Then there were the old poems which we all learned. My favorite was, "The Jackets Green," the song of a young girl whose lover died for Ireland in the time of William III. The red coat and the green jacket! All the differences between the British and Irish lay in the contrast between those two colors. William III, too! Up to his reign the Irish army had been a reality; Ireland had had a population of nine millions. To-day there are only four millions of Irish in Ireland, a country that could easily support five times that number in ease and comfort. The history of my country after the time of William III seemed to me to be a history of oppression which we should tell with tears if we did not tell it with anger.
But I believed the time was at hand to do something. We all believed that; for an English war is always the signal for an Irish rising. Ever since this war began, I had been hearing of vague plans. In Glasgow I belonged to the Irish Volunteers and to the Cumman-na-mBan, an organization of Irish girls and women. I had learned to shoot in one of the rifle practice clubs which the British organized so that women could help in the defense of the Empire. These clubs had sprung up like mushrooms and died as quickly, but I kept on till I was a good marksman. I believed the opportunity would soon come to defend my own country. And now I was going over at Christmas to learn what hope there was of a rising in the spring.
After all, I did not go to the quiet hills of Monaghan, but to Dublin at the invitation of the most patriotic and revolutionary woman in all Ireland. Constance Gore-Booth, who by her marriage with a member of the Polish nobility became the Countess Markievicz, had heard of my work in the Cumman-na-mBan and wanted to talk with me. She knew where all the men and women who loved Ireland were working, and sooner or later met them all, in spite of the fact that she was of Planter stock and by birth of the English nobility in Ireland.
CONSTANCE GORE-BOOTH, COUNTESS DE MARKIEVICZ
One of the leaders of the rising. (Her death sentence was
commuted to life imprisonment)
It was at night that I crossed the Irish Sea. All other passengers went to their state-rooms, but I stayed on deck. Leaning back in a steamer-chair, with my hat for a pillow, I dropped asleep. That I ever awakened was a miracle. In my hat I was carrying to Ireland detonators for bombs, and the wires were wrapped around me under my coat. That was why I had not wanted to go to a state-room where I might run into a hot-water pipe or an electric wire that would set them off. But pressure, they told me when I reached Dublin, is just as dangerous, and my head had been resting heavily on them all night!
It is hard now to think of that hospitable house in Leinster Road with all the life gone out of it and its mistress in an English prison. Every one coming to Dublin who was interested in plays, painting, the Gaelic language, suffrage, labor, or Irish Nationalism, visited there. The Countess Markievicz kept "open house" not only for her friends, but for her friends' friends. As one of them has written: "Until she came down to breakfast in the morning, she never knew what guests she had under her roof. In order not to disturb her, they often climbed in through the window late at night."