1
Henry Quinn climbed into a carriage at Amiens Street station and sat
back in his seat and puffed with pleasure, blowing out his breath with a
long "poo-ing" sound. He was quit of Trinity College at last! Thank God,
he was quit of it at last! The hatred with which he had entered Trinity
had, in his four years of graduation, been mitigated ... there were even
times when he had kindly thoughts of Trinity ... but every letter he
received from Gilbert Farlow or Ninian Graham or Roger Carey stirred the
resentment he felt at his separation from his friends who had gone to
Cambridge, and so, in spite of the kindlier feeling he now had for the
College, he was happy to think that he was quitting it for the last
time. "But it isn't Irish," he insisted when his father complained of
his lack of love for Trinity. "It's ... it's a hermaphrodite of a
college, neither one thing nor another, English nor Irish. I always
feel, when I step out of College Green into Trinity, that I've stepped
right out of Ireland and landed on the point of a rock in the middle of
the Irish Sea ... and the point pricks and is damned uncomfortable!"
"You've got the English habit of damning everything, Henry!" his father
replied at a tangent.
But Henry would not be drawn away from his argument.
"The atmosphere of the place is all wrong," he went on. "The Provost
looks down the side of his nose at you if he thinks you take an interest
in Ireland!"
Mr. Quinn, in his eagerness to defend his College from reproaches which
he knew to be deserved, reminded Henry that the Provost had a
considerable reputation as a Greek scholar, but his effort only
delivered him more completely into Henry's hands.
"But, father," Henry said, "you yourself used to say what's the good of
knowing all about Greece when you don't know anything about Ireland. I
don't care about Greece and all those rotten little holes in the Aegean
... that's dead and done with ... but I do care about Ireland which
isn't dead and done with!"
It was then that Mr. Quinn found consolation. "Well, anyway, you've
learned to love Ireland," he said. "Trinity's done that much for you!"
"Trinity hasn't done it for me," Henry answered, "I did it for myself."
Lying back in his seat, waiting for the train to steam out of the
station on its journey to Belfast, Henry remembered that conversation
with his father, and his mind speculated freely on his attitude towards
Trinity. "I don't care," he said, "if I never put my foot inside the
gates again!"
Something that Patrick Galway said to him once, when he and John Marsh
were talking of Trinity, came back to his memory. "The College is living
on Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke," Galway said, and added, "It's
like a maiden lady in a suburb giving herself airs because her
great-grandfather knew somebody who was great. It hasn't produced a man
who's done anything for Ireland, except harm, not in the last hundred
years anyhow. Lawyers and parsons and officials, that's the best Trinity
can do! If you think of the Irishmen who've done anything fine for
Ireland, you'll find that, when they came from universities at all, they
came from Oxford or Cambridge, anywhere on God's earth but Trinity.
Horace Plunkett was at Oxford...."
"Eton, too!" Marsh had interjected.
"Yes, Eton!" Galway went on. "Think of it! An Irish patriot coming from
Eton where you'd think only Irish oppressors would come from! If
Plunkett had been educated in an Irish school and sent to Trinity, do
you think he'd have done anything decent for Ireland?"
"Yes," Henry had replied promptly. "He's that kind of man!"
"No, he wouldn't," Galway retorted. "They'd have educated the decency
out of him, and he'd have been a ... a sort of Lord Ashtown!"
But Henry would have none of that. He would not believe that a man's
nature can be altered by pedagogues.
"Horace Plunkett would have been a good Irishman if he'd been born and
reared and educated in an Orange Lodge," he said.
"I'm not talking about natures," Galway replied. "I'm talking about
beliefs. They'd have told him it was no good trying to build up an Irish
nation...."
"He wouldn't have believed them," Henry retorted. "Damn it, Galway, do
you think a man like Plunkett would let a lot of fiddling schoolmasters
knock him off his balance?"
"I'm a schoolmaster," Galway answered, "and I know what schoolmasters
can do!" His voice changed, deepening, as he spoke. "I know what the
young teachers in Ireland mean to do!"
"What do they mean to do?" Henry had asked jokingly.
"Make Irishmen," Galway answered.
"If only Trinity would make Irishmen," he went on, "we'd all be saved a
deal of trouble. But it won't, and when a man of family, like Plunkett,
is born with good will for Ireland, he has to go to England to be
educated. And he ought to be educated in Ireland, and he would be if
Trinity were worth a damn. I wish I were Provost, I'd teach Irishmen to
be proud of their birth!"
"Well, when we've made Ireland a nation," said Henry, chaffing him,
"we'll make you Provost of Trinity!" and Galway, though he knew that
Henry was jesting, smiled with pleasure.
"When Ireland is a nation!" Marsh murmured dreamily.
2
It was extraordinary, Henry thought, how little at home he had felt in
Dublin. He had the feel of Ballymartin in his bones. He had kinship with
the people in Belfast. At Rumpell's and at Boveyhayne he had had no
sensation of alien origin. He had stepped into the life of the school as
naturally as Gilbert Farlow had done, and at Boveyhayne, even when he
still had difficulty in catching the dialect of the fishermen, he had
felt at home. But in Dublin, he had an uneasy feeling that after all, he
was a stranger. In his first year at Trinity, he had been brutally
contemptuous of the city and its inhabitants. "They can't even put up
the names of the streets so that people can read them," he said to John
Marsh soon after he arrived in Dublin. "They're so _damned_
incompetent!" And Marsh had told him to control his Ulster blood.
"You're right to be proud of Ulster," he had said, "but you oughtn't to
go about talking as if the rest of Ireland were inhabited by fools!"
"I know I oughtn't," Henry replied, "but I can't help it when I see the
way these asses are letting Dublin down!"
That was how he felt about Dublin and the Dublin people, that Dublin was
being "let down" by her citizens. His first impression of the city was
that it was noble, even beautiful, in spite of its untidiness, its
distress. He would wander about the streets, gazing at the fine old
Georgian houses, tumbling into decay, and feel so much anger against the
indifferent citizens that sometimes he felt like hitting the first
Dublin man he met ... hitting him hard so that he should bleed!...
"I feel as if Dublin were like an old mansion left by a drunken lord in
the charge of a drunken caretaker," he said to Marsh. "It's horrible to
see those beautiful houses decaying, but it's more horrible to think
that nobody cares!"
Marsh had taken him one Sunday to a house where there were ceilings
that were notable even in Dublin which is full of houses with beautiful
ceilings.
"If we had houses like that in Belfast," Henry had said, as they came
away, "we wouldn't let them become slums!"
"No," retorted Marsh, unable to restrain himself from sneering, "you'd
make peep-shows out of them and charge for admission!"
"Well, that would be better than turning them into slums," Henry
answered good-humouredly.
"Would it?" Marsh replied.
"_Would it?_" Henry wondered. The train was now on its way to Belfast,
and, looking idly out of the window, he could see the waves of the Irish
Sea breaking on the sands at Malahide, heaving suddenly into a
glassy-green heap, and then tumbling over into a sprawl of white foam.
Would it? he wondered, thinking again of what Marsh had said about the
Georgian houses with their wide halls and lovely Adams ceilings. There
was no beauty of building at all in Belfast, and no one there seemed
anxious that there should be: in all that city, so full of energy and
purpose and grit and acuteness of mind, there did not appear to be one
man of power who cared for the fine shape or the good look of things;
but, after all, was that so very much worse than the state of mind of
the Dublin people who, knowing what beauty is, carelessly let it decay?
He began to feel bitterly about Ireland and her indifference to culture
and beauty. He told himself that Ireland was the land of people who do
not care....
"They've got to be made to care!" he said aloud.
But how was it to be done?...
His sense of being an alien in Dublin had persisted all the time that he
had lived there. The Dublin people were gregarious and garrulous, and he
was solitary and reflective. Marsh and Galway had taken him to houses
where people met and talked without stopping, and much conversation with
miscellaneous, casually-encountered people bored Henry. He had no gift
for ready talk and he disliked crowds and he was unable to carry on
a conversation with people whom he did not know, of whose very names he
was ignorant. Sometimes, he had envied Marsh and Galway because of the
ease with which they could converse with strangers. Marsh would talk
about himself and his poems and his work with an innocent vanity that
made people like him; but Henry, self-conscious and shy, could not talk
of himself or his intentions to any but his intimates. Sitting here, in
this carriage, from which, even now, he could see in the distance,
veiled in clouds, the high peaks of the Mourne mountains, he tried to
explain this difference between Marsh and himself. Why was it that these
Dublin men were so lacking in reticence, so eager to communicate, while
he and Ulstermen were reserved and eager to keep silent? He set his
problem in those terms. He identified himself as a type of the
Ulsterman, and began to develop a theory, flattering to himself, to
account for the difference between Dublin people and Ulstermen ... until
he remembered that Ernest Harper was an Ulsterman. Mr. Quinn had taken
Henry to see Harper on the first Sunday evening after they had arrived
in Dublin from England, and Harper had received him very charmingly and
had talked to him about nationality and co-operation and the Irish drama
and the strange inability of Lady Gregory to understand that it was not
she who had founded the Abbey Theatre, until Henry, who had never heard
of Lady Gregory, began to feel tired. He had waited patiently for a
chance to interpolate something into the monologue until hope began to
leave him, and then, with a great effort he had interrupted the flow of
Harper's vivid talk and had made a reference to a picture hanging on the
wall beside him. It showed a flaming fairy in the middle of a dark
wood....
"Oh, yes," Harper said, "that's the one I saw!"
"You saw?" Henry had exclaimed in astonishment.
And then he remembered that Harper spoke of fairies as intimately as
other men speak of their friends....
"Good God!" he thought, "_where am I?_" and wondered what Ninian Graham
would make of Ernest Harper.
Harper was an Ulsterman, and so was George Russell, whom people called
"A. E." Marsh and Galway, now almost inseparable, had taken Henry to
hear George Russell speaking on some mystical subject at the Hermetic
Club, and Henry, bewildered by the subject, had felt himself
irresistibly attracted to the fiery-eyed man who spoke with so little
consciousness of his audience. After the meeting was ended, he had
walked part of the way home with Russell and had listened to him as he
said the whole of his lecture over again ... and he left him with a
feeling that Russell was unaware of human presences, that the company of
human beings was not necessary to him, that his speech was addressed,
not to the visible audience or the visible companion, but to an audience
or a companion that no one but himself could see. Was there any one on
earth less like the typical Ulsterman than George Russell, who preached
mysticism and better business, or Ernest Harper who took penny tramrides
to pay visits to the fairies?
No, this theory of some inherent difference between Ulstermen and other
Irishmen would not work. There must be some other explanation of Henry's
dislike of crowds, his silence in large companies, his inability to
assert himself in the presence of strangers. Why was it that he was
unable to talk about himself and the things he had done and the things
he meant to do as Marsh talked? It was not because he was more modest,
had more humility, than Marsh; for in his heart, Henry was vain.... And
while he was asking himself this question, suddenly he found the answer.
It was because he was afraid to talk about himself, it was because he
had not got the courage to be vain and self-assertive in crowds. His
inability to talk among strangers, to make people cease their own
conversation in order to listen to him, was part of that cowardice that
had prevented him from diving into the sea when he went with his father
to swim at Cushendall and had sent him shivering into the shelter of
the hedge when the runaway horse came galloping down the Ballymena
road....
This swift, lightning revelation made him stand up in the carriage and
gape at the photographs of Irish scenery in front of him.
"Oh, my God!" he said to himself, "am I always to be tortured like
this?"
4
He sat back in his seat and lay against the cushions without moving. He
saw himself now very clearly, for he had the power to see himself with
the closest fidelity. He knew now that all his explanations were
excuses, that the bitter things he had sometimes said of those who had
qualities which he had not, were invented to prevent him from admitting
that he was without courage. Any fight, mental or physical, unnerved him
when it brought him into personal contact with his opponents. He could
write wounding things to a man, but he could not say them to him without
losing possession of himself and his tongue; and so he passed from the
temper of a cool antagonist to that of an enraged shrew. He had tried to
explain the garrulity of the Dublin people by saying that they were
obliged to talk and to persist in talking because "otherwise they'd
start to think!" but he knew now that that was not an accurate
explanation, that it was an ill-natured attempt to cover up his own lack
of force.
"And that's worse than cowardice," he said to himself, "to excuse my own
funkiness by pretending that courage isn't courage!"
He remembered that he had invented a bitter phrase about Yeats one night
when he had seen the poet in a house in Dublin. "Yeats is behaving as if
he were the archangel Gabriel making the Annunciation!" he had said, and
the man to whom he had said it had laughed and asked what Henry thought
Yeats was announcing.
"A fresh revision of one of his lyrics," he had replied....
"And I'd give the world," he said now, "to be able to put on his
pontifical air!"
He had a shrinking will; his instinct in an emergency was to back away
from things. He had not got the capacity to compel men to do his bidding
by the simple force of his personality. If he succeeded in persuading
people to do things which he suggested to them he was only able to do so
after prolonged discussion, sometimes only after everything else had
failed. At Rumpell's, Gilbert had made suggestions as if they were
commands that must instantly be obeyed ... and they had been instantly
obeyed; but when Henry made suggestions, either people did not listen to
them or, having listened to them, they acted on some other suggestion,
until at last, Henry, disheartened, seldom proposed anything until the
last moment, and then he made his proposal in a way which seemed to
indicate that he thought little of it; and when some of his suggestions
were accepted and had proved, in practice, to be good, his attitude had
been, not that of the man who is absolutely sure of himself, but rather
of the man who gasps with relief because something that he thought was
very likely to be a failure, had proved to be a success.
Depression settled on him so heavily that he began to believe that he
was bound to fail in everything that he undertook to do, and when he
thought of the bundle of manuscript in his portmanteau, he had a sudden
inclination to take it out and fling it through the window of the
carriage. He had not spoken of his writing to any one except John Marsh,
and to him, he had only said that he intended to write a novel some day.
Once, indeed, he had said, "I've written quite a lot of that novel I
told you about!" but Marsh, intent on something else, had answered
vaguely, "Oh, yes!" and had changed the conversation, leaving Henry to
imagine that he had little faith in his power to write. He had been so
despondent after that, that he had gone back to College and, having
re-read what he had written, had torn the manuscript in pieces and
thrown it into the grate because it seemed so dull and tasteless. He had
not written a word after that for more than a month, and he might not
have written anything for a longer period had he not heard from Gilbert
Farlow that he had finished a comedy in three acts and had sent it to
Mr. Alexander. The news stimulated him, and in a little while he was
itching to write again. In the evening, he began to re-write the story
and thereafter it went on, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, until it
was finished. His feelings about it changed with remarkable rapidity. He
read it over, in its unfinished state, many times, feeling at one time
it was excellent, and at another time that it was poor, flatulent stuff,
without colour or vivacity.
Writing did not give pleasure to him: it gave him pain. He felt none of
that exultation in creating characters which he had been told was part
of the pleasures of an author. There were times, indeed, when he felt a
mitigated joy in writing because his ideas were fluent and words fell
easily off his pen, but even on those occasions, the labour of writing
hurt him and exhausted him. The times of pleasurable writing were short
interludes between the long stretches of painful writing, little oases
that made the journey across the desert just possible. And then there
were those periods of appalling misery when, having ended a chapter, he
wondered what he should make his people do next. He would leave them,
landed neatly at the end of some adventure or emotional crisis, feeling
that the story was going on splendidly and that his power to write was
full and strong, and then, having written the number of the next
chapter, he would reach forward to write the first word ... and suddenly
there was devastation in his mind, and "My God! I don't know what to
make them do now!" he would say.
He had read in a literary journal that some authors planned their
stories before they began to write them. They prepared a summary of the
tale, and then enlarged the summary. They knew exactly what was to
happen in each chapter. A character could not move or rise or sit down
or turn pale or look pleased without the author having known about it
long before the act was performed. It was as if the author could count
the very hairs on the heads of his people. "Just like God!" Henry had
said to himself when he had finished reading the article.... He had
tried to make a plan, and, after much labour, had completed one; but it
was useless to him, for when he came to write out the story, his
characters kicked it aside and insisted on behaving in some other way
than he had planned that they should behave. It was as if they had taken
their destinies into their own hands and insisted on living their lives
in accordance with their own wishes instead of living them in accordance
with his.... It was fortunate then that he began to read "Tristram
Shandy," for when he saw how Sterne's pen, refusing to obey him, had
filled some of his pages with curly lines and dots and confusions, had
even declined to fill a chapter at all, impudently skipping it, he
realised that authors are but creatures in the hands of some force that
wills them to create things which they cannot control and sometimes
cannot understand.
Writing his book had given him one pleasure. On the day on which he
wrote the last word of it, he felt joy. Before he began to write, he had
read in Forster's "Life of Dickens" that the great novelist had parted
from his characters with pain. Henry parted from his characters with
pleasure. "Thank God," he said, as he put down his pen, "I've finished
with the brutes!"
He had enjoyed reading the story in its finished state, and when he had
packed the manuscript into his portmanteau, he had felt that the story
was good, and had sat in a chair dreaming of the success it would make
and the praise he would receive for it. He tried to calculate the number
of copies that would be sold, basing his calculations on the total
population of the British Isles. "There are over forty millions of
people in England and Wales alone," he said to himself, "and another
ten millions, say, in Scotland and Ireland ... about fifty millions in
all. I ought to sell a good many copies ... and then there's America!"
He thought that ten per cent. of the population might buy the story, and
believed that his estimate was modest until he remembered that ten per
cent. of fifty millions is five millions!...
And that made him laugh. Even he, in his wildest imaginings, did not
dream of selling five million copies of his novel.
5
He wished now that he had asked John Marsh and Patrick Galway to read
the story and tell him what they thought of it. They were honest men,
and would criticise his work frankly. At that moment, he had an
insatiable longing to know the truth, mingled with a strange fear of
knowing it. What he wished to know was whether or not he had the
potentialities of a great author in him. He knew that his story was not
commonplace stuff, but he was afraid that it might only be middling
writing, and he did not wish to be a middling writer. If he could not be
a great writer, he did not wish to be a writer at all. There were
thousands and thousands of novels in the world which did no more for men
than enable them to put their minds to sleep. Henry did not wish to add
a book to their number. There were other books, fewer in number than
those, which showed that their authors had some feeling for life, but
not enough, and these authors went on, year after year, producing one or
more novels, each of which "showed promise," but never showed
achievement. The life these men pursued always eluded them. It was
impossible for Henry to join the crowd of people who produced books
which perished with the generation that they pleased. That much he knew.
But he was eager that he should not fall into the ranks of the
semi-great, the half-clever; and his fear was that his place was in
their midst.
While he was ruminating in this manner, he remembered that Gilbert
Farlow had written to him a few days before he left Dublin, and he
ceased to think of his career as a writer and began to search his
pockets for Gilbert's letter.
"I'll show the manuscript to Gilbert," he said to himself. "Old Gilbert
loves telling people the truth!"
He found the letter and began to read it. "_Quinny_," it began, for
Gilbert had abandoned "dears" because, he said, he sometimes had to
write to people who were detestable:
_"Quinny: How soon can you get quit of that barrack in Dublin where your
misguided father thinks you are being taught to be Irish? Cast your eyes
on the address at the head of this notepaper. It is a noble house that
Roger and I have discovered. Ninian has seen it and he approves of it. I
said I'd break his blighted neck for him if he disapproved of it, which
may have had something to do with his decision, though not much, for
Ninian has become a very muscular young fellow and I shouldn't have
liked the job of breaking his neck very much. Roger and I have been here
for a week now, and Ninian joins us at the end of the month. He's down
at Boveyhayne at present, catching lobsters and sniffing the air, all of
which he says is very good for him and would be better for me. And you.
And Roger. There is a tablet on the front wall of the house, fixed by
the London County Council, which says that Lord Thingamabob used to live
here sometime in the eighteenth century. The landlord tried to raise the
rent on that account, but we said we were Socialists and would expect
the rent to be decreased because of the injury to our principles caused
by residence in a house that had been inhabited by a member of the
cursed, bloated and effete aristocracy. He begged our pardon and said
that in the circumstances, he wouldn't charge anything extra, but he had
us in the end, the mouldy worm, for he said that it was the custom to
make Socialists pay a quarter's rent in advance. The result was that
Roger had to stump up ... I couldn't for I was broke ... which made dear
little Roger awfully unpleasant to live with for a whole day. I offered
to go back and tell the man that we weren't Socialists at all, but
Improved Tories, but he said I'd done enough harm. It's a pity that old
Roger hasn't got a better sense of humour._
_We have chosen two rooms for you, one to work in, and the other to
sleep in. We're each to have two rooms, so that we can go and be morose
in comfort if we want to; but I daresay in the evenings we'll want to be
together. I've thought out a scheme of decoration for your room--all
pink rosebuds and stuff like that. Roger asked me not to be an ass when
I told him of it. His notion is a nice quiet distemper. Perhaps you'd
better see to the decoration yourself although I must say I always
thought your taste was perfectly damnable._
_By-the-way, there's a ghost in this house. It's supposed to be the
ghost of Lord Thingamabob, and I believe it is. I saw it myself three
nights ago, and it was as drunk as a fiddler. My God, Quinny, it's a
terrible thing to see an intoxicated spook. Roger wouldn't believe me
when I told him about it afterwards. He said I was drunk myself and that
he heard me tumbling up the stairs to bed. Which is a lie. I did see it,
and it was drunk. I heard it hiccough! I wouldn't say it was drunk if it
wasn't. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, Quinny, and it would be a very dirty
trick to slander a poor bogey that can't defend itself. It looked very
like its descendant, Lord Middleweight, and it had the same soppy grin
that he has when he thinks he's said something clever. Damned ass, that
chap!_
_Alexander sent my comedy back. He sent a note along with it and told me
what a clever lad I am and more or less hinted that when I've grown up,
I can send him another play. I suppose he thinks I'm a kid in
knickerbockers. The result of this business is that I'm going to try and
get a job as a dramatic critic. If I do, God help the next play he
produces. I'm a hurt man, and I shall let the world know about it. I'm
half-way through another piece which will take some place by storm, I
hope. It's a very bright play, much better than the muck Oscar Wilde
wrote, not so melodramatic, and tons better than anything Bernard Shaw
has written. It's all about me._
_We've got an old woman called Clutters to housekeep for us. I chose her
on account of her name, and it is a piece of good luck that she cooks
extraordinarily well. There is also a maid, but we don't know her name,
so we call her Magnolia. I'm really writing all this rot to get myself
into the "twitter-twitter" mood. One of the characters in my new comedy
talks like a character in a book by E. F. Benson, and I have to work
myself up into a state of babbling fatuity before I can write her lines
for her._
_Come to London as soon as you can._
_Gilbert."_
6
The prospect of settling in London in the society of his schoolfriends
pleased him. Marsh and Galway had tried to persuade him to make his home
in Dublin, pleading that it was the duty of every educated Irishman to
live in Ireland. "We haven't got many educated men on our side," Marsh
said, "not a hundred in the whole of Ireland, and we need people like
you!" They talked of political schemes that must be prepared for the
parliament that would some day be re-established in College Green. "And
they can only be prepared by educated men," Marsh said.
Henry would not listen to them. His longing was to be with Gilbert and
Roger and Ninian in London. Dublin made very little appeal to him, and
the job of regenerating Ireland was so immense that it frightened him.
"I haven't got a common ground with you people," he said to Marsh and
Galway. "You're Catholic to start off with, and I'm like my father, I
think the Catholic religion is a contemptible religion. And you're not
interested in anything but Ireland and the Gaelic movement. I'm
interested in everything!"
"Don't you want to do _anything_ for Ireland then?" John Marsh had
asked.
"Oh, yes! I'll vote for Home Rule when I get a vote," he had replied.
"I know what your end will be," Patrick Galway added in a sullen voice.
"You'll become a Chelsea Nationalist ... willing to do anything for
Ireland but live in it!"
Well, who would want to live in Ireland with its penny-farthing
politics! London for him! London and a sense of bigness, of wide ideas
and the constant interplay of many minds!
He would talk to his father about Gilbert's proposal. There would be all
sorts of subjects to discuss with him, that and the question of an
allowance and the question of a career....
The train ran swiftly through the suburbs of Belfast and presently
pulled up at the terminus. He descended from his carriage and called a
jarvey who drove him across the city to the Northern Counties station
where he took train again. It was late that night when he arrived at
Ballymartin.