1
He had returned to Ireland. In Dublin, he found a strange mixture of
emotions. Marsh and Galway and their friends were drilling with greater
determination than ever, and occasionally they were to be seen parading
the streets. Some of them wore green uniforms, shaped after the pattern
of the khaki uniform of the British Army, but most of them wore their
ordinary clothes, with perhaps a bandolier and a belt and a slouch hat.
They carried rifles of an old make, and had long, clumsy bayonets slung
by their sides. It seemed to Henry as he watched a company of them
marching through College Green that these men were not of the fighting
breed ... that these pale clerks and young workmen and elderly
professors and hungry, emaciated labourers were unlikely to deal in the
serious work of war ... and when he met John Marsh in the evening, he
sneered at him. Marsh kept his temper. He was more tolerant now than he
had been in the days when he had tutored Henry at Ballymartin. He
admitted that the Sinn Feiners were widely unpopular. There were many
reasons why they should be. Dublin was full of men and women mourning
for their sons who had died at Suvla Bay ... and were in no mood for
rebellion.
"The war's popular in the Combe," he said. "The women are better off now
than they were in peace times. That's a handsome tribute to
civilisation, isn't it? The country people are the worst. They're rich
... the war's bringing them extraordinary prosperity ... and some of our
people are tactless. But we've got to go on. We've got to save Ireland's
soul!..."
Henry made an impatient gesture. "Why do you talk that high-falutin'
stuff," he said.
"It isn't high-falutin' stuff, Henry. I'm speaking what I believe to be
the truth. The English have tried a new way to kill the Irish spirit,
and by God they look like succeeding. They couldn't kill it by
persecuting us, they couldn't kill it by ruining us, but they may kill
it by making us prosperous. I feel heart-broken when I talk to the
farmers. Money! That's all they think about. They rob their children of
their milk and feed them on tea, so's they can make a few more pence.
Oh, they're being anglicised, Henry! If we can only blow some of the
greed out of them, well have done something worth while!"
He was more convinced now than ever that the Irish were to be betrayed
by the English after the war.
"Look how they minimise our men's bravery at the front. Even the _Irish
Times_ is protesting!..."
It seemed to Henry to be ridiculous to believe that the English
government was deliberately depreciating the work of the Irish soldiers,
and he said so. "They hardly mention the names of any regiments," he
pointed out.
But John Marsh had an answer for him. He produced a despatch written by
a British admiral in which was narrated the story of the landing at
Suvla Bay and the beaches about Gallipoli.
"He mentioned the name of every regiment that took part in the landing,
except the two Irish regiments that did the hardest work and suffered
the most deaths. I suppose that was an accident, Henry, a little
oversight!"
"You don't think he left them out on purpose, do you?"
"I do. So does every man in Ireland, Unionist or Nationalist. You see,
we know this man in Ireland ... he's a well-known Unionist ... a bigot
... and there isn't a person in Ireland who doesn't believe that he
deliberately left the names of Dublins and the Munsters out of his
despatch. He forgot, when he was writing it, that he was a sailor, and
remembered only that he was a politician ... the kind that dances on
dead men's graves!"
It was difficult to argue with Marsh or with any one who thought as he
thought, in face of that despatch. The omission was inexplicable if one
did not accept the explanation offered by Marsh. The tradition of the
sea is an honourable one, and sailors do not do things like that ... the
scurvy acts of the cheaper politicians....
"You make a fence about your mind, John," said Henry, "and you spend all
your efforts in strengthening it, so that you haven't time either to
look over it and see what's beyond it, or to cultivate what's inside it.
You're just building up barriers, when you should be knocking them
down!"
It was useless to be angry with Marsh or to argue with him. In
everything that was done, he saw the malevolent intent of a treacherous
people.
"Look at this," he said one evening when the English papers had come in,
and he pointed to a leading article in the _Morning Post_ in which the
writer stated that the bravery of the Irish soldiers showed that the
Irish people had now no feeling or grievance against the English, and
therefore Home Rule was no longer necessary. "Already, they're plotting!
They defile the dead ... they use our dead men as ... as political
arguments!"
"But the _Morning Post_ has no influence in England," Henry retorted
angrily. "It's only read by footmen and sluts!..."
"Some of our people are dubious," John went on. "They're inclined to
take your point of view, and trust the English. I'll read this paper to
them. That'll pull them up. We'd have been content with Home Rule
before, but we want absolute separation now. We don't want to be
associated with a race that makes bargains on bodies!..."
"You're doing a damned bad work, John!..."
"I'm helping to keep Ireland Irish, Henry!" He paused for a few moments,
and then, laughing a little self-consciously, he proceeded. "Do you know
that poem of Yeats's?"
_It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone._
Henry nodded his head.
"Well, we're going to see whether we can't make Yeats re-write it.
Good-night, Henry!"
2
He stayed in Dublin for a few weeks, gathering up old threads and
working on his novel; but the book made slow progress, and so, thinking
that if he were in a quieter, less social place, he could work more
quickly, he went home to Ballymartin, and here, soon after he arrived,
he received a letter from Roger, announcing that he intended to enter
the artillery almost at once. "_I can get a commission_," he wrote,
"_and so I shall go in. You said something about wanting to join at the
same time as me, but perhaps as you are going to be married to Mary
shortly, you'll want to wait until afterwards. If I were you I should
apply for a commission in an Irish regiment._"
He put the letter down abruptly. Ever since the death of Ninian, he had
felt convinced that the four friends were to be killed in battle.
Gilbert had been the first to join, and Gilbert was the first to be
killed. Then Ninian joined ... and Ninian died. Roger, too, would be
killed, and so would he, when he joined. The death of Gilbert had seemed
to him to be a casual thing, a tragic accident, but when Ninian had been
killed, it had seemed to him that here was no fortuity, that Gilbert and
Ninian had died inevitably, that Roger and he, when they went out, would
be unable to escape this destiny ... and everything that he had done
since Ninian's death had been done in that belief. He would finish a
book, he would marry Mary, he would settle his estate as best he could
... and then he would make the end that Gilbert and Ninian had made....
But now, as he put Roger's letter down, he had a swift, compelling
desire to dodge his destiny, to elude death, to alter the course of
things. Why should he die? Why should he yield himself up, his youth,
his work, his love, his hope of happiness and renown and honour ... to
this consuming thing! He could look to years of happiness with Mary,
years of work on his books, years of enjoyment of things won and earned
... and he was to give up all that promise and go to a bloody death in
war? Not every man who went was killed or even wounded ... one knew that
... but _he_ would be killed ... he knew that, he told himself, as well
as he knew that he was then alive. Sensitive-natured men, such as he,
were bound to be killed ... they had not the phlegm of men with blunter
natures ... they would not be able to keep still when stillness meant
safety ... their nerves would go, and in that hideous hell of noise and
battering, of men killing or being killed, his mind might be
destroyed....
That seemed to him to be the worst thing of all. He might not be killed
... he might be made mad....
"I can do other work," he said to himself. "I can work for Ireland. I
can try to make things friendlier here!..."
He planned a group of Young Irishmen, as he named them, to do for
Ireland what Roger's Improved Tories had hoped to do for England. They
could study the conditions of Irish elementary education; they could try
to make a survey of Irish wealth in the hope of discovering the
incidence of its distribution; they could make an enquiry into work and
wages, and try to stimulate the growth of Trades Unionism. He could help
to make opinion, to create a social consciousness, to establish a
tradition of honourable service to the community.... There were a host
of things he could do, valuable things, for Ireland, things that were
not now being done by any one. He knew people in Dublin, Crews and
Jordan and Saxon and men like them, who were of his mind and would work
patiently at dull things in the hope of getting an ordered community.
Railways! One had to get the Irish railways reorganised and grouped. If
one could solve the problem of traffic, so that the East and West and
North and South of Ireland would be as accessible to each other as the
East and West and North and South of England, one would have made a
large movement towards a better state....
That was what he would do. He would help to construct things, not to
destroy them. He was not afraid to go to the war ... that was not the
reason why he was resolving that he would refuse to be a soldier. It was
because he could do better, finer work by living for Ireland than by
dying for England. People throughout Europe were already perturbed at
the waste of potential men in war ... wondering whether, after all, it
was a wise thing to let rare men, men of unique gifts go to war. Was it
really wise of England to let such a man as Gilbert Farlow, with the
rare gift of comedy, be lost in that haphazard manner? Ninian had had
the potentialities of a great engineer. Would it not have been wiser to
have kept him to his railway-building than to have let him fall, as he
fell, to the bullet of a sniper?... Already people were asking such
questions as these. If he were to go out, and were to be killed, would
they not say, "This man had gifts that marked him out from other men. We
ought not to have wasted him!" Well, why should he be wasted? He was not
afraid. He insisted that he was not afraid. It needed high courage to
stand up and say, "I am a man of special gift and I will not let that
gift be wasted in war!" That, in effect, was what he was preparing to
do. People would speak behind his back ... speak even to his face ...
and call him a coward! Well, let them do so....
3
But in his heart, he knew that he was afraid to go. Almost he deceived
himself into believing that he was behaving well in refusing to join the
Army so that he might devote himself more assiduously to Ireland and his
work ... but not completely did he persuade himself. The fear of death
was in him and he could not allay it. The fear of mutilation, of
madness, of blindness, of shattered nerves sent him shuddering from the
thought of offering himself as a soldier ... and mixed up with this
devastating fear was a queer vanity that almost conquered the fear.
"If I were to go in, I might do something ... something distinguished!"
There were times when he gave himself up to dreams of glory, saw himself
decorated with high awards for bravery. He would imagine himself
performing some impossible act of courage ... saving an Army Corps from
destruction ... showing resource in a period of crisis, and so bringing
salvation where utter loss had seemed inevitable. But these times of
glory were few and brief: he saw himself most often, killed
ingloriously, inconspicuously, one of a crowd, blown, perhaps, to pieces
or buried in bombarded earthworks; and through his dreams of glory and
his plans for work in Ireland, there stubbornly thrust itself this
accusation: I'm a coward! I'm a coward! I'm a coward!
In England, men were charging the queer people who called themselves
Conscientious Objectors with cowardice, but the charge seemed a baseless
one to Henry. He did not believe that he could endure the odium and
obloquy which some of the Conscientious Objectors had borne. There was
courage in the man who said, "I will fight for my country!" but that
courage might be less than that of the man who said, "I will not fight
for my country!" Henry was not a Conscientious Objector, nor could he
understand the state of mind of the man who was. He was a coward.
Inside him, he knew that he was a coward. Inside him, he accused himself
of cowardice. Everything in his life showed that he was a coward, that
he shrank from physical combats, from tests of courage, that sometimes
he shrank from spiritual contests....
"I ought to tell Mary," he said to himself. "I can't marry her without
telling her that I'm ... a funk!"
But he temporised even in this. "I'll wait a little while longer," he
said. "Perhaps later on!..."
Always he wanted to thrust the unpleasant thing a little further off; It
was as if he had said to himself, "I won't deal with it just yet ... and
perhaps it won't need to be dealt with!"
"I'll finish my book first," he said, "and then I'll tell Mary. Perhaps
the war will be over!..."
4
Mary wrote to him twice every week. Rachel Carey and her baby were
staying at Boveyhayne Manor now, and Mary was glad of their company in
the house, for the child gave Mrs. Graham pleasure. She enquired
continually about his book. "_What a pity_," she wrote once, "_that it
was not finished before Roger went into the Army. Then you could both
have gone in together._" And he had written, "_Yes, it is a pity the
book was not done before Roger joined up ... but it'll soon be finished.
I'm getting on excellently with it. When it's finished, I'll come over
to Boveyhayne, and then we'll settle just when we shall get
married!..._"
Then came a mood of abasement, and he wrote a long, incoherent letter to
her, telling her that he had resolved that he would not go into the
Army. "_Because I'm a coward, Mary. I've thought the thing over from
beginning to end, thought about it until I became dizzy with thinking,
and this is the end of it all: I'm a coward. I haven't the pluck to go
into the Army. That's the truth, Mary! I make excuses for myself ... I
pretend that this is England's war, not Ireland's, and tell myself that
an Irishman who joins the British Army should be regarded in the way
that an American, who joined, would be regarded ... that Irish soldiers
in the British Army are Foreign Legionaries ... and I twist my mind
about in an effort to make excuses like that, to convince, not you or
any one else_, but me. _I think I could convince_ you _that I ought not
to join, but I can't convince myself. I'm not joining, simply because
I'm a damned coward, Mary. I'm not fit to be your husband, dear. I
wasn't fit to be the friend of Gilbert and Ninian. I'm a contemptible
thing that runs to its burrow when it hears of danger. I'm glad my
father is dead. He hated the war, but he'd have hated to know that I was
not in it. He took it for granted that I would go ... never dreamed that
I wouldn't go. If he'd thought that I wouldn't join, he would never have
talked to me about the war in the way he did. My father was a proud man,
Mary, as proud as your mother, and I think he'd have died of shame if
he'd thought I was funking this. I don't know what you'll think of me. I
know what I think of myself. I simply can't face it, Mary ... that
bloodiness and groaning and stench and unending horror. That's the truth
about me. I'm a coward, and I'm not fit for you. I'd fail you, dear, if
you needed me. I fail everybody. I fail everything. I'm rotten through
and through...._"
5
But he did not send the letter to her. He had read it over before
putting it in the envelope. "Hysterical," he said to himself, calmer now
that he had vented his feelings. "That's what it is!"
He was about to tear it up, but before he could, do so, his mind veered
again. "I'll put it away," he said. "I'll leave it until the morning,
and read it again. Perhaps I'll think differently then. I ought to tell
Mary. I can't go on just not joining, and letting her gradually
suspect. I ought to go to her, and tell her straight out. When my book's
done I'll go to her...."
"What sort of a man am I?" he said again. "Analysing myself like this
... turning myself inside out ... poking and probing into my mind!...
Fumbling over my life, that's what I'm doing! Why don't I stand up to
things? What's the meaning of me? What am I here for?"
If he could only strip himself to the marrow of his mind, if he could
only see inside himself and know what was his purpose and discover the
content of his being....
"I'm morbid," he said. "I'm too introspective. I ought to look out of
myself. But I can't. It isn't my fault that my eyes are turned inwards.
I'm made like that. I can't alter my make. I can destroy myself, but I
can't alter my make....
"Perhaps," he thought, "if I were to take more exercise, if I were to go
for long walks, I'd think less about these things. I'd get healthier
notions. If I were to enlist, go into the ranks, and endure all that the
men endure, that might make my mind healthier. All that drill and
marching....
"But it's the spirit of me that's wrong," he muttered aloud. "It's not
my body ... it's _me_!"
"I must work. I must work hard, and forget all this torturing!..."
He wrote furiously at his book, and gradually it came to its end. "I'll
go down to Dublin again," he said, when it was finished "and see if I
can't do something there that'll make me forget things!"
He stayed at Ballymartin until he had corrected the proofs of the new
book, and then some business on the estate kept him at home for nearly
another month. It was not until well in the New Year that he was able to
leave home, and almost at the last moment he decided not to go to
Dublin, but to travel from Belfast, by Liverpool, to Boveyhayne. Mary
had asked him to spend Christmas with them, but he had made an excuse:
estate business and his book; because he could not yet bring himself to
tell her of his cowardice. He felt that when he did so, she would end
their engagement, and he wished to keep her love as long as he could. He
wrote to her very frequently, more frequently than she wrote to him,
telling her of Irish affairs. She had had difficulty in understanding so
many things, but she was eager to know about them. He had filled a
letter with bitter complaint of the corruption in Irish civic life, and
she had asked why he believed in Home Rule. "_If you can't trust these
people to manage a municipality, how can you trust them to manage a
nation?_" And he had written a lengthy epistle on the state of Ireland.
"_You see, dear_," he wrote, "_it isn't reasonable to expect us to undo
in a generation work which it took your country several centuries to do.
Your people have steadily destroyed and corrupted my people. I know
they're trying to make amends, but they mustn't expect miracles. You
can't wave a wand over Ireland, and say 'Let there be light!' and
instantly get light. You've got to remember that Ireland is populated
largely by the dregs of Ireland ... what was left after your countrymen
had persecuted and exiled and hanged the most vigorous and most
courageous men we had ... and it'll take a generation or two, more
perhaps, to get a decent level again. The most powerful man in Dublin at
this minute is a haberdasher who owns almost everything there is to own:
newspapers, conveyances and heaven knows what; and he has the mind of
... well, an early nineteenth-century mill-owner! John Marsh spends a
deal of time in vilifying the English as a mean-minded people, but my
God, he has only got to look round the corner in Dublin, to see
mean-minded men by the hundred. He wrote to me the other day, crowing
because his Volunteers had prevented the application of conscription to
Ireland, and that's a frame of mind I don't understand. He's an
idealist, but all his ideals are being employed to enable mean-minded
and greedy men like the farmers to go on being more mean-minded and
greedier. The principal argument seems to be that the Irishman must stay
at home and make money out of the war. That's a long way from the days
of the 'wild geese' and the order of chivalry, isn't it?_
"_I'm a Home Ruler because I want to see a sense of responsibility
cultivated in these people, and you can't have a sense of responsibility
until you've got something for which you are responsible. I don't doubt
that out of this heart-breaking population, a decent-minded population
will come. After all, the first settlers in Australia weren't much
better than the people who control the Dublin Corporation, were they? If
John Marsh had been about the world more, had had to manage things, and
if Mineely and Connolly and the Dublin Labour people had not been
embittered beyond all sanity of judgment by that haberdasher I mentioned
earlier in this letter, they'd have been useful in the way that I want
Crews and Jordan and Saxon and all those patient people to be useful._
"_I wish you could meet Crews and Jordan and Saxon. They're very
dissimilar, but they've got something like the unifying motive of a
monastery, and they're willing to serve and to plod and to be patient. I
fight with Saxon because he's a pacifist, but like all pacifists he's a
very pugnacious person, and he can get frightfully angry, but it's
pitiful to see him when he's been angry, because he's so sorry
afterwards. I'm not a pacifist, but I haven't a tenth of his pluck. He'd
endure anything, that man. Crews and Jordan are younger than he, and
very brainy. Crews looks as if he were one of the Don't-Care-a-Damn
Brigade ... Dublin's full of them ... but he does care. He has a
curiously subtle brain, and I do not know any one so imperturbable as he
is. He never loses his temper ... at least I've never seen him lose it
... except, so he says, with stockbrokers and haberdashers and that kind
of rubbish. Jordan is one of the brainiest men in Ireland ... that, I
suppose, is because he has got some English blood in him: a
cynical-looking man, but that's all his fun. And he works, my goodness,
he works!_
"_It's with men like these that I want to work, because I believe that
they will prepare the place for the foundation of a decent commonwealth.
They aren't miracle-mongers, thank God, like John Marsh and Galway and
Mineely. They aren't up in the sky to-day and down in the mud to-morrow.
They keep to the level._
"_Then there's the Plunkett House lot. You remember, I told you about
Sir Horace Plunkett and the Co-operative Movement. Well, I want to get
Crews and Jordan and Saxon to link themselves on to the Plunkett House
people and form the nucleus of a new Irish Group. There are a few of the
men at Trinity College who will come into it, but I'm afraid all the men
at the National University are under the influence of Marsh and
MacDonagh and the sloppy romantics._
"_You see, dear, don't you, that this job of making a commonwealth of
worth in Ireland is a long and difficult one. That's why we've got to be
very patient. Everything's against us. We have a contemptible press, a
cowardly crowd of corrupt politicians, a greedy people, an ignorant and
bigoted priesthood (that includes the Protestant clergy) and a complete
lack of social consciousness and plan of life. But then, what's life
for, if it isn't to cope with difficulties like that...._"
6
There was snow, thick and long-lying, on the ground when he reached
Boveyhayne, and the _crunch-crunch_ of it under their feet, as Mary and
he walked home, gave him a feeling of pleasure, and the cold, bracing
air exhilarated him so that he laughed at things which would otherwise
barely have made him smile. The antics of Rachel's daughter, as related
to him by Mary, seemed extraordinarily entertaining, and when he drew
Mary's arm in his and pressed it tightly, he felt that there was nothing
in heaven or on earth more to be desired than the love of a woman and
the love of a child. He had a sense of age, of a passed boundary, that
made him feel much older than Mary. "Here I am, listening to her as she
talks gaily about a child's pranks, nodding my head and laughing, too
... and in a little while I shall tell her everything ... and then I
shall go ... and we will not laugh again together. I'm holding her arm
closely in mine, and presently I shall kiss her lips, and she will put
her arms about me with the careless intimacy of lovers ... and then I
shall tell her everything ... and she will kiss me no more ... and our
intimacy will shrivel up!..."
He wished to prolong his pleasure in this walk through the snow, and so
he took her back to the Manor by long roads and roundabout ways. They
did not climb up the old path over the cliff because that was so much
shorter than the hair-pin road.... "I must tell her soon," he said to
himself, "but before I tell her, I must feel the most of her love for
me!"
He listened to her, not for what she was saying, but for the sound of
her voice, and made short answers to her so that he might interrupt the
flow of her speech as little as possible. When he returned along this
road, he would come alone and for the last time, and so, that his memory
of her might be full, he would be no more than her auditor and watcher.
Just to have her by his side, her arm in his, and hear her ... that was
sufficient.
They walked through the village and when they came to Boveyhayne lane,
he said to her, "Isn't there a longer way, Mary!" and she laughed at
him, bantering him because of his sudden desire for exercise; but she
yielded to him, and they took the longer road that led them past the
Roman quarries to the fir tree, standing in isolation where the main
roads meet.
"Mary," he said, as they came in sight of the house, "I want to tell
you something ... something important!..."
"Yes, Quinny!"
"But not now, dear. To-night! Or to-morrow, perhaps!"
She pinched his cheek in a pretence at anger. "You were always very
vague, Quinny!" she said.
"I know," he answered. "It's a kind of ... cowardice, that, isn't it?
I'm vague because I dislike ... am afraid ... to be definite. I'm a
frightful coward, Mary!..."
He might approach the subject by these devious ways, he told himself. He
had not meant to talk to her about his failure in courage until she and
he could be alone in the evening ... this walk together was to be the
final lovers' stroll, unmarred by any bitterness ... but even in his
effort to postpone the time of telling, he had prepared to tell her ...
and perhaps it was better that she should know now. Here, indeed, in
this snowy silence, they were free from any intrusion. It might not be
possible to make his confession to her without interruption from Rachel
or Mrs. Graham ... and some feeling for the fitness of things made him
decide that this outdoor scene was a better place for his purpose than
the lamplit interior of the Manor. Through the blown branches of the
hedges he could see the thick sheets of snow spread over the fields. The
boughs of the fruit-trees in the orchard showed very black beneath their
white covering, as if they felt cold, and he looted away quickly to the
haystacks in the farmyard that seemed so warm in spite of the snow. The
dusk was drawing in, and the grey sky was darkening for the night....
"Mary," he said, so abruptly that she looked up at him enquiringly.
"Let's walk back a little way...."
"But, Quinny, it's getting late. They'll wonder what's happened to us!"
"I want to tell you ... now, Mary!"
He compelled her to turn, as he spoke, and they walked slowly back
towards the fir tree.
"What is it, Quinny?" she asked tenderly, as if she would comfort him.
"I ... I want to tell you something!"
"Yes?"
"I hardly know how to begin. It's very difficult, dear...."
"What is it, Quinny?" she demanded, more anxiously.
But still he would not tell her ... he must have her love a little
longer.
"Mary, I love you so much, dear ... oh, I feel like a fool when I try to
tell you how much I love you!"
"I know you love me, Quinny!"
"And now ... this very minute ... I love you far more than I've ever
loved you. Every bit of me is in love with you, Mary. You're very sweet
and dear!..."
She had a sense of impending disaster, but she did not express it in her
words. "And I love you, Quinny!" she said. "I can't love you more than
I've always loved you!..."
"Could you love me less than you've always loved me?" he asked, turning
and standing before her so that his eyes were looking into hers.
"I don't know," she answered. "I've never tried!"
He did not say any more for a few moments, but stood with his hands on
her shoulders, looking steadily into her eyes, while she looked steadily
into his. Then he took his hands from her shoulders and drew her into
the shelter of his arms, and kissed her, letting his lips lie long on
hers.
"What do you want to tell me?" she said in a whisper.
7
Then he told her.
"I wrote to you when I was at Ballymartin," he said, "but I did not
post the letter. I brought it with me. I meant to destroy it because I
thought it was too emotional, and then I thought that perhaps I had
better let you see it so that you might judge me, not just as I am now,
talking to you quietly like this, but as I was when I wrote it!"
He took the letter from his pocket and gave it to her.
"I had to tell you, Mary. I couldn't marry you without letting you know
what kind of man I am. I'm too frightened to go to the Front. At the
bottom of all my excuses, that's the truth."
She did not speak, but stood with his letter in her hands, turning it
over....
"I've tried to persuade myself," he went on, "that I'm of special
account, that I ought not to go to the war, but I know very well that in
a time like this, no one is of special account. Gilbert said something
like that at Tre'Arrdur Bay when I told him that his life was of greater
value than the life of ... of a clerk. I suppose, the finer a man is,
the more willing he is to take his share in war, and if that's true, I'm
not really a fine man. I'm simply a coward, hoarding up my life in a
cupboard, like a miser hoarding up his money. I should have been the
first to spend myself ... like Gilbert and Ninian. I'm the only one of
the Improved Tories who hasn't gone! ... Oh, I couldn't offer you
myself, dear. I'm too mean ... I'm a failure in fineness.... I used to
feel contempt for Jimphy Jayne ... but he didn't hesitate for a moment.
It never entered his head not to go. The moment the war began, Gilbert
enlisted, and I suppose Ninian must have left that railway the very
minute he heard the news. I was never quite ... never quite on their
level, Mary, and I don't suppose I ever shall be now!"
She moved slightly, as if she were tired of remaining in one position,
and were shifting to an easier one, but still she did not speak, nor did
she raise her eyes to look at him.
"I'm not fit to be your husband," he said. "I'm not fit to be any
woman's husband, but much less yours. Even now, when I 'm standing here
talking to you in this safety, the thought of ... of being out there
makes me shiver with fear. It's the thought of ... of dying!... I think
and think of all those young chaps, all the fellows I knew, robbed of
their right to live and love, as I love you, and work and make their end
in decency and peace ... and I can't bear it. I want to save myself from
the wreckage ... to hide myself in safety until this ... this horror is
ended!" He paused for a while, as if he were searching for words and
then he went on. "There was an officer in my carriage to-day ... going
on to Whimple ... and he told me about poison gas ... the men died in
frightful agony, he said ... and then he talked about machine guns....
'They can perforate a man like a postage stamp,' he said.... Isn't it
vile, Mary?"
Her head was still bent, and as she did not make an answer to him, he
turned to look away from her. He remembered how Sheila Morgan, in her
anger at his cowardice, had struck him in the face and had furiously
bidden him to leave her.... Mary would not strike him, but she, too,
would bid him to go from her....
He felt her hand on his arm.
"Quinny!" she said very softly, and he turned to find her standing
nearer to him and looking up at him with no less love than she had
looked at him before he had made his confession to her.
"I don't love you, Quinny, only for what's fine in you," she said, and
her speech was full of hesitation as if she could not adequately express
her meaning. "I love you ... for _all_ of you. I just take the bad with
the good, and ... and make the best of it, dear!"
"You still want me, Mary?..."
"My dear," she said, half laughing and half crying, "I've always wanted
you!... Oh, what's the good," she went on with an impetuous rush of
words, "of loving a man only when he comes up to your expectations. I
want to love you even when you don't come up to my expectations,
Quinny, and I do love you, dear. It hasn't anything to do with whether
you're brave or not brave, or good or bad, or great or common. I just
love you ... don't you see?... because you're _you_!..."
He stared at her incredulously. He had been so certain that she would
bid him leave her when she learned of his cowardice.
"But!..."
"Come home," she said. "You must be very tired, and cold!"
She put her arm in his, and drew him homewards, and he yielded to her
like a little child.
As they turned the corner of the apple-orchard, they could see lights
shining from the windows of the Manor, making a warm splash on the snow
that lay in drifts about the garden. There was a great quietness that
was broken now and then by the twittering of birds in the hedges as they
nestled for the night, or the cries made by the screech-owls, hooting in
the copse.
8
Mrs. Graham and Rachel had left them alone for a while, after dinner,
and as he sat, with her at his feet, fondling her hair, she spoke of her
feeling for him again.
"I've wondered sometimes," she said, "about your not joining ... it
seemed odd ... but I thought that perhaps there was something that would
explain it. I'd like you to join, Quinny ... I can't pretend that I
wouldn't ... but I don't feel that I ought to ask you to do so. If I
were a man I should join, I think, but I'm not a man, and I'm not likely
to have to suffer any of the things that a man has to suffer if he goes
... and so I don't say anything. I don't know why I'd like you to go ...
I ought to be glad that you haven't gone because I love you and I don't
want to lose you ... but all the same I'd like you to go. It isn't just
because other men have gone, and I don't feel any desire for revenge
because Ninian's been killed ... it's just because England's England, I
suppose...." She laughed a little nervously. "I can hardly expect you to
feel about England as I do. You're Irish!.."
"I've made that excuse for myself, Mary. Don't you make it for me. I
know inside me that the war isn't England's war ... it's the world's
war. John Marsh admits that much. He doesn't like English rule in
Ireland, but he doesn't pretend that German rule would be better ... not
seriously, anyhow. No, dear, I haven't that excuse. I know that if we
lose this war, the world will be a worse place to live in than it is. I
haven't any conscientious objection ... I don't feel that we are in the
wrong ... I feel that we're in the right ... that we never were so right
as we are. I'm simply anxious to save my skin. And even if I felt that
John Marsh were right in being anti-English, I don't feel that I have
any right to take up that attitude. England's done no wrong to my
family.... You see, dear, I haven't any excuse that's worth while ...
except the wish to preserve my life ... and that's a poor excuse. When I
think of being at the Front, I think of myself as dead ... lying out
there ... without any of the decencies ... until I'm offensive to the
men who were my friends ... until they sicken at the stench of _me_!..."
"Don't, dear!" she murmured.
"Perhaps I shall conquer this ... this meanness. I want to conquer it. I
want to behave as I believe. I believe that there are things one should
be glad to fight for and die for ... and I want to feel glad to fight
for them and be ready to die for them. But now I feel most that I want
to be safe ... to go on living and living and enjoying things...."
"But can you enjoy things if they're not worth dying for, Quinny? If
England weren't worthy dying for, would it be worth living in! That's
how I feel!"
"That's how I _think_, Mary, but it isn't how I _feel_. I feel that I
want to be safe no matter what happens ... if civilisation is to go to
smash and we're to be driven back to savagery, distrusting and being
distrusted ... I feel that I don't care ... that I want to be safe, to
go on living, even if I have to live in a cave and hide from
everything.... Oh, my dear, don't you see what a poor thing I am!"
"Yes," she said simply.
"And yet you're willing to marry me?"
"Yes. I can't help loving you, any more than I can help loving my
country. I can't explain it and I don't want to explain it. If I were a
man and England were in the wrong, I'd fight for England just because
she's England. Everything makes me feel like that. When Ninian was
killed, something went on saying, 'You're English! You mustn't cry!
You're English!' And when I look at the trees outside, I feel that
they're English, too, and that they're telling me I'm English ... that
somehow they're special trees, different from the trees in other
countries ... that they've got something that I've got, and that I've
got something they've got ... something that a French tree or a German
tree hasn't got.... Oh, I know it's silly, but I can't help it ... and
when I used to walk about the lanes and fields after Ninian's death ...
I felt that the birds and the grass and the ferns and everything were
saying 'You're English!' and I wanted to say back to them, 'You're
English, too!...' I suppose people feel like that everywhere ... those
friends of yours in Ireland must feel like that about Ireland ... and
Germans, too!..."
He nodded his head. "It's a madness, this nationality," he said, "but
you can't get a cure for it. Even I feel it!"
"Quinny!"
"Yes, Mary!"
There was a nervous note in her voice. She got up, so that she was on
her knees, and fingered the lapels of his coat.
"Quinny!" she said again, and he waited for her to proceed. "I ... I
want us to get married ... soon! You'll probably go into the Army ...
nobody could go on feeling as you do, and not go in ... and I'd like us
to ... to have had some time together ... before you go. I don't want to
be married to you just ... just a day or two before you go. I ... I want
to have lived with you and to ... to have taken care of your house ...
with you in it!..."
He folded her in his arms.
"You will, Quinny?" she said.
"Yes," he answered.