1
Mr. Quinn died at Christmas. The old man, weakened by his long illness,
had been stunned by the War, and when his second illness seized him, he
made no effort to resist it. He would lie very quietly for a long while,
and then a paroxysm of fury would possess him, and he would shake his
fist impotently in the air. "If they wanted a war," he shouted once,
"why didn't they go and fight it themselves. They were paid to keep the
peace, and ... and!..."
He fell back on his pillow, exhausted, and when Henry, hurrying up the
stairs to him the moment he heard the shout, reached him, he was gasping
for breath. "It's all right, son!" he said when he had recovered
himself. "It's all right!..."
"It's foolish of you, father, to agitate yourself like that," Henry said
to him, putting his arms round him and lifting him into a more
comfortable position.
"I can't help it, Henry, when I think of ... of all the young lads!...
By God, they'd no right to do it!..."
"Hush, father!..."
"They'd no right to do it! You'd think they were greedy for blood ...
young men's blood!" He pointed to an English newspaper lying on the
floor. "Did you read that paper?" he said.
"Yes."
"Houndin' them into it," the old man went on. "Yellin' for young men! By
God, I'd be ashamed ... parsons an' women an' old men that can't fight
themselves, houndin' young men into it! If they'd any decency, they'd
shut up...."
"All right, father!"
"The man that owns this paper ... whatshisname!..."
"It doesn't matter, does it? Lie still and be quiet!"
"I can't be quiet. Like a damned big monster, yellin' for boys to eat.
Has he any childher, will you tell me?..."
"I don't know, father!"
"Of course he hasn't. An' here he is, yelpin' in his damned rag every
day, 'Fee-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a young man!' Why don't they
shove him at the Front ... the very front!"
"You must keep quiet, father!"
"All right, Henry, all right!"
He was silent for a few minutes, and then he began again, in a quieter
voice. "I'd have put the men that made it, the whole lot of them, in the
front rank, and let them blow themselves to blazes. Old men sittin' in
offices, an' makin' wars, an' then biddin' young men to pay the price of
them! By God, that's mean! By God, that's low!..."
"But old men couldn't bear the strain of it, father!" Henry interjected,
and he recalled some of the horrors of the trenches where the soldiers
had stood with the water reaching to their waists; but Mr. Quinn
insisted that the old men should have fought the war they made.
"Who cares a damn whether they can bear it or not," he said. "Let 'em
die, damn 'em! They're no good!" He turned quickly to Henry, and
demanded, "What good are they? Tell me that now!" but before Henry could
make an answer to him, he went off insistently, "They're no good, I tell
you. I know well what they're like ... sittin' in their clubs, yappin'
an' yappin' an' demandin' this an' demandin' that, an' gettin' on one
another's nerves; an' whatever happens it's not them that suffers for
it: it's the young lads that pays for everything. Look at the way the
old fellows go on in Parliament, Henry! By God, I want to vomit when I
read about them! Yappin' an' yappin' when they should be down on their
knees beggin' God's forgiveness...."
He spoke as if he were not himself an old man, and it did not seem
strange to Henry that he should speak in that fashion, for Mr. Quinn's
spirit had always been a young spirit.
"An' these wee bitches with their white feathers," he went on, "ought to
be well skelped. If I had a daughter, an' she did a thing like that, by
God, I'd break her skull for her!"
"I suppose they think they're doing their duty, father, and they're
young!..."
"There's women at it, too. I read in the paper yesterday mornin' that
there was grown women doin' it. There's nobody has any right to bid a
man go to that except them that's been to it themselves. If the women
an' the parsons an' the old men can't fight for their country, they can
hold their tongues for it, an' by God they ought to be made to hold
them...."
He asked continually after Gilbert.
"He's a sergeant now, father. He's been offered a commission, but he
won't take it!..."
"Why?"
"Oh, one of his whimsy-whamsies, I suppose. He says the non-commissioned
officers are the backbone of the Army, and he prefers to be part of the
backbone. You remember Ninian Graham, father?"
"I do, rightly!..."
"He's come home to join. He's in the Engineers!"
Mr. Quinn did not make any answer to Henry. He slipped a little further
into the bed, and lay for a long while with his eyes closed, so long
that Henry thought he had fallen asleep; but, just when Henry began to
tiptoe from the room, he opened his eyes again, and suddenly they were
full of tears.
"The fine young fellows," he said. "The fine young lads!"
2
And at Christmas, he died. He had called Henry to him that morning, and
had enquired about "The Fennels," which had lately been published after
a postponement and much hesitation, and about the new book on which
Henry was now working.
"That's right," he said, when he heard that Henry was working steadily
on it. "It'll keep your mind from broodin'. How's the Ulster book
goin'?"
"'The Fennels'?"
"Ay. You had hard luck, son, in bringing out your best book at a time
like this, but never matter, never matter!..."
"I don't know how it's doing. It's too soon to tell yet. The reviews
have been good, but I don't suppose people are buying books at present!"
"You've done a good few now, Henry!"
"Five, father."
"Ay, I have the lot there on that ledge so's I can take them down easily
an' look at them. I feel proud of you, son ... proud of you!"
He began to remind Henry of things that had happened when he was a boy.
His mind became flooded with memories. "Do you mind Bridget Fallon?" he
would say, and then he would recall many incidents that were connected
with her. "Do you mind the way you wanted to go to Cambridge, an' I
wouldn't let you," and "Do you mind the time you took the woollen balls
from Mr. Maginn's house?...."
Henry remembered. Mr. Maginn, the vicar of Ballymartin, had invited
Henry to spend the afternoon with his nephew and niece and some other
children. They had played a game with balls made of coloured wool, and
while they were playing, Henry, liking the pattern of one of them, had
put it into his pocket. It had been missed, and there had been a search
for it, in which Henry had joined. He was miserable, and he wanted to
confess that he had the ball, but every time he opened his lips to say
that he had it, he felt afraid, and so he had refrained from speaking.
He felt, too, that every one knew that he had taken it, but still he
could not confess that he had it, and when they said, "Isn't it queer? I
wonder where it's gone!" he had answered, "Yes, isn't it queer?" They
had abandoned the search, and had played another game, but all the
pleasure of the party was lost for Henry. He kept saying to himself,
"You've got it. _You've_ got it!..."
He had hurried home after the party was over, and when he reached the
shrubbery, he dug a hole and buried the ball in it. He had closed his
eyes as he took it out of his pocket, so that he should not see the
bright colours of it, and had heaped the earth on to it as if he could
not conceal it quickly enough ... but burying it had not quieted his
mind. He felt, whenever he met Mr. Maginn, that the vicar looked at him
as if he were saying to himself, "You stole the woollen ball!...." At
the end of the month, he had gone to his father and told him of it, and
Mr. Quinn had cocked his eye at him for a moment and considered the
subject.
"If I were you, Henry," he had said, "I'd dig up that ball and take it
back to Mr. Maginn and just tell him about it!"
Henry could remember how hard it had been to do that, how he had
loitered outside the gates of the vicarage for an hour, trying to force
himself to go up to the door and ask for the vicar ... and how kind Mr.
Maginn had been when, at last, he had made his confession!
Oh, yes, he remembered!...
"You were a funny wee lad, Henry," Mr. Quinn said, taking his son's hand
in his. "Always imaginin' things!" He thought for a second or two. "I
suppose," he went on, "that's what makes you able to write books ...
imaginin' things! Ay, that's it!"
They sat in quietness for a while, and then Mr. Quinn fell asleep, and
Henry went down to the library and worked again on his new novel, for
which he had not yet found a title; and in his sleep, Mr. Quinn died.
3
Henry had finished a chapter of the book, and he put down his pen, and
yawned. He was tired, and he thought gratefully of tea. Hannah would
bring a tray to his father's room. There would be little soda farls and
toasted barn-brack, and perhaps she would have made "slim-jim," and
there would be newly-churned butter and home-made jam, which Hannah, in
her Ulster way, would call "Preserve." ...
He got up from the table and went into the hall.
"Will tea be long, Hannah?" he called down the stairs, leading to the
kitchens.
"Haven't I it near ready?" she answered.
He had gone up the staircase at a run, and had entered his father's
room, expecting to see him sitting up....
"Hilloa," he said, stopping sharply, "still asleep!" and he went out of
the room and called softly to Hannah, now coming up the stairs, to take
the tray to the library. "He's asleep, Hannah!" he said almost in a
whisper.
"He's never asleep at this hour," she answered.
And somehow, as she said that, he knew. He went back into the room and
leant over his father, listening....
"Is he dead, Master Henry?" Hannah said, as she came into the room. She
had left the tray on a table on the landing.
Henry straightened himself and turned to her. "Yes, Hannah!" he said
quietly.
The old woman threw her apron over her head and let a great cry out of
her. "Och, ochanee!" she moaned, "Och, och, ochanee!..."
4
He had none of the terror he had had when Mrs. Clutters lay dead in the
Bloomsbury house. He went into the room and stood beside his father's
body. The finely moulded face had a proud look and a great look of
peace. "I don't feel that he's dead," Henry murmured to himself. "I
shall never feel that he's dead!"
"I wasn't with him enough," he went on. "I left him alone too often...."
Extraordinarily, they had loved each other. Underneath all that
roughness of speech and violence of statement, there was great
tenderness and understanding. He spoke his mind, and more than his mind,
but he was generous and quick to retract and quicker to console. "I'm an
Ulsterman," he said once. "Ulster to the marrow, an' begod I'm proud of
it!"
"But I'm Irish too," he added, turning to John Marsh as he said it,
fearful lest he should have hurt John's feelings. "Begod, it's gran' to
be Irish. I pity the poor devils that aren't!..."
He was a great lover of life, exulting in his strength and vigour,
shouting sometimes for the joy of hearing himself shout. "And shy, too,"
Henry murmured to himself, "shy as a wren about intimate things!"
The sight of his father's placid face comforted him. One might cry over
other people, but not over _him_. Henry felt that if he were to weep for
his father, and the old man, regaining life for a moment were to open
his eyes and see him, he would shout at him, "Good God, Henry, what are
you cryin' about? Go out, man, an' get the fresh air about you!..."
He put his hand out and touched the dead man.
"All right, father!" he said aloud....
5
There was much to do after the burial, and it was not until the
beginning of the Spring that Henry left Ballymartin. He had completed
his sixth novel, and had asked that the proofs should be sent to him as
speedily as possible so that he might correct them before he left
Ireland, and while he was waiting for them, he had travelled to Dublin
for a few days, partly on business connected with his estate and partly
to see his friends. Mr. Quinn had spent a great deal of money on his
farming experiments, the more freely as he found that Henry's books
brought him an increasing income, and so Henry had decided to let the
six hundred acres which Mr. Quinn himself had farmed. At first, he had
thought of selling the land, but it seemed to him that his father would
have liked him to keep it, and so he did not do so. He settled his
affairs with his solicitors, and then returned to Ballymartin; but
before he did so, he spent an evening with John Marsh, whom he found
still keenly drilling.
"But why are you drilling now?" he asked. "This hardly seems the time to
be playing at soldiers, John!"
"I'm not playing, Henry. I _am_ a soldier!"
It was difficult to remember how many armies there were in Ireland. The
Ulster Volunteers still sulked in the North. The National Volunteers had
split. The politicians, alarmed at the growth of the Volunteer Movement
among their followers, had swooped down on the Volunteers and "captured"
them. John Marsh and Galway and their friends had seceded, and, under
the presidency of a professor of the National University, John
MacNeill, had formed a new body, called the Irish Volunteers. The
politicians, failing to understand the temper of their time, worked to
discourage the growth of the Volunteer Movement, and the result of their
efforts was that the more enthusiastic and courageous of the National
Volunteers seceded to the Irish Volunteers.
"We're growing rapidly," John said to Henry. "They're flocking out of
the Nationals into ours as hard as they can. We've got Thomas MacDonagh
and Patrick Pearse and a few others with us, and we're trying to link up
with Larkins' Citizen Army. Mineely's urging Connolly on to our side,
but Connolly's more interested in the industrial fight than in the
national fight. But I think we'll get him over!"
Their objects were to defend themselves from attack by the Ulster
Volunteers if attack were made, to raise a rebellion if the Home Rule
Bill were not passed into law, and to resist the enactment of
conscription in Ireland. The burden of their belief was still the fear
of betrayal. "But you're going to get Home Rule," Henry would say to
them, and they would answer, "We'll believe it when we see the King
opening the Parliament in College Green. Not before. We know what the
English are like...."
Henry had suggested to them that they should offer the services of their
volunteers to the Government in return for the immediate enactment of
the Bill, but they saw no hope of such an offer being accepted and
honoured. "The minute they'd got us out of the way, they'd break their
word," said Galway. "Our only hope is to stay here and make ourselves as
formidable as we can. You can't persuade the English to do the decent
thing ... you can only terrorise them into it. Look at the way the
Ulster people have frightened the wits out of them!..."
"But the Ulster people haven't frightened the wits out of them. I can't
understand you fellows! You sit here with preconceived ideas in your
heads, and you won't check them by going to see the people you're
theorising about. You keep on saying the same thing over and over again,
and you won't listen to any one who tells you that you've got hold of
the wrong end of the stick!..."
"My dear Henry," said John, "our history is enough for us. Even since
the war, the English have tried to belittle the Irish. They've done the
most inept, small things to annoy us. They'd have got far more men from
Ireland than they have done, if they 'd behaved decently; but they
couldn't. They simply couldn't do the decent thing to Ireland. That's
their nature.... I'd have gone myself!..."
"You?"
"Yes. I think the Germans are in the wrong. I think they've behaved
badly, and anyhow, I don't like their theory of life. But the English
couldn't treat us properly. We wanted an Irish Division, with Irish
officers, and Irish colours, and Irish priests ... but no! They actually
stopped some women in the South from making an Irish flag for the Irish
regiments!... What are you to do with people like that. If they aren't
treacherous, they're so stupid that it's impossible to do anything with
them, and we'd much better be separate from them!"
"I should have thought that Belgium showed the folly of that sort of
thing," said Henry. "A little country can't keep itself separate from a
big one. It'll get hurt if it does."
"Belgium fought, didn't she?" John answered. "I daresay we should get
beaten, too, but we could fight, couldn't we?"
Henry went away from them in a state of depression. It seemed impossible
to persuade them to behave reasonably. Fixed and immovable in their
minds was this belief that England would use them in her need ... and
then betray them when her need was satisfied.
He went back to Ballymartin and corrected his proofs.
"I'll go over to England next week," he said to himself when he had
revised the final proofs and posted them to his publishers.
6
Mrs. Graham had written to him when his father died. "_My dear Henry_,"
she wrote, "_I know how you must feel at the death of your father, and I
know, too, that you will not wish to have your sorrow intruded on. A
letter is a poor thing, but, my dear, I send you all my sympathy. I
never saw your father, but Ninian has often spoken of him to me, and I
know that his loss must be almost unbearable to you. Perhaps he was
glad, as I should be glad, to slip away from the thought and memory of
this horrible war, and that may bring comfort to you. If you feel lonely
and unhappy at home, come to Boveyhayne for a while. You know how glad
we shall be to have you. It is very quiet here now, more than a hundred
of our men have gone into the Navy or the Army, and the poor women are
full of anxiety about them. Ninian has just been moved to Colchester. I
daresay he has written to you before this. If you would like to come to
Boveyhayne just send a telegram to me. That will be sufficient. Believe
me, my dear Henry, Your sincere friend, Janet Graham._"
* * * * *
He remembered Mrs. Graham's letter now, and he went to his writing desk
and took it from the notes of condolence he had received. Ninian and
Gilbert and Roger had written to him, short, abrupt letters that he knew
were full of kindly concern for him, and Rachel had written too. There
was a letter from Mary.
* * * * *
_Dear Quinny, you don't know how sorry I am. It must be awful to lose
your father when you and he have been such chums. I can only just
remember my father, and how I cried when he was taken away, and so I
know how hard it must be for you. Your friend, Mary._
* * * * *
He read Mrs. Graham's note, and Mary's several times, and as he read
them, he had a longing to go to Boveyhayne again. The house at
Ballymartin was so lonely, now that his father's heavy footsteps no
longer sounded through the hall. Sometimes, forgetting that he was dead,
Henry would stop suddenly and listen as if he were listening for his
father's voice. Since his return from Dublin, he had felt his loss more
poignantly than he had before he went away. In the old days, his father
would have been at the station to meet him. There would have been a
hearty shout, and....
"I must go," he said to himself, "I must go. I can't bear to be here
now."
He went down to the village and telegraphed to Mrs. Graham telling her
that he would be with her two days later, and while he was in the post
office, the _Belfast Evening Telegraph_ came in.
"I'll take my copy with me," he said to the post-mistress, and he opened
it at once to read the news. There was a paragraph in a corner of the
paper, which caught his eye at once. It announced the death in action of
Lord Jasper Jayne.
"My God!" he said, crumpling the paper as he gaped at the announcement.
"Is it bad news, sir?" the post-mistress asked.
"A friend of mine," he answered, turning to her. "Killed at the Front!"
"Aw, dear," she said. "Aw, dear-a-dear! An' there'll be plenty more,
sir. There's young fellas away from the village, sir. My own nephew's
away. You mind him, don't you, sir! Peter Logan!..."
"Peter Logan!"
"Ay, he used to keep the forge 'til he married Matt Hamilton's niece,
an' then he took to the land. Nothin' would stop him, but to be off.
Nothin' at all would stop him. I toul' him myself the Belgians was
Catholics an' the Germans was Protestants, but nothin' would stop
him...."
"Sheila Morgan's husband," Henry murmured.
"Ay," she answered, "that was her name before she was married. He's
trainin' now, an' in a while, I suppose, he'll be off like the rest of
them. Och, ochanee, sir, isn't this a terr'ble world, wi' nothin' but
fightin' an' wringlin'? Will that be all you're wantin', sir?"
"Yes, thanks," he said.
Poor old Jimphy! They had all been contemptuous of him ... and now!...
Cecily would be free now! Oh, but what of that? Poor Jimphy! He had not
wished for much from life ... and sometimes it had seemed that he had
got much more than he needed....
"The best of us can't do more than he did," Henry thought as he walked
home. "A man can't give more than he's got, and Jimphy's given
everything!"
7
He started up, and looked about the room, and while he listened, he
could hear the big clock in the hall sounding three times. He was
shivering, though he was not cold. In his dream, he had seen Jimphy, all
bloody and broken....
"Oh, my God, how horrible!" he groaned.
He got up and went to the window, but he could not see beyond the high
trees, which swayed and moaned and took strange shapes in the wind. His
dream still held his mind, and as he looked into the darkness and saw
the bending branches yielding and rebounding, it seemed to him that he
saw the soldiers rushing forward and heard their cries, hoarse with war
lust or stifled by the blood that gushed from their mouths as they
staggered and fell ... and as he had seen him in his dream, so he saw
Jimphy again, running forward and shouting as he ran, until suddenly
with a queer wrinkled look of amazement on his face, he stopped, and
then, clasping his hands to his head, tumbled in a shapeless heap on the
ground ... but now it seemed to him that as Jimphy fell, his face
changed: it was no longer Jimphy's face, but his own.
"My God, it's me!" he cried, shrinking away from the window, and
clutching at the curtains as if he would cover himself with them. "My
God, it's _me_!"
He shut his eyes tightly and stumbled back to bed. He bruised himself
against a chair, but he was afraid to open his eyes, and he rolled into
bed, covering himself completely with the clothes, and buried his face
in his folded arms. In his mind, one thought hammered insistently: _I
must live! I must live! I must live!_
8
"I'm run down," he said to himself in the morning. "That's what's the
matter with me. I'm run down!"
His father's death had affected him, he thought, far more than he had
imagined. He would be all right again after a rest in Devonshire. It was
natural that he should be in a nervous state ... quite natural. He would
go straight to Boveyhayne from Liverpool. He could catch the Bournemouth
Express, and change at Templecombe. ... "That's what I'll do," he said,
and he hurried downstairs to prepare for his journey.