Himself drifted to a far corner, where I lost him.
I made my way across the great warm room towards the fireplace. Tea was progressing merrily, and I was soon seated with a cup in my hand, eating potato cakes hot from the kitchen.
There were about thirty people present—grave professors, elderly people who might have been doctors or lawyers, one or two who looked like decadent poets, and lots of wives. Everybody was talking. This man had been in the post office during the Rebellion, that woman had carried the Sinn Fein flag somewhere else on that occasion. They told racy stories against themselves and against the British Government.
“The other day,” a priest next door to me began, “I was in Talbot Street at the time of that shooting. You remember?”
“I remember,” said a woman, dropping her cigarette into her saucer. “Yes, do go on.”
“I was in the pork butcher’s shop. As a matter of fact, a bullet nearly got me in there. Quite near enough. I haven’t got the sawdust out of my pants yet, I hugged the floor so close. I went out as soon as it was safe. The D.M.Ps. had gone; you know the way they go. One of the boys was stretched in the middle of the road. There wasn’t much life left in him, not enough to suffer. I knelt down beside him, and the crowd drifted back. A Tommy was standing near, with his hands on his rifle and his tin hat on his head. He wasn’t taking any notice of me. There were other wounded people. All of a sudden an old beggar woman shouldered her way through the crowd to the Tommy. ‘Och,’ sez she, ‘take that tin lid off iv ye while his riverince is saying his prayers.’”
Some one leant above me with a jug of cream.
“Cream?” He poured cream into my cup and sat down by my side with the jug in his hand. “What a life we lead,” he said. “Have you been raided yet?”
“Yes, not so very long ago.”
“Did they take anything?”