Chapter XVIII: Part 18

There was a sound of steps in the passage, and he sat up and listened. Then the door opened and Mrs. Graham came in. There was a bright look in her tearless eyes. Her lips were firmly closed, and he saw that her hands were clenched. He stood up as she entered, and looked at her as she came towards him. She came close to him and laid her hand on his.

"Poor Mary," she said, softly, "we ... we must comfort poor Mary!"

She looked about the room. "Where is she?" she asked, turning to him again.

"Upstairs," he answered.

She went towards the door. "I must go and comfort her," she said. "She was ... very fond of ... of Ninian!"

He followed her to the door, afraid that she might break down, but she did not break down. She gathered her skirts about her, and went up the stairs to Mary's room, and her steps were firm and proud. He could hear the rustle of her skirt on the landing as she passed along it out of his sight, and then he heard her knocking on Mary's door.

"Can I come in, Mary?" she asked in a clear voice.

He could hear the door opening ... and then he heard it being closed again.

He stood at the foot of the stairs, listening, but there was no need of him. He turned away, and as he did so, Widger came into the hall. The old man stood for a moment or two without speaking. Then he made a suppliant movement with his trembling hands.

"It b'ain't true!..." he mumbled thickly.

"Yes, Widger," Henry answered, "it is."

The old man turned away. "I knowed 'un ever since 'e were a baby," he said, and his lips were quivering. "Praper li'l chap 'e were, too!

"It b'ain't right," he went on, looking helplessly about him. Then his voice took a firmer, more definite note, "Where's missus to?" he asked.

"She's upstairs, Widger," Henry answered. "I don't think I'd say anything to her at present, if I were you!"

"Very well, sir!"

He moved away. The vitality seemed to have gone out of him, and suddenly he had become old ... senile ... shuffling.

"They'm wisht times, sir!" he said, as he left the hall.

4

Henry wrote to Roger, telling him of Ninian's death, and when he had finished the letter, he went out to post it. He could not sit still in the house ... he felt that he must move about until he was worn and exhausted. Mrs. Graham was still with Mary, but perhaps by the time he returned, they would be able to come downstairs again. The pride with which Mrs. Graham had supported herself in her grief seemed to him almost god-like. Once, in the South of Ireland, he had seen a peasant woman bidding good-bye to her husband. As the train steamed out of the station, she howled like a wounded animal, spinning round like a teetotum, and waving her hands and arms wildly. Her hair had tumbled down her back, and her eyes seemed to be melting, so freely did she weep ... and then when the train had disappeared round a bend of the track, she dried her eyes and went home. Her grief, that had seemed utterly inconsolable, had been no more than a summer shower.... He had had difficulty in preventing himself from laughing, and he could not restrain a feeling of contempt for her. "They write plays about that kind of silly howling at the Abbey Theatre, and call it 'the Celtic twilight.' No dignity, no decency!..."

He had heard sentimental Englishmen prating about "the tragic soul" of Ireland because they had listened to hired women _keening_ over the dead. "But that isn't grief," he had said to them. "They're paid to do that!" The Irish liked to splash about in their emotions ... they wallowed in them....

But Mrs. Graham's grief was more than a summer shower. Henry knew instinctively that Ninian's death had killed her. She might live for many years, but she would be a dead woman. She would show very little, nothing, to those who looked to see the signs of woe, but in her heart she would hoard her desolation, keeping it to herself, obtruding her sorrow on no one ... waiting patiently and silently for her day of release, when, as her faith told her, she and her son would come together again....

"It's unfair," he told himself, "to compare the grief of an illiterate Irishwoman with the grief of an English lady!"

But then he had seen the grief of poor Englishwomen. Four of the Boveyhayne men had been drowned in a naval battle. He had gone to the memorial service in Boveyhayne Church, and had seen the friends of those men mingling their tears ... but there had been none of this emotional savagery, this howling like women in kraals, this medicine-man grief....

5

They were both in the drawing-room when he returned.

"I've written to Roger," he said, to explain his absence. "Perhaps," he went on, "there are other letters you'd like me to write?"

"Yes," she said, "it would be kind of you, Henry!..."

There was Ninian's uncle, the Dean of Exebury, and Mr. Hare, with whom he had worked ... they must be told at once ... and there were other relatives, other friends. He spent the evening in doing the little services that must be done when there is death, and found relief for his mind in doing them.

"I told the servants," he said, looking up from a letter he was writing. "Old Widger wanted to see you!..."

"Poor Widger," she said. "He and Ninian were so fond of each other!"

She got up and went to the door. "I must go and say something to him," she said. "He'll feel it so much!"

She closed the door behind her, and he sat staring at it after she had gone. The matchless pride of her, that she could forget herself so completely and think of the subordinate sorrow of her servant when she might have been absorbed by her own!

He turned to Mary who was sitting near him, and reached out and took her hand in his, but neither of them spoke.

What was there to say? Ninian was dead ... old men had made a war, and this young man had paid for it ... and everywhere in Europe, there were mourners for the young, slain for the folly and incompetence of the old and the worn and the impatient.

He released Mary's hand, and resumed the writing of his letter. Before he had finished it, Mrs. Graham returned to the room.

"Poor Widger," she said, "he ... he cried!"

She came to the table where Henry was writing, and placed her hand on his shoulder, and looked concernedly at him.

"Aren't you tired, Henry?" she said.

"No, thanks!" he answered, glancing up at her and smiling.

"You mustn't tire yourself!" she bent over him and kissed his forehead lightly. "You've been a great help, Henry," she said.

6

But in her room, where none could see her, she shed her tears....

THE TENTH CHAPTER

1

He had returned to Ireland. In Dublin, he found a strange mixture of emotions. Marsh and Galway and their friends were drilling with greater determination than ever, and occasionally they were to be seen parading the streets. Some of them wore green uniforms, shaped after the pattern of the khaki uniform of the British Army, but most of them wore their ordinary clothes, with perhaps a bandolier and a belt and a slouch hat. They carried rifles of an old make, and had long, clumsy bayonets slung by their sides. It seemed to Henry as he watched a company of them marching through College Green that these men were not of the fighting breed ... that these pale clerks and young workmen and elderly professors and hungry, emaciated labourers were unlikely to deal in the serious work of war ... and when he met John Marsh in the evening, he sneered at him. Marsh kept his temper. He was more tolerant now than he had been in the days when he had tutored Henry at Ballymartin. He admitted that the Sinn Feiners were widely unpopular. There were many reasons why they should be. Dublin was full of men and women mourning for their sons who had died at Suvla Bay ... and were in no mood for rebellion.

"The war's popular in the Combe," he said. "The women are better off now than they were in peace times. That's a handsome tribute to civilisation, isn't it? The country people are the worst. They're rich ... the war's bringing them extraordinary prosperity ... and some of our people are tactless. But we've got to go on. We've got to save Ireland's soul!..."

Henry made an impatient gesture. "Why do you talk that high-falutin' stuff," he said.

"It isn't high-falutin' stuff, Henry. I'm speaking what I believe to be the truth. The English have tried a new way to kill the Irish spirit, and by God they look like succeeding. They couldn't kill it by persecuting us, they couldn't kill it by ruining us, but they may kill it by making us prosperous. I feel heart-broken when I talk to the farmers. Money! That's all they think about. They rob their children of their milk and feed them on tea, so's they can make a few more pence. Oh, they're being anglicised, Henry! If we can only blow some of the greed out of them, well have done something worth while!"

He was more convinced now than ever that the Irish were to be betrayed by the English after the war.

"Look how they minimise our men's bravery at the front. Even the _Irish Times_ is protesting!..."

It seemed to Henry to be ridiculous to believe that the English government was deliberately depreciating the work of the Irish soldiers, and he said so. "They hardly mention the names of any regiments," he pointed out.

But John Marsh had an answer for him. He produced a despatch written by a British admiral in which was narrated the story of the landing at Suvla Bay and the beaches about Gallipoli.

"He mentioned the name of every regiment that took part in the landing, except the two Irish regiments that did the hardest work and suffered the most deaths. I suppose that was an accident, Henry, a little oversight!"

"You don't think he left them out on purpose, do you?"

"I do. So does every man in Ireland, Unionist or Nationalist. You see, we know this man in Ireland ... he's a well-known Unionist ... a bigot ... and there isn't a person in Ireland who doesn't believe that he deliberately left the names of Dublins and the Munsters out of his despatch. He forgot, when he was writing it, that he was a sailor, and remembered only that he was a politician ... the kind that dances on dead men's graves!"

It was difficult to argue with Marsh or with any one who thought as he thought, in face of that despatch. The omission was inexplicable if one did not accept the explanation offered by Marsh. The tradition of the sea is an honourable one, and sailors do not do things like that ... the scurvy acts of the cheaper politicians....

"You make a fence about your mind, John," said Henry, "and you spend all your efforts in strengthening it, so that you haven't time either to look over it and see what's beyond it, or to cultivate what's inside it. You're just building up barriers, when you should be knocking them down!"

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 sluts!..."

"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 associated with a race that makes bargains on bodies!..."

"You're doing a damned 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 bloody 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 hell 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 assiduously 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 abasement, 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 damned 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. "Analysing 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 municipality, 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 God, 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 principal 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-Damn 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!_

"_It's with men like these that I want to work, because I believe that they will prepare the place for the foundation of a decent commonwealth. They aren't miracle-mongers, thank God, like John Marsh and Galway and Mineely. They aren't up in the sky to-day and down in the mud to-morrow. They keep to the level._

"_Then there's the Plunkett House lot. You remember, I told you about Sir Horace Plunkett and the Co-operative Movement. Well, I want to get Crews and Jordan and Saxon to link themselves on to the Plunkett House people and form the nucleus of a new Irish Group. There are a few of the men at Trinity College who will come into it, but I'm afraid all the men at the National University are under the influence of Marsh and MacDonagh and the sloppy romantics._

"_You see, dear, don't you, that this job of making a commonwealth of worth in Ireland is a long and difficult one. That's why we've got to be very patient. Everything's against us. We have a contemptible press, a cowardly crowd of corrupt politicians, a greedy people, an ignorant and bigoted priesthood (that includes the Protestant clergy) and a complete lack of social consciousness and plan of life. But then, what's life for, if it isn't to cope with difficulties like that...._"

6

There was snow, thick and long-lying, on the ground when he reached Boveyhayne, and the _crunch-crunch_ of it under their feet, as Mary and he walked home, gave him a feeling of pleasure, and the cold, bracing air exhilarated him so that he laughed at things which would otherwise barely have made him smile. The antics of Rachel's daughter, as related to him by Mary, seemed extraordinarily entertaining, and when he drew Mary's arm in his and pressed it tightly, he felt that there was nothing in heaven or on earth more to be desired than the love of a woman and the love of a child. He had a sense of age, of a passed boundary, that made him feel much older than Mary. "Here I am, listening to her as she talks gaily about a child's pranks, nodding my head and laughing, too ... and in a little while I shall tell her everything ... and then I shall go ... and we will not laugh again together. I'm holding her arm closely in mine, and presently I shall kiss her lips, and she will put her arms about me with the careless intimacy of lovers ... and then I shall tell her everything ... and she will kiss me no more ... and our intimacy will shrivel up!..."

He wished to prolong his pleasure in this walk through the snow, and so he took her back to the Manor by long roads and roundabout ways. They did not climb up the old path over the cliff because that was so much shorter than the hair-pin road.... "I must tell her soon," he said to himself, "but before I tell her, I must feel the most of her love for me!"

He listened to her, not for what she was saying, but for the sound of her voice, and made short answers to her so that he might interrupt the flow of her speech as little as possible. When he returned along this road, he would come alone and for the last time, and so, that his memory of her might be full, he would be no more than her auditor and watcher. Just to have her by his side, her arm in his, and hear her ... that was sufficient.

They walked through the village and when they came to Boveyhayne lane, he said to her, "Isn't there a longer way, Mary!" and she laughed at him, bantering him because of his sudden desire for exercise; but she yielded to him, and they took the longer road that led them past the Roman quarries to the fir tree, standing in isolation where the main roads meet.

"Mary," he said, as they came in sight of the house, "I want to tell you something ... something important!..."

"Yes, Quinny!"

"But not now, dear. To-night! Or to-morrow, perhaps!"

She pinched his cheek in a pretence at anger. "You were always very vague, Quinny!" she said.

"I know," he answered. "It's a kind of ... cowardice, that, isn't it? I'm vague because I dislike ... am afraid ... to be definite. I'm a frightful coward, Mary!..."

He might approach the subject by these devious ways, he told himself. He had not meant to talk to her about his failure in courage until she and he could be alone in the evening ... this walk together was to be the final lovers' stroll, unmarred by any bitterness ... but even in his effort to postpone the time of telling, he had prepared to tell her ... and perhaps it was better that she should know now. Here, indeed, in this snowy silence, they were free from any intrusion. It might not be possible to make his confession to her without interruption from Rachel or Mrs. Graham ... and some feeling for the fitness of things made him decide that this outdoor scene was a better place for his purpose than the lamplit interior of the Manor. Through the blown branches of the hedges he could see the thick sheets of snow spread over the fields. The boughs of the fruit-trees in the orchard showed very black beneath their white covering, as if they felt cold, and he looted away quickly to the haystacks in the farmyard that seemed so warm in spite of the snow. The dusk was drawing in, and the grey sky was darkening for the night....

"Mary," he said, so abruptly that she looked up at him enquiringly. "Let's walk back a little way...."

"But, Quinny, it's getting late. They'll wonder what's happened to us!"

"I want to tell you ... now, Mary!"

He compelled her to turn, as he spoke, and they walked slowly back towards the fir tree.

"What is it, Quinny?" she asked tenderly, as if she would comfort him.

"I ... I want to tell you something!"

"Yes?"

"I hardly know how to begin. It's very difficult, dear...."

"What is it, Quinny?" she demanded, more anxiously.

But still he would not tell her ... he must have her love a little longer.

"Mary, I love you so much, dear ... oh, I feel like a fool when I try to tell you how much I love you!"

"I know you love me, Quinny!"

"And now ... this very minute ... I love you far more than I've ever loved you. Every bit of me is in love with you, Mary. You're very sweet and dear!..."

She had a sense of impending disaster, but she did not express it in her words. "And I love you, Quinny!" she said. "I can't love you more than I've always loved you!..."

"Could you love me less than you've always loved me?" he asked, turning and standing before her so that his eyes were looking into hers.

"I don't know," she answered. "I've never tried!"

He did not say any more for a few moments, but stood with his hands on her shoulders, looking steadily into her eyes, while she looked steadily into his. Then he took his hands from her shoulders and drew her into the shelter of his arms, and kissed her, letting his lips lie long on hers.

"What do you want to tell me?" she said in a whisper.

7

Then he told her.

"I wrote to you when I was at Ballymartin," he said, "but I did not post the letter. I brought it with me. I meant to destroy it because I thought it was too emotional, and then I thought that perhaps I had better let you see it so that you might judge me, not just as I am now, talking to you quietly like this, but as I was when I wrote it!"

He took the letter from his pocket and gave it to her.

"I had to tell you, Mary. I couldn't marry you without letting you know what kind of man I am. I'm too frightened to go to the Front. At the bottom of all my excuses, that's the truth."

She did not speak, but stood with his letter in her hands, turning it over....

"I've tried to persuade myself," he went on, "that I'm of special account, that I ought not to go to the war, but I know very well that in a time like this, no one is of special account. Gilbert said something like that at Tre'Arrdur Bay when I told him that his life was of greater value than the life of ... of a clerk. I suppose, the finer a man is, the more willing he is to take his share in war, and if that's true, I'm not really a fine man. I'm simply a coward, hoarding up my life in a cupboard, like a miser hoarding up his money. I should have been the first to spend myself ... like Gilbert and Ninian. I'm the only one of the Improved Tories who hasn't gone! ... Oh, I couldn't offer you myself, dear. I'm too mean ... I'm a failure in fineness.... I used to feel contempt for Jimphy Jayne ... but he didn't hesitate for a moment. It never entered his head not to go. The moment the war began, Gilbert enlisted, and I suppose Ninian must have left that railway the very minute he heard the news. I was never quite ... never quite on their level, Mary, and I don't suppose I ever shall be now!"

She moved slightly, as if she were tired of remaining in one position, and were shifting to an easier one, but still she did not speak, nor did she raise her eyes to look at him.

"I'm not fit to be your husband," he said. "I'm not fit to be any woman's husband, but much less yours. Even now, when I 'm standing here talking to you in this safety, the thought of ... of being out there makes me shiver with fear. It's the thought of ... of dying!... I think and think of all those young chaps, all the fellows I knew, robbed of their right to live and love, as I love you, and work and make their end in decency and peace ... and I can't bear it. I want to save myself from the wreckage ... to hide myself in safety until this ... this horror is ended!" He paused for a while, as if he were searching for words and then he went on. "There was an officer in my carriage to-day ... going on to Whimple ... and he told me about poison gas ... the men died in frightful agony, he said ... and then he talked about machine guns.... 'They can perforate a man like a postage stamp,' he said.... Isn't it vile, Mary?"

Her head was still bent, and as she did not make an answer to him, he turned to look away from her. He remembered how Sheila Morgan, in her anger at his cowardice, had struck him in the face and had furiously bidden him to leave her.... Mary would not strike him, but she, too, would bid him to go from her....

He felt her hand on his arm.

"Quinny!" she said very softly, and he turned to find her standing nearer to him and looking up at him with no less love than she had looked at him before he had made his confession to her.

"I don't love you, Quinny, only for what's fine in you," she said, and her speech was full of hesitation as if she could not adequately express her meaning. "I love you ... for _all_ of you. I just take the bad with the good, and ... and make the best of it, dear!"

"You still want me, Mary?..."

"My dear," she said, half laughing and half crying, "I've always wanted you!... Oh, what's the good," she went on with an impetuous rush of words, "of loving a man only when he comes up to your expectations. I want to love you even when you don't come up to my expectations, Quinny, and I do love you, dear. It hasn't anything to do with whether you're brave or not brave, or good or bad, or great or common. I just love you ... don't you see?... because you're _you_!..."

He stared at her incredulously. He had been so certain that she would bid him leave her when she learned of his cowardice.

"But!..."

"Come home," she said. "You must be very tired, and cold!"

She put her arm in his, and drew him homewards, and he yielded to her like a little child.

As they turned the corner of the apple-orchard, they could see lights shining from the windows of the Manor, making a warm splash on the snow that lay in drifts about the garden. There was a great quietness that was broken now and then by the twittering of birds in the hedges as they nestled for the night, or the cries made by the screech-owls, hooting in the copse.

8

Mrs. Graham and Rachel had left them alone for a while, after dinner, and as he sat, with her at his feet, fondling her hair, she spoke of her feeling for him again.

"I've wondered sometimes," she said, "about your not joining ... it seemed odd ... but I thought that perhaps there was something that would explain it. I'd like you to join, Quinny ... I can't pretend that I wouldn't ... but I don't feel that I ought to ask you to do so. If I were a man I should join, I think, but I'm not a man, and I'm not likely to have to suffer any of the things that a man has to suffer if he goes ... and so I don't say anything. I don't know why I'd like you to go ... I ought to be glad that you haven't gone because I love you and I don't want to lose you ... but all the same I'd like you to go. It isn't just because other men have gone, and I don't feel any desire for revenge because Ninian's been killed ... it's just because England's England, I suppose...." She laughed a little nervously. "I can hardly expect you to feel about England as I do. You're Irish!.."

"I've made that excuse for myself, Mary. Don't you make it for me. I know inside me that the war isn't England's war ... it's the world's war. John Marsh admits that much. He doesn't like English rule in Ireland, but he doesn't pretend that German rule would be better ... not seriously, anyhow. No, dear, I haven't that excuse. I know that if we lose this war, the world will be a worse place to live in than it is. I haven't any conscientious objection ... I don't feel that we are in the wrong ... I feel that we're in the right ... that we never were so right as we are. I'm simply anxious to save my skin. And even if I felt that John Marsh were right in being anti-English, I don't feel that I have any right to take up that attitude. England's done no wrong to my family.... You see, dear, I haven't any excuse that's worth while ... except the wish to preserve my life ... and that's a poor excuse. When I think of being at the Front, I think of myself as dead ... lying out there ... without any of the decencies ... until I'm offensive to the men who were my friends ... until they sicken at the stench of _me_!..."

"Don't, dear!" she murmured.

"Perhaps I shall conquer this ... this meanness. I want to conquer it. I want to behave as I believe. I believe that there are things one should be glad to fight for and die for ... and I want to feel glad to fight for them and be ready to die for them. But now I feel most that I want to be safe ... to go on living and living and enjoying things...."

"But can you enjoy things if they're not worth dying for, Quinny? If England weren't worthy dying for, would it be worth living in! That's how I feel!"

"That's how I _think_, Mary, but it isn't how I _feel_. I feel that I want to be safe no matter what happens ... if civilisation is to go to smash and we're to be driven back to savagery, distrusting and being distrusted ... I feel that I don't care ... that I want to be safe, to go on living, even if I have to live in a cave and hide from everything.... Oh, my dear, don't you see what a poor thing I am!"

"Yes," she said simply.

"And yet you're willing to marry me?"

"Yes. I can't help loving you, any more than I can help loving my country. I can't explain it and I don't want to explain it. If I were a man and England were in the wrong, I'd fight for England just because she's England. Everything makes me feel like that. When Ninian was killed, something went on saying, 'You're English! You mustn't cry! You're English!' And when I look at the trees outside, I feel that they're English, too, and that they're telling me I'm English ... that somehow they're special trees, different from the trees in other countries ... that they've got something that I've got, and that I've got something they've got ... something that a French tree or a German tree hasn't got.... Oh, I know it's silly, but I can't help it ... and when I used to walk about the lanes and fields after Ninian's death ... I felt that the birds and the grass and the ferns and everything were saying 'You're English!' and I wanted to say back to them, 'You're English, too!...' I suppose people feel like that everywhere ... those friends of yours in Ireland must feel like that about Ireland ... and Germans, too!..."

He nodded his head. "It's a madness, this nationality," he said, "but you can't get a cure for it. Even I feel it!"

"Quinny!"

"Yes, Mary!"

There was a nervous note in her voice. She got up, so that she was on her knees, and fingered the lapels of his coat.

"Quinny!" she said again, and he waited for her to proceed. "I ... I want us to get married ... soon! You'll probably go into the Army ... nobody could go on feeling as you do, and not go in ... and I'd like us to ... to have had some time together ... before you go. I don't want to be married to you just ... just a day or two before you go. I ... I want to have lived with you and to ... to have taken care of your house ... with you in it!..."

He folded her in his arms.

"You will, Quinny?" she said.

"Yes," he answered.

THE ELEVENTH CHAPTER

1

They were to be married as soon as Lent was over. Mrs. Graham, reluctant to lose Mary, had pleaded for delay, urging that Ballymartin was so far from Boveyhaven that she would seldom see her. "Two days' post," she protested.

"But you'll come and stay with us, mother," Mary declared, "and we'll come and stay with you!"

It would be quite easy for Henry to come to Devonshire, for he could carry his work about with him. Then Mrs. Graham had yielded to them, and it was settled that the marriage was to take place at the beginning of May. Neither Mary nor he had spoken again of the question of enlistment. She had said all that was in her mind about it, and what followed was for him to decide.

He went back to Ballymartin. There were things to be done at home in preparation for the coming of a bride. The house had not known a mistress since his mother's death, and his father had been too preoccupied with his agricultural experiments to bother greatly about the interior of his house. So long as he could find things more or less where he had left them, Mr. Quinn had been content.

"You won't overhaul it too much, Quinny?" Mary said to him, "because I'd like to do some of that!"

He had promised that he would do no more than was immediately necessary; and then he went.

"I shall have to go to Dublin," he had told her. "There'll be a lot of stuff to settle with lawyers!" Her settlement, for example. "I'll go home first, then on to Dublin, and then back here. I shall get to Boveyhayne just after Easter!"

2

Mr. Quinn had not greatly bothered about the interior of the house, but Hannah had, and although there were things that needed to be done, there was less than he had imagined.

"I'm going to be married, Hannah!" he said to her soon after he had arrived home.

"Are you, now?" she exclaimed.

"Yes. You remember Mr. Graham?..."

"Ay, poor sowl, I mind him ... the nice-spoken, well-behaved lad he was!..."

"Well, I'm going to marry his sister!"