JUMBO’S WIFE

I

When he had taken his breakfast, silently as his
way was after a drunk, he lifted the latch and
Went out without a word. She heard his feet tramp
down the ﬂagged laneway, waking iron echoes, and,
outraged, shook her fist after him; then she
pulled off the old red ﬂannel petticoat and black
shawl she was wearing, and crept back into the
hollow of the bed. But not to sleep. She went
over and over in her mind the shame of last
night’s bout, felt at her lip where he had split
it with a blow, and recalled how she had ﬂed into
the roadway screaming for help and been brought
back by Pa Kenefick, the brother of the murdered
boy. Somehow that had sobered Jumbo.  Since
Michael, the elder of the Kenefick brothers, had
been taken out and killed by the police, the
people looked up to Pa rather as they looked up
to the priest, but more passionately, more
devotedly. She remembered how even Jumbo, the
great swollen insolent Jumbo had crouched back
into the darkness when he saw that slip of a lad
walk in before her. ‘Stand away from me,’ he had
said, but not threateningly. ‘It was a shame,’ Pa
had retorted, ‘a confounded shame for a drunken
elephant of a man to beat his poor decent wife
like that,’ but Jumbo had said nothing, only ‘Let
her be, boy, let her be! Go away from me now and
I’ll quieten down.’ ‘You’d better quieten down,’
Pa had said, ‘or you’ll answer for it to me, you
great bully you,’ and he had kicked about the
ﬂoor the pieces of the delf that Jumbo in his
drunken frenzy had shattered one by one against
the wall. ‘I tell you I won’t lay a finger on
her,’ Jumbo had said, and sure enough, when Pa
Kenefick had gone, Jumbo was a quiet man.  But it
was the sight of the brother of the boy that had
been murdered rather than the beating she had had
or the despair at seeing her little share of delf
smashed on her, that brought home to Jumbo’s wife
her own utter humiliation. She had often thought
before that she would run away from Jumbo, even,
in her wild way, that she, would do for him, but
never before had she seen so clearly what a wreck
he had made of her life. The sight of Pa had
reminded her that she was no common trollop but a
decent girl; he had said it, ‘your decent poor
wife,’ that was what Pa had said, and it was
true; she was a decent poor woman. Didn’t the
world know how often she had pulled the little
home together on her blackguard of a husband, the
man who had ’listed in the army under a false
name so as to rob her of the separation money,
the man who would keep a job only as long as it
pleased him, and send her out then to work in the
nurseries, picking fruit for a shilling a day?

She was so caught up into her own bitter
reﬂections that when she glanced round suddenly
and saw the picture that had been the ostensible
cause of Jumbo’s fury awry, the glass smashed in
it, and the bright colours stained with tea, her
lip fell, and she began to moan softly to herself.
It was a beautiful piece—that was how she
described it—a beautiful, massive piece of a big
big castle, all towers, on a rock, and mountains
and snow behind. Four shillings and sixpence it
had cost her in the Coal Quay market. Jumbo would
spend three times that on a drunk' ay three
times and five times that Jumbo would spend, and
for all, he had smashed every cup and plate and
dish in the house on her poor little
picture—because it was extravagance, he said.

She heard the postman’s loud double knock and the
child beside her woke and sat up. She heard a
letter being slipped under the door.  Little
Johnny heard it too. He climbed down the Side of
the bed, pattered across the ﬂoor in his
nightshirt and brought it to her. A letter with
the On-his-Majesty’s-Service stamp; it was
Jumbo's pension that he drew every quarter.  She
slipped it under her pillow with a fresh burst of
rage. It would keep. She would hold on to it
until he gave her his week’s wages on
Friday. Yes, she would make him hand over every
penny of it even if he killed her after. She had
done it before, and would do it again.

Little Johnny began to cry that he wanted his
breakfast, and she rose, sighing, and dressed.
Over the fire as she boiled the kettle she
meditated again on her wrongs, and was startled
when she found the child actually between her
legs holding out the long envelope to the ﬂames,
trying to boil the kettle with it. She snatched
it wildly from his hand and gave him a vicious
slap across the face that set him howling. She
stood turning the letter over and over in her
hand curiously, and then started as she
remembered that it wasn’t until another month
that Jumbo’s pension fell due. She counted the
weeks; no, that was right, but what had them
sending out Jumbo’s pension a month before it was
due?

When the kettle boiled she made the tea, poured
it out into two tin ponnies, and sat into table
with the big letter propped up before her as
though she was trying to read its secrets through
the manilla covering. But she was no closer to
solving the mystery when her breakfast of bread
and tea was done, and, sudden resolution coming
to her, she held the envelope over the spout of
the kettle and slowly steamed its fastening
away. She drew out the ﬂimsy note inside and
opened it upon the table. It was an order, a
money order, but not the sort they sent to
Jumbo. The writing on it meant little to her, but
what did mean a great deal were the careful
figures, a two and a five that filled one
corner. A two and a five and a sprawling sign
before them; this was not for Jumbo—or was it?
All sorts of suspicions began to form in her
mind, and with them a feeling of pleasurable
excitement.

She thought of Pa Kenefick. Pa was a good scholar
and the proper man to see about a thing like
this. And Pa had been good to her. Pa would feel
she was doing the right thing in showing him this
mysterious paper, even if it meant nothing but a
change in the way they paid Jumbo’s pension; it
would show how much she looked up to him.

She threw her old black shawl quickly about her
shoulders and grabbed at the child’s hand.  She
went down the low arched laneway where they
lived—Melancholy Lane, it was called—and up the
road to the Kenefick’s. She knocked at their
door, and Mrs. Kenefick, whose son had been
dragged to his death from that door, answered
it. She looked surprised when, she saw the other
woman, and only then Jumbo’s wife realised how
early it was. She asked excitedly for Pa. He
wasn’t at home, his mother said, and she didn’t
know when he would be home, if he came at
all. When she saw how crestfallen her visitor
looked at this, she asked politely if she
couldn’t send a message, for women like Jumbo’s
wife frequently brought information that was of
use to the volunteers. No, no, the other woman
said earnestly, it was for Pa’s ears, for Pa’s
ears alone, and it couldn’t wait. Mrs. Kenefick
asked her into the parlour, where the picture of
the murdered boy, Michael, in his Volunteer
uniform hung. It was dangerous for any of the
company to stay at home, she said, the police
knew the ins and outs of the district too well;
there was the death of Michael unaccounted for,
and a dozen or more arrests, all within a month
or two. But she had never before seen Jumbo’s
wife in such a state and wondered what was the
best thing for her to do. It was her daughter who
decided it by telling where Pa was to be found,
and immediately the excited woman raced off up
the hill towards the open country.

She knocked at the door of a little farmhouse off
the main road, and when the door was opened she
saw Pa himself, in shirt-sleeves, filling out a
basin of hot water to shave. His first words
showed that he thought it was Jumbo who had been
at her again, but, without answering him,
intensely conscious of herself and of the
impression she wished to create, she held the
envelope out at arm’s length. He took it, looked
at the address for a moment, and then pulled out
the flimsy slip. She saw his brows bent above it,
then his lips tightened. He raised his head and
called, ‘Jim, Liam, come down! Come down a
minute!’ The tone in which he said it delighted
her as much as the rush of footsteps
upstairs. Two men descended a ladder to the
kitchen, and Pa held out the slip. ‘Look at
this!’ he said. They looked at it, for a long
time it seemed to her, turning it round and round
and examining the postmark on the envelope. She
began to speak rapidly.  ‘Mr. Kenefick will tell
you, gentlemen, Mr.  Kenefick will tell you, the
life he leads me. I was never one for regulating
me own, gentlemen, but I say before me God this
minute, hell will never be full till they have
him roasting there.  A little pitcher I bought,
gentlemen, a massive little piece—Mr. Kenefick
will tell you—I paid four and sixpence for it—he
said I was extravagant. Let me remark he’d spend
three times, ay, and six times, as much on
filling his own gut as I’d spend upon me home and
child. Look at me, gentlemen, look at me lip
Where he hit me—Mr.  Kenefick will tell you—I was
in gores of blood.’ ‘Listen now, ma’am,’ one of
the men interrupted suavely, ‘we’re very grateful
to you for showing us this letter. It’s something
we wanted to know this long time, ma’am. And now
like a good woman will you go back home and not
open your mouth to a soul about it, and, if
himself ask you anything, say there did ne’er a
letter come?’ Of course, she said, she would do
whatever they told her. She was in their
hands. Didn’t Mr.  Kenefick come in, like the
lovely young man he was, and save her from the
hands of that dancing hangman Jumbo? And wasn’t
she sorry for his mother, poor little ’oman, and
her fine son taken away on her? Weren’t they all
crazy about her?

The three men had to push her out the door,
saying that she had squared her account with
Jumbo at last.


II

At noon with the basket of food under her arm,
and the child plodding along beside her, she made
her way through the northern slums to a factory
on the outskirts of the city. There, sitting on
the grass beside a little stream—her usual
station—she waited for Jumbo. He came just as the
siren blew, sat down beside her on the grass,
and, without as much as fine day, began to unpack
the food in the little basket.  Already she was
frightened and unhappy; she dreaded what Jumbo
would do if ever he found out about the letter,
and find out he must.  People said he wouldn’t
last long on her, balloon and all as he was. Some
said his heart was weak, and others that he was
bloated out with dropsy and would die in great
agony at any minute. But those who said that
hadn’t felt the weight of Jumbo’s hand.

She sat in the warm sun, watching the child
dabble his fingers in the little stream, and all
the bitterness melted away within her. She had
had a hard two days of it, and now she felt
Almighty God might well have pity on her, and
leave her a week or even a fortnight of quiet,
until she pulled her little home together
again. Jumbo ate placidly-and contentedly; she
knew by this his drinking bout was almost
over. At last he pulled his cap well down over
his eyes and lay back with his wide red face to
the sun. She watched him, her hands upon her
lap. He looked for all the world like a huge,
fat, sulky child. He lay like that without
stirring for some time; then he stretched out his
legs, and rolled over and over and over downhill
through the grass. He grunted with pleasure, and
sat up blinking drowsily at her from the edge of
the cinder path. She put her hand in her
pocket. ‘Jim, will I give you the price of an
ounce of ’baccy?’ He stared up at her for a
moment. ‘There did ne’er a letter come for me?’
he asked, and her heart sank. ‘No, Jim,’ she said
feebly, ‘what letter was it you were expecting?’
‘Never mind, you. Here, give us a couple of lob
for a wet!’ She counted him out six coppers and
he stood up to go.

All the evening she worried herself about Pa
Kenefick and his friends—though to be sure they
were good-natured, friendly boys. She was glad
when Jumbo came in at tea-time; the great bulk of
him stretched out in the corner gave her a
feeling of security. He was almost in good humour
again, and talked a little, telling her to shut
up when her tongue wagged too much, or sourly
abusing the ‘bummers’ who had soaked him the
evening before. She had cleared away the supper
things when a motor-car drove up the road and
stopped at the end of Melancholy Lane.  Her heart
misgave her. She ran to the door and looked out;
there were two men coming up the lane, one of
them wearing a mask; when they saw her they broke
into a trot. ‘Merciful Jesus!’ she screamed, and
rushed in, banging and bolting the door behind
her. Jumbo stood up slowly.  ‘What is it?’ he
asked. ‘That letter.’ ‘What letter?’ ‘I showed it
to Pa Kenefick, that letter from the barrack.’
The blue veins rose on Jumbo’s forehead as though
they would burst.  He could barely speak but
rushed to the fireplace and swept the poker above
her head. ‘If it’s the last thing I ever do I’ll
have your sacred life!’ he said in a hoarse
whisper. ‘Let me alone! Let me alone!’ she
shrieked. ‘They’re‘at the door!’ She leaned her
back against the door, and felt against her spine
the lurch of a man’s shoulder. Jumbo heard it; he
watched her with narrowed, despairing eyes, and
then beckoned her towards the back door. She went
on before him on tiptoe and opened the door
quietly for him. ‘Quick,’ he said, ‘name of
Jasus, lift me up this.’ This was the back wall,
which was fully twice his own height but had
footholes by which he could clamber up. She held
his feet in them, and puffing and growling, he
scrambled painfully up, inch by inch, until his
head was almost level with the top of the wall;
then with a gigantic effort he slowly raised his
huge body and laid it ﬂat upon the spiny
top. ‘Keep them back, you!’ he said.

‘Here,’ she called softly up to him, ‘take this,’
and he bent down and caught the poker.

It was dark in the little kitchen. She crept to
the door and listened, holding her breath. There
was no sound. She was consumed with anxiety and
impatience. Suddenly little Johnny sat up and
began to howl. She grasped the key and turned it
in the lock once; there was no sound; at last she
opened the door slowly. There was no one to be
seen in the lane. Night was setting in —maybe he
would dodge them yet. She locked the screaming
child in behind her and hurried down to the
archway.

The motor-car was standing where it had stopped
and a man was leaning over the wheel smoking a
cigarette. He looked up and smiled at
her. ‘Didn’t they get him yet?’ he asked, ‘No,’
she said mechanically. ‘Ah, cripes!’ he swore,
‘with the help of God they’ll give him an awful
end when they ketch him.’ She stood there looking
up and down the road in the terrible stillness:
there were lamps lighting behind every window but
not a soul appeared. At last a strange young man
in a trench-coat rushed down the lane towards
them. ‘Watch out there,’ he cried. ‘He’s after
giving us the slip. Guard this lane and the one
below, don’t shoot unless you can get him.’ He
doubled down the road and up the next laneway.

The young man in the car topped his cigarette
carefully, put the butt end in his waistcoat
pocket and crossed to the other side of the road.
He leaned nonchalantly against the wall and drew
a heavy revolver. She crossed too and stood
beside him. An old lamplighter came up one of the
lanes from the city and went past them to the
next gas-lamp, his torch upon his shoulder. ‘He’s
a brute of a man,’ the driver said consolingly,
‘sure, I couldn’t but hit him in the dark itself.
But it’s a shame now they wouldn’t have a
gas-lamp at that end of the lane, huh!’ The old
lamplighter disappeared up the road, leaving two
or three pale specks of light behind him.

They stood looking at the laneways each end of a
little row of cottages, not speaking a word.
Suddenly the young man drew himself up stiﬂly
against the wall and raised his left hand towards
the fading sky. ‘See that?’ he said gleefully.
Beyond the row of cottages a figure rose slowly
against a chimney-pot; they could barely see it
in the twilight, but she could not doubt who it
was. The man spat upon the barrel of his gun and
raised it upon his crooked elbow; then the dark
figure leaped out as it were upon the air and
disappeared among the shadows of the houses.
‘Jasus !’ the young man swore softly, ‘wasn’t
that a great pity?’ She came to her senses in a
ﬂash.  ‘Jumbo!’ she shrieked, ‘me poor Jumbo!
He’s kilt, he’s kilt!’ and began to weep and clap
her hands. The man looked at her in comical
bewilderment. ‘Well, well!’ he said, ‘to think of
that! And are you his widda, ma’am?’ ‘God melt
and wither you!’ she screamed and rushed away
towards the spot where Jumbo’s figure had
disappeared.

At the top of the lane a young man with a
revolver drove her back. ‘Is he kilt?’ she cried.
‘Too well you know he’s not kilt,’ the young man
replied savagely. Another wearing a mask came out
of a cottage and said ‘He’s dished us
again. Don’t stir from this. I’m going round to
Samson’s Lane.’ ‘How did he manage it?’ the first
man asked. ‘Over the roofs. This place is a
network, and the people won’t stir a finger to
help us.’

For hours that duel in the darkness went on,
silently, without a shot being fired. What mercy
the people of the lanes showed to Jumbo was a
mercy they had never denied to any hunted thing.
His distracted wife went back to the
road. Leaving the driver standing alone by his
car she tramped up and down staring up every tiny
laneway. It did not enter her head to run for
assistance. On the opposite side of the road
another network of lanes, all steep-sloping, like
the others, or stepped in cobbles, went down into
the heart of the city. These were Jumbo’s only
hope of escape, and that was why she watched
there, glancing now and then at the maze of
lights beneath her.

Ten o’clock rang out from Shandon—shivering, she
counted the chimes. Then down one of the lanes
from the north she heard a heavy clatter of
ironshod feet. Clatter, clatter, clatter; the
feet drew nearer, and she heard other, lighter,
feet pattering swiftly behind. A dark figure
emerged through an archway, running with frantic
speed.  She rushed out into the middle of the
road to meet it, sweeping her shawl out on either
side of her head like a dancer’s sash. ‘Jumbo, me
lovely Jumbo!’ she screamed. ‘Out of me way,
y’ould crow!’ the wild quarry panted, ﬂying past.

She heard him take the first ﬂight of steps in
the southern laneway at a bound. A young man
dashed out of the archway a moment after and gave
a hasty look around him. Then he ran towards her
and she stepped out into the lane to block his
passage. Without swerving he rushed into her at
full speed, sweeping her off her feet, but she
drew the wide black shawl about his head as they
fell and rolled together down the narrow sloping
passage. They were at the top of the steps and he
still struggled frantically to free himself from
the filthy enveloping shawl. They rolled from
step to step, to the bottom, he throttling her
and cursing furiously at her strength; she still
holding the shawl tight about his head and
shoulders. Then the others came and dragged him
off, leaving her choking and writhing upon the
ground.

But by this time Jumbo was well beyond their
reach.


III

Next morning she walked dazedly about the town,
stopping every policeman she met and asking for
Jumbo. At the military barrack on the hill they
told her she would find him in one of the city
police barracks. She explained to the young
English officer who spoke to her about Pa
Kenefick, and how he could be captured, and for
her pains was listened to in wide-eyed
disgust. But what she could not understand in the
young officer’s attitude to her, Jumbo, sitting
over the fire in the barrack day-room, had
already been made to understand, and she was
shocked to see him so pale, so sullen, so
broken. And this while she was panting with pride
at his escape!  He did not even ﬂy at her as she
had feared he would, nor indeed abuse her at
all. He merely looked up and said with the
bitterness of utter resignation, ‘There’s the one
that brought me down!’ An old soldier, he was cut
to the heart that the military would not take him
in, but had handed him over to the police for
protection.  ‘I’m no use to them now,’ he said,
‘and there’s me thanks for all I done. They’d as
soon see me out of the way; they’d as soon see
the poor old crature that served them out of the
way.’ ‘It was all Pa Kenefick’s doings,’ his wife
put in frantically, ‘it was no one else done
it. Not that my poor slob of a man ever did him
or his any harm....’ At this the policemen
round her chuckled and Jumbo angrily bade her be
silent.  ‘But I told the officer of the swaddies
where he was to be found,’ she went on
unheeding. ‘What was that?’ the policemen asked
eagerly, and she told them of how she had found
Pa Kenefick in the little cottage up the hill.

Every day she went to see Jumbo. When the weather
was fine they sat in the little garden behind the
barrack, for it was only at dusk that Jumbo could
venture out and then only with military or police
patrols. There were very few on the road who
would speak to her now, for on the night after
Jumbo’s escape the little cottage where Pa
Kenefick had stayed had been raided and smashed
up by masked policemen. Of course, Pa and his
friends were gone. She hated the neighbours, and
dug into her mind with the fear of what might
happen to Jumbo was the desire to be quit of Pa
Kenefick. Only then, she felt in her blind
headlong way, would Jumbo be safe. And what
divil’s notion took her to show him the letter?
She’d swing for Pa, she said, sizing up to the
policemen.

And Jumbo grew worse and worse. His face had
turned from brick—red to grey. He complained
always of pain and spent whole days in bed. She
had heard that there was a cure for his illness
in red ﬂannel, and had made him a nightshirt of
red ﬂannel in which he looked more than ever like
a ghost, his hair grey, his face quite
colourless, his fat paws growing skinny under the
wide crimson sleeves. He applied for admission to
the military hospital, which was within the area
protected by the troops, and the request was met
with a curt refusal. That broke his courage. To
the military for whom he had risked his life he
was only an informer, a common informer, to be
left to the mercy of their enemy when his
services were no longer of value.  The policemen
sympathised with him, for they too were despised
by the ‘swaddies’ as makers of trouble, but they
could do nothing for him. And when he went out
walking under cover of darkness with two
policemen for an escort the peeple turned and
laughed at him. He heard them, and returned to
the barrack consumed with a rage that expressed
itself in long fits of utter silence or sudden
murderous outbursts.

She came in one summer evening when the fit was
on him, to find him struggling in the dayroom
with three of the policemen. They were trying to
wrest a loaded carbine from his hands.  He wanted
blood, he shouted, blood, and by Christ they
wouldn’t stop him. They wouldn’t, they wouldn’t,
he repeated, sending one of them flying against
the hearth. He’d finish a few of the devils that
were twitting him before he was plugged
himself. He’d shoot everyone, man, woman, and
child that came in his way. His frenzy was
terrifying and the three policemen were swung
this way and that, to right and left, as the
struggle swept from wall to door and back. Then
suddenly he collapsed and lay unconscious upon
the ﬂoor. When they brought him round with whisky
he looked from one. to the other, and drearily,
with terrible anguish, he cursed all the powers
about him, God, the King, the republicans,
Ireland, and the country he had served.

‘Kimberley, Pietermaritzburg, Bethlem,
Bloemfontein,’ he moaned. ‘Ah, you thing, many’s
the hard day I put down for you! Devil’s cure to
me for a crazy man! Devil’s cure to me, I say!
With me cane and me busby and me scarlet
coat—’twas aisy you beguiled me!... The curse of
God on you!... Tell them to pay me passage, d’you
hear me? Tell them to pay me passage and I’ll go
out to Inja and fight the blacks for you!’ '

It was easy to see whom he was talking to.

‘Go the road resigned, Jim,’ his wife counselled
timidly from above his head. Seeing him
like this she could already believe him dying.

‘I will not.... I will not go the road resigned.’

‘... to His blessed and holy Will,’ she babbled.

Lifting his two fists from the ground he thumped
upon his chest like a drum.

‘’Tisn’t sickness that ails me, but a broken
heart,’ he cried. ‘Tell them to pay me passage!
Ah, why didn’t I stay with the lovely men we
buried there, not to end me days as a public
show.... They put the croolety of the world
from them young, the creatures, they put the
croolety of the world from them young!’

The soldiers had again refused to admit him to
the military hospital. Now the police had grown
tired of him, and on their faces he saw relief,
relief that they would soon be shut of him, when
he entered some hospital in the city, where
everyone would know him, and sooner or later his
enemies would reach him. He no longer left the
barrack. Disease had changed that face of his
already; the only hope left to him now was to
change it still further. He grew a beard.

And all this time his wife lay in wait for Pa
Kenefick. Long hours on end she watched for him
over her half-door. Twice she saw him pass by the
laneway, and each time snatched her shawl and
rushed down to the barrack, but by the time a car
of plain-clothes men drove up to the Kenefick’s
door Pa was gone. Then he ceased to come home at
all, and she watched the movements of his sister
and mother. She even trained little Johnny to
follow them, but the child was too young and too
easily outdistanced.  When she came down the road
in the direction of the city, all the women
standing at their doors would walk in and shut
them in her face.

One day the policeman on duty at the barrack door
told her gruffly that Jumbo was gone. He was in
hospital somewhere; she would be told where if he
was in any danger. And she knew by the tone in
which he said it that the soldiers had not taken
Jumbo in; that somewhere he was at the mercy of
his changed appearance and assumed name, unless,
as was likely, he was already too far gone to
make it worth the ‘rebels’’ while to shoot
him. Now that she could no longer see him there
was a great emptiness in her life, an emptiness
that she filled only with brooding and
hatred. Everything within her had turned to
bitterness against Pa Kenefick, the boy who had
been the cause of it all, to whom she had
foolishly shown the letter and who had brought
the ‘dirty Shinners’ down on her, who alone had
cause to strike at Jumbo now that he was a sick
and helpless man.

‘God, give me strength!’ she prayed. ‘I’ll sober
him. O God, I’ll put him in a quiet habitation!’

She worked mechanically about the house. A
neighbour’s averted face or the closing of a door
in her path brought her to such a pitch of fury
that she swept out into the road, her shawl
stretched out behind her head, and tore up and
down, screaming like a madwoman; sometimes
leaping into the air with an obscene gesture;
sometimes kneeling in the roadway and cursing
those that had affronted her; sometimes tapping
out a few dance steps, a skip to right and a skip
to left, just to rouse herself. ‘I’m a bird
alone!’ she shrieked, ‘a bird alone and the hawks
about me! Good man, clever man, handsome man, I’m
a bird alone!’ And ‘That they might rot and
wither, root and branch, son and daughter, born
and unborn; that every plague and pestilence
might end them and theirs; that they might be
called in their sins’—this was what she prayed in
the traditional formula, and the neighbours
closed their doors softly and crossed themselves.
For a week or more she was like a woman
possessed.


IV

Then one day when she was standing by the archway
she saw Pa Kenefick and another man come down the
road. She stood back without being seen, and
waited until they had gone by before she emerged
and followed them. It was no easy thing to do
upon the long open street that led to the quays,
but she pulled her shawl well down over her eyes,
and drew up her shoulders so that at a distance
she might look like an old woman. She reached the
foot of the hill without being observed, and
after that, to follow them through the crowded,
narrow side-streets of the city where every
second woman wore a shawl was comparatively
easy. But they walked so fast it was hard to keep
up with them, and several times she had to take
short-cuts that they did not know of, thus losing
sight of them for the time being. Already they
had crossed the bridge, and she was growing
mystified; this was unfamiliar country and,
besides, the pace was beginning to tell on
her. They had been walking now for a good two
miles and she knew that they would soon
outdistance her. And all the time she had seen
neither policeman nor soldier.

Gasping she stood and leaned against a wall,
drawing the shawl down about her shoulders for a
breath of air. ‘Tell me, ma’am,’ she asked of a
passer—by, ‘where do this road go to?’ ‘This is
the Mallow Road, ma’am,’ the other said, and
since Jumbo’s wife made no reply she asked was it
any place she wanted. ‘No, indeed,’ Jumbo’s wife
answered without conviction. The other lowered
her voice and asked sympathetically, ‘Is it the
hospital you’re looking for, poor woman?’ Jumbo’s
wife stood for a moment until the question sank
in. ‘The hospital?’ she whispered. ‘The hospital?
Merciful God Almighty!’ Then she came to her
senses. ‘Stop them!’ she screamed, rushing out
into the roadway, ‘stop them!’ Murder! Murder!
Stop them!’

The two men who by this time were far ahead heard
the shout and looked back. Then one of them
stepped out into the middle of the road and
signalled to a passing car. They leaped in and
the car drove off. A little crowd had gathered
upon the path, but when they understood what the
woman’s screams signified they melted silently
away. Only the woman to whom she had first spoken
remained. ‘Come with me, ma’am,’ she said. ‘’Tis
only as you might say a step from this.’

A tram left them at the hospital gate and Jumbo’s
wife and the other woman rushed in.  She asked
for Jumbo Geany, but the porter looked at her
blankly and asked what ward she was looking
for. ‘There were two men here a minute ago,’ she
said frantically, ‘where are they gone to?’ ‘Ah,’
he said, ‘now I have you! They’re gone over to
St. George’s Ward....’

In St. George’s Ward at that moment two or three
nuns and a nurse surrounded the house doctor, a
tall young man who was saying excitedly, ‘I
couldn’t stop them, couldn’t stop them! I told
them he was at his last gasp, but they wouldn’t
believe me!’ ‘He was lying there,’ said the nurse
pointing to an empty bed, ‘When that woman came
in with the basket, a sort of dealing woman she
was. When she saw him she looked hard at him and
then went across and drew back the bedclothes.
“Is it yourself is there, Jumbo?”  says she, and,
poor man, he starts up in bed and says out
loud-like “You won’t give me away?  Promise me
you won’t give me away.” So she laughs and says,
“A pity you didn’t think of that when you gave
Mike Kenefick the gun, Jumbo!” After she went
away he wanted to get up and go home. I seen by
his looks he was dying and I sent for the priest
and Doctor Connolly, and he got wake—like, and
that pair came in, asking for a stretcher, and—’
The nurse began to bawl.

Just then Jumbo’s wife appeared, a distracted,
terrified figure, the shawl drawn back from her
brows, the hair falling about her face.  ‘Jumbo
Geany?’ she asked. ‘You’re too late,’ said the
young doctor harshly, ‘they’ve taken him away.’
‘No, come back, come back!’ he shouted as she
rushed towards the window that opened on to the
garden at the back of the hospital, ‘you can’t go
out there!’ But she wriggled from his grasp,
leaving her old black shawl in his hands. Alone
she ran across the little garden, to where
another building jutted out and obscured the view
of the walls. As she did so three shots rang out
in rapid succession.  She heard a gate slam; it
was the little wicket gate on to another road;
beside it was a stretcher with a man’s body lying
on it. She ﬂung herself screaming upon the body,
not heeding the little streams of blood that
ﬂowed from beneath the armpit and the head. It
was Jumbo, clad only in a nightshirt and bearded
beyond recognition.  His long, skinny legs were
naked, and his toes had not ceased to twitch. For
each of the three shots there was a tiny wound,
two over the heart and one in the temple, and
pinned to the cheap ﬂannelette nightshirt was a
little typed slip that read

                 SPY.

They had squared her account with Jumbo at last.