FEIN SKETCHES 
 
 THE HOUNDS OF BANS A. By 
 Daniel Corkery. B. W. Heubsch. 
 
 THE old idea (at least, it is sev- 
 eral years old) that the Irish 
 literary movement has come to 
 a halt, that it is even less than 
 marking time and suffering a retro- 
 gression, that no new figures of im- 
 portance to compare with the 
 pioneers of the renascence have 
 arisen, is hardly borne out upon con- 
 sideration. It is true that the 
 poetic drama written in Ireland to- 
 day may not compare with that of 
 the opening years of William Butler 
 Yeats, Edward Martyn and their 
 comrades, but in the novel form it 
 may confidently be asserted that 
 Ireland is still (and likely to remain 
 so) a potent force. One has but to 
 think of James Joyce, Lennox Rob- 
 inson, Brinsley MacNamara and 
 Daniel Corkery. Corkery is, if we 
 except MacNamara, the most prom- 
 ising of the younger men, and he is 
 dramatist, poet and prose writer in j 
 turn. His first book to be pub- | 
 lished on this side of the Atlantic 
 Ocean, " The Hounds of Banba," is 
 a collection of nine sketches (or 
 short stories, as one chooses to call 
 them) that will well repay reading, 
 and for several reasons. 
 It is a book that has been written 
 
 by a man of inflamed patriotic pas- 
 sions, and as such it should grip 
 the reader mightily. Corkery is a 
 careful and distinguished handler of 
 prose, and each one of the nine 
 sketches in this book are impreg- 
 nated with a subtle .poetic atmos- 
 phere that lifts them from the 
 merely clever. They are all sketches 
 of Sinn Fein activities, of men 
 venturing all for their country, and 
 they are indubitably written by a 
 man whose whole sympathies go out 
 to these men, hunted by day and 
 night, who fought so savagely and 
 secretly for a free Ireland during the 
 guerrilla warfare that followed Eas- 
 ter Week in Dublin, 1910, and which 
 was at its fiercest during those 
 bloody and terrible months before 
 the Irish Free State pact was signed 
 in .London. 
 
 Two types in these sketches will 
 stand out in the mind of the reader, 
 and he does not necessarily have to 
 be an Irish sympathizer to feel the 
 utmost admiration for them. There 
 is the type of the old Fenian, the 
 man who has fought and conspired 
 in the past for a free Ireland and 
 gone down to defeat with his ideals 
 unimpaired and the dream still 
 bright before his eyes. Such a man 
 is old Muirish in the sketch called 
 " The Ember." To this old fighter 
 comes the writer of the sketch flee- 
 ing from the English after Easter 
 Week, and it is from the hands of. 
 this old lion that the writer receives 
 the little bag of money which had 
 been saved for fifty years. It is 
 Fenian gold, money that had been 
 collected years before. Old Muirish 
 says: 
 
 'Tis queer * * * but 'tis 
 often I found myself speaking to 
 that little bag of gold the same 
 as if it would be a Christian man. 
 " Ye're useless," I'd say to it, "I 
 may as well throw ye into the 
 river. If T hand ye over +" **">
 
 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA
 
 Crown 8vo, 
 
 The Hounds of Banba 
 
 R. CORKERY who is the 
 acknowledged master of the 
 short story in Ireland, has 
 fully maintained the high reputation 
 gained by the publication of "A 
 Minister Twilight." <f The stories 
 are of the present da} 7 , dealing with 
 the adventures of men "on the run." 
 
 "The Hounds of Banba" is full of the eternal 
 youth of the world. Here it is the youth that 
 goes out to fight for liberty, and, hunted like a 
 hare upon the mountains, still fights and still 
 hopes. Mr. Corkery, it is needless to say, tells 
 his stories with an extraordinary artistic skill 
 and technical as well as emotional beauty. He 
 can bring tears to your eyes with grief, your 
 heart into your mouth with fear. With his 
 fugitive rebels you scramble and race over black 
 hill-sides, dodging police, knocking up sleeping 
 cottagers for a night's shelter. And then the 
 sick jar of the climax "I was caught. . . . That 
 night I slept in a lonely cell in Cork jail." Mr. 
 Corkery has an extraordinary power of sweeping 
 
 THE TALBOT PRESS LIMITED DUBLIN 
 T. FISHER UN WIN LIMITED LONDON
 
 The Hounds of Banba (con.) 
 
 the strings of our emotions with the turn of a 
 phrase. He has also an uncanny skill in con- 
 veying atmosphere the atmosphere of tense, 
 strung nerves and reckless, self-conscious dare- 
 devilry in which the Irish revolutionaries have 
 been living for years. . . . Mr. Corkery relies 
 not on his construction of plots, but on his 
 presentment of emotional and psychological 
 atmosphere. It is rather with group psychology 
 than individual psychology that he mostly deals, 
 but his handling of individuals is as vivid and 
 as moving. "The Hounds of Banba" is essen- 
 tially, like Mr. Corkery's other books, the work 
 of a poet. He has caught in it all the poetry 
 and the passion of revolt. MiSS RosK MAC- 
 AUI<AY in Time and Tide. 
 
 I have read this book twice, and still find myself 
 searching for words to convey an impression of 
 it. One reason for this impotence is that a 
 passage cannot anywhere be detached to give 
 the clue to it. The whole is greater (for what 
 that is worth) than any part. It is an unity 
 lacking something I know not what ; a twilight 
 peopled by forms; the twilight and its ghostly 
 beings with a certain substance but not com- 
 plete. The characters are by no means sharply 
 defined ; they merge into atmosphere. With 
 Falstaff now, or Mr. Micawber, or Touchstone, 
 or a hundred other creations it would be possible 
 
 THE TALBOT PRESS LIMITED DUBLIN 
 T. FISHER UNWIN LIMITED LONDON 
 
 ^
 
 The Hounds 
 
 of Banba (con.) 
 
 to recall to mind, we know where we are. These 
 are complete ; they live. But it is as if the 
 characters of the stories or studies under review 
 are scarcely yet born. <1T Perhaps it is a true 
 picture of Ireland in the making that Mr. 
 Corkery has painted. He is an artist, at any 
 rate. Nowhere is there a suggestion of propa- 
 ganda The result is that in one respect 
 
 at least the book is more valuable than any 
 Unionist newspaper leader or Freeman's Journal 
 cartoon. It is the book to be studied if we wish 
 to understand Ireland and the Irish question. 
 Whatever the rights and wrongs of that question, 
 
 this is Ireland <ff No doubt but that Mr. 
 
 Corkery is an artist and "The Hounds of Banba" 
 
 a book of mark In its own subtle way it 
 
 appeals for understanding, and for this reason 
 alone is a book to be bought and read and 
 pondered. Bookman' s Journal. 
 The story called "On the Heights" is a fine 
 piece of work ... it is but an incident, but it 
 is told with force. "A Bye-product" too . . . 
 is sinister in its simplicity. The last story . . . 
 more definitely strikes the note of pure beauty. 
 The character of Nan Twohig is beautiful. 
 ^ .... a picture of Ireland .... a picture 
 charged with passion and pride. Times Liter- 
 ary Supplement. 
 .... it is impossible to blind oneself to the 
 
 THE TALBOT PRESS LIMITED DUBLIN 
 T. FISHER UNWIN LIMITED LONDON
 
 THE 
 HOUNDS OF BANRA 
 
 BY 
 
 DANIEL CORKEi,^ 
 
 NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. MCMXXII
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
 
 TO THE 
 YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND 
 
 You strike in here, chant your wild songs, and go: 
 
 The chroniclers, with rush lights, stumble after: 
 
 And ah! to see them blot the sunrise glow 
 
 Of your bright deeds and dreams, your tears and laughter.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 THE EMBER, n 
 
 ON THE HEIGHTS, 37 
 
 Co WARDS, 55 
 
 SEUMAS, 71 
 
 THE AHERNS, 105 
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY GOES HOME, 125 
 
 AN UNFINISHED SYMPHONY, 153 
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT, 169 
 
 THE PRICE, 197
 
 THE EMBER
 
 THE EMBER 
 I 
 
 Nor very long before the opening of the war I 
 was sent to organise the Volunteers in the north- 
 west corner of County Cork. I made my way 
 to a hamlet called Monera, a windy spot on the 
 lower slope of a mountain a handful of white- 
 washed walls, sharp-edged, staring, against a 
 background that was rough and dark with 
 heather and rock, hillside and hamlet unrelieved 
 by a single bush or tree. It is a place where 
 everything is hard and black and challenging. 
 For my purpose, it was dead and cold, yet at the 
 same time, strangely enough, still quite proud of 
 the fight it had made for the land in the early 
 'eighties. Only in few districts in those wild days 
 were such wild deeds done; they tell of them still, 
 but they do not boast of them, the stories arc too 
 terrible for that. If you are strange to the ways 
 of the people you will blurt out, "But which of 
 the brothers shot him?" and you will be answered 
 quietly, almost without surprise, "Well, now, 
 isn't it a queer thing, the only man could tell you 
 that, he's in America with twenty years." 
 
 ii
 
 12 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 It was strange to find such a place apathetic. 
 Doubtless it had carried the rough and over- 
 bearing methods of Fenianism into the Land 
 League struggle, and later had carried the 
 methods of the Land League, hardly less terrible, 
 into the politics of a tamer day, only to find them 
 at last discountenanced; whereupon it probably 
 ceased to trouble itself any more with such affairs. 
 The old fight, the Gael against the Sassenach, 
 that was what those windy hillsides were set for. 
 The fragments of Irish verse that even still fall 
 unexpectedly from the lips of the old men, the 
 crafty proverbs they fling at one another when 
 bargaining at a fair, half jocose, wholly earnest, 
 their vague and seemingly fool-simple answers if 
 they cannot fathom the reason of your curiosity 
 that immemorial fight it was that gave birth 
 to this hard wisdom, this ceaseless alertness, these 
 fierce songs. 
 
 I gathered the young men into a lamplit 
 schoolroom, and spoke to them of the Volunteer 
 idea: we must preserve the liberties of Ireland. 
 The fine phrase fell on them as though they were 
 figures of lichened stone, their clothing of stiff, 
 undyed homespun suggesting the image. I soon 
 made an end, weakly and despairingly. 
 
 I had a young lad with me, I was breaking him 
 in, he was presently to be sent off organising else- 
 where. Well, he then took the matter in hand,
 
 THE EMBER 13 
 
 and he put the violence of the 'prentice boy into 
 his oratory: he spoke of the impending attack of 
 the Orangemen of the North on us all as soon as 
 ever Home Rule was granted. We must arm 
 against that attack, we must preserve our newly- 
 granted liberty from assault, even with our lives ! 
 From his fine voice, the fine attitude he threw 
 head raised, shoulders stiffened, pillared legs 
 one would have expected a burst of wild applause 
 a surging forward as if our rough-built plat- 
 form must be rushed. No such thing! Only a 
 dull staring and a silence; in which presently a 
 great old figure rose up I can still see the keen 
 old face, the eagle eye, deep set, the sharp bones 
 rose up deliberately, faced us a single moment, 
 and then, almost carelessly, threw his right 
 shoulder at us, making for the open door, 
 uttering a vast sigh, "Home Rule ! Oh wisha ! 
 Wisha! Wisha!" 
 
 A ripple of laughter went through the men; 
 they were too shy or too unused to such pro- 
 ceedings to make any freer with us. My 
 'prentice boy was put out. The old eagle's con- 
 tempt had left him unable to put any thought at 
 all into intelligible words; and I was not anything 
 better. The crowded men below us the lamps 
 over their heads struck light only on a nose or 
 chin were shyly turning their heads to one 
 another, and had begun to whisper. I stood up,
 
 14 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 and at the same moment, in a far corner, a wild- 
 looking figure crouched up against me, fumbling 
 at the air with a great hand, thick and hard from 
 the plough. I saw him making an effort to speak, 
 the light on his working chin. "Young man," he 
 gasped, "that's not the talk old Muirish wants at 
 all aw! you're mistaken, you're mistaken 
 entirely." 
 
 The gesture of his open hand downed us for 
 simpletons. 
 
 "What is it Muirish wants?" I cried, angrily. 
 I had roused a lion. 
 
 "What is it?" he roared at me. "You know 
 very well what it is." 
 
 His eyes stared, as if they had no power to 
 shift away. 
 
 They were now all on their feet, catching his 
 hands, cheering him and drawing away from us 
 until a gap lay between us. One of them then 
 stepped into that lamp-lit space. "Go on!" 
 "'Tis all right!" "Go on, Jack!" a hundred 
 phrases were whispered behind him. He was a 
 splendid bit of manhood; my eyes measured him. 
 
 "You mean well," he said; "we're not saying 
 otherwise; but Muirish that man that's gone 
 out we're all one in these parts there's no 
 difference we're all one we're all one. . . ." 
 
 His speech had become incoherent. We were 
 to understand that Muirish had spoken for all.
 
 THE EMBER 1$ 
 
 Suddenly there was movement among them, one of 
 them made for the door, just as Muirish had 
 done, and as if rejoiced that someone had dis- 
 covered what was just the right thing to do, they 
 all at once rose up and crowded eagerly after him 
 into the open air, leaving us there in the empty 
 room with a ripple of laughter in our ears. 
 
 I looked at my 'prentice boy he was so white 
 and rough with passion that I thought it well to 
 keep silent. After some intentional delay on my 
 part, we lit our lamps and cycled away into the 
 dark, that ripple of laughter still in our ears; and 
 I thought how much better it were for an evan- 
 gelist in Eirinn to leave a place under a hail of 
 turf sods than in such a manner, how he would 
 have more chance of being listened to if ever he 
 returned. 
 
 The only comfort I could pluck from the occur- 
 rence was the thought that I had at last found the 
 key to somewhat similar occurrences in other 
 places in Munster. In certain baronies we would 
 get a royal welcome, in the very next barony 
 to these we might be treated as in Monera. 
 "Why," I now said, with my eyes eating up the 
 stony way, "there's a Muirish in every one of 
 them!" And then, my mind running on, I saw 
 that every extreme movement in Ireland leaves 
 behind it a remnant of its broken army an old 
 workman in a factory in a city, a cobbler in a little
 
 16 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 shop in a village, or, like Muirish, a shepherd in 
 a hut on a mountain-side great old hearts that 
 preserve to the next generation, even to the sec- 
 ond next, the spark of fire that they themselves 
 had received in the self-same manner from those 
 that long since were gone home into the silence. 
 Old embers that seem extinct and grey, Oisins 
 dreaming of the heroic dead they have so long 
 outlived, ineffectual in a thousand cases, except 
 to raise jeers and laughter, but in others, 
 where natural powers of will and mind aid them, 
 not ineffectual in hardening the thoughts of a 
 hillside or the thoughts of a little group of men 
 in a corner of a big town, making of them a 
 rocky soil for newer ideas. 
 
 II 
 
 Before I was sent again to Monera the world 
 was far into the great war, and volunteering had 
 become a dangerous propaganda. The "old 
 fight" was again on. England's difficulty was 
 Ireland's opportunity, and England had plainly 
 never been in such difficulty. To those of us 
 who had learned to read the Irish poets, their 
 well-knit, stone-hard, wolf-fierce songs were ever 
 in our ears; they haunted us, those songs, and in- 
 deed the men themselves, they looked at us from
 
 THEEMBER 17 
 
 the dark with wild eyes; we remembered what 
 they had suffered, we knew what had wrung 
 those songs from them. 
 
 "Life conquereth still; as dust the whirlwinds blow 
 
 Alexander, Caesar, and all their power and due! 
 Tara is grass, and Troy itself lieth low 
 It may be that Death will reach the English too." 
 
 Such lines haunted me. I awoke at night with 
 them flowing from my lips. They were on my 
 tongue as, for the second time, I rode of a night- 
 fall into that death-still, white-walled hamlet 
 the bearer of a fiery cross. 
 
 At the first cry of real war Monera had leaped 
 to arms; witnessing it, Muirish doubtless had 
 thrown a score of years from his back. As fine a 
 company of Volunteers as I had ever drilled 
 awaited me there. Their Captain's name was 
 Felix MacSwiney. Felix is a name common 
 among the MacSwineys. He praised the courage 
 of his men, yet, I could see, he stood afraid of 
 them: he could not hold them in. He had tried 
 to quench that spirit in them by dint of what he 
 called Barrack Square drilling, and now they 
 were growing restive under it. Could I bring 
 variety into their soldiering? 
 
 We he and I determined on some skirmish- 
 ing among the rocky hills. We planned a sham 
 attack; that night we would carry it out. He
 
 l8 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 would have his men assembled in a secret place 
 in the hills, I would be guided to it. 
 
 It was a moonlight night in August, full of 
 tenderness and breadth and distance; and this, 
 and the nature of the country the huge rocks, 
 fallen on their faces, spreading a cloak of shadow, 
 the heathery slopes unresponsive to the moon- 
 light, unlit by it, the leaping streams, flashing and 
 carolling, tireless in both I will never forget it 
 all the night, the land, and then the men, the 
 creatures of this land! Young colts were not so 
 touchy, so eager, so highly-strung, so intelligent 
 with spirit: their large eyes flashed at me in 
 fiery earnestness. They would bark their shins 
 against the juts of rock, rush unthinkingly 
 through streams and boggy hollows, and leap 
 across chasms that frightened me. We sur- 
 rounded, or rather half surrounded our objective, 
 and most skilfully took it a difficult massif that 
 culminated in a huge leaning turret of rock, 
 called the Priest's Tower. Then we rested 
 where? Between it and the gaping chasm be- 
 low, on a narrow slope of grass cropped and 
 recropped by those mountainy sheep that our 
 skirmishing had sent, with timid cries, scamper- 
 ing into the dark nooks. Above us, blanched in 
 the moonlight, leaned the towering mass, not 
 unlike an epic priest, indeed; below us, just a 
 mass of shadow, with here and there a flank of
 
 THE EMBER 19 
 
 rock, bright with moonlight; and far under the 
 shadow a leaping stream whose voice was so 
 constantly i ; n the ear that one forgot it ex- 
 cept in the silences. We looked down into it, 
 this floating, veil-like shadow, and leaning over 
 us that rock-built priest also looked down 
 into it, but with greater intentness, it would 
 seem. 
 
 Not long could the lads keep silent. They 
 began to see companies and companies of march- 
 ing men in these various shadowings. They de- 
 scribed their movements, spied out their objec- 
 tives. Presently they began to drill them these 
 legions of their restless minds. "Eyes right! 
 Left turn! Form fours!" a hundred voices (I 
 thought I caught a hint of mimicry here and 
 there in them), a hundred cries, and the rocks, 
 awakened, bravely sent them back. At last I 
 made them a little speech, and Felix MacSwiney 
 dismissed them. 
 
 He and I then cut across the defile by a path 
 I had not suspected, crossed the brawling stream, 
 and made up the opposite slope of mountain. 
 I was to sleep in his place. Leisurely we climbed, 
 full of earnest talk, yet not unconscious of the 
 beauty of the night, now so full of calm and 
 silence after the chatter and the ringing cries. 
 We struck at last into a little path. It widened. 
 We came on the traces of a wheel track. Higher
 
 20 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 up, the mass of a little hut, thatched to the 
 ground it seemed, silhouetted itself suddenly 
 against the, sky. A tiny little wi'ndow, dimly 
 lighted, hid itself in under the thatch. I stepped 
 up. 
 
 "That is?" I said. 
 
 " 'Tis there he lives," he answered, "Muirish." 
 
 "Alone? not alone, there?" I asked again 
 quickly. 
 
 "Why, yes, except for the dogs a terrible 
 breed. Whenever he goes into the village for 
 supplies, they walk at his heels. I tell you I 
 wouldn't be the man to take a try - o.ut of him 
 and they about; they'd tear you." 
 
 We stepped towards it silently; w'e were soon 
 within its shadow. 
 
 "We'll strike in," MacSwiney whispered. 
 
 "I'd rather not," I answered. An encounter 
 with Muirish would quite exhaust, I felt, what- 
 ever little energy I had left. At the same time, 
 I strained my eye against the little window, there 
 was but one pane in it. I saw a couple of huge 
 dogs, one a greyhound, lying about the hearth 
 flag in the glow of the turves, curled up in sleep. 
 Otherwise the place was empty. As I looked, the 
 hound drew his shoulder-blades up around his 
 ears, slowly and tensely, then suddenly relaxed 
 them and lay still.
 
 TH E EMBER 21 
 
 "There's no Muirish here," I whispered, when 
 I was sure of the dog's sleeping. 
 
 "But, look! the candle is lighting; he's not 
 in bed." MacSwiney raised his head; he was 
 wondering where Muirish could be. 
 
 "He must be at my place," he said at last. 
 
 The saying was not too welcome to me; but 
 I withdrew my eyes from the glowing and stilly 
 interior, and made forward with him, not speak- 
 ing a word. We were just about to step from 
 the shadow of the hut into the flood of light 
 when he stopped me. 
 
 "There! there ! look at him!" 
 
 His back towards us, dark as a pillar- 
 stone, Muirish was standing on a boulder, a long 
 staff in his hand. He was as still as the Priest's 
 Tower itself, which we could see beyond him, 
 standing high and lonely across and above the 
 shadowy defile. The collie dog that stood be- 
 side him, its nose in the air, was no less still and 
 alert than its master. The two together, they 
 made a group very like that rocky tower beyond 
 them. That at its own side and these at their 
 side were holding vigil above the tumbled rocks, 
 the waters and the shadows. The old man's 
 attitude was one of listening, listening rather 
 than peering: it was for that reason we held our- 
 selves so still. He slowly raised his head, turned
 
 22 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 round, an4 leaning heavily on the staff, de- 
 scended from his point of vantage. We kept 
 our stillness. He passed close to us, the dog 
 sidling along at his right hand. He lifted the 
 latch and went in, closing the door behind him. 
 
 "He was listening to our drilling," I said softly. 
 
 "That's it, surely," there was relief in my com- 
 panion's voice. I could not help peeping once 
 again through that dim pane of glass. He was 
 seated on the settle, straight opposite my eyes. 
 He sat rigid, intensely gathered into his thoughts. 
 His sceptre lay beside him; his two fists fiercely 
 clasped his shapeless felt hat against his breast. 
 It was not a restful attitude, yet it would hold 
 him for hours, one felt. He was far removed, 
 whether into the past or future, who could say? 
 Or whether he was making a prayer? 
 
 Ill 
 
 I will now tell of my third meeting with him. 
 It was late in the summer of 1916 memorable 
 year. I was on the run, or, in the phrase that 
 goes through so many centuries of Irish history, 
 I was on my keeping. I had been in the Post 
 Office in Dublin during the whole of Easter Week. 
 I had seen the ring of fire closing in around us, 
 had gazed, fascinated, at the scared cats walk-
 
 THEEMBER 23 
 
 ing rather leisurely from the burning houses, 
 had tended a friend whose reason had given away, 
 had taken drugs to preserve my own. Now the 
 police were chivying me and a thousand others, 
 it would seem, from place to place. I had es- 
 caped them a hundred times. As an old woman 
 I had walked through a party of them; I 
 cursed them in Irish that they should think a 
 son of mine one of them rebels! I opened the 
 door to them in a country hotel it was in Clare- 
 morris neighbourhood and helped them search 
 it, through and through. But one tires of being 
 chivied from place to place in one's own country, 
 and the idea that you will eventually be nabbed 
 grows stronger and stronger, robbing you of the 
 sense of rest; and I firmly believe what I have 
 heard a friend of mine say one who had led the 
 police a very pretty dance indeed, right round the 
 Five Fifths of Eirinn that a feeling of volup- 
 tuous ease ran through him, as if his whole 
 body smiled, when, after six months of it, a rough 
 hand gripped him one night by the shoulder and 
 held him fast. 
 
 It was in the city of Kilkenny a place where 
 the young men have the voice of history ever 
 in their ears that the thought came to me, "I 
 will rise up at midnight and make for Monera in 
 the quiet hills, and there I'll heal me of my griev- 
 ous wound." I do not know why or how it
 
 24 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 is, but when one is living as I was then, acting 
 a part with which s.o many books of Irish history 
 had made me familiar, a touch of the boy-heroic 
 comes back into one's thoughts, into one's lan- 
 guage (at least when alone), and no matter how 
 much one may smile at the quaint phrases, they 
 do bring a certain healing with them, as if one 
 had made a fragment of song. To live dan- 
 gerously is, I suppose, to live lyrically. My only 
 wound was a deep melancholy that I could not 
 shake off, let me rush as I would from place to 
 place; and no sooner had I spoken the silly words 
 than I really did feel some lightening of the strain 
 of flight. In Monera, at MacSwiney's house, I 
 would lie lost until my nerves were strong again. 
 (And at the back of my mind there was per- 
 haps, at the same time, the sly, malicious thought 
 that I, who had risked all in the burning post 
 office, would find out Muirish and fling his scorn- 
 ful "Wisha! Wisha! Wisha!" back into his 
 teeth.) 
 
 I reached Monera, and made my way to Mac- 
 Swiney's house at Kilsheelan. I walked into it 
 just as his people, his mother and two sisters, 
 were making the place ready for the night. They 
 had had no tidings of me, had thought of me as 
 among the unnamed dead, for they had come 
 to know that I had never been deported to Fron- 
 goch with the other prisoners, had never appeared
 
 THEEMBER 2$ 
 
 before a court-martial. How their Irish welcome 
 went round my heart ! Gaels of the Gael, they re- 
 ceived me, spoke to me, welcomed me, slaved for 
 me in the true Gaelic spirit, and quite without 
 knowing it. Their forefathers had been doing 
 as much for the hunted Gaels of four centuries 
 those shadowy, unnamed warriors, poets, strag- 
 glers, kerns, gallowglasses, tories, rapparees, out- 
 laws, white-boys, fenians who would crowd on 
 my imagination, unbidden, unlocked for, often in 
 the most listless moments, the name of a bridge 
 or hill, a flash of princely pride in a peasant boy's 
 face, or a verse of vengeful curses from an old 
 bedridden crone summoning them with rude po- 
 tency from their haphazard graves. My heart 
 opened. "Yes, I'm tired, God knows it, but . . . 
 let us sit at the door, Felix, the night is too beau- 
 tiful for sleep." 
 
 We did so, sitting there by each other on two 
 boulders that helped to buttress the gable of his 
 house. We talked quietly, even sadly, for our 
 movement was broken, perhaps finished, yet not 
 dishonoured: and the moon sloped across the 
 Priest's Tower, looking at us with shining, won- 
 dering face, as a child might. We sank into 
 silence, as if to let it go by; and I knew the bles- 
 sedness of a somewhat wistful peacefulness. 
 
 Nothing is easier than to overstay your time on 
 the heights; a moment later I had said to my
 
 26 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 friend: "And Muirish? There's no change in 
 him? He's the same cross-grained, cranky old 
 fenian? We were only play-actors, he said. . . ." 
 (That malicious thought was uttering itself.) 
 
 Felix rose up. He would not answer without 
 a moment's delay. Silently he lifted himself, 
 slowly, in tune with the thought that held 
 him. Then, smiling, he stretched out a hand to 
 the moonlit wall and took hold of a snail that 
 was climbing it obliquely, leaving a silvery track; 
 without looking at it he threw it behind him into 
 the greenery. He wiped his fingers on his 
 trousers. In my mind I was repeating: But Mui- 
 rish? Muirish? However, Felix making no 
 movement to sit again, I rose up beside him, 
 saying: "There's a heavy dew, and you'll be ris- 
 ing early in the morning." 
 
 " 'Tis better go in," he said. 
 
 He slept that night on the settle, surrendering 
 me his bed. He showed me into the little room, 
 placed the candle on the table, and turned to go. 
 He paused then and said: "As for Muirish I'm 
 getting frightened about him." His eyes looked 
 at me. An unpleasant thought swept a shadow 
 across my mind. I dismissed it with a toss of my 
 head. 
 
 "Nonsense, I'd trust him; he's too old to 
 change." 
 
 "Oh not that ! Not that ! Muirish is as true
 
 THEEMBER 27 
 
 as steel. But he's not himself that's what 
 I mean. I'm uneasy about him, and he has no 
 one with him." 
 
 I thought a moment. 
 
 "We'll go to see him," I said. 
 
 He bent his head. "I'd like it," he replied. 
 
 "To-morrow night, then." 
 
 It was delicious rest I had that night. I was 
 too tired to sleep, and indeed I hardly wished 
 for sleep, my nerves were so perceptibly losing 
 the sense of strain that had held them so 
 long. I felt it slipping from me, quietly, 
 quietly. And when I quenched the candle, above 
 my eyes was the rich glow from the turf losing it- 
 self in the dark thatch and the dark roof-timbers, 
 very warm and mellow. And sometimes, with a 
 very thrill of delight, I would feel my mind open 
 itself to the vision of the hundred thousand hill- 
 tops that were outside those cosy walls I would 
 feel the moonlight bathing them in peace, and the 
 cold stars above them. "Monera, Monera, Mon- 
 era 1" I whispered for very love of it, my spirit 
 growing all the time from strength to strength. 
 At last there was Muirish as I had last seen 
 him, a slab of stone with a skirt of shadow about 
 itl Yet Monera ! Monera ! was what I still whis- 
 pered while still beholding in vision the intense 
 old figure watching and waiting above the vale, 
 as if Monera and he were one. I ceased my lyric
 
 28 . THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 word. I went into a deep stillness. Then I 
 lifted myself on an elbow, and stared through the 
 little window, on which the turf glow was dancing 
 into the rich blue that lay beyond. But when I 
 settled down again, with firm assurance of sleep, 
 I knew what I should do next day. At break- 
 fast I said: 
 
 "Felix, as I came through Duhallow I discov- 
 ered that the Volunteers were beginning to pull 
 themselves together. . . ." 
 
 He caught at my hopefulness : 
 
 "Do you wish it? Do you wish it?" he 
 blurted out, in the quick way of the southron. 
 
 "Why shouldn't I wish it?" I said. 
 
 "I was afraid you'd throw cold water on it, you 
 who were in the fight, who saw the surrender." 
 
 That very day Felix went around the valleys, 
 and that same night we had as large a muster as 
 before at the Priest's Tower. My commands 
 rang bravely out; and the lads drilled with a se- 
 riousness that had had no place in our previous 
 drillings. I went cold to think suddenly that the 
 next fight, if ever it came, would be fought out to 
 the cry, "Revenge!" Almost in silence we dis- 
 missed the company, and, as before, made for 
 the lonely hut. 
 
 A voice suddenly startled us : 
 
 "You'll come in, you'll come in?" 
 
 Muirish was making down on us, with a nerv-
 
 THEEMBER 29 
 
 ous swiftness in his plunging forward that 
 frightened me. Felix spoke as quickly in 
 reply : 
 
 "We were going up. Be careful, Muirish." 
 
 "Ah you were drilling, I heard ye, I heard 
 ye. Say it, say it?" He was shaking with 
 excitement. 
 
 "We were," I answered. 
 
 "I do be deceiving myself, I do be fancying 
 I hear voices." His hand went across his brow. 
 
 "It was our voices, the lads, you heard." 
 
 "Come in, come in, I want ye." 
 
 We followed him in. 
 
 "Felix," he said; "'tis the same?" 
 
 He looked at me, he looked at Felix. 
 
 "The same," Felix answered; "and he was in 
 the fight in Dublin he's a hunted man." 
 
 "Ah! Ah!" He was caressing my hand. "Sit 
 there, my son." I sat down. 
 
 "Felix," he said, "maybe you'd leave this young 
 man and myself the freedom of the place for a 
 while?" 
 
 Felix sprang up. 
 
 "Since you wish it, Muirish." There was re- 
 spect and understanding in the voice. 
 
 " 'Tis kind for him to be like that," the old 
 man said when the door had closed again on us. 
 
 The place was not different: there was his staff 
 close to his hand; there were his dogs the great
 
 30 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 hound's body taking beautiful curves in his sleep; 
 but the old man was shrunken away a good deal 
 from what he was when last I saw him, and his 
 boldness of address was gone. 
 
 "Wait now," he said, and I could see the con- 
 centration it needed before he could say what was 
 in his mind; it was visible in his rapt stillness, in 
 his bent brows. After a long and, for me, ner- 
 vous pause, my mind running on Felix's fear, he 
 said : 
 
 "Ye held out a week." He was, of course, 
 talking of our fight in Dublin. There followed 
 a deeper silence than before. Then he thrust 
 his head forward into mine, and his fierce old eye 
 held me. 
 
 "Cogar," he said, "it wasn't any shortage of 
 powder and ball betrayed ye?" 
 
 I was glad to be able to answer him : 
 
 "Oh, no, not at all except, except in one 
 place, perhaps, and even there " 
 
 "What's that what's that you're saying?" 
 
 He had clutched my shoulder, I was trem- 
 bling to his trembling. 
 
 "In one place . . . where young Heuston was, 
 they say the ammunition ran out . . ." 
 
 His clutch fell off and he sat back, a figure of 
 stone, before me. For a moment I knew that he 
 neither felt nor saw nor thought; I grew afraid. 
 
 "But what did that matter?" I rushed out my
 
 THE EMBER 31 
 
 words. "In either case he would have had to 
 give in when the general surrender came. No, 
 Muirish, no; it was not want of ammunition " 
 
 "You're sure?" 
 
 "I'm sure." 
 
 "You're sure, young man; you're sure of it?" 
 
 His clutch on me again, he would shake the 
 truth from me. 
 
 "As sure as I'm sitting here." 
 
 His grip released, but not the force in his voice. 
 
 "Then what was it?" 
 
 "It was want of, want of, ... everything! 
 Want of men, want of ... everything!" 
 
 "I suppose it was," he said, very quietly. 
 'Tis I should know." His face turned away 
 from me, and I was glad for it. His lips pursed 
 themselves out, and when, after long thought it 
 seemed to me, he spoke again, it was not to me 
 alone he spoke: 
 
 "Them big guns of theirs, a mint of money 
 wouldn't buy even one of them." 
 
 "You may sing it," I said. 
 
 He thought again: 
 
 "But that's no excuse for me." 
 
 I did not understand him. I said nothing. 
 He rose up. 
 
 "If I go into that caboose of mine," he said, 
 nodding at a little ramshackle room he had made 
 at the gable end away from us, "you'll maybe
 
 32 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 wait till I come back to ye?" It was an old 
 man's speech. 
 
 "Of course I'll wait," I returned. 
 
 He went slowly across the earthen ground, 
 and I soon heard him searching for something in 
 the little place beyond. . . . He was coming. A 
 little ticken bag it was that he held out to me. 
 
 "Take it," he said. 
 
 There were coins in it and notes. 
 
 "No, no; I couldn't dream of it. Things are 
 so dear, you'll want it; besides " 
 
 "Even if I did want it," he smiled at me, "I 
 couldn't touch it; 'tisn't mine to make free with. 
 Them that entrusted it to me they're cold this 
 thirty years 'twasn't for that they left it with 
 me. Take it, young man, and sorry I am I didn't 
 make it over on ye when ye were here be- 
 fore." 
 
 "That's fenian gold," I said. 
 
 "It is, and for fifty years I have kept my grip 
 on it." 
 
 "It will get to the right quarters, never fear," 
 I said bravely. 
 
 He was smiling to himself. He spoke now in 
 a quiet voice : 
 
 " 'Tis queer," he began, "but 'tis often I found 
 myself speaking to that little bag of gold the 
 same as if it would be a Christian man. 'Ye're 
 useless,' I'd say to it; 'I may as well throw ye into
 
 THEEMBER 33 
 
 the river. If I hand ye over to the young men 
 nowadays 'tis on the hounds they'd spend ye, or 
 on the goaling, maybe.' That's what I'd say to 
 it; and yet I was wrong; 'tis them very same 
 young lads made the fight in Dublin, so they tell 
 me. But an old man's mind, 'tis a queer contriv- 
 
 ance." 
 
 " 'Tis wanted now worse than ever," I said. 
 
 That pleased him. 
 
 "Do you tell me so? And it wouldn't have 
 made any difference if I gave it to ye before?" 
 
 "Not a bit of difference," I said. 
 
 " 'Tis a great consolation ye're giving me. I 
 was broken with thinking on it. I tell you, a man 
 can be too wise and too careful and too mistrust- 
 ful. And I was always like that. But 'tis in ease 
 I'll lay my head down in my empty house this 
 night. Good night to ye." 
 
 He had hobbled with me to the door. I 
 paused. I looked up into his face; I suddenly 
 thought of what I would say to him; I would 
 hearten him with those four lines that were ever 
 and always in our thoughts, of how decay would 
 as surely come upon the English as it had come 
 upon Alexander and Caesar: 
 
 "Do threasgair an saol is do sheid an ghaoth mar smal 
 Alastram, Caesar is an mheid do bhi 'na bpairt; 
 Ta an Teamhair 'na fear is feach an Traoi mar ta, 
 'S na Sasanaigh fein, dob' fheidir go bhfaighdis has."
 
 34 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 He drank them in, he swallowed them with 
 open mouth. 
 
 "Again! Again!" he said; and again I repeated 
 them, I knew he was making them his own. I 
 knew, too, I had given him in perfect form the 
 whole burden and pressure of his thoughts. He 
 turned in, wondering how that could be wonder- 
 ing, yet comforted, comforted for ever.
 
 ON THE HEIGHTS
 
 ON THE HEIGHTS 
 I 
 
 A STRANGER handed in a little slip of paper at 
 the door of the farmhouse in Acharas where I 
 had been hiding for several weeks: within ten 
 minutes of receiving it I was on my bicycle, was 
 flying at break-neck speed down mountainy bohe- 
 reens, one after another, crossing through water- 
 courses without dismounting, and skimming the 
 sharp corners of boulders by half inches or less. 
 And yet I was all but caught! Only for their 
 hooting, as their motor swerved from the main 
 road, I had ridden into their arms. I caught that 
 hoot ! hoot ! and flung from my path by very in- 
 stinct; slap-dash in among the rocks and furze I 
 went, went as far as I could, then threw myself 
 off on the heather, and breathing like a swim- 
 mer after a long swim against time, could do 
 nothing but wait, helpless. Puffing and panting 
 on my knees, I could see them between the rocks : 
 with frowning determination they were putting 
 their heavy military motor at the hill, and I 
 recognised the sergeant in charge. "Mullery!" 
 I gasped, and grabbed my handlebar again by 
 
 37
 
 38 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 instinct. If I fell into Mullery's hands, it meant 
 five years : he was a man that would swear any- 
 thing. When they had gone by, I mounted 
 again, and swept into Gougane Barra by the back 
 road, and was just making on for Keimaneigh 
 when something spoke in my ear perhaps it was 
 the old Gaelic saints who lie there at rest "They 
 will have set a watch in Keimaneigh : take the 
 mountains." And so, instead of taking the com- 
 fortable if heavy road through the Pass of Kei- 
 maneigh, I made straight for Co.omroe, facing 
 the great walls of rock that enclose that most im- 
 pressive of mountain glens. I have never heard 
 that any other mortal ever pushed a bicycle up 
 the one thousand eight hundred feet of jagged 
 rock that hangs above the inches there; but I did 
 it, how I do not know, unless it was the vision of 
 that dogged face in the motor car that kept me 
 ever pushing on and on and up and up. 
 
 As I shoved, dragged, slided, lifted my wheels 
 up the rocks, the sweat ran freely and warmly 
 down my back and limbs. I gave it no thought, I 
 felt no weariness. But when I reached the sum- 
 mit and expected to see the sun again, a cold sea 
 wind struck me, refreshed me, and then, suddenly, 
 chilled me; and up before me rose a wall of white 
 mist. I looked for the mountain-peaks that used 
 to guide me there, but none were visible in the
 
 ON THE HEIGHTS 39 
 
 cloud. Feeling it all around me, licking and 
 stroking me, and remembering how warm it had 
 been in the coom, I knew I was making into a 
 night of r"ain; and there are no wetter hills in the 
 whole of Munster. As I went forward I tried 
 to recollect the whereabouts of the nearest house 
 in those forlorn uplands, but all my landmarks 
 were blotted out. I came suddenly on a close- 
 huddled flock of black-faced mountainy sheep; 
 they looked at me and scampered off into the 
 mists with timid cries; they, too, seemed to be 
 waiting for the rain. I felt lonelier than before. 
 The pursuit was over and done with years ago, 
 it appeared. I thought of it no more. Could 
 I make the Coomahola river before nightfall, was 
 the only question that would rise up in my mind, 
 as I pushed my bicycle now over the shale and 
 then through growths of fragrant bog-myrtle. 
 And it would come into my mind, too, that though 
 I was making forward with fair speed I was do- 
 ing no good, for I did not know where I was go- 
 ing. Yet somehow I feared to stop. I stumbled 
 on and on, till suddenly I saw beside me a flat 
 table of rock, about two feet high, as perfectly 
 shaped as if stonecutters had worked at it. Be- 
 fore I had willed it, it seemed, I was sitting on it 
 with a sense of delicious ease. "I will think out 
 exactly where I am and where I will go," I said,
 
 40 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 comforting myself with a pretence of will power 
 that I knew well was but a pretence. Then down 
 came the rain, slanting from the south-west. 
 
 II 
 
 I bowed my head to it in sheer hopelessness 
 and that action it was that saved me. Beneath 
 my eyes I saw certain light marks on the ground, 
 not wheel marks they were not more than two 
 feet six apart, and besides they were not cut into 
 the ground. I was instantly following them. I 
 knew what they were. They were the marks of 
 a "tray," as the peasants of that place call it both 
 in Irish and English a sort of light sleigh on 
 which they bring down the cut turf from places 
 in the uplands that are too steep for horse and 
 cart. These marks meant a house, sooner or 
 later. With the greatest care I kept to them. 
 And soon I began to come on other signs of hu- 
 man ways and strivings a cairn of stones, a first 
 effort at a clearance, then a crazy sort of bound- 
 ary fence, long abandoned to its own will, then at 
 last two forked stakes in the ground, a young ash 
 sapling laid across them, closing a gap. I blessed 
 the human touch: the pious hands of husbandry 
 had made it! Then I struck the path. 
 
 The night thickened, and the rain thickened;
 
 ON THE HEIGHTS 41 
 
 but now with the path beneath my feet, all 
 broken shale it was, I did not mind. I thought 
 I might leave my bicycle there until I had found 
 the house, which I knew to be somewhere in the 
 darkness. I laid it in the dripping heather and 
 made more swiftly on. (I recovered it next day, 
 clean as a new pin.) A waft of turf smoke struck 
 me. I breathed it in with wide nostrils. My 
 spirits rose, I could shout out. Then in a pit of 
 darkness beneath me to the right I saw the tiny 
 little eye of a lamplit window, warm-coloured, and 
 looking as if its kindly gleam had been peering out 
 that way on the hills for thousands and thousands 
 of years, so steady it was. I used no caution. 
 I made for it through the blackness, and lost the 
 path. I found myself stumbling down the side of 
 a little ravine I splashed through a leaping 
 stream, I almost fell upon the door. I banged 
 it with my fist. I heard movement within, a 
 collie whined, voices whispered. I could not 
 wait. I banged again, and the rain pelted my 
 warm wrist. I caught the latch and shook the, 
 door. "Open! Open!" I cried. Within, I 
 heard the bolts being withdrawn. 
 
 A low-toned, uncertain voice spoke in my 
 face : 
 
 "Who arc you ? What is it you want ? Come 
 in. You're all wet." 
 
 A dull-looking, middle-aged man and his wife,
 
 42 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 a soft-featured, kindly creature, drew back from 
 me, and continued to sta*re at me; I felt annoyed 
 at their doubtful reception; there was no hearti- 
 ness in it. 
 
 "I'm wet all right," I said, trying to speak 
 calmly; but then I added with a bitterness I could 
 not help, "there arc more than me on the hills 
 these times, and better than me." 
 
 By these words I would give them to under- 
 stand why I was on the hills. 
 
 The man's jaw fell; he looked at his wife; they 
 stared at me helplessly, even more stupidly than 
 before, I thought, and more frigidly. He came 
 one step towards me and whispered : 
 
 "Maybe you'd speak low? Maybe you 
 would?" 
 
 What did he mean? 
 
 "Draw up to the fire; take your coat off," the 
 woman said, handing me a towel to wipe my face. 
 
 "Why should I speak low? Is there anyone 
 sick?" I said, looking at the poor staring creature 
 that was man of the house. 
 
 "No, no; there's no one sick, thanks be to God; 
 glory be to His Holy Name!" 
 
 He was smiling at me in an indeterminate sort 
 of way, his jaw hanging. He was a weak- 
 mouthed man, I could see. He went doddering 
 away. -His wife pointed to the door in the par- 
 tition at the end of the room.
 
 ON THE HEIGHTS 43 
 
 "The old man, his father he's asleep within, 
 and he's noisy if anyone wakes him." 
 
 That then was why I should speak low. I un- 
 derstood. I had met such old men before 
 Lears, but Lears who get the best of the bargain, 
 maintaining their rights of property to the very 
 day that they have to step into the grave. We 
 found ourselves speaking in whispers, all three 
 of us, I trying to explain how I found the track 
 to their lonely door and they wondering how I 
 had missed the wider track across the hills. After 
 all, they were a good-hearted couple and could 
 enjoy a chat if one carried it on in whispers. 
 
 The man raised his head suddenly: we all lis- 
 tened. The winds were coming up from Bantry 
 Bay, they were roaring upon the roof. As we 
 listened, in flew the door with a crash, the fire 
 was scattered on the hearth, the sheep dog sprang 
 from his sleep, planted his legs and howled at the 
 storm. We all flung ourselves on the door. In 
 the sudden tumult I forgot myself. As we got 
 the door to I shouted with vast enjoyment: 
 
 "There ! there ! stay outside now with Ser- 
 geant Mullery," I added under my breath. 
 
 "Hush! hush! sir; lave ye." 
 
 Both man and wife were terrified, it seemed. 
 They were looking towards the end of the room. 
 
 I put my hand to my mouth, hunching my shoul- 
 ders, and turning like them towards the unseen
 
 44 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 sleeper how we leap at moments back into our 
 childhood! But too late, too late. Three 
 dreadful blows were struck on that partition to- 
 wards which we were all looking, and an aged but 
 vigorous and indignant voice cried out above the 
 storm in ringing Irish: 
 
 "Am I to be kept always in the dark? Ever 
 and always ! Look at me, and I for the last hour 
 killed with listening to your foolery and dogs 
 and giggling and the stranger's* voice stun- 
 ning me; and 'tisn't worth your while, Shawn, to 
 come in with a little word." 
 
 Man and wife were trying to smile" at me; but 
 I could see that they were used to getting the 
 worse of it. They did not know what was best 
 to do. 
 
 "I'll answer him," I said. They clutched 
 me. 
 
 "No, no," they were whispering warmly in my 
 face; "no, sir; no sir." 
 
 I cried out in Irish as ringing as his own : 
 
 "You'd drive a stranger from your door, this 
 night?" Half in jest, half in earnest, I spoke the 
 words. The winds wer-e roaring with a great 
 voice; I could hear the cataracts pouring. 
 
 " 'Tis no decent person would be travelling the 
 hills this night," I was answered, and there was 
 suspicion and challenge in the tones.
 
 ON THE HEIGHTS 45 
 
 "There's a more decent person on- your floor 
 this night," I answered back, and in spite of my- 
 self my voice was hard and rough, "a more decent 
 person than ever walked this hungry land since 
 St. Finnbarr left it, travelling to the east." 
 
 "Left it and blessed it," the voice answered me 
 in triumph. 
 
 "I doubt it," I answered, and my anger was 
 gone; and there came swiftly over me a joyous- 
 ness to think of the two of us shouting at each 
 other there in that lonely land with the roaring 
 storm outside, grandest of orchestras. 
 
 "I doubt it," I cried, in a great voice. 
 
 "He did," h'e answered. 
 
 "I doubt it." 
 
 " 'Tis well known; the authors say so!" 
 
 My heart opened to him! How often I had 
 heard that or similar phrases from his like ! "Se 
 adeir na h-ughdair . . ." 
 
 "If he did, ye ought to remember it, and not 
 drive a stranger from. . . ." 
 
 "There's no one doing the like; but haven't I 
 the right to complain if my son will not tell me 
 who 'tis comes in or goes out? Come in to me, 
 Shawn, and let you make the stranger his meal, 
 Nora." 
 
 Shawn went in to him, having first looked 
 despairingly at his wife, who smiled back en-
 
 46 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 couragingly. I felt I had not fathomed any one 
 of the three of them. 
 
 "He'll be in his sleep in a moment," she said 
 to me in a whisper. "You gave him his answer." 
 She was more courageous than the man. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I made free with the big teapot of black tea 
 she made me, and with the lovely bread, laugh- 
 ing to myself and yet wondering. After a while 
 Shawn returned to us on tiptoe from the old 
 man's room, and, silenced, we could hear the deep 
 and vigorous breathing of his father. 
 
 I began telling them of the detestable war 
 bread the people in the cities and towns had to 
 eat, and of the great scarcity of everything 
 among them; they sighed over them, the poor 
 creatures ! And so the night passed. I began to 
 wonder why they did not suggest retiring, 
 for it was now near midnight. I began to 
 yawn involuntarily, and to measure the settle 
 with my eyes. I had often slept on one. They 
 were again confused. At last the man, who was 
 certainly an extraordinarily gentle creature, 
 touched my sleeve shyly and said: "The only 
 place we have for you to sleep in is with himself,"
 
 ON THE HEIGHTS 47 
 
 he nodded towards the partition. I was just 
 about to say, "What about the settle?" when I 
 thought suddenly that there were but the two 
 rooms in the house; I glanced about and saw that 
 the press on which the candle was lighting was 
 of course a folded-up bedstead. Yet I didn't 
 answer: I did not relish the thought of sleeping 
 with a person I had just quarrelled with. 
 
 "You could slip in quietly. He sleeps 
 sound." 
 
 I smiled at him. 
 
 "Go in," I said, throwing myself erect, "and 
 tell him the police and the soldiers are on my 
 track, and see what he'll say?" 
 
 I felt sure that anyone who kept the "authors" 
 in his thoughts would not refuse a corner of his 
 bed to a rapparee. I was surprised how they 
 took my words! Had they not known it? 
 
 "No, no," they both cried warmly at me; "not 
 that way at all," the man moved about the 
 flags in trouble. 
 
 " 'Tis better say no word about the soldiers or 
 police at all," the wife urged; "only that 'tis how 
 a tourist is after losing his way in the fogs, a 
 tourist was fishing in Loch Fada. Go on, 
 Shawn, and tell him that; 'tis a story will do no 
 one any harm." 
 
 I consented, and Shawn went very timidly into
 
 48 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 his father's presence. We listened; yet there 
 was no noise between them, no squabbling at all. 
 He came out gesturing that the way was clear. 
 About midnight I stepped very carefully over the 
 old man's rather bulky figure, to take my share of 
 the huge old bed. 
 
 "Out the candle," he growled at me. 
 Timidly enough I mumbled an apology, and did 
 so. Outside, the winds shrieked among the up- 
 land gullies and the waters fell in them. 
 
 IV 
 
 I awoke with some dim feeling of annoyance. 
 It was pitch dark and the storm was still roaring, 
 but near by was an unceasing whisper, a sharp 
 hissing of breath between teeth and lips : the old 
 man, hunched up in the bed, was praying. I 
 dozed off again, and again I woke, and the 
 hissing was still going on beside me. He was, I 
 suspected, carrying out a practice of fifty or sixty 
 years' standing. To the roaring winds outside 
 he was deaf: he knew their voices better than I. 
 I was listening to them, to him, thankful for the 
 nest of warmth and peace I found myself in. I 
 would occasionally hear the rattle of his beads, 
 and from the sound could guess at their huge size.
 
 ON THE HEIGHTS 49 
 
 Dozing again, I heard him gather them up; and 
 then I am quite clear I heard the words, "... 
 and for the souls of all the men they put to death 
 in Dublin!" His voice fell to a whisper, and a 
 vigorous "Amen !" finished his prayers, as with 
 a clasp. He shrugged the clothes up about his 
 shoulders, groped under the pillow, and settled 
 himself to sleep. A sudden rush of thought and 
 feeling swept over me. "The souls of all the 
 men they put to death in Dublin," I repeated, and 
 I thought of this lonely old man praying for them 
 in this unknown cabin on the uplands. In the 
 phrase of the people,! was glorified to think of it. 
 
 Yet presently I fell to wondering why his son 
 and his son's wife had implored me not to tell 
 him that I was a hunted man on the hills. I 
 could not understand it. 
 
 VI 
 
 I awoke in the bright morning to find the old 
 man's fingers touching and feeling my brow with 
 great gentleness. He started when my eyes
 
 5P THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 glared up at him. It was then I saw him for the 
 first time with any distinctness. He had a fringe 
 of white, wool-white whiskers in under his shaven 
 chin; he looked like a shepherd in an old play or 
 in a picture; but there was a keenness and a 
 sharpness about the brow an alertness that 
 made one forget this first thought of him. Seeing 
 how he had started, I greeted him in good Irish. 
 He smiled at me : 
 
 "You're no tourist was fishing Loch Fada," he 
 said, knowingly. I listened a moment; there was 
 no stir in the room outside. I felt sure they had 
 not yet risen, had not yet been speaking to him. 
 The sun was bathing the hills, a robin w*as singing. 
 Even in the little darksome cabin there was an 
 air of freshness and gladness. 
 
 "What am I, then?" I said. 
 
 "You're no tourist," he said again, with the 
 same wise and, I thought, encouraging smile. 
 
 "But what am I?" 
 
 "I'll tell you: you're one of them!" He gave 
 me a slow, antique wink; it was like a gesture. 
 "I was one of them myself and I young," he 
 added. He flung up his head. 
 
 "It wasn't I told you I was a tourist." 
 
 "No, 'twas himself. But you, 'twas yourself, 
 and no one else, told me told me what I know. 
 Brother," he said, using the familiar word 
 among the Gaels, "you were dreaming . . .
 
 ON TH E HEIGHTS 51 
 
 powerful dreams !" What wild foolery had I 
 been crying out in my sleep ! His eyes were full 
 of vision my dreams ! 
 
 " 'Twill come to pass," he said, "the authors 
 foretold it." I had no reply, except to stare at 
 him, his face aglow, bending upon mine. 
 
 "But isn't this a pitiful thing," he grew mourn- 
 ful above me, "that man outside, that son of 
 mine he's a thing without courage, he's like a 
 sheep after being worried by the dogs, he is that! 
 He'd be afraid to hang a bit of green on the door, 
 or to keep a gun in the house. I'm sick and 
 tired of him. But look, forgive me the welcome 
 I gave you : these times there do be men in plain 
 clothes going from house to house, innocent- 
 looking slobs of men, gathering up information, 
 and that pair outside, I must be watching them. 
 'Tisn't too much I'd tell them." He repeated 
 that solemn wink of his. 
 
 VII 
 
 I left him still in his bed, and I sat at breakfast 
 with the two others. 
 
 "You got on all right with himself?" 
 
 "I did, I did, then." 
 
 "He's a bit cross sometimes: he was a Fenian 
 in the old days."
 
 52 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 "He told me so." 
 
 They looked sharply at me. They were 
 wondering how much he had told me. And in 
 that state of mind I left them.
 
 COWARDS
 
 ROSSADOON is a promontory on the Kerry coast. 
 It ends in two blunt points that are not unlike the 
 unshapely fingers of a giant's hand in a Scandi- 
 navian story, only that one of them, that on the 
 northern side, is bigger in every way than the 
 other, built up of huger cliffs, and so higher and 
 freer of the winds and the clouds. Yet it was 
 that northern point that the hardy people of old 
 chose, when Christianity was still young in the 
 land, to give to God, building their little stone 
 church of four simple walls upon it, and burying 
 their dead between that little church and the steep 
 edge of the cliff. Of that early church only 
 fragments of broken walls remain; hundreds of 
 years must have passed since Mass was last sung 
 there above the sea ; but the crowded gravestones, 
 many of them too neat, too new, tell us that the 
 people of Rossadoon lay their dead of to-day with 
 those that died over a thousand years ago. Too 
 neat, too new, indeed, those shapely stones; and 
 
 55
 
 56 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 those on which one meets with such an inscription 
 as: 
 
 "Sacred to the memory of John O'Riordan, of New 
 Inn. . . . Erected by his son, Michael J. O'Riordan, 
 of Portland, Maine, U. S. A." 
 
 those are seldom in keeping with the place. Yet 
 there, on North Point, among the crowded graves, 
 will soon be erected a monument far bigger, far 
 richer than any of those that American dollars 
 have paid for. It will be set up above the grave 
 of Tomas O'Miodhachain, and the inscription, 
 in the purest of Gaelic phrasing, will tell how he 
 died in Mountjoy Prison for sake of that land 
 for which so many others like him have died in 
 every age. 
 
 And so Tomas O'Miodhachain is gone home 
 for ever to North Point, in Rossadoon lying 
 within ten fields of where he was born. 
 
 Colonel Hastings, too, has gone home, as if 
 for ever, it seems, to his old grey weather-beaten 
 house in South Point. And it was on the self-same 
 day that those two men of Rossadoon went home 
 the rebel and the colonel. But, as for that 
 bright-faced boy the colonel's only son, Edward 
 Pendrift Hastings, who, in a certain way, saw 
 them home he had gone home before either of 
 them, not, however, to South Point with his
 
 COWARDS 57 
 
 father, nor to North Point with the rebel: in a 
 soldier's grave he rests, not far from Arras. 
 
 II 
 
 It was on a day of bright grey mists, those 
 mists that seem to hide not one but many suns, 
 that the poor wasted body of the rebel was 
 brought by train, like any other dead thing, to 
 Cappaban. There its guard of young Republican 
 Volunteers from Dublin delivered it into the 
 keeping of the local company of Republican 
 Volunteers from Rossadoon. The funeral pro- 
 cession was soon faced to the west, faced against 
 that straggling, winding, up-and-down hillside 
 road of rock and shale, which, growing ever 
 narrower and narrower for seven miles, passes at 
 last, as a mere track in the heather, between 
 broken walls into the graveyard on the Point. At 
 the start there seemed to be three funerals rather 
 than one : in the middle of the road the gathered 
 Volunteer companies of the whole countryside 
 marched evenly and compactly, far too numerous 
 and too fierce-minded to take any check from the 
 squads of silent, heavily-armed police that were 
 gathered at every corner of the road, marched 
 with pipe music and draped drums and draped
 
 58 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 flags, the coffin in the midst of them, wrapped in 
 the bright Republican colours, looking like an 
 enamelled jewel-case against the hillsides, dim 
 and grey in the mists. But on either hand of the 
 steady, disciplined marching of the Volunteers 
 there streamed along an irregular crowd of the 
 people of the countryside: men, women and 
 children, old and young, with here and there an 
 old farmer from the hills on horseback, his brain 
 alight and fiery with memories of other fights, 
 other heroic deaths, other memorable funerals. 
 Later on, those horsemen, and indeed the whole 
 throng, would of themselves form too into pro- 
 cessional order and take their place behind the 
 drilled men about the coffin, but at the start the 
 three bodies moved along the road in a silence 
 that was full of hidden, fiery thoughts, as the 
 mists were full of hidden suns. 
 
 The countrymen from Cappaban and Ross- 
 buidhe and Rossadoon itself, although they gave 
 every heed to it, could not march like the pale- 
 faced men who had brought the body with them 
 from Dublin; but ever since Tomas O'Miodha- 
 chain himself had left them two and a half years 
 before, their drilling had been neglected; and 
 many a one of them, now swinging awkwardly 
 along, had a thought that the lifeless clay in their 
 midst was conscious of this lack of training in their
 
 COWARDS 59 
 
 bearing, was somehow rebuking them. Yes, the 
 Dublin men marthed better; but it was not that 
 alone that set them apart, not that alone but this: 
 they had realised, unlike the men in faraway 
 Kerry, what death by starvation in a cell in 
 Mountjoy really means, had weighed it against 
 the other deaths that are incident to rebels 
 death in a hot fight, death in the dawn, facing a 
 firing squad, death on the scaffold and come to 
 feel that more than any one of them it tested the 
 spirit within, the spirit itself, unaided and alone. 
 As they marched now in unbroken silence, without 
 the least glancing to right or left, their lips 
 seemed uniformly thin and set, their brows 
 uniformly pale and bent and hard, for each of 
 them was marching on in the silence of loneliness. 
 And somehow as the march went steadily on, 
 climbing the hill with no abatement of speed or 
 steadiness, this realisation of what death in prison 
 really means, had meant to their own neighbour's 
 boy, began to rule in the spirit of the whole 
 throng, as well as in that of the men of Dublin, to 
 unify them, to silence them, to stiffen them. Even 
 from a distance one seemed to notice it, to yield 
 to it, as to something severe an : d terrible and 
 threatening; and then were it not for the relief 
 and the release that was in the music of the pipes 
 one would scream out.
 
 60 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 III 
 
 Colonel Hastings, sitting high in his trap, did 
 not notice it, did not cry out, did not even catch 
 the wild music that was shrilling from sea to sea. 
 He had been away from home for the past fort- 
 night, had been to the War Office in London, 
 was now making for home in a chilling silence. 
 He would have driven straight on and into the 
 procession, his road cutting across its road, if 
 his man had not touched his arm : 
 
 "That's the funeral the crowd passing " 
 
 "What funeral?" The colonel was staring and 
 frowning at the black mass streaming so earnestly 
 forward. 
 
 "The Sinn Feiner's funeral," the man answered, 
 timidly. "Tom Mehigan's funeral, the boy that 
 died in Dublin, in prison. They wouldn't like 
 us to break into them. . . ." 
 
 Then, perhaps, the colonel did notice that 
 strange stiffness, that severity in the marching. 
 
 "Why should I?" he whispered, in so strange 
 a voice, so choked a voice, that his man glanced 
 up at him from under his brows. 
 
 And so they sat there, the colonel two cushions 
 higher than his man, while the funeral flowed by 
 below them on the road. The discoloured leaves 
 of the trees dropped their mist-drops noisily about 
 them.
 
 COWARDS 6l 
 
 Were he half the age he was, the colonel might 
 have stepped into the ranks of the pale-faced men 
 and marched with them. Like theirs, his brows, 
 too, were bent, his lips thin and set, his eyes as 
 hard as steel. And the voice that had whispered 
 so strangely went well with this look of inhuman- 
 ity, so new to him. It was this star-like gleam, 
 this aloofness from the common warm stir of life, 
 that made him akin to the young men from Dub- 
 lin. His man, daring to touch his sleeve, had 
 expected from him an outburst of fury, at the 
 least a snap of vexation. His mind was full of 
 the last meeting between the rebel and the colo- 
 nel. It was at the one recruiting meeting that 
 was ever held in Rossadoon. The colonel had 
 made his speech, had announced that he was send- 
 ing his only son into the army, had asked the 
 young lads of the place to step forward like men 
 and join him. Not one had stepped forward. 
 How the colonel's eye blazed up, how he trem- 
 bled with passion, how he flung his head in the 
 air! 
 
 "I tell you what you are, you're cowards, cow- 
 ards!" And then, his man remembered now, 
 Tom Mehigan, in one spring, had leaped on to 
 the fence beside the colonel: 
 
 " 'Tis the cowards that go !" 
 
 " 'Tis the cowards that stay!" 
 
 " 'Tis the cowards that go!"
 
 62 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 " 'Tis the cowards that stay by their dams!" 
 
 Too excited to catch up the phrase or its mean- 
 ing, Tomas O'Miodhachain had then gripped the 
 colonel's shoulder with his left hand, had flung 
 his right towards the son who stood pale-faced 
 by in silence: 
 
 " 'Tis he's the coward to go !" 
 
 " 'Tis you're the coward to stay you and your 
 men," and the colonel wrenched himself free and 
 raised his whip. 
 
 "Strike me !" 
 
 Then many men had leaped in between them, 
 the police inspector led the colonel to his trap 
 (this self-same trap), his men formed themselves 
 into a thick body around it, and the Loyalist party 
 moved off, the whole meeting remaining behind 
 them intact, holding the ground as won, and 
 chanting in a single voice : 
 
 'Wrap the green flag round me, boys, 
 
 To die were far more sweet, 
 With Erin's noble emblem, boys, 
 To be my winding sheet." 
 
 It was wise for Tomas to leave Rossadoon 
 after that; he went to Dublin. 
 
 All this was present to the old man when he 
 touched the colonel's sleeve; but as soon as he 
 heard his master's voice, "He's after hearing 
 some terrible thing in London," he thought, and
 
 COWARDS 63 
 
 he glanced timidly from under his brows at the 
 frozen face. 
 
 It was to get some account of his son's death in 
 France that the colonel had gone to London. It 
 was thought he would even go to France. Here 
 he was come back far sooner than expected, cold 
 and silent and aloof. 
 
 IV 
 
 Until they stopped up to let the crowds pass, 
 the colonel had not spoken one word, had glanced 
 neither to the right hand nor to the left hand. 
 He did not even raise his eyes when, after long 
 driving, his own place, still three miles away, rose 
 up, like an old grey castle, against the rim of the 
 grey sea. He had only stared straight ahead; 
 and yet for all that would have driven into the 
 midst of the crowds on the road if his man had 
 not checked him. That old man, Maurice Di- 
 neen was his name, gave his master the true pity 
 of the old retainer. Indeed he had to struggle 
 with himself to keep his silence. He could 
 have, and how willingly would have, broken out 
 into a wild lament for the dead boy, in which 
 there would be thoughts and words and phrases 
 that no Hastings that ever lived could make him- 
 self for his relief. He had known the boy, had
 
 64 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 loved him, and loved him now the more for his 
 hard fate, of which he had thoughts that must 
 never be expressed. 
 
 Beyond count of time now, a tiny drop of reb- 
 elly Irish blood would suddenly leap to the sur- 
 face in every generation of the Hastings. As in 
 many another of the Garrison houses, their mem- 
 oirs are parti-coloured. There's the story of one 
 of them who fought for King James at the Boyne, 
 of another who died fighting with the Wild Geese 
 against the English at Fontenoy, of another who 
 held lands in trust for the Papists when to do so 
 was a high crime, of another who voted against 
 the Union. And fortune has taken care that 
 whatever there is of romance in these memoirs 
 hangs around those wilder bloods that would 
 not keep the safe path. When the young heir 
 went to Trinity, what must he do but begin to 
 learn Irish and lisp sedition ! The old people at 
 home shook their heads and smiled; "A true Has- 
 tings!" they said. Then came the war; and the 
 young lad was brought home and sent into the 
 army. If he showed no inclination for it, he 
 made no protest. Every other Garrison House in 
 the country was doing the same. After all, that 
 was the tradition. And, once in the' army, he 
 went through the mill of training with such high 
 spirits and brightness that th'e old colonel, in his 
 delight, used to read his letters to his visitors.
 
 COWARDS 65 
 
 slapping the pages with the back of his fingers and 
 saying: "A true Hastings." But when the Ris- 
 ing came and the sixteen leaders, some of whom 
 the lad had met with in the literary circles of Dub- 
 lin, were executed, group after group, the colonel 
 no longer read to his visitors the letters that were 
 still coming to him from France, for they had be- 
 come critical and snappish and occasionally 
 framed little lyrics and sonnets on Ireland A 
 true Hastings! 
 
 The procession had all but passed. Groups of 
 women in black shawls and black cloaks were fuss- 
 ily making forward, five or six abreast, to be in 
 time for the last prayers and the shots above the 
 dead. They were too hurried for speaking. But 
 a rough man's voice began to cry out, incoherently 
 and indistinctly, so that it was hard to catch his 
 words: "I'm as worthy to walk as any of ye! 
 'Tisn't Tom Mehigan would reject me the Lord 
 have mercy on his soul. I'm as good an Irish- 
 man as any of ye, and Tom wouldn't deny that!" 
 There was then but a mumbling, and then a cry 
 more passionate than before: "Don't mind me 
 coat, lave ye ! Don't mind it. Better men than 
 me, they wore it and had to wear it. Don't mind
 
 66 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 it, lave ye." There was again a silence, and the 
 very end of the procession, old men limping on 
 sticks and little girls hurrying them forward, went 
 by, too earnest to notice the outcry of the drunken 
 soldier. "I'm as ready to die for me country as 
 any of ye. But no, I'm rejected! The little 
 boys, they wouldn't have me, I'd disgrace them! 
 The old soldier would disgrace them!" There 
 was wild indignation and surprise in the words. 
 The colonel's horse was now slowly, and with 
 nervous forelegs, stepping down the steep road. 
 The colonel saw the open road below him clear 
 for a moment, but suddenly a huge, untidy figure 
 in khaki, with a red, flushed, dribbling face, came 
 headlong into the space; staring after the crowds 
 ascending the road from him, his two arms wide 
 in the air, he looked like a blind man on an un- 
 familiar Toad, groping and sprawling. He was 
 returning on his phrases, "Don't mind me coat, 
 lave ye; better men than me had to wear it." 
 But the crowds were now too far from him; he 
 turned and lurched to the corner where the roads 
 met, and was about to fling himself there on the 
 soft grass when he caught sight of the colonel. 
 He drew himself up, steadied himself, and a 
 strange and troubled look struggled in his eyes, 
 and his poor dribbling lips worked a little. He 
 saluted, and then, as if that was not enough, he 
 quickly snatched the cap from his head a"nd held
 
 COWARDS 67 
 
 it in his hands against his breast, as the 
 people do when a religious procession is passing 
 by. The colonel, grey and cold, still staring with 
 fixed eyes, went on as if he had neither seen nor 
 heard; but out burst the drunken voice again, 
 warm and broken with sympathy: "Don't mind 
 them, sir; he was no coward; so he wasn't. He 
 Vvas no more a coward than that boy they're bury- 
 ing on the hill. He was a gentleman, he was, 
 and good to the men, and if 'twas fighting for the 
 ould land he was, by Christ, they wouldn't have to 
 shoot him for cowardice !" 
 
 The colonel sprang bolt upright in his trap, 
 blind and deaf and maddened. He clutched the 
 whip and lashed his animal. He tried to speak 
 to it. It was rearing in the shafts, its head toss- 
 ing. "Home, home!" he cried to it at last, 
 hoarsely, hardly audible. The horse leaped for- 
 ward and flew like the wind. 
 
 And so the colonel lies buried in the old grey 
 house on the South Point, almost as deeply, it 
 would seem, as Tomas O'Miodhachain lies bur- 
 ied in his grave on the North Point, or his own 
 dishonoured son in his unmarked sleeping place 
 in France. God be his comforting.
 
 SEUMAS
 
 SEUMAS I 
 I 
 
 WHEN I struck on him he was shooting through 
 the crowds in Patrick street, his pale, earnest, 
 winsome face thrust out, his lips parted. 
 
 "Not so fast, not so fast," I said, holding him 
 up. 
 
 "Oh! Oh! you'll come? You'll be very use- 
 ful!" 
 
 Who ever refused him! His shining, long- 
 lashed eyes too large! too beautiful! were al- 
 ready searching my face for consent; his slender 
 hand, his delicate fingers were touching my coat 
 lapel. 
 
 "Where? where?" I laughed. 
 
 The pale hand leaped from me like a spring 
 and feverishly began plucking sixpenny novels 
 from all his pockets, within his coat, without. 
 Many of the books were old and tattered, many 
 had no covers; the covers of the others were 
 blood-red, flaring, with the author's portrait for 
 centrepiece. He thrust them into my hands; one 
 or two of them fell, and "The Baron's Sons," 
 "The Baron's Sons," "The Baron's Sons," I read 
 on every one of them. 
 
 71
 
 72 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 I asked him what in the name of Dr. Maurus 
 Jokai did it all mean. 
 
 "Weapons !" He was still searching, his head 
 bent, "bombs! I'm collaring the market before 
 the censor finds it out. I have searched all Cork, 
 all except two little shops. Only two more. And 
 you'll do them. You will? Or look! You'll 
 do the one in Douglas street; I'll take the other. 
 I know the poor man. He's deaf. 'Tis near the 
 North Gate bridge - >" 
 
 "Wait, wait, give us a chance. I'm to get 
 more of these?" I flapped my books at him. 
 
 "Of course; and hurry." 
 
 "But why?" 
 
 "Because the censor will find them out, and 
 
 "But what for?" 
 
 "You'll understand. Don't believe a word he 
 
 says 
 
 "Who?" 
 
 "The man in Douglas street. Shove him 
 about, he's frightfully slow. You must throw 
 the tables and chairs aside and decanters. 
 'Tis behind them I always get anything I want." 
 
 II 
 
 Of course I went, hot-foot. No one ever re- 
 fused him. As Monica O'Sullivan used to say,
 
 S E U M A S^I 73 
 
 the rhythm of him was Mozartian. "Think of 
 Mozart" this was her way of putting it "for- 
 get the world awhile its slow pulse go to him, 
 his music, I mean, and there's Seumas! The 
 sunny earnestness, never sour, never dark even 
 how the game was going." A true description, 
 and it explains why one could no more refuse 
 oneself to him than to Mozart. For a moment 
 you would ; but then you threw yourself upon him, 
 coveting burdens, lest he might think you were 
 not in earnest. 
 
 In the little shop in Douglas street, after 
 swallowing pints of dust and getting great rhom- 
 boidal slices of it on my shoulders and knees, I 
 hauled out two new sixpenny copies. I wondered 
 whether Seumas would be satisfied with such a 
 harvest; anyway I went to our rooms. He soon 
 came in. He looked hungry and fagged, all ex- 
 cept his shining eyes: trafficking in dusty second- 
 hand bookshops was no work for such lungs as 
 his. But he was triumphant; he also had found 
 two, one of which was filthy and full of candle 
 wax: 
 
 "This is for myself," he flourished. "I 
 wouldn't part with it for the world. A student's 
 copy! 'Tis stiff with midnight wax on it 
 Sheares street tallow. I'd know it anywhere." 
 
 I threw my lovely twins on the table. 
 "There!"
 
 74 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 He admired them. He was satisfied with me. 
 
 "But I'll keep this for ever: it smells of to- 
 bacco." He thrust the filthy thing into a deep 
 inside breast pocket where he usually kept a num- 
 ber of Pearse's pamphlets. 
 
 "But I don't understand; what are you going 
 to do with them the others? You're not going 
 to burn them?" 
 
 "No;" he kept on slapping them free of dust, 
 " 'tis they'll do the burning." 
 
 "Now," he divided the heap, giving me 
 the cleaner lot "if you meet Murphy John 
 Francis or Hillary, or Tubby you just deliver 
 your goods. You'll say: 'Hillary, maybe you have 
 never read Dr. Maurus Jokai's great book, "The 
 Baron's Sons"?' give it out like that, very seri- 
 ously, and he'll take it. John Francis you must 
 manage him yourself. But don't give it till 
 he promises to read it." 
 
 "But they'll meet; they'll suspect something; 
 they'll smell a rat." 
 
 "Ah, they'll have come on Mausmann by 
 then!" 
 
 "Mausmann!" It sounded like a furtive pun. 
 I stared at him. 
 
 "For the sake of Mausmann have I spent my 
 five bob except Mausmann, there's nothing in 
 it. See here," he was turning the pages and 
 talking at the same time, "Mausmann was a
 
 SEUMAS I 75 
 
 student look here." He began to read; I read, 
 too, my eyes following his taper finger: 
 
 "At that moment there appeared from the opposite 
 direction an odd-looking, long-legged student, with 
 three enormous ostrich plumes waving in his hat and 
 a prominent red nose dominating his thin smooth-shaven 
 face. A tricoloured sash crossed his breast, while a 
 slender parade sword, girt high up under his arm to 
 prevent his stumbling over it, hung at his side. . . ." 
 
 "There you are," cried Seumas, in high de- 
 light; "he's worth a battalion to us, I tell you he 
 is. That nose of his, and the plumes. . . ." 
 
 I began to see a glimmer of an idea in his 
 scattering of Jokai's book among his fellow-stu- 
 dents. They are not great readers, they come 
 for the most part from homes quite innocent of 
 books, but the worst of them would read a novel, 
 moreover a revolutionary novel; and Seumas, I 
 took it, hoped that this long-legged student 
 should help to quicken the pace. 
 
 A student known as "Commercial Career" 
 came in, and I saw Seumas present him with a 
 copy not without some ceremony. "I don't know 
 any book," he said, with great seriousness, "that 
 gives one the hang of that blasted Austro-Hun- 
 garian squabble like it you'll find it simplify 
 the riddle of the Hapsburgs, I tell you. . . ." 
 
 "Commercial Career" looked wisely at the por-
 
 76 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 trait on the cover and said with his solemn smile, 
 "Well, I'll sample it, yes, I'd like to see what Dr. 
 Maurus Jokai has to say for himself." He makes 
 jokes like that: sometimes you'd think he was a 
 bishop. 
 
 When we were rid of him I asked Seumas what 
 good was it to give such a book to such a man. 
 "Oh, he'll read it. He'll take notes. Then 
 he'll give it to some fool of a fellow we never 
 could get at; and he'll use my very words, or, 
 this is what he'll say: 'I know no book that 
 helps one more thoroughly to realise the inner 
 meaning' Oh, Lord! Lord I" 
 
 III 
 
 By evening I had my dozen Hungarian novels 
 scattered among the boys all except one. To 
 place that I strolled into the Club. It is a dingy 
 house in a back street. We boast of it, and cer- 
 tainly 'tis macabre enough for anything. Before 
 we got hold of it, some dreadful murders had 
 been committed there; but it would almost have 
 done without the murders so gruesome is it. 
 In the one small flicker of gas, the most one could 
 get at that period of the war, it looked even din- 
 gier than usual. It was thick with shadows; and 
 in these shadows I saw a knot of students huddled
 
 S E U M A S I 77 
 
 together under that one jet, some of them up on 
 the billiard table. The midmost man he had 
 glasses on him, with eyebrows raised above the 
 rims was peering into my book, reading it for 
 them as well as he could. Some of them had 
 their faces towards me, their ears sidelong to- 
 wards the reader, their eyes fixed on nothing. 
 
 "Great fudge ! great fudge !" they cried, wav- 
 ing me to join them. The reader raised his eyes 
 a moment, glared at me, moistened his lips and 
 resumed: 
 
 "Hugo Mausmann stepped forward and made a com- 
 ical gesture, indicating his desire to be heard. Deliber- 
 ately drawing out his snuff-box, he tapped it with his 
 finger, and proceeded to take a pinch, an action which 
 struck the spectators as so novel, under the circumstances, 
 that they became silent to a man and they permitted the 
 speaker to begin his inexhaustible flow of doggerel. 
 With frequent use of such rhyming catchwords as, 'In 
 freedom's cause I beg you pause,' 'your country's fame, 
 your own good name,' 'our banner bright, our heart's 
 delight,' 'we're brothers all to stand or fall,' he 
 poured out his jingling verse, concluding in a highly 
 dramatic manner by embracing the hussar officer at his 
 side, in sign of the good fellowship which he described 
 as uniting all classes in the brotherhood of freedom." 
 
 They awaited, just stirring a little in their im- 
 patience, the fall of the voice at the end (I must 
 say Four Eyes read it well) but then at once, as
 
 78 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 if the same thought had come to all of them, the 
 group broke and a great cheer rang out. "Maus- 
 mann! Mausmann! hip! hip!" They leaped 
 from the tables and danced about the room. 
 Their cheering woke the dreary old house, 
 woke the dark old street; and then cracked off 
 into strange phrases cried out in all the accents 
 of Munster : "Our banner bright, green, yellow, 
 white!" "To stand or fall and damn them all!" 
 "Sinn Fein abu! and high time, too!" "We'll 
 fight again, and not in vain!" "We're not beat 
 yet, don't you forget!" and then a sort of game 
 was struck upon: one man would sing out a 
 phrase, and the others would find its fellow 
 "To Roisin Dhu!" was cried out and found the 
 answer, "For ever true !" "We'll hunt the Huns" 
 "With our good guns!" The bedlam was ear- 
 splitting. "We'll fight for them" was shouted 
 several times before it found its answer. "We'll 
 fight for them" "We'll fight for them . . . !" 
 "We'll fight for them . . .!" Then someone 
 cried "We will like . . . !" and the whole crowd 
 roared in a frenzy of enthusiam in which they 
 embraced the hussars at their side. They were 
 shouting, they were sputtering, coughing with 
 their backs to the wall; they were laughing and 
 brandishing sticks in the air, and Tubby flourished 
 his Colt. When he mounted the table to make 
 them his speech I knew it by heart I left them.
 
 SEUMAS I 79 
 
 I carried the picture of them with me the 
 bright frenzy of them there under the flickering 
 gas-jet, in that shabby old room, and I thought 
 of Mausmann's end in the story: 
 
 'What's the matter?" 
 
 "Something that never happened to me before 
 I'm killed!" 
 
 IV 
 
 I ran into Seumas and told him how they had 
 taken Mausmann to their heart. He was de- 
 lighted : he looked for results far beyond my ken- 
 ning. And then, I know not how, we drifted 
 into an argument on the Church's inner attitude 
 towards republicanism. We had no facts to go 
 on, and we found this out for each other after 
 some strenuous hours. I also found out (he 
 never would 1 ) that we were standing on St. Pat- 
 rick's bridge, that a cutting wind was blowing up 
 the river, and that Seumas had been coughing the 
 whole time. I persuaded him to go to his lodg- 
 ings in Sheares street, that he was not needed in 
 the club that night. 
 
 The next day, my work took me outside the 
 city, and kept me there till the fall of night. It 
 was into a dark squally mass of empty, echoing
 
 8o THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 streets and squares I made at last, tired of the 
 loneliness of the dead country. I longed for com- 
 panionship for Seumas by preference, or Tubby, 
 or even Hillary, and yet it was none of these, but 
 Monica O'Sullivan herself I struck against. I 
 could hardly credit my luck. Of Monica, Seu- 
 mas used always to speak, to speak quite openly, 
 in the phrase Naisi uses of Deirdre in Mr. Yeats's 
 play, "My Eagle 1" and we never cavilled at it. 
 I checked the phrase on the tip of my tongue, for 
 more than ever her pointed chin was in the air, 
 her nostrils sniffing, her eyes firm and bright with 
 daring. Was ever any other girl so much of 
 a piece? figure, bearing, voice, spirit? Her 
 background that windy night was one of the 
 myths the story of Emer, of Fand, of Deirdre. 
 She greeted me in Irish: 
 
 "You look tired?" 
 
 "I have been in the country all day (My 
 Eagle!)." 
 
 "I could tell you have not been with the boys, 
 you look so dull." 
 
 "Thank you (My Eagle)," and I bowed. 
 
 "I mean, you need tuning up I have just 
 parted with them." 
 
 "Make allowance (My Eagle) the old 
 harp " 
 
 She cut me short:
 
 SEUMAS I 8l 
 
 "Fact is, the club has passed a stunning res- 
 olution even Seumas is satisfied." 
 
 "Great fudge! Great fudge!" I thought 
 within me; what I said was: 
 
 "This is Mausmann's doing." 
 
 "They go beyond him: he wanted only an 
 amended constitution: we want Liberty Liberty 
 sans phrase." 
 
 "But he helped Mausmann did." 
 
 'Twas coming in either case. We'll tell Seu- 
 mas 'twas Mausmann's doing 'tis all one. It 
 seems that we students, we alone are speaking 
 with the unfettered voice of Munster." She 
 glanced at me, a challenge. 
 
 I spoke some dull commonplace. I had helped 
 to pass so many such resolutions in my day that I 
 could not fathom how this one, passed at a meet- 
 ing of irresponsible students, made such a differ- 
 ence. 
 
 "But Seumas says 'tis wonderful, wonderful." 
 
 "So 'tis, so 'tis; the students here twenty years 
 ago, we all know . . . they were glad to be mis- 
 taken for . . . for the Ascendancy ! . . . for the 
 little English . . . the bears, as our Gaelic poets 
 used to call them. They modelled themselves 
 upon Trinity ... as Trinity models itself on Ox- 
 ford and Cambridge reactionaries !" The 
 speech pleased her.
 
 82 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 "What Seumas sees in it is this: We have 
 leaped on to the European plane." 
 
 I thought of Europe clutched in the grip of 
 war. I said nothing; perhaps I smiled. She 
 spoke on : 
 
 "Everything that happened in European coun- 
 tries struggling to be free, will happen here hence- 
 forth, so he says." 
 
 I thought of things that had happened, that 
 were always happening in European countries 
 struggling to be free in Russia, in old Italy, in 
 Poland, in old Holland and I had nothing to 
 say. But she was merciless: 
 
 "A terrible prospect but splendid, splendid, 
 the end will be the same !" 
 
 "Yes, yes," I said, meaning nothing. (My 
 Eagle ! my Eagle ! my Eagle ! the look of her, 
 so firm in the squally night, set the word pulsing 
 in my brain.) 
 
 She left me; she had to attend a meeting of her 
 friends of the Cumann na mBan, to whom a 
 young doctor was giving a series of lectures in 
 "First Aid." 
 
 VI 
 
 I then found myself walking very quickly, and 
 for no reason. Everywhere was darkness, and
 
 SEUMAS I 83 
 
 the boisterous wind had its will of the streets, 
 for they were empty except for the English con- 
 script soldiers who, in groups of five and six, 
 wandered about in silence. Comrades of theirs 
 with machine guns were ranked, at important 
 corners, and in the side streets were long lines of 
 huge, dark-clothed policemen ranged against the 
 walls. They hardly spoke at all, and when they 
 did, they spoke in whispers. Their hands were 
 nervously playing about their guns. I took no 
 account of them, I could only rush quickly from 
 place to place, dissatisfied with myself, not 
 daring to think either on what my eagle had said 
 or on herself. Either thought would call up the 
 other: I could not rest on either; I was not at 
 rest, thinking on neither. But I would have 
 sudden inner glimpses of her as she swept off 
 from me, her head in the air, ready for anything 
 My Eagle! 
 
 I was still walking quickly yet aimlessly 
 through the dark, blustery street, when I caught 
 the sound of cheering. Somehow I was glad. I 
 stood still, sniffing the air. 
 
 "Young man, you'll do no good by loitering 
 there the other side of the bridge would be 
 better for you." 
 
 A six-foot policeman was frowning at me. I 
 threw a glance at him and made towards the 
 cheering. It was coming nearer, a roar and a
 
 84 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 song. About sixty policemen, marching four 
 deep at the head of the procession, went silently 
 and heavily by, in their great belted black coats. 
 Then came a crowd of students in a dense mass, 
 very excited and fierce-looking. They carried a 
 great tricolour; its springtime colours, when 
 caught and bellied in a gust of wind, would shine 
 with unexpected brightness in the odd gleams of 
 the electric lamps. Sharply pointed forward, it 
 seemed to hurry everything along. They were 
 chanting Peter Kearney's wild ballad: 
 
 "No more our ancient sireland 
 Shall shelter the despot or the slave"; 
 
 and the dash of youth was in their limbs. They 
 were celebrating the passing of their resolution. 
 
 One of them fell out; he had been seized with 
 a fit of coughing. I went towards him. I knew 
 it was Seumas. He was bent in two, and yet he 
 would laugh out at me "Great fudge! Great 
 fudge!" I could hardly hear him in the stormy 
 song going by. At last I said: 
 
 "This is a terrible night for you to be out in." 
 
 "This is a great night, a brave night, a bonny 
 night a Russian night." The cough hindered 
 him again. 
 
 "Better go home," I said. 
 
 "No, no." 
 
 "Well, we'll go a little way down here awhile."
 
 SEUMAS I 5 
 
 I dragged him from the crowd down a little 
 side street. He began to recover, to stand and 
 look back, his nostrils in the air. The side street 
 certainly was very dull and cold and dark. But 
 presently there was wild cheering, then screams, 
 and then a thick crowd of men and girls began to 
 race by us. Stones were flung, and we heard a 
 few shots. I don't know what had happened. I 
 hastened Seumas as fast as I could, but we heard 
 screaming all round us: and then we were alone. 
 Instinctively we drew into a dark doorway, and a 
 moment afterwards the police, with their bay- 
 onets far out and their heads down, swept past. 
 They would be holding both ends of the street in 
 a moment. 
 
 I rapped at the door behind us. 
 
 "Who is it? Who is it?" 
 
 "Quick, quick," I said. 
 
 VII 
 
 A young woman opened it. There was no 
 need to explain; Seumas was limp with coughing, 
 and he was still coughing. His face was all 
 sweaty with it. But he smiled at the girl, and 
 motioned that he was all right. 
 
 "Certainly," she said, when I asked permission 
 to stay until the police had gone.
 
 86 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 She brought us in to the little living room, 
 where a good fire was burning. Everything was 
 very clean, bright and homely everything was 
 very still after the wild stampede outside. A 
 cradle stood near the fire, and a very old woman 
 sat beside it on a low stool. She looked up at us 
 with a wistful, curious expression, kept her eyes 
 on us for quite a while, and turned away without 
 a word. Her hair was grey and thin, and her 
 forehead all wrinkles. The young woman's back 
 was towards us; she stood above a kitchen table, 
 on which she was ironing some white linens. We 
 felt the silence of the place and wondered at it 
 felt it the more perhaps since from far away 
 would come the high-pitched sound of cheering, 
 singing, and cries, with vivid suggestions of 
 trouble in them. And we could see that though 
 both the young and old woman were also 
 attending to the distant tumult, they would not 
 for some reason refer to it. We felt those few 
 silent moments very long: our brains were eager. 
 Seumas at last caught my eye, and turning away 
 nodded towards his left-hand side. There, 
 hanging on the wall in a brown wood frame, hung 
 a cheap enlarged photograph of a soldier. The 
 eyes were just two black spots. I peeped at it; 
 and I caught Seumas smiling at me in his gentle 
 way. "Mother," cried a child's voice from a 
 side room.
 
 SEUMAS I 87 
 
 The young woman placed her iron on the stand 
 and went into the room. "Yes, yes," she 
 whispered querulously, going from us, and I 
 noticed how scared she looked. The old woman 
 bent towards us, and spoke with eagerness: 
 
 "Speak to her, boys, speak to her her man is 
 in great danger, they say (she nodded at the 
 photograph to explain her words) and she's 
 breaking her heart and all the confusion and 
 crying and running!" She shook her head 
 hopelessly and stopped and began to stir the 
 cradle and to croon above it. We knew it was 
 true what she had said of the poor "Munster" 
 being in danger. That very morning we had 
 read of their being in the operations around 
 Givenchy. 
 
 The young wife not returning, the old woman 
 went on to explain how her man had come to join 
 the army; and there was nothing new in the ex- 
 planation: it was the old tale of unemployment 
 and the fear of the break-up of the little home. 
 "You may be sure, young man, 'tisn't for love of 
 them he's fighting for them whisht she's 
 coming speak to her, young man." She was 
 looking at Seumas. 
 
 It was easy enough to speak to her for, on re- 
 turning to the room, she brought a little child in 
 her arms, a little girl with gipsy-like eyes, large, 
 brown, startled-looking; she couldn't get her to
 
 88 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 sleep, she said. Seumas rose at once and made 
 free with the little one. As he did so I saw the 
 old woman peering at him, at his wasted cheeks, 
 his shrunken frame. And my thoughts went 
 back at once to the swift-moving band of students 
 with their tricolour, how it had flung him aside, a 
 broken soldier, for whom they could not wait. I 
 was looking at him; I looked at the poor scared 
 soldier's wife who was speaking with him. The 
 fright was beginning to lift from her as she went 
 from incident to incident in her husband's long 
 years of dealing with his employers. The old 
 woman still kept peering at Seumas's thin face, 
 thin hands. "I'll make him a cup of tea," she 
 whispered to me at last, as if we had been 
 speaking about him. 
 
 It was midnight when we left them. The city 
 was as quiet as a mouse. The streets were 
 empty: even the winds had gone away home. 
 The moon had risen and was now laying silvery 
 tissues on spires and chimney stacks, on corner- 
 stones and plinths, and across the streets there lay 
 vasty shadows, sharp and great and thick, un- 
 broken by any spark or flash or glare of 
 business lamp or street lamp, for all, on account 
 of the wide, free light of heaven, had been put 
 out. Seumas breathed in the serenity of the 
 night : 
 
 "I hope any of the lads haven't been hurt," he
 
 SEUMAS I 89 
 
 said; "and that poor 'Munster' I hope he hasn't 
 been blown to bits that photograph doesn't do 
 justice to him, I'm sure." 
 
 Like two tourists who have arrived at their 
 journey's end and have nothing in the world to 
 do, we sauntered about the streets, holding our 
 cigarettes daintily in the air and blowing out long 
 and luxurious puffs of fragrant smoke. Occa- 
 sionally far off we would see a squad of police 
 crossing a stretch of moonlight, making for the 
 barracks. The city was at truce until the 
 following night. 
 
 But I knew that Seumas, between his luxurious 
 puffings, was already thinking out some new little 
 scheme to keep the boys from flagging. Yes, 
 that was all his thought; and I envied him his 
 single-mindedness; and yet could not help saying 
 to him as we parted: 
 
 "For God's sake, Seumas, lie up for a few days 
 and put up a few pounds of fat." He looked at 
 me and smiled.
 
 SEUMAS II 
 
 I 
 
 Now for Monica O'Sullivan's idea of him : 
 
 Last night, as I listened to a rather good per- 
 formance of the "Marriage of Figaro," it came 
 to me, Monica O'Sullivan of the Cumann na 
 mBan, that it might be well to write down what I 
 knew of the late Seumas O'Donovan. 
 
 No, he was nothing of a musician, he neither 
 sung nor played, and between the incidents of that 
 lovely opera and those of his few years of life 
 there is no affinity, as you will gather, only in its 
 rhythms in their rhythms, his life and the opera, 
 is there anything similar. As I listened, I first 
 from sheer, quiet happiness, rose above myself, 
 wanted to speak, to touch someone, ever so 
 lightly and there suddenly was Seumas! I 
 thought my heart would break. 
 
 To go back. I was swept into the Republican 
 Movement by the events of Easter Week; it was 
 not possible to resist them. Before that I was 
 much the same as any other young girl in an Irish 
 city. I have a sister in a convent, another 
 married, a brother who is dead: in those years I 
 
 go
 
 SEUM AS I I 91 
 
 used often to think on them, now one, then an- 
 other. I read whatever novels I could lay hands 
 on. It did not strike me that it was only a very 
 rare one of them that got within the skin of life 
 as Seumas used to say. I hoped to be married 
 some time and all that sort of thing. But then 
 I met Seumas. 
 
 II 
 
 It was at one of those wild meetings of protest 
 that followed as soon after the execution of the 
 Republican leaders as the people of Ireland dared 
 to draw their breath. That night we had speech 
 after speech, I remember, one more impassioned 
 than another. You could not be critical when the 
 speakers were young men who had risked every- 
 thing, and whose only desire was that Banba 
 would one day accept their lives, as she had 
 accepted their leaders' into whose vacant places 
 they had stepped, though all too young and inex- 
 perienced you could not be critical if sometimes 
 they flung out words that were reckless and even 
 savage. We made no mourning that night: we 
 roared defiance instead, and found relief in the 
 "Soldier's Song" the Dublin carpenter's song 
 that had been sung in the Post Office in Dublin 
 in a circle of fire. We were conscious that a new
 
 92 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 spirit of self-reliance and discipline and faith had 
 come into Irish life. We knew we could trust 
 one another, could trust ourselves. We, too, 
 could suffer. 
 
 At a gap, as it seemed, in the proceedings a 
 young man with a brow like a god's but with a 
 face and body worn to the bone, stepped across 
 the platform and whispered to the chairman; and 
 the difficulty must have vanished, for the business 
 went on again triumphantly. 
 
 "There's Seumas: his work is bearing fruit," 
 I heard a man's voice beside me. I riveted my 
 eyes on the man called Seumas. I saw him disap- 
 pear from the platform almost immediately. 
 That was my first glimpse of him. 
 
 I was alone, and I had to leave the meeting be- 
 fore it ended. It was a bleak night although 
 it was the month of May. I paused in the 
 vestibule, reluctant to face it. Then I stepped 
 out. 
 
 I saw a figure in an overcoat leaning with its 
 back against the wall; and very melancholy it 
 looked, hunched up there alone in the gloom after 
 the lights and sense of daring within. It sprang 
 suddenly into life, stood in front of me: 
 
 "Are you unwell? I beg your pardon you're 
 not unwell?" 
 
 "Why, no." 
 
 "I thought you might have had to come out."
 
 S E U M A S I I 93 
 
 It seemed no other cause than illness could 
 have brought me out. I explained that I had to 
 get home at a reasonable hour, explained also, I 
 couldn't help explaining, how splendid it all 
 was, and how sorry I was at not being able to 
 stay. 
 
 "I'm glad you're not unwell, anyhow," he said, 
 lifting his cap, and resuming his position against 
 the wall. At once he looked again like one of 
 those night watchmen you sometimes come on in 
 the small hours, who look to be a portion of the 
 warehouse they protect. 
 
 I could not forget him his curious attitude 
 of loneliness there in the darkness, cold and 
 buttoned up, aloof from the wild life and reckless 
 spirit within the building. How he had sprung 
 at me ! all life and gentle earnestness and why 
 should I not write it? charm! 
 
 Ill 
 
 I was not long in the movement before I knew 
 how true was the description I had heard of him. 
 He pulled a hundred strings, yet those whom I 
 met would make excuses for his present slackness! 
 I should have seen him in the dull years before 
 the Rising, when it seemed that the language 
 revival must fail. It was in those years I should
 
 94 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 have known Seumas! How he slaved at the 
 ancient tongue himself, delving into its literature, 
 and in the light of that literature re-examining 
 the historians, only to find them colossal dunder- 
 heads; how he would gather in crowd after crowd 
 of boys and girls to learn that language, only to 
 find them drift away again into the unheeding 
 mob ! Then he had to do so much else : rents 
 for the club rooms had to be paid, meetings to be 
 organised, papers to be squared, politicians to be 
 argued with, old priests to be mollified. He 
 would write long controversial letters to the 
 papers, over most respectable-sounding names, 
 proving the value of the Gaelic language as a 
 commercial asset, as an instrument of culture, as 
 a saving grace in a lost world and he would 
 write long replies to them, just to keep the pot 
 boiling. They all agreed, the letters he wrote 
 over the signature, P. P., on the "Language as 
 the Vehicle of the Faith," were the gem of the 
 collection; they dripped unction from every 
 phrase. They would quote them to me ! There 
 was no need for them to tell me of the charm 
 and vivacity with which he had done these things; 
 I had now come to know him, and could picture 
 him in those dull days, when he could find but 
 few to help. 
 
 He was frail and delicate; and I soon under- 
 stood why he kept outside crowded rooms and
 
 S E U M A S I I 95 
 
 meetings: he was husbanding the little strength 
 he had left. 
 
 After the Rising there was in Ireland, as every- 
 one knows, a sense of spiritual exaltation that 
 laughed all the wisdom of the world to scorn. 
 As Seumas put it to me : the soul of Ireland had 
 been more deeply influenced through the hundred 
 men who had died for her in Dublin than the soul 
 of England through the hundreds of thousands 
 who had died for her in France. And he would 
 add: In the world of the spirit there is no such 
 thing as length and breadth; it is not numbers 
 that count, not volume. But I pointed out to 
 him then, and he complimented me on my insight, 
 that the deaths in Dublin had evoked the memory 
 of all the countless tragedies that had taken place 
 in the long drawn-out fight between England and 
 Ireland. Through them the past had become 
 alive, visible to us all. The warriors of old the 
 O'Neills, the O'Donnells, the O'Sullivans they 
 rode the land again, and Tone and Emmet were 
 speaking in every ear, and with them, the name- 
 less dead that had fought and died in the same 
 fight. So that volume does count (I would say), 
 but he would answer: No, it is intensity only 
 that counts intensity alone can raise vision. 
 Vision! the land was swept with it our lives 
 were dazzled: we lived nobler. 
 
 Seumas was, of course, the embodiment of this
 
 96 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 spirit of exaltation. Words poured from him 
 joyous words. Ireland was safe: her soul was 
 the same old priceless soul : no wealth could pur- 
 chase it: no power break it. And since every- 
 body had begun to learn Irish, it seemed that 
 everybody had at last come to know all this. 
 "Wait," Seumas would say, "till they all have 
 read Keating and David Brudair and Pierce Fer- 
 riter and Sean Clarach then, our governors, if 
 we still have governors, we can break them like 
 that" and he would break a match in his fin- 
 gers. 
 
 Suddenly, all in one day, scores of the young 
 men were arrested. Squads of police and sol- 
 diers, armed to the teeth, yet nervous-looking for 
 all that, swept into the workshops, into the dra- 
 pery stores, and brought out quite young-looking 
 lads with them from bench and counter. They 
 were not even given time to get on a coat or over- 
 coat. We saw them being marched in couples or 
 singly through the streets to the gaol bright 
 young lads, with their teeth set and their heads 
 held at the highest, shining with pride ; they, too, 
 had been deemed worthy. Banba had accepted 
 them! 
 
 Seumas was not arrested. Lily Hegarty and 
 I came on him that evening: he was gliding along 
 swiftly, furtively, looking very depressed. We 
 ran to him.
 
 S E U M A S I I 97 
 
 "How's this?' Lily burst out, "not arrested; 
 oh, Seumas!" 
 
 His spirit failed him for a moment. He had 
 to pull himself together. "Oisin i ndiaidh na 
 Feinne" (Oisin in the wake of the Fenians) he 
 said, with a shrug of the shoulders. 
 
 There was no explanation for it. Ned O'Brien 
 had been arrested poor Ned ! Tubby had been 
 arrested, amid great cheering. (What will he 
 do for his bottle of stout!) Hillary had shown 
 fight who would have expected it? They had 
 all been arrested. The gaol was thronged. 
 They could now be heard singing their rebelly 
 songs. They had turned the place upside down. 
 "I wouldn't mind," he said, "but I have been 
 shadowed since Christmas !" 
 
 We knew this: we had seen the detectives fol- 
 lowing him, waiting in doorways while he, inno- 
 cently enough, went into a shop to buy cigarettes. 
 We had often shadowed them, just for sport. 
 And here he was still at large! We could un- 
 derstand how desolate the city had become for 
 him. But we joked him : 
 
 "You'll never get over this," Lily said. 
 
 He could make no answer. We saw that he 
 would prefer his own company to ours. We left 
 him. 
 
 But Lily said, when we had gone a little way : 
 
 "Poor Seumas, he^ll soon be arrested quite
 
 98 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 suddenly, and there'll be no release," and then 
 she said a line of some old Irish poem which I 
 did not understand. 
 
 IV 
 
 That night I leaped from my sleep right out on 
 the floor, right over to the window not quite 
 awake. "Yes, yes," I was saying, like a fool. I 
 thrust my head out and got a handful of gravel 
 in my eyes : 
 
 "What is it? What is it?" 
 "Whisper, he's arrested, Seumas." 
 It was Lily's voice. I almost fell with fear. 
 It couldn't be that he was dead. "Quite sud- 
 denly," she had said to me that evening, words 
 that were in my mind last thing and I lying sleep- 
 less in bed. 
 
 "Lily," I said, and I tried to keep my voice 
 steady, "is he with the others?" 
 
 "Yes," she whispered up to me, "going in his 
 own door they pounced on him a full dozen of 
 them; they must have thought him a desperate 
 character." 
 
 "Wait a moment; I'll be down to you." 
 "No, no; don't come down; we're going off. 
 You and I, we're told off to see after his food in 
 the morning. I'll call you up at half-past six."
 
 S E U M A S I I 99 
 
 They went off, the two of them I had never 
 asked who the second was. I got swiftly into my 
 bed, trembling from head to foot, my teeth chat- 
 tering. I clenched my fists, trying to control my- 
 self. A thousand thoughts swept upon me. I 
 saw prison walls, cold flags, iron bars and Seu- 
 mas a poor thing of skin and bones, angular, 
 very pale with great eyes. And I here . . . 
 hugging myself into warmth! . . . 
 
 There was great excitement in the morning 
 while we prepared the food which we knew we 
 would be allowed to carry in to the prisoners. 
 
 Unlike the other girls who, longer in the Cu- 
 mann na mBan than we, were quite familiar with 
 the ways of the gaol, we went through the early, 
 quiet, wide-open streets with swiftness and height- 
 ened colour. We spoke in whispers. But I did 
 not speak of what my thoughts overnight had 
 been. As ladies of the Cumann na mBan our 
 part was to be cool, business-like and brave. We 
 swung up the Western road. 
 
 "Seumas!" cried Lily, without warning, clutch- 
 ing my arm. 
 
 There he was bearing down upon us, his wan 
 and fleeting smile showing that he had seen us 
 first. The collar of his coat was turned up about 
 his throat, and he looked very seedy, as if he had
 
 100 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 not removed his clothes or slept during the night. 
 His face was grey, and when he spoke, his voice 
 was only a thin, hard whisper. His fingers 
 played about his coat collar, keeping the warmth 
 of it to his throat. 
 
 We guessed what had happened before he 
 spoke. 
 
 "Rejected!" he said, and shut his lips. 
 
 Lily had the good sense to say: 
 
 "Happy man," and she rattled on quite quickly, 
 and I thanked her in my heart, for it was long 
 before I could trust myself. 
 
 "The old fool of a doctor," he said, shrugging, 
 "wouldn't have me at any price Good Lord 
 sure I was worse three years ago than I am now. 
 Lily, you remember, wasn't I?" 
 
 She joked about his condition three years ago; 
 in comparison, he was now a Cuchulain. 
 
 We swept him into a little favourite restaurant 
 of ours (we had to knock the good woman up) 
 and did our best to rally him into good humour 
 while we spread our luxurious wares (luxurious 
 for war times) before him on the table. But it 
 was long before we succeeded ; and even then the 
 gloom would suddenly fall again on him. He 
 washed his face; and meanwhile, outside, the 
 streets were waking up: cars and waggons were 
 passing, trambells were clanging and crowds 
 were hurrying by. The sun was warm.
 
 SEUMAS II 101 
 
 "Look here," he said at last, "rise up now and 
 we''ll have a long walk in the fields." 
 And so we had, my God ! my God ! 
 
 V 
 
 Four days after this, Seumas went to bed at the 
 end of a long and busy day; and in the middle of 
 the night something happened to him, as Maus- 
 mann said, that had never happened to him be- 
 fore. I can now think that that way was per- 
 haps the best. 
 
 VI 
 
 Thus ends Monica O'Sullivan's account of Seu- 
 mas O'Donovan. She took it to Hillary Hill- 
 ary of all men in the world! He is a dandy, 
 and, like all dandies, lacks sensibility. Yet it was 
 to him she took it. Perhaps she was testing it. 
 He brought it to me. 
 
 "She wanted to know would it do for our 
 paper." 
 
 "What did you say to her?" 
 
 "I said I thought it too feminine, too hectic." 
 
 "Not too intimate?" 
 
 He glanced at me sharply.
 
 102 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 "She got mad with me, so I said, to show her 
 what was wrong with it, 'One would think you 
 were engaged to him !' ' 
 
 "And she?" 
 
 "She nearly bit me. 'Thanks!' she said, and 
 swept off with herself. You'd better give it back 
 to her: I know she forgot to take it, and then 
 wouldn't come back for it when she remembered 
 what she had done." 
 
 "I'll manage it," I said. And as I handled 
 it I remembered how I had seen her at the Opera 
 House looking at the "Marriage of Figaro." 
 She was alone, wrapped up in herself, unconscious 
 of all others, like a girl in the arms of the man 
 she loves. Coming out we almost touched shoul- 
 ders; I had almost smiled upon her, almost spoken 
 when I caught a view of her full face : she had not 
 yet awakened! I made my way to my cold and 
 shabby lodgings. I had seen my eagle with her 
 eyes dimmed, with her wings broken, tamed a 
 thing it was not given to any living man to do 
 no, nor to the might of England!
 
 THE AHERNS
 
 THE AHERNS 
 
 I 
 
 BECAUSE I knew no house in that country (we 
 had not then opened it up ; now we have no less 
 than three strong companies of Volunteers there 
 fine fellows), I took my chance in the little 
 hotel. It was the usual kind of hotel one finds 
 in a place that has neither charm nor business of 
 its own just a public-house, with a few stuffy 
 little bedrooms. For whole months at a time it 
 would doubtless forget that it was a hotel at all. 
 Then some old-time angler would alight on it, 
 or a commercial traveller, thinking he had discov- 
 ered a virgin land and would work it, or some 
 sort of official from Dublin; for some weeks after 
 the passage of one of these it would still wear 
 somehow the flaunt of a hotel, but mostly it was 
 just a public-house by the side of a road in a graz- 
 ing district, somnolent in the summer and almost 
 forgotten in the winter shuttered the whole day 
 long, its door closed out. 
 
 Except for a middle-aged man named Harley 
 * an angler, with a pursed-out, gloomy, silent 
 mouth, I had the house to myself. I was in bed 
 before he had come down from the lake in the 
 
 105
 
 IC>6 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 hills: I hoped to be far on my road before he 
 would rise in the morning, and I therefore saw 
 no use in deepening our half-hour's acquaintance- 
 ship. I remember I did hear him come in, I did 
 hear the corks popping in the silent night. But 
 I had fallen again to sleep when, all confused for 
 a moment, I heard the sudden rush of a motor. 
 Its speed was so great that I felt sure of its pas- 
 sing when, without a voice in the night, I heard 
 it swerve towards the house and stop up, its 
 stifled energy setting my room quivering. Then 
 there were voices enough, quick, low, hard, cer- 
 tain of themselves. I heard the rattle of guns, 
 footsteps noisily making up the stairs, and the 
 publican's voice wailing out, "It's not fair of ye, 
 gentlemen, it's not fair at all." I was had! I 
 felt a sort of disgust, of sickness; the swiftness 
 of the capture, the ease of it, staggered me. I 
 had not even left my bed; I had not even thought 
 of flight. 
 
 They were tapping, peremptorily, at poor Har- 
 ley's door. They were turning the handle, walk- 
 ing in to him bayonets and all! They were 
 now at my door. It was flung in, a flash of light 
 sweeping walls and ceiling. 
 
 In my sleep, my left elbow raised itself to keep 
 out the dazzle of their lanterns, and I grumbled 
 thickly. Voices were whispering. I knew the
 
 TH E AH ERNS 107 
 
 landlord pushed them aside. "Gentlemen, gen- 
 tlemen, can't ye see he's not the man ye're after." 
 
 I growled again, puffing out my lips. "You 
 mustn't speak," I heard. It was the District In- 
 spector's voice, I could tell that. 
 
 " 'Twas four to one, damn and blast your 
 soul," I rapped out, up in their very faces. 
 
 "Can't ye see? 'Tis a farmer's son he is, was 
 at the Junction where else? and lost his money." 
 
 They shook me. 
 
 "Your name, what's your name?" 
 
 "It has nothing to do with it you'll hand over 
 the money or . . ." and without putting a tooth 
 in them I flung a handful of terrible words up in 
 their very mouths. 
 
 "By damn," said the landlord, " 'tis how he 
 won; 'twas whiskey he was drinking, too, all 1 
 had." He chuckled. I felt him by me. 
 
 "Waking or sleeping, 'twould be all the same; 
 'tis little ye'd get from him wake up, sonny," 
 he urged. But he gave my arm a sharp little 
 nip the moment he said it. I was too drunk to 
 wake, my head went from side to side on the pil- 
 low, like a child's head of a hot summer's night. 
 They were whispering. "Wake up, sonny," he 
 said again. I could hear Harley's voice timidly 
 calling him. "I'm coming, I'm coming, sir." 
 He nipped my arm again.
 
 Io8 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 I felt him going. What would happen next? 
 "I don't believe 'tis him," I heard. I raised at 
 once a long rigmarole; there was neither sense 
 nor meaning in it, but I kept it up ; and I would 
 repeat the one sentence six times running without 
 the slightest pause at the endings. And while I 
 was in it that outburst of speech I felt the 
 room grow calm and cool and silent around me. 
 They had stolen away. 
 
 After all, it was not I that they were seeking. 
 It was Killeenan; they had tracked him right 
 from Dublin to this countryside and then lost 
 him, from their very hands, as it were. But 
 there was a voice among those whisperers around 
 my bed, and I had had dealings with that voice 
 already; I had heard it giving evidence against 
 me at a courtmartial in Cork; it had got me con- 
 demned to three years' imprisonment not one 
 month of which I had served. Sergeant Naylor 
 would, I think, be quite content with me as a 
 capture that rich night in autumn: I should any- 
 how, be far better than no one. 
 
 II 
 
 A curious thing happened when they were gone. 
 1 was sitting up in the bed, listening to their car 
 getting off into the hills like a swift wind, when
 
 THEAHERNS 109 
 
 the landlord slipped into my room, softly turning 
 the lock on the door behind him. As quietly 
 again, he lit the candle, drew the one chair to 
 my bed and sat on it, looking at me with a 
 strange smile. In this deliberation I could 
 see he was trying to hide his high-strung nerv- 
 ousness. 
 
 "Do you know me?" I asked him. 
 
 "No," he said; "but I knew what you were the 
 moment you came in the door." 
 
 I was surprised; he had not by the slightest 
 look or word let me understand that he knew my 
 business. 
 
 "How did you know what I was?" 
 
 He smiled again, lifted himself, and gave his 
 head the slightest little toss. I knew it at once; 
 but must own that I had never observed it till 
 then. Our lads use it at the courtsmartial when, 
 asked if they have anything to say, they reply, as 
 in a formula, "I want to say that I haven't a dog's 
 respect for this court or its findings." I had 
 never observed it till then, as I say, and I was 
 quite unaware that it could be observed in me in 
 my ordinary moments observed, moreover, by 
 a country publican ! He was smiling with a 
 certain shyness in his eyes. I held my hand out 
 to him. 
 
 "I'm thankful to you," I said. 
 
 "Didn't we do it well, better than if we were
 
 110 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 after planning it out beforehand?" His look 
 was all eagerness. 
 
 "Far better," was all I could say. 
 
 "I don't know how I did it. I was never any 
 use at deceiving people, let alone the likes of them; 
 something kept me up. . . ." His voice 
 suddenly weakened, his fingers went trailing 
 weakly across his forehead. I saw sweat stand- 
 ing on it. He was turning white. I leaped 
 from the bed. 
 
 "Hold up! 'Tis nothing, 'tis nothing." 
 
 He hadn't a word in him. I thought there 
 might be some whiskey in Harley's room. I 
 made for it, candle in hand. He had just got in- 
 to bed for the second time. I laid my hand on a 
 little flask. "The old man is not well; he's after 
 fainting. They frightened him." 
 
 To give him his due he wanted to come with 
 me ; but I would not allow him. 
 
 "I'm getting old, I suppose," said the publican, 
 when the weakness had passed. "A man should 
 be able to stand more than that these times," he 
 added, with that quaint shy smile of his. 
 
 I put my landlord to bed (there was no one 
 else in the house but the three of us) and I left 
 him very proud and happy at having saved me 
 from my enemies. 
 
 'Twould be frightful if they nabbed you under 
 my roof," he said.
 
 TH E AH ERNS III 
 
 III 
 
 I am sure I would have slept all right if it were 
 not for this second disturbance. I remained 
 sitting up in my bed, smoking cigarette after cig- 
 arette; and it came to me, I do not know how, 
 that Sergeant Naylor would recollect having seen 
 my face before, might even recollect when and 
 where ; and in two minutes I was dressing myself 
 with quick fingers. 
 
 I slipped silently down the stairs, and I re- 
 member noticing the stuffy smell in the shop, 
 and wondering how it could be as stuffy as that 
 in such an open, windy country. I slipped the 
 bolts there were four of them turned the key 
 in the lock, and very quietly rolled my bicycle 
 from the door in the stillness of the misty dawn. 
 I crept softly forward. Down came the gable 
 window. 
 
 "Young man, I say, young man, where are you 
 going?" 
 
 "Sh! sh!" I breathed at him, " 'tis better for 
 me to go. They'll come back." I watched his 
 white hair sticking out in tufts around his head. 
 There was an innocence in his look that made me 
 think of a woman's face. The world and its hard 
 wisdom, for some reason, had passed him by.
 
 112 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 "But you'll have something before you'll 
 start?" 
 
 "No, no; 'tis better not. I know where to go. 
 I'll have a good breakfast, I'll warrant you." 
 
 "You will, you will." These were not the 
 words he would say, I felt. 
 
 "You'll be welcome here any time, night or 
 day. Ye're suffering ye'r own share, running like 
 the poor hare and the dogs upon ye," he imme- 
 diately added. 
 
 The chilly dawn was around me and its great 
 stillness. 
 
 "There are others suffering more the men in 
 English prisons," I answered; and, having said it, 
 I was just mounting when two lines of Sean 
 Clarach's came into my mind, and I flung up my 
 head and chanted them to the white old head in 
 the window: 
 
 "Is iomdha mac dilis dibeartha uaim, 
 Is a Chriost, nach truagh me 'na n-easbaidhe." 
 
 "The same old story?" I said, with a sudden 
 bitterness, still speaking in Irish. 
 
 "I don't understand ye," he said, in a sort of 
 wail, "but it's great to hear ye speaking that 
 language; it reminds me of them that's gone 
 great men! great men!" 
 
 I waved a hand, and left him there, staring 
 after me in the silent morning.
 
 TH E AHERNS 113 
 
 IV 
 
 About ten miles off was a country I knew when 
 a boy, I had often spent vacations in it. As I 
 rode and rode, Sean Clarach's earnest words 
 gradually went from my mind, and the beautiful 
 autumn morning began to wrap me about with 
 quiet pleasure. And I began to think of the 
 farmer's son I had known in the old days in this 
 place towards which I was making: we had fished 
 its streams together for long days, and ridden the 
 one horse to the little town on messages. And 
 the thought of him, so gentle he always was, fitted 
 into my mood, and still further quieted it, en- 
 riched it, too those old days had been so sweet 
 and homely, and the later days so full of anxiety 
 and rush and uncertainty. I swept round a 
 corner which was shadowy with trees, and then 
 dismounted; nothing else could I have done; there 
 on the hillside before me was my friend's house 
 Gregory Ahern's house. 
 
 I told myself he must now be a man, but I 
 could picture him only as a boy. These were our 
 fields. I looked all over them, one after another. 
 As with -all Ireland the place had improved very 
 much sheds had been added, barns had begun 
 to cluster about the house, and a screen of larch 
 had been planted against the north-east. It was
 
 114 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 so prosperous-looking that I had some slight fear 
 that it might have passed into other hands. At 
 last, I wheeled my bicycle up the bohereen and 
 through the farmyard. The house door was 
 open. An old man greeted me: an oblique 
 rectangle of sharp sunlight fell on the floor, 
 reaching to his feet. 
 
 " 'Tis," he said; "you're at the right house." 
 
 "And you," I said, "are Humphrey Ahern." 
 
 "The same," he said, cautiously. 
 
 "You don't know me?" 
 
 He raised his eyes and kept them fixed on me. 
 
 "Pardon me," he said, with an easy courtesy 
 that brought vividly back to me the boy Gregory 
 I had known in the old days; there was something 
 in him that, even then, I used to wonder at, not 
 able to name it. 
 
 "Pardon me," he blinked at me, "the rheu- 
 matism has me destroyed. I can't rise, and I 
 cannot see with the sun." He made an effort to 
 rise. 
 
 "It's fifteen years since I was last in this place," 
 I said, coming close to him, "your son, Gregory, 
 would know me." 
 
 "If he knew you then, he won't deny you now." 
 I thought there was a touch of meaning in his 
 words: had I been tossing my head in the air, I 
 wondered ? 
 
 "Gregory, and all of them, are in the sheds
 
 TH E AH ERNS 
 
 with the cows; they'll be here in a moment; rest 
 yourself." 
 
 The womenfolk came in first. They had no 
 difficulty in recalling me: they asked after my 
 people. Then Gregory came my old friend 
 only now six feet in height, big of bone, keen-eyed, 
 a little jerky in movement. His voice was indis- 
 tinct, his whole bearing had that excessive gentle- 
 ness that is so common in Munster. His diffi- 
 dence almost prevented speech. After some 
 time : 
 
 "I read your book," he said. "I have it in- 
 side," he nodded towards the little parlour. 
 
 I was surprised. My little book of poems had 
 not, I had very good reason to know, voyaged 
 far beyond my friends in Dublin. 
 
 "And you were in the Rising, and in Frongoch; 
 I was going to write to you. ... I didn't. . . ." 
 
 He glanced shyly at me: his eyes fell. I had 
 reddened a little. The fact is I had never 
 thought of him for yeftrs and years ! His people 
 were staring at me. They evidently had as yet 
 never met anyone who had gone through that 
 terrible week in Dublin or slept in prisons. And 
 he, surely, had kept all this to himself. He had 
 enshrined me ! I could see it ; and I stumbled in
 
 Il6 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 my speech, as a consequence, fearing that the 
 least hint of the Dublin literary man or the hero 
 of many prisons would break from me. I tried 
 to keep my head steady, as one does for a 
 photographer. His people had become more 
 than polite : the old man was examining me with 
 steady eyes and pursed lips, thinking his thoughts. 
 
 At our meal of home-made cake, eggs and tea, 
 with great shyness Gregory said: "I read an 
 article you wrote in 'The Rebel' ; it was called 
 'When the gods arrive, the half-gods go' I 
 
 thought it good perhaps I have no right " 
 
 I checked him. Other articles, too, wayside things, 
 he recalled; he had treasured them for my 
 sake. I feared he would quote them, repeat them ! 
 
 "You should have written to me," I said. 
 
 "Gregory isn't the boy to do a thing like that," 
 his aunt broke in, smiling with quiet eyes. He 
 gave a little shrug, and stood upright, staring 
 through the open door. 
 
 I couldn't place him, my mind couldn't cover 
 his with any confidence; I had met that typte of 
 Munsterman before, had discovered unexpected 
 depths in them a grit that is not blatant. It 
 has often failed us of the Volunteers to make 
 drill sergeants out of them; but they may keep 
 a whole countryside up to the mark. They go to 
 America, to England, to Glasgow and keep 
 labour politics red hot! I tremble before them.
 
 TH E AHERNS llj 
 
 And Gregory was, I could see, even among the 
 type quite exceptional: his own people had even 
 noticed it. I was not at ease, the more so on 
 account of that head-toss the publican had dis- 
 covered in me. I knew I had lately developed, 
 in my flying from place to place, from company 
 to company, something of the soldier of fortune 
 indeed we, all of us, put on the soldier of 
 fortune a little too often, sometimes as a mask, 
 sometimes for the sport of the thing. I would 
 redden with shame if now the least hint of that 
 hail-fellow-well-met boisterousness came to the 
 top. Gregory's type shrink before such loudness, 
 abashed, and yet deeply scornful. And perhaps 
 it was to avoid any such display that I began to 
 speak of my escape from the District Inspector 
 an incident where my part was not heroic. I 
 stopped suddenly they were examining me with 
 such earnest eyes. "Oh, but there was no danger, 
 no danger at all. They wouldn't have shot me ! 
 At the worst it might have meant three 
 years. . . ." 
 
 "But if you resisted?" 
 
 "But I wouldn't " 
 
 " 'Tis the publican we're thinking of," said 
 Gregory's father. 
 
 "How?" I said. 
 
 "He didn't betray you?" 
 
 I was glad to speak of the publican's part, of
 
 IlS THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 how he had helped me, as with the surety of in- 
 stinct. I told of my leaving him, of my thank- 
 fulness. They lifted up, looking at one another. 
 
 "He's an uncle of Gregory's," the old man 
 shook his head at his son. 
 
 "Your brother?" I said. 
 
 "The same," he replied quietly. 
 
 'Tis in the blood," I whispered, under my 
 breath. 
 
 The next moment I was sorry I had told them 
 all this. I was now not only a man on his 
 keeping, but one almost within the clutches of his 
 pursuers. Already I could see them glancing 
 through the windows: a labouring boy, who had 
 been listening, rose up and casually strolled 
 through the door to the gate of the farmyard, 
 stood there a moment looking east, looking west, 
 as if sniffing the air. Coming back he threw 
 himself along the settle. "He's another Ahern," 
 I said to myself. 
 
 Gregory himself had fallen into an unbroken 
 silence. Once or twice I caught him glancing at 
 me, and I would question myself whether I had 
 bragged or spoken cheaply or tossed my head. 
 How much easier it is to face the hot little eyes 
 of the martinets who preside at the courtsmartial 
 than it is to meet those questioning eyes where 
 admiration wrestles with old love!
 
 THE AHERNS 119 
 
 VI 
 
 I slept with Gregory that night. Even when 
 we were alone, I sitting on his bed, he smoking 
 the cigarette I had given him, I couldn't win him 
 from his reserve. I got in first. His voice 
 changing a little, he jerked out: "Are you sure 
 there's no danger? Couldn't we mount guard? 
 Jack and myself; 'twould be only a couple of 
 hours each. He'll be glad to do so; I know 
 him." 
 
 I laughed. 
 
 "You need to knock about a bit." 
 
 "Everyone says that," he jerked his head, half' 
 piteously, half-humorously. 
 
 I do not know how many hours I had slept 
 when I awoke quietly from a pleasant sleep. As 
 one will in a strange room, I had to look for the 
 window. There, with a start, I saw Gregory 
 with his head thrust out into the air I 
 
 "Gregory! For the love of heaven, what are 
 you doing there?" 
 
 "Nothing, nothing, I couldn't sleep. I fancied 
 I heard people prowling." 
 
 "Have sense, boy, have sense!" 
 
 "Everything is quiet," he said coming from 
 the window.
 
 120 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 "I declare," I said, " 'tis I will have to mount 
 guard over you." 
 
 "I really thought I heard something . . . only 
 for that " 
 
 "If you rise again I'll go out and sleep in the 
 shed I'd have more peace and quietness." 
 
 "But supposing you were caught here in our 
 house." 
 
 "Lord! The Aherns would never recover 
 from the shame of it !" 
 
 He laughed. 
 
 "We're not used to it." 
 
 "What?" I said. 
 
 "Having people like you with us felons 
 rebels. ... I suppose I'd make a bad soldier?" 
 
 A bad soldier ! He was like a young colt that 
 would tremble and dance about the field but 
 once in the race ! 
 
 The next time I woke 'twas with the sweat 
 standing on my brow. I was being hanged, but 
 for all that they could not stifle my voice. 
 Hundreds of them were there before me, their 
 faces white and distorted with passion moving, 
 drawing close to me, vanishing. Everything 
 was in movement; and it was my voice that had 
 caused it. I was making a speech such as had 
 never been made before on the scaffold flinging 
 out taunts to them that made them squirm and 
 vanish from my eyes ! And all the time I was
 
 TH E AH ERNS 121 
 
 being stifled. . . . When I awoke Gregory's long, 
 and, truth to tell, strong and bony arm was 
 fiercely around my neck. You might see a 
 wooden horse so grasped in the arm of a sleeping 
 child! 
 
 Disengaging his arm, though I did so with all 
 gentleness, he almost awoke. "What! what!" 
 he murmured, and then a crowd of little words 
 ran from him. But he was fast in his sleep. I 
 breathed easily: I could not bear that he should 
 know he had gripped me like that. I do not 
 know what he was dreaming of; but I am sure of 
 one thing, however; whatever it was it was not he 
 who was playing the leading part in it, making 
 fine speeches, casting heroic scorn on his country's 
 enemies. 
 
 Time has passed. Yes, he keeps that whole 
 countryside firm. He has it in his grip. He will 
 be dragged from his house some night and shot. 
 Or he may, in the end, die in prison of a hunger 
 strike. He will not fail, nor look a fool the 
 big things being come.
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY 
 GOES HOME
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY 
 GOES HOME 
 
 I 
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY having been now 
 laid to rest with his Gaelic ancestors in Muckross 
 Abbey, my life, I trust, will soon again begin to 
 flow into its old channels. 
 
 The memory of the Colonel was becoming, 
 perhaps, the faintest of all my memories I had 
 not seen him for years and years when I chanced 
 on this casual little paragraph in my morning 
 paper : 
 
 "The lecture that Colonel Mac Gillicuddy was to 
 give in Wexford Town Hall on 'Cromwell in Wex- 
 ford' has been prohibited by the authorities." 
 
 Then the Colonel is home from India, I 
 thought. He had been wounded at the battle of 
 the Somme, and these wounds, I knew, had un- 
 fitted him for further. active service; I also knew 
 that he had since then been put in charge of some 
 commissariat department in India, and that he 
 had had to make frequent journeys into the very 
 heart of that vast land, as well as into 
 
 125
 
 126 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 Mesopotamia; but beyond this I knew nothing. 
 
 Anyway, he was now in Ireland and anxious to 
 lecture in town halls what had happened to 
 him? To lecture, moreover, on "Cromwell in 
 Wexford," and in Wexford itself whatever had 
 happened to him? 
 
 Other colonels, it is true, had endeavoured to 
 influence opinion in Ireland by lecturing on Irish 
 themes: I myself had heard a colonel lecture on 
 "The Wild Geese" in quite a sympathetic way, 
 and not without some show of learning; but then 
 this was before the Rising 'in Dublin at Easter, 
 1916, and the colonel who had done so was by 
 nature a flashy sort of person. Colonel Mac 
 Gillicuddy was different: a silent, brooding sort 
 of man, somewhat of a student, he would not be 
 twenty-four hours in Ireland, his native land, 
 without perceiving that all such methods of in- 
 fluencing Irishmen had become useless, the temper 
 of the people having changed so much. 
 
 I found a faint smile beginning to play about 
 my lips. I thought of Mac Gillicuddy himself 
 a quiet, brooding man with pursed lips and a top- 
 heavy brow why, his very appearance on the 
 platform would kill the life of any lecture hall in 
 the world, though it were lit with a hundred arc- 
 lamps and festooned with red and white flowers. 
 And then his theme, "Cromwell in Wexford!" 
 What other picture could that bring before the
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY 127 
 
 mind than the slaughter in cold blood by the 
 Cromwellian soldiery of the 300 noble women of 
 the town as they gathered for sanctuary about the 
 stone cross in the market place surely an ex- 
 traordinary story on the lips of a British officer! 
 Then the place he had chosen Wexford itself! 
 And then the time November, 1919, when the 
 nerves of all Ireland were strained almost to the 
 breaking point ! Even as this thought flashed on 
 my mind, I looked through the paper, and there, 
 spread all over it, were stories of arrests, of mid- 
 night raids for arms, of prisoners hunger- 
 striking in prison, of shootings, of jailings, of 
 further proclamations of martial law. And I 
 had only to look through the window to see 
 soldiers marching by, armed to the teeth. Of 
 the Colonel's desire to lecture on "Cromwell in 
 Wexford" at such a time, in such a place, I could 
 make nothing, except that something had 
 happened to him. 
 
 II 
 
 I saw no other mention of that lecture in the 
 papers; a fortnight afterwards, however, I 
 received a short note from him, a fact surprising 
 enough in itself, for during his two years of ser- 
 vice in France and since in India eventful years
 
 128 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 he had not written me even one letter. His 
 note made no apology for all this, neither did he 
 make any inquiry of how these years had passed 
 for me; he simply mentioned, casually it seemed, 
 that he intended staying three weeks longer in 
 Drogheda, studying on the spot the details of 
 Cromwell's massacre in that town! How long he 
 had been there already, why he had chosen to 
 delve into these terrible things, and why he should 
 trouble me with them all this had not crossed 
 his mind, it seemed. His postscript was queerer 
 still : "Have you seen Tate's book on 'Kitchener 
 in Africa'?" 
 
 That I noted. I had not heard of such a book, 
 but since Mac himself had served under Kitch- 
 ener in his African wars, it was likely to be 
 authoritative or he wouldn't have referred me to 
 it. "Tate's 'Kitchener in Africa,' " I wrote in 
 my notebook; and even as I did so a sudden 
 thought jerked, jerked the pen from the paper: 
 why, Mac himself must have witnessed some terri- 
 ble slayings in his time, perhaps even taken a 
 hand in them! 
 
 I stood up straight. I no longer smiled: his 
 deadly earnest face, which now was all my vision, 
 forbade it. I had to put away my work and go 
 out into the streets. With a nervous, unrestful 
 stride, that I found impossible to control, I went 
 from hilltop to hilltop, without purpose. Fagged,
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY 129 
 
 yet quieted somewhat in spirit, I reached my 
 lodging again about eight o'clock at night. A 
 postcard stood against the foot of my lamp. I 
 saw that it was Mac's writing. I turned the other 
 side and read these words, "Syed Ameer Khal- 
 doun's book on India also." 
 
 India ! I could hardly touch the food they put 
 on the table before me. And yet there was noth- 
 ing like a definite thought in my mind nothing, 
 only the sense of a far-off background that I was 
 afraid to examine, a background of outrage and 
 blood and horizon-flames tonguing the distant 
 skies; and against this background I would see, 
 all the time, Mac Gillicuddy's brooding face, his 
 top-heavy brow, his pursed lips, his gloomy eyes 1 
 
 III 
 
 I had just settled down of an evening three 
 weeks later on to resume the reading of Tate's ill- 
 advised book on Kitchener in the Soudan when the 
 Colonel was announced. I couldn't take my eyes 
 from his face. He had changed, he had aged, 
 withered, but these changes I might have looked 
 for: he was verging on the middle age, and his 
 life had been a hard one. It was not these 
 changes in him that held me in wonder: it was a 
 certain expression that would come across his face,
 
 130 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 chilling the air; and I could feel that he had some- 
 how come on new standards and that he was now 
 judging the world by them : at such times I would 
 halt midway in a sentence, hoping he would not 
 guess the conclusion I had intended ! And often, 
 until his whole face looked distorted, his right 
 eyebrow would climb up his forehead, slowly, 
 slowly; and the eye itself, so exposed, would then 
 glare mercilessly into one's very brain! His 
 very appearance disturbed me deeply. He did not 
 speak of India or Egypt; his mind was too full, 
 at the moment, of Drogheda and Wexford. 
 Every detail of Cromwell's (or as he had taken to 
 pronouncing the name, Crom'ell's) massacres in 
 these places he had amassed, sifted, examined and 
 arranged; and I could see that by dint of brood- 
 ing on them, the terrible scenes, the locale of 
 which he had been so familiarising himself with, 
 had become alive for him, were burning as fiercely 
 before his inner eye as if, like a poet, he had 
 created them out of some central theme of human 
 vileness. Noting how he would linger, involun- 
 tarily I was sure, on certain incidents the kill- 
 ing of infants in the crypts of St. Peter's Church 
 in Drogheda, or the dragging with ropes of an old 
 priest over the cobble stones noting his rigid 
 air of concentration at these moments, I could 
 feel that the energy of his mind was exactly that
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY 131 
 
 of a poet's in the throes of creation: he was, I 
 was certain, in the midst of passionate confusion, 
 blood was flowing beneath his eyes, steaming, and 
 the odour of it was in his nostrils. 
 
 I was really glad when, at two in the morning, 
 he rose to go. I felt I should accompany him, 
 for his ardour of mind was such that he might 
 easily go astray or walk into the river, yet this 
 I could not bring myself to do : he had exhausted 
 my powers. When I shut the door on him I 
 spread myself, dressed as I was, on my bed, forc- 
 ing myself to think on anything, on everything, 
 except on those wild scenes he had been speaking 
 of like a living witness. ... I kept my eyes in 
 the clutch of my left hand. . . . After a long 
 spell of this artificially-nurtured coma, as it were, 
 I sprang up suddenly, caught up Tate's book on 
 Kitchener and hurled it into the fire, for an in- 
 sidious, morbid craving to dip again into his hor- 
 rors had begun to form itself in my quietening 
 spirit. 
 
 IV 
 
 The next morning he called to tell me that he 
 was starting at once for Kerry. Cromwell, I 
 gladly recollected had never visited Kerry, and I
 
 132 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 remember I said, " 'Tis the very place for you 
 a charming land, wild, romantic, yet gentle, 
 somehow, with mild winds from the sea. Be- 
 sides, it is the home of the Mac Gillicuddys." 
 
 "Yes; I have been told they were a branch of 
 the O'Sullivans." 
 
 "That is so." 
 
 I was glad to find him in so contained a mood. 
 I expected he would satisfy himself with south 
 Kerry, with Kenmare, or Waterville, or Killarney 
 itself, with its magnificent Macgillicuddy Reeks, 
 the mountain land of his ancestors; but a few 
 days later I had a few lines from him from Bally- 
 ferriter, which is in the north. Ballyferriter, he 
 informed me, means the Town of the Ferriters, 
 an old Norman family; and then he added: "In 
 Killarney I visited Cnoc-na-gCaorach (the Hill 
 of the Sheep) where Pierce Ferriter, the warrior 
 poet, the prince who was head of the clan, was 
 hanged, a priest on one side, a bishop on the other, 
 in the time of Cromwell." I could not help mut- 
 tering, "Still harping on his Cromwell"; but I 
 read on: "From my bedroom window here I can 
 see the whole of Smerwick Harbour; as I write 
 the moon is shining on Dunanore." 
 
 Smerwick! Dunanore! And not another 
 word, only the two names two names that I 
 had almost forgotten. It was not for nothing
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY 133 
 
 he had gone to Ballyferriter ! I could picture 
 his gloomy eyes looking out on the still waters of 
 that haunted bay. I should have gone with him. 
 The very next morning I had a letter from him 
 which was, to say the least of it, incoherent. It 
 puzzled me. There were lines in it, dashed down 
 I could see, about Sir Walter Raleigh, about 
 Lord Grey terrible judgments; then there were 
 homely phrases: "Among the Irish-speaking 
 people of this place I find the word for sixpence 
 is raol, which surely is the Spanish word real." 
 Then following right on that: "I hear screams 
 in the dead night," and then, "Why does one 
 become sometimes and quite suddenly possessed 
 of a wild gaiety in such spots?" Every sentence 
 in the letter, all but two, was quite intelligible, 
 but as a whole it was without sequence: it was 
 no more to be understood than the broken phrases 
 a soldier, after a day of battle, flings from him in 
 his restless sleep. It happened that I had just 
 been reading Miigge's Life of Nietzsche, and I 
 recollected how he tells that the incoherency of 
 the philosopher's letters was the first hint his 
 friends had of his approaching madness. I 
 grew suddenly afraid. I picked up a time- 
 table, and in less than an hour I was journeying 
 towards Dingle, which is the nearest station to 
 Ballyferriter.
 
 134 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 I found him weakly struggling with his excite- 
 ment. While eating the plain fare, the home- 
 made bread, that had been put before me, I 
 noticed that his face was becoming more and 
 more haggard: the invisible fingers of a fixed 
 idea were dragging at his cheeks. He could not 
 help rising from the table to survey for the 
 twentieth time the quiet bay outside, and he 
 would scan its distances as anxiously as if he 
 were fearful that an enemy squadron might at any 
 moment round its rocky headlands. He was 
 soon hurrying me along beside its gentle waters. 
 For December it was a day of wondrous mild- 
 ness, and never were any waters so limpid and 
 beautiful in colour. They fell on the golden 
 sands in just one long wave, that caught the 
 mellow tints of the sky as it rose and broke lazily 
 in foam. To our right, a black stump of a 
 ruined stronghold stood a little way back from 
 the waters. The Colonel pointed it out to me, 
 and told me how it had belonged to the Fitz- 
 geralds, when they were over-lords of all this 
 land, and how one of them, when nearing his end, 
 had asked to be raised up so that his last vision 
 might be the waters of his beloved bay. The
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY 135 
 
 Colonel spoke in a wistful tone, and I began to 
 hope that this quiet country of St. Brendan and 
 many another life-forsaking hermit so far from 
 the turmoil of the world, might again win him to 
 peacefulness. But the next moment, standing 
 where San Josepho's Spaniards, three hundred 
 years ago, had made their fight, he was, with an 
 edge on his voice, pointing out to me the traces of 
 the fort they had thrown up, and was showing me 
 where Raleigh butchered the whole 800 of them 
 to death, they having first surrendered to him 
 their arms. Feeling that edge on his voice, I drew 
 him unsuspectingly from the spot, and kept him 
 pacing by the lisping and breaking waters almost 
 till midnight, hoping that by first tiring out his 
 body the great peace of the wide moonlight night 
 might the more surely win upon his spirit. 
 
 I had just got into bed with a certain flatter- 
 ing thought that my ruse had not quite failed, 
 when I heard him tapping hurriedly at my door. 
 Before I was half dressed he was in the room. 
 
 "Look! Look!" He had flung up my win- 
 dow, his hand was stretched into the night: when 
 I drew to his side I could see it trembling. Be- 
 yond it, was all the sweep of the bay, dreamy- 
 looking in the moon, and quiet slopes of shadow 
 were laid upon the hills. But, of course my eyes 
 were fixed on that spit of land where Raleigh had
 
 136 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 done his slaughtering, for towards that the trem- 
 bling moon-white hand, as I instinctively knew, 
 was fiercely stretched. 
 
 "Ah, my God! my God!" he was breathing, 
 and I could feel his limbs trembling. "Horrible ! 
 horrible ! horrible I" 
 
 "What? what?" I said. 
 
 "The cries, the cries," he whispered. I could, 
 by the sound of his voice, tell that there was no 
 natural moisture left in his mouth; it was scarcely 
 speech that came from him. He was hanging on 
 to me, and his trembling shook me. Could it be 
 possible that he was beholding in vision the mur- 
 dering of 800 defenceless men? saw it as an 
 artist would in vivid groupings of destroyer 
 and destroyed? 
 
 I peeped at him. His teeth were chattering, 
 and his hands clutched my shoulders heavily, as 
 if his legs were giving way; he was shrinking 
 back from what he was glaring at. Yet the only 
 sounds to be heard from outside were some sea- 
 fowl quarrelling above a school of sprats (as I 
 took it) in the mouth of the bay sharp cries 
 or melancholy, long-drawn and wailing. Was 
 it these cries that were playing havoc with him? 
 I felt my own ears greedily gathering them in, I 
 felt myself yielding to them, I found them taking 
 on some strange hurry and wildness. Bah! I 
 shook myself. But he was trying to speak, and I
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY 137 
 
 thought it was the word "Cries" I again heard. 
 
 "Rather inadequate," I flung out peevishly, 
 thinking, perhaps, to break the spell that was on 
 him; the cries of the sea birds just then were very 
 far away, and indeed, not unpleasant in the still 
 night. How could anyone mix them up with the 
 wild screaming of a massacre? But I had tugged 
 at some tightened nerve in him. He leaped from 
 me, back into the room, and the heaviness of 
 weakness was gone from him. He was now all 
 nerve and sinew. He was glaring at me : 
 
 "Inadequate ! inadequate ! That's just it." 
 He spoke as if the problem of his life had been 
 solved. 
 
 "Inadequate! Laughable! Laughable, when 
 you think of the horror of it! It is that that 
 makes one reckless in such businesses. Wild, in- 
 human (how he was glaring at me!) delighted 
 to give the edge of the sword on a grey pate, or 
 a soft breast, or a child! 'I will make them 
 squeal,' you say, you can't help saying it when 
 the passion of slaughter is upon you, but you . . . 
 you can't make them squeal loud enough! and 
 then, and then . . . my God ! my God ! Shut it ! 
 shut it! The curtains. Those also Oh! my 
 God! my God!" 
 
 He had flung himself on the bed, burying his 
 face in the pillow. I knew he felt himself swoon- 
 ing off, dizzy; and seeing that he was beyond
 
 138 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 making any effort to get a grip of himself, I said 
 no word to him, only gripped his limp hand firmly, 
 firmly there is no other medicine for such a 
 crisis until, little by little, the terror p-assed 
 from him. 
 
 I was careful not to let him again out of my 
 sight. As the death-still night went on oh, 
 what a land of holy silence it is! he won back 
 almost to his own self and tried to force me to 
 my bed, protesting that it was not kind of me to 
 treat him like an invalid. I shook my head, and 
 there I sat until the inevitable reaction had come 
 upon him, and he was sunken into an unrestful 
 sleep. 
 
 The night was chilly, and there was no fire in the 
 grate, and, not caring to rouse the household, 
 my only plan was to slip into the room he had 
 left and rifle it of the blankets and wrap myself 
 in them ; which done, there I kept vigil over him, 
 like a shepherd in an eastern land. Sometimes 
 the loud scream of a sea-bird would cut through 
 the night, and I would glance at him to see if he 
 stirred to it. But, no. Then the silence would 
 deepen and my thoughts would follow the strong- 
 winged bird over the wide waters. I began to
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY 139 
 
 recollect all that I had ever learned of the massa- 
 cre Raleigh had made in this lonely land; and the 
 slaughters that have been made by others in this 
 country before and since, connecting one with an- 
 other; and how it came about I do not know, but 
 suddenly, with firm assurance, it came to me that 
 Mac Gillicuddy was picturing all those terrible 
 scenes in the light of his experiences in Africa and 
 India and Mesopotamia ! Certain phrases in his 
 letters, certain words I had heard him use, cer- 
 tain inquiries he had been making of me, began to 
 swarm back on me, one summoning another, and 
 at last I almost shouted out: I have it, I have 
 it! the fixed idea that is harrying him into mad- 
 ness ! 
 
 With confidence I bent my eyes on the bed. He 
 was whining, squealing like a young puppy in its 
 first illness; but I didn't mind: I could cure him! 
 Now he was still, quite still, seeming as if he 
 were listening to things far away that sense of 
 strain-, -I noticed, never once went from him, 
 asleep or awake. 
 
 Then little spasms of terror would cross his 
 white features, which he would try to shake off. 
 Yet still I did not lose confidence that now, under- 
 standing his disease, I could make a cure. 
 
 Of course we left Ballyferriter the next day. 
 To catch the first train from Dingle we had to 
 leave in the dark of the morning, and dark it was,
 
 140 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 the moon having sunken. A curious thing hap- 
 pened : In a wild, lonely place near Lord Ventry's 
 woodlands, groups of silent-moving figures be- 
 gan to pass us on the road. The whole country, 
 as everybody knows, was disturbed at the time by 
 groups of armed men raiding in the nights. 
 I grew timid. 
 
 "Who are these?" I whispered to the old 
 driver. "Whisht!" he snarled at me. 
 
 "But who are they?" I persisted. 
 
 " 'Tis little sense ye have, for an Irishman," 
 he said. I then said: 
 
 "Are they Sinn Feiners?" 
 
 "How would I know?" he growled at me. 
 
 The Colonel had caught the words, "Sinn 
 Feiner," it seemed. He gripped the driver. 
 
 "Halt awhile, driver," he said. "I want to 
 see these men; I won't be long." He was just 
 leaping from the car, when the driver, with some 
 magic word he had, set the horse prancing. I 
 caught the Colonel's arm. 
 
 "Are you mad?" I said to him. 
 
 "Mad!" and he flung his head up; the horse 
 was still rebelliously dancing along the road. 
 
 "Yes, mad," the driver shot at him; "them 
 fellows would destroy you, and the likes of them 
 clothes on your back!" The Colonel was still 
 in khaki.
 
 The figures had vanished. We were recklessly 
 rushing along through places where there was 
 not the faintest glimpse of light of any kind upon 
 the road. 
 
 VII 
 
 When I had him seated in the train I began 
 to think of the remedy I would try. Since he was 
 haunted by the vision of the reverse of the Brit- 
 ish Empire I would speak of its obverse. After 
 all, one could make out a case for it. Had it 
 not spread Christianity, I would say, into those 
 wild lands, throwing some certain share of its 
 wealth and its choicest children into the work? 
 Then, its glorious pioneers their gallant for- 
 tunes, their fame might one quote of them: 
 
 "Only the actions of the just 
 Smell sweet and blossom in the dust!" 
 
 Then I would attempt to show what a bless- 
 ing those vast hinterlands are to a mother-country, 
 how they are as a very sporting jungle for the 
 younger sons who, remaining at home, must gam- 
 ble away the estates. Lastly, I would speak of 
 the stream of wealth that has been for centuries 
 flowing into England itself from those seemingly 
 inexhaustible sources. Of that one could speak
 
 142 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 with confidence. ... So I would speak to him; 
 but I would not begin yet awhile, for he was sun- 
 ken into some deep reverie : he had not yet- quite 
 shaken off his wild visions- of the night. 
 
 We stopped at a little place called Emlough, 
 if I remember right, and resuming our journey I 
 made an attempt to speak: but he raised his hand, 
 motioning me to silence. Soon afterwards a 
 crowd of English soldiers, very tired-looking, 
 armed to the teeth, got into our carriage, and I 
 thought I saw the Colonel shudder. To start 
 with a colonel a discussion on the two sides, the 
 glory and the shame of the British Empire in a 
 carriage full of soldiers might lead to the most 
 unimaginable results as things were just then, 
 so I was forced to hold my peace. And these 
 soldiers kept us company until we reached home ! 
 I could see that their presence had made Mac 
 Gillicuddy very excited. And there were other 
 incidents as well to play upon him. In Tralee 
 we saw groups of armed policemen lining the 
 main street; presently we saw military motor 
 lorries bringing some Sinn Fein prisoners to trial 
 young lads, they stood daringly upright in the 
 hooded waggons, with bare steel all round them. 
 We noticed how the people moved quickly 
 through the streets in* a sort of gloomy silence, 
 peering into the hooded waggons as they passed 
 in quick succession.
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY 143 
 
 It was dark night when we reached the city. 
 The next day I would make my first attempt to 
 win Mac Gillicuddy from that fixed idea that was 
 ruining his mind. 
 
 VIII 
 
 We were weary. I threw myself into a deep 
 chair. The Colonel seated himself at the table, 
 opened the evening paper he had bought at the 
 door as we entered, and became engrossed in it, 
 it seemed. Presently he rose. "Pardon," he 
 said carelessly, and went out, the paper still in 
 his hand. 
 
 He spoke so* calmly, as if by having at last 
 made up his mind on some definite plan, he had 
 crushed his excitement into quiescence, that I 
 thought of questioning him as soon as he 
 returned. But there was no sign of his return- 
 ing! I went seeking him at once, with a grow- 
 ing agitation in my mind. He was nowhere in the 
 house. Without a moment's delay I was rush- 
 ing through the streets, sharply peering at all 
 that I met or overtook. And the streets were 
 crowded and uneasy. As in Tralee and Dingle 
 they were swarming with squads of soldiers with 
 their helmets and packs on them; and batches of 
 heavily-coated policemen, with white, strained
 
 144 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 faces, went silently and swiftly about what- 
 ever business they had on hand. Military mo- 
 tors and military lorries were recklessly tearing 
 through the dimly-lit darkness. And the people 
 seemed hurrying too, and silent. 
 
 For fully three hours I dived hither and thither 
 through wide and narrow streets through 
 squares lit by arc-lamps and through filthy pass- 
 ages where there were no lamps of any kind. In 
 an alley way a poor beggarman was singing; 
 his hair was long and matted, he had a thick, un- 
 kempt beard, he wasn't four feet in height, an 
 old overcoat that he was wearing soaked water 
 from the muddy ground. Yet he was singing 
 heartily, and the name, Ireland, was in every 
 line : 
 
 " 'Tis Ireland, 'tis beautiful Ireland, 
 
 Ireland, the gem of the sea, 
 Oh, my heart is at home in old Ireland, 
 And I wish that old Ireland was free." 
 
 He had a pair of nigger's bones in his right 
 hand, he flourished them to the rhythm. I don't 
 think I should have noticed him, but in three 
 different places I came on him that night. I be- 
 gan to think in the end that maybe he was not a 
 beggarman at all. 
 
 Exhausted, I again reached my lodgings in the 
 market square; how wide, free and airy it was
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY 145 
 
 after the narrow streets! The moon held half 
 of it in a white still light, the other half was black 
 with shadow, in which a few odd lamp-lit win- 
 dows glimmered very warm and mellow, con- 
 trasting with the wan moonlight. 
 
 "My friend has not returned?" 
 
 "No, sir; there is no trace of him. Johnny, 
 here, saw him going out." 
 
 "Well, send in whatever you have; I'm faint- 
 ing." 
 
 "Yes, sir; and there's the paper." 
 
 I had little mind for it, but as it lay there on 
 the table, I saw in scare head-lines: 
 
 "Massacre at Amritsar! 
 2,000 Indians Shot Down by the English. 
 500 Killed Outright." 
 
 There was little other information except the 
 name, General Dyer. I must confess I did not 
 cast one thought on those murdered Indians, nor 
 on their murderers; my one thought was Mac 
 Gillicuddy. This was the news he had been so 
 intent upon; it was this dreadful story, come so 
 pat upon its hour, that had sent him out and he 
 had gone so calmly out ! Though the paper trem- 
 bled in my hand, my weariness had fallen from 
 me. I was sweaty and cold, yet anxious to be 
 up and doing; the shock those three lines of print 
 had given me had called out those reserves of
 
 146 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 spirit that in such moments so dominate the mere 
 body. 
 
 "I must find him," I said. I swallowed some 
 cups of tea, one after another, and rose up to 
 make again for the streets. 
 
 At that moment I heard steps on the stairs, 
 and in flung Mac Gillicuddy himself, quickly and 
 nervously! An appalling wistfulness was in his 
 features, his eyes were wide and pale, his lips 
 weak. He threw himself into a deep chair and 
 buried his head in his hands. And these hands, 
 too, seemed so pale, long-fingered, sweaty! 
 
 "What has happened?" I said. 
 
 Without removing his hands from his face he 
 shook his head. He wouldn't speak. 
 
 Meanwhile, outside, the whole city seemed to 
 have gone into riot; that it was in train for it I 
 had noticed in my rushing through it. The 
 tramp, tramp of soldiers went by, the rattling of 
 their horses and waggons. Far away a rebelly 
 song was being sung firmly and defiantly. Sud- 
 denly we heard cries and screams, and hundreds 
 of voices: 
 
 "Release the man, release him!" "Shame on 
 ye , ye " "Shame!" "Shame!" "Shame!" 
 
 I listened to it all, still staring at the broken 
 figure sunken into the chair. Again I heard the 
 cries, "Release him, release him!" and "Let him
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY 147 
 
 go, ye ." And then all the cries, shouts, run- 
 ning, singing, seemed to gather up into one long, 
 loud, triumphant roar. I leaped to the window, 
 I saw a great crowd below, a group of policemen 
 in the centre, buffetted by the people, and a wild, 
 squirming little figure in their grasp my little 
 ballad-singer, I thought. They were all in the 
 moonlight; but a different crowd were surging 
 into the square from a far-off angle, singing; and 
 it was their coming that had caused the cheering. 
 The little prisoner squirmed more than ever, and 
 at last the policemen had to let him go. They 
 then formed up into a dense mass, and began to 
 fight their way back towards the opening they 
 had come from. All was confusion; stones be- 
 gan to fly through the air, glass was broken. 
 Little knots of people stood still, clutching one 
 another, and others began to whirl around the 
 knots, like currents in a rock-strewn river. Pres- 
 ently, other shouts, yells and screams, screams of 
 terror, arose in another corner of the square; very 
 shrill, they were, very high-pitched; and at once 
 the whole crowd broke into a wild stampede : an 
 armoured car had entered from a side street at 
 a tearing rate and was encircling the square ; the 
 place emptied itself in a flick of time, lay again 
 open to the moonlight and to the broad shadows. 
 Still the car tore around it, circling it three
 
 148 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 times. At last it stood still. At its first com- 
 ing Mac Gillicuddy had dragged himself wea- 
 rily to my side; together we had watched its an- 
 tics; now we were staring speechless at it, as it 
 stood there, throbbing in the moonlight in a pool 
 of shadow; it seemed to look around to see where 
 next it should make a spring. We saw two 
 young heads rise above it. They laughed. 
 They spoke. If Mac Gillicuddy caught the 
 words, I did not; but he raced from the room as 
 if struck by a whip. I leaped after him. I 
 flew down the stairs. He banged through the 
 glass doors. I opened them. I saw him making 
 headlong for the car. The two heads turned 
 towards him. Then down they went. He 
 leaped at the car, crying out I know not what. 
 A succession of revolver shots rang out, seemed 
 to fly everywhere. Then the car blew a cloud 
 of smoke and moved. He was all limbs, right in 
 front of it. I could see nothing for a moment 
 only a lifting cloud. Then in, beneath, that 
 little cloud I saw a figure crawling slowly on all 
 fours, like a beast, stupidly, heavily a most ri- 
 diculous posture. It only went a little way, 
 when down it flopped, kissing the ground. And 
 all the time the car circled the square. It 
 swerved to escape the bundle that now lay in its 
 path, and then shot swiftly out of sight by the 
 side street it had entered from. There, in the
 
 COLONEL MAC GILLICUDDY 149 
 
 middle of the moonlight, lay Mac Gillicuddy, 
 dead, with his secrets. 
 
 It seems he had gone to the Sinn Fein head- 
 quarters and laid certain plans before them for 
 the wrecking of the British Empire, offering his 
 services in the carrying out of them. They would 
 not listen to him. It was then he returned to 
 me, a man who had suddenly given way to de- 
 spair. 
 
 He sleeps in Muckross Abbey. Hundreds 
 of other Mac Gillicuddys soldiers also sleep 
 there, too. Considering the story of his life, the 
 manner of his swift death, it is curious to try to 
 imagine how those old Gaelic warriors received 
 him, their kinsman. With aloofness? or with 
 kindly welcome? 
 
 I, who knew him so well, I can picture him only 
 as a poor abashed and tongue-tied figure, shrink- 
 ing away from their hard gazing, their fierce 
 brows. May he rest in peace.
 
 AN UNFINISHED SYMPHONY
 
 AN UNFINISHED SYMPHONY 
 
 I 
 
 I WOULD dare it and my heart leaped and sang 
 as soon as I had spoken. God knows, I was 
 drained of spirit. If those young men of that 
 countryside, those young Republicans, who were 
 ready to dare all, to take five years in jail without 
 making any defence, whose brothers had died that 
 the infant 'Republic might be set up, who would 
 die themselves to maintain it if those young men 
 I was finding flat, shallow, dull, commonplace! in 
 myself was the fault, as I told myself ten times a 
 day. Every morning now I arose unfit for the 
 day's work, (I was organising the Intelligence De- 
 partment of the Republican Volunteer Army in 
 that eastern part of County Cork) , and during the 
 actual conferences I would find my mind wander- 
 ing, and I would find the men looking at me 
 shrewdly, perplexed at my casual way of doing the 
 thing; and yet I could not, try as I might, win 
 back to my old energy; I had grown suddenly stale 
 that was all that was to be said. 
 
 And then suddenly, and by the merest chance, 
 I heard that Eibhlin Ni Chartha, or Eileen Mac- 
 
 153
 
 154 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 Carthy, if you find it easier to remember that 
 form of her name, was in Knockacashlawn, which 
 is not very far from Mogeela, which is itself on 
 the railway that she would be there for some 
 weeks with some relatives of hers, and that her 
 coming there had already made a difference. A 
 difference? surely, surely! I had no doubt at 
 all I would find a very efficient Cumann na mBan 
 in the place, ready for all emergencies; I would 
 find them learning Irish, learning First Aid, learn- 
 ing how to cook on an open fire, above all, I would 
 find them learning Eibhlin herself! Yes, I 
 would go to her. 
 
 There would be no need to explain anything. 
 Owing to my way of living these few years past, 
 running from place to place, seldom daring to 
 sleep at home, we had never "fixed matters up," 
 as people say, but I was confidently certain that 
 Eibhlin would become one day my wife, and this 
 I knew that she knew just as well as I. In the 
 wells of her spirit I would bathe. We would 
 laugh, we would cycle, we would dance the rinnce 
 fada in the farm kitchens, we would play cards 
 with the labourers, we would borrow the farmers' 
 hunters and make the frosty roads ring beneath 
 our hoofs, we would go shooting in the bogs we 
 would climb the high hills, we would surprise the 
 simple people who were giving us so large-heart- 
 edly of their stores, of their pity, of their love.
 
 AN UNFINISHED SYMPHONY 
 
 They would say : "Those Sinn Feiners look how 
 merry they can be and they not knowing the 
 night they'll be flung into prison, or maybe shot 
 or hanged!" Then, after five days, or eight, or 
 ten, I would take up my work again, and push 
 ahead with it, rejoicing in those gifts of insight 
 and tact that God had given me. Yes, I would 
 dare all and go to her. 
 
 II 
 
 This was the risk: the police, as I well knew, 
 had still the thought that I had never left the 
 Mogeela district ! I had heard that even still the 
 young men in those parts would stroll lazily and 
 sleepily from their fathers' houses of a morning 
 with little or nothing to do these wintry days 
 and find a few policemen disappearing round a 
 corner policemen who had been peeping in at 
 their windows or listening at their doors and shut- 
 ters, seeking a strange accent, a strange face, seek- 
 ing my poor self! For me, there was risk, but 
 as I told myself, for the Republic there was 
 greater risk in my staying where I was, daw- 
 dling at the work instead of doing it. So could 
 it be reasoned out, I said, my going to Knock- 
 acashlawn; but only little had reason to say to 
 it: I was doing right in going there, reason or no
 
 156 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 reason. I knew, I felt deep down in me, that I 
 was doing right! 
 
 And the first stage of my journey went well 
 with me. I kept to the up-hill, down-hill, ancient, 
 overgrown by-roads of the pack-horse centuries, 
 some of them nowadays just tracks on a hillside; 
 and I dashed into the railway station at just the 
 right moment to fling myself into a carriage I 
 knew the lack of a ticket would make no differ- 
 ence all the men on that part of the line were 
 "ours." They knew me of old. "Thank God! 
 Thank God!" I said, almost aloud, when I found 
 the train moving nicely off, passing the stolid po- 
 licemen, who, chin in air, quite efficiently surveyed 
 us as we passed, catching sight, perhaps, of a 
 young man, or at least of a large handkerchief 
 wiping the sweaty face and brow of a young man 
 in a third class carriage. Thank God, so much 
 was over, and I had three-quarters of an hour be- 
 fore anything else could happen. 
 
 I found myself examining, rather with interest, 
 two old maiden ladies, the only other human 
 souls in the carriage, and I was surprised to find 
 myself doing so; already I was being renewed; or 
 else T could not have given myself up to this quiet 
 contemplation of them. They were dainty old 
 ladies, sisters to all seeming: the piece of purple 
 ribbon in the furs of the one was flesh of the flesh 
 of the piece of purple ribbon in the hat? bonnet?
 
 AN UNFINISHED SYMPHONY 157 
 
 hat? of the other. In equal parts they had 
 shared out their rather ample stock of old-fash- 
 ioned jewellery I could match one thing with 
 another. Sisters, yet with a difference, as two 
 blossoms on the one plant may differ. Their 
 heads were turned from me, they were intent on 
 the w r intry landscape passing by, so intent that I 
 knew that everyone of all their thoughts was 
 gathered on my poor lone hunted self. The little 
 lady on the left was reserved-looking, long-faced a 
 trifle, almost colourless, her lips too thin, too 
 closely shut. Her sister was pleasanter, more 
 easily read; she was the blossom that had caught 
 the sunshine, the relics of long-faded roses were 
 still in her cheeks, and her eye was lively. The 
 paler lady had no trouble at all in keeping her 
 gaze on the bleak fields running by, but after a 
 hundred little twitchings, ahems, stirrings, the 
 plump little lady suddenly swept her eyes full 
 upon me, at the same time delicately drawing the 
 tip of a very slight little flimsy handkerchief to 
 and fro several times along her still ruddy little 
 lips. She found me, of course, lost in a brown 
 study. 
 
 They were both a little birdlike of aspect, they 
 always are ! but this old lady now surveying me, 
 with some surprise, I warrant, was a song bird 
 that would impulsively burst (in her youth, of 
 course) into trills and runs and cadenzas, if only
 
 158 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 an unexpected gush of sunbeams fell on her as she 
 walked in the fields, while her sister, I thought to 
 myself, could not do with less than a branch of 
 waxen candles and a little crowd of well-mannered 
 ladies and gentlemen about her before her care- 
 ful notes would fall perhaps with unexpected 
 passion from her rather firm lips. Poor old 
 chits they had rubbed through the long years, 
 never agreeing in anything, never exactly of the 
 same mind, pertly impossible, often frankly of- 
 fensive to each other they could not guess how 
 much one thing they were to me. 
 
 I saw now that while I had been riding pell- 
 mell through the bright morning, seemingly reck- 
 less, the sense of danger, the need for alertness 
 had been more and more becoming the whole of 
 me, knotting me up, as it were. I remembered 
 how when I had, unapprehended, flung myself into 
 the train and found it begin to move off, I remem- 
 bered the "Thank God" that had fallen from my 
 lips, and, now so quietly to recall it, I felt myself 
 opening out from that knot of care, opening out, 
 spreading myself as a plant after the night is 
 over, ready to drink in whatever sun and winds 
 there may be abroad. And there before my eyes 
 were this pair of sister-birds either a puzzle if 
 the other were not by. They were a gift from a 
 quiet old world that had not been mine for a very 
 long time. The pair of them there between me
 
 AN UNFINISHED SYMPHONY 159 
 
 and the dull wintry landscape on which the colour- 
 less dusk was falling, lifting, falling, lifting they 
 were like an old-fashioned melody not insistent, 
 not emotional, not headlong, just a gentle singing, 
 a soft rhythm, with a pensive undersong, with 
 little to say except that all roughness and noise 
 and haste and danger were better forgotten for 
 ever and ever. Only once did they speak. The 
 brighter little lady said: 
 
 " 'Tis a very dull evening, very dull." 
 And the other gravely nodded her head. But 
 I found myself smiling, and saying "Dull! No! 
 no ! 'Tis a sweet old evening I am winging to 
 my gradh geal t to my bright love, though you do 
 not suspect it, nor do you suspect how much more 
 keenly, ardently, passionately I will drink her into 
 me for your sitting here beside me in your withered 
 maidenhood." 
 
 Ill 
 
 At the next station in a flutter of colour and 
 laughter and swift, long-gloved, white-gloved 
 hands there broke in upon our quietness two young 
 girls of whom one was called Mamie and the 
 other Lil as we were all presently to know. 
 They were richly befurred and wrapped, hidden 
 away almost; for all that, however, one caught
 
 160 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 sight of dainty flesh, dainty ribbons, creamy white- 
 ness, linen-whiteness, soft pinks, little bits of flash- 
 ing jewellery, too, and very bright, frankly-youth- 
 ful eyes. But it was rather their swift glances, 
 their unhidden excitement, their meaningless yet 
 significant words and phrases that best told what 
 fun they were after. It is a country of big, square- 
 built houses, and quite certainly one of them would 
 be blazing with lights and throbbing with dancing 
 couples this night behind its screen of branchy, 
 silent trees. 
 
 Mamie, the younger, could not keep still; and 
 when her fresh, musical voice leaped out upon us 
 every cell of her healthy, warm, exhilarated being 
 was living in it. 
 
 "Oh! I do hope Dickie will not fail us! He 
 won't? he won't?" She was staring up in the face 
 of her sister, who sat opposite her. 
 
 "You can't trust him," a voice far quieter, 
 paler, answered, the lips alone moving. 
 
 There was a silence, the bright eyes withdrawn 
 from her sister's face were busy with some vision 
 of their own. 
 
 "I know what he'll say . . . Oh !" There was 
 a silvery laugh, running off into a boyish chuckle. 
 
 "Yes." The laugh was not answered, only the 
 words. 
 
 "He'll say, 'Do you remember that night at 
 Bransby's?'"
 
 AN UNFINISHED SYMPHONY l6l 
 
 A soft look of comprehension lit up the quieter 
 eyes of the taller girl. "Yes," she answered 
 again. 
 
 "And I'll say . . . Oh! oh!" She was choking 
 with laughter, lowering her face into all her pink, 
 linen and creamy mantlings. 
 
 "You'd never guess what I'll say?" 
 
 "Be quiet, Mamie." 
 
 "I'll say: 'What night at Bransby's? I was 
 never at ' ' 
 
 She could not finish for laughing. 
 
 Sh. Be quiet. You mustn't. . . . He'd 
 
 U ' 
 
 "And the stupid! he'll lift up his eyebrows, you 
 know. He'll say, 'Haw!' three times. 'Haw! 
 Haw 1 Haw !' ' She spoke them with an effort at 
 self-mastery, very quietly in Dickie's voice, except 
 the last, which fell into her own. 
 
 How my two old birds oh, they had aged im- 
 mensely! were watching, were listening 1 
 
 "He's stupider than Will, but he's nicer, he's 
 much nicer. I like him much better, I love him!" 
 
 Lily's quiet eyes glanced with some touch of 
 shame in them towards the old ladies had they 
 heard? And Mamie's reckless glance followed, 
 and, at what she saw, Dickie suddenly seemed to 
 fall quite out of her mind. She was frankly ex- 
 amining now one, now the other of the two faded 
 sisters, her thoughts passing quite legibly across
 
 1 62 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 her face. Who are they? Where are they go- 
 ing? What makes her do that? The other is 
 doing it now. Are they cold? Were they there 
 when we come in? Poor old things, you're very 
 queer-looking, though I don't know what's the 
 matter with you. . . . Then quite suddenly she 
 turned from them, and caught up Will and Dickie 
 again. "Yes, for he's not conceited, and Will is, 
 he's as conceited as a poll-parrot. I know; be- 
 cause the night " 
 
 But Lily's dainty shoe stretched out in a little 
 petulant kick, and the other shrugged her 
 shoulders, and swept us all again with a glance 
 full of inquiry: You're not listening? It doesn't 
 matter whether you are or not not a bit. . . . 
 Then she suddenly leaped from her place and flat- 
 tened her nose on the window-pane. 
 
 We were entering a little sideway station: the 
 train was screaming. She swooped again upon 
 us: 
 
 "Here we are, old Lil! Hurry, girl, hurry!" 
 
 She was again at the window, and again she 
 turned to us, this time with a great change in her 
 voice : it was low, hushed with surprise. 
 
 "Lil, 'tis . . . John!" 
 
 The gentler girl, on hearing the word, stood 
 suddenly upright, and the voice in which she spoke 
 was fuller, richer, than her sister's had been; how 
 could a voice so change !
 
 AN UNFINISHED SYMPHONY 163 
 
 "Tisn't? Mamie! Mamie!" 
 
 Mamie was again looking at her. 
 
 "I'm sure. 'Tis, 'tis, Lil." 
 
 "Oh! Mamie " Then there was a 
 
 whispering, and both began, nervously, quickly, 
 to gather their wraps and little parcels to- 
 gether. 
 
 I opened the door for them. The younger girl 
 leaped down and shook hands with a young man. 
 He swung from her and folded the quieter girl 
 in his arms, passionately and without a 
 word. 
 
 I saw that. I stood upright myself, I do not 
 know what gesture I made, nor if I said any 
 words, in Irish or English. I found myself stand- 
 ing, swaying, for the train was again travelling, 
 my hat in one hand, my other hand straying some- 
 how over my head, my forehead. And I knew I 
 was frightening the old ladies. 
 
 "Excuse me," I said, huskily. "I got a dizzi- 
 ness, a dizziness." 
 
 "If you sit down?" 
 
 "Yes." I sat down. I was trembling. 
 
 A few moments afterwards I was telling myself 
 that it was time I had put my work from me, 
 when the sight of two lovers, strangers to me, 
 embracing on a country platform, had so played 
 upon me. 
 
 It was six months since I had last seen Eileen
 
 164 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 MacCarthy; six months full of tragedies, of 
 shooting, of imprisonments since last I had held 
 her in my arms. 
 
 I would hold her in my arms this night! A 
 great ecstasy seized me. I felt the train whirling 
 me along whirling a thing not entirely conscious. 
 It was also whirling along two old maiden ladies. 
 That I knew. But they were far away from me. 
 . . . The rapture passed. They were still here 
 before me. I should love to help them if only 
 one could! 
 
 And then I began to think that the two stages 
 of this journey had been like two movements in a 
 sonata the first a pensive, quiet movement; the 
 second, a movement far brighter, yet still reminis- 
 cent somehow of the first, except for that suddenly 
 swift and passionate close. And as I thought of 
 this I found myself staring at the old ladies, as 
 one might stare at two children who had not yet 
 put their teeth in that fruit we call life and my 
 lips were moving in silent speech. "But there'll 
 be a third movement Oh, yes! There'll be a 
 third movement, brighter, swifter, deeper, it has 
 begun, it has begun. . . ." 
 
 And I was already glowing with the thought of 
 it, something was surging within me; this night 
 I would make certain that Eileen MacCarthy 
 would be my wife for ever. These times, these 
 times of terror and partings and jailings and sud-
 
 AN UNFINISHED SYMPHONY 165 
 
 den deaths were not times for delaying in, 
 and. . . . 
 
 Anyway I am glad to remember I had the grace 
 to bid the old ladies good-bye as I leaped from the 
 train. 
 
 IV 
 
 I rushed for my bicycle. The station, I noted 
 gleefully, was empty of all policemen. I was soon 
 on the dark road riding along. I saw the lighted- 
 up train curve away in the distance, its bright 
 plumes of cloud breaking into fragments; I heard 
 its rhythm begin to merge into the night. 
 
 The clouds were gone. The sky was spangled 
 all over with wide-eyed stars: how beautiful 
 among them were the frost-still branchy treetops ! 
 I breathed deeply, deeply. I was drinking a cup 
 full of joy in a night of serene and stately beauty. 
 
 My two old ladies were still journeying on : now 
 they were chattering, I hoped; how colourless 
 their version of this short journey would be 
 poor souls, whose eyes had never opened ! Mamie 
 and Lily were now whirling and laughing in 
 a swift dance in that lighted-up old square house 
 within its park of solemn trees. I did not envy 
 them. There was room for all. Truly night 
 is a deep womb . . . "deeper than daylight
 
 l66 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 thought," as the German poet puts it. Soon . . . 
 
 "Halt! Who goes there? Haiti Get down 
 . . . we'll fire !" The voice was roaring, I felt 
 my knees weaken, grow cold. "Right. We're 
 right." 
 
 A whistle was blown. I heard rifles grounded. 
 I was caught. The policemen at the first railway 
 station were not so unobservant as I had thought. 
 
 That night I spent in a lonely cell in Cork jail, 
 pacing it, pacing it, disentangling a hundred 
 thoughts, a hundred anxieties. Gradually the 
 heat went from my brain, and I sat down on the 
 edge of my bed. I tried to reckon what time it 
 was. It was about two o'clock. The silence was 
 appalling. Far away, I heard the scream of a 
 distant train.
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT 
 
 I 
 
 AMONG the mountaineers of that corner of the 
 Comeraghs there was a sluggishness of feeling 
 not to be found anywhere else in Munster. Per- 
 haps they thought themselves beyond the reach 
 of any law in their secret fastnesses; or it may 
 be that Sean O'Leary's explanation was the true 
 one : they were a slow people by nature, he 
 would say what were they but the descendants 
 of Raleigh's English folk, of Boyle's English 
 folk, for all the perfect Irish that was their 
 mother-tongue? O'Leary was from the west, 
 was, of course, a Gael of the Gaels "The 
 O'Learys that were wedded to Ireland," he 
 would quote from Egan O'Rahilly and was, 
 perhaps, something too hard on the simple 
 people of the east. But at last even this slow 
 people began to stir when, in the autumn of 1918, 
 it seemed quite certain that England would put 
 the Conscription Act in force in Ireland. 
 
 II 
 
 Nicholas Motherway was tearing at the hunk 
 of wheaten bread like the poor foolish creature 
 
 169
 
 170 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 he was. No one had ever seen those flat, un- 
 shapely features, those wandering eyes, take on 
 the keenness of intelligence: at best one caught 
 in that empty face only a vague expectancy, a 
 gleam that began to die away before it had half 
 ripened. The mouth was now active, and the 
 strength of the jaws and teeth was plainly seen, 
 but no sooner would the feeding be done with 
 than the lips would droop open again and the 
 whole chin and lower face sag down helplessly. 
 His father, an old man, stared at him with pity, 
 with contempt; and only for the trouble that a 
 year ago had fallen upon himself, indeed there 
 would have been no pity at all in this nightly 
 reckoning of his son. That trouble, that un- 
 expected stroke of paralysis, had left him a 
 shrunken, palsied, grey-faced creature, weak and 
 broken, and now it was only in short moments of 
 forgetfulness that the old thoughts, free and 
 rough, would rise uppermost in his mind and 
 break from him in snarling words. 
 
 Voices and footsteps were hurrying to their 
 open door. The son started, rose uncertainly, 
 a scared look wavering in his eyes. His father 
 cried at him angrily: 
 
 "Where would you be going? Sit down, let 
 ye." 
 
 The lump sat down awkwardly, timidly. 
 
 "Come in, men, come in, let ye."
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT 171 
 
 Sean O'Leary, Sean Wall, a farmer's son 
 named George Hankard, a man named Gum- 
 bleton, a few others stepped rather shyly in, 
 filling the doorway, shutting away the flood of 
 dusky, filmy gold that was abroad between the 
 running hilltops and the paling sky. 
 
 It was Sean O'Leary came forward; indeed, it 
 was he who had gathered the others from their 
 far-scattered houses. 
 
 " 'Tis how 'tis, Maurice," he began, "we're 
 after learning that the police are after sending 
 our names and all about us to Dublin, and that 
 to-morrow maybe, or the day after, the military 
 will be coming to drag us from our homes to 
 fight for them, to fight for England, and " 
 
 The old man was looking at them shrewdly; 
 he was always glad when anything came to break 
 in upon his empty, listless days; he raised 
 his hand, with something of command in the ges- 
 ture. 
 
 "And tell me," he said, "isn't England after 
 getting enough already? Every single man that 
 could be coaxed out of this country by lies or 
 love or money to fight for her in this cruel, un- 
 christian war isn't she after getting them? 
 And tell me, them that are left, wouldn't it be a 
 crime against the Almighty God to force them 
 to fight against their will, men that hate the very 
 name of her?" His hand came flat down on the
 
 172 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 deal table and stayed flat on it, his eyes were 
 buried in them. 
 
 "That's what we say," O'Leary jerked out in 
 his quick, nervous way; and the others repeated 
 his phrase, or others like it, thinking that the old 
 man's strong flow of words needed at least so 
 much notice from them. 
 
 With greater warmth the old man spoke 
 again : 
 
 " 'Twould be a crime and a mighty crime 
 against the Almighty God for England to put 
 the bayonet into a boy's hand and say to him: 
 'Stab them and slay them and kill them, and 
 slaughter them whether 'tis in your mind to do 
 so or not.' ' 
 
 He had lifted himself from the chair: the 
 others could see the rickety table, on which his 
 left hand was leaning heavily, trembling to the 
 trembling of his limbs, but all this he had himself 
 forgotten. His eyes, usually so grey and wist- 
 ful, were burning upon the group, holding them 
 in wonder, for they had had no thought of being 
 received in such a manner. 
 
 "That boy of mine, the only one left me, I'd 
 rather see him stretched here on this table, and 
 the habit on him, than fighting for them and 
 making a great stir, maybe Nicholas!" he 
 cried, turning his head; but the boy had slipped 
 away from the men into the little room where
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT 173 
 
 his bed was, and was now peeping through the 
 loosely-jointed boards at the group his father 
 was dominating, "Nicholas, come hither, let ye," 
 and he turned again to the young men, "they 
 say they're not particular who they take. . . ." 
 "It don't matter a damn," Sean O'Leary broke 
 in swiftly, "not one of us they'll get, not one. 
 Rich and poor, strong and weak, we're gathering 
 together; and if they'll lay hands on any one of 
 us whatsoever there'll be shots firing on the hills 
 I tell ye, firing at all hours of day and 
 night. . . ." 
 
 "And is it now ye're gathering together ?" 
 
 "This very night we're gathering in the Name 
 
 of God. And we'll have a meeting in the coom 
 
 and we'll " 
 
 "The blessing of God on the work 'tis holy." 
 And so his son, Nicholas Motherway, the 
 poor lump of a fool, went with them. At first 
 he shambled awkwardly behind them, for he 
 feared that they might at any moment break out 
 into mockery of him, as used so often to happen 
 at the turf cuttings, at the threshings ; and it was 
 a long time before it crept into his slow brain 
 that all that was over and done with. Little by 
 little, somehow, as they went on across the broad 
 shoulders of the hills from house to house, the 
 crowd growing larger, louder, and more spirited, 
 he found himself becoming more and more one
 
 174 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 with them and they with him. ... It was a 
 night of silvery starshine, large, open and wide, 
 and the great empty spaces of the mountain- 
 land seemed to be waiting, to be waiting for 
 some battle-call to sound on them that, or the 
 descent of angels in robes of white. . . . The 
 dawn was almost come upon the mountains be- 
 fore Nicholas burst in with unaccustomed noise 
 and vigour on the old man, who had sat at the 
 hearth all night awaiting him. He was full of 
 bubbling, incoherent speech, at the end of which 
 his wondering father was half aware that a 
 dreadful battle had been fought in the coom, 
 that thousands upon thousands of men had been 
 all night tramping across the hills. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Nicholas, after some bad blundering, suddenly 
 left the ranks and placed himself side by side 
 with Sean O'Leary himself, Who was drilling 
 them. Nobody minded the irregularity: what 
 was he but an idiot? Again and again the group 
 of men in the lonely coom formed "fours," every 
 time more nearly perfect, and still the lump of a 
 man he was far bigger and heavier than the 
 best of them although quite young, hesitated 
 about trying it himself.
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT 175 
 
 "Again! again!" he cried out suddenly, and 
 again Sean's voice gave out the command, and 
 again the little squad went through the trick. 
 Then the simpleton clapped his hands with joy, 
 burst out into drivelling laughter, leaped back 
 to his place in the ranks and stood, stiff as the 
 best of them, awaiting the word. This time he 
 did it, and the whole crowd broke into wild and 
 merry cheering. 
 
 That night, too, he had a tale for his waiting 
 father. 
 
 IV 
 
 A few nights afterwards, O'Leary himself 
 did not come to drill them : Lingwood it was that 
 took his place, and Lingwood was not skilful 
 enough to bring them on to anything new nor 
 alert enough to keep them in good trim, so that 
 before half the night was spent they were lying 
 listlessly along the edge of the stream that ran 
 through the levels. It was noisy and swift: its 
 parent hills were not far off, indeed they were 
 looking right down on it, with night beginning 
 to darken and chill their climbing shadows. 
 
 Wall was lying lazily along it; his head and 
 shoulders were leant back into the soft foliage 
 of a willow, and his right foot, stretched from
 
 176 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 him, was idly toeing a lump of rock that, half 
 sunken in the bank, hung above the stream. 
 Presently, with a sudden splash and gurgle it 
 fell from the soft mould into the waters, the 
 debris discolouring them. When they cleared 
 again, the worn surface of the stone laughed 
 brightly up at them through the turf-coloured 
 stream. Lingwood at once roused himself, 
 knelt, and lifted the stone from the stream's bed. 
 He felt it in his hand, he weighed it; it was just 
 the right stone for throwing from the shoulders. 
 
 At midnight Nicholas entered the cabin with a 
 clatter of noise: 
 
 "Eirigh, 'athar," he said, with boldness and 
 pride, "is agamsa ta an sgeal duit" "Rise, 
 father," he said, " 'tis I that have the story for 
 you." 
 
 And he would scarcely give him time to rise. 
 
 "Easy, boy, easy," his father was imploring 
 him, "what is the story you have?" 
 
 "This is no place for it," he answered; "this 
 is no place for it; come hither." 
 
 And the half-dressed, awkward old man, with 
 the white hair tumbling down about his eyes, and 
 his grey flannel shirt open at the throat, had to 
 follow him into the common room where alone in 
 the house there was space to stir and leap. The 
 turf, spread all along the wide hearth, lit the 
 place with a red glow.
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT 177 
 
 "Sit down there, father." And impetuously, 
 the simpleton put him sitting back against the 
 side wall, leaving the whole floor of trampled 
 earth free for himself. The old man was 
 sharply peering at the boy's face, trying to find 
 the expression in his eyes. He had to look up 
 at him; his height was huge, huger than before, 
 for that ungainly droop with which he used to 
 carry his shoulders was falling away from him: 
 besides his head was up in the mellow dusk that 
 hovered under the thatch, and only fitfully would 
 the glow of the fire catch and throw the whole 
 shoulders, head, and face into relief. Up in 
 that fitfully-lighted darkness the great head was 
 swaying and tossing with a new pride, a new 
 alertness. 
 
 Nicholas had thrown his coat from him, 
 tightened his belt, braced himself up. He 
 glanced behind him, and placed his heel against 
 the partition that ran across the room. His 
 great right hand bent back sharp at the wrist, 
 bracketing an imaginary stone, he balanced him- 
 self stiffly, back and forth, until his whole body 
 was stretched like a bow; then with a wild whoop 
 of triumph, he lifted himself and threw the 
 imaginary stone hurtling through the air. After 
 a moment of blindness, of confusion of mind, so 
 huge the swinging figure in the little space, so 
 swift the rush, so wild the yell, the old man
 
 178 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 knew that his son was smiling down on him from 
 the darkness beneath the thatch, was swaying 
 before him. He tried to smile in return, but 
 there must have been something of uncertainty, 
 of fear in it, for suddenly Nicholas threw him- 
 self along the settle, flung his legs carelessly 
 over its straight arm, and with wild laughter 
 shook the place that place where for many 
 years ever since the last of the trusty sons had 
 gone to America the sound of song or fiddle or 
 laughter had never been heard! 
 
 "Whisht, Nicholas, whisht; look at the hour 
 it is; and how do you know what strangers would 
 be abroad these terrible times." 
 
 The son did not hear him: he was laughing at 
 more than his father, he was remembering the 
 faces in the coom, how they had looked at him 
 in his moment of triumph. His mother, a soft, 
 poor creature, broke urgently from the inner 
 room: she was fastening her bodice: 
 
 "For God's sake, Nicholas, lie down in your 
 bed; what is it is happening to ye at all?" 
 
 Nicholas leaped at her, laid playful hands on 
 her, warm and huge and hard they were, lifted 
 her, swung her across the floor and planted her 
 near the hearth on the remaining sugawn chair 
 that was always there. Then swiftly again, he 
 sprang to his place at the partition; once more
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT 179 
 
 he balanced himself, slowly, slowly, with a fierce 
 grin of determination on his brows, and his lips 
 blown out. It seemed an age before he would 
 make the throw. At last he leaped in the air, 
 this time with no yell of triumph however, with 
 rather a broken groan, and the end of the spring 
 was a stumble, as weak and straggling as the cry. 
 He gathered himself together, with effort it 
 seemed, only to fall again on the settle, panting 
 and puffing in exaggerated exhaustion. 
 
 At first they did not know it for acting, and 
 both rose in terror from their chairs: but again 
 the wild laughter broke from him; his head was 
 flung back, and they could see the strong teeth 
 shining in his mouth, regular as a wall of cut stone. 
 
 "For God's sake, Nicholas, don't be frighten- 
 ing us," his mother began again, but by this some 
 spirit had leaped in the breast of the poor old 
 palsied man: 
 
 "Whisht, woman," he said; "if he can't have 
 his sport here where is he to have it?" and 
 turning disdainfully from her, "Who was it, 
 who was it?" he cried, his head stretched out, 
 and his eyes glowing. 
 
 "The Lintagh!" Nicholas cried back to him in 
 a smother of laughter, "The Lintagh of 
 Tooreenaglas !" 
 
 The eldest son of every Lingwood family in
 
 180 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 that glen was known as a "lintagh" a word 
 whose meaning is not clear and Maurice 
 Motherway knew the Lintagh of Tooreenaglas 
 for a giant of a man, fierce and rough and proud: 
 he looked at his son, now sitting there, a 
 strange alertness upon him, with wonder and 
 admiration; then he rose and caught his hand 
 and shook it and prayed the blessing of Christ 
 on his strength and courage. 
 
 Earlier than now was usual with him, Nicholas 
 returned from his drilling: there was but little 
 life in him. 
 
 "You're early to-night, a mhic?" his father 
 said, peering at him, as was now his habit, to dis- 
 cover his temper. "Is it how how Sean did 
 not come to ye?" 
 
 "It is not." 
 
 He threw himself on the chair nearest to the 
 door, and bent upon the old gun he had been 
 drilling with. He was frowning upon it, twisting 
 and turning it in his rough hands. The lamp 
 threw its light down on the bent neck: it looked 
 like a bit of a young pine from which the bark 
 had been newly stripped away. 
 
 "Put it from you now, Nicholas, put it away
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT l8l 
 
 till the next time; you could never tell who'd 
 step in to us." 
 
 " 'Tis a crazy old thing it is." He spoke 
 sullenly, his fingers tugging viciously at the iron 
 work upon it. 
 
 'Twill do what we want of it." 
 
 " 'Tis a crazy old thing, it is!" The words 
 were louder and louder. 
 
 "Ah, well; ah, well!" the old man was 
 hobbling back to the place he had risen from, 
 when he heard a roar: 
 
 " 'Tis a foolish, crazy old thing it is there 
 to it!" 
 
 It went flying across the room, full tilt against 
 the whitened wall, it fell heavily on its muzzle 
 and lay still. And his father saw Nicholas rise 
 up, and go out the door and stand there for a 
 long time, his two hands stuck fiercely in his belt, 
 huge and black and angry, against the starry 
 sky, uncertain where to turn or what to do. 
 
 VI 
 
 In spite of Ireland's protest, in spite of a 
 hundred advices, in spite of the difference the 
 coming in of the Americans was making in the 
 war, England, it seemed, was intent on putting 
 the Conscription Act in force on the Irish people.
 
 182 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 But that did not explain the eager whispering of 
 the group of Comeragh men in the lonely dark- 
 ening coom. They were guessing, arguing, 
 questioning about a thing that had happened 
 among them that day: in a place four miles off 
 from the little hamlet, a policeman, all but life- 
 less from loss of blood, had been found lying on 
 the road, his head battered in as by a stone or 
 cudgel. The men in the coom had no thought 
 of how it had happened or of who it was that 
 had done it. The story that had already spread 
 over the mountains was that four masked men 
 had leaped upon the policeman, downed him, 
 and taken away his arms; and this story they 
 hardly knew whether to believe or discredit. 
 But for the most part it was of what would 
 follow that they were speaking; they knew that 
 there would be a thorough searching of the dis- 
 trict, lines of soldiers would be scouring the 
 mountains, with aeroplanes circling overhead; 
 and O'Leary was warning them that the tiniest 
 revolver found in their possession would mean 
 a sentence of two years in prison, while any sort 
 of rifle. ... As he spoke a voice jerked out: 
 "Here's Nick Motherway down to us." They 
 turned and looked up the path; they saw him 
 leaping down, making short cuts from angle to 
 angle, springing from crag to crag, a gun held 
 firmly above his head. As he came running to-
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT 183 
 
 wards them, they all at once looked at one 
 another and widened a little away from him. 
 O'Leary himself had gone pale: he was high- 
 strung, he needed warning before he could be 
 sure of himself. He tried to speak lightly: 
 
 "That's a fine gun you have, Nick." 
 
 " 'Tis my father's gun." 
 
 " 'Tis not your father's gun." 
 
 "Oh, but it is." 
 
 " 'Twas your father's gun you had last 
 night. . . ." 
 
 "'Twasn't; but an old crazy thing wouldn't 
 shoot off for me." 
 
 "Let me see that one you have ; let me handle 
 it." 
 
 "No; my father told me not to let it out of 
 my hands." 
 
 VII 
 
 While shooting in the coom, one after another 
 of them, a scout of theirs brought word that 
 motor lorries had already begun to bring squads 
 of soldiers to the lonely barrack where the 
 wounded policeman was shouting in hi delirium. 
 Yes; to-morrow aeroplanes would be circling 
 over the mountains and lines of soldiers would 
 be scouring across them, over and hither. Not
 
 184 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 a cowshed, not a dairy-room but would be 
 searched, not a turf stack but would be tumbled 
 to the ground. 
 
 The young men stopped their shooting and 
 gathered into one little knot in that darkening 
 valley, and they spoke in whispers. They had 
 not, up to this, ever come into handigrips with 
 English soldiers, neither had any of them ever 
 been in prison. But they knew how the Galtee 
 mountains had been parcelled out and searched 
 and researched after the dreadful affair at Knock- 
 long; and they all agreed that it would be a fool- 
 ish thing to sleep in their homes that night. 
 
 That night there was the sound of wailing in 
 lonely glens: the war seemed to have come to 
 their doors. 
 
 "Mother, maybe 'twould be as well for me 
 not to be here if the soldiers come surrounding 
 us during the night." 
 
 "Are you certain of that, a Thomais? 
 Wouldn't it be better for you to stay and answer 
 their riddling? What are you afraid of? 
 Aren't we able and ready to prove to the world 
 that you didn't stir from the bog the whole day 
 long?" 
 
 " 'Tis better for us all to be on the one word, 
 mother; them fellows are too clever for the like 
 of us; we'd think we were mastering them, and
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT 185 
 
 maybe 'tis hanging ourselves we'd be, or hanging 
 one another!" 
 
 The mother would give way: it was better 
 they should be all on the one word; but even as 
 she gave her consent her eyes would be greedily 
 feeding themselves on the boy's face, and her 
 mind would be already yielding to the fears that 
 would rush overwhelmingly upon her as soon as 
 she had bolted the door for the night on him! 
 
 There was no such parting in Nicholas's house, 
 no such wailing when the door was fastened and 
 the lamp quenched. For there was Nicholas 
 himself, and in high glee, too, after his bout of 
 successful shooting in the glen. It was a lonely, 
 far-away house, and no word whatever had 
 reached the father or mother of the attack on the 
 policeman. 
 
 But late in the night when all were in bed, and 
 the house was as dark and as silent as the moun- 
 tain top above it, a muffled, earnest hammering 
 sounded on the bolted door. Soon there was 
 whispering from bed to bed: 
 
 "Nicholas, Nicholas, is it for you that knock- 
 ing is?" 
 
 u No, 'tis not for me it is. What would they 
 be wanting with me?" 
 
 "Will you rise up and ask them what it is they 
 want?"
 
 l86 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 "I will not rise up to them." 
 
 "They'll never stop. 'Tisn't the police, the 
 police would be calling out to us to open." 
 
 " 'Tis you they'll be asking for, whoever 'tis." 
 
 The hammering continued, not louder, how- 
 ever, than before. The old woman spoke to her 
 husband: her voice sounded softer than by day: 
 
 " 'Tis better for yourself to speak to them. 
 Nicholas, don't be listening to them at all, nor 
 speaking with them at all." 
 
 Then suddenly, as if grown careless or des- 
 perate, the hammering redoubled in force, in 
 speed, and a voice was calling to them to open 
 at once. 
 
 'Tis the Gaelic he has." The old man 
 raised his voice: 
 
 "In the Name of God who are you, and what 
 do you want of us?" 
 
 "Open, or 'tis destroyed you'll be." 
 
 "My God! 'tis destroyed we'll be, he says. 
 I'll open. . . . I'll open to ye." 
 
 He limped out and pulled the bolts without a 
 word. O'Leary rushed in-. 
 
 "Where's that gun?" 
 
 "What are you saying?" 
 
 "Where's Nicholas; where's that gun he 
 had?" 
 
 "The gun 'tis in smithereens it is. If 'tis 
 the bits of it. ... Look, here . . . here."
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT 187 
 
 O'Leary looked at the battered old thing. 
 That was not the gun he had come for. 
 
 "My God! answer my question, and let me be 
 off out of this. Blame yourself if ye have the 
 police and the soldiers dragging the two of ye off 
 before the night is out. Ye won't answer my 
 question." 
 
 "There's Nicholas there for ye." 
 
 He opened the rickety old door in the 
 partition and shoved in the candle. O'Leary 
 brushed past it. 
 
 "Nicholas, where's that gun you had?" 
 
 A sleep-warmed face looked up at him: there 
 was a harvest of laughter mantling it, every- 
 where. 
 
 "Where is it, tell me?" 
 
 "Can't ye look for it? If ye find it, carry it 
 off with ye. Slan beo leat, a ghunna Horn !" 
 
 "I tell you you'll be taken to Cork, to the jail, 
 if 'tis found in the house:" 
 
 "Find it!" And then his laughter rang out 
 suddenly and bo-istcrously, careless of the night. 
 The old man came hastening to him. 
 
 "Nicholas, let ye be quiet, be quiet, 'tisn't 
 right for ye to be laughing this hour of the 
 night." 
 
 "I'm done with ye," O'Leary blurted out, and 
 left them there. He plunged down the bo- 
 hereen: a little knot of silent men awaited him.
 
 1 88 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 "Have ye it?" 
 
 'Tisn't in it. I'm sure of it. Here's his 
 father's old thing. 'Tis little information 
 they'll get from Nicky, I warrant ye." 
 
 They went their way, warning the scattered 
 people to get rid of whatever old guns they had 
 before the police came in the morning. 
 
 VIII 
 
 "I'm waiting for ye. I'm waiting for ye." 
 
 It was true, the old man had been awaiting 
 them. Now he rose up defiantly, but his teeth 
 could be heard chattering in his head with excite- 
 ment, not with fright. 
 
 The two policemen stepped in, bending their 
 huge bodies under the lintel, darkening the place. 
 Soldiers, fully armed, helmeted, followed them; 
 two others remained outside the door, their rifles 
 grounded. 
 
 The policemen without a word began to search 
 the house, while the soldiers, from Staffordshire 
 they were, gaped at their white, strained faces. 
 But soon they turned their boyish eyes on the 
 passionate, shrunkcn-up, trembling old man who 
 was following the policemen from point to point, 
 right at their coat tails, mocking them. Some- 
 times he would scramble in front of them : "Here
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT 189 
 
 ye are Sergeant; 'tis my own feathers, the best of 
 them is in it. Stick your bayonets into it and 
 see for yourself. Wouldn't ye take it with ye? 
 'Twould be useful to ye down in that nest of 
 yours. . . . And what is it you're after finding? 
 Whatever it is, take it off with you: you're wel- 
 come to it. Nothing! And didn't I know ye'd 
 be here this blessed morning, and didn't I hide 
 the guns and the swords and the cannons up 
 in the rocks, up in the rocks of the moun- 
 tains. Sure 'twas for hiding-places God made 
 them. . . ." 
 
 Nicholas was all the time standing foolishly 
 in the middle of the floor; he was bigger than 
 either of the policemen, the soldiers were only 
 manikins beside him. He had not spoken a 
 word; one could make no guess at his thoughts: 
 perhaps his mind was just a wide vacancy dis- 
 turbed on its far edges. He made no wonder of 
 his father's flow of bitter words. 
 
 "My boys in America, the four of them, 'tis 
 sore set they'd be to see ye wrecking the place 
 like this: 'tis out on ye they would, and the King 
 of England himself wouldn't stay nor hinder 
 them." 
 
 "Let ye stop that gab." One of the policemen 
 could no longer keep his temper. 
 
 "I will not stop it: the house is mine." 
 
 The wife came to him.
 
 190 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 "In the Name of God, Maurice, let ye hold 
 quiet." 
 
 "What for would I stop? Is it lies or the 
 plain truth I'm telling?" 
 
 He roared out the words at them. His 
 passion seemed to have shaken his disease from 
 his limbs, from his tongue. 
 
 "Let ye keep silent, whatever 'tis ye're telling." 
 
 "Lay hands on me, why don't ye ! Lay hands 
 on me ! Or on him. Finish God's work, let ye. 
 He laid hands on us blessed be His Holy 
 Name. But He didn't finish the work. Let ye 
 finish it, and the King of England won't see your 
 children begging their bread. . . ." 
 
 "Hold quiet, I'm tellingye. 'Tis well ye know 
 why I haven't ye bundled into the waggon by this, 
 handcuffed and trussed. Hold quiet, or I'll " 
 
 The sergeant had almost gripped the old man 
 by the shoulder, and the old man had made no 
 retreat from him. But, mouthing unintelligibly, 
 Nicholas slid in between them. No one could 
 catch his words, whether he threatened or ex- 
 cused. The mother threw herself upon him, 
 speaking wildly; her husband she trusted not to 
 go beyond the harm of words, but not her son. 
 "Not you at all, Nicholas," she was saying, "not 
 you at all." *The searching had ceased; soldiers 
 and all, they were staring at the great boy-man, in
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT 191 
 
 whom life had come suddenly to the blossoming. 
 He threw his mother from him, and with a sudden 
 cry of joyous recollection swept towards the door. 
 "Stop him," the sergeant cried; "don't let him 
 out." Instinctively he had given the command: 
 he had no reason for it. The soldiers made a 
 fence with their bayonets. Nicholas baulked at 
 the steel, stretched a hand between the blades and 
 made a grab at one of the soldiers. But another 
 jabbed him viciously in the forearm with a bay- 
 onet, and he leaped back from them, his eyes 
 fierce with anger, his brows scowling: he was at 
 bay, the blood running down his hand. In the 
 silence the old man suddenly fell down, heavily, 
 without a word or groan. 
 
 IX 
 
 A wild south-wester was blowing over the Com- 
 eraghs that night the rain would follow. In 
 the thick darkness O'Leary climbed the stony 
 pathway towards the Motherways' house. He 
 listened. There was not a sound from within. 
 Yet on account of the gale he had to pound the 
 door. He heard the old woman's heavy boots 
 as she came to open it. 
 
 "How is he?" 
 
 "He's sleeping, thanks be to God. They say
 
 192 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 he won't be anything the worse for it, but sure 
 'tis well I know he's a good deal nearer to the 
 grave, Sean." 
 
 " 'Tis well he didn't go off on you; be thank- 
 ful for that much." 
 
 "Sure, I am. But, Sean, whisper to me 
 Nicholas is inside," she nodded at the little 
 bed-room "and he has a great gun with him, 
 wherever he got it, and I'm frightened to have 
 it with him." 
 
 Sean was looking at her. She came to him 
 and caught him earnestly by the shoulders. 
 
 "If you could get it from him, Sean?" and 
 her eyes were cold with terror. 
 
 He shook his head. "Don't be afraid," he 
 whispered. 
 
 He tapped at the dark-painted door of the 
 side room. He got no reply. He lifted the 
 latch and stepped in: the old man lay stretched 
 before him on the bed like a corpse, grey-faced; 
 he looked twenty years older than when Sean had 
 last seen him. From the sleeping face Sean 
 tried to keep his eyes from straying, but at the 
 same time he knew that Nicholas was sitting by 
 the bed, erect, watchful, like a hunter, and that a 
 heavy-looking gun was laid across his knees, 
 gripped in rigid hands. He did not speak a 
 word, he gave no sign of recognizing his visitor. 
 
 Sean withdrew just as quietly as he had stepped
 
 A BYE-PRODUCT 193 
 
 in. He found the old woman standing quite still 
 in the self-same position as when he had left her. 
 'Twould be no use to ask him for it," he 
 whispered her. "Don't be afraid : there's no fear 
 they'll come here again for some time." 
 
 One does not linger on a mountain side when 
 a southwest wind is sweeping a sea of rain against 
 it, but the thing that set Sean O'Leary plunging 
 through the darkness, leaping headlong from 
 rock to rock was not the discomfort of the rain 
 and wind, but the vision that had seized on his 
 brain the meagre, death-like figure laid flat upon 
 the bed, the wild creature watching by it, the gun 
 across the huge knees, the fierce grip. And in 
 the light of that vision the task of freeing his 
 native land that he and others like him had taken 
 upon their shoulders seemed suddenly to have be- 
 come immensely heavier, infinitely more involved, 
 more surely fraught through and through with 
 living pain: one of those moments, when we see 
 into the life of things had come to him. Next 
 day he drilled his men as usual as usual, if not 
 more quietly, yet more firmly, with more grip. 
 He had become surer of himself; perhaps the 
 progress he was making was not unlike Nicholas 
 Motherway's, only on a higher plane.
 
 THE PRICE
 
 THE PRICE 
 
 I 
 
 ALTHOUGH it had often happened since the spring 
 softened the weather, that his youngest son, Cia- 
 ran, did not come home until the day was break- 
 ing, old Laurence Mac Carthy could no longer 
 keep the bed that night. He had to rise. The 
 cocks were crowing, and the gables of the ruined 
 abbey of St. Ciaran, up to which all the lines and 
 ways of the little town of Balliniskey led, were 
 becoming a rich black against the lightening sky. 
 Very quietly he slipped from his bed; his other 
 son, Tom, the son on whom all the responsibility 
 of the farm and shop depended, slept in the next 
 room, and to awaken him might only once more 
 renew the bitterness that had arisen in the little 
 family since Ciaran, the younger son, had taken 
 to drilling on the hills in the dark nights, if not, 
 indeed, to something far more dangerous than 
 drilling. Very quietly he slipped from the room, 
 looking much older and more shrunken than was 
 usual with him. He held his heavy boots 
 clutched in under his right arm, and his left hand 
 felt along the handrail of the stairs in the dark- 
 ness. His lower lip was drawn in about the few 
 
 197
 
 198 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 teeth that remained to him, drawn in in anxiety 
 and alertness. He went through the untidy 
 shop, feeling from one bag of meal to another, 
 and out into the store at the gable end. Very 
 carefully he drew back the bolts on the wicket, 
 and then he could see right along the whole 
 street of the town. The cold of morning was in 
 the air, and the mists of autumn lingered like 
 clouds in the wide space where the main street 
 opened into the square. He saw a dog, he knew 
 it to be Pat Keily's dog, nosing along the street, 
 from door to door, very silently; nothing else 
 was abroad; the cocks, however, were still crow- 
 ing lustily in the yards behind the houses; one 
 could picture them, stretching to the skies, tri- 
 umphantly sending their voices to far distances. 
 
 "My God, protect him ! my God, be with him," 
 he was praying continually, and his head was 
 quivering, and his lips were moving vigorously. 
 He did not want to be seen there; above all, he 
 did not want Tom to rise up and find him there; 
 and yet he could not shut the wicket he had 
 opened, could not again face up the stairs. 
 
 Two young men stood suddenly before him. 
 They had come through Moloney's stabling yard, 
 leaping over the wall into the little bohereen that 
 led up to the hillside. He knew them. One was 
 the Casey boy; the other was the schoolmaster's 
 son, Sam Lillis. They stopped up suddenly to
 
 THE PRICE 199 
 
 find him in the wicket before them. "Oh !" they 
 jerked out, and young Casey turned irresolutely 
 on his heel, looking to see if anyone else were 
 following. But Sam Lillis gave a sort of military 
 salute : 
 
 "Ciaran, Ciaran's after meeting with an ac- 
 cident." 
 
 The old man couldn't take it in. He turned 
 his head halfway from the erect young man, spat 
 on the ground and bent his brows fiercely. He 
 did the same always when a price was put on his 
 stock at a fair; he did it to gain time. Then his 
 head swung up quickly: 
 
 " 'Sh I lave ye, himself's asleep." 
 
 They were looking at him. They had come 
 through the yard in a hurry, in a hurry had leaped 
 over the wall, their eyes were very bright, their 
 cheeks flushed. This blank pause they could not 
 understand. 
 
 "Ciaran's wounded ... in the shoulder. 
 Maybe 'tisn't too much after all. . . ." 
 
 "Wounded? Ye're sure of that? God's will 
 be done." 
 
 "We are. We are. Look, they're coming 
 now." 
 
 Lillis raised a hand to the little group that were 
 making down the bohereen, a hint of marching 
 even then in the noise of their coming. " 'Sh!" 
 he said; "'sh!"
 
 200 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 The old man caught the boy Casey's shoulder. 
 
 "Would you go up, like a good boy, and tell 
 Tom to come down to us?" 
 
 "I will, sir." 
 
 The little crowd were at hand. The old man 
 stepped outside the wicket the opening was a 
 narrow one and stood helplessly by, bent down 
 like the bough of an ancient tree. 
 
 "Michael," he said to Michael Keohane, who, 
 he knew, was captain over them; "ah, Michael, 
 he's only a boy, a slip of a boy." 
 
 But Keohane, who for the past few years had 
 had always more problems to decide upon than 
 he was able to come at, had acquired a quick and 
 somewhat hard way of answering such questions 
 as took one no further. 
 
 "A boy," he rapped out; "he's a damned sight 
 better than the men of this place; we could hear 
 them snoring through their windows snoring at 
 us ! My God, they made me mad. If you go 
 first, Tim, that way." 
 
 They had him scarcely in the store when 
 another of the little band thrust in his head. He 
 was pale, thin, and his teeth showed in the gums. 
 
 "Mick, Mick," he whispered quickly; "come 
 out; listen; is it a motor? Anyway, 'tis broad 
 daylight." 
 
 Keohane listened quietly, for rather a long
 
 THE PRICE 201 
 
 time, it seemed. " 'Tis better clear anyhow," he 
 said. "We can't do any more." 
 
 Tom had come into the store, his face was red, 
 his black hair was tossed about his forehead. He 
 had had a full night's sleep. Keohane shot a 
 glance at him. 
 
 "There he's for you ; 'twill be some time before 
 he'll finish that rick for you!" He turned on 
 his heel and went out. 
 
 "Don't mind him, Tom; he's excited," the 
 father said. 
 
 But Tom was examining the unconscious face 
 of his brother; his voice surprised his father. 
 
 'Tis true for him," he said. "Yesterday he 
 was nearly killed with the piking. I felt sorry 
 for him myself. Take him by the feet. Nell 
 will be down now." 
 
 The old father could go only very slowly, and 
 Tom spoke again: 
 
 'Tis no use in complaining; it comes to all 
 of them in their turn." 
 
 Nell, his only sister, came in. She was crying 
 very softly, as a child might in a dream; she too 
 feared her brother's judgment. 
 
 "Don't be hard on him, Tom. Sure you 
 won't?" 
 
 "Who's hard on him?" 
 
 "Nobody, I know, I know."
 
 202 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 "Jack Casey said it went right through; if it 
 did, he mightn't be too bad." They had never 
 heard so kind a voice coming from Tom's lips, 
 Tom, who managed everyone of themselves, as 
 well as every detail of the house, farm and shop. 
 
 "But 'twas a pity they failed," he continued, 
 and they asked no questions; but, little by little, 
 they got from him what he had been told by 
 Jack Casey that they had tried to hold up a 
 military motor lorry in which a prisoner, Bat 
 Kennedy's son, was being taken to Cork. That 
 they had failed, that one of the police had been 
 wounded, and that Ciaran had showed the stuff 
 that was in him. 
 
 "My God," he said, "but they think highly of 
 him, the boys do. When he's recovered we'll 
 send him out to Aunt Mary's place and give him 
 a long holiday, so we will." 
 
 II. 
 
 It seemed the boy would never regain conscious- 
 ness. Dr Keating had come in his trap and 
 dressed the wound : unless it grew septic, he hoped 
 for complete recovery, only 'twould take time; 
 besides they could not tell what the nervous sys- 
 tem had suffered from the shock. Very silently 
 the day went by; and though they did their best
 
 T H E P R I C E 203 
 
 to keep the story from spreading, many a whis- 
 pered inquiry had to be answered, equally in a 
 whisper, over the counters and over the sacks of 
 meal that day. Even before the shops had 
 opened, lorries of military and police had been 
 rushing through the place, making for the scene 
 of the fight at Templebreeda, almost ten miles off. 
 Three aeroplanes had already swooped over the 
 roofs of the houses. But up to the present no in- 
 quiries had been made, and it seemed the author- 
 ities were on the wrong track. 
 
 In the afternoon Nan Twohig slipped quietly 
 into the shop; she had brought some flowers from 
 her hillside garden; she had also brought a little 
 phial of Lourdes water. 
 
 She was tall and very erect, yet lissom and 
 graceful in her movements. Her eyes were soft 
 and grey, always wide open, and very frank look- 
 ing. Her lips were palish, never moist, and very 
 sweet and gentle in their unbroken repose. She 
 brought a moment of stillness into every group 
 she joined, just one moment, in which their looks, 
 their words, their thoughts underwent a subtle 
 chastening. Yet no one had ever known her to 
 make judgment on any one or to reprove or scorn. 
 She had no fear in her, no yearnings, it would 
 seem; no curiosity. She knew where she was go- 
 ing, as an infant knows its mother's breast. And 
 in some dim way, the whole town knew it too; in
 
 204 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 their thoughts she was already a Sister of Charity. 
 
 In a little house on the hillside not far from the 
 ruined abbey, she lived with her parents, both now 
 very old; they had married late in life, and she 
 was their only child. Her father had sold out 
 the hotel it was practically the only hotel in the 
 place; and now the three of them lived in great 
 retirement in their sheltered nook. Their com- 
 fort was, morning and evening, to frequent the 
 church, in which, at Sunday Mass and at the Sun- 
 day Benediction, Nan played the organ and con- 
 ducted the choir. 
 
 A phial of Lourdes water was, indeed, a treas- 
 ure. 
 
 "I will not, Nan," old Laurence Mac Carthy 
 said to her, the two of them standing above the 
 unconscious figure so limp-looking in the bed. "I 
 will not; it is more fitting that you do it yourself, 
 whatever you think right." 
 
 She looked a little perplexed. She was star- 
 ing fixedly at the young lad's face. It was a good- 
 looking face, well-shaped, oval in its outline, re- 
 fined, the features sharply cut. In the stillness, 
 lifelessness of unconsciousness, the outline of the 
 features was everything, as in the face of a corpse; 
 and one would think that Nan Twohig had never 
 seen the young man before, so intently were her 
 eyes set upon him.
 
 THE PRICE 205 
 
 "Very well," she said, and she took the phial 
 of blessed water and made the Sign of the Cross 
 upon the features, touching his brow, his lips, with 
 the water. And then the father lifted very gently 
 the bed-clothes from the shoulder and Nan again 
 made the Sign of the Cross on the dressings. 
 That done, she dropped on her knees, and bent her 
 head in prayer. Her face and that of the young 
 man were very close together: he was lying on his 
 right side along the edge of the bed. The father 
 stood above her. She felt his hand touch her on 
 the shoulder; she opened her eyes, and she saw 
 that Ciaran, too, had opened his eyes, was look- 
 ing at her gravely; suddenly she saw him smile 
 to recognise her, but it did not last more than a 
 few moments. Sudden fear, pain, made his fea- 
 tures wince; his gaze sharpened a moment, became 
 dark and full of distress; and he lapsed again 
 into unconsciousness before a word had been 
 spoken to him. She rose up trembling, trying to 
 master herself. Colour had come up into her 
 pale cheeks, and her fingers stretched to support 
 herself on the low table that stood near the bed. 
 
 The old man took no notice of her; it was on 
 his son's face that his eyes were set. 
 
 "Nan," he whispered, "did you see that? 
 Wouldn't you say that would be a good sign?" 
 
 "Oh, yes," she could hardly speak; her voice
 
 206 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 sounded hard and rough to her. "Oh, yes, he'll 
 come out of it, little by little. . . . I'll leave you 
 this." 
 
 She went away, hushed and wondering. 
 
 Ill 
 
 That sudden change that had come so swiftly 
 over the smiling eyes, she carried with her: it re- 
 newed itself in her vision again and again. She 
 went swiftly and silently through the agitated peo- 
 ple. That there was a region of pain, of fear, 
 that she had never realised, hovered among her 
 thoughts; of all her thoughts that chiefly she 
 would put away from her by her swift hurrying; 
 for it questioned her, questioned her prudence and 
 her own courage. It now seemed to her so cal- 
 lous to have given utterance to heroic thoughts 
 without making any effort to realise the suffer- 
 ing that such thoughts may bring in their 
 train ! 
 
 Her attitude all along in the ever-multiplying 
 troubles that were being poured out on her peo- 
 ple, on her country, had surprised even those who 
 best knew her. They had known her for a nun- 
 like spirit, moving in her own ways, in ways that 
 were not the world's. There were thousands like
 
 THE PRICE 207 
 
 her in Ireland, gentle souls whose real country 
 was the cloister, whom only the duties of life kept 
 still in the world. That such a soul should take 
 unflinching stand by the side of the young men, 
 was scarcely to be understood. The old priest 
 had time and again spoken of them as hotheads, 
 had threatened the country with famine if they 
 persevered in their wild courses, had warned the 
 farmers and the shopkeepers to look after their 
 sons, if they did not want to see their bank bal- 
 ances come tumbling down. It was little use for 
 him: the young men went on with their drilling, 
 with their raiding for arms, with their attacks on 
 police barracks, on the mails, on patrols of mili- 
 tary and police : and in all that they did Nan Two- 
 hig justified them. This, however, she did pri- 
 vately; in simple words she would give her 
 opinion not knowing that her words would run 
 from lip to lip, would temper the opinions of the 
 worldly-wise and strengthen further the resolve 
 of the young men never to give in. In aloofness, 
 in repose, her life flowed on unchanged. Once 
 only did she do a thing that surprised herself and 
 astonished the town. It was the first Sunday in 
 August, and the little church was crowded to the 
 door. In the middle of the Mass, the old priest, 
 who had never made even one mistake in all the 
 dragging years of his long life, had asked for the
 
 208 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 customary prayers for the dead, had begun to read 
 out the list of names : 
 
 "James O'Donovan, of Lyrenagreine. 
 "Thomas O'Rourke, of Lismoran. 
 "John Dempsey, of Tobberinglas " 
 
 and there suddenly he paused, puzzling out, it 
 was evident, the next name on the list. After a 
 moment he began to read on again, there were 
 but three other names, and had finished them, 
 had raised his head and was looking straight 
 down the church through his spectacles, when 
 Nan Twohig's voice spoke out quite clearly from 
 the little organ gallery: 
 
 "And for the soul of Roger Casement, whose 
 anniversary occurs about this time." 
 
 Very few looked around from the altar, 
 scarcely one; besides, their eyes were all on the 
 priest, who stood still on the altar steps facing 
 down the church. They could see his struggle to 
 steady his voice to finish the prayers for the dead: 
 "May their souls and the souls of all the faithful 
 departed, through the mercy of God, rest in 
 peace. Amen." Then he turned again to the 
 altar, and resumed the whisper of the Mass in ? 
 silence that seemed to be afraid of itself. 
 
 Yes, that action on her part did surprise her- 
 self, yet not so much as one would think; she was 
 quite sure that she had done nothing wrong.
 
 THEPRICE 209 
 
 Because it was Nan Twohig that had done that 
 extraordinary thing, the people discussed it only 
 in whispers and never discussed it with the Canon 
 himself; neither did he invite discussion on it. 
 Silence was the better thing, whether she had done 
 right or wrong. But one old man did say: "Peo- 
 ple that walk that way, with their heads up, and 
 their eyes looking straight before them, you can 
 never tell what it is they'll stop at." But one 
 thing embarrassed the gentle soul: she noticed for 
 the first time that the Volunteers, young men, 
 many of them, whose names she had never heard, 
 would salute her and glance shyly at her with 
 grateful eyes as she passed on. But it was 
 now more than a month since that Sunday in 
 August. 
 
 All the day motor lorries of military and police 
 were tearing through the long street of the 
 town, sending up clouds of dust. The soldiers 
 were but boys for the most part; they had taken 
 off their helmets and their hair was tossed about 
 their foreheads. They carried their rifles with 
 the barrels resting on the edge of the lorry. And 
 baggage, clothing, hair, faces, guns, as well as the 
 motor itself, were white with the dust of the 
 country roads. They laughed out boisterously 
 or sang as they passed through the silent towns. 
 In the afternoon an armoured car rattled swiftly 
 through the street and disappeared in a cloud of
 
 210 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 dust. The people, who had never before seen 
 one, began to put up their shutters, and to gather 
 in anxious groups. Everybody had come to know 
 of the fight at Templebreeda, of young Ciaran 
 Mac Carthy's bravery, and of the wounded police- 
 man. Reprisals had followed such happenings 
 in other places, and that was what they feared. 
 News arrived that Templebreeda had been sur- 
 rounded by a cordon of troops, that the houses 
 were being searched and that many arrests had 
 been made. In one case the three sons had been 
 swept off, in another the father and the only boy. 
 Some small arms, some scraps of ammunition, 
 some Sinn Fein literature, some books or papers 
 in the Irish language had been found in their 
 houses, and explanations were neither asked nor 
 offered. 
 
 Nan had just heard the news of the arrests 
 when the motor lorries swept again at a terrific 
 rate through the street: they were returning. 
 The second and third carried the prisoners that 
 had been made. Young men, some indeed only 
 boys in their teens, they stood upright, hand- 
 cuffed one to another, in a ring of steel. They 
 were dressed in their working clothes. They 
 waved their caps, hurrahed and sang whenever 
 they passed through a little hamlet or village; 
 and the ring of soldiers about them stood erect 
 and very silent. But the older men among the
 
 THE PRICE 211 
 
 prisoners were depressed and awkward-looking: 
 they had not yet had time to fling themselves on 
 the reckless heroic plane where the young men 
 had been dwelling for months and years. 
 
 Nan's heart had been opened that morning, 
 and she saw it all with a sense of warm, piteous 
 tears. She saw how cowed the townspeople 
 were; as the prisoners passed only an odd one of 
 the people would raise a hand or cap. They 
 had not the heart. At that time the jails were 
 crammed with prisoners, and some of them were 
 on the point of death from hunger-striking, while 
 day by day others of them were drifting home to 
 their people, wrecked in body and sometimes in 
 mind. 
 
 No sooner had they all swept by, leaving the 
 street full of whirling clouds of dust, than the 
 children of the place formed into ranks and 
 marched around the streets shouting out their 
 Republican songs at the top of their voices. Nan 
 felt thankful for the heartiness of their singing: 
 she was repeating the words of their songs for 
 her own comforting: 
 
 "No more our ancient sireland 
 Shall shelter the despot or the slave." 
 
 All this that she had seen, the rushing motors, 
 the young prisoners, the anxious people, whisper- 
 ing, and fearful of what the night or the next
 
 212 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 day would bring upon themselves, Nan carried to 
 bed with her that night. She could not sleep for 
 it; and scraps of the boys' songs would ring 
 through her brain; and then the young flesh of 
 Ciaran Mac Carthy, quivering with agony, his 
 eyes darkening with it, she would see his head 
 laid sideways and quite helpless on the white pil- 
 low. And she was not satisfied with her own 
 part in all this, though she did not even ask her- 
 self if she could have done otherwise. 
 
 IV 
 
 And so she was sitting up in her bed, listening, 
 one would think, from the expression of her face. 
 She could see the tree-tops dark against the clear 
 sky, and occasionally a bird fluttered quite close to 
 her window, as if it were pulling at the leaves. 
 She grew cold, and with a smothered sigh lay 
 down, drawing the clothes warmly about her. 
 Presently she raised her head: she thought she 
 heard someone climbing over the wall of her gar- 
 den, thought she heard a leap down on the grass. 
 She kept quite still, terrified. Dreadful things 
 had been done, done on both sides, during the 
 past twelve months, and even to the hearts of 
 the Volunteers themselves, daring and courageous 
 as they were, a peremptory knocking at the door
 
 THE PRICE 213 
 
 in the dead of night would send coldness and 
 fear. For such a knocking she felt herself wait- 
 ing, though she had no idea what would happen 
 to herself, having heard it! She heard a stir- 
 ring and then a low whistle. She started vio- 
 lently. "Christ help me, Christ protect me," 
 *hc was praying. The whistle was repeated. If 
 it were a signal to others ! She was half-way 
 out the bed, she would go into her mother's 
 room, when she heard whistled very soft and low, 
 the first notes of "Wrap the Green Flag Round 
 Me, Boys" a song that had become burdened 
 with the most tragic associations. Her heart 
 opened; she felt reassured; and her thoughts 
 thanked him, whoever it was, for having struck on 
 such a signal at the very moment when terror 
 was chilling her through and through. She liked 
 the song: like everyone else she had often found 
 it singing in her brain, as if it would never end; 
 like an old friend it came to her now. 
 
 She crept to the window and opened it. A 
 voice whispered up : 
 
 "Is that Miss Twohig?" 
 
 "Yes; what is it you want?" 
 
 "No one can hear us?" 
 
 "No; you're Michael Keohane?" 
 
 "Yes, I am. Tell me, would it be possible 
 for us to bring Ciaran Mac Carthy up here. 
 Could you keep him for some time?"
 
 214 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 "Up here! Now?" She could not help her 
 surprise. 
 
 "Yes. We think it best. His house will 
 surely be searched to-morrow; he's well known to 
 them. He'd be safe here. And the doctor 
 wouldn't allow us to take him any distance with- 
 out a proper ambulance." 
 
 "But now, you said?" 
 
 " 'Twould be best. We must keep it se- 
 cret from the people in the town. Please let 
 us." 
 
 "Oh! don't think I'm against it. We'd do 
 more than that for Ciaran, for any of you." 
 
 "I know that; we call you our best recruiting 
 sergeant!" 
 
 She heard him laugh; but all the anxiety of the 
 long day swept back on her at his words. He 
 spoke again: 
 
 "Your people won't be against it?" 
 
 "They're all right; I'll answer for them." 
 
 "Could you have a place ready in an hour's 
 time?" 
 
 "Yes, certainly, in less." 
 
 When he had gone, she dressed in haste and 
 went to her mother's room. Then she was run- 
 ning up stairs and down stairs and from room to 
 room, her arms full of bundles of white linen. 
 She was full of quiet excitement, and indeed full 
 of a secret joy, a secret fire she could not quench.
 
 THE PRICE 215 
 
 Her house was honoured; she herself was 
 honoured; it did not matter what happened next. 
 They might come and break in the panels of the 
 door which had become their usual way of enter- 
 ing houses or leap in through the windows on 
 top of them; and no resistance coultl be made; 
 but it did not matter; she would have suffered 
 with the rest, and so could take her place without 
 misgivings in the Ireland that was being born. 
 And though she would have taken in any wounded 
 Volunteer whatever, she was glad it was Ciaran 
 Mac Carthy that she was asked to take in. For 
 a moment she had forgotten all the anxious 
 thoughts that were with her the length of that 
 long day; now she could chirp like a bird. 
 
 In less than an hour he was lying there beneath 
 her eyes. He regained consciousness; and began 
 to speak to her with great shyness. He was 
 overjoyed at the way Tom had taken this upset. 
 He always knew he was good at heart, but he 
 had great responsibilities, and responsibilities 
 harden a man; look at Michael Keohane. And 
 then she chatted to him of what Michael had 
 said of himself, of his courage and he laughed 
 gently, and was glad to have his captain think so 
 well of him. But she would not let him talk. 
 He must keep quiet. And quietly he shut his 
 eyes and dozed off to sleep. Soon afterwards 
 his sister, Nell, came into the room and found
 
 2l6 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 her there, sitting quietly, staring straight in front 
 of her, full of wonder. A warmth was in her 
 heart. She was remembering the richness of 
 Ciaran's hazel eyes, the frank, boyish gladness in 
 them when he smiled. 
 
 When our heart opens at all, it opens to the 
 cold winds as well as to the kindly sun. As soon 
 as Nan entered her own room, leaving Nell to 
 keep watch by Ciaran's side until the morning, 
 which was the arrangement they had made, new 
 fears swept down upon her. She tried to put 
 them away; everything had not gone on too well, 
 and even if it had, well, it was God's will. And 
 his wound had not taken cold in the journey 
 through the hillside fields beneath the cold stars. 
 And he would not be arrested ... It was true 
 the night was chilly, she had felt it herself, sitting 
 up in bed; and certainly it was colder now, as was 
 only natural. If he were arrested he would go 
 on hunger-strike rather than be classed among the 
 criminals and treated as one. And if he did! 
 She went from change to change. And behind 
 all her questionings was this thought: that what- 
 ever had happened, whatever was happening (his 
 wound might be turning poisonous at that very
 
 THE PRICE 217 
 
 moment) whatever would happen she was bear- 
 ing no part in it. She was herself lived in an- 
 other world callous and impotent. 
 
 Suddenly she began to reclothe herself, snatch- 
 ing up her garments quickly and buttoning them 
 with quick, deft fingers. The pious little ejacu- 
 lations that she had been whispering to herself, 
 almost mechanically, she whispered no longer. 
 But her own erectness had returned to her. She 
 had resumed herself. 
 
 In Balliniskey there is a standing devotion to 
 their patron saint, to St. Ciaran. They make 
 rounds at the ruined abbey on the hillside, just 
 above the town; and many a boy in the streets 
 of the little place answers to the old saint's name. 
 Nan shared in this devotion; and in those years 
 of national trouble had often found great con- 
 solation in praying at the holy well in the old 
 abbey grounds. Suddenly, while undressing, the 
 thought of the broken abbey set there above 
 their houses, looking down on them, the thought 
 of the old Gaelic saint, had come to her with 
 already an assurance of comfort; St. Ciaran, it 
 seemed, in some mysterious way could marry her, 
 could knit her into the troubles that had come yet 
 once again on his own ancient land, that had come 
 on his own boy, Ciaran Mac Carthy, for loving 
 the same old land. 
 
 Quickly she dressed, wrapped a long, whitish
 
 2l8 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 warm cloak she had about her, stepped swiftly 
 yet silently down the stairs, opened the door, 
 and made hastily along the little hillside path that 
 led to the holy well; there were but two fields to 
 go through. 
 
 Parallel to and above the main street, she was 
 walking along the hillside, swiftly and without 
 fear; her eyes were set straight before her: a 
 queen walking apart from, yet in the gaze of 
 her people, would walk with the self-same air. 
 
 Below her, without turning her head, she was 
 conscious of the jumbled roofage of the sleep- 
 ing town ; there was the irregular line of the street, 
 and beyond, the massing of the houses at the hilly 
 end of the square. In a window, as she went 
 along, she caught the tiny gleam of a little red 
 lamp; she had seen that little gleam before; she 
 knew it burned all night long before a statue 
 of the Sacred Heart: to see it was a good omen. 
 
 She heard stirrings in the bushes they had 
 nothing to do with her; and she felt the sting of 
 the constant wind, but with that neither had she 
 anything to do. She drew the cloak about her 
 and made on. 
 
 Still tighter she drew it about her whilst she 
 knelt at the well, for the wind seemed to have 
 strengthened. Her two hands, almost hidden 
 within it, gripped its edges and drew them closer 
 and closer about her shoulders as she sank deeper
 
 THE PRICE 219 
 
 and deeper into the heart of her prayer. Her 
 forearms were folded, rigid and hard, pressing 
 against her breast. Her head was bent down 
 earnestly, so much so that the bone of her chin 
 seemed welded into the wrist bone of her left 
 hand. She had become one mass, without limbs 
 it seemed, and that mass was leant, almost fiercely, 
 against the grey and twisted trunk of a little 
 elder tree that the wind off the hillside had bent 
 away from the well. And so she prayed, without 
 a movement of the lips, perhaps without a word. 
 After some time a sound from far away dis- 
 turbed her: it was like a stronger wind than this 
 that was on her brow. She put it away from her, 
 it was a distraction. But it was still strength- 
 ening, and a throbbing had come into it. The 
 throbbing was now imparted to the whole place, to 
 her own framework of flesh and bone. She 
 wondered at it; and involuntarily glanced aside, 
 swiftly, when a light flashed up in a back window. 
 It did not last more than a second: it was sud- 
 denly quenched, leaving a great gap of darkness. 
 Then she heard a window raised, she heard a 
 voice say, "Listen, can't ye !" After a moment 
 she heard a different voice, a frightened voice, 
 cry out, "For God's sake, shut it!" The window 
 was shut down. Farther off, other voices were 
 speaking in low tones, as if from window to 
 window. They, too, ceased after a moment.
 
 220 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 And then the whole place was certainly throb- 
 bing to that ever-increasing, windy sound that 
 was coming nearer and nearer. She would not 
 stir: it would pass away, pass away into the 
 distance. 
 
 Thf t throbbing sound, furious with suppressed 
 force, suddenly swelled into a roar, had come 
 round a corner, swelled into a sudden song, loud, 
 drunken, triumphant. She did not know the 
 song. It was roaring rather than song, only 
 there was laughter in it. Shots were fired. She 
 leaped to the sound. She shook her head as if 
 there were marbles in her ears. Ail the dogs in 
 the place were howling or yapping. More shots 
 were fired, again, again; and glass began to fall 
 down on the flags. The throbbing was less now; 
 and the song was broken into odd phrases and 
 shouts; but the dogs were still howling or snap- 
 ping viciously. Orders were shouted out loudly, 
 fiercely. She could not stir. She had no 
 thought no more than a person has while he is 
 falling from a height to his death. Suddenly 
 there was wild cheering and a great glare shot 
 up, lit up everything in so bright a flash that she 
 could see nothing for it. But the flash of it 
 died down to one spot: there below her in the 
 street she could see great tongues of flames com- 
 ing out through the broken glass of Kelly's shop, 
 coming fiercely out and licking the front of the
 
 THE PRICE 221 
 
 house. She lost control of her limbs to under- 
 stand the meaning of it, to understand what was 
 come to her little town. She might have stood 
 up, or fallen down, or leaped up on the steps of 
 the stone cross. She was all eyes, glaring into that 
 corner of flame the rest of the town had 
 not shown a sign of life: not a window had been 
 raised, not a lamp lit! Against the flames, al- 
 most in under them, she could see human figures 
 running swiftly from place to place; they bent 
 down as they ran, and orders pursued them. 
 Now women's voices burst out, one of them wail- 
 ing out the Holy Name without ceasing. But 
 the little figures that were tending the flames only 
 ra'n the more swiftly from place to place. She 
 had seen pictures like it devils trying to burn 
 a saint of God: they were armed with long fork- 
 like implements. Her eyes fell on one of the 
 figures : his back was to the flames, he was star- 
 ing straight up at her; he grabbed another by the 
 shoulder : two of them, side by side, were staring 
 up at her, and she could not move. A little 
 crowd of them gathered then together; one of 
 them cried out, and another struck him on the 
 mouth; that she saw quite plainly. Then they 
 ran, all in the one direction, the man who was 
 struck running last. 
 
 "But she became a nun all the same."
 
 222 THE HOUNDS OF BANBA 
 
 < "She always intended to become a nun." 
 
 "But she should have waited till her parents 
 died." 
 
 "Well, she didn't." 
 
 "And they saw her from the street." 
 
 "More than they saw her. She had climbed 
 the steps of the cross, and stood by its side, with 
 her right hand stretched out, stiff; and the light 
 played up on her; and petrol makes a strong 
 light. They saw her hand move. They fled. 
 On the steps she was found." 
 
 "She saved Balliniskey. Look at what they 
 were after doing in Lismoran." 
 
 "She did; and perhaps that is why she did not 
 wait till her parents died before becoming a nun." 
 
 " 'Twas a sort of miracle. But then there's 
 Ciaran Mac Carthy." 
 
 "Yes, indeed." 
 
 "And there's Ireland, too." 
 
 "And this is the end of all, that all miracles are 
 the fruit of love."
 
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