A curious adventure befell me on this occasion. I sat on a low wall covered with moss. There had been a heavy shower of rain, and the country was very green and lovely. The sombre hills in the distance were relieved by the intense blue of the sky and white of the clouds. The long white lane wound coaxingly to the west calling for new adventures. Nobody passed me for full twenty minutes. There was much to think about: the stupid blunders of politicians and the many injustices of life. I was content to sit alone and muse on things in that loveliest bit of countryside. Suddenly the roar of a motor engine broke upon the stillness, and there flashed past me a large military lorry full of troops with grim faces and poised rifles. Ten seconds and they were gone; and I too rose to go. At my elbow, as if sprung out of the ground, was an old man who had come silently up during my musings.
“You are a stranger here, lady, and not an Irishwoman, and if you will take advice from an old man you will never sit on a wall in an Irish country lane. Not now, at any rate. I know a man who did that. He was found dead in the lane. He was picked off by a crack British rifleman who shot at the target from a distance to win a bet. Oh, it was an accident,” he added hastily, noting my horrified expression. “It was not known that the chosen target was a human being. It might have been anything at a distance, a young tree, a large stone—anything. What happened once might happen again. And in that red cloak of yours what an excellent target you would be. You take great risks in Ireland during the foreign occupation. Good day to you, ma’am.”
One day, having succeeded in hiring a car, I drove to some of the more remote farms in the hills I had seen and admired from the side of the road where I talked with the old man. The youth who drove me was a member of the Republican Army, but a discreet and quiet boy, who would not be drawn into conversation. We sped for an hour and a half along a bad road in a high wind. It was bitterly cold, but fine and sunny. We stopped at the cottage of an old widow to ask for some information, but she lived in hourly terror of the barracks two miles away, and would tell us nothing. On we went till we came to a farm at the crest of the hill standing back a little from the high road.
It was a poor farm, one of the poorest in the district. The farmer was a strong, thick-set type, not very easy to persuade to tell his story. His wife was a pale, delicate woman without the words to express all she felt and knew. Her ordinary speech was Irish. We sat down in the kitchen, and the wife worked the bellows till a bright blaze burst from the soft coal piled up on the old-fashioned huge hearthstone. The water in the large potato cauldron began to steam, and the tiny potatoes cooking for the pigs to stir in the pot. Three dogs of different breeds invited the stranger to caress them. A couple of cats lay curled up on the kitchen table. A white hen roosted on the top of a sack of grain, and chickens walked up and down the floor. An immense sow peeped in at the door just for friendliness, and turned away when she had satisfied her curiosity.
“It was midnight,” began the farmer, “and the wife and Oi wurr in bed. All av a sudden a bullet flew through the window. Thin Oi knew that the Black and Tans was here. They broke in the door an’ asked furr moi lads. The bhoys was slapin’ in the barrn. They ran away, but they was caught, an’ the soldiers made them kneel in the yard wid thurr hands above thurr heads whoile they surrched the house. They found nothin’ at all. Thin they told the lads to run. They ran out av the gate an’ the dirty blackguards shot at thim. But they got away, all but wan. He was shot in the arrm and leg, an’ he’s lyin’ in the hospital now. We found him in the turnup field the next mornin’ bleeding bad; for it was foive hours he was lying thurr before we found him, the pore lad.” He spoke quietly and without emotion, but there was a gleam in his eye that spoke volumes of hate and fury. Later in the day I went to the hospital and saw the wounded son, a beautiful, modest boy with the sort of open face that invites perfect trust. He told me he neither smokes nor drinks, and passed the cigarettes I brought him to his comrades.
“It is the rule of the Republican Army,” added the gentle Catholic sister who was nursing these wounded boys, “that no alcohol must be taken. Would to heaven it were the rule of the British Army too. But they tell me that Dublin Castle gives drink freely to the men it sends out upon its black errands.” She stopped suddenly, and busied herself with one of her patients in some confusion for fear she had said too much. It reminded me of a pathetic school teacher in Petrograd who told me things about herself, thinking I was sympathetic, and then became overwhelmed with fear lest she had made a mistake and revealed her secrets to a Bolshevik spy. “You will not give me away, dear madame? I have said nothing wrong, have I? Only that we are all very hungry and very unhappy? Say you will not report what I have said. Swear it! Swear it!” And she pressed my hand in her fear of what might befall her till I could have shouted with pain.
The old peasant wife begged me to take tea, but there was much to do that day, so I begged to be excused, and drove away to a small farm still more remote from the broad highway. This farm was reached through two ploughed fields. In it lived an elderly farmer, his wife and daughter. I knocked loudly at the door, but there was no reply. I knocked again and again, but nobody appeared. A dog barked loudly, suggesting human habitation, so I persisted, and after a while the farmer appeared and roughly demanded my business. I told him who I was and what my errand—to hear his story and make it known.
“And what forr should Oi tell ye my sthory,” he demanded fiercely. “Don’t ye know, don’t the people av England know that it was the English Crown that killed my bhoy? Don’t the English people know widout my tellin’ thim what thurr soldiers are doin’ to Oireland? Av course they know; but they don’t care. Oi’ll not tell ye wan worrd av the tale.”
His daughter came in, a buxom dark-haired girl, whose face was black with the smoke from the peat fire, and we two listened for ten minutes to the most terrible outpouring of hate and rage against England that it has ever been my lot to hear. I sat perfectly still, but the torrent of passionate words brought from an inner room the farmer’s white-haired old wife, who greeted me with the grace of a queen and tried to stem the torrent of the old man’s rage. “I understand, dear friend,” I said to the old woman, “I understand. If I had lost a child in such a way I should probably have said much worse things than this, being a woman.”