Changing Winds Part 26

"This affair with Sheila Morgan is all the more reason why you should think of something big to do. I wish you were coming to Dublin with me now. Dublin's very beautiful in the summer, and we could go up into the mountains and talk about things."

"Oh, well, we shall meet in Dublin fairly soon," Henry replied, smiling at Marsh. It had been settled that he was to enter Trinity a little earlier than his father had previously planned.

"Yes, that's true!"

The hour at which the train was due to depart came, and Henry got out of the carriage and stood on the platform while Marsh, his head thrust through the window, talked to him.

"You might write to me," he said. "We ought not to drift away from each other, Henry!..."

"We won't do that. We'll see each other in Dublin."

"Yes, of course. You must meet Galway when you come back. He's a schoolmaster and a barrister and a poet and heaven knows what not. He's a splendid fellow. Perhaps he'll persuade you to take more interest in Irish things!"

"Perhaps!"

The guard blew his whistle, and the train began to move out of the station.

"Don't get too English, Henry!" Marsh shouted, waving his hand in farewell.

Henry smiled at him, but did not answer.

"Good-bye!" Marsh called to him.

"Good-bye!" Henry answered.

The train swung round a bend and disappeared on its way south, and Henry, strangely desolate, turned and walked away from the station.

2

In the excitement of leaving Ballymartin and sightseeing in the shipyard, he had almost forgotten Sheila Morgan, but now, his mind stimulated by his talk with Marsh and his spirit depressed by his loneliness, his thoughts returned to her, and it seemed to him that he detested her. She had insulted him, struck him, humiliated and shamed him. When he remembered that he had told her of his love for her and had asked her to marry him, and had been told in reply that she wanted a man, not a coward, he felt that he could not bear to return to Ireland again. His mood was mingled misery and gladness. At Boveyhayne, thank heaven, he would be free of Sheila and probably he would never think of her again. Gilbert and Ninian would fill his mind, and of course there would be Mrs. Graham and Mary. Mary! It was strange that he should have let Mary slip out of his thoughts and let Sheila slip into them. He had actually proposed to Mary and she had accepted him, and then he had left her and forgotten her because of Sheila. He remembered that he had not replied to the letter she had written to him before John Marsh came to Ballymartin. He had intended to write, but somehow he had not done so ... and then Sheila came, and it was impossible to write to her. He wondered what he should say to her when they met. Would she come to Whitcombe station to meet him? What was he to say to her?...

He had treated her shabbily. Of course, she was only a kid, as Ninian himself would say, but then he had made love to her, and anyhow she would be less of a kid now than she was when he last saw her.... He got tired of walking about the streets, and he made his way to the quays and pa.s.sed across the gangway on to the deck of the steamer. A cool air was blowing up the Lagan from the Lough, and when he leaned over the side of the ship he could see the dark skeleton shape of the shipyard. His thoughts were extraordinarily confused, rambling about his father and Sheila Morgan and John Marsh and Mary Graham and Tom Arthurs and Ireland and ships and England and Gilbert Farlow and Ninian and Roger....

"I ought never to have thought of any one but Mary," he said to himself at last. "I _really_ love her. I was only ... only pa.s.sing the time with Sheila!"

"Well, thank G.o.d I'll soon be in Devonshire," he went on, "and out of all this. If only my Trinity time were over, and I were settled in London with Gilbert and the others, I'd be happy again!" He thought of John Marsh, and as he leant over the side of the boat, looking down on the dark water flowing beneath him, he seemed to see Marsh's eager face, framed in the window of the railway carriage. He almost heard Marsh saying again, "Well, what do _you_ propose to do for Ireland?..."

"Oh, d.a.m.n Ireland," he said out loud.

He walked away from the place where he had imagined he had seen Marsh's face peering at him out of the water, and as he walked along the deck, he could hear the noise of hammering in the shipyard made by the men on the night-shift. Tom Arthurs's brain was still working, though Tom Arthurs was now at home.

"That's real work," Henry murmured to himself, "and a lot better than gabbling about Ireland's soul as if it were the only soul in the world!

Poor old John! I disappoint him horribly...." He was standing in the bows of the boat, looking towards the Lough. "I wonder," he said to himself, "whether Mary'll be at Whitcombe station!"

3

The peculiar sense of isolation which overwhelms an Irishman when he is in England, fell upon Henry the moment he climbed into the carriage at Lime Street station. None of the pa.s.sengers in his compartment spoke to each other, whereas in Ireland, every member of the company would have been talking like familiars in a few minutes. About an hour after the train had left Liverpool, some one leant across to the pa.s.senger facing him and asked for a match, and a box of matches was pa.s.sed to him without a word from the man who owned them. "Thanks!" said the pa.s.senger who had borrowed the box, as he returned it. No more was said by any one for half an hour, and then the man opposite to Henry stretched himself and said, "We're getting along!" and turned and laid his head against the window and went to sleep.

"We _are_ different!" Henry thought to himself. "We're certainly different ... only I wonder does the difference matter much!"

He tried to make conversation with his neighbour, but was unsuccessful, for his neighbour replied only in monosyllables, and sometimes did not even articulate at all, contenting himself with a grunt....

"Well, why should he talk to me?" Henry thought to himself. "He isn't interested in me or my opinions, and perhaps he wants to read or think!..."

Marsh would have denied that the man wanted to think. He would have denied that the man had the capacity to think at all. Henry remembered how Marsh had generalised about the English. "They live on their instincts," he had said. "They never live on their minds!" and he had quoted from an article in an English newspaper in which the writer had lamented over the decline and fall of intellect among his countrymen.

The writer declared that no one would pay to see a play that made a greater demand upon the mind than is made in a musical comedy, and that even this slight demand was proving to be more than many people could bear: the picture palace was destroying even the musical comedy.

"But are we any better than that?" Henry had asked innocently, and Marsh, indignant, had declared that the Irish were immeasurably better than _that_.

"But are we?" Henry asked himself as the train swiftly moved towards London.

And through his mind there raced a long procession of questions for which he could not find answers. His mind was an active, searching mind, but it was immature, and there were great gaps in it that could only be filled after a long time and much experience. He had not the knowledge which would enable him to combat the opinions of Marsh, but some instinct in him caused him to believe that Marsh's views of England and Ireland were largely prejudiced views. "I don't feel any less friendly to Gilbert and Ninian and Roger than I do to John Marsh or any other Irishman, and I don't feel that John understands me better than they do!" That was the pivot on which all his opinions turned. He could only argue from his experience, and his experience was that this fundamental antagonism between the Irish and the English, on which John Marsh insisted, did not exist. When Marsh declared pa.s.sionately that he did not wish to see Ireland made into a place like Lancashire, he was only stating something that many Englishmen said with equal pa.s.sion about the unindustrialised parts of England. Gilbert Farlow denounced mill-owners with greater fury than Mr. Quinn denounced them.... It seemed to Henry that he could name an English equivalent for every Irish friend he had.

"There are differences, of course," he said to himself, remembering the silent company of pa.s.sengers who shared his compartment, "but they don't matter very much!"

"I wish," he went on, "John Marsh weren't so bitter against the English.

Lots of them would like him if he'd only let them!"

He looked out of the window at the wide fields and herds of cattle and comfortable farmhouses, built by men whose lives were more or less secure, and ... "Of course!" he exclaimed in his mind. "That's the secret of the whole thing! When our people have had security for life as long as these people have had it, their houses will be as good as these are, and their farms as rich and clean and comfortable!"

One had only to remember the history of Ireland to realise that many of the differences between the English and the Irish were no more than the differences between the hunter and the hunted, the persecutor and the persecuted. How could the Irish help having a lower standard of life than the English when their lives had been so disrupted and disturbed that it was difficult for them to have a standard of life at all? Now, when the disturbance was over and security of life had been obtained (after what misery and bitterness and cruel lack of common comprehension!) the Irish would soon set up a level of life that might ultimately be higher than that of the English.

"Of course," said Henry, remembering something that his father had said, "there'll be a Greedy Interval!"

The Greedy Interval, the first period of prosperity in Ireland when the peasants, coming suddenly from insecurity and poverty to safety and well-being, would claw at money like hungry beasts clawing at food, had been the subject of many arguments between Mr. Quinn and John Marsh, Mr.

Quinn maintaining that greed was the princ.i.p.al characteristic of a peasant nation, inherent in it, inseparable from it.

"Look at the French," he had said on one occasion. "By G.o.d, they buried their food in their back-gardens rather than let their hungry soldiers have it in the Franco-German War! Would an aristocrat have done that, John Marsh? They saw their own countrymen who had been fighting for them, starving, and they let them starve!..."

It was the same everywhere. "I never pa.s.s a patch of allotments," he said, "without thinkin' that their mean, ugly, _little_ look is just like a peasant's mind, an' beG.o.d I'm glad when I'm past them an' can see wide lands again!" Peasants were greedy, narrow, unimaginative, lacking in public spirit. In France, in Belgium, in Holland and Russia, in all of which countries Mr. Quinn had travelled much, there was a peasant spirit powerfully manifested, and almost invariably that manifestation was shown in a mean manner.

"That's what your wonderful Land Laws are going to do for Ireland!" Mr.

Quinn had exclaimed scornfully. "_We're_ to be thrown out of our land, an' louts like Tom McCrum are to be put in our place!..."

Henry had sympathised with his father then, but he felt that the best of the argument was with John Marsh who had replied that the Irish landlords would never have been dispossessed of their land, if they had been worthy of it. "If they'd thought as much about their responsibilities as they thought about their rights, they'd still have their rights!" he said.

"I suppose that's so," Henry said to himself, picking up a paper that he had bought in Liverpool and beginning to read. "I must talk to Gilbert about it!"

4

Ninian and Gilbert met him at Whitcombe station. As he stood on the little platform of the carriage, he could see that Mary was not with them, and he felt disappointed. She might have come, too!...

"Here he is," he heard Gilbert shout to Ninian as the train drew up.

"Hilloa, Quinny!"