her.”

Sir James did not hear either the guard’s question or the driver’s answer. He did hear, with great satisfaction, what the station master said next.

“Are you right there now?” the man shouted, “for if you are it’s time you were starting.”

He unrolled a green flag and waved it. He blew a shrill blast on his whistle. The driver stepped into the cab of the engine and handled his levers. The train started.

Sir James leaned back in the corner of his compartment and smiled. The track over which he travelled was badly laid and the train advanced by jerks and bumps. But the motion was pleasant to Sir James. Any forward movement of that train would have been pleasant to him. Each bump and jerk brought him a little nearer to Dunadea and therefore a little nearer to Miss Molly Dennison. Sir James was very heartily in love with a girl who seemed to him to be the most beautiful and the most charming in the whole world. Next day, such was his good fortune, he was to marry her. Under the circumstances a much weaker man than Sir James would have withstood the engine driver and resisted the invitation of Mrs. Mulcahy’s hotel in Finnabeg. Under the circumstances even an intellectual man of the professor type was liable to pleasant day dreams.

Sir James’ thoughts went back to the day, six months before, when he had first seen Miss Molly Dennison. She had been recommended to him by a friend as a young lady likely to make an efficient private secretary. Sir James, who had just become Head of the Ministry of Strikes, wanted a private secretary. He appointed Miss Dennison, and saw her for the first time when she presented herself in his office. At that moment his affection was born. It grew and strengthened day by day. Miss Molly’s complexion was the radiant product of the soft, wet, winds of Connaugh, which had blown on her since her birth. Not even four years’ work in Government offices in London had dulled her cheeks. Her smile had the fresh innocence of a child’s and she possessed a curious felicity of manner which was delightful though a little puzzling. Her view of strikes and the important work of the Ministry was fresh and quite unconventional. Sir James, who had all his life moved among serious and earnest people, found Miss Molly’s easy cheerfulness very fascinating. Even portentous words like syndicalism, which rang in other people’s ears like the passing bells of our social order, moved her to airy laughter. There were those, oldish men and slightly less oldish women, who called her flippant. Sir James offered her his hand, his heart, his title, and a share of his £2,500 a year. Miss Molly accepted all four, resigned her secretaryship and went home to her father’s house in Dunadea to prepare her trousseau.

The train stopped abruptly. But even the bump and the ceasing of noise did not fully arouse Sir James from his pleasant dreams. He looked out of the window and satisfied himself that he had not reached Dunadea station or indeed any other station. The rain ran down the window glass, obscuring his view of the landscape. He was dimly aware of a wide stretch of grey-brown bog, of drifting grey clouds and of a single whitewashed cottage near the railway line. He lit a cigarette and lay back again. Molly’s face floated before his eyes. The sound of Molly’s voice was fresh in his memory. He thought of the next day and the return journey across the bog with Molly by his side.

At the end of half an hour he awoke to the fact that the train was still at rest. He looked out again and saw nothing except the rain, the bog, and the cottage. This time he opened the window and put out his head. He looked up the line and down it. There was no one to be seen.

“The signals,” thought Sir James, “must be against us.” He looked again, first out of one window, then out of the other. There was no signal in sight. The single line of railway ran unbroken across the bog, behind the train and in front of it. Sir James, puzzled, and a little wet, drew back into his compartment and shut the window. He waited, with rapidly growing impatience, for another half hour. Nothing happened. Then he saw a man come out of the cottage near the line. He was carrying a basket in one hand and a teapot in the other. He approached the train. He came straight to Sir James’ compartment and opened the door. Sir James recognised the engine driver.

“I was thinking,” said the man, “that maybe your honour would be glad of a cup of tea and a bit of bread. I am sorry there is no butter, but, sure, butter is hard to come by these times.”

He laid the teapot on the floor and put the basket on the seat in front of Sir James. He unpacked it, taking out a loaf of home made bread, a teacup, a small bottle of milk, and a paper full of sugar.

“It’s not much to be offering a gentleman like yourself,” he said, “but it’s the best we have, and seeing that you’ll be here all night and best part of to-morrow you’ll be wanting something to eat.”

Sir James gasped with astonishment.

“Here all night!” he said. “Why should we be here all night? Has the engine broken down?”

“It has not,” said the driver.

“Then you must go on,” said Sir James. “I insist on your going on at once.”

The driver poured out a cup of tea and handed it to Sir James. Then he sat down and began to talk in a friendly way.

“Sure, I can’t go on,” he said, “when I’m out on strike.”

Sir James was so startled that he upset a good deal of tea. As Head of the Ministry of Strikes he naturally had great experience, but he had never before heard of a solitary engine driver going on strike in the middle of a bog.

“The way of it is this,” the driver went on. “It was giv out, by them that does be managing things that there was to be a general strike on the first of next month. You might have heard of that, for it was in all the papers.”

Sir James had heard of it. It was the subject of many notes and reports in his Ministry.

“But this isn’t the 1st of next month,” he said.

“It is not,” said the driver. “It’s no more than the 15th of this month. But the way I’m placed at present, it wouldn’t be near so convenient to me to be striking next month as it is to be striking now. There’s talk of moving me off this line and putting me on to the engine that does be running into Athlone with the night mail; and it’s to-morrow the change is to be made. Now I needn’t tell you that Athlone’s a mighty long way from where we are this minute.”

He paused and looked at Sir James with an intelligent smile.

“My wife lives in the little house beyond there,” he said pointing out of the window to the cottage. “And what I said to myself was this: If I am to be striking--which I’ve no great wish to do--but if it must be--and seemingly it must--I may as well do it in the convenientest place I can; for as long as a man strikes the way he’s told, there can’t be a word said to him; and anyway the 1st of next month or the 15th of this month, what’s the differ? Isn’t one day as good as another?”

He evidently felt that his explanation was sufficient and satisfactory. He rose to his feet and opened the door of the compartment. “I’m sorry now,” he said, “if I’m causing any inconvenience to a gentleman like yourself. But what can I do? I offered to leave you behind at Finnabeg, but you wouldn’t stay. Anyway the night’s warm and if you stretch yourself on the seat there you won’t know it till morning, and then I’ll bring you over another cup of tea so as you won’t be hungry. It’s a twenty-four hour strike, so it is; and I won’t be moving on out of this before two o’clock or may be half past. But what odds? The kind of place Dunadea is, a day or two doesn’t matter one way or another, and if it was the day after to-morrow in place of to-morrow you got there it would be the same thing in the latter end.”

He climbed out of the compartment as he spoke and stumped back through the rain to his cottage. Sir James was left wondering how the people of Dunadea managed to conduct the business of life when one day was the same to them as another and the loss of a day now and then did not matter. He was quite certain that the loss of a day mattered a great deal to him, his position being what it was. He wondered what Miss Molly Dennison would think when he failed to appear at her father’s house that evening for dinner; what she would think--the speculation nearly drove him mad--when he did not appear in the church next day. He put on an overcoat, took an umbrella and set off for the engine driver’s cottage. He had to climb down a steep embankment and then cross a wire fence. He found it impossible to keep his umbrella up, which distressed him, for he was totally unaccustomed to getting wet.

He found the driver, who seemed to be a good and domesticated man, sitting at his fireside with a baby on his knee. His wife was washing clothes in a corner of the kitchen.

“Excuse me,” said Sir James, “but my business in Dunadea is very important. There will be serious trouble if----”

“There’s no use asking me to go on with the train,” said the driver, “for I can’t do it. I’d never hear the last of it if I was to be a blackleg.”

The woman at the washtub looked up.

“Don’t be talking that way, Michael,” she said, “let you get up and take the gentleman along to where he wants to go.”

“I will not,” said the driver, “I’d do it if I could but I won’t have it said that I was the one to break the strike.”

It was very much to the credit of Sir James that he recognised the correctness of the engine driver’s position. It is not pleasant to be held up twenty-four hours in the middle of a bog. It is most unpleasant to be kept away from church on one’s own wedding day. But Sir James knew that strikes are sacred things, far more sacred than weddings. He hastened to agree with the engine driver.

“I know you can’t go on,” he said, “nothing would induce me to ask you such a thing. But perhaps---”

The woman at the washtub did not reverence strikes or understand the labour movement. She spoke abruptly.

“Have sense the two of you,” she said, “What’s to hinder you taking the gentleman into Dunadea, Michael?”

“It’s what I can’t do nor won’t,” said her husband.

“I’m not asking you to,” said Sir James. “I understand strikes thoroughly and I know you can’t do it. All I came here for was to ask you to tell me where I could find a telegraph office.”

“There’s no telegraphic office nearer than Dunadea,” said the engine driver, “and that’s seven miles along the railway and maybe nine if you go round by road.”

Sir James looked out at the rain. It was thick and persistent. A strong west wind swept it in sheets across the bog. He was a man of strong will and great intellectual power; but he doubted if he could walk even seven miles along the sleepers of a railway line against half a gale of wind, wearing on his feet a pair of patent leather boots bought for a wedding.

“Get up out of that, Michael,” said the woman, “And off with you to Dunadea with the gentleman’s telegram. You’ll break no strike by doing that, so not another word out of your head.”

“I’ll--I’ll give you ten shillings with pleasure,” said Sir James, “I’ll give you a pound if you’ll take a message for me to Mr. Dennison’s house.”

“Anything your honour chooses to give,” said the woman, “will be welcome, for we are poor people. But it’s my opinion that Michael ought to do it for nothing seeing it’s him and his old strike that has things the way they are.”

“To listen to you talking,” said the driver, “anybody would think I’d made the strike myself; which isn’t true at all, for there’s not a man in the country that wants it less than me.”

Sir James tore a leaf from his note book and wrote a hurried letter to Miss Dennison. The engine driver tucked it into the breast pocket of his coat and trudged away through the rain. His wife invited Sir James to sit by the fire. He did so gladly, taking the stool her husband had left. He even, after a short time, found that he had taken the child on to his knee. It was a persistent child, which clung round his legs and stared at him till he took it up. The woman went on with her washing.

“What,” said Sir James, “is the immediate cause of this strike?”

“Cause!” she said. “There’s no cause, only foolishness. If it was more wages they were after I would say there was some sense in it. Or if it was less work they wanted you could understand it--though it’s more work and not less the most of the men in this country should be doing. But the strike that’s in it now isn’t what you might call a strike at all. It’s a demonstration, so it is. That’s what they’re saying anyway. It’s a demonstration in favour of the Irish Republic, which some of them play-boys is after getting up in Dublin. The Lord save us, would nothing do them only a republic?”

Two hours later Sir James went back to his railway carriage. He had listened with interest to the opinions of the engine driver’s wife on politics and the Labour Movement. He was convinced that a separate and independent Ministry of Strikes ought to be established in Dublin. His own office was plainly incapable of dealing with Irish conditions. He took from his bag a quantity of foolscap paper and set to work to draft a note to the Prime Minister on the needs and ideas of Irish Labour. He became deeply interested in his work and did not notice the passing time.

He was aroused by the appearance of Miss Molly Dennison at the door of his carriage. Her hair, which was blown about her face, was exceedingly wet. The water dripped from her skirt and sleeves of her jacket. Her complexion was as radiant and her smile as brilliant as ever.

“Hullo, Jimmy,” she said. “What a frowst! Fancy sitting in that poky little carriage with both windows shut. Get up and put away your silly old papers. If you come along at once we’ll just be in time for dinner.”

“How did you get here,” said Sir James. “I never thought--. In this weather--. How _did_ you get here?”

“On my bike, of course,” said Molly. “Did a regular sprint. Wind behind me. Going like blazes. I’d have done it in forty minutes, only Michael ran into a sheep and I had to wait for him.”

Sir James was aware that the engine driver, grinning broadly, was on the step of the carriage behind Molly.

“I lent Michael Dad’s old bike,” said Molly, “and barring the accident with the sheep, he came along very well.”

“What I’m thinking,” said the driver, “is that you’ll never be able to fetch back against the wind that does be in it. I wouldn’t say but you might do it, miss; but the gentleman wouldn’t be fit. He’s not accustomed to the like.”

“We’re not going to ride back,” said Molly. “You’re going to take us back on the engine, with the two bikes in the tender, on top of the coal.”

“I can’t do it, miss,” said the driver. “I declare to God I’d be afraid of my life to do it. Didn’t I tell you I was out on strike?”

“We oughtn’t to ask him,” said Sir James. “Surely, Molly, you must understand that. It would be an act of gross disloyalty on his part, disloyalty to his union, to the cause of labour. And any effort we make to persuade him---- My dear Molly, the right of collective bargaining which lies at the root of all strikes----”

Molly ignored Sir James and turned to the engine driver.

“Just you wait here five minutes,” she said, “till I get someone who knows how to talk to you.”

She jumped out of the carriage and ran down the railway embankment. Sir James and the engine driver watched her anxiously. “I wouldn’t wonder,” said Michael, “but it might be my wife she’s after.”

He was quite right. Five minutes later, Molly and the engine driver’s wife were climbing the embankment together.

“I don’t see,” said Sir James, “what your wife has to do with the matter.”

“By this time to-morrow,” said Michael, “you will see; if so be you’re married by then, which is what Miss Molly said you will be.”

His wife, with Molly after her, climbed into the carriage.

“Michael,” she said, “did the young lady tell you she’s to be married to-morrow?”

“She did tell me,” he said, “and I’m sorry for her. But what can I do? If I was to take that engine into Dunadea they’d call me a blackleg the longest day ever I lived.”

“I’d call you something a mighty deal worse if you don’t,” said his wife. “You and your strikes! Strikes, Moyah! And a young lady wanting to be married!”

Michael turned apologetically to Sir James.

“Women does be terrible set on weddings,” he said, “and that’s a fact.”

“That’ll do now, Michael,” said Molly; “stop talking and put the two bikes on the tender, and poke up your old fires or what ever it is you do to make your engine go.”

“Molly,” said Sir James, when Michael and his wife had left the carriage, “I’ve drawn up a note for the Prime Minister advising the establishment of a special Ministry of Strikes for Ireland. I feel that the conditions in this country are so peculiar that our London office cannot deal with them. I think perhaps I’d better suggest that he should put you at the head of the new office.”

“Your visit to Ireland is doing you good already,” said Molly. “You’re developing a sense of humour.”

III. THE FACULTY OF MEDICINE

Dr. Farelly, Medical Officer of Dunailin, volunteered for service with the R.A.M.C. at the beginning of the war. He had made no particular boast of patriotism. He did not even profess to be keenly interested in his profession or anxious for wider experience. He said, telling the simple truth, that life at Dunailin was unutterably dull, and that he welcomed war--would have welcomed worse things--for the sake of escaping a monotony which was becoming intolerable.

The army authorities accepted Dr. Farelly. The local Board of Guardians, which paid him a salary of £200 a year, agreed to let him go on the condition that he provided a duly qualified substitute to do his work while he was away. There a difficulty faced Dr. Farelly. Duly qualified medical men, willing to take up temporary jobs, are not plentiful in war time. And the job he had to offer--Dr. Farelly was painfully conscious of the fact--was not a very attractive one.

Dunailin is a small town in Western Connaught, seven miles from the nearest railway station. It possesses a single street, straggling and very dirty, a police barrack, a chapel, which seems disproportionately large, and seven shops. One of the shops is also the post office. Another belongs to John Conerney, the butcher. The remaining five are public houses, doing their chief business in whisky and porter, but selling, as side lines, farm seeds, spades, rakes, hoes, stockings, hats, blouses, ribbons, flannelette, men’s suits, tobacco, sugar, tea, postcards, and sixpenny novels. The chief inhabitants of the town are the priest, a benevolent but elderly man, who lives in the presbytery next the large chapel; Sergeant Rahilly, who commands the six members of the Royal Irish Constabulary and lives in the barrack; and Mr. Timothy Flanagan, who keeps the largest shop in the town and does a bigger business than anyone else in porter and whisky.

Dr. Farelly, standing on his doorstep with his pipe in his mouth, looked up and down the street. He was more than ever convinced that it might be very difficult to get a doctor to go to Dunailin, and still harder to get one to stay. The town lay, to all appearance, asleep under the blaze of the noonday August sun. John Conerney’s greyhounds, five of them, were stretched in the middle of the street, confident that they would be undisturbed. Sergeant Rahilly sunned himself on a bench outside the barrack door, and Mr. Flanagan sat in a room behind his shop nodding over the ledger in which his customers’ debts were entered. Dr. Farelly sighed. He had advertised for a doctor to take his place in all the likeliest papers, and had not been rewarded by a single answer. He was beginning to think that he must either resign his position at Dunailin or give up the idea of war service.

At half-past twelve the town stirred in its sleep and partially awoke. Paddy Doolan, who drove the mail cart, arrived from Derrymore. Dr. Farelly strolled down to the post office, seeking, but scarcely hoping for, a letter in reply to his advertisements. He was surprised and very greatly pleased when the postmistress handed him a large envelope, fat and bulging, bearing a Manchester postmark. The moment he opened it Dr. Farelly knew that he had got what he wanted, an application for the post he had to offer. He took out, one after another, six sheets of nicely-printed matter. These were testimonials signed by professors, tutors, surgeons, and doctors, all eloquent about the knowledge, skill, and personal integrity of one Theophilus Lovaway. Dr. Farelly stuffed these into his pocket. He had often written testimonials himself--in Ireland everyone writes them in scores--and he knew precisely what they were worth. He came at last to a letter, very neatly typewritten. It began formally:

“Dear Sir--I beg to offer myself as a candidate for the post of medical officer, temporary, for the town and district of Dunailin, on the terms of your advertisement in _The British Medical Journal_.”

Dr. Farelly, like the Etruscans in Macaulay’s poem, “could scare forbear to cheer.” He walked jauntily back to his house, relit his pipe and sat down to read the rest of the letter.

Theophilus Lovaway was apparently a garrulous person. He had covered four sheets with close typescript. He began by stating that he was only just qualified and had never practised anywhere. He hoped that Dr. Farelly would not consider his want of experience a disqualification. Dr. Farelly did not care in the least.

If Theophilus Lovaway was legally qualified to write prescriptions, nothing else mattered. The next three paragraphs of the letter--and they were all long--described, in detail, the condition of Lovaway’s health. He suffered, it appeared, from a disordered heart, weak lungs, and dyspepsia. But for these misfortunes, the letter went on, Theophilus would have devoted himself to the services of his country in her great need. Dr. Farelly sniffed. He had a prejudice against people who wrote or talked in that way. He began to feel less cheerful. Theophilus might come to Dunailin. It was very doubtful whether he would stay there long, his lungs, heart, and stomach being what they were.

The last half of the letter was painfully disconcerting. Two whole pages were devoted to an explanation of the writer’s wish to spend some time in the west of Ireland. Theophilus Lovaway had managed, in the middle of his professional reading, to study the literature of the Irish Renaissance. He had fallen deeply in love with the spirit of the Celtic peasantry. He described at some length what he thought that spirit was. “Tuned to the spiritual” was one of the phrases he used. “Desire-compelling, with the elusiveness of the rainbow’s end,” was another. Dr. Farelly grew despondent. If Theophilus expected life in Dunailin to be in the least like one of Mr. Yeats’ plays, he was doomed to a bitter disappointment and would probably leave the place in three weeks.

But Dr. Farelly was not going to give up hope without a struggle. He put the letter in his pocket and walked across the road to Timothy Flanagan’s shop.

“Flanagan,” he said, “I’ve got a man to take on my job here.”

“I’m glad to hear it, doctor,” said Flanagan. “It would be a pity now if something was to interfere with you, and you wanting to be off massacring the Germans. If the half of what’s in the papers is true, its massacring or worse them fellows want.”

“The trouble is,” said Dr. Farelly, “that the man I’ve got may not stay.”

“Why wouldn’t he stay? Isn’t Dunailin as good a place to be in as any other? Any sensible man----”

“That’s just it,” said Dr. Farelly. “I’m not at all sure that this is a sensible man. Just listen to this.”

He read aloud the greater part of the letter.

“Now what do you think of the man who wrote that?” he asked; “what kind of fellow would you say he was?”

“I’d say,” said Flanagan, “that he’s a simple, innocent kind of man; but I wouldn’t say there was any great harm in him.”

“I’m very much afraid,” said Dr. Farelly, “that he’s too simple and innocent. That’s the first thing I have against him. Look here now, Flanagan, if you or anyone else starts filling this young fellow up with whisky--it will be an easy enough thing to do, and I don’t deny that it’ll be a temptation. But if you do it you’ll have his mother or his aunt or someone over here to fetch him home again. That’s evidently the kind of man he is. And if I lose him I’m done, for I’ll never get anyone else.”

“Make your mind easy about that, doctor. Devil the drop of whisky he’ll get out of my shop while he’s here, and I’ll take care no other one will let him have a bottle. If he drinks at all it’ll be the stuff he brings with him in his own portmanteau.”

“Good,” said Dr. Farelly, “I’ll trust you about that. The next point is his health. You heard what he said about his heart and his lungs and his stomach.”

“He might die on us,” said Flanagan, “and that’s a fact.”

“Oh, he’ll not die. That sort of man never does die, not till he’s about ninety, anyhow. But it won’t do to let him fancy this place doesn’t agree with him. What you’ve got to do is to see that he gets a proper supply of good, wholesome food, eggs and milk, and all the rest of it.”

“If there’s an egg in the town he’ll get it,” said Flanagan, “and I’ll speak to Johnny Conerney about the meat that’s supplied to him. You may trust me, doctor, if that young fellow dies in Dunailin it’ll not be for want of food.”

“Thanks,” said Dr. Farelly; “and keep him cheerful, Flanagan, don’t let him mope. That brings me to the third point. You heard what he wrote about the Irish Renaissance and the Celtic spirit?”

“I heard it right enough,” said Flanagan, “but I’m not sure do I know the meaning of it.”

“The meaning of it,” said Dr. Farelly, “is fairies, just plain, ordinary fairies. That’s what he wants, and I don’t expect he’ll settle down contentedly unless he finds a few.”

“Sure you know well enough, doctor, that there’s no fairies in these parts. I don’t say there mightn’t have been some in times past, but any there was is now gone.”

“I know that,” said Dr. Farelly, “and I’m not asking you to go beating thorn bushes in the hopes of catching one. But if this fellow, Theophilus Lovaway--did ever you hear such a name?--if he wants fairies he must hear about them. You’ll have to get hold of a few people who go in for that sort of thing. Now what about Patsy Doolan’s mother? She’s old enough, and she looks like a witch herself.”

“If the like of the talk of Patsy Doolan’s mother would be giving him is any use I’ll see he’s satisfied. That old woman would talk the hind leg off a donkey about fairies or anything else if you were to give her a pint of porter, and I’ll do that. I’ll give it to her regular, so I will. I’d do more than that for you, doctor, for you’re a man I like, let alone that you’re going out to foreign parts to put the fear of God into them Germans, which is no more than they deserve.”

Dr. Farelly felt satisfied that Mr. Flanagan would do his best for Lovaway. And Mr. Flanagan was an important person. As the principal publican in the town, the chairman of all the councils, boards, and leagues there were, he had an enormous amount of influence. But Dr. Farelly was still a little uneasy. He went over to the police barrack and explained the situation to Sergeant Rahilly. The sergeant readily promised to do all he could to make Dunailin pleasant for the new doctor, and to keep him from getting into mischief or trouble. Only in the matter of Lovaway’s taste for Irish folk-lore and poetry the sergeant refused to promise any help. He was quite firm about this.

“It wouldn’t do for the police to be mixed up in that kind of work,” he said. “Politics are what a sergeant of police is bound to keep out of.”

“But hang it all,” said Dr. Farelly, “fairies aren’t politics.”

“They may or they may not be,” said the sergeant. “But believe me, doctor, the men that talks about them things, fairies and all that, is the same men that’s at the bottom of all the leagues in the country, and it wouldn’t do for me to be countenancing them. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you now, doctor. If I can’t get fairies for him I’ll see that anything that’s to be had in the district in the way of a fee for a lunatic or the like goes to the young fellow you’re bringing here. I’ll do that, and if there’s more I can do you can reckon on me--barring fairies and politics of all kinds.”

Mr. Flanagan and Sergeant Rahilly were trustworthy men. In a good cause they were prompt and energetic. Flanagan warned the other publicans in the town that they must not supply the new doctor with any whisky. He spoke seriously to John Conerney the butcher.

“Good meat, now, Johnny. The best you have, next to what joints you might be supplying to the priest or myself. He has a delicate stomach, the man that’s coming, and a bit of braxy mutton might be the death of him.”

He spoke to Paddy Doolan and told him that his old mother would be wanted to attend on the new doctor and must be ready whenever she was called for.

“Any old ancient story she might know,” he said, “about the rath beyond on the hill, or the way they shot the bailiff on the bog in the bad times, or about it’s not being lucky to meet a red-haired woman in the morning, anything at all that would be suitable she’ll be expected to tell. And if she does what she’s bid there’ll be a drop of porter for her in my house whenever she likes to call for it.”

Sergeant Rahilly talked in a serious but vague way to everyone he met about the importance of treating Dr. Lovaway well, and the trouble which would follow any attempt to rob or ill-use him.

Before Dr. Lovaway arrived his reputation was established in Dunailin. It was generally believed that he was a dipsomaniac, sent to the west of Ireland to be cured. It was said that he was very rich and had already ordered huge quantities of meat from Johnny Conerney. He was certainly of unsound mind: Mr. Flanagan’s hints about fairies settled that point. He was also a man of immense influence in Government circles, perhaps a near relation of the Lord-Lieutenant: Sergeant Rahilly’s way of speaking convinced everyone of that. The people were, naturally, greatly interested in their new doctor, and were prepared to give him a hearty welcome.

His arrival was a little disappointing. He drove from the station at Derrymore on Paddy Doolan’s car, and had only a small portmanteau with him. He was expected to come in a motor of his own with a vanload of furniture behind him. His appearance was also disappointing. He was a young man. He looked so very young that a stranger might have guessed his age at eighteen. He wore large, round spectacles, and had pink, chubby cheeks. In one respect only did he come up to popular expectation. He was plainly a young man of feeble intellect, for he allowed Paddy Doolan to overcharge him in the grossest way.

“Thanks be to God,” said Sergeant Rahilly to Mr. Flanagan, “it’s seldom anyone’s sick in this place. I wouldn’t like to be trusting the likes of that young fellow very far. But what odds? We’ve got to do the best we can for him, and my family’s healthy, anyway.”

Fate has a nasty trick of hitting us just where we feel most secure. The sergeant himself was a healthy man. His wife did not know what it was to be ill. Molly, his twelve-year old daughter, was as sturdy a child as any in the town. But Molly had an active mind and an enterprising character. On the afternoon of Doctor Lovaway’s arrival, her mother, father, and most other people being fully occupied, she made her way round the back of the village, climbed the wall of the doctor’s garden and established herself in an apple tree. She took six other children with her. There was an abundant crop of apples, but they were not nearly ripe. Molly ate until she could eat no more. The other children, all of them younger than Molly, stuffed themselves joyfully with the hard green fruit.

At eight o’clock that evening Molly complained of pains. Her mother put her to bed. At half-past eight Molly’s pains were considerably worse and she began to shriek. Mrs. Rahilly, a good deal agitated by the violence of the child’s yells, told the sergeant to go for the doctor. Sergeant Rahilly laid down his newspaper and his pipe. He went slowly down the street towards the doctor’s house. He was surprised to hear shrieks, not unlike Molly’s, in various houses as he passed. Mrs. Conerney, the butcher’s wife, rushed out of her door and told the sergeant that her little boy, a child of nine, was dying in frightful agony.

Mr. Flanagan was standing at the door of his shop. He beckoned to the sergeant.

“It’s lucky,” he said, “things happening the way they have on the very first night of the new doctor being here.”

“I don’t know so much about luck,” said Sergeant Rahilly. “What luck?”

“The half of the children in the town is took with it,” said Flanagan.

“You may call that luck if it pleases you,” said the sergeant. “But it’s not my notion of luck. My own Molly’s bellowing like a young heifer, and Mrs. Conerney’s boy is dying, so she tells me. If that’s luck I’d rather you had it than me.”

“I’m sorry for the childer,” said Flanagan; “but Mrs. Doolan, who’s in the shop this minute drinking porter, says it’ll do them no harm if they’re given a sup of water to drink out of the Holy Well beyond Tubber Neeve, and a handful of rowan berries laid on the stomach or where-ever else the pain might be.”

“Rowan berries be damned,” said the sergeant. “I’m off for the doctor; not that I’m expecting much from him. A young fellow with a face like that! I wish to God Dr. Farelly was back with us.”

“Doctors is no use,” said Flanagan, “neither one nor another, if it’s true what Mrs. Doolan says.”

“And what does Mrs. Doolan say?” asked the sergeant.

“I’m not saying I believe her,” said Flanagan, “and I’m not asking you to believe her, but what she says is----”

He whispered in the sergeant’s ear. The sergeant looked at him bewildered.

“Them ones?” he said, “Them ones? Now what might you and Mrs. Doolan be meaning by that, Timothy Flanagan?”

“Just fairies,” said Flanagan. “Mind you, I’m not saying I believe it.”

“Fairies be damned,” said the sergeant.

“They may be,” said Flanagan. “I’m not much of a one for fairies myself; but you’ll not deny, sergeant that it looks queer, all the children being took the same way at the same time. Anyhow, whether you believe what Mrs. Doolan says or not----”

“I do not believe it,” said the sergeant. “Not a word of it.”

“You needn’t,” said Flanagan, “I don’t myself. All I say is that it’s lucky a thing of the sort happening the very first evening the new doctor’s in the place. It’s fairies he’s after, remember that. It’s looking for fairies that brought him here. Didn’t Dr. Farelly tell me so himself and tell you? Wasn’t Dr. Farelly afraid he wouldn’t stay on account of fairies being scarce about these parts this long time? And now the place is full of them--according to what Mrs. Doolan says.”

Sergeant Rahilly heard, or fancied he heard, a particularly loud shriek from Molly. He certainly heard the wailing of Mrs. Conerney and the agitated cries of several other women. He turned from Flanagan without speaking another word and walked straight to the doctor’s house.

Five minutes later Dr. Lovaway, hatless and wearing a pair of slippers on his feet, was running up the street towards the barrack. His first case, a serious one, calling for instant attention, had come to him unexpectedly. Opposite Flanagan’s shop he was stopped by Mrs. Doolan. She laid a skinny, wrinkled, and very dirty hand on his arm. Her shawl fell back from her head, showing a few thin wisps of grey hair. Her eyes were bleary and red-rimmed, her breath reeked of porter.

“Arrah, doctor dear,” she said, “I’m glad to see you, so I am. Isn’t it a grand thing now that a fine young man like you would be wanting to sit down and be talking to an old woman like myself, that might be your mother--no, but your grandmother?”

Dr. Lovaway, desperately anxious to reach the sergeant’s suffering child, tried to shake off the old woman. He suspected that she was drunk. He was certain that she was extremely unpleasant. The suggestion that she might be his mother filled him with loathing. It was not any pleasanter to think of her as a grandmother.

Mrs. Doolan clung tightly to his arm with both her skinny hands.

Mr. Flanagan approached them from behind; leaning across Lovaway’s shoulders, he whispered in his ear:

“There’s not about the place--there’s not within the four seas of Ireland, one that has as much knowledge of fairies and all belonging to them as that old woman.”

“Fairies!” said Lovaway. “Did you say---- Surely you didn’t say fairies?”

“I just thought you’d be pleased,” said Flanagan, “and it’s lucky, so it is, that Mrs. Doolan should happen to be in the town to-night of all nights, just when them ones--the fairies, you know, doctor--has half the children in the town took with pains in their stomachs.”

Dr. Lovaway looked round him wildly. He supposed that Flanagan must be mad. He had no doubt that the old woman was drunk.

“I’ve seen the like before,” she said, leering up into Lovaway’s face. “I’ve seen worse. I’ve seen a strong man tying himself into knots with the way they had him held, and there’s no cure for it only----”

Lovaway caught sight of Sergeant Rahilly. In his first rush to reach the stricken child he had left the sergeant behind. The sergeant was a heavy man who moved with dignity.

“Take this woman away,” said Lovaway. “Don’t let her hold me.”

“Doctor, darling,” whined Mrs. Doolan, “don’t be saying the like of that.”

“Biddy Doolan,” said the sergeant, sternly, “will you let go of the doctor? I’d be sorry to arrest you, so I would, but arrested you’ll be if you don’t get along home out of that and keep quiet.”

Mrs. Doolan loosed her hold on the doctor’s arm, but she did not go home. She followed Lovaway up the street, moving, for so old a woman, at a surprising pace.

“Doctor, dear,” she said, “don’t be giving medicine to them childer. Don’t do it now. You’ll only anger them that’s done it, and it’s a terrible thing when them ones is angry.”

“Get away home out of that, Biddy Doolan,” said the sergeant.

“Don’t be hard on an old woman, now, sergeant,” said Mrs. Doolan. “It’s for your own good and the good of your child I’m speaking. Doctor, dear, there’s no cure but the one. A cup of water from the well of Tubber Neeve, the same to be drawn up in a new tin can that never was used. Let the child or the man, or it might be the cow, or whatever it is, let it drink that, a cup at a time, and let you----”

Lovaway followed by the sergeant, entered the barrack. He needed no guiding to the room in which Molly lay. Her shrieks would have led a blind man to her bedside.

Mrs. Doolan was stopped at the door by a burly constable. She shouted her last advice to the doctor as he climbed the stairs.

“Let you take a handful of rowan berries and lay them on the stomach or wherever the pain might be, and if you wrap them in a yellow cloth it will be better; but they’ll work well enough without that, only not so quick.”

Driven off by the constable Mrs. Doolan went back to Flanagan’s shop. She was quite calm and did not any longer appear to be the worse for the porter she had drunk.

“You’ll give me another sup, now, Mr. Flanagan,” she said. “It’s well I deserve it. It’s terrible dry work talking to a man like that one who won’t listen to a word you’re saying.”

Flanagan filled a large tumbler with porter and handed it to her.

“Tell me this now, Mrs. Doolan,” he said.

“What’s the matter with Molly Rahilly and the rest of them?”

“It’s green apples,” said Mrs. Doolan, “green apples that they ate in the doctor’s garden. Didn’t I see the little lady sitting in the tree and the rest of the childer with her?”

Dr. Lovaway made a somewhat similar diagnosis. He spent several busy hours going in and out of the houses where the sufferers lay. It was not till a quarter past eleven that he returned to his home and the town settled down for the night. At half-past eleven--long after the legal closing hour--Sergeant Rahilly was sitting with Mr. Flanagan in the room behind the shop. A bottle of whisky and a jug of water were on the table in front of them.

“It’s a queer thing now about that doctor,” said Flanagan. “After what Dr. Farelly said to me I made dead sure he’d be pleased to find fairies about the place. But he was not. When I told him it was fairies he looked like a man that wanted to curse and didn’t rightly know how. But sure the English is all queer, and the time you’d think you have them pleased is the very time they’d be most vexed with you.”

IV. A LUNATIC AT LARGE

It was Tuesday, a Tuesday early in October, Dr. Lovaway finished his breakfast quietly, conscious that he had a long morning before him and nothing particular to do. Tuesday is a quiet day in Dunailin; Wednesday is market day and people are busy, the doctor as well as everybody else. Young women who come into town with butter to sell take the opportunity of having their babies vaccinated on Wednesday. Old women, with baskets on their arms, find it convenient on that day to ask the doctor for something to rub into knee-joints where rheumatic pains are troublesome. Old men, who have ridden into town on their donkeys, consult the doctor about chronic coughs, and seek bottles likely to relieve “an impression on the chest.”

Fridays, when the Petty Sessions’ Court sits, are almost as busy. Mr. Timothy Flanagan, a magistrate in virtue of the fact that he is Chairman of the Urban District Council, administers justice of a rude and uncertain kind in the Court House. While angry litigants are settling their business there, and repentant drunkards are paying the moderate fines imposed on them, their wives ask the doctor for advice about the treatment of whooping cough or the best way of treating a child which has incautiously stepped into a fire. Fair days, which occur once a month, are the busiest days of all. Everyone is in town on fair days, and every kind of ailment is brought to the doctor. Towards evening he has to put stitches into one or two cut scalps and sometimes set a broken limb. On Mondays and Thursdays the doctor sits in his office for an hour or two to register births and deaths.

But Tuesdays, unless a fair happens to fall on Tuesday, are quiet days. On this particular Tuesday Dr. Lovaway was pleasantly aware that he had nothing whatever to do and might count on having the whole day to himself. It was raining very heavily, but the weather did not trouble him at all. He had a plan for the day which rain could not mar.

He sat down at his writing table, took from a drawer a bundle of foolscap paper, fitted a new nib to his pen and filled his ink bottle. He began to write.

“_A Study of the Remarkable Increase of Lunacy in Rural Connaught_.”

The title looked well. It would, he felt, certainly attract the attention of the editor of _The British Medical Journal_.

But Dr. Lovaway did not like it. It was not for the editor of _The British Medical Journal_, or indeed, for a scientific public that he wanted to write. He started fresh on a new sheet of paper.

“_Lunacy in the West of Ireland: Its Cause and Cure_.”

That struck him as the kind of title which would appeal to a philanthropist out to effect a social reform of some kind. But Dr. Lovaway was not satisfied with it. He respected reformers and was convinced of the value of their work, but his real wish was to write something of a literary kind. With prodigal extravagance he tore up another whole sheet of foolscap and began again.

“_The Passing of the Gael Ireland’s Crowded Madhouses_.”

He purred a little over that title and then began the article itself. What he wanted to say was clear in his mind. He had been three weeks in Dunailin and he had spent more time over lunatics than anything else. Almost every day he found himself called upon by Sergeant Rahilly to “certify” a lunatic, to commit some unfortunate person with diseased intellect to an asylum. Sometimes he signed the required document. Often he hesitated, although he was always supplied by the sergeant and his constables with a wealth of lurid detail about the dangerous and homicidal tendencies of the patient. Dr. Lovaway was profoundly impressed.

He gave his whole mind to the consideration of the problem which pressed on him. He balanced theories. He blamed tea, inter-marriage, potatoes, bad whisky, religious enthusiasm, and did not find any of them nor all of them together satisfactory as explanations of the awful facts. He fell back finally on a theory of race decadence. Already fine phrases were forming themselves in his mind: “The inexpressible beauty of autumnal decay.” “The exquisiteness of the decadent efflorescence of a passing race.”

He covered a sheet of foolscap with a bare--he called it a detached--statement of the facts about Irish lunacy. He had just begun to recount his own experience when there was a knock at the door. The housekeeper, a legacy from Dr. Farelly, came in to tell him that Constable Malone wished to speak to him. Dr. Lovaway left his MS. with a sigh. He found Constable Malone, a tall man of magnificent physique, standing in the hall, the raindrops dripping from the cape he wore.

“The sergeant is after sending me round to you, sir,” said Constable Malone, “to know would it be convenient for you to attend at Ballygran any time this afternoon to certify a lunatic?”

“Surely not another!” said Dr. Lovaway.

“It was myself found him, sir,” said the constable with an air of pride in his achievement. “The sergeant bid me say that he’d have Patsy Doolan’s car engaged for you, and that him and me would go with you so that you wouldn’t have any trouble more than the trouble of going to Ballygran, which is an out-of-the-way place sure enough, and it’s a terrible day.”

“Is the man violent?” asked Dr. Lovaway.

By way of reply Constable Malone gave a short account of the man’s position in life.

“He’s some kind of a nephew of Mrs. Finnegan,” he said, “and they call him Jimmy Finnegan, though Finnegan might not be his proper name. He does be helping Finnegan himself about the farm, and they say he’s middling useful. But, of course, now the harvest’s gathered, Finnegan will be able to do well enough without him till the spring.”

This did not seem to Dr. Lovaway a sufficient reason for incarcerating Jimmy in an asylum.

“But is he violent?” he repeated. “Is he dangerous to himself or others?”

“He never was the same as other boys,” said the constable, “and the way of it with fellows like that is what you wouldn’t know. He might be quiet enough to-day and be slaughtering all before him to-morrow. And what Mrs. Finnegan says is that she’d be glad if you’d see the poor boy to-day because she’s in dread of what he might do to-morrow night?”

“To-morrow night! Why to-morrow night?”

“There’s a change in the moon to-morrow,” said the constable, “and they do say that the moon has terrible power over fellows that’s took that way.”

Dr. Lovaway, who was young and trained in scientific methods, was at first inclined to argue with Constable Malone about the effect of the moon on the human mind. He refrained, reflecting that it is an impious thing to destroy an innocent superstition. One of the great beauties of Celtic Ireland is that it still clings to faiths forsaken by the rest of the world.

At two o’clock that afternoon Dr. Lovaway took his seat on Patsy Doolan’s car. It was still raining heavily. Dr. Lovaway wore an overcoat of his own, a garment which had offered excellent protection against rainy days in Manchester. In Dunailin, for a drive to Ballygran, the coat was plainly insufficient. Mr. Flanagan hurried from his shop with a large oilskin cape taken from a peg in his men’s outfitting department. Constable Malone, under orders from the sergeant, went to the priest’s house and borrowed a waterproof rug. Johnny Conerney, the butcher, appeared at the last moment with a sou’wester which he put on the doctor’s head and tied under his chin. It would not be the fault of the people of Dunailin, if Lovaway, with his weak lungs, “died on them.”

Patsy Doolan did not contribute anything to the doctor’s outfit, but displayed a care for his safety.

“Take a good grip now, doctor,” he said. “Take a hold of the little rail there beside you. The mare might be a bit wild on account of the rain, and her only clipped yesterday, and the road to Ballygran is jolty in parts.”

Sergeant Rahilly and Constable Malone sat on one side of the car, Dr. Lovaway was on the other. Patsy Doolan sat on the driver’s seat. Even with that weight behind her the mare proved herself to be “a bit wild.” She went through the village in a series of bounds, shied at everything she saw in the road, and did not settle down until the car turned into a rough track which led up through the mountains to Ballygran. Dr. Lovaway held on tight with both hands. Patsy Doolan, looking back over his left shoulder, spoke words of encouragement.

“It’ll be a bit strange to you at first, so it will,” he said. “But by the time you’re six months in Dunailin we’ll have you taught to sit a car, the same as it might be an armchair you were on.”

Dr. Lovaway, clinging on for his life while the car bumped over boulders, did not believe that a car would ever become to him as an armchair.

Ballygran is a remote place, very difficult of access. At the bottom of a steep hill, a stream, which seemed a raging torrent to Dr. Lovaway, flowed across the road. The mare objected very strongly to wading through it. Farther on the track along which they drove became precipitous and more stony than ever. Another stream, scorning its properly appointed course, flowed down the road, rolling large stones with it. Patsy Doolan was obliged to get down and lead the mare. After persuading her to advance twenty yards or so he called for the help of the police. Sergeant Rahilly took the other side of the mare’s head. Constable Malone pushed at the back of the car. Dr. Lovaway, uncomfortable and rather nervous, wanted to get down and wade too. But the sergeant would not hear of this.

“Let you sit still,” he said. “The water’s over the tops of my boots, so it is, and where’s the use of you getting a wetting that might be the death of you?”

“Is it much farther?” asked Lovaway.

The sergeant considered the matter.

“It might be a mile and a bit,” he said, “from where we are this minute.”

The mile was certainly an Irish mile, and Dr. Lovaway began to think that there were some things in England, miles for instance, which are better managed than they are in Ireland. “The bit” which followed the mile belonged to a system of measurement even more generous than Irish miles and acres.

“I suppose now,” said the sergeant, “that the country you come from is a lot different from this.”

He had taken his seat again on the car after leading the mare up the river. He spoke in a cheery, conversational tone. Dr. Lovaway thought of Manchester and the surrounding district, thought of trams, trains, and paved streets.

“It is different,” he said, “very different indeed.”

Ballygran appeared at last, dimly visible through the driving rain. It was a miserable-looking hovel, roofed with sodden thatch, surrounded by a sea of mud. A bare-footed woman stood in the doorway. She wore a tattered skirt and a bodice fastened across her breast with a brass safety-pin. Behind her stood a tall man in a soiled flannel jacket and a pair of trousers which hung in a ragged fringe round his ankles.

“Come in,” said Mrs. Finnegan, “come in the whole of yez. It’s a terrible day, sergeant, and I wonder at you bringing the doctor out in the weather that does be it in. Michael”--she turned to her husband who stood behind her--“let Patsy Doolan be putting the mare into the shed, and let you be helping him. Come in now, doctor, and take an air of the fire. I’ll wet a cup of tea for you, so I will.”

Dr. Lovaway passed through a low door into the cottage. His eyes gradually became accustomed to the gloom inside and to the turf smoke which filled the room. In a corner, seated on a low stool, he saw a young man crouching over the fire.

“That’s him,” said Mrs. Finnegan. “That’s the poor boy, doctor. The sergeant will have been telling you about him.”

The boy rose from his stool at the sound of her voice.

“Speak to the gentleman now,” said Mrs. Finnegan. “Speak to the doctor, Jimmy alannah, and tell him the way you are.”

“Your honour’s welcome,” said Jimmy, in a thin, cracked voice. “Your honour’s welcome surely, though I don’t mind that ever I set eyes on you before.”

“Whisht now, Jimmy,” said the sergeant. “It’s the doctor that’s come to see you, and it’s for your own good he’s come.”

“I know that,” said Jimmy, “and I know he’ll be wanting to have me put away. Well, what must be, must be, if it’s the will of God, and if it’s before me it may as well be now as any other time.”

“You see the way he is,” said the sergeant.

“And I have the papers here already to be signed.”

Dr. Lovaway saw, or believed he saw, exactly how things were. The boy was evidently of weak mind. There was little sign of actual lunacy, no sign at all of violence about him. Mrs. Finnegan added a voluble description of the case.

“It might be a whole day,” she said, “and he wouldn’t be speaking a word, nor he wouldn’t seem to hear if you speak to him, and he’d just sit there by the fire the way you see him without he’d be doing little turns about the place, feeding the pig, or mending a gap in the wall or the like. I will say for Jimmy, the poor boy’s always willing to do the best he can.”

“Don’t be troubling the doctor now, Mrs. Finnegan,” said the sergeant. “He knows the way it is with the boy without your telling him. Just let the doctor sign what has to be signed and get done with it. Aren’t we wet enough as it is without standing here talking half the day?”

The mention of the wet condition of the party roused Mrs. Finnegan to action. She hung a kettle from a blackened hook in the chimney and piled up turf on the fire. Jimmy was evidently quite intelligent enough to know how to boil water. He took the bellows, went down on his knees, and blew the fire diligently. Mrs. Finnegan spread a somewhat dirty tablecloth on a still dirtier table and laid out cups and saucers on it.

Dr. Lovaway was puzzled. The boy at the fire might be, probably was, mentally deficient. He was not a case for an asylum. He was certainly not likely to become violent or to do any harm either to himself or anyone else. It was not clear why Mrs. Finnegan, who seemed a kindly woman, should wish to have him shut up. It was very difficult to imagine any reason for the action of the police in the matter. Constable Malone had discovered the existence of the boy in this remote place. Sergeant Rahilly had taken a great deal of trouble in preparing papers for his committal to the asylum, and had driven out to Ballygran on a most inclement day. Dr. Lovaway wished he understood what was happening.

Finnegan, having left Patsy Doolan’s mare, and apparently Patsy Doolan himself in the shed, came into the house.

Dr. Lovaway appealed to him.

“It doesn’t seem to me,” he said, “that this boy ought to be sent to an asylum. I shall be glad to hear anything you have to tell me about him.”

“Well now,” said Mr. Finnegan, “he’s a good, quiet kind of a boy, and if he hasn’t too much sense there’s many another has less.”

“That’s what I think,” said Dr. Lovaway.

Jimmy stopped blowing the fire and looked round suddenly.

“Sure, I know well you’re wanting to put me away,” he said.

“It’s for your own good,” said the sergeant.

“It’ll do him no harm anyway,” said Finnegan, “if so be he’s not kept there.”

“Kept!” said the sergeant. “Is it likely now that they’d keep a boy like Jimmy? He’ll be out again as soon as ever he’s in. I’d say now a fortnight is the longest he’ll be there.”

“I wouldn’t like,” said Finnegan, “that he’d be kept too long. I’ll be wanting him for spring work, but I’m willing to spare him from this till Christmas if you like.”

Dr. Lovaway, though a young man and constitutionally timid, was capable of occasional firmness.

“I’m certainly not going to certify that boy as a lunatic,” he said.

“Come now, doctor,” said the sergeant persuasively, “after coming so far and the wet day and all. What have you to do only to put your name at the bottom of a piece of paper? And Jimmy’s willing to go. Aren’t you, Jimmy?”

“I’ll go if I’m wanted to go,” said Jimmy.

The water boiled. Mrs. Finnegan was spreading butter on long slices cut from a home-baked loaf. It was Jimmy who took the kettle from the hook and filled the teapot.

“Mrs. Finnegan,” said Dr. Lovaway, “why do you want the boy put into an asylum?”

“Is it me wanting him put away?” she said. “I want no such thing. The notion never entered my head, nor Michael’s either, who’s been like a father to the boy. Only when Constable Malone came to me, and when it was a matter of pleasing him and the sergeant, I didn’t want to be disobliging, for the sergeant is always a good friend of mine, and Constable Malone is a young man I’ve a liking for. But as for wanting to get rid of Jimmy! Why would I? Nobody’d grudge the bit the creature would eat, and there’s many a little turn he’d be doing for me about the house.”

Mr. Finnegan was hovering in the background, half hidden in the smoke which filled the house. He felt that he ought to support his wife.

“What I said to the sergeant,” he said, “no longer ago than last Friday when I happened to be in town about a case I had on in the Petty Sessions’ Court--what I said to the sergeant was this: ‘So long as the boy isn’t kept there too long, and so long as he’s willing to go----’”

Jimmy, seated again on his low stool before the fire, looked up.

“Amn’t I ready to go wherever I’m wanted?” he said.

“There you are now, doctor,” said the sergeant. “You’ll not refuse the poor boy when he wants to go?”

“Sergeant,” said Dr. Lovaway, “I can’t, I really can’t certify that boy is a lunatic. I don’t understand why you ask me to. It seems to me----”

Poor Lovaway was much agitated. It seemed to him that he had been drawn into an infamous conspiracy against the liberty of a particularly helpless human being.

“I don’t think you ought to have asked me to come here,” he said. “I don’t think you should have suggested---- It seems to me, sergeant, that your conduct has been most reprehensible. I’m inclined to think I ought to report the matter to--to----” Dr. Lovaway was not quite sure about the proper place to which to send a report about the conduct of a sergeant of the Irish Police. “To the proper authorities,” he concluded feebly.

“There, there,” said the sergeant, soothingly, “we’ll say no more about the matter. I wouldn’t like you to be vexed, doctor.”

But Dr. Lovaway, having once begun to speak his mind, was not inclined to stop.

“This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened,” he said. “You’ve asked me to certify lunacy in some very doubtful cases. I don’t understand your motives, but----”

“Well, well,” said the sergeant, “there’s no harm done anyway.”

Mrs. Finnegan, like all good women, was anxious to keep the peace among the men under her roof.

“Is the tea to your liking, doctor,” she said, “or will I give you a taste more sugar in it? I’m a great one for sugar myself, but they tell me there’s them that drinks tea with ne’er a grain of sugar in it at all. They must be queer people that do that.”

She held a spoon, heaped up with sugar, over the doctor’s cup as she spoke. He was obliged to stop lecturing the sergeant in order to convince her that his tea was already quite sweet enough. It was, indeed, far too sweet for his taste, for he was one of those queer people whose tastes Mrs. Finnegan could not understand.

The drive home ought to have been in every way pleasanter than the drive out to Ballygran. Patsy Doolan’s mare was subdued in temper; so docile, indeed, that she allowed Jimmy to put her between the shafts. She made no attempt to stand on her hind legs, and did not shy even at a young pig which bolted across the road in front of her. Dr. Lovaway could sit on his side of the car without holding on. The rain had ceased and great wisps of mist were sweeping clear of the hilltops, leaving fine views of grey rock and heather-clad slopes. But Dr. Lovaway did not enjoy himself. Being an Englishman he had a strong sense of duty, and was afflicted as no Irishman ever is by a civic conscience. He felt that he ought to bring home somehow to Sergeant Rahilly a sense of the iniquity of trying to shut up sane, or almost sane, people in lunatic asylums. Being of a gentle and friendly nature he hated making himself unpleasant to anyone, especially to a man like Sergeant Rahilly, who had been very kind to him.

The path of duty was not made any easier to him by the behaviour of the sergeant. Instead of being overwhelmed by a sense of discovered guilt, the police, both Rahilly and Constable Malone, were pleasantly chatty, and evidently bent on making the drive home as agreeable as possible for the doctor. They told him the names of the hills and the more distant mountains. They showed the exact bank at the side of the road from behind which certain murderous men had fired at a land agent in 1885. They explained the route of a light railway which a forgotten Chief Secretary had planned but had never built owing to change of Government and his loss of office. Not one word was said about Jimmy, or lunatics, or asylums. It was with great difficulty that Dr. Lovaway succeeded at last in breaking in on the smooth flow of chatty reminiscences. But when he did speak he spoke strongly. As with most gentle and timid men, his language was almost violent when he had screwed himself up to the point of speaking at all.

The two policemen listened to all he said with the utmost good humour. Indeed, the sergeant supported him.

“You hear what the doctor’s saying to you, Constable Malone,” he said.

“I do, surely,” said the constable.

“Well, I hope you’ll attend to it,” said the sergeant, “and let there be no more of the sort of work that the doctor’s complaining of.”

“But I mean you too, sergeant,” said Dr. Lovaway. “You’re just as much to blame as the constable. Indeed more, for you’re his superior officer.”

“I know that,” said the sergeant; “I know that well. And what’s more, I’m thankful to you, doctor, for speaking out what’s in your mind. Many a one wouldn’t do it. And I know that every word you’ve been saying is for my good and for the good of Constable Malone, who’s a young man yet and might improve if handled right. That’s why I’m thanking you, doctor, for what you’ve said.”

When Solomon said that a soft answer turneth away wrath he understated a great truth. A soft answer, if soft enough, will deflect the stroke of the sword of justice. Dr. Lovaway, though his conscience was still uneasy, could say no more. He felt that it was totally impossible to report Sergeant Rahilly’s way of dealing with lunatics to the higher authorities.

That night Sergeant Rahilly called on Mr. Flanagan, going into the house by the back door, for the hour was late. He chose porter rather than whisky, feeling perhaps that his nerves needed soothing and that a stronger stimulant might be a little too much for him. After finishing a second bottle and opening a third, he spoke.

“I’m troubled in my mind,” he said, “over this new doctor. Here I am doing the best I can for him ever since he came to the town, according to what I promised Dr. Farelly.”

“No man,” said Flanagan, “could do more than what you’ve done. Everyone knows that.”

“I’ve set the police scouring the country,” said the sergeant, “searching high and low and in and out for anyone, man or woman, that was the least bit queer in the head. They’ve worked hard, so they have, and I’ve worked hard myself.”

“No man harder,” said Flanagan.

“And everyone we found,” said the Sergeant, “was a guinea into the doctor’s pocket. A guinea, mind you, that’s the fee for certifying a lunatic, and devil a penny either I or the constables get out of it.”

“Nor you wouldn’t be looking for it, sergeant. I know that.”

“I would not. And I’m not complaining of getting nothing. But it’s damned hard when the doctor won’t take what’s offered to him, when we’ve had to work early and late to get it for him. Would you believe it now, Mr. Flanagan, he’s refused to certify half of the ones we’ve found for him?”

“Do you tell me that?” said Flanagan.

“Throwing good money away,” said the sergeant; “and to-day, when I took him to see that boy that does be living in Finnegan’s, which would have put two guineas into his pocket, on account of being outside his own district, instead of saying ‘thank you’ like any ordinary man would, nothing would do him only to be cursing and swearing. ‘It’s a crime,’ says he, ‘and a scandal,’ says he, ‘and it’s swearing away the liberty of a poor man,’ says he; and more to that. Now I ask you, Mr. Flanagan, where’s the crime and where’s the scandal?”

“There’s none,” said Flanagan. “What harm would it have done the lad to be put away for a bit?”

“That’s what I said to the doctor. What’s more, they’d have let the boy out in a fortnight, as soon as they knew what way it was with him. I told the doctor that, but ‘crime,’ says he, and ‘scandal,’ says he, and ‘conspiracy,’ says he. Be damn, but to hear him talk you’d think I was trying to take two guineas out of his pocket instead of trying to put it in, and there’s the thanks I get for going out of my way to do the best I could for him so as he’d rest content in this place and let Dr. Farelly stay where he is to be cutting the legs off the Germans.”

“It’s hard, so it is,” said Flanagan, “and I’m sorry for you, sergeant. But that’s the way things is. As I was saying to you once before and maybe oftener, the English is queer people, and the more you’d be trying to please them the less they like it. It’s not easy to deal with them, and that’s a fact.”

V. THE BANDS OF BALLYGUTTERY

The Wolfe Tone Republican Club has its headquarters at Ballyguttery. Its members, as may be guessed, profess the strongest form of Nationalism. There are about sixty of them. The Loyal True-Blue Invincibles are an Orange Lodge. They also meet in Ballyguttery. There are between seventy and eighty Loyal Invincibles. There are also in the village ten adult males who are not members of either the club or the lodge. Six of these are policemen. The other four are feeble people of no account, who neglect the first duty of good citizens and take no interest in politics.

Early in September the Wolfe Tone Republicans determined to hold a demonstration. They wished to convince a watching world, especially the United States of America, that the people of Ballyguttery are unanimous and enthusiastic in the cause of Irish independence. They proposed to march through the village street in procession, with a band playing tunes in front of them, and then to listen to speeches made by eminent men in a field.

The Loyal Invincibles heard of the intended demonstration. They could hardly help hearing of it, for the Wolfe Tone Republicans talked of nothing else, and the people of Ballyguttery, whatever their politics, live on friendly terms with each other and enjoy long talks about public affairs.

The Loyal Invincibles at once assembled and passed a long resolution, expressing their determination to put a stop to any National demonstration. They were moved, they said, by the necessity for preserving law and order, safeguarding life and property, and maintaining civil and religious liberty. No intention could have been better than theirs; but the Wolfe Tone Republicans also had excellent intentions, and did not see why they should not demonstrate if they wished to. They invited all the eminent men they could think of to make speeches for them. They also spent a good deal of money on printing, and placarded the walls round the village with posters, announcing that their demonstration would be held on September fifteenth, the anniversary of the execution of their patron Wolfe Tone by the English.

In fact Wolfe Tone was not executed by the English or anyone else, and the date of his death was November the nineteenth. But that made no difference to either side, because no one in Ballyguttery ever reads history.

The Loyal True-Blue Invincibles did not tear down the posters. They were kindly men, averse to unneighbourly acts. But they put up posters of their own, summoning every man of sound principles to assemble on September fifteenth at 10.30 a.m, in order to preserve law, order, life, property, and liberty, by force if necessary.

Mr. Hinde, District Inspector of Police in Ballyguttery, was considering the situation. He was in an uncomfortable position, for he had only four constables and one sergeant under his command. It seemed to him that law and order would disappear for the time, life and property be in danger, and that he would not be able to interfere very much with anybody’s liberty. Mr. Hinde was, however, a young man of naturally optimistic temper. He had lived in Ireland all his life, and he had a profound belief in the happening of unexpected things.

On September the tenth the Wolfe Tone Republicans made a most distressing discovery.

Six months before, they had lent their band instruments to the Thomas Emmet Club, an important association of Nationalists in the neighbouring village.

The Thomas Emmets, faced with a demand for the return of the instruments, confessed that they had lent them to the Martyred Archbishops’ branch of the Gaelic League. They, in turn, had lent them to the Manchester Martyrs’ Gaelic Football Association. These athletes would, no doubt, have returned the instruments honestly; but unfortunately their association had been suppressed by the Government six weeks earlier and had only just been re-formed as the Irish Ireland National Brotherhood.

In the process of dissolution and reincarnation the band instruments had disappeared. No one knew where they were. The only suggestion the footballers had to make was that the police had taken them when suppressing the Manchester Martyrs. This seemed probable, and the members of the Wolfe Tone Republican Club asked their president, Mr. Cornelius O’Farrelly, to call on Mr. Hinde and inquire into the matter.

Mr. Hinde was surprised, very agreeably surprised, at receiving a visit one evening from the president of the Republican Club. In Ireland, leading politicians, whatever school they belong to, are seldom on friendly terms with the police. He greeted O’Farrelly warmly.

“What I was wishing to speak to you about was this--” O’Farrelly began.

“Fill your pipe before you begin talking,” said Mr. Hinde. “Here’s some tobacco.” He offered his pouch as he spoke. “I wish I could offer you a drink; but there’s no whisky to be got nowadays.”

“I know that,” said O’Farrelly in a friendly tone, “and what’s more, I know you’d offer it to me if you had it.”

He filled his pipe and lit it. Then he began again: “What I was wishing to speak to you about is the band instruments.”

“If you want a subscription--” said Hinde.

“I do not want any subscription.”

“That’s just as well, for you wouldn’t get it if you did. I’ve no money, for one thing; and besides it wouldn’t suit a man in my position to be subscribing to rebel bands.”

“I wouldn’t ask you,” said O’Farrelly. “Don’t I know as well as yourself that it would be no use? And anyway it isn’t the money we want, but our own band instruments.”

“What’s happened to them?” said Hinde.

“You had a lot. Last time I saw your band it was fitted out with drums and trumpets enough for a regiment.”

“It’s just them we’re trying to get back.”

“If anyone has stolen them,” said Hinde, “I’ll look into the matter and do my best to catch the thief for you.”

“Nobody stole them,” said O’Farrelly; “not what you’d call stealing, anyway; but it’s our belief that the police has them.”

“You’re wrong there,” said Hinde. “The police never touched your instruments, and wouldn’t.”

“They might not if they knew they were ours. But from information received we think the police took them instruments the time they were suppressing the Manchester Martyrs beyond the Lisnan, the instruments being lent to them footballers at that time.”

“I remember all about that business,” said Hinde. “I was there myself. But we never saw your instruments. All we took away with us was two old footballs and a set of rotten goal-posts. Whatever happened to your instruments, we didn’t take them. I expect,” said Hinde, “that the Manchester Martyr boys pawned them.”

O’Farrelly sat silent. It was unfortunately quite possible that the members of the football club had pawned the instruments, intending, of course, to redeem them when the club funds permitted.

“I’m sorry for you,” said Hinde. “It’s awkward for you losing your drums and things just now, with this demonstration of yours advertised all over the place. You’ll hardly be able to hold the demonstration, will you?”

“The demonstration will be held,” said O’Farrelly firmly.

“Not without a band, surely. Hang it all, O’Farrelly, a demonstration is no kind of use without a band. It wouldn’t be a demonstration. You know that as well as I do.”

O’Farrelly was painfully aware that a demonstration without a band is a poor business. He rose sadly and said good night. Hinde felt sorry for him.

“If the police had any instruments,” he said, “I’d lend them to you. But we haven’t a band of our own here. There aren’t enough of us.”

This assurance, though it was of no actual use, cheered O’Farrelly. It occurred to him that though the police had no band instruments to lend it might be possible to borrow elsewhere. The Loyal True-Blue Invincibles, for instance, had a very fine band, well supplied in every way, particularly with big drums. O’Farrelly thought the situation over and then called on Jimmy McLoughlin, the blacksmith, who was the secretary of the Orange Lodge.

“Jimmy,” said O’Farrelly, “we’re in trouble about the demonstration that’s to be held next Tuesday.”

“It’d be better for you,” said Jimmy, “if that demonstration was never held. For let me tell you this: the Lodge boys has their minds made up to have no Papist rebels demonstrating here.”

“It isn’t you, nor your Orange Lodge nor all the damned Protestants in Ireland would be fit to stop us,” said O’Farrelly.

Jimmy McLoughlin spit on his hands as if in preparation for the fray. Then he wiped them on his apron, remembering that the time for fighting had not yet come.

“And what’s the matter with your demonstration?” he asked.

“It’s the want of instruments for the band that has us held up,” said O’Farrelly. “We lent them, so we did, and the fellows that had them didn’t return them.”

Jimmy McLoughlin pondered the situation. He was as well aware as Mr. Hinde, as O’Farrelly himself, that a demonstration without a band is a vain thing.

“It would be a pity now,” he said slowly, “if anything was to interfere with that demonstration, seeing as how you’re ready for it and we’re ready for you.”

“It would be a pity. Leaving aside any political or religious differences that might be dividing the people of Ballyguttery, it would be a pity for the whole of us if that demonstration was not to be held.”

“How would it be now,” said Jimmy Mc-Loughlin, “if we was to lend you our instruments for the day?”

“We’d be thankful to you if you did, very thankful,” said O’Farrelly; “and, indeed, it’s no more than I’d expect from you, Jimmy, for you always were a good neighbour. But are you sure that you’ll not be wanting them yourselves?”

“We will not want them,” said Jimmy Me-Loughlin. “It’ll not be drums we’ll be beating that day--not drums, but the heads of Papists. But mind what I’m saying to you now. If we lend you the instruments, you’ll have to promise that you’ll not carry them beyond the cross-roads this side of Dicky’s Brae. You’ll leave the whole of them there beyond the cross-roads, drums and all. It wouldn’t do if any of the instruments got broke on us or the drums lost--which is what has happened more than once when there’s been a bit of a fight. And it’ll be at Dicky’s Brae that we’ll be waiting for you.”

“I thought as much,” said O’Farrelly, “and I’d be as sorry as you’d be yourself if any harm was to come to your drums. They’ll be left at the cross-roads the way you tell me. You may take my word for that. You can pick them up there yourselves and take them back with you when you’re going home in the evening--those of you that’ll be left alive to go home. For we’ll be ready for you, Jimmy, and Dicky’s Brae will suit us just as well as any other place.”

The Wolfe Tone Republicans are honourable men. Their band marched at the head of the procession through the streets of the village. They played all the most seditious tunes there are, and went on playing for half a mile outside the village. The police, headed by Mr. Hinde, followed them. At the cross-roads there was a halt. The bandsmen laid down the instruments very carefully on a pile of stones beside the road. Then they took the fork of the road which leads southwards.

The direct route to Dicky’s Brae lies northwest along the other fork of the road. Cornelius O’Farrelly had the instinct of a military commander. His idea was to make a wide detour, march by a cross-road and take the Dicky Brae position in the rear. This would require some time; but the demonstrators had a long day before them, and if the speeches were cut a little short no one would be any the worse.

Jimmy McLoughlin and the members of the Loyal True-Blue Invincibles sat on the roadside at the foot of Dicky’s Brae and waited. They expected that the Wolfe Tone Republicans would reach the place about noon. At a quarter to twelve Mr. Hinde and five police arrived. They had with them a cart carefully covered with sacking. No one was in the least disturbed by their appearance. Five police, even with an officer at their head, cannot do much to annoy two armies of sixty and seventy men.

The police halted in the middle of the road. They made no attempt to unload their cart.

At 1.30 Jimmy McLoughlin took council with some of the leading members of the Loyal True-Blue Invincible Lodge. It seemed likely that the Wolfe Tone Republicans had gone off to demonstrate in some other direction, deliberately shirking the fight which had been promised them.

“I’d never have thought it of Cornelius O’Farrelly,” said Jimmy sadly. “I had a better opinion of him, so I had. I knew he was a Papist and a rebel and every kind of a blackguard, but I’d never have thought he was a coward.”

While he spoke, a small boy came running down the hill. He brought the surprising intelligence that the Wolfe Tone Republicans were advancing in good order from a totally unexpected direction. Jimmy McLoughlin looked round and saw them. So did Mr. Hinde.

While Jimmy summoned his men from the ditches where they were smoking and the fields into which they had wandered, Mr. Hinde gave an order to his police. They took the sacking from their cart. Underneath it were all the band instruments belonging to the Orange Lodge. The police unpacked them carefully and then, loaded with drums and brass instruments, went up the road to meet the Wolfe Tone Republicans.

Jimmy McLoughlin ran to Mr. Hinde, shouting as he went:

“What are you doing with them drums?”

Mr. Hinde turned and waited for them.

“I’m going to hand them over to Cornelius O’Farrelly,” he said.

“You’re going to do nothing of the sort,” said Jimmy, “for they’re our drums, so they are.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Mr. Hinde, “all I know is that they’re the instruments which O’Farrelly’s band were playing when they marched out of the town. They left them on the side of the road, where my men found them.”

“What right had you to be touching them at all,” said Jimmy.

“Every right. O’Farrelly was complaining to me three days ago that one set of band instruments had been stolen from him. It’s my business to see that he doesn’t lose another set in the same way, even if he’s careless enough to leave them lying about on the side of the road.”

“Amn’t I telling you that they’re ours, not his?” said Jimmy.

“You’ll have to settle that with him.”

“Sure, if I settle that with him,” said Jimmy, “in the only way anything could be settled with a pack of rebels, the instruments will be broke into smithereens before we’re done.”

This seemed very likely. Jimmy McLoughlin’s bandsmen, armed with sticks and stones, were forming up on the road. The police had already handed over the largest drum to one of the leading Wolfe Tone Republicans. It was Cornelius O’Farrelly who made an attempt to save the situation.

He came forward and addressed Mr. Hinde. “It would be better,” he said, “if you’d march the police off out of this and let them take the band instruments along with them, for if they don’t the drums will surely be broke and the rest of the things twisted up so as nobody’ll ever be able to blow a tune on them again, which would be a pity and a great loss to all parties concerned.”

“I’ll take the police away if you like,” said Mr. Hinde, “but I’m hanged if I go on carting all those instruments about the country. I found them on the side of the road where you left them, and now that I’ve given them back to you I’ll take no further responsibility in the matter.”

The two sets of bandsmen were facing each other on the road. The instruments were divided between them. They were uttering the most bloodthirsty threats, and it was plain that in a minute or two there would be a scrimmage.

“Jimmy,” said O’Farrelly, “if the boys get to fighting----”

“I don’t know,” said Jimmy gloomily, “where the money’s to come from to buy new drums.”

“It might be better,” said O’Farrelly, “if we was to go home and leave the instruments back safe where they came from before worse comes of it.”

Ten minutes later the instruments were safely packed again into the cart. One of the Loyal True-Blue Invincibles led the horse. A Wolfe Tone Republican sat in the cart and held the reins. Jimmy McLoughlin and Cornelius O’Farrelly walked together. It was plain to everyone that hostilities were suspended for the day.

“I’m thinking,” said Jimmy, “that ye didn’t hold your demonstration after all. I hope this’ll be a lesson to you not to be trying anything of the sort for the future.”

“For all your fine talk,” said O’Farrelly, “you didn’t stop us. And why not? Because you weren’t fit to do it.”

“We could have done it,” said Jimmy, “and we would. But what’s the use of talking? So long as no demonstration was held we’re satisfied.”

“So long as you didn’t get interfering with us, we’re satisfied.”

Mr. Hinde, walking behind the procession with his five police, had perhaps the best reason of all for satisfaction.

VI. STARTING THE TRAIN

Tom O’Donovan leaned as far as possible out of the window of the railway carriage, a first-class smoking carriage.

“Good-bye Jessie, old girl,” he said. “I’ll be back the day after to-morrow, or the next day at latest. Take care of yourself.”

Mrs. O’Donovan, who was not very tall, stood on tip-toe while he kissed her.

“You’ll have time enough to get dinner in Dublin,” she said, “or will you dine on the boat?”

“They give you a pretty fair dinner on the boat,” said Tom, “and it’s less fussy to go on board at once.”

She had said that to him before, and he had made the same answer; but it is necessary to keep on saying something while waiting for a train to start, and on such occasions there is very seldom anything fresh to say.

“And you’ll see Mr. Manners to-morrow morning,” she said, after a short pause.

“Appointment for 10.30,” said Tom. “I’ll breakfast at the Euston Hotel and take the tube to his office. Bye-bye, old girl.”

But the “bye-bye,” like the kiss, was premature. The train did not start.

“If I get Manners’ agency,” said Tom, “we’ll be on the pig’s back. You’ll be driving about in a big car with a fur coat on you in the inside of six months.”

“Be as fascinating as you can, Tom,” she said.

“He’d hardly have asked me to go all the way to London,” said Tom, “if he wasn’t going to give me the agency.”

They had reasoned all that out half-a-dozen times since the letter arrived which summoned Tom to an interview in Mr. Manners’ office. There was no doubt that the agency, which meant the sole right of selling the Manners’ machines in Ireland, would be exceedingly profitable. And Tom O’Donovan believed that he had secured it.

He glanced at the watch on his wrist.

“I wonder what the deuce we’re waiting for,” he said.

But passengers on Irish railways now-a-days are all accustomed to trains which do not start, and have learned the lesson of patience. Tom waited, without any sign of irritation, Mrs. O’Donovan chatted pleasantly to him. The train had reached the station in good time. It was due in Dublin two hours before the mail boat left Kingstown. There was no need to feel worried.

Yet at the end of half-an-hour Tom did begin to feel worried. When three-quarters of an hour had passed he became acutely anxious.

“If we don’t get a move on soon,” he said, “I shall miss the boat, and--I say, Jessie, this is getting serious.”

Missing the boat meant missing his appointment in London next morning, and then--why, then Manners would probably give the agency to someone else. Tom opened the door of his carriage and jumped out.

“I’ll speak to the guard,” he said, “and find out what’s the matter.”

The guard, a fat, good-humoured looking man, was talking earnestly to the engine driver. Tom O’Donovan addressed him explosively.

“Why the devil don’t you go on?” he said.

“The train is not going on to-day,” said the guard. “It’ll maybe never go on at all.”

“Why not?”

It was the engine driver who replied. He was a tall, grave man, and he spoke with dignity, as if he were accustomed to making public speeches on solemn occasions.

“This train,” he said, “will not be used for the conveyance of the armed forces of the English Crown, which country is presently at war with the Irish Republic.”

“There’s soldiers got into the train at this station,” said the guard, in a friendly explanatory tone, “and the way things is it wouldn’t suit us to be going on, as long as them ones,” he pointed to the rear of the train with his thumb, “stays where they are.”

“But--oh, hang it all!--if the train doesn’t go on I shall miss the mail boat at Kingstown, and if I’m not in London to-morrow morning I shall lose the best part of £1,000 a year.”

“That would be a pity now,” said the guard. “And I’d be sorry for any gentleman to be put to such a loss. But what can we do? The way things is at the present time it wouldn’t suit either the driver or me to be taking the train on while there’d be soldiers in it. It’s queer times we’re having at present and that’s a fact.”

The extreme queerness of the times offered no kind of consolation to Tom O’Donovan. But he knew it was no good arguing with the guard.

He contented himself with the fervent expression of an opinion which he honestly held.

“It would be a jolly good thing for everybody,” he said, “if the English army and the Irish Republic and your silly war and every kind of idiot who goes in for politics were put into a pot together and boiled down for soup.”

He turned and walked away. As he went he heard the guard expressing mild agreement with his sentiment.

“It might be,” said the guard. “I wouldn’t say but that might be the best in the latter end.”

Tom O’Donovan, having failed with the guard and the engine driver, made up his mind to try what he could do with the soldiers. He was not very hopeful of persuading them to leave the train; but his position was so nearly desperate that he was unwilling to surrender any chance. He found a smart young sergeant and six men of the Royal Wessex Light Infantry seated in a third-class carriage. They wore shrapnel helmets, and their rifles were propped up between their knees.

“Sergeant,” said Tom, “I suppose you know you are holding up the whole train.”

“My orders, sir,” said the sergeant, “is to travel---”

“Oh, I know all about your orders. But look here. It would suit you just as well to hold up the next train. There’s another in two hours, and you can get into it and sit in it all night. But if you don’t let this train go on I shall miss the boat at Kingstown, and if I’m not in London to-morrow morning I stand to lose £1,000 a year.”

“Very sorry, sir,” said the sergeant, “but my orders--I’d be willing to oblige, especially any gentleman who is seriously inconvenienced. But orders is orders, sir.”

Jessie O’Donovan, who had been following her husband up and down the platform, caught his arm.

“What _is_ the matter, Tom?” she said. “If the train doesn’t start soon you’ll miss the boat. Why don’t they go on?”

“Oh, politics, as usual, Jessie,” said Tom. “I declare to goodness it’s enough to make a man want to go to heaven before his time, just to be able to live under an absolute monarchy where there can’t be any politics. But I’m not done yet. I’ll have another try at getting along before I chuck the whole thing up. Is there a girl anywhere about, a good-looking girl?”

“There’s the young woman in the bookstalls,” said Jessie, “but she’s not exactly pretty. What do you want a girl for?”

Tom glanced at the bookstall.

“She won’t do at all,” he said. “They all know her, and, besides, she doesn’t look the part. But I know where I’ll get the girl I want. Jessie, do you run over to the booking office and buy two third-class returns to Dublin.”

He left her standing on the platform while he jumped on to the line behind the train, crossed it, and climbed the other platform. She saw him pass through the gate and run along the road to the town. Being a loyal and obedient wife she went to the booking office and bought two tickets, undisturbed by the knowledge that her husband was running fast in search of a girl, a good-looking girl.

Tom O’Donovan, having run a hundred yards at high speed, entered a small tobacconist’s shop. Behind the counter was a girl, young and very pretty. She was one of those girls whose soft appealing eyes and general look of timid helplessness excite first the pity, then the affection of most men.

“Susie,” said Tom O’Donovan, breathlessly, “ran upstairs and put on your best dress and your nicest hat and all the ribbons and beads you have. Make yourself look as pretty as you can, but don’t be more than ten minutes over the job, And send your father to me.”

Tom O’Donovan was a regular and valued customer. Susie had known him as a most agreeable gentleman since she was ten years old. She saw that he was in a hurry and occupied with some important affair. She did as he told her without stopping to ask any questions. Two minutes later her father entered the shop from the room behind it.

“Farrelly,” said Tom O’Donovan, “I want the loan of your daughter for about four hours. She’ll be back by the last train down from Dublin.”

“If it was any other gentleman only yourself, Mr. O’Donovan, who asked me the like of that I’d kick him out of the shop.”

“Oh! it’s all right,” said Tom, “my wife will be with her the whole time and bring her back safe.”

“I’m not asking what you want her for, Mr. O’Donovan,” said Farrelly, “but if it was any other gentleman only yourself I would ask.”

“I want to take her up to Dublin along with my wife,” said Tom, “and send her down by the next train. I’d explain the whole thing to you if I had time, but I haven’t. All I can tell you is that I’ll most likely lose £1,000 a year if I don’t get Susie.”

“Say no more, Mr. O’Donovan,” said Farrelly. “If that’s the way of it you and Mrs. O’Donovan can have the loan of Susie for as long as pleases you.”

Susie changed her dress amazingly quickly. She was back in the shop in six minutes, wearing a beautiful blue hat, a frock that was almost new, and three strings of beads round her neck.

“Come on,” said O’Donovan, “we haven’t a minute to lose.”

They walked together very quickly to the station.

“Susie,” said Tom, “I’m going to put you into a carriage by yourself, and when you get there you’re to sit in a corner and cry. If you can’t cry----”

“I can if I like,” said Susie.

“Very well, then do. Get your eyes red and your face swollen and have tears running down your cheeks if you can manage it, and when I come for you again you’re to sob. Don’t speak a word no matter what anyone says to you, but sob like--like a motor bicycle.”

“I will,” said Susie.

“And if you do it well, I’ll buy you the smartest blouse in London to-morrow and bring it home to you.”

When they reached the station they jumped down from the platform and crossed the line to the train. Tom opened the door of an empty third-class carriage and pushed Susie into it. Then he went round to the back of the train and climbed on to the platform.

He made straight for the carriage in which the soldiers sat.

“Sergeant,” he said, “will you come along with me for a minute?”

The sergeant, who was beginning to find his long vigil rather dull, warned his men to stay where they were. Then he got out and followed Tom O’Donovan. Tom led him to the carriage in which Susie sat. The girl had done very well since he left her. Her eyes were red and swollen. Her cheeks were slobbered. She held a handkerchief in her hand rolled into a tight damp ball.

“You see that girl,” said Tom.

“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant. “Seems to be in trouble, sir.”

“She’s in perfectly frightful trouble,” said Tom. “She’s on her way to Dublin--or she would be if this train would start--so as to catch the night mail to Cork. She was to have been married in Cork to-morrow morning and to have gone off to America by a steamer which leaves Queenstown at 10.30 a.m. Now of course, the whole thing is off. She won’t get to Dublin or Cork, and so can’t be married.”

Susie, when she heard this pitiful story, sobbed convulsively.

“It’s very sad,” said Tom.

The sergeant, a nice, tender-hearted young man, looked at Susie’s pretty face and was greatly affected.

“Perhaps her young man will wait for her, sir,” he said.

“He can’t do that,” said Tom. “The fact is that he’s a demobilised soldier, served all through the war and won the V.C. And the Sinn Feiners have warned him that he’ll be shot if he isn’t out of the country before midday to-morrow.”

Susie continued to sob with great vigour and intensity. The sergeant was deeply moved.

“It’s cruel hard, sir,” he said. “But my orders----”

“I’m not asking you to disobey orders,” said Tom, “but in a case like this, for the sake of that poor young girl and the gallant soldier who wants to marry her--a comrade of your own, sergeant. You may have known him out in France--I think you ought to stretch a point. Listen to me now!”

He drew the sergeant away from the door of the carriage and whispered to him.

“I’ll do it, sir,” said the sergeant. “My orders say nothing about that point.”

“You do what I suggest,” said Tom, “and I’ll fix things up with the guard.”

He found the guard and the engine driver awaiting events in the station-master’s office. They were quite willing to follow him to the carriage in which Susie sat. They listened with deep emotion to the story which Tom told them. It was exactly the same story which he told the sergeant, except this time the bridegroom was a battalion commander of the Irish Volunteers whose life was threatened by a malignant Black-and-Tan. Susie sobbed as bitterly as before.

“It’s a hard case, so it is,” said the guard, “and if there was any way of getting the young lady to Dublin----”

“There’s only one way,” said Tom, “and that’s to take on this train.”

“It’s what we can’t do,” said the engine driver, “not if all the girls in Ireland was wanting to get married. So long as the armed forces of England----”

“But they’re not armed,” said Tom.

“Michael.” said the engine driver to the guard, “did you not tell me that them soldiers has guns with them and tin hats on their heads?”

“I did tell you that,” said the guard, “and I told you the truth.”

“My impression is,” said Tom, “that those soldiers aren’t armed at all. They seem to be a harmless set of men off to Dublin on leave, very likely going to be married themselves. They’re certainly not on duty.”

The engine driver scratched his head.

Susie, inspired by a wink from Tom, broke into a despairing wail.

“If that’s the way of it,” said the engine driver, “it would be different, of course.”

“Come and see,” said Tom.

The sergeant and his men were sitting in their compartment smoking cigarettes. Their heads were bare. Most of them had their tunics unbuttoned. One of them was singing a song, in which the whole party joined:

“Mary, Jane and Polly Find it very jolly When we take them out with us to Tea--tea--tea!”

There was not a single rifle to be seen anywhere.

“There now,” said Tom. “You see for yourselves. You can’t call those men munitions of war.”

The guard, who had seen the soldiers march into the station, was puzzled; but the engine driver seemed convinced that there had been some mistake.

“I’ll do it,” he said, “for the sake of the young girl and the brave lad that wants to marry her, I’ll take the train to Dublin.”

“Well, hurry up,” said Tom. “Drive that old engine of yours for all she’s worth.”

The driver hastened to his post. The guard blew his whistle shrilly. Tom seized his wife by the arm.

“Hop into the carriage with Susie Farrelly,” he said. “Dry her eyes, and tell her I’ll spend £5 on a silk blouse for her, pink or blue or any colour she likes. I’ll explain the whole thing to you when we get to Dublin. I can’t travel with you. The guard is only half convinced and might turn suspicious if he saw us together.”

Tom O’Donovan caught, just caught the mail boat at Kingstown. He secured the agency for the sale of the Manners’ machines in Ireland. He is in a fair way to becoming a very prosperous man; but it is unlikely that he will ever be a member either of Parliament or Dail Eireann. He says that politics interfere with business.

VII. UNLAWFUL POSSESSION

When Willie Thornton, 2nd Lieutenant in the Wessex Fusiliers, was sent to Ireland, his mother was nervous and anxious. She had an idea that the shooting of men in uniform was a popular Irish sport and that her boy would have been safer in Germany, Mesopotamia, or even Russia. Willie, who looked forward to some hunting with a famous Irish pack, laughed at his mother. It was his turn to be nervous and anxious when, three weeks after joining his battalion, he received an independent command. He was a cheerful boy and he was not in the least afraid that anyone would shoot him or his men. But the way the Colonel talked to him made him uncomfortable.

“There’s your village,” said the Colonel.

William peered at the map spread on the orderly-room table, and saw, in very small print, the name Dunedin. It stood at a place where many roads met, where there was a bridge across a large river.

“You’ll billet the men in your Court House,” said the Colonel, “and you’ll search every motor that goes through that village to cross the bridge.”

“For arms, sir?” said Willie.

“For arms or ammunition,” said the Colonel. “And you’ll have to keep your eyes open, Thornton. These fellows are as cute as foxes. There isn’t a trick they’re not up to and they’ll tell you stories plausible enough to deceive the devil himself.”

That was what made Willie Thornton nervous. He would have faced the prospects of a straight fight with perfect self-confidence. He was by no means so sure of himself when it was a matter of outwitting men who were as cute as foxes; and “these fellows” was an unpleasantly vague description. It meant, no doubt, the Irish enemy, who, indeed, neither the Colonel nor Willie could manage to regard as an enemy at all. But it gave him very little idea of the form in which the enemy might present himself.

On the evening of Good Friday Willie marched his men into Dunedin and took possession of the Court House. That day was chosen because Easter is the recognized season for Irish rebellions, just as Christmas is the season for plum puddings in England, and May Day the time for Labour riots on the Continent. It is very convenient for everybody concerned to have these things fixed. People know what to expect and preparations can be properly made. The weather was abominably wet. The village of Dunedin was muddy and looked miserable. The Court House, which seldom had fires in it, was damp and uncomfortable. Willie unloaded the two wagons which brought his men, kit, and rations, and tried to make the best of things.

The next day was also wet, but Willie, weighted by a sense of responsibility, got up early. By six o’clock he had the street which led to the bridge barricaded in such a way that no motor-car could possibly rush past. He set one of his wagons across the street with its back to the house and its pole sticking out. In this position it left only a narrow passage through which any vehicle could go. He set the other wagon a little lower down with its back to the houses on the opposite side of the street and its pole sticking out. Anyone driving towards the bridge would have to trace a course like the letter S, and, the curves being sharp, would be compelled to go very slowly, Willie surveyed this arrangement with satisfaction. But to make quite sure of holding up the traffic he stretched a rope from one wagon pole to the other so as to block the centre part of the S. Then he posted his sentries and went into the Court House to get some breakfast.

The people of Dunedin do not get up at six o’clock. Nowadays, owing to the imposition of “summer time” and the loss of Ireland’s half-hour of Irish time, six o’clock is really only half-past four, and it is worse than folly to get out of bed at such an hour. It was eight o’clock by Willie Thornton’s watch before the people became aware of what had happened to their street. They were surprised and full of curiosity, but they were not in the least annoyed. No one in Dunedin had the slightest intention of rebelling. No one even wanted to shoot a policeman. The consciences, even of the most ardent politicians, were clear, and they could afford to regard the performance of the soldiers as an entertainment provided free for their benefit by a kindly Government. That was, in fact, the view which the people of Dunedin took of Willie Thornton’s barricade, and of his sentries, though the sentries ought to have inspired awe, for they carried loaded rifles and wore shrapnel helmets.

The small boys of the village--and there are enormous numbers of small boys in Dunedin--were particularly interested. They tried the experiment of passing through the barricade, stooping under the rope when they came to it, just to see what the soldiers would do. The soldiers did nothing. The boys then took to jumping over the rope, which they could do when going downhill, though they had to creep under it on the way back. This seemed to amuse and please the soldiers, who smiled amiably at each successful jump. Kerrigan, the butcher, encouraged by the experience of the small boys, made a solemn progress from the top of the street to the bridge. He is the most important and the richest man in Dunedin, and it was generally felt that if the soldiers let him pass the street might be regarded as free to anyone. Kerrigan is a portly man, who could not have jumped the rope, and would have found it inconvenient to crawl under it. The soldiers politely loosed one end of the rope and let him walk through.

At nine o’clock a farmer’s cart, laden with manure, crossed the bridge and began to climb the street. Willie Thornton came to the door of the Court House with a cigarette in his mouth and watched the cart. It was hoped by the people of Dunedin, especially by the small boys, that something would happen. Foot passengers might be allowed to pass, but a wheeled vehicle would surely be stopped. But the soldiers loosed the rope and let the cart go through without a question. Ten minutes later a governess cart, drawn by a pony, appeared at the top of the street. It, too, was passed through the barricade without difficulty. There was a general feeling of disappointment in the village, and most of the people went back to their houses. It was raining heavily, and it is foolish to get wet through when there is no prospect of any kind of excitement. The soldiers, such was the general opinion, were merely practising some unusual and quite incomprehensible military manouvre.

The opinion was a mistaken one. The few who braved the rain and stood their ground watching the soldiers, had their reward later on. At ten o’clock, Mr. Davoren, the auctioneer, drove into the village in his motor-car. Mr. Davoren lives in Ballymurry, a town of some size, six miles from Dunedin. His business requires him to move about the country a good deal, and he is quite wealthy enough to keep a Ford car. His appearance roused the soldiers to activity. Willie Thornton, without a cigarette this time, stood beside the barricade. A sentry, taking his place in the middle of the street, called to Mr. Davoren to halt. Mr. Davoren, who was coming along at a good pace, was greatly surprised, but he managed to stop his car and his engine a few feet from the muzzle of the sentry’s rifle.

Willie Thornton, speaking politely but firmly, told Mr. Davoren to get out of the car. He did not know the auctioneer, and had no way of telling whether he was one of “these fellows” or not. The fact that Mr. Davoren looked most respectable and fat was suspicious. A cute fox might pretend to be respectable and fat when bent on playing tricks. Mr. Davoren, still surprised but quite good-humoured, got out of his car. Willie Thornton and his sergeant searched it thoroughly. They found nothing in the way of a weapon more deadly than a set of tyre levers. Mr. Davoren was told he might go on. In the end he did go on, but not until he, the sergeant, Willie Thornton, and one of the sentries had worked themselves hot at the starting-crank. Ford engines are queer-tempered things, with a strong sense of self-respect. When stopped accidentally and suddenly, they often stand on their dignity and refuse to go on again. All this was pleasant and exciting for the people of Dunedin, who felt that they were not wasting their day or getting wet in vain. And still better things were in store for them. At eleven o’clock a large and handsome car appeared at the end of the street. It moved noiselessly and swiftly towards the barricade. The chauffeur, leaning back behind his glass screen, drove as if the village and the street belonged to him. Dunedin is, in fact, the property of his master, the Earl of Ramelton; so the chauffeur had some right to be stately and arrogant. Every man, woman, and child in Dunedin knew the car, and there was tiptoe excitement. Would the soldiers venture to stop and search this car? The excitement became intense when it was seen that the Earl himself was in the car. He lay back very comfortably smoking a cigar in the covered tonneau of the limousine. Lord Ramelton is a wealthy man and Deputy Lieutenant for the county. He sits and sometimes speaks in the House of Lords. He is well known as an uncompromising Unionist, whose loyalty to the king and empire is so firm as to be almost aggressive.

There was a gasp of amazement when the sentry, standing with his rifle in his hands, called “Halt!” He gave the order to the earl’s chauffeur quite as abruptly and disrespectfully as he had given it to Mr. Davoren. The chauffeur stopped the car and leaned back in his seat with an air of detachment and slight boredom. It was his business to stop or start the car and to drive where he was told. Why it was stopped or started or where it went were matters of entire indifference to him. Lord Ramelton let down the window beside him and put out his head.

“What the devil is the matter?” he said.

He spoke to the chauffeur, but it was Willie Thornton who answered him.

“I’m afraid I must trouble you to get out of the car, sir; you and the chauffeur.”

He had spoken quite as civilly to Mr. Davoren half an hour before. He added “sir” this time because Lord Ramelton is an oldish man, and Willie Thornton had been well brought up and taught by his mother that some respect is due to age. He did not know that he was speaking to an earl and a very great man. Lord Ramelton was not in the least soothed by the civility.

“Drive on, Simpkins,” he said to the chauffeur.

Simpkins would have driven on if the sentry had not been standing, with a rifle in his hands, exactly in front of the car. He did the next best thing to driving on. He blew three sharp blasts of warning on his horn. The sentry took no notice of the horn. The men of the Wessex Fusiliers are determined and well-disciplined fellows. Willie Thornton’s orders mattered to that sentry. Lord Ramelton’s did not. Nor did the chauffeur’s horn.

Willie Thornton stepped up to the window of the car. He noticed as he did so that an earl’s coronet surmounting the letter R was painted on the door. He spoke apologetically, but he was still quite firm. A coronet painted on the door of a car is no proof that the man inside is an earl. The Colonel had warned Willie that “these fellows” were as cute as foxes.

“I’m afraid I must trouble you to get out, sir,” said Willie. “My orders are to search every car that goes through the village.”

Lord Ramelton had once been a soldier himself. He knew that the word “orders” has a sacred force.

“Oh, all right,” he said. “It’s damned silly; but if you’ve got to do it, get it over as quick as you can.”

He turned up the collar of his coat and stepped out into the rain. The chauffeur left his seat and stood in the mud with the air of a patient but rather sulky martyr. What is the use of belonging to the aristocracy of labour, of being a member of the Motor Drivers’ Union, of being able to hold up civilisation to ransom, if you are yourself liable to be held up and made to stand in the rain by a common soldier, a man no better than an unskilled labourer. Nothing but the look of the rifle in the unskilled labourer’s hand would have induced Simpkins to leave his sheltered place in the car.

Willie Thornton had every intention of conducting his search rapidly, perhaps not very thoroughly. Lord Ramelton’s appearance, his voice, and the coronet on the panel, all taken together, were convincing evidence that he was not one of “these fellows,” and might safely be allowed to pass.

Unfortunately there was something in the car which Willie did not in the least expect to find there. In the front of the tonneau was a large packing-case. It was quite a common-looking packing-case made of rough wood. The lid was neatly but firmly nailed down. It bore on its side in large black letters the word “cube sugar”.

Willie’s suspicions were aroused. The owners of handsome and beautifully-upholstered cars do not usually drive about with packing-cases full of sugar at their feet. And this was a very large case. It contained a hundredweight or a hundredweight and a half of sugar--if it contained sugar at all. The words of the Colonel recurred to Willie: “There’s not a trick they’re not up to. They’d deceive the devil himself.” Well, no earl or pretended earl should deceive Willie Thornton. He gave an order to the sergeant.

“Take that case and open it,” he said.

“Damn it,” said the Earl, “you mustn’t do that.”

“My orders,” said Willie, “are to examine every car thoroughly.”

“But if you set that case down in the mud and open it in this downpour of rain the--the contents will be spoiled.”

“I can’t help that, sir,” said Willie. “My orders are quite definite.”

“Look here,” said Lord Ramelton, “if I give you my word that there are no arms or ammunition in that case, if I write a statement to that effect and sign it, will it satisfy you?”

“No, sir,” said Willie. “Nothing will satisfy me except seeing for myself.”

Such is the devotion to duty of the young British officer. Against his spirit the rage of the empire’s enemies breaks in vain. Nor are the statements of “these fellows,” however plausible, of much avail.

Lord Ramelton swallowed, with some difficulty, the language which gathered on his tongue’s tip.

“Where’s your superior officer?” he said.

Willie Thornton believed that all his superior officers were at least ten miles away. He had not noticed--nor had anyone else--that a grey military motor had driven into the village. In the grey motor was a General, with two Staff Officers, all decorated with red cap-bands and red tabs on their coats.

The military authorities were very much in earnest over the business of searching motor-cars and guarding roads. Only at times of serious danger do Generals, accompanied by Staff Officers, go out in the wet to visit outpost detachments commanded by subalterns.

The General left his car and stepped across the road. He recognised Lord Ramelton at once and greeted him with cheery playfulness.

“Hallo!” he said, “Held up! I never expected you to be caught smuggling arms about the country.”

“I wish you’d tell this boy to let me drive on,” said Lord Ramelton. “I’m getting wet through.”

The General turned to Willie Thornton.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

Willie was pleasantly conscious that he had done nothing except obey his orders. He saluted smartly.

“There’s a packing-case in the car, sir,” he said, “and it ought to be examined.”

The General looked into Lord Ramelton’s car and saw the packing-case. He could scarcely deny that it might very easily contain cartridges, that it was indeed exactly the sort of case which should be opened. He turned to Lord Ramelton.

“It’s marked sugar,” he said. “What’s in it really?”

Lord Ramelton took the General by the arm and led him a little way up the street. When they were out of earshot of the crowd round the car he spoke in a low voice.

“It _is_ sugar,” he said. “I give you my word that there’s nothing it that case except sugar.”

“Good Lord!” said the General. “Of course, when you say so it’s all right, Ramelton. But would you mind telling me why you want to go driving about the country with two or three hundredweight of sugar in your ear?”

“It’s not my sugar at all,” said Lord Ramelton. “It’s my wife’s. You know the way we’re rationed for sugar now--half a pound a head and the servants eat all of it. Well, her ladyship is bent on making some marmalade and rhubarb jam. I don’t know how she did it, but she got some sugar from a man at Ballymurry. Wangled it. Isn’t that the word?”

“Seems exactly the word,” said the General.

“And I’m bringing it home to her. That’s all.”

“I see,” said the General. “But why not have let the officer see what was in the case? Sugar is no business of his, and you’d have saved a lot of time and trouble.”

“Because a village like this is simply full of spies.”

“Spies!” said the General. “If I thought there were spies here I’d----”

“Oh, not the kind of spies you mean. The Dunedin people are far too sensible for that sort of thing. But if one of the shopkeepers here found out that a fellow in Ballymurry had been doing an illicit sugar deal he’d send a letter off to the Food Controller straightaway. A man up in Dublin was fined £100 the other day for much less than we’re doing. I don’t want my name in every newspaper in the kingdom for obtaining sugar by false pretences.”

“All right,” said the General. “Its nothing to me where you get your sugar.”

Willie Thornton, much to his relief, was ordered to allow the Earl’s car to proceed, un-searched. The chauffeur, who was accustomed to be dry and warm, caught a nasty chill, and was in a bad temper for a week. He wrote to the Secretary of his Union complaining of the brutal way in which the military tyrannised over the representatives of skilled labour. The people of Dunedin felt that they had enjoyed a novel and agreeable show. Lady Ramelton made a large quantity of rhubarb jam, thirty pots of marmalade, and had some sugar over for the green gooseberries when they grew large enough to preserve.

VIII. A SOUL FOR A LIFE

Denis Ryan and Mary Drennan stood together at the corner of the wood where the road turns off and runs straight for a mile into the town. They were young, little more than boy and girl, but they were lovers and they stood together, as lovers do. His left arm was round her. His right hand held her hand. Her head rested on his shoulder.

“Mary, darling,” he whispered, “what’s to hinder us being married soon?”

She raised her head from his shoulder and looked tenderly into his eyes.

“If it wasn’t for my mother and my father, we might,” she said; “but they don’t like you, Denis, and they’ll never consent.”

Money comes between lovers sometimes; but it was not money, nor the want of it, which kept Mary and Denis apart. She was the daughter of a prosperous farmer--a rich man, as riches are reckoned in Ireland. He was a clerk in a lawyer’s office, and poorly paid. But he might have earned more. She would gladly have given up anything. And the objections of parents in such cases are not insuperable. But between these two there was something more. Denis Ryan was a revolutionary patriot. Mary Drennan’s parents were proud of another loyalty. They hated what Denis loved. The two loyalties were strong and irreconcilable, like the loyalties of the South and the North when the South and the North were at war in America.

“What does it matter about your father and mother?” he said. “If you love me, Mary, isn’t that enough?”

She hid her face on his shoulder again. He could barely hear the murmur of her answer.

“I love you altogether, Denis! I love you so much that I would give my soul for you!”

A man came down the road walking fast. He passed the gate of Drennan’s farm and came near the corner where the lovers stood. Denis took his arm from Mary’s waist, and they moved a little apart. The man stopped when he came to them.

“Good-evening, Denis!” he said. “Good-evening, Miss Drennan!”

The greeting was friendly enough, but he looked at the girl with unfriendly eyes.

“Don’t forget the meeting to-night, Denis!” he said. “It’s in Flaherty’s barn at nine o’clock. Mind, now! It’s important, and you’ll be expected!”

The words were friendly, but there was the hint of a threat in the way they were spoken. Without waiting for an answer, he walked on quickly towards the town. Mary stretched out her hands and clung tight to her lover’s arm. She looked up at him, and fear was in her face.

“What is it, Denis?” she asked. “What does Michael Murnihan want with you?”

Women in Ireland have reason to be frightened now. Their lovers, their husbands, and their sons may be members of a secret society, or they may incur the enmity of desperate men. No woman knows for certain that the life of the man she loves is safe.

“What’s the meeting, Denis?” she whispered. “What does he want you to do?”

He neither put his arm round her nor took her hand again.

“It’s nothing, Mary,” he said. “It’s nothing at all!”

But she was more disquieted at his words, for he turned his face away from her when he spoke.

“What is, it?” she whispered again. “Tell me, Denis!”

“It’s a gentleman down from Dublin that’s to talk to the boys to-night,” he said, “and the members of the club must be there to listen to him. It will be about learning Irish that he’ll talk, maybe, or not enlisting in the English Army.”

“Is that all, Denis? Are you sure now that’s all? Will he not want you to do anything?”

That part of the country was quiet enough. But elsewhere there were raidings of houses, attacks on police barracks, shootings, woundings, murders; and afterwards arrests, imprisonments, and swift, wild vengeance taken. Mary was afraid of what the man from Dublin might want. Denis turned to her, and she could see that he was frightened too.

“Mary, Mary!” he said. “Whatever comes or goes, there’ll be no harm done to you or yours!”

She loosed her hold on his arm and turned from him with a sigh.

“I must be going from you now, Denis,” she said, “Mother will be looking for me, and the dear God knows what she’d say if she knew I’d been here talking to you.”

Mrs. Drennan knew very well where her daughter had been. She spoke her mind plainly when Mary entered the farm kitchen.

“I’ll not have you talking or walking with Denis Ryan,” she said; “nor your father won’t have it! Everybody knows what he is, and what his friends are. There’s nothing too bad for those fellows to do, and no daughter of mine will mix herself up with them!”

“Denis isn’t doing anything wrong, mother,” said Mary. “And if he thinks Ireland ought to be a free republic, hasn’t he as good a right to his own opinion as you or me, or my father either?”

“No man has a right to be shooting and murdering innocent people, whether they’re policemen or whatever they are. And that’s what Denis Ryan and the rest of them are at, day and night, all over the country. And if they’re not doing it here yet, they soon will. Blackguards, I call them, and the sooner they’re hanged the better, every one of them!”

In Flaherty’s barn that night the gentleman from Dublin spoke to an audience of some twenty or thirty young men. He spoke with passion and conviction. He told again the thousand times repeated story of the wrongs which Ireland has suffered at the hands of the English in old, old days. He told of more recent happenings, of men arrested and imprisoned without trial, without even definite accusation, of intolerable infringements of the common rights. He spoke of the glorious hope of national liberty, of Ireland as a free Republic. The men he spoke too, young men all of them, listened with flashing eyes, with clenched teeth, and faces moist with emotion. They responded to his words with sudden growings and curses. The speaker went on to tell of the deeds of men elsewhere in Ireland. “The soldiers of the Irish Republic,” so he called them. They had attacked the armed forces of English rule. They had stormed police barracks. They had taken arms and ammunitions where such things were to be found. These, he said, were glorious deeds wrought by men everywhere in Ireland.

“But what have you done here?” he asked. “And what do you mean to do?”

Michael Murnihan spoke next. He said that he was ashamed of the men around him and of the club to which he belonged.

“It’s a reproach to us,” he said, “that we’re the only men in Ireland that have done nothing. Are we ready to fight when the day for fighting comes? We are not. For what arms have we among us? Only two revolvers. Two revolvers, and that’s all. Not a gun, though you know well, and I know, that there’s plenty of guns round about us in the hands of men that are enemies to Ireland. I could name twenty houses in the locality where there are guns, and good guns, and you could name as many more. Why don’t we go and take them? Are we cowards?”

The men around him shouted angrily that they were no cowards. Denis Ryan, excited and intensely moved, shouted with the rest. It seemed to him that an intolerable reproach lay on him and all of them.

“What’s to hinder us going out to-night?” said Murnihan. “Why shouldn’t we take the guns that ought to be in our hands and not in the hands of men who’d use them against us? All of you that are in favour of going out tonight will hold up your hands.”

There was a moment’s silence. None of the men present had ever taken part in any deed of violence, had ever threatened human life or openly and flagrantly broken the law. The delegate from Dublin, standing near Murnihan, looked round at the faces of the men. There was a cool, contemptuous smile on his lips.

“Perhaps,” he said, “you’d rather not do it. Perhaps you’d rather go away and tell the police that I’m here with you. They’ll be glad of the information. You’ll get a reward, I dare say. Anyhow, you’ll be safe.”

Stung by his reproach, the young men raised their hands one after another. Denis Ryan raised his, though it trembled when he held it up.

“So we’re all agreed,” said Murnihan. “Then we’ll do it to-night. Where will we go first?”

There was no lack of suggestions. The men knew the locality in which they lived and knew the houses where there were arms. Sporting guns in many houses, revolvers in some, rifles in one or two.

“There’s a service rifle in Drennan’s,” said Murnihan, “that belonged to that nephew of his that was out in France, fighting for the English, and there’s a double-barrelled shotgun there, too.”

“Drennan is no friend of ours,” said a man. “He was always an enemy of Ireland.”

“And Drennan’s away at the fair at Ballyruddery, with his bullocks,” said another. “There’ll be nobody in the house--only his wife and daughter. They’ll not be able to interfere with us.”

Murnihan asked for ten volunteers. Every man in the room, except Denis Ryan, crowded round him, offering to go.

“Eight will be enough,” said Murnihan. “Two to keep watch on the road, two to keep the women quiet, and four to search the house for arms.”

He looked round as he spoke. His eyes rested distrustfully on Denis Ryan, who stood by himself apart from the others. In secret societies and among revolutionaries, a man who appears anything less than enthusiastic must be regarded with suspicion.

“Are you coming with us, Denis Ryan?” asked Murnihan.

There was silence in the room for a minute. All eyes were fixed on Denis. There was not a man in the room who did not know how things were between him and Mary Drennan. There was not one who did not feel that Denis’ faithfulness was doubtful. And each man realised that his own safety, perhaps his own life, depended on the entire fidelity of all his fellows. Denis felt the sudden suspicion. He saw in the faces around him the merciless cruelty which springs from fear. But he said nothing. It was the delegate from Dublin who broke the silence. He, too, seemed to understand the situation. He realised, at all events, that for some reason this one man was unwilling to take part in the raid. He pointed his finger at Denis.

“That man,” he said, “must go, and must take a leading part!”

So, and not otherwise, could they make sure of one who might be a traitor.

“I’m willing to go,” said Denis. “I’m not wanting to hang back.”

Murnihan drew two revolvers from his pocket. He handed one of them to Denis.

“You’ll stand over the old woman with that pointed at her head,” he said. “The minute we enter the house we’ll call to her to put her hands up, and if she resists you’ll shoot. But there’ll be no need of shooting. She’ll stand quiet enough!”

Denis stepped back, refusing to take the revolver.

“Do it yourself, Murnihan,” he said, “if it has to be done!”

“I’m not asking you to do what I’m not going to do myself. I’m taking the other revolver, and I’ll keep the girl quiet!”

“But--but,” said Denis, stammering, “I’m not accustomed to guns. I’ve never had a revolver in my hand in my life. I’m--I’m afraid of it!”

He spoke the literal truth. He had never handled firearms of any sort, and a revolver in the hands of an inexperienced man is of all weapons the most dangerous. Nevertheless, with Murnihan’s eye upon him, with the ring of anxious, threatening faces round him, he took the revolver.

An hour later, eight men walked quietly up to the Drennan’s house. They wore black masks. Their clothes and figures were rudely but sufficiently disguised with wisps of hay tied to their arms and legs. Two of them carried revolvers. At the gate of the rough track which leads from the high road to the farmhouse the party halted. There was a whispered word of command. Two men detached themselves and stood as sentries on the road. Six men, keeping in the shadow of the trees, went forward to the house. A single light gleamed in one of the windows. Murnihan knocked at the door. There was no response. He knocked again. The light moved from the window through which it shone, and disappeared. Once more Murnihan knocked. A woman’s voice was heard.

“Who’s there at this time of night?”

“In the name of the Irish Republic, open the door!” said Murnihan. “Open, or I’ll break it down!”

“You may break it if you please!” It was Mrs. Drennan who spoke. “But I’ll not open to thieves and murderers!”

The door of an Irish farmhouse is a frail thing ill-calculated to withstand assault. Murnihan flung himself against it, and it yielded. He stepped into the kitchen with his revolver in his hand. Denis Ryan was beside him. Behind him were the other four men pressing in. In the chimney nook, in front of the still glowing embers of the fire, were Mrs. Drennan and her daughter. Mary stood, fearlessly, holding a candle in a steady hand. Mrs. Drennan was more than fearless. She was defiant. She had armed herself with a long-handled hay-fork, which she held before her threateningly, as a soldier holds a rifle with a bayonet fixed.

“Put up your hands and stand still,” said Murnihan, “both of you!”

“Put up your hands!” said Denis, and he pointed the revolver at Mrs. Drennan.

The old woman was undaunted.

“You murdering blackguards!” she shouted. “Would you shoot a woman?”

Then she rushed at him, thrusting with the hay-fork. Denis stepped back, and back again, until he stood in the doorway. One of the sharp prongs of the hay-fork grazed his hand, and slipped up his arm tearing his skin. Involuntarily, his hand clutched the revolver. His forefinger tightened on the trigger. There was a sharp explosion. The hay-fork dropped from Mrs. Drennan’s hand. She flung her arms up, half turned, and then collapsed, all crumpled up, to the ground.

Mary Drennan sprang forward and bent over her.

There was dead silence in the room. The men stood horror-stricken, mute, helpless. They had intended--God knows what. To fight for liberty! To establish an Irish Republic! To prove themselves brave patriots! They had not intended this. The dead woman lay on the floor before their eyes, her daughter bent over her. Denis Ryan stood for a moment staring wildly, the hand which held the revolver hanging limp. Then he slowly raised his other hand and held it before his eyes.

Mary Drennan moaned.

“We’d better clear out of this!” said Murnihan. He spoke in a low tone, and his voice trembled.

“Clear out of this, all of you!” he said, “And get home as quick as you can. Go across the fields, not by the roads!”

The men stole out of the house. Only Denis and Murnihan were left, and Mary Drennan, and the dead woman. Murnihan took Denis by the arm and dragged him towards the door. Denis shook him off. He turned to where Mary kneeled on the ground. He tore the mask from his face and flung it down.

“Oh, Mary, Mary!” he said. “I never meant it!”

The girl looked up. For an instant her eyes met his. Then she bent forward again across her mother’s body. Murnihan grasped Denis again.

“You damned fool!” he said. “Do you want to hang for it? Do you want us all to hang for this night’s work?”

He dragged him from the house. With his arm round the waist of the shuddering man he pulled him along and field to field until they reached a by-road which led into the town.

Three days later Inspector Chalmers, of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and Major Whiteley, the magistrate, sat together in the office of the police barrack stations.

“I’ve got the men who did it,” said Chalmers. “I’ve got the whole eight of them, and I can lay my hands on all the rest of their cursed club any minute I like.”

“Have you any evidence?” asked Whiteley. “Any evidence on which to convict?”

“I’ve no evidence worth speaking of,” said Chalmers, “unless the girl can identify them. But I know I’ve got the right men.”

“The girl won’t know them,” said Whiteley. “They’re sure to have worn masks. And even if she did recognise one of them she’d be afraid to speak. In the state this country’s in everyone is afraid to speak.”

“The girl won’t be afraid,” said Chalmers. “I know her father, and I knew her mother that’s dead, and I know the girl. There never was a Drennan yet that was afraid to speak, I’ve sent the sergeant to fetch her. She ought to be here in a few minutes, and then you’ll see if she’s afraid.”

Ten minutes later Mary Drennan was shown into the room by the police-sergeant. The two men who were waiting for her received her kindly.

“Sit down, Miss Drennan!” said Major Whiteley. “I’m very sorry to trouble you, and I’m very sorry to have to ask you to speak about a matter which must be painful to you. But I want you to tell me, as well as you can recollect, exactly what happened on the night your mother was murdered.”

Mary Drennan, white faced and wretched, told her story as she had told it before to the police-officer. She said that her father was absent from home, taking bullocks to the fair, that she and her mother sat up late, that they went to bed together about eleven o’clock. She spoke in emotionless, even tones, even when she told how six men had burst into the kitchen.

“Could you recognise any of them?” said Major Whiteley.

“I could not. They wore masks, and had hay tied over their clothes.”

She told about her mother’s defiance, about the scuffle, about the firing of the shot. Then she stopped short. Of what happened afterwards she had said nothing to the police-officer, but Major Whiteley questioned her.

“Did any of the men speak? Did you know their voices?”

“One spoke,” she said, “but I did not know the voice.”

“Did you get any chance of seeing their faces, or any of their faces?”

“The man who fired the shot took off his mask before he left the room, and I saw his face.”

“Ah!” said Major Whiteley. “And would you recognise him if you saw him again?”

He leaned forward eagerly as he asked the question. All depended on her answer.

“Yes,” said Mary. “I should know him if I saw him again.”

Major Whiteley leaned across to Mr. Chalmers, who sat beside him.

“If you’ve got the right man,” he whispered, “we’ll hang him on the girl’s evidence.”

“I’ve got the right man, sure enough,” said Chalmers.

“Miss Drennan,” said Major Whiteley, “I shall have eight men brought into this room one after another, and I shall ask you to identify the man who fired a shot at your mother, the man who removed his mask before he left the room.”

He rang the bell which stood on the table.

The sergeant opened the door, and stood at attention. Mr. Chalmers gave his orders.

“Bring the prisoners into the room one by one,” he said, “and stand each man there”--he pointed to a place opposite the window--“so that the light will fall full on his face.”

Inspector Chalmers had not boasted foolishly when he said that he had taken the right men. Acting on such knowledge as the police possess in every country, he had arrested the leading members of the Sinn Fein Club. Of two of them he was surer than he was of any of the others. Murnihan was secretary of the club, and the most influential member of it, Denis Ryan had gone about the town looking like a man stricken with a deadly disease ever since the night of the murder. The lawyer who employed him as a clerk complained that he seemed totally incapable of doing his work. The police felt sure that either he or Murnihan fired the shot; that both of them, and probably a dozen men besides, knew who did.

Six men were led into the office one after another. Mary Drennan looked at each of them and shook her head. It came to Murnihan’s turn. He marched in defiantly, staring insolently at the police-officer and at the magistrate.

He displayed no emotion when he saw Mary Drennan. She looked at him, and once more shook her head.

“Are you sure?” said Chalmers. “Quite sure?”

“I am sure,” she said. “He is not the man I saw.”

“Remove him,” said Chalmers.

Murnihan stood erect for a moment before he turned to follow the sergeant. With hand raised to the salute he made profession of the faith that was in him:

“Up the rebels!” he said. “Up Sinn Fein! God save Ireland!”

Denis Ryan was led in and set in the appointed place. He stood there trembling. His face was deadly pale. The fingers of his hands twitched. His head was bowed. Only once did he raise his eyes and let them rest for a moment on Mary’s face. It was as if he was trying to convey some message to her, to make her understand something which he dared not say.

She looked at him steadily. Her face had been white before. Now colour, like a blush, covered her cheeks. Chalmers leaned forward eagerly, waiting for her to speak or give some sign. Major Whiteley tapped his fingers nervously on the table before him.

“That is not the man,” said Mary Drennan.

“Look again,” said Chalmers. “Make no mistake.”

She turned to him and spoke calmly, quietly:

“I am quite certain. That is not the man.”

“Damn!” said Chalmers. “The girl has failed us, after all. Take him away, sergeant!”

Denis Ryan had covered his face with his hands when Mary spoke. He turned to follow the sergeant from the room, a man bent and beaten down with utter shame.

“Stop!” said Chalmers. He turned fiercely to Mary. “Will you swear--will you take your oath he is not the man?”

“I swear it,” said Mary.

“You’re swearing to a lie,” said Chalmers, “and you know it.”

Major Whiteley was cooler and more courteous.

“Thank you, Miss Drennan,” he said. “We need not trouble you any further.”

Mary Drennan rose, bowed to the two men, and left the room.

“You may let those men go, Chalmers,” said Major Whiteley quietly. “There’s no evidence against them, and you can’t convict them.”

“I must let them go,” said Chalmers. “But they’re the men who were there, and the last of them, Denis Ryan, fired the shot.”

Mary Drennan never met her lover again, but she wrote to him once before he left the country.

“You see how I loved you, Denis. I gave you your life. I bought it for you, and my soul was the price I paid for it when I swore to a lie and was false to my mother’s memory. I loved you that much, Denis, but I shall never speak to you again.”