The Red Hand of Ulster/Chapter 8

R. CONROY arrived at luncheon-time, and Lady Moyne took him in hand at once. I watched her talking to him during the meal and afterwards when they walked together round the lawn. I came to the conclusion that Lady Moyne would have no difficulty in obtaining any subscription she wanted from the millionaire. They were, of course, intimate with each other. Lady Moyne had been Conroy’s guest in the days when his London house was a centre of social life. She had sailed with him on the Finola. But this was the first time she had him at Castle Affey; and therefore the first time he had seen Lady Moyne in her character as hostess. It is not to be wondered at that he yielded to her charm. Like all women of real capacity Lady Moyne was at her best in her own house.

But she was too clever a hostess to devote herself entirely to one guest. She took Babberly for a drive later in the afternoon and I felt that my time had come. I determined to be true to my trust and to make myself agreeable to Conroy. Unfortunately he did not seem to want my company. He went off for a long walk with Malcolmson. This surprised me. I should have supposed beforehand that talk about artillery would have bored Conroy; and Malcolmson, since this Home Rule struggle began, has talked of nothing else.

I spent the afternoon with Mr. Cahoon, and we talked about Home Rule, of course.

“What those fellows want,” he said, “is to get their hands into our pockets. But it won’t do.”

“Those fellows” were, plainly, the Nationalist leaders.

“Taxation?” I said.

“Belfast will be the milch cow of the Dublin Parliament,” said Cahoon. “Money will be wanted to feed paupers and pay priests in the south and west. We’re the only people who have any money.”

I had never before come in contact with a man like Cahoon, and I was very much interested in him. His contempt, not only for our fellow-countrymen in Leinster, Munster and Connacht, but for all the other inhabitants of the British Isles was absolute. He had a way of pronouncing final judgment on all the problems of life which fascinated me.

“That’s all well enough in its way,” he would say; “but it won’t do in Belfast. We’re business men.”

I think he said those words five times in the course of the afternoon, and each time they filled me with fresh delight. If the man had been a fool I should not have been interested in him. If he had been a simple crude money maker, a Stock Exchange Imperialist, for instance, I should have understood him and yawned. But he was not a fool. A man cannot be a fool who manages successfully a large business, who keeps in touch with the swift vicissitudes of modern international commerce, who has organized into a condition of high efficiency an industrial army of several thousand working-men and women. And Mr. Cahoon, in a curious hard way, was touched with idealisms; I discovered, accidentally, that he devotes his spare time on Saturdays to the instruction of young men in cricket and football. His Sunday afternoons he gives to an immense Bible-class for boys of fifteen or sixteen. He has built and maintains, on the sole condition that he does not actually lose money by it, a kind of model village in a suburban district of Belfast. In order to look after this village properly he gets up at five o’clock in the morning on three days in the week. In winter, when his social work is in full swing, he spends almost all his evenings at a large Working-Men’s club. He spends his summer holidays in the seaside camp of The Boys’ Brigade. It would be difficult to find a man who crams more work into what are supposed to be his leisure hours. He has, of course, little time for reading and he never travels. His devotion to good works leaves him no opportunity for culture, and accounts for the fact that he believes the things which Babberly says on platforms. He would, I did not actually try him with the subject, but I have no doubt he would, have brushed the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant into the world’s waste-basket with his unvarying formula: It wouldn’t do in Belfast. They are business men there.

We worried on about his fear of the over-taxation of Belfast and the industrial North. I tried to get from him some definite account of the exact taxes which he feared. I tried to get him to explain how he proposed to fight, against whom he intended to fight, who might be expected to fight on his side. I do not think he got angry with me for my persistency, but his contempt for me steadily increased. I am not a business man and so I could not possibly, so he hinted, understand how they feel about the matter in Belfast.

“But do you think,” I said, “that your workmen will go out and be shot in order to save you from paying an extra penny in the pound income tax? That’s what it comes to, you know, and I don’t see why they should do it. They don’t pay income tax, or for that matter death duties.”

Cahoon looked me full in the face for nearly half a minute without replying. Then he took out his watch and looked at it. Then he took me by the arm and led me towards the yard.

“Did you ever see the Green Loaney Scutching Mill?” he said.

I had never seen any scutching mill. I have only a vague idea of what a scutching mill is.

“It’ll not be more than twenty miles from this,” said Cahoon. “And in my car we’ll do it and be back for dinner.”

I did not particularly want to spend the rest of the afternoon rushing about the country in Cahoon’s motor car. I preferred to stay quietly on the Castle Affey lawn and talk about Home Rule.

“But about the working-man,” I said, “and the prospect of his fighting—”

“You’ll be better able to talk about that,” said Cahoon, “when you’ve seen the man I’m going to take you to. Seeing’s believing.”

I was, of course, quite willing to go with Cahoon if he would really show me a citizen soldier in a scutching mill. We got out the motor car and started.

“He’s a man by the name of McConkey,” said Cahoon.

“A good name,” I said. “One expects something from a McConkey.”

Cahoon did not say anything for about ten minutes. Then he went on—

“McConkey is foreman in the mill.”

“The scutching mill?” I asked.

It was, of course, the scutching mill. I only asked the question in order to keep up the conversation. The long silences were embarrassing. Cahoon did not answer me. At the end of another quarter of an hour of furious driving he gave me a little further information about McConkey.

“He neither drinks nor smokes.”

This led me to think that he might be some relation to my friend Crossan, possibly a cousin.

“I happen to know,” said Cahoon a little later, “that he has upwards of £500 saved.”

Undoubtedly McConkey and Crossan are close relations, brothers-in-law perhaps.

We reached the Green Loaney Scutching Mill at about half-past five o’clock. Cahoon, who seemed to know all about the establishment, led me through some very dusty purlieus. McConkey, when we came upon him, did not seem particularly pleased to see Cahoon. He looked at me with suspicious malignity.

“There’s a gentleman here,” said Cahoon, “who wants to know whether you mean to fight rather than submit to Home Rule.”

“Aye,” said McConkey, “I do.”

Then he looked me square in the face without winking. Cahoon did the same thing exactly. Neither of them spoke. It was clearly my turn to say something; but with four hard grey eyes piercing my skin I found it difficult to think of a remark. In the end I said:

“Really?”

They both continued to stare at me. Then McConkey broke the silence again.

“You’ll no be a Papist?” he said.

“Certainly not,” I replied. “In fact I am a church-warden.”

McConkey thrust his hand deep into a hip pocket in the back of his trousers and drew out a somewhat soiled packet of yellow tracing paper.

“Look at thon,” he said.

I unfolded the tracing paper and found on it drawings of a machine gun. Cahoon peered over my shoulder.

“She’s a bonny wee thing,” said McConkey.

She looked to me large and murderous. Cahoon expressed his admiration for her, so I said nothing.

“I’ll no be that badly off for something to fight with,” said McConkey, “when the time comes.”

“Do you mean to say,” I said, “that you’ve bought that weapon?”

“I haven’t her bought yet,” said McConkey; “but I have the money by me.”

“And you actually mean—” I said.

“Ay. I do.”

I looked at Cahoon. He was still studying the drawings of the gun.

“It’ll be queer,” said McConkey, slowly, “if she doesna’ land a few of them in hell before they have me catched.”

I turned to Cahoon again.

“Do you really think,” I said, “that he—?”

“We’re business men,” said Cahoon, “and we don’t throw away our money.”

“But,” I said, “who are you going to shoot at? It would be silly to attack a tax collector with a gun like that. I don’t see who—”

“Oh,” said Cahoon, “don’t fret about that. We’ll find somebody to shoot at.”

“There’ll be plenty,” said McConkey, “when the time comes.”

“The real difficulty,” said Cahoon, “is that—”

“They’ll no be wanting to stand up till us,” said McConkey.

The relations of Capital with Labour are, I understand, strained in other parts of the United Kingdom. Here, with Home Rule on the horizon, they seem to be actually cordial. There is certainly a good deal to be said for Lady Moyne’s policy. So long as Cahoon and McConkey have a common taste for making domestic pets of machine guns they are not likely to fall out over such minor matters as wages and hours of work.

I had a good deal to think of as Cahoon drove me back to Castle Affey. My main feeling was one of great personal thankfulness. I shall never, I hope, take part in a battle. If I do I hope I shall be found fighting against some properly organized army, the men and officers of which have taken up the business of killing in a lofty professional spirit. I cannot imagine anything more likely to shatter my nerve than to be pitted against men like McConkey, who neither drink nor smoke, but save and spend their savings on machine guns. The regular soldier has his guns bought for him with other people’s money. He does not mind much if no gory dividend is earned. McConkey, on the other hand, spends his own money, and being a business man, will hate to see it wasted. He would not be satisfied, I imagine, with less than fifty corpses per cent. as a return on his expenditure.

At dinner that evening Conroy made a suggestion for our evening’s entertainment.

“Lady Moyne,” he said, “ought to read us the speech which she is to make next week to the Unionist women.”

I had never heard of the Unionist women before, and knew nothing of their wish to be spoken to. The Dean assured me that they were numerous and quite as enthusiastic as their husbands and brothers. Cahoon said that he was giving his mill hands a half holiday in order that the girls might go to listen to Lady Moyne. Babberly struck in with a characteristic speech.

“The influence of women,” he said, “can hardly be over-estimated. We must never forget that the most impressionable years of a man’s life are those during which he is learning to say his prayers beside his mother’s knee.”

This, as I recognized was a mere paraphrase of the proverb which states that the hand which rocks the cradle rules the world. The secret of Babberly’s great success as an orator is that he has a striking power of putting platitudes into new words.

I ventured to suggest that, so far as the present political situation was concerned it was hardly worth while trying to get at the children who were learning to say their prayers. The Home Rule Bill would be either rejected or passed long before any of that generation had votes. Lady Moyne was good enough to smile at me; but Babberly felled me at once.

“The women whom we expect to influence,” he said, “have fathers, brothers and husbands as well as young children.”

After dinner we had the speech. A secretary, who had once been Lady Moyne’s governess and still wore pince-nez, brought a quantity of type-written matter into the drawing-room. Moyne wanted me to slip away with him to the billiard room; but I refused to do so. I wanted to watch Lady Moyne making her speech. I am glad that I resisted his appeal. Lady Moyne not only read us the speech. She delivered it to us, treated us, indeed, to a rehearsal, I might even call it a dress rehearsal, for she described at some length the clothes she intended to wear. They must have been the most sumptuous in her wardrobe.

“The poor dears,” she said, “want something to brighten their lives. Besides, they’ll take it as a compliment to them if I’m like Solomon in all his glory.”

I gathered from this remark that the audience was to consist mainly of the wives and sisters of McConkey and other men of the same class. Cahoon’s wife, if he had one, would not require a display of Lady Moyne’s best clothes to seal her attachment to the Union.

The speech was an uncommonly good one. A phrase in it frequently repeated, appealed to me very strongly. Lady Moyne spoke about “our men.” I do not know why it is, but the phrase “our women” as used for instance by military officers who have been to India, always strikes me as singularly offensive. It suggests seraglios, purdahs and other institutions by which Turks, and Orientals generally, assert and maintain the rights of property with regard to the other sex. “Our men,” on the other hand, is redolent of sentimental domesticity. I never hear it without thinking of women who are mothers and makers of men; who sew on trouser buttons and cook savoury messes for those who are fighting the battle of life for them in a rough world, sustained by an abiding vision of noble womanhood and the sanctity of home. It is an extraordinarily appealing phrase and Lady Moyne used it for all it was worth. As addressed by her to wives and sisters of the Belfast working-men, it had a further value. The plural possessive pronoun bracketed McConkey with Lord Moyne. McConkey’s wife, assuming for the moment that he had not abstained from matrimony as he had from tobacco, shared his joys and sorrows, his hopes and fears, heartened him for his daily toil, would join no doubt in polishing the muzzle of the machine gun. So Lady Moyne in her gorgeous raiment, sustained Lord Moyne, her man. That was the suggestion of the possessive pronoun, and the audience was not allowed to miss it. Poor Moyne did miss it, for he was nearly asleep in a chair. But McConkey’s wife would not. Her heart would glow with a sense that she and Lady Moyne were sisters in their anxious care for the men entrusted to them.

That single phrase made such a violent emotional appeal to me that I missed all the rest of the speech. Each time I began to recover a little from hearing it and was prepared to give my attention to something else, Lady Moyne used to repeat it, and then I was hypnotized again. I have no doubt, however, that the speech was a powerful appeal for the maintenance of the Union. Conroy said so afterwards and Babberly entirely agreed with him. The Dean suggested that something might be put in about the sanctity of the marriage tie, a matter of particular importance to women and likely to be seriously affected by the passing of a Home Rule Bill. Lady Moyne thanked him for calling her attention to the omission. The secretary, who had once been a governess, adjusted her pince-nez and took a note.

In the smoking-room that evening Conroy took command of the conversation, and for the first time since I arrived at Castle Affey we got off politics. He told us a good deal about how he made his fortune. Most men who have made fortunes enjoy talking about how they made them. But their stories are nearly always most uninteresting. My impression is that they do not themselves understand how they came to be rich. But Conroy understood, or at all events thought he understood, his own success. He believed that he was rich because he had, more than other men, a love of the excitement which comes with risk. He had the spirit of the true adventurer, the man who pursues novelty and danger for their own sakes. Every story he told us illustrated and was meant to illustrate this side of his character. He despised the rest of us, especially me perhaps. We, Cahoon, the Dean, even Malcolmson, though he was a bristly fighting man, certainly Moyne who had gone quietly to bed—we were tame barndoor fowls, eating the sordid messes spread for us by that old henwife, civilized society. Conroy was a free bird of the wild. He snatched golden grain for nutriment from the hand of a goddess. These were not his words or his metaphors, but they represented the impression which his talk and his stories left on my mind.

At twelve o’clock I rose to say good night. As I did so a servant entered the room and told Conroy that his motor was ready for him at the door. Conroy left the room at once, and left the house a few minutes later.

I suppose we ought, all of us, to have been surprised. Motor drives in the middle of the night are an unusual form of amusement, and it was impossible to suppose that Conroy could have any business requiring immediate personal attention in the neighbourhood of Castle Affey. But his talk during the evening had left its impression on other minds as well as mine. We bid each other good night without expressing any astonishment at Conroy’s conduct. Cahoon refrained from saying that inexplicable midnight expeditions were not the kind of things they cared for in Belfast. Even he recognized that a man who had accumulated as large a fortune as Conroy’s must not be judged by ordinary standards.

I, unfortunately, failed to go to sleep. I tried to read the works of Alexander Pope, of which I found a well-bound copy in my bedroom. But my mind only became more active. I got up at last and covered six sheets of the Castle Affey note paper with a character sketch of Conroy. I maintained that he was wrong in supposing that a capacity for daring is the secret of becoming rich. Bob Power, for instance, is as daring as any man living and certainly loves risk for its own sake, but Bob will not die a rich man. Nor will Conroy. Wealth falls into the hands of such men occasionally, as vast hoards of gold did one hundred and fifty years ago into the holds of pirate ships. But no one ever heard of a buccaneer who died with a large fortune safely invested. Before Conroy dies his fortune will have taken to itself wings and fled back to that goddess of his who gave it. This was the substance of my article. Marion typed it out for me when I went home, but neither of the editors who usually print my articles would have it. I suppose that they did not know Conroy personally. If they had known him they would have appreciated my character sketch. I called it, I remember, “Our Contemporary Pirates,” a title which ought to have been attractive.

At three o’clock, just as I was finishing my article, I heard Conroy’s motor on the gravel outside my window.

He appeared at breakfast looking fresh and cheerful. None of us asked him where he had been the night before, and he did not offer us any information.

After breakfast he asked me to go for a walk with him. Lady Moyne, who heard the invitation given, looked pleased, and I recollected at once that I had promised to interest Conroy in the Unionist cause and lead him on to the point of giving a large subscription to our funds.

These party funds have always been rather a puzzle to me. I have never understood why it should be necessary for rich Liberals, rich Conservatives and American Irishmen to spend enormous sums of money in persuading people to vote. The theory of democratic government is, I suppose, that the citizen expresses his opinion freely in a polling booth. If he has not got an opinion it would surely be better to leave him alone. If he has an opinion and attaches any importance to it he will go to the polling booth without being dragged there by a kind of special constable hired for the purpose. If the money of the party funds were given to the voters in the form of bribes, the expenditure would be intelligible. It might even be justified; since an occasional tip would be most welcome to nearly every elector. But to spend tens of thousands of pounds on what is called organization seems very foolish. However I am not a practical politician, and my immediate object was not to explain the theory of political finance to Conroy, but to work him up into the frame of mind in which he would sign cheques.

I cannot flatter myself that I did this or even helped to do it. Conroy did not give me a chance. He began to talk about the Irish land question, a thing in which I no longer take any but an academic interest. He asked me if I still owned a small estate in Co. Galway which had belonged to my father. I told him that I had long ago sold it and was uncommonly glad to do so.

“Not a paying proposition?” said Conroy.

“Oh,” I said, “it paid very well; but the fact is, what with the agitation about grazing lands, and the trouble about people in congested districts—”

“I reckon,” said Conroy, “that your ancestors mismanaged the property some.”

I expect they did. But I did not expect to have their misdeeds brought home to me in a vigorous personal way.

“Your father,” said Conroy, “or your grandfather, turned my grandfather off a patch of land down there in 1850.”

My grandfather had, I have heard, a theory that small holdings of land were uneconomic. He evicted his tenants and made large grass farms. Nowadays we hold the opposite opinion. We are evicting large tenants and establishing small holdings. Our grandsons, I dare say, will go back again to the large farms. I explained to Conroy that he ought not to blame my grandfather who was acting in accordance with the most advanced scientific theories of his time.

Conroy was very nice about the matter. He said he had no grudge against either me or my grandfather. He had, however, so he told me frankly, a prejudice against everything English; an inherited prejudice, and not quite so irrational as it looked. It was after all the English who invented the economic theories on which my grandfather acted. He talked so much about his dislike of England and everything English that I did not like to introduce the subject of the subscription to Lady Moyne’s political fund. He did, in the end, subscribe largely. When I heard about his £1000 cheque I supposed that he must have counted the Union with us a misfortune for England and so wished to perpetuate it. Either that was his motive, so I thought, or else Lady Moyne had captivated him as she always captivates me.