“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.