Ever since Pitt and Castlereagh perpetrated their Act of Union two
political parties have struggled together in Ireland. Both of them have
been steadily prominent, so prominent that they have sometimes attracted
the attention of the English public, and drawn to their contest a little
quite unintelligent interest. The simplest and most discernible line
of division between them is a religious one. The Protestant party has
hitherto been guided and led by the gentry. It has been steadily loyal
to England and to the English Government. It has not been greatly
concerned about Ireland or Ireland’s welfare, but has been consistently
anxious to preserve its own privileges, powers, and property. It has not
come well out of the struggle of the nineteenth century. Its Church has
been disestablished, its privileges and powers abolished, and the last
remnants of its property are being filched from it. It is a curious
piece of irony that this party should have hastened its own defeat
by the very policy adopted to secure victory. No doubt the Irish
aristocracy would have suffered less if they had been seditious instead
of loyal. The Roman Catholic party has been led by ecclesiastics, and
has always included the bulk of the people. Its leaders have not cared
for the welfare of Ireland any more than the Protestant party, but they
have always pretended that they did, being in this respect much wiser
than their opponents. They have pulled the strings of a whole series of
political movements, and made puppets dance on and off the stage as they
chose. Also they have understood how to deal with England. Unlike the
Protestant party, they have never been loyal, because they knew from the
first that England gives most to those who bully or worry her. They have
kept one object steadily in view, an object quite as selfish in reality
as that of the aristocracy--the aggrandisement of their Church. For
this they have been prepared at any time to sacrifice the interests
of Ireland, and are content at the present moment to watch the country
bleeding to death with entire complacency. The leaders of this party
enter upon the twentieth century in sight of their promised land. They
possess all the power and nearly all the wealth of Ireland. If the
Bishops can secure the continuance of English government for the next
half-century Ireland will have become the Church’s property. Her
money will go to propagating the faith. Her children will supply the
English-speaking world with a superfluity of priests and nuns.
Outside both parties there have always been a few men united by no ties
of policy or religion, unless, as perhaps we may, we call patriotism
a kind of religion. Other lands have been loved sincerely, devotedly,
passionately, as mothers, wives, and mistresses are loved. Ireland alone
has been loved religiously, as men are taught to love God or the
saints. Her lovers have called themselves Catholic or Protestant: such
distinctions have not mattered to these men. They have scarcely ever
been able to form themselves into a party, never into a strong or a wise
party. They have been violent, desperate, frequently ridiculous, but
always sincere and unselfish. Their great weakness has lain in the fact
that they have had no consistent aim. Some of their leaders have looked
for a return to Ireland’s Constitution, and built upon the watchword of
the volunteers, ‘The King, the Lords, and the Commons of Ireland.’ Some
have dreamed of a complete independence, of an Irish republic shaping
its own world policy. Some have wholly distrusted politics, and given
their strength to the intellectual, spiritual, or material regeneration
of the people. Among these men have been found the sanest practical
reformers and the wildest revolutionary dreamers. On the outskirts of
their company have hung all sorts of people. Parliamentary politicians
have leaned towards them, and been driven straightway out of public
life. Criminals have claimed fellowship with them, and brought
discredit upon honourable men. Poets and men of letters have drawn
their inspiration from their strivings, and in return have decked their
patriotism with imperishable splendour. In the future, no doubt,
the struggle will lie between this party and the hitherto victorious
hierarchy, with England for ally, and the fight seems a wholly unequal
one. It was into an advanced and vehement group of patriots that Mary
O’Dwyer introduced Hyacinth. He became a regular reader of the _Croppy_,
and made the acquaintance of most of the contributors to its pages. He
found them clever, enthusiastic, and agreeable men and women, but, as
he was forced to admit to himself, occasionally reckless. One evening a
discussion took place in Mary O’Dwyer’s room which startled and shocked
him. Excitement ran high over the events of the war. The sympathies
of the ‘Independent Irelanders,’ as they called themselves, fiercely
assertive even in their name, were of course entirely with the Boers,
and they received every report of an English reverse with unmixed
satisfaction.
When Hyacinth entered the room he found four people there. Mary
O’Dwyer herself was making tea at a little table near the fire. Augusta
Goold--the famous Finola--was stretched in a deep chair smoking
a cigarette. She was a remarkable woman both physically and
intellectually. It was her delight to emphasize her splendid figure
by draping it in brilliant reds and yellows. To anyone who cared to
speculate on such a subject it seemed a mystery why her clothes remained
on her when she walked. The laws of gravity seemed to demand that they
should loosen with her movements, become detached, and finally drop
down. Nothing of the sort had ever happened, so it must be presumed that
she had secret and unconventional ways of fastening them. Similarly it
was not easy to see why her hair stayed upon her head. It was arranged
upon no recognised system, and suggested that she had perfected the art,
known generally only to heroines of romances, of twisting her tresses
with a single movement into a loose knot. That she affected white frills
of immense complexity was frequently evident, owing to the difficulty
she experienced in confining her long legs to feminine attitudes.
Her complexion put it in the power of her enemies to accuse her of
familiarity with cosmetics--a slander, for she had been observed to turn
green during an attack of sea-sickness. She had great brilliant eyes,
which were capable of expressing intensity of enthusiasm or hatred,
but no one had ever seen them soften with any emotion like love. Her
attitude towards social conventions was symbolized by her clothes. In
the old days, when the houses of ‘society’ had still been open to her,
she was accustomed to challenge criticism by fondling a pet monkey
at tea-parties. Since she had lost caste by taking up the cause of
‘Independent Ireland’ the ape had been discarded, and the same result
achieved by occasional bickerings with the police. She was an able
public speaker, and could convince her audiences for a time of the
reasonableness of opinions which next morning appeared to be the outcome
of delirium. She wrote, not, like Mary O’Dwyer, verse in which any
sentiment may be excused, but incisive and vigorous prose. Occasionally
even the Castle officials got glimmerings of the meaning of one of her
articles, and suppressed the whole issue of the _Croppy_ in which it
appeared.
Near her sat a much less remarkable person--Thomas Grealy, historian
and archaeologist. He had been engaged for many years on a history of
Ireland, but no volume of it had as yet appeared. His friends suspected
that he had got permanently stuck somewhere about the period of the
introduction of Christianity into the island. His essays, published in
the _Croppy_, dwelt with passionate regret on the departed glories
of Tara. He held strong views about the historical reality of the
Tuath-de-Danaan, and got irritated at the most casual mention of Dr.
Petrie’s theory of the round towers. He had proved that King Arthur
was an Irishman, with whose reputation Malory and Tennyson had taken
unwarrantable liberties. The name of Dante brought a smile of contempt
to his lips, for he knew that the ‘Purgatorio’ was stolen shamelessly
from the works of a monk of Cong. He nourished a secret passion for
Finola. He never ventured to declare it, but his imagination endowed
every heroine, from Queen Maev down to the foster daughter of the
Leinster farmer who married King Cormac, with Miss Goold’s figure, eyes
and hair. It was perhaps the burning of this passion which rendered him
so cadaverous that his clothes--in other respects also they looked as
if they had been bought in far-off happier days--hung round him like the
covering of a broken-ribbed umbrella.
The fourth person present was Timothy Halloran, who hovered about Mary
O’Dwyer’s tea-table. He was what the country people call a ‘spoilt
priest.’ Destined by simple and pious parents to take Holy Orders, he
got as far as the inside of Maynooth College. While there he had kicked
a fellow-student down the whole length of a long corridor for telling
tales to the authorities. A committee of ecclesiastics considered the
case, and having come to the conclusion that he lacked vocation for
the priesthood, sent him home. Timothy was accustomed to say that his
violence might have been passed over, but that his failure to appreciate
the devotion to duty which inspired the tale-bearer marked him
decisively as unfit for ordination. He never regretted his expulsion,
although he complained bitterly that he had been nearly choked before
they cast him out. He meant, it is to be supposed, that the effort to
instil a proper reverence for dogma had almost destroyed his capacity
for thought, not that the fingers of the reverend professors had
actually closed around his windpipe. His subsequent experiences had
included a period of teaching in an English Board School, a brief, but
not wholly unsatisfactory, career as a political organizer in New
York, and a return to Ireland, where he earned a precarious living as a
journalist.
All four greeted Hyacinth warmly as he entered the room.
‘We were just discussing,’ said Mary O’Dwyer, ‘the failure of our
attempt to organize a field hospital and a staff of nurses for the
Boers. It is a shame to have to admit that the English garrison in
Ireland can raise thousands of pounds for their war funds, and the Irish
can’t be got to subscribe a few hundreds.’
‘The wealth of the country,’ said Grealy, ‘is in the hands of a
minority--the so-called Loyalists.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Finola sharply. ‘If you ever gave a thought to anything
more recent than the High-King’s Court at Tara you would know that the
landlords are not the wealthy part of the community any longer. There’s
many a provincial publican calling himself a Nationalist who could buy
up the nearest landlord and every Protestant in the parish along with
him. I’m a Protestant myself, born and bred among the class you speak
of, and I know.’
‘You’re quite right, Miss Goold,’ said Tim. ‘The people could have given
the money if they liked. I attribute the failure of the fund to the
apathy or treachery of the priests, call it which you like. There isn’t
a Protestant church in the country where the parsons don’t preach “Give
give, give” to their people Sunday after Sunday. And what’s the result?
Why, they have raised thousands of pounds.’
‘After the poem you published in last week’s _Croppy_,’ said Hyacinth
to Mary O’Dwyer, ‘I made sure the subscriptions would have come in. Your
appeal was one of the most beautiful things I ever read. It would have
touched the heart of a stone.’
‘Poetry is all well enough,’ said Tim. ‘I admire your verses, Mary,
as much as anyone, but we want a collection at every church door after
Mass. That’s what we ought to have, but it’s exactly what we won’t get,
because the priests are West Britons at heart. They would pray for the
Queen and the army to-morrow, like Cardinal Vaughan, if they weren’t
afraid.’
‘I believe,’ said Finola, ‘that we went the wrong way about the thing
altogether. We asked for a hospital, and we appealed to the people’s
pity for the wounded Boers. Nobody in Ireland cares a pin about
the Boers. Why on earth should we? From all I can hear they are a
narrow-minded, intolerant set of hypocrites. I’d just as soon read the
stuff some fool of an English newspaper man wrote about “our brother the
Boer” as listen to the maudlin sentiment our people talk. We don’t want
to help the Boers. We want to hurt the English.’
‘And you think----’ said Grealy.
‘I think,’ went on Finola, ‘that we ought to have asked for volunteers
to go out and fight, instead of nurses to cocker up the men who are
fools enough to get themselves shot. We’d have got them.’
‘You would not,’ said Tim. ‘The clergy would have been dead against you.
They would have nipped the whole project in the bud without so much as
making a noise in doing it.’
‘That’s true,’ said Grealy. ‘Remember, Miss Goold, it was the priests
who cursed Tara, and the monks who broke the power of the Irish Kings. I
haven’t worked the thing out yet, but I mean to show----’
Finola interrupted the poor man ruthlessly:
‘Let’s try it, anyway. Let’s preach a crusade.’
‘Not the least bit of good,’ said Tim. ‘Every blackguard in the country
is enlisted already in the Connaught Bangers or the Dublin Fusiliers,
or some confounded Militia regiment. There’s nobody left but the nice,
respectable, goody-goody boys who wouldn’t leave their mothers or miss
going to confession if you went down on your knees to them.’
‘Well, then, the Irish troops ought to shoot their officers, and walk
over to the Boer camp,’ said Finola savagely.
Hyacinth half smiled at what seemed to him a monstrous jest. Then, when
he perceived that she was actually in earnest, the smile froze into a
kind of grin. His hands trembled with the violence of his indignation.
‘It would be devilish treachery,’ he blurted out. ‘The name of Irishman
will never be disgraced by such an act.’
Augusta Goold flung her cigarette into the grate, and rose from her
chair. She stood over Hyacinth, her hands clenched and her bosom heaving
rapidly. Her eyes blazed down into his until their scorn cowed him.
‘There is no treachery possible for an Irishman,’ she said, ‘except
the one of fighting for England. Any deed against England--yes, _any_
deed--is glorious, and not shameful.’
Hyacinth was utterly quelled. He ventured upon no reply. Indeed, not
only did her violence render argument undesirable--and it seemed for
the moment that he would find himself in actual grips with a furious
Amazon--but her words carried with them a certain conviction. It
actually seemed to him while she spoke as if a good defence might be
made for Irish soldiers who murdered their officers and deserted to an
enemy in the field. It was not until hours afterwards, when the vivid
impression of Finola’s face had faded from his recollection, when he had
begun to forget the flash of her eyes, the poise of her figure, and the
glow of her draperies, that his moral sense was able to reassert itself.
Then he knew that she had spoken wickedly. It might be right for an
Irishman to fight against England when he could. It might be justifiable
to seize the opportunity of England’s embarrassment to make a bid for
freedom by striking a blow at the Empire. So far his conscience went
willingly, but that treachery and murder could ever be anything but
horrible he refused altogether to believe.
Another conversation in which he took part about this time helped
Hyacinth still further to understand the position of his new friends.
Tim Halloran and he were smoking and chatting together over the fire
when Maguire joined them.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Halloran. ‘You look as if you’d been
at your mother’s funeral.’
‘You’re not so far out in your guess,’ said Maguire grimly. ‘I spent the
morning at my sister’s wedding. Would you like a bit of the cake?’ He
produced from his pocket a paper containing crushed fragments of white
sugar and a shapeless mass of citron and currants. ‘With the compliments
of the Reverend Mother,’ he said. ‘Try a bit.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’ said Hyacinth.
‘Oh, I assure you the Sisters of Pity do these things in style,’ said
Maguire. ‘It’s a pretty fancy, that of the wedding-cake, isn’t it?
But you’re a Protestant, Conneally; you don’t understand this delicate
playfulness. I was present to-day at the reception of my only sister
into the Institute of the Catholic Sisters of Pity, founded by Honoria
Kavanagh. I’ve lost Birdie Maguire, that’s all, the little girl that
used to climb on to my knee and kiss me, and instead of her there’s a
Sister Monica Mary, who will no doubt pray for my soul when she’s let.’
‘What was the figure in her case?’ asked Tim in a perfectly
matter-of-fact tone.
‘Six hundred pounds,’ said Maguire. ‘It must have put the old man to the
pin of his collar to pay it. The only time he ever talked to me about
his affairs he told me he had got four hundred pounds put by for
Birdie’s fortune, and that I was to have my medical course and whatever
the old shop would fetch when he was gone. They must have put the screw
on pretty tight to make him spring the extra two hundred. I dare say I
shall suffer for it in the end. He must have borrowed the money.’
Hyacinth felt intensely curious about this young nun. Like most
Protestants he had grown up to regard monasticism in all its forms as
something remote, partly horrible, wholly unintelligible.
‘Why did she do it?’ he asked. ‘What sort of a girl was she? Do you mind
telling me?’
‘Not in the least,’ said Maguire. ‘Only I’m not sure that I know. Three
years ago--that is, when I left home--she was the last sort of girl you
could imagine going into a convent. She was pretty, fond of nice clothes
and admiration, as keen as every girl ought to be on a dance. I never
supposed she had a thought of religion in her head--I mean, beyond the
usual confessions and attendances at Mass.’
‘I suppose,’ said Hyacinth, ‘your people wanted it.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Maguire. ‘Perhaps my mother did. I don’t know.’
‘You see, Conneally,’ said Tim Halloran, ‘it is a sort of hall-mark
of respectability among people like Maguire’s to have a girl in a good
convent. A little lower down in the social scale, in the class I come
from, the boys are made priests. A doctor is a more expensive article to
manufacture, so Maguire’s father selected that line of life for him. Not
that they could have made a priest of you, Maguire, in any case. You’d
have disgraced Maynooth, as I did.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Hyacinth. ‘I thought a vocation for the life
was necessary.’
‘Oh, so it is,’ said Tim Halloran, ‘but, you see, there’s the period of
the novitiate. Given a girl at an impressionable age, the proper convent
atmosphere, and a prize of six hundred pounds for the Order, and it
will go hard with the Reverend Mother if she can’t work the girl up to
a vocation. It takes a man a lifetime to make six hundred pounds in
a country shop, but there’s many a one who does it by hard work and
self-denial; then down come the nuns and sweep it away, and it’s
wasted. It ought to be invested in a local factory or in waterworks, or
gas-works, or fifty other things that would benefit the town it’s made
in. It ought to be fructifying and bearing interest; instead of which
off it goes to Munich for stained glass, or to Italy for a marble altar.
Is it any wonder Ireland is crying out with poverty?’
‘Yes,’ said Maguire, ‘and that’s not the worst of it. I’d be content to
let them take the damned money and deck their churches with it, but the
girls--there are hundreds of them caught every year for nuns, and swept
out of life. It isn’t the Irish convents alone that get them. American
nuns come over and Australian nuns, and they go round and round the
country picking up girls here and there, and carry them off. There,
I don’t want to talk too much about it. The money is nothing, but the
girls and boys----’
‘It seems strange to me,’ said Hyacinth, ‘that when you think that way
you should go on belonging to your Church.’
‘Desert the Church!’ said Maguire. ‘We’ll never do that. How could we
live without religion? And what other religion is there? I grant you
that your priests wouldn’t rob us, but--but think of the cold of it.
You can’t realize it, Conneally, but think what it would mean to
a Catholic--a religion without saints, without absolution, without
sacrifice. Besides, what we complain of is not Catholicism. It’s a
parasitic growth destroying the true faith, defiling the Church.’
‘Yes,’ said Tim Halloran, ‘and even from my point of view how should we
be the better of a change? Your Church is ruled by old women who think
the name of Englishman the most glorious in the world. You preach
loyalty, and I believe you pray for the Queen in your services. A nice
fool I would feel praying that the Queen should have victory over her
enemies.’
For a long time afterwards this conversation dwelt in Hyacinth’s mind.
Tim Halloran he knew to be practically a freethinker, but Maguire
regularly heard Mass on Sundays, and often went to confession. It was a
puzzle how he could do so, feeling as he did about the religious Orders.
So insistent did the problem become to his mind that he found himself
continually leading the conversation round to it from one side or
another. Mary O’Dwyer told him that she also had a sister in a nunnery.
‘She teaches girls to make lace, and wonderful work they do. She is
perfectly happy. I think her face is the sweetest and most beautiful
thing I have ever seen. There is not a line on it of care or of
fretfulness. It seems to me as if her whole life might be described as
a quiet smile. I always feel better by the mere recollection of her face
for a long time after I have visited her. Oh, I know it wouldn’t do
for me. I couldn’t stand it for a week. I should go mad with the quiet
restraint of it all. But my sister is happy. I can’t forget that. I
suppose she has a vocation.’
‘Vocation,’ said Hyacinth thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I can understand how that
would make all the difference. But how many of them have the vocation?’
‘Don’t you think vocation might be learnt? I mean mightn’t one grow into
it, if one wished to very much, and if the life was constantly before
one’s eyes, beautiful and calm?’
It was almost the same thought which Timothy Halloran had suggested.
Mary O’Dwyer spoke of growing into vocation, Tim of the working of it
up. Was there any difference except a verbal one?
On another occasion he spoke to Dr. Henry about the position of the
Church of Ireland in the country.
‘We have proved,’ said the professor, ‘that the Roman claims have no
support in Scripture, history, or reason. Our books remain unanswered,
because they are unanswerable. We can do no more.’
‘We might offer the Irish people a Church which they could join,’ said
Hyacinth.
‘We do. We offer them the Church of St. Patrick, the ancient, historic
Church of Ireland. We offer them the two Sacraments of the Gospel,
administered by priests duly ordained at the hands of an Episcopate
which goes back in an unbroken line to the Apostles. We present them the
three great creeds for their assent. We use a liturgy that is at once
ancient and pure. The Church of Ireland has all this, is beyond dispute
a branch of the great Catholic Church of Christ.’
‘It may be all you say,’ said Hyacinth, ‘but it is not national. In
sentiment and sympathy it is English and not Irish.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Dr. Henry. ‘I think I understand how you
feel, but I cannot consent to the conclusion you want to draw. There
is no real meaning in the cry for nationality. It is a sentiment, a
fashion, and will pass. Even if it were genuine and enduring, I hold it
to be better for Ireland to be an integral part of a great Empire than a
contemptible and helpless item among the nations of the world, a prey to
the intrigues of ambitious foreign statesmen.’
Hyacinth sighed and turned to go, but Dr. Henry laid a hand upon his
shoulder and detained him.
‘Conneally,’ he said kindly, ‘let me give you a word of advice. Don’t
mix yourself up with your new friends too much. You will ruin your own
prospects in life if you do. There is nothing more fatal to a man among
the people with whom you and I are to live and work than the suspicion
of being tainted with Nationalist ideas. You can’t be both a rebel and
a clergyman. You see,’ he added with a smile, ‘I take enough interest in
you to know who your friends are, and what you are thinking about.’