Page:The Gael Vol XXII January to December 1903.djvu/160

June, 1903. who had brought the case of Ireland before the whole world; won over Scotland and Wales and split England herself into two hostile camps, where before she had been an opposing unit.

The Parnell episode, one of the saddest in the history of our unhappy country, is merely a memory now, but it will be many a long day before the misfortune which the desertion of this great statesman brought upon Ireland can be atoned for. In the opinion of many, it never can be atoned for.

Forster, to whom Parnell referred in a speech at Galway as "this hypocritical, humanitarian Secretary Buckshot Forster," because he had ordered buckshot served to those policemen who were assigned to evictions, died leaving this ignominious epithet his most prominent mark of identification from end to end of the land. His dying words were reported to be: "No Home Rule."

Some wag wanted it understood that there was a way of reading the phrase—and that, too, the correct way, he even asserted—which would show that the old despot repented at the last moment; and that was by inserting a semicolon after "No." It is too subtle a distinction, however, to waste words upon at this late day.

Forster could do mean things to a political opponent; but perhaps the meanest thing of which he was guilty was to peer through the bars one day at Parnell, while he happened to be taking exercise with the other prisoners in the association hall. The incident has never before been referred to; and as I find it in the manuscript of my little "Jail Journal." which I have preserved all those years, and of part of which this article is merely a transcript, I make mention of it now for the first time.

Captain Barlow, as I remember, was chairman of the Prisons Board. We knew that from the record. Forster's face and lumbering, uncouth figure were familiar to everybody, for they had been published far and wide, more especially since the designation "Buckshot" Forster had been given him. A few of us, who were "on the inside," got the tip from one of the warders that the Chief Secretary was visiting the prison; and so we were on the watch. Parnell himself was unaware of it.

Presently, on the outer side of the iron-barred gate leading to the hall, a group of solemn-visaged men, all well fed and comfortably dressed, gathered and talked in barely audible tones. There sure enough stood old Forster and his bushy beard, a group of Prison Board people with him.

They had come, no doubt, to see the animals. Captain Dennehy, the Governor—I think that was his name—stood alongside, flanked by Patterson, the Deputy Governor. Captain Dennehy, as I remember, was a Catholic; which surely ought, of itself, have made every man of us a loyal subject of the Queen—were it not that the Irish are known to be such an incorrigible race! Not far away was Searle the chief warder, jingling the keys. He was frequently in full control.

A sleeky oily customer was Searle, his grey eyes denoting cruelty, had he the opportunity to be cruel. I can see him plainly now. I never looked at this official without thinking of Dr. Trevor, who had charge of that same Kilmainham jail, when Robert Emmet was led forth to execution, one hundred years ago; and whose merciless treatment of the political prisoners of that day was a counterpart of the conduct of the notorious Cunningham, who had charge of the old hell-hole in City Hall Park, New York, whence Nathan Hale marched out to the gallows. Searle had come originally from out the Orange preserve in Ulster, and had a perpetual grin, but, of course, no country. He just looked it, too. There they stayed, the personification of robber strength and security, until Parnell had passed by.

I know he didn't see them; but it is my impression that he heard afterwards of the incident How it affected him, or whether he suffered it to affect him at all, can probably never be told, for Parnell cultivated the art of inward feeling in a way common to no other man of note who has ever appeared in the history of our hapless land.

But how mean and unmanly was all this. The doings of England in Ireland reek with just such petty provocations. After the Fashoda affair and during the Boer war, Premier Salisbury, complaining of the criticism of England by the French newspapers and French public men, spoke of it protestingly as a series of pin pricks."

England should be the last to make complaint of that kind, in view of her behavior toward our people. Bereft of imagination themselves, the English appear unable to understand that there can be any form of pain save bodily pain—a primary emotion merely, that might arouse a pig as readily as it would arouse a man.

The lord and master at St Helena for a time during the imprisonment of Napoleon was Sir Hudson Lowe—a village Dogberry on a tuppeny throne. His methods and "Buckshot" Forster's methods were strikingly alike. Lowe made life hell for Napoleon by his vindictive pettiness.

His conduct reached the straining point on a certain occasion, when this one-horse squireen invited his distinguished prisoner, the man who had made and unmade kings and kingdoms, and on whose brain at one time the safety of the British Empire had hung, to dinner "to meet the Countess."

For very shame's sake, the Government sent him at last about his business, just as it did Forster, if I'm not mistaken. But it was then too late; the damage had been done. Surely, they are an unnatural lot those English; especially when their relations with Ireland come to be reckoned.

My space is all but spent, so I shall close. What remains to be said in closing? Ah, me! There remains more to be said of those Kilmainham days than I could squeeze into a score such articles as this; more, probably, than I shall ever find time to say. Here now it lies beside me in manuscript, and in the rough, my little "jail journal," exactly as it was penned from day to day, twenty-one years ago, when each incident was fresh, each personality vivid, and each conclusion, in a measure, it maybe, immature.

As reflection must precede conclusion, if we are to think aright I was given most of all to the former process of thought in those days; to the latter in these. If I should describe my lot as irksome, rather than unhappy, the situation would appear fairly clear. Browning tells how "Irks care the crop-full bird— Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast"

But as we were neither "crop-full" nor "maw-crammed," the "irks" and the "frets" must have proceeded from other causes.

Each day was but a repetition of the preceding one, save when our little colony was increased by the arrival of some prominent "suspect" from the outside, around whom we gathered to learn how the fight was going on. With the approach of Christmas, everybody became gloomy. Parnell was ill. Certain petty punishment had been visited on him because he had tendered one of the warders, a fellow named White, a half-sovereign to take out a letter.

What Jasper Tully amusingly described as "skilly and whack," had been our diet during some months; but Christmas Day, for the first time, we were regaled from the outside at our own expense; and in the interior of more than one dead fowl delivered at the prison that memorable Christmas morning, there was found tucked away a tiny bottle of something which cannot with truth be described as ginger ale!

As I lay down to sleep that night I can say that all present troubles seemed for the moment dissipated, and I lived and moved in some vast, unknown realm, where there were neither prisons nor coercion acts, and where the might of England had been more than once successfully defied.

"I cannot paint my dream; it was so
 * bright.

So fraught with dazzling radiance
 * to me

It threw a glamor o'er my wildered
 * sight
 * And left me blinded by my ecstasy.

My longing soul essayed in vain to
 * soar

Beyond the shining path of sun and
 * stars.

But all too soon she languished as de-
 * fore,

Panting and worn, behind her prison
 * bars!

New York, May 13, 1903.