Changing Winds Part 98

"Very well, sir!"

He moved away. The vitality seemed to have gone out of him, and suddenly he had become old ... senile ... shuffling.

"They'm wisht times, sir!" he said, as he left the hall.

4

Henry wrote to Roger, telling him of Ninian's death, and when he had finished the letter, he went out to post it. He could not sit still in the house ... he felt that he must move about until he was worn and exhausted. Mrs. Graham was still with Mary, but perhaps by the time he returned, they would be able to come downstairs again. The pride with which Mrs. Graham had supported herself in her grief seemed to him almost G.o.d-like. Once, in the South of Ireland, he had seen a peasant woman bidding good-bye to her husband. As the train steamed out of the station, she howled like a wounded animal, spinning round like a teetotum, and waving her hands and arms wildly. Her hair had tumbled down her back, and her eyes seemed to be melting, so freely did she weep ... and then when the train had disappeared round a bend of the track, she dried her eyes and went home. Her grief, that had seemed utterly inconsolable, had been no more than a summer shower.... He had had difficulty in preventing himself from laughing, and he could not restrain a feeling of contempt for her. "They write plays about that kind of silly howling at the Abbey Theatre, and call it 'the Celtic twilight.' No dignity, no decency!..."

He had heard sentimental Englishmen prating about "the tragic soul" of Ireland because they had listened to hired women _keening_ over the dead. "But that isn't grief," he had said to them. "They're paid to do that!" The Irish liked to splash about in their emotions ... they wallowed in them....

But Mrs. Graham's grief was more than a summer shower. Henry knew instinctively that Ninian's death had killed her. She might live for many years, but she would be a dead woman. She would show very little, nothing, to those who looked to see the signs of woe, but in her heart she would h.o.a.rd her desolation, keeping it to herself, obtruding her sorrow on no one ... waiting patiently and silently for her day of release, when, as her faith told her, she and her son would come together again....

"It's unfair," he told himself, "to compare the grief of an illiterate Irishwoman with the grief of an English lady!"

But then he had seen the grief of poor Englishwomen. Four of the Boveyhayne men had been drowned in a naval battle. He had gone to the memorial service in Boveyhayne Church, and had seen the friends of those men mingling their tears ... but there had been none of this emotional savagery, this howling like women in kraals, this medicine-man grief....

5

They were both in the drawing-room when he returned.

"I've written to Roger," he said, to explain his absence. "Perhaps," he went on, "there are other letters you'd like me to write?"

"Yes," she said, "it would be kind of you, Henry!..."

There was Ninian's uncle, the Dean of Exebury, and Mr. Hare, with whom he had worked ... they must be told at once ... and there were other relatives, other friends. He spent the evening in doing the little services that must be done when there is death, and found relief for his mind in doing them.

"I told the servants," he said, looking up from a letter he was writing.

"Old Widger wanted to see you!..."

"Poor Widger," she said. "He and Ninian were so fond of each other!"

She got up and went to the door. "I must go and say something to him,"

she said. "He'll feel it so much!"

She closed the door behind her, and he sat staring at it after she had gone. The matchless pride of her, that she could forget herself so completely and think of the subordinate sorrow of her servant when she might have been absorbed by her own!

He turned to Mary who was sitting near him, and reached out and took her hand in his, but neither of them spoke.

What was there to say? Ninian was dead ... old men had made a war, and this young man had paid for it ... and everywhere in Europe, there were mourners for the young, slain for the folly and incompetence of the old and the worn and the impatient.

He released Mary's hand, and resumed the writing of his letter. Before he had finished it, Mrs. Graham returned to the room.

"Poor Widger," she said, "he ... he cried!"

She came to the table where Henry was writing, and placed her hand on his shoulder, and looked concernedly at him.

"Aren't you tired, Henry?" she said.

"No, thanks!" he answered, glancing up at her and smiling.

"You mustn't tire yourself!" she bent over him and kissed his forehead lightly. "You've been a great help, Henry," she said.

6

But in her room, where none could see her, she shed her tears....

THE TENTH CHAPTER

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 G.o.d 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!"