Changing Winds Part 77

John smiled at him. "You're to get well at once," he answered. "We can't have you lying ill at a time like this!"

"An' aren't you an' the like of you enough to make any man ill? Come here to me, an' let me have a look at you. I can't see you rightly in that light.... You're lookin' pale on it, John. What ails you?"

"I'm tired, that's all. I shall be all right in the morning...."

"You're workin' yourself to death! That's what you're doin'. Sit down there by the side of the bed till I talk to you!"

John drew a chair up to the old man's bedside, and sat down on it as he had been bidden. Henry, anxious lest his father should overtax his strength, sat at the foot of the bed.

"An' what are you drillin' for?" Mr. Quinn demanded of John.

"We must defend ourselves, Mr. Quinn...."

"Defend me granny! An' who's goin' to harm you?" Henry made a motion as if he would quieten his father, but the old man shook him off. "Leave me alone, Henry," he said, "an' let me have my say!" He turned again to John Marsh. "Isn't there the English Army to defend you if anybody tries to injure you? What call have you to start another lot of d.a.m.ned volunteers to be makin' ill-feelin' in the country for?"

"We must be prepared to defend ourselves," John insisted. "We can't trust the English...."

And so they wrangled until Mr. Quinn, too tired to continue, sent Henry and Marsh from his room.

"Take him away an' talk to him, Henry!" he said. "He'll not be happy 'til he's in bother, that lad. Away on with you, John!..."

5

It was while John Marsh was at Ballymartin, that the mutiny at the Curragh Camp took place. The soldiers had been ordered to Ulster to maintain order ... and their officers had refused to go.

"I thought you said we could depend on the English Army," John exclaimed to Mr. Quinn in very excited tones. "This looks like it, doesn't it? If they'd been ordered to march on _us_, they'd have done it quick enough.

That's why we're drilling, Mr. Quinn. We've got to defend ourselves.

Supposing the Ulster Volunteers attack us!..."

"They won't," Mr. Quinn snapped at him.

"But supposing they do, are we to sit down and let them do it? I tell you we daren't trust to the English. They'll promise everything and give nothing. That's the nature of them. They're a treacherous race!..."

"I wish to my G.o.d you had some sense, John Marsh," said Mr. Quinn.

"Oh, I know you think I'm a madman, but you can't deny facts, and the facts are that the English have systematically betrayed the Irish throughout their history. If there's a war on, they go down on their hands and knees and ask us to win it for them ... they offer us the sun and the moon and the stars for our help ... but the minute they've got over their fright, they start plotting to get out of their promises.

They've done it before and they'll do it again. I want our Volunteers to be more than a defensive organisation. I want them to be an offensive organisation. If we don't look out very sharply well find that the English have ruined Ireland again. They've started to do it openly now.

You've heard, haven't you, about the Cunard Line and Queenstown?..." It appeared that the Cunard Line had abandoned Queenstown as a port of call for American liners.... That means absolute ruin for Queenstown!...

Cas.e.m.e.nt tried to get the Hamburg-Amerika line to send their boats instead, and they'd agreed to do so ... all the preparations were made to welcome the first of their boats ... and then the scheme was abandoned by the Germans. The English Foreign office got at them!... "Oh, of course, it's only Ireland, and Irish people and Irish interests can be neglected and ruined without a blush so long as the English interests are safe.... More and more I'm convinced that we've got to separate from them. They're a common-minded people. You know they are! They're hucksters ... they think in ... in ha'porths!..."

6

The attempt to bring John Marsh to reason was a failure, and he went back to Dublin more resolved to make the Volunteers an offensive body than he had been when he arrived. He had seen a review of the Ulster Volunteer Force in Belfast and the setness of the men impressed him.

"They'll fight all right," he said. "I don't suppose their leaders have any stomach for fighting, but the men have plenty. By G.o.d, I wish they were on our side!"

"Well, why don't you try to get them on your side!" Henry demanded.

"Your notion of conciliating them is to start getting ready to fight them!"

"We have tried to conciliate them," Marsh replied. "When Carson formed his Provisional Government, some of us asked him to extend it to the whole of Ireland. Do you think we wouldn't rather have Carson than Redmond? He's got _some_ stuff in him anyhow, but Redmond!..."

He made a gesture of contempt. "I've no use," he said, "for a man who looks so like Napoleon without being Napoleon!"

"But Carson wouldn't," he went on. "It's all very well to say 'Conciliate Ulster!' but Ulster won't let us conciliate her. The Ulster people have nothing but contempt for us, and they ram Belfast down our throats until we're sick of it. And a lot of their prosperity is just good luck and ... and favour. They've been well looked after by the English, and they're near everything ... coalfields and Lancashire. Do you think if Galway was where Belfast is, it wouldn't be as prosperous?

If they're so almighty clever as they say they are, why don't they come and lead us, instead of clinging on to England like a pampered kid?..."

Henry listened patiently to John. There must, he thought, be some powerful motive for so much pa.s.sion. He had come to look upon nationality as a contemptible thing, a fretful preoccupation with little affairs, but when he faced the fury of John Marsh, he could not deny that this pa.s.sion, whether it be little or big, will bring the world to broils until it be satisfied. He did not now feel that irritation which he had formerly felt when John derided the English or called them by opprobrious names. He could make allowances for the anger of the dispossessed. "That kind of talk," he thought, "kills itself. Marsh has only to let himself go along enough, and he'll let himself go altogether. He'll exhaust his abuse...."

He remembered that when Gilbert and he had arrived in Dublin after their flight from London, they had tried to discover just what Marsh and his friends meant to do with Ireland when they had gained control of the country ... but Marsh and his friends had no plans. They talked vaguely of the national spirit and of self-government, but they could not be induced to name a specific reform to which they would set their minds.

Some one had given a copy of Dale's Report of Irish Elementary Education to Henry, and he had read it with something like horror. It seemed to him that here was the whole Irish problem, that when this was solved, everything was solved ... but when he spoke of it to Marsh and his friends he found that most of them had never heard of Dale's Report, were scarcely aware of the fact that there was an Irish education problem. "We'll deal with that after we've got Home Rule," they would say, waving their hands in the airy fashion in which futile people always wave their hands. And so it was with everything else. They would deal with that _after_ they had got Home Rule. Gilbert and Henry had explored the Combe and the dreadful swamp of slums reaching up from Ringsend and spilling almost into the gardens of Merrion Square....

"But don't they know about this?" Gilbert asked in amazement. "I mean, haven't they any eyes ... or noses?"

"They'll deal with that _after_ they've got Home Rule," Henry answered miserably.

They had gone back to their lodgings in a state of deep depression.

Wherever one went in Dublin, one was followed by little whining children, demanding alms in the cadging voice of the professional beggar, and many of them were hopelessly diseased....

"I thought the Irish were very religious and moral?" Gilbert said once, as they pa.s.sed a group of sickly children sitting at the entrance to a court of Baggot Street.

"Why?" Henry replied.

"These kids are syphilitic," Gilbert answered. "The place is full of syphilis!"

"Dublin is a garrison town and a University town," said Henry, with a shrug of his shoulders. "There are eight barracks in Dublin ... it's the most be-barracked city in the Kingdom.... Oh, we're terribly moral, we Irish. As moral as ostriches. If you pick up a Dublin newspaper, it's a million to one you'll see a reference to 'the innate purity of the Irish women,' written probably by a boozy reporter. No, Gilbert, you're wrong about these kids. They're not syphilitic.... Good Lord, no! That's English misgovernment. Wait 'til they've got Home Rule ... and those kids won't be syphilitic any more!..."

They had met a man at Ernest Harper's who wore the kilt of the Gael, and had listened to him while he bleated about the beautiful purity of the Irish women. He was a convert to Catholicism and Nationalism and anti-Englishism, and he had the appearance of a nicely-brought-up saint.

"He looks as if he had just committed a miracle, and is afraid he may do it again!" Gilbert whispered to Henry. This man purred at them. "The priests have kept Ireland pure," he murmured. "Many harsh things have been said about them, but no one has ever denied that they have kept Ireland pure!"

"I do," said Henry, full of desire to shock the Celt.

"You do?..."

"Anybody can keep a man pure by putting him in prison. That's what the priests have done. They've put the Irish people in gaol!..."

The kilted Celt shrank away from him. He was sorry, but he could not possibly sit still and listen to such conversation. He hoped that he was as broad-minded as any one, but there were limits.... Very wisely, he thought, the Church!...

"Blast the Church!" said Henry, and the kilted Celt had gone shivering away from him.

"That kind of person makes me foam at the mouth," Henry muttered to Gilbert "The Irish people aren't any purer than any other race. It's all bunk.u.m, this talk about their 'innate purity.' If you clap the population into gaol, you can keep them 'pure,' in act anyhow, and if the priests won't let the s.e.xes mingle openly, they can get up a spurious purity just like that. If a girl gets into trouble in Ireland, she goes to the priest and confesses, and the priest takes jolly good care that the man marries her. That's why the rate of illegitimacy is so low. And anyhow, the bulk of the people are agricultural, and country people are more continent than any other people. It's the same in England, but the English don't go about bleating of their 'innate purity.' I tell you, Gilbert, the trouble with this country is self-consciousness...."

"Home Rule ought to cure that!" said Gilbert.

"That's why I'm a Home Ruler," Henry replied. "If you chaff these people, they get angry and want to fight. If anybody were to get up in a public hall and say about the Irish one-quarter of the things that Bernard Shaw says in public about the English, the audience would flay him alive and wreck the building. They're too little to stand chaff easily. It takes a big people to bear criticism good-naturedly.... All the same, Gilbert, your d.a.m.ned countrymen are to blame for all this!"

"I know that," said Gilbert, "but your d.a.m.ned countrymen seem determined to remain like it!"