Changing Winds

Changing Winds.

by St. John G. Ervine.

THE FIRST CHAPTER

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It would be absurd to say of Mr. Quinn that he was an ill-tempered man, but it would also be absurd to say that he was of a mild disposition.

William Henry Matier, a talker by profession and a gardener in his leisure moments, summarised Mr. Quinn's character thus: "He'd ate the head off you, thon lad would, an' beg your pardon the minute after!"

That, on the whole, was a just and adequate description of Mr. Quinn, and certainly no one had better qualifications for forming an estimate of his employer's character than William Henry Matier; for he had spent many years of his life in Mr. Quinn's service and had, on an average, been discharged from it about ten times per annum.

Mr. Quinn, the younger son of a poor landowner in the north of Ireland, had practised at the Bar without success. His failure to maintain himself at the law was not due to ignorance of the statutes of the land or to any inability on his part to distort their meaning: it was due solely to the fact that he was a Unionist and a gentleman. His Unionism, in a land where politics take the place of religion, prevented him from receiving briefs from Nationalists, and his gentlemanliness made it impossible for him to accept briefs from the Unionists; for if an Irish lawyer be a Unionist, he must play the lickspittle and tomtoady to the lords and ladies of the Ascendency and be ready at all times and on all occasions to deride Ireland and befoul his countrymen in the presence of the English people.

"I'd rather eat dirt," Mr. Quinn used to say, "than earn my livin' that way!"

He contrived, however, to win prosperity by his marriage to Miss Catherine Clotworthy, the only daughter of a Belfast mill-owner: a lady of watery spirit who irked her husband terribly because she affected an English manner and an English accent. He was very proud of his Irish blood and he took great pride in using Ulster turns of speech. Mrs.

Quinn, whose education had been "finished" at Brighton, frequently urged him to abandon his "broad" way of talking, but the princ.i.p.al effect she had on him was to intensify the broadness of his accent.

"I do wish you wouldn't say _Aye_," she would plead, "when you mean _Yes_!"

And then he would roar at her. "What! Bleat like a d.a.m.ned Englishman!

Where's your wit, woman?"

Soon after the birth of her son, she died, and her concern, therefore, with this story is slight. It is sufficient to say of her that she inherited a substantial fortune from her father and that she pa.s.sed it on, almost unimpaired, to her husband, thus enabling him to live in comfortable disregard of the law as a means of livelihood. He had a small estate in County Antrim, which included part of the village of Ballymartin, and there he pa.s.sed his days in agricultural pursuits.

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Mr. Quinn, as has been stated, was a Unionist, and, in spite of his Catholic name, a Protestant; but he had a poor opinion of his Unionist neighbours who, so he said, were far more loyal to England than England quite liked. He hated the English accent... "finicky bleatin'," he called it... and declared, though he really knew better, that all Englishmen spoke with a c.o.c.kney intonation. "A lot of h-droppers," he called them, adding, "G.o.d gave them a decent language, but they haven't the gumption to talk it!" The Oxford voice, in his opinion, was educated c.o.c.kney, uglier, if possible, than the uneducated brand.

An Englishman, hearing Mr. Quinn talk in this fas.h.i.+on, might pardonably have imagined that he was listening to a fanatical Nationalist, a dynamiting Fenian, but if, being a Liberal, he had ventured to advocate Home Rule for Ireland in Mr. Quinn's presence, he would speedily have found that he was in error. "d.a.m.n the fear!" Mr. Quinn would say when people charged him with being a Home Ruler. The motive of his Unionism, however, was neither loyalty to England nor terror of Rome: it was wholly and unashamedly a matter of commerce. "The English bled us for centuries," he would say, "an' it's only fair we should bleed them.

We've got our teeth in their skins, an' they're sh.e.l.lin' out their money gran'! That's what the Union's for--to make them keep on sh.e.l.lin' out their money. An' instead of tellin' the people to bite deeper an' get more money out of them, the fools o' Nationalists is tellin' them to take their teeth out! Never," he would exclaim pa.s.sionately, "never, while there's a s.h.i.+llin' in an Englishman's pocket!"

Mr. Quinn, of course, treated every Englishman he met with courtesy, for he was an Irish gentleman, and he had sometimes been heard to speak affectionately of some person of English birth. The chief result of this civility, conjoined with the ferocity of his political statements, was that his English friends invariably spoke of him as "a typical Irishman." They looked upon him as so much comic relief to the more serious things of their own lives, and seemed constantly to expect him to

At such times, Mr. Quinn felt as if he could annihilate an Englishman.

"Ah, well," he would say, restraining himself, "we all know what the English are like, G.o.d help them!"

It was because of his strong feeling for Ireland and Irish things that he decided to have his son, Henry, educated in Ireland. "Anyway," he said to the lad, "you'll have an Irish tongue, whatever else you have!"

He sent the boy to a school in the County Armagh and left him there until he discovered that he was not being educated at all. He had questioned Henry on the history and geography of Ireland one day, and had found to his horror that while Henry could tell him exactly where Popocatepetl was to be found, and knew that Mount Everest was 29,002 feet high, and could name the kings of England and the dates of their accession as easily as he could recite the Lord's Prayer, he had no knowledge of the whereabouts or character of Lurigedan, a hill in the County Antrim, and could tell him nothing of the Red Earls and the beautiful queens of Ireland. He knew something that was true, and much that was not, of Queen Elizabeth and King Alfred, but nothing, true or false, of Deirdre and Red Hugh O'Neill.

"What the h.e.l.l's the good of knowin' about Popocatepetl," Mr. Quinn shouted at him, "when you don't know the name of a hill on your own doorstep!"

Lurigedan was hardly "on his own doorstep," and Mr. Quinn himself only knew of it because he had once, very breathlessly, climbed to its summit, but an Irish hill was of more consequence to him than the highest mountain in the world; and so he descended upon the master of the school, a dreepy individual with a tendency to lament the errors of Rome, and d.a.m.ned him from tip to toe so effectually that the alarmed pedagogue gladly consented to the immediate termination of Henry's career at his establishment. Thereafter, Henry was educated in England, for Mr. Quinn did not propose to sacrifice efficiency to patriotism.

"An' if you come back talkin' like a d.a.m.ned c.o.c.kney," he said to his son as he bade good-bye to him, "I'll cut the legs off you!"

When Henry came home in the holidays, Mr. Quinn would spend hours in testing his tongue.

"Sound your _r_s," he would say repeatedly, because he regarded one's ability to say the letter _r_ as a test of a man's control of the English language. "If you were to listen to an Englishman talkin' on the telephone, you'd hear him yelpin' _'Ah yoh thah?'_ just like a big buck n.i.g.g.e.r, 'til you'd be sick o' listenin' to him! Say, '_Are you there?_', Henry son!"

And Henry would say _"Are you there_, father?" very gravely.

"That's right," the old man would exclaim, listening with delight to the rolling _r_s. "Always sound your _r_s whatever you do. I'll not own you if you come home sayin,'_Ah yoh thah?_' when you mean '_Are you there?_'

Do you mind me, now?"

"Yes, father."

"Well, be heedin' me, then! Now, how are you on the _h_s. Are you as steady on them as you were when you were home before?"

Then Henry would protest. "But, father," he would say, "they don't all drop their _h_s. It's only the common ones that drop them!...

"They're all common, Henry... the whole lot, common as dirt!" Mr. Quinn retorted once to that, and then began to tell his son how the English people had lost the habits and instincts of gentlemen in the eighteenth century... "where Ireland still is, my son!"... and had become money-grubbers. "The English," he said, lying back in his chair and delivering his sentences as if he were a monarch p.r.o.nouncing decrees, "ceased to be gentlemen on the day that Hargreaves invented the spinnin'-jenny, and landlords gave way to mill-owners." He stopped for a second or two and then continued as if an idea had only just come into his head. "An' it was proper punishment for Hargreaves," he said, "that the English let him die in the workhouse. Proper punishment. What the h.e.l.l did he want to invent the thing for?..."

Henry looked up, startled by the sudden anger that swept over his father, replacing the oracular banter with which he had begun his discourse on the decadence of manners in England.

"But, father," he said, "you aren't against machinery, are you?"

"Yes, I am," Mr. Quinn replied, banging the arm of his chair with his fist. "I'd smash every machine in the world, if I were in authority."

"That's absurd, father. I mean, what would become of progress?"

Mr. Quinn leaped out of his chair and strode up and down the room.

"Progress! Progress!" he exclaimed. "D'ye think machines are progress?

D'ye think a factory is progress? Some of you young chaps think you're makin' progress when you're only makin' changes. I tell you, Henry, the only thing that is capable of progression is the human soul, and machines can't develop _that_!" He came back to his seat as he said this and sat down, but he did not lie back as he had done before. He sat forward, gazing intently at his son, and spoke with a curious pa.s.sion such as Henry had never heard him use before. "Look here, Henry!" he said, "there was a girl in the village once called Lizzie McCamley... a fine bit of a girl, too, big and strong, an' full of fun, an' she got tired of the village. Her father was a labourer, an' all she could see in front of her was the life of a labourer's wife. Well, it isn't much of a life, that, an' Lizzie's mother had a poor life even for a labourer's wife because McCamley boozed. I don't blame Lizzie for wantin' somethin' better than that. I'd have despised her if she hadn't wanted somethin' better. But what did she do? She had an uncle in Belfast workin' in your grandfather's mill, an' she came to me an' she asked me to use my influence with your grandfather to get her a job in the mill. An' I did. An' by G.o.d, I'm sorry for it! I'll rue it 'til my dyin' day, I can tell you!"

"But why, father!"

"Your grandfather gave her a job in the weavin' room of his mill. Do you know what that's like, Henry?" Henry shook his head. He had never been inside a linen-mill. "The linen has to be woven in a moist atmosphere, or else it'd become brittle an' so it wouldn't be fine," Mr. Quinn went on; "an' the atmosphere is kept moist by lettin' steam escape from pipes into the room where the linen is bein' woven--a damp, muggy, steamy atmosphere, Henry... an' Lizzie McCamley left this village... left work in the fields there to go up to Belfast an' work in that for ten s.h.i.+llin's a week! An' that's what people calls progress! I wish you could see her now--half rotten with disease, her that was the healthiest girl in the place before she went away. She's always sick, that girl, an' she can't eat anythin' unless her appet.i.te is stimulated with stuff like pickles. She's anaemic an' debilitated, an' the last time I saw her, she'd got English cholera.... She married a fellow that was as sick as herself, an' she had a child that wasn't fit to be born... it died, thank G.o.d!... an' then she went back to her work an' became sicker. An'

she'll go on like that 'til she dies, a rotten, worn-out woman, the mother of rotten children when she ought to have had fine healthy brats, an' could have had them too, if it hadn't been for this d.a.m.ned progress we're all makin'!"

Henry did not reply to his father. He did not know what to reply. His mind was still in the pliable state, and he found that he was being infected by his father's pa.s.sion. But he had been taught at Rumpell's to believe in Invention, in Progress by the Development of Machinery, and so his mind reeled a little under this sudden onslaught on his beliefs.

"Well," said Mr. Quinn. "Is that your notion of progress, Henry! Makin'

fine linen out of healthy girls?"

"No, father, of course not. Only!..."

Mr. Quinn stood up, and caught hold of his son's shoulder. "Come over to the window, Henry!" he said, and they walked across the room together.

"Look out there," he said, pointing towards the fields that stretched to the foot of the hills. "That's fine, isn't it!" he exclaimed.

"It's very beautiful, father," Henry replied, looking across the fields of corn and clover and the pastures where the silken-sided cattle browsed and flocks of sheep cropped the short gra.s.s.

"It's _land_, Henry!" said Mr. Quinn, proudly. "You can do without machines in the long run, but you can't do without _that_!"

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