Part 16

An armoured car passed, with its machine guns poking through the loop-holes, and people stared at it sullenly or fell back on the sidewalks as it went by. Many of them ran quickly into side streets when a lorry full of soldiers came at a rapid speed down the street. It was covered with a wired cage in which young soldiers wearing steel hats, like those boys with whom Bertram had crossed, sat with rifles on their knees, looking down on the crowd in Sackville Street with unfriendly eyes, smiling ironically when they saw them running.

Dublin in time of Peace, after the Great War! In that former life of Bertram’s—how many years ago?—it had been a gay, careless old city, if he remembered well. Young as he was, he had walked up that very street alone, or hand in hand with Susan, without any fear, or sense of peril.

Somewhere in the city was Susan now, weeping because the man she loved was to be hanged on Wednesday morning, which was next day. He must find her, and stand by her in this time of trouble. But first he must find Digby.

It was to find Digby that Bertram had come to Dublin. He had a last wild hope that Digby might help to get a reprieve for Dennis O’Brien. A word from him to his commanding officer, from that officer to the Judge Advocate in Dublin Castle, might have some result. The condemned man was Digby’s brother-in-law, Michael Pollard’s son-in-law. Surely, surely it might lead to mercy.

Digby was in barracks somewhere on the north side of the city. Bertram found the place by enquiring of a group of soldiers, halted with stacked rifles in a street off Fitzwilliam Square. They were suspicious at first, and would not answer his questions. The sergeant went so far as to tell him to “clear off, unless he wanted a hole through his head.” He became civil and informative when Bertram gave him his card, showing his old rank of major in the British Army.

“Sorry, sir! But we have to be careful. These damned Irish—”

The barracks where Digby was quartered were a good mile away, and difficult to find. No good asking the passers-by, and quite dangerous. They didn’t like people who paid friendly visits to British barracks. He had better be careful, walking alone. Not pleasant to be shot in the back of the head!

The sergeant drew a little map on the back of an envelope. He seemed to know Dublin blindfold.

“I’ve searched every street in that district. Two of my lads were killed in Donegal Street, not two weeks ago. Not a health resort in that quarter!”

With the map, Bertram found the barracks, and was glad to get there. As he walked up dirty narrow streets where “washing” was hanging out of the windows, sullen glances, and sometimes foul words, greeted him from people lounging in their doorways, or slouching by. A young girl spat as he passed, as though he were a living stench. Two youths with caps drawn over their eyes followed him a little way, scowling when he turned to glance at them, and searching him with suspicious eyes. They dropped back at a corner saloon. A frowsy woman sitting on a doorstep smoking a cutty pipe, while some bare-legged children played about the street, raised her voice and cursed him.

“May the divils of Hell strike you dead for an English blackguard!”

“I’m as Irish as yourself, mother!” he answered her, not liking the way in which windows began to open and heads come out, at the sound of her shrill voice.

“Irish are ye! Then why the divil d’ye look like an English cut-throat? Holy Mother o’ God! May the English soon be driven into the sea and all drowned with the spawn of Hell!”

At the barrack gate, the sentry fell back with his bayonet on guard. At the sight of an unknown civilian he looked thoroughly scared, and the point of his bayonet trembled.

“It’s all right, my man,” said Bertram, in his best army style. “I’m Major Bertram Pollard. I’ve come to see my brother, Mr. Digby Pollard.”

“No civilians allowed, sir,” said the man. “Nobody in civil clothes,” he added, as a concession to Bertram’s rank.

“Send a message up to the O.C. It’s important.”

The message was sent, and an orderly came down to take him to Colonel Lavington. It appeared that Digby was out on a search party and would not be back until the following day.

“Sorry!” said the Colonel pleasantly. “Anything I can do for you, Major?”

Bertram was utterly depressed by this stroke of evil luck. By the time Digby came back, O’Brien’s execution would have happened. He revealed the tragedy of his mission to the Colonel.

“I’m here on a forlorn hope, sir,” he said. “It’s to make a plea for a man condemned to death. My sister’s husband, Dennis O’Brien.”

Colonel Lavington sat up in his chair, and did not hide his surprise.

“That man O’Brien! Your brother-in-law?”

“Didn’t my brother Digby tell you?”

“Not a word!”

The Colonel was sympathetic. He made no concealment of his hatred of the whole show in Ireland.

“I ought not to say so—I’m a Regular, you know!—but the politicians in England seem to be bungling frightfully. I don’t approve of these executions. They only inflame passion still further, and make martyrs of the condemned men. The scenes that go on round the prison on the morning of execution are hair-raising!”

There was no doubt about Dennis O’Brien’s guilt. He had been captured in the ambush, after shooting a British officer—poor young Stewart-MacKey. He’d been tried by Court Martial and condemned to death for murder. Of course, in a way, it wasn’t murder. The Irish argued that men captured like that ought to be treated as prisoners of war. As a soldier, he saw something in that. Still, as long as the present policy continued, he could not criticise. It was all a dirty business. Dreadful! Worse than war!

He would ring up the Judge Advocate. He might go as far as that.

Bertram listened while he “rang up.” He listened with a sense of Fate in the disjointed words spoken at last over that little instrument in a white-washed room furnished with a table, two chairs, and a map of Dublin on the wall.

“Is that the Judge Advocate? Oh, Colonel Lavington speaking. About that man, Dennis O’Brien, in Mountjoy Prison. Yes, to be hanged to-morrow morning. Yes. I have his brother-in-law here, Major Bertram Pollard, son of Michael Pollard, M.P. His brother-in-law. Yes. You knew? Telegrams from London? Oh, yes, special report! Well, then, you don’t think—No. Not a chance? Must take place? Reprieve impossible? I understand, sir. Yes. Yes. Sorry to have troubled you. Oh, of course. At six o’clock to-morrow? Thanks. Quite so. Yes, Major Pollard’s with me now. Yes. I’ll explain. Your regrets? Yes. Thanks again, sir. All right. Good-bye.”

“Not a chance?” asked Bertram.

The Judge Advocate had explained fully. Bertram could hear the crackle of his voice on the telephone. The Colonel’s words had been said between long bouts of speech from the Judge Advocate—that hoarse crackling in the receiver of the instrument.

“No. You understood by my answers? The Judge Advocate has been in communication with the Chief Secretary about the case. It has been thoroughly considered. Their decision is definite. Justice must take its course, and so on. Well! . . . I’m extremely sorry for your sake, and for your sister’s.”

He was wonderfully courteous, charmingly sympathetic, not at all a Black and Tan in his political opinions, but it would make no difference to Dennis O’Brien.

The execution was at six o’clock? Yes, at Mountjoy Prison. There would be strong guards outside. Sure to be a public demonstration.

Bertram thanked Colonel Lavington, gave him the latest news about the English Strike, shook hands, and went. His coming to Ireland had been in vain. He might as well have remained in London, except for the knowledge that he had done his best, for Susan’s sake.

He had no idea where his sister was living in the city, and perhaps it was better so. What could he say to her? How could he give her any comfort?

XXXIII

That night he slept a little in his chair in a bedroom of the Shelbourne Hotel. At four o’clock in the morning he awakened, cramped and chilled. It was the morning of execution. Something called to him to go out to Mountjoy Prison, though overnight he had no such intention. “The scenes that go on round the prison are hair-raising,” said the Colonel. What kind of scenes? He would go and see for himself. It would help him to understand the spirit of the Irish people, the spirit of half his own blood.

He found a jaunting car, and bargained with the jarvey to take him to the prison.

“They’re hanging Dennis O’Brien,” said the man. “God’s curse on them!”

All round the prison were strong forces of troops. Several armoured cars were drawn up, and a search-light was turned on a dense black crowd of people waiting there through the night, for the coming of dawn. They were mostly women and young girls, with shawls over their heads. Some bareheaded, some well-dressed with hats of the latest style. They were of all classes and ages, and with them were some priests who moved about among them, leading the recitation of the Rosary.

Again and again, with endless repetition, the crowd, kneeling on the cobble-stones, murmured their prayer:

Hail, Mary, full of grace, The Lord is with thee, . . . . . . . . . . Holy Mary, Mother of God, Pray for us sinners Now and at the hour of our death, Amen

Between each prayer there rose another sound, the strangest, most terrible sound of a human kind that Bertram had ever heard beyond a battlefield. It was the wailing of women. It was like the cry of the Banshee, as he had imagined it with horror in childhood. It rose and fell in rhythmic anguish, from all those shawl-covered women, kneeling with bowed heads, or raising their heads and hands like a Greek chorus, to the heavens above. The search-light moved above them, touched their white hands, searched along the line of upturned faces, seemed to search their souls and reveal their passion. Between the “decades” of the Rosary, and the wail of the women, other voices rose, crying out ejaculatory prayers and sacred names.

“Holy Mother o’ God! . . . Sweet Jesus, have mercy on him! . . . Christ be with him to the end! . . . Saint Joseph, comfort him! . . . God help him!”

The soldiers in their shrapnel helmets and field kit stood motionless. Their helmets—the old “tin hats” of France and Flanders,—were touched at times by the white finger of light, and their faces were sharply illumined in those moments. Young, square-jawed, English faces. Now and again one of them pushed back some one in the crowd with the butt-end of his rifle, sharply, but without brutality. An officer passed down their lines, occasionally spoke a word of command. Bertram was edged amidst a group of women. When they knelt, he felt himself isolated and too prominent, as the only man among them, and standing. He decided to kneel, and he too bowed his head when the prayers rose again for a soul shortly to be hurled into eternity at the end of a hangman’s rope. Frightful thought! That man had been a comrade of his in the war. They had touched hands. Only a few weeks ago he had sat in Bertram’s study in Holland Street with Susan, his young wife, Bertram’s sister. Now this!

Holy Mary, Mother o’ God, Pray for us sinners, Now and at the hour of our death, Amen.

For the hundredth or thousandth time the words of the Rosary came from the kneeling crowd. A woman close to Bertram fell all huddled in a faint on the cold stones. Other women bent over her, loosened her shawl. A girl was sobbing loudly, with her face in her hands. A boy—a mere child—ended his prayer with a curse. “To Hell with England!”

Somewhere, perhaps, in the crowd was Susan, weeping and praying for her man. When the search-light passed Bertram stared closely at some of the women’s faces, but did not see his sister, though more than once his heart gave a thump because he thought some girl was like her. The light of dawn crept into the sky, above the prison walls. Presently a silver streak broke through the black clouds. The crowd perceived it, and because the hour of execution was coming near, the wail of the women rose louder, with greater anguish.

“Christ have mercy on him!”

“Lord have mercy on him!”

A bell began to toll. Bertram could see it wagging to and fro in the turret of a chapel above the prison wall.

A priest stood up on a box, or some small platform, and spoke some words to the crowd, which Bertram failed to hear. Somewhere in the crowd a woman shrieked, and then was hushed down. All heads were bowed, and a dreadful hush came upon them for what seemed like a long time to Bertram, before the patter of prayers rose again. The dawn was creeping up, and the sky was grey, and rain began to fall.

Bertram was conscious of stones cutting into his knees. He was faint with hunger, and felt a little sick. He found himself trembling, and a cold sweat broke upon his forehead.

Dennis O’Brien! Susan’s husband!

What year was this? 1921! Nineteen hundred and twenty one years in the Christian era! After the Great War. . . . Civilisation! . . . Peace! . . . The Self-Determination of Peoples! . . . Liberty! . . . What was Joyce doing? . . . What was all this tragedy called Life? . . . Where was God? . . . Where was Susan in the crowd? . . . Oh, Christ!

The silver streak broadened, and the top of the prison wall was clear cut against the sky.

The bell tolled. A strange deep sigh came from the crowd. The bell stopped tolling. Above the prison wall a little black square fluttered.

A priest stood on the box again, and raised his hands, and spoke some more words. Bertram heard the end of them.

“May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace, Amen.”

Another priest took his place.

“He died as a Christian martyr. His last words were, ‘God save Ireland’!”

A frightful confusion of sound burst forth. No one was kneeling now. The women had risen to their feet, some wailing, some crying in shrill, fierce tones, some weeping noisily, some laughing, even, as one girl near Bertram, with hysteria. Men’s voices sounded among the women’s.

“God save Ireland! To hell with England! May God curse them for this day! The bloody tyrants!”

As in a kind of liturgy, prayers answered the curses.

“May his soul rest in peace!”

“Mother of God, pray for him!”

The soldiers were turning back the crowd with their rifles lengthwise. An officer shouted words of command. An armoured car moved, driving a line among the women. Bertram was pressed amidst a living mass, mostly women, forced along with them. The tress of a woman’s hair, uncoiled in the night, flicked across his face. Hands grabbed at his shoulders for support. A girl swooned and fell against him, and he put his arm about her and helped to carry her. Presently, after a long while, as it seemed, he found himself with elbow-room, able to walk freely, following separate groups of men and women. . . .

In Sackville Street he came face to face with Susan. She was walking with a girl on each side of her, one of whom was Betty O’Brien, the sister of Dennis, who was hanged. Their clothes were wet and bedraggled, their hair wild, like all the women who had waited outside the prison.

“Susan!” said Bertram.

She stared at him without recognition for a moment, and then faltered forward, and clutched him, and wept with her head against him. But not for long. Some other passion shook her, not of grief but rage. She drew back from her brother, and took Betty’s arm.

“Bertram,” she said, in a hoarse voice, “for what has happened to-day I’ll never forgive England. I’m Sinn Fein to the death. Body and soul of me for Ireland and liberty!”

In her tear-stained eyes was a wild light. She looked like a drunken woman of the streets.

A crowd gathered about them, and an English officer came up and said very politely, “Please pass away. Please don’t make trouble.”

“Get away yourself,” said Betty O’Brien. “Out of Ireland with all your tyranny!”

“I must ask you to move on,” said the officer.

Bertram tried to induce Susan to give him her address, but she refused.

“I want to be alone,” she said. “And you’re too English.”

“I’m your brother, and the same old pal,” said Bertram. “I want to help you, little sister.”

She put her hand on his arm.

“Help me by leaving me. Don’t you understand? I’ve been through Hell’s torture.”

She turned away from him, down a side street, with Betty and the other girl, and he did not follow her, because he understood.

That morning in the Shelbourne Hotel, he was called up on the telephone by Colonel Lavington.

“Is that Major Pollard? Oh, good morning.”

There was a moment’s silence, some hesitation on the telephone. Then the Colonel spoke again.

“I’m sorry to report bad news. Your brother Digby was killed last night. A sniper’s bullet on the outskirts of Dublin. A splendid young man. Most regrettable.”

Most regrettable! It was the old phrase used in the Great War when youth was killed. “I regret to report the loss of your gallant son—”

How was Bertram to face his mother with the news? How was he going to balance the tragedy of Dennis O’Brien with the tragedy of Digby Pollard? How was he going to get any sane judgment about this frightful orgy of death and outrage, hangings and shootings, prayers and curses and bleeding hearts?

Digby! That kid! A baby only a few years ago, to whom he told fairy-tales as he lay in bed! Now dead by a sniper’s bullet. What year of the Christian era? Yes, 1921! Bertram in his room at the Shelbourne laughed aloud, harshly, and then wept.

XXXIV

One of the tragic moments of Bertram’s life, which afterwards he could never remember without a shadow darkening his mind, was when he entered his father’s house after that visit to Dublin.

His way back had been delayed by the Coal Strike. The fast train from Holyhead was cancelled, and he had to come by a slow train, crowded with men thrown out of work by the shutting down of factories for lack of fuel. “It’s the end of England if this lasts long,” said one of them, but Bertram thought only of his journey’s end, and of his meeting with his mother, now that Digby lay dead, with a sniper’s bullet through his brain.

The news had come to her, he found, through a report in _The Evening News_, confirmed, almost immediately, by a telegram to his father from the Irish Secretary. Mrs. Pollard was in her little sitting-room when Bertram arrived, and tried to rise from her desk when he bent and put his arms about her. She didn’t weep very much, except for one brief agony of tears, but was quite broken. Over and over again she spoke the name of the dead boy, her last child, and said many times that she knew he was doomed. She was almost too weak to walk across her room, and complained that her heart had gone “queer.”

Bertram carried her up to bed that evening, and sent for a doctor, who looked grave, and told Bertram that his mother was in a very feeble state of health, with a pulse far below normal. Nothing organically wrong, except a cardiac weakness, but general lack of vitality. She would need constant attention, and he would send a trained nurse round that night.

Bertram sat by his mother’s side before the nurse came that evening. She clasped his hand almost like a child afraid to be left alone in the dark, as once he had held hers. Several times she seemed to be wandering in her mind, wandering back to the early days of her motherhood, when her children were young. She seemed to be worried because Dorothy had torn her frock, and a little later, told Bertram not to tease Susan.

“Do you hear me—?” she asked suddenly, after a long silence.

Bertram bent over her, and told her that he heard.

“You mustn’t tease little Susan,” she said. “You’re getting a big boy now.”

Then she fell asleep, still clasping his hand, and he listened to her breathing which seemed troubled, and sometimes came with a quick flutter.

Bertram sat cramped in his chair, while the room darkened as the evening crept on. All his love for his mother moved in him with poignancy, now that she lay stricken by this last blow of fate. After his boyhood, when his mother had been all in all to him, she had become not much more than a beautiful memory. Oxford, the War, Marriage, had thrust her out of his active interests of life. Weeks had passed, and he had not given a thought to her.

Now he remembered, and renewed the devotion of his boyhood to this little woman, so frail, but so brave, till now, who had never spared herself to give her children health, who had been so patient with all their woes, and so eager for their happiness. He remembered when he had been unwell, and she had tip-toed to his room at night, to feel whether his forehead was “feverish,” to dose him with little white pills from her homeopathic chest, and send him to sleep with a few soothing words. They had taken all that for granted, as children. Now, in manhood, Bertram, sitting by his mother’s bed, reproached himself at the thought of his ingratitude, accused himself of selfishness, was sharply touched with, pity, because of all this little mother of his had suffered in life, and with anger against life itself.

The War had been an agony to her. She could never understand the reason for all that massacre. It made her doubt even the goodness of God, which before she had never doubted. That so many boys should be killed, for “politics,” as she said, sounded to her a terrible cruelty, due to some madness which had overtaken the world. She had submitted, doubtfully and silently, to her husband’s fierce patriotism, and to Bertram’s excitement when he first enlisted, and to all the war-fever of England. Perhaps Dorothy’s marriage to a German, before the War, made her less inclined to desire the wholesale slaughter of the enemy than many mothers of England. She felt pity even for the German mothers, to the great annoyance of Michael Pollard, and the amusement of Bertram in the first ardour of his hatred for the enemy—quickly quenched after a few weeks of fighting, when he, too, lost all actual hate for the poor wretches on the other side of the barbed wire, sitting in mud, as he was sitting, with the same chance of being blown to bits.

She had rejoiced in the Armistice because it had saved Bertram, and Digby, who was getting ready to go out, and all other boys of a fighting world. An enormous burden of anxiety was lifted from her shoulders by the “Cease Fire” of the guns. She became young in spirit again, for a time, until gradually she came to suspect that there was no great security in this peace, and was aware of an orgy of blood and murder in Ireland, which came very close to her when Digby became a “Black and Tan.”

Bertram alone there, in her bedroom, in the darkness that closed about him, thought of all the tragedy of life that hadn’t ended with the war. It was still claiming its victims, though Peace had come. It had released human passions everywhere, unchained the primitive instincts of the human beast, weakened the nerve-power and controls of civilised life, made a wreck of many lives and hearts. Death was still busy. Famine and pestilence were ravaging many peoples. In the one letter he had received from Christy in Russia there were terrible words.

“Millions are eating nothing but grass and leaves, and not enough of that,” he wrote. “Typhus is sweeping these people like a scourge.”