He remembered “the Move”—the frightful excitement of it—when, at nine years of age, he had left this house with all the family, for England. He had wept bitterly at leaving, especially when his broken rocking-horse had been cast on to the scrap heap, with other wreckage of nursery life. He could remember the mangy tuft of hair on that wooden beast, and the smell of red paint which had once represented a saddle. He had kissed its wooden nose, and howled when it was taken from him for ever.
Betty had frightened him about England. “The English will skin you alive if you make a noise in their London town. . . . The English know nothing but hate for the Irish. . . . The English are a bad-tempered set of spalpeens, and there’s no truth in them at all.”
Dublin! . . . It was strange to be here among his own people, a foreigner among them. He had the English way of speech, the English way of mind. Some of them, especially the young men, scowled at him as he passed down Sackville Street. They knew him as English by the cut of his clothes, by the look in his eyes. They didn’t see the Irish strain of blood in him.
He looked at their faces as they pushed by. What was wrong with them? They were people haunted by some hidden fear. There was fear in their eyes. They kept glancing about them, uneasily, watchfully. Some men were nailing boards outside a shop window, and one of the planks fell on to the pavement with a slight crash. Instantly a group of people gathered round a shop window scattered and ran into neighbouring doorways. The men with the boards laughed. One of them called out, “No danger at all, at all!”—and in a moment or two men and women emerged from shelter, smiled at each other, and went their way again, with that nervous glance to left and right.
Haunted! Yes, that was the word. Many of the women had haggard eyes, drawn, pallid faces, little lines of pain about their mouths. They looked as though they had lost their sleep for nights or weeks. Their nerves were tattered. It was easy to see that by their sudden shrinking from any little noise, like the crack of a jarvey’s whip, or a boy’s shrill whistle.
They greeted each other like women Bertram had seen in French villages after mornings of great battle when the wounded had gone streaming by.
“Dear God!” said one woman to another as he passed.
“Mother of Mercy!” said another.
There was no mystery about it. Here, in Sackville Street were outward and visible signs of conflict, old and recent; the ruins of the Post Office and public buildings bombarded during the Rebellion of Easter Week in ’16, and new bulletmarks on the walls of shops, and through plate-glass windows. Many shops were barricaded. Others were shut up and barred. Women did their shopping through narrow entrances of stacked timber. It was a city of Civil War.
Worse than Civil War, thought Bertram, for here there was no knowing who was friend and who enemy. Any of these young Irishmen strolling by might have a bomb in his pocket, and hurl it at any man he had marked down, rightly or wrongly, as a spy, a detective, a Government official, a British officer in mufti. From any window or any roof might come the crack of a sniper’s bullet.