Collected Stories (109 page)

“Why?” I asked mockingly. “Are you thinking of turning informer?”

I was sorry the moment I'd said it. It wasn't fair from a man at liberty to one with only his wits between him and the firing squad. His big face grew as red as if I'd slapped it.

“All right,” he muttered, “I was asking for that. But you see the way I am! The man is no particular friend of mine, and it's his life or mine.”

“That's what you're assuming,” I said.

“And aren't I right?” he asked, pushing his big face into mine with a sort of hypnotic look in his eyes.

The trouble was, he was. That's the curse of civil war. No matter what high notions you start with, it always degenerates into a series of personal quarrels, family against family, individual against individual, until at last you hardly mind what side they're on.

“Very well,” I said. “You are. Who was it?”

“Micky Morgan—Monkey Morgan from Dirrane.”

“And what was Monkey Morgan from Dirrane doing in Duncartan?”

“Ah, he shouldn't have been there at all, man,” he said, tapping me on the elbow, and for a moment it was just one officer speaking to another. “'Tisn't his area. But fellows like that, nobody can control them.”

“And where does Monkey Morgan hang out?” I asked.

“Mostly in Mick Tom Ogue's in Beensheen; Mick is a sort of cousin of his mother's.”

“This isn't another invitation like the one in Duncartan?” I asked.

“What sort of fool do you take me for?” he asked contemptuously.

“I don't know,” I said. “I was just wondering.… All right, hang on!”

Then I went out and ordered up two lorries and twenty men. I made sure the sentry was out of the way before I went back to the cell. I had a cap and greatcoat with me.

“Put these on,” I said, and Hartnett did.

“They're a good fit,” he said, thrusting his hands into the pockets.

“Yes,” I said. “They belonged to MacDunphy.”

Then we went out to the waiting lorries. Hartnett avoided the headlights; apart from that there was nothing to show that he wasn't just another officer from Dublin on a tour of inspection.

“All right, colonel,” I said in a loud voice to him. “Step in!”

He sat in front between me and the driver. It was a dark night with brilliant stars. We went up through the hills by roads we both knew well, though he knew them far better than I. Once he made me cross an open field to avoid the delay at a blown-up bridge. At last we stopped at the foot of a lane, and the men got out quietly. He pointed out to me where to post sentries so that the house was completely covered, and then he and I led the way up the lane. When we reached the door of the farmhouse he stood on one side and let me do the knocking. We didn't knock long because the door began to give under the rifle butts, and it was hastily opened for us by an old man in his shirt.

“Ye can't do anything to me,” he shouted. “I have varicose veins.”

We caught Morgan in the bedroom, pulling on his socks. He made a dive for his Peter the Painter, but two of our men got him on the floor before he could use it. He was a slight man with a long, hard, fighting face. We waited while he dressed. Then he pulled himself erect and went out with his chin in the air. He didn't notice the tall man standing by the door with his chin in his chest. I wondered what Hartnett's feelings were just at that moment.

I wondered more a few days later when I glanced out of the office window and saw the prisoners exercising within the barbed wire. Hartnett and Morgan were walking side by side. I stood leaning for a long time on the window, thinking how curious it was.

I
T WAS
next day or perhaps the day after that that Morrissey slouched into my office in his usual uninhibited manner with a cigarette hanging from one corner of his mouth. He stood with his back to the fire, his hands folded behind him.

“Did you hear anything about this escape?” he asked.

“No,” I said without interest. “Has there been one?”

“There's going to be. It's all arranged with the fellows outside. One of our contacts brought in the news.”

“And who's planned it?” I asked. “Hartnett?”

“I don't know. I suppose it is. Listen,” he added in a squeaky voice, knocking his ashes behind him into the fire, “when is that fellow going to be bumped?”

I was exasperated almost beyond endurance by the fellow's tone. It was both ill-bred and childish. He was like a schoolboy expecting a prize. Hartnett was his prize.

“I'm not sure that he is going to be—bumped,” I said. (In fact, I knew perfectly well that he wasn't, but I was taking care that Morrissey didn't know. Nobody must know if Hartnett's life was to be saved from his own men.)

“Well, all I can say is, it's a damn shame,” said Morrissey. “Any idea what's behind it?”

“Some people have friends in high places,” I said oracularly.

“Looks like it,” Morrissey said impudently, and I knew he meant me.

“You might remember,” I said, “that there was a time when people like Hartnett were considered quite useful.… All right. I'll speak to him myself. Send him up, will you, please?”

Hartnett was led up a few moments later by the sentry. He looked rather more like himself, confident and at the same time watchful.

“Tell me,” I asked, “what's all this about an escape?”

“An escape?” he asked wonderingly. “What escape? 'Tis news to me.”

“Oh, is it?” I asked. “Are you quite sure you're not the ringleader?”

He looked at me doubtfully for a moment and then his lip began to curl.

“You're not by any chance looking for an excuse to break your bargain?” he asked almost contemptuously.

“No,” I said without taking offense, “I don't have to look for excuses. Your friend, Morrissey, has just been in to know why you haven't been executed. Several others would like to know the same thing. They're not going to be told if I can manage it. So there isn't going to be any escape. Do you understand?”

He thought for a moment, sighed, and nodded.

“I understand,” he said hopelessly. “You're right, of course.”

He was going out when I stopped him. I couldn't let him go like that. Afterward I was glad I didn't.

“Don't think I'm criticizing you,” I said. “It's just that there are certain actions we can't hedge about, that's all.”

He nodded again and went out.

T
WO
DAYS
later Morgan was executed. I was wakened by the noises outside and then I lay awake listening for the bangs. “That's for you, MacDunphy,” I said, but it gave me no satisfaction. I wondered if Hartnett was awake listening to them, too. Two men regretting a bargain. When I got up there was the usual air of gloom and hysteria in the barrack. Morrissey was on the drink from early morning. Shutters had been put up in the town, and I sent round a lorry of men to take them down again. Then I went off to Moorlough for a conference.

While I was there a telephone message came through from Daly to say that two of our men had been shot in the street. I realized the danger at once.

“All right, Jimmie,” I said, trying to make my voice sound natural. “Hold everything till I come back.”

I didn't even wait to clear up things after the conference but got the driver to go hell for leather through the dusk. It was the darkness I was afraid of, and darkness had fallen when we reached the barrack gate.

“Everything all right, sergeant?” I asked at the guardroom.

“Everything all right, sir,” he said. “You heard that two of our fellows were shot.”

“Yes, I heard that. Nothing else?”

“Only one of the prisoners shot, trying to escape.”

“I see,” I said. “Hartnett, I suppose?”

“That's right, sir,” he said in confusion. “Did they tell you?”

“I was expecting something of the sort,” I said. “And Captain Morrissey shot him. Where is the body, sergeant?”

He began to stammer. The damn fools had even been trying to keep the truth from me! I found the body lying in a shed in the yard, abandoned on the straw. I picked it out with my torch. The head had fallen sideways as though he were trying to sleep. He had been shot through the back.

As I was coming in, Morrissey came up to me; he was recovering from his drinking bout and a bit frightened.

“Oh, about that fellow, Hartnett,” he began to stammer.

“I know,” I said. “You murdered him. Good-night.”

Afterward he came up and started hammering on my door, demanding an explanation, but I only told him to go to hell. I felt sick of it all. That's what I mean about civil war. Sooner or later it turns into a set of personal relationships. Hartnett and I were like that; accomplices, if you care to put it that way.

Requiem

F
ATHER
F
OGARTY
, the curate in Crislough, was sitting by the fire one evening when the housekeeper showed in a frail little woman of sixty or sixty-five. She had a long face, with big eyes that looked as though they had wept a great deal, and her smile lit up only the lower half of her face. Father Fogarty was a young man with a warm welcome for the suffering and the old. A man with emotions cut too big for the scale of his existence, he was forever floundering in enthusiasms and disillusionments, wranglings and reconciliations; but he had a heart like a house, and almost before the door closed behind her, he was squeezing the old woman's hand in his own two fat ones.

“You're in trouble,” he said in a low voice.

“Wisha, aren't we all, father?” she replied.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” he said. “Is it something I can do for you?”

“Only to say Mass for Timmy, father.”

“I'll do that, to be sure,” he said comfortingly. “You're cold. Sit down a minute and warm yourself.” Then he laid a big paw on her shoulder and added in a conspiratorial whisper, “Do you take anything? A drop of sherry, maybe?”

“Ah, don't be putting yourself out, father.”

“I'm not putting myself out at all. Or maybe you'd sooner a sup of whiskey. I have some damn good whiskey.”

“Wisha, no, father, I wouldn't, thanks. The whiskey goes to my head.”

“It goes to my own,” he replied cheerfully. “But the sherry is good, too.” He didn't really know whether it was or not, because he rarely drank, but, being a hospitable man, he liked to give his visitors the best. He poured a glass of sherry for her and a small one for himself, and lit one of his favorite cheroots.

The old woman spread her transparent hands to the blaze and sipped at her wine. “Oh, isn't the heat lovely?” she exclaimed with girlish delight, showing her old gums. “And the sherry is lovely, too, father. Now, I know you're surprised to see me, but I know all about you. They told me to come to you if I was in trouble. And there aren't many priests like that, father. I was never one to criticize, but I have to say it.”

“Ah,” he said jovially, throwing himself back in his big leather chair and pulling on his cheroot, “we're like everybody else, ma'am. A mixed lot.”

“I dare say you're right,” she said, “but they told me I could talk to you.”

“Everyone talks to me,” he said without boastfulness. It was true. There was something about him that invited more confidences than a normal man could respect, and Father Fogarty knew he was often indiscreet. “It's not your husband?” he added doubtfully.

“Ah, no, father,” she replied with a wistful smile. “Poor Jim is dead on me these fifteen years. Not, indeed, that I don't miss him just the same,” she added thoughtfully. “Sometimes I find myself thinking of him, and he could be in the room with me. No, it's Timmy.”

“The son?”

“No, father. Though he was like a son to me. I never had any of my own. He was Jim's. One of the last things Jim did was to ask me to look after him, and indeed, I did my best. I did my best.”

“I'm sure you did, ma'am,” said Father Fogarty, scowling behind his cheroot. He was a man who took death hard, for himself and for others. A stepchild was not the same thing, of course, but he supposed you could get just as attached to one of those. That was the trouble; you could get attached to anything if only you permitted yourself to do so, and he himself was one who had never known how to keep back. “I know how hard it is,” he went on, chewing at his cheroot till his left eyebrow descended and seemed to join in the process, and he resembled nothing so much as a film gangster plotting the murder of an innocent victim. “And there's little anyone can say that will console you. All I know from my own experience is that the more loss we feel the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means we had something worth grieving for. The ones I'm sorry for are the ones that go through life not even knowing what grief is. And you'd be surprised the number of them you'd meet.”

“I dare say in one way they're lucky,” she said broodingly, looking into the fire.

“They are not lucky, ma'am, and don't you believe it,” he said gruffly. “They miss all the things that make life worth while, without even knowing it. I had a woman in here the other night,” he added, pointing his cheroot at the chair she sat in, “sitting where you're sitting now, and she told me when her husband gave the last breath she went on her knees by the bed and thanked God for taking him.”

“God help us,” the old woman said, clasping her hands. “I hope no one does the same thing over herself someday.”

“Thanked God for taking him,” Fogarty repeated with his troubled boyish frown. “What sort of mind can a woman like that have?”

“Oh, she's hard, she's hard,” agreed the old woman, still looking into the fire.

“Hard as that hearthstone,” he said dramatically. “My God, a man she'd lived with the best part of her life, whatever his faults might have been! Wouldn't you think at least she'd have some remorse for the things she'd done to him in all those years?”