For once she appeared a little abashed. A great flurry of wind came along, and the inferno within the stone walls glowed, and flames pushed through the stone crevices here and there, leapt out of the windows, climbed through the roof, and turning into smoke, went whirling into the sky. Great pieces of charred material went floating like black birds into the air. All eyes were fixed on the clock, which continued to tick.
“It was the most beautiful building in Ireland,” Mrs. Slaney said. “Many a time I have been in there when I was a girl with my cousins, who held their heads very high on the north side of the city. It seems unfortunate that the Volunteers should have considered it necessary to burn it.” Then the old fire came back. “But England is to blame, England for what has happened. The Customs House represents to us the very heart of England. After Dublin Castle everything that is iniquitous in English rule is most strongly represented by that building. England has caused the ruin of that place just in the same way as she caused the destruction of the Post Office, another of our beautiful buildings.”
I departed before very long, vanquished. The clock was still going at the time; but it had stopped before next morning. The following afternoon I was down that way again when the dome, which seemed to be supporting the statue of Commerce, capitulated. The flames pushed through its joints, like the edges of some starving tongue thrusting up from within; it crumpled, it palpitated, it curled in agony, it disappeared. But the statue stood, defying the lust of the great crowd gathered to see it crash down to the pavement, and was standing high over the wreckage after the last spark had been quenched.
This coup of the Republican Volunteers, though one of the most brilliant they had carried out, was never mentioned with special satisfaction even in the ranks of Sinn Fein. There was regret in the note of rejoicing. Ireland had lost her finest building.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE COMING OF SUMMER
With the arrival of June a long dry summer made a beginning. The leaves were thick upon the trees, the birds had done their spring singing and were sending their families out into the world, and the nursemaids and children had all come back again to Stephen’s Green. The babies that had filled the perambulators of last year toddled beside the wheels this year, and new babies were lying upon the old cushions.
But political affairs showed no alteration, and though it was fixed in everybody’s mind that the British Government was about to make a change in policy, an overture of peace or a fiercer war, there was no sign of this, and affairs were more acute. But these days could not desolate a man as the winter days had done, for now there was sunshine and now there was light.
One morning, as I wandered in the direction of Stephen’s Green I saw Mrs. Desmond Fitzgerald. She must have come in from her cottage in the hills. I wanted to ask her something; but she was moving at her own special pace, which resembled nothing so much as the tireless trot of a wolf, and perceiving I would have to hire a side-car to overtake her, and being without funds, I went into the Green and fell upon a seat in a muse. The nursemaids, the children and the cereopsis goose from Australia drifted out of my vision.
I revived to see walking by me ten Republican Volunteers or ten of the murder gang, according to what were one’s political opinions. These people wore trench coats, the pockets of which were swollen with guns and bombs, and they looked very self-conscious. They had come up Grafton Street and in by the main gate there, and they were crossing the Green in couples to the farther end. They must be going to blow up somebody, I thought, and fell into a muse again upon them.