Changing Winds Part 30

"Good-bye, Gilbert!" Henry answered in a low tone.

"I suppose you'll write to me some day?"

"I suppose so. Yes, of course!..."

"Ripping day, isn't it? Shame to be wasting it in a blooming train!"

"Yes!"

He wished that the train would break down so that he need not part from Gilbert yet, but while he was wishing, it began to move. Gilbert stood back from the carriage and waved his hand to him, and Henry leant with his head through the window of his carriage, smiling....

"d.a.m.n Trinity," he said, sitting back in his seat, and letting depression envelop him. "d.a.m.n and blast Trinity!..."

THE SECOND BOOK

OF

CHANGING WINDS

I write of Youth, of Love, and have Accesse By these, to sing of cleanly-Wantonnesse.

HERRICK.

THE FIRST CHAPTER

1

Henry Quinn climbed into a carriage at Amiens Street station and sat back in his seat and puffed with pleasure, blowing out his breath with a long "poo-ing" sound. He was quit of Trinity College at last! Thank G.o.d, he was quit of it at last! The hatred with which he had entered Trinity had, in his four years of graduation, been mitigated ... there were even times when he had kindly thoughts of Trinity ... but every letter he received from Gilbert Farlow or Ninian Graham or Roger Carey stirred the resentment he felt at his separation from his friends who had gone to Cambridge, and so, in spite of the kindlier feeling he now had for the College, he was happy to think that he was quitting it for the last time. "But it isn't Irish," he insisted when his father complained of his lack of love for Trinity. "It's ... it's a hermaphrodite of a college, neither one thing nor another, English nor Irish. I always feel, when I step out of College Green into Trinity, that I've stepped right out of Ireland and landed on the point of a rock in the middle of the Irish Sea ... and the point p.r.i.c.ks and is d.a.m.ned uncomfortable!"

"You've got the English habit of d.a.m.ning everything, Henry!" his father replied at a tangent.

But Henry would not be drawn away from his argument.

"The atmosphere of the place is all wrong," he went on. "The Provost looks down the side of his nose at you if he thinks you take an interest in Ireland!"

Mr. Quinn, in his eagerness to defend his College from reproaches which he knew to be deserved, reminded Henry that the Provost had a considerable reputation as a Greek scholar, but his effort only delivered him more completely into Henry's hands.

"But, father," Henry said, "you yourself used to say what's the good of knowing all about Greece when you don't know anything about Ireland. I don't care about Greece and all those rotten little holes in the aegean ... that's dead and done with ... but I do care about Ireland which isn't dead and done with!"

It was then that Mr. Quinn found consolation. "Well, anyway, you've learned to love Ireland," he said. "Trinity's done that much for you!"

"Trinity hasn't done it for me," Henry answered, "I did it for myself."

Lying back in his seat, waiting for the train to steam out of the station on its journey to Belfast, Henry remembered that conversation with his father, and his mind speculated freely on his att.i.tude towards Trinity. "I don't care," he said, "if I never put my foot inside the gates again!"

Something that Patrick Galway said to him once, when he and John Marsh were talking of Trinity, came back to his memory. "The College is living on Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke," Galway said, and added, "It's like a maiden lady in a suburb giving herself airs because her great-grandfather knew somebody who was great. It hasn't produced a man who's done anything for Ireland, except harm, not in the last hundred years anyhow. Lawyers and parsons and officials, that's the best Trinity can do! If you think of the Irishmen who've done anything fine for Ireland, you'll find that, when they came from universities at all, they came from Oxford or Cambridge, anywhere on G.o.d's earth but Trinity.

Horace Plunkett was at Oxford...."

"Eton, too!" Marsh had interjected.

"Yes, Eton!" Galway went on. "Think of it! An Irish patriot coming from Eton where you'd think only Irish oppressors would come from! If Plunkett had been educated in an Irish school and sent to Trinity, do you think he'd have done anything decent for Ireland?"

"Yes," Henry had replied promptly. "He's that kind of man!"

"No, he wouldn't," Galway retorted. "They'd have educated the decency out of him, and he'd have been a ... a sort of Lord Ashtown!"

But Henry would have none of that. He would not believe that a man's nature can be altered by pedagogues.

"Horace Plunkett would have been a good Irishman if he'd been born and reared and educated in an Orange Lodge," he said.

"I'm not talking about natures," Galway replied. "I'm talking about beliefs. They'd have told him it was no good trying to build up an Irish nation...."

"He wouldn't have believed them," Henry retorted. "d.a.m.n it, Galway, do you think a man like Plunkett would let a lot of fiddling schoolmasters knock him off his balance?"

"I'm a schoolmaster," Galway answered, "and I know what schoolmasters can do!" His voice changed, deepening, as he spoke. "I know what the young teachers in Ireland mean to do!"

"What do they mean to do?" Henry had asked jokingly.

"Make Irishmen," Galway answered.

"If only Trinity would make Irishmen," he went on, "we'd all be saved a deal of trouble. But it won't, and when a man of family, like Plunkett, is born with good will for Ireland, he has to go to England to be educated. And he ought to be educated in Ireland, and he would be if Trinity were worth a d.a.m.n. I wish I were Provost, I'd teach Irishmen to be proud of their birth!"

"Well, when we've made Ireland a nation," said Henry, chaffing him, "we'll make you Provost of Trinity!" and Galway, though he knew that Henry was jesting, smiled with pleasure.

"When Ireland is a nation!" Marsh murmured dreamily.

2

It was extraordinary, Henry thought, how little at home he had felt in Dublin. He had the feel of Ballymartin in his bones. He had kinship with the people in Belfast. At Rumpell's and at Boveyhayne he had had no sensation of alien origin. He had stepped into the life of the school as naturally as Gilbert Farlow had done, and at Boveyhayne, even when he still had difficulty in catching the dialect of the fishermen, he had felt at home. But in Dublin, he had an uneasy feeling that after all, he was a stranger. In his first year at Trinity, he had been brutally contemptuous of the city and its inhabitants. "They can't even put up the names of the streets so that people can read them," he said to John Marsh soon after he arrived in Dublin. "They're so _d.a.m.ned_ incompetent!" And Marsh had told him to control his Ulster blood.

"You're right to be proud of Ulster," he had said, "but you oughtn't to go about talking as if the rest of Ireland were inhabited by fools!"

"I know I oughtn't," Henry replied, "but I can't help it when I see the way these a.s.ses are letting Dublin down!"

That was how he felt about Dublin and the Dublin people, that Dublin was being "let down" by her citizens. His first impression of the city was that it was n.o.ble, even beautiful, in spite of its untidiness, its distress. He would wander about the streets, gazing at the fine old Georgian houses, tumbling into decay, and feel so much anger against the indifferent citizens that sometimes he felt like hitting the first Dublin man he met ... hitting him hard so that he should bleed!...

"I feel as if Dublin were like an old mansion left by a drunken lord in the charge of a drunken caretaker," he said to Marsh. "It's horrible to see those beautiful houses decaying, but it's more horrible to think that n.o.body cares!"

Marsh had taken him one Sunday to a house where there were ceilings that were notable even in Dublin which is full of houses with beautiful ceilings.