“I’m afraid she’s not well enough to get anybody’s love just yet,” he said icily.
“All my sympathy to you, old man,” answered Kenneth.
This time Bertram had slammed down the receiver. He had no desire whatever for Kenneth’s sympathy. He wished the fellow would get his Grecian nose down to his job at the Foreign Office and keep it there. Otherwise it might be in danger of getting broken one day.
That last ring he had answered took the frown off his forehead after he had listened to the first words over the wire.
“Oh, is that you, mother? Yes, Joyce seems out of danger now. . . . Come round? . . . Well, is the governor at the House to-night? . . . The Irish debate? Oh, yes, I forgot that monstrous farce. All right. I’ll come, then.”
He remembered there were other tragedies in life besides his own, more death than that of his still-born child when he bought an evening paper at the Underground station in the High Street, Kensington, on his way to his father’s house in Sloane Street.
“Six deaths in Dublin to-day. Serious Ambush. More reprisals.”
Those were the headings on the front page, and he felt sick at the words, and wouldn’t read the details. The same thing as usual. British officers fired at and killed by boys in civilian clothes. Young Irishmen dragged out of their beds and shot in cold blood by “unknown men, said to be in uniform.” Irish homes burnt by the military. Raids, bomb outrages, searches—the usual daily record of anarchy in Ireland which was becoming intolerable in his soul because of his divided allegiance as half an Irishman and half an Englishman, half a democrat and half a Tory, half a Protestant and half a Catholic, at least, he hoped, a Christian. He opened the paper as he sat in the district train, and saw his father’s name on the centre page:
“Great Speech by Mr. Michael Pollard, K.C.:
Defends Government Policy of Reprisals.”