Hyacinth Part 3

'Do you know the West well?' he asked.

'Indeed, I do not. I've always longed to go and spend a whole long summer there, but I've never had the chance.'

'Then how did you know it was like that? I mean, how did you catch the spirit of it in your poem?'

'Did I?' she said. 'I am so glad. But I don't deserve any credit for it. I wrote those verses after I had been looking at one of Jim Tynan's pictures. You know them, of course? No? Oh, but you must go and see them at once if you love the West. And you do, don't you?'

'It is my home,' said Hyacinth.

When he had finished his tea she introduced him to some of the people who were in the room. Afterwards he came to know them, but the memories which Miss O'Dwyer's verses called up in him made him absent and preoccupied. He scarcely heard the names she spoke. Soon the party broke up, and Hyacinth turned to look for Maguire.

'I'm afraid Mr. Maguire has gone,' said Miss O'Dwyer. 'He has a lecture to attend this afternoon. You must come here again, Mr. Conneally. Come next Wednesday--every Wednesday, if you like. We can have a talk about the West. I shall want you to tell me all sorts of things. Perhaps Finola will be here next week. She very often comes. I shall look forward to introducing you to her. You are sure to admire her immensely.

We all do.'

'Yes, I've heard of her,' said Hyacinth. 'Mr. Maguire told me who she was.'

'Oh, but he couldn't have told you half. She is magnificent. All the rest of us are only little children compared to her. Now be sure you come and meet her.'

CHAPTER IV

Ever since Pitt and Castlerea perpetrated their Act of Union two political parties have struggled together in Ireland. Both of them have been steadily prominent, so prominent that they have sometimes attracted the attention of the English public, and drawn to their contest a little quite unintelligent interest. The simplest and most discernible line of division between them is a religious one. The Protestant party has. .h.i.therto been guided and led by the gentry. It has been steadily loyal to England and to the English Government. It has not been greatly concerned about Ireland or Ireland's welfare, but has been consistently anxious to preserve its own privileges, powers, and property. It has not come well out of the struggle of the nineteenth century. Its Church has been disestablished, its privileges and powers abolished, and the last remnants of its property are being filched from it. It is a curious piece of irony that this party should have hastened its own defeat by the very policy adopted to secure victory. No doubt the Irish aristocracy would have suffered less if they had been seditious instead of loyal. The Roman Catholic party has been led by ecclesiastics, and has always included the bulk of the people. Its leaders have not cared for the welfare of Ireland any more than the Protestant party, but they have always pretended that they did, being in this respect much wiser than their opponents. They have pulled the strings of a whole series of political movements, and made puppets dance on and off the stage as they chose. Also they have understood how to deal with England. Unlike the Protestant party, they have never been loyal, because they knew from the first that England gives most to those who bully or worry her. They have kept one object steadily in view, an object quite as selfish in reality as that of the aristocracy--the aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of their Church. For this they have been prepared at any time to sacrifice the interests of Ireland, and are content at the present moment to watch the country bleeding to death with entire complacency. The leaders of this party enter upon the twentieth century in sight of their promised land. They possess all the power and nearly all the wealth of Ireland. If the Bishops can secure the continuance of English government for the next half-century Ireland will have become the Church's property. Her money will go to propagating the faith. Her children will supply the English-speaking world with a superfluity of priests and nuns.

Outside both parties there have always been a few men united by no ties of policy or religion, unless, as perhaps we may, we call patriotism a kind of religion. Other lands have been loved sincerely, devotedly, pa.s.sionately, as mothers, wives, and mistresses are loved. Ireland alone has been loved religiously, as men are taught to love G.o.d or the saints. Her lovers have called themselves Catholic or Protestant: such distinctions have not mattered to these men. They have scarcely ever been able to form themselves into a party, never into a strong or a wise party. They have been violent, desperate, frequently ridiculous, but always sincere and unselfish. Their great weakness has lain in the fact that they have had no consistent aim. Some of their leaders have looked for a return to Ireland's Const.i.tution, and built upon the watchword of the volunteers, 'The King, the Lords, and the Commons of Ireland.' Some have dreamed of a complete independence, of an Irish republic shaping its own world policy. Some have wholly distrusted politics, and given their strength to the intellectual, spiritual, or material regeneration of the people. Among these men have been found the sanest practical reformers and the wildest revolutionary dreamers. On the outskirts of their company have hung all sorts of people. Parliamentary politicians have leaned towards them, and been driven straightway out of public life. Criminals have claimed fellows.h.i.+p with them, and brought discredit upon honourable men. Poets and men of letters have drawn their inspiration from their strivings, and in return have decked their patriotism with imperishable splendour. In the future, no doubt, the struggle will lie between this party and the hitherto victorious hierarchy, with England for ally, and the fight seems a wholly unequal one. It was into an advanced and vehement group of patriots that Mary O'Dwyer introduced Hyacinth. He became a regular reader of the _Croppy_, and made the acquaintance of most of the contributors to its pages. He found them clever, enthusiastic, and agreeable men and women, but, as he was forced to admit to himself, occasionally reckless. One evening a discussion took place in Mary O'Dwyer's room which startled and shocked him. Excitement ran high over the events of the war. The sympathies of the 'Independent Irelanders,' as they called themselves, fiercely a.s.sertive even in their name, were of course entirely with the Boers, and they received every report of an English reverse with unmixed satisfaction.

When Hyacinth entered the room he found four people there. Mary O'Dwyer herself was making tea at a little table near the fire. Augusta Goold--the famous Finola--was stretched in a deep chair smoking a cigarette. She was a remarkable woman both physically and intellectually. It was her delight to emphasize her splendid figure by draping it in brilliant reds and yellows. To anyone who cared to speculate on such a subject it seemed a mystery why her clothes remained on her when she walked. The laws of gravity seemed to demand that they should loosen with her movements, become detached, and finally drop down. Nothing of the sort had ever happened, so it must be presumed that she had secret and unconventional ways of fastening them. Similarly it was not easy to see why her hair stayed upon her head. It was arranged upon no recognised system, and suggested that she had perfected the art, known generally only to heroines of romances, of twisting her tresses with a single movement into a loose knot. That she affected white frills of immense complexity was frequently evident, owing to the difficulty she experienced in confining her long legs to feminine att.i.tudes.

Her complexion put it in the power of her enemies to accuse her of familiarity with cosmetics--a slander, for she had been observed to turn green during an attack of sea-sickness. She had great brilliant eyes, which were capable of expressing intensity of enthusiasm or hatred, but no one had ever seen them soften with any emotion like love. Her att.i.tude towards social conventions was symbolized by her clothes. In the old days, when the houses of 'society' had still been open to her, she was accustomed to challenge criticism by fondling a pet monkey at tea-parties. Since she had lost caste by taking up the cause of 'Independent Ireland' the ape had been discarded, and the same result achieved by occasional bickerings with the police. She was an able public speaker, and could convince her audiences for a time of the reasonableness of opinions which next morning appeared to be the outcome of delirium. She wrote, not, like Mary O'Dwyer, verse in which any sentiment may be excused, but incisive and vigorous prose. Occasionally even the Castle officials got glimmerings of the meaning of one of her articles, and suppressed the whole issue of the _Croppy_ in which it appeared.

Near her sat a much less remarkable person--Thomas Grealy, historian and archaeologist. He had been engaged for many years on a history of Ireland, but no volume of it had as yet appeared. His friends suspected that he had got permanently stuck somewhere about the period of the introduction of Christianity into the island. His essays, published in the _Croppy_, dwelt with pa.s.sionate regret on the departed glories of Tara. He held strong views about the historical reality of the Tuath-de-Danaan, and got irritated at the most casual mention of Dr.

Petrie's theory of the round towers. He had proved that King Arthur was an Irishman, with whose reputation Malory and Tennyson had taken unwarrantable liberties. The name of Dante brought a smile of contempt to his lips, for he knew that the 'Purgatorio' was stolen shamelessly from the works of a monk of Cong. He nourished a secret pa.s.sion for Finola. He never ventured to declare it, but his imagination endowed every heroine, from Queen Maev down to the foster daughter of the Leinster farmer who married King Cormac, with Miss Goold's figure, eyes and hair. It was perhaps the burning of this pa.s.sion which rendered him so cadaverous that his clothes--in other respects also they looked as if they had been bought in far-off happier days--hung round him like the covering of a broken-ribbed umbrella.

The fourth person present was Timothy Halloran, who hovered about Mary O'Dwyer's tea-table. He was what the country people call a 'spoilt priest.' Destined by simple and pious parents to take Holy Orders, he got as far as the inside of Maynooth College. While there he had kicked a fellow-student down the whole length of a long corridor for telling tales to the authorities. A committee of ecclesiastics considered the case, and having come to the conclusion that he lacked vocation for the priesthood, sent him home. Timothy was accustomed to say that his violence might have been pa.s.sed over, but that his failure to appreciate the devotion to duty which inspired the tale-bearer marked him decisively as unfit for ordination. He never regretted his expulsion, although he complained bitterly that he had been nearly choked before they cast him out. He meant, it is to be supposed, that the effort to instil a proper reverence for dogma had almost destroyed his capacity for thought, not that the fingers of the reverend professors had actually closed around his windpipe. His subsequent experiences had included a period of teaching in an English Board School, a brief, but not wholly unsatisfactory, career as a political organizer in New York, and a return to Ireland, where he earned a precarious living as a journalist.

All four greeted Hyacinth warmly as he entered the room.

'We were just discussing,' said Mary O'Dwyer, 'the failure of our attempt to organize a field hospital and a staff of nurses for the Boers. It is a shame to have to admit that the English garrison in Ireland can raise thousands of pounds for their war funds, and the Irish can't be got to subscribe a few hundreds.'

'The wealth of the country,' said Grealy, 'is in the hands of a minority--the so-called Loyalists.'

'Nonsense,' said Finola sharply. 'If you ever gave a thought to anything more recent than the High-King's Court at Tara you would know that the landlords are not the wealthy part of the community any longer. There's many a provincial publican calling himself a Nationalist who could buy up the nearest landlord and every Protestant in the parish along with him. I'm a Protestant myself, born and bred among the cla.s.s you speak of, and I know.'

'You're quite right, Miss Goold,' said Tim. 'The people could have given the money if they liked. I attribute the failure of the fund to the apathy or treachery of the priests, call it which you like. There isn't a Protestant church in the country where the parsons don't preach "Give give, give" to their people Sunday after Sunday. And what's the result?

Why, they have raised thousands of pounds.'

'After the poem you published in last week's _Croppy_,' said Hyacinth to Mary O'Dwyer, 'I made sure the subscriptions would have come in. Your appeal was one of the most beautiful things I ever read. It would have touched the heart of a stone.'

'Poetry is all well enough,' said Tim. 'I admire your verses, Mary, as much as anyone, but we want a collection at every church door after Ma.s.s. That's what we ought to have, but it's exactly what we won't get, because the priests are West Britons at heart. They would pray for the Queen and the army to-morrow, like Cardinal Vaughan, if they weren't afraid.'

'I believe,' said Finola, 'that we went the wrong way about the thing altogether. We asked for a hospital, and we appealed to the people's pity for the wounded Boers. n.o.body in Ireland cares a pin about the Boers. Why on earth should we? From all I can hear they are a narrow-minded, intolerant set of hypocrites. I'd just as soon read the stuff some fool of an English newspaper man wrote about "our brother the Boer" as listen to the maudlin sentiment our people talk. We don't want to help the Boers. We want to hurt the English.'

'And you think----' said Grealy.

'I think,' went on Finola, 'that we ought to have asked for volunteers to go out and fight, instead of nurses to c.o.c.ker up the men who are fools enough to get themselves shot. We'd have got them.'

'You would not,' said Tim. 'The clergy would have been dead against you.

They would have nipped the whole project in the bud without so much as making a noise in doing it.'

'That's true,' said Grealy. 'Remember, Miss Goold, it was the priests who cursed Tara, and the monks who broke the power of the Irish Kings. I haven't worked the thing out yet, but I mean to show----'

Finola interrupted the poor man ruthlessly:

'Let's try it, anyway. Let's preach a crusade.'

'Not the least bit of good,' said Tim. 'Every blackguard in the country is enlisted already in the Connaught Bangers or the Dublin Fusiliers, or some confounded Militia regiment. There's n.o.body left but the nice, respectable, goody-goody boys who wouldn't leave their mothers or miss going to confession if you went down on your knees to them.'

'Well, then, the Irish troops ought to shoot their officers, and walk over to the Boer camp,' said Finola savagely.

Hyacinth half smiled at what seemed to him a monstrous jest. Then, when he perceived that she was actually in earnest, the smile froze into a kind of grin. His hands trembled with the violence of his indignation.

'It would be devilish treachery,' he blurted out. 'The name of Irishman will never be disgraced by such an act.'

Augusta Goold flung her cigarette into the grate, and rose from her chair. She stood over Hyacinth, her hands clenched and her bosom heaving rapidly. Her eyes blazed down into his until their scorn cowed him.

'There is no treachery possible for an Irishman,' she said, 'except the one of fighting for England. Any deed against England--yes, _any_ deed--is glorious, and not shameful.'

Hyacinth was utterly quelled. He ventured upon no reply. Indeed, not only did her violence render argument undesirable--and it seemed for the moment that he would find himself in actual grips with a furious Amazon--but her words carried with them a certain conviction. It actually seemed to him while she spoke as if a good defence might be made for Irish soldiers who murdered their officers and deserted to an enemy in the field. It was not until hours afterwards, when the vivid impression of Finola's face had faded from his recollection, when he had begun to forget the flash of her eyes, the poise of her figure, and the glow of her draperies, that his moral sense was able to rea.s.sert itself.

Then he knew that she had spoken wickedly. It might be right for an Irishman to fight against England when he could. It might be justifiable to seize the opportunity of England's embarra.s.sment to make a bid for freedom by striking a blow at the Empire. So far his conscience went willingly, but that treachery and murder could ever be anything but horrible he refused altogether to believe.

Another conversation in which he took part about this time helped Hyacinth still further to understand the position of his new friends.

Tim Halloran and he were smoking and chatting together over the fire when Maguire joined them.

'What's the matter with you?' asked Halloran. 'You look as if you'd been at your mother's funeral.'

'You're not so far out in your guess,' said Maguire grimly. 'I spent the morning at my sister's wedding. Would you like a bit of the cake?' He produced from his pocket a paper containing crushed fragments of white sugar and a shapeless ma.s.s of citron and currants. 'With the compliments of the Reverend Mother,' he said. 'Try a bit.'

'What on earth do you mean?' said Hyacinth.

'Oh, I a.s.sure you the Sisters of Pity do these things in style,' said Maguire. 'It's a pretty fancy, that of the wedding-cake, isn't it?

But you're a Protestant, Conneally; you don't understand this delicate playfulness. I was present to-day at the reception of my only sister into the Inst.i.tute of the Catholic Sisters of Pity, founded by Honoria Kavanagh. I've lost Birdie Maguire, that's all, the little girl that used to climb on to my knee and kiss me, and instead of her there's a Sister Monica Mary, who will no doubt pray for my soul when she's let.'

'What was the figure in her case?' asked Tim in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone.

'Six hundred pounds,' said Maguire. 'It must have put the old man to the pin of his collar to pay it. The only time he ever talked to me about his affairs he told me he had got four hundred pounds put by for Birdie's fortune, and that I was to have my medical course and whatever the old shop would fetch when he was gone. They must have put the screw on pretty tight to make him spring the extra two hundred. I dare say I shall suffer for it in the end. He must have borrowed the money.'

Hyacinth felt intensely curious about this young nun. Like most Protestants he had grown up to regard monasticism in all its forms as something remote, partly horrible, wholly unintelligible.