Changing Winds Part 107

His head was rolling, but he was able to walk. "He's not much hurt,"

Henry murmured to himself, "but he's d.a.m.ned frightened."

"Aw, what did ye do it for? Aw! Aw! Aw!..."

"Take him to the hospital!..."

They led him a little way towards the hospital of St. Vincent de Paul, and then, for some reason, changed their minds, and took him into the Park. It was difficult now to see what was happening. There was a derelict tram near the club, and beyond that, still pawing at the ground, was the wounded horse....

"Why don't they shoot the poor beast!" Henry exclaimed.

But it would not enter their minds to put the animal out of pain. They were Catholics, and Catholic peoples, the world over, are cruel to beasts. Too intent on pitying their own souls, to have pity on animals....

13

He closed the shutters and turned on the light. "I wonder where John is?" he thought as he did so. "_This_ is why he couldn't come to Glendalough with me. What the h.e.l.l does he think he's going to gain by it?" He glanced about the room. "It's d.a.m.ned odd," he said aloud, "but I don't feel frightened. I should have thought I'd feel scared.... Of course, as there was going to be a rebellion, I'm rather glad I'm here to see it!"

He went to his bedroom and got a pack of patience cards.

"There'll be no theatre to-night!" he said. "I think I'll play 'Miss Milligan.' ..."

14

The silence of the house made him feel restless.

"I'll go to bed," he exclaimed. "I may as well get all the sleep I can."

He went to his room, and stumbled towards the windows.

"I'll close the shutters while I'm undressing;" he went on. "I don't want to be 'potted' needlessly!"

He tried to see into the Park, but the great ma.s.ses of trees that undulated like a rough sea, prevented him from seeing anything. There were figures at the gate ... on guard!

"I wonder if that little red-haired man's still there," he thought.

"Poor devils! Some of them must feel d.a.m.ned queer to-night!..."

He closed the shutters, and switched the light on, and then, when he had undressed he darkened the room again. "I must have some air," he said, opening the shutters.

He climbed into bed. Now and then a rifle-shot was fired, and sometimes there was a succession of shots....

"In the morning," he said, as he turned on his side and closed his eyes, "they'll be cleared out of that!..."

THE THIRTEENTH CHAPTER

1

He awoke suddenly, and sat up in bed. "Good Lord!" he exclaimed, "I've been asleep!" It was still dark, but less dark than it was when he came to bed. He could just see the time by holding his watch close to his eyes. "Four," he murmured. It was strange that he should have slept at all, for there had been spasmodic firing all night. He got out of bed, and went across his room to the window, and looked out, and as he looked, the wounded horse struggled to rise, pawing the ground feebly, and then fell over on its side. "It isn't dead!..." When he had looked at it last, it had been lying very still, and he had thought it was dead.

He looked across the road to the Park gates, but could not see any one standing there. "Perhaps they've gone!" There was a shapeless thing lying on the ground, outside the gates, but he could not make out what it was. In the dim light, it looked like a great piece of paper ... the debris of a windy day.

There was no movement anywhere ... the horse was still now ... but now and then a single shot rang out, and then came a volley. "You'd think they were just trying to make a noise! I wonder what's been happening all night," he said, as he went back to bed.

2

He fell asleep again, and when he awoke, wakened by a heavier sound of shooting, it was almost six o'clock, and it was light. "That must be the soldiers," he thought, listening to the heavier rifle fire. He sat up in bed, and glanced about the room. "I _was_ an a.s.s not to keep the shutters closed," he said aloud. "A stray bullet might have come in here ... I wonder whether the shutters would stop a bullet. After all, Bibles do!..."

He could just see the Republican flag floating from the flagstaff on the roof of the College of Surgeons. "They're still there, then!" And while he sat looking at it, he heard the sound of some one, wearing heavy boots, coming down the streets, making loud clattering echoes in the silence. "That's funny!" he said. "People are going about already.

Perhaps it's over ... practically over!..."

He got out of bed, and as he did so, he heard the sharp rattle of rifles, and when the echo of it had ceased, he could not hear the noise of heavy treading any more. He stood still in the centre of the room, listening, and presently he heard a groan. He ran to the window and looked out. In the roadway, beneath him, an old man was lying on his back, groaning very faintly.

"They've killed him!" Henry murmured, glancing across the road at the hotel, from which the sound of firing had come. "They didn't challenge him ... they just shot him!"

Four times, the old man groaned, and then he died. He was lying in the att.i.tude of a young child asleep. One leg was outstretched and the other was lightly raised. His right arm was lying straight out from his body, and the hand was turned up and hollowed. Very easy and natural was his att.i.tude, lying there in the morning light. He looked like a labourer.

"Going to his work," I suppose. "Thinking little of the rebellion. Just stumping along to his job ... and then!..."

There was a bundle lying by his side, a red handkerchief that seemed to be holding food ... and flowing towards it, trickling, so slowly did it move, from his body was a little red dribble....

Henry looked at him with a feeling of curiosity and pity. He had never seen a man killed before. He had never seen any dead person, not even Mrs. Clutters, until his father died. He had purposely avoided seeing Mrs. Clutters' body ... something in the thought of death repelled him and made him reluctant to look at a corpse, and so, when he had been asked if he would like to see Mrs. Clutters, he had made some evasive reply. It had been different when his father died. He had looked on him, not as a dead man, but as his father, still, even in death, his father, able to love and be loved. When he thought of death, he thought, not of Mr. Quinn, but of Mrs. Clutters, and always it seemed to him that the dead were frightful.... But this old man, a few moments ago intent on getting to his work in time, and now, cognisant, perhaps of all the mysteries of this world, had nothing frightful about him. There was beauty in the way he was lying in the roadway ... in that careless, graceful att.i.tude ... as if he were gratefully resting after much labour....

He looked across the roadway, and now it was plain that the shapeless thing that had looked in the dim light like paper blown to a corner by the wind, was a dead man. He, too, was lying on his back, with his legs stretched straight out and slightly parted ... and while Henry looked at him, it seemed to him that the man was familiar to him. The brown dust-coat he was wearing!... And then he remembered. It was the red-haired, angry-looking, nervous man, who had chewed his moustache and gaped about him with bloodshot eyes....

He dressed, and went downstairs. The servants were up, and moving about the house, and one of them came to him.

"Will you have your breakfast now, sir!" she asked, and when he had answered that he would, she said, "There's no milk, sir. The milkman didn't come this morning!"

"It doesn't matter," he replied. "I'll have it without!"

He went to the front of the house, while his breakfast was being prepared, and looked out of the window. In the bushes on the other side of the road, he could see a youth, crawling on his stomach, and dragging a rifle after him. He raised himself on to his knees, and glanced up at the hotel, where there were some soldiers who had been brought in during the night, and when he had raised himself, the soldiers in the upper windows saw him, and fired on him. He got up and ran across the path towards the shelter of the trees, and as he ran, the bullets spattered about him. Then he staggered ... and Henry could not see him again.

3

An ambulance came and the bodies of the rebel and the labourer were put into it and taken away. The horse had been hauled to the pavement, and it lay in a great congealed mess of blood that had poured from a gash in its throat....

4

Later in the morning, the people began to move about, and after a while the streets were full of sightseers. It was possible now to learn something of what happened on the previous day and during the night.

There had been fierce fighting in places. Soldiers were hurrying from the Curragh, from the North of Ireland, from England. The thing was serious ... the rebels had seized various strategic points, and were determined to fight hardly. During the night, realising that Stephen's Green was a dangerous place to be in, they had left it for the shelter of the College of Surgeons. Some of them were still there, sniping from safe points.

Henry went out and wandered about the streets. If there were soldiers in Dublin, there were very few, and the rebels still had possession of the city. He listened to the comments of the people who pa.s.sed him, and as he listened, he realised that there was resentment everywhere against the Sinn Feiners. Behind one of the gates of the Park, a Sinn Feiner was lying face downwards in the hole he had made to be a trench, and the crowd climbed up the railings to gape at him. A youth thrust his way through the people and peered at the dead man, and then he turned to the crowd and said to them, "Let's get the poor chap out and bury him!" A girl looked at him resentfully, and hurried to a towsled woman standing on the kerb, and told her what the youth had said, and instantly the woman rushed at him and hit him about the head and back. "No, ye'll not get him out," she yelled at him. "Let him lie there an' rot like the poor soldiers!"