Changing Winds Part 102

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.

"G.o.d wouldn't be hard on the like of her, the poor, innocent woman. I toul' lies til her, G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sionately, and as she kissed him, she cried:

"G.o.d 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 subst.i.tute 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, G.o.d-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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d!"

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!"

"G.o.d 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!"