It was nothing strange to be stopped by the military in the street and searched for arms, and the custom was growing to let women carry the guns until they were wanted and receive them again afterwards, for women were not allowed to be searched except in emergency by women searchers. The British Government was paternal in some things to the end, and earned the righteous scorn of Loyalist and Republican alike.
About this time we paid visits to Mrs. Erskine Childers. Her house was one of the rocks of Republicanism. One met there the more extreme Cumann na mBan, and as the Cumann na mBan consisted of women they were nearly all extreme. It was whispered that all sorts of people on the run visited the place; but the ordinary visitor to the house never met these people. It was necessary for Mrs. Childers to lead an inactive life, and her energies had gone into her intellect. She sat all day in her library dipping into her books, and she had become very well educated politically.
The rule that the convert makes the fiercest apostle held good in the case of these two—of Mrs. Childers, an American citizen, and of Childers, the Englishman, who in earlier years had served Britain and the British Empire in the army and the navy. The nationality of Mrs. Childers, and the fact that she was a person of breeding in a movement where most of the followers belonged to the people, made her valuable, and all wandering strangers whose sympathy it was desirable to enlist, were taken along to her with the words, “Oh, you must see Mrs. Erskine Childers. She can tell you so much.” Mrs. Childers, refined, daintily dressed, intellectual, lying on her couch, put them right upon the wrongs of Ireland.
The strangest of the birds of passage that passed through Ireland during these troubled times were Americans, who, one and all, belied their national reputation for shrewdness. Those I came across in Ireland were emotional, simple individuals, ready to credit any well-told story.
What of Childers himself, the toiling Childers, the small harassed man, for ever pedalling his bicycle; Childers who, of all those hard-working people, outworked all others; Childers who looked as though he might die and still sit upon his bicycle with his legs going round and round? This toiling Republican, whom the British Government in the strangeness of its ways left free, was he a man with a broken heart, and this very fever of work the effort to escape his sorrow? Was there truth in the whisper that he was a disappointed English naval man, who in pique had thrown himself into Irish affairs? Then, indeed, he was a small man, and all his furious pedalling would never bring him balm. But if his work for Ireland represented truth to him, so that no doubt ever came to make him irresolute, so that he never thought hungrily of his own country which he had forsaken then, indeed, he was bigger than the common run of man, and his toil may have brought repose to his spirit.
Mrs. Desmond Fitzgerald had a cottage in the hills, not very far from the city. We made occasional pilgrimages there. The two-mile walk from the station was nothing on those first kind summer days. There were pools of shade for the traveller to wade through under the trees; the lower lands were golden with gorse; the sky was high and serene. Yet the country bore more marks of ruin than the city.
An occasional gaunt building, such as the skeleton of the Customs House or the General Post Office, was all the wear and tear the city showed, though observant people could find bullet holes in a good many windows, some of them small and clean as if an augur had bored them, others brutally done, so that the cracks had run all about the pane. Sometimes a great plate-glass window would be annihilated, sometimes the fragments of some bomb leaping from the pavement would tear a score of holes in a door and stay embedded there; but next day the glazier would be along with his putty and the decorator with his paint brush, and there would be nothing to see.
It was different in the country. One came upon trees felled across the road, or lying prone, leaving just enough space for the cart of the marketing peasant. One came upon walls tumbled to the ground, and a pyramid of broken masonry lying in wait for the hurrying police tender. Round abrupt corners one stepped into trenches dug across the road to receive the front wheels of some military lorry shaking upon its way.
Military and police presently took with them little bridges to engineer the lorries across the trenches, and so with a bare halt went throbbing on their way; but the graves set in the road for leviathan fare stayed there unattended, yawning for the poor peasant and his cart. Nobody filled these gaps, perhaps from patriotism, perhaps because such busybody act might call down the vengeance of the Republican Army hanging somewhere in the hills, or equally probably because the tired peasant, having negotiated the yawn with his own wit, left other people to be as wise as he, and went on home, looking neither right nor left, in case he saw more than was wise.
But summer had come quite indifferent to these things; and by wood and hedge and stream it had arrived a-blooming; it had gone rolling up and down the hills, and into the shining sky.