I took the tram back to College Green, and found the paper boys raising a great clamour there. The first of the Cork hunger strikers had died. As I left the tram and threaded through the crowd towards Grafton Street, I felt that, like myself, all these people I was rubbing shoulders with were fearful this was an augury of more terrible events.

For more than two months the incredible fast of fifty Irishmen had been capturing the public imagination, and, according to the Nationalist Press, the imagination of half the world. Interest in the fasting men had lasted through eight weeks of fierce events—violent deed followed daily by violent reprisal.

On August 12th, Terence MacSwiney, who had succeeded to the office of Lord Mayor of Cork on the assassination of Lord Mayor MacCurtain, was arrested, and with other prisoners to the number of fifty-one, went on hunger strike.

This represented a definite battle—it had a beginning, it had an end—between the British Government and Sinn Fein; and as the Cabinet acted with a consistency it had seldom shown before and was not often to show after, Sinn Fein suffered a defeat. There had been many previous hunger strikes; and the authorities had invariably given way at the eleventh hour.

It is curious to look over Dublin newspapers of that date and see the black headlines, which announced, morning after morning, the straits of the Irish “martyrs.” Back come those gloomy weeks when days were shortening and cold and damp were returning to the land again.

I find what seems to be one of the first entries. “Lord Mayor, Terence MacSwiney, arrested Thursday night in the City Hall. The (Republican) Arbitration Courts were sitting, and about fifteen persons were arrested with the Lord Mayor.”

At his trial the Lord Mayor, as chief magistrate of the city, declared illegal a court martial which sat to try him in Cork, and those taking part in it were liable to arrest under the laws of the Irish Republic.

He was charged with (a) having a police cypher under his control; (b) having in his possession a document likely to cause disaffection; (c) having made a seditious speech on the occasion of his election as successor to the late Lord Mayor MacCurtain.

“A perfectly innocent man!” as Mrs. Slaney had declared.

Throughout his trial the Lord Mayor behaved with dignity, and at the end said, “I wish to state that I will put a limit to any term of imprisonment you may impose. I have taken no food since Thursday, therefore I shall be free in a month. I shall be free, dead or alive, within a month.”

But the Lord Mayor was to be alive two months after that.

The National Press began a campaign for the release of the hunger strikers. Before the fast was many days old the following headlines had appeared:—

“Lord Mayor unable to speak. Signs of the end. Deathbed message.” “Sinking very rapidly.” In smaller type, “Cork captives dying.” “Just fading away. Deathbed scenes.”

But to the embarrassment of the Press, which as usual lacked restraint, the strikers delayed dying, and week after week passed, until all fasting records were broken. Little by little the fury of the Press abated, and presently the “martyrs” were shifted from the leading columns to less important places.

A cloud gathered over the affair. Then threats were tried. The Medical Officer at Cork Prison received the following letter:—

With the majority of the nation the strikers remained national heroes, “martyr” was the word most commonly used in connection with them; but as the fast became more and more incredible, a section of the public began to experience doubt. All sorts of rumours were afloat—that the Lord Mayor could not return to Cork owing to the rage of his friends—that the Catholic Church was troubled and divided whether this decision to starve should be considered as suicide or not. In the meantime prayers were offered for the strikers in thousands of homes, and tears stole down thousands of cheeks at thought of the men suffering for Ireland.

“One of God’s miracles!” frequently declared Mrs. Slaney, as the fast passed from fifty days to sixty days, and went on towards seventy. And this belief in Divine intervention was common to many hearts.

What would happen if the Lord Mayor died? It was hinted there would be some terrible reply from the Irish Volunteers.

Now, when the strikers were becoming legendary, one of them had died, and crisis had returned like a thunderbolt.

“Monstrous!” Mrs. Slaney exclaimed, meeting me at the top of the stairs. “Monstrous! So at last they have murdered that splendid young Irishman! They’ll murder the others before they have finished their bloody work!”

The British Government murdered two others, or two others decided to murder themselves, according to one’s politics, and it looked as though the British Government had the strength of mind to murder the lot; but before this could be done Sinn Fein gave up the battle, and Arthur Griffith, the acting President, called off the strikers. Victory went to the British Government, and there were no more hunger strikes.

Did these men, who had suffered a long illness and a painful death, die for nothing? No. In spite of doubts as to the strictness of the fast, the sacrifice made by them helped in the hardening process the nation was undergoing.

It had been intended to bring the dead Lord Mayor to Dublin; but this was forbidden, and the coffin was taken by ship to Cork. Sinn Fein replied by ordering a day of mourning, and presented Dublin with the shadow of a funeral, flowers taking the place of the coffin in the hearse. Citizens were ordered to close their shops, and those whom sentiment for the Lord Mayor did not persuade to renounce a day’s trade, put up their shutters upon warnings that they would be wise to show visible marks of respect.

I went down to O’Connell Bridge to see this funeral without a corpse. The day had turned into a Sunday, and the streets were filled with the proletariat. The Mass, which I had listened to at the pro-cathedral, had been a stupendous experience. Every inch of the stone pavement of the great church had been covered with kneeling humanity crying out dolorous Latin cries to the chanting of the priests, and fingering countless rosaries. The flood of feeling flowed this way and that like waves heaving in a sea. I did not know whether to marvel at this spectacle or to sneer at it. Were we in this mourning church wrapped in a flame of sorrow, which was going to weld the nation into a metal out of which an everlasting sword could be forged: or more truly were a few tricksters playing on the easily wrought feelings of a not quite adult nation, which, childlike, weeps as easily as it laughs? Labour and Capital over again! Look right, look left—who here was not drawn from the working or shop assistant classes? As I heard these people calling out the sounding Latin phrases, I shook my head.

The press upon O’Connell Bridge was tremendous, and presently the hearse came round a corner. It was filled with flowers. After it rolled a Dublin funeral, only there went by a greater line of shabby carriages than even Dublin usually gets together. One looked and looked, and still more horses came round the distant corner.

In the following of this funeral marched Irish Volunteers and Cumann na mBan. They left no impression on me other than being dusty and riding on the top of a wave of emotion, which might set them down as quickly as it had lifted them up. Again it was Labour versus Capital, the servant against the master. These people were the same as the kneeling congregation, and the majority of them were growing up.

But this demonstration was a manifestation of that resolution which was affecting the nation as new blood poured into the veins of an anÆmic man. Whether the exaltation was enduring enough to carry the nation to a renaissance, to a splendid rebirth, or whether it was sufficient and no more to take this people through a struggle with Britain, was a matter for a prophet. A temporary state or a lasting state, its existence could not be denied.

One of these nights a man started signalling from a house which looked upon the back of our own. We watched him from our beds. He had a lamp, and lived in a top story. The signalling continued at intervals over a period of several weeks, and what came of it all I do not know; but it made these nights more mysterious watching this lonely man and his lamp high up in the attic.

Then, one evening, Mrs. Slaney started to act in a peculiar manner. About ten o’clock she began fluttering up and down the stairs, and when I suggested locking the front door as usual, she said she would do it. A quarter of an hour later I caught her fluttering on the stairs, and this time she was unable to contain herself. She took me into the half dark of one of the landings.

“I am putting up a friend for a night or two,” she said, avoiding my glance. “He’s a Sinn Feiner, and he doesn’t want to go home. I’m giving him the little spare room at the top of the house. He has to come after dark, as he doesn’t want it known where he is. I don’t want a word said to anybody.”

“Is he on the run?” I asked brutally.

“Well, not exactly that; but he has a little work on hand, and he doesn’t want to be disturbed. He thought it was safer to come round here in case they should think of raiding his flat during the next day or two. Ah!”

A gentle knock had come to the front door. Mrs. Slaney fluttered down to the hall, where, as usual, no light was burning.

She managed successfully to manoeuvre our mysterious caller into the upper reaches of the house; I heard no more of them, and nobody seemed to have noticed his incoming or his out-going next morning. But the following night Mrs. Slaney, who made the journey to the hall shorter by drifting into our rooms early in the evening, began to fidget as soon as the clock had turned ten. The gentle knock came at last, and she bustled down to the hall.

Somebody had to make the visitor’s bed, and on the morrow Mrs. O’Grady, on her knees on a piece of newspaper raking out our fire, sniffed, and said, “Terrible times!”

“What’s up, Mrs. O’Grady?” we inquired.

“Ah,” said Mrs. O’Grady, sniffing again, “the woman upstairs is always up to something or other. She’s always after keeping in with somebody.”

“Who’s it now?”

“God forgive her for having a man like that in the house these times. Risking us all! There’s my man downstairs, he says the Black-and-Tans have only got to know there’s some one here, and they’ll come and take every man in the house off to the Castle, and perhaps burn the house down.”

“If that’s the case, Mrs. O’Grady, these do indeed be terrible times.”

“That woman doesn’t know how to treat decent people when she do get them in the house,” went on Mrs. O’Grady, passing over my wit. “Now, what right has she got to have a man like that with you here? Now you’re what I call class. I said to himself downstairs, I said those new people that have taken the drawing-room flat, they’re class. They’re the nicest lady and gentleman we’ve ever had here. They’re class.”

We changed the conversation.

But I was in some part to solve the mystery that evening, for this time Mrs. Slaney had arranged to leave the hall door on the latch. Our visitor must have come in unheard and gone upstairs. Mrs. Slaney, strangely enough, was spending the evening in our rooms, and had brought down, as far as I remember, a tray with coffee things on. When she proposed retiring, I carried this up for her, and going ahead into the sitting-room, found there, in a corner by the fire as if he had been warming his hands at it, and still with his overcoat on, the mysterious visitor. He looked round like an animal caught in a trap, and then he said good night in answer to my good night. I was only a moment putting the tray down and going.

I tell this story because this man’s advent was to be my downfall later on. I did not then know who he was; but his identity leaked out in time.

He bore the most picturesque name in Ireland—Darrel Figgis—and he wore the most romantic beard. He looked like some mediÆval personage stepped out of a picture. He was a novelist, a poet, a dramatic critic, and other things. Not very long before he had been nearly hanged at a drumhead court-martial held by some irresponsible, and it was whispered among the philistines that he went about the country afterwards selling pieces of the true rope. He was not one of the recognised Sinn Fein leaders; but he had been fairly prominent in the cause, doing propaganda work, and he had been imprisoned. There was only one such beard as his in Dublin—his own—and it was said he refused to part with it, even when he went on the run, although by so doing he added materially to the chances of capture.

He visited us three or four nights, and then departed as unostentatiously as he came.

So every day brought its new event, and the weeks stalked by in grim procession.

Early in November, the execution of Kevin Barry caused another of those demonstrations, which revealed the national temper. On the bleak morning a vast crowd gathered in the yard of Mountjoy Prison and recited the Rosary, standing and kneeling together some time before the execution, and continuing in prayer until the hour of execution was passed, when they quietly withdrew.

Since his capture in the skirmish outside the King Street bakery, Kevin Barry, who was a medical student, eighteen years old, had joined the number of national heroes. He was young, he was a soldier of the Republic, it was repeated everywhere that he had been tortured by the British military authorities, and in spite of his treatment he had refused to speak. The nation set itself with a will to the making of this new hero.

“Splendid!” declared Mrs. Slaney, returning from her baby club. “You should have been there this afternoon to hear those mites singing of Kevin Barry. We all helped to teach them, and they picked up music and words at once. Where, but in Ireland, would you find such quick children?”

Poor little devils! Taught their prejudices before they know what they are doing. As soon as they can stand put into the strait-jacket of a narrow national patriotism—that thing which has had its uses, but now should be out of date.

There is every reason to suppose that Kevin Barry met his death as a soldier would wish to meet it; but that is no reason why one should not look sternly at the facts of the case. The scrimmage outside the bakery was not a glorious affair. The Irish Volunteers, guns in their pockets, posed as civilians until the chosen moment, and Kevin Barry alone did not make good his escape. A woman said, in my hearing, “Was there ever a country like Ireland for the number of patriots and martyrs? Look at Kevin Barry—a boy of eighteen!”

What of the two British soldiers who were killed in that skirmish, one of whom was said to be sixteen? Did they not give their lives for their country as surely as did Kevin Barry? What of the men who have perished in every corner of the Empire for generations back? Their numbers must be as the sands of the seashore. But some peoples use words more easily than others, and those who work for the inarticulate must expect their epitaph short and sharp.

Before the anguish of that tragedy was over there came a new shout from the Nationalist Press: “Expectant Mother Shot Dead.”

A countrywoman was killed at her cottage door by a stray bullet fired from a lorry passing along the road. “Expectant Mother Shot Dead!” The headlines struck one like a blow in the face.

And all this while increasing ruin and arrest. Tales of girls’ hair cut off because they talked to the police. Tales of the police stripping men, beating them, and sending them home naked. Tales of men tied to chairs and thrown into the river. Tales of men who waited in ambush hour after hour for their quarry to come round the curve with an insatiable lust of hate. Tales of ferocious reprisals when homes were looted and the inhabitants driven into the fields to couch with fox and hare. Who dare give the story in detail: one would never be done. Deed of terror replied to by deed of terror, and never an attempt by the partisans of one side or other to reach the truth, and give that exact truth to the world, and tell that exact truth to themselves.

Three furious November weeks passed away.