Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 11, 15 March 1923, Page 5

Evening Memories

(By William O'Brien.)

CHAPTER (Continued.)

The scales would have dipped more heavily still only for the slices of cold mutton which dear old Father McAlroy now began to import in his coat pockets, and with a tyranny there was no resisting hectored me into devouring. The old gentleman's daily chat, now fast changing from the most crusted Whiggery to a patriotism with a smell of gunpowder, was a feast even more delightful than his cold leg of mutton. The strain betimes caused me to be haunted by a darker apprehension.' Since my entry into the prison I had been wholly without outdoor exercise. This eternity of solitude, and the absence of occupation for mind or body, might well have ended in the worst of all fates, but for two devices which supplied me with plentiful mental food. One was the endeavor to recollect passages of Dante's Divine Comedy which were once my delight, but had long faded from my memory. Under the powerful aid of my present excitation, the rich Italian verse gradually came out as from a palimpsest, word by word, and passage by passage, until I could rejoicefully march up and down declaiming the magnificent music which has never since left my memory. As my recollections of the Tuscan chant began to be exhausted, there followed a choir of smaller singing-birds: Irish, English, and French. My other resource was devoting a night apiece to my personal recollections of each of the 32 counties, the meetings held there, the wars and skirmishes, the friendships formed, the fallen comrades, the ballads ringing with its name. Cavan was the only county of the 32 which I had only once or twice visited; but even on the Cavan night I had a glorious symposium with Cavan's immortal member, Joe Biggar, his fearlessness of the old Scottish Covenanter camp, his pawky humor and kind heart, his quaint code of political morals: "Never resign anything," "never withdraw anything," "never apologise for anything," and "never enter into an arbitration until you've first squared the arbitrator."

Truly nights and suppers of the gods, for all the threatenings of what was to come; but of this a new and formidable possibility was now looming up. For the mesmerio "John Kelly of Tralee" had by this time arranged a goodly plot for the night, come when it might, when the hesitating Chief Secretary should make up his mind to strike. He had secured the allegiance of four warders, including two of the imported Protestants, in addition to the indispensable Clerk at the front gate. Of any party of four the Governor might select for his midnight raid, at least two were sure to be of our partisans. The idea was that I was to make for the door as it was unlocked, and push my way

through the warders in the darkness, our own friends seizing the keys from the Governor and in the confusion locking him into the cell. The danger,point was how to pass the armed policeman patrolling the passage outside my window. The circumstances of the moment were to determine whether we were to make a rush to disarm him or take our chance of : a shot from his carbine in our run straight for the front gate,-after which there were elaborate arrangements for smuggling me into safe quarters, together with such of the prison officials as the night's adventure might have compromised.

In the meantime, Governor, Doctor, Chaplain, and warders were left in as miserable uncertainty as myself as to when the order for action might be given. Mr. Balfour now hit upon a plan for resolving his own indecision, which was destined to bring a stain of blood upon his name that will not easily be effaced. One morning a man professing to be a doctor knocked at the gate, and without giving the Governor or the Prison Doctor the smallest indication of who he was, signed the Visitors' Book with the initials "G.P.8." (I suppose "General Prisons Board"), and requested to be shown to my room. f This secret emissary, as it afterwards turned out, had been selected as an espial to advise the Chief Secretary how far his own officials could be relied upon in a policy of Thorough jusqu-'au bout. The selection was one of astounding indiscretion. He was a Dr. Barr, the Medical Officer of Kirkdale Prison, and a disciplinarian of iron repute in the English Prison Service; but, what was of very much more seriousness in the man who was to determine issues of life or death as between Irish Nationalists and their gaolers, Dr. Barr was a north of Ireland Orangeman of elemental bitterness and the Chairman of a Unionists Association in Liverpool seething with prejudice against Mr. Balfour's Irish prisoners. In his relations with myself, Dr. Barr proved to be a replica of the Hon. Charles Bourke —equally abrupt, insolent and stony, and in the result equally ready to digest the venom of his spleen; for it appears to be certain that it was Dr. Barr's report which decided the Chief Secretary's capitulation on each of my three conditions, whilst it no loss certainly brought in its train the breaking and death of John Mandeville and the suicide of Dr. Ridley, for whom the terror of "the Unknown" or "the Mysterious One" (these were his own expressions) continued to be, in all our conversations, the haunting spectre of his life. It is possible also that some inkling of the machinations of "John Kelly of Tralee" had reached Dublin Castle, and confirmed Dr. Barr's own evil report of the unreliability of almost everybody connected with the Irish Prison Service.

But even to the last the surrender was as ungracious as it was tardy. For more than a week after Mr. Balfour had publicly announced in England that no further attempt would be made to enforce the prison rules against me, his prisoner was still submitted to the petty torment of being compelled to tramp up and down all night, without venturing to undress, listening to every sound that might be the herald of an encounter full of anxieties, neither Governor nor Doctor being in a position to make sure what the next visit from "the Unknown" might portend. My evidence at the Mandeville inquest gives some notion of the incredible silliness, as of a nagging woman, with which the fermentation was continued to the last:

"It was then and then only (on an undertaking from tho Governor that there would be no attack) I was able to take off my clothes. Then, when the clothes stolen from me were returned, it was in the most extraordinary manner, bit by bit. One day I got back my coat and vest; two or three days after when there, was snow on the ground I got back my top-coat. After that it was intimated to me that my linen shirt, which I had never changed since I entered, would be washed for me, and next —six weeks after my imprisonment— Governor told me that the Prisons Board had made an order, apart altogether from the Doctor, that I should be allowed to wear my own clothes during the remainder of my imprisonment." My two other defiances of prison discipline were never further contested.

But the main point was that the seemingly impossible had come to pass. The prison rules of adamant had melted like, snow under the hot breath of public opinion. The victory was io complete) (hat cotite'mpt and amusement

began to mingle with the popular indignation and with my own. When on the day of my release the Governor proffered a third-class ticket to Dublin, he submitted with a groan to the demand that it must be a first-class one, and when on his remonstrance I pointed to the Prison Rules ordaining that a prisoner, on release must be sent back under the same conditions on which he was brought from the place of conviction, observing: “I was brought from Cork in a special train, and only that I am a moderate man, Governor, I should demand a special train to be sent back in,” there was a. gleam of malice as well as of forlorn fun in the worthy man’s eyes as he replied to my small joke: “Upon my soul, I should..not object, if you could only make Mr. Balfour pay for it.” (To be continued.)