In the excitement of leaving Ballymartin and sightseeing in the shipyard, he had almost forgotten Sheila Morgan, but now, his mind stimulated by his talk with Marsh and his spirit depressed by his loneliness, his thoughts returned to her, and it seemed to him that he detested her. She had insulted him, struck him, humiliated and shamed him. When he remembered that he had told her of his love for her and had asked her to marry him, and had been told in reply that she wanted a man, not a coward, he felt that he could not bear to return to Ireland again. His mood was mingled misery and gladness. At Boveyhayne, thank heaven, he would be free of Sheila and probably he would never think of her again. Gilbert and Ninian would fill his mind, and of course there would be Mrs. Graham and Mary. Mary! It was strange that he should have let Mary slip out of his thoughts and let Sheila slip into them. He had actually proposed to Mary and she had accepted him, and then he had left her and forgotten her because of Sheila. He remembered that he had not replied to the letter she had written to him before John Marsh came to Ballymartin. He had intended to write, but somehow he had not done so ... and then Sheila came, and it was impossible to write to her. He wondered what he should say to her when they met. Would she come to Whitcombe station to meet him? What was he to say to her?...
He had treated her shabbily. Of course, she was only a kid, as Ninian himself would say, but then he had made love to her, and anyhow she would be less of a kid now than she was when he last saw her.... He got tired of walking about the streets, and he made his way to the quays and passed across the gangway on to the deck of the steamer. A cool air was blowing up the Lagan from the Lough, and when he leaned over the side of the ship he could see the dark skeleton shape of the shipyard. His thoughts wereextraordinarily confused, rambling about his father and Sheila Morgan and John Marsh and Mary Graham and Tom Arthurs and Ireland and ships and England and Gilbert Farlow and Ninian and Roger....
"I ought never to have thought of any one but Mary," he said to himself at last. "Ireallylove her. I was only ... only passing the time with Sheila!"
"Well, thank God I'll soon be in Devonshire," he went on, "and out of all this. If only my Trinity time were over, and I were settled in London with Gilbert and the others, I'd be happy again!" He thought of John Marsh, and as he leant over the side of the boat, looking down on the dark water flowing beneath him, he seemed to see Marsh's eager face, framed in the window of the railway carriage. He almost heard Marsh saying again, "Well, what doyoupropose to do for Ireland?..."
"Oh, damn Ireland," he said out loud.
He walked away from the place where he had imagined he had seen Marsh's face peering at him out of the water, and as he walked along the deck, he could hear the noise of hammering in the shipyard made by the men on the night-shift. Tom Arthurs's brain was still working, though Tom Arthurs was now at home.
"That's real work," Henry murmured to himself, "and a lot better than gabbling about Ireland's soul as if it were the only soul in the world! Poor old John! I disappoint him horribly...." He was standing in the bows of the boat, looking towards the Lough. "I wonder," he said to himself, "whether Mary'll be at Whitcombe station!"
The peculiar sense of isolation which overwhelms an Irishman when he is in England, fell upon Henry the moment he climbed into the carriage at Lime Street station. None of the passengers in his compartment spoke toeach other, whereas in Ireland, every member of the company would have been talking like familiars in a few minutes. About an hour after the train had left Liverpool, some one leant across to the passenger facing him and asked for a match, and a box of matches was passed to him without a word from the man who owned them. "Thanks!" said the passenger who had borrowed the box, as he returned it. No more was said by any one for half an hour, and then the man opposite to Henry stretched himself and said, "We're getting along!" and turned and laid his head against the window and went to sleep.
"Wearedifferent!" Henry thought to himself. "We're certainly different ... only I wonder does the difference matter much!"
He tried to make conversation with his neighbour, but was unsuccessful, for his neighbour replied only in monosyllables, and sometimes did not even articulate at all, contenting himself with a grunt....
"Well, why should he talk to me?" Henry thought to himself. "He isn't interested in me or my opinions, and perhaps he wants to read or think!..."
Marsh would have denied that the man wanted to think. He would have denied that the man had the capacity to think at all. Henry remembered how Marsh had generalised about the English. "They live on their instincts," he had said. "They never live on their minds!" and he had quoted from an article in an English newspaper in which the writer had lamented over the decline and fall of intellect among his countrymen. The writer declared that no one would pay to see a play that made a greater demand upon the mind than is made in a musical comedy, and that even this slight demand was proving to be more than many people could bear: the picture palace was destroying even the musical comedy.
"But are we any better than that?" Henry had asked innocently, and Marsh, indignant, had declared that the Irish were immeasurably better thanthat.
"But are we?" Henry asked himself as the train swiftly moved towards London.
And through his mind there raced a long procession of questions for which he could not find answers. His mind was an active, searching mind, but it was immature, and there were great gaps in it that could only be filled after a long time and much experience. He had not the knowledge which would enable him to combat the opinions of Marsh, but some instinct in him caused him to believe that Marsh's views of England and Ireland were largely prejudiced views. "I don't feel any less friendly to Gilbert and Ninian and Roger than I do to John Marsh or any other Irishman, and I don't feel that John understands me better than they do!" That was the pivot on which all his opinions turned. He could only argue from his experience, and his experience was that this fundamental antagonism between the Irish and the English, on which John Marsh insisted, did not exist. When Marsh declared passionately that he did not wish to see Ireland made into a place like Lancashire, he was only stating something that many Englishmen said with equal passion about the unindustrialised parts of England. Gilbert Farlow denounced mill-owners with greater fury than Mr. Quinn denounced them.... It seemed to Henry that he could name an English equivalent for every Irish friend he had.
"There are differences, of course," he said to himself, remembering the silent company of passengers who shared his compartment, "but they don't matter very much!"
"I wish," he went on, "John Marsh weren't so bitter against the English. Lots of them would like him if he'd only let them!"
He looked out of the window at the wide fields and herds of cattle and comfortable farmhouses, built by men whose lives were more or less secure, and ... "Of course!" he exclaimed in his mind. "That's the secret of the whole thing! When our people have had security for life as long as these people have had it, their houses will be as good asthese are, and their farms as rich and clean and comfortable!"
One had only to remember the history of Ireland to realise that many of the differences between the English and the Irish were no more than the differences between the hunter and the hunted, the persecutor and the persecuted. How could the Irish help having a lower standard of life than the English when their lives had been so disrupted and disturbed that it was difficult for them to have a standard of life at all? Now, when the disturbance was over and security of life had been obtained (after what misery and bitterness and cruel lack of common comprehension!) the Irish would soon set up a level of life that might ultimately be higher than that of the English.
"Of course," said Henry, remembering something that his father had said, "there'll be a Greedy Interval!"
The Greedy Interval, the first period of prosperity in Ireland when the peasants, coming suddenly from insecurity and poverty to safety and well-being, would claw at money like hungry beasts clawing at food, had been the subject of many arguments between Mr. Quinn and John Marsh, Mr. Quinn maintaining that greed was the principal characteristic of a peasant nation, inherent in it, inseparable from it.
"Look at the French," he had said on one occasion. "By God, they buried their food in their back-gardens rather than let their hungry soldiers have it in the Franco-German War! Would an aristocrat have done that, John Marsh? They saw their own countrymen who had been fighting for them, starving, and they let them starve!..."
It was the same everywhere. "I never pass a patch of allotments," he said, "without thinkin' that their mean, ugly,littlelook is just like a peasant's mind, an' begod I'm glad when I'm past them an' can see wide lands again!" Peasants were greedy, narrow, unimaginative, lacking in public spirit. In France, in Belgium, in Holland and Russia, in all of which countries Mr. Quinn had travelledmuch, there was a peasant spirit powerfully manifested, and almost invariably that manifestation was shown in a mean manner.
"That's what your wonderful Land Laws are going to do for Ireland!" Mr. Quinn had exclaimed scornfully. "We'reto be thrown out of our land, an' louts like Tom McCrum are to be put in our place!..."
Henry had sympathised with his father then, but he felt that the best of the argument was with John Marsh who had replied that the Irish landlords would never have been dispossessed of their land, if they had been worthy of it. "If they'd thought as much about their responsibilities as they thought about their rights, they'd still have their rights!" he said.
"I suppose that's so," Henry said to himself, picking up a paper that he had bought in Liverpool and beginning to read. "I must talk to Gilbert about it!"
Ninian and Gilbert met him at Whitcombe station. As he stood on the little platform of the carriage, he could see that Mary was not with them, and he felt disappointed. She might have come, too!...
"Here he is," he heard Gilbert shout to Ninian as the train drew up. "Hilloa, Quinny!"
"Hilloa, Gilbert!"
"Hop out quickly, will you!"
He hopped out as quickly as he could and said "Hilloa!" to Ninian, who said "Hilloa!" and slapped his back and called him an old rotter.
"Widger'll take your luggage," Gilbert said, taking control of their movements as he always did. "Hang on to this, Widger," he added, taking a handbag from Henry and throwing it into Widger's arms. "Show him the rest of your stuff, Quinny, and let's hook off. We're going to walk to Boveyhayne. You'll need a stretch after sittingall that time, and Ninian's getting disgustingly obese, so we make him run up and down the road over the cliff three times so's to thin him down!..."
"Funny ass!" said Ninian.
"Mrs. Graham wanted Mary to come with us, but we wouldn't let her. We're tired of females, Ninian and I, and Mary's very femaley at present. She's started to read poetry!..."
"Out loud!" Ninian growled. "I'm sick of people who read out loud to me. When Mary's not spouting stuff about 'love' and 'dove' and 'heaven above' and that sort of rot, Gilbert's reading his damn play to me!"
"I'll read it to you, Quinny!" Gilbert said, linking his arm in Henry's.
They had left the station, and were now walking along the unfinished road above the shingle. There was a heat haze hanging over the smooth blue sea, so that sky and water merged into each other imperceptibly. In front of them, they could see the white cliffs of Boveyhayne shining in the descending sun. There were great stalks of charlock, standing out of the grass on the face of the cliffs, giving them a golden head.
"If Marley's on Whitcombe beach, we'll row over to Boveyhayne," said Ninian. "You'd like to get on to the sea, wouldn't you, Quinny?"
Henry nodded his head.
"No," said Gilbert, "we won't. We'll sit here for a while, and I'll read my play to Quinny. I carry it about with me, Quinny, so that I can read it to Ninian whenever his spirits are low!"
"I never saw such a chap!" Ninian mumbled.
"This great, hairy, beefy fellow," Gilbert went on, seizing hold of Ninian's arm with his disengaged hand, "does not love literature!..."
Ninian broke free from Gilbert's grip. "Marley is on the beach," he said, and ran ahead to engage the boat.
"Well, Quinny!" said Gilbert, when Ninian had gone.
"Well, Gilbert!" Henry replied.
"How's Ireland? Still making an ass of itself?"
Henry made no answer to Gilbert's question because he knew that an answer was not expected. Had any one else spoken in that fashion to him, any other Englishman, he would probably have angered instantly, but Gilbert was different from all other people in Henry's eyes, and was privileged to say whatever he pleased.
"Gilbert," he said, "I want to have a long jaw with you about something!..."
The English way of speaking came naturally to him, and he said "a long jaw about something" as easily as if he had never been outside an English public school.
"What?" Gilbert said.
"Oh, everything. Ireland and things!"
"All right, my son!"
"You see!..."
"Wait though," said Gilbert, "until we catch up with Ninian. He ought to hear it, too. He has a wise old noddle, Ninian, although he's such a fat 'un.... My God, Quinny, isn't he getting big? If he piles up any more muscle, hell have to go to Trinity Hall and join the beefy brutes and get drunk and all that kind of manly thing!" They came up with Ninian as he spoke. "Won't you, Ninian?"
"Won't I what?" Ninian replied.
"Have to go to Trinity Hall if you go on being a beefy Briton. Hilloa, Marley!"
"Good-evenin', sir!" said old Marley.
They got into the boat, and Ninian rowed them round the white cliff to Boveyhayne beach, where they left the boat and walked up the village street to the lane that led to Boveyhayne Manor.
"Henry wants to talk about the world, Ninian!" said Gilbert as they left the beach. "We'd better have a good old gabble after dinner to-night, hadn't we?"
"It doesn't matter what I say," said Ninian, "you'llgabble anyhow. Anything to keep him from reading his blooming play to me!" he added, turning to Henry.
He had a sense of disappointment when he met Mary. In his reaction from Sheila Morgan, he had imagined Mary coming to greet him with something of the alert youthfulness with which she had met him when he first visited Boveyhayne, but when she came into the hall, a book in her hand, he felt that there was some stiffness in her manner, a self-consciousness which had not been there before.
"How do you do?" she said, offering her hand to him like any well-bred girl.
She did not call him "Quinny" or show in her manner or speech that he was particularly welcome to her.
"I suppose," he thought to himself, "she's cross because I didn't answer her letter!"
He resolved that he would bring her back to her old friendliness....
"I expect you're tired," she said. "We'll have tea in a minute or two. Mother's lying down. She's not very well!"
She would have said as much to a casual acquaintance, Henry thought.
"Not well!" he heard Ninian saying. "What's the matter with her?"
"She's tired. I think she's got a headache. There was a letter from Uncle Peter!" Mary answered, and her tone indicated that the letter from Uncle Peter accounted for everything.
"Oh!" said Ninian, scowling and turning away.
They went into the drawing-room to tea, and Henry had a sense of intruding on family affairs, mingled with his disappointment because Mary was not as he had expected her to be. It might be, of course, that the letter from Uncle Peter had affected Mary almost as much as it seemedto have affected Mrs. Graham, and that presently she would be as natural as she had been that other time ... but then he remembered that Gilbert had said that she was "being very femaley at present." She poured out tea for them as if she were a new governess, and she reproved Ninian once for saying "Damn!" when he dropped his bread and butter....
"Mary's turned pi!" said Ninian.
She frowned at him and told him not to be silly.
"She calls the Communion Service the Eucharist, and crosses herself and flops and bows!..."
"You're very absurd, Ninian!" she said.
Almost unconsciously, he began to compare her to Sheila Morgan. He remembered the free, natural ways of Sheila, and liked them better than these new, mannered ways of Mary. How could any one prefer this stiltedness to that ease, this self-consciousness to that state of being unaware of self?... In Belfast, when he had left John Marsh, and in his loneliness had thought of the way Sheila had humiliated him, he had had a sharp sense of revulsion from her, a loathing for her, a desire never to see her again; but now, sitting here looking at Mary and oppressed by her youngladyishness, his longing for Sheila came back to him with greater strength, and he resolved that he would write to her that night and beg her to forgive him for his cowardice and let him be her sweetheart again....
"Will you have some more tea!" Mary was saying to him, and he started at the sound of her voice.
"Oh, thanks!" he said, passing his cup to her.
"Thinking, Quinny?" Gilbert exclaimed, reaching for a bun.
"Eh? Oh, yes! I was thinking!" he answered. "What time does the evening post go out?" he said to Ninian.
"Six-twenty-five," Ninian answered.
"Thanks. I just want to write to Ireland!..."
"It'll get there just as soon if you post it to-morrow," said Gilbert.
Mary left them. "I'm going up to mother," she said, as she got up from the tea table. "She's awfully sorry she couldn't be down to welcome you," she added to Henry who had moved to open the door for her.
"I hope she'll soon be better," he answered.
When she had gone, Ninian got up and cursed lustily.
"Damn and blast him," he said.
They did not speak. They knew that Ninian's anger had some relation to Mrs. Graham's headache and the letter from Uncle Peter, and they felt that it was not their business to speak, even though Ninian had drawn them into the affair.
"I'm sorry," said Ninian, sitting down again. "I ought not to have broken out like that before you chaps, but I couldn't help it."
Henry coughed as if he were clearing his throat, but he did not speak, and Gilbert sat still and gazed at the toe of his shoe.
"He always upsets mother, damn him!" Ninian looked up at them. "My Uncle Peter married a girl in a confectioner's shop at Cambridge. He's that kind of ass! He never writes to mother except when he's in a mess, and he always expects her to get him out of it. I can't stand a man who does that sort of thing. She's an awful bitch, too ... his wife! We had them here once!... My God!"
Ninian lay back in his seat and remained silent for a while as if he were contemplating in his mind the picture of Uncle Peter and his wife on that awful visit to Boveyhayne. They waited for him to continue.
"I used to feel ashamed to go into the village," he said at last. "The way she talked to the fishermen—one minute snubbing them, and the next, talking to them as if she were a servant-girl. They didn't like it. Jim Rattenburyhated it, I know. She wasn't one of us and she wasn't one of them. A damned in-between, that's what she was. And Uncle Peter used to get drunk!... I'm awfully sorry, you chaps, I oughtn't to be boring you like this!"
"That's all right," said Gilbert.
"I was jolly glad when they went," Ninian went on. "Jolly glad! Poor mother had a hell of a time while they were here!"
"I suppose so," Henry murmured, hardly knowing what to say.
"I can't understand a man marrying a woman like that," Ninian said. "I mean, I can understand a fellow ragging about with a girl, but I can't understand him marrying her and ... and upsetting things!"
It was on the tip of Henry's tongue to say something about Ninian's belief in democracy, for he remembered that Gilbert, in one of his letters, had declared that Ninian had become a I'm-as-good-as-you-and-a-damn-sight-better-politician, but he did not say it.
"The girl isn't happy. Anybody can see she isn't happy, and Uncle Peter isn't happy, and between them they make us damn miserable. That kind of marriage is bound to fail,Ithink. People ought to marry in their own class!..."
"Unless they're big enough to climb out of it," said Gilbert.
"Sheisn't!"
It came to Henry suddenly that he was proposing to do what Ninian's Uncle Peter had done: marry a girl who was not of his class. He listened to Ninian and Gilbert as they talked of this intimate mingling of classes, and wondered what they would say if they knew of Sheila. Gilbert and Ninian were agreed that on the whole it was foolish for a man to marry that kind of girl. "It doesn't work," said Gilbert, and he told a story of a man whom his father had known, an officer in the Indian army who developed communist beliefs when he retired and had married his cook. "It's a ghastly failure," said Gilbert.
"I'm all for equality," Ninian said, "but it's silly to think that we're always equal now. We're not!..."
"And never will be," Gilbert interjected.
"I don't agree with you, Gilbert. I think that things like habits and manners can be fairly equalised!..."
"Minds can't!"
"No, of course not; but decent behaviour can, and it's silly to start mingling classes until you've done that. You rub each other the wrong way over little things that don't really matter, but that irritate like blazes. I've talked about it with mother. She used to think I was the sort of chap who'd do what Uncle Peter did. Uncle Peter frightened me off that kind of thing!"
It was absurd, Henry thought, to think that all women were like Uncle Peter's wife. Sheila was not that sort of girl at all. She would not make a man feel ashamed!...
He broke off in the middle of his thoughts to listen to Gilbert who was enunciating a doctrine that was new to Henry.
"There are aristocrats and there are plebs," said Gilbert, "and they won't mingle. That's all about it. I believe that the majority of the working people are different from us, not only in their habits ... that's nothing ... just the veneer ... but in their nature. We've been achieved somehow ... evolution and that sort of thing ... because they needed people to look after them and direct them and control them. We're as different from working people as a race-horse is from a cart-horse. Things that are quite natural to us are simply finicky fussy things to them. I wish to God talking like this didn't make a fellow feel like a prig!..."
He broke off almost angrily.
"Let's go out," he said. "I want to smoke!"
"But it's true all the same," he went on when they gotoutside, almost as if he had not broken his speech. "Whether we tried for it or not, we've got people separated into groups, and we'll never get them out of them. Some of us are servants and some of us are bosses, and we've developed natures like that, and we can't get away from them!" Henry reminded them of men who had climbed from low positions to high positions. "They're the accidents," Gilbert went on. "They prove nothing, and I'm certain that if you could go back into their ancestry, you'd find they sprang from people like us, who had somehow slithered down until the breed told and a turn up was taken!..."
They argued round and round the subject, admitting here, denying there....
"Anyhow," Gilbert ended, "it is true that a man who marries a village girl makes a mistake, isn't it?"
"Not always," Henry replied.
"Nearly always," said Gilbert.
"Uncle Peter made a mistake anyhow," Ninian said.
He went to his room, pleading that he was tired, to write his letter to Sheila before dinner. As he was going upstairs, Mary began to descend, and he saw that her look was brighter.
"Go back," she called to him, waving her hand as if to thrust him down the stairs again. "It's unlucky to pass people on the stairs. Don't you know that?"
He descended again as she bade him, laughing as he did so, and waited until she had come down.
"Mother's much better now," she said when she had reached his side. "She's coming down to dinner."
"I'm awfully glad," he replied. He hesitated for a second or two, standing with one foot on the last step of the stairs. "I say, Mary," he said.
"Yes, Quinny!" she answered, turning to him.
So she had not forgotten that she had called him by his nick-name.
"I say, Mary," he said again, still undecided as to whether he should speak his mind or not.
"Yes?" she repeated.
He went up a step or two of the stairs. "Oh, I don't know," he exclaimed. "I only wanted to say how nice it is to be here again!"
"Oh, yes!" Mary said, and he imagined that her tone was one of disappointment.
"I'll be down presently," he went on, and then he ran up the stairs to his room.
"I don't know," he said to himself, as he closed his door. "I'm damned if I know!"
He sat down at the writing-table and spread a sheet of notepaper in front of him. "I wish I knew!..." he murmured, and he wrote down the date. "Mary is awfully nice, and I like her of course, but Sheila!..."
He put the pen down again and sat back in his chair and stared out of the window. Out in the farmyard, he could hear the men bedding the horses, and there was a clatter of cans from the dairy where the women were turning the milk into cream. He could hear a horse whinnying in its stall ... and as he listened he seemed to see Sheila, as he had seen her on her uncle's farm before he had failed in courage, standing outside the byre with a crock in her hands and a queer, teasing look in her eyes. "You're the quare wee fella!" she was saying, and then, "I like you quaren well!..."
He seized the pen again and began to write.
He had almost finished the letter when Gilbert knocked on his door and shouted, "Can I come in, Quinny?"
He put the letter under the blotting paper, and called, "Yes, Gilbert!" in reply.
"Aren't you ready yet?" Gilbert asked.
"No, not yet, but I won't be long changing!"
"Righto!" said Gilbert, going to the other window and looking across the fields. "Rum go about Ninian's uncle, isn't it?" he said, playing with the tassle of the blind.
"Eh?" said Henry.
"There must be something low in a man who marries a woman like that, don't you think?"
"Oh, I don't know. Why should there be?"
"Obvious, isn't it? I mean, there can't be much in common otherwise, can there? Unless the man's a sentimental ass. It's as if you or I were to marry one of the girls out there in the yard, milking the cows. She'd be awfully useful for that job ... milking cows ... but you wouldn't want her to be doing it all the time. It depends, I suppose, on what you want to do. If you've got any ambition!..."
He did not finish the sentence, but Henry understood and nodded his head as if he agreed with him.
"I must trot off," Gilbert said suddenly, going towards the door. "I'm keeping you!..." He paused with his fingers on the handle of the door. "I say, Quinny," he said, "do you know anything about women?"
"No, not much," Henry answered. "Do you?"
"No. Funny, isn't it?" he replied, and then he went out of the room.
Henry sat still for a moment, staring at the closed door, and then turned back to the writing-table and took the letter to Sheila from beneath the blotting-paper. He read it through and sat staring at it until the writing became a dancing blur.... He got up, carrying the letter in his hand, and went to the door and opened it. He tried to call "Gilbert!" but the name came out in a whisper, and before he could call again, he heard the noise of laughter and then the sound of a young voice singing. Mary was downstairs, teasing Ninian. He could hear Ninian, halflaughing, half growling, as he shouted, "Don't be an old ass, Mary!"
He shut the door and went back to the writing-table, still holding the letter in his hand, and while he stood there, a gong was sounded in the hall.
"Lord!" he said, "I shall have to hurry!" and he tore up the letter and put it in the waste-paper basket.
They passed their time in bathing and boating and walking, and sometimes Mary was with them, but mostly she was not. They went out in the mornings, soon after breakfast, taking food with them, and seldom returned until the evening. They took long tramps to Honiton and Lyme Regis and Sidmouth, and once they walked to Exeter and returned home by train. Mary liked boating and bathing, but she did not care for walking, and the distances they travelled were beyond her strength; and so it came about that gradually, during Henry's stay at Boveyhayne, she ceased to take part in their outings. It seemed odd to him that she did not make any reference to their love-making. She called him "Quinny" and was friendly enough, but she called Gilbert by his Christian name and was as friendly with him as she was with Henry. He felt hurt when he thought of her indifference to him. "You'd think she'd forgotten about it!" he said to himself one evening when he was sitting alone with her in the garden, and he oscillated between the desire to ignore her and the desire to have it out with her; but he dallied so long between one desire and the other that Gilbert and Ninian and Mrs. Graham had joined them before he had made a decision. He could not understand Mary. She seemed to have grown shy and quiet and much less demonstrative than she had been when he first knew her.
"Mary's growing up," Mrs. Graham said to him oneevening, irrelevantly; and of course she was, but she had not grown up so much that there should be all this difference between Mary now and Mary then.
"Oh, well!" he generally concluded when his thoughts turned to her, "she's only a kid!"
And sometimes that explanation seemed to satisfy him. There were other times when it failed to satisfy him, and he told himself that Mary was justly cold to him because he had not been loyal to their compact. He had not answered her letters and he had made love to Sheila Morgan. "I suppose," he said to himself, "I'd be at Ballymartin now, making love to Sheila, if it hadn't been for that horse!"
He tried on several occasions to talk to Mary about her unanswered letter, to invent some explanation of his neglect, but always he failed to say anything, too nervous to begin, too afraid of being snubbed, too eager to leave the explanation over until the next day; and so he never "had it out" with her.
"I am a fool!" he would say to himself in angry rebuke, but even while he was reproaching himself, his mind was devising an excuse for his behaviour. "We're really too young," he would add. "It's silly of me to think of this sort of thing at all, and Mary's still a schoolgirl!..."
"I'll just say something to her before I go away," he thought. "Something that will ... explain everything!"
Then Mr. Quinn wrote to him to say that he was in London on business. He was anxious that Henry should come to town so that they could return to Ireland together. "We'll go to Dublin," he wrote, "and I'll leave you there. You needn't come to Ballymartin until the end of the first term."
He felt strangely chilled by his father's letter. This jolly holiday at Boveyhayne was to be the end of one life, and the journey to Dublin was to be the beginning of another; and he did not wish to end the one life or begin theother. He could feel growing within him, an extraordinary hatred of Trinity College, and he almost wrote to his father to say that he would rather not go to a University at all than go to T. C. D. It was cruel, he told himself, to separate him from his friends and compel him to go to a college that meant nothing on earth to him.
"I shan't know any one there," he said to Gilbert and Ninian, "and I probably won't want to know any one. It's a hole, that's what it is, a rotten hole. If the dons were any good, they'd be at Oxford or Cambridge!..."
"You're not much of a patriot," Ninian said.
"I don't want to be a damned patriot. I want to be with people I like. I don't see why I should be compelled to go and live with a lot of people I don't know and don't care about, just because I'm Irish and they're Irish, when I really want to be with you and Gilbert and Roger.... I haven't seen Roger since I left Rumpell's and I don't suppose I shall see him for a long time!"
Gilbert tried to mock him out of his anger. "This emotion does you credit, young Quinny!" he said, "and we are touched, Ninian and I. Aren't we, Ninian! But you must be a man, Quinny! Four years hence, we shall all meet in London,Deo volente, and we'll be able to compare the education of Ireland with the education of England. Oh, Lordy God, I sometimes wish we hadn't got minds at all. I think it must be lovely to be a cow ... nothing to do but chew the damned cud all day. No soul to consider, no mind to improve, no anything!..."
Gilbert and he left Boveyhayne together, but Gilbert was only going as far as Templecombe with him, where he was to change on his way to Cheltenham. Ninian and Mary saw them off at Whitcombe, and when he remembered the circumstances in which she had seen him off before, Henry had a longing to take hold of her arm and lead her to the end of the platform, as he had done then, and tell her that he was sorry for everything and beg her to start againwhere they had left off that day ... but Gilbert was there and Ninian was there, and there was no opportunity, and the train went off, leaving the explanation unmade.
"Good-bye, Quinny!" Gilbert said at Templecombe.
"Good-bye, Gilbert!" Henry answered in a low tone.
"I suppose you'll write to me some day?"
"I suppose so. Yes, of course!..."
"Ripping day, isn't it? Shame to be wasting it in a blooming train!"
"Yes!"
He wished that the train would break down so that he need not part from Gilbert yet, but while he was wishing, it began to move. Gilbert stood back from the carriage and waved his hand to him, and Henry leant with his head through the window of his carriage, smiling....
"Damn Trinity," he said, sitting back in his seat, and letting depression envelop him. "Damn and blast Trinity!..."
I write of Youth, of Love, and have AccesseBy these, to sing of cleanly-Wantonnesse.Herrick.
I write of Youth, of Love, and have AccesseBy these, to sing of cleanly-Wantonnesse.Herrick.
Henry Quinn climbed into a carriage at Amiens Street station and sat back in his seat and puffed with pleasure, blowing out his breath with a long "poo-ing" sound. He was quit of Trinity College at last! Thank God, he was quit of it at last! The hatred with which he had entered Trinity had, in his four years of graduation, been mitigated ... there were even times when he had kindly thoughts of Trinity ... but every letter he received from Gilbert Farlow or Ninian Graham or Roger Carey stirred the resentment he felt at his separation from his friends who had gone to Cambridge, and so, in spite of the kindlier feeling he now had for the College, he was happy to think that he was quitting it for the last time. "But it isn't Irish," he insisted when his father complained of his lack of love for Trinity. "It's ... it's a hermaphrodite of a college, neither one thing nor another, English nor Irish. I always feel, when I step out of College Green into Trinity, that I've stepped right out of Ireland and landed on the point of a rock in the middle of the Irish Sea ... and the point pricks and is damned uncomfortable!"
"You've got the English habit of damning everything, Henry!" his father replied at a tangent.
But Henry would not be drawn away from his argument.
"The atmosphere of the place is all wrong," he went on. "The Provost looks down the side of his nose at you if he thinks you take an interest in Ireland!"
Mr. Quinn, in his eagerness to defend his College from reproaches which he knew to be deserved, reminded Henrythat the Provost had a considerable reputation as a Greek scholar, but his effort only delivered him more completely into Henry's hands.
"But, father," Henry said, "you yourself used to say what's the good of knowing all about Greece when you don't know anything about Ireland. I don't care about Greece and all those rotten little holes in the Ægean ... that's dead and done with ... but I do care about Ireland which isn't dead and done with!"
It was then that Mr. Quinn found consolation. "Well, anyway, you've learned to love Ireland," he said. "Trinity's done that much for you!"
"Trinity hasn't done it for me," Henry answered, "I did it for myself."
Lying back in his seat, waiting for the train to steam out of the station on its journey to Belfast, Henry remembered that conversation with his father, and his mind speculated freely on his attitude towards Trinity. "I don't care," he said, "if I never put my foot inside the gates again!"
Something that Patrick Galway said to him once, when he and John Marsh were talking of Trinity, came back to his memory. "The College is living on Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke," Galway said, and added, "It's like a maiden lady in a suburb giving herself airs because her great-grandfather knew somebody who was great. It hasn't produced a man who's done anything for Ireland, except harm, not in the last hundred years anyhow. Lawyers and parsons and officials, that's the best Trinity can do! If you think of the Irishmen who've done anything fine for Ireland, you'll find that, when they came from universities at all, they came from Oxford or Cambridge, anywhere on God's earth but Trinity. Horace Plunkett was at Oxford...."
"Eton, too!" Marsh had interjected.
"Yes, Eton!" Galway went on. "Think of it! An Irish patriot coming from Eton where you'd think only Irish oppressors would come from! If Plunkett had beeneducated in an Irish school and sent to Trinity, do you think he'd have done anything decent for Ireland?"
"Yes," Henry had replied promptly. "He's that kind of man!"
"No, he wouldn't," Galway retorted. "They'd have educated the decency out of him, and he'd have been a ... a sort of Lord Ashtown!"
But Henry would have none of that. He would not believe that a man's nature can be altered by pedagogues.
"Horace Plunkett would have been a good Irishman if he'd been born and reared and educated in an Orange Lodge," he said.
"I'm not talking about natures," Galway replied. "I'm talking about beliefs. They'd have told him it was no good trying to build up an Irish nation...."
"He wouldn't have believed them," Henry retorted. "Damn it, Galway, do you think a man like Plunkett would let a lot of fiddling schoolmasters knock him off his balance?"
"I'm a schoolmaster," Galway answered, "and I know what schoolmasters can do!" His voice changed, deepening, as he spoke. "I know what the young teachers in Ireland mean to do!"
"What do they mean to do?" Henry had asked jokingly.
"Make Irishmen," Galway answered.
"If only Trinity would make Irishmen," he went on, "we'd all be saved a deal of trouble. But it won't, and when a man of family, like Plunkett, is born with good will for Ireland, he has to go to England to be educated. And he ought to be educated in Ireland, and he would be if Trinity were worth a damn. I wish I were Provost, I'd teach Irishmen to be proud of their birth!"
"Well, when we've made Ireland a nation," said Henry, chaffing him, "we'll make you Provost of Trinity!" and Galway, though he knew that Henry was jesting, smiled with pleasure.
"When Ireland is a nation!" Marsh murmured dreamily.
It was extraordinary, Henry thought, how little at home he had felt in Dublin. He had the feel of Ballymartin in his bones. He had kinship with the people in Belfast. At Rumpell's and at Boveyhayne he had had no sensation of alien origin. He had stepped into the life of the school as naturally as Gilbert Farlow had done, and at Boveyhayne, even when he still had difficulty in catching the dialect of the fishermen, he had felt at home. But in Dublin, he had an uneasy feeling that after all, he was a stranger. In his first year at Trinity, he had been brutally contemptuous of the city and its inhabitants. "They can't even put up the names of the streets so that people can read them," he said to John Marsh soon after he arrived in Dublin. "They're sodamnedincompetent!" And Marsh had told him to control his Ulster blood. "You're right to be proud of Ulster," he had said, "but you oughtn't to go about talking as if the rest of Ireland were inhabited by fools!"
"I know I oughtn't," Henry replied, "but I can't help it when I see the way these asses are letting Dublin down!"
That was how he felt about Dublin and the Dublin people, that Dublin was being "let down" by her citizens. His first impression of the city was that it was noble, even beautiful, in spite of its untidiness, its distress. He would wander about the streets, gazing at the fine old Georgian houses, tumbling into decay, and feel so much anger against the indifferent citizens that sometimes he felt like hitting the first Dublin man he met ... hitting him hard so that he should bleed!...
"I feel as if Dublin were like an old mansion left by a drunken lord in the charge of a drunken caretaker," he said to Marsh. "It's horrible to see those beautiful houses decaying, but it's more horrible to think that nobody cares!"
Marsh had taken him one Sunday to a house where therewere ceilings that were notable even in Dublin which is full of houses with beautiful ceilings.
"If we had houses like that in Belfast," Henry had said, as they came away, "we wouldn't let them become slums!"
"No," retorted Marsh, unable to restrain himself from sneering, "you'd make peep-shows out of them and charge for admission!"
"Well, that would be better than turning them into slums," Henry answered good-humouredly.
"Would it?" Marsh replied.
"Would it?" Henry wondered. The train was now on its way to Belfast, and, looking idly out of the window, he could see the waves of the Irish Sea breaking on the sands at Malahide, heaving suddenly into a glassy-green heap, and then tumbling over into a sprawl of white foam. Would it? he wondered, thinking again of what Marsh had said about the Georgian houses with their wide halls and lovely Adams ceilings. There was no beauty of building at all in Belfast, and no one there seemed anxious that there should be: in all that city, so full of energy and purpose and grit and acuteness of mind, there did not appear to be one man of power who cared for the fine shape or the good look of things; but, after all, was that so very much worse than the state of mind of the Dublin people who, knowing what beauty is, carelessly let it decay? He began to feel bitterly about Ireland and her indifference to culture and beauty. He told himself that Ireland was the land of people who do not care....
"They've got to be made to care!" he said aloud.
But how was it to be done?...
His sense of being an alien in Dublin had persisted all the time that he had lived there. The Dublin people were gregarious and garrulous, and he was solitary and reflective. Marsh and Galway had taken him to houses where people met and talked without stopping, and much conversation with miscellaneous, casually-encountered people bored Henry. He had no gift for ready talk and he disliked crowds and he was unable to carry on a conversation with people whom he did not know, of whose very names he was ignorant. Sometimes, he had envied Marsh and Galway because of the ease with which they could converse with strangers. Marsh would talk about himself and his poems and his work with an innocent vanity that made people like him; but Henry, self-conscious and shy, could not talk of himself or his intentions to any but his intimates. Sitting here, in this carriage, from which, even now, he could see in the distance, veiled in clouds, the high peaks of the Mourne mountains, he tried to explain this difference between Marsh and himself. Why was it that these Dublin men were so lacking in reticence, so eager to communicate, while he and Ulstermen were reserved and eager to keep silent? He set his problem in those terms. He identified himself as a type of the Ulsterman, and began to develop a theory, flattering to himself, to account for the difference between Dublin people and Ulstermen ... until he remembered that Ernest Harper was an Ulsterman. Mr. Quinn had taken Henry to see Harper on the first Sunday evening after they had arrived in Dublin from England, and Harper had received him very charmingly and had talked to him about nationality and co-operation and the Irish drama and the strange inability of Lady Gregory to understand that it was not she who had founded the Abbey Theatre, until Henry, who had never heard of Lady Gregory, began to feel tired. He had waited patiently for a chance to interpolate something into the monologue until hope began to leave him, and then, with a great effort he had interrupted the flow of Harper's vivid talk and had made a reference to a picture hanging on the wall beside him. It showed a flaming fairy in the middle of a dark wood....
"Oh, yes," Harper said, "that's the one I saw!"
"You saw?" Henry had exclaimed in astonishment.
And then he remembered that Harper spoke of fairies as intimately as other men speak of their friends....
"Good God!" he thought, "where am I?" and wondered what Ninian Graham would make of Ernest Harper.
Harper was an Ulsterman, and so was George Russell, whom people called "A. E." Marsh and Galway, now almost inseparable, had taken Henry to hear George Russell speaking on some mystical subject at the Hermetic Club, and Henry, bewildered by the subject, had felt himself irresistibly attracted to the fiery-eyed man who spoke with so little consciousness of his audience. After the meeting was ended, he had walked part of the way home with Russell and had listened to him as he said the whole of his lecture over again ... and he left him with a feeling that Russell was unaware of human presences, that the company of human beings was not necessary to him, that his speech was addressed, not to the visible audience or the visible companion, but to an audience or a companion that no one but himself could see. Was there any one on earth less like the typical Ulsterman than George Russell, who preached mysticism and better business, or Ernest Harper who took penny tramrides to pay visits to the fairies?
No, this theory of some inherent difference between Ulstermen and other Irishmen would not work. There must be some other explanation of Henry's dislike of crowds, his silence in large companies, his inability to assert himself in the presence of strangers. Why was it that he was unable to talk about himself and the things he had done and the things he meant to do as Marsh talked? It was not because he was more modest, had more humility, than Marsh; for in his heart, Henry was vain.... And while he was asking himself this question, suddenly he found the answer. It was because he was afraid to talk about himself, it was because he had not got the courage to be vain and self-assertive in crowds. His inability to talk among strangers, to make people cease their own conversation in order to listen to him, was part of that cowardice that had prevented him from diving into the sea when he went with his father to swim at Cushendall and had sent him shivering into the shelter of the hedge when the runaway horse came galloping down the Ballymena road....
This swift, lightning revelation made him stand up in the carriage and gape at the photographs of Irish scenery in front of him.
"Oh, my God!" he said to himself, "am I always to be tortured like this?"
He sat back in his seat and lay against the cushions without moving. He saw himself now very clearly, for he had the power to see himself with the closest fidelity. He knew now that all his explanations were excuses, that the bitter things he had sometimes said of those who had qualities which he had not, were invented to prevent him from admitting that he was without courage. Any fight, mental or physical, unnerved him when it brought him into personal contact with his opponents. He could write wounding things to a man, but he could not say them to him without losing possession of himself and his tongue; and so he passed from the temper of a cool antagonist to that of an enraged shrew. He had tried to explain the garrulity of the Dublin people by saying that they were obliged to talk and to persist in talking because "otherwise they'd start to think!" but he knew now that that was not an accurate explanation, that it was an ill-natured attempt to cover up his own lack of force.
"And that's worse than cowardice," he said to himself, "to excuse my own funkiness by pretending that courage isn't courage!"
He remembered that he had invented a bitter phrase about Yeats one night when he had seen the poet in a house in Dublin. "Yeats is behaving as if he were the archangel Gabriel making the Annunciation!" he had said, and the man to whom he had said it had laughed and asked what Henry thought Yeats was announcing.
"A fresh revision of one of his lyrics," he had replied....
"And I'd give the world," he said now, "to be able to put on his pontifical air!"
He had a shrinking will; his instinct in an emergency was to back away from things. He had not got the capacity to compel men to do his bidding by the simple force of his personality. If he succeeded in persuading people to do things which he suggested to them he was only able to do so after prolonged discussion, sometimes only after everything else had failed. At Rumpell's, Gilbert had made suggestions as if they were commands that must instantly be obeyed ... and they had been instantly obeyed; but when Henry made suggestions, either people did not listen to them or, having listened to them, they acted on some other suggestion, until at last, Henry, disheartened, seldom proposed anything until the last moment, and then he made his proposal in a way which seemed to indicate that he thought little of it; and when some of his suggestions were accepted and had proved, in practice, to be good, his attitude had been, not that of the man who is absolutely sure of himself, but rather of the man who gasps with relief because something that he thought was very likely to be a failure, had proved to be a success.
Depression settled on him so heavily that he began to believe that he was bound to fail in everything that he undertook to do, and when he thought of the bundle of manuscript in his portmanteau, he had a sudden inclination to take it out and fling it through the window of the carriage. He had not spoken of his writing to any one except John Marsh, and to him, he had only said that he intended to write a novel some day. Once, indeed, he had said, "I've written quite a lot of that novel I told you about!" but Marsh, intent on something else, had answered vaguely, "Oh, yes!" and had changed the conversation, leaving Henry to imagine that he had little faith in his power to write. He had been so despondent after that,that he had gone back to College and, having re-read what he had written, had torn the manuscript in pieces and thrown it into the grate because it seemed so dull and tasteless. He had not written a word after that for more than a month, and he might not have written anything for a longer period had he not heard from Gilbert Farlow that he had finished a comedy in three acts and had sent it to Mr. Alexander. The news stimulated him, and in a little while he was itching to write again. In the evening, he began to re-write the story and thereafter it went on, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, until it was finished. His feelings about it changed with remarkable rapidity. He read it over, in its unfinished state, many times, feeling at one time it was excellent, and at another time that it was poor, flatulent stuff, without colour or vivacity.
Writing did not give pleasure to him: it gave him pain. He felt none of that exultation in creating characters which he had been told was part of the pleasures of an author. There were times, indeed, when he felt a mitigated joy in writing because his ideas were fluent and words fell easily off his pen, but even on those occasions, the labour of writing hurt him and exhausted him. The times of pleasurable writing were short interludes between the long stretches of painful writing, little oases that made the journey across the desert just possible. And then there were those periods of appalling misery when, having ended a chapter, he wondered what he should make his people do next. He would leave them, landed neatly at the end of some adventure or emotional crisis, feeling that the story was going on splendidly and that his power to write was full and strong, and then, having written the number of the next chapter, he would reach forward to write the first word ... and suddenly there was devastation in his mind, and "My God! I don't know what to make them do now!" he would say.
He had read in a literary journal that some authors planned their stories before they began to write them. They prepared a summary of the tale, and then enlargedthe summary. They knew exactly what was to happen in each chapter. A character could not move or rise or sit down or turn pale or look pleased without the author having known about it long before the act was performed. It was as if the author could count the very hairs on the heads of his people. "Just like God!" Henry had said to himself when he had finished reading the article.... He had tried to make a plan, and, after much labour, had completed one; but it was useless to him, for when he came to write out the story, his characters kicked it aside and insisted on behaving in some other way than he had planned that they should behave. It was as if they had taken their destinies into their own hands and insisted on living their lives in accordance with their own wishes instead of living them in accordance with his.... It was fortunate then that he began to read "Tristram Shandy," for when he saw how Sterne's pen, refusing to obey him, had filled some of his pages with curly lines and dots and confusions, had even declined to fill a chapter at all, impudently skipping it, he realised that authors are but creatures in the hands of some force that wills them to create things which they cannot control and sometimes cannot understand.
Writing his book had given him one pleasure. On the day on which he wrote the last word of it, he felt joy. Before he began to write, he had read in Forster's "Life of Dickens" that the great novelist had parted from his characters with pain. Henry parted from his characters with pleasure. "Thank God," he said, as he put down his pen, "I've finished with the brutes!"
He had enjoyed reading the story in its finished state, and when he had packed the manuscript into his portmanteau, he had felt that the story was good, and had sat in a chair dreaming of the success it would make and the praise he would receive for it. He tried to calculate the number of copies that would be sold, basing his calculations on the total population of the British Isles. "There are over forty millions of people in England and Wales alone,"he said to himself, "and another ten millions, say, in Scotland and Ireland ... about fifty millions in all. I ought to sell a good many copies ... and then there's America!" He thought that ten per cent. of the population might buy the story, and believed that his estimate was modest until he remembered that ten per cent. of fifty millions is five millions!...
And that made him laugh. Even he, in his wildest imaginings, did not dream of selling five million copies of his novel.
He wished now that he had asked John Marsh and Patrick Galway to read the story and tell him what they thought of it. They were honest men, and would criticise his work frankly. At that moment, he had an insatiable longing to know the truth, mingled with a strange fear of knowing it. What he wished to know was whether or not he had the potentialities of a great author in him. He knew that his story was not commonplace stuff, but he was afraid that it might only be middling writing, and he did not wish to be a middling writer. If he could not be a great writer, he did not wish to be a writer at all. There were thousands and thousands of novels in the world which did no more for men than enable them to put their minds to sleep. Henry did not wish to add a book to their number. There were other books, fewer in number than those, which showed that their authors had some feeling for life, but not enough, and these authors went on, year after year, producing one or more novels, each of which "showed promise," but never showed achievement. The life these men pursued always eluded them. It was impossible for Henry to join the crowd of people who produced books which perished with the generation that they pleased. That much he knew. But he was eager that he should not fall into the ranks of the semi-great, the half-clever; and his fear was that his place was in their midst.
While he was ruminating in this manner, he remembered that Gilbert Farlow had written to him a few days before he left Dublin, and he ceased to think of his career as a writer and began to search his pockets for Gilbert's letter.
"I'll show the manuscript to Gilbert," he said to himself. "Old Gilbert loves telling people the truth!"
He found the letter and began to read it. "Quinny," it began, for Gilbert had abandoned "dears" because, he said, he sometimes had to write to people who were detestable:
"Quinny: How soon can you get quit of that barrack in Dublin where your misguided father thinks you are being taught to be Irish? Cast your eyes on the address at the head of this notepaper. It is a noble house that Roger and I have discovered. Ninian has seen it and he approves of it. I said I'd break his blighted neck for him if he disapproved of it, which may have had something to do with his decision, though not much, for Ninian has become a very muscular young fellow and I shouldn't have liked the job of breaking his neck very much. Roger and I have been here for a week now, and Ninian joins us at the end of the month. He's down at Boveyhayne at present, catching lobsters and sniffing the air, all of which he says is very good for him and would be better for me. And you. And Roger. There is a tablet on the front wall of the house, fixed by the London County Council, which says that Lord Thingamabob used to live here sometime in the eighteenth century. The landlord tried to raise the rent on that account, but we said we were Socialists and would expect the rent to be decreased because of the injury to our principles caused by residence in a house that had been inhabited by a member of the cursed, bloated and effete aristocracy. He begged our pardon and said that in the circumstances, he wouldn't charge anything extra, but he had us in the end, the mouldy worm, for he said that it was the custom to make Socialists pay a quarter's rent in advance.The result was that Roger had to stump up ... I couldn't for I was broke ... which made dear little Roger awfully unpleasant to live with for a whole day. I offered to go back and tell the man that we weren't Socialists at all, but Improved Tories, but he said I'd done enough harm. It's a pity that old Roger hasn't got a better sense of humour.
We have chosen two rooms for you, one to work in, and the other to sleep in. We're each to have two rooms, so that we can go and be morose in comfort if we want to; but I daresay in the evenings we'll want to be together. I've thought out a scheme of decoration for your room—all pink rosebuds and stuff like that. Roger asked me not to be an ass when I told him of it. His notion is a nice quiet distemper. Perhaps you'd better see to the decoration yourself although I must say I always thought your taste was perfectly damnable.
By-the-way, there's a ghost in this house. It's supposed to be the ghost of Lord Thingamabob, and I believe it is. I saw it myself three nights ago, and it was as drunk as a fiddler. My God, Quinny, it's a terrible thing to see an intoxicated spook. Roger wouldn't believe me when I told him about it afterwards. He said I was drunk myself and that he heard me tumbling up the stairs to bed. Which is a lie. I did see it, and it was drunk. I heard it hiccough! I wouldn't say it was drunk if it wasn't. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, Quinny, and it would be a very dirty trick to slander a poor bogey that can't defend itself. It looked very like its descendant, Lord Middleweight, and it had the same soppy grin that he has when he thinks he's said something clever. Damned ass, that chap!
Alexander sent my comedy back. He sent a note along with it and told me what a clever lad I am and more or less hinted that when I've grown up, I can send him another play. I suppose he thinks I'm a kid in knickerbockers. The result of this business is that I'm going to try and get a job as a dramatic critic. If I do, God helpthe next play he produces. I'm a hurt man, and I shall let the world know about it. I'm half-way through another piece which will take some place by storm, I hope. It's a very bright play, much better than the muck Oscar Wilde wrote, not so melodramatic, and tons better than anything Bernard Shaw has written. It's all about me.
We've got an old woman called Clutters to housekeep for us. I chose her on account of her name, and it is a piece of good luck that she cooks extraordinarily well. There is also a maid, but we don't know her name, so we call her Magnolia. I'm really writing all this rot to get myself into the "twitter-twitter" mood. One of the characters in my new comedy talks like a character in a book by E. F. Benson, and I have to work myself up into a state of babbling fatuity before I can write her lines for her.
Come to London as soon as you can.
Gilbert."