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 o
f 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 af
fording 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.”
8
How long it is since I last saw Manchester! I don’t suppose that even now it is a bright place at midnight, and then it was dead.
Midnight! When I told Nellie the time she nearly fainted. She had never before been out at midnight. Late hours and sin were almost synonymous in her mind. She rose hastily, and in the matter-of-fact atmosphere of departure the faint note of hysteria that had come upon the evening was dissipated.
My Son, My Son Page 8