When he returned to Ballymoy after his interview with Mr. Dowling,
Hyacinth set himself to fulfil his threat of writing to the _Croppy_.
He spent Saturday afternoon and evening in his lodgings with the paper
containing the blatant speech spread out before him. He blew his anger
to a white heat by going over the evidence of the man’s grotesque
hypocrisy. He wrote and rewrote his article. It was his first attempt
at expressing thought on paper since the days when he sought to satisfy
examiners with disquisitions on Dryden’s dramatic talent and other
topics suited to the undergraduate mind. This was a different business.
It was no longer a question of filling a sheet of foolscap with
grammatical sentences, discovering synonyms for words hard to spell. Now
thoughts were hot in him, and the art lay in finding words which would
blister and scorch. Time after time he tore up a page of bombast or
erased ridiculous flamboyancies. Late at night, with a burning head and
ice-cold feet, he made his last copy, folded it up, and, distrusting the
cooler criticism of the morning, went out and posted it to the _Croppy_.
A letter from Miss Goold overtook him the following Thursday in the
hotel at Clogher.
‘I was delighted to hear from you again,’ she wrote. ‘I was afraid
you had cut me altogether, gone over to the respectable people, and
forgotten poor Ireland. Captain Quinn told me that you and he had
quarrelled, and I gathered that you rather disapproved of him. Well, he
was a bit of a blackguard; but, after all, one doesn’t expect a man
who takes on a job of that kind to be anything else. I never thought
it would suit you, and you will do me the justice of remembering that I
never wanted you to volunteer. Now about your article. It was admirable.
These “Cheap Patriots”’--it was thus the article was headed--‘are just
the creatures we want to scarify. Dowling and his kind are the worst
enemies Ireland has to-day. We’ll publish anything of that kind you send
us, and remember we’re not the least afraid of anybody. It’s a grand
thing for a paper to be as impecunious as the _Croppy_. No man but
a fool would take a libel action against us with any hope of getting
damages. A jury might value Dowling’s character at any fantastic sum
they chose, but it would be a poor penny the _Croppy_ would pay. Still,
we’re not so hard up that we can’t give our contributors something,
and next week you’ll get a small cheque from the office. I hope it may
encourage you to send us more. Don’t be afraid to speak out. If anything
peculiarly seditious occurs to you, write it in Irish. I know it’s all
the same to you which language you write in. Do us half a column every
fortnight or so on Western life and politics.’
Hyacinth was absurdly elated by Miss Goold’s praise. He made up his
mind to contribute regularly to the _Croppy_, and had visions of a great
future as a journalist, or perhaps a literary exponent of the ideas of
Independent Ireland.
Meanwhile, he became very intimate both with the Quinns and with Canon
Beecher’s family. Mrs. Quinn was an enthusiastic gardener, and early in
the spring Hyacinth helped her with her flowerbeds. He learnt to plait
the foliage of faded crocuses, and pin them tidily to the ground with
little wooden forks. He gathered suitable earth for the boxes in which
begonias made their earliest sproutings, and learned to know the
daffodils and tulips by their names. Later on he helped Mr. Quinn to mow
the grass and mix a potent weed-killer for the gravel walks. There came
to be an understanding that, whenever he was not absent on a journey, he
spent the latter part of the afternoon and the evening with the Quinns.
As the days lengthened the family tea was pushed back to later and later
hours to give more time out of doors.
There is something about the very occupation of gardening which is
deadening to enthusiasm. Perhaps a man learns patience by familiarity
with growing plants. Nature is never in a hurry in a garden, and there
is no use in trying to hustle a flower, whereas a great impatience is
the very life-spirit of enthusiastic patriotism. There has probably
never been a revolutionary gardener, or even a strong Radical who worked
with open-air flowers. Of course, in greenhouses things can be forced,
and the spirit of the ardent reformer may find expression in the nurture
of premature blooms. Perhaps also the constant stooping which gardening
necessitates, especially in the early spring, when the weeds grow
plentifully, tends to destroy the stiff mental independence which must
be the attitude of the militant patriot. It is very difficult for a man
who has stooped long enough to have conquered his early cramps and aches
to face the problems of politics with uncompromising rigidity. Hyacinth
recognised with a curious qualm of disgust that his thoughts turned less
and less to Ireland’s wrongs and Ireland’s future as he learnt to care
for the flowers and the grass.
No doubt, too, the atmosphere of the Quinns’ family life was not
congenial to the spirit of the Irish politician. Mrs. Quinn was totally
uninterested in politics, and except a prejudice in favour of what she
called loyalty, had absolutely no views on any question which did
not directly affect her home and her children. Mr. Quinn had a
coldly-reasonable political and economic creed, which acted on the
luxuriant fancies of Hyacinth’s enthusiasm as his weed-killer did on
the tender green of the paths. He declined altogether to see any good in
supporting Irish manufactures simply because they were Irish. The story
of O’Reilly’s attitude towards his shawls moved him to no indignation.
‘I think he’s perfectly right,’ he said. ‘If a man can buy cheap shawls
in England he would be a fool to pay more for Irish ones. Business can’t
be run on those lines. I’m not an object of charity, and if I can’t
meet fair competition I must go under, and it’s right that I should go
under.’
Hyacinth had no answer to give. He shirked the point at issue, and
attacked Mr. Quinn along another line in the hope of arousing his
indignation.
‘But it is not fair competition that you are called upon to face. Do
you call it fair competition when the Government subsidizes a woollen
factory in a convent?’
‘Ah!’ said Mr. Quinn, ‘you are thinking of the four thousand pounds
the Congested Districts Board gave to the convent at Bobeen. But it is
hardly fair to hold the Government responsible for the way that body
wastes eighty thousand pounds a year.’
‘The Government is ultimately responsible, and you must admit that,
after such a gift, and in view of the others which will certainly
follow, you are called upon to meet most unfair competition.’
‘Yes, I admit that. But isn’t that exactly what you want to make
general? There doesn’t seem to me any difference between giving a bounty
to one industry and imposing a protective tariff in favour of another;
and if your preference for Irish manufactures means anything, it means
a sort of voluntary protection for every business in the country. If you
object to the Robeen business being subsidized you can’t logically try
to insist on mine being protected.’
It was puzzling to have the tables turned on him so adroitly. Hyacinth
was reduced to feeble threat.
‘Just wait a while till the nuns get another four thousand pounds, and
perhaps four thousand pounds more after that, and see how it will affect
you.’
Mr. Quinn smiled.
‘I’m not much afraid of nuns as trade competitors, or, for the matter of
that, of the Congested Districts Board either. If the Yorkshire people
would only import a few Mother Superiors to manage their factories,
and take the advice of members of our Board in their affairs, I would
cheerfully make them a present of any reasonable subsidy, and beat them
out of the market afterwards.’
There was another influence at work on Hyacinth’s mind which had as much
to do with the decay of his patriotism as either the gardening or Mr.
Quinn’s logic. Marion Beecher and her sister were very frequently at the
Mill House during the spring and summer. There was one long afternoon
which was spent in the marking out of the tennis-ground. Mr. Quinn had
theories involving calculations with a pencil and pieces of paper about
the surest method of securing right angles at the corners and parallel
lines down the sides of the court. Hyacinth and Marion worked obediently
with a tape measure and the garden line. One of the boys messed
cheerfully with a pail of liquid whitening. Afterwards the gardening was
somewhat deserted, and Hyacinth was instructed in the game. It took
him a long time to learn, and for many afternoons he and Marion were
regularly beaten, but she would not give up hope of him. Often the
excuse of her coming to the Quinns was the necessity of practising some
new hymn or chant for Sunday. Hyacinth worked as hard at the music as at
the tennis under her tuition, and there came a time when he could sing
an easy tenor part with fair accuracy. Then in the early summer, when
the evenings were warm, hymns were sung on the lawn in front of the
house. There seemed no incongruity in Marion Beecher’s company in
passing without a break from lawn-tennis to hymn-singing, and Mr. Quinn
was always ready to do his best at the bass with a serious simplicity,
as if it were a perfectly natural and usual thing to close an
afternoon’s amusement with ‘Rock of Ages.’ Hyacinth was not conscious of
any definite change in his attitude towards religion. He still believed
himself to be somehow outside the inner shrine of the life which the
Beechers and the Quinns lived, just as he had been outside his father’s
prayers. But he found it increasingly difficult after an hour or two of
companionship with Marion Beecher to get back to the emotions which had
swayed him during the weeks of his intimacy with Miss Goold. To write
for the _Croppy_ after sitting beside Marion in church on Sunday
evenings was like passing suddenly from a quiet wood into a heated
saloon where people wrangled. A wave of the old passionate feeling, when
it returned, affected him as raw spirit would the palate of a boy.
One day early in summer--the short summer of Connaught, which is
glorious in June, and dissolves into windy mist and warm rain in the
middle of July--Hyacinth was invited by Canon Beecher to join a boating
party on the lake. The river, whose one useful function was the turning
of Mr. Quinn’s millwheel, wound away afterwards through marshy fields
and groves of willow-trees into the great lake. At its mouth the
Beechers kept their boat, a cumbrous craft, very heavy to row, but safe
and suited to carry a family in comfort. The party started early--Canon
Beecher, Hyacinth, and one of the boys very early, for they had to
walk the two miles which separated Ballymoy from the lake shore. Mrs.
Beecher, the girls, the two other boys, and the baskets of provisions
followed a little later on the Rectory car, packed beyond all
possibility of comfort. The Canon himself pulled an oar untiringly, but
without the faintest semblance of style, and the party rippled with joy
when they discovered that Hyacinth also could row.
‘Now,’ said Elsie, ‘we can go anywhere. We can go on rowing and rowing
all day, and see places we’ve never seen before.’
‘My dear girl,’ said her mother, ‘remember that Mr. Conneally and your
father aren’t machines. You mustn’t expect them to go too far.’
‘Oh, but,’ said Elsie, ‘father says he never gets tired if he has only
one oar to pull.’
The Canon was preparing for his toil. The old coat, in colour now almost
olive green, was folded and used as a cushion by Marion in the bow. His
white cuffs, stowed inside his hat, were committed to the care of Mrs.
Beecher. He rolled his gray shirtsleeves up to the elbow, and unbuttoned
his waistcoat.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘I’m ready. If I’m not hurried, I’ll pull along all day.
But what about you, Conneally? You’re not accustomed to this sort of
thing?’
But Hyacinth for once was self-confident. He might be a poor singer and
a contemptible tennis player, but he knew that nothing which had to do
with boats could come amiss to him. He looked across the sparkling water
of the lake.
‘I’ll go on as long as you like. You won’t tire me when there’s no tide
and no waves. This is a very different business from getting out the
sweeps to pull a nobby five miles against the strength of the ebb, with
a heavy ground swell running.’
About eleven o’clock they landed on an island and ate biscuits. The
Canon told Hyacinth the story of the ruin under whose walls they sat.
‘It belonged to the Lynotts, the Welshmen of Tyrawley. They were at feud
with the Burkes, and one night in winter----’
The girls wandered away, carrying their biscuits with them. It is
likely that they had heard the story every summer as long as they could
remember. Mrs. Beecher alone still maintained an attitude of admiration
for her husband’s antiquarian knowledge, the more creditable because she
must have been familiar with the onset of the MacWilliam Burkes before
even Marion was old enough to listen. To Hyacinth the story was both
new and interesting. It stirred him to think of the Lynotts fighting
hopelessly, or begging mercy in the darkness and the cold just where he
sat now saturate with sunlight and with life. He gazed across the mile
of shining water which separated the castle from the land, and tried to
realize how the Irish servant-girl swam from the island with an infant
Lynott on her back, and saved the name from perishing. How the snow must
have beaten in her face and the lake-waves choked her breath! It was a
great story, but the girls, shouting from the water’s edge, reminded him
that he was out to pull an oar, and not to sentimentalize. He and the
Canon rose, half smiling, half sighing, and took their places in the
boat.
They penetrated before luncheon time to a bay hitherto unknown to the
Beechers. A chorus of delight greeted its discovery. The water shone
bright green and very clear above the slabs of white limestone. The
shore far inland was almost verdure-less. Broad flat rocks lay baking
in the sunshine, and only the scantiest grass struggled up between their
edges. Sometimes they overlapped each other, and rose like an immense
staircase. Fifty yards or so from the land was a tiny island entirely
overgrown with stunted bushes. The boat was pushed up to it and a
landing-place sought, but the shrubs were too thick, and it was decided
to picnic among the rocks on the land. Then Marion in the bow made a
discovery. A causeway about a foot under water led from the island to
the shore. The whole party leaned over to examine it. Every stone was
visible in the clear water, and it was obvious that it had been planned
and built, and was no merely accidental formation of the rocks. The
Canon had heard of a similar device resorted to by an island hermit
to insure the privacy of his cell. Hyacinth spoke vaguely of the
settlements of primitive communities of lake-dwellers. The three boys
planned an expedition across the causeway after luncheon.
‘We’ll carry our shoes and stockings with us,’ they said, ‘and then
explore the island. Perhaps there is a hermit there still, or
a primitive lake-dweller. What is a primitive lake-dweller, Mr.
Conneally?’
Hyacinth was uncertain, but hazarded a suggestion that the lake-dwellers
were the people who buried each other in raths. The Canon, whose
archaeology did not go back beyond St. Patrick, offered no correction.
Tea was made later on in yet another bay, this time on the eastern shore
of the lake. An oak wood grew down almost to the water’s edge, and the
branches overhung a sandy beach, more golden than any sea-strand. The
whole party collected dead wood and broken twigs for the fire. Then,
while the girls unpacked the baskets and secured the kettle amidst the
smoke, Hyacinth lay back luxuriously and watched the sun set behind the
round-shouldered mountain opposite. The long, steep slope shone
bright green while the sun still rested in view above the summit; then
suddenly, when the topmost rim of it had dipped out of sight, the whole
mountainside turned purple, and a glory of gold and crimson hung above
it on the motionless streaks of cloud. Slowly the splendour faded, the
purple turned gray, and a faint breeze fluttered across the lake.
The day was the first of many which Hyacinth gave to such expeditions.
The work of Mr. Quinn’s office was not so pressing as to necessitate
his spending every day there when he was in Ballymoy, and a holiday
was always obtainable. The lake scenery remained vivid in his memory in
after-years, and had its influence upon him even while he enjoyed it,
unconscious of anything except the present pleasure. There was something
besides the innocent gaiety of the girls and the simple sincerity of the
Canon’s platitudes, something about the lake itself, which removed him
to a spiritual region utterly remote from the fiery atmosphere of Miss
Goold’s patriotism. Many things which once loomed very large before him
sank to insignificance as he drank to the full of the desolation around
him. The past, in which no doubt men strove and hoped, hated and loved
and feared, had left the just recognisable ruins of some castles and the
causeway built by an unknown hermit or the prehistoric lake-dwellers.
A few thatched cabins, faintly smoking, and here and there a cairn of
stones gathered laboriously off the wretched fields, were the evidences
of present activity. Now and then a man hooted to his dog as it barked
at the sheep on the hillside, or a girl drove a turf-laden donkey inland
from the boggy shore. Otherwise there were no signs of human life. A
deep sense of monotony and inevitableness settled down upon Hyacinth. He
came for the first time under the great enchantment which paralyzes
the spirit and energy of the Celt. He knew himself to be, as his people
were, capable of spasms of enthusiasm, the victim of transitory burnings
of soul. But the curse was upon him--the inevitable curse of feeling too
keenly and seeing too clearly to be strenuous and constant. The flame
would die down, the enthusiasm would vanish--it was vanishing from him,
as he knew well--and leave him, not indeed content with common life, but
patient of it, and to the very end sad with the sense of possibilities
unrealized.
Yet it was not without many struggles and periods of return to the older
emotions that Hyacinth surrendered his enthusiasm. There still recurred
to him memories of his father’s vision of an Armageddon and the
conception of his own part in it. Sometimes, waking very early in the
morning, he became vividly conscious of his own feebleness of will and
his falling away from great purposes. The conviction that he was called
to struggle for Ireland’s welfare, to sacrifice, if necessary, his life
and happiness for Ireland, was strong in him still. He felt himself
affected profoundly by the influences which surrounded him, but he had
not ceased to believe that the idea of self-sacrificing labour was for
him a high vocation. He writhed, his limbs twisting involuntarily, when
these thoughts beset him, and often he was surprised to discover that he
was actually uttering aloud words of self-reproach.
Then he would write fiercely, brutally, catch at the excuse of some
hypocrisy or corruption, or else denounce selfishness and easy-going
patriotic sentiment, finding subject for his satire in himself. His
articles brought him letters of praise from Miss Goold. ‘You have it,’
she wrote once, ‘the thing we all seek for, the power of beating red-hot
thought into sword-blades. Write more like the last.’ But the praise
always came late. The violent mood, the self-reproach, the bitterness,
were past. His life was wrapt round again with softer influences, and he
read his own words with shame when they reached him in print. Afterwards
for a while, if he wrote at all, it was of the peasant life, of quaint
customs, half-forgotten legends and folklore. These articles appeared
too, but brought no praise from Miss Goold. Once she reproached him when
he lapsed into gentleness for many consecutive weeks.
‘You oughtn’t to waste yourself. There are fifty men and women can do
the sort of thing you’re doing now; we don’t want you to take it up.
It’s fighting men we need, not maundering sentimentalists.’