The old man’s blue eyes softened a little at this, and after I had tried to make him understand that it was no idle curiosity that had brought me from England to his lonely farm, he said brokenly: “Well, ma’am, ye seem to have a koind heart, an’ if it’s really wantin’ to help sthop this koind av thing ye’re afther Oi’ll thry to tell ye.” And he tried. But he failed. He broke into awful weeping instead. And when she saw her old man broken down the old wife fell a-weeping too, and there was such a wailing and a sobbing in that little farm kitchen as almost drew the heart out of the body. I took the frail old woman in my arms and tried to soothe her. I begged her to cry on my shoulder. She said she couldn’t cry, hadn’t cried since they brought the boy home dead. Her eyes were wild and burning. Between dry sobs and moans I got the tale.
The men had come in the night, the same men who had shot the lad at the farm below, and the same night, and demanded the whereabouts of one of the sons. Neither man nor wife knew. They had not seen the boy for weeks. They pushed the old farmer against the wall and threatened to kill him if he didn’t tell. A young and delicate boy, never allowed out at nights because of his lungs, hearing the noise and the scuffle dressed quickly and rushed into the room crying: “Don’t shoot my old dad. Shoot me.”
“Ah,” said one of the intruders, “here’s our man. I knew they had him somewhere.”
“No,” said another. “He’s not the chap. It’s his brother we’re after.”
“Never mind,” was the retort. “This one will do.” And they dragged him across the field to the waiting lorry and there they shot him dead. “Trying to escape,” was the official story; but it was not true, and nobody believes it. If in Ireland you speak of this excuse in any company there are shouts of ironic laughter.
“And it was to save his father my poor bhoy went wid the murthering men,” said the poor mother; “an’ for that they shot him, the black-hearted scoundrels; an’ no priest wid him wan he died. But if there’s a God in ’ivin me pore bhoy will go straight to his arms, forr niver a word av wrong could be said against the lad. He was the best son Oi had, an’ a good bhoy to his father.”
A small black cross on the side of the road and the letters R.I.P. mark the spot where the young martyr was killed.
I left the farm sick with the sight of so much pain and sorrow. The old man accompanied me to the gate, choosing the path for me and offering his aid over the bad places with all the instinctive courtesy of his race. His eye lit up when he heard that “the Prisident” had arrived in Ireland. He idealized De Valera with all the power of his native imagination. He told how, for miles around, men, women and little children were afraid to sleep in their beds at night, but took to the fields and hills, and slept in blankets under the hedges. The wind whistled past me as he spoke, and the rain began to fall, and I pulled my cloak more tightly around me, for I heard with the mind’s ear small children in the night sobbing themselves to sleep under the dank hedgerows.
I had planned to visit other sufferers, but farther I could not go. The human spirit bruises itself to death in the perpetual contemplation at close quarters of misery and wrong, and relief in action becomes necessary for sanity. I would go to Cork and see the sacked city, and then return to England with the story of it all.