1
Three days later, Henry left Ballymartin and travelled to Belfast in the
company of John Marsh. In Belfast they were to separate: Marsh was to
return to Dublin and Henry was to cross by the night boat to Liverpool,
and proceed from there to London, and then on from Waterloo to
Boveyhayne. Marsh, a little sad because the Ballymartin classes must now
collapse, but greatly glad to return to the middle of Irish activities
in Dublin, had turned over in his mind what Mr. Quinn had said about
Henry's future, and he was wondering exactly what he should say to
Henry. They had several hours to spend in Belfast, and Marsh proposed
that they should visit the shipyards and, if they had time, inspect a
linen mill; and Henry, who had always felt great pride when he saw the
stocks and gantries of the shipyards and reflected that out of the
multitudinous activities of Ulster men the greatest ships in the world
were created, eagerly assented to Marsh's proposal. Mr. Quinn had given
them a letter of introduction to a member of the great firm of Harland
and Wolff, and Mr. Arthurs, because of his friendship for Mr. Quinn,
conducted them through the yard himself.
They stayed so long in the shipyard that there was no time left for the
visit to the linen mill, and so, when they had had tea, they set off to
the Great Northern Railway station where Marsh was to catch his train to
Dublin.
Mr. Arthurs' immense energy and his devotion to his work and his
extraordinary pride not only in the shipyard but in the men who worked
in it had made a deep impression on Marsh and Henry. He seemed to know
the most minute details of the vast complication of functions that
operated throughout the works. While they were passing through one of
the shops, a horn had blown, and instantly a great crowd of men and lads
had poured out of the yard on their way to their dinner, and Mr.
Arthurs, standing aside to watch them, and greeting here one and there
another, turned to Marsh and said, "Those are my pals!" Thousands of
men, grimy from their work, each of them possessed of some peculiar
skill or great strength, thousands of them, "pals" of this one man whose
active brain conceived ships of great magnitude and endurance! Mr.
Arthurs had passed through the shipyard from apprenticeship to
directorship: he had worked in this shop and in that, just as the men
worked, and had learned more about shipbuilding than it seemed possible
for any man to learn. "He knows how many rivets there are in the
_Oceanic_," one of the foremen in the yard said to Marsh when they were
being shown round. "He's the great boy for buildin' boats!"
Marsh, until then, had never met a man like Mr. Arthurs. His life had
been passed in Dublin, among people who thought and talked and
speculated, but seldom did; and he had been habituated to scoffing talk
at Belfast men ... "money-grubbers" ... mitigated, now and then, by a
grudging tribute to their grit and great energy and resource. Mr.
Arthurs had none of the money-grubbing spirit in him; his devotion to
his work of shipbuilding was as pure as the devotion of a Samurai to the
honour of Japan; and Marsh, who was instantly sensitive to the presence
of a noble man, felt strongly drawn to him.
"I wish we could get him on our side, Henry!" he said, as they sat in
the station, waiting for the train to draw up to the platform. "I'd give
all the lawyers we've got for that one man!"
"Father thinks Tom Arthurs is the greatest shipbuilder that's ever
lived," Henry answered.
"He might be the greatest Irishman that's ever lived," Marsh rejoined,
"if he'd only give a quarter of the devotion to Ireland that he gives to
ships."
"I suppose he thinks he's giving all his devotion to Ireland now ... and
he is really. Isn't he, John? His firm is famous all over the world, and
he's one of the men that have made it famous. It must be very fine for
him to think that he's doing big things for his country!"
Marsh nodded his head. "We're rather foolish about Belfast in Dublin,"
he said. "After all, real work is done here, isn't it? And the chief
industry of Dublin ... what is it? Absolutely unproductive! Porter!
Barrels and barrels of it, floating down the Liffey and nothing,
_nothing real_, floating back! I like that man Arthurs. I wish to heaven
we had him on our side!"
"He's a Unionist," Henry replied.
It occurred to Marsh, in the middle of his reflections on Tom Arthurs,
that he should ask Henry what he proposed to do for Ireland.
"I'd like to do work as big and fine as Arthurs does," he said.
"Wouldn't you, Henry?"
"Yes."
"What _do_ you propose to do, Henry?"
"I don't know. I haven't thought definitely about that sort of thing
yet. I've just imagined I'd like to do _something_. I'm afraid I can't
build ships!..."
"There are other things besides ships, Henry!"
"I know that. John, I'm going to say something that'll make you angry,
but I can't help that. When Tom Arthurs was showing us over the Island,
I couldn't help thinking that all that Gaelic movement was a frightful
waste of time!" Marsh made a gesture, but Henry would not let him speak.
"No, don't interrupt me, John," he said. "I must say what I feel. Look
at the Language class at Ballymartin. What's been the good of all the
work you put into it?"
"We've given them a knowledge of a national separateness, haven't we?"
"Have we? They were keener on the dances, John. I don't believe we've
done anything of the sort, and if we had, I think it would be a pity!"
"A pity! A pity to make the Irish people realise that they're Irish and
different from the English!"
"Oh, you won't agree, I know, John, but I think Tom Arthurs is doing
better work for Ireland than you are," Henry retorted.
"He's doing good work, very good work, but not better work than I am.
He's establishing an Irish industry, but I'm helping to establish an
Irish nation, an Irish soul!..."
"That's what you want to do, but I wonder whether it's what you are
doing," said Henry.
They were silent for a while, and before they spoke again, the train
backed into the station, and they passed through the barriers so that
Marsh could secure his seat.
"Well, what do _you_ propose to do for Ireland?" Marsh asked again, when
he had entered his carriage.
"The best I can, I suppose. I don't know yet!..."
Marsh turned quickly to Henry and put his hand on his shoulder. "Henry,"
he said, "I hope you don't mind ... I know about Sheila Morgan and
you!..."
"You know?..."
"Yes. I'm sorry about that. I don't think you should let it upset you!"
Henry did not reply for a few moments, but sat still staring in front of
him. In a sub-conscious way, he was wondering why it was that the
carriages were not cleaner....
"I'm frightfully miserable, John," he said at last.
"But why, Henry?"
"Oh, because of everything. I don't know. I'm a fool, I suppose!"
"You're not going to pieces just because you've fallen in love with a
girl and it's turned out wrong? My dear Henry, that's a poor sort of a
spirit!"
"I know it is, but I'm a sloppy fellow!..."
"This affair with Sheila Morgan is all the more reason why you should
think of something big to do. I wish you were coming to Dublin with me
now. Dublin's very beautiful in the summer, and we could go up into the
mountains and talk about things."
"Oh, well, we shall meet in Dublin fairly soon," Henry replied, smiling
at Marsh. It had been settled that he was to enter Trinity a little
earlier than his father had previously planned.
"Yes, that's true!"
The hour at which the train was due to depart came, and Henry got out of
the carriage and stood on the platform while Marsh, his head thrust
through the window, talked to him.
"You might write to me," he said. "We ought not to drift away from each
other, Henry!..."
"We won't do that. We'll see each other in Dublin."
"Yes, of course. You must meet Galway when you come back. He's a
schoolmaster and a barrister and a poet and heaven knows what not. He's
a splendid fellow. Perhaps he'll persuade you to take more interest in
Irish things!"
"Perhaps!"
The guard blew his whistle, and the train began to move out of the
station.
"Don't get too English, Henry!" Marsh shouted, waving his hand in
farewell.
Henry smiled at him, but did not answer.
"Good-bye!" Marsh called to him.
"Good-bye!" Henry answered.
The train swung round a bend and disappeared on its way south, and
Henry, strangely desolate, turned and walked away from the station.
2
In the excitement of leaving Ballymartin and sightseeing in the
shipyard, he had almost forgotten Sheila Morgan, but now, his mind
stimulated by his talk with Marsh and his spirit depressed by his
loneliness, his thoughts returned to her, and it seemed to him that he
detested her. She had insulted him, struck him, humiliated and shamed
him. When he remembered that he had told her of his love for her and had
asked her to marry him, and had been told in reply that she wanted a
man, not a coward, he felt that he could not bear to return to Ireland
again. His mood was mingled misery and gladness. At Boveyhayne, thank
heaven, he would be free of Sheila and probably he would never think of
her again. Gilbert and Ninian would fill his mind, and of course there
would be Mrs. Graham and Mary. Mary! It was strange that he should have
let Mary slip out of his thoughts and let Sheila slip into them. He had
actually proposed to Mary and she had accepted him, and then he had left
her and forgotten her because of Sheila. He remembered that he had not
replied to the letter she had written to him before John Marsh came to
Ballymartin. He had intended to write, but somehow he had not done so
... and then Sheila came, and it was impossible to write to her. He
wondered what he should say to her when they met. Would she come to
Whitcombe station to meet him? What was he to say to her?...
He had treated her shabbily. Of course, she was only a kid, as Ninian
himself would say, but then he had made love to her, and anyhow she
would be less of a kid now than she was when he last saw her.... He got
tired of walking about the streets, and he made his way to the quays and
passed across the gangway on to the deck of the steamer. A cool air was
blowing up the Lagan from the Lough, and when he leaned over the side of
the ship he could see the dark skeleton shape of the shipyard. His
thoughts were extraordinarily confused, rambling about his father and
Sheila Morgan and John Marsh and Mary Graham and Tom Arthurs and Ireland
and ships and England and Gilbert Farlow and Ninian and Roger....
"I ought never to have thought of any one but Mary," he said to himself
at last. "I _really_ love her. I was only ... only passing the time with
Sheila!"
"Well, thank God I'll soon be in Devonshire," he went on, "and out of
all this. If only my Trinity time were over, and I were settled in
London with Gilbert and the others, I'd be happy again!" He thought of
John Marsh, and as he leant over the side of the boat, looking down on
the dark water flowing beneath him, he seemed to see Marsh's eager face,
framed in the window of the railway carriage. He almost heard Marsh
saying again, "Well, what do _you_ propose to do for Ireland?..."
"Oh, damn Ireland," he said out loud.
He walked away from the place where he had imagined he had seen Marsh's
face peering at him out of the water, and as he walked along the deck,
he could hear the noise of hammering in the shipyard made by the men on
the night-shift. Tom Arthurs's brain was still working, though Tom
Arthurs was now at home.
"That's real work," Henry murmured to himself, "and a lot better than
gabbling about Ireland's soul as if it were the only soul in the world!
Poor old John! I disappoint him horribly...." He was standing in the
bows of the boat, looking towards the Lough. "I wonder," he said to
himself, "whether Mary'll be at Whitcombe station!"
3
The peculiar sense of isolation which overwhelms an Irishman when he is
in England, fell upon Henry the moment he climbed into the carriage at
Lime Street station. None of the passengers in his compartment spoke to
each other, whereas in Ireland, every member of the company would have
been talking like familiars in a few minutes. About an hour after the
train had left Liverpool, some one leant across to the passenger facing
him and asked for a match, and a box of matches was passed to him
without a word from the man who owned them. "Thanks!" said the passenger
who had borrowed the box, as he returned it. No more was said by any one
for half an hour, and then the man opposite to Henry stretched himself
and said, "We're getting along!" and turned and laid his head against
the window and went to sleep.
"We _are_ different!" Henry thought to himself. "We're certainly
different ... only I wonder does the difference matter much!"
He tried to make conversation with his neighbour, but was unsuccessful,
for his neighbour replied only in monosyllables, and sometimes did not
even articulate at all, contenting himself with a grunt....
"Well, why should he talk to me?" Henry thought to himself. "He isn't
interested in me or my opinions, and perhaps he wants to read or
think!..."
Marsh would have denied that the man wanted to think. He would have
denied that the man had the capacity to think at all. Henry remembered
how Marsh had generalised about the English. "They live on their
instincts," he had said. "They never live on their minds!" and he had
quoted from an article in an English newspaper in which the writer had
lamented over the decline and fall of intellect among his countrymen.
The writer declared that no one would pay to see a play that made a
greater demand upon the mind than is made in a musical comedy, and that
even this slight demand was proving to be more than many people could
bear: the picture palace was destroying even the musical comedy.
"But are we any better than that?" Henry had asked innocently, and
Marsh, indignant, had declared that the Irish were immeasurably better
than _that_.
"But are we?" Henry asked himself as the train swiftly moved towards
London.
And through his mind there raced a long procession of questions for
which he could not find answers. His mind was an active, searching mind,
but it was immature, and there were great gaps in it that could only be
filled after a long time and much experience. He had not the knowledge
which would enable him to combat the opinions of Marsh, but some
instinct in him caused him to believe that Marsh's views of England and
Ireland were largely prejudiced views. "I don't feel any less friendly
to Gilbert and Ninian and Roger than I do to John Marsh or any other
Irishman, and I don't feel that John understands me better than they
do!" That was the pivot on which all his opinions turned. He could only
argue from his experience, and his experience was that this fundamental
antagonism between the Irish and the English, on which John Marsh
insisted, did not exist. When Marsh declared passionately that he did
not wish to see Ireland made into a place like Lancashire, he was only
stating something that many Englishmen said with equal passion about the
unindustrialised parts of England. Gilbert Farlow denounced mill-owners
with greater fury than Mr. Quinn denounced them.... It seemed to Henry
that he could name an English equivalent for every Irish friend he had.
"There are differences, of course," he said to himself, remembering the
silent company of passengers who shared his compartment, "but they don't
matter very much!"
"I wish," he went on, "John Marsh weren't so bitter against the English.
Lots of them would like him if he'd only let them!"
He looked out of the window at the wide fields and herds of cattle and
comfortable farmhouses, built by men whose lives were more or less
secure, and ... "Of course!" he exclaimed in his mind. "That's the
secret of the whole thing! When our people have had security for life as
long as these people have had it, their houses will be as good as these
are, and their farms as rich and clean and comfortable!"
One had only to remember the history of Ireland to realise that many of
the differences between the English and the Irish were no more than the
differences between the hunter and the hunted, the persecutor and the
persecuted. How could the Irish help having a lower standard of life
than the English when their lives had been so disrupted and disturbed
that it was difficult for them to have a standard of life at all? Now,
when the disturbance was over and security of life had been obtained
(after what misery and bitterness and cruel lack of common
comprehension!) the Irish would soon set up a level of life that might
ultimately be higher than that of the English.
"Of course," said Henry, remembering something that his father had said,
"there'll be a Greedy Interval!"
The Greedy Interval, the first period of prosperity in Ireland when the
peasants, coming suddenly from insecurity and poverty to safety and
well-being, would claw at money like hungry beasts clawing at food, had
been the subject of many arguments between Mr. Quinn and John Marsh, Mr.
Quinn maintaining that greed was the principal characteristic of a
peasant nation, inherent in it, inseparable from it.
"Look at the French," he had said on one occasion. "By God, they buried
their food in their back-gardens rather than let their hungry soldiers
have it in the Franco-German War! Would an aristocrat have done that,
John Marsh? They saw their own countrymen who had been fighting for
them, starving, and they let them starve!..."
It was the same everywhere. "I never pass a patch of allotments," he
said, "without thinkin' that their mean, ugly, _little_ look is just
like a peasant's mind, an' begod I'm glad when I'm past them an' can see
wide lands again!" Peasants were greedy, narrow, unimaginative, lacking
in public spirit. In France, in Belgium, in Holland and Russia, in all
of which countries Mr. Quinn had travelled much, there was a peasant
spirit powerfully manifested, and almost invariably that manifestation
was shown in a mean manner.
"That's what your wonderful Land Laws are going to do for Ireland!" Mr.
Quinn had exclaimed scornfully. "_We're_ to be thrown out of our land,
an' louts like Tom McCrum are to be put in our place!..."
Henry had sympathised with his father then, but he felt that the best of
the argument was with John Marsh who had replied that the Irish
landlords would never have been dispossessed of their land, if they had
been worthy of it. "If they'd thought as much about their
responsibilities as they thought about their rights, they'd still have
their rights!" he said.
"I suppose that's so," Henry said to himself, picking up a paper that he
had bought in Liverpool and beginning to read. "I must talk to Gilbert
about it!"
4
Ninian and Gilbert met him at Whitcombe station. As he stood on the
little platform of the carriage, he could see that Mary was not with
them, and he felt disappointed. She might have come, too!...
"Here he is," he heard Gilbert shout to Ninian as the train drew up.
"Hilloa, Quinny!"
"Hilloa, Gilbert!"
"Hop out quickly, will you!"
He hopped out as quickly as he could and said "Hilloa!" to Ninian, who
said "Hilloa!" and slapped his back and called him an old rotter.
"Widger'll take your luggage," Gilbert said, taking control of their
movements as he always did. "Hang on to this, Widger," he added, taking
a handbag from Henry and throwing it into Widger's arms. "Show him the
rest of your stuff, Quinny, and let's hook off. We're going to walk to
Boveyhayne. You'll need a stretch after sitting all that time, and
Ninian's getting disgustingly obese, so we make him run up and down the
road over the cliff three times so's to thin him down!..."
"Funny ass!" said Ninian.
"Mrs. Graham wanted Mary to come with us, but we wouldn't let her. We're
tired of females, Ninian and I, and Mary's very femaley at present.
She's started to read poetry!..."
"Out loud!" Ninian growled. "I'm sick of people who read out loud to me.
When Mary's not spouting stuff about 'love' and 'dove' and 'heaven
above' and that sort of rot, Gilbert's reading his damn play to me!"
"I'll read it to you, Quinny!" Gilbert said, linking his arm in Henry's.
They had left the station, and were now walking along the unfinished
road above the shingle. There was a heat haze hanging over the smooth
blue sea, so that sky and water merged into each other imperceptibly. In
front of them, they could see the white cliffs of Boveyhayne shining in
the descending sun. There were great stalks of charlock, standing out of
the grass on the face of the cliffs, giving them a golden head.
"If Marley's on Whitcombe beach, we'll row over to Boveyhayne," said
Ninian. "You'd like to get on to the sea, wouldn't you, Quinny?"
Henry nodded his head.
"No," said Gilbert, "we won't. We'll sit here for a while, and I'll read
my play to Quinny. I carry it about with me, Quinny, so that I can read
it to Ninian whenever his spirits are low!"
"I never saw such a chap!" Ninian mumbled.
"This great, hairy, beefy fellow," Gilbert went on, seizing hold of
Ninian's arm with his disengaged hand, "does not love literature!..."
Ninian broke free from Gilbert's grip. "Marley is on the beach," he
said, and ran ahead to engage the boat.
"Well, Quinny!" said Gilbert, when Ninian had gone.
"Well, Gilbert!" Henry replied.
"How's Ireland? Still making an ass of itself?"
Henry made no answer to Gilbert's question because he knew that an
answer was not expected. Had any one else spoken in that fashion to him,
any other Englishman, he would probably have angered instantly, but
Gilbert was different from all other people in Henry's eyes, and was
privileged to say whatever he pleased.
"Gilbert," he said, "I want to have a long jaw with you about
something!..."
The English way of speaking came naturally to him, and he said "a long
jaw about something" as easily as if he had never been outside an
English public school.
"What?" Gilbert said.
"Oh, everything. Ireland and things!"
"All right, my son!"
"You see!..."
"Wait though," said Gilbert, "until we catch up with Ninian. He ought to
hear it, too. He has a wise old noddle, Ninian, although he's such a fat
'un.... My God, Quinny, isn't he getting big? If he piles up any more
muscle, hell have to go to Trinity Hall and join the beefy brutes and
get drunk and all that kind of manly thing!" They came up with Ninian as
he spoke. "Won't you, Ninian?"
"Won't I what?" Ninian replied.
"Have to go to Trinity Hall if you go on being a beefy Briton. Hilloa,
Marley!"
"Good-evenin', sir!" said old Marley.
They got into the boat, and Ninian rowed them round the white cliff to
Boveyhayne beach, where they left the boat and walked up the village
street to the lane that led to Boveyhayne Manor.
"Henry wants to talk about the world, Ninian!" said Gilbert as they left
the beach. "We'd better have a good old gabble after dinner to-night,
hadn't we?"
"It doesn't matter what I say," said Ninian, "you'll gabble anyhow.
Anything to keep him from reading his blooming play to me!" he added,
turning to Henry.
5
He had a sense of disappointment when he met Mary. In his reaction from
Sheila Morgan, he had imagined Mary coming to greet him with something
of the alert youthfulness with which she had met him when he first
visited Boveyhayne, but when she came into the hall, a book in
her hand, he felt that there was some stiffness in her manner, a
self-consciousness which had not been there before.
"How do you do?" she said, offering her hand to him like any well-bred
girl.
She did not call him "Quinny" or show in her manner or speech that he
was particularly welcome to her.
"I suppose," he thought to himself, "she's cross because I didn't answer
her letter!"
He resolved that he would bring her back to her old friendliness....
"I expect you're tired," she said. "We'll have tea in a minute or two.
Mother's lying down. She's not very well!"
She would have said as much to a casual acquaintance, Henry thought.
"Not well!" he heard Ninian saying. "What's the matter with her?"
"She's tired. I think she's got a headache. There was a letter from
Uncle Peter!" Mary answered, and her tone indicated that the letter from
Uncle Peter accounted for everything.
"Oh!" said Ninian, scowling and turning away.
They went into the drawing-room to tea, and Henry had a sense of
intruding on family affairs, mingled with his disappointment because
Mary was not as he had expected her to be. It might be, of course, that
the letter from Uncle Peter had affected Mary almost as much as it
seemed to have affected Mrs. Graham, and that presently she would be as
natural as she had been that other time ... but then he remembered that
Gilbert had said that she was "being very femaley at present." She
poured out tea for them as if she were a new governess, and she reproved
Ninian once for saying "Damn!" when he dropped his bread and butter....
"Mary's turned pi!" said Ninian.
She frowned at him and told him not to be silly.
"She calls the Communion Service the Eucharist, and crosses herself and
flops and bows!..."
"You're very absurd, Ninian!" she said.
Almost unconsciously, he began to compare her to Sheila Morgan. He
remembered the free, natural ways of Sheila, and liked them better than
these new, mannered ways of Mary. How could any one prefer this
stiltedness to that ease, this self-consciousness to that state of being
unaware of self?... In Belfast, when he had left John Marsh, and in his
loneliness had thought of the way Sheila had humiliated him, he had had
a sharp sense of revulsion from her, a loathing for her, a desire never
to see her again; but now, sitting here looking at Mary and oppressed by
her youngladyishness, his longing for Sheila came back to him with
greater strength, and he resolved that he would write to her that night
and beg her to forgive him for his cowardice and let him be her
sweetheart again....
"Will you have some more tea!" Mary was saying to him, and he started at
the sound of her voice.
"Oh, thanks!" he said, passing his cup to her.
"Thinking, Quinny?" Gilbert exclaimed, reaching for a bun.
"Eh? Oh, yes! I was thinking!" he answered. "What time does the evening
post go out?" he said to Ninian.
"Six-twenty-five," Ninian answered.
"Thanks. I just want to write to Ireland!..."
"It'll get there just as soon if you post it to-morrow," said Gilbert.
Mary left them. "I'm going up to mother," she said, as she got up from
the tea table. "She's awfully sorry she couldn't be down to welcome
you," she added to Henry who had moved to open the door for her.
"I hope she'll soon be better," he answered.
When she had gone, Ninian got up and cursed lustily.
"Damn and blast him," he said.
They did not speak. They knew that Ninian's anger had some relation to
Mrs. Graham's headache and the letter from Uncle Peter, and they felt
that it was not their business to speak, even though Ninian had drawn
them into the affair.
"I'm sorry," said Ninian, sitting down again. "I ought not to have
broken out like that before you chaps, but I couldn't help it."
Henry coughed as if he were clearing his throat, but he did not speak,
and Gilbert sat still and gazed at the toe of his shoe.
"He always upsets mother, damn him!" Ninian looked up at them. "My Uncle
Peter married a girl in a confectioner's shop at Cambridge. He's that
kind of ass! He never writes to mother except when he's in a mess, and
he always expects her to get him out of it. I can't stand a man who does
that sort of thing. She's an awful bitch, too ... his wife! We had them
here once!... My God!"
Ninian lay back in his seat and remained silent for a while as if he
were contemplating in his mind the picture of Uncle Peter and his wife
on that awful visit to Boveyhayne. They waited for him to continue.
"I used to feel ashamed to go into the village," he said at last. "The
way she talked to the fishermen--one minute snubbing them, and the next,
talking to them as if she were a servant-girl. They didn't like it. Jim
Rattenbury hated it, I know. She wasn't one of us and she wasn't one of
them. A damned in-between, that's what she was. And Uncle Peter used to
get drunk!... I'm awfully sorry, you chaps, I oughtn't to be boring you
like this!"
"That's all right," said Gilbert.
"I was jolly glad when they went," Ninian went on. "Jolly glad! Poor
mother had a hell of a time while they were here!"
"I suppose so," Henry murmured, hardly knowing what to say.
"I can't understand a man marrying a woman like that," Ninian said. "I
mean, I can understand a fellow ragging about with a girl, but I can't
understand him marrying her and ... and upsetting things!"
It was on the tip of Henry's tongue to say something about
Ninian's belief in democracy, for he remembered that Gilbert,
in one of his letters, had declared that Ninian had become a
I'm-as-good-as-you-and-a-damn-sight-better-politician, but he did not
say it.
"The girl isn't happy. Anybody can see she isn't happy, and Uncle Peter
isn't happy, and between them they make us damn miserable. That kind of
marriage is bound to fail, _I_ think. People ought to marry in their own
class!..."
"Unless they're big enough to climb out of it," said Gilbert.
"_She_ isn't!"
It came to Henry suddenly that he was proposing to do what Ninian's
Uncle Peter had done: marry a girl who was not of his class. He listened
to Ninian and Gilbert as they talked of this intimate mingling of
classes, and wondered what they would say if they knew of Sheila.
Gilbert and Ninian were agreed that on the whole it was foolish for a
man to marry that kind of girl. "It doesn't work," said Gilbert, and he
told a story of a man whom his father had known, an officer in the
Indian army who developed communist beliefs when he retired and had
married his cook. "It's a ghastly failure," said Gilbert.
"I'm all for equality," Ninian said, "but it's silly to think that we're
always equal now. We're not!..."
"And never will be," Gilbert interjected.
"I don't agree with you, Gilbert. I think that things like habits and
manners can be fairly equalised!..."
"Minds can't!"
"No, of course not; but decent behaviour can, and it's silly to start
mingling classes until you've done that. You rub each other the wrong
way over little things that don't really matter, but that irritate like
blazes. I've talked about it with mother. She used to think I was the
sort of chap who'd do what Uncle Peter did. Uncle Peter frightened me
off that kind of thing!"
It was absurd, Henry thought, to think that all women were like Uncle
Peter's wife. Sheila was not that sort of girl at all. She would not
make a man feel ashamed!...
He broke off in the middle of his thoughts to listen to Gilbert who was
enunciating a doctrine that was new to Henry.
"There are aristocrats and there are plebs," said Gilbert, "and they
won't mingle. That's all about it. I believe that the majority of the
working people are different from us, not only in their habits ...
that's nothing ... just the veneer ... but in their nature. We've been
achieved somehow ... evolution and that sort of thing ... because they
needed people to look after them and direct them and control them. We're
as different from working people as a race-horse is from a cart-horse.
Things that are quite natural to us are simply finicky fussy things to
them. I wish to God talking like this didn't make a fellow feel like a
prig!..."
He broke off almost angrily.
"Let's go out," he said. "I want to smoke!"
"But it's true all the same," he went on when they got outside, almost
as if he had not broken his speech. "Whether we tried for it or not,
we've got people separated into groups, and we'll never get them out of
them. Some of us are servants and some of us are bosses, and we've
developed natures like that, and we can't get away from them!" Henry
reminded them of men who had climbed from low positions to high
positions. "They're the accidents," Gilbert went on. "They prove
nothing, and I'm certain that if you could go back into their ancestry,
you'd find they sprang from people like us, who had somehow slithered
down until the breed told and a turn up was taken!..."
They argued round and round the subject, admitting here, denying
there....
"Anyhow," Gilbert ended, "it is true that a man who marries a village
girl makes a mistake, isn't it?"
"Not always," Henry replied.
"Nearly always," said Gilbert.
"Uncle Peter made a mistake anyhow," Ninian said.
6
He went to his room, pleading that he was tired, to write his letter to
Sheila before dinner. As he was going upstairs, Mary began to descend,
and he saw that her look was brighter.
"Go back," she called to him, waving her hand as if to thrust him down
the stairs again. "It's unlucky to pass people on the stairs. Don't you
know that?"
He descended again as she bade him, laughing as he did so, and waited
until she had come down.
"Mother's much better now," she said when she had reached his side.
"She's coming down to dinner."
"I'm awfully glad," he replied. He hesitated for a second or two,
standing with one foot on the last step of the stairs. "I say, Mary," he
said.
"Yes, Quinny!" she answered, turning to him.
So she had not forgotten that she had called him by his nick-name.
"I say, Mary," he said again, still undecided as to whether he should
speak his mind or not.
"Yes?" she repeated.
He went up a step or two of the stairs. "Oh, I don't know," he
exclaimed. "I only wanted to say how nice it is to be here again!"
"Oh, yes!" Mary said, and he imagined that her tone was one of
disappointment.
"I'll be down presently," he went on, and then he ran up the stairs to
his room.
"I don't know," he said to himself, as he closed his door. "I'm damned
if I know!"
He sat down at the writing-table and spread a sheet of notepaper in
front of him. "I wish I knew!..." he murmured, and he wrote down the
date. "Mary is awfully nice, and I like her of course, but Sheila!..."
He put the pen down again and sat back in his chair and stared out of
the window. Out in the farmyard, he could hear the men bedding the
horses, and there was a clatter of cans from the dairy where the women
were turning the milk into cream. He could hear a horse whinnying in its
stall ... and as he listened he seemed to see Sheila, as he had seen her
on her uncle's farm before he had failed in courage, standing outside
the byre with a crock in her hands and a queer, teasing look in her
eyes. "You're the quare wee fella!" she was saying, and then, "I like
you quaren well!..."
He seized the pen again and began to write.
7
He had almost finished the letter when Gilbert knocked on his door and
shouted, "Can I come in, Quinny?"
He put the letter under the blotting paper, and called, "Yes, Gilbert!"
in reply.
"Aren't you ready yet?" Gilbert asked.
"No, not yet, but I won't be long changing!"
"Righto!" said Gilbert, going to the other window and looking across the
fields. "Rum go about Ninian's uncle, isn't it?" he said, playing with
the tassle of the blind.
"Eh?" said Henry.
"There must be something low in a man who marries a woman like that,
don't you think?"
"Oh, I don't know. Why should there be?"
"Obvious, isn't it? I mean, there can't be much in common otherwise, can
there? Unless the man's a sentimental ass. It's as if you or I were to
marry one of the girls out there in the yard, milking the cows. She'd be
awfully useful for that job ... milking cows ... but you wouldn't want
her to be doing it all the time. It depends, I suppose, on what you want
to do. If you've got any ambition!..."
He did not finish the sentence, but Henry understood and nodded his head
as if he agreed with him.
"I must trot off," Gilbert said suddenly, going towards the door. "I'm
keeping you!..." He paused with his fingers on the handle of the door.
"I say, Quinny," he said, "do you know anything about women?"
"No, not much," Henry answered. "Do you?"
"No. Funny, isn't it?" he replied, and then he went out of the room.
Henry sat still for a moment, staring at the closed door, and then
turned back to the writing-table and took the letter to Sheila from
beneath the blotting-paper. He read it through and sat staring at it
until the writing became a dancing blur.... He got up, carrying the
letter in his hand, and went to the door and opened it. He tried to call
"Gilbert!" but the name came out in a whisper, and before he could call
again, he heard the noise of laughter and then the sound of a young
voice singing. Mary was downstairs, teasing Ninian. He could hear
Ninian, half laughing, half growling, as he shouted, "Don't be an old
ass, Mary!"
He shut the door and went back to the writing-table, still holding the
letter in his hand, and while he stood there, a gong was sounded in the
hall.
"Lord!" he said, "I shall have to hurry!" and he tore up the letter and
put it in the waste-paper basket.
8
They passed their time in bathing and boating and walking, and sometimes
Mary was with them, but mostly she was not. They went out in the
mornings, soon after breakfast, taking food with them, and seldom
returned until the evening. They took long tramps to Honiton and Lyme
Regis and Sidmouth, and once they walked to Exeter and returned home by
train. Mary liked boating and bathing, but she did not care for walking,
and the distances they travelled were beyond her strength; and so it
came about that gradually, during Henry's stay at Boveyhayne, she ceased
to take part in their outings. It seemed odd to him that she did not
make any reference to their love-making. She called him "Quinny" and was
friendly enough, but she called Gilbert by his Christian name and was as
friendly with him as she was with Henry. He felt hurt when he thought of
her indifference to him. "You'd think she'd forgotten about it!" he said
to himself one evening when he was sitting alone with her in the garden,
and he oscillated between the desire to ignore her and the desire to
have it out with her; but he dallied so long between one desire and the
other that Gilbert and Ninian and Mrs. Graham had joined them before he
had made a decision. He could not understand Mary. She seemed to have
grown shy and quiet and much less demonstrative than she had been when
he first knew her.
"Mary's growing up," Mrs. Graham said to him one evening, irrelevantly;
and of course she was, but she had not grown up so much that there
should be all this difference between Mary now and Mary then.
"Oh, well!" he generally concluded when his thoughts turned to her,
"she's only a kid!"
And sometimes that explanation seemed to satisfy him. There were other
times when it failed to satisfy him, and he told himself that Mary was
justly cold to him because he had not been loyal to their compact. He
had not answered her letters and he had made love to Sheila Morgan. "I
suppose," he said to himself, "I'd be at Ballymartin now, making love to
Sheila, if it hadn't been for that horse!"
He tried on several occasions to talk to Mary about her unanswered
letter, to invent some explanation of his neglect, but always he failed
to say anything, too nervous to begin, too afraid of being snubbed, too
eager to leave the explanation over until the next day; and so he never
"had it out" with her.
"I am a fool!" he would say to himself in angry rebuke, but even while
he was reproaching himself, his mind was devising an excuse for his
behaviour. "We're really too young," he would add. "It's silly of me to
think of this sort of thing at all, and Mary's still a schoolgirl!..."
"I'll just say something to her before I go away," he thought.
"Something that will ... explain everything!"
Then Mr. Quinn wrote to him to say that he was in London on business. He
was anxious that Henry should come to town so that they could return to
Ireland together. "We'll go to Dublin," he wrote, "and I'll leave you
there. You needn't come to Ballymartin until the end of the first term."
He felt strangely chilled by his father's letter. This jolly holiday at
Boveyhayne was to be the end of one life, and the journey to Dublin was
to be the beginning of another; and he did not wish to end the one life
or begin the other. He could feel growing within him, an extraordinary
hatred of Trinity College, and he almost wrote to his father to say that
he would rather not go to a University at all than go to T. C. D. It was
cruel, he told himself, to separate him from his friends and compel him
to go to a college that meant nothing on earth to him.
"I shan't know any one there," he said to Gilbert and Ninian, "and I
probably won't want to know any one. It's a hole, that's what it is, a
rotten hole. If the dons were any good, they'd be at Oxford or
Cambridge!..."
"You're not much of a patriot," Ninian said.
"I don't want to be a damned patriot. I want to be with people I like. I
don't see why I should be compelled to go and live with a lot of people
I don't know and don't care about, just because I'm Irish and they're
Irish, when I really want to be with you and Gilbert and Roger.... I
haven't seen Roger since I left Rumpell's and I don't suppose I shall
see him for a long time!"
Gilbert tried to mock him out of his anger. "This emotion does you
credit, young Quinny!" he said, "and we are touched, Ninian and I.
Aren't we, Ninian! But you must be a man, Quinny! Four years hence, we
shall all meet in London, _Deo volente_, and we'll be able to compare
the education of Ireland with the education of England. Oh, Lordy God, I
sometimes wish we hadn't got minds at all. I think it must be lovely to
be a cow ... nothing to do but chew the damned cud all day. No soul to
consider, no mind to improve, no anything!..."
Gilbert and he left Boveyhayne together, but Gilbert was only going as
far as Templecombe with him, where he was to change on his way to
Cheltenham. Ninian and Mary saw them off at Whitcombe, and when he
remembered the circumstances in which she had seen him off before, Henry
had a longing to take hold of her arm and lead her to the end of the
platform, as he had done then, and tell her that he was sorry for
everything and beg her to start again where they had left off that day
... but Gilbert was there and Ninian was there, and there was no
opportunity, and the train went off, leaving the explanation unmade.
9
"Good-bye, Quinny!" Gilbert said at Templecombe.
"Good-bye, Gilbert!" Henry answered in a low tone.
"I suppose you'll write to me some day?"
"I suppose so. Yes, of course!..."
"Ripping day, isn't it? Shame to be wasting it in a blooming train!"
"Yes!"
He wished that the train would break down so that he need not part from
Gilbert yet, but while he was wishing, it began to move. Gilbert stood
back from the carriage and waved his hand to him, and Henry leant with
his head through the window of his carriage, smiling....
"Damn Trinity," he said, sitting back in his seat, and letting
depression envelop him. "Damn and blast Trinity!..."