The Informer

By Liam O’Flaherty.

Imprint

This ebook is the product of many hours of hard work by volunteers for Standard Ebooks, and builds on the hard work of other literature lovers made possible by the public domain.

This particular ebook is based on digital scans from the Internet Archive.

The source text and artwork in this ebook are believed to be in the United States public domain; that is, they are believed to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. They may still be copyrighted in other countries, so users located outside of the United States must check their local laws before using this ebook. The creators of, and contributors to, this ebook dedicate their contributions to the worldwide public domain via the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. For full license information, see the Uncopyright at the end of this ebook.

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces ebook editions of public domain literature using modern typography, technology, and editorial standards, and distributes them free of cost. You can download this and other ebooks carefully produced for true book lovers at standardebooks.org.

I

It was three minutes to six o’clock in the evening of the fifteenth of March 192‒.

Francis Joseph McPhillip ran up the concrete steps leading to the glass-panelled swing door that acted as street entrance to the Dunboy Lodging House. The House, as it was called in Dublin, among criminal and pauperized circles, was a grey concrete building of four stories. It stood on the left-hand side of a wide windswept asphalt lane off B—— Road on the south side of the city. A maze of slum streets surrounded it. An indefinable smell of human beings living in a congested area filled the air around it. From the building itself, a smell of food and of floors being scrubbed with soap and hot water emanated.

A drizzling rain was falling from a black bulging sky. Now and again a flock of hailstones, driven by a sudden gust of querulous wind, clattered down the lane, falling in little dancing groups on the hard, perspiring asphalt.

McPhillip ran up the four steps and peered into the hall hurriedly through the glass door. He put his face so close to the glass that his excited breath caused an immediate blur of vapour on the frozen pane. Then he turned about. He crouched against the angle of the doorway and peered around the corner of the wall, up the lane through which he had just come. He wanted to find out whether anybody was following him. He was a murderer.

He had killed the secretary of the local branch of the Farmers’ Union during the farm labourers’ strike at M—— in the previous October. Since then he had been hiding out in the mountains with a group of men who were evading arrest, brigands, criminals and political refugees. He had just come into Dublin half an hour previously on a goods train. The conductor of the train was a member of the Revolutionary Organization, to which McPhillip himself had belonged when he shot the Farmers’ Union Secretary.

He saw nobody of account in the lane. An old woman crossed near the far end. She had a black shawl about her head and in her hand a milk jug, with a corner of the shawl drawn across its mouth to keep out the rain. A man was singing forlornly, facing the kerb on the right-hand side, with his cap held out in front of him. He was begging, but nobody took any notice of him.

McPhillip’s eyes darted about everywhere, with the speed and acuteness of one who has perfected his detective sensibilities by necessity and long practice. The street was quite safe. He sighed and turned about to survey the interior of the House.

He was a man of middle size and slightly built, but his shoulders were broad enough for a giant. His body narrowed down from the shoulders, so that the hips and waist were totally out of proportion to the upper part of the body. His right leg opened outwards in a curve below the knee and he placed the toe of the right foot on the ground before the heel when he walked, so that his walk had the crouching appearance of a wild animal stalking in a forest. His face was thin and sallow. His hair was black and cropped close. His eyebrows were black and bushy. His eyelashes were long and they continually drooped over his eyes. When his eyelashes drooped his eyes were blue, sharp and fierce. But when he raised his lashes for a moment to think of something distant and perhaps imaginary, his eyes were large, wistful and dreamy. They were soft and full of a sorrow that was unfathomable. His jaws were square, sharp and fleshless. His lips were thin and set tightly. This gave the lower part of his face a ferocious appearance. His nose was long and straight. His cheeks were hollow and on the cheekbones a bright flush appeared when he was seized with a fit of hard, dry coughing which he tried to suppress.

He was dressed in a shabby pair of wrinkled navy blue trousers and a fawn-coloured, shabby raincoat, buttoned up around his throat like a uniform. His boots were old and thin. They creaked with moisture soaked in through their torn soles. He wore a grey tweed cap. Under his left armpit he carried an automatic pistol in a leather holster. The pistol hung from a lanyard that was suspended from his neck.

As he stood looking in through the door, the fingers of his right hand were thrust in between the first and second buttons of his raincoat. The tips of the fingers rested on the cold butt of the automatic.

Within the hall three old men were waiting in a row outside the closed glass window of the office on the right-hand side. The nearest old man to the door wore a brown pauper’s uniform. Both his eyes had cataracts and he seemed to be on the point of going into a faint. He was leaning on a stick and his head kept bobbing like a man that is in a drunken stupor and is on the point of falling asleep. The second old man wore a torn old dress suit. He looked like a waiter thrown out of employment through old age. He had a sharp lean face. The farthest old man was dressed in a medley of unspeakable rags and he shook his body continually trying to scratch himself on the insides of his clothes. The three of them stood in silence. Beyond them, four more concrete steps led to a long passage through the building. A corridor crossed the passage at the far end. Men passed along the corridor now and again in groups.

McPhillip was about to push through the door when the glass panel was pulled up with a screech and a man’s head appeared at the window. The man cracked his thumb and forefinger and motioned the nearest old man to approach, the old man dressed in rags. The old man started and cried out in a weak, childish voice: “Oh be Janey I’d forgotten.” Smiling weakly and muttering to himself he began to rummage among his rags. The man at the window looked at him, pursed up his lips angrily and disappeared.

Presently he reappeared from around the corner of the office. He came up to the old man and stood in front of him with his hands on his hips and his legs spread wide apart. His neat blue trousers were perfectly creased. He was in his shirt sleeves, so that his diamond sleeve links and the large diamond in his tie flashed in the half darkness. His hair was glued to his head with perfumed oil. Its odour pervaded the whole hallway. He looked at the old man with an expression of mixed contempt and anger. The two other old men began to snigger fawningly and tried to appear to have absolutely no connection with the ragged old man.

At last the ragged old man found a red handkerchief, and in his excitement he could not undo the knot that bound it together in a ball.

“Here,” he cried, holding out the handkerchief to the clerk, “there are five pennies and four halfpennies there. Me fingers are all stiff with the rheumatism an’ I can’t untie it. Maybe ye’d do it for me for th’ honour o’ God?”

Then he looked up into the clerk’s face with his mouth open. But the clerk, without taking any notice of the handkerchief, was looking at the old man’s face as if he were going to strike him. The old man began to tremble.

“Get out of here,” yelled the clerk suddenly in a thunderous voice.

Then he became motionless again. The old man began to babble and shiver. He turned about and shuffled down the steps to the door, scratching his shoulder-blades against his clothes as he moved. He went down two steps and then paused uncertainly and looked behind him. Then he shuddered, took another step, lost his balance and slipped. He slithered to the door on his buttocks. The other two old men began to laugh and titter. The clerk scowled at them. “What are ye laughing at?” he cried. They stopped immediately. “Hey you,” he continued, pointing his finger at the ragged old man, who had reached the street outside and was standing irresolutely on the kerb looking back over his shoulders. “If I catch you here again, you old fool, I’ll hand you over to the police. Go away now and get into the workhouse where you belong. Huh!”

The old man wrinkled up his monkey-like face into a grimace of surprise and misery. He cast a terrified look at the haggard face of McPhillip, that peered at him out of the angle of the wall to the left of the door. Then he mumbled something and set off down the lane at a broken trot. The other two old men in the hall began to whisper to one another as soon as the clerk turned his back and walked back into the office.

“Be the holy,” said one, “he should be shot, wha?”