Produced by David Widger
GENERAL JOHN REGAN
By George A. Birmingham
Copyright, 1913 By George H. Doran Company
TO CHARLES H. HAWTREY
who has allowed me to offer this
story to him in memory of times
that were very pleasant to me.
July 1913
Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER I
The Irish police barrack is invariably clean, occasionally picturesque,
but it is never comfortable. The living-room, in which the men spend
their spare time, is furnished with rigid simplicity. There is a table,
sometimes two tables, but they have iron legs. There are benches to
sit on, very narrow, and these also have iron legs. Iron is, of course,
harder than wood. Men who are forced to look at it and rub their legs
against it at meal times are likely to obtain a stern, martial spirit.
Wood, even oak, might in the long run have an enervating effect on their
minds. The Government knows this, and if it were possible to have tables
and benches with iron tops as well as iron legs police barracks in
Ireland would be furnished with them. On the walls of the living-room
are stands for arms. Here are ranged the short carbines with which,
in extreme emergencies, the police shoot at the other inhabitants of
Ireland. The sight of these weapons serves to remind the men that they
form a military force.
Near the carbines hang a few pairs of handcuffs, unobtrusively, because
no one wants to emphasize the fact that the police in Ireland have to
deal with ordinary wrong doers as well as with turbulent mobs. Ornament
of every kind is rigorously excluded from these rooms. It is all very
well to aim at the development of the aesthetic faculty for children by
putting pictures and scraggy geraniums in pots into schoolrooms. No one
wants a policeman to be artistic. But the love of the beautiful breaks
out occasionally, even in policemen who live in barracks. Constable
Moriarty, for instance, had a passion for music. He whistled better
than any man in Ballymoy, and spent much of his leisure in working up
thrilling variations of popular tunes.
Being confined by the call of duty to the living-room of the barrack in
Ballymoy for a whole morning, he had accomplished a series of runs and
trills through which the air of “The Minstrel Boy” seemed to struggle
for expression. His attention was fixed on this composition, and not at
all on the newspaper which lay across his knees.
At twelve o’clock he rose from the bench on which he was sitting and
allowed the newspaper to fall in a crumpled heap on the floor at
his feet. He stretched himself and yawned. Then he glanced round the
barrack-room with an air of weariness. Sergeant Colgan, his tunic
unbuttoned, his grey flannel shirt open at the neck, dozed uncomfortably
in a corner. Moriarty looked at him enviously. The sergeant was much
the older man of the two, and was besides of portly figure. Sleep came
easily to him under the most unpromising circumstances. Moriarty was not
more than twenty four years of age. He was mentally and physically an
active man. Before he went to work on “The Minstrel Boy” he had wooed
sleep in vain. Even a three days’ old copy of the Weekly Freeman had
brought him no more than a series of stupefying yawns. If a man cannot
go to sleep over a back number of a weekly paper there is no use his
trying to go to sleep at all. He may as well whistle tunes.
Moriarty left the living-room in which the sergeant slept and went out
to the door of the barrack. He stared across the market square. The sun
shone pitilessly. Except for a fat white dog, which lay asleep in the
gutter opposite the shop of Kerrigan, the butcher, no living thing
was to be seen. Hot days are so rare in west of Ireland towns that the
people succumb to them at once. Business, unless it happens to be market
day, absolutely ceases in a town like Ballymoy when the thermometer
registers anything over eighty degrees. Moriarty stretched himself again
and yawned. He looked at the illustrated poster which hung on a board
beside the barrack door. It proclaimed the attractiveness of service in
the British army. It moved him to no interest, because he had seen it
every day since he first came to Ballymoy. The gaudy uniforms depicted
on it excited no envy in his mind. His own uniform was of sober
colouring, but it taught him all he wanted to know about the discomfort
of such clothes in hot weather. His eyes wandered from the poster and
remained fixed for some time on the front of the office of the Connacht
Advocate. The door was shut and the window blind was pulled down. An
imaginative man might have pictured Mr. Thaddeus Gallagher, the
editor, penning ferocious attacks upon landlords at his desk inside,
or demonstrating, in spite of the high temperature, the desperate
wickedness of all critics of the Irish Party. But Moriarty was by
temperament a realist. He suspected that Thaddeus Gallagher, divested of
his coat and waistcoat, was asleep, with his feet on the office table.
Next to the newspaper office was the Imperial Hotel, owned and managed
by Mr. Doyle. Its door was open, so that any one with sufficient energy
for such activity might go in and get a drink at the bar. Moriarty gazed
at the front of the hotel for a long time, so long that the glare of
light reflected from its whitewashed walls brought water to his eyes.
Then he turned and looked into the barrack again. Beside him, just
outside the door of the living-room, hung a small framed notice, which
stated that Constable Moriarty was on guard. He looked at it. Then he
peeped into the living-room and satisfied himself that the sergeant
was still sound asleep. It was exceedingly unlikely that Mr. Gregg, the
District Inspector of the Police, would visit the barrack on such a very
hot day. Moriarty buttoned his tunic, put his forage cap on his head,
and stepped out of the barrack.
He crossed the square towards Doyle’s Hotel. A hostile critic of
the Royal Irish Constabulary—and there are such critics even of this
excellent body of men—might have suspected Moriarty of adventuring in
search of a drink. The great heat of the day and the extreme dulness
of keeping guard over a barrack which no one ever attacks might have
excused a longing for bottled porter. It would have been unfair to blame
Moriarty if he had entered the bar of the hotel and wakened Mr. Doyle.
But he did no more than glance through the open door. He satisfied
himself that Mr. Doyle, like the sergeant and Mr. Thaddeus Gallagher,
was sound asleep. Then he passed on and turned down a narrow laneway at
the side of the hotel.
This led him into the yard at the back of the hotel. A man of delicate
sensibilities would have shrunk from entering Mr. Doyle’s yard on a
hot day. It was exceedingly dirty, and there were a great many decaying
things all over it, besides a manure heap in one corner and a pig-stye
in another. But Constable Moriarty had no objection to bad smells.
He sat down on the low wall of the pig-stye and whistled “Kathleen
Mavourneen.” He worked through the tune twice creditably, but without
attempting variations. He was just beginning it a third time when a door
at the back of the hotel opened and a girl came out. Moriarty stopped
whistling and grinned at her amiably. She was a very pretty girl, but
she was nearly as dirty as the yard. Her short skirt was spotted and
stained from waist-band to the ragged fringe where there had once been
a hem. Her boots were caked with dry mud. They were several sizes too
large for her and seemed likely to fall off when she lifted her feet
from the ground. A pink cotton blouse was untidily fastened at her neck
with a brass safety pin. Her hair hung in a thick pig-tail down her
back. In the higher ranks of society in Connacht, as elsewhere, girls
are generally anxious to pose as young women at the earliest possible
moment. They roll up their hair and fasten it with hairpins as soon as
their mothers allow them. But girls of the peasant class in the west of
Ireland put off the advance of womanhood as long as they can. Wiser
than their more fashionable sisters, they dread the cares and
responsibilities of adult life. Up to the age of twenty, twenty-one,
or twenty-two, they still wear their hair in pig-tails and keep their
skirts above their ankles.
“Is that you, Mary Ellen?” said Constable Moriarty.
The girl stood still. She was carrying a bucket full of a thick yellow
liquid in her right hand. She allowed it to rest against her leg. A
small portion of its contents slopped over and still further stained her
skirt. She looked at Constable Moriarty out of the corners of her eyes
for a moment. Then she went on again towards the pig-stye. She had large
brown eyes with thick lashes. Her hair was still in a pig-tail, and
her skirt was far from covering the tops of her boots; but she had
a precocious understanding of the art of looking at a man out of the
corners of her eyes. Moriarty was agreeably thrilled by her glance.
“Is it the pig you’re going to feed?” he asked.
“It is,” said Mary Ellen.
A very chivalrous man, or one trained in the conventions of what is
called polite society, might have left his seat on the wall and helped
the girl to carry the bucket across the yard. Moriarty did neither the
one nor the other. Mary Ellen did not expect that he would. It was her
business and not his to feed the pigs. Besides, the bucket was very
full. That its contents should stain her dress did not matter. It
would have been a much more serious thing if any of the yellow slop had
trickled down Constable Moriarty’s beautiful trousers.
She reached the pig-stye, lifted the bucket, and tipped the contents
into a wooden trough. Constable Moriarty, still seated on the wall,
watched her admiringly. Her sleeves were rolled up above the elbows. She
had very well-shaped, plump, brown arms.
“There’s many a man,” he said, “might be glad enough to be that pig.”
Mary Ellen looked up at him with an air of innocent astonishment.
“Why would he then?” she said.
“The way he’d have you bringing his dinner to him,” said Moriarty.
This compliment must have been very gratifying to Mary Ellen, but she
made no reply to it. She set down the empty bucket on the ground and
rubbed her hands slowly on the sides of her skirt Moriarty probably
felt that he had done as much as could be expected of him in the way of
pretty speeches. He whistled “Kathleen Mavourneen” through once while
Mary Ellen wiped her hands dry. She picked up her bucket again and
turned to go away.
“Tell me this now,” said Moriarty. “Did ever you have your fortune
told?”
“I did not,” she said.
“It’s what I’m good at,” said Moriarty, “is telling fortunes. There was
an aunt of mine one time that was terrible skilful at it. It was her
taught me.”
“It’s a pity she had no more sense.”
“If you was to sit up on the wall beside me,” said Moriarty, “and if you
was to lend me the loan of your hand for one minute——”
“Get out,” said Mary Ellen.
“You’d be surprised, so you would,” said Moriarty, “at the things I’d
tell you.”
“I might.”
“You would.”
“But I won’t be,” said Mary Ellen, “for I’ve more to do than to be
listening to you.”
“Where’s the hurry?” said Moriarty. “Sure the day’s long.”
The affair might have ended in a manner pleasant to Moriarty and
interesting to the pig. The attraction of the occult would in all
probability have overcome Mary Ellen’s maidenly suspicions. She might
not have sat upon the wall. She would have almost certainly have yielded
her sticky hand if a sudden sound had not startled Moriarty. A motor-car
hooted at the far end of the village street. Moriarty jumped off the
wall.
“There’s one of them motor-cars,” he said, “and the fellow that’s in her
will be stopping at the barrack for to ask his way to somewhere. It’s a
curious thing, so it is, that them motor drivers never knows the way to
the place they’re going to, and it’s always the police they ask, as
if the police had nothing to do but to attend to them. I’ll have to be
off.”
He left the yard, hurried down the narrow lane, and crossed the road
to the barrack. Just as he reached it the car, a large, opulent-looking
vehicle, stopped outside Doyle’s Hotel. Moriarty went into the barrack
and wakened the sergeant. He had a keen sense of his duty towards his
superior officer. It would not have been kind or right to allow the
sergeant to sleep through an event so unusual as the stopping of a
handsome motor outside the door of the Imperial Hotel.
The car was a large one, but it carried only a single traveller. He
was a lean, sharp-faced man, clean shaven, with very piercing hard grey
eyes. He blew three blasts on the horn of his motor. Then Mr. Doyle
came out of the door. He blinked irritably at the stranger. The strong
sunlight affected his eyes, and the rude way in which he had been
awakened from his sleep overcame for a moment the natural instinct
of the hotel keeper. All hotel keepers are civil to possible guests.
Otherwise they would not succeed in their business. Mr. Doyle knew this,
but he scarcely realised at first that the gentleman in the motor-car
might be a guest. His was not a tourist’s hotel and he had been very
sound asleep.
“Say,” said the stranger, “are you the proprietor?”
“I am,” said Doyle.
“Can I register?” said the motorist.
The word was strange to Doyle, Guests at his hotel were very few. A
commercial traveller stopped a night with him occasionally, trying to
push the sale of drapery goods or boots in Ballymoy. An official of a
minor kind, an instructor in agriculture, or a young lady sent out to
better the lot of domestic fowls, was stranded now and then in Ballymoy
and therefore obliged to spend the night in Doyle’s hotel. But such
chance strangers merely asked for rooms and food. They did not want to
“register.”
“Can you what?” said Doyle.
“Register,” said the stranger.
“I don’t know can you,” said Doyle. “This is a backward place, but you
might try them at the police barrack. The sergeant’s an obliging man,
and if the thing can be done I wouldn’t doubt but he’d do it for you.”
“You don’t kind of catch on to my meaning,” said the stranger. “What I
want is to stop a day or two in your hotel.”
Doyle suddenly realised the possibilities of the situation.
“You can do that of course,” he said, “and welcome. I’d be glad if we
had a gentleman like yourself every day of the week.”
He turned as he spoke and shouted for Mary Ellen.
“Business pretty stagnant?” said the stranger.
“You may say that. Mary Ellen, Mary Ellen! Come here, I say.”
The stranger got out of his car. He looked up and down the empty street.
“Guess,” he said, “since I travelled in this slumbrous old country of
yours I’ve seen considerable stagnation, but this licks the worst I’ve
struck yet. Your town pretty well fathoms the depths. Are the folks here
alive at all?”
“They are, of course.”
Doyle looked round him as he spoke. He saw a good deal that the stranger
missed. Sergeant Colgan and Constable Moriarty standing well back inside
the barrack door, were visible, dim figures in the shadow, keenly alert,
surveying the stranger. Young Kerrigan, the butcher’s son, crouched,
half concealed, behind the body of a dead sheep which hung from a hook
outside the door of his father’s shop. He too was watching. One side of
the window blind of the Connacht Eagle office was pulled aside. Thaddeus
Gallagher was without doubt peering at the motor-car through a corner of
the window. Three small boys were lurking among the packing cases which
stood outside a shop further down the street. Doyle felt justified in
repeating his statement that many of the inhabitants of Ballymoy were
alive.
“There is,” he said, “many a one that’s alive enough, though I don’t say
but that business might be brighter. Mary Ellen, I say, come here.”
Mary Ellen appeared at the door of the hotel. She had improved her
appearance slightly by putting on an apron. But she had not found time
to wash her face. This was not her fault. Washing is a serious business.
In Mary Ellen’s case it would have taken a long time if it were to be in
the least effective. Doyle’s call was urgent.
“Why didn’t you come when you heard me calling you?” he said.
Mary Ellen looked at him with a gentle tolerant smile. She belonged to a
race which had discovered the folly of being in a hurry about anything.
She knew that Doyle was not really in a hurry, though he pretended to
be.
“Amn’t I coming?” she said.
Then she looked at the stranger. He, being a stranger and apparently
a man of some other nation, might perhaps really be in a hurry. Such
people sometimes are. But his eccentricities in no way mattered to
Mary Ellen. The wisdom of the ages was hers. The Irish have it. So
have eastern peoples. They will survive when the fussy races have worn
themselves out. She gave the stranger one glance of half contemptuous
pity and then looked at the motorcar.
“Now that you are here,” said Doyle severely, “will you make yourself
useful?”
Mary Ellen stared at the motor-car. Her beautiful brown eyes opened very
wide. Her mouth opened slightly and expanded in a smile. A long line of
the black transferred from the kitchen kettle to her cheek reached from
her ear to the point of her chin. It was broken as her smile broadened
and finally part of it was lost in the hollow of a dimple which
appeared. Mary Ellen had never before seen so splendid a motor.
“Will you stop grinning,” said Doyle, “and take the gentleman’s things
into the house?”
“My name,” said the stranger, “is Billing, Horace P. Billing.”
“Do you hear that now?” said Doyle to Mary Ellen.
She approached the motor-car cautiously, still smiling. Mr. Billing
handed out two bags and then a photographic camera with tripod legs,
strapped together. Doyle took one of the bags. Mary Ellen took the
other. Mr. Billing himself carried the camera.
“It occurs to me,” said Mr. Billing, “that this town kind of cries out
to be wakened up a bit.”
“I wouldn’t say,” said Doyle, “but it might be the better of it.”
Mary Ellen turned round and looked at Mr. Billing. She felt that he was
likely, if he were really bent on waking up the town, to begin with
her. It did not please her to be wakened up. She looked at Mr. Billing
anxiously. She wanted to know whether he were the kind of man who would
be able to rouse her to unusual activity.
“Where I come from,” said Mr. Billing, “I’m reckoned to hustle quite
considerable. I’d rather like to try if I could get a move on your
folks.”’
“You can try,” said Doyle. “I’d be glad if you’d try, for the place
wants it.”
No harm could possibly come of the effort; and it was likely to occupy
Mr. Billing for several days. The prospect was gratifying to Doyle.
A guest who travelled in a very large motor-car might be made to pay
heavily for his rooms and his meals.
Five small boys came out of different houses up and down the street.
When Mr. Billing, Doyle and Mary Ellen entered the hotel the boys
drifted together towards the motor-car. They walked all round it. They
peered cautiously into it. The boldest of them prodded the tyres with
his fingers. The window of the office of the Connacht Eagle was opened,
and Mr. Thaddeus Gallagher looked out Young Kerrigan emerged from the
shelter of the body of the dead sheep and stood outside the shop.
His father joined him. Both of them stared at the motor-car. Sergeant
Colgan, followed by Constable Moriarty, stepped out of the police
barrack and stalked majestically across the street. The sergeant frowned
heavily at the small boys.
“Be off out of that, every one of yez,” he said.
The small boys retreated at once. The law, in spite of all that is said
to the contrary, is greatly respected in the west of Ireland. Sergeant
Colgan would have made it respected anywhere. His appearance was far
more impressive than that of any judge in his robes of office. Constable
Moriarty, who was more than six feet high, was impressive too.
“That’s a fine car,” said the sergeant.
“It is,” said Moriarty, “as fine a one as ever I seen.”
“The man that owns it will be a high up man,” said the sergeant.
“He will,” said Moriarty.
The sergeant looked into the car. He gazed at the steering-wheel with
interest. He glanced intelligently at the levers. His eyes rested
finally on a speedometer.
“The like of that,” he said, pointing it out to Moriarty, “is what I
never seen before.”
“I’ve heard of them,” said Moriarty.
“There’s a clock along with it,” said the sergeant.
“The man that owns it,” said Moriarty, “must have a power of money.”