The inspector invited Blake to go to the police station with him, and here, as Blake had expected, he was shown the usual lying propaganda and pamphlets of Sinn Fein, which have been distributed by the million throughout England, Scotland, Wales, and the U.S.A. An extract from one pamphlet is worth repeating:—
“Famine is about to add thousands of innocent victims to the hundreds of thousands already in need of the bare necessities that keep body and soul together. In every Irish village and town sickness, pestilence, and death invade the humble homes, striking swiftly and surely the mothers and children incapable of resistance through months of struggle against cold and hunger.... Children of tender years, ragged and wretched, trudge daily through the cold to a school now used for a relief station to obtain the one meal a day on which they live—a piece of bread and a warm drink.”
Seeing from his ribbons that the man had served in the war, Blake asked him if he would take the word of a brother officer against that of a Sinn Fein rebel. The inspector seemed to think this a good joke, and replied: “A brother officer every time.” “Well, then,” said Blake, “as an ex-British officer, I give you my word of honour that all those pamphlets you have just shown me are a pack of lies circulated by Irish rebels to ruin your country.”
Still the inspector was only half convinced, and in spite of all Blake could say he saw when he at last left that the man’s belief in the printed pamphlets of Sinn Fein was still unshaken. Such is the tremendous effect of print, whether newspapers or pamphlets, on the modern mind, and the firm belief in the old saying that there can be no smoke without a fire.
That afternoon Blake was carried off by his hostess to a drawing-room lecture at a big country-house. His hostess was not quite sure what the lecture was about, but believed it had something to do with Russia. After tea the lecturer arose, and before he uttered a word, Blake had a premonition of what was coming. A tall thin man, with pronounced Celtic peculiarities and a mane of long, lank, black hair, Blake had seen his prototype thousands of times in the west of Ireland.
Throwing back his great mane with a jerk of his head, the lecturer started on an impassioned recital of the atrocities committed in Ireland by the British Army of Occupation, practically the same collection of lies and wicked quarter truths which Blake had heard from the police inspector that morning.
Blake watched the faces of the audience closely, mostly women of the upper and middle classes, and could see that the lecturer’s ready tongue was making a deep impression on them. There was no yawning or fidgeting, and the audience, many of them with the parted lips of rapt attention, kept their eyes riveted on the quite interesting face of the wild man of the west, camouflaged by a London tailor to harmonise with an English drawing-room.
Blake let the man have a fair innings, and then while he was drinking a glass of water (Blake felt like asking him if he would not prefer poteen) stood up and said quietly, “Ladies and gentlemen, so far this lecture has been nothing but a pack of lies from beginning to end. The lecturer is a Sinn Fein rebel camouflaged as an Irish gentleman, and I am a D.I. of the Royal Irish Constabulary. During the war I fought for your country, and the lecturer probably assisted the Boches in every underhand and mean way he could. You can judge for yourselves which of us is most probably telling the truth, and nothing but the truth.”
The wild man turned with a wicked snarl, all signs of the veneer gone, and his face reminded Blake of a cornered gunman he had had to deal with once during a raid on a Dublin lodging-house; and there would probably have been an ugly and unseemly scene, but the owner of the house intervened, and gently but firmly led the wild man out of the room, while Blake and his friends left the house at once.
On his return Blake found a cipher wire from his County Inspector recalling him at once, and going by car to London managed to catch the Irish mail from Euston. All the sleepers were engaged, but by good luck he found himself in possession of a first-class compartment.