My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  Now they slanted over the cross-roads, with the hop-shuffle-hop stabbing its pain through Rory, and they came through a loose-swinging gate to the big field in whose far corner was the dark loom of the barn. So near their refuge, they tried to hurry, Rory swinging out his leg and muttering to them to go quickly. When they were in the gloom of the great building they rested again for a while, drawing deep sobs of joy, fugitives come through ordeal to sanctuary.

  Literally, in there, they could not see a step before their faces. But they knew every inch of that way, and unerringly crossed the wide uneven floor to the corner where the ladder went up to the loft. Clinging with both hands, hopping on one leg, Rory could make the ascent alone, every rung gained at the cost of anguish as his loose-hanging leg jarred the ladder. He lay again, half-fainting, at the top. Conroy went warily forward to hold aside the loose boards; Maggie finished the journey as she had begun it, with Rory’s strangling arms about her neck.

  And now, indeed in sanctuary at last, they chanced a light: the merest glim cast by a small electric torch with a handkerchief tied round its head. They laid Rory upon the pallet, gave him brandy, and then Maggie cut off one leg of his trousers and turned to the box where she kept her bandages and splints.

  “My God, there’s not a splint in the place,” she groaned as the pitiful little light fell upon the box that was her pride. Everything was there, everything she needed, except some pieces of flat wood. She and Conroy gazed with consternation into the box.

  “We could smash the box,” he said.

  “’Tis too strong. I wouldn’t dare risk the noise.”

  “Well, listen, Maggie. You’ll find some bits of packing-case wood downstairs behind the door. I brought them myself, intending to smooth them off some day.”

  “Look after him,” said Maggie. “Not an inch must he stir. I’ll be back at once.”

  *

  Sitting on the bench in Richmond Park, with the deer stepping delicately across the grass that was vivid with the green of earliest spring, Maggie paused and looked round in wonder, as though from the horrors she had been recounting she had stepped suddenly into an awareness of the graciousness about her. “I must go on,” she said. “It will hurt you.” I nodded, and she continued.

  “When I got downstairs to the floor of the barn, I was afraid. I had the tiny light with me, and it made the shadows more frightening than if there had been no light at all. I felt as though someone were walking behind me, and someone was. He said suddenly: ‘I was sure there were three of you. Where are the others?’

  “I stopped quite still. He said: ‘Don’t move. Don’t turn round. There’s no reason for you to see me.’ Then he took the little light from my hand and stuck the end of the torch in a truss of hay. ‘That’s excellent,’ he said. ‘Now I can see you, but I can remain invisible as I have been ever since you left the house. Where are the others?’

  “He had a beautiful voice. He spoke so low and so pleasantly that I was almost betwitched into answering.

  “‘We followed that other fellow, too,’ he said ‘the one with the broken wrist. We didn’t want to lose any of the bonny fighters. There’s a matter of a dozen or so dead men to be accounted for, to say nothing of the lot blown up in the lorry last night. Tell me, where are the others?’

  “I did not speak. I could almost feel him shrug his shoulders, almost see him smile, standing there behind me in the dark. ‘No?’ he said. ‘No information? Well, my dear, I’m in command of the men here. I feel responsible, you know, after what’s happened today. I’m afraid I shall have to find out. Where are the others?’

  “This time, he reached out his arm from behind me so that I could see he held a revolver. Then he drew it back, and there was nothing but the voice. It was so different a voice from any that I expected—so smooth and speaking so beautifully.

  “‘Well, ’pon my soul,’ he said at last, ‘if you don’t speak soon, then by the word of an Essex—’

  “And then I knew. All the time he had been speaking, that voice coming out of the dark seemed to be coming out of the darkness of years and years ago. It had been puzzling my memory, and when he said the name everything lit up. I thought of us all sitting that night, singing, when that mad old captain came and we all sang his hymn. And I thought of swimming and sailing and fishing, and he and Rory loving one another. And I thought my heart would break with joy because I knew I had only to turn round and see a face I remembered and say: ‘But, Oliver, it’s Rory. He’s upstairs. You won’t want to hurt him.’

  “And then I turned round, and he said: ‘Humph! Inquisitive? Well, here I am.’ And with that he turned a strong torch of his own full on his face. And, oh, dear God, it wasn’t the face I knew. It was cold and cruel, and the eyes were smiling terribly with wound marks round them, and there were wounds that twisted his lips to a sneer. And my heart dried up, and fear came on me, and suddenly I shrieked.

  “And that was how I betrayed Rory.

  “There was silence after I shrieked, and then he shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘That ought to fetch ’em.’ He didn’t know me. I could see that he didn’t know me.

  “And then there was nothing to do but wait. He had snapped out his torch. I could hear a creeping and crawling along the floor of the loft. He could hear it, too. It went on for a long time, till I knew that Rory was at the opening over the ladder. Then suddenly a big electric torch flashed from up there down into the floor of the barn and began searching for us. It was Conroy holding it, so that Rory could shoot. When the shot came I screamed again, and the thunder in my ears drowned the noise of my own cry. Oliver had fired over my head. Rory slipped head first down the ladder, his arms sprawled out, his wounded leg folded up under him when he came to rest. Conroy watched from above. He had no revolver.

  “First, Oliver took the revolver out of Rory’s hand and put it in his pocket. Then he turned him over. He knew at once. His own revolver fell from his hand. All the marks seemed to go out of his face as though a sponge had cleaned them off. He looked soft and young and gentle. Then they flowed back. There was too much to be wiped away. He picked up his revolver and turned to me, ‘Maggie Donnelly?’ he said.

  “‘Maggie O’Riorden.’

  “‘Christ!’ he said. ‘Christ?’ and ran out of the barn.

  “Then Conroy came down the ladder. He stood looking at Rory for a moment with tears streaming down his face. Then he turned and struck me in the mouth. ‘You bitch!’ he said. He spat in the straw at my feet and stumbled out into the darkness. I knew what he meant. He thought that I had been tortured to make me say where Rory was, and that I hadn’t been brave enough to keep my mouth shut, that I had screamed and so brought Rory crawling out to be killed. But it wasn’t that. It was Oliver’s face.”

  She began to cry, and I comforted her as best I could, and we got up and walked on a little way.

  She had stayed in the barn all night, sitting with her back against a bale of hay, with Rory’s head in her lap, her hands stroking his hair. His face was uninjured. Towards dawn she saw through the cracks in the barn a red flickering light. Then she went out and ran across the field which they had traversed so painfully not long before. Half the village was on fire. Great bulging columns of smoke, charged with red light, and dancing volleys of sparks shot up into the darkness from what had been Ballybar. She stood at the cross-roads watching the infernal spectacle till the flames grew paler against the light growing in the east. Then she heard the sound of marching on the road. She crawled behind the hedge, and what was left of the flying column of Black-and-Tans trailed past her in the dawn. Oliver marched at the head of them. Suddenly one of the men began to sing. Oliver turned upon him savagely: “Shut your blasted mouth,” he said.

  The man protested: “Can’t a feller sing?”

  Then, Maggie said, Oliver’s face went blind with fury. He was carrying a heavy stick and he turned and belaboured the man over the head till he reeled and fell. The others closed about him, muttering. He took
a revolver from his belt, formed them into ranks, and marched them off. He walked last, the revolver in his hand. She watched till they were out of sight on the road just grey with morning twilight. Then she went on into Ballybar.

  There was nothing to stay for: nothing but the houses foundering in the sea of fire and one or two of the boys’ bodies lying in the road. Ken Conroy was there, dead, under the wall of a burning house. She understood the blow he had given her and the reason for it, and she forgave him, and took up his little jockey’s body and carried it and laid it under the wall of the graveyard just beyond the end of the street. She kissed the dead face before she laid him in the dust, and that was the last thing she did in Ballybar.

  “You see,” she said, “Mrs. O’Riorden doesn’t understand how it was. She says she would like to have been at the funeral, as though it were something with nice wreaths and singing. But, you see, it was like that. And I couldn’t tell her, could I?”

  “No, my dear,” I said, looking down at the earnest face, so young with its eyes so grey, “I think you were wise and strong to leave it as you did.”

  “And if I’d talked about it,” she said, “it would have been very hard not to mention Oliver. And I didn’t want to do that, because Rory was very fond of you, and he loved Oliver once. He wouldn’t have wished it. There’s sorrow enough in the world, without my coming between friends.”

  Then I cried, cried as I had never cried before, as I shall never cry again, tears of anguish for the wrong that had been done, tears for Rory lying beyond the reach of tears in a far-off draughty barn, tears for Oliver venting his savage sorrow as he marched hopelessly along the road of twilight, tears of humiliation at the wisdom and steadfastness of the girl at my side. She walked along quietly, embarrassed by the sobs that shook me, looking shyly into my face from time to time.

  “You’re too good, too good,” I managed to say at last. “Why should you protect me like this?”

  “Good?” she said. “No, I’m not good. I’m trying to be sensible, that’s all. Aren’t you sad and lonely like the rest of us? Very well, then.”

  We walked in silence for a while, and then I asked her: “What are you going to do now?”

  “Do?” she asked with surprise. “Why, I must go back.”

  “Must you?”

  “Why, yes. A few more days and I shall be strong enough. There’s a lot still to do.”

  I left her at Eileen’s gate.

  *

  She wrote to me when she got back, and told me that Rory had been buried at Ballybar. Then she left that part of the country and engaged in I know not what work in Dublin. Her letters continued to reach me irregularly, but never a hint was there as to what she was doing. And then in January, 1922, the Treaty with Ireland was signed, and she wrote me a letter of anguish. She was irreconcilable. With Charles Burgess and de Valera and Mary MacSwiney she turned her back on the old comrades of the long and bloody fight. Then, for the only time, she mentioned Rory’s name. “If Rory were alive, his gun would be pointing at Michael Collins now.”

  She was still in Dublin, and moved by I know not what impulse I went to see her. She was consorting daily with black rebellious women, indulging in orgies of despair. And soon all this was to issue in a country cleft again, brother turning the knife in brother’s wound. When that was over, she sailed for America; and no news ever reached me or Dermot again of Rory’s widow.

  At the end of that last brief visit to her in Dublin, I sailed for Holyhead in a mood of misery. Ireland and the Irish and the Cause of Ireland and Irish Patriots had haunted my life from that far-off day when Dermot bowed to the memory of the Manchester Martyrs in an Ancoats bedroom. Gladly I watched the coast fade behind me.

  At Holyhead my coach was shared by four raffish-smart young men who played cards for high stakes. Their voices had a shrill nervous edge; their eyes were swift yet furtive.

  At Chester one of them said: “The Captain’ll have to change here for Manchester. Better get out and say good-bye.”

  They tumbled out on to the platform. I got out, too, to stretch my legs. From farther down the train came a group of men, led by one whose face I felt I ought to know. The two groups mingled, with loud and hearty greetings, back-slapping and nervous laughter.

  Then I and my four travelling companions got back into our compartment. The window was down, and the captain and his group gathered there. The train began to move. “Well, boys,” the captain shouted, “remember the motto: no work while there’s a bank to rob.”

  He took off his felt hat and waved it, and suddenly I remembered Captain Dennis Newbiggin. Plumage made a spot of bright colour in the band of his hat.

  “You boys demobbed at last?” I asked my companions.

  None of them answered. They looked at me furtively, suspiciously, as they shuffled the cards and went on playing for high stakes.

  35

  “May it please your Lordship; ladies and gentlemen of the jury. On the first Monday in December last, Percy Lupton, a young man of twenty-seven, went out to his work in the district of Higher Broughton in Manchester. He was a young man who had known a good deal of misfortune. He was gassed during the war, and was something of an invalid thereafter. The consequence was that after leaving the army he was unable to obtain regular employment for a long time. But at last his luck changed—changed, alas! for the worse, as we shall hear—for he was given what promised to be a permanent job. It is one of the most tragic features of this case that on the strength of this promise Lupton married. He had taken a brief honeymoon—a mere week-end—and on that first Monday of December he set out for the first time as a man with work, with hope, with a purpose in life. His young wife’s last words to him as he left the house—the last words, as it happened, that she was to speak to him on earth—were these: ‘Mind this fog. It will be the death of you.’ Words, my lord, and ladies and gentlemen, which seem, as we recall them now, to have had a dreadful prescience and prophecy.

  “Lupton’s work was this. His uncle was a builder who owned a great deal of house property. There was a small office in the builder’s yard, and here Lupton was to take charge of the ordering of builder’s material; he was to hear complaints from tenants as to necessary repairs to property; he was to investigate them; and generally make himself useful on the administrative side of his uncle’s business. On Monday afternoons, he was to make the rounds of the considerable number of houses which his uncle owned and collect the rents. No one else worked in the office: it was a one-man job.

  “You will be told in evidence that Lupton was seen to arrive at the office soon after nine in the morning. The men who came and went in the yard saw him there throughout the morning, and some of them spoke to him. He was seen eating his lunch in the office, and at about two o’clock he was seen to set out on his rounds, carrying a small black Gladstone bag.

  “Evidence will be put in, tracing his movements almost to the second of his death. You will hear of the houses he called at and how much money had accumulated in the bag by the time the afternoon was over.

  “You will hear that Oliver Essex, who stands there before you accused of the murder of Percy Lupton, lodged in one of the houses at which Lupton collected the rent, that he was aware that Monday was the day for the collection, because his landlady, Mrs. Newbiggin, had once left the money and asked him to pay it, when the collector called. She will tell you that she happened on that occasion to return home earlier than she had expected and that she heard Essex say jokingly to the collector, the predecessor of the murdered man, Lupton, that his little black bag seemed well furnished and might be worth a snatch. The collector replied that he would like to see anyone try a snatch from him; and to that Essex answered: ‘I know something of the art.’

  “Evidence will be given that Essex had done no work for a long time, that he was in debt not only to his landlady but also to many tradespeople. One of these tradespeople, a tailor to whom he owed fifteen guineas, had pressed him for payment the week before Percy Lup
ton was killed. He will tell you that Essex said: ‘Don’t worry. You shall have the money soon if I have to do someone in to get it.’

  “Well, now, let us return to what Percy Lupton was doing on that fatal day. Just as he was leaving the last house at which he had to call, he met an acquaintance and old army comrade, Henry Sugden. It was now six o’clock, the fog was thicker than it had been all day, and Sugden will tell you how he and Lupton walked along together, and how Lupton expressed his joy at having found regular work which permitted him to set up a home of his own. Sugden’s way home happened to be past the builder’s yard where Lupton’s office was. Lupton took out his key, opened the office door, and stood for a moment talking to Henry Sugden. He said: ‘Don’t wait, Harry. I may be ten minutes. I want to enter this money in the books and lock it in the safe.’ Sugden then said good-night, and no one saw Percy Lupton alive again.

  “Sugden will tell you the exact time at which he parted from the dead man, because when Lupton told him not to wait, he looked at his wrist-watch, and he remembers saying: ‘No. I must push off. It’s twenty-past six.’

  “As it happens, we have a check on time a little later. A young waiter named Daniel Kassassian had arranged to meet his sweetheart, a domestic servant, at a street corner at six-thirty. The corner was on the opposite side of the street from Lupton’s office, and about thirty yards farther down. Kassassian, as soon as he arrived there, looked at his watch to see if he were in time for his appointment. He will tell you that he noted he was dead on time—six-thirty; and that at that very moment he heard a terrible cry.

  “What happened, my lord, and ladies and gentlemen, in that little office between six-twenty and six-thirty, when Kassassian bounded across the road, it will be for this court, on the evidence submitted, to decide. It is the contention of the prosecution in this case that in those ten fatal minutes Oliver Essex murdered Percy Lupton.