Changing Winds Part 31

"If we had houses like that in Belfast," Henry had said, as they came away, "we wouldn't let them become slums!"

"No," retorted Marsh, unable to restrain himself from sneering, "you'd make peep-shows out of them and charge for admission!"

"Well, that would be better than turning them into slums," Henry answered good-humouredly.

"Would it?" Marsh replied.

"_Would it?_" Henry wondered. The train was now on its way to Belfast, and, looking idly out of the window, he could see the waves of the Irish Sea breaking on the sands at Malahide, heaving suddenly into a gla.s.sy-green heap, and then tumbling over into a sprawl of white foam.

Would it? he wondered, thinking again of what Marsh had said about the Georgian houses with their wide halls and lovely Adams ceilings. There was no beauty of building at all in Belfast, and no one there seemed anxious that there should be: in all that city, so full of energy and purpose and grit and acuteness of mind, there did not appear to be one man of power who cared for the fine shape or the good look of things; but, after all, was that so very much worse than the state of mind of the Dublin people who, knowing what beauty is, carelessly let it decay?

He began to feel bitterly about Ireland and her indifference to culture and beauty. He told himself that Ireland was the land of people who do not care....

"They've got to be made to care!" he said aloud.

But how was it to be done?...

His sense of being an alien in Dublin had persisted all the time that he had lived there. The Dublin people were gregarious and garrulous, and he was solitary and reflective. Marsh and Galway had taken him to houses where people met and talked without stopping, and much conversation with miscellaneous, casually-encountered people bored Henry. He had no gift for ready talk and he disliked crowds and he was unable to carry on a conversation with people whom he did not know, of whose very names he was ignorant. Sometimes, he had envied Marsh and Galway because of the ease with which they could converse with strangers. Marsh would talk about himself and his poems and his work with an innocent vanity that made people like him; but Henry, self-conscious and shy, could not talk of himself or his intentions to any but his intimates. Sitting here, in this carriage, from which, even now, he could see in the distance, veiled in clouds, the high peaks of the Mourne mountains, he tried to explain this difference between Marsh and himself. Why was it that these Dublin men were so lacking in reticence, so eager to communicate, while he and Ulstermen were reserved and eager to keep silent? He set his problem in those terms. He identified himself as a type of the Ulsterman, and began to develop a theory, flattering to himself, to account for the difference between Dublin people and Ulstermen ... until he remembered that Ernest Harper was an Ulsterman. Mr. Quinn had taken Henry to see Harper on the first Sunday evening after they had arrived in Dublin from England, and Harper had received him very charmingly and had talked to him about nationality and co-operation and the Irish drama and the strange inability of Lady Gregory to understand that it was not she who had founded the Abbey Theatre, until Henry, who had never heard of Lady Gregory, began to feel tired. He had waited patiently for a chance to interpolate something into the monologue until hope began to leave him, and then, with a great effort he had interrupted the flow of Harper's vivid talk and had made a reference to a picture hanging on the wall beside him. It showed a flaming fairy in the middle of a dark wood....

"Oh, yes," Harper said, "that's the one I saw!"

"You saw?" Henry had exclaimed in astonishment.

And then he remembered that Harper spoke of fairies as intimately as other men speak of their friends....

"Good G.o.d!" he thought, "_where am I?_" and wondered what Ninian Graham would make of Ernest Harper.

Harper was an Ulsterman, and so was George Russell, whom people called "A. E." Marsh and Galway, now almost inseparable, had taken Henry to hear George Russell speaking on some mystical subject at the Hermetic Club, and Henry, bewildered by the subject, had felt himself irresistibly attracted to the fiery-eyed man who spoke with so little consciousness of his audience. After the meeting was ended, he had walked part of the way home with Russell and had listened to him as he said the whole of his lecture over again ... and he left him with a feeling that Russell was unaware of human presences, that the company of human beings was not necessary to him, that his speech was addressed, not to the visible audience or the visible companion, but to an audience or a companion that no one but himself could see. Was there any one on earth less like the typical Ulsterman than George Russell, who preached mysticism and better business, or Ernest Harper who took penny tramrides to pay visits to the fairies?

No, this theory of some inherent difference between Ulstermen and other Irishmen would not work. There must be some other explanation of Henry's dislike of crowds, his silence in large companies, his inability to a.s.sert himself in the presence of strangers. Why was it that he was unable to talk about himself and the things he had done and the things he meant to do as Marsh talked? It was not because he was more modest, had more humility, than Marsh; for in his heart, Henry was vain.... And while he was asking himself this question, suddenly he found the answer.

It was because he was afraid to talk about himself, it was because he had not got the courage to be vain and self-a.s.sertive in crowds. His inability to talk among strangers, to make people cease their own conversation in order to listen to him, was part of that cowardice that had prevented him from diving into the sea when he went with his father to swim at Cushendall and had sent him shivering into the shelter of the hedge when the runaway horse came galloping down the Ballymena road....

This swift, lightning revelation made him stand up in the carriage and gape at the photographs of Irish scenery in front of him.

"Oh, my G.o.d!" he said to himself, "am I always to be tortured like this?"

4

He sat back in his seat and lay against the cushions without moving. He saw himself now very clearly, for he had the power to see himself with the closest fidelity. He knew now that all his explanations were excuses, that the bitter things he had sometimes said of those who had qualities which he had not, were invented to prevent him from admitting that he was without courage. Any fight, mental or physical, unnerved him when it brought him into personal contact with his opponents. He could write wounding things to a man, but he could not say them to him without losing possession of himself and his tongue; and so he pa.s.sed from the temper of a cool antagonist to that of an enraged shrew. He had tried to explain the garrulity of the Dublin people by saying that they were obliged to talk and to persist in talking because "otherwise they'd start to think!" but he knew now that that was not an accurate explanation, that it was an ill-natured attempt to cover up his own lack of force.

"And that's worse than cowardice," he said to himself, "to excuse my own funkiness by pretending that courage isn't courage!"

He remembered that he had invented a bitter phrase about Yeats one night when he had seen the poet in a house in Dublin. "Yeats is behaving as if he were the archangel Gabriel making the Annunciation!" he had said, and the man to whom he had said it had laughed and asked what Henry thought Yeats was announcing.

"A fresh revision of one of his lyrics," he had replied....

"And I'd give the world," he said now, "to be able to put on his pontifical air!"

He had a shrinking will; his instinct in an emergency was to back away from things. He had not got the capacity to compel men to do his bidding by the simple force of his personality. If he succeeded in persuading people to do things which he suggested to them he was only able to do so after prolonged discussion, sometimes only after everything else had failed. At Rumpell's, Gilbert had made suggestions as if they were commands that must instantly be obeyed ... and they had been instantly obeyed; but when Henry made suggestions, either people did not listen to them or, having listened to them, they acted on some other suggestion, until at last, Henry, disheartened, seldom proposed anything until the last moment, and then he made his proposal in a way which seemed to indicate that he thought little of it; and when some of his suggestions were accepted and had proved, in practice, to be good, his att.i.tude had been, not that of the man who is absolutely sure of himself, but rather of the man who gasps with relief because something that he thought was very likely to be a failure, had proved to be a success.

Depression settled on him so heavily that he began to believe that he was bound to fail in everything that he undertook to do, and when he thought of the bundle of ma.n.u.script in his portmanteau, he had a sudden inclination to take it out and fling it through the window of the carriage. He had not spoken of his writing to any one except John Marsh, and to him, he had only said that he intended to write a novel some day.

Once, indeed, he had said, "I've written quite a lot of that novel I told you about!" but Marsh, intent on something else, had answered vaguely, "Oh, yes!" and had changed the conversation, leaving Henry to imagine that he had little faith in his power to write. He had been so despondent after that, that he had gone back to College and, having re-read what he had written, had torn the ma.n.u.script in pieces and thrown it into the grate because it seemed so dull and tasteless. He had not written a word after that for more than a month, and he might not have written anything for a longer period had he not heard from Gilbert Farlow that he had finished a comedy in three acts and had sent it to Mr. Alexander. The news stimulated him, and in a little while he was itching to write again. In the evening, he began to re-write the story and thereafter it went on, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, until it was finished. His feelings about it changed with remarkable rapidity. He read it over, in its unfinished state, many times, feeling at one time it was excellent, and at another time that it was poor, flatulent stuff, without colour or vivacity.

Writing did not give pleasure to him: it gave him pain. He felt none of that exultation in creating characters which he had been told was part of the pleasures of an author. There were times, indeed, when he felt a mitigated joy in writing because his ideas were fluent and words fell easily off his pen, but even on those occasions, the labour of writing hurt him and exhausted him. The times of pleasurable writing were short interludes between the long stretches of painful writing, little oases that made the journey across the desert just possible. And then there were those periods of appalling misery when, having ended a chapter, he wondered what he should make his people do next. He would leave them, landed neatly at the end of some adventure or emotional crisis, feeling that the story was going on splendidly and that his power to write was full and strong, and then, having written the number of the next chapter, he would reach forward to write the first word ... and suddenly there was devastation in his mind, and "My G.o.d! I don't know what to make them do now!" he would say.

He had read in a literary journal that some authors planned their stories before they began to write them. They prepared a summary of the tale, and then enlarged the summary. They knew exactly what was to happen in each chapter. A character could not move or rise or sit down or turn pale or look pleased without the author having known about it long before the act was performed. It was as if the author could count the very hairs on the heads of his people. "Just like G.o.d!" Henry had said to himself when he had finished reading the article.... He had tried to make a plan, and, after much labour, had completed one; but it was useless to him, for when he came to write out the story, his characters kicked it aside and insisted on behaving in some other way than he had planned that they should behave. It was as if they had taken their destinies into their own hands and insisted on living their lives in accordance with their own wishes instead of living them in accordance with his.... It was fortunate then that he began to read "Tristram Shandy," for when he saw how Sterne's pen, refusing to obey him, had filled some of his pages with curly lines and dots and confusions, had even declined to fill a chapter at all, impudently skipping it, he realised that authors are but creatures in the hands of some force that wills them to create things which they cannot control and sometimes cannot understand.

Writing his book had given him one pleasure. On the day on which he wrote the last word of it, he felt joy. Before he began to write, he had read in Forster's "Life of d.i.c.kens" that the great novelist had parted from his characters with pain. Henry parted from his characters with pleasure. "Thank G.o.d," he said, as he put down his pen, "I've finished with the brutes!"

He had enjoyed reading the story in its finished state, and when he had packed the ma.n.u.script into his portmanteau, he had felt that the story was good, and had sat in a chair dreaming of the success it would make and the praise he would receive for it. He tried to calculate the number of copies that would be sold, basing his calculations on the total population of the British Isles. "There are over forty millions of people in England and Wales alone," he said to himself, "and another ten millions, say, in Scotland and Ireland ... about fifty millions in all. I ought to sell a good many copies ... and then there's America!"

He thought that ten per cent. of the population might buy the story, and believed that his estimate was modest until he remembered that ten per cent. of fifty millions is five millions!...

And that made him laugh. Even he, in his wildest imaginings, did not dream of selling five million copies of his novel.

5

He wished now that he had asked John Marsh and Patrick Galway to read the story and tell him what they thought of it. They were honest men, and would criticise his work frankly. At that moment, he had an insatiable longing to know the truth, mingled with a strange fear of knowing it. What he wished to know was whether or not he had the potentialities of a great author in him. He knew that his story was not commonplace stuff, but he was afraid that it might only be middling writing, and he did not wish to be a middling writer. If he could not be a great writer, he did not wish to be a writer at all. There were thousands and thousands of novels in the world which did no more for men than enable them to put their minds to sleep. Henry did not wish to add a book to their number. There were other books, fewer in number than those, which showed that their authors had some feeling for life, but not enough, and these authors went on, year after year, producing one or more novels, each of which "showed promise," but never showed achievement. The life these men pursued always eluded them. It was impossible for Henry to join the crowd of people who produced books which perished with the generation that they pleased. That much he knew.

But he was eager that he should not fall into the ranks of the semi-great, the half-clever; and his fear was that his place was in their midst.

While he was ruminating in this manner, he remembered that Gilbert Farlow had written to him a few days before he left Dublin, and he ceased to think of his career as a writer and began to search his pockets for Gilbert's letter.

"I'll show the ma.n.u.script to Gilbert," he said to himself. "Old Gilbert loves telling people the truth!"

He found the letter and began to read it. "_Quinny_," it began, for Gilbert had abandoned "dears" because, he said, he sometimes had to write to people who were detestable:

_"Quinny: How soon can you get quit of that barrack in Dublin where your misguided father thinks you are being taught to be Irish? Cast your eyes on the address at the head of this notepaper. It is a n.o.ble house that Roger and I have discovered. Ninian has seen it and he approves of it. I said I'd break his blighted neck for him if he disapproved of it, which may have had something to do with his decision, though not much, for Ninian has become a very muscular young fellow and I shouldn't have liked the job of breaking his neck very much. Roger and I have been here for a week now, and Ninian joins us at the end of the month. He's down at Boveyhayne at present, catching lobsters and sniffing the air, all of which he says is very good for him and would be better for me. And you.

And Roger. There is a tablet on the front wall of the house, fixed by the London County Council, which says that Lord Thingamabob used to live here sometime in the eighteenth century. The landlord tried to raise the rent on that account, but we said we were Socialists and would expect the rent to be decreased because of the injury to our principles caused by residence in a house that had been inhabited by a member of the cursed, bloated and effete aristocracy. He begged our pardon and said that in the circ.u.mstances, he wouldn't charge anything extra, but he had us in the end, the mouldy worm, for he said that it was the custom to make Socialists pay a quarter's rent in advance. The result was that Roger had to stump up ... I couldn't for I was broke ... which made dear little Roger awfully unpleasant to live with for a whole day. I offered to go back and tell the man that we weren't Socialists at all, but Improved Tories, but he said I'd done enough harm. It's a pity that old Roger hasn't got a better sense of humour._

_We have chosen two rooms for you, one to work in, and the other to sleep in. We're each to have two rooms, so that we can go and be morose in comfort if we want to; but I daresay in the evenings we'll want to be together. I've thought out a scheme of decoration for your room--all pink rosebuds and stuff like that. Roger asked me not to be an a.s.s when I told him of it. His notion is a nice quiet distemper. Perhaps you'd better see to the decoration yourself although I must say I always thought your taste was perfectly d.a.m.nable._

_By-the-way, there's a ghost in this house. It's supposed to be the ghost of Lord Thingamabob, and I believe it is. I saw it myself three nights ago, and it was as drunk as a fiddler. My G.o.d, Quinny, it's a terrible thing to see an intoxicated spook. Roger wouldn't believe me when I told him about it afterwards. He said I was drunk myself and that he heard me tumbling up the stairs to bed. Which is a lie. I did see it, and it was drunk. I heard it hiccough! I wouldn't say it was drunk if it wasn't. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, Quinny, and it would be a very dirty trick to slander a poor bogey that can't defend itself. It looked very like its descendant, Lord Middleweight, and it had the same soppy grin that he has when he thinks he's said something clever. d.a.m.ned a.s.s, that chap!_

_Alexander sent my comedy back. He sent a note along with it and told me what a clever lad I am and more or less hinted that when I've grown up, I can send him another play. I suppose he thinks I'm a kid in knickerbockers. The result of this business is that I'm going to try and get a job as a dramatic critic. If I do, G.o.d help the next play he produces. I'm a hurt man, and I shall let the world know about it. I'm half-way through another piece which will take some place by storm, I hope. It's a very bright play, much better than the muck Oscar Wilde wrote, not so melodramatic, and tons better than anything Bernard Shaw has written. It's all about me._

_We've got an old woman called Clutters to housekeep for us. I chose her on account of her name, and it is a piece of good luck that she cooks extraordinarily well. There is also a maid, but we don't know her name, so we call her Magnolia. I'm really writing all this rot to get myself into the "twitter-twitter" mood. One of the characters in my new comedy talks like a character in a book by E. F. Benson, and I have to work myself up into a state of babbling fatuity before I can write her lines for her._

_Come to London as soon as you can._

_Gilbert."_

6

The prospect of settling in London in the society of his schoolfriends pleased him. Marsh and Galway had tried to persuade him to make his home in Dublin, pleading that it was the duty of every educated Irishman to live in Ireland. "We haven't got many educated men on our side," Marsh said, "not a hundred in the whole of Ireland, and we need people like you!" They talked of political schemes that must be prepared for the parliament that would some day be re-established in College Green. "And they can only be prepared by educated men," Marsh said.

Henry would not listen to them. His longing was to be with Gilbert and Roger and Ninian in London. Dublin made very little appeal to him, and the job of regenerating Ireland was so immense that it frightened him.

"I haven't got a common ground with you people," he said to Marsh and Galway. "You're Catholic to start off with, and I'm like my father, I think the Catholic religion is a contemptible religion. And you're not interested in anything but Ireland and the Gaelic movement. I'm interested in everything!"

"Don't you want to do _anything_ for Ireland then?" John Marsh had asked.