Changing Winds Part 99

It was useless to be angry with Marsh or to argue with him. In everything that was done, he saw the malevolent intent of a treacherous people.

"Look at this," he said one evening when the English papers had come in, and he pointed to a leading article in the _Morning Post_ in which the writer stated that the bravery of the Irish soldiers showed that the Irish people had now no feeling or grievance against the English, and therefore Home Rule was no longer necessary. "Already, they're plotting!

They defile the dead ... they use our dead men as ... as political arguments!"

"But the _Morning Post_ has no influence in England," Henry retorted angrily. "It's only read by footmen and s.l.u.ts!..."

"Some of our people are dubious," John went on. "They're inclined to take your point of view, and trust the English. I'll read this paper to them. That'll pull them up. We'd have been content with Home Rule before, but we want absolute separation now. We don't want to be a.s.sociated with a race that makes bargains on bodies!..."

"You're doing a d.a.m.ned bad work, John!..."

"I'm helping to keep Ireland Irish, Henry!" He paused for a few moments, and then, laughing a little self-consciously, he proceeded. "Do you know that poem of Yeats's?"

_It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone._

Henry nodded his head.

"Well, we're going to see whether we can't make Yeats re-write it.

Good-night, Henry!"

2

He stayed in Dublin for a few weeks, gathering up old threads and working on his novel; but the book made slow progress, and so, thinking that if he were in a quieter, less social place, he could work more quickly, he went home to Ballymartin, and here, soon after he arrived, he received a letter from Roger, announcing that he intended to enter the artillery almost at once. "_I can get a commission_," he wrote, "_and so I shall go in. You said something about wanting to join at the same time as me, but perhaps as you are going to be married to Mary shortly, you'll want to wait until afterwards. If I were you I should apply for a commission in an Irish regiment._"

He put the letter down abruptly. Ever since the death of Ninian, he had felt convinced that the four friends were to be killed in battle.

Gilbert had been the first to join, and Gilbert was the first to be killed. Then Ninian joined ... and Ninian died. Roger, too, would be killed, and so would he, when he joined. The death of Gilbert had seemed to him to be a casual thing, a tragic accident, but when Ninian had been killed, it had seemed to him that here was no fortuity, that Gilbert and Ninian had died inevitably, that Roger and he, when they went out, would be unable to escape this destiny ... and everything that he had done since Ninian's death had been done in that belief. He would finish a book, he would marry Mary, he would settle his estate as best he could ... and then he would make the end that Gilbert and Ninian had made....

But now, as he put Roger's letter down, he had a swift, compelling desire to dodge his destiny, to elude death, to alter the course of things. Why should he die? Why should he yield himself up, his youth, his work, his love, his hope of happiness and renown and honour ... to this consuming thing! He could look to years of happiness with Mary, years of work on his books, years of enjoyment of things won and earned ... and he was to give up all that promise and go to a b.l.o.o.d.y death in war? Not every man who went was killed or even wounded ... one knew that ... but _he_ would be killed ... he knew that, he told himself, as well as he knew that he was then alive. Sensitive-natured men, such as he, were bound to be killed ... they had not the phlegm of men with blunter natures ... they would not be able to keep still when stillness meant safety ... their nerves would go, and in that hideous h.e.l.l of noise and battering, of men killing or being killed, his mind might be destroyed....

That seemed to him to be the worst thing of all. He might not be killed ... he might be made mad....

"I can do other work," he said to himself. "I can work for Ireland. I can try to make things friendlier here!..."

He planned a group of Young Irishmen, as he named them, to do for Ireland what Roger's Improved Tories had hoped to do for England. They could study the conditions of Irish elementary education; they could try to make a survey of Irish wealth in the hope of discovering the incidence of its distribution; they could make an enquiry into work and wages, and try to stimulate the growth of Trades Unionism. He could help to make opinion, to create a social consciousness, to establish a tradition of honourable service to the community.... There were a host of things he could do, valuable things, for Ireland, things that were not now being done by any one. He knew people in Dublin, Crews and Jordan and Saxon and men like them, who were of his mind and would work patiently at dull things in the hope of getting an ordered community.

Railways! One had to get the Irish railways reorganised and grouped. If one could solve the problem of traffic, so that the East and West and North and South of Ireland would be as accessible to each other as the East and West and North and South of England, one would have made a large movement towards a better state....

That was what he would do. He would help to construct things, not to destroy them. He was not afraid to go to the war ... that was not the reason why he was resolving that he would refuse to be a soldier. It was because he could do better, finer work by living for Ireland than by dying for England. People throughout Europe were already perturbed at the waste of potential men in war ... wondering whether, after all, it was a wise thing to let rare men, men of unique gifts go to war. Was it really wise of England to let such a man as Gilbert Farlow, with the rare gift of comedy, be lost in that haphazard manner? Ninian had had the potentialities of a great engineer. Would it not have been wiser to have kept him to his railway-building than to have let him fall, as he fell, to the bullet of a sniper?... Already people were asking such questions as these. If he were to go out, and were to be killed, would they not say, "This man had gifts that marked him out from other men. We ought not to have wasted him!" Well, why should he be wasted? He was not afraid. He insisted that he was not afraid. It needed high courage to stand up and say, "I am a man of special gift and I will not let that gift be wasted in war!" That, in effect, was what he was preparing to do. People would speak behind his back ... speak even to his face ...

and call him a coward! Well, let them do so....

3

But in his heart, he knew that he was afraid to go. Almost he deceived himself into believing that he was behaving well in refusing to join the Army so that he might devote himself more a.s.siduously to Ireland and his work ... but not completely did he persuade himself. The fear of death was in him and he could not allay it. The fear of mutilation, of madness, of blindness, of shattered nerves sent him shuddering from the thought of offering himself as a soldier ... and mixed up with this devastating fear was a queer vanity that almost conquered the fear.

"If I were to go in, I might do something ... something distinguished!"

There were times when he gave himself up to dreams of glory, saw himself decorated with high awards for bravery. He would imagine himself performing some impossible act of courage ... saving an Army Corps from destruction ... showing resource in a period of crisis, and so bringing salvation where utter loss had seemed inevitable. But these times of glory were few and brief: he saw himself most often, killed ingloriously, inconspicuously, one of a crowd, blown, perhaps, to pieces or buried in bombarded earthworks; and through his dreams of glory and his plans for work in Ireland, there stubbornly thrust itself this accusation: I'm a coward! I'm a coward! I'm a coward!

In England, men were charging the queer people who called themselves Conscientious Objectors with cowardice, but the charge seemed a baseless one to Henry. He did not believe that he could endure the odium and obloquy which some of the Conscientious Objectors had borne. There was courage in the man who said, "I will fight for my country!" but that courage might be less than that of the man who said, "I will not fight for my country!" Henry was not a Conscientious Objector, nor could he understand the state of mind of the man who was. He was a coward.

Inside him, he knew that he was a coward. Inside him, he accused himself of cowardice. Everything in his life showed that he was a coward, that he shrank from physical combats, from tests of courage, that sometimes he shrank from spiritual contests....

"I ought to tell Mary," he said to himself. "I can't marry her without telling her that I'm ... a funk!"

But he temporised even in this. "I'll wait a little while longer," he said. "Perhaps later on!..."

Always he wanted to thrust the unpleasant thing a little further off; It was as if he had said to himself, "I won't deal with it just yet ... and perhaps it won't need to be dealt with!"

"I'll finish my book first," he said, "and then I'll tell Mary. Perhaps the war will be over!..."

4

Mary wrote to him twice every week. Rachel Carey and her baby were staying at Boveyhayne Manor now, and Mary was glad of their company in the house, for the child gave Mrs. Graham pleasure. She enquired continually about his book. "_What a pity_," she wrote once, "_that it was not finished before Roger went into the Army. Then you could both have gone in together._" And he had written, "_Yes, it is a pity the book was not done before Roger joined up ... but it'll soon be finished.

I'm getting on excellently with it. When it's finished, I'll come over to Boveyhayne, and then we'll settle just when we shall get married!..._"

Then came a mood of abas.e.m.e.nt, and he wrote a long, incoherent letter to her, telling her that he had resolved that he would not go into the Army. "_Because I'm a coward, Mary. I've thought the thing over from beginning to end, thought about it until I became dizzy with thinking, and this is the end of it all: I'm a coward. I haven't the pluck to go into the Army. That's the truth, Mary! I make excuses for myself ... I pretend that this is England's war, not Ireland's, and tell myself that an Irishman who joins the British Army should be regarded in the way that an American, who joined, would be regarded ... that Irish soldiers in the British Army are Foreign Legionaries ... and I twist my mind about in an effort to make excuses like that, to convince, not you or any one else_, but me. _I think I could convince_ you _that I ought not to join, but I can't convince myself. I'm not joining, simply because I'm a d.a.m.ned coward, Mary. I'm not fit to be your husband, dear. I wasn't fit to be the friend of Gilbert and Ninian. I'm a contemptible thing that runs to its burrow when it hears of danger. I'm glad my father is dead. He hated the war, but he'd have hated to know that I was not in it. He took it for granted that I would go ... never dreamed that I wouldn't go. If he'd thought that I wouldn't join, he would never have talked to me about the war in the way he did. My father was a proud man, Mary, as proud as your mother, and I think he'd have died of shame if he'd thought I was funking this. I don't know what you'll think of me. I know what I think of myself. I simply can't face it, Mary ... that bloodiness and groaning and stench and unending horror. That's the truth about me. I'm a coward, and I'm not fit for you. I'd fail you, dear, if you needed me. I fail everybody. I fail everything. I'm rotten through and through...._"

5

But he did not send the letter to her. He had read it over before putting it in the envelope. "Hysterical," he said to himself, calmer now that he had vented his feelings. "That's what it is!"

He was about to tear it up, but before he could, do so, his mind veered again. "I'll put it away," he said. "I'll leave it until the morning, and read it again. Perhaps I'll think differently then. I ought to tell Mary. I can't go on just not joining, and letting her gradually suspect. I ought to go to her, and tell her straight out. When my book's done I'll go to her...."

"What sort of a man am I?" he said again. "a.n.a.lysing myself like this ... turning myself inside out ... poking and probing into my mind!...

Fumbling over my life, that's what I'm doing! Why don't I stand up to things? What's the meaning of me? What am I here for?"

If he could only strip himself to the marrow of his mind, if he could only see inside himself and know what was his purpose and discover the content of his being....

"I'm morbid," he said. "I'm too introspective. I ought to look out of myself. But I can't. It isn't my fault that my eyes are turned inwards.

I'm made like that. I can't alter my make. I can destroy myself, but I can't alter my make....

"Perhaps," he thought, "if I were to take more exercise, if I were to go for long walks, I'd think less about these things. I'd get healthier notions. If I were to enlist, go into the ranks, and endure all that the men endure, that might make my mind healthier. All that drill and marching....

"But it's the spirit of me that's wrong," he muttered aloud. "It's not my body ... it's _me_!"

"I must work. I must work hard, and forget all this torturing!..."

He wrote furiously at his book, and gradually it came to its end. "I'll go down to Dublin again," he said, when it was finished "and see if I can't do something there that'll make me forget things!"

He stayed at Ballymartin until he had corrected the proofs of the new book, and then some business on the estate kept him at home for nearly another month. It was not until well in the New Year that he was able to leave home, and almost at the last moment he decided not to go to Dublin, but to travel from Belfast, by Liverpool, to Boveyhayne. Mary had asked him to spend Christmas with them, but he had made an excuse: estate business and his book; because he could not yet bring himself to tell her of his cowardice. He felt that when he did so, she would end their engagement, and he wished to keep her love as long as he could. He wrote to her very frequently, more frequently than she wrote to him, telling her of Irish affairs. She had had difficulty in understanding so many things, but she was eager to know about them. He had filled a letter with bitter complaint of the corruption in Irish civic life, and she had asked why he believed in Home Rule. "_If you can't trust these people to manage a munic.i.p.ality, how can you trust them to manage a nation?_" And he had written a lengthy epistle on the state of Ireland.

"_You see, dear_," he wrote, "_it isn't reasonable to expect us to undo in a generation work which it took your country several centuries to do.

Your people have steadily destroyed and corrupted my people. I know they're trying to make amends, but they mustn't expect miracles. You can't wave a wand over Ireland, and say 'Let there be light!' and instantly get light. You've got to remember that Ireland is populated largely by the dregs of Ireland ... what was left after your countrymen had persecuted and exiled and hanged the most vigorous and most courageous men we had ... and it'll take a generation or two, more perhaps, to get a decent level again. The most powerful man in Dublin at this minute is a haberdasher who owns almost everything there is to own: newspapers, conveyances and heaven knows what; and he has the mind of ... well, an early nineteenth-century mill-owner! John Marsh spends a deal of time in vilifying the English as a mean-minded people, but my G.o.d, he has only got to look round the corner in Dublin, to see mean-minded men by the hundred. He wrote to me the other day, crowing because his Volunteers had prevented the application of conscription to Ireland, and that's a frame of mind I don't understand. He's an idealist, but all his ideals are being employed to enable mean-minded and greedy men like the farmers to go on being more mean-minded and greedier. The princ.i.p.al argument seems to be that the Irishman must stay at home and make money out of the war. That's a long way from the days of the 'wild geese' and the order of chivalry, isn't it?_

"_I'm a Home Ruler because I want to see a sense of responsibility cultivated in these people, and you can't have a sense of responsibility until you've got something for which you are responsible. I don't doubt that out of this heart-breaking population, a decent-minded population will come. After all, the first settlers in Australia weren't much better than the people who control the Dublin Corporation, were they? If John Marsh had been about the world more, had had to manage things, and if Mineely and Connolly and the Dublin Labour people had not been embittered beyond all sanity of judgment by that haberdasher I mentioned earlier in this letter, they'd have been useful in the way that I want Crews and Jordan and Saxon and all those patient people to be useful._

"_I wish you could meet Crews and Jordan and Saxon. They're very dissimilar, but they've got something like the unifying motive of a monastery, and they're willing to serve and to plod and to be patient. I fight with Saxon because he's a pacifist, but like all pacifists he's a very pugnacious person, and he can get frightfully angry, but it's pitiful to see him when he's been angry, because he's so sorry afterwards. I'm not a pacifist, but I haven't a tenth of his pluck. He'd endure anything, that man. Crews and Jordan are younger than he, and very brainy. Crews looks as if he were one of the Don't-Care-a-d.a.m.n Brigade ... Dublin's full of them ... but he does care. He has a curiously subtle brain, and I do not know any one so imperturbable as he is. He never loses his temper ... at least I've never seen him lose it ... except, so he says, with stockbrokers and haberdashers and that kind of rubbish. Jordan is one of the brainiest men in Ireland ... that, I suppose, is because he has got some English blood in him: a cynical-looking man, but that's all his fun. And he works, my goodness, he works!_