Ossian's Ride (7 page)

And this of course was the center point of the story of Deirdre herself. It mattered little whether she lived with Naisi or Conchobar. What did matter was the idea that not even the king himself is above his own laws. Was this true of the universe itself?

But this is an intelligence report, not a treatise on philosophy. So I need say no more of my evening in Armagh. I caught an early-morning bus to Cavan. Just outside Monaghan two police cars closed in on us. This was obviously one of the lightning searches that I had heard of, and it gave me the shock of my young life. What a fool to be caught with a bus timetable and a packet of maps! My impulse was to try to jettison the darned things. They were in one of the front pockets of my rucksack, and I thought that maybe I could get rid of them when I lifted the rucksack down from the luggage carrier. Then it crossed my mind that this would be just what the police were looking for. In any case, if they searched me thoroughly, they would find the money.

“Everybody remain seated, please,” shouted the conductor. Two guards got into the bus and two stayed outside. Systematically they went through the papers of the passengers. For the most part they passed on quickly, but sometimes questions were asked and luggage had to be brought down from the carrier. It was rather like going through customs. Were the Irish really any better with their present prosperity and restrictions than they used to be in the old days of poverty and freedom? Were restrictions an essential concomitant of prosperity?

My turn was coming up when I had the one great stroke of luck I needed. I suppose that every bus load of passengers must have contained one or two dubious characters. At all events the police found one. In a trice they bundled him out of the bus into one of the waiting cars. When the two guards climbed back to complete their examination, they were already psychologically satisfied men. They had got a case, fulfilled their quota, were ready to be half generous.

I handed over my passport and visa.

“Hey, young feller, your visa is stamped for Wicklow and Dublin. You’ve no right to be in this part of the country. What’s the idea?”

“I wanted to see Armagh. Is there anything very wrong in that?”

“Not if you’d had your visa stamped properly.”

“But I didn’t know that I would want to go to Armagh when I came through immigration. With the best will in the world, you can’t always foretell what you will want to be doing three weeks from now.”

“You should have checked with the immigration authorities before you left Dublin.”

“I can see that now, but I’m afraid it just didn’t occur to me at the time.”

“And where would you be going on this bus?”

“I’m on my way back to Dublin.”

“This isn’t the way to Dublin at all.”

“It is, if you don’t have to look at everything with a professionally suspicious mind.”

He didn’t like this, but I knew it was the sort of remark that a real bad hat simply wouldn’t make. I hurried on. “I came up from Dublin yesterday by the direct route, so obviously I don’t want to go back the same way. By going via Cavan I can see more of the country.”

“How am I to know you left Dublin yesterday?”

“Well, it could easily be checked that I left Trinity yesterday.”

“You’re at Trinity, are you?”

“Yes, that’s my base.”

I rummaged in my pocket and produced a bus ticket stub.

“Probably you can verify my statement from this.”

He first looked carefully at the stub and then went off for a word with the conductor. When he came back I saw that I had escaped.

“Now look here, Mr. Sherwood, I’m going to give you a chance. It would have served you right if I’d taken you along with that other feller and left you to cool your heels in jail for a couple of days. Remember that as a visitor it’s up to you to respect our laws. If you want to go off to any place again, see to it that you check with the proper authorities before you start.”

It flashed through me that I must avoid showing any sign of relief.

When the man had gone my neighbor remarked, “Well, he certainly gave you a grilling.”

“Yes, it’s a bit awkward when you’re not used to all these rules and regulations.”

This conversation, continuing intermittently right through to Cavan, was a nuisance. Still I managed to make reasonable remarks of some sort and to think over the situation at the same time.

Manifestly I must reorganize my ideas about travel. There must be no more buses, except in emergency. The solution was plain. I must walk, and why not? In a week I could walk across the whole of Ireland. And I must keep well away from these great main roads. I must journey by paths and byways, as bards and tinkers have always traveled from time immemorial. I would not be safe in these tremendous buses, these high-speed modern contraptions, even if I threw away my maps, which was not to be thought of. Besides, I was sure that neither Seamus Colquhoun (God rest his soul, as the Irish would say), nor P.S.D., nor I.C.E. ever traveled in any way except by super-streamlined automobile. Yes, undoubtedly the quiet way was the right way.

But there was one particular bus that I must still catch, the one from Cavan to Dublin. It was more than likely the police would take the trouble to verify that I really left Cavan for Dublin, which I did shortly after 11 A.M., as if I were racing for home like a scalded cat.

The bus stopped to take on passengers in the neighborhood of Stradone. This was what I had been waiting for. I managed to slip away without attracting much attention. It was unlikely that the conductor was in the confidence of the police, but there was no sense in advertising myself by openly asking for the bus to be stopped.

I was now about forty miles from Longford. By nightfall I reckoned on making fifteen miles or more, leaving an easy twenty-five for the following day. I would still be delivering Colquhoun’s notebook within three days, just as I had promised. My route lay over the hills to Bellananagh. There I would go quickly across the main road to the south, then to Arvagh, and round the west side of Lough Gowna, along the higher ground into Longford.

As soon as I started along a leafy country lane I knew that my new plan was correct; an indescribable relief from the tension of the past fortnight swept through me. Of course I could not easily have got out of Dublin on foot. I had been right to start with a bus, and I had been lucky to learn my lesson so soon.

I bought provisions in a village along my road and ate lunch in a grassy meadow. I wished I knew the names of the summer flowers. Curious how much better one knows the spring flowers.

By early evening I was well across the main road. My way led along an apparently endless twisting road that lifted itself mile after mile over hill and down dale, and I began to wonder where in all this confusion I could find a place for the night. Not that I had the slightest personal objection to sleeping out of doors, but then one soon acquires an unkempt look. This I wished to avoid, at least until I had fulfilled my commission in Longford.

Sundown was approaching when I reached a small farmstead set in an oasis of pasturage, maybe fifty or sixty acres in area. With the confidence of youth I knocked firmly on the half-opened door. A weather-beaten old farmer appeared.

“I am a traveler, and I wonder if you have a corner where I might lay my head for the night?”

“Will you enter the house?” was the reply, with the courtesy of two thousand years of Celtic culture behind it. “It is a stranger wishing to pass the night,” he added to his wife, who was standing back in the shadow so that I didn’t see her at first.

“Then he may sleep by the fire. Would he be wanting a bite to eat?”

I wasn’t sure of the correct etiquette here, but since it seemed as if the two had already eaten supper, I answered that I had food in my sack, although a drop of tea would be a great thing to a man who had walked such a long dry way. This seemed the proper thing, for it soon appeared that neither the farmer nor his wife were anything loath to drink another cup themselves.

I almost choked over my simple meal when in the middle of it the woman switched on a television set. The thing had scarcely been visible before in the gloom, nor had I noticed the aerial as I approached the house. It seemed as if two different worlds had come into sharp conflict, and yet why not? This is exactly why television has stopped the drain of population from country to town. Here were two people, apparently isolated in a remote spot, who by the flick of a knob could now find themselves immersed in the maelstrom of human affairs.

How wrong it is to imagine that economics represents the prime moving factor in historical change. Give every man fifty pounds and let him spend it on beer, cigarettes and horse racing, and there will be no historical change to speak of. But give every man a television set costing fifty pounds and there will be a change of significance, a change that may even turn out to be profound. It is not money that is important in itself, but the things that one can buy with money. So much is a mere truism. But it is not a truism to say that what one can buy depends on technology, not on economics. Technology is the key to social change.

I was now getting pretty fit, and I had little difficulty in sleeping through the night in my impromptu bed. The farmer was up by daybreak, which suited me well, for in traveling by foot it is best to reckon time by the sun. I washed and shaved under a pump in the yard, and breakfasted on porridge, bacon and eggs, and of course the inevitable mug of tea. For their kindness the old couple would take little by way of recompense, which was to prove typical of all my experience in Ireland while I was living close to the earth.

Shortly after leaving the farm the pathway turned into a covered lane. At this early hour dew was on the grass and the birds were still singing loudly. When an hour or two later I restocked with provisions in Arvagh, I found to my delight that there was no danger of a repetition of yesterday’s experience on the bus. No one seemed to notice as I walked through the sleepy little town. It was of course the situation that the police could not watch every man, woman and child in Ireland, however much they might have liked to do so. With the force at their disposal, all they could do was to watch and raid the places where the chance of discovering nefarious activities was as at its highest. Arvagh was not such a place.

I should like to be able to record that this little pastoral idyll continued through as far as Longford. But it did not. It was shattered by precisely the sort of event that Percy Parsonage had warned me against. The direction of the wind made it difficult to hear the approach of a car. It came furiously toward me as I reached the corner of a narrow twisting road. Barely in time I leaped into the near-side ditch. It was the same Chevrolet I had remarked outside the cafe in Armagh, and it now contained but two passengers.

With an intense foreboding I increased my pace to a jog trot. About a mile farther on I noticed that a big car had been driven off the road into a fair-sized copse. There were tire marks on the grass, and I followed them, for maybe a hundred, yards to a spot where a car had been parked. Thick undergrowth had made further progress impossible except on foot, and indeed it was clear from the bushes that there were broken and pushed aside that someone had forced his way through not long before. I pushed along the line of the broken foliage for about five minutes before I came out into an open clearing. There, on ground that no doubt had carried a carpet of bluebells only a month before, was the body of the fresh-faced boy who had kept company with the two thugs in Armagh.

They hadn’t even troubled to make sure that he was dead; he had simply been left to die. I gave the poor devil what crude first aid I could, but it was hopeless from the start. I had sat with him for about ten minutes when amazingly he opened his eyes.

“Don’t leave me—alone” was the faint whisper.

I gripped his hand tightly. “No, of course I won’t, old fellow.”

He tried to speak once again, but the best I could catch was the name “Cathleen,” and something that sounded like “the cannon with the crown ....” Then it was all over.

I closed his eyes and covered him with my sheet sleeping bag. If I had been a real 100 per cent agent, I suppose I would have searched through his pockets, but I had no impulse to do so. I was overwhelmed by a sense of tragedy and could do no more than turn sadly away and retrace my steps to the road.

The immediate problem was how to inform the police. To make a personal statement to them was obviously out of the question; an anonymous note was better; but best of all this was something I could leave to Shaun Houseman. It was little enough for him to do in return for my delivery of the notebook. I had intended to slip the notebook into an envelope addressed “For the attention of Mr. Shaun Houseman,” and simply drop it in at the Unicorn Hotel as I passed by. I had no wish to become embroiled any more deeply in the affairs of British Security, or of P.S.D., or of any of the other Intelligences, or with the sort of goons who had disposed of the young lad. My real business was with I.C.E., and the sooner I got down to it the better I would be pleased.

It was now about 4 P.M. and I was barely seven miles to the north of Longford. I should be at the Unicorn Hotel comfortably before six o’clock. Three or four miles farther on I was temporarily forced to a halt by a wave of nausea—delayed reaction, I suppose. But the lost time was soon made up, for the nausea was followed by an emotion whose very existence in myself I had never suspected before. I was impelled forward by a wave of cold fury.

The approach into Longford produced a calming influence, however, so that I was able to hunt down the Unicorn with a more balanced mind. A Chevrolet sedan was parked outside. It looked very much like the Chevrolet I had seen three hours before, but, if it was, the number plates had been changed.

I have said already that I am the possessor of a suspicious mind. There seemed now to be no point in declaring my hand, at any rate just for the present. It was obviously a good idea to take a rather close look at the Unicorn Hotel and at its inhabitants, to take a close look at Mr. Shaun Houseman in particular.