Then he told her.
"I wrote to you when I was at Ballymartin," he said,"but I did not post the letter. I brought it with me. I meant to destroy it because I thought it was too emotional, and then I thought that perhaps I had better let you see it so that you might judge me, not just as I am now, talking to you quietly like this, but as I was when I wrote it!"
He took the letter from his pocket and gave it to her.
"I had to tell you, Mary. I couldn't marry you without letting you know what kind of man I am. I'm too frightened to go to the Front. At the bottom of all my excuses, that's the truth."
She did not speak, but stood with his letter in her hands, turning it over....
"I've tried to persuade myself," he went on, "that I'm of special account, that I ought not to go to the war, but I know very well that in a time like this, no one is of special account. Gilbert said something like that at Tre'Arrdur Bay when I told him that his life was of greater value than the life of ... of a clerk. I suppose, the finer a man is, the more willing he is to take his share in war, and if that's true, I'm not really a fine man. I'm simply a coward, hoarding up my life in a cupboard, like a miser hoarding up his money. I should have been the first to spend myself ... like Gilbert and Ninian. I'm the only one of the Improved Tories who hasn't gone! ... Oh, I couldn't offer you myself, dear. I'm too mean ... I'm a failure in fineness.... I used to feel contempt for Jimphy Jayne ... but he didn't hesitate for a moment. It never entered his head not to go. The moment the war began, Gilbert enlisted, and I suppose Ninian must have left that railway the very minute he heard the news. I was never quite ... never quite on their level, Mary, and I don't suppose I ever shall be now!"
She moved slightly, as if she were tired of remaining in one position, and were shifting to an easier one, but still she did not speak, nor did she raise her eyes to look at him.
"I'm not fit to be your husband," he said. "I'm not fit to be any woman's husband, but much less yours. Evennow, when I 'm standing here talking to you in this safety, the thought of ... of being out there makes me shiver with fear. It's the thought of ... of dying!... I think and think of all those young chaps, all the fellows I knew, robbed of their right to live and love, as I love you, and work and make their end in decency and peace ... and I can't bear it. I want to save myself from the wreckage ... to hide myself in safety until this ... this horror is ended!" He paused for a while, as if he were searching for words and then he went on. "There was an officer in my carriage to-day ... going on to Whimple ... and he told me about poison gas ... the men died in frightful agony, he said ... and then he talked about machine guns.... 'They can perforate a man like a postage stamp,' he said.... Isn't it vile, Mary?"
Her head was still bent, and as she did not make an answer to him, he turned to look away from her. He remembered how Sheila Morgan, in her anger at his cowardice, had struck him in the face and had furiously bidden him to leave her.... Mary would not strike him, but she, too, would bid him to go from her....
He felt her hand on his arm.
"Quinny!" she said very softly, and he turned to find her standing nearer to him and looking up at him with no less love than she had looked at him before he had made his confession to her.
"I don't love you, Quinny, only for what's fine in you," she said, and her speech was full of hesitation as if she could not adequately express her meaning. "I love you ... forallof you. I just take the bad with the good, and ... and make the best of it, dear!"
"You still want me, Mary?..."
"My dear," she said, half laughing and half crying, "I've always wanted you!... Oh, what's the good," she went on with an impetuous rush of words, "of loving a man only when he comes up to your expectations. I want to love you even when you don't come up to my expectations, Quinny, and I do love you, dear. It hasn't anything to do with whether you're brave or not brave, or good or bad, or great or common. I just love you ... don't you see?... because you'reyou!..."
He stared at her incredulously. He had been so certain that she would bid him leave her when she learned of his cowardice.
"But!..."
"Come home," she said. "You must be very tired, and cold!"
She put her arm in his, and drew him homewards, and he yielded to her like a little child.
As they turned the corner of the apple-orchard, they could see lights shining from the windows of the Manor, making a warm splash on the snow that lay in drifts about the garden. There was a great quietness that was broken now and then by the twittering of birds in the hedges as they nestled for the night, or the cries made by the screech-owls, hooting in the copse.
Mrs. Graham and Rachel had left them alone for a while, after dinner, and as he sat, with her at his feet, fondling her hair, she spoke of her feeling for him again.
"I've wondered sometimes," she said, "about your not joining ... it seemed odd ... but I thought that perhaps there was something that would explain it. I'd like you to join, Quinny ... I can't pretend that I wouldn't ... but I don't feel that I ought to ask you to do so. If I were a man I should join, I think, but I'm not a man, and I'm not likely to have to suffer any of the things that a man has to suffer if he goes ... and so I don't say anything. I don't know why I'd like you to go ... I ought to be glad that you haven't gone because I love you and I don't want to lose you ... but all the same I'd like you to go. It isn't just because other men have gone, andI don't feel any desire for revenge because Ninian's been killed ... it's just because England's England, I suppose...." She laughed a little nervously. "I can hardly expect you to feel about England as I do. You're Irish!.."
"I've made that excuse for myself, Mary. Don't you make it for me. I know inside me that the war isn't England's war ... it's the world's war. John Marsh admits that much. He doesn't like English rule in Ireland, but he doesn't pretend that German rule would be better ... not seriously, anyhow. No, dear, I haven't that excuse. I know that if we lose this war, the world will be a worse place to live in than it is. I haven't any conscientious objection ... I don't feel that we are in the wrong ... I feel that we're in the right ... that we never were so right as we are. I'm simply anxious to save my skin. And even if I felt that John Marsh were right in being anti-English, I don't feel that I have any right to take up that attitude. England's done no wrong to my family.... You see, dear, I haven't any excuse that's worth while ... except the wish to preserve my life ... and that's a poor excuse. When I think of being at the Front, I think of myself as dead ... lying out there ... without any of the decencies ... until I'm offensive to the men who were my friends ... until they sicken at the stench ofme!..."
"Don't, dear!" she murmured.
"Perhaps I shall conquer this ... this meanness. I want to conquer it. I want to behave as I believe. I believe that there are things one should be glad to fight for and die for ... and I want to feel glad to fight for them and be ready to die for them. But now I feel most that I want to be safe ... to go on living and living and enjoying things...."
"But can you enjoy things if they're not worth dying for, Quinny? If England weren't worthy dying for, would it be worth living in! That's how I feel!"
"That's how Ithink, Mary, but it isn't how Ifeel. I feel that I want to be safe no matter what happens ... if civilisation is to go to smash and we're to be driven back to savagery, distrusting and being distrusted ... I feel that I don't care ... that I want to be safe, to go on living, even if I have to live in a cave and hide from everything.... Oh, my dear, don't you see what a poor thing I am!"
"Yes," she said simply.
"And yet you're willing to marry me?"
"Yes. I can't help loving you, any more than I can help loving my country. I can't explain it and I don't want to explain it. If I were a man and England were in the wrong, I'd fight for England just because she's England. Everything makes me feel like that. When Ninian was killed, something went on saying, 'You're English! You mustn't cry! You're English!' And when I look at the trees outside, I feel that they're English, too, and that they're telling me I'm English ... that somehow they're special trees, different from the trees in other countries ... that they've got something that I've got, and that I've got something they've got ... something that a French tree or a German tree hasn't got.... Oh, I know it's silly, but I can't help it ... and when I used to walk about the lanes and fields after Ninian's death ... I felt that the birds and the grass and the ferns and everything were saying 'You're English!' and I wanted to say back to them, 'You're English, too!...' I suppose people feel like that everywhere ... those friends of yours in Ireland must feel like that about Ireland ... and Germans, too!..."
He nodded his head. "It's a madness, this nationality," he said, "but you can't get a cure for it. Even I feel it!"
"Quinny!"
"Yes, Mary!"
There was a nervous note in her voice. She got up, sothat she was on her knees, and fingered the lapels of his coat.
"Quinny!" she said again, and he waited for her to proceed. "I ... I want us to get married ... soon! You'll probably go into the Army ... nobody could go on feeling as you do, and not go in ... and I'd like us to ... to have had some time together ... before you go. I don't want to be married to you just ... just a day or two before you go. I ... I want to have lived with you and to ... to have taken care of your house ... with you in it!..."
He folded her in his arms.
"You will, Quinny?" she said.
"Yes," he answered.
They were to be married as soon as Lent was over. Mrs. Graham, reluctant to lose Mary, had pleaded for delay, urging that Ballymartin was so far from Boveyhaven that she would seldom see her. "Two days' post," she protested.
"But you'll come and stay with us, mother," Mary declared, "and we'll come and stay with you!"
It would be quite easy for Henry to come to Devonshire, for he could carry his work about with him. Then Mrs. Graham had yielded to them, and it was settled that the marriage was to take place at the beginning of May. Neither Mary nor he had spoken again of the question of enlistment. She had said all that was in her mind about it, and what followed was for him to decide.
He went back to Ballymartin. There were things to be done at home in preparation for the coming of a bride. The house had not known a mistress since his mother's death, and his father had been too preoccupied with his agricultural experiments to bother greatly about the interior of his house. So long as he could find things more or less where he had left them, Mr. Quinn had been content.
"You won't overhaul it too much, Quinny?" Mary said to him, "because I'd like to do some of that!"
He had promised that he would do no more than was immediately necessary; and then he went.
"I shall have to go to Dublin," he had told her. "There'll be a lot of stuff to settle with lawyers!" Her settlement, for example. "I'll go home first, then on toDublin, and then back here. I shall get to Boveyhayne just after Easter!"
Mr. Quinn had not greatly bothered about the interior of the house, but Hannah had, and although there were things that needed to be done, there was less than he had imagined.
"I'm going to be married, Hannah!" he said to her soon after he had arrived home.
"Are you, now?" she exclaimed.
"Yes. You remember Mr. Graham?..."
"Ay, poor sowl, I mind him ... the nice-spoken, well-behaved lad he was!..."
"Well, I'm going to marry his sister!"
"It'll be quaren nice to think o' this house havin' a mistress in it again, an' wee weans, mebbe. I was here, a young girl, when your father brought your mother home ... I mind it well ... she was a quiet woman, an' she stud in the hall there as nervous as a child 'til I went forrit to her, an' said, 'Ye're right an' welcome, ma'am!', an' then she plucked up her heart, an' she give me a wee bit of a smile, an' said 'Thank ye, Hannah!' for your father told her who I was. An' she used to come an' talk to me afore you were born ... she was terrible frightened, poor woman. Ay, she was terrible frightened of havin' you! Your father couldn't make her out at all. It was a quare pity!"
He let her ramble on, for he wanted now to hear about his mother, of whom he knew so little. There was a portrait of her in the house, a fair, slight, timid-looking woman who seemed to be shrinking out of the frame. It was odd to think that she was his mother, this frightened woman of whom he had no memory whatever, for whom he had no tender feeling. He had loved his father deeply, but he had no love for his mother. How could he feel lovefor her? He had never known her!... But now he wanted to know all that Hannah knew about her, for Hannah perhaps had known more about her than any one. Hannah had cared for her, pitied her....
"Yes, Hannah!" he said, so that she might proceed.
"She was sure she was goin' to die, an' I had the quare work to keep her quiet. An' she was terrible feard of dyin'!"
He listened to her with a strange feeling of pain. All that he had endured at the thought of fighting had been endured by his mother at the thought of giving him birth. He felt that now, at last, he knew his mother and could sympathise with her and love her.
"But sure what was the sense of bein' afeard of that," Hannah Went on. "God wouldn't be hard on the like of her, the poor, innocent woman. I toul' lies til her, God forgive me, an' let on to her that people made out that it was worse nor it was to have a child ... but she had a despert bad time of it, for she was a weak woman, with no body in her at all, an' a poor will to suffer things. She never was the better of you!" She smiled at him sadly. "Never! An' she took no interest in nothin' after that ... she could hardly bear to look at you ... an' you her own wee son. She didn't live long after you come, an' mebbe it was as well, for God never made her to contend with anything. I was quaren fond of her. Ye had to like her, she was that helpless. She couldn't thole any one next or near her but myself ... and so I got fond of her, for a body has to like people that depends on them. Will your wife be a fair lady or a dark lady, Master Henry?"
He realised that she wished him to describe Mary to her.
"She's dark," he said. "Not at all like her brother!"
"Ay, he was the big, fair man that was a credit to a woman to have!"
"I have her photograph upstairs," Henry went on, "I'll go and get it. You'd like to see it, wouldn't you?"
"Deed an' I would," she answered.
He got the photograph and gave it to her, and she took it in her hands and looked at it very steadily.
"She's a comely-lookin' girl," she said, handing it to him again. "She has sweet eyes an' a proud way of holdin' her head. She shud be a good wife to you. I'll be glad to see her here, for dear knows, it's lonesome sittin' in the house with no one to look after. I miss your da sore, Master Henry, an' it's seldom you're here now!"
"I'll be here much more in future, Hannah!"
"Well, thank God for that! I like well to see the quality in their houses, an' them not to be runnin' here an' runnin' there, an' not thinkin' of their own place an' their own people. An' I pray to God you'll have fine childher, an' I'll be well-spared to see them growin' up to be a credit to you!"
The old woman's patient service and love seemed very noble to him, and he went to her and took her hand. "You're the only mother I've ever known, Hannah!" he said. "You've always been very good to me!"
"An' why wouldn't I be good to you?" she exclaimed, raising her fine blue eyes to his. "Aren't you the only child I ever had to rear? Dear bless you, son, what else would I be but good to you?"
And suddenly she put her arms about him and kissed him passionately, and as she kissed him, she cried:
"God only knows what I'm girnin' for!" she exclaimed, releasing him and drying her eyes.
He wandered about the house, touching a chair or fingering a curtain or looking at a portrait, and wondered how Mary would like her new home. It was not an old house, nor had the Quinns lived in it from the time it was built, and so Henry could not feel about it what Ninian must have felt about Boveyhayne Manor, in which his ancestors hadlived for four centuries. But it was his home, in which he had been born, in which his mother and father had died, and it seemed to him to be as full of memories and tradition as Mary's home. The war had broken the line of Grahams, broken a tradition that had survived the dangers of four hundred years. That seemed to Henry to be a pity. Perhaps, he thought, this worship of Family is a foolish thing. There was a danger in being rooted to one place, in letting your blood become too closely mingled, and a tradition might very well become a substitute for life; but when all that was said and admitted, there was a pride in one's breeding that made life seem like a sacrament, and the years but the rungs of a long ladder. Once, in the days of the Bloomsbury house, they had talked of tradition, and some one had related the old story of the American tourist who was shown the sacred light, and told that it had not been out for hundreds of years. "Well, I guess it's out now!" the American replied, blowing the light out. They had made a mock of the horrified priest and had protested that his service to the flame was a waste of life and energy and time. And when they had said all that they had to say, Ninian, speaking more quietly than was his wont, had interjected, "But don't you think the American was rather a cad?"
They had argued fiercely then, some of them protesting that the American's disregard of a worn convention was splendid, virile, youthful, god-like. Roger, Henry remembered, had sided with Ninian so far as to admit that the American's behaviour had been too inconsiderate. "He might have discussed the matter with the priest ... tried to persuade him to blow it out himself!" but that was as far as he would go with Ninian.
"I admit," Ninian had retorted, "that it was a foolish tradition ... but don't you think the American was rather a cad. It was better, wasn't it, to have that tradition than to have none at all?"
Now, standing here, in this house that had been hisfather's, and now was his, and would, in due time, be his son's, if ever he should have a son, it seemed to him that Ninian had been right in his contention. And just as Mary, moving through the Devonshire lanes, had felt that everything proclaimed its Englishness and hers, making them and her part of each other, so he, looking out of the window across the fields, felt something inside him insisting, "You're Irish. You must be proud! You're Irish! You must be proud!..."
He remembered very vividly how his father had led him to this very window once and, pointing towards the fields, had said, "That's land, Henry!Myland!..."
And because he had been proud of his land, had been part of it, as it had been part of him, he had been willing to spend himself on it. There seemed to Henry to be in that, all that there was in patriotism. Irrationally, impulsively, unaccountably one loved one's country. The air of it and the earth of it, the winds that blew over it and the seas that encircled it, all these had been mingled to make men, so that when there was danger and threat to a man's country, some native thing in him stirred and compelled him to say, "This is my body! This is my blood!" and sent him out, irrationally, impulsively, unaccountably, to die in its defence. There was here no question of birth or possessions: the slum-man felt this stirring in his nature as strongly as the landlord. In that sudden, swift rising of young men when war was declared, each man instinctively hurrying to the place of enlistment, there were men from slums and men from mansions, all of them, in an instant, made corporate, given unity, brought to communion, partaking of a sacrament, becoming at that moment a sacrament themselves....
But if this stirring in one's nature made a man both a sacrament and a partaker of a sacrament, was there not yetsomething horrible in this spilling of blood, this breaking of bodies? Was this sacrament only to be consummated by the butcher? Was there no healing sacrament which, when a man partook of it, gave him life and more life! Was there not an honourable rivalry among nations, each to be better than the other, to replace this brawling about boundaries, this pettifogging with frontiers? Was there to be no end to this killing and preparing for killing? Would men, from now on, set themselves to the devisal of murderous and more murderous weapons of war until at last an indignant, disgusted God, sick of the smell of blood, threw the earth from Him, caring nothing what happened to it, so that it was out of His consciousness?...
While he looked out of the window, the dusk settled down, and he could see the mists rising from the fields. He drew the curtains, and went and sat down by the fire. There was a faint odour of burning turf in the room, and as he watched the blue spirals of smoke curling up the chimney, he remembered how he had trudged across Dartmoor once, and, suddenly, unexpectedly had turned a corner of the road, and looked down on a village in a hollow, and for a moment or two had imagined he was in Ireland because of the smell of burning turf that came from the cottage chimneys.
"We and they are one," he murmured to himself. "Our differences are but two aspects of the same thing. Our blood and their blood, our earth and their earth, mingled and made sacramental, shall be to the glory of God!"
The door opened, and Hannah came in, carrying a lighted lamp.
"I just thought I'd bring it myself," she said. "I'd be afeard of my life to let Minnie handle it. Dear knows, but she'd set herself on fire, or mebbe the house, an' that'd be a nice thing, an' a new mistress comin' to it. Will I put it down here by your elbow?"
"Anywhere, Hannah!" he answered.
"I'll just rest it here then, where it'll not be too strongfor your eyes. Yon ought to have the electric light put in the house. Major Cairnduff has it in his house, an' it's not half the size of this one.... Will I get you something?"
"No, thank you, Hannah!"
"A taste of some thin' to ate, mebbe, or a sup to drink?"
"Nothing, thank you!"
She went over to the fire. "Dear bless us," she said, "that's no sort of a fire at all. What come over you, to let it get that low!"
"I didn't notice it, Hannah!"
"'Deed an' I don't suppose you did ... moidherin' your mind about one thing an' another! There'll be a different story to tell when the mistress comes home. Mark my words, there will! Dear, oh, dear, oh, dear!..."
"I'm going to Belfast to-night, Hannah," he said when he had been at home a few weeks. "I want to catch an early train to Dublin to-morrow."
"Yes," she said.
"When I come back, I shall bring my wife with me!"
"God bless us and save us," she exclaimed, "it'll be quare to think of you with a wife, an' it on'y the other day since you were a child, an' me skelpin' you for provokin' me. Well, I'll have the house ready for yous both when you come!"
"Will you tell Matier to harness the horse...."
"I'll tell him this minute. That man's near demented mad at the thought of you marryin'. 'Be the hokey O!' he says whenever I go a-near him, an' then he starts laughin' an' tellin' me it's the great news altogether. 'I wish,' says he, 'the oul' lad was alive. He'd be makin' hell's blazes for joy!' Och, he's cracked, that fella. I tell him many's the time it's in the asylum he should be, but sure, you might as well talk to the potstick as talk to him. He'lldrive you to the station with a heart an' a han', and the capers of him when you both come back'll be like nothin' on God's earth!"
"So long as he doesn't capsize us both into the ditch!..."
"Him capsize you! I'd warm his lug for him if he dar'd to do such a thing!..."
He had been to the offices of Messrs. Kilworth and Kilworth in Kildare Street, and had seen Sir John Kilworth and settled as much of his business as could then be done. Now, wondering just what he should do next, he made his way to Stephen's Green and entered the Park, and while he was standing on the bridge over the lake, looking at the dark fish in the water, he felt a hand on his shoulder, and turning round, saw John Marsh.
"I didn't know you were in Dublin," John said, holding out his hand.
"I haven't been here very long," Henry answered, "and I'm going away again after Easter. I'm going to be married."
"Married!"
"Yes ... to Ninian Graham's sister. I've often talked of you to her. You must come and stay with us when we get back to Ballymartin."
"Yes. Yes, I should like to! I hope you'll be happy, Henry!" He spoke in a nervous, agitated way that was not habitual with him, and Henry, looking more closely at him, saw that he was tired and ill-looking.
"Aren't you well, John?" he asked.
"Oh, yes. Yes, I'm quite well. I'm rather tired, that's all. I've been working very hard!"
"Still drilling?"
"Yes ... still drilling!"
"What are you doing at Easter, John?" Henry asked.
Marsh looked at him quickly, almost in a startled fashion."At Easter!" he repeated. "Oh ... nothing! Why?"
"You and I might go for a long walk through the mountains," Henry answered. "We could walk to Glendalough and back again. It would just fill up the Easter holidays. Let's start to-morrow morning. I'm staying at the Club. You can meet me there!"
"No, I'm sorry, Henry, I can't go with you!..."
"Why not? You said you'd nothing particular to do!"
"I'm going to Mass in the morning...."
"Well, that doesn't matter. We can start after you've been. Come along, John. You look washed-out, and the tramp'll do you good!..."
Marsh shook his head. "I can't go, Henry," he said. "It isn't only to-morrow morning that I want to go to Mass ... I want to go the day after ... and I want to go with all ... all my people on Easter Sunday!"
"You've grown very religious, John. Do you go to Mass every morning?"
"I've been every morning now for a month. You see, one doesn't know ... well, perhaps I am growing more religious. I won't keep you now. Perhaps I shall see you again!..."
"Why, of course, you'll see me again. Heaven and earth, man, anybody'd think you were going to die, the way you talk!"
Marsh did not speak. He smiled when Henry spoke of dying, and then looked away. They were still standing on the bridge, and he leant on the parapet and looked down on the lake.
"Queer things, fish!" he said.
"Not nearly so queer as you are," Henry answered. "Why won't you come with me? You won't want to be cooped up in Dublin all Easter, do you?"
"Cooped up!"
"Yes. Two or three days of mountain air 'ud do you a world of good. You'd better come with me!"
"No, I can't," he answered so abruptly that Henry didnot press the matter again. "When are you going to be married, Henry?" he asked, speaking in his old, kindly tone again.
"At the beginning of May ... less than a fortnight now!"
Marsh turned away from the water, and stood with his back to the parapet. "Why don't you spend Easter with your fiancée?" he said.
"That isn't quite possible, John. I should only be in the way, if I were there now!"
"Or at Ballymartin. It would be rather nice to spend Easter at Ballymartin!"
"Well, I will, if you'll come with me...."
"I can't do that. I don't think I should stay in Dublin at Easter if I were you...."
"Why?"
"Oh, it'll be dull for you. People go away. There's not much to do. I should go to the North or over to England or somewhere if I were you!"
Henry felt resentful. "You seem damned anxious to get rid of me, John," he said. "You won't come into the mountains with me, and you keep on telling me to clear out of Dublin!"
Marsh turned to him quickly, and put his hand on his arm.
"My dear Henry," he said, very gently, "you know that I don't feel like that. I thought you'd be ... I thought you'd have a happier Easter out of Dublin, that was all. That place in Wales, where you went with poor Farlow...."
"Tre'Arrdur Bay?"
"Yes. Why don't you go there? It really isn't much further than Glendalough."
"You can't walk to it, John, and you can walk to Glendalough!"
"Oh, well, if you won't go ... you won't go, and there's an end of it. Good-bye!"
"Wait a bit. Come and dine with me to-night!"
"I can't, Henry!" Henry made an angry gesture. "Don't be hurt," Marsh went on quickly. "I have things to attend to. You see, I didn't know you were here. I'm on my way now to a ... a committee meeting. I'll come and see you to-morrow, if I can manage it. I'll lunch with you somewhere!"
"All right. I'll meet you here at one, and we'll lunch at the Shelbourne. By the way, John, aren't there some races on Monday?"
"Yes ... at Fairyhouse!"
"Well, couldn't we go to them? I've never seen a horse-race in my life!..."
"I don't think I can manage that, Henry!..."
"Oh, damn you, you can't manage anything. Well, all right, I'll see you to-morrow!"
"Good-bye, then!..."
He went off, leaving Henry on the bridge staring after him, and as he went towards the Grafton Street gate, there was something slightly incongruous about his look.
"I know what it is," Henry said to himself. "His coat's too big for him. He always did wear things that didn't fit him!"
Marsh did not keep the appointment. Soon after one o'clock, a boy came to Henry, and asked him if he were Mr. Quinn, and when Henry had assured him that he was, he said, "Mr. Marsh bid me to tell you, sir, that he's not able to come. He says he's very sorry, but he can't help it!"
The lad repeated the message almost as if he had learned it by heart. "Oh, very well!" Henry said, offering money to him.
"Ah, sure, that's all right, sir!" the lad said, and then he went away.
"I suppose," Henry said to himself angrily, "he's at his damned drilling again!"
He lunched alone, and then took the tram to Kingstown, and walked from there to Bray along the coast. He felt dispirited and lonely. Jordan and Saxon were out of Dublin ... Jordan was in Sligo, he had heard, and Saxon was staying with his uncle near the mountains. He knew that Crews lived in Bray, but he had forgotten the address. "Perhaps," he thought, "I shall see him in the street...."
"Lordy God!" he exclaimed, "I'd give the world for some one to talk to. John Marsh might have tried to meet me. Fooling about with his ... penny-farthing volunteers!"
"In a little while," he said to himself, as he descended into Killiney and walked along the road by the railway station, "I shall be married to Mary, and then!..."
He remembered what she had said to him at Boveyhayne, "I'd like you to go, Quinny ... I can't pretend that I wouldn't...."
He stood for a while, leaning against the wall and looking out over the crumpled sea. "I don't know," he said to himself, "I don't know!"
He climbed to the top of Bray Head, and while he stood there, his mind was full of thoughts that beat backwards and forwards. In olden times, the histories said, Ireland had sent a stream of scholars over the waste places of Europe to fertilise them and make them fruitful. "Now," he thought bitterly, "we send 'bosses' to Tammany Hall...."
He tried to envisage the means whereby Ireland would be brought to the measure and the stature of a dignified and honourable nation ... "not this brawling, whining, cadging, snivelling, Oh-Jesus-have-mercy-on-us disorder!"and he saw only a long, tedious, painful process of self-regeneration. "We must rise on our own wings!"
"But first we must be free, free from the bondage of history, free from the bondage of romance, free from the bondage of politics, free from the bondage of religion, and free from the bondage of our bellies!"
"There are four Irishmen to be conquered and controlled: the Publican, the Priest, the Politician and the Poet...."
"We cannot be friendly with England until we are equal with England ... but England cannot make us equal with her ... we can only do that ourselves!"
"England is our sister ... not our mother!..."
"Catholicism is Death ... and Intolerance is Death. Wherever there is Catholicism there is Decay that will not be stopped until the people protest. Wherever there is Intolerance there is a waste of life, a perversion of energy. When the Protestant ceases, and the Catholic begins, to shout 'To Hell with the Pope,' there will be glory and life in Ireland...."
He tried to plan a means of making a change of mind in Ireland. "We must make opinions and active brains!" and so he saw himself urging his friends to abandon parliaments to the middle-aged and the second-rate, while they bent their minds to the conquest of the schools. "Let the old men make their speeches," he said aloud as if he were addressing a conference. "We'll mould the minds of the children!"
They must exult in service. "I believe in Work ... in the Job Well Done ... in giving oneself without ceasing ... in the holy communion of men labouring together for something which is greater than themselves ... in spending oneself with no reward but to know that one is spent well!..."
They would enlist the young men of generous mind. They would open their minds to the knowledge of the wide world, and would pity the man who was content only to be an islander; and they would give the harvest of their mindsto their juniors, so that they, when they grew to manhood, might find greater ease in working for the common good. They would demand, not privileges, but responsibilities. "If we cannot make decisions, even when we decide wrongly, then we are not men!"
"We must kill the Publican, we must subdue the Priest, we must humiliate the Politician, and chasten the Poet...."
"In all our ways, O God, let us guide ourselves!..."
It seemed to him that God was not a Being who miraculously made the world, but a Being who laboured at it, suffered and failed, and rose again and achieved.... He could hear God, stumbling through the Universe, full of the agony of desire, calling continually, "Let there be Light! Let there be Light!..."
He looked about him. Behind him, lay the long broken line of the Wicklow mountains, with the Sugar Loaf thrusting its pointed head into the heavens. There in front of him, heaving and tumbling, was the sea: a miracle of healing and cleansing. It would be good, he thought, to spend one's life in the sound of the sea, taking no care for the lives of other men, content that oneself was fed and comfortable. "But that would not be enough. There must be Light and More Light!"
"God," he said, "has many forms. In that place, he is a Quietness ... in this place, a Discontent ... in a third place, a Quest."
"But here, God is a Demand. 'Let there be Light! Let there be more Light!'"
He went home and wrote to Mary. "My impulse is to tell you no more than this, that I love you. I wrote to youthis morning, and I have nothing to add that is news. But I feel an overpowering desire to insist on my love for you ... to do nothing for ever but love you and love you.... You see the mood I'm in! I went out of Dublin to-day, sulking and depressed because John Marsh had failed me and I was lonely, but now I'm extraordinarily happy. I feel that I have only to stretch out my hand and touch you ... and then I shall be depressed no more. This is not a letter. It has no beginning and it will have no end. It's an outpouring. To-night is very beautiful. I went up to my bedroom a few moments ago, and sat at the window looking over Stephen's Green. There was a blue mist hanging over the trees, and the sky was full of light and colour. I do not believe there is any place in the world where one sees so much of the sky as in Dublin. It reaches up and up until you feel that if a bird were to pierce the clouds with its beak, it would tear a hole in the heavens and let the universe in. And while I was sitting there, I felt very near to you, dearest. In ten days we shall be married, and then you will come with me and see these places, too. I shall become Irish over again when I show you my home, and I shall watch Ireland taking hold of you and absorbing you and making you as Irish as I am. You'll go on thinking that you're English until some one speaks disparagingly of Ireland, and then you'll flare up, and you'll be Irish, not only in nature, but in knowledge. Ireland does that to people, so you cannot hope to escape. Good-night, my very dear!"
On Sunday, he went into the mountains, and in the evening he returned to Dublin. There was an extraordinary quietness in the streets, though they were crowded with people ... the quietness that comes when people are tired and happy. As he crossed O'Connell Bridge, he stood for a few moments to look up the Liffey. The sunset had transmuted the river to the look of a sheet of crinkled gold, and the sunlight made the houses on the quays look warm and lovely, even though they were old and worn and discoloured. "In her heart," he thought, "Dublin is still a proud lady, although her dress be draggled!"
He turned to look at a company of Volunteers who were marching towards Liberty Hall. There were little girls in Gaelic dress at the head of them, accompanied by a pale, tired-looking woman, with tightened lips, who stumped heavily by the side of them; and following them, came young men and boys and a shuffling group of hungry labourers, misshapen by heavy toil and privation ... and as the company passed by, girls stood on the pavement and jeered at them. They pointed to the woman with tightened lips, and mocked at her uniform and her tossed hair....
"They're fools," Henry thought, looking at them as they went wearily on, "but, by God, they're finer than the people who jeer at them. They ... they are serving something ... and these Don't-Care-a-Damners aren't serving anything!..."
There was a man at his elbow who turned to him and said, "Them lads 'ud run like hell if you were to point a penny pop-gun at them! If a peeler was to take their names, they'd be shiverin' with fright. They'd fall out of their trousers with the terror'd be on them!"
Henry did not answer. Indeed, it seemed incredible that there was any fight in them ... if he had been asked for his opinion, he might have said something similar to what this stranger had said to him ... but he hated to hear the man's disparagement, and so he did not make any answer to him.
"I'd rather have them on my side than have him," he thought as he moved away, "with the stink of porter on him!"
It sickened him to see the generosity and the youth walking in the company of the hopelessness of Ireland, trainingthemselves in the means of killing. "If they'd put all that energy and enthusiasm into something that will preserve life and make it deeper and finer, nothing could prevail against them. If only John had more intellect and less emotion ... if Mineely and Connolly were less bitter!"
He walked along Grafton Street, turning phrases over in his mind, angry phrases, bitter things that he would say to John Marsh when he met him.
"What have young lads and girls to do with Hate and Death?" he said to himself, as if he were talking to Marsh. "You're perverting them from their purpose! You're robbing God of His due ... of the hope that fills His Heart with each generation!"
"But it's no good talking to him ... he's too fond of spilling over. If he were like Yeats, content to love Ireland at a distance ... to 'arise and go now' no further than the Euston Road ... he might achieve something, and at all events, he'd be harmless!"
He turned out of Grafton Street into Stephen's Green.
"To-morrow," he said to himself, "I'll go to Fairyhouse!"
And then he went to his Club. He was tired and sleepy, and soon after supper, he went to bed.
It was late when he awoke and so, feeling lazy after his day's climbing, he resolved that he would not go to the races. "I'll loaf about," he said, "and to-night I'll go to a theatre." There was a letter from Mary and one from Roger. "Gerald Luke was killed in France last week, and so was Clifford Dartrey. Goeffrey Grant has been wounded badly. The Improved Tories have suffered heavily in the War...." Roger wrote.
When he had breakfasted, he left the Club and walked towards Sackville Street. He would go to the Abbey Theatre, he thought, and book a seat for the evening performance.
There was an odd, bewildered look about the people who stood in groups in Sackville Street.
"What's up?" Henry said to a bystander.
"Begod," said the man, "I think there's a rebellion on. That's what this woman says anyway!"
"A what?"
"A rebellion or something of the sort. You can ask her yourself! Begod, it's a quare day to have it. The people'll not enjoy themselves at all...."
Henry turned to the woman who was standing in the centre of the group, endlessly relating her experience.
"I went to the Gener'l," she said, "an' I said to the man behin' the counter, 'Gimme two ha'penny postcards an' a penny stamp an' change for a shillin', if you please!' and I hadn't the words out of my mouth 'til a man in a green uniform ... one of them Sinn Feiners ... come up to me, an' pointed a gun at me, an' toul' me to go home. 'Go home yourself!' says I, an' I give his oul' gun a push with my hand, 'an' who are you to be orderin' a person about?' 'If you don't go on when I tell you,' says he, 'I'll shoot you!' an' I declare to my God he looked as if he'd blow the head off you. 'Well, wait till I get my change anyway,' says I. 'Ye'll get no change here,' says he. 'I will so,' I said, and I turned to the man behind the counter, but, sure, God bless you, he wasn't there. 'Well, this bates all,' says I to the Sinn Feiner, 'an if the peelers catches a houldt of you, you'll get into bother over the head of this!' I picked up my shillin', an' I went out. The place was full of them. They were orderin' everybody out, except a couple or three soldiers that they made prisoners. An' if you were to go down there now, you'd see them, young fellas that I could bate with my one hand, cocked up behin' the windas with guns in their hands, an' telling people to move on out of that...."
Some one came into the group, and said "What's that?" and she turned to him and began again. "I went in to the Gener'l," she said, "an' I said to the man behin' the counter, 'Gimme two ha'penny postcards....'"
Henry made his way out of the group of listeners, and walked down the street towards the General Post Office.
"It's absurd," he said. "Ridiculous! A rebellion!"
But something was toward. On the roof of the Post Office there were two flags, a green flag with a motto on it, and a tri-colour, orange, white and green. There was hardly any wind, and the flags hung limply from their staffs, but as Henry approached the Post Office, the wind stirred, and the green flag fluttered enough for him to read what was printed on it. It bore the legendIRISH REPUBLIC.
"It's a poor sort of performance, this!" he said as he came up to the building.
All the windows on the ground floor were broken, and many of those on the upper floors, and in each window, on sacks laid on piled furniture, were one or two young volunteers, each with a rifle cocked....
There was a holiday mood on the people. They had come out to enjoy themselves, and here was an entertainment beyond their dreams of pleasure.... It was a dangerous kind of joke to play ... one of them oul' guns might go off, and who knows who might get killed dead ... and it was a serious thing to seize possession of the Post Office ... if the peelers was to come an' catch them at it an' bring them before the magistrates, they'd be damn near transported ... but it was the great joke all the same. Whoever thought there would be the like of that to see, and not a penny to pay for it.... The minute the peelers came up ... where in hell were the peelers?
It was then that they began to believe that there was more than a joke in this rebellion. There were no policemen to be seen anywhere. "That's strange now! There ought to be a peeler or two about!..."
Then some one, pale and startled, came by. "They've killed a policeman!" he said. "The unfortunate man! I was coming past the Castle, and I saw a Sinn Feiner go up to him and blow his brains out. Not a word of warning! The poor man put up his hand to bid them go back ... they were trying to get into the Castle ... and the Sinn Feiner lifted his rifle and shot him dead!..."
"Begod, it's in earnest they are!..."
"But what can they do? They can't hold out against the British Army...."
"They might do a lot, now! They're mad, the whole of them! What in hell do they want to start a rebellion for?..."
Henry moved away. He went from group to group, listening to one for a while, and then moving on to another. There were many rumours already flying through the crowd. The Germans had landed in the West, and were marching to Dublin. A "mysterious stranger" had been captured on the coast of Kerry a few days before. "It was Casement!" The German Navy had made a raid on England, and the British Fleet had been badly beaten....
A youth, holding a rifle with a fixed bayonet, stood on sentry-go in the middle of the street. He was very pale and tired and nervous-looking, but looked as resolute as he looked tired. He did not speak to any one, nor did any one speak to him. He stood there, staring fixedly in front of him, watching and watching....
There was a sound of rumbling carts, and the noise of people cheering, and presently a procession of wagons, loaded with cauliflower, and guarded by armed Volunteers, came out of a side street, and drove up to the Post Office.
"The Commissariat!" some one said. "Begod they'll betired of cauliflower before they're through with that lot!"
It was comical to see those loads of cauliflower being driven past. Ireland was to fight for freedom with her stomach full of cauliflower....
There was a Proclamation of the Republic on a wall near by, and he hurried to read it.
"What's the thing at the head of it?" a woman asked, gazing at the Gaelic inscription on top of the Proclamation.
"That's Irish," the man beside her replied.
"I know that. What does it mean?"
"Begod, I don't know...."
Henry read the Proclamation through, and then re-read the finely-phrased end of it!