The Informer quotes

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.

Again he began to cough and he had to stop. Gypo was not listening to him. He had not heard a word.

A monstrous idea had prowled into his head, like an uncouth beast straying from a wilderness into a civilized place where little children are alone.

He did not hear McPhillip’s words or his coughing, although the monstrous idea was in relation to McPhillip.

He kicked the swing door open with his foot without taking his hands out of his pockets. In the hallway, a constable in a black, cone-shaped, night helmet stood facing him, pulling on his gloves. Gypo halted and stared at the constable.

“I have come to claim the twenty pounds reward offered by the Farmers’ Union for information concerning Francis Joseph McPhillip,” he said in a deep, low voice.

While he was trying to fire again, his left hand slipped and lost its hold. The pistol muzzle struck the edge of the sill. The bullet shot upwards and entered McPhillip’s brain through the right temple.

When they picked him out of the orange box in the back garden where he fell, he was quite dead.

At the same slow, swinging, rolling gait, he crossed the street through the traffic without pausing, without stepping aside, without looking to the right or to the left. Motorcars, carts, bicycles and wagons swerved to avoid him.

He went through them without looking at them, like a great monster walking through a cloud of ants, that are carrying on their futile and infinitesimal labours about his feet.

They turned towards him to curse, but those that saw his face gaped and passed into the night with the curse unuttered. His face, with the humps on it shining in the glare of the lamps, was like a subtle mask.

They turned towards him to curse, but those that saw his face gaped and passed into the night with the curse unuttered. His face, with the humps on it shining in the glare of the lamps, was like a subtle mask.

It was so⁠ ⁠… so dead.

He walked straight across the pavement into a public-house. He kicked the swing door open with his foot, without taking his hands out of his pockets, just as he had entered the police-station.

Suddenly he felt a wet daub coming down each cheek. He started. He was shedding tears. The horror of the act made him stare wild eyed. He swore aloud. He bared his teeth of their covering of thick lips and ground them.

His youth went out like a candle that is quenched by a squall in a long passage.

The grinning spectre of the present became real once more. He shut his mouth. He sighed very deeply.

Everywhere, in the streets, in the public-houses, in the tenement kitchens, where old red-nosed men craned forward their shrivelled necks to hear the dreadful news, one word was whispered with fear and hatred.

It was the word “Informer.”

Gypo heard that word as he reached the junction of Titt Street and Bryan Road—a long wide road, lined with little shops, the sidewalks strewn with papers, little heaps of dirt in the gutters, two tramcar lines rusted by the drizzling rain, groups of loafers …

But the inside of his head was perfectly empty, with his forehead pressing against it, hot and congested, as if he had been struck a violent blow with a flat stick.

The idea floundered about in his head, repeating itself aimlessly, like a child calling for help in an empty house.

“No,” he muttered to himself, as he gripped his clasp knife fiercely in his trousers pocket, “I can’t make out anythin’ standin’ here in the rain in front of a pub. Better go ahead.”

It was too refined. The pronunciation of the words was too correct. It had not that careless certainty of the born lady. She spoke in an angry tenor voice, in the rich soft tones of the Midlands, her mother’s birthplace.

Her voice had the softness of butter, that voice which patriotic Irishmen always associate with kindness and unassailable innocence and virtue, but which is really the natural mask of a stern, resolute character.

“Aren’t we bad enough,” she continued, “without your acting like a drunken tramp? Shut up and don’t disgrace yourself.” She stamped her right foot and cried again: “Shut up.”

There was an indescribable coldness and depth in them which it is beyond the power of any colour to describe. They stared without a movement of the pupils or of the lashes at Gypo’s face, expressing no emotion whatever.

They were not doors of the soul like ordinary eyes, but spy holes.

They stared glassily like a cat’s eyes.

But they were not merely two men, two human beings. They were something more than that. They represented the Revolutionary Organization. They were merely cogs in the wheel of that Organization. That was what he feared, what rendered him powerless.

He feared that mysterious, intangible thing, that was all brain and no body. An intelligence without a body.

A thing that was full of plans, implacable, reaching out everywhere invisibly, with invisible tentacles like a supernatural monster. A thing that was like a religion, mysterious, occult, devilish.

Gypo returned the stare. The two men, unlike in their features and bodies, were exactly alike in the impassivity of their stare.

Gypo’s face was like a solid and bulging granite rock, impregnable but lacking that intelligence that is required by strength in order to be able to conquer men.

Gallagher’s face was less powerful physically, but it was brimful of intelligence. The forehead was high and it seemed to surround the face. The eyes were large and wide apart. The nose was long and straight. The mouth was thin-lipped.

“Yer a liar,” bellowed Gypo, “don’t I see ye lookin’ at me?”

“Well a cat can look at a king,” cried the stranger, thrusting out his chin and spitting venomously to his left.

“What are ye sayin’ about kings?” said Gypo angrily. “Better say nothin’ about kings around here, me lad. I think yer lookin’ for trouble. I’ve got a good mind to give ye a wallop in the jaw.”

He stood head and shoulders above them, revelling in the attention he was attracting.

He stood so impassively with his arms folded, that he might be mistaken for a great scowling statue at a distance.

Then he suddenly raised his right hand and made a circular movement with it.

The sorrows and the miseries of life were forgotten in that moment of common rejoicing. And perhaps that joyous mumble of chattering voices, rising through the steam in that slum eating-house, was a beautiful hymn of praise to the spirit of life.

And Gypo stood among them like some primeval monster just risen from the slime in which all things had their origin.

While around him crowded the others, like insects upon which he had been destined to fatten.

It was a dreary sight. It almost shouted its experiences, and if it had shouted, it would have talked in that endless, loud, babbling scream in which maniacs and demented creatures utter their words.

It was alive in that peculiar way in which ruins are alive at night, when the earth is covered with darkness and the living sleep.

But Gypo was not sensitive. For him, the street, with its dirt and its squalor, was a savage sauce to whet his appetite for the riotous feast of … He strode rapidly.

That had to be. The “cause” was above all these things. Why! It was his wife who often urged him on to give all his time to the “cause” whenever he became slightly despondent or disheartened, timorous or apathetic.

Ever struggling without reward!

So he thought suddenly. But almost as soon as the thought entered his brain another thought came in mad, bloodshot pursuit. He pulled savagely at his pipe and ejected the first thought in terror.

“Take it,” said Biddy Burke indignantly.

“A pound note doesn’t smell when it’s changed.”

“Money is the common whore of all humanity,” stuttered a tall, lean, drunken gentleman, who dozed by the window with his head dangling.

“Take it,” said Biddy Burke indignantly. “A pound note doesn’t smell when it’s changed.”

“Money is the common whore of all humanity,” stuttered a tall, lean, drunken gentleman, who dozed by the window with his head dangling.

“I bet she got more than that to give ye,” said another woman.

“Commandant, I’m all mixed up an’ I can remember nothin’.”

It was horrid, that pitiful, forlorn cry of pain and of absolute despair coming from such a giant.

“All right then,” said Gallagher, “don’t worry yourself. We have to get to the bottom of this business, so we’ll just set to work, the two of us, and maybe we can piece the whole thing together.

It was a dead rest, like the rest of a child in the womb before birth, sucking strength all round for the savage struggle with life that will soon commence. Every organ and tissue and muscle was straining for a renewal of strength.

When blundering reason flees, instinct, that is fundamental and unerring, rushes to the defence of life.

At twelve minutes past three, one minute after he had been condemned to death, Gypo moved. He opened his eyes and closed the right hand that lay palm upwards on the ground. He clenched the hand rigidly until the wrist joint snapped with the tension.

But he was immediately fully conscious, as soon as he moved, of all that had happened before he had been thrown into the cell. Still more peculiar, he was quite calm and collected about everything.

The darkness consoled him. He felt at home in it. It concealed him.

He felt immensely big and strong in the darkness. There was nothing in his immediate neighbourhood but a darksome void that his personality overpowered. He could bellow and his voice would resound through that darkness indefinitely. There would be no resistance.

It’s not that I mind. It’s waiting without a chance of knowing what’s going to happen. They talk of the bravery of those louts that get the V.C. What are they but stupid carrot-heads? Theirs is the bravery of the dull-witted ox.

A man must be intelligent to be brave.

It’s only the intelligent man that can visualize danger. If he is brave he never seeks danger, but he seeks dangerous methods of life. You see the difference? Well, it doesn’t matter anyway.

The cord was around the statue’s neck, in a noose.

The statue was not suspended there out of crude respect, as might be supposed. It was hung there as a blasphemous protest against the incompetence of the saint.

Four years before she had made a novena to Saint Joseph, requesting a cure for muscular rheumatism, and because her request was not granted she hung up the statue by the neck.

Her eyes alone showed life and intelligence. They were small, fierce, blue eyes, blazing with cunning and avarice.

Her body, hidden beneath the clothes, resembled a mountain that had been reduced to a shapeless pulp by concussion.

Gypo surveyed her without any emotion. Then he looked around for Katie. He saw her standing in the corner behind the door. She was still dressed as he had met her in the public-house early in the evening. But her dress had become dishevelled.