LAUGHTER While he was waiting for Eric Nolan to appear he told mother and daughters the story of the last ambush. It was Alec Gorman’s story, really, and it needed Alec’s secretive excited way of telling it and his hearty peal of laughter as he brought it to a close. It concerned an impossible young fellow in the neighbourhood who was always begging for admission to the active service unit, always playing about with guns and explosives, and always letting on he was somebody of importance. The soldiers knew of his mania, and did not take the trouble to put him under arrest, much to his own fury and disgust. To anyone who would listen he told the wildest stories about his adventures, and pretended to any and every sort of office; he was quartermaster, company commandant, staff captain, intelligence officer, and the deuce only knew what besides. And—the crowning touch in the comedy—he had a hare-lip. Now, one night Alec had a private ambush—quite unauthorised, of course, like everything he did. He launched a bomb at a lorry-of soldiers in the street, and then ran away up a dark lane, his cap pulled well down over his eyes, and his hand on the butt of his revolver. By the light of a gas-lamp he saw Hare-lip running breathlessly towards him, in trench coat, riding-breeches and gaiters. When he saw Alec he stopped, and in a tone as authoritative as he could adopt demanded to know what was wrong. At this Alec’s delight in devilment made off with his prudence. ‘There was an ambush at the cross, mister,’ he whined. ‘Two fine boys kilt outright—they’re picking up the bits of them still, may God punish the blackguards that done it!’ Hare-lip stood for a moment as if stupefied. Then he clapped his hands to his eyes in fury and despair (it was a treat to see Alec take off this gesture). His hat fell off and rolled into a puddle. ‘Oh, nJesus!’ he moaned. ‘Oh, nJesus, nand nthey never ntold nme!’ They laughed, mother and daughters. Stephen marvelled at the courage of the old woman who sat there so coolly while he cleaned his three revolvers. Every other day her house was raided, but crippled as she was with rheumatism, and with two sons in prison it brought no diminution of her high spirits. He liked to see her with a revolver in her hand, turning it over and over, and blinking endlessly at it, a good-humoured, wondering smile on her toothless gums. Her younger daughter, plump and debonair, showed the traces more; she had begun to fidget, and her mother covered her with good-humoured abuse. ‘I’m sixty-eight years of age, child! I’m forty-six years older than you, and a broomstick wouldn’t straighten me back, but I’d make ten of you. Ten of you? I would and twenty! I’d go out in the morning with me little gun in me hand and stand up to a brigade of them. What did I say to their jackeen of a lieutenant the other night? Tell Stephen what I said to him. “Get out o’ me way, you rat!” says I, “get out o’ me way before I give you me boot where your mother forgot to give you the stick!” I did so, Stephen.’ As for Norah, the elder girl, she was like a mask. That cold and pointed beauty of hers rarely showed feeling. At last they heard Eric Nolan’s knock. He came in, tall, bony, and cynical, a little too carefully dressed for the poor student he was, a little too nonchalant for a revolutionary. He smoked a pipe, carried a silver-mounted walking-stick and wore yellow gloves. There was a calculated but attractive insolence about his way of entering a house and greeting the occupants. He laid his walking-stick on the table, and covered the handle with his hat. Then he made way for Norah who went upstairs to dress, leant against the stair rail and made eyes at Mary whom he disliked and who heartily disliked him. Stephen, adoring even his mannerisms, smiled and tossed the three revolvers on the table. ‘There!’ he said, ‘these are ready anyway. Now what about the bomb, Mrs. M’Carthy?’ . The old lady fumbled for a moment in her clothes and produced a Mills bomb red with rust. She could not resist the temptation to hold the grisly thing to the light and blink admiringly at it for a moment before she handed it to Stephen. ‘Oh, God!’ she exclaimed, seeing his hand tremble slightly. ‘Look who I’m giving it to. Lord, look, will ye! He’s shaking like an aspen leaf.’ And she gaily hit him over the knuckles. ‘You’re no soldier, ‘Stephen. Steady your hand, you cowardly thing!’ At that moment they heard a fierce hammering at the door. Stephen was so startled that he almost dropped the bomb, but the old lady was on her feet in a flash. She snatched the bomb back from him and took up one of the revolvers. ‘I’ll bring these,’ she said tensely. ‘Mary, you take the other two. Hurry, you little fool!’ Bent with pain she was already half-way up the stairs. The two young men stood, one at either side of Mary, not daring to speak. She was leaning on the table, looking blankly down on the two oily revolvers which lay beneath her open fingers. She had gone deathly pale. The knocking began again, loud enough to waken the neighbourhood. Rat-tat—tat! ‘Mary, Mary, what are you doing?’ the old woman’s voice hissed down the stairs. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. With a slight almost imperceptible shiver, she lifted one of the revolvers and slid it down the bosom of her dress; she did it slowly and deliberately. After a moment the other followed. Eric Nolan went on tiptoe to the outer door, and looked back at Stephen who was standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘Ready?’ he whispered, and Stephen nodded, too unnerved to speak. He straightened his spectacles with an unsteady hand. The door opened, there was a rush of heavy feet, and a tall figure dressed in green uniform that was sodden and black with rain stood at the kitchen door. Stephen drew in his breath sharply, and stood back. The uniformed figure lurched helplessly towards him, and without warning Mary staggered and burst into a shriek of excited laughter. Stephen ran to her, and was just in time to put his arm about her and prevent her from falling. He heard Norah taking the stairs three at a time. Her face showed no surprise, but it struck him for the first time that it was a tired, rather dispirited face. With her help he carried Mary to her room. When he came back to the kitchen the man in uniform was sitting on a chair beside the door; a great flushed face and fuddled, anxious eyes fixed abstractedly upon the opposite wall. Abstractedly too his great hand rose and smoothed down a long dribbling moustache. Eric Nolan stood silently beside him in utter mystification. Then with a supreme effort of will the man came to himself, and glared at Stephen. ‘I—I forgot me bracelet,’ he said weakly. ‘Who in hell are you?’ asked Stephen. ‘Who am I? Who am I? There’s a queshion t’ask! young man, I’m the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy.... But I forgot me bracelet.’ Nolan chuckled grimly. ‘You’re probably only one when you’re sober,’ he said. ‘At the moment you’re very drunk.’ ‘Drunk? Of course, I’m drunk. But I’m not very drunk. You sh’d see me when I’m took bad!’ He clucked his tongue in horror. ‘I’m a fright—a fright! Six stitches it took t’mend wan man I hit.’ ‘What brought you here then?’ ‘Wha’ brought---? I’m a friend of the family, amn’t I? Wha’ brought _you_ here, may I ask?’ Norah came downstairs again, dressed for walking. Stephen looked at her and she nodded. ‘Good night, Tom,’ she said to the soldier. ‘Good night, Norah love! Good night! Good night!’ ‘Remember me to the other six,’ said Nolan amicably, taking up his hat and stick. The two young men went out with Norah, and stood for a few minutes by the door until her trim little figure, battling with the rain from behind an umbrella, disappeared round the corner of the avenue. Then they followed her nonchalantly, buttoning their heavy coats up at the throat. When they reached the road she was some distance ahead of them, and this distance they maintained discreetly. They passed a patrol which was walking slowly down the road with rifles at the ready, but they were not halted. That was the effect of Eric’s yellow gloves, Stephen thought gleefully. They reached the top of the dark lane in which Alec had met Harelip. Norah, who was standing by the wall in the shadows, handed them the bomb and guns, and with a cold ‘Good luck!’ went on. Two other men who passed her coming down the lane raised their hats, but she barely glanced at them. Then the little group of four gathered together, and after a whispered consultation climbed over a wall at the side of the lane and made their way through tall wet grass to the back of a row of houses that flanked the main road. At one point a house had been demolished, and through the gap they had a clear View of a public-house on the opposite side of the road, its big front window lit behind red blinds. Somebody was singing there. They knelt in the wet grass as they did at the back of the church on Sundays, putting their overcoats under one knee. Stephen glanced at his companions. It was as though he still saw them in the darkness and the falling rain; Eric Nolan, self-conscious and faintly sarcastic about it all; Stanton, the gloomy little auctioneer, who as he said in his pompous way did these things ‘purely as a gesture—as a matter of principle’; and Cunningham, the butcher, who wasn’t in the least like a butcher, and bubbled over with an extraordinary lightness and grace that suggested anything rather than Ireland. Cunningham was a funk, and admitted to funk with great elegance and good—humour. The sight of a gun, he said, was always sufficient to throw him into ‘hysterics, and this was something more than a good joke, because Stephen had seen him when his ugly, puckish face suggested that his imagination was strained almost to breaking point. Yet, unlike Stanton, he would not have admitted that it was a matter of principle with him, and perhaps he was speaking the truth when he said that he did it for the sake of enjoyment. Otherwise, why should he have come out night after night with them as he did, good-humouredly letting himself be stuck for the riskiest jobs, and recounting next day how he had faced them armed with bromides, aspirin, and whisky? For a full half~hour they knelt in the rain, not speaking, almost afraid to move. The rain penetrated their pants, and the wet cloth hugged their knees. Stephen smiled as he saw Nolan’s yellow gloves hanging like dead leaves from his left hand. His own cap sent an icy drizzle down the back of his neck, and the peak becoming limper sank across his eyes, half-blinding him. He knew he would be in a foul temper when this was over. The rain fell with an intolerable persistence. In the public-house over the way, one song ended and another began. Suddenly he heard a faint hum and stiffened. He drew his dry fingers across the lenses of his spectacles which were streaming with rain, and glanced at the other three. But whether it was his spectacles or his nerves that were at fault, he saw only three shadows that might not have been men at all. He could no longer distinguish them, and as he looked more closely, they seemed to dissolve and disappear into the dark and empty background of the fields. He felt himself alone there, utterly alone. Once more he dabbed furiously at his glasses, and now two of the figures took shape again and seemed to come to life for a moment. What he saw was the slow raising of one arm, then another; a hand shook and he caught the wet glint of a revolver. He drew his own revolver and looked across the road. He could see nothing now but the red-lighted Window opposite him that seemed all in a moment to have become very small and far away. He levelled his revolver at that; there was nothing else at which to aim. Somebody was singing, but the voice grew fainter as the rum-brum-brum of a heavy lorry lurching through the waste mud approached. Rum-brum—it came nearer and nearer—brum—and suddenly panic seized him. Suppose the lorry were to pass? Suppose that already it had passed unseen? He looked for his companions, but could see nothing except a billowing curtain of darkness on either hand; the red light of the public-house window had blinded him to everything else. He half-raised himself; the red light went out; the singing continued faintly over the roar of an engine. He sprang to his feet. It took him but the fraction of a second to realise what had happened, and he fired blindly at the spot where the light had been. He fired again, heard a steady sputter of shots beside him, and a dark figure detached itself from the blackness around, and sped away through the thick grass. The song ceased sharply. The light appeared again, but now it was so close he felt he could almost touch it with his hand. He caught his breath sharply and wondered whether the bomb had been a dud or Cunningham had failed to draw the rusty old pin. On the instant it exploded, but not close to him like the shots; he had forgotten it must burst on the car which had already rounded the corner. The sudden thunder-clap of it left him dazed; he stood for a moment and listened, but heard nothing except the roar of the engine as the lorry made off wildly and unsteadily towards the barrack. His sense of time had vanished. It had been merely the boom of the gong, the rising of the curtain. He waited. Already, he could hear in the distance the sound of another lorry tearing up the road. He no longer wished to go, but felt as if he were rooted to the spot. It had happened too quickly to be taken in; he wanted more of it, and still more until the flavour of it was on his tongue. Then a hand caught at his arm, and giving way! to the sweet sensation of flight, he ran arm-in-arm with Cunningham. He heard beside him something that was like sobbing, the throaty sobbing of hysteria, and had almost given way to his surprise and consternation before he realised what it was. Not sobbing, but chuckling, a quiet contented chuckling, like a lover’s laughter in a dark lane. In spite of himself he found the mirth contagious, and chuckled too. There was something strange in that laughter, something out of another world, inhuman and sprightly, as though some gay spirit were breathing through them both. They cleared the wall, rejoined their companions, and resumed their flight at a jog-trot. Eric Nolan was saying indignantly between panting breaths, ‘It wouldn’t work! The damned thing wouldn’t fire! I think it—a shame to—send men out—with guns—like that!’ But passing under a street-lamp that was pale in the streaming rain, Stephen saw Cunningham’s ugly wet face, flushed with laughter, running beside him and chuckled again. At that moment a dark figure detached itself from the gloom of an archway and came towards them. It was an old woman. She had a tattered coat over her head, and held it tightly beneath her chin; little wisps of grey hair emerged all round it and hung limp with rain. She was very small and very old. Stanton and Nolan went on, but Cunningham and Stephen halted to speak to her. They were above the city now, and it lay far beneath them in the hollow, a little bowl of smudgy, yellow light. ‘Tell me, _a ghile_’ (that is ‘O Brightness’), the old woman cried in a high cracked voice, ‘tell me, child! I heard shooting below be the cross. Is it the fighting is on?’ ‘No, mother,’ shouted Cunningham, and it seemed to Stephen that he could no longer control himself. He shook with laughter and looked at the old tramp woman with wild, happy eyes. ‘That was no shooting!’ ‘Wasn’t it, son?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘Lord! oh, Lord! I thought I heard shooting, and says I to meself, “God direct me,” says I like that, “will I risk trapsing down to th’ ould doss at all?” And sure then I says, “Wouldn’t it be better for you, Moll Clancy, to be shot quick and clane than to die of rheumatics in a mouldy ditch?” And you say they were no shots, child?’ ' ‘No, I tell you,’ he shouted, catching the old tramp affectionately by the shoulders and shaking her. ‘Now listen to me, mother, and I'll tell you how it happened. It was an old woman was the cause of it all. The old woman in the shop below, mother. She’s deaf, do you hear me? Stone-deaf, and that’s how she spends the winter nights, blowing paper bags!’ She looked at him for a moment and laughed, a high cracked laugh that shook her tiny frame. ‘Ah, you devil! You young devil!’ she cried gaily. ‘Good night, mother!’ he shouted and strode on. ‘Young devil! Young devil!’ she yelled merrily after him, and for a little while she stood watching, until their boyish figures disappeared under the gloom of the trees, and the sound of their running feet died away in the distance. Then, still smiling, she resumed her way into the sleeping city.