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By Root 1057 0

a faint odour of cats) and continued almost without interruption throughout the day and on into the night. There was an excellent spirit at these games: an air of gaiety and abandon, almost of recklessness, reigned over the chattering groups. By the end of the chilly autumn evening, with dampness and dark beyond the window panes, the hooting of an owl in the park or the lonely cry of a peacock, when one of the ladies irrevocably dozed off with the cards in her ancient arthritic fingers and there was no one at hand to replace her (which meant the end of the game, of course), one pair of players might add up the score and find that they were winning or losing by some prodigious number of tricks accumulated during the day, several hundred perhaps...And everyone would climb the stairs chuckling to their rooms and dream of aces and knaves and a supply of trumps that would last for ever and ever, one trump after another, an invincible superiority subject to neither change nor decay nor old age, for a trump will always be a trump, come what may.

Around these tables rumours continued to circulate and prosper. One day it was thought that a brigade of Cossacks, émigrés from Russia whose fiendish Bolshevists they no longer found it worth their while to quell, had been hired en bloc by Dublin Castle to subdue the Irish. Someone else announced confidently that a hungry mob in County Mayo had seized and eaten a plump Resident Magistrate; because this story, absurd though it was, happened to coincide with the actual disappearance of an R.M. (though not from County Mayo) it gave all the ladies a dreadful frisson and a kaleidoscope of bad dreams. But then the R.M. was discovered, in a coffin left on a railway line, and all was well. It said in the Irish Times that he had been buried and dug up again (reprisals had been threatened if his whereabouts were not made known), but there was no mention of cannibalism.

But while the ladies gossiped cheerfully and playing-cards continued to snow down on the green baize tables the Major was at his most despondent. Above all, he took a gloomy view of the reprisals at Balbriggan and elsewhere. The result of this degeneration of British justice could only be chaotic. Once an impartial and objective justice was abandoned every faction in Ireland, every person in Ireland, was free to invent his own version of it. A man one met in the street in Kilnalough might with equal justification (provided it fitted into his own private view of things) offer you a piece of apple pie or slit your throat. But given the way things were going (the Major could not help feeling) he would be more likely to slit your throat.

If no throats were actually slit in Kilnalough in the first days after the disturbances, there were, nevertheless, some ugly incidents. Miss Archer was rudely barged into the gutter by two mountainous Irishwomen clad in black and wearing men’s boots. She then dropped her muff, which was trampled on and kicked around like a football by a group of urchins. Wisely she left it to them and fled before anything worse happened. Not long afterwards a young hooligan in Kilnalough put his stick through the spokes of Charity’s bicycle, causing her to fall and graze her knees and palms. Stones were thrown at the people from the Majestic but without causing any great harm. Viola O’Neill, while buying buttons in the haberdashery (Boy O’Neill informed the Major), had had some obscene words spoken into her innocent ears which, naturally, she had failed to comprehend.

But presently the Major’s sense of shock and dismay over the degeneration of British justice evaporated, leaving only a sediment of contempt and indifference. After all, if one lot was as bad as the other why should anyone care? “Let them sort it out for themselves.”

He was bored, he was lonely, and one day he realized that Edward was getting on his nerves. The more the Major thought about this, the stronger his aversion grew. Strange that he had never noticed before how he disliked the fellow. These days the mere sight of Edward was enough to set him