She stared distractedly round the room in a way that reminded me of the sad, mad time when Eric first went out of her life.
“But you will be all right,” I assured her.
“If I’m not, remember you married a lost soul, George; I warned you. I kill whatever I touch.” . . .
4
It is hardly to be imagined that I carried a light heart to Ireland. And the state of the country at this time was not of a kind to cure any private depression. In 1916 I entered Dublin as an academic nationalist, who had voted year after year with the staunch, self-effacing Redmondites; I left as a perfervid Sinn Feiner, when the men who had played with me as boys five-and-twenty years before were shot off their crazy barricades or done to death by a mockery of legal forms. Then for the first time, face to face with a people cheated of its promised independence, I too said that no trust was to be reposed in English honour and no sane leadership expected from men who believed in English pledges. Through weary years we liberals had fought constitutionally for our Home Rule Bill; it was inscribed on the Statute Book in spite of intrigues and intimidation; but treason triumphed over constitutionalism on the day when Germany made war in the belief that an Irish guerilla would keep Great Britain from taking part.
Melancholy memories and uneasy forebodings were my companions on the familiar road to Holyhead. I was dining with my uncle Bertrand on the night when the Home Rule Act was suspended; he at least had protested and perhaps he was a little self-righteous, but in 1916 I was to remember his grim prediction that from the breach of that undertaking, which every party in parliament helped to repudiate, would follow inevitably the discredit of the simpleton nationalists and the rise of Sinn Fein. The rebellion, which he foretold so accurately, was succeeded by a repression, which he and every one else knew would continue until the next rebellion. Sinn Fein, in these first months of the armistice, was penetrating the country peacefully; but even John Carstairs, who usually advocated the use of machine-guns and aeroplanes against political opponents, recognized that there would be war if the present army of occupation interfered. As yet there were only sporadic outrages on both sides, followed by reprisals, followed by counter-reprisals. As always happens, the non-combatants, squeezed by both sides, suffered most.
On this score, when at last I reached Lake House, I had no personal complaint to make. My agent told me that certain Sinn Feiners had been billeted on me and certain stores of food commandeered; my gun-room had been emptied; but both my cars, after a short period of detention, were returned with a permit from republican headquarters. This, I believe, made them liable to seizure by the forces of the crown; but my agent warned me that any license which recognized the authority of Dublin Castle would cause the cars to be taken and not restored. And nothing in Kerry tempted the Castle to send its emissaries so far into hostile territory. If I abstained from provocative acts or speeches, I should be left in peace.
“They like you,” my agent was good enough to tell me; “and it’s what they’re all saying, that you should be living here.”
“Are the tenants paying me any rent?,” I asked.
“They are.”