goes from Mundy.'
'I've got my car, Aunt Lizette.'
'You be careful, or they'll take it from you, and you trussed up like a fowl in the bottom of it-if you're not lying in a ditch with a bullet in your back.'
'Maybe I'll join the rebels,' he said, mischief in his eyes.
He kissed her goodbye, and went back through the silent streets to his hotel. There were sentries everywhere now, and he was challenged three times. The people were off the streets. The blinds were drawn across the windows of the houses. John-Henry went into the bar of the hotel. It was empty, except for the bartender and one young fellow of about his own age, or a little older, sitting in the corner, reading a newspaper. He glanced up when John-Henry entered, and then looked hard at him, with that questing stare of recognition which a man wears upon his face when he sees someone after a spate of years and has difficulty in finding a name. John-Henry turned his back, and ordered a whisky-and-soda.
'There's been a bit of trouble this afternoon, hasn't there?' he said to the bartender.
The fellow wiped a glass with a napkin, and glanced imperceptibly at the man in the corner, who had resumed his reading of the newspaper.
'Three people killed in the square,' he said quietly, 'or so I am told. I don't know anything about it. I've been in the hotel all day.'
He went to the other end of the bar, and pretended to be busy with some glasses.
'Scared,' thought John-Henry. 'If he says a word more the chap reading a newspaper may inform against him. Where the devil have I seen that man before?'
But the newspaper was up in front of his face.
John-Henry sipped his whisky-and-soda, and thought about his aunt Lizette living all alone in her flat in the terrace, the youngest and most frail of all her family, and the last survivor-both Aunt Kitty and Aunt Molly had died during the war, in early middle-age. We're a funny family, he thought, we either go quickly, or live to a rude old age. Grandfather Henry Brodrick was getting on for eighty when he died in Brighton. And his wife wouldn't let him be brought across the water and buried at Ardmore, she wanted him in the big white cemetery at Brighton. John-Henry remembered the letter coming from his mother when he was at Dartmouth, telling him that his grandfather had died, and in the holidays they had gone and picnicked at Clonmere and dreamt dreams about the future. The war came so swiftly, spilling the dreams…
The door of the bar swung open, and three officers came in. They were laughing and joking.
'I tell you it's true,' said one of them. 'A whole party was over in London a year or so ago, and asked to see Casement's grave. They had brought wreaths and flowers and heaven knows what else. And the governor of the place hoodwinked 'em and showed them where Crippen or some chap was buried, and they went down on their knees and crossed themselves, and said 'Hail Mary.' Funniest thing you ever saw, said the governor.'
The officers leant against the bar and ordered drinks.
'They're not human,' said another. 'We ought to have orders to shoot the lot. They're the scum of the earth, and always have been.'
The first officer glanced across at John-Henry.
He had merry eyes, for all his hard mouth.
'What are you drinking?' he said.
'The spirit of the country,' said John-Henry, raising his glass.
'You'd better have one with us, then,' said the officer, laughing. 'It's the thing we are trying to down.'
He put his hat on the bar, and John-Henry looked at it closely. The hated emblem of a hated band. Yet the man seemed harmless enough, and was only doing his duty, and obeying orders.
'Do you belong to this God-forsaken country?' asked the officer.
'I do,' said John-Henry, 'and what's more I intend to live in it.'
'You must be crazy,' said the other, 'unless you're a sportsman. They know how to breed horses, if nothing else.'
'Good woodcock shooting, where I belong,' said John-Henry, 'and snipe in the bogs, and hares on Doon Island and Hungry Hill. That's the only sort of shooting I care about, not this monkey-business you fellows have to do.'
'Doon Island?' said one of them. 'I had a friend garrisoned there at one time. It's quiet, I believe, down west of Mundy. The people won't play either way.'
'Too idle,' said John-Henry, 'like myself.
They only want to be left alone. And now what about having a drink with me? I don't suppose I'm the first of my countrymen to offer you hospitality.'
The bartender came forward, and John-Henry moved up closer to the officers.
'Four whiskies-and-sodas for these gentlemen and myself,' he said.
He listened with half an ear to the stories of the fighting, how the Town Hall, in a city farther north, had been seized by the rebels and set ablaze, and then the fellows had spent all their ammunition and taken to their heels and hidden out in the mountains.
'We went out to look for them,' said the officer, 'and brought them all back, two of them dead from lying out there in the cold. We shot the rest next morning.
Oh, we have lively moments. It's not all sitting on our backsides.'
And this, thought John-Henry, has been going on through the ages, and my family took no part in it.
They lived at Clonmere, and built their mines, and raised their copper, and came in here to Slane to the shipping-office without caring a damn who bled on the roadside, as long as they lived in comfort at Clonmere. And all I care about is for this lunacy to be over so that I can do the same. The officers had swallowed their drinks, and were fixing their belts.
'And now what?' said John-Henry.
'Patrol,' said the first officer, 'and maybe a knife under the ribs. Come and join us.'
'Not I,' smiled John-Henry.
'We'll come and shoot woodcock with you,' said the officer, 'when we've killed enough of your countrymen.
Goodnight, and good luck.'
'Goodnight,' said John-Henry.
The bartender was putting up the shutters and fastening the bolts.
'That's the last of them,' he said, 'there won't be any more tonight. You'll go up through the hotel entrance, if you please.'
John-Henry glanced round the room. It was empty, except for himself and the bartender.
'There was a man in the corner,' he said, 'when I first came in. I seemed to recognise his face.
Do you know who he was?'
The bartender shook his head.
'We get all sorts these days,' he said.
'He must have slipped away very quietly,' said John-Henry. 'I'm sorry about it, because I had a feeling he came from Doonhaven.'
The bartender ran a cloth along the side of the bar.
'If he came from your home,' he said slowly, 'it's a pity he saw you drinking with the Black and Tans.'
John-Henry stared at him.
'What do you mean?' he said. 'I don't know those fellows. They're nothing to me.'
'No,' said the bartender, 'but this is a funny country… Goodnight, sir.'
He switched off the light over the bar as a signal of dismissal.
John-Henry walked slowly up the stairs to bed. He drew aside the curtains of his room, and looked at the sky. The rain had cleared, and the stars were shining. There was a clean fresh smell in the air of washed streets, and night itself, and early spring. The church bell tolled out the hour. Down in the street, below his window, the patrol marched by with tramping feet.
The rain had all gone by morning, and the sun was shining as John-Henry drove out of Slane along the road to Mundy. His spirits were high, for he was young and in good health, and his car ran well, and he was going home. The dream of boyhood was to come true at last, Gone were the years of war, of stress, and duty, of travelling
