"My dear young lady, in your present mood you're capable of most things," I said. "But Beresford and I are going to forget what you've been saying to-night, and I think you'll be glad to forget it, too."
4
One says rhetorically that one will forget a phrase or an episode, but my single glimpse of Mrs. O'Rane's temper had frightened forgetfulness away. I kept on telling myself that it was no business of mine, that my rule for thirty years had been to let the younger generation take care of itself untrammelled; yet, when George Oakleigh telephoned to me from the Admiralty, begging me to cancel other engagements and dine with him, I had to prepare myself for any kind of bad news.
I could see, when he came into the club, that there was something on his mind, but we had no opportunity for private conversation during dinner, as Maurice Maitland attached himself to our table for first-hand news of the Irish rebellion. I had imagined that George, even with an Irish estate, an Irish upbringing and an unmixed Irish ancestry, was too much overlaid with his English associations to feel more than academically on the Irish aspirations. To see him after a holiday in Ireland, where he had gone to fish and had never stirred nearer the county Kerry than Dublin, was to see a hillsman made suddenly mindful of the hills and of his own infancy. Forgotten fires of racial love and antagonism had been blown into life. There was no attempt to be judicial; he had arrived too late for the rebellion (or I dare swear he would have had a hand in it), he was not concerned with the bloodshed which it had caused; it was the sight and stories of the repression which made his blood boil and his voice ring.
"So much for Skeffington!" he cried. "And Casement prosecuted by Smith, who threatened exactly the same tactics before the war! My God! I wonder when you English think this will be forgotten! You've seen the sentences? One woman was carted off to penal servitude for life. 'For life' one of her friends kept saying. 'But Ireland was free for three days,' answered the woman. We've a rare palate for phrases in Ireland. How soon do you imagine that phrase will be forgotten? I'm seeing red at this moment. For two pins I'd join our young friend Beresford in any propaganda against this country that he cared to start." Then he caught sight of Maitland's expression of shocked perplexity. "I mean it, General. When the Huns pretend to be amazed that the Belgians don't eat out of their hands, we're righteously disgusted at the hypocrisy of it. On my honour, you English are every bit as dense or hypocritical with us."
"But the trouble is over now, surely?" Maitland unwarily asked.
"It will never be over in your lifetime or mine! Redmond made the old blunder of trusting the English, he promised a united front in Ireland, when the war broke out, instead of holding the government to ransom. And the government responded by scrapping the Home Rule Act. You've lost Ireland, the Nationalist party's dead and damned, henceforth you'll have a swelling Sinn Fein army held down by English troops—as in Poland, as in Alsace-Lorraine, as in north Italy before the liberation. And I don't envy you the job of making things sweet with America."
Dinner was over before our discussion of Ireland, but, when Maitland left us to return to the War Office, the interruption changed the current of George's thoughts. I was not sorry, for I had endured two nights of Irish debate with Grayle, who saw in the rebellion fresh proof of governmental incompetence and new need for a change in which I was to assist him.
"I didn't ask you here to listen to me tub-thumping," George began apologetically, when we were alone. "How lately have you seen anything of the O'Ranes?"
I told him of the meeting in Beresford's flat.