1
It would be absurd to say of Mr. Quinn that he was an ill-tempered man,
but it would also be absurd to say that he was of a mild disposition.
William Henry Matier, a talker by profession and a gardener in his
leisure moments, summarised Mr. Quinn's character thus: "He'd ate the
head off you, thon lad would, an' beg your pardon the minute after!"
That, on the whole, was a just and adequate description of Mr. Quinn,
and certainly no one had better qualifications for forming an estimate
of his employer's character than William Henry Matier; for he had spent
many years of his life in Mr. Quinn's service and had, on an average,
been discharged from it about ten times per annum.
Mr. Quinn, the younger son of a poor landowner in the north of Ireland,
had practised at the Bar without success. His failure to maintain
himself at the law was not due to ignorance of the statutes of the land
or to any inability on his part to distort their meaning: it was due
solely to the fact that he was a Unionist and a gentleman. His Unionism,
in a land where politics take the place of religion, prevented him from
receiving briefs from Nationalists, and his gentlemanliness made it
impossible for him to accept briefs from the Unionists; for if an Irish
lawyer be a Unionist, he must play the lickspittle and tomtoady to the
lords and ladies of the Ascendency and be ready at all times and on all
occasions to deride Ireland and befoul his countrymen in the presence of
the English people.
"I'd rather eat dirt," Mr. Quinn used to say, "than earn my livin' that
way!"
He contrived, however, to win prosperity by his marriage to Miss
Catherine Clotworthy, the only daughter of a Belfast mill-owner: a lady
of watery spirit who irked her husband terribly because she affected an
English manner and an English accent. He was very proud of his Irish
blood and he took great pride in using Ulster turns of speech. Mrs.
Quinn, whose education had been "finished" at Brighton, frequently urged
him to abandon his "broad" way of talking, but the principal effect she
had on him was to intensify the broadness of his accent.
"I do wish you wouldn't say _Aye_," she would plead, "when you mean
_Yes_!"
And then he would roar at her. "What! Bleat like a damned Englishman!
Where's your wit, woman?"
Soon after the birth of her son, she died, and her concern, therefore,
with this story is slight. It is sufficient to say of her that she
inherited a substantial fortune from her father and that she passed it
on, almost unimpaired, to her husband, thus enabling him to live in
comfortable disregard of the law as a means of livelihood. He had a
small estate in County Antrim, which included part of the village of
Ballymartin, and there he passed his days in agricultural pursuits.
2
Mr. Quinn, as has been stated, was a Unionist, and, in spite of his
Catholic name, a Protestant; but he had a poor opinion of his Unionist
neighbours who, so he said, were far more loyal to England than England
quite liked. He hated the English accent ... "finicky bleatin'," he
called it ... and declared, though he really knew better, that all
Englishmen spoke with a Cockney intonation. "A lot of h-droppers," he
called them, adding, "God gave them a decent language, but they haven't
the gumption to talk it!" The Oxford voice, in his opinion, was educated
Cockney, uglier, if possible, than the uneducated brand.
An Englishman, hearing Mr. Quinn talk in this fashion, might pardonably
have imagined that he was listening to a fanatical Nationalist, a
dynamiting Fenian, but if, being a Liberal, he had ventured to advocate
Home Rule for Ireland in Mr. Quinn's presence, he would speedily have
found that he was in error. "Damn the fear!" Mr. Quinn would say when
people charged him with being a Home Ruler. The motive of his Unionism,
however, was neither loyalty to England nor terror of Rome: it was
wholly and unashamedly a matter of commerce. "The English bled us for
centuries," he would say, "an' it's only fair we should bleed them.
We've got our teeth in their skins, an' they're shellin' out their money
gran'! That's what the Union's for--to make them keep on shellin' out
their money. An' instead of tellin' the people to bite deeper an' get
more money out of them, the fools o' Nationalists is tellin' them to
take their teeth out! Never," he would exclaim passionately, "never,
while there's a shillin' in an Englishman's pocket!"
Mr. Quinn, of course, treated every Englishman he met with courtesy, for
he was an Irish gentleman, and he had sometimes been heard to speak
affectionately of some person of English birth. The chief result of this
civility, conjoined with the ferocity of his political statements, was
that his English friends invariably spoke of him as "a typical
Irishman." They looked upon him as so much comic relief to the more
serious things of their own lives, and seemed constantly to expect him
to perform some amusing antic, some innately Celtic act of comic folly.
At such times, Mr. Quinn felt as if he could annihilate an Englishman.
"Ah, well," he would say, restraining himself, "we all know what the
English are like, God help them!"
It was because of his strong feeling for Ireland and Irish things that
he decided to have his son, Henry, educated in Ireland. "Anyway," he
said to the lad, "you'll have an Irish tongue, whatever else you have!"
He sent the boy to a school in the County Armagh and left him there
until he discovered that he was not being educated at all. He had
questioned Henry on the history and geography of Ireland one day, and
had found to his horror that while Henry could tell him exactly where
Popocatepetl was to be found, and knew that Mount Everest was 29,002
feet high, and could name the kings of England and the dates of their
accession as easily as he could recite the Lord's Prayer, he had no
knowledge of the whereabouts or character of Lurigedan, a hill in the
County Antrim, and could tell him nothing of the Red Earls and the
beautiful queens of Ireland. He knew something that was true, and much
that was not, of Queen Elizabeth and King Alfred, but nothing, true or
false, of Deirdre and Red Hugh O'Neill.
"What the hell's the good of knowin' about Popocatepetl," Mr. Quinn
shouted at him, "when you don't know the name of a hill on your own
doorstep!"
Lurigedan was hardly "on his own doorstep," and Mr. Quinn himself only
knew of it because he had once, very breathlessly, climbed to its
summit, but an Irish hill was of more consequence to him than the
highest mountain in the world; and so he descended upon the master of
the school, a dreepy individual with a tendency to lament the errors of
Rome, and damned him from tip to toe so effectually that the alarmed
pedagogue gladly consented to the immediate termination of Henry's
career at his establishment. Thereafter, Henry was educated in England,
for Mr. Quinn did not propose to sacrifice efficiency to patriotism.
"An' if you come back talkin' like a damned Cockney," he said to his son
as he bade good-bye to him, "I'll cut the legs off you!"
When Henry came home in the holidays, Mr. Quinn would spend hours in
testing his tongue.
"Sound your _r_s," he would say repeatedly, because he regarded one's
ability to say the letter _r_ as a test of a man's control of the
English language. "If you were to listen to an Englishman talkin' on the
telephone, you'd hear him yelpin' _'Ah yoh thah?'_ just like a big buck
nigger, 'til you'd be sick o' listenin' to him! Say, '_Are you there?_',
Henry son!"
And Henry would say _"Are you there_, father?" very gravely.
"That's right," the old man would exclaim, listening with delight to the
rolling _r_s. "Always sound your _r_s whatever you do. I'll not own you
if you come home sayin,'_Ah yoh thah?_' when you mean '_Are you there?_'
Do you mind me, now?"
"Yes, father."
"Well, be heedin' me, then! Now, how are you on the _h_s. Are you as
steady on them as you were when you were home before?"
Then Henry would protest. "But, father," he would say, "they don't all
drop their _h_s. It's only the common ones that drop them!...
"They're all common, Henry ... the whole lot, common as dirt!" Mr. Quinn
retorted once to that, and then began to tell his son how the English
people had lost the habits and instincts of gentlemen in the eighteenth
century ... "where Ireland still is, my son!" ... and had become
money-grubbers. "The English," he said, lying back in his chair and
delivering his sentences as if he were a monarch pronouncing decrees,
"ceased to be gentlemen on the day that Hargreaves invented the
spinnin'-jenny, and landlords gave way to mill-owners." He stopped for a
second or two and then continued as if an idea had only just come into
his head. "An' it was proper punishment for Hargreaves," he said, "that
the English let him die in the workhouse. Proper punishment. What the
hell did he want to invent the thing for?..."
Henry looked up, startled by the sudden anger that swept over his
father, replacing the oracular banter with which he had begun his
discourse on the decadence of manners in England.
"But, father," he said, "you aren't against machinery, are you?"
"Yes, I am," Mr. Quinn replied, banging the arm of his chair with his
fist. "I'd smash every machine in the world, if I were in authority."
"That's absurd, father. I mean, what would become of progress?"
Mr. Quinn leaped out of his chair and strode up and down the room.
"Progress! Progress!" he exclaimed. "D'ye think machines are progress?
D'ye think a factory is progress? Some of you young chaps think you're
makin' progress when you're only makin' changes. I tell you, Henry, the
only thing that is capable of progression is the human soul, and
machines can't develop _that_!" He came back to his seat as he said this
and sat down, but he did not lie back as he had done before. He sat
forward, gazing intently at his son, and spoke with a curious passion
such as Henry had never heard him use before. "Look here, Henry!" he
said, "there was a girl in the village once called Lizzie McCamley ... a
fine bit of a girl, too, big and strong, an' full of fun, an' she got
tired of the village. Her father was a labourer, an' all she could see
in front of her was the life of a labourer's wife. Well, it isn't much
of a life, that, an' Lizzie's mother had a poor life even for a
labourer's wife because McCamley boozed. I don't blame Lizzie for
wantin' somethin' better than that. I'd have despised her if she hadn't
wanted somethin' better. But what did she do? She had an uncle in
Belfast workin' in your grandfather's mill, an' she came to me an' she
asked me to use my influence with your grandfather to get her a job in
the mill. An' I did. An' by God, I'm sorry for it! I'll rue it 'til my
dyin' day, I can tell you!"
"But why, father!"
"Your grandfather gave her a job in the weavin' room of his mill. Do you
know what that's like, Henry?" Henry shook his head. He had never been
inside a linen-mill. "The linen has to be woven in a moist atmosphere,
or else it'd become brittle an' so it wouldn't be fine," Mr. Quinn went
on; "an' the atmosphere is kept moist by lettin' steam escape from pipes
into the room where the linen is bein' woven--a damp, muggy, steamy
atmosphere, Henry ... an' Lizzie McCamley left this village ... left
work in the fields there to go up to Belfast an' work in that for ten
shillin's a week! An' that's what people calls progress! I wish you
could see her now--half rotten with disease, her that was the healthiest
girl in the place before she went away. She's always sick, that girl,
an' she can't eat anythin' unless her appetite is stimulated with stuff
like pickles. She's anaemic an' debilitated, an' the last time I saw her,
she'd got English cholera.... She married a fellow that was as sick as
herself, an' she had a child that wasn't fit to be born ... it died,
thank God!... an' then she went back to her work an' became sicker. An'
she'll go on like that 'til she dies, a rotten, worn-out woman, the
mother of rotten children when she ought to have had fine healthy brats,
an' could have had them too, if it hadn't been for this damned progress
we're all makin'!"
Henry did not reply to his father. He did not know what to reply. His
mind was still in the pliable state, and he found that he was being
infected by his father's passion. But he had been taught at Rumpell's to
believe in Invention, in Progress by the Development of Machinery, and
so his mind reeled a little under this sudden onslaught on his beliefs.
"Well," said Mr. Quinn. "Is that your notion of progress, Henry! Makin'
fine linen out of healthy girls?"
"No, father, of course not. Only!..."
Mr. Quinn stood up, and caught hold of his son's shoulder. "Come over to
the window, Henry!" he said, and they walked across the room together.
"Look out there," he said, pointing towards the fields that stretched to
the foot of the hills. "That's fine, isn't it!" he exclaimed.
"It's very beautiful, father," Henry replied, looking across the fields
of corn and clover and the pastures where the silken-sided cattle
browsed and flocks of sheep cropped the short grass.
"It's _land_, Henry!" said Mr. Quinn, proudly. "You can do without
machines in the long run, but you can't do without _that_!"
3
"An' what do you think a mill-owner'd make of it, Henry!" Mr. Quinn said
as they stood there gazing on the richness of the earth. Near at hand,
they could hear the sound of a lawn-mower, leisurely worked by William
Henry Matier, and while they waited for him to come into view, a great
fat thrush flew down from a tree and seized a snail and beat it against
a stone until its shell was broken....
"I suppose he'd spoil it, father!" Henry answered.
"Spoil it!" Mr. Quinn exclaimed. "Damn it, Henry, he'd desecrate it!
He'd tear up my cornfields and meadows and put factories and mills in
their place! That's what he'd do!" He turned sideways and leant against
the lintel of the window so that he was looking at his son. "There was a
fellow came to see me once," he said, "from London. A speculatin' chap,
an' he wanted me to put capital into a scheme he had on. Do you know
what sort of a scheme it was, Henry?"
"No, father!"
"He wanted to develop the mineral resources of the County Wicklow, an'
he wanted me to lend him money to do it. He said that some Germans had
surveyed the whole district, an' there was an immense fortune just
waitin' to be torn out of the earth.... I could hardly keep my feet off
his backside! 'Do you want to turn Glendalough into a place like
Wigan?' I said to him. 'It's all in the interests of progress,' says
he.... No, I didn't give him any of my money. I was as civil to him as I
could be, an' he never knew how near he was to his death that day...."
Mr. Quinn's anger evaporated, and he began to laugh to himself as he
thought of the difficulty he had had in restraining his rage against the
speculator and how frightened that person would have been had he known
how angry he had made him.
"He was a little smooth chap," he said, "with smooth hair an' smooth
clothes and a smooth voice. You could hardly tell it was hair, it was
that smooth. You'd nearly think somebody had painted it on his skull. He
couldn't make me out when I said I'd rather starve than let a halfpenny
of my money be used to make a mess of Glendalough, an' he talked about
the necessity of havin' a broad outlook on the world. I suppose he went
away an' told everybody that I was a reactionary an' a bad landlord. Oh,
I can hear him spoutin' away about me ... he got into parliament soon
after that, an' used to denounce landlords an' blether away about
progress. An' I daresay everybody that listens to him thinks I'm a
stupid fellow, standin' in the way of everything. I'm a landlord, an'
so, of course, I'm obsolete and tyrannical an' thick-headed, an' all
that, but I wouldn't treat one of my labourers the way your grandfather
treated his for the wide world. Mind you, he was a religious man ... I
don't mean that he pretended to be religious ... he really was
religious, after a fashion ... wouldn't have missed goin' to church or
sayin' his prayers night _an'_ mornin' for a mint of money ... an' yet
there didn't seem to him to be anything wrong in lettin' men an' women
make money for him in that ... that disgustin' way. I can't understand
that. I'm damned if I can!"
Something stirred uneasily in Henry's mind. He became acutely conscious
of the principal source of his father's income, and he remembered
things that had been said to him by Gilbert Farlow at Rumpell's. Gilbert
Farlow was his chief friend at Rumpell's, the English school to which he
had been sent after his experience at Armagh, and Gilbert called himself
an hereditary socialist because his father had been a socialist before
him. ("He was one of the first members of the Fabian Society," Gilbert
used to say proudly.) Gilbert had strong, almost violent, views on
Personal Responsibility for General Wrongs. He always referred to rich
people as "oligarchs," or "the rotters who live on rent and interest"
and declared that it was impossible for them to escape from the
responsibility for the social chaos by asserting that they,
individually, had kind hearts and had never been known to underpay or
overwork any one. Remembering Gilbert's views, Henry could not help
thinking that it was all very well for his father to denounce the mill
in that fashion, but after all he was living on the money that was made
in it....
"But, father," he said, hesitatingly, "haven't we got grandfather's
money now ... and the mill!..."
"No, not the mill, Henry. Your grandfather turned that into a limited
company, an' your mother sold her shares in it. I told her to sell
them!"
Henry's conscience still pricked him. It seemed to him that selling the
shares was very like running away from the responsibility.
"But all the same," he said, "we've got money that was made out of the
mill by grandfather...."
"So we have, Henry," Mr. Quinn replied good-temperedly, "an' we're
makin' a better use of it than he did. Some one's got to use it, an' I'm
doin' the best I can with it. You've only got to look at my land to see
how well I've used the money. It's better land than it was when I got
it, isn't it?" Henry nodded his head. Even he knew that much. "I've
enriched it an' drained it an' improved it in ways that'll benefit them
that come after me ... not me, but you an' your children, Henry ... an'
that's a good use to make of it. I've planted trees that I'll never
reap a ha'penny from, an' I've spent money on experiments that did me no
good but helped to increase knowledge about land. Look at the labourers'
cottages I've built, an' the plots of land I've given them. Aren't they
good! Didn't I put up the best part of the money to build the new school
because the old one was lettin' in the wind an' rain?"
Henry's knowledge of sociology was not sufficient to enable him to cope
with these arguments ... there was no Gilbert Farlow at his elbow to
prompt him ... and so he collapsed.
"I suppose you're right, father," he said.
"_Suppose_ I'm right," Mr. Quinn replied. "_Of course_ I'm right!"
"I know well," he continued after he had fumed for a few moments,
"there's people ... socialists an' radicals an' people like that ...
makes out that landlords are the curse of the world. They think we're
nothin' in comparison with mill-owners an' that sort, but I tell you,
Henry, whatever we are an' whatever we were, we're better than the
people that have taken our place. We didn't tear up the earth an' cover
it with slag-heaps or turn good rivers into stinkin' sewers. We didn't
pollute the rivers with filth an' poison the fish!" He turned suddenly
to Henry and said in a quieter tone, "You've never seen Wigan, have you,
Henry?"
"No, father."
"Well, you'd think by the look of it, it was made on the seventh day ...
when God rested. Landlords didn't do that, Henry, or anything as bad as
that. It was mill-owners that did it. Oh, I know well enough that
landlords were not all they ought to have been, but I'm certain of this,
that labourers on the land were healthier under landlords than they are
under mill-owners, and even if we weren't as good to the labourers as we
might have been, at least we had respect for God's world, an' I never
met a mill-owner yet that had respect for anything but a bankbook. I've
been in Lancashire an' I've listened to these mill-owners ... I've
listened to them talkin', an' I've listened to them eatin' an' drinkin'
... an' they talked 'brass' an' they thought 'brass,' an' I'm damned if
they didn't drink 'brass.' That's characteristic of them. They call
money 'brass.' Brass! Do you think they care for the fine look of things
or an old house or a picture or books or anything that's decent? No,
Henry ... all they care for is 'brass,' an' that's what's the matter
with the English ... they think too much about money ... easy money ...
an' they think so much about gettin' it that none of them have any time
to think of how they'll spend it when they do get it. An' they just fool
it away! Eat it away, drink it away! An' then they have to go to Buxton
an' Matlock an' Harrogate to sweat the muck out of their blood!"
Henry reminded his father of the bloods and bucks and macaronis of the
eighteenth century ... the last of the English gentlemen.
"After all, father, they weren't so very much better than the lot you're
denouncing!"
"Yes, they were. They had the tradition of gentlemen behind them. They
were drunkards and gamblers and women-hunters an' Lord knows what not,
but behind it all, Henry, they had the tradition of gentlemen, an' that
saved them from things that a mill-owner does as a matter of course. An'
anyway, their theory was right. They thought more of spendin' money than
of makin' it, an' that was right. It isn't makin' money that matters ...
any fool can do that ... it's spendin' money that matters. You're less
likely to make a mess of the world when you're spendin', than when
you're makin', money, an' the English'll find that out yet. God'll not
forget in a hurry the way they tore up their good land an' made dirty,
stinkin' towns out of it, an' by the Holy O, He'll make them suffer for
it. If I was an Englishman, I wouldn't want any one to see places like
Wigan an' the towns where they dig coal an' make pottery ... I'd ... I'd
be ashamed to look God in the face when I had mind of them...."
4
Late that night, long after Henry had gone to bed, Mr. Quinn came to his
room and wakened him.
"What is it, father!" Henry said, starting up in alarm.
"It's all right, son," Mr. Quinn replied. "I'm sorry I startled you.
I've been thinkin' over what I said to you this afternoon ... about
machinery. You're not to take me too seriously."
Henry, his eyes still full of sleep, blinked uncomprehendingly at his
father.
"I mean, son," Mr. Quinn went on, "that it'd be silly to break up every
machine in the world. Of course, it would! You must have thought I was
daft talkin' like that. What I mean is, I'd smash up all the machines
that make a mess of men an' women. That's all. I'm sorry I disturbed
you, Henry, but I couldn't bear to think of you lyin' here mebbe
thinkin' I was talkin' out of the back of my neck. I'm not very clever,
son ... I've a moidhered sort of a mind ... an' I say things sometimes
that aren't what I mean at all. You must be tired out, Henry. Good-night
to you!"
"Good-night, father!"
Mr. Quinn walked towards the door of the room, shading the light of the
candle from the draught, but before he had reached it, Henry called to
him.
"Father," he said.
"Yes, Henry," Mr. Quinn replied, turning to look at his son.
"You're a Socialist!"
"No, I'm not. I'm a Conservative," said Mr. Quinn, and then he went out
of the room, closing the door quietly behind him.
5
Many things troubled Mr. Quinn, but the thing that troubled him most was
his son's nervousness. Henry, when he was a child, would cry with fright
during a thunderstorm, and he never in after life quite lost the sense
of apprehension when the clouds blackened. He loved horses, but he could
not sit on a horse's back without being haunted by the fear that the
animal would run away or that he would be thrown from his seat. He could
swim fairly well, but he was afraid to dive, and he never swam far out
of his depth without a sensation of alarm that he would not be able to
return in safety.
"Your mother was like that," Mr. Quinn said to him once. "She never was
in a theatre in her life, 'til I married her. Her father was too
religious to let her go to such a place, an' I had the great job to
persuade her to go with me. I took her to see Henry Irving in Belfast
once, an' all the time she kept whisperin' to me, 'Suppose I was to die
now, where'd I wake up?' That's a fact, Henry! Your mother was terribly
frightened of hell. An' even when she got over that, she was always
wonderin' if it was safe to go to a theatre. She'd imagine the place was
sure to go on fire, an' then she'd be burned alive or get crushed to
death or somethin' like that. I nearly felt scared myself, the way she
went on! I wish you weren't so nervous, Henry!"
They were at Cushendall when Mr. Quinn said this. They had ridden over
on bicycles intent on a day's picnic by the sea, and soon after they had
arrived, Mr. Quinn itched to be in the water. They had stripped on the
beach, and clambered over the rocks to a place where a deep, broad pool
was separated from the Irish Sea by a thick wedge of rock, covered by
long, yellow sea-weed. There was a swell on the sea, and so Mr. Quinn
decided to swim in the pool. "This is a good place for a dive," he said,
standing on the edge of the flat rock and looking down into the deep
pool, and then he put his hands above his head and, bending forward,
dived down into the water so finely that there was hardly any splash. He
came up, puffing and blowing, shaking the water from his eyes and hair,
and swam up and down the pool, now on his back, now on his side, and
then suddenly with a shout he would curl himself up and dive and swim
beneath the water, and again come up, red and shiny and puffing and
blowing and shouting, "Aw, that's grand! Aw, that's grand!" He could
stand on his hands in the water and turn somersaults and find pennies on
the sandy bottom. He loved all sport, but the sport that he loved best
was swimming. He liked to sit on a rock and let great waves come and hit
him hearty thumps in the back. He liked to bury his face in the water.
He liked the feel of the water on his body. He liked to stand up in the
sunshine and watch the drops of water glistening on his body. He liked
to lie on the sea-weed or the sand after his swim and let the sun dry
him. "It's great health, this!" he would say, kicking and splashing in
the sea.
"Come on," he shouted to Henry, after he had dived.
Henry was sitting on the sea-weed, with his arms clutched tightly round
his shins, shivering a little in the wind.
"You'll catch your death of cold if you sit there instead of jumpin'
in," his father called to him. "Dive, man! That's a grand place!"
Henry stood up ... and then turned away from the rock. He caught hold of
the sea-weed and slowly lowered himself into the water.
"That wasn't much of a dive," his father said, swimming up to him.
Henry did not answer. He swam across the pool and clambered out on the
other side and waited for his father, who followed after him.
"I wish you weren't so nervous," Mr. Quinn said a second time, as he sat
down on the sea-weed beside his son.
"So do I, father," Henry replied, "but I can't help it. I try to make
myself not feel afraid, but I just can't. If I could only not think
about it!..."
"Aye, that's it, Henry. You think too much. Do you mind that bit in
Shakespeare about people that think bein' dangerous. Begod, that's true!
Thin men think, that's what Shakespeare says, an' he's right, though
I've known fat men to think, too, but anyway thin men aren't near the
swimmers that fat men are. Well, I suppose it's no use complainin'. You
can't help thinkin' if you have that kind of a mind ... only I wish it
didn't make a coward of you!"
A twist of pain passed over the boy's face when his father said
"Coward," and instantly Mr. Quinn was sorry.
"I didn't mean that exactly," he said very quickly, putting out his hand
and touching Henry's bare back. "I didn't mean _coward_, Henry. I know
you're not that sort at all. It's just nervousness, that's what it is!"
He scrambled to his feet as he spoke, and stood for a moment or two,
slipping about on the wet sea-weed. He slapped his big, hairy chest with
his hands, and then he swung his arms over his head in order to send the
blood circulating more rapidly through his veins.
"I wish I were as big and strong as you are, father!" said Henry, gazing
at his father's muscular frame.
"You're a greedy young rascal," his father answered. "Sure, haven't you
more brains in your wee finger than I have in my whole body, an' what
more do you want! It would be a poor thing if your father hadn't got
something you haven't. Come on, now, an' I'll swim you a race to the end
of the pool an' back, an' then we must go home."
He plunged into the water and swam about, making a great noise and
splash, and deliberately looking away from his son. He was giving him an
opportunity to slip into the water without being seen to shrink from the
dive.
"Are you comin', Henry!" he asked, without looking back.
"Yes, father," the boy replied, standing up and looking fearfully into
the water. He lifted his hands above his head and drew in his breath. He
moved forward, half shutting his eyes, and poised himself on the edge of
the rock, ready for the plunge. Then he put his hands down again and
lowering himself on to the sea-weed, slipped slowly into the water and
struck out. "I'm coming, father!" he said.
"That's right, my son, that's right!" Mr. Quinn replied, looking round.
6
He did not speak of Henry's nervousness again, but it troubled him none
the less. He himself was so fearless, so careless of danger, so eager
for adventure that he could not understand his son's shrinking from
peril.
"I used to think," he said to himself one day, "that boys took their
physique from their mothers an' their brains from their fathers, but it
doesn't seem to have worked out like that with Henry. He doesn't seem to
have got anything from me.... It's a rum business, whatever way you look
at it."