XXXII
It was a rough passage from Holyhead, and he felt sick in the smoking saloon, crowded with officers of the Royal Scots, among whom, silent and absorbed in thought or prayer, sat two Irish priests. There was a battalion of soldiers on board—mostly boys of nineteen or so—and most of them were horribly sick as they lay among their kit and rifles. They cursed Ireland, the War Office, Lloyd George, and other powers which had ordained this night passage across the Irish Channel and the “bloody job” at the end of it.
Bertram spoke a few words to one of the officers, a captain with a row of decorations. He had been on service in Ireland before, and was going back from leave.
“What’s it like over there?” asked Bertram.
“Like nothing on earth,” said the officer. “Worse than France, barring barrage-fire. One never knows when one is going to be sniped, or blown up by a bomb thrown from a side street. Not a gentleman’s job! A rotten dirty business.”
“What’s going to be the end of it?”
The young officer shrugged his shoulders.
“They’ll go on with this guerrilla game for centuries, unless we wipe out the whole lot. Another Cromwell show! Of course, I’m not supposed to hold opinions, but speaking privately, I’d give them anything less than a Republic, clear out British troops, and let them stew in their own juice. They’d fight like Hell among themselves. That would make less Irish in the world, and save a lot of trouble. What’s your view?”
Bertram’s view was much the same, with regard to “clearing out,” though he believed they wouldn’t go in for civil war among themselves if they had Dominion Home Rule.
“You don’t know them,” said the Captain of Royal Scots.
“I’m half Irish,” Bertram told him, and the officer said, “Oh!” suspiciously, and after that was silent and moved away.
The railway journey to North Wall was uneventful. The line was guarded by troops, and there were many soldiers in the train, wearing steel hats and full fighting kit. Boys again, sullen-looking, and with shifty, nervous eyes.
Then Dublin.
Bertram walked through the streets like a revenant. Dublin belonged to a former life. He had forgotten it for a thousand years—or was it only sixteen? He found his way to Merrion Square, and stood outside his father’s old home—Number 23—and gazed up at its windows through dirty lace curtains.
Inside one of those rooms he had first seen the light of day. Half-forgotten incidents of his childhood came back to him, vividly, with astonishing sharpness of detail. He remembered putting his head once through those railings and not being able to get it out again. That was when he was four years old, or thereabouts. Good Heavens! There were two of the railings bent, where his Irish nurse had pressed them apart with a cry of “Holy Mother of God!” Betty was her name. He remembered now. And there was the ring and wrought iron lion’s head of the door-knocker which he had just been able to reach on tip-toe, later in that early life of his.
He remembered “the Move”—the frightful excitement of it—when, at nine years of age, he had left this house with all the family, for England. He had wept bitterly at leaving, especially when his broken rocking-horse had been cast on to the scrap heap, with other wreckage of nursery life. He could remember the mangy tuft of hair on that wooden beast, and the smell of red paint which had once represented a saddle. He had kissed its wooden nose, and howled when it was taken from him for ever.
Betty had frightened him about England. “The English will skin you alive if you make a noise in their London town. . . . The English know nothing but hate for the Irish. . . . The English are a bad-tempered set of spalpeens, and there’s no truth in them at all.”
Dublin! . . . It was strange to be here among his own people, a foreigner among them. He had the English way of speech, the English way of mind. Some of them, especially the young men, scowled at him as he passed down Sackville Street. They knew him as English by the cut of his clothes, by the look in his eyes. They didn’t see the Irish strain of blood in him.
He looked at their faces as they pushed by. What was wrong with them? They were people haunted by some hidden fear. There was fear in their eyes. They kept glancing about them, uneasily, watchfully. Some men were nailing boards outside a shop window, and one of the planks fell on to the pavement with a slight crash. Instantly a group of people gathered round a shop window scattered and ran into neighbouring doorways. The men with the boards laughed. One of them called out, “No danger at all, at all!”—and in a moment or two men and women emerged from shelter, smiled at each other, and went their way again, with that nervous glance to left and right.
Haunted! Yes, that was the word. Many of the women had haggard eyes, drawn, pallid faces, little lines of pain about their mouths. They looked as though they had lost their sleep for nights or weeks. Their nerves were tattered. It was easy to see that by their sudden shrinking from any little noise, like the crack of a jarvey’s whip, or a boy’s shrill whistle.
They greeted each other like women Bertram had seen in French villages after mornings of great battle when the wounded had gone streaming by.
“Dear God!” said one woman to another as he passed.
“Mother of Mercy!” said another.
There was no mystery about it. Here, in Sackville Street were outward and visible signs of conflict, old and recent; the ruins of the Post Office and public buildings bombarded during the Rebellion of Easter Week in ’16, and new bulletmarks on the walls of shops, and through plate-glass windows. Many shops were barricaded. Others were shut up and barred. Women did their shopping through narrow entrances of stacked timber. It was a city of Civil War.
Worse than Civil War, thought Bertram, for here there was no knowing who was friend and who enemy. Any of these young Irishmen strolling by might have a bomb in his pocket, and hurl it at any man he had marked down, rightly or wrongly, as a spy, a detective, a Government official, a British officer in mufti. From any window or any roof might come the crack of a sniper’s bullet.
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?