Mrs. O’Grady’s forebodings were to prove themselves only too true. The
fatal evening came at the end of an April day when the Crown Forces
made a great haul of propaganda in Molesworth Street. Rumour had it
they had penetrated into a basement and found there the temporary
offices of the _Irish Bulletin_, the official organ of Sinn Fein. Six
typewriters and two tons of literature to do with propaganda were
borne off in triumph to the Castle. Rumour also had it that Darrel
Figgis had incriminated himself to his beard. A neighbour received word
over the telephone that Figgis’s flat had been raided, his typewriter
smashed, the bindings of some of his books destroyed. Figgis had gone
on the run, and warning came to us to get anything seditious out of the
house, as it was likely to be raided for him at any time. By five in
the evening Mrs. Desmond Fitzgerald had got all her stuff away, a man
carrying it off in a sack through the streets.
There was more of winter than spring these days, as one knew as soon
as it got dark. We were sitting after dinner as close up to the fire as
we could get when at our sitting-room door came the knock which we knew
better than Poe ever knew the knock of his raven.
“Come in,” I said, and stood bowing by the sofa.
The door opened, and Mrs. Slaney entered. “I thought you might like
this morning’s paper,” she said, smiling from one to the other of us.
She joined us on the sofa, and took one of my cigarettes. Silence
reigned until she had had a puff or two, and then she broke it.
“It is perfectly monstrous what those brutes did this morning to Mr.
Figgis. They have raided his flat four times to-day. They wantonly
destroyed his typewriter, and I hear they have damaged the backs of a
number of his books. He has such a choice library. A most cultured,
refined man.”
“I suppose they smashed his typewriter because he used it for seditious
work, and they probably pulled the backs off his books to see if he
had anything hidden behind. They often get information that way,” I
suggested.
“Nonsense, they take a pleasure in wanton destruction.”
“What’s that?”
There came into the street the noise of powerful engines. In two or
three seconds the sound had risen to a loudness which filled every
empty space. We threw up our heads, and Mrs. Slaney flushed.
I went to the window, drew the blind aside, and peered into the dark.
Under the window there were blinding shafts of light from acetylene
lamps, and pitch dark everywhere else. Two lorries had drawn up to the
door, and men were leaping out.
“They’ve come again,” Mrs. Slaney exclaimed, her hand on her heart.
“They’re after Mr. Figgis.”
There were two lorries, one a bomb-proof affair like a chicken coop,
and the other unlike a chicken coop. Before Mrs. Slaney had stopped
there came a thunderous knock on the door.
I held the door open for her, and she bustled out of the room and down
the stairs. For a moment her voice dominated everything in the hall,
and then it was lost in the noise of many men tramping into the hall
and bounding up the ancient stairs. I made a dive for my MS.
“They’ll be coming in here,” I said. “It’ll be a beastly nuisance if
they disarrange things. I wouldn’t be surprised if they found Figgis
upstairs, only he’d be a fool to come.”
I had got the MS. in a bundle when the door was thrown open, and men
covered with guns poured in. This was only a tributary of the main
river, which continued to flow into the upper reaches of the house.
“What’s your name?”
I gave my name. “This lady is my wife.”
“Where’s Figgis?”
“Haven’t seen him for months.”
“He was here last night.”
“Was he?”
“Are you a friend of Michael Collins?”
“Haven’t met him yet.”
Suddenly the tributary left off questioning and joined the main
stream, in which, through the open door, I caught sight of several
acquaintances who had visited the house on other occasions. We finished
tidying the valuable things, so that if the rooms were searched we
could show what was there. Then a terrible man in khaki, the man in
khaki who was always in charge of the job, climbed the stairs. He
looked redder, fiercer, and more morose than ever. He stalked in and
looked us up and down.
“What’s your name?”
I gave my name. “This is my wife.”
“Are you Irish?”
“No.”
“What are you doing in Ireland?”
“We came over on business.”
“What business?”
“I had a scheme of child adoption I hoped to get going,” said my wife.
“Where is it?” he demanded, as if we would pull it out of our pockets.
“It was a frail plant,” I answered, “and is now no more. First the
Catholics came, and said to me, will you please be giving up that work
for its after converting our children to Protestantism you are. Then
the Protestants came and said they to me, will you be after giving that
up, please, for it’s converting our children to Rome you have in mind.
The plant was frail and it died.”
“Why didn’t you go home?”
“We stopped to write a book.”
He grunted and said, “What do you write?”
I showed him the MS. on the table. “This is some of our stuff.”
He came across and took up some of it, and looked through it as if he
thought very little of it. He flopped it down on the table and stalked
out on to the landing, and called down the stairs in a great voice--
“Hi, two more of you fellows come up here. There seems to be the only
man in the house in this room, and not a damn one of you looking after
him.”
A good-looking, refined and most dapper little man answered this
request. He came into the room and, finding a woman there, seemed
considerably embarrassed. He began a perfunctory search of our
belongings; but when the man in khaki went to the top of the house, he
looked behind a picture or two and sank into a chair.
The door had been shut. A depressing silence fell. The little man in
the chair was the neatest Auxiliary I ever saw, and in spite of the
rake of his Balmoral bonnet might have appeared in any drawing-room. By
his voice he was quite well bred.
“I’m fed up with this job,” he announced, breaking the strained
silence, and giving my wife the benefit of most of his attention, “but
I’ve had no say in it. I’m a major in the Regular Army in India and
came home on leave, and then they bunged me over here, and made me join
up in the Auxiliaries. I sent for my wife then, and we were among the
people called on by the Shinners on the November Sunday. I was out, and
they insulted and intimidated my wife, who was going to have a child.
She has been semi-paralysed since, and I’m waiting to do in one or two
Shinners before returning home.”
“There’s a catch in that story somewhere,” I thought, and the result of
my scepticism was that we all sank into another silence, hearing only
the movement of many people trampling overhead. There seemed a great
deal of talking below, and occasionally the high, quick voice of Mrs.
Fitzgerald. I knew they would find it a case of Mother Hubbard with
her, unless some brilliant searcher of seditious papers had discovered
the secret of the infant Fergus. But let that secret rest!
Presently the trampling seemed to be getting louder, and coming down
from the top of the house. Was Mrs. Slaney coming down in chains? The
door was thrown open, it was the habit of these people to throw a door
wide open so that nobody could shoot from behind it, and in stalked
our morose acquaintance in khaki. Behind him I saw two men staggering
downstairs with a portmanteau, and thought, “Begad, they’ve captured
something.” But there was no Mrs. Slaney in chains.
Our friend stuck his legs apart, balanced on them, and said, after
looking round the room, “You had better put a coat on. It’s a cold
night.”
This made me look up. “Eh?” I said.
“You’re coming with us,” he answered.
“Coming with you?”
“We’ve found ammunition in the house,” he announced, “and we’re taking
every man in the house.”
“Ammunition?”
“Oh yes, you know nothing about it, of course. It was in Mrs. Slaney’s
bedroom.”
“But I’m a married man,” I expostulated. “How am I likely to know
what’s in Mrs. Slaney’s bedroom?”
A brief three-handed conversation, in which my wife joined, took place,
and at the end of it I submitted to fate, and wrapped myself in my
oldest overcoat. The last of the party had tramped down the stairs. The
raid was over.
Mrs. Slaney came in looking double her size with indignation.
“You’ve got me into trouble now, Mrs. Slaney,” I said, or something to
that effect. “They’ve found your ammunition, and they’re taking me to
the Castle.”
“Monstrous!” she exclaimed. “Iniquitous! Just a few war trophies.” She
turned on our morose friend. “I swear to you I did not know what those
things were.”
“You mean to tell me you don’t know bullets?”
“No.”
He turned away from her and grunted at me, “Come along.” Mrs. Slaney
marched out of the room.
Finishing my toilet with a scarf, I followed in the descent, the man in
khaki, our dapper guard, and my wife making up the rear. The front door
was open, and all the cold and dark in the world were coming in through
it. The black of outside was blacker because of the lorry lights, and
the said lorries were now cranked up and humming to be off. Men were
climbing into them by the back.
The hall had emptied of raiders. At the bottom of the stairs we found
Mrs. Fitzgerald, Mrs. Slaney, and a tearful Mrs. O’Grady standing
in a circle like chickens come round a trough, and in the middle of
them, miserable as a whippet in the wind, O’Grady in a bowler and a
threadbare overcoat. They had plunged into the bowels of the house and
captured him. There was no check in the tide and I seemed to be passing
through the hall and down the steps like a boat passing an island.
There were upraised women’s voices. Mrs. Fitzgerald was quite collected
and giving advice. My wife was ordering me to wrap up. Mrs. O’Grady was
calling upon the saints to help her poor man.
Mrs. Slaney had the last word. “Iniquitous!” she exclaimed in my ear,
as I was looking for the top step. “But now you will be able to see for
yourself what our splendid young men are experiencing every day.”
As I have said there were two lorries, one like a chicken coop and
the other unlike a chicken coop. We were told to get into the chicken
coop. This I at least was most agreeable to do, as I had no desire to
be a target of homeless Sinn Feiners. Then with a flourish we were away
under the eyes of many interested people hanging from upper windows. We
raced through the deserted streets. It had been raining, and the roads
shone wherever the lamps fell upon them.
We were the second car. There seemed in our lorry two sorts of seats,
a bad sort, and a worse sort, wooden planks resting on boxes, and
rolls of wire. We sat, about a dozen all told, on these things, and
except for O’Grady and myself, every man had a rifle and about three
guns apiece. At the end of a minute we were about to fly down Grafton
Street, when the front car came to a halt and began to run round. This
time it took the lead down Kildare Street, and we after it, and we all
came to a stop this side of the ruined Maples Hotel, at No 29, which
was Darrel Figgis’s flat.
“They’re after him,” I thought. “They are very optimistic people.”
Figgis’s flat was under the roof, and there was no light burning. Half
the Auxiliaries left the lorries, filed up the steps, and a great
banging began at the door. The sound echoed down the streets. Then a
light appeared at the top of the house, the window opened, and a woman
in a nightgown leaned out. I thought it was Mrs. Figgis; but it turned
out to be Mrs. Coneray, president of the Woman’s Franchise League. The
knocking never ceased, the figure above disappeared, and presently the
door opened, and the Auxiliaries were swallowed up in the dark of the
passage.
There followed a long wait in the cold.
Suddenly a man at my side leapt round like a cat spotting a mouse.
Everybody waked up. “A man ran across the road just then,” he called
out. “At the mouth of Molesworth Street. I swear he did.”
One or two Auxiliaries mooched backwards and forwards across the road
with their rifles under their arms. One of these, with his rifle at
the ready, went as far as the corner of Molesworth Street; but he came
back saying there was nothing to see. There was another wait, which was
shortened by a small chatty individual who came up to our lorry and
began to talk to me through the wire netting. He chatted like an old
acquaintance.
“We took Desmond Fitzgerald,” he said, in the pleasantest fashion. “A
bad house that.”
“Is it?” I answered.
“Figgis was there lately,” he went on.
“So I am told. I never saw him.”
“Why are you there?”
“I don’t appear to be there just now.”
“Why don’t you move?”
“No need to. You’ve done it for me.”
The door opened, and the Auxiliaries came filing out. Never a word
was said. They climbed into the lorries, and we began to tear round
the corners at the previous breakneck speed. Soon we were racing past
Trinity and the Bank of Ireland. In the middle of College Green an
armoured car was at work with a searchlight, turning the beam slowly
across the face of Trinity, lighting up the windows one after another.
Not a fly could have crawled unnoticed upon that surface. We took no
notice of them, nor they of us. For a minute we were racing along Dame
Street, and then with a sweep we were turning in to the Castle Gate,
the great doors were pulled apart, and we were at a standstill within
the Castle Yard.