The strangest of the birds of passage that passed through Ireland during these troubled times were Americans, who, one and all, belied their national reputation for shrewdness. Those I came across in Ireland were emotional, simple individuals, ready to credit any well-told story.
What of Childers himself, the toiling Childers, the small harassed man, for ever pedalling his bicycle; Childers who, of all those hard-working people, outworked all others; Childers who looked as though he might die and still sit upon his bicycle with his legs going round and round? This toiling Republican, whom the British Government in the strangeness of its ways left free, was he a man with a broken heart, and this very fever of work the effort to escape his sorrow? Was there truth in the whisper that he was a disappointed English naval man, who in pique had thrown himself into Irish affairs? Then, indeed, he was a small man, and all his furious pedalling would never bring him balm. But if his work for Ireland represented truth to him, so that no doubt ever came to make him irresolute, so that he never thought hungrily of his own country which he had forsaken then, indeed, he was bigger than the common run of man, and his toil may have brought repose to his spirit.
Mrs. Desmond Fitzgerald had a cottage in the hills, not very far from the city. We made occasional pilgrimages there. The two-mile walk from the station was nothing on those first kind summer days. There were pools of shade for the traveller to wade through under the trees; the lower lands were golden with gorse; the sky was high and serene. Yet the country bore more marks of ruin than the city.
An occasional gaunt building, such as the skeleton of the Customs House or the General Post Office, was all the wear and tear the city showed, though observant people could find bullet holes in a good many windows, some of them small and clean as if an augur had bored them, others brutally done, so that the cracks had run all about the pane. Sometimes a great plate-glass window would be annihilated, sometimes the fragments of some bomb leaping from the pavement would tear a score of holes in a door and stay embedded there; but next day the glazier would be along with his putty and the decorator with his paint brush, and there would be nothing to see.