1
They were to be married as soon as Lent was over. Mrs. Graham, reluctant
to lose Mary, had pleaded for delay, urging that Ballymartin was so far
from Boveyhaven that she would seldom see her. "Two days' post," she
protested.
"But you'll come and stay with us, mother," Mary declared, "and we'll
come and stay with you!"
It would be quite easy for Henry to come to Devonshire, for he could
carry his work about with him. Then Mrs. Graham had yielded to them, and
it was settled that the marriage was to take place at the beginning of
May. Neither Mary nor he had spoken again of the question of enlistment.
She had said all that was in her mind about it, and what followed was
for him to decide.
He went back to Ballymartin. There were things to be done at home in
preparation for the coming of a bride. The house had not known a
mistress since his mother's death, and his father had been too
preoccupied with his agricultural experiments to bother greatly about
the interior of his house. So long as he could find things more or less
where he had left them, Mr. Quinn had been content.
"You won't overhaul it too much, Quinny?" Mary said to him, "because I'd
like to do some of that!"
He had promised that he would do no more than was immediately necessary;
and then he went.
"I shall have to go to Dublin," he had told her. "There'll be a lot of
stuff to settle with lawyers!" Her settlement, for example. "I'll go
home first, then on to Dublin, and then back here. I shall get to
Boveyhayne just after Easter!"
2
Mr. Quinn had not greatly bothered about the interior of the house, but
Hannah had, and although there were things that needed to be done, there
was less than he had imagined.
"I'm going to be married, Hannah!" he said to her soon after he had
arrived home.
"Are you, now?" she exclaimed.
"Yes. You remember Mr. Graham?..."
"Ay, poor sowl, I mind him ... the nice-spoken, well-behaved lad he
was!..."
"Well, I'm going to marry his sister!"
"It'll be quaren nice to think o' this house havin' a mistress in it
again, an' wee weans, mebbe. I was here, a young girl, when your father
brought your mother home ... I mind it well ... she was a quiet woman,
an' she stud in the hall there as nervous as a child 'til I went forrit
to her, an' said, 'Ye're right an' welcome, ma'am!', an' then she
plucked up her heart, an' she give me a wee bit of a smile, an' said
'Thank ye, Hannah!' for your father told her who I was. An' she used to
come an' talk to me afore you were born ... she was terrible frightened,
poor woman. Ay, she was terrible frightened of havin' you! Your father
couldn't make her out at all. It was a quare pity!"
He let her ramble on, for he wanted now to hear about his mother, of
whom he knew so little. There was a portrait of her in the house, a
fair, slight, timid-looking woman who seemed to be shrinking out of the
frame. It was odd to think that she was his mother, this frightened
woman of whom he had no memory whatever, for whom he had no tender
feeling. He had loved his father deeply, but he had no love for his
mother. How could he feel love for her? He had never known her!... But
now he wanted to know all that Hannah knew about her, for Hannah perhaps
had known more about her than any one. Hannah had cared for her, pitied
her....
"Yes, Hannah!" he said, so that she might proceed.
"She was sure she was goin' to die, an' I had the quare work to keep her
quiet. An' she was terrible feard of dyin'!"
He listened to her with a strange feeling of pain. All that he had
endured at the thought of fighting had been endured by his mother at the
thought of giving him birth. He felt that now, at last, he knew his
mother and could sympathise with her and love her.
"But sure what was the sense of bein' afeard of that," Hannah Went on.
"God wouldn't be hard on the like of her, the poor, innocent woman. I
toul' lies til her, God forgive me, an' let on to her that people made
out that it was worse nor it was to have a child ... but she had a
despert bad time of it, for she was a weak woman, with no body in her at
all, an' a poor will to suffer things. She never was the better of you!"
She smiled at him sadly. "Never! An' she took no interest in nothin'
after that ... she could hardly bear to look at you ... an' you her own
wee son. She didn't live long after you come, an' mebbe it was as well,
for God never made her to contend with anything. I was quaren fond of
her. Ye had to like her, she was that helpless. She couldn't thole any
one next or near her but myself ... and so I got fond of her, for a body
has to like people that depends on them. Will your wife be a fair lady
or a dark lady, Master Henry?"
He realised that she wished him to describe Mary to her.
"She's dark," he said. "Not at all like her brother!"
"Ay, he was the big, fair man that was a credit to a woman to have!"
"I have her photograph upstairs," Henry went on, "I'll go and get it.
You'd like to see it, wouldn't you?"
"Deed an' I would," she answered.
He got the photograph and gave it to her, and she took it in her hands
and looked at it very steadily.
"She's a comely-lookin' girl," she said, handing it to him again. "She
has sweet eyes an' a proud way of holdin' her head. She shud be a good
wife to you. I'll be glad to see her here, for dear knows, it's lonesome
sittin' in the house with no one to look after. I miss your da sore,
Master Henry, an' it's seldom you're here now!"
"I'll be here much more in future, Hannah!"
"Well, thank God for that! I like well to see the quality in their
houses, an' them not to be runnin' here an' runnin' there, an' not
thinkin' of their own place an' their own people. An' I pray to God
you'll have fine childher, an' I'll be well-spared to see them growin'
up to be a credit to you!"
The old woman's patient service and love seemed very noble to him, and
he went to her and took her hand. "You're the only mother I've ever
known, Hannah!" he said. "You've always been very good to me!"
"An' why wouldn't I be good to you?" she exclaimed, raising her fine
blue eyes to his. "Aren't you the only child I ever had to rear? Dear
bless you, son, what else would I be but good to you?"
And suddenly she put her arms about him and kissed him passionately, and
as she kissed him, she cried:
"God only knows what I'm girnin' for!" she exclaimed, releasing him and
drying her eyes.
3
He wandered about the house, touching a chair or fingering a curtain or
looking at a portrait, and wondered how Mary would like her new home. It
was not an old house, nor had the Quinns lived in it from the time it
was built, and so Henry could not feel about it what Ninian must have
felt about Boveyhayne Manor, in which his ancestors had lived for four
centuries. But it was his home, in which he had been born, in which his
mother and father had died, and it seemed to him to be as full of
memories and tradition as Mary's home. The war had broken the line of
Grahams, broken a tradition that had survived the dangers of four
hundred years. That seemed to Henry to be a pity. Perhaps, he thought,
this worship of Family is a foolish thing. There was a danger in being
rooted to one place, in letting your blood become too closely mingled,
and a tradition might very well become a substitute for life; but when
all that was said and admitted, there was a pride in one's breeding that
made life seem like a sacrament, and the years but the rungs of a long
ladder. Once, in the days of the Bloomsbury house, they had talked of
tradition, and some one had related the old story of the American
tourist who was shown the sacred light, and told that it had not been
out for hundreds of years. "Well, I guess it's out now!" the American
replied, blowing the light out. They had made a mock of the horrified
priest and had protested that his service to the flame was a waste of
life and energy and time. And when they had said all that they had to
say, Ninian, speaking more quietly than was his wont, had interjected,
"But don't you think the American was rather a cad?"
They had argued fiercely then, some of them protesting that the
American's disregard of a worn convention was splendid, virile,
youthful, god-like. Roger, Henry remembered, had sided with Ninian so
far as to admit that the American's behaviour had been too
inconsiderate. "He might have discussed the matter with the priest ...
tried to persuade him to blow it out himself!" but that was as far as he
would go with Ninian.
"I admit," Ninian had retorted, "that it was a foolish tradition ... but
don't you think the American was rather a cad. It was better, wasn't it,
to have that tradition than to have none at all?"
Now, standing here, in this house that had been his father's, and now
was his, and would, in due time, be his son's, if ever he should have a
son, it seemed to him that Ninian had been right in his contention. And
just as Mary, moving through the Devonshire lanes, had felt that
everything proclaimed its Englishness and hers, making them and her part
of each other, so he, looking out of the window across the fields, felt
something inside him insisting, "You're Irish. You must be proud! You're
Irish! You must be proud!..."
He remembered very vividly how his father had led him to this very
window once and, pointing towards the fields, had said, "That's land,
Henry! _My_ land!..."
And because he had been proud of his land, had been part of it, as it
had been part of him, he had been willing to spend himself on it. There
seemed to Henry to be in that, all that there was in patriotism.
Irrationally, impulsively, unaccountably one loved one's country. The
air of it and the earth of it, the winds that blew over it and the seas
that encircled it, all these had been mingled to make men, so that when
there was danger and threat to a man's country, some native thing in him
stirred and compelled him to say, "This is my body! This is my blood!"
and sent him out, irrationally, impulsively, unaccountably, to die in
its defence. There was here no question of birth or possessions: the
slum-man felt this stirring in his nature as strongly as the landlord.
In that sudden, swift rising of young men when war was declared, each
man instinctively hurrying to the place of enlistment, there were men
from slums and men from mansions, all of them, in an instant, made
corporate, given unity, brought to communion, partaking of a sacrament,
becoming at that moment a sacrament themselves....
4
But if this stirring in one's nature made a man both a sacrament and a
partaker of a sacrament, was there not yet something horrible in this
spilling of blood, this breaking of bodies? Was this sacrament only to
be consummated by the butcher? Was there no healing sacrament which,
when a man partook of it, gave him life and more life! Was there not an
honourable rivalry among nations, each to be better than the other, to
replace this brawling about boundaries, this pettifogging with
frontiers? Was there to be no end to this killing and preparing for
killing? Would men, from now on, set themselves to the devisal of
murderous and more murderous weapons of war until at last an indignant,
disgusted God, sick of the smell of blood, threw the earth from Him,
caring nothing what happened to it, so that it was out of His
consciousness?...
While he looked out of the window, the dusk settled down, and he could
see the mists rising from the fields. He drew the curtains, and went and
sat down by the fire. There was a faint odour of burning turf in the
room, and as he watched the blue spirals of smoke curling up the
chimney, he remembered how he had trudged across Dartmoor once, and,
suddenly, unexpectedly had turned a corner of the road, and looked down
on a village in a hollow, and for a moment or two had imagined he was in
Ireland because of the smell of burning turf that came from the cottage
chimneys.
"We and they are one," he murmured to himself. "Our differences are but
two aspects of the same thing. Our blood and their blood, our earth and
their earth, mingled and made sacramental, shall be to the glory of
God!"
The door opened, and Hannah came in, carrying a lighted lamp.
"I just thought I'd bring it myself," she said. "I'd be afeard of my
life to let Minnie handle it. Dear knows, but she'd set herself on fire,
or mebbe the house, an' that'd be a nice thing, an' a new mistress
comin' to it. Will I put it down here by your elbow?"
"Anywhere, Hannah!" he answered.
"I'll just rest it here then, where it'll not be too strong for your
eyes. Yon ought to have the electric light put in the house. Major
Cairnduff has it in his house, an' it's not half the size of this
one.... Will I get you something?"
"No, thank you, Hannah!"
"A taste of some thin' to ate, mebbe, or a sup to drink?"
"Nothing, thank you!"
She went over to the fire. "Dear bless us," she said, "that's no sort of
a fire at all. What come over you, to let it get that low!"
"I didn't notice it, Hannah!"
"'Deed an' I don't suppose you did ... moidherin' your mind about one
thing an' another! There'll be a different story to tell when the
mistress comes home. Mark my words, there will! Dear, oh, dear, oh,
dear!..."
5
"I'm going to Belfast to-night, Hannah," he said when he had been at
home a few weeks. "I want to catch an early train to Dublin to-morrow."
"Yes," she said.
"When I come back, I shall bring my wife with me!"
"God bless us and save us," she exclaimed, "it'll be quare to think of
you with a wife, an' it on'y the other day since you were a child, an'
me skelpin' you for provokin' me. Well, I'll have the house ready for
yous both when you come!"
"Will you tell Matier to harness the horse...."
"I'll tell him this minute. That man's near demented mad at the thought
of you marryin'. 'Be the hokey O!' he says whenever I go a-near him, an'
then he starts laughin' an' tellin' me it's the great news altogether.
'I wish,' says he, 'the oul' lad was alive. He'd be makin' hell's blazes
for joy!' Och, he's cracked, that fella. I tell him many's the time it's
in the asylum he should be, but sure, you might as well talk to the
potstick as talk to him. He'll drive you to the station with a heart
an' a han', and the capers of him when you both come back'll be like
nothin' on God's earth!"
"So long as he doesn't capsize us both into the ditch!..."
"Him capsize you! I'd warm his lug for him if he dar'd to do such a
thing!..."