“That wouldn’t get you out of the wood, for you’d make a martyr of me and exploit my ideals.”
“That’s so. There’s that side, of course. But still that’s what I think I’d do. I certainly wouldn’t go muddling about trying to do two mutually contradictory things at the same time. All you men here—the whole thing’s simply offensive.”
“Does the hypocrisy offend you then? You ought to have become accustomed to that by this time as a nation.”
“Well, yes, in a way it does, I suppose. But it’s not that mainly; it’s the clumsy thinking; it’s not thinking the thing out from the beginning. Do I horrify you?”
“Not at all. If you came over to Ireland you’d have a great audience. We’d agree with you in every word, simply and utterly. We’d be delighted to meet one of your nation who looked at things without any silly sentiment. You’re a sentimental people, and at bottom very cruel; we’re not sentimental. You are as sentimental as any yourself; but you’ve at least got your mentality clear of it, and so for the first time you can see things as they are. The worst of it is that, dealing with a sentimental people, you are making us superficially sentimental too, and that’s distracting us from our work. I only wish that more of you would talk as you do, instead of slobbering. And shoot away; as long as you say why, without using words that convey nothing to us and that only mean sloppy thinking on your part.”
“But I thought you objected to the shootings in Dublin.”
“Certainly. Those men were my brothers. But they weren’t shot as you said you’d shoot me, because you were out to smash an opposed thing as the only logical alternative to giving it the run of its own life, but, if you please, because they didn’t accept certain standards which none of us can ever accept until we make and endorse them in terms of ourselves—or, rather, which we now do and must for ever act upon in that sense, because it’s the first principle of life so to do. And then, when you have them shot, you turn round and praise their noble ideals! In the name of heaven, what ideals?”
“I think I should certainly shoot you now.”
“To smash me. Good man! We’d understand that in Ireland, where your Liberal sentiments bore us, and your Tory hectoring irritates us. We’re a kindly people—human and hospitable; but you, because you can escape into words and hide realities from yourselves, are cruel and inhospitable.”
And I believe he would have shot me. Many were the conversations we had; many were the kindly, thoughtful acts he did for us; and he was courtesy itself to the ladies who spent their days at the prison gate taking rebuffs from everyone in the prison, in the determination to see that each man of us received what he had need of, food or clothing. But he would have reasoned the thing out and shot me, without the least ill-will or high-falutin. And I would have borne him no ill-will, for the fight would have continued long past the two of us.