“All right,” he said at last, “put away yer gat, Tommy. I’ll stay quiet.”
A few people had gathered on the far side of the street and were looking on curiously. An immense crowd would have already gathered on ordinary occasions, but there was tension and anxiety in the district that night. Shooting might begin at any minute. It was always so. One death brings another in its train. Each man thought this in his own mind, although nobody breathed a word. It was a kind of silent terror.
“Come on, boys,” said Connor, “let’s get away from here. We’re gatherin’ a crowd.”
“Come on down to Ryan’s,” whispered Mulholland to Gypo, in his usual lazy, insinuating voice, as if nothing had happened, “Commandant Gallagher is down there. He wants to see ye.”
“What does he want with me?” growled Gypo. “I’m not a member o’ the Organization any more. He’s got nothin’ to do with me. I’m not goin’.”
“Come on, man,” whispered Connor, “don’t stand here chawin’. He’s not goin’ t’ate ye. Come on. Is it afraid o’ the Commandant ye are? Why so?”
“I’m not afraid of any man that was ever pupped,” growled Gypo. “Come on.”
The three men walked off abreast, in step like soldiers, their feet falling loudly on to the wet pavement, heels first. At the corner the footfalls became confused. Gypo spat into the street. Mulholland sneezed. They entered the public-house by a little narrow side door that had a bright brass knob on it. They went along a narrow passage, through a stained-glass swing door, into a brightly lit oblong room.
A man was sitting by a little gas fire on a high three legged stool facing the door. When Gypo saw the man he stopped dead.
The man was Commandant Dan Gallagher.
VI
During the previous autumn a terrific sensation had been caused all over Ireland by the farm-labourers’ strike in the M⸺ district. The sensation was brought to a crisis by the murder of the Farmers’ Union Secretary. For the first time it was discovered that the Revolutionary Organization had spread its influence among the farm-labourers and over the whole country. Something had been discovered. A Government secret organization had overlapped the Communist organization and there was a little effervescence, which was immediately suppressed by the Government. Very little leaked out publicly. The newspapers were forbidden to talk about it. The Conservative organs in Dublin had timid editorials demanding that the Government should take the people into its confidence. What really was the extent of this “conspiracy against the national safety”?
Then immediately Commandant Dan Gallagher became a public figure and a general topic of conversation. He came out of obscurity in a night as it were. People suddenly discovered that he was a power in the country. He was photographed and interviewed and his photographs appeared in all the newspapers both in this country and in England and in America. He promptly denounced the murder as a “foul crime against the honour of the working class and the whole revolutionary movement.” He began to be feared intensely in official quarters as a “slippery customer.” This phrase was used at a Government Cabinet meeting.
Just about that time, the leading organ of the English aristocracy had a two-column leading article on the subject of Commandant Dan Gallagher. In the course of the article a short survey of Gallagher’s life was given sarcastically. The following is an extract from the article:
“… This flower of Irish manhood grew on an obscure dunghill, in the daily practice of all these virtues, which are indigenous to the Irish soil, if one is to believe the flowery utterances of the politicians on St. Patrick’s Day. His father was a small peasant farmer in Kilkenny. Having assisted very probably in the gentle assassination of a few of his landlord’s agents in the past, reverently decided to devote the activities of his promising son to the service of his God. But Daniel would have none of it. He was meant for other fields of conquest. He succeeded in making himself famous in the ecclesiastical seminary in which he was being prepared for the priesthood, by smashing the skull of one of the Roman priests during a dispute on the playground. The instrument used in this display of boyish gaiety was the favourite Irish weapon, a hurling stick.
“The young Fionn McCumhaill was expelled and fled the country. He drifted around for eight years without a trace of his whereabouts. Very possibly he spent the time in the United States. We can well imagine that he was favourably received among those organizations in the United States which are governed by Irishmen intent on the destruction of the British Empire by conspiracy, murder, slander, and all the other delectable schemes that come to life so readily in the Gaelic brain. We can imagine him perfecting himself in the arts of gunmanship, deceit and those obscure forms of libidinous vice which are said to be practiced by this morose type of revolutionary in order to dull his sensibilities into an apathy which the consciousness of even the most horrible enormities cannot penetrate. …
“At any rate he has returned to his beloved motherland endowed liberally with those qualities which make him dear to the hearts of all Irishmen of murderous inclinations. These latter unfortunately form as yet a considerable portion of the population of Ireland. Mr. Gallagher has a powerful and enthusiastic following.
“His brand of Communism is of the type that appeals most to the Irish nature. It is a mixture of Roman Catholicism, Nationalist Republicanism and Bolshevism. Its chief rallying cries are: ‘Loot and Murder.’ ” …
The following is an extract from an article which appeared a little while later in the columns of the official organ of the American Revolutionary Organization:
“When the glorious history of the struggle for proletarian liberation in Ireland comes to be written, the name of Comrade Dan Gallagher will stampede from cover to cover in
