“God save us!” Mrs. O’Grady exclaimed to Himself when she heard of
the truce, and to this day I have not made up my mind whether the
exclamation was one of hope or despair.
She had summered in the stifling basement and had grown thin. She
toiled hopelessly upstairs with sweat upon her forehead, she limped
hopelessly downstairs, groaning with the burden of living, as she
stooped to gather into her hands some particularly obvious trail of
dust left by her broom.
As she grew lean the man in the street filled out with the new
confidence of the truce. He sunned himself at the shop doors, and heard
unmoved the sounds of motors back-firing.
One of the avatars who roamed Dublin and called on us now and then,
grew prophetic over a lobster salad in the little flat.
“Ireland’s only hope now is from the North,” he said thoughtfully. “The
Dail is becoming respectable. It has lost its soul.”
“You expected them to reject the terms?”
“Not at all. I expected them to accept. Sinn Fein has grown
respectable. The North is the only hope.” He put a lobster claw on
the carpet and brought his great foot down on it. “That’s a sight you
wouldn’t see out of Ireland,” he said: “an avatar cracking a lobster’s
claw.”
“The carpet belongs to Desmond Fitzgerald,” I answered. “So you have
the spectacle of an avatar cracking a lobster’s claw on a Cabinet
Minister’s carpet, a sight which certainly could not be seen outside
Ireland.”
“It’s like this,” he continued. “Ireland is one of the spiritual poles
of the earth, and the salvation of the world must come through her.
The mould of Western civilisation must be broken up. It’s rotten. If
Ireland can stay as she is and not sink back into the materialism of
other countries, she has the power to strike the blow that will shatter
the present system. There is no sham in the North, the Ulsterman is
fundamental. He holds the germ of spirituality in him like every
Irishman does. The North will come to blows with the South. That will
start the whole thing. It’s going to be a bloody fight.”
“I suppose the Irishman’s spiritual,” I answered. “He is certainly
always saying he is. Personally I believe he mixes up spirituality
with an astonishing ability to shift his point of view and make it fit
the occasion. Look how the truce is being broken every day in the most
barbarous way, and no doubt the truce breakers salve their consciences
by saying they want a Republic and not a Free State, and that they are
holding to a spiritual ideal. You people can be material enough. Irish
landladies can hold their own with any landladies in the world.”
“The trouble will start quickly,” the avatar announced. “It will start
over the boundary commission, I don’t know how I know, but something
tells me. A clash between England and America will follow, the colonies
will be divided among themselves. The British Empire will go. Europe
will go. In Ireland, nursed through all the chaos, will be a small
group of people who will undertake the reconstruction of the world.”
“I’ll wait and see if it comes off,” I said doubtfully. “Ireland’s
rather a small place to be as important as that. Personally, I think
she’s too old to influence the world very much now. Her psyche was
arrested in the days of Cuchulan. She’s pagan at heart. Christianity
fits her like a hair shirt. She’s ages old. You want a new people to
regenerate a world.”
“You’re right. I feel the pull of pagan worship.”
“I’ve been told that all through the west of Ireland the peasants still
take their old pagan relics out of hiding and worship them as soon as
the priest is out of sight.”
“It’s true. Don’t you feel the very mountains of Ireland are sacred?
How can a people like us throw off our past?”
“Shoddy days, shoddy days,” Himself answered, coming out of a trance in
the corner. “Let’s hope the world isn’t too old to get better. I was
at A. E.’s on Sunday evening. Madam Markievicz was there, and Darrel
Figgis, and James Stephens the poet, and the rest of them, and some one
brought up De Valera’s letter to Lloyd George, the one where he says
that Lloyd George offers Ireland margarine when Ireland wants butter.
Madam Markievicz excused the use of such phraseology in political
correspondence. ‘Ah, Constance, Constance,’ A. E. remonstrated, shaking
his head. Then Figgis, who has the happy knack of getting in a thrust
all round, said, ‘The days seem to have gone when Cromwell chose Milton
for his secretary, so that his despatches might be written in the best
Latin of the period.’ The thought that De Valera had a poorer literary
taste than Cromwell upset us so that we all went home. If the new world
is to come, let it come soon.”
The avatar rose to take his departure. “Good-bye,” he said. “It’s an
awful thing to be the only sane man in the world.”
Mrs. Slaney was full of rage at the iniquities of Lloyd George when she
first heard the British offer; but after a talk with Father Murphy, who
pointed out that the terms were all that Ireland desired, she shifted
her ground, and became a staunch Free Stater. From then on her fear was
lest the Republicans should upset the Free State and send Ireland into
anarchy.
The last day in our old flat came. Mrs. O’Grady shook hands with bright
round tears rolling after one another down her face.
“God save us!” she said, “but I feel as if my own children were walking
out of the house this very minute. Indeed, and I never looked to see
the day when you would go.”
Later came the good-bye to Ireland. It sank into the sea. Its own
peculiar soft atmosphere hung over it and passed into a sea haze.
Two days later I was having tea with a friend in London.
“My dear,” she said, “what an awful time you must have had. Of course
you were awfully brave to stay.”
“There was no special danger if you didn’t interfere,” I assured her.
“No danger? But they are murderers?”
“There are plenty of murderers in the world, and they aren’t all Sinn
Feiners.”
“But they murdered women. Look at the women they shot, and by order,
too. More than one woman. We shot no women. And look at their terrible
Sinn Fein regiment, the Black-and-Tans.”
“But, my dear, the Black-and-Tans were British Government police,” I
gasped.
It was no use. She smiled in a superior manner.
“You think I don’t know,” she said, “but I’ve followed every line in
the papers about the Irish question ever since you were over there.
I was always so afraid you might have been shot in an ambush, and I
should so hate not seeing it. I remember seeing in the paper--I cut
out the paragraph to show you, but I lost it--that the majority of the
Black-and-Tans were Irishmen.”
“But a Government force.”
“Nonsense. I’m sure you’re mistaken. I must look for the paragraph.
More tea?”
Years of Sinn Fein propaganda had accomplished no more than that.