"I can understand the difficulty you have in believing that people could behave so ... so basely," Mullally said, as the train carried them out of Salisbury.
"I don't believe it at all," Henry answered, "and I think that any one who does believe it is a malicious-minded ass!"
"But they hold the shares ... you can see the list ofshareholders at Somerset House for yourself ... and they'll take the profits. I'm quite willing to believe in the goodness of the average man ... in fact, I've denounced the doctrine of Original Sin very forcibly before now ... but I must say that there's something very suspicious about this business. Very suspicious. And you know some of the soldiers are really rather!..."
"Rather what?" said Henry.
"Well, I don't like saying anything about anybody, but some of them are not all that they should be. They should set an example, and they don't. I've heard some very startling things about the behaviour of the soldiers. Very startling things. I don't want to say anything that may sound unpleasant, but I suggest that you should read the Report of the Registrar-General when it comes out. It will cause some consternation, I can promise you. Young women, Quinn, simply can't be kept away from the soldiers, and I've been told ... well!..."
Again he shrugged his shoulders, and turned his palms upwards and raised his eyebrows. A Member of Parliament had written to theMorning Postabout it ... a Conservative member of Parliament, not a Liberal or a Socialist, mark you, but a Conservative....
"Two thousand cases expected in one town," Mullally whispered. "Knows it for a fact. Seen the girls!..."
Mullally proposed a calculation. They were to work out the number of unmarried girls who would shortly become mothers, using the Conservative M.P.'s letter as a basis of calculation.
"Thousands and thousands," he prophesied. "Hundreds of thousands.Allillegitimate. I believe, of course, that we make too much fuss about the marriage laws, Quinn, but still ... there are limits, don't you think? I mean, we must make changes slowly, not in this ... this drastic fashion. But what are you to expect? When the very Cabinet Ministers are proved to have shares in munitionworks, is it any wonder that the common soldier runs riot?..."
"I get out at the next station," said Henry.
"Do you?" said Mullally. "But I thought you didn't change until you got to Whitcombe Junction?"
"I don't" said Henry, "but I get out at the next station!"
"I see," said Mullally.
"About time," Henry thought.
After dinner, he asked Mary to walk to the village with him.
"Isn't it late?" Mrs. Graham objected.
"Oh, no," he answered. "It's a beautiful moonlight night, and I feel I want to stretch my legs. I've been cooped up in the train best part of the day. Come along, Mary!"
"I'll just get my coat," she said.
When they were ready, he put his arm in hers, and they walked down the long lane, past the copse and through the pine trees, to the village.
"It's very quiet to-night," Mary said.
"Extraordinarily still," he answered.
There was no one in the village street and there were no lights shining from any of the windows, except from the bedroom of a cottage near the sea.
"They've all gone to bed very early, haven't they?" he said, glancing about the deserted street.
"But it isn't early, Quinny," she replied. "It's quite late. It must be nearly ten o'clock. We had dinner much later to-night because your train was so long in getting in!"
"Well, they're missing a gorgeous night, all of them," he exclaimed, holding her tightly.
They walked to the fisherman's shelter and stood againstthe iron rail on top of the low cliff. The moon had made a broad path of golden light across the bay, from the shingle to the pinnacle on the nearer of the two headlands, and they could see the golden water flowing through the hole in the cliff.
"I'd love to bathe now," Mary said. "I'd love to swim all along that splash of moonlight to the caves and back again...."
A belated sea-gull cried wearily overhead and then flew off to its nest in the cliffs.
"The water's awfully black looking outside the moonlight," Henry exclaimed.
"Ummm!" she answered.
They shivered a little in the cold air, and instinctively they drew closer to each other. Beneath them, lying high on the shingle, were the trawlers, lying ready for the morning when the fishermen would push them down into the sea.
"Tom Yeo and Jim Rattenbury are going to have a motor put into their trawler," Mary said. "It'll make a lot of difference to them. They'll be able to go out even when there isn't any wind."
Henry did not answer. He had a strange sense of fear that was inexplicable to him. He seemed to be outside himself, outside his own fear, looking on at it and wondering what had caused it. He felt as if something were pulling at him, trying to force him to look round ... and he was afraid to look round.... He shuddered violently.
"Are you cold, Quinny?" Mary said anxiously, turning to him.
"Yes," he answered quickly, wishing to account for his sudden shivering in a way that would not alarm her. "We'd better go back!..."
What was the matter? Why was he so suddenly afraid and so strangely afraid? If it had been dark, very dark, and he had been alone ... but it was bright moonlight ... so bright that one could almost see to read ... and Mary was with him ... and yet he was afraid to lookround at the White Cliff. Something inside him, apart from him, seemed to feel that if he looked up the long steep path over the White Cliff ...he would see something.
"Come on, Mary!" he said, turning to go, and turning in such a way that he could not see the Cliff.
They walked rapidly up the street.... "That'll warm me," he explained to Mary ... and as he walked, he was afraid to look back.
"What the devil's the matter with me?" he kept saying to himself until they reached the end of the lane leading to the Manor.
"You're walking too quickly, Quinny!" Mary said, holding back.
"I'm sorry, dear," he exclaimed, slackening his pace reluctantly.
He had never had this sensation before ... as if a fear had been stuck on to him, a fear that was not part of his nature, a thing outside him trying to get inside him.... He forgot that Mary had complained of the rapidity with which he was walking, and he set off again. The pine trees had a black, ominous look, and the sound of the wind blowing through their needles was like continuous moaning.
"Are you trying to win a race, Quinny?" Mary said.
He laughed nervously. "No. I'm ... I'm sorry!..."
As they passed the copse, he shut his eyes, and so he stumbled over the rough ground and almost fell.
"What is it, Quinny?" Mary demanded, catching hold of him.
"It's nothing," he said. "I'm tired, that's all...."
He shut the door behind him quickly, and fastened the bolts. Mary had gone into the drawing-room, and when he had secured the door, he followed her.
"Mother's gone to bed," she said, and then, going to him and putting her hands on his shoulder, she added, "What is it, Quinny? Something's upset you. I know it has!"
He looked at her for a few moments without speaking.
"Tell me, please!" she insisted.
He put his arm about her and led her to the armchair by the fire, and when she was seated, he sat down on the floor beside her.
"I didn't want to tell you until we got home," he said. "I didn't want to frighten you...."
"What was it? Was there anything there?..."
"I don't know what it was, Mary, but I suddenly felt frightened ... a queer kind of fright. I was afraid to look round for fear I should see something ... I don't know what ... on the cliff. I felt that something wanted me to look round, and I wouldn't. I didn't dare to look round. All the way up the street, I felt that something wanted me to look round.... I'm not afraid now!"
"How queer," she said in a low voice.
"I've never felt anything like it before ... half afraid and half not afraid!..."
He began to talk about Mullally. "He's a toad, that fellow," he said, "an ... an enlarged toad!"
"I'm going to bed," she interrupted. "Good-night, Quinny!"
She bent her face to his.
"Good-night, my dear!" he said, kissing her fondly.
Three days later, when he had almost forgotten his fright on the cliffs, he went down to the village to get the morning papers.
"What's the news," he said to one of the villagers whom he met on the way.
"'Bout the same, sir. Don't seem to be much 'appenin' at present," the man replied.
He went on to the news agency and got the papers, and then, hastily glancing at the headlines for the more obvious news, he tucked the papers under his arm and went slowly back to the Manor by another road than the one by which he had come into the village. There was a field with a hollow where one could lie in shelter and see the whole of the bay and the eastern cliffs in one direction, and the Axe Valley in another, and here he sat for a while, smoking and reading and now and then trying to follow the tortuous windings of the Axe as it came down the marsh to the sea.
"If Ninian were here," he said to himself, "he'd start making plans to straighten it out!..."
He glanced through the war bulletins, with their terrible iteration of trenches taken and trenches lost. People read the war news carelessly now, almost wearily, so accustomed had they become to the daily report of positions evacuated and positions retrieved, forgetting almost that at the taking or the losing of a trench, men lost their lives.
"There isn't much in the paper this morning," he said, and then he turned to a page of lesser news, and almost as he did so, his eye caught sight of Gilbert's name. His grip on the paper was so tight that he tore it. He stared at the paragraph with startling eyes, reading and re-reading it, as if he were unable to comprehend the meaning of the thing he read.... Then, as understanding came to him, he gaped about with vacant eyes.
"Oh, my God!" he cried, "Gilbert's been killed!"
He got up, half choking, and scrambled out of the field. A labourer greeted him, but he made no answer. He ran up the road, and as he ran, he cried to himself, "Gilbert's dead ... it isn't true ... it isn't true!..."
He thrust open the gate and ran swiftly up to the door.
"Mary!" he shouted. "Mary! Mary!!..."
She came running to him, followed by her mother.
"What is it?" she cried, and her heart was full of fear.
Mrs. Graham clutched at him. "It isn't ... it isn't...."
He sank down into a chair and buried his head in his hands. "Gilbert's dead," he said. "He's been killed!..."
Mary knelt beside him, and drew his head on to her shoulder. She did not speak. There was nothing that could be said. She knew that Gilbert and Henry had cared for each other as men seldom care ... and no one, not even she, could bring comfort to the one who was left. So she just held him....
Mrs. Graham had left them alone. Her fear had been for Ninian, and when she heard Gilbert's name, her relief was such that she had hurried from the room lest Henry, stricken by the death of his friend, should see her face.
"I know now," he said when he was calmer, "what it was on the White Cliff. He wanted to tell me, Mary. He wanted to tell me ... and I wouldn't look round. Oh, my God, I wouldn't look round!"
It was unbelievable that Gilbert was dead. In his mind, Henry could see him, careless, extravagant, always good-tempered and sometimes strangely wise and understanding ... and he could not believe that he would never see him again, that all that youth and generosity and promise should be turned so untimely to corruption. Gilbert's friends would not even know where his grave was ... they would not have the poor consolation of finding a place that was his, marked out from all the other places.... He had been seen, running forward ... and then he was seen no more....
"Perhaps," Henry said to comfort himself, "he's been taken prisoner. We shall hear later on that he's been taken prisoner!..."
He snatched at any hope. Men had been posted among the dead ... and then, after a time of mourning, had come the news that they still lived. Perhaps Gilbert was lying somewhere ... wounded ... and after a while, news of him would come. Other men might die, but it was incredible that Gilbert should be killed....
He became obsessed with the belief that Gilbert still lived. He went about expecting to see him suddenly turning a corner and shouting, "Hilloa, Quinny!" At any moment, a door might open, and Gilbert would walk in and say, "Well, coves!" There was a printed copy of "The Magic Casement" in the house, and Henry would pick it up, and turn over the pages.... "But he can't be dead," he would say to himself, as he fingered the book. "It's absurd!..." Even when hope died, there came times whenthe belief in Gilbert's survival thrust itself into his mind. When theLusitaniawas torpedoed, he said to himself, "Why, we saw her just after the war began, Gilbert and I, and we cheered!..."
The brutality of the war smote him hard. In less than a year from the day when they had stood on the rocks at Tre'Arrdur Bay, lustily cheering as the great Atlantic liner sailed up the sea to the Mersey, Gilbert was dead and the proud ship was a wreck, sneakily destroyed....
Gilbert had left the beginning of a play behind him. He had regretted that he could not finish it before going out to the peninsula ... had believed that in it he would create something finer and deeper than he had yet done ... and now it would never reach completion. The mind that imagined it was no more than the rubbish of the fields when the harvest is gathered....
His own work became tasteless to him. He turned with disrelish from his manuscript. "What's the good of it," he said to himself, whenever he looked at it. He tried to put himself into communication with Gilbert's spirit, remembering that night below the White Cliff, when, he now believed, Gilbert had tried to tell him of his death. A month before, he would have ridiculed any one who suggested to him that he should attempt to speak to the dead. "Spookery!" he would have said. But now, in his eagerness to atone, as he said, for his failure to respond when Gilbert had tried to speak to him, he put faith in things that, before, would have seemed contemptible to him. But with all his will to believe, he could not call Gilbert to him. There was a blankness, a condemning silence....
"I failed my friend," he groaned to himself once, "When he felt for me most, I ... I failed him!"
He had gone up to the Common with Mary, and had lain there, talking of Gilbert ... of what Gilbert had beendoing this time a year ago ... of something that Gilbert had said once ... of an escapade at Rumpell's ... and then Mary and he had gone home across the fields. As they walked up the lane to the house, they saw a telegraph messenger ahead of them. They quickened their pace. There was an anxious, strained look on Mary's face, and as the messenger, hearing them behind him, turned and stopped, she made a clutching movement with her hands. "Oh, Quinny!" she said, turning to him with frightened eyes. The boy waited until Henry went up to him, regarding them both with curiosity.
"Is it for us?" Henry asked, knowing that it was, and the boy nodded his head. "I'll take it," he went on. "It'll save you the trouble of going up to the house!"
"Thank you, sir!" the messenger said, and then he handed the telegram to Henry. "Is there any answer, sir?" he asked.
"I don't know," Henry replied. "We'll ... we'll bring it down to the post-office, if there is!"
He knew that there would not be any answer....
The boy went off, looking back at them now and then, over his shoulder.
"Shall I open it, Mary!" Henry said.
"Do you think?..." She did not complete her sentence for she was afraid to utter the thought that was in her mind.
"If it should be bad news," Henry said, "we'd ... we'd better prepare her for it!"
They stood there, holding the telegram still unopened, as if they could not make a decision....
"Open it, Quinny!" Mary said at last, and he opened the buff envelope and took out the form.
The Secretary for War regretted!...
He looked up from the telegram, and saw that Mary was standing in a strained attitude, waiting for him to speak.
"Is it ... is itthat?" she said, almost in a whisper.
He bowed his head. "Yes," he said.
She did not speak. She stood quite still, looking at him as if she were trying to find something, but did not know where to look for it. He moved nearer to her, and took hold of her hand and drew her close to him, and she lay quietly in his arms.... There was a bird singing very clearly over their heads, and suddenly, while they stood there, silently consoling each other, two wood pigeons flew out of the highest tree, making a great beating of wings as they flew off across the fields. There was a robin in the hedge, turning its head this way and that, and regarding them with curiosity....
She stirred, and then withdrew herself from his arms.
"We must go home," she said, "and tell mother!"
Mrs. Graham was in the garden, and she came to the gate as she saw them approaching, waving her hand and smiling at them.
"Will you tell her, Quinny," Mary said, and she slackened her pace slightly and dropped behind him.
He turned to look for her. "Come with me," he said. "I can't tell her ... alone!"
There was a chilly fear over both of them. They felt that this blow would strike her down, that she would not survive it. Ninian was the beginning and the end of her life. If Ninian were gone, everything was gone. This house, the farm, the fields were without purpose if Ninian were not there to own them.... They went slowly forward, and as they approached they saw her smile vanish, and a puzzled look come in its place. She had waved her hand and smiled at them, but they had not waved back to her, they had not answered her smile ... and then she saw the telegram in Henry's hand. She made a quick movement, opening the gate and coming rapidly to them.
"What is it?" she said, hoarsely.
He could not think of anything to say....
"It's from the War Office, mother," Mary said.
He stood ready to put his arms about her and support her....
"Give it to me," she said, holding out her hand for the telegram, and he passed it to her.
They stood silently before her while she read it. Then Mary went close to her. "Mother!..." she said.
Mrs. Graham did not make any answer to Mary. She still held the telegram in her hands, and gazed at it, reading it over and over....
"Mother, dear!" Mary reached up, and put her arms about her mother's neck.
"Yes, Mary," she answered very calmly.
But Mary could not say any more. She buried her head on her mother's shoulder, and the tears that she had been holding back, would not be held back any longer, and sobs burst from her that seemed as if they would choke her.
"My dear," said Mrs. Graham, raising Mary's face to hers, "we must ... we must be brave!"
She turned to Henry. "Take her in," she said, "and ... and comfort her!"
He went to them, and put his arm about Mary, and led her to the house. "Won't you come in, too?" he said, turning to Mrs. Graham.
"No, Henry," she answered. "Not yet. I want to be out here. I ... I want to be alone!"
She moved away, going slowly down the avenue of trees until she reached the orchard, and then she went into it, and was hidden by the apple trees....
He led Mary into the house. "We can't do anything, Mary," he said. "We're ... we're all caught in this thing ... and we can't do anything...."
She went to her room, and when he had seen the door close behind her, he turned to go back to the drawing-room. He would have to write to Roger. "First it was Gilbert ... then it was Ninian ... presently, it will be!..."
He shuddered, and tried to shut the thought out of his mind.
There was a servant in the hall. "Tell the others," he said in a cold, toneless voice, "that Mr. Ninian ... has been killed in France!"
"Oh, sir!..." the girl cried, clasping her hands together.
He did not wait to hear, and she hurried down the passage to the kitchens.
"Two of us gone now," he said to himself.
He searched for writing materials, wandering round and round the room until he forgot what it was he wanted. "I'm looking for something," he said aloud, "I'm looking for something, but I don't know what it is!..."
Then he remembered.
"I mustn't let myself go," he said to himself. "I must keep a hold of myself. I've got to look after them ... they'll want some one to ... to lean on!"
He began the letter to Roger. "Dear Roger," he wrote, and then he dropped his pen. He sat with his elbows resting on the table, staring in front of him, but seeing nothing. "First there was Gilbert," he was saying to himself, "then there was Ninian ... and presently there will be ...me!"
One could not believe it. One could not believe it. Why it was only a little while ago that Ninian was here, in this very room, telling them how clever the Engineers were. They were to win the war, these Engineers, unless stupid people, like the "dug-out," prevented them from doing so. There, in that corner there, over by the fire, that was where he had sat, and told them of the Engineers. He had lain back in his chair, carelessly throwing his leg over the arm of it.... And when Mrs. Graham had risen and left the room, unable to stay any longer, and had called to him to come to her room and say "Good-night!" he had looked anxiously after her, and then, after a little while of fidgetting and poor effort to talk lightly, had gone to her....
How could one believe it! How could any one believe that this hideous nightmare was true!... that this horrible thing which devoured young men was not a creature of a fevered mind.... Presently the blood would cool and the eyes would see clearly ... and Ninian's great shouting voice would roar through the house, and Gilbert would stroll in, and say "Hilloa, coves!..."
There was a sound of steps in the passage, and he sat up and listened. Then the door opened and Mrs. Graham came in. There was a bright look in her tearless eyes. Her lips were firmly closed, and he saw that her hands were clenched. He stood up as she entered, and looked at her as she came towards him. She came close to him and laid her hand on his.
"Poor Mary," she said, softly, "we ... we must comfort poor Mary!"
She looked about the room. "Where is she?" she asked, turning to him again.
"Upstairs," he answered.
She went towards the door. "I must go and comfort her," she said. "She was ... very fond of ... of Ninian!"
He followed her to the door, afraid that she might break down, but she did not break down. She gathered her skirts about her, and went up the stairs to Mary's room, and her steps were firm and proud. He could hear the rustle of her skirt on the landing as she passed along it out of his sight, and then he heard her knocking on Mary's door.
"Can I come in, Mary?" she asked in a clear voice.
He could hear the door opening ... and then he heard it being closed again.
He stood at the foot of the stairs, listening, but there was no need of him. He turned away, and as he did so, Widger came into the hall. The old man stood for a moment ortwo without speaking. Then he made a suppliant movement with his trembling hands.
"It b'ain't true!..." he mumbled thickly.
"Yes, Widger," Henry answered, "it is."
The old man turned away. "I knowed 'un ever since 'e were a baby," he said, and his lips were quivering. "Praper li'l chap 'e were, too!
"It b'ain't right," he went on, looking helplessly about him. Then his voice took a firmer, more definite note, "Where's missus to?" he asked.
"She's upstairs, Widger," Henry answered. "I don't think I'd say anything to her at present, if I were you!"
"Very well, sir!"
He moved away. The vitality seemed to have gone out of him, and suddenly he had become old ... senile ... shuffling.
"They'm wisht times, sir!" he said, as he left the hall.
Henry wrote to Roger, telling him of Ninian's death, and when he had finished the letter, he went out to post it. He could not sit still in the house ... he felt that he must move about until he was worn and exhausted. Mrs. Graham was still with Mary, but perhaps by the time he returned, they would be able to come downstairs again. The pride with which Mrs. Graham had supported herself in her grief seemed to him almost god-like. Once, in the South of Ireland, he had seen a peasant woman bidding good-bye to her husband. As the train steamed out of the station, she howled like a wounded animal, spinning round like a teetotum, and waving her hands and arms wildly. Her hair had tumbled down her back, and her eyes seemed to be melting, so freely did she weep ... and then when the train had disappeared round a bend of the track, she dried her eyes and went home. Her grief, that had seemed utterly inconsolable, had been no more than a summershower.... He had had difficulty in preventing himself from laughing, and he could not restrain a feeling of contempt for her. "They write plays about that kind of silly howling at the Abbey Theatre, and call it 'the Celtic twilight.' No dignity, no decency!..."
He had heard sentimental Englishmen prating about "the tragic soul" of Ireland because they had listened to hired womenkeeningover the dead. "But that isn't grief," he had said to them. "They're paid to do that!" The Irish liked to splash about in their emotions ... they wallowed in them....
But Mrs. Graham's grief was more than a summer shower. Henry knew instinctively that Ninian's death had killed her. She might live for many years, but she would be a dead woman. She would show very little, nothing, to those who looked to see the signs of woe, but in her heart she would hoard her desolation, keeping it to herself, obtruding her sorrow on no one ... waiting patiently and silently for her day of release, when, as her faith told her, she and her son would come together again....
"It's unfair," he told himself, "to compare the grief of an illiterate Irishwoman with the grief of an English lady!"
But then he had seen the grief of poor Englishwomen. Four of the Boveyhayne men had been drowned in a naval battle. He had gone to the memorial service in Boveyhayne Church, and had seen the friends of those men mingling their tears ... but there had been none of this emotional savagery, this howling like women in kraals, this medicine-man grief....
They were both in the drawing-room when he returned.
"I've written to Roger," he said, to explain his absence. "Perhaps," he went on, "there are other letters you'd like me to write?"
"Yes," she said, "it would be kind of you, Henry!..."
There was Ninian's uncle, the Dean of Exebury, and Mr. Hare, with whom he had worked ... they must be told at once ... and there were other relatives, other friends. He spent the evening in doing the little services that must be done when there is death, and found relief for his mind in doing them.
"I told the servants," he said, looking up from a letter he was writing. "Old Widger wanted to see you!..."
"Poor Widger," she said. "He and Ninian were so fond of each other!"
She got up and went to the door. "I must go and say something to him," she said. "He'll feel it so much!"
She closed the door behind her, and he sat staring at it after she had gone. The matchless pride of her, that she could forget herself so completely and think of the subordinate sorrow of her servant when she might have been absorbed by her own!
He turned to Mary who was sitting near him, and reached out and took her hand in his, but neither of them spoke.
What was there to say? Ninian was dead ... old men had made a war, and this young man had paid for it ... and everywhere in Europe, there were mourners for the young, slain for the folly and incompetence of the old and the worn and the impatient.
He released Mary's hand, and resumed the writing of his letter. Before he had finished it, Mrs. Graham returned to the room.
"Poor Widger," she said, "he ... he cried!"
She came to the table where Henry was writing, and placed her hand on his shoulder, and looked concernedly at him.
"Aren't you tired, Henry?" she said.
"No, thanks!" he answered, glancing up at her and smiling.
"You mustn't tire yourself!" she bent over him andkissed his forehead lightly. "You've been a great help, Henry," she said.
But in her room, where none could see her, she shed her tears....
He had returned to Ireland. In Dublin, he found a strange mixture of emotions. Marsh and Galway and their friends were drilling with greater determination than ever, and occasionally they were to be seen parading the streets. Some of them wore green uniforms, shaped after the pattern of the khaki uniform of the British Army, but most of them wore their ordinary clothes, with perhaps a bandolier and a belt and a slouch hat. They carried rifles of an old make, and had long, clumsy bayonets slung by their sides. It seemed to Henry as he watched a company of them marching through College Green that these men were not of the fighting breed ... that these pale clerks and young workmen and elderly professors and hungry, emaciated labourers were unlikely to deal in the serious work of war ... and when he met John Marsh in the evening, he sneered at him. Marsh kept his temper. He was more tolerant now than he had been in the days when he had tutored Henry at Ballymartin. He admitted that the Sinn Feiners were widely unpopular. There were many reasons why they should be. Dublin was full of men and women mourning for their sons who had died at Suvla Bay ... and were in no mood for rebellion.
"The war's popular in the Combe," he said. "The women are better off now than they were in peace times. That's a handsome tribute to civilisation, isn't it? The country people are the worst. They're rich ... the war's bringing them extraordinary prosperity ... and some of our people are tactless. But we've got to go on. We've got to save Ireland's soul!..."
Henry made an impatient gesture. "Why do you talk that high-falutin' stuff," he said.
"It isn't high-falutin' stuff, Henry. I'm speaking what I believe to be the truth. The English have tried a new way to kill the Irish spirit, and by God they look like succeeding. They couldn't kill it by persecuting us, they couldn't kill it by ruining us, but they may kill it by making us prosperous. I feel heart-broken when I talk to the farmers. Money! That's all they think about. They rob their children of their milk and feed them on tea, so's they can make a few more pence. Oh, they're being anglicised, Henry! If we can only blow some of the greed out of them, well have done something worth while!"
He was more convinced now than ever that the Irish were to be betrayed by the English after the war.
"Look how they minimise our men's bravery at the front. Even theIrish Timesis protesting!..."
It seemed to Henry to be ridiculous to believe that the English government was deliberately depreciating the work of the Irish soldiers, and he said so. "They hardly mention the names of any regiments," he pointed out.
But John Marsh had an answer for him. He produced a despatch written by a British admiral in which was narrated the story of the landing at Suvla Bay and the beaches about Gallipoli.
"He mentioned the name of every regiment that took part in the landing, except the two Irish regiments that did the hardest work and suffered the most deaths. I suppose that was an accident, Henry, a little oversight!"
"You don't think he left them out on purpose, do you?"
"I do. So does every man in Ireland, Unionist or Nationalist. You see, we know this man in Ireland ... he's a well-known Unionist ... a bigot ... and there isn't a person in Ireland who doesn't believe that he deliberately left the names of Dublins and the Munsters out of his despatch. He forgot, when he was writing it, that he was asailor, and remembered only that he was a politician ... the kind that dances on dead men's graves!"
It was difficult to argue with Marsh or with any one who thought as he thought, in face of that despatch. The omission was inexplicable if one did not accept the explanation offered by Marsh. The tradition of the sea is an honourable one, and sailors do not do things like that ... the scurvy acts of the cheaper politicians....
"You make a fence about your mind, John," said Henry, "and you spend all your efforts in strengthening it, so that you haven't time either to look over it and see what's beyond it, or to cultivate what's inside it. You're just building up barriers, when you should be knocking them down!"
It was useless to be angry with Marsh or to argue with him. In everything that was done, he saw the malevolent intent of a treacherous people.
"Look at this," he said one evening when the English papers had come in, and he pointed to a leading article in theMorning Postin which the writer stated that the bravery of the Irish soldiers showed that the Irish people had now no feeling or grievance against the English, and therefore Home Rule was no longer necessary. "Already, they're plotting! They defile the dead ... they use our dead men as ... as political arguments!"
"But theMorning Posthas no influence in England," Henry retorted angrily. "It's only read by footmen and sluts!..."
"Some of our people are dubious," John went on. "They're inclined to take your point of view, and trust the English. I'll read this paper to them. That'll pull them up. We'd have been content with Home Rule before, but we want absolute separation now. We don't want to be associated with a race that makes bargains on bodies!..."
"You're doing a damned bad work, John!..."
"I'm helping to keep Ireland Irish, Henry!" He paused for a few moments, and then, laughing a little self-consciously, he proceeded. "Do you know that poem of Yeats's?"
It's with O'Leary in the grave.Romantic Ireland's dead and gone.
Henry nodded his head.
"Well, we're going to see whether we can't make Yeats re-write it. Good-night, Henry!"
He stayed in Dublin for a few weeks, gathering up old threads and working on his novel; but the book made slow progress, and so, thinking that if he were in a quieter, less social place, he could work more quickly, he went home to Ballymartin, and here, soon after he arrived, he received a letter from Roger, announcing that he intended to enter the artillery almost at once. "I can get a commission," he wrote, "and so I shall go in. You said something about wanting to join at the same time as me, but perhaps as you are going to be married to Mary shortly, you'll want to wait until afterwards. If I were you I should apply for a commission in an Irish regiment."
He put the letter down abruptly. Ever since the death of Ninian, he had felt convinced that the four friends were to be killed in battle. Gilbert had been the first to join, and Gilbert was the first to be killed. Then Ninian joined ... and Ninian died. Roger, too, would be killed, and so would he, when he joined. The death of Gilbert had seemed to him to be a casual thing, a tragic accident, but when Ninian had been killed, it had seemed to him that here was no fortuity, that Gilbert and Ninian had died inevitably, that Roger and he, when they went out, would be unable to escape this destiny ... and everything that hehad done since Ninian's death had been done in that belief. He would finish a book, he would marry Mary, he would settle his estate as best he could ... and then he would make the end that Gilbert and Ninian had made....
But now, as he put Roger's letter down, he had a swift, compelling desire to dodge his destiny, to elude death, to alter the course of things. Why should he die? Why should he yield himself up, his youth, his work, his love, his hope of happiness and renown and honour ... to this consuming thing! He could look to years of happiness with Mary, years of work on his books, years of enjoyment of things won and earned ... and he was to give up all that promise and go to a bloody death in war? Not every man who went was killed or even wounded ... one knew that ... buthewould be killed ... he knew that, he told himself, as well as he knew that he was then alive. Sensitive-natured men, such as he, were bound to be killed ... they had not the phlegm of men with blunter natures ... they would not be able to keep still when stillness meant safety ... their nerves would go, and in that hideous hell of noise and battering, of men killing or being killed, his mind might be destroyed....
That seemed to him to be the worst thing of all. He might not be killed ... he might be made mad....
"I can do other work," he said to himself. "I can work for Ireland. I can try to make things friendlier here!..."
He planned a group of Young Irishmen, as he named them, to do for Ireland what Roger's Improved Tories had hoped to do for England. They could study the conditions of Irish elementary education; they could try to make a survey of Irish wealth in the hope of discovering the incidence of its distribution; they could make an enquiry into work and wages, and try to stimulate the growth of Trades Unionism. He could help to make opinion, to create a social consciousness, to establish a tradition of honourableservice to the community.... There were a host of things he could do, valuable things, for Ireland, things that were not now being done by any one. He knew people in Dublin, Crews and Jordan and Saxon and men like them, who were of his mind and would work patiently at dull things in the hope of getting an ordered community. Railways! One had to get the Irish railways reorganised and grouped. If one could solve the problem of traffic, so that the East and West and North and South of Ireland would be as accessible to each other as the East and West and North and South of England, one would have made a large movement towards a better state....
That was what he would do. He would help to construct things, not to destroy them. He was not afraid to go to the war ... that was not the reason why he was resolving that he would refuse to be a soldier. It was because he could do better, finer work by living for Ireland than by dying for England. People throughout Europe were already perturbed at the waste of potential men in war ... wondering whether, after all, it was a wise thing to let rare men, men of unique gifts go to war. Was it really wise of England to let such a man as Gilbert Farlow, with the rare gift of comedy, be lost in that haphazard manner? Ninian had had the potentialities of a great engineer. Would it not have been wiser to have kept him to his railway-building than to have let him fall, as he fell, to the bullet of a sniper?... Already people were asking such questions as these. If he were to go out, and were to be killed, would they not say, "This man had gifts that marked him out from other men. We ought not to have wasted him!" Well, why should he be wasted? He was not afraid. He insisted that he was not afraid. It needed high courage to stand up and say, "I am a man of special gift and I will not let that gift be wasted in war!" That, in effect, was what he was preparing to do. People would speak behind his back ... speak even to his face ... and call him a coward! Well, let them do so....
But in his heart, he knew that he was afraid to go. Almost he deceived himself into believing that he was behaving well in refusing to join the Army so that he might devote himself more assiduously to Ireland and his work ... but not completely did he persuade himself. The fear of death was in him and he could not allay it. The fear of mutilation, of madness, of blindness, of shattered nerves sent him shuddering from the thought of offering himself as a soldier ... and mixed up with this devastating fear was a queer vanity that almost conquered the fear.
"If I were to go in, I might do something ... something distinguished!"
There were times when he gave himself up to dreams of glory, saw himself decorated with high awards for bravery. He would imagine himself performing some impossible act of courage ... saving an Army Corps from destruction ... showing resource in a period of crisis, and so bringing salvation where utter loss had seemed inevitable. But these times of glory were few and brief: he saw himself most often, killed ingloriously, inconspicuously, one of a crowd, blown, perhaps, to pieces or buried in bombarded earthworks; and through his dreams of glory and his plans for work in Ireland, there stubbornly thrust itself this accusation: I'm a coward! I'm a coward! I'm a coward!
In England, men were charging the queer people who called themselves Conscientious Objectors with cowardice, but the charge seemed a baseless one to Henry. He did not believe that he could endure the odium and obloquy which some of the Conscientious Objectors had borne. There was courage in the man who said, "I will fight for my country!" but that courage might be less than that of the man who said, "I will not fight for my country!" Henry was not a Conscientious Objector, nor could he understand the state of mind of the man who was. He was a coward.Inside him, he knew that he was a coward. Inside him, he accused himself of cowardice. Everything in his life showed that he was a coward, that he shrank from physical combats, from tests of courage, that sometimes he shrank from spiritual contests....
"I ought to tell Mary," he said to himself. "I can't marry her without telling her that I'm ... a funk!"
But he temporised even in this. "I'll wait a little while longer," he said. "Perhaps later on!..."
Always he wanted to thrust the unpleasant thing a little further off; It was as if he had said to himself, "I won't deal with it just yet ... and perhaps it won't need to be dealt with!"
"I'll finish my book first," he said, "and then I'll tell Mary. Perhaps the war will be over!..."
Mary wrote to him twice every week. Rachel Carey and her baby were staying at Boveyhayne Manor now, and Mary was glad of their company in the house, for the child gave Mrs. Graham pleasure. She enquired continually about his book. "What a pity," she wrote once, "that it was not finished before Roger went into the Army. Then you could both have gone in together." And he had written, "Yes, it is a pity the book was not done before Roger joined up ... but it'll soon be finished. I'm getting on excellently with it. When it's finished, I'll come over to Boveyhayne, and then we'll settle just when we shall get married!..."
Then came a mood of abasement, and he wrote a long, incoherent letter to her, telling her that he had resolved that he would not go into the Army. "Because I'm a coward, Mary. I've thought the thing over from beginning to end, thought about it until I became dizzy with thinking, and this is the end of it all: I'm a coward. I haven't the pluck to go into the Army. That's the truth, Mary! Imake excuses for myself ... I pretend that this is England's war, not Ireland's, and tell myself that an Irishman who joins the British Army should be regarded in the way that an American, who joined, would be regarded ... that Irish soldiers in the British Army are Foreign Legionaries ... and I twist my mind about in an effort to make excuses like that, to convince, not you or any one else, but me.I think I could convinceyouthat I ought not to join, but I can't convince myself. I'm not joining, simply because I'm a damned coward, Mary. I'm not fit to be your husband, dear. I wasn't fit to be the friend of Gilbert and Ninian. I'm a contemptible thing that runs to its burrow when it hears of danger. I'm glad my father is dead. He hated the war, but he'd have hated to know that I was not in it. He took it for granted that I would go ... never dreamed that I wouldn't go. If he'd thought that I wouldn't join, he would never have talked to me about the war in the way he did. My father was a proud man, Mary, as proud as your mother, and I think he'd have died of shame if he'd thought I was funking this. I don't know what you'll think of me. I know what I think of myself. I simply can't face it, Mary ... that bloodiness and groaning and stench and unending horror. That's the truth about me. I'm a coward, and I'm not fit for you. I'd fail you, dear, if you needed me. I fail everybody. I fail everything. I'm rotten through and through...."
But he did not send the letter to her. He had read it over before putting it in the envelope. "Hysterical," he said to himself, calmer now that he had vented his feelings. "That's what it is!"
He was about to tear it up, but before he could, do so, his mind veered again. "I'll put it away," he said. "I'll leave it until the morning, and read it again. Perhaps I'll think differently then. I ought to tell Mary. I can'tgo on just not joining, and letting her gradually suspect. I ought to go to her, and tell her straight out. When my book's done I'll go to her...."
"What sort of a man am I?" he said again. "Analysing myself like this ... turning myself inside out ... poking and probing into my mind!... Fumbling over my life, that's what I'm doing! Why don't I stand up to things? What's the meaning of me? What am I here for?"
If he could only strip himself to the marrow of his mind, if he could only see inside himself and know what was his purpose and discover the content of his being....
"I'm morbid," he said. "I'm too introspective. I ought to look out of myself. But I can't. It isn't my fault that my eyes are turned inwards. I'm made like that. I can't alter my make. I can destroy myself, but I can't alter my make....
"Perhaps," he thought, "if I were to take more exercise, if I were to go for long walks, I'd think less about these things. I'd get healthier notions. If I were to enlist, go into the ranks, and endure all that the men endure, that might make my mind healthier. All that drill and marching....
"But it's the spirit of me that's wrong," he muttered aloud. "It's not my body ... it'sme!"
"I must work. I must work hard, and forget all this torturing!..."
He wrote furiously at his book, and gradually it came to its end. "I'll go down to Dublin again," he said, when it was finished "and see if I can't do something there that'll make me forget things!"
He stayed at Ballymartin until he had corrected the proofs of the new book, and then some business on the estate kept him at home for nearly another month. It was not until well in the New Year that he was able to leave home, and almost at the last moment he decided not to go to Dublin, but to travel from Belfast, by Liverpool, toBoveyhayne. Mary had asked him to spend Christmas with them, but he had made an excuse: estate business and his book; because he could not yet bring himself to tell her of his cowardice. He felt that when he did so, she would end their engagement, and he wished to keep her love as long as he could. He wrote to her very frequently, more frequently than she wrote to him, telling her of Irish affairs. She had had difficulty in understanding so many things, but she was eager to know about them. He had filled a letter with bitter complaint of the corruption in Irish civic life, and she had asked why he believed in Home Rule. "If you can't trust these people to manage a municipality, how can you trust them to manage a nation?" And he had written a lengthy epistle on the state of Ireland.
"You see, dear," he wrote, "it isn't reasonable to expect us to undo in a generation work which it took your country several centuries to do. Your people have steadily destroyed and corrupted my people. I know they're trying to make amends, but they mustn't expect miracles. You can't wave a wand over Ireland, and say 'Let there be light!' and instantly get light. You've got to remember that Ireland is populated largely by the dregs of Ireland ... what was left after your countrymen had persecuted and exiled and hanged the most vigorous and most courageous men we had ... and it'll take a generation or two, more perhaps, to get a decent level again. The most powerful man in Dublin at this minute is a haberdasher who owns almost everything there is to own: newspapers, conveyances and heaven knows what; and he has the mind of ... well, an early nineteenth-century mill-owner! John Marsh spends a deal of time in vilifying the English as a mean-minded people, but my God, he has only got to look round the corner in Dublin, to see mean-minded men by the hundred. He wrote to me the other day, crowing because his Volunteers had prevented the application of conscription to Ireland, and that's a frame of mind I don't understand. He's an idealist, but all his ideals are being employed to enable mean-minded and greedy men like the farmers to go on being more mean-minded and greedier. The principal argument seems to be that the Irishman must stay at home and make money out of the war. That's a long way from the days of the 'wild geese' and the order of chivalry, isn't it?
"I'm a Home Ruler because I want to see a sense of responsibility cultivated in these people, and you can't have a sense of responsibility until you've got something for which you are responsible. I don't doubt that out of this heart-breaking population, a decent-minded population will come. After all, the first settlers in Australia weren't much better than the people who control the Dublin Corporation, were they? If John Marsh had been about the world more, had had to manage things, and if Mineely and Connolly and the Dublin Labour people had not been embittered beyond all sanity of judgment by that haberdasher I mentioned earlier in this letter, they'd have been useful in the way that I want Crews and Jordan and Saxon and all those patient people to be useful.
"I wish you could meet Crews and Jordan and Saxon. They're very dissimilar, but they've got something like the unifying motive of a monastery, and they're willing to serve and to plod and to be patient. I fight with Saxon because he's a pacifist, but like all pacifists he's a very pugnacious person, and he can get frightfully angry, but it's pitiful to see him when he's been angry, because he's so sorry afterwards. I'm not a pacifist, but I haven't a tenth of his pluck. He'd endure anything, that man. Crews and Jordan are younger than he, and very brainy. Crews looks as if he were one of the Don't-Care-a-Damn Brigade ... Dublin's full of them ... but he does care. He has a curiously subtle brain, and I do not know any one so imperturbable as he is. He never loses his temper ... at least I've never seen him lose it ... except, so he says, with stockbrokers and haberdashers and that kind of rubbish. Jordan is one of the brainiest men in Ireland ...that, I suppose, is because he has got some English blood in him: a cynical-looking man, but that's all his fun. And he works, my goodness, he works!
"It's with men like these that I want to work, because I believe that they will prepare the place for the foundation of a decent commonwealth. They aren't miracle-mongers, thank God, like John Marsh and Galway and Mineely. They aren't up in the sky to-day and down in the mud to-morrow. They keep to the level.
"Then there's the Plunkett House lot. You remember, I told you about Sir Horace Plunkett and the Co-operative Movement. Well, I want to get Crews and Jordan and Saxon to link themselves on to the Plunkett House people and form the nucleus of a new Irish Group. There are a few of the men at Trinity College who will come into it, but I'm afraid all the men at the National University are under the influence of Marsh and MacDonagh and the sloppy romantics.
"You see, dear, don't you, that this job of making a commonwealth of worth in Ireland is a long and difficult one. That's why we've got to be very patient. Everything's against us. We have a contemptible press, a cowardly crowd of corrupt politicians, a greedy people, an ignorant and bigoted priesthood (that includes the Protestant clergy) and a complete lack of social consciousness and plan of life. But then, what's life for, if it isn't to cope with difficulties like that...."
There was snow, thick and long-lying, on the ground when he reached Boveyhayne, and thecrunch-crunchof it under their feet, as Mary and he walked home, gave him a feeling of pleasure, and the cold, bracing air exhilarated him so that he laughed at things which would otherwise barely have made him smile. The antics of Rachel's daughter, as related to him by Mary, seemed extraordinarily entertaining, and when he drew Mary's arm in his and pressed it tightly, he felt that there was nothing in heaven or on earth more to be desired than the love of a woman and the love of a child. He had a sense of age, of a passed boundary, that made him feel much older than Mary. "Here I am, listening to her as she talks gaily about a child's pranks, nodding my head and laughing, too ... and in a little while I shall tell her everything ... and then I shall go ... and we will not laugh again together. I'm holding her arm closely in mine, and presently I shall kiss her lips, and she will put her arms about me with the careless intimacy of lovers ... and then I shall tell her everything ... and she will kiss me no more ... and our intimacy will shrivel up!..."
He wished to prolong his pleasure in this walk through the snow, and so he took her back to the Manor by long roads and roundabout ways. They did not climb up the old path over the cliff because that was so much shorter than the hair-pin road.... "I must tell her soon," he said to himself, "but before I tell her, I must feel the most of her love for me!"
He listened to her, not for what she was saying, but for the sound of her voice, and made short answers to her so that he might interrupt the flow of her speech as little as possible. When he returned along this road, he would come alone and for the last time, and so, that his memory of her might be full, he would be no more than her auditor and watcher. Just to have her by his side, her arm in his, and hear her ... that was sufficient.
They walked through the village and when they came to Boveyhayne lane, he said to her, "Isn't there a longer way, Mary!" and she laughed at him, bantering him because of his sudden desire for exercise; but she yielded to him, and they took the longer road that led them past the Roman quarries to the fir tree, standing in isolation where the main roads meet.
"Mary," he said, as they came in sight of the house,"I want to tell you something ... something important!..."
"Yes, Quinny!"
"But not now, dear. To-night! Or to-morrow, perhaps!"
She pinched his cheek in a pretence at anger. "You were always very vague, Quinny!" she said.
"I know," he answered. "It's a kind of ... cowardice, that, isn't it? I'm vague because I dislike ... am afraid ... to be definite. I'm a frightful coward, Mary!..."
He might approach the subject by these devious ways, he told himself. He had not meant to talk to her about his failure in courage until she and he could be alone in the evening ... this walk together was to be the final lovers' stroll, unmarred by any bitterness ... but even in his effort to postpone the time of telling, he had prepared to tell her ... and perhaps it was better that she should know now. Here, indeed, in this snowy silence, they were free from any intrusion. It might not be possible to make his confession to her without interruption from Rachel or Mrs. Graham ... and some feeling for the fitness of things made him decide that this outdoor scene was a better place for his purpose than the lamplit interior of the Manor. Through the blown branches of the hedges he could see the thick sheets of snow spread over the fields. The boughs of the fruit-trees in the orchard showed very black beneath their white covering, as if they felt cold, and he looted away quickly to the haystacks in the farmyard that seemed so warm in spite of the snow. The dusk was drawing in, and the grey sky was darkening for the night....
"Mary," he said, so abruptly that she looked up at him enquiringly. "Let's walk back a little way...."
"But, Quinny, it's getting late. They'll wonder what's happened to us!"
"I want to tell you ... now, Mary!"
He compelled her to turn, as he spoke, and they walked slowly back towards the fir tree.
"What is it, Quinny?" she asked tenderly, as if she would comfort him.
"I ... I want to tell you something!"
"Yes?"
"I hardly know how to begin. It's very difficult, dear...."
"What is it, Quinny?" she demanded, more anxiously.
But still he would not tell her ... he must have her love a little longer.
"Mary, I love you so much, dear ... oh, I feel like a fool when I try to tell you how much I love you!"
"I know you love me, Quinny!"
"And now ... this very minute ... I love you far more than I've ever loved you. Every bit of me is in love with you, Mary. You're very sweet and dear!..."
She had a sense of impending disaster, but she did not express it in her words. "And I love you, Quinny!" she said. "I can't love you more than I've always loved you!..."
"Could you love me less than you've always loved me?" he asked, turning and standing before her so that his eyes were looking into hers.
"I don't know," she answered. "I've never tried!"
He did not say any more for a few moments, but stood with his hands on her shoulders, looking steadily into her eyes, while she looked steadily into his. Then he took his hands from her shoulders and drew her into the shelter of his arms, and kissed her, letting his lips lie long on hers.
"What do you want to tell me?" she said in a whisper.