Mr. Quinn carried on his struggle for nearly a year, although from the
very first he might have recognised its hopelessness. Time after time
Hyacinth made his tour, and visited the shopkeepers who had once been
his customers. Occasionally he succeeded in obtaining orders, and a
faint gleam of hope encouraged him, but he had no steady success. Mr.
Quinn’s original estimate of the situation was so far justified that
after a while the religious animosity died out. Shopkeepers even
explained apologetically that they gave their orders to the Robeen
convent for purely commercial reasons.
‘Their goods are cheaper than yours, and that’s the truth, Mr.
Conneally.’
Hyacinth recognised that Mr. Quinn was being beaten at his own game. He
had attempted to drive the nuns out of the market by underselling them,
and now it appeared that they, too, were prepared to face a loss. It was
obvious that their losses must be great, much greater than Mr. Quinn’s.
Rumours were rife of large loans raised by the Mother Superior, of
mortgages on the factory buildings and the machinery. These stories
brought very little consolation, for, as Hyacinth knew, Mr. Quinn was
very nearly at the end of his resources. He refused to borrow.
‘When I am forced to close up,’ he said, ‘I shall do so with a clear
balance-sheet. I have no wish for bankruptcy.’
‘I should like,’ said Hyacinth vindictively, ‘to see the Reverend Mother
reduced to paying a shilling in the pound.’
‘I am afraid,’ said Mr. Quinn, ‘you won’t see that. The convent is a
branch of an immense organization. No doubt, if it comes to a pinch,
funds will be forthcoming.’
‘Yes, and they won’t draw on their own purse till they have got all
they can out of the Congested Districts Board. I have no doubt they are
counting on another four thousand pounds to start them clear when they
have beaten you.’
One day, quite accidentally, Hyacinth came by a piece of information
about the working of the Robeen factory which startled him. He was
travelling home by rail. It happened to be Friday, and, as usual in
the early summer, the train was crowded with emigrants on their way to
Queenstown. The familiar melancholy crowd waited on every platform.
Old women weeping openly and men with faces ridiculously screwed and
puckered in the effort to restrain the rising tears clung to their sons
and daughters. Pitiful little boxes and carpet bags were piled on
the platform. Friends clung to hands outstretched through the
carriage-windows while the train moved slowly out. Then came the long
mournful wail from those left behind, and the last wavings of farewell.
At the Robeen station the crowd was no less than elsewhere. The
carriages set apart for the emigrants were full, and at the last minute
two girls were hustled into the compartment where Hyacinth sat. A woman,
their mother, mumbled and slobbered over their hands. An old man, too
old to be their father, shouted broken benedictions to them. Two
young men--lovers, perhaps, or brothers--stood red-eyed, desolate and
helpless, without speaking. After the train had started Hyacinth looked
at the girls. One of them, a pretty creature of perhaps eighteen years
old, wept quietly in the corner of the carriage. Beside her lay her
carpet bag and a brown shawl. On her lap was an orange, and she held a
crumpled paper bag of biscuits in her hand. There was nothing unusual
about her. She was just one instance of heartbreak, the heart-break of a
whole nation which loves home as no other people have ever loved it, and
yet are doomed, as it seems inevitably, to leave it. She was just one
more waif thrown into the whirlpool of the great world to toil and
struggle, succeed barrenly or pitifully fail; but through it all,
through even the possible loss of faith and ultimate degradation, fated
to cling to a love for the gray desolate fatherland. The other girl
was different. Hyacinth looked at her with intense interest. She was the
older of the two, and not so pretty as her sister. Her face was thin and
pale, and a broad scar under one ear showed where a surgeon’s knife had
cut. She sat with her hands folded on her lap, gazing dry-eyed out of
the window beside her. There was no sign of sorrow on her face, nothing
but a kind of sulky defiance.
After a while she took the paper bag out of her sister’s hand, opened
it, and began to eat the gingerbread biscuits it contained. Hyacinth
spoke to her, but she turned her head away, and would not answer him.
His voice seemed to rouse the younger sister, who stopped crying and
looked at him curiously. He tried again, and this time he spoke in
Irish.
At once the younger girl brightened and answered him. Apparently she had
no fear that malice could lurk in the heart of a man who spoke her own
language. In a few minutes she was chatting to him as if he were an old
friend.
He learnt that the two girls were on their way to New York. They had
a sister there who had sent them the price of their tickets. Yes, the
sister was in a situation, was getting good wages, and had clothes ‘as
grand as a lady’s.’ She had sent home a photograph at Christmas-time,
which their mother had shown all round the parish. These two were to get
situations also as soon as they arrived. Oh yes, there was no doubt of
it: Bridgy had promised. There were four of them left at home--three
boys and a girl. No doubt in time they would all follow Bridgy to
America--all but Seumas; he was to have the farm. No, the girls
could not get married, because their father was too poor to give them
fortunes. There was nothing for them but to go to America. But their
mother had not wanted them to go. The clergy and the nuns were against
the girls going. Indeed, they nearly had them persuaded to send Bridgy’s
money back.
‘But Onny was set on going.’
She glanced at her sister in the corner of the carriage. Hyacinth turned
to her.
‘Why do you want to leave Ireland?’
But Onny remained silent, sulky, at it seemed. It was the younger girl
who answered him.
‘They say it’s a fine life they have out there. There’s good money to be
earned, and mightn’t we be coming home some day with a fortune?’
‘But aren’t you sorry to leave Ireland?’
Again he looked at the elder girl, and this time was rewarded with a
flash of defiant bitterness from her eyes.
‘Sorry, is it? No, but I’m glad!’
‘Onny’s always saying that there was nothing to be earned in the
factory. And she got more than the rest of us. Wasn’t she the first girl
that Sister Mary Aloysius picked out of the school when the young lady
from England came over to teach us? She was the best worker they had.’
‘It’s true what she says,’ said Onny. ‘I was the best worker they had. I
worked for them for three years, and all I was getting at the end of it
was six shillings a week. Why would I be working for that when I might
be getting wages like Bridgy’s in America? What sense would there be in
it?’
‘But why did you work for such wages?’
‘Well, now,’ said the younger girl, ‘how could we be refusing the
Reverend Mother when she came round the town herself, and gave warning
that we’d all be wanted?’
‘There’s few,’ continued Onny, without noticing her sister, ‘that earned
as much as I did. Many a girl works there and has no more than one and
ninepence to take home at the end of the week.’
Hyacinth began to understand how it was that Mr. Quinn was being
hopelessly beaten. This was no struggle between two trade rivals, to be
won by the side with the longer purse. Nor was it simply a fight between
an independent manufacturer and a firm fed with Government bounties. Mr.
Quinn’s rival could count on an unlimited supply of labour at starvation
wages, while he had to hire men and women at the market value of their
services. He had been sorry for the two girls when they got into the
train. Now he felt almost glad that they were leaving Ireland. It
appeared that they had certainly chosen the wiser part.
He arrived at home dejected, and sat down beside the fire in his room
to give himself up to complete despair. He found no hope anywhere. Irish
patriotism, so he saw it, was a matter of words and fine phrases. No one
really believed in it or would venture anything for it. Politics was a
game at which sharpers cheated each other and the people. The leaders
were bold only in sordid personal quarrels. The mass of the people were
utterly untouched by the idea of nationality, in earnest about nothing
but huckstering and petty gains. Over all was the grip of a foreign
bureaucracy and a selfish Church tightening slowly, squeezing out the
nation’s life, grasping and holding fast its wealth. No man any longer
made any demand except to be allowed to earn what would buy whisky
enough to fuddle him into temporary forgetfulness of the present misery
and the imminent tyranny.
The slatternly maid-servant who brought him his meals and made his bed
tapped at the door.
‘Please, sir, Jimmy Loughlin’s after coming with a letter from Mr.
Quinn, and he’s waiting to know if you’ll go.’
Hyacinth read the note, which asked him to call on his employer that
afternoon.
‘Tell him I’ll be there.’
‘Will you have your dinner before you go? The chops is in the pan below.
Or will I keep them till you come back?’
‘Oh, I’ve time enough. Bring them as soon as they’re cooked, and for
goodness’ sake see that the potatoes are properly boiled.’
He took up a great English weekly paper, with copies of which Canon
Beecher supplied him at irregular intervals, and propped it against
the dish-cover while he ate. The article which caught his attention was
headed ‘Angels in Connaught.’ It contained an idealized account of the
work of the Robeen nuns, from whose shoulders it seemed to the writer
likely that wings would soon sprout. There was a description of the once
miserable cabins now transformed into homesteads so comfortable that
English labourers would not disdain them. The people shared in the
elevation of their surroundings. Men and women, lately half-naked
savages, starved and ignorant, had risen in the scale of civilization
and intelligence to a level which almost equalled that of a Hampshire
villager. The double stream of emigration to the United States and
migration to the English harvest-fields was stopped. An earthly paradise
had been created in a howling wilderness by the self-denying labours of
the holy ladies, aided by the statesmanlike liberality of the Congested
Districts Board. There was another page of the article, but Hyacinth
could stand no more.
He stood up and glanced at his watch. It was already nearly five
o’clock. He pushed his way down the street, where the country-people,
having completed their week’s marketing, were loading donkeys on the
footpath or carts pushed backwards against the kerbstone. Women dragged
their heavily-intoxicated husbands from the public-houses, and girls,
damp and bedraggled, stood in groups waiting for their parents. He
turned into the gloomy archway of the mill, unlocked the iron gate, and
crossed the yard into the Quinns’ garden. The lamp burned brightly in
the dining-room, and he could see Mrs Quinn in her chair by the fireside
sewing. Her children sat on the rug at her feet. He saw their faces
turned up to hers, gravely intent. No doubt she was telling them some
story. He stood for a minute and watched them, while the peaceful joy
of the scene entered into his heart. This, no doubt, a home full of such
love and peace, was the best thing life had got to give. It was God’s
most precious benediction. ‘Lo, thus shall a man be blessed who feareth
the Lord.’ He turned and passed on to the door. The servant showed him
in, not, as he expected, to the sitting-room he had just gazed at, but
to Mr. Quinn’s study.
It was a desolate chamber. A plain wooden desk like a schoolmaster’s
stood in one corner, and upon it a feeble lamp. A bookcase surmounted a
row of cupboards along one wall. Its contents--Hyacinth had often looked
over them--were a many-volumed encyclopaedia, Macaulay’s ‘History of
England,’ Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs,’ a series entitled ‘Heroes of the
Reformation,’ and some bound volumes of a trade journal. Above the
chimneypiece hung two trout-rods, a landing-net, and an old gun. The
grate was fireless. It was a room obviously not loved by its owner.
Neither pleasure nor comfort was looked for in it. It was simply a place
of escape from the attractions of quiet ease when business overflowed
the proper office hours. Mr. Quinn rose from his desk when Hyacinth
entered.
‘I am very glad to see you,’ he said; ‘I want to have a talk with you.’
Hyacinth waited while he arranged and rearranged some papers on the desk
in front of him. Mr. Quinn, although he had specially sent for Hyacinth,
seemed in no hurry to get to the subject of the interview. When he did
speak, it was evident from his tone that the important topic was still
postponed.
‘How did you get on this week?’
Hyacinth had nothing good to report. He took from his pocket the
note-book in which he entered his orders, and went over it. It contained
an attenuated list. Moreover, the harvest had been bad, and old debts
very difficult to collect. Mr. Quinn listened, apparently not very
attentively, and when the reading was over said:
‘What you report this week is simply a repetition of the story of the last
six months. I did not expect it to be different. It makes the decision
I have to make a little more inevitable, that is all. Mr. Conneally, we
have been very good friends, and since you have been in my employment I
have been satisfied with you in every way. Now I am unable to employ you
any longer. I am giving up my business.’
Hyacinth made an effort to speak, but Mr. Quinn held up his hand and
silenced him.
‘This week,’ he continued, ‘I received news which settled the matter
for me. Jameson and Thorpe, the big drapers in Dublin, were my best
customers for certain goods. Last Monday they wrote that they had an
offer of blankets at a figure a long way below mine. I didn’t believe
that articles equal in quality to mine could be produced at the price,
and wrote a hint to that effect. I received--nothing could have been
more courteous--a sample of the blankets offered. Well, I admit that it
was at least equal to what I could supply in every way. I wrote again
asking as a favour to be supplied with the name of the competing firm. I
got the answer to-day. Mr. Thorpe wrote himself. The Robeen convent has
undersold me.’
Hyacinth made another attempt to speak.
‘Let me finish,’ said Mr. Quinn. ‘I had foreseen, of course, that this
was coming. I have no more capital to fall back upon. I do not mean to
run into debt. There is nothing for me but to dismiss my employées and
shut up.’
‘Yes,’ said Hyacinth. ‘And then----’
He knew he had no right to ask a question about the future, but the
thought of Mrs. Quinn and her children as he had seen them in the
dining-room almost forced him to inquire what was to happen to them. A
spasm of extreme pain crossed Mr. Quinn’s face.
‘You are thinking of my wife. It will be hard--yes, very hard. She loved
this place, her friends here, her garden, and all the quiet, peaceful
life we have lived. Well, there is to be an end of it. But don’t look so
desperate.’ He forced himself to smile as he spoke. ‘We shall not starve
or go to the workhouse. I have a knowledge of woollen goods if I have
nothing else, and I dare say I can get an appointment as foreman or
traveller for some big drapery house. But I may not be reduced to that.
There is a secretary wanted just now in the office of one of the Dublin
charitable societies. I mean to apply for the post. Canon Beecher and
our Bishop are both members of the committee, and I am sure will do
their best for me. The salary is not princely--a hundred and twenty
pounds a year, I think. But there, I ought not to be talking all this
time about myself. I must try and do something for you.’
‘Never mind me,’ said Hyacinth; ‘I shall be all right. But I can’t bear
to think of you and Mrs. Quinn. Poverty like that in Dublin! Have you
thought what it means? A shabby little house in a crowded street, off at
the back of somewhere; dirt and stuffiness and vulgarity all around you.
She can’t be expected to stand it--or you either.’
‘My dear boy,’ said Mr. Quinn, ‘my wife and I have been trying all our
lives to be Christians. Shall we receive good at the Lord’s hand and not
evil also? However it may be with me, I know that she will not fail in
the trial.’
His face lit up as he spoke, and the smile on it was no longer forced,
but clear and brave. Hyacinth knew that he was once again in the
presence of that mysterious power which enables men and women to meet
and conquer loss and pain, against which every kind of misfortune beats
in vain. His eyes filled with tears as he took Mr. Quinn’s hand and bade
him good-night.