Part 9

His gaiety at the little Sunday evenings which he holds quite regularly, goes far, I am told, towards easing the strain on the taut nerves of the Sinn Fein intellectuals who attend them. On the Sunday evening I was present the subject of jail journals was broached. Darrell Figgis had just written one. In a dim corner of the room was miniatured the ivory face and the red gold beard of the much imprisoned Figgis.

"Why write a jail journal?" queried AE, smiling towards the corner. "The rare book, the book that bibliophiles will pray to find twenty years from now, will be written by an Irishman who never went to jail."

Some one, I think that it was "Jimmy" Stephens, author of "The Crock of Gold," who sat cross-legged on the end of a worn wicker chaise longue and talked with all the facility with which he writes, mentioned the countess's plan of living in the Coombe district. AE returned that as far as he knew the countess was the only member of parliament who felt called upon to live with her constituency.

Then suddenly the whole room seemed to join a chorus of protest against President Wilson. At the Peace Conference all power was his. He was backed by the richest, greatest nation in the world. But he failed to keep his promise of gaining the self-determination of small nations. Was he yielding to the anti-Irish sentiment brought about by English control of the cables and English propaganda in the United States--was he to let his great republic be intellectually dependent on the ancient monarchy?

"Perhaps," said AE to me after a few meditative puffs of his pipe, "you feel like the American who was with us on a similar occasion a few weeks ago. At last he burst out with: 'It's no conception which Americans have of their president that he should take the place and the duties of God Omnipotent in the world,'"

One day I went to discuss Irish labor with AE. I climbed up to that most curious of all magazine offices--the Irish Homestead office up under the roof of Plunkett House. It is a semi-circular room whose walls are covered with the lavender and purple people of AE's brush. AE was ambushed behind piles of newspapers, and behind him in a grate filled with smouldering peat blocks sat the black tea kettle. As a reporter, one of the few things for which I am allowed to retain respect is the editorial dead line. So I assured AE that I would be glad to return when he had finished writing. But with a courtesy that is evidently founded on an inversion of the American rule that business should always come before people, he assured me that he could sit down at the fire with me at once.

Now I knew that he had great sympathy with laborers. I recalled his terrible letter against Dublin employers in the great strike of 1913 when he foretold that the success of the employers in starving the Dublin poor would necessarily lead to "red ruin and the breaking up of laws.... The men whose manhood you have broken will loathe you, and will always be brooding and seeking to strike a new blow. The children will be taught to curse you. The infant being moulded in the womb will have breathed into its starved body the vitality of hate. It is not they--it is you who are pulling down the pillars of the social order." But I knew, too, that he was opposed to violence, so I wondered what he would say to this:

"A labor leader just told me that it was his belief that industrial revolution would take place in Ireland in two or three years. Labor waits only till it has secured greater unity between the north and south. Then it will take over industry and government by force."

"I had hoped--I am trying to convince the labor leaders here," he said finally, "of the value of the Italian plan for the taking over of industry. The Italian seaman's union co-operatively purchased and ran boats on which they formerly had been merely workers."

Russia he spoke of for a moment. People shortly over from Russia told him, as he had felt, that the soviet was not the dreadful thing it was made out to be. But a dictatorship of the workers he would not like. He wanted, he said with an upward movement of his big arms, he wanted to be free.

"Now I am for the building of a co-operative commonwealth on co-operative societies. Ireland can and is developing her own industries through co-operation. She is developing them without aid from England and in the face of opposition in Ireland.

"England, you see, is used to dealing with problems of empire--with nations and great metropolises. When we bring her plans that mean life or death to just villages, the matter is too small to discuss. She is bored.

"Ireland offers opposition in the person of the 'gombeen man.' He is the local trader and money lender. And co-operative buying and selling takes away his monopoly of business.

"Paddy Gallagher up in Dungloe in the Rosses will give you an idea of the poverty of the Irish countryside, of the extent that the poverty is due to the gombeen men, 'the bosses of the Rosses,' and of the ability of the co-operative society to develop and create industry even in such a locality.

"Societies like Paddy Gallagher's are springing up all over Ireland. The rapid growth may be estimated from the fact that in 1902 their trade turnover was $7,500,000, and in 1918, $50,000,000. These little units do not merely develop industry; they also bind up the economic and social interests of the people.

"In a few years these new societies and others to be created will have dominated their districts, and political power will follow, and we will have new political ideals based on a democratic control of agriculture and industry, and states and people will move harmoniously to a given end.

"Ireland might attain, by orderly evolution, to a co-operative commonwealth in fifty to two hundred years.

"But these are dangerous times for prophecy."

PADDY GALLAGHER: GIANT KILLER.

From the dark niche under the gray boulder where the violets grow, a Donegal fairy flew to the mountain cabin to bring a birthday wish to Patrick Gallagher. The fairy designed not that great good would come to Paddy, but that great good would come to his people through him. At least when Paddy grew up, he slew the child-eating giant, Poverty, who lived in Donegal.

Paddy began to fight poverty when he could scarcely toddle. With his father, whose back was laden with a great rush basket, he used to pad in his bare feet down the mountainside to the Dungloe harbor--down where the hills give the ocean a black embrace. Father and son would wade into the ocean that was pink and lavender in the sunset. Above them, the white curlews swooped and curved and opened their pine wood beaks to squawk a prayer for dead fish. But the workers did not stop to watch. Their food also was in question. They must pluck the black seaweed to fertilize their field.

When the early sun bronzed the bog, and streaked the dark pool below with gold, Paddy and his father began to feed the dried wavy strands of kelp between the hungry brown furrow lips. They packed the long groove near the stone fence; they rounded past the big boulder that could not be budged; last of all, they filled the short far row in the strangely shaped little field. At noon, Paddy's mother appeared at the half door of the cabin and called in the general direction of the field--it was difficult to see them, for their frieze suits had been dyed in bog water and she could not at once distinguish them from the brown earth. They were glad to come in to eat their sugarless and creamless oatmeal.

In the evening Paddy ran over the road to his cousin's. Western clouds were blackening and his little cousin was pulling the pig into the cabin as a man puts other sort of treasure out of danger into a safe. Paddy listened a moment. He could hear the castanets of the tweed weaver's loom and the hum of his uncle's deep voice as he sang at his work. He ran to the rear of the cabin and up the stone steps to the little addition. A lantern filled the room he entered with black, harp-like shadows of the loom. While the uncle stopped treadling and held the blue-tailed shuttle in his hand, the breathless little boy told him that the field was finished.

"God grant," said the uncle with a solemnity that put fear into the heart of Paddy, "there may be a harvest for you."

Paddy watched his mother work ceaselessly to aid in the fight that his father and he were making against poverty. During the month her needles would click unending wool into socks, and then on Saturday she would trudge--often in a stiff Atlantic gale--sixteen miles to the market in Strabane. There she sold the socks at a penny a pair.

In spite of combined hopes, the potato plants were floppily yellow that year. Their stems felt like a dead man's fingers. No potatoes to eat. None to exchange for meal. What were they to do?

The gombeen man told them. As member of the county council, he said, he would secure money for the repair of the roads. All those who worked on the road would get paid in meal.

"Let your da' not worry," said the fat gombeen man pompously to Paddy. Paddy had brought the ticket that his father had obtained by a week's work to exchange for twenty-eight pounds of corn meal. "I'll keep famine from the parish. Charity's not dead yet."