Changing Winds

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 Cockney intonation.

"A lot of h-droppers," he called them, adding, "God gave them a decent language, but they haven't the gumption to talk it!" The Oxford voice, in his opinion, was educated Cockney, uglier, if possible, than the uneducated brand.

An Englishman, hearing Mr. Quinn talk in this fashion, 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. "Damn 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 shellin' out their money gran'! That's what the Union's for-to make them keep on shellin' 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 passionately, "never, while there's a shillin' 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 perform some amusing antic, some innately Celtic act of comic folly. 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, God 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 hell'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 damned 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 damned Cockney," 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 rs," 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 nigger, '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 rs. "Always sound your rs 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 hs. 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 hs. 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 pronouncing 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 hell 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 passion 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 God, 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 shillin'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 appetite is stimulated with stuff like pickles. She's an?mic 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 God!... 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 damned 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 passion. 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 grass.

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

"An' what do you think a mill-owner'd make of it, Henry!" Mr. Quinn said as they stood there gazing on the richness of the earth. Near at hand, they could hear the sound of a lawn-mower, leisurely worked by William Henry Matier, and while they waited for him to come into view, a great fat thrush flew down from a tree and seized a snail and beat it against a stone until its shell was broken....

"I suppose he'd spoil it, father!" Henry answered.

"Spoil it!" Mr. Quinn exclaimed. "Damn it, Henry, he'd desecrate it! He'd tear up my cornfields and meadows and put factories and mills in their place! That's what he'd do!" He turned sideways and leant against the lintel of the window so that he was looking at his son. "There was a fellow came to see me once," he said, "from London. A speculatin' chap, an' he wanted me to put capital into a scheme he had on. Do you know what sort of a scheme it was, Henry?"

"No, father!"

"He wanted to develop the mineral resources of the County Wicklow, an' he wanted me to lend him money to do it. He said that some Germans had surveyed the whole district, an' there was an immense fortune just waitin' to be torn out of the earth.... I could hardly keep my feet off his backside! 'Do you want to turn Glendalough into a place like Wigan?' I said to him. 'It's all in the interests of progress,' says he.... No, I didn't give him any of my money. I was as civil to him as I could be, an' he never knew how near he was to his death that day...."

Mr. Quinn's anger evaporated, and he began to laugh to himself as he thought of the difficulty he had had in restraining his rage against the speculator and how frightened that person would have been had he known how angry he had made him.

"He was a little smooth chap," he said, "with smooth hair an' smooth clothes and a smooth voice. You could hardly tell it was hair, it was that smooth. You'd nearly think somebody had painted it on his skull. He couldn't make me out when I said I'd rather starve than let a halfpenny of my money be used to make a mess of Glendalough, an' he talked about the necessity of havin' a broad outlook on the world. I suppose he went away an' told everybody that I was a reactionary an' a bad landlord. Oh, I can hear him spoutin' away about me ... he got into parliament soon after that, an' used to denounce landlords an' blether away about progress. An' I daresay everybody that listens to him thinks I'm a stupid fellow, standin' in the way of everything. I'm a landlord, an' so, of course, I'm obsolete and tyrannical an' thick-headed, an' all that, but I wouldn't treat one of my labourers the way your grandfather treated his for the wide world. Mind you, he was a religious man ... I don't mean that he pretended to be religious ... he really was religious, after a fashion ... wouldn't have missed goin' to church or sayin' his prayers night an' mornin' for a mint of money ... an' yet there didn't seem to him to be anything wrong in lettin' men an' women make money for him in that ... that disgustin' way. I can't understand that. I'm damned if I can!"

Something stirred uneasily in Henry's mind. He became acutely conscious of the principal source of his father's income, and he remembered things that had been said to him by Gilbert Farlow at Rumpell's. Gilbert Farlow was his chief friend at Rumpell's, the English school to which he had been sent after his experience at Armagh, and Gilbert called himself an hereditary socialist because his father had been a socialist before him. ("He was one of the first members of the Fabian Society," Gilbert used to say proudly.) Gilbert had strong, almost violent, views on Personal Responsibility for General Wrongs. He always referred to rich people as "oligarchs," or "the rotters who live on rent and interest" and declared that it was impossible for them to escape from the responsibility for the social chaos by asserting that they, individually, had kind hearts and had never been known to underpay or overwork any one. Remembering Gilbert's views, Henry could not help thinking that it was all very well for his father to denounce the mill in that fashion, but after all he was living on the money that was made in it....

"But, father," he said, hesitatingly, "haven't we got grandfather's money now ... and the mill!..."

"No, not the mill, Henry. Your grandfather turned that into a limited company, an' your mother sold her shares in it. I told her to sell them!"

Henry's conscience still pricked him. It seemed to him that selling the shares was very like running away from the responsibility.

"But all the same," he said, "we've got money that was made out of the mill by grandfather...."

"So we have, Henry," Mr. Quinn replied good-temperedly, "an' we're makin' a better use of it than he did. Some one's got to use it, an' I'm doin' the best I can with it. You've only got to look at my land to see how well I've used the money. It's better land than it was when I got it, isn't it?" Henry nodded his head. Even he knew that much. "I've enriched it an' drained it an' improved it in ways that'll benefit them that come after me ... not me, but you an' your children, Henry ... an' that's a good use to make of it. I've planted trees that I'll never reap a ha'penny from, an' I've spent money on experiments that did me no good but helped to increase knowledge about land. Look at the labourers' cottages I've built, an' the plots of land I've given them. Aren't they good! Didn't I put up the best part of the money to build the new school because the old one was lettin' in the wind an' rain?"

Henry's knowledge of sociology was not sufficient to enable him to cope with these arguments ... there was no Gilbert Farlow at his elbow to prompt him ... and so he collapsed.

"I suppose you're right, father," he said.

"Suppose I'm right," Mr. Quinn replied. "Of course I'm right!"

"I know well," he continued after he had fumed for a few moments, "there's people ... socialists an' radicals an' people like that ... makes out that landlords are the curse of the world. They think we're nothin' in comparison with mill-owners an' that sort, but I tell you, Henry, whatever we are an' whatever we were, we're better than the people that have taken our place. We didn't tear up the earth an' cover it with slag-heaps or turn good rivers into stinkin' sewers. We didn't pollute the rivers with filth an' poison the fish!" He turned suddenly to Henry and said in a quieter tone, "You've never seen Wigan, have you, Henry?"

"No, father."

"Well, you'd think by the look of it, it was made on the seventh day ... when God rested. Landlords didn't do that, Henry, or anything as bad as that. It was mill-owners that did it. Oh, I know well enough that landlords were not all they ought to have been, but I'm certain of this, that labourers on the land were healthier under landlords than they are under mill-owners, and even if we weren't as good to the labourers as we might have been, at least we had respect for God's world, an' I never met a mill-owner yet that had respect for anything but a bankbook. I've been in Lancashire an' I've listened to these mill-owners ... I've listened to them talkin', an' I've listened to them eatin' an' drinkin' ... an' they talked 'brass' an' they thought 'brass,' an' I'm damned if they didn't drink 'brass.' That's characteristic of them. They call money 'brass.' Brass! Do you think they care for the fine look of things or an old house or a picture or books or anything that's decent? No, Henry ... all they care for is 'brass,' an' that's what's the matter with the English ... they think too much about money ... easy money ... an' they think so much about gettin' it that none of them have any time to think of how they'll spend it when they do get it. An' they just fool it away! Eat it away, drink it away! An' then they have to go to Buxton an' Matlock an' Harrogate to sweat the muck out of their blood!"

Henry reminded his father of the bloods and bucks and macaronis of the eighteenth century ... the last of the English gentlemen.

"After all, father, they weren't so very much better than the lot you're denouncing!"

"Yes, they were. They had the tradition of gentlemen behind them. They were drunkards and gamblers and women-hunters an' Lord knows what not, but behind it all, Henry, they had the tradition of gentlemen, an' that saved them from things that a mill-owner does as a matter of course. An' anyway, their theory was right. They thought more of spendin' money than of makin' it, an' that was right. It isn't makin' money that matters ... any fool can do that ... it's spendin' money that matters. You're less likely to make a mess of the world when you're spendin', than when you're makin', money, an' the English'll find that out yet. God'll not forget in a hurry the way they tore up their good land an' made dirty, stinkin' towns out of it, an' by the Holy O, He'll make them suffer for it. If I was an Englishman, I wouldn't want any one to see places like Wigan an' the towns where they dig coal an' make pottery ... I'd ... I'd be ashamed to look God in the face when I had mind of them...."

Late that night, long after Henry had gone to bed, Mr. Quinn came to his room and wakened him.

"What is it, father!" Henry said, starting up in alarm.

"It's all right, son," Mr. Quinn replied. "I'm sorry I startled you. I've been thinkin' over what I said to you this afternoon ... about machinery. You're not to take me too seriously."

Henry, his eyes still full of sleep, blinked uncomprehendingly at his father.

"I mean, son," Mr. Quinn went on, "that it'd be silly to break up every machine in the world. Of course, it would! You must have thought I was daft talkin' like that. What I mean is, I'd smash up all the machines that make a mess of men an' women. That's all. I'm sorry I disturbed you, Henry, but I couldn't bear to think of you lyin' here mebbe thinkin' I was talkin' out of the back of my neck. I'm not very clever, son ... I've a moidhered sort of a mind ... an' I say things sometimes that aren't what I mean at all. You must be tired out, Henry. Good-night to you!"

"Good-night, father!"

Mr. Quinn walked towards the door of the room, shading the light of the candle from the draught, but before he had reached it, Henry called to him.

"Father," he said.

"Yes, Henry," Mr. Quinn replied, turning to look at his son.

"You're a Socialist!"

"No, I'm not. I'm a Conservative," said Mr. Quinn, and then he went out of the room, closing the door quietly behind him.