THE WOMAN OF KNOCKALOE The publishers wish it to be understood that nothing in this book is intended to refer to real-life persons in the Isle of Man or elsewhere. THE WOMAN OF KNOCKALOE _A Parable_ By HALL CAINE “_Love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave;... Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it._” TORONTO THE RYERSON PRESS 1923 COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC. PRINTED IN U. S. A. VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK EDITORIAL NOTE “The Woman of Knockaloe” is first of all a love story. In our opinion it is a charming and natural love story, beautiful in its purity, and irresistible in its human appeal; so simple in its incidents that it might be a nursery tale, so stark in its telling that it might be a Saga, so inevitable in the march of its scenes, from its almost breathless beginning to its tremendous end, that it might be a Greek tragedy. In this character alone I think it calls for serious consideration. But it is more than a love story. It is a Parable, carrying an unmistakable message, an ostensible argument. Readers all over the world will so interpret it. They will see that it has special application to the times, that it is directed against War as the first author of the racial hatred, the material ruin, the sorrow and suffering, the poverty and want, which are now threatening the world with destruction; that it is a plea for universal peace, for speedy and universal disarmament, as the only alternative to universal anarchy. The story is laid in a little backwater of the war--a backwater which has never before, perhaps, been explored in literature--but nevertheless it is not in the ordinary sense a war story. The late Great War does not enter it at all, except as an evil wind which blows over a mile and a half by half a mile of land in a small island in the Irish Sea, an Internment Camp, wherein twenty-five thousand men and one woman, cut off from life, pass four and a half years within an enclosure of barbed wire. This narrow space of blackened earth is intended to stand for the world in little, from 1914 to the present year, and the few incidents of the simple yet poignant tale are meant to illustrate the effect of the late war on the heart of humanity, to describe at very close quarters the consequences of what we call The Peace on the condition of the world and the soul of mankind, and to point to what the author believes to be the only hope of saving both from the spiritual and material suicide to which they are hurrying on. It is neither pro-British nor pro-German in sympathy, but purely pro-human. War itself is the only enemy the Parable is intended to attack.