Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 8, 22 February 1923, Page 7

Evening Memories

(By William O'Brien.)

CHAPTER XlX.—(Continued.) The next morning Dr. Ridley arrived in a state of much excitement to announce that he had ordered my removal to hospital. The explanation of the sudden decision came with a visit from Dr. McAlroy, who, with a. gleam of fun under his overhanging eyebrows, cried out: "Bedad, you have set the town on fire," and informed me that the battalion of Scots Guards who had cheered me in Mitchelstown, and had been drafted into Tullamore the previous day as a prison garrison, had renewed their cheers at the Gaol gate, and had been early that morning removed by special train. The Doctor walked over with me to my new quarters spacious room, with a mattress-bed and a fire burning— made a piteous appeal to me to end the quarrel on my own terms, upon the smple condition that I would wear the blue hospital dress which was lying on the bed. The hospital suit, he explained, was quite another thing from the ordinary prison uniform, and was, he more than suggested, specially invented to satisfy my vow not to wear the uniform of criminals. The poor man was crestfallen to find that my difficulty was not a tailoring question as between blue and grey. How little the distinction between the prison homespun and that of outer Ireland really mattered, was amusingly illustrated by a remark of Dr. Duggan, the Bishop of Clonfert, who, with two other bishops, visited me in "the cage" in Cork Gaol, while still an untried prisoner, and consequently entitled to wear my own garments. "My poor man, have they put the prison clothes on you already?" moaned the old Bishop, and great was the merriment of his brother prelates when I rallied him on the insult to my tailor of mistaking my dingy and doubtless clumsy suit of homespun tweed for the stuff and the taste of the prison clothier. Nor were the Doctor's visions of the improved dietary under the new conditions much more alluring. For one long accustomed to all sorts of hurried and irregular meals, and sometimes to no meal at all, the ordinary prison fare presented no serious inconvenience. The stuff purporting to be cocoa., the contents of the weird cauldron called soup" and the slabs of suet pudding were not to be negotiated, but the black bread was little below a tolerable war-bread standard, and the three potatoes served in .a, net, which were the Friday dinner, and which I had to peel with my fingers with a gambler's interest in the question whether some black spot in any of the three might not diminish the bulk—the feast Mashed down with new milk saved from my breakfast allowance— me with a banquet of rather keener relish than if it came from the copper saucepans of a Parisian corden bleu. "What are.we to do with you?" cried the Doctor, wringing his hands. "Upon my word, that is just what is puzzling myself," was the reply.

Days passed without any attempt to make any of the three vetoed Rules operative. The unfortunate Governor developed a new side of his character which most truly gave me more personal distress than any discomfort of my own. From the first faint bullying he passed to entreaty and from entreaty to actual tears. The huge man swayed to and fro in a state of distraction of which two eyes turned in ‘ diametrically opposite directions seemed to be only one of the symptoms, as he. repeated: “If I don’t do it they will get somebody else to do it, and what is to become of my little family?” I strove my hardest to console him by assuring him I could not have a particle of illwill against prison officials who only obeyed orders under compulsion; that my war was with high placed politicians, who used both their officials and their prisoners as pawns in a heartless game of their own. One morning he came

in with, a particularly long face. “The Chairman has come,” he announced, as if he were announcing the executioner —his ojyn as well as mine. “The Chairman” was the Hon. Charles Bourke, the Chairman of the Prisons Board, a disciplinarian the bare mention of whose name made the Irish prison warder, or Governor for that matter, shiver all over. “The Chairman,” an exceedingly tall, haughty 'man, with the air of a Sultan of the Arabian Nights, at the clapping of whose hands a thousand slaves made answer—stalked into the room with his hat on, and without prologue barked out: “I understand you are disobeying the Prison Rules.” Here was the entire Balfour regime incarnate before my eyes in one insolent tyrant. “The Chairman,” to use a Scottish phrase, instantly “raised my corruption.” In a tone wilfully as offensive as his own, I replied: “As long as a man claiming to bo a gentleman keeps his hat on in ray room, I shall have nothing more to say to him.” The great man stalked out of the room again, without another word. Wilfrid Blunt, in his entertaining Diary, mentions a similar incident, when the same man entered his cell at Galway, and although received with cordial courtesy by the prisoner, who was the bosom friend of his brother, Hon. Algernon Bourke (known in society as “Button”) rewarded Mr. Blunt’s forbearance by “leaving the cell abruptly after a few uncivil words about the condition of my cell,” and ordering the removal of his rug, blankets, and of a bible printed in legible type in mere wanton insolence, (p. 393). Whereas in my own case the autocrat abandoned any present attempt to avenge my open defiance, and I became the hero of the prison staff who could not believe their eyes or ears when they learned how the bully had been flouted. Show*nS> perhaps, that the French proverb may sometimes fit the aristocrat as well as the horny-handed:

Oignez vilain, il vous poindra, Poignez vilain, il vous oindra.

The Doctor, a, few days afterwards, confided to mo that the Governor had been to Dublin to threaten resignation, repeating his mournful litany: "Why didn't they do it in Cork? Why did they put them upon us in Tullamore?" By this time the real object of the transfer to Tullamore—the calculation that the outside public could hear no more of what was passing inside the walls of that Cromwellian stronghold— been completely baffled. An unsuspected clause of the Prison Act was discovered by which not only the Visiting Justices of a particular gaol, but every magistrate of the county in which the prisoner had been convicted was entitled to visit him and report as to his treatment. Accordingly, the magistrates of the vast County of Cork began to descend upon Tullamore to break the sepulchral silence in which, the operations of "The Chairman" were to be carried on "according to plan," and the unfortunate Governor found a new clause of distraction n the duty of escorting not only the local Nationalist-Justice, Dr. Moorhead—a man of skill, acumen, and tenacity— now became a daily visitor— the magistrates whom almost every day's trains were beginning to bring from the most distant parts of the Comity Cork, while the gaol gates were once more besieged by Irish and English pressmen waiting to snap up the reports of the visitors. From the moment his anti-publicity boom was broken, the Chief Secretary in the jackboots of Cromwell proved himself once again to be a Cromwell-in-plaster-of-paris. I have no doubt Dr. Ridley was not leading me into any trap when with a chuckle he gave me to understand that "everybody was in a funk" about undertaking any physical attack to force me into the prison uniform"! It was his hint which emboldened me to throw off my clothes at night. Governmental genius hit upon a nobler expedient than honest force. (To be continue 3.)