I had been out when the Auxiliaries made their call, and I returned to find a gaping congregation at the mouth of our street, and outside our house the glaring headlights of an armoured car, and two great shadowy lorries, which were filling up again with men. As I reached the door, a neighbour, on tiptoe with excitement, called from her top doorstep, “They’ve raided your house again, and they’ve taken a man out of it.”
I had come as the curtain was falling. The engines of the lorries were humming, and first one lorry moved off and then the next, and the armoured car rolled on their heels. In a few moments the street, which had been filled with noise, became quiet again, heads went in from windows, and people retreated from doorsteps.
But our door remained open, and on the top step, in the hall light, stood a little group of women: Mrs. Slaney, upright and defiant, Mrs. Fitzgerald gazing wistfully into the dark, and my wife.
“What do you think of this?” Mrs. Slaney demanded, turning terribly upon me as I came up the steps. “Any honest Englishman must blush for what his Government does.”
While I was searching for a happy answer, Mrs. Fitzgerald said something which gave me a peep into her mind.
“If it weren’t for the work,” she said, “it’s a good thing in some ways that this has happened. There was always the chance he might be shot in the street. He’s safer where he is. And he wanted a rest.”
“There you are, Mabel,” said a voice, and Miss Gavan Duffy, sister of the Sinn Fein Ambassador to Rome, came up the steps.
“They’ve just taken him,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said.
“I heard,” Miss Gavan Duffy answered, making me wonder at the speed at which news travelled among them.
Mrs. Fitzgerald had become all energy. “I shall have to go down and let the newspapers know,” she said. “They’ll have it in to-morrow morning like that. Once it’s in the papers the Castle people are less likely to do anything to him.”