CHAPTER XV
There are certain professions, in themselves honest, useful, and even estimable, for which society has agreed to entertain a feeling of contempt. It is, for instance, very difficult to think of a curate as anything except a butt for satirists, or to be respectful to the profession of tailoring, although many a man for private pecuniary reasons is meek before the particular individual who makes his clothes. Yet the novelist and the playwright, who hold the mirror up to modern humanity, are occasionally kind even to curates and tailors. There is a youthful athlete in Holy Orders who thrashes, to our immense admiration, the village bully, bewildering his victim and his admirers with his mastery of what is described a little vaguely as the ‘old Oxford science.’ Once, at least, a glamour of romance has been shed over the son of a tailor, and it becomes imaginable that even the chalker of unfinished coats may in the future be posed as heroic. There is still, however, a profession which no eccentric novelist has ever ventured to represent as other than entirely contemptible. The commercial traveller is beneath satire, and outside the region of sympathy. If he appears at all in fiction or on the stage, he is irredeemably vulgar. He is never heroic, never even a villain, rarely comic, always, poor man, objectionable. This is a peculiar thing in the literature of a people like the English, who are not ashamed to glory in their commercial success, and are always ready to cheer a politician who professes to have the interests of trade at heart. Amid the current eulogies of the working man and the apotheosis of the beings called ‘Captains of Industry,’ the bagman surely ought to find at least an apologist. Without him it seems likely that many articles would fail to find a place in the windows of the provincial shopkeepers. Without him large sections of the public would probably remain ignorant for years of new brands of cigarettes, and dyspeptic people might never come across the foods which Americans prepare for their use.
Also the individual bagman is often not without his charm. He knows, if not courts and princes, at least hotels and railway companies. He is on terms of easy familiarity with every ‘boots’ in several counties. He can calculate to a nicety how long a train is likely to be delayed by a fair ‘somewhere along the line.’ He is also full of information about local politics. In Connaught, for instance, an experienced member of the profession will gauge for you the exact strength of the existing League in any district. He knows what publicans may be regarded as ‘priest’s men,’ and who have leanings towards independence. His knowledge is frequently minute, and he can prophesy the result of a District Council election by reckoning up the number of leading men who read the United Irishman, and weighing them against those who delight in the pages of the Leader. The men who can do these things are themselves local. They reside in their district, and, as a rule, push the sales and collect the debts of local brewers and flour-merchants. The representatives of the larger English firms only make their rounds twice or three times a year, and are less interesting. They pay the penalty of being cosmopolitan, and tend to become superficial in their judgment of men and things.
Hyacinth, like most members of the public, was ignorant of the greatness and interest of his new profession. He entered upon it with some misgiving, and viewed his trunk of sample blankets and shawls with disgust. Even a new overcoat, though warm and weatherproof, afforded him little joy, being itself a sample of Mr. Quinn’s frieze. One thought alone cheered him, and even generated a little enthusiasm for his work. It occurred to him that in selling the produce of the Ballymoy Mill he was advancing the industrial revival of Ireland. He knew that other people, quite heroic figures, were working for the same end. A Government Board found joyous scope for the energies of its officials in giving advice to people who wanted to cure fish or make lace. It earned the blessing which is to rest upon those who are reviled and evil spoken of, for no one, except literary people, who write for English magazines, ever had a good word for it. There were also those—their activity took the form of letters to the newspapers—who desired to utilize the artistic capacity of the Celt, and to enrich the world with beautiful fabrics and carpentry. They, too, were workers in the cause of the revival. Then there were great ladies, the very cream of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, who petted tweeds and stockings, and offered magnificent prizes to industrious cottagers. They earned quite large sums of money for their protégés by holding sales in places like Belfast and Manchester, where titles can be judiciously cheapened to a wealthy bourgeoisie, and the wives of ship-builders and cotton-spinners will spend cheerfully in return for the privilege of shaking hands with a Countess. A crowd of minor enthusiasts fostered such industries as sprigging, and there was one man who believed that the future prosperity of Ireland might be secured by teaching people to make dolls. It was altogether a noble army, and even a commercial traveller might hold his head high in the world if he counted himself one of its soldiers. Hitherto results have not been at all commensurate with the amount of printer’s ink expended in magazine articles and advertisements. Yet something has been accomplished. Nunneries here and there have been induced to accept presents of knitting-machines, and people have begun to regard as somehow sacred the words ‘technical education.’ The National Board of Education has also spent a large sum of money in reviving among its teachers the almost forgotten art of making paper boats.
Hyacinth very soon discovered that his patriotic view of this work did not commend itself to his brother travellers. He found that they had no feeling but one of contempt for people whom they regarded as meddling amateurs. Occasionally, when some convent, under a bustling Mother Superior, advanced from the region of half-charitable sales at exhibitions into the competition of the open market, contempt became dislike, and wishes were expressed in quite unsuitable language that the good ladies would mind their own proper business. Until Hyacinth learnt to conceal his hopes of Ireland’s future as a manufacturing country he was regarded with suspicion. No one, of course, objected to his making what use he could of patriotism as an advertisement, but he was given to understand that, like other advertisements, it could not be quoted among the initiated without a serious breach of good manners. Even as an advertisement it was not rated highly.
There was an elderly gentleman, stout and somewhat bibulous, who superintended the consumption of certain brands of American cigarettes in the province of Connaught. Hyacinth met him in the exceedingly dirty Railway Hotel at Knock. Since there were no other guests, and the evening was wet, the two were thrown upon each other’s society in the commercial-room.
‘I don’t think,’ said Mr. Hollywell, in reply to a remark of Hyacinth’s, ‘that there’s the least use trying to drag patriotic sentiment into business. Of course, since you represent an Irish house—woollen goods, I think you said—you’re quite right to run the fact for all it’s worth. I don’t in the least blame you. Only I don’t think you’ll find it pays.’
He sipped his whisky-and-water—it was still early, and he had only arrived at his third glass—and then proceeded to give his personal experience.
‘Now, I work for an American firm. If there was any force in the patriotic idea I shouldn’t sell a single cigarette. My people are in the big tobacco combine. You must have read the sort of things the newspapers wrote about us when we started. From any point of view, British Imperial or Irish National, we should have been boycotted long ago if patriotism had anything to do with trade. But look at the facts. Our chief rivals in this district are two Irish firms. They advertise in Gaelic, which is a mistake to start with, because nobody can read it. They get the newspaper people to write articles recommending a “great home industry” to public support. They get local branches of all the different leagues to pass resolutions pledging their members to smoke only Irish tobacco. But until quite lately they simply didn’t have a look in.’
‘Why?’ asked Hyacinth. ‘Were your things cheaper or better?’
‘No,’ said the other, ‘I don’t think they were either. You see, prices are bound to come out pretty even in the long run, and I should say that, if anything, they sold a slightly better article. It’s hard to say exactly why we beat them. When competition is really keen a lot of little things that you would hardly notice make all the difference. For one thing, I get a free hand in the matter of subscribing to local bazaars and race-meetings. I’ve often taken as much as a pound’s worth of tickets for a five-pound note that some priest was raffling in aid of a new chapel. It’s wonderful the orders you can get from shopkeepers in that kind of way. Then, we get our things up better. Look at that.’
He handed Hyacinth a highly-glazed packet with a picture of a handsome brown dog on it.
‘Keep it,’ said Mr. Hollywell. ‘I give away twenty or thirty of those packets every week. Now look inside. What have you? Oh, H.M.S. Majestic. That’s one of a series of photos of “Britain’s first line of defence.” Lots of people go on buying those cigarettes just to get a complete collection of the photos. We supply an album to keep them in for one and sixpence. There’s another of our makes which has pictures of actresses and pretty women. They are extraordinarily popular. They’re perfectly all right, of course, from the moral point of view, but one in every ten is in tights or sitting with her legs very much crossed, just to keep up the expectation. It’s very queer the people who go for those photos. You’d expect it to be young men, but it isn’t.’
The subject was not particularly interesting to Hyacinth, but since his companion was evidently anxious to go on talking, he asked the expected question.
‘Young women,’ said Mr. Hollywell. ‘I found it out quite by accident. I got a lot of complaints from one particular town that our cigarettes had no photos with them. I discovered after a while that a girl in one of the principal shops had hit on a dodge for getting out the photos without apparently injuring the packets. The funny thing was that she never touched the ironclads or the “Types of the soldiers of all nations,” which you might have thought would interest her, but she collared every single actress, and had duplicates of most of them. And she wasn’t an exception. Most girls goad their young men to buy these cigarettes and make collections of the photos. Queer, isn’t it? I can’t imagine why they do it.’
‘You said just now,’ said Hyacinth, ‘that latterly you hadn’t done quite so well. Did you run out of actresses and battleships?’
‘No; but one of the Irish firms took to offering prizes and enclosing coupons. You collected twenty coupons, and you got a silver-backed looking-glass—girls again, you see—or two thousand coupons, and you got a new bicycle. It’s an old dodge, of course, but somehow it always seems to pay. However, all this doesn’t matter to you. All I wanted was to show you that there is no use relying on patriotism. The thing to go in for in any business is attractive novelties, cheap lines, and, in the country shops, long credit.’
It was not very long before Hyacinth began to realize the soundness of Mr. Hollywell’s contempt for patriotism. In the town of Clogher he found the walls placarded with the advertisements of an ultra-patriotic draper. ‘Féach Annseo,’ he read, ‘The Irish House. Support Home Manufactures.’ Another placard was even more vehement in its appeal. ‘Why curse England,’ it asked, ‘and support her manufacturers?’ Try O’Reilly, the one-price man.’ The sentiments were so admirable that Hyacinth followed the advice and tried O’Reilly.
The shop was crowded when he entered, for it was market day in Clogher. The Irish country-people, whose manners otherwise are the best in the world, have one really objectionable habit. In the street or in a crowded building they push their way to the spot they want to reach, without the smallest regard for the feelings of anyone who happens to be in the way. Sturdy country-women, carrying baskets which doubled the passage room they required, hustled Hyacinth into a corner, and for a time defeated his efforts to emerge. Getting his case of samples safely between his legs, he amused himself watching the patriot shopkeeper and his assistants conducting their business. It was perfectly obvious that in one respect the announcements of the attractive placard departed from the truth: O’Reilly was not a ‘one-price man,’ He charged for every article what he thought his customers were likely to pay. The result was that every sale involved prolonged bargaining and heated argument. In most cases no harm was done. The country-women were keenly alive to the value of their money, and evidently enjoyed the process of beating down the price by halfpennies until the real value of the article was reached. Then Mr. O’Reilly and his assistants were accustomed to close the haggle with a beautiful formula:
‘To you,’ they said, with confidential smiles and flattering emphasis on the pronoun—‘to you the price will be one and a penny; but, really, there will be no profit on the sale.’
Occasionally with timid and inexperienced customers O’Reilly’s method proved its value. Hyacinth saw him sell a dress-length of serge to a young woman with a baby in her arms for a penny a yard more than he had charged a moment before for the same material. Another thing which struck him as he watched was the small amount of actual cash which was paid across the counter. Most of the women, even those who seemed quite poor, had accounts in the shop, and did not shrink from increasing them. Once or twice a stranger presented some sort of a letter of introduction, and was at once accommodated with apparently unlimited credit.
At length there was a lull in the business, and Hyacinth succeeded in spreading his goods on a vacant counter, and attracting the attention of Mr. O’Reilly. He began with shawls.
‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that you will give me a good order for these shawls.’
Mr. O’Reilly fingered them knowingly.
‘Price?’ he said.
Hyacinth mentioned a sum which left a fair margin of profit for Mr. Quinn. O’Reilly shook his head and laughed.
‘Can’t do it.’
Hyacinth reduced his price at once as far as possible.
‘No use,’ said Mr. O’Reilly.
Compared with the suave oratory to which he treated his customers, this extreme economy of words was striking.
‘See here,’ he said, producing a bundle of shawls from a shelf beside him. ‘I get these for twenty-five shillings a dozen less from Thompson and Taylor of Manchester.’
Hyacinth looked at them curiously. Each bore a prominent label setting forth a name for the garment in large letters surrounded with wreaths of shamrocks. ‘The Colleen Bawn,’ he read, ‘Erin’s Own,’ ‘The Kathleen Mavourneen,’ ‘The Cruiskeen Lawn.’ The appropriateness of this last title was not obvious to the mere Irishman, but the colour of the garment was green, so perhaps there was a connection of thought in the maker’s mind between that and ‘Lawn.’ ‘Cruiskeen’ he may have taken for the name of a place.
‘Are these,’ asked Hyacinth, ‘what you advertise as Irish goods?’
Mr. O’Reilly cleared his throat twice before he replied.
‘They are got up specially for the Irish market.’ In the interests of his employer Hyacinth kept his temper, but the effort was a severe one.
‘These,’ he said, ‘are half cotton. Mine are pure wool. They are really far better value even if they were double the price.’
Mr. O’Reilly shrugged his shoulders.
‘I don’t say they’re not, but I should not sell one of yours for every dozen of the others.’
‘Try,’ said Hyacinth; ‘give them a fair chance. Tell the people that they will last twice as long. Tell them that they are made in Ireland.’
‘That would not be the slightest use. They would simply laugh in my face. My customers don’t care a pin where the goods are made. I have never in my life been asked for Irish manufacture.’
‘Then, why on earth do you stick up those advertisements?’ said Hyacinth, pointing to the ‘Féach Annseo’ which appeared on a hoarding across the street.
Mr. O’Reilly was perfectly frank and unashamed.
‘The other drapery house in the town is owned by a Scotchman, and of course it pays more or less to keep on saying that I am Irish. Besides, I mean to stand for the Urban Council in March, and those sort of ads. are useful at an election, even if they are no good for business.’
‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ said Hyacinth, shirking a discussion on the morality of advertising: ‘I’ll let you have a dozen shawls at cost price, and take back what you can’t sell, if you give me your word to do your best for them.’
Similar discussions followed the display of serges and blankets. It appeared that nice-looking goods could be sent over from England at lower prices. It was vain for Hyacinth to press the fact that his things were better. Mr. O’Reilly admitted as much.
‘But what am I to do? The people don’t want what is good. They want a cheap article which looks well, and they don’t care a pin whether the thing is made in England, Ireland, or America. Take my advice,’ he added as Hyacinth left the shop: ‘get your boss to do inferior lines—cheap, cheap and showy.’
So far Mr. Hollywell’s opinions were entirely justified. The appeal of the patriotic press to the public and the shopkeepers on behalf of the industrial revival of Ireland had certainly not affected the town of Clogher. Hyacinth was bitterly disappointed; but hope, when it is born of enthusiasm, dies hard, and he was greatly interested in a speech which he read one day in the ‘Mayo Telegraph’. It had been made at a meeting of the League by an Ardnaree shopkeeper called Dowling. A trade rival—the fact of the rivalry was not emphasized—had advertised in a Scotch paper for a milliner. Dowling was exceedingly indignant. He quoted emigration statistics showing the number of girls who left Mayo every year for the United States. He pointed out that all of them might be employed at home, as milliners or otherwise, if only the public would boycott shops which sold English goods or employed Scotch milliners. He more than suspected that the obnoxious advertisement was part of an organized attempt to effect a new plantation of Connaught—‘worse than Cromwell’s was.’ The fact that Connaught was the only part of Ireland which Cromwell did not propose to plant escaped the notice of both Mr. Dowling and his audience. The speech concluded with a passionate peroration and a verse, no doubt declaimed soundingly, of ‘The West’s Awake.’
Hyacinth made an expedition to Ardnaree, and called hopefully on the orator. His reception was depressing in the extreme. The shop, which was large and imposing, was stocked with goods which were obviously English, and Mr. Dowling curtly refused even to look at the samples of Mr. Quinn’s manufactures. Hyacinth quoted his own speech to the man, and was amazed at the cynical indifference with which he ignored the dilemma.
‘Business is one thing,’ he said, ‘and politics is something entirely different.’
Hyacinth lost his temper completely.
‘I shall write to the papers,’ he said, ‘and expose you. I shall have your speech reprinted, and along with it an account of the way you conduct your business.’
A mean, hard smile crossed Mr. Dowling’s mouth before he answered:
‘Perhaps you don’t know that my wife is the Archbishop’s niece?’
Hyacinth stared at him. For a minute or two he entirely failed to understand what Mrs. Dowling’s relationship to a great ecclesiastic had to do with the question. At last a light broke on him.
‘You mean that an editor wouldn’t print my letter because he would be afraid of offending a Roman Catholic Archbishop?’
The expression ‘Roman Catholic’ caught Mr. Dowling’s attention.
‘Are you a Protestant?’ he asked. ‘You are—a dirty Protestant—and you dare to come here into my own house, and insult me and trample on my religious convictions. I’m a Catholic and a member of the League. What do you mean, you Souper, you Sour-face, by talking to me about Irish manufactures? Get out of this house, and go to the hell that’s waiting for you!’
As Hyacinth turned to go, there flashed across his mind the recollection of Miss Goold and her friends who wrote for the Croppy.
‘There’s one paper in Ireland, anyhow,’ he said, ‘which is not afraid of your wife nor your Archbishop. I’ll write to the Croppy, and you’ll see if they won’t publish the facts.’
Mr. Dowling grinned.
‘I don’t care if they do,’ he said. ‘The priests are dead against the Croppy, and there’s hardly a man in the town reads it. Go up there now to Hely’s and try if you can buy a copy. I tell you it isn’t on sale here at all, and whatever they publish will do me no harm.’
When Hyacinth returned to the hotel he found Mr. Holywell seated, with the inevitable whisky-and-water beside him, in the commercial-room.
‘Well, Mr. Conneally,’ he said, ‘and how is patriotism paying you? Find people ready to buy what’s Irish?’
Hyacinth, boiling over with indignation, related his experience with Mr. Dowling.
‘What did I tell you?’ said Mr. Hollywell. ‘But anyhow you’re just as well out of a deal with that fellow. I wouldn’t care to do business with him myself. I happen to know, and you may take my word for it’ —his voice sunk to a confidential whisper—‘that he’s very deep in the books of two English firms, and that he daren’t—simply daren’t—place an order with anyone else. They’d have him in the Bankruptcy Court to-morrow if he did. I shouldn’t feel easy with Mr. Dowling’s cheque for an account until I saw how the clerk took it across the bank counter. You mark my words, there’ll be a fire in that establishment before the year’s out.’
The prophecy was fulfilled, as Hyacinth learnt from the Mayo Telegraphy and Mr. Dowling’s whole stock of goods was consumed. There were rumours that a sceptical insurance company made difficulties about paying the compensation demanded; but the inhabitants of Ardnaree marked their confidence in the husband of an Archbishop’s niece by presenting him with an address of sympathy and a purse containing ten sovereigns.
Most of Hyacinth’s business was done with small shopkeepers in remote districts. The country-people who lived out of reach of such centres of fashion as Ardnaree and Clogher were sufficiently unsophisticated to prefer things which were really good. Hats and bonnets were not quite universal among the women in the mountain districts far back where they spoke Irish, and Mr. Quinn’s head-kerchiefs were still in request. Even the younger women wanted garments which would keep them warm and dry, and Hyacinth often returned well satisfied from a tour of the country shops. Sometimes he doubted whether he ought to trust the people with more than a few pounds’ worth of goods, but he gradually learnt that, unlike the patriotic Mr. Dowling, they were universally honest. He discovered, too, that these people, with their imperfect English and little knowledge of the world, were exceedingly shrewd. They had very little real confidence in oratorical politicians, and their interest in public affairs went no further than voting consistently for the man their priest recommended. But they quickly understood Hyacinth’s arguments when he told them that the support of Irish manufactures would help to save their sons and daughters from the curse of emigration.
‘Faith, sir,’ said a shopkeeper who kept a few blankets and tweeds among his flour-sacks and porter-barrels, ‘since you were talking to the boys last month, I couldn’t induce one of them to take the foreign stuff if I was to offer him a shilling along with it.’
CHAPTER XVI
When he returned to Ballymoy after his interview with Mr. Dowling, Hyacinth set himself to fulfil his threat of writing to the Croppy. He spent Saturday afternoon and evening in his lodgings with the paper containing the blatant speech spread out before him. He blew his anger to a white heat by going over the evidence of the man’s grotesque hypocrisy. He wrote and rewrote his article. It was his first attempt at expressing thought on paper since the days when he sought to satisfy examiners with disquisitions on Dryden’s dramatic talent and other topics suited to the undergraduate mind. This was a different business. It was no longer a question of filling a sheet of foolscap with grammatical sentences, discovering synonyms for words hard to spell. Now thoughts were hot in him, and the art lay in finding words which would blister and scorch. Time after time he tore up a page of bombast or erased ridiculous flamboyancies. Late at night, with a burning head and ice-cold feet, he made his last copy, folded it up, and, distrusting the cooler criticism of the morning, went out and posted it to the Croppy.
A letter from Miss Goold overtook him the following Thursday in the hotel at Clogher.
‘I was delighted to hear from you again,’ she wrote. ‘I was afraid you had cut me altogether, gone over to the respectable people, and forgotten poor Ireland. Captain Quinn told me that you and he had quarrelled, and I gathered that you rather disapproved of him. Well, he was a bit of a blackguard; but, after all, one doesn’t expect a man who takes on a job of that kind to be anything else. I never thought it would suit you, and you will do me the justice of remembering that I never wanted you to volunteer. Now about your article. It was admirable. These “Cheap Patriots”’—it was thus the article was headed—‘are just the creatures we want to scarify. Dowling and his kind are the worst enemies Ireland has to-day. We’ll publish anything of that kind you send us, and remember we’re not the least afraid of anybody. It’s a grand thing for a paper to be as impecunious as the Croppy. No man but a fool would take a libel action against us with any hope of getting damages. A jury might value Dowling’s character at any fantastic sum they chose, but it would be a poor penny the Croppy would pay. Still, we’re not so hard up that we can’t give our contributors something, and next week you’ll get a small cheque from the office. I hope it may encourage you to send us more. Don’t be afraid to speak out. If anything peculiarly seditious occurs to you, write it in Irish. I know it’s all the same to you which language you write in. Do us half a column every fortnight or so on Western life and politics.’
Hyacinth was absurdly elated by Miss Goold’s praise. He made up his mind to contribute regularly to the Croppy, and had visions of a great future as a journalist, or perhaps a literary exponent of the ideas of Independent Ireland.
Meanwhile, he became very intimate both with the Quinns and with Canon Beecher’s family. Mrs. Quinn was an enthusiastic gardener, and early in the spring Hyacinth helped her with her flowerbeds. He learnt to plait the foliage of faded crocuses, and pin them tidily to the ground with little wooden forks. He gathered suitable earth for the boxes in which begonias made their earliest sproutings, and learned to know the daffodils and tulips by their names. Later on he helped Mr. Quinn to mow the grass and mix a potent weed-killer for the gravel walks. There came to be an understanding that, whenever he was not absent on a journey, he spent the latter part of the afternoon and the evening with the Quinns. As the days lengthened the family tea was pushed back to later and later hours to give more time out of doors.
There is something about the very occupation of gardening which is deadening to enthusiasm. Perhaps a man learns patience by familiarity with growing plants. Nature is never in a hurry in a garden, and there is no use in trying to hustle a flower, whereas a great impatience is the very life-spirit of enthusiastic patriotism. There has probably never been a revolutionary gardener, or even a strong Radical who worked with open-air flowers. Of course, in greenhouses things can be forced, and the spirit of the ardent reformer may find expression in the nurture of premature blooms. Perhaps also the constant stooping which gardening necessitates, especially in the early spring, when the weeds grow plentifully, tends to destroy the stiff mental independence which must be the attitude of the militant patriot. It is very difficult for a man who has stooped long enough to have conquered his early cramps and aches to face the problems of politics with uncompromising rigidity. Hyacinth recognised with a curious qualm of disgust that his thoughts turned less and less to Ireland’s wrongs and Ireland’s future as he learnt to care for the flowers and the grass.
No doubt, too, the atmosphere of the Quinns’ family life was not congenial to the spirit of the Irish politician. Mrs. Quinn was totally uninterested in politics, and except a prejudice in favour of what she called loyalty, had absolutely no views on any question which did not directly affect her home and her children. Mr. Quinn had a coldly-reasonable political and economic creed, which acted on the luxuriant fancies of Hyacinth’s enthusiasm as his weed-killer did on the tender green of the paths. He declined altogether to see any good in supporting Irish manufactures simply because they were Irish. The story of O’Reilly’s attitude towards his shawls moved him to no indignation.
‘I think he’s perfectly right,’ he said. ‘If a man can buy cheap shawls in England he would be a fool to pay more for Irish ones. Business can’t be run on those lines. I’m not an object of charity, and if I can’t meet fair competition I must go under, and it’s right that I should go under.’
Hyacinth had no answer to give. He shirked the point at issue, and attacked Mr. Quinn along another line in the hope of arousing his indignation.
‘But it is not fair competition that you are called upon to face. Do you call it fair competition when the Government subsidizes a woollen factory in a convent?’
‘Ah!’ said Mr. Quinn, ‘you are thinking of the four thousand pounds the Congested Districts Board gave to the convent at Bobeen. But it is hardly fair to hold the Government responsible for the way that body wastes eighty thousand pounds a year.’
‘The Government is ultimately responsible, and you must admit that, after such a gift, and in view of the others which will certainly follow, you are called upon to meet most unfair competition.’
‘Yes, I admit that. But isn’t that exactly what you want to make general? There doesn’t seem to me any difference between giving a bounty to one industry and imposing a protective tariff in favour of another; and if your preference for Irish manufactures means anything, it means a sort of voluntary protection for every business in the country. If you object to the Robeen business being subsidized you can’t logically try to insist on mine being protected.’
It was puzzling to have the tables turned on him so adroitly. Hyacinth was reduced to feeble threat.
‘Just wait a while till the nuns get another four thousand pounds, and perhaps four thousand pounds more after that, and see how it will affect you.’
Mr. Quinn smiled.
‘I’m not much afraid of nuns as trade competitors, or, for the matter of that, of the Congested Districts Board either. If the Yorkshire people would only import a few Mother Superiors to manage their factories, and take the advice of members of our Board in their affairs, I would cheerfully make them a present of any reasonable subsidy, and beat them out of the market afterwards.’
There was another influence at work on Hyacinth’s mind which had as much to do with the decay of his patriotism as either the gardening or Mr. Quinn’s logic. Marion Beecher and her sister were very frequently at the Mill House during the spring and summer. There was one long afternoon which was spent in the marking out of the tennis-ground. Mr. Quinn had theories involving calculations with a pencil and pieces of paper about the surest method of securing right angles at the corners and parallel lines down the sides of the court. Hyacinth and Marion worked obediently with a tape measure and the garden line. One of the boys messed cheerfully with a pail of liquid whitening. Afterwards the gardening was somewhat deserted, and Hyacinth was instructed in the game. It took him a long time to learn, and for many afternoons he and Marion were regularly beaten, but she would not give up hope of him. Often the excuse of her coming to the Quinns was the necessity of practising some new hymn or chant for Sunday. Hyacinth worked as hard at the music as at the tennis under her tuition, and there came a time when he could sing an easy tenor part with fair accuracy. Then in the early summer, when the evenings were warm, hymns were sung on the lawn in front of the house. There seemed no incongruity in Marion Beecher’s company in passing without a break from lawn-tennis to hymn-singing, and Mr. Quinn was always ready to do his best at the bass with a serious simplicity, as if it were a perfectly natural and usual thing to close an afternoon’s amusement with ‘Rock of Ages.’ Hyacinth was not conscious of any definite change in his attitude towards religion. He still believed himself to be somehow outside the inner shrine of the life which the Beechers and the Quinns lived, just as he had been outside his father’s prayers. But he found it increasingly difficult after an hour or two of companionship with Marion Beecher to get back to the emotions which had swayed him during the weeks of his intimacy with Miss Goold. To write for the Croppy after sitting beside Marion in church on Sunday evenings was like passing suddenly from a quiet wood into a heated saloon where people wrangled. A wave of the old passionate feeling, when it returned, affected him as raw spirit would the palate of a boy.
One day early in summer—the short summer of Connaught, which is glorious in June, and dissolves into windy mist and warm rain in the middle of July—Hyacinth was invited by Canon Beecher to join a boating party on the lake. The river, whose one useful function was the turning of Mr. Quinn’s millwheel, wound away afterwards through marshy fields and groves of willow-trees into the great lake. At its mouth the Beechers kept their boat, a cumbrous craft, very heavy to row, but safe and suited to carry a family in comfort. The party started early—Canon Beecher, Hyacinth, and one of the boys very early, for they had to walk the two miles which separated Ballymoy from the lake shore. Mrs. Beecher, the girls, the two other boys, and the baskets of provisions followed a little later on the Rectory car, packed beyond all possibility of comfort. The Canon himself pulled an oar untiringly, but without the faintest semblance of style, and the party rippled with joy when they discovered that Hyacinth also could row.
‘Now,’ said Elsie, ‘we can go anywhere. We can go on rowing and rowing all day, and see places we’ve never seen before.’
‘My dear girl,’ said her mother, ‘remember that Mr. Conneally and your father aren’t machines. You mustn’t expect them to go too far.’
‘Oh, but,’ said Elsie, ‘father says he never gets tired if he has only one oar to pull.’
The Canon was preparing for his toil. The old coat, in colour now almost olive green, was folded and used as a cushion by Marion in the bow. His white cuffs, stowed inside his hat, were committed to the care of Mrs. Beecher. He rolled his gray shirtsleeves up to the elbow, and unbuttoned his waistcoat.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘I’m ready. If I’m not hurried, I’ll pull along all day. But what about you, Conneally? You’re not accustomed to this sort of thing?’
But Hyacinth for once was self-confident. He might be a poor singer and a contemptible tennis player, but he knew that nothing which had to do with boats could come amiss to him. He looked across the sparkling water of the lake.
‘I’ll go on as long as you like. You won’t tire me when there’s no tide and no waves. This is a very different business from getting out the sweeps to pull a nobby five miles against the strength of the ebb, with a heavy ground swell running.’
About eleven o’clock they landed on an island and ate biscuits. The Canon told Hyacinth the story of the ruin under whose walls they sat.
‘It belonged to the Lynotts, the Welshmen of Tyrawley. They were at feud with the Burkes, and one night in winter——’
The girls wandered away, carrying their biscuits with them. It is likely that they had heard the story every summer as long as they could remember. Mrs. Beecher alone still maintained an attitude of admiration for her husband’s antiquarian knowledge, the more creditable because she must have been familiar with the onset of the MacWilliam Burkes before even Marion was old enough to listen. To Hyacinth the story was both new and interesting. It stirred him to think of the Lynotts fighting hopelessly, or begging mercy in the darkness and the cold just where he sat now saturate with sunlight and with life. He gazed across the mile of shining water which separated the castle from the land, and tried to realize how the Irish servant-girl swam from the island with an infant Lynott on her back, and saved the name from perishing. How the snow must have beaten in her face and the lake-waves choked her breath! It was a great story, but the girls, shouting from the water’s edge, reminded him that he was out to pull an oar, and not to sentimentalize. He and the Canon rose, half smiling, half sighing, and took their places in the boat.
They penetrated before luncheon time to a bay hitherto unknown to the Beechers. A chorus of delight greeted its discovery. The water shone bright green and very clear above the slabs of white limestone. The shore far inland was almost verdure-less. Broad flat rocks lay baking in the sunshine, and only the scantiest grass struggled up between their edges. Sometimes they overlapped each other, and rose like an immense staircase. Fifty yards or so from the land was a tiny island entirely overgrown with stunted bushes. The boat was pushed up to it and a landing-place sought, but the shrubs were too thick, and it was decided to picnic among the rocks on the land. Then Marion in the bow made a discovery. A causeway about a foot under water led from the island to the shore. The whole party leaned over to examine it. Every stone was visible in the clear water, and it was obvious that it had been planned and built, and was no merely accidental formation of the rocks. The Canon had heard of a similar device resorted to by an island hermit to insure the privacy of his cell. Hyacinth spoke vaguely of the settlements of primitive communities of lake-dwellers. The three boys planned an expedition across the causeway after luncheon.
‘We’ll carry our shoes and stockings with us,’ they said, ‘and then explore the island. Perhaps there is a hermit there still, or a primitive lake-dweller. What is a primitive lake-dweller, Mr. Conneally?’
Hyacinth was uncertain, but hazarded a suggestion that the lake-dwellers were the people who buried each other in raths. The Canon, whose archaeology did not go back beyond St. Patrick, offered no correction.
Tea was made later on in yet another bay, this time on the eastern shore of the lake. An oak wood grew down almost to the water’s edge, and the branches overhung a sandy beach, more golden than any sea-strand. The whole party collected dead wood and broken twigs for the fire. Then, while the girls unpacked the baskets and secured the kettle amidst the smoke, Hyacinth lay back luxuriously and watched the sun set behind the round-shouldered mountain opposite. The long, steep slope shone bright green while the sun still rested in view above the summit; then suddenly, when the topmost rim of it had dipped out of sight, the whole mountainside turned purple, and a glory of gold and crimson hung above it on the motionless streaks of cloud. Slowly the splendour faded, the purple turned gray, and a faint breeze fluttered across the lake.
The day was the first of many which Hyacinth gave to such expeditions. The work of Mr. Quinn’s office was not so pressing as to necessitate his spending every day there when he was in Ballymoy, and a holiday was always obtainable. The lake scenery remained vivid in his memory in after-years, and had its influence upon him even while he enjoyed it, unconscious of anything except the present pleasure. There was something besides the innocent gaiety of the girls and the simple sincerity of the Canon’s platitudes, something about the lake itself, which removed him to a spiritual region utterly remote from the fiery atmosphere of Miss Goold’s patriotism. Many things which once loomed very large before him sank to insignificance as he drank to the full of the desolation around him. The past, in which no doubt men strove and hoped, hated and loved and feared, had left the just recognisable ruins of some castles and the causeway built by an unknown hermit or the prehistoric lake-dwellers. A few thatched cabins, faintly smoking, and here and there a cairn of stones gathered laboriously off the wretched fields, were the evidences of present activity. Now and then a man hooted to his dog as it barked at the sheep on the hillside, or a girl drove a turf-laden donkey inland from the boggy shore. Otherwise there were no signs of human life. A deep sense of monotony and inevitableness settled down upon Hyacinth. He came for the first time under the great enchantment which paralyzes the spirit and energy of the Celt. He knew himself to be, as his people were, capable of spasms of enthusiasm, the victim of transitory burnings of soul. But the curse was upon him—the inevitable curse of feeling too keenly and seeing too clearly to be strenuous and constant. The flame would die down, the enthusiasm would vanish—it was vanishing from him, as he knew well—and leave him, not indeed content with common life, but patient of it, and to the very end sad with the sense of possibilities unrealized.
Yet it was not without many struggles and periods of return to the older emotions that Hyacinth surrendered his enthusiasm. There still recurred to him memories of his father’s vision of an Armageddon and the conception of his own part in it. Sometimes, waking very early in the morning, he became vividly conscious of his own feebleness of will and his falling away from great purposes. The conviction that he was called to struggle for Ireland’s welfare, to sacrifice, if necessary, his life and happiness for Ireland, was strong in him still. He felt himself affected profoundly by the influences which surrounded him, but he had not ceased to believe that the idea of self-sacrificing labour was for him a high vocation. He writhed, his limbs twisting involuntarily, when these thoughts beset him, and often he was surprised to discover that he was actually uttering aloud words of self-reproach.
Then he would write fiercely, brutally, catch at the excuse of some hypocrisy or corruption, or else denounce selfishness and easy-going patriotic sentiment, finding subject for his satire in himself. His articles brought him letters of praise from Miss Goold. ‘You have it,’ she wrote once, ‘the thing we all seek for, the power of beating red-hot thought into sword-blades. Write more like the last.’ But the praise always came late. The violent mood, the self-reproach, the bitterness, were past. His life was wrapt round again with softer influences, and he read his own words with shame when they reached him in print. Afterwards for a while, if he wrote at all, it was of the peasant life, of quaint customs, half-forgotten legends and folklore. These articles appeared too, but brought no praise from Miss Goold. Once she reproached him when he lapsed into gentleness for many consecutive weeks.
‘You oughtn’t to waste yourself. There are fifty men and women can do the sort of thing you’re doing now; we don’t want you to take it up. It’s fighting men we need, not maundering sentimentalists.’