Hyacinth Part 17

It was no longer a question of filling a sheet of foolscap with grammatical sentences, discovering synonyms for words hard to spell. Now thoughts were hot in him, and the art lay in finding words which would blister and scorch. Time after time he tore up a page of bombast or erased ridiculous flamboyancies. Late at night, with a burning head and ice-cold feet, he made his last copy, folded it up, and, distrusting the cooler criticism of the morning, went out and posted it to the _Croppy_.

A letter from Miss Goold overtook him the following Thursday in the hotel at Clogher.

'I was delighted to hear from you again,' she wrote. 'I was afraid you had cut me altogether, gone over to the respectable people, and forgotten poor Ireland. Captain Quinn told me that you and he had quarrelled, and I gathered that you rather disapproved of him. Well, he was a bit of a blackguard; but, after all, one doesn't expect a man who takes on a job of that kind to be anything else. I never thought it would suit you, and you will do me the justice of remembering that I never wanted you to volunteer. Now about your article. It was admirable.

These "Cheap Patriots"'--it was thus the article was headed--'are just the creatures we want to scarify. Dowling and his kind are the worst enemies Ireland has to-day. We'll publish anything of that kind you send us, and remember we're not the least afraid of anybody. It's a grand thing for a paper to be as impecunious as the _Croppy_. No man but a fool would take a libel action against us with any hope of getting damages. A jury might value Dowling's character at any fantastic sum they chose, but it would be a poor penny the _Croppy_ would pay. Still, we're not so hard up that we can't give our contributors something, and next week you'll get a small cheque from the office. I hope it may encourage you to send us more. Don't be afraid to speak out. If anything peculiarly seditious occurs to you, write it in Irish. I know it's all the same to you which language you write in. Do us half a column every fortnight or so on Western life and politics.'

Hyacinth was absurdly elated by Miss Goold's praise. He made up his mind to contribute regularly to the _Croppy_, and had visions of a great future as a journalist, or perhaps a literary exponent of the ideas of Independent Ireland.

Meanwhile, he became very intimate both with the Quinns and with Canon Beecher's family. Mrs. Quinn was an enthusiastic gardener, and early in the spring Hyacinth helped her with her flowerbeds. He learnt to plait the foliage of faded crocuses, and pin them tidily to the ground with little wooden forks. He gathered suitable earth for the boxes in which begonias made their earliest sprout-ings, and learned to know the daffodils and tulips by their names. Later on he helped Mr. Quinn to mow the gra.s.s and mix a potent weed-killer for the gravel walks. There came to be an understanding that, whenever he was not absent on a journey, he spent the latter part of the afternoon and the evening with the Quinns.

As the days lengthened the family tea was pushed back to later and later hours to give more time out of doors.

There is something about the very occupation of gardening which is deadening to enthusiasm. Perhaps a man learns patience by familiarity with growing plants. Nature is never in a hurry in a garden, and there is no use in trying to hustle a flower, whereas a great impatience is the very life-spirit of enthusiastic patriotism. There has probably never been a revolutionary gardener, or even a strong Radical who worked with open-air flowers. Of course, in greenhouses things can be forced, and the spirit of the ardent reformer may find expression in the nurture of premature blooms. Perhaps also the constant stooping which gardening necessitates, especially in the early spring, when the weeds grow plentifully, tends to destroy the stiff mental independence which must be the att.i.tude of the militant patriot. It is very difficult for a man who has stooped long enough to have conquered his early cramps and aches to face the problems of politics with uncompromising rigidity. Hyacinth recognised with a curious qualm of disgust that his thoughts turned less and less to Ireland's wrongs and Ireland's future as he learnt to care for the flowers and the gra.s.s.

No doubt, too, the atmosphere of the Quinns' family life was not congenial to the spirit of the Irish politician. Mrs. Quinn was totally uninterested in politics, and except a prejudice in favour of what she called loyalty, had absolutely no views on any question which did not directly affect her home and her children. Mr. Quinn had a coldly-reasonable political and economic creed, which acted on the luxuriant fancies of Hyacinth's enthusiasm as his weed-killer did on the tender green of the paths. He declined altogether to see any good in supporting Irish manufactures simply because they were Irish. The story of O'Reilly's att.i.tude towards his shawls moved him to no indignation.

'I think he's perfectly right,' he said. 'If a man can buy cheap shawls in England he would be a fool to pay more for Irish ones. Business can't be run on those lines. I'm not an object of charity, and if I can't meet fair compet.i.tion I must go under, and it's right that I should go under.'

Hyacinth had no answer to give. He s.h.i.+rked the point at issue, and attacked Mr. Quinn along another line in the hope of arousing his indignation.

'But it is not fair compet.i.tion that you are called upon to face. Do you call it fair compet.i.tion when the Government subsidizes a woollen factory in a convent?'

'Ah!' said Mr. Quinn, 'you are thinking of the four thousand pounds the Congested Districts Board gave to the convent at Bobeen. But it is hardly fair to hold the Government responsible for the way that body wastes eighty thousand pounds a year.'

'The Government is ultimately responsible, and you must admit that, after such a gift, and in view of the others which will certainly follow, you are called upon to meet most unfair compet.i.tion.'

'Yes, I admit that. But isn't that exactly what you want to make general? There doesn't seem to me any difference between giving a bounty to one industry and imposing a protective tariff in favour of another; and if your preference for Irish manufactures means anything, it means a sort of voluntary protection for every business in the country. If you object to the Robeen business being subsidized you can't logically try to insist on mine being protected.'

It was puzzling to have the tables turned on him so adroitly. Hyacinth was reduced to feeble threat.

'Just wait a while till the nuns get another four thousand pounds, and perhaps four thousand pounds more after that, and see how it will affect you.'

Mr. Quinn smiled.

'I'm not much afraid of nuns as trade compet.i.tors, or, for the matter of that, of the Congested Districts Board either. If the Yorks.h.i.+re people would only import a few Mother Superiors to manage their factories, and take the advice of members of our Board in their affairs, I would cheerfully make them a present of any reasonable subsidy, and beat them out of the market afterwards.'

There was another influence at work on Hyacinth's mind which had as much to do with the decay of his patriotism as either the gardening or Mr.

Quinn's logic. Marion Beecher and her sister were very frequently at the Mill House during the spring and summer. There was one long afternoon which was spent in the marking out of the tennis-ground. Mr. Quinn had theories involving calculations with a pencil and pieces of paper about the surest method of securing right angles at the corners and parallel lines down the sides of the court. Hyacinth and Marion worked obediently with a tape measure and the garden line. One of the boys messed cheerfully with a pail of liquid whitening. Afterwards the gardening was somewhat deserted, and Hyacinth was instructed in the game. It took him a long time to learn, and for many afternoons he and Marion were regularly beaten, but she would not give up hope of him. Often the excuse of her coming to the Quinns was the necessity of practising some new hymn or chant for Sunday. Hyacinth worked as hard at the music as at the tennis under her tuition, and there came a time when he could sing an easy tenor part with fair accuracy. Then in the early summer, when the evenings were warm, hymns were sung on the lawn in front of the house. There seemed no incongruity in Marion Beecher's company in pa.s.sing without a break from lawn-tennis to hymn-singing, and Mr. Quinn was always ready to do his best at the ba.s.s with a serious simplicity, as if it were a perfectly natural and usual thing to close an afternoon's amus.e.m.e.nt with 'Rock of Ages.' Hyacinth was not conscious of any definite change in his att.i.tude towards religion. He still believed himself to be somehow outside the inner shrine of the life which the Beechers and the Quinns lived, just as he had been outside his father's prayers. But he found it increasingly difficult after an hour or two of companions.h.i.+p with Marion Beecher to get back to the emotions which had swayed him during the weeks of his intimacy with Miss Goold. To write for the _Croppy_ after sitting beside Marion in church on Sunday evenings was like pa.s.sing suddenly from a quiet wood into a heated saloon where people wrangled. A wave of the old pa.s.sionate feeling, when it returned, affected him as raw spirit would the palate of a boy.

One day early in summer--the short summer of Connaught, which is glorious in June, and dissolves into windy mist and warm rain in the middle of July--Hyacinth was invited by Canon Beecher to join a boating party on the lake. The river, whose one useful function was the turning of Mr. Quinn's millwheel, wound away afterwards through marshy fields and groves of willow-trees into the great lake. At its mouth the Beechers kept their boat, a c.u.mbrous craft, very heavy to row, but safe and suited to carry a family in comfort. The party started early--Canon Beecher, Hyacinth, and one of the boys very early, for they had to walk the two miles which separated Ballymoy from the lake sh.o.r.e. Mrs.

Beecher, the girls, the two other boys, and the baskets of provisions followed a little later on the Rectory car, packed beyond all possibility of comfort. The Canon himself pulled an oar untiringly, but without the faintest semblance of style, and the party rippled with joy when they discovered that Hyacinth also could row.

'Now,' said Elsie, 'we can go anywhere. We can go on rowing and rowing all day, and see places we've never seen before.'

'My dear girl,' said her mother, 'remember that Mr. Conneally and your father aren't machines. You mustn't expect them to go too far.'

'Oh, but,' said Elsie, 'father says he never gets tired if he has only one oar to pull.'

The Canon was preparing for his toil. The old coat, in colour now almost olive green, was folded and used as a cus.h.i.+on by Marion in the bow. His white cuffs, stowed inside his hat, were committed to the care of Mrs.

Beecher. He rolled his gray s.h.i.+rtsleeves up to the elbow, and unb.u.t.toned his waistcoat.

'Now,' he said, 'I'm ready. If I'm not hurried, I'll pull along all day.

But what about you, Conneally? You're not accustomed to this sort of thing?'

But Hyacinth for once was self-confident. He might be a poor singer and a contemptible tennis player, but he knew that nothing which had to do with boats could come amiss to him. He looked across the sparkling water of the lake.

'I'll go on as long as you like. You won't tire me when there's no tide and no waves. This is a very different business from getting out the sweeps to pull a n.o.bby five miles against the strength of the ebb, with a heavy ground swell running.'

About eleven o'clock they landed on an island and ate biscuits. The Canon told Hyacinth the story of the ruin under whose walls they sat.

'It belonged to the Lynotts, the Welshmen of Tyrawley. They were at feud with the Burkes, and one night in winter----'

The girls wandered away, carrying their biscuits with them. It is likely that they had heard the story every summer as long as they could remember. Mrs. Beecher alone still maintained an att.i.tude of admiration for her husband's antiquarian knowledge, the more creditable because she must have been familiar with the onset of the MacWilliam Burkes before even Marion was old enough to listen. To Hyacinth the story was both new and interesting. It stirred him to think of the Lynotts fighting hopelessly, or begging mercy in the darkness and the cold just where he sat now saturate with sunlight and with life. He gazed across the mile of s.h.i.+ning water which separated the castle from the land, and tried to realize how the Irish servant-girl swam from the island with an infant Lynott on her back, and saved the name from peris.h.i.+ng. How the snow must have beaten in her face and the lake-waves choked her breath! It was a great story, but the girls, shouting from the water's edge, reminded him that he was out to pull an oar, and not to sentimentalize. He and the Canon rose, half smiling, half sighing, and took their places in the boat.

They penetrated before luncheon time to a bay hitherto unknown to the Beechers. A chorus of delight greeted its discovery. The water shone bright green and very clear above the slabs of white limestone. The sh.o.r.e far inland was almost verdure-less. Broad flat rocks lay baking in the suns.h.i.+ne, and only the scantiest gra.s.s struggled up between their edges. Sometimes they overlapped each other, and rose Uke an immense staircase. Fifty yards or so from the land was a tiny island entirely overgrown with stunted bushes. The boat was pushed up to it and a landing-place sought, but the shrubs were too thick, and it was decided to picnic among the rocks on the land. Then Marion in the bow made a discovery. A causeway about a foot under water led from the island to the sh.o.r.e. The whole party leaned over to examine it. Every stone was visible in the clear water, and it was obvious that it had been planned and built, and was no merely accidental formation of the rocks. The Canon had heard of a similar device resorted to by an island hermit to insure the privacy of his cell. Hyacinth spoke vaguely of the settlements of primitive communities of lake-dwellers. The three boys planned an expedition across the causeway after luncheon.

'We'll carry our shoes and stockings with us,' they said, 'and then explore the island. Perhaps there is a hermit there still, or a primitive lake-dweller. What is a primitive lake-dweller, Mr.

Conneally?'

Hyacinth was uncertain, but hazarded a suggestion that the lake-dwellers were the people who buried each other in raths. The Canon, whose archaeology did not go back beyond St. Patrick, offered no correction.

Tea was made later on in yet another bay, this time on the eastern sh.o.r.e of the lake. An oak wood grew down almost to the water's edge, and the branches overhung a sandy beach, more golden than any sea-strand. The whole party collected dead wood and broken twigs for the fire. Then, while the girls unpacked the baskets and secured the kettle amidst the smoke, Hyacinth lay back luxuriously and watched the sun set behind the round-shouldered mountain opposite. The long, steep slope shone bright green while the sun still rested in view above the summit; then suddenly, when the topmost rim of it had dipped out of sight, the whole mountainside turned purple, and a glory of gold and crimson hung above it on the motionless streaks of cloud. Slowly the splendour faded, the purple turned gray, and a faint breeze fluttered across the lake.

The day was the first of many which Hyacinth gave to such expeditions.

The work of Mr. Quinn's office was not so pressing as to necessitate his spending every day there when he was in Ballymoy, and a holiday was always obtainable. The lake scenery remained vivid in his memory in after-years, and had its influence upon him even while he enjoyed it, unconscious of anything except the present pleasure. There was something besides the innocent gaiety of the girls and the simple sincerity of the Canon's plat.i.tudes, something about the lake itself, which removed him to a spiritual region utterly remote from the fiery atmosphere of Miss Goold's patriotism. Many things which once loomed very large before him sank to insignificance as he drank to the full of the desolation around him. The past, in which no doubt men strove and hoped, hated and loved and feared, had left the just recognisable ruins of some castles and the causeway built by an unknown hermit or the prehistoric lake-dwellers.

A few thatched cabins, faintly smoking, and here and there a cairn of stones gathered laboriously off the wretched fields, were the evidences of present activity. Now and then a man hooted to his dog as it barked at the sheep on the hillside, or a girl drove a turf-laden donkey inland from the boggy sh.o.r.e. Otherwise there were no signs of human life. A deep sense of monotony and inevitableness settled down upon Hyacinth. He came for the first time under the great enchantment which paralyzes the spirit and energy of the Celt. He knew himself to be, as his people were, capable of spasms of enthusiasm, the victim of transitory burnings of soul. But the curse was upon him--the inevitable curse of feeling too keenly and seeing too clearly to be strenuous and constant. The flame would die down, the enthusiasm would vanish--it was vanis.h.i.+ng from him, as he knew well--and leave him, not indeed content with common life, but patient of it, and to the very end sad with the sense of possibilities unrealized.

Yet it was not without many struggles and periods of return to the older emotions that Hyacinth surrendered his enthusiasm. There still recurred to him memories of his father's vision of an Armageddon and the conception of his own part in it. Sometimes, waking very early in the morning, he became vividly conscious of his own feebleness of will and his falling away from great purposes. The conviction that he was called to struggle for Ireland's welfare, to sacrifice, if necessary, his life and happiness for Ireland, was strong in him still. He felt himself affected profoundly by the influences which surrounded him, but he had not ceased to believe that the idea of self-sacrificing labour was for him a high vocation. He writhed, his limbs twisting involuntarily, when these thoughts beset him, and often he was surprised to discover that he was actually uttering aloud words of self-reproach.

Then he would write fiercely, brutally, catch at the excuse of some hypocrisy or corruption, or else denounce selfishness and easy-going patriotic sentiment, finding subject for his satire in himself. His articles brought him letters of praise from Miss Goold. 'You have it,'

she wrote once, 'the thing we all seek for, the power of beating red-hot thought into sword-blades. Write more like the last.' But the praise always came late. The violent mood, the self-reproach, the bitterness, were past. His life was wrapt round again with softer influences, and he read his own words with shame when they reached him in print. Afterwards for a while, if he wrote at all, it was of the peasant life, of quaint customs, half-forgotten legends and folklore. These articles appeared too, but brought no praise from Miss Goold. Once she reproached him when he lapsed into gentleness for many consecutive weeks.

'You oughtn't to waste yourself. There are fifty men and women can do the sort of thing you're doing now; we don't want you to take it up.

It's fighting men we need, not maundering sentimentalists.'

CHAPTER XVII

It was during the second year of Hyacinth's residence in Ballymoy that the station-master at Clogher died. The poor man caught a cold one February night while waiting for a train which had broken down three miles outside his station. From the cold came first pneumonia, and then the end. Now, far to the east of Clogher, on a different branch of the railway-line, is a town with which the people of Mayo have no connection whatever. In it is a very flouris.h.i.+ng Masonic lodge. Almost every male Protestant in the town and the neighbourhood belongs to it, and the Rector of the parish is its chaplain. Among its members at that time was an intelligent young man who occupied the position of goods clerk on the railway. The Masonic brethren, as in duty bound, used their influence to secure his promotion, and brought considerable pressure to bear on the directors of the company to have him made station-master at Clogher.

It is said with some appearance of truth that no appointment in Ireland is ever made on account of the fitness of the candidate for the post to be filled. Whether the Lord Lieutenant has to nominate a Local Government Board Inspector, or an Urban Council has to select a street scavenger, the principle acted on is the same. No investigation is made about the ability or character of a candidate. Questions may be asked about his political opinions, his religious creed, and sometimes about the social position of his wife, but no one cares in the least about his ability. The matter really turns upon the amount of influence which he can bring to bear. So it happened that John Crawford, Freemason and Protestant, was appointed station-master at Clogher. Of course, n.o.body really cared who got the post except a few seniors of John Crawford's, who wanted it for themselves. Probably even they would have stopped grumbling after a month or two if it had not happened that a leading weekly newspaper, then at the height of its popularity and influence, was just inaugurating a crusade against Protestants and Freemasons.

The case of John Crawford became the subject of a series of bitter and vehement articles. It was pointed out that although Roman Catholics were beyond all question more intelligent, better educated, and more upright than Protestants, they were condemned by the intolerance of highly-paid officials to remain hewers of wood and drawers of water. It was shown by figures which admitted of no controversy that Irish railways, banks, and trading companies were, without exception, on the verge of bankruptcy, entirely owing to the apathy of shareholders who allowed their interests to be sacrificed to the bigotry of directors. It was urged that a public meeting should be held at Clogher to protest against the new appointment.

The meeting was convened, and Father Fahey consented to occupy the chair. He was supported by a dispensary doctor, anxious to propitiate the Board of Guardians with a view to obtaining a summer holiday; a leading publican, who had a son at Maynooth; a grazier, who dreaded the possible part.i.tion of his ranch by the Congested Districts Board; and Mr. O'Reilly, who saw a hope of drawing custom from the counter of his rival draper, the Scotchman.

Father Fahey opened the proceedings with a speech. He a.s.sured his audience that he was not actuated by any spirit of religious bigotry or intolerance. He wished well to his Protestant fellow-countrymen, and hoped that in the bright future which lay before Ireland men of all creeds would be united in working for the common good of their country.

These sentiments were not received with vociferous applause. The audience was perfectly well aware that something much more to the point was coming, and reserved their cheers. Father Fahey did not disappoint them. He proceeded to show that the appointment of the new station-master was a deliberate insult to the faith of the inhabitants of Clogher.