Worse things happened in Dublin every day. The Sinn Feiners began to carry out their “executions” in the streets. Two Auxiliaries were shot coming out of a Grafton Street Picture House. It was said a woman pointed them out, and when the dying men were lying on the pavement nobody dared go near them. Two more Auxiliaries were shot while they were sitting at tea with their wives. The kidnappings were going on. The military and police never rested, and all night long there was shooting. People were sick to death at the state of things.
Nobody ever said what was at the bottom of his or her heart, for nobody was sure of the other person’s beliefs, and everybody feared the power of the opposite side. Meanwhile the country was going to rack and ruin, and was there a human man or woman who did not long for peace?
CHAPTER XXVI
THE TWELFTH OF JULY
Now that the height of the summer had come, and each day was hotter than the last, there began an exodus from Dublin of all who had opportunity, and among the speeding guests was myself. I left my wife behind and winged a flight to Ulster, being primed that I would have taken no true stock of Ireland until I had examined the strange race that moved, and lived, and had its being in the north-east of the country. It was said that the first half of July was the season to study these people, as their national fury waxed greatest at that time of year, reaching its most notable height on the twelfth of the month, and thereafter abating.
The end of June found me setting out upon my journey.
The train that drew me out of Amiens Street railway station, Dublin, and disgorged me at Belfast, did undoubtedly take me out of one country and set me down in another. I left Ireland and came to a Scotland, not a Scotland identical with that over the sea; but a Scotland that smacked of the other Scotland in speech, in hardihood, and in the make of mind that, in the face of a Catholic Ireland, made its sons cherish the stern old beliefs of Covenanting days. Behold some later race, vigorous, masculine, most tenacious, had breasted an intervening sea and found a footing in Ireland. New influences coming upon the fathers had modified the children; but time had not yet worn out the original mould.
Go north and you will find the answer to the question, Why are the Irish always divided? The north-east quarter has the same winds as blow about the rest of Ireland, has the same roads as those on which the rest of Ireland walks, grows the same grass; but has another people in whom it breeds a separate vision. The statement that Ireland absorbs all who come to her, making them her own, is a poet’s dream or a politician’s romance.
The two Irish peoples are poles apart—the Orangemen masculine, stern, uncompromising, when they are spiritual, alight with the steady burning fire of Puritan days taken out of some old history book, touched with mediæval narrowness, energetic, clean; Catholic Ireland, feminine and temperamental, poetical, easy going, lazy, able in dream to conceive the noblest ideal, unfitted in character to carry it to a conclusion, broad where the Orangemen are narrow, pliable where the Orangemen are rigid.
Why did the old Covenanting blood never flow into the Celtic veins as other blood has done? Have political differences been all the cause? Is the Orangeman’s love of Empire as uncompromising as he says? Is Celtic Ireland’s hate of Britain implacable? I for one do not believe that Ulster’s love is so burning hot; nor am I sure that Celtic Ireland’s hate of Britain is so undying. The Irish flame burns up now and then, fanned by a new generation of leaders; but when the bellows cease to blow there seems to be no fire.