"I am on good terms with my tenants; my rents are fair rents; I evict nobody. What have they to gain by shooting me?"
But it was not from his own tenants that trouble was expected. It was not because Mr. Smith-Barry was not a good landlord, but because he was the leader of the landlords in the South of Ireland, and the most formidable opponent of the League that his life was threatened. "It may be so," he said: "but I think I will go on as I am." And from that nobody could move him.
Now, as it happened, shortly before I left London I had met one of the chief officials in the Home Office who said to me:
"You are going to Ireland."
"Yes, but how do you know?"
"Never mind how I know. What I want to say to you is, Take a revolver with you."
I was on the point of making a light answer, but stopped. If you get a hint of that kind from a man who rules over the Criminal Department of the Home Office and the police generally, you accept it and do as you are told. I had a revolver with me, therefore, and when the time came to go back to London I left it in its case on Mr. Smith-Barry's writing-table, with a letter asking him to accept it from me and once more begging him to carry it if only that it might be known that he carried it, or if only out of his friendship to me. This prevailed. He wrote me that he still thought we made a needless fuss about it, but he could not refuse the gift and he could not refuse to carry it. No letter ever pleased me more. I have never again seen my friend the Chief Constable, but I have never forgotten him, and I think of him now as a fine impersonation of that authority of the law which, in those turbulent days, he asserted and successfully maintained against great odds.