The Red Hand of Ulster Part 21

They are armed as a rule with short round sticks. On very important occasions they carry an inferior kind of firearm called a carbine.

There were, I guessed about three hundred men in the church, and they were armed with modern rifles. G.o.dfrey's faith in the inherent majesty of the law was extremely touching.

"Did he go?" I asked.

"I don't think he intends to," said G.o.dfrey, "but he did not give me a decided answer."

Our police sergeant is a man of sense.

"Did you say," I asked, "that they're going to march to Belfast?"

"That's what the sergeant told me," said G.o.dfrey.

"Actually walk the whole way?"

Belfast is a good many miles away from us. It would, I suppose, take a quick walker the better part of two days to accomplish the journey.

"He said 'march,'" said G.o.dfrey. "I suppose he meant to walk."

This is, as we are constantly reminded, the twentieth century. I should have supposed that any one who wanted to get from this place to Belfast would have gone in a train. Our nearest railway station is some way off, but one might walk to it in an hour and a half. Once there, the journey to Belfast can be accomplished in another two hours. It seems rather absurd to spend two days over it, but then the whole thing is rather absurd. The rifles are absurd. The gathering of three hundred men into a church to indulge in a kind of grace before meat as preparation for a speech from Babberly is rather absurd. To set a peal of bells playing--but I am not quite sure about the hymn tune. It did not sound to me absurd as it came across the bay. I am, I trust, a reasonable man, not peculiarly liable to be swept off my feet by waves of emotion; but there was something in the sound of that hymn tune which prevented me from counting it, along with our other performances, as an absurdity.

CHAPTER XVII

The Dean and his men did actually march to Belfast. I saw them there two days later. I also saw them start, ranged in very fair order with the Dean at their head. The most surprising thing about their march was that they had no band. There are at least two bands in the town. I subscribe to both of them regularly and have occasionally given a donation to a third which enjoys an intermittent existence, springing into sudden activity for a week or two and then disappearing for months. I asked the police sergeant, who is a South of Ireland man and very acute of mind, why none of the bands accompanied the army. The explanation he gave me was interesting and suggestive.

"There isn't as much as a boy in the district," he said, "who'd content himself with a drum when he might have the handling of a rifle."

And yet an excessive fondness for drums has been reckoned--by English politicians--one of the failings of the Ulster man.

I went to Belfast next morning quite unexpectedly. No peal of bells heartened me for my start, partly because all the bell-ringers and nearly all the able-bodied members of the church in the parish had marched forth with the Dean. Partly also, I suppose, because I did not travel in a heroic way. I am much too old to undertake a two-days'

walking tour, so I went by train. G.o.dfrey saw me off. I owed this attention, I am sure, to the fact that Marion was with me. She told G.o.dfrey that she was going to marry Bob Power, but G.o.dfrey did not on that account cease to regard her as his property. He had hopes, I fancy, that Bob Power would be killed in some fight with a Custom House officer. Marion, on the other hand, was vaguely afraid that either Bob or I would get injured while rioting in Belfast. That was her reason for going with me.

I went because I received on Friday evening a very urgent letter from Lady Moyne. She and Lord Moyne had just arrived in Belfast, and her letter was sent to me by a special messenger on a motor bicycle. She wished me to attend an extraordinary meeting of the "Ulster Defence Committee" which, in defiance of our strong sabbatarian feeling, was to be held on Sunday afternoon.

"We elected you a member of the committee at a meeting held yesterday in London," she wrote, "so you have a perfect right to be present and to vote."

That meeting must have been held after McNeice, Malcolmson and Cahoon returned to Ireland. They regard me as a Laodicean in the matter of Home Rule, and would never have consented to my sitting on a committee which controlled, or at all events was supposed to control, the actions of the Ulster leaders.

"It's most important, dear Lord Kilmore," the letter went on, "that you should be present on Sunday. Your well-known moderation will have a most steadying influence, and if it should come to a matter of voting, your vote may be absolutely necessary."

After getting a letter of that kind I could not well refuse to go to Belfast. Even without the letter I should, I think, have gone. I was naturally anxious to see what was going to happen.

I spent my time in the train reading several different accounts of an important Nationalist meeting held the day before in a village in County Clare, the name of which I have unfortunately forgotten. Three of the chief Nationalist orators were there, men quite equal to Babberly in their mastery of the art of public speaking. I read all their speeches; but that was not really necessary. None of them said anything which the other two did not say, and none of them left out anything which the other two had said.

They all began by declaring that under Home Rule all Irishmen should receive equal consideration and be treated with equal respect. They all looked forward to the day when they would be walking about the premises at present occupied by the Bank of Ireland in Dublin with their arms round Babberly's neck. The dearest wish of their hearts--so they all said, and the people of County Clare cheered heartily--was to unite with Lord Moyne, Babberly, Malcolmson and even the Dean in the work of regenerating holy Ireland. Any little differences of religious creed which might exist would be entirely forgotten as soon as the Home Rule Bill was safely pa.s.sed. They then went on to say that the Belfast people, and the people of County Antrim and County Down generally, were enthusiastically in favour of Home Rule. The fact that they elected Unionist members of Parliament and held Unionist demonstrations was accounted for by the existence of a handful of rack-renting landlords, a few sweating capitalists and some clergymen whose churches were empty because the people were tired of hearing them curse the Pope.

Poor Moyne has sold every acre of his property and the Dean's only difficulty with the majority of his large congregation is that he does not curse the Pope often enough to please them. Cahoon, I am told, only sweats in the old-fashioned intransitive sense of the word. He is frequently bathed in perspiration himself. I never heard of his insisting on his workmen getting any hotter than was natural and necessary. But these criticisms are beside the mark. No one supposes that a political orator means to tell the truth when he is making a speech. Politics could not be carried on if he did. What the public expects and generally insists on is that the inevitable lies should have their loins girt about with a specious appearance of truthfulness. Every speaker must offer distinct and convincing proofs that his statements are strictly accurate reflections of fact. The best and simplest way of doing this is by means of bold challenge. The speaker offers to deposit a large sum of money with the local mayor to be paid over to a deserving charity, if any opponent of the speaker can, to the satisfaction of twelve honourable men, generally named, disprove some quite irrelevant truism, or can prove to the satisfaction of the same twelve men the falsity of some universally accepted plat.i.tude. This method is very popular with orators, and invariably carries conviction to their audiences.

The Nationalist members in County Clare broke away into a variant of the familiar plan. They challenged the Government.

"Let the Government," they said, all three of them, "proclaim the meeting to be held in Belfast on Monday next, and allow the public to watch with contempt the deflation of the wind-distended bladder of Ulster opposition to Home Rule. We venture to say that the little group of selfish wire-pullers at whose bidding the meeting has been summoned, will sneak away before the batons of half a dozen policemen, and their followers will be found to be non-existent."

The Government, apparently, believed the Nationalist orators, or half believed them. Sir Samuel c.l.i.thering was sent over to Belfast, to report, confidentially, on the temper of the people. He must have sent off his despatch before the Dean's army marched in, before any of the armies then converging on the city arrived, before the Belfast people had got out their rifles. The Government in the most solemn and impressive manner, proclaimed the meeting. That was the news with which we were greeted when our train drew up at the platform in Belfast.

The proclamation of meeting is one of the regular resources of governments when Irish affairs get into a particularly annoying tangle. There have been during my time hundreds of meetings proclaimed in different parts of the country. The Lord Lieutenant and the Chief Secretary never get any thanks for their action. The people who want to hold the meeting always accuse the Government of violating the right of free speech and subst.i.tuting a military tyranny for the Magna Charta. The other people who do not want the meeting to be held always say that the Government ought to have proclaimed it much sooner than it did, and ought to have imprisoned, perhaps beheaded, the men who intended to speak at the meeting.

Bob Power met us on the platform, which was horribly crowded, and immediately conducted Marion to a motor car which he had in waiting outside the station. Then he came back to me and we went together in search of Marion's luggage. It was while we were pushing our way through the crowd that he told me the great news. I said that the failure of the demonstration would be a disappointment to the Dean and his riflemen who would have to walk all the way home again without hearing Babberly's speech.

"I'm not so sure about that," said Bob. "We may have the meeting in spite of their teeth."

"You can't possibly," I said, "hold a meeting when--dear me! Who are those?"

There was a crowd round the luggage van where we were trying to discover Marion's trunk. An unmannerly porter shoved me back, and I b.u.mped into a man who had something hard and k.n.o.bby in his hand. I looked round. He was a soldier in the regular khaki uniform with a rifle in his hand. The bayonet was fixed. I felt deeply thankful that it was pointing upwards and not in a horizontal direction when the porter charged me. It might quite easily have gone through my back.

This man appeared to be a kind of outpost sentry. Behind him, all similarly armed, were twenty or thirty more men drawn up with their backs to the wall of the station. A youth, who looked bored and disgusted, was in command of them and stood at the end of the line.

His sword struck me as being far too big for him.

"Who on earth are those?" I said.

"Those," said Bob, "are the troops who are overawing us. Some of them.

There are lots more. You'll see them at every street corner as we go along. By jove! I believe that's Nosey Henderson in command of this detachment. Excuse me one moment, Lord Kilmore. Henderson was with me at Harrow. I'll just shake hands with him."

He turned to the young officer as he spoke.

"Hullo Nosey," he said, "I didn't know you were in these parts."

"Ordered up from the Curragh," said Henderson. "d.a.m.ned nuisance this sort of police duty. We oughtn't to be asked to do it."

"Your particular job," said Bob, "is to overawe the railway porters, I suppose."

"Been here since nine o'clock this morning," said Henderson, "and haven't had a blessed thing to eat except two water biscuits. What's the row all about? That's what I can't make out."

"Oh! It's quite simple," said Bob. "Our side wants to hold a meeting--"

"You are on a side then, are you?"

"Of course I am," said Bob. "I'm in command of a company of volunteers. We don't run to khaki uniforms and bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, but we've got guns all right."

"I say," said Henderson, "tell me this now. Any chance of a sc.r.a.p?

Real fighting, you know? I've been asking all sorts of fellows, and n.o.body seems to be able to say for certain."

"We shan't begin it," said Bob; "but, of course, if you get prodding at us with those spikes you have at the end of your guns--"

"There are a lot of fellows in this town that would be all the better of being prodded. Every porter that walks along the platform spits when he pa.s.ses us in a d.a.m.ned offensive way. You would think they were looking for trouble."

The crowd round the luggage van cleared away a little and we found Marion's trunk. Bob handed it over to a porter and we joined Marion in the motor car.