Of course these people were only corner-boys. They were corner-boys in the strictest sense of the word. They were on the way to a corner where they would throw those bombs and let off those guns, and then they would depart home as hurriedly and as safely as they could. They were corner-boys. And yet they were something more than corner-boys. The type of warfare they conducted brought them few casualties; but one had only to see those self-conscious anxious faces to know it was not the joy of murder that impelled them on the way. These people, who had just walked by, were going to render a certain service at a street corner because they believed their country needed that service. Why deny them any lustre that was theirs?
I fell out of my muse about ten minutes later when I heard the roar of a couple of bombs and some rifle fire. Bullets clipped the leaves overhead, and I felt ruffled. They must have blown somebody up, I thought, and fell into a second muse.
As a matter of fact they had nearly blown my wife up, and also several women with perambulators; but the only person who got shot was an old beggar woman sitting on the steps of St. Vincent’s Hospital. My wife said when the bombs were thrown and the Auxiliaries were firing back, the Volunteers seized the perambulators and hustled them and the frantic nurses into the shelter of Stephen’s Green. Whether this act was to protect the children, or whether it was to take suspicion off the Volunteers, she could not make up her mind. Let us give judgment for the first.
I awakened from my second muse to find a gun being flourished at my stomach, and a fiery Auxiliary, an ex-officer and a loyal gentleman or one of Hamar Greenwood’s hired assassins, according to a man’s views, ordering me to “go over there and be searched.” I looked “over there,” and saw all the men in the Green bunched together and the Auxiliaries searching them. I started to go over, and the Auxiliary flew after another solitary individual. There were half a dozen bushes on the way I could have dropped guns behind.
In a minute or two I had joined the bunch of men. I began to feel in a hurry all of a sudden, for it was getting towards lunch-time, and when a queue was formed, I took an opportunity to get into the front of it. It was after I was well in position that I remembered my pocket-book had entries in it, names of Sinn Feiners and titles of pamphlets, which might cause these gentlemen in Balmoral bonnets to prick up their ears. They might feel it on their conscience to haul me off to the Castle to explain myself, and it was easier to enter the Castle Yard than to leave the Castle Yard. I became humble. I withdrew, I evaporated, I murmured after you, sir, and I went crabwise to the last place in the line. It took me twenty minutes and a good deal of bother to pull the necessary leaves from my pocket-book without being noticed, tear them into little bits, and sprinkle them in the grass.
When my turn came the Auxiliary said without touching me, “You’ll do.”
“Search me,” I demanded.
He smiled, patted my pockets, and said, “You’ll do.”
They knew the sort of man to look for.
But, of course, anybody who knew the ropes realised the searching of this line of men had been pathetic, for over on the seats sat nursemaids and little typists, and other high-heeled and short-skirted people. If any of the ambushers had had the misfortune to be shut in the gardens, their guns were not on them. They would be in some bush, or they would be in the dress of one of those demure maidens.