Yet his visit was salutary. It whipped one out of one’s misery, and gave one something to fight for. I turned to the rules on the wall and read them carefully and completely. The jail having been newly re-opened, the Governor was a Chief Warder acting as Governor. (This I afterwards perceived, for I did not then know the distinction between Chief Warders and Governors.) Later in the morning he entered to give me my instructions for the day; and when he did so, I had sufficiently mastered the section relating to “Prisoners Awaiting Trial” to interrogate him on its application to myself. I claimed the right to books, to tobacco, to daily newspapers, to daily letters out and in, to daily visitors, to my own meals ordered from the town, and to getting another prisoner, if I so wished it, to clean out my cell each day.
Whatever was there to be claimed, I claimed. At first he sought to put me by. But when I compelled him to an admission that I was at least a “Prisoner Awaiting Trial” then I claimed the fulfilment of the rights accorded to that type of prisoner. It required some address at first to get him to converse, for the usual method was harshly and instantly to strike down any attempt at conversation. It was necessary at first, quite casually and calmly, to ask an interpretation of the rules; and then, once the net of discussion was cast, it was not so difficult to hold him in its toils.
He looked at me as though he wished he had removed the troublesome rules. “You forget,” he said, “these aren’t ordinary times. You are under martial law now. The soldiers are the masters of us all now, so they are. I amn’t very sure that I know where I am myself. Rules don’t apply now. Nothing applies. I get my instructions from day to day. They might take you out to-morrow morning and shoot you, so they might, and nobody to save you. Isn’t the whole of the City of Dublin in ruins? I cannot give you but what I’m bid, and those rules don’t relate to you—they don’t relate to anybody.”
He granted me permission, however, to send out for my meals, if I so wished it, and to write one letter each day, on a sheet provided for that purpose. As a tally against the failure of my other rights he agreed that I might keep my bed-board down for certain hours of the day a concession that very much perplexed my northern warder.
I learnt from the other prisoners afterwards that this Governor was very rough and harsh with them. At first he was so with me; but finally he shewed me as much kindliness as was possible under the circumstances. He did so in a strange way. He would enter my cell and shout at me as harshly as at any; and then he would close the door, sit on my stool, and begin to talk quite humanly. Such conversations would conclude as brusquely and sharply as they began. Thus a certain kinship emerged between us. We were both Irishmen, with a stranger’s martial hand against us both, thrusting me into jail, and abrogating his rules. In that mood he always spoke to me as one fellow-countryman might to another of some unintelligible foreigner that had come into our land; and then he would remember that he was leagued with the foreigner, whereas I was pledged against him, when he would make some curt remark and leave me.
V.
Later in the morning I heard the jingle of the warder’s keys, the grating of locks, and the tramp of feet down the wooden passage outside. Presently it came to my turn, and my door was flung open. When I made no move, my warder appeared in the doorway with angry countenance to ask me what I was doing.
“Am I wanted?” I asked.