“You’ve got me into trouble now, Mrs. Slaney,” I said, or something to that effect. “They’ve found your ammunition, and they’re taking me to the Castle.”
“Monstrous!” she exclaimed. “Iniquitous! Just a few war trophies.” She turned on our morose friend. “I swear to you I did not know what those things were.”
“You mean to tell me you don’t know bullets?”
“No.”
He turned away from her and grunted at me, “Come along.” Mrs. Slaney marched out of the room.
Finishing my toilet with a scarf, I followed in the descent, the man in khaki, our dapper guard, and my wife making up the rear. The front door was open, and all the cold and dark in the world were coming in through it. The black of outside was blacker because of the lorry lights, and the said lorries were now cranked up and humming to be off. Men were climbing into them by the back.
The hall had emptied of raiders. At the bottom of the stairs we found Mrs. Fitzgerald, Mrs. Slaney, and a tearful Mrs. O’Grady standing in a circle like chickens come round a trough, and in the middle of them, miserable as a whippet in the wind, O’Grady in a bowler and a threadbare overcoat. They had plunged into the bowels of the house and captured him. There was no check in the tide and I seemed to be passing through the hall and down the steps like a boat passing an island. There were upraised women’s voices. Mrs. Fitzgerald was quite collected and giving advice. My wife was ordering me to wrap up. Mrs. O’Grady was calling upon the saints to help her poor man.
Mrs. Slaney had the last word. “Iniquitous!” she exclaimed in my ear, as I was looking for the top step. “But now you will be able to see for yourself what our splendid young men are experiencing every day.”
As I have said there were two lorries, one like a chicken coop and the other unlike a chicken coop. We were told to get into the chicken coop. This I at least was most agreeable to do, as I had no desire to be a target of homeless Sinn Feiners. Then with a flourish we were away under the eyes of many interested people hanging from upper windows. We raced through the deserted streets. It had been raining, and the roads shone wherever the lamps fell upon them.
We were the second car. There seemed in our lorry two sorts of seats, a bad sort, and a worse sort, wooden planks resting on boxes, and rolls of wire. We sat, about a dozen all told, on these things, and except for O’Grady and myself, every man had a rifle and about three guns apiece. At the end of a minute we were about to fly down Grafton Street, when the front car came to a halt and began to run round. This time it took the lead down Kildare Street, and we after it, and we all came to a stop this side of the ruined Maples Hotel, at No 29, which was Darrel Figgis’s flat.