Bob Power called on me next morning. Marion and I were busy at my history of Irish rebellions when Bob was shown into the library. The sun, I recollect, was shining so brightly outside that I had the blinds pulled down in order to soften the light. Bob’s entrance had much the same effect as pulling up the blinds again. He brought the sunshine with him, not in the trying form of heat and glare, but tempered with a sea breeze, and broken, so it seemed to me, into the sparkle of leaping waves. His work, the night before, whatever it was, had not affected his spirits.
As a rule I dislike being interrupted when I am engaged in my literary work. I always absolutely hate it when Godfrey is the interrupter. But I found myself quite pleased when Bob Power said that we ought not to sit indoors on so fine a day. Marion ran off to get her hat and joined us on the lawn. Bob Power led us straight to the garden, and when we got there, made for the strawberry bed. He owned to a pleasant recollection of the feast he had enjoyed the day before.
There is a good deal of the school-boy about Bob Power, and Marion is quite young enough to enjoy gorging herself with ripe strawberries. I, alas! am nearly sixty years of age. A very small number of strawberries satisfies me, and I find that stooping to gather them from beneath their nets tires me after a short time. Bob Power and Marion wandered far intothe remoter parts of my strawberry bed. I stayed near the pathway. Their voices reached me and their laughter; but I could not hear what they were saying to each other. I felt suddenly lonely. They were getting on very well without me. I went on by myself and inspected my melon frames. I left them after a while and took a look at my poultry yard.
The rearing of poultry is one of the things which I do in order to benefit my country. Quite ordinary chickens satisfy my personal needs, and the egg of the modest barndoor fowl is all I ask at breakfast-time. But an energetic young lady in a short tweed skirt and thick brown boots explained to me two years ago that Ireland would be a much happier country if everybody in it kept fowls with long pedigrees. She must have been right about this, because the government paid her a small salary to go round the country saying it; and no government, not even ours, would pay people to say what is not true. Her plan for introducing the superior hens into the homes of the people was that I should undertake the care of such birds as she sent me, and give their eggs, under certain conditions, to any one who asked for them. This I agreed to do, and my new fowl yard, arranged exactly as the young lady in thick boots wished, is my latest effort in patriotism.
The hens which inhabited it were very fine-looking birds, and the cock who dominated them was a credit to any government. I watched them with real pleasure for some time. Then it occurred to me as curious that a government which recognized the value of good blood in birds, bulls, boars, horses, and even bees—if bees have blood—should be not only indifferent but actually hostile to our human aristocracy. For yearspast animals of pedigree have been almost forced upon Ireland. Men of pedigree have as far as possible been discouraged from remaining in this country. This idea struck me as very suitable for one of my light newspaper articles. I was unwilling to lose grip of it and allow it to fade away as Malcolmson and his cannons had faded the night before. I took a sheet of paper and a pencil from my pocket and sat down on a stone to make a rough draft of the article. Before I had written three sentences I heard Marion’s voice.
“Oh, there you are, father. We were looking for you everywhere. Mr. Power and I want you to come and play tennis with us.”
I rose and stuffed my paper into my pocket. I felt quite glad that they had found me, although I do not care for playing tennis, and, as a rule, enjoy writing articles.
“You will get on much better without me,” I said.
“Oh no,” said Marion; “Mr. Power is sure to beat me in a single; but I think I’d have a pretty good chance if you are on his side.”
I was to act as a handicap. My efforts to help Power were reckoned to be worth one, perhaps two strokes in every game for Marion. This was not complimentary to me; but I dare say my tennis deserves no more respectful treatment. I agreed to be a handicap, and I was a good one. Marion won the first set. I got exceedingly hot, but, up to the middle of the second set, I enjoyed myself. Then Godfrey appeared. He watched my efforts with an air of cold superiority and contemptuous surprise. My heart failed me and I was obliged to ask to be allowed to stop.
Bob Power invited us to lunch on theFinola. Marion accepted the invitation joyfully. Godfrey also accepted, although I do not think Power meant to ask him. But Godfrey is not the kind of man to miss the chance of getting into touch, however remotely, with any one as rich as Conroy. Power eyed him with an expression of frank dislike. Godfrey, it seemed to me, did not much like Power. He was probably annoyed at the way in which Power made himself agreeable to Marion. Godfrey regarded Marion as, in a sense, his property, although there was nothing in the way of an engagement between them.
McNeice, whom I had hoped to meet, was not on the yacht. The steward explained to us that he was spending the day with Crossan. I could see that the thought of any one spending the day with Crossan outraged Godfrey’s sense of decency. By way, I suppose, of annoying Power, he asked what had been happening on theFinolaat twelve o’clock the night before.
“I was awakened up,” he said, “by the noise of carts going along the street and I looked out. I could see lights on the yacht and on the pier. What on earth were you doing at that time of night?”
“Coaling,” said Power, shortly.
It was plain to me that he disliked being asked questions. It must have been plain to Godfrey, too, for he immediately asked another.
“How did you get coal in a place like this?”
“Dear me,” said Marion, “how very unromantic! I thought you were smuggling!”
Godfrey’s face assumed an expression of quite unusual intelligence. He suspected Power of evil practicesof some sort. Marion’s suggestion of smuggling delighted him.
“But where did you get the coal?” he persisted.
“My dear Godfrey,” I said, “for all you or I know there may be hundreds of tons of it piled up in the co-operative store. Crossan has a wonderful business instinct. He may have speculated on a visit from some large steamer and be making a large profit. I am the principal shareholder, and nothing pleases me better than to see the store succeeding.”
I knew, as a matter of fact, that Crossan had no coal. I also knew that theFinolawas not coaling. The carts were loaded when they were going up the hill. They would have been empty if they had been going to get coal for theFinola. I made my remark in the hope of discouraging Godfrey from asking more questions.
“I wish you would smuggle something,” said Marion. “I should love to have some French lace laid at my door in a bale in the middle of the night.”
Marion reads novels, and the smugglers in these import French lace. In real life the only people who try to cheat the nation out of its duty on lace are tourist ladies, and they would not share their spoils with Marion.
“But why did you coal in the middle of the night?” said Godfrey.
One of Godfrey’s most striking characteristics is his persistent curiosity. There is hardly anything in the world which Godfrey will not find out if he is given time. A secret has the same attraction for him that cheese has for a mouse. Some day, I hope, he will find a trap baited with a seductive mystery.
“We always coal at night,” said Power.
“Of course,” said Marion, “the dirt shows so much less at night than it would in daylight.”
“But,” said Godfrey, “I don’t understand why you—”
I rose and said that we must go ashore. I invited Power to dinner, and urged him to bring McNeice with him if possible. I made it quite plain that I was not inviting Godfrey. Power accepted the invitation, and sent us off in a boat. I said good-bye firmly to Godfrey at the end of the pier. I was annoyed with him for cross-questioning our host at his own table. Marion and I walked home. Godfrey walked up the hill towards the co-operative store. I am sure he did not want to see Crossan. I cannot suppose that he would venture to catechise McNeice. I expect he meant to prowl round the premises in hopes of discovering casks of smuggled brandy or cases full of tobacco.
McNeice came to dinner, and I am bound to say that I found myself very nearly in agreement with Godfrey’s opinion of him. He was a singularly ill-mannered man. Power devoted himself to Marion, and I felt at once that their conversation was not of a kind that was likely to be interesting either to McNeice or me. They were talking about ski-ing and skating in Switzerland. McNeice made no effort to talk at all. He sucked his soup into his mouth with a loud hissing noise, and glared at me when I invited him to admire our scenery. His fish he ate more quietly, and I took the opportunity of reminding him of our correspondence about St. Patrick. The subject roused him.
“There are,” he said, “seventeen different theories about the place of that man’s birth.”
I knew nine myself, my own, of which I was a little proud, being the ninth. I did not expect McNeice to deliver a harangue on the whole seventeen, but that is what he did. Having bolted his fish, he began in a loud, harsh voice to pour contempt on all attempts at investigating the early history of our national saint. He delayed our progress through dinner a good deal, because he would neither refuse nor help himself to theentréewhich my butler held at his elbow. It was not until he had finished with the whole seventeen theories about the saint that he turned his attention to dinner again. I ventured to suggest that he had not even mentioned my own theory.
“Oh,” he said, “you have a theory too, have you?”
My theory, at the time of its first appearance, occupied ten whole pages of theNineteenth Century, and when republished, with notes, in pamphlet form, was reviewed by two German papers. I felt hurt by his ignorance of it, and reminded him again that we had corresponded about the subject while I was writing the article.
“If you’ve time to waste on that sort of thing,” he said, “why not devote it to living bishops instead of one who has been dead over a thousand years?”
The idea of investigating the origins of our existing bishops was new to me but not in the least attractive.
“Wouldn’t it be rather waste of labour,” I said, “to build up an hypothesis about the birthplace of a living bishop when—”
“It’s certainly waste of labour to build up an hypothesis about a dead one.”
“I meant to say,” I added, “that if one did want to know such a thing—”
“Nobody does,” said McNeice.
“It would,” I went on, “be much simpler to write and ask him.”
I gathered from the way in which he spoke that McNeice did not like bishops; but I was not prepared for the violence of the speech which he made to me after dinner. Marion and Power were at the piano, which stands in a far-off corner of my rather oversized drawing-room. McNeice settled himself in front of the fire, his long legs straddled far apart, the bow of his white tie twisted under his ear. He is a man of singularly ferocious appearance. He has very bushy eyebrows which meet across the bridge of his nose, shining green eyes, a large jaw heavily underhung, and bright red hair.
He addressed me for more than half an hour on the subject of bishops in general. I should be very sorry to write down the things he said. Some of them were quite untrue. Others were utterly unjust. It is quite wrong, for instance, to impute it as a crime to a whole class of men that their heads are bald. Nobody can help being bald if his hair will not grow any more than he can help being fat if his stomach will swell. Fatness was another of the accusations which McNeice hurled against the bishops. I suppose this violent hatred of an inoffensive class of men was partly the result of McNeice’s tremendous Protestantism. The poet Milton, I think, felt in the same way about the prelates of his day. Partly it may have been the expression of his naturally democratic temperament. Bishops like to be called “my lord” by servants and clergymen. McNeice, I imagine, has a quite evangelical dislike of such titles. I dare say that it was thefact of my being a lord which made him so rude to me.
On the afternoon of my garden-party I happened to be standing close beside Lady Moyne when she was saying good-bye to the Dean. Her final remark was addressed quite as much to him as to me.
“What we have got to do,” she said, “is to make use of this virile democracy of ours; to mould it into an instrument for the preservation of social order. The introduction of the Home Rule Bill gives us just about the chance we want.”
I found myself wondering, while the diatribe against the bishops was in full swing, whether Lady Moyne would succeed in moulding McNeice into a weapon for her hand. It seemed to me more probable at the moment that McNeice would in the end tumble her beautiful head from the block of a guillotine into the basket of sawdust which waited underneath.
Marion and Bob Power were singing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas while McNeice preached to me. They at least were having an enjoyable evening. I dare say McNeice enjoyed himself too. If so, my dinner-party was not given in vain. One cannot reasonably expect more than three out of every four people to be happy at the same time. It was my misfortune that I happened to be the fourth.
TheFinolasteamed out of our bay next morning. Marion saw her go, and became quite lyrical at breakfast about the beauty of her “lines,” a word which, as applied to the appearance of a yacht, she can only have learned from Bob Power. I was not able to share her rapture because theFinolawent out at 6 a. m., an hour at which I make it a settled rule to be in bed. Marion is generally in bed at 6 a. m. too. She made an exceptional effort that morning.
For a week I enjoyed almost unbroken peace, and accumulated quite a large sheaf of notes for my work on the Irish Rebellions. Even Godfrey refrained from worrying me. But such happiness was too good to last long. On Saturday morning three things happened, every one of them of a disturbing kind. I received a letter from Lady Moyne in which she invited me to spend three days during the following week at Castle Affey. Castle Affey is Lord Moyne’s chief Irish place. He has three others in various parts of the country and one in England. It is about ten miles from my home. Lady Moyne invited Marion too; but this was evidently an after thought, and she discounted the value of the invitation by saying that her party was to consist almost entirely of men and might be dull for Marion. I suspected politics at once, and advised Marion to refuse the invitation. I accepted it. Politics bore me a good deal; but it is interesting to watchpoliticians at their game. It is also pleasant, very pleasant, to be in the company of Lady Moyne. The prospect of the visit was as I have said disturbing. I prefer monotony. But if things must fall splashing into the pool of my life, I would as soon they took the form of visits to Castle Affey as any other.
The next thing which happened that morning was a deputation. It consisted of six out of the twenty carters whom Crossan has organized in the interests of our fishing industry. They made the modest request that I should drive my nephew Godfrey out of the neighbourhood. I felt the strongest possible sympathy with them. If I were a carter, a fisherman, a shopkeeper, or a farmer, and lived in Kilmore, I should certainly wish Godfrey to live somewhere else. I did not even question the members of the deputation about their special reasons for wanting to get rid of Godfrey. They told me in general terms that he was interfering in business which was “none of his.” I wanted no evidence in support of such a statement. Godfrey always interferes in everything. A very freckled young man who seemed to be junior member of the deputation, added that Godfrey “spied” upon them. Of course Godfrey spied on them. He spies on me.
Strong as my sympathy was with the perfectly reasonable request of the deputation, I could not act as I was asked. Godfrey is, of course, in my employment. He collects the head rents still payable to me from some parts of the town which were not sold when I parted with the rest of my estate. For this I pay him £200 a year. I could, I suppose, dismiss him if I chose; but the plain fact is that if I dismissed Godfrey he would immediately starve or go to the workhouse.He is quite unfit to earn his living in any way. Once, after great exertions, I secured for him a kind of minor clerkship in a government office. His duties, so far as I was able to learn, were to put stamps on envelopes, and he was provided with a damp sponge to prevent any injury which might happen to his tongue through licking the stamps. At the end of a year he was dismissed as hopelessly incompetent. He came back to me, beautifully dressed, with a small despatch-box full of tradesmen’s bills, and a grievance against the government. It was plain to me after that experiment that Godfrey could never earn his own living. I did not see my way to let him drift into the workhouse. He is, little as I like him, the heir to my title, and, in mere decency, I could not allow the cost of his support to fall on the rates.
This is just one of the ways in which the democratic spirit of independence has affected us all without our knowing it. In the seventeenth century any member of the aristocracy who was afflicted with an heir like Godfrey had him shut up in the Bastille, or the Tower, by means oflettres de cachetor whatever corresponded to such instruments in England. There the objectionable young man ate bread and drank water at the expense of the public funds. Nobody seems to have suffered any discomfort at the thought that the cost of the support of his relative was falling either on the rates or the taxes. (I am not sure which it was but it must have been one or the other.) Nowadays we are horribly self-conscious in such matters. The debilitated labourer began it, objecting, absurdly, to being fed by other people in the workhouse. His spirit spread to the upper classes, and it is now impossible,morally, for me, a peer, to send my heir to the workhouse. Fortunately public opinion is swinging round again. The latest type of working-man has no objection to receiving an Old Age Pension, and likes to hear of his children being given free breakfasts at school. In time this new feeling will soak through to the class to which I belong. Then I shall be able, without a qualm, to send Godfrey to the workhouse. At present, I regret to say, I cannot.
I explained all this carefully to the deputation. It pained me to have to say no to their request, but I said it quite firmly. My decision, I think, was understood. My feelings I fear were not.
Very soon after the deputation left, Godfrey himself arrived. He wanted me to dismiss Crossan. I am not at all sure that I could dismiss Crossan even if I wanted to do so. He is the manager of our co-operative store, and although most of the money which went to the starting of that enterprise was mine there is a considerable number of small shareholders. Crossan also runs the fishing business and our saw mill. I capitalized both these industries, lending money to the men to buy nets and good boats, and buying the various saws which are necessary to the making of planks. This no doubt gives me some hold over Crossan, but not enough to enable me to dismiss him as I might a cook. Besides, I do not want to dismiss Crossan. He is managing these different enterprises in such a way that they earn fair interest on the capital I put into them.
“I’ve been looking into things a bit, Excellency,” said Godfrey.
I quite believed that. The deputation of carters said the same thing in other words.
“And you’ll find yourself in an awkward place one of these days if that fellow Crossan is allowed to go on as he’s going.”
“I hope you’re not going to drag up that dispute about the carters, Godfrey. I’m sick of it.”
The dispute about the carters is really an unpleasant business. As originally organized there were eight Protestant carters and four Roman Catholics. A year ago Crossan dismissed the four Roman Catholic carters, and one of the Protestants who was suspected of religious indifference. Their places were filled by five Orangemen of the most determined kind. Now the profits of this carting business are considerable. The five men who were dismissed appealed to Godfrey. Godfrey laid their case before me. I gathered that Godfrey had a high opinion of the outcasts who always spoke to him with the respect due to his position. He had a low opinion of the five interlopers who were men of rude speech and democratic independence of manner. I was foolish enough to speak to Crossan about the matter. He met me with a blunt assertion that it was impossible to trust what he called “Papishes.” There, as a lover of peace rather than justice, I wanted to let the matter rest; but Godfrey took up the subject again and again in the course of the following year. He persisted, not out of any love for justice though this once he was on the side of justice, but simply out of hatred of Crossan.
“It’s not only the dismissal of those carters,” said Godfrey. “There’s a great deal more behind that. There’s something going on which I don’t understand.”
“If you don’t understand it,” I said, “you can’t expect me to.”
“Look here, Excellency, you remember the time that yacht of Conroy’s, theFinola, was in here?”
“Of course I do. You went and left my cards on Bob Power.”
“I’m very sorry now that I did. There’s something fishy about that yacht. What was she doing on the night she was here?”
“Coaling,” I said; “I don’t see why I should dismiss Crossan because Conroy’s yacht came in here for coal.”
“She wasn’t coaling,” said Godfrey.
I knew that, of course; so I said nothing, but left Godfrey to develope his grievance whatever it was.
“Ever since that night,” said Godfrey, “there has been something or other going on in the yard behind the stores. Those carters are in it, whatever it is, and a lot more men, fishermen and young farmers. They’re up there every night.”
“Probably dancing,” I said.
“Much more likely to be drinking.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk nonsense, Godfrey. You know perfectly well that the store has not got a licence, and there’s no drink sold there. Besides Crossan is a fanatical teetotaller.”
“That wouldn’t stop him,” said Godfrey, “if he could sell the stuff cheap and make money on it; if”—here he sank his voice—“if it hadn’t paid duty.”
Now Crossan is one of those Christians who has added to the original Ten Commandments a Mohammedan prohibition of alcohol in any form. Godfrey, I have no doubt, would break any of the commandments which he recognized, if he saw his way to making a small profit on the sin. But I did not think that even a 25 per cent.dividend would tempt Crossan to disregard his self-imposed prohibition of alcohol.
“That’s all nonsense,” I said. “In the first place theFinoladidn’t come in here to land a cargo of smuggled goods.”
“Then what did she come for?”
I did not know, so I ignored Godfrey’s question.
“And in the second place Crossan wouldn’t debauch the whole place by making the men drunk night after night on smuggled spirits. Why, only three weeks ago he spoke to me seriously about the glass of claret I drink at dinner. He did it quite respectfully and entirely for my good. I respected him for it.”
“He’s up to some mischief,” said Godfrey, sulkily, “and it won’t be too pleasant for you, Excellency, when the Inland Revenue people find out, and you are let in for a prosecution. I tell you that every night for the last week men have been going up to that store after dark, twenty or thirty of them, truculent, disrespectful blackguards out of the Orange Lodge. I’ve watched them.”
“Did you watch them coming out again?”
“I did, twice,” said Godfrey. “They didn’t go home till nearly one o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t stop up every night, so I only saw them twice.”
“Well,” I said, “were they drunk?”
“No,” said Godfrey, unwillingly, “they were not. They walked quite straight.”
“That explodes your theory then. If they had been drinking smuggled spirits for hours and hours, they would have been drunk.”
“They were at some mischief,” said Godfrey.
“They were probably getting up a concert,” I said.
“No, they weren’t, for—”
“Look here, Godfrey,” I said, “I’ve listened to you pretty patiently for a long time; but I really cannot spare you the whole morning. If you have anything to do I wish you’d go and do it. If you haven’t you’d better go to bed and sleep off your absurd suspicions.”
One has to speak very plainly to Godfrey. Hints are simply wasted on him. Even after my last remark he hesitated for a moment. Then he turned and went.
I felt in the mood to write a short story which I have had in my mind for some time. I very often write short stories; but have never yet got an editor who cares to print any of them. The one I had in my mind when Godfrey left me was, however, likely to be particularly good. It was to be the autobiography of a murderer; not an ordinary murderer who slays through desire of gain or in obedience to an inborn criminal instinct. My murderer was to be a highly respectable, God-fearing man, a useful citizen, a good father, a man of blameless life and almost blameless thoughts, generous, high-principled, beloved. He was to slay his victim with one of the fire-irons on his hearth. The murderous impulse was to take possession of him quite suddenly but with absolutely irresistible force. He was to kill a man who had been boring him for hours. My intention was to write the story in such a way as to win public sympathy for my murderer and to make every one feel that the dead man deserved his fate. I meant to model the dead man on my nephew Godfrey.
I still think that a very good short story might be written along those lines, but I doubt whether I shallever write it. I wrote about two thousand words that morning before I was interrupted by the luncheon gong. I was unable to go on writing after luncheon because the conversation I had with Marion distracted my mind and turned my thoughts to another subject.
“Father,” she said, “do you think that Mr. Power could really have been smuggling things in that yacht?”
“No,” I said; “he couldn’t possibly.”
“It’s very queer,” said Marion.
“What’s queer?”
“Oh, nothing. Only this morning Rose had a new gold brooch, quite a handsome one.”
Rose is Marion’s maid, a pleasant and I believe efficient girl of agreeable appearance.
“Even if Mr. Power was smuggling,” I said, “it’s exceedingly unlikely that he’d bring in a cargo of gold brooches to give to the servants in the district.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” said Marion. “In fact Rose told me that her young man gave her the brooch. He’s a very nice, steady young fellow with a freckly face and he drives one of the carts for Crossan.”
He must, I suspect, be the same young man who accused Godfrey of being a spy. If so he is evidently a judge of character, and his selection of Rose as a sweet-heart is a high compliment to her.
“He promised her a gold bracelet next week,” said Marion, “and Rose is very mysterious about where he gets the money.”
“As long as he doesn’t steal it from me,” I said, “I don’t care where he gets it.”
“It’s very queer all the same. Rose says that a lot of the young men in the village have heaps of moneylately, and I thought it might have something to do with smuggling.”
This is what distracted my mind from the story of the man who murdered Godfrey. I could not help wondering where Rose’s young man and the others got their money. They were, I assumed, the same young men who frequented the co-operation store during the midnight hours. It was, of course, possible that they might earn the money there by some form of honest labour. But I could not imagine that Crossan had started one of those ridiculous industries by means of which Government Boards and philanthropic ladies think they will add to the wealth of the Irish peasants. Besides, even if Crossan had suddenly developed symptoms of kindly idiocy, neither wood-carving or lace-making could possibly have made Rose’s freckly faced young man rich enough to buy a gold brooch. The thing puzzled me nearly as much as did theFinola’smidnight activity.
All competent critics appear to agree that art ought to be kept entirely distinct from moral purposes. A picture meant to urge us on to virtue—and there are such pictures—is bad art. A play or a novel with a purpose stands condemned at once. The same canon of criticism must, I suppose, apply to parties of all kinds, dinner-parties, garden-parties, or house-parties. A good host or hostess ought, like the painter and the novelist, to aim at making her work beautiful in itself; and should not have behind the hospitality a cause of any kind, charitable or political.
I myself dissent, humbly, of course, from this view. Pictures likeTime, Death and Judgment—I take it as an example of the kind of picture which is meant to make us good because I once saw it hung up in a church—appeal to me strongly. I do not like novels which aim at a reform of the marriage laws; but that is only because sex problems bore me horribly. I enjoy novels written with any other purpose. I hate parties, such as those which Godfrey instigates me to give, which have no object except that of merely being parties, the bare collection together of human beings in their best clothes. I was, therefore, greatly pleased when I discovered that my original guess was right and that Lady Moyne’s party was definitely political. I found this out when I arrived in the drawing-room before dinner. I was a little too early and there wasno one in the room except Moyne. He shook hands with me apologetically and this gave me a clue to the nature of the entertainment before me. He dislikes politics greatly, and would be much happier than he is if he were allowed to hunt and fish instead of attending to such business as is carried on in the House of Lords. But a man cannot expect to get all he wants in life. Moyne has a particularly charming and clever wife who enjoys politics immensely. The price he pays for her is the loss of a certain amount of sport and the endurance of long periods of enforced legislative activity.
“I ought to have told you before you came,” he said, “that—well, you know that my lady is very strongly opposed to this Home Rule Bill.”
Moyne is fifteen years or so older than his wife. He shows his respect for her by the pretty old-fashioned way in which he always speaks of her as “my lady.”
“The fact is,” he went on, “that the people we have with us at present—”
“Babberly?” I asked.
Moyne nodded sorrowfully. Babberly is the most terrific of all Unionist orators. If his speeches were set to music, the orchestra would necessarily consist entirely of cornets, trumpets and drums. No one could express the spirit of Babberly’s oratory on stringed instruments. Flutes would be ridiculous.
“Of course,” said Moyne, still apologetically, “it really is rather a crisis you know.”
“It always is,” I said. “I’ve lived through seventy or eighty of them.”
“But this is much worse than most,” he said. “Aman called Malcolmson arrived this afternoon, a colonel of some sort. Was in the artillery, I think.”
“You read his letter inThe Times, I suppose?”
“Yes, I did. But I needn’t tell you, Kilmore, that that kind of thing is all talk. My wife—”
“I fancy Lady Moyne would look well asvivandière,” I said, “marching in front of an ambulance waggon with a red cross on it.”
Moyne looked pained. He is very fond of Lady Moyne and very proud of her. This is quite natural. I should be proud of her too if she were my wife.
“Her idea,” said Lord Moyne, “is—”
Just then our Dean came into the room. His presence emphasised the highly political nature of the party. Unless she had asked Crossan, Lady Moyne could not have got hold of any one of more influence with our north of Ireland Protestant democracy. The Dean cannot possibly be accustomed to the kind of semi-regal state which is kept up at Castle Affey. I should be surprised to hear that he habitually dresses for dinner. It was only natural, therefore, that he should be a little overawed by the immensity of the rooms and the number of footmen who lurk about the halls and passages. When he began explaining to me the extreme iniquity of the recent Vatican legislation about mixed marriages, he spoke in a quite low voice. As a rule this subject moves the Dean to stridency; but the heavy magnificence of Castle Affey crushed him into a kind of whisper. This encouraged me. If the Dean had been in his usual condition of vigour, I should not have ventured to do anything except agree with him heartily. Feeling that I might never catch him in a subdued mood again, I seized a chance of expressingmy own views on the mixed marriage question. It seems to me that the whole difficulty about the validity of these unions might be got over by importing a few priests of the Greek Church into Ireland. The Vatican, I believe, recognizes that these Orientals really are priests. The Protestants could not reasonably object to their ministrations since they refuse to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Pope. A mixed marriage performed by one of them would, therefore, be valid in the opinion of the ecclesiastical advisers of, let us say, the bridegroom. It would be quite unobjectionable to those responsible for the soul of the bride. I put my plan as persuasively as I could; but the Dean did not seem to see any merit in it. Indeed I have never met any one who did. That is the great drawback to trying to help the Irish nation out of its difficulties. No one will ever agree to a reasonable compromise.
I took Lady Moyne in to dinner and enjoyed myself very much. She was—as indeed she always is—beautifully dressed. Although she talked a good deal to Babberly who sat on the other side of her, she left me with the impression that I was the person who really interested her, and that she only turned occasionally to her other neighbour from a sense of duty. Babberly talked about Unionist clubs and the vigorous way in which the members of them were doing dumb bell exercises, so as to be in thoroughly good training when the Home Rule Bill became law. The subject evidently interested him very much. He has a long white beard of the kind described as patriarchal. When he reaches exciting passages in his public speeches, and even when he is saying something emphatic in private life, his beard wags up and down. On this occasionit rose and fell like a foamy wave. That was what convinced me that he was really interested in the activity of the Unionist clubs. Lady Moyne smiled at him in her bewilderingly bewitching way, and then turned round and smiled at me.
“But,” I said, “do you actually mean to go out and do battle?”
“It won’t be necessary,” said Babberly. “Once the English people understand that we mean to die rather than see our lives and liberties—”
“Nowadays,” said Lady Moyne, “when the industrial proletariate is breaking free from all control, it is a splendid thing for us to have a cause in which we take the lead, which will bind our working classes to us, and make them loyal to those who are after all their best friends and their natural leaders.”
I quite saw Lady Moyne’s point. Crossan would not be at all likely to follow her or regard her as his best friend in ordinary matters. He might even resent her interference with his affairs. But on the subject of Home Rule Crossan would certainly follow any one who took his side of the great controversy. If Lady Moyne wore an orange sash over her pretty dresses Crossan would cheer her. While Home Rule remained a real danger he would refrain from asking why Lord Moyne should spend as much on a bottle of champagne for dinner, as would feed the children of a labourer for a week. It did not surprise me to find that Lady Moyne was clever enough to understand Crossan. I wanted to know whether Babberly understood.
“But,” I said to him, “suppose that the men you are enrolling take what you say seriously—”
“I assure you, Lord Kilmore,” said Babberly, “we are quite serious.”
I could hear Malcolmson at the other end of the table explaining to Moyne a scheme for establishing a number of artillery forts on the side of the Cave Hill above Belfast Lough. His idea apparently, was to sink any British warship which was ill-advised enough to anchor there with a view to imposing Home Rule on us. Malcolmson, at all events, was quite serious.
“It will never come to fighting,” said Babberly again. “After all, the great heart of the English people is sound. They will never consent to see their brethren and co-religionists handed over—”
Lady Moyne turned to me and smiled again. I am sixty years of age, but her smile gave me so much pleasure that I failed to hear the rest of what Babberly said.
When at the end of dinner Lady Moyne left us, we congregated round the other end of the table, and everybody talked loud; everybody, that is, except Moyne and me. Moyne looked to me very much as if he wanted to go to sleep. He blinked a good deal, and when he got his eyes open seemed to hold them in that state with considerable effort. I did not feel sleepy, and became more and more interested as the conversation round me grew more violent. Babberly talked about a campaign among the English constituencies. He had a curious and quite pathetic faith in the gullibility of the British working-man. Nobody listened much to Babberly. The Dean prosed on about the effects of theNe Temeredecree. We all said that we agreedwith him, and then stopped listening. Malcolmson got on to field guns, and had an elaborate plan for training gunners without actual practice. Babberly did not like this talk about artillery. He kept on saying that we should never get as far as that. A Mr. Cahoon, who came from Belfast, and spoke with the same kind of accent as McNeice, prophesied doleful things about the paralyzing of business under a Home Rule Parliament. What interested me was, not the conversation which beat fiercely on my ears, but the personal question, Why had Lady Moyne invited me to this party?
I am constitutionally incapable of becoming excited about politics, and have therefore the reputation, quite undeserved, of being that singular creature, a Liberal peer. Why, being the kind of Gallio I am, I should have been, like a second Daniel, thrown among these lions, I could not understand. They were not the least likely to convert me to their own desperate intensity of feeling. If Lady Moyne wanted to convert me a far better plan would have been to invite me to her house after the politicians had gone away. Circe, I imagine, did not attract new lovers by parading those whom she had already turned into swine. Nor could I suppose that I had been brought to Castle Affey in order to convert people like Malcolmson to pacific ways of thought. In the first place, Lady Moyne did not want him converted. He and his like were a valuable asset to the Conservative party. And even if she had wanted them converted I was not the man to do it. I am mildly reasonable in my outlook upon life. To reason with Malcolmson is much the same as if a man, meaning well, were to offer a Seidlitz powder to an enraged hippopotamus.
It was not until next day that I found a solution of my problem. Moyne buttonholed me after breakfast, and invited me, rather wistfully I thought, to go round the stables with him. He wanted my opinion of a new filly. I went, pursued by the sound of the Dean’s voice.
He was telling the story of a famous case of wife desertion brought about by theNe Temeredecree. He was telling it to Cahoon, the Belfast manufacturer, who must, I am sure, have heard it several times before.
I used, long ago, to be a good judge of horses. I still retained my eye for a neat filly. Moyne’s latest acquisition was more than neat. I stroked her neck, and patted her flanks with genuine appreciation. Moyne looked quite cheerful and babbled pleasantly about hunting. Then Lady Moyne came through the door of the stable. I was very glad to see her. Her dress, a simple brown tweed, suited her admirably, and her smile, less radiant, perhaps, than it was the night before when set off by her diamonds, was most attractive. Moyne, too, though I knew that he did not want to talk politics, was glad to see her. She came into the horse-box, and fondled the filly. Then she sighed.
“What a lot we have to go through for a good cause!” she said. “Those terrible men!”
“Heavy going,” said Moyne, “that kind of thing at breakfast. Let’s take out the new car, and go for a spin.”
“I should love to,” she said, “but I must not. I only ran out to speak to you for a minute, Lord Kilmore.”
Her eyes led me to believe at dinner the night before that I was the one man among her guests that she really wanted to talk to. Now her lips said the samething plainly. I did not believe it, of course; but I felt quite as much gratified as if it had been true.
“Mr. Conroy comes this afternoon,” she said.
“That millionaire fellow?” said Moyne, who was evidently not well up in the list of his visitors.
“And I want you to take him in hand,” said Lady Moyne to me—not to her husband. “He’s very clever, and it’s most important to get him interested in our movement.”
“You’d much better take him in hand yourself,” I said. “If any one could interest him—”
“I shall, of course; but I can’t always be with him. I’m dreadfully afraid that if Mr. Babberly talks to him—but you know what Mr. Babberly is. He’s splendid in Parliament and on a platform; perfectly splendid. We’ve nobody like him. But he might not quite suit Mr. Conroy. Then poor dear Colonel Malcolmson does talk such nonsense. Of course it’s very good in its way, and I do hope the Liberals will lay to heart what he says about fighting before it’s too late—”
“Mr. Conroy is a business man,” I said, “and has a reputation for shrewdness.”
“That’s just it,” said Lady Moyne, “and the others—the Dean and that curious Mr. Cahoon. They’re dears, perfect dears in the way they stand up for the Union and the Empire, but—” She shrugged her shoulders, and smiled.
“I quite understand,” I said; “but, after all, I’m rather an old bore, too.”
“You!” said Lady Moyne. “You’re a literary man, and that’s so rare, you know, in our class. And, besides, you’re a Liberal. I don’t mean in any offensivesense of the word; only just that you’re not a party man. I must run away now; but you will do your best with Mr. Conroy, won’t you? We want a big subscription from him.”
The Dean caught me a little later in the morning, and, though I told him I had letters to write, he insisted on explaining to me that, as a clergyman, he considered it wrong to take any active part in politics.
“The Church,” he said, “cannot allow herself to become attached to any party. She must stand above and beyond party, a witness to divine and eternal righteousness in public affairs.”
I am, on the whole, glad that I heard the Dean say this. I should certainly have believed he was taking a side in politics, if he had not solemnly assured me that he was not. I might even have thought, taking at their face value certain resolutions passed by its General Synod, that the Church was, more or less, on the side of the Unionists, if the Dean had not explained to me that she only appeared to be on their side because they happened to be always in the right, but that she would be quite as much on the side of the Liberals if they would only drop their present programme which happened in every respect to be morally wrong. This cleared my mind for me, and I felt quite ready to face Conroy at luncheon, and dispel any difficulties he might feel about the Church and politics.
Mr. Conroy arrived at luncheon-time, and Lady Moyne took him in hand at once. I watched her talking to him during the meal and afterwards when they walked together round the lawn. I came to the conclusion that Lady Moyne would have no difficulty in obtaining any subscription she wanted from the millionaire. They were, of course, intimate with each other. Lady Moyne had been Conroy’s guest in the days when his London house was a centre of social life. She had sailed with him on theFinola. But this was the first time she had him at Castle Affey; and therefore the first time he had seen Lady Moyne in her character as hostess. It is not to be wondered at that he yielded to her charm. Like all women of real capacity Lady Moyne was at her best in her own house.
But she was too clever a hostess to devote herself entirely to one guest. She took Babberly for a drive later in the afternoon and I felt that my time had come. I determined to be true to my trust and to make myself agreeable to Conroy. Unfortunately he did not seem to want my company. He went off for a long walk with Malcolmson. This surprised me. I should have supposed beforehand that talk about artillery would have bored Conroy; and Malcolmson, since this Home Rule struggle began, has talked of nothing else.
I spent the afternoon with Mr. Cahoon, and we talked about Home Rule, of course.
“What those fellows want,” he said, “is to get their hands into our pockets. But it won’t do.”
“Those fellows” were, plainly, the Nationalist leaders.
“Taxation?” I said.
“Belfast will be the milch cow of the Dublin Parliament,” said Cahoon. “Money will be wanted to feed paupers and pay priests in the south and west. We’re the only people who have any money.”
I had never before come in contact with a man like Cahoon, and I was very much interested in him. His contempt, not only for our fellow-countrymen in Leinster, Munster and Connacht, but for all the other inhabitants of the British Isles was absolute. He had a way of pronouncing final judgment on all the problems of life which fascinated me.
“That’s all well enough in its way,” he would say; “but it won’t do in Belfast. We’re business men.”
I think he said those words five times in the course of the afternoon, and each time they filled me with fresh delight. If the man had been a fool I should not have been interested in him. If he had been a simple crude money maker, a Stock Exchange Imperialist, for instance, I should have understood him and yawned. But he was not a fool. A man cannot be a fool who manages successfully a large business, who keeps in touch with the swift vicissitudes of modern international commerce, who has organized into a condition of high efficiency an industrial army of several thousand working-men and women. And Mr. Cahoon, in a curious hard way, was touched with idealisms; I discovered, accidentally, that he devotes his spare time on Saturdays to the instruction of youngmen in cricket and football. His Sunday afternoons he gives to an immense Bible-class for boys of fifteen or sixteen. He has built and maintains, on the sole condition that he does not actually lose money by it, a kind of model village in a suburban district of Belfast. In order to look after this village properly he gets up at five o’clock in the morning on three days in the week. In winter, when his social work is in full swing, he spends almost all his evenings at a large Working-Men’s club. He spends his summer holidays in the seaside camp of The Boys’ Brigade. It would be difficult to find a man who crams more work into what are supposed to be his leisure hours. He has, of course, little time for reading and he never travels. His devotion to good works leaves him no opportunity for culture, and accounts for the fact that he believes the things which Babberly says on platforms. He would, I did not actually try him with the subject, but I have no doubt he would, have brushed the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant into the world’s waste-basket with his unvarying formula: It wouldn’t do in Belfast. They are business men there.
We worried on about his fear of the over-taxation of Belfast and the industrial North. I tried to get from him some definite account of the exact taxes which he feared. I tried to get him to explain how he proposed to fight, against whom he intended to fight, who might be expected to fight on his side. I do not think he got angry with me for my persistency, but his contempt for me steadily increased. I am not a business man and so I could not possibly, so he hinted, understand how they feel about the matter in Belfast.
“But do you think,” I said, “that your workmen will go out and be shot in order to save you from paying an extra penny in the pound income tax? That’s what it comes to, you know, and I don’t see why they should do it. They don’t pay income tax, or for that matter death duties.”
Cahoon looked me full in the face for nearly half a minute without replying. Then he took out his watch and looked at it. Then he took me by the arm and led me towards the yard.
“Did you ever see the Green Loaney Scutching Mill?” he said.
I had never seen any scutching mill. I have only a vague idea of what a scutching mill is.
“It’ll not be more than twenty miles from this,” said Cahoon. “And in my car we’ll do it and be back for dinner.”
I did not particularly want to spend the rest of the afternoon rushing about the country in Cahoon’s motor car. I preferred to stay quietly on the Castle Affey lawn and talk about Home Rule.
“But about the working-man,” I said, “and the prospect of his fighting—”
“You’ll be better able to talk about that,” said Cahoon, “when you’ve seen the man I’m going to take you to. Seeing’s believing.”
I was, of course, quite willing to go with Cahoon if he would really show me a citizen soldier in a scutching mill. We got out the motor car and started.
“He’s a man by the name of McConkey,” said Cahoon.
“A good name,” I said. “One expects something from a McConkey.”
Cahoon did not say anything for about ten minutes. Then he went on—
“McConkey is foreman in the mill.”
“The scutching mill?” I asked.
It was, of course, the scutching mill. I only asked the question in order to keep up the conversation. The long silences were embarrassing. Cahoon did not answer me. At the end of another quarter of an hour of furious driving he gave me a little further information about McConkey.
“He neither drinks nor smokes.”
This led me to think that he might be some relation to my friend Crossan, possibly a cousin.
“I happen to know,” said Cahoon a little later, “that he has upwards of £500 saved.”
Undoubtedly McConkey and Crossan are close relations, brothers-in-law perhaps.
We reached the Green Loaney Scutching Mill at about half-past five o’clock. Cahoon, who seemed to know all about the establishment, led me through some very dusty purlieus. McConkey, when we came upon him, did not seem particularly pleased to see Cahoon. He looked at me with suspicious malignity.
“There’s a gentleman here,” said Cahoon, “who wants to know whether you mean to fight rather than submit to Home Rule.”
“Aye,” said McConkey, “I do.”
Then he looked me square in the face without winking. Cahoon did the same thing exactly. Neither of them spoke. It was clearly my turn to say something; but with four hard grey eyes piercing my skin I found it difficult to think of a remark. In the end I said:
“Really?”
They both continued to stare at me. Then McConkey broke the silence again.
“You’ll no be a Papist?” he said.
“Certainly not,” I replied. “In fact I am a church-warden.”
McConkey thrust his hand deep into a hip pocket in the back of his trousers and drew out a somewhat soiled packet of yellow tracing paper.
“Look at thon,” he said.
I unfolded the tracing paper and found on it drawings of a machine gun. Cahoon peered over my shoulder.
“She’s a bonny wee thing,” said McConkey.
She looked to me large and murderous. Cahoon expressed his admiration for her, so I said nothing.
“I’ll no be that badly off for something to fight with,” said McConkey, “when the time comes.”
“Do you mean to say,” I said, “that you’ve bought that weapon?”
“I haven’t her bought yet,” said McConkey; “but I have the money by me.”
“And you actually mean—” I said.
“Ay. I do.”
I looked at Cahoon. He was still studying the drawings of the gun.
“It’ll be queer,” said McConkey, slowly, “if she doesna’ land a few of them in hell before they have me catched.”
I turned to Cahoon again.
“Do you really think,” I said, “that he—?”
“We’re business men,” said Cahoon, “and we don’t throw away our money.”
“But,” I said, “who are you going to shoot at? Itwould be silly to attack a tax collector with a gun like that. I don’t see who—”
“Oh,” said Cahoon, “don’t fret about that. We’ll find somebody to shoot at.”
“There’ll be plenty,” said McConkey, “when the time comes.”
“The real difficulty,” said Cahoon, “is that—”
“They’ll no be wanting to stand up till us,” said McConkey.
The relations of Capital with Labour are, I understand, strained in other parts of the United Kingdom. Here, with Home Rule on the horizon, they seem to be actually cordial. There is certainly a good deal to be said for Lady Moyne’s policy. So long as Cahoon and McConkey have a common taste for making domestic pets of machine guns they are not likely to fall out over such minor matters as wages and hours of work.
I had a good deal to think of as Cahoon drove me back to Castle Affey. My main feeling was one of great personal thankfulness. I shall never, I hope, take part in a battle. If I do I hope I shall be found fighting against some properly organized army, the men and officers of which have taken up the business of killing in a lofty professional spirit. I cannot imagine anything more likely to shatter my nerve than to be pitted against men like McConkey, who neither drink nor smoke, but save and spend their savings on machine guns. The regular soldier has his guns bought for him with other people’s money. He does not mind much if no gory dividend is earned. McConkey, on the other hand, spends his own money, and being a business man,will hate to see it wasted. He would not be satisfied, I imagine, with less than fifty corpses per cent. as a return on his expenditure.
At dinner that evening Conroy made a suggestion for our evening’s entertainment.
“Lady Moyne,” he said, “ought to read us the speech which she is to make next week to the Unionist women.”
I had never heard of the Unionist women before, and knew nothing of their wish to be spoken to. The Dean assured me that they were numerous and quite as enthusiastic as their husbands and brothers. Cahoon said that he was giving his mill hands a half holiday in order that the girls might go to listen to Lady Moyne. Babberly struck in with a characteristic speech.
“The influence of women,” he said, “can hardly be over-estimated. We must never forget that the most impressionable years of a man’s life are those during which he is learning to say his prayers beside his mother’s knee.”
This, as I recognized was a mere paraphrase of the proverb which states that the hand which rocks the cradle rules the world. The secret of Babberly’s great success as an orator is that he has a striking power of putting platitudes into new words.
I ventured to suggest that, so far as the present political situation was concerned it was hardly worth while trying to get at the children who were learning to say their prayers. The Home Rule Bill would be either rejected or passed long before any of that generation had votes. Lady Moyne was good enough to smile at me; but Babberly felled me at once.
“The women whom we expect to influence,” he said, “have fathers, brothers and husbands as well as young children.”
After dinner we had the speech. A secretary, who had once been Lady Moyne’s governess and still wore pince-nez, brought a quantity of type-written matter into the drawing-room. Moyne wanted me to slip away with him to the billiard room; but I refused to do so. I wanted to watch Lady Moyne making her speech. I am glad that I resisted his appeal. Lady Moyne not only read us the speech. She delivered it to us, treated us, indeed, to a rehearsal, I might even call it a dress rehearsal, for she described at some length the clothes she intended to wear. They must have been the most sumptuous in her wardrobe.
“The poor dears,” she said, “want something to brighten their lives. Besides, they’ll take it as a compliment to them if I’m like Solomon in all his glory.”
I gathered from this remark that the audience was to consist mainly of the wives and sisters of McConkey and other men of the same class. Cahoon’s wife, if he had one, would not require a display of Lady Moyne’s best clothes to seal her attachment to the Union.
The speech was an uncommonly good one. A phrase in it frequently repeated, appealed to me very strongly. Lady Moyne spoke about “our men.” I do not know why it is, but the phrase “our women” as used for instance by military officers who have been to India, always strikes me as singularly offensive. It suggests seraglios, purdahs and other institutions by which Turks, and Orientals generally, assert and maintain the rights of property with regard to the other sex. “Our men,” on the other hand, is redolent of sentimental domesticity.I never hear it without thinking of women who are mothers and makers of men; who sew on trouser buttons and cook savoury messes for those who are fighting the battle of life for them in a rough world, sustained by an abiding vision of noble womanhood and the sanctity of home. It is an extraordinarily appealing phrase and Lady Moyne used it for all it was worth. As addressed by her to wives and sisters of the Belfast working-men, it had a further value. The plural possessive pronoun bracketed McConkey with Lord Moyne. McConkey’s wife, assuming for the moment that he had not abstained from matrimony as he had from tobacco, shared his joys and sorrows, his hopes and fears, heartened him for his daily toil, would join no doubt in polishing the muzzle of the machine gun. So Lady Moyne in her gorgeous raiment, sustained Lord Moyne, her man. That was the suggestion of the possessive pronoun, and the audience was not allowed to miss it. Poor Moyne did miss it, for he was nearly asleep in a chair. But McConkey’s wife would not. Her heart would glow with a sense that she and Lady Moyne were sisters in their anxious care for the men entrusted to them.
That single phrase made such a violent emotional appeal to me that I missed all the rest of the speech. Each time I began to recover a little from hearing it and was prepared to give my attention to something else, Lady Moyne used to repeat it, and then I was hypnotized again. I have no doubt, however, that the speech was a powerful appeal for the maintenance of the Union. Conroy said so afterwards and Babberly entirely agreed with him. The Dean suggested that something might be put in about the sanctity of themarriage tie, a matter of particular importance to women and likely to be seriously affected by the passing of a Home Rule Bill. Lady Moyne thanked him for calling her attention to the omission. The secretary, who had once been a governess, adjusted her pince-nez and took a note.
In the smoking-room that evening Conroy took command of the conversation, and for the first time since I arrived at Castle Affey we got off politics. He told us a good deal about how he made his fortune. Most men who have made fortunes enjoy talking about how they made them. But their stories are nearly always most uninteresting. My impression is that they do not themselves understand how they came to be rich. But Conroy understood, or at all events thought he understood, his own success. He believed that he was rich because he had, more than other men, a love of the excitement which comes with risk. He had the spirit of the true adventurer, the man who pursues novelty and danger for their own sakes. Every story he told us illustrated and was meant to illustrate this side of his character. He despised the rest of us, especially me perhaps. We, Cahoon, the Dean, even Malcolmson, though he was a bristly fighting man, certainly Moyne who had gone quietly to bed—we were tame barndoor fowls, eating the sordid messes spread for us by that old henwife, civilized society. Conroy was a free bird of the wild. He snatched golden grain for nutriment from the hand of a goddess. These were not his words or his metaphors, but they represented the impression which his talk and his stories left on my mind.
At twelve o’clock I rose to say good night. As I didso a servant entered the room and told Conroy that his motor was ready for him at the door. Conroy left the room at once, and left the house a few minutes later.
I suppose we ought, all of us, to have been surprised. Motor drives in the middle of the night are an unusual form of amusement, and it was impossible to suppose that Conroy could have any business requiring immediate personal attention in the neighbourhood of Castle Affey. But his talk during the evening had left its impression on other minds as well as mine. We bid each other good night without expressing any astonishment at Conroy’s conduct. Cahoon refrained from saying that inexplicable midnight expeditions were not the kind of things they cared for in Belfast. Even he recognized that a man who had accumulated as large a fortune as Conroy’s must not be judged by ordinary standards.
I, unfortunately, failed to go to sleep. I tried to read the works of Alexander Pope, of which I found a well-bound copy in my bedroom. But my mind only became more active. I got up at last and covered six sheets of the Castle Affey note paper with a character sketch of Conroy. I maintained that he was wrong in supposing that a capacity for daring is the secret of becoming rich. Bob Power, for instance, is as daring as any man living and certainly loves risk for its own sake, but Bob will not die a rich man. Nor will Conroy. Wealth falls into the hands of such men occasionally, as vast hoards of gold did one hundred and fifty years ago into the holds of pirate ships. But no one ever heard of a buccaneer who died with a large fortune safely invested. Before Conroy dies his fortunewill have taken to itself wings and fled back to that goddess of his who gave it. This was the substance of my article. Marion typed it out for me when I went home, but neither of the editors who usually print my articles would have it. I suppose that they did not know Conroy personally. If they had known him they would have appreciated my character sketch. I called it, I remember, “Our Contemporary Pirates,” a title which ought to have been attractive.
At three o’clock, just as I was finishing my article, I heard Conroy’s motor on the gravel outside my window.
He appeared at breakfast looking fresh and cheerful. None of us asked him where he had been the night before, and he did not offer us any information.
After breakfast he asked me to go for a walk with him. Lady Moyne, who heard the invitation given, looked pleased, and I recollected at once that I had promised to interest Conroy in the Unionist cause and lead him on to the point of giving a large subscription to our funds.
These party funds have always been rather a puzzle to me. I have never understood why it should be necessary for rich Liberals, rich Conservatives and American Irishmen to spend enormous sums of money in persuading people to vote. The theory of democratic government is, I suppose, that the citizen expresses his opinion freely in a polling booth. If he has not got an opinion it would surely be better to leave him alone. If he has an opinion and attaches any importance to it he will go to the polling booth without being dragged there by a kind of special constable hired for the purpose. If the money of the party funds were given to thevoters in the form of bribes, the expenditure would be intelligible. It might even be justified; since an occasional tip would be most welcome to nearly every elector. But to spend tens of thousands of pounds on what is called organization seems very foolish. However I am not a practical politician, and my immediate object was not to explain the theory of political finance to Conroy, but to work him up into the frame of mind in which he would sign cheques.