The farthest point of the bread round touched the comfortable suburb of Withington, and on a day in the following October as I was driving down a Withington street I was hailed by name. “Hi, Bill!” Dermot O’Riorden was leaning from a bedroom window. I pulled up, and soon Dermot came running down the short garden path. He looked younger and happier, and he looked prosperous. “Let me congratulate you,” he said, “on giving up the odious job of pen-pushing. A baker is a craftsman.”
“I’m not a baker,” I said. “I’m a van-boy.”
“Never mind. A baker’s van-boy is worth a platoon of stockbrokers in any decent community. Can you spare a minute? Drive the bloodstock in here.”
The house was square and solid, with a good front door, a bow-window on either side of it, and three flat windows on the first floor. There was a gate leading to a small coach-house at the side. I drove the van through, fastened the reins to a ring in the wall, and walked with Dermot to the front door.
“You’re looking prosperous,” I said. “This your house?”
His startled eyebrows took flight and his pale eyes laughed. “Prosperous, enough,” he said, “but not so prosperous as all that, as you’d know if you took the trouble to look us up now and then.”
It was a merited reproof. I had passed a sluggish winter and a lazy summer: chapel on Sunday nights, class meetings on Thursdays, too few evenings in my own room, and many, many evenings playing draughts and ludo with old Moscrop. Ludo was his favourite game. It was the most unprofitable stretch of time I had spent since that far-off day when I met Eustace Oliver. I had not even visited the only friends I had: Dermot and his wife and his parents.
“No,” said Dermot, “this is not my house. This is a job I’ve been doing—the biggest job I’ve had yet.”
I glanced about me. “It looks nice.”
“Nice! Is that all you’ve got to say about the work of the finest furniture designer in Manchester? Nice! It’s marvellous.”
He ran his hand with a characteristic caress over the panelling of the small square hall. “Right,” I agreed. “It’s marvellous.”
“And it all came out of having that little shop window in Deansgate. The chap who’s just bought this house was passing by, saw the furniture, and stepped right into the spider’s parlour. He’s given me a free hand to do what I like here within the £500 limit. That gives me a bit of profit.”
Dermot took me proudly round the house, and pointed out that he was doing decoration as well as furnishing. “Does anything strike you about it all?” he asked when we had walked through all the rooms.
“Clean, bright, airy...”
“Simplification. I’m cutting off the curls and getting down to the skull. I’m keeping my work as solid as anything Morris ever did, but I’m taking out a lot of the fancy work. Look at this table.”
We were in the dining-room, and the table was certainly a lovely one. “D’you remember the one I made for my mother?” Dermot asked. “Those great bulging legs? I shudder now when I look at them. See the difference? This is just a table: solid, straightforward. Everything there is to it is due to sheer proportion. And believe me, that’s perfect.”
It was, so far as I could see. “I’ve taken out of there the foulest fireplace you ever saw,” said Dermot, “and put in that simple surround of Dutch tiles. The walls will be white. I wish we could have some cleaner light than gas. We all shall, of course, soon. But I’m just a bit too soon for that. And I want to find a new name for myself. I’m not just a cabinetmaker any more. I want something to give the idea that I take over the whole show and make it beautiful. You see, I’m thinking of my new shop. I want a bigger place all to myself. How’s this: Maker of beautiful furniture and decorator of interiors?”
Common enough now. Everyone is an interior decorator today. But Dermot O’Riorden was the first man I heard use the words and the first man I saw employing simplification, pure proportion, in place of a gaudy opulence.
“Hallo there! Anyone in?” a voice shouted from the hall, and Sheila walked into the room, carrying a basket. “The boss’s lunch,” she said. The boss bounded across the room and threw his arms about her. She was looking very happy and well, the black eyes dancing in her small dark face.
She shook hands and invited me to share the lunch. “There’s enough for three,” she said. “I’m trying to get some fat on this old skinnimalink.”
But it was already more than time that I was off. I stayed long enough to express surprise that she was able to leave the shop. “You don’t know the half our news yet,” said Dermot. “You ought to keep in touch with your friends. I’ve got an assistant in the shop now that I’m out on jobs like this. Because, you see, this is only the first. And Sheila’s got a house all of her own—haven’t you—eh?” And he gave her a loving hug.
“You must come and see us, Bill,” Sheila said. “Tomorrow night?”
Dermot gave me the address, and I said I’d be there. Then I went, leaving Sheila unpacking the lunch basket on the lovely table. I shouted back through the open window, as I turned the horse into the road: “I may bring a friend.”
*
Now why had I said that? I turned to the right into Wilmslow Road, driving back towards Hulme, and I kept on asking myself: Why did the idea come to me to take Nellie Moscrop to see Dermot and Sheila? And I had to say that it was simply because she had become so accustomed, so familiar. For the greater part of a year now she had grown on me like a habit. The chapel and the class meeting, one or two week-night lectures at Oddy Road, a chapel society or two. At one of them I had been induced to read a paper on the novels of Charles Dickens. It was a good paper. I still have it. I have read it recently and was not ashamed of it. I kept it because it was the first piece of writing I managed to finish. Nothing else had been finished. Both Nellie—very timorously—and old Moscrop in a brutal matter-of-fact fashion over the ludo board—inquired from time to time about the novel. It made the blood rush to my head. I hated to be asked about anything I was writing, particularly when it was going dreadfully; but I managed polite answers.
“Polite answers” about summed up my relationship with Nellie. I couldn’t but be aware of her hovering and enveloping presence, particularly as her father again and again emphasised it.
“Cooking’s not what it used to be, Nellie,” he said one night as we all sat at supper.
The poor girl’s agitation was at once extreme. She was a born housewife, and was touched to the quick. The frown deepened between her eyebrows, and without speaking she gave puzzled looks first at him, then at the excellent food on the table. Old Moscrop, who sat opposite me, allowed one eyelid to rise, then fall in a slow-motion wink. “I mean,” he explained, “it’s better than it used to be when you had only your poor old father to consider. Feed the brute—eh?—if I may coin a phrase—feed the brute.”
At that, Nellie’s confusion became greater than ever. She had nothing to say. There was nothing to say. I had myself noticed the gradually intensified attention she had given to the table.
It was not only that. She kept my room spotless. My metal pen-tray and inkwell were always being polished, and, though I had protested that it was not her job, she cleaned out my fireplace and relaid the fire every time I lit it. She insisted on my wearing extra clothing when the weather was very cold, and once, when I looked for my spare shoes, I found that she had sent them to the cobbler because one had a small leak.
When we went out together she spoke but little, yet I could feel the happiness in her heart. If by accident I touched her I was aware of the shock that went through her to the marrow. That night when I read the paper on Dickens she sat listening to me with glistening eyes as though I were a prime minister proposing some copper-bottomed scheme to secure the well-being of the nation; and when some misguided fool suggested that perhaps Miss Moscrop would propose the vote of thanks, she got on to her legs, trembled, and sat down, shaking her head.
Altogether, there was no doubt that Nellie was in love with me. I didn’t feel even an egotistical pride that, without effort, I had achieved this miracle. It was hardly possible to conceive one human being less enthusiastic about another than I was about Nellie. And yet those words I had shouted to Dermot put the whole situation on a different footing. Hitherto, we had gone nowhere together save at her invitation. Now, for the first time, I was proposing to invite her. The words had come almost unconsciously to my lips. I remembered old Moscrop’s question: “What about the bakery when I’m gone?” Was that it? The bakery was not grandeur, but it was a sort of security. It was a place where a man could be his own boss, and get down in comfort to other things which he might wish to do. I was not aghast at this sudden beam of insight into my own mind. I just shut off the beam quickly and drove home.
*
There was a snap of autumn in the air the next morning. When I had got the bread van loaded, I slipped into the living-room, to drink a final cup of tea before setting out on the round. It was another of the small domestic habits I had got into, and in which Nellie pampered me. Moscrop was pampered too. Everything was done for him in those days. I had been nearly a year under his roof, and bit by bit I had learned most of what was to be known about his business and had taken off his hands one responsibility after another. First under his direction, and now using my own intelligence, I was doing all the buying for the business, and deciding such matters as when a defaulting customer should be struck off the supply. Moscrop’s asthma was going from bad to worse, and now the paroxysms seized him almost daily. It was small wonder that he got up later and later, and on that morning in October, 1891, when I returned back for my cup of tea, he was just sitting down to his breakfast. The Manchester Guardian was open on the table before him.
He looked up when I entered the room. “Parnell’s dead,” he announced.
“Oh,” I said, for Parnell dead or alive meant nothing to me.
Nellie came in from the kitchen, carrying a teapot. “Wasn’t he a bad man?” she asked.
“He was an adulterer,” Moscrop exclaimed, his face going turgid with passion, “an adulterer, and a traitor, too.”
One did not lightly use the word adulterer in those days in the presence of a girl like Nellie Moscrop. She placed the teapot hastily upon the table and retreated to the kitchen. When she returned with her father’s eggs and bacon, I saw that her face was burning, and, as Moscrop was still glowering at the paper and looking as though he might burst out again at any moment, I said, to ease the tension: “Nellie, a friend of mine has asked me to have supper tonight with him and his wife. Would you like to come with me? He’d be glad to meet you. And his wife’s a very nice girl. They’re just about our age.”
The crimson in Nellie’s cheeks did not diminish, but now I knew it was not for the adultery of Mr. Charles Stewart Parnell. “I’d love to,” she said. “May I, Father?”
Moscrop, too, forgot his rage. “May I, may I,” he mimicked wheezily. “We’ve got a dutiful daughter, haven’t we? Always wondering whether what she does pleases us, eh? Well, well, well. Do something to please yourself for once, my girl. And this pleases you, eh? I can see it does. Yes, I can see it does.”
He wandered on heavily, driving her from the room again, and when we were alone he gave me one of his stupendous winks. “Bill,” he said, “none but the brave deserves the fair, if I may coin a phrase”; and that drove me out, too. I wanted to offer him no chance to wish me luck, which he was clearly on the point of doing.
*
We walked all the way to Dermot’s house that night. It is a good step from Hulme to Ancoats, where he was still living, hut interesting enough. Near as Hulme is to the heart of Manchester, Nellie’s time was so closely divided between home and chapel that she rarely visited the great shopping streets. So we wandered through Oxford Street, and across the big open space of Albert Square to Cross Street, and went slowly up Market Street. Then we turned off to the left through the mean streets that led to Ancoats. It was all a grand adventure to Nellie. The mere thought of going to a meal with strangers was to her exciting and a little disturbing.
“D’you think they’ll like me?” she asked nervously, as we turned into Dermot’s dingy street.
“Good gracious,” I said rather crossly, “why should they not like you? Always try to look at it like that. Don’t get into the habit of looking down on yourself. Dermot and Sheila are intelligent, courteous people.”
“Are they Catholics?” she asked, and the fear of the Scarlet Woman was in her voice.
“I don’t know what they are. They’ve never mentioned religion to me, and if I were you, I wouldn’t mention it to them. Anyway, here’s their front door. Don’t you think it looks a treat?”
Evidently Dermot was not going to hide under a bushel his light as a decorator. It was by now dark, but the light of a street lamp fell upon the door, painted an olive green that shone like silk, and decorated with a lovely brass knocker wrought in the conventional but always to me pleasing shape of a lion’s head with a ring passing through the mouth. It was an agreeable door to find in that miserable little street.
Dermot and Sheila both came to the door full of welcome, and when they had drawn us into their sitting-room, even Nellie’s reticence dropped enough to permit the exclamation to be drawn from her: “How beautiful!”
“D’you know, Miss Moscrop,” Dermot laughed, “I believe it is! You see what Bill misses by giving the cold shoulder to his friends.”
“And what we miss, too,” said Sheila, “when he doesn’t allow us to meet his other friends.”
“You’re full of blarney, the pair of you,” I protested, “but this is a lovely room.”
“Just advertisement,” said Dermot. “I’ve got to stun my clients. Coming in and out of that bloody street, they get the full sense of contrast.”
Nellie stared hard on hearing a forbidden word so gaily spoken, and Sheila said: “Dermot, try to be bloodless this evening, will you?”
Dermot gave a loud self-accusing laugh, crossed over to Nellie, and knelt before her with his head bowed. “Strike me, Miss Moscrop,” he said. “Smite the devil out of me, if you think such words devilish. Anyway,” he added gravely, “I’ll say it no more. ’Twas not courteous.”
The room we were sitting in had been stripped down to the plaster and painted white. “You’ll forgive the fireplace,” said Dermot. “That’s the landlord’s, and I can’t touch it.” The floorboards were stained and polished, and in front of the fireplace was the first white rug I ever saw in my life. The curtains, too, were a new idea to me. They were of a rich material, deeply red, and what was strange about them in a cottage home was that they did not merely cover the window. They were hangings, not curtains. They hung in graceful drapery over the whole wall. One small low table stood in front of them, and on it was an earthenware pitcher containing white chrysanthemums. There were a few beautifully-made book-cases stocked with volumes whose bindings were all of vivid colours. The only other furniture in the room was a big billowy divan and two easy chairs; and the light was from a lamp, shaded with parchment-coloured silk, on a stand of finely wrought iron. Sheila went well with that room. She wore a long Pre-Raphaelite-looking dress of dusky red that suited the dark vivacious beauty of her face.
“The worst of these two-up-and-two-downs,” said Dermot, “is that we can’t have a dining-room. This is very nice to sit in, but we shall have to feed in the kitchen. I haven’t tried to make that a work of art, because I shall be out of this as soon as I can. So come on now, and enjoy the beauty of contrast.”
The contrast was striking enough, though Sheila’s kitchen was spotless. The chairs and the table, which was covered by a red-and-white check cloth, were of Dermot’s new simple workmanship, and everything superfluous had been swept out of the room. Sheila brought a steak-and-kidney pie straight from the oven to the table, and Dermot produced a bottle of wine from the dresser.
“This to grace a rare occasion,” he announced, “indeed, two rare occasions. One, the return of William Essex to the friends of his youth; and, two, the receipt of Dermot O’Riorden of his first cheque. My client has paid up today, with a handsome testimonial thrown in.” He held the bottle of Burgundy towards Nellie’s glass. “Miss Moscrop, permit me.”
Nellie, with a little panic-stricken gesture, placed her hand over the glass. “I’m a teetotaller,” she said, in a small frightened voice. Sheila at once filled her glass from the water-jug.
“You, Bill?” Dermot asked.
“Yes. We must drink to the cheque.”
“Now safely in the bank. It came by this morning’s post, and before the morning was out I’d opened an account.”
“And drawn ten pounds out of it,” said Sheila.
“And drawn ten pounds out of it. But that doesn’t alter the fact that the account’s open. It’s a grand moment, Bill, when you open an account. You must try it some day.”
“I shall.”
“D’you make anything out of your writing yet?”
“Nothing,” I said ruefully.
“He doesn’t stick at it, Mr. O’Riorden,” Nellie exclaimed suddenly. “I do all I can to make him. I do wish he’d go on with it. He could do it. I know he could. You should have heard his paper on Charles Dickens.” Then she shut up with swift embarrassment; and Sheila said kindly: “He will, Nellie. May I call you that? Don’t try to rush him. Just leave him alone. Leave him alone when he doesn’t want to write, and particularly leave him alone when he does. There; I sound quite motherly. Dermot, the cheese and biscuits are behind you on the dresser.”
We drank to the cheque, and Dermot and Sheila drank to me and Nellie, and we then drank to them. It was all rather silly and childish, but happy and friendly, and when the two girls had put on aprons and carried the things to the scullery, Dermot and I went back to the sitting-room. He took out a tobacco-pouch and began to fill a pipe. “My latest vice,” he said. “Haven’t you taken to it?”
“No.”
“Oh, you must,” he said. “That’s what’s wrong with your writing. Come on; come and buy a pipe at once.”
“No, no. Don’t be daft.”
“Daft! You’ll thank me to your dying day. Come on, now. I insist on buying you a pipe out of my first cheque. You buy me something when you get yours.”
“Good. That’s a bargain.”
He shouted to Sheila that he’d be back in a minute, and we plunged out into the short bleak street that was now full of a thin fog. The lights of the tobacconist’s shop on the corner were an orange smudge till we were almost upon them. Dermot bought me the best briar pipe the shop had, together with an ounce of Smith’s Glasgow Mixture, and I bought myself a red rubber tobacco-pouch. The counter of the little shop was strewn with cheap periodicals. Dermot took one up. It was called Titbits. “Stick that in your pocket and study it when you get home,” he said. “That’s how you’ll make your money to begin with.”
Then we wandered back through the cold foggy dark. It was not till we were just outside the door that Dermot said: “That girl’s in love with you—madly in love with you. Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
“So long as you know. She’s a good girl. She’s honest.”
Sheila and Nellie were back in the sitting-room, with coffee on a little table. They sat on the big divan, and Dermot and I, smoking our pipes, on either side of the fire. Nellie watched my performance as though it were of unusual virtuosity, and Sheila chaffed me unmercifully, and pointed out the quickest route to the back-yard. But I didn’t suffer any of the qualms I had been led to expect, and I don’t think a day has gone by from that time to this without my smoking a pipe. Heaven help me! That night was forty-five years ago!
Forty-five years ago since Dermot drew that letter out of his pocket and said: “Oh, I was going to tell you, Bill. I got a letter from Fergus this morning. He’s thriving in the States. Fergus is my brother, Miss Moscrop. He went out to join my uncle in New York. Listen to this.
“‘My dear Dermot,—Why don’t you chuck your fretwork and come out here and join me? I’ve been asking you for years, but I’ll never be able to make you realise what you’re missing. The more I see of Uncle Con, the more amazing he appears to be. I simply can’t realise that he and father were brothers. These stores of his are beginning now to push out of New York and he swears that in the next ten years he will have one in every town of over 50,000 inhabitants in the States. Next week I go to Chicago, where we are opening up the first outside New York. I wish to the Lord you’d come and help to keep the money in the family. I am—let me say it modestly—already Uncle Con’s right-hand man, but there’s room for you, too.
“‘Believe me, Dermot, this is the life—incredible after Ancoats. But I’m getting used to it now, getting used to a house full of servants, getting used to seeing the old man signing 10,000-dollar cheques for charity.
“‘One thing I can’t get used to is Uncle Con’s Irish republican mania. You know I’ve been a sort of confidential secretary to him for years now, and it’s been an eye-opener. This country is riddled with secret societies. The old man is always meeting the maddest Irishmen, and the amount of his money that flows down that drain is beyond belief. There’s a wizened little rat called Michael Flynn who’s for ever to and fro between here and Ireland, and he never goes from this house without a wad in his pocket. Look out for this chap Flynn. He’s in England now, and Uncle Con has given him your address. If he looks you up, I hope you will be more pleased to see him than I ever am.
“‘But that’s how it is, Dermot. It seems that in our family we can’t have two brothers simultaneously devoted to Irish freedom. Father never cared a hoot about it, but his brother’s mad, with a purely sentimental madness, because he’d no more go back to live in Ireland than he’d fly. And now there’s you with Cathleen ni Houlihan and the I.R.A. on the brain, while all I ask is to be allowed to get on with the job of taking the O’Riorden chain of stores from here to the Pacific coast. We’ll do it, too, a darn sight sooner than you’ll see a President running an Irish Republic.’”
“There’s plenty more like that,” said Dermot, “but that’s enough. What do you think of my brother, Miss Moscrop?”
Nellie blinked at him short-sightedly, and the pucker deepened between her brows. “Really, Mr. O’Riorden,” she said, “I know nothing about these matters, but your brother seems a very sensible man to me.”
Dermot’s eyes suddenly blazed with anger and contempt. “Yes,” he said, clapping the letter down upon the mantelpiece, “very sensible.”
Then, his voice rising to a shrill note: “D’you know nothing,” he cried, “of the way Ireland has been bled and butchered and drained white by this damned money-grubbing Empire of yours, by the fat landlords sitting on their backsides in London, while the peasants haven’t so much as a rotten potato to eat—”
Sheila jumped up and put her arms around him. “Dermot, my darling,” she said, “not tonight, please, not tonight.”
He sat down, white and trembling, upon the divan, muttering: “I’m a pretty host, am I not? I’m a pretty host,” and at that moment there was a knock, which sounded furtive and discreet, upon the front door. Sheila went to see who was there, and a moment later returned with the strangest little gnome of a man I had ever seen. He cannot have been more than five feet high, and at first it was difficult to see him at all. A long double-breasted overcoat almost obliterated him and swept the floor at his feet. A woollen muffler was wound round his neck, and a black felt hat was pulled down over his eyes which at first were all we could see of his features, peeping brightly out from ambush.
“Dermot, this is Mr. Michael Flynn,” Sheila said.
Dermot leapt to his feet and took the hand of the diminutive creature with what seemed to me to be almost reverence. “Mr. Michael Flynn!” he said. “Chester. The rising of ’67. Clerkenwell gaol.” And it sounded as though he were talking of Troy and Salamis.
Michael Flynn was introduced to me and Nellie, and as he shook my hand I was astonished by the strength and fervour of his grip. He took off his hat, unwound the muffler from round his neck, and then pulled off his overcoat. He threw the coat down on the uncarpeted floor, and there was a hard sound as though the pocket contained metal.
There he stood, dressed in dingy tweeds, with a face like a small withered Shakespeare’s. The little pointed beard was red; the hair brushed back from the great domed cranium was thin and dirty-looking; the eyes were bright and furtive as a weasel’s. He pulled a pipe and tobacco-pouch from his pocket. “I may smoke?” he asked.
“Yes, do,” said Sheila.
“And drink, too, I hope,” said Dermot. He hastened to the kitchen for the Burgundy. The bottle was still half-full. We had been timorous drinkers. Dermot placed the bottle and a glass on a table by Flynn’s chair. Flynn filled the glass, took a swig as though it had been beer, and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
“Ye’ve heard of me from your uncle?” he asked.
“We’ve heard of you from many people,” Dermot answered, and Sheila nodded.
“I don’t often need an introduction to patriots,” said Flynn, “and now we can all be at home. Your uncle gave me your address, Mr. O’Riorden, in case I should need it, if ye know what I mean?”
Dermot nodded, his eyes bright. “I have never had a chance to do anything,” he said. “I have done nothing but talk. I long to do something real.”
“Perhaps you will,” said Flynn. “But there’s no need just now. I’m not in hiding tonight. If I was, I know I could count on Conal O’Riorden’s grandson.”
Dermot started in his chair. “You didn’t know my grandfather?” he asked.
“Did I not!” Flynn demanded, his voice rising suddenly to a passionate note. “Did he not die in these arms with the front of his belly sticking to his spine? Ye’ve heard of the famine of 1845? Ye’ve heard of two million Irishmen, some of them rotting in the ground like the rotten potatoes that they couldn’t eat, some of them flying overseas, driven out of the dear motherland that couldn’t suckle her own children because the breasts of her were drained dry by the English parasites? Ay, ye’ve heard of that, but did no one tell ye that your grandfather and grandmother, too, died in a ditch—in a ditch on the roadside with the cold rain raining down and none but me to close their eyes?”
Dermot sat with his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, gazing exaltedly at the old man who had risen and was striding to and fro before the fire. “They keep these things from ye,” he cried, his face fanatically shining. “What shall we do with Irish fathers who keep these things from their sons? I’m an old man. I’m seventy-six years old, and may the Mother of God help me to fight for Ireland to the last. I was thirty years old when the famine came, and never a day since then has passed but I’ve lifted up my hand against England.”
Flynn was a great story-teller, and the story he told that night was one which, clearly, he had told many times before. He held us all spellbound with his picture of the quiet country life of men and women who asked nothing of God or man but the leave to work and eat a little food. “Never a bite of meat from year’s end to year’s end, Potatoes were good enough to keep life in the likes of us.”
He made us feel the long wet sunless days that came with the autumn of 1845, the spread of the potato-disease that wiped out the food of a people, the settling down of winter with the famine-fever spreading through the land, and dysentery and starvation.
“We warmed our bellies at our little fires of peat, but, God, man, you need to warm a belly from the inside.
“And then,” said Flynn, in a hushed dramatic whisper, “they began to die. Old men and old women and little children, dying up and down the length and breadth of a fertile land that God made to bear laughing harvests. But the only harvest was death’s harvest. And when death grinned at the window, out they would go, shivering with ague, weak bags of skin and bone, indistinguishable from death themselves, to ask the food which they knew they would never find. They wandered to the towns, and there was no food in the towns, and they lay down on the pavements and died there. It was a winter not fit for dogs to be abroad, with death and pestilence riding in the fog, but up and down the land they went, dressed like scarecrows in a few old rags, crawling up the little bohereens to knock at cottage doors. But no one came from the cottages to give them food because there was no food in the cottages. There were only dead men and women—only citizens,” Flynn burst out in a sudden gust of rage, “of the great Empire that was carrying Christianity to the heathen millions of the earth.”
None of us uttered a word. The little man stood erect before the fireplace, holding us with his blue eye and with the ease of one accustomed to moving multitudes of people.
“It was in December of that year,” he said, “that my father died—God give him rest eternal.” He crossed himself, and Dermot and Sheila crossed themselves, too. Nellie, already shaken by meeting a man the like of whom she had never guessed at, noticed with dismay those three flickering gestures, those sketchy evocations of Calvary.
“He died in the morning,” said Michael Flynn. “We were alone in the little cabin on the edge of the bog, he and I. I was his only son. My mother had long been dead. There was a bed of sacks in the corner of the cabin, and he lay there burning with the fever. There was no light but what came from the smoulder of the peat, and all night long I knelt by his bed and now and then dipped my finger in a cup of water to wet his lips. He was only fifty-five. He would have been a strong man in his prime, but there he lay, the skin clinging to his skull and the great eyes of him burning in their sockets. He was in his working clothes as he had first lain down, and at the same time he burned and shivered. I sat there in the lonely cabin and listened to the rising wind and the rain on the roof and at the window, and I thought of all the thousands who were dying in my dear land. They were dying like this in their cabins, and they were dying out there under the sky, these poor rent-paying beasts who could be left to rot to death now that they could pay their rent no longer.”
Flynn paused again, and in the silence we heard that in Ancoats, too, the rain was suddenly beating on the window. He held up his finger. “Hush!” he commanded. “That is the sound I heard, long years ago, in the silence and loneliness of the night. And that sound, Dermot O’Riorden, was the sound of shot! It was the sound of battle. It was the call that from that day to this has been ever in my ears—the call to drive from a land that was never theirs the oppressors who doomed us to labour that they might live riotously, and when we could labour no longer doomed us to support as best we might the obscene death that their eyes must not be troubled to behold!
“When the little window whitened with the dawn, I stood away from the bed and looked out upon the new day that was coming over the bog. Grey and wet and hopeless it was, another grand day for the crucifixion of Ireland. I turned back to my father, and in that brief moment he was gone.
“I left him there, without burial, as so many thousands were left, and went out into the sad day. There was nothing to wait for now. My aim was to get to Cork and go to America. I had not gone far when I found a man lying in a ditch by the roadside, and that was your grandfather, Dermot. He was young—no older than I was myself—thirty, I should say; and when I bent down to lift him up I saw that his coat had been thrown over a woman to keep her from the wet and cold. She was dead, but beautiful as she lay there with the rain falling upon her open eyes, and a look almost of relief upon her face. I sat in the ditch, and took the man upon my knees, and laid his head upon my breast. My body warmed him, and he opened his eyes, and at that moment there came along a man wheeling all that he possessed upon a hand-cart. He had a little brandy, and he poured a drop between the dying man’s lips. He revived enough to tell us a story that we knew only too well: how he and his wife had wandered forth to seek food and had found nothing, how they had reached the end of their strength there in the ditch, and how they had lain there all night. He told us that two children had been left behind in the cabin, and he told us where the cabin was, and then he died. I laid him alongside his wife, and the man with the hand-cart and I went on together.
“He told me that he, too, was going to Cork, where he had a brother who was a priest. He was no priest himself, but a profane blasphemer who put into words the black curses that were in my heart. God grant him pardon and rest eternal.” Again three crosses flickered through the room. “He had a little money which bought a bite of the food that was hoarded here and there, and that and his precious brandy kept the breath of life in us. We picked up the two boys and put them on the hand-cart, and we made Cork on the third day. We had walked through a graveyard, the like of which God grant we never see again.”
Silence fell for a while, then Dermot said: “And one of the boys was my father?”
“He was. And one was your uncle. You have a brother, Dermot, not living in a house like this. He’s living in a palace full of kowtowing servants and all the fat is flowing to his side of the plate. He doesn’t like me. No, no—don’t protest. I know it. But perhaps he’d think more of me if he knew what his uncle, Con O’Riorden, knows, and what you know now. But you needn’t tell him. There are few amusements left for me now, and one is to think that that young man would not be in existence if I hadn’t trundled his father to Cork on a hand-cart.”
With the great story off his chest, Michael Flynn relaxed a little, filled his pipe, and sat down. We all breathed easier. In more matter-of-fact tones, Flynn told how he had left the two boys with the Irish priest whom he had never seen again, nor his blaspheming generous brother. “So you see,” he said, “that’s how I became a Fenian. That’s how I was mixed up in the attempt to seize Chester Castle in ’67, and in the great scheme for a rising in Ireland only a month later.”
“Tell us about that,” said Sheila breathlessly, and once again Flynn was launched on a tremendous narrative. “The snow defeated us,” he said. “We reckoned all factors except the snow, for snow is not a thing you count on much in Ireland. We had the guns and we had the boys, and up and down the land we were to meet, but mostly in the defiles and gorges of the mountains. And day after day the snow fell, and it fell night after night. The fields were deep in it, the roads were impassable, and the drifts filled the meeting-places in the mountains. We had some grand commanders, men who had learned their job in the American civil war, but what could commanders do against the little feathery traitors that were mightier than all the police in their barracks?”
And so the great rebellion fizzled out with a few unco-ordinated shootings here and there, a few deaths, a few arrests, and all much as it was before.
Then the reckless old Fenian had come to Manchester. “Kelly and Deasy,” he said. “Grand fellows they were. They had lain out with me in the hills of Antrim. They had been with me in New York. Ay, Dermot, time was passing. We were veterans. Twenty-two years had gone by since the famine, twenty-two years in which we had done much and suffered much. I know the climate of Dartmoor. I know it well.” He leaned back in his chair, smiling with reminiscent complacency through the smoke-filled room. Sheila got up and stirred the fire before he went on. “We go our different ways. Dartmoor was mine for a long time, success in New York was your uncle’s. Mind you, he was not then the wealthy man he has since become, but already he was well-to-do and a power in the Irish movement. I went there as soon as I was out of gaol, and there I first met Kelly and Deasy. We worked together, and not long after the little traitor snowflakes had fallen in Ireland, Kelly and Deasy were arrested in Manchester.
“So to Manchester I came, and others came, too, but you may be sure we did not travel together. If I were here on such business as that tonight, Dermot, I would be asking you to hide me. But then I did not go to your father. No; I went to a patriot.”
I watched Dermot’s hands instinctively clench themselves, and the green flecks light his eyes; nor were those signs lost on Flynn, who had spent a dangerous lifetime in the reading of men. “Ach, lad,” he said, “don’t let it worry you. To some of us God gives the guts to suffer and, if need be, die; to others he doesn’t, and that’s all there is to it.
“Well, one by one we gathered in that house: Allen, O’Brien, Larkin, Condon, and a few others whose names I forget, and we made our plan to rescue Kelly and Deasy. It all seemed as easy as kissing the Blarney Stone. We knew that as sure as fate they’d be remanded and sent back to gaol, and so we’d post ourselves in a spot where the Black Maria’d pass, hold it up, smash it open, and rush the boys away.
“And so, some on one side of the street, some on the other, we waited, and sure enough there came the Black Maria as I’ll see it to my dying day. I’ll never forget the great horses tossing their heads up and down, jingling the bits and chains that shone like new silver, or the white foam of their mouths, or the red nostrils of them as I rushed out, brandished my revolver, planted myself in the road, and yelled: ‘Stop, or begod, I’ll blow lights through you!’
“Ye see, that was my job: to stop the van and keep the policeman on the box covered while the other boys smashed a way in to Deasy and Kelly. It was all to be so simple: a revolver shot in the lock, and out they’d come. Well, so they did, but the shot killed a sergeant, and that’s why they hanged Allen, Larkin and O’Brien: three men hanged for an accidental death.
“I’d made my own plans for Kelly and Deasy and myself. We did some quiet dodging through the back streets till we came out almost on the very spot where the sergeant was shot. That was the last place where they’d dream of looking for us, and that was where I’d arranged we’d stay. There was a grand patriot there, an undertaker, who hailed from County Down, and he had three fine coffins in his window. The coffins were on trestles, and no one could see the air-holes in the bottom. We knew that house would be searched, and there we stayed in the coffins in the shop window till it was all over. Then he drove us out, still in the coffins, one one night, one the next, and one the night after that, and who would stop a coffin that was being delivered at the house of death? But we were delivered to friends far enough away, and I was not in Manchester again till the day the martyrs died. I mingled with the crowd that all night long—a dark November night—danced and sang before the prison. ‘Rule Britannia,’ they sang, and I skulked among them vowing my soul to the day when Britannia should rule no more.
“It was the Manchester martyrs that turned Parnell’s thoughts to Home Rule, and now Parnell himself is dead. Do we regret it?”
“No!” Dermot shouted, and Sheila, sitting there white-lipped and fascinated, murmured: “No, not the likes of him.”
“You’re right, my children,” Flynn said, standing erect once more, and, for all his little stature, dominating us with the concentrated venom of his looks. “Who wants Home Rule? Who wants to listen to a set of bloody play-boys larricking in the House of Commons and affording the great British public as much amusement as a pack of paid clowns? What sort of Ireland would Parnell have given us if he’d got his Home Rule? He’d have had his Irish Parliament, and what would he have been then? A good old Tory, sitting on his behind at Avonmore as comfortably as an English squire in Berkshire.” The little man’s voice rose high. “We who’ve been through the blood and fire, we who’ve seen our fathers rot, we who’ve toiled in English gaols and seen the flag fly up to announce our comrades’ deaths at English hands—we don’t want Home Rule. We want Ireland, all Ireland, nothing but Ireland, to be the home of our people for ever and ever.”
There was a dramatic silence. I looked round the room, myself moved by the man’s eloquence. Nellie sat staring at him as at some monster in human shape. Never before had she met a man who gloried in what she could but consider a life of crime. Dermot’s face was painfully working. Sheila’s countenance was rapt and lit. No one wished to break the quiet. It was broken by a sudden low cry from Sheila. She placed her hand to her side. Dermot at once leapt up and went to her. Flynn crossed the room in a stride and took her hand. “What is it, alannah? What is it, then?” he murmured.
Sheila looked at Dermot. “The child!” she whispered. “I felt him—for the first time. I felt him stirring.”
“You will give him to Ireland,” said Flynn simply.
Dermot stood up. “God damn England,” he said. “We will give him to Ireland.”
“We will,” said Sheila. “God bless Ireland.”