GENERAL JOHN REGAN
By George A. Birmingham
Copyright, 1913 By George H. Doran Company
TO CHARLES H. HAWTREY
who has allowed me to offer this
story to him in memory of times
that were very pleasant to me.
July 1913
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
The Irish police barrack is invariably clean, occasionally picturesque, but it is never comfortable. The living-room, in which the men spend their spare time, is furnished with rigid simplicity. There is a table, sometimes two tables, but they have iron legs. There are benches to sit on, very narrow, and these also have iron legs. Iron is, of course, harder than wood. Men who are forced to look at it and rub their legs against it at meal times are likely to obtain a stern, martial spirit. Wood, even oak, might in the long run have an enervating effect on their minds. The Government knows this, and if it were possible to have tables and benches with iron tops as well as iron legs police barracks in Ireland would be furnished with them. On the walls of the living-room are stands for arms. Here are ranged the short carbines with which, in extreme emergencies, the police shoot at the other inhabitants of Ireland. The sight of these weapons serves to remind the men that they form a military force.
Near the carbines hang a few pairs of handcuffs, unobtrusively, because no one wants to emphasize the fact that the police in Ireland have to deal with ordinary wrong doers as well as with turbulent mobs. Ornament of every kind is rigorously excluded from these rooms. It is all very well to aim at the development of the aesthetic faculty for children by putting pictures and scraggy geraniums in pots into schoolrooms. No one wants a policeman to be artistic. But the love of the beautiful breaks out occasionally, even in policemen who live in barracks. Constable Moriarty, for instance, had a passion for music. He whistled better than any man in Ballymoy, and spent much of his leisure in working up thrilling variations of popular tunes.
Being confined by the call of duty to the living-room of the barrack in Ballymoy for a whole morning, he had accomplished a series of runs and trills through which the air of “The Minstrel Boy” seemed to struggle for expression. His attention was fixed on this composition, and not at all on the newspaper which lay across his knees.
At twelve o’clock he rose from the bench on which he was sitting and allowed the newspaper to fall in a crumpled heap on the floor at his feet. He stretched himself and yawned. Then he glanced round the barrack-room with an air of weariness. Sergeant Colgan, his tunic unbuttoned, his grey flannel shirt open at the neck, dozed uncomfortably in a corner. Moriarty looked at him enviously. The sergeant was much the older man of the two, and was besides of portly figure. Sleep came easily to him under the most unpromising circumstances. Moriarty was not more than twenty four years of age. He was mentally and physically an active man. Before he went to work on “The Minstrel Boy” he had wooed sleep in vain. Even a three days’ old copy of the Weekly Freeman had brought him no more than a series of stupefying yawns. If a man cannot go to sleep over a back number of a weekly paper there is no use his trying to go to sleep at all. He may as well whistle tunes.
Moriarty left the living-room in which the sergeant slept and went out to the door of the barrack. He stared across the market square. The sun shone pitilessly. Except for a fat white dog, which lay asleep in the gutter opposite the shop of Kerrigan, the butcher, no living thing was to be seen. Hot days are so rare in west of Ireland towns that the people succumb to them at once. Business, unless it happens to be market day, absolutely ceases in a town like Ballymoy when the thermometer registers anything over eighty degrees. Moriarty stretched himself again and yawned. He looked at the illustrated poster which hung on a board beside the barrack door. It proclaimed the attractiveness of service in the British army. It moved him to no interest, because he had seen it every day since he first came to Ballymoy. The gaudy uniforms depicted on it excited no envy in his mind. His own uniform was of sober colouring, but it taught him all he wanted to know about the discomfort of such clothes in hot weather. His eyes wandered from the poster and remained fixed for some time on the front of the office of the Connacht Advocate. The door was shut and the window blind was pulled down. An imaginative man might have pictured Mr. Thaddeus Gallagher, the editor, penning ferocious attacks upon landlords at his desk inside, or demonstrating, in spite of the high temperature, the desperate wickedness of all critics of the Irish Party. But Moriarty was by temperament a realist. He suspected that Thaddeus Gallagher, divested of his coat and waistcoat, was asleep, with his feet on the office table. Next to the newspaper office was the Imperial Hotel, owned and managed by Mr. Doyle. Its door was open, so that any one with sufficient energy for such activity might go in and get a drink at the bar. Moriarty gazed at the front of the hotel for a long time, so long that the glare of light reflected from its whitewashed walls brought water to his eyes. Then he turned and looked into the barrack again. Beside him, just outside the door of the living-room, hung a small framed notice, which stated that Constable Moriarty was on guard. He looked at it. Then he peeped into the living-room and satisfied himself that the sergeant was still sound asleep. It was exceedingly unlikely that Mr. Gregg, the District Inspector of the Police, would visit the barrack on such a very hot day. Moriarty buttoned his tunic, put his forage cap on his head, and stepped out of the barrack.
He crossed the square towards Doyle’s Hotel. A hostile critic of the Royal Irish Constabulary—and there are such critics even of this excellent body of men—might have suspected Moriarty of adventuring in search of a drink. The great heat of the day and the extreme dulness of keeping guard over a barrack which no one ever attacks might have excused a longing for bottled porter. It would have been unfair to blame Moriarty if he had entered the bar of the hotel and wakened Mr. Doyle. But he did no more than glance through the open door. He satisfied himself that Mr. Doyle, like the sergeant and Mr. Thaddeus Gallagher, was sound asleep. Then he passed on and turned down a narrow laneway at the side of the hotel.
This led him into the yard at the back of the hotel. A man of delicate sensibilities would have shrunk from entering Mr. Doyle’s yard on a hot day. It was exceedingly dirty, and there were a great many decaying things all over it, besides a manure heap in one corner and a pig-stye in another. But Constable Moriarty had no objection to bad smells. He sat down on the low wall of the pig-stye and whistled “Kathleen Mavourneen.” He worked through the tune twice creditably, but without attempting variations. He was just beginning it a third time when a door at the back of the hotel opened and a girl came out. Moriarty stopped whistling and grinned at her amiably. She was a very pretty girl, but she was nearly as dirty as the yard. Her short skirt was spotted and stained from waist-band to the ragged fringe where there had once been a hem. Her boots were caked with dry mud. They were several sizes too large for her and seemed likely to fall off when she lifted her feet from the ground. A pink cotton blouse was untidily fastened at her neck with a brass safety pin. Her hair hung in a thick pig-tail down her back. In the higher ranks of society in Connacht, as elsewhere, girls are generally anxious to pose as young women at the earliest possible moment. They roll up their hair and fasten it with hairpins as soon as their mothers allow them. But girls of the peasant class in the west of Ireland put off the advance of womanhood as long as they can. Wiser than their more fashionable sisters, they dread the cares and responsibilities of adult life. Up to the age of twenty, twenty-one, or twenty-two, they still wear their hair in pig-tails and keep their skirts above their ankles.
“Is that you, Mary Ellen?” said Constable Moriarty.
The girl stood still. She was carrying a bucket full of a thick yellow liquid in her right hand. She allowed it to rest against her leg. A small portion of its contents slopped over and still further stained her skirt. She looked at Constable Moriarty out of the corners of her eyes for a moment. Then she went on again towards the pig-stye. She had large brown eyes with thick lashes. Her hair was still in a pig-tail, and her skirt was far from covering the tops of her boots; but she had a precocious understanding of the art of looking at a man out of the corners of her eyes. Moriarty was agreeably thrilled by her glance.
“Is it the pig you’re going to feed?” he asked.
“It is,” said Mary Ellen.
A very chivalrous man, or one trained in the conventions of what is called polite society, might have left his seat on the wall and helped the girl to carry the bucket across the yard. Moriarty did neither the one nor the other. Mary Ellen did not expect that he would. It was her business and not his to feed the pigs. Besides, the bucket was very full. That its contents should stain her dress did not matter. It would have been a much more serious thing if any of the yellow slop had trickled down Constable Moriarty’s beautiful trousers.
She reached the pig-stye, lifted the bucket, and tipped the contents into a wooden trough. Constable Moriarty, still seated on the wall, watched her admiringly. Her sleeves were rolled up above the elbows. She had very well-shaped, plump, brown arms.
“There’s many a man,” he said, “might be glad enough to be that pig.”
Mary Ellen looked up at him with an air of innocent astonishment.
“Why would he then?” she said.
“The way he’d have you bringing his dinner to him,” said Moriarty.
This compliment must have been very gratifying to Mary Ellen, but she made no reply to it. She set down the empty bucket on the ground and rubbed her hands slowly on the sides of her skirt Moriarty probably felt that he had done as much as could be expected of him in the way of pretty speeches. He whistled “Kathleen Mavourneen” through once while Mary Ellen wiped her hands dry. She picked up her bucket again and turned to go away.
“Tell me this now,” said Moriarty. “Did ever you have your fortune told?”
“I did not,” she said.
“It’s what I’m good at,” said Moriarty, “is telling fortunes. There was an aunt of mine one time that was terrible skilful at it. It was her taught me.”
“It’s a pity she had no more sense.”
“If you was to sit up on the wall beside me,” said Moriarty, “and if you was to lend me the loan of your hand for one minute——”
“Get out,” said Mary Ellen.
“You’d be surprised, so you would,” said Moriarty, “at the things I’d tell you.”
“I might.”
“You would.”
“But I won’t be,” said Mary Ellen, “for I’ve more to do than to be listening to you.”
“Where’s the hurry?” said Moriarty. “Sure the day’s long.”
The affair might have ended in a manner pleasant to Moriarty and interesting to the pig. The attraction of the occult would in all probability have overcome Mary Ellen’s maidenly suspicions. She might not have sat upon the wall. She would have almost certainly have yielded her sticky hand if a sudden sound had not startled Moriarty. A motor-car hooted at the far end of the village street. Moriarty jumped off the wall.
“There’s one of them motor-cars,” he said, “and the fellow that’s in her will be stopping at the barrack for to ask his way to somewhere. It’s a curious thing, so it is, that them motor drivers never knows the way to the place they’re going to, and it’s always the police they ask, as if the police had nothing to do but to attend to them. I’ll have to be off.”
He left the yard, hurried down the narrow lane, and crossed the road to the barrack. Just as he reached it the car, a large, opulent-looking vehicle, stopped outside Doyle’s Hotel. Moriarty went into the barrack and wakened the sergeant. He had a keen sense of his duty towards his superior officer. It would not have been kind or right to allow the sergeant to sleep through an event so unusual as the stopping of a handsome motor outside the door of the Imperial Hotel.
The car was a large one, but it carried only a single traveller. He was a lean, sharp-faced man, clean shaven, with very piercing hard grey eyes. He blew three blasts on the horn of his motor. Then Mr. Doyle came out of the door. He blinked irritably at the stranger. The strong sunlight affected his eyes, and the rude way in which he had been awakened from his sleep overcame for a moment the natural instinct of the hotel keeper. All hotel keepers are civil to possible guests. Otherwise they would not succeed in their business. Mr. Doyle knew this, but he scarcely realised at first that the gentleman in the motor-car might be a guest. His was not a tourist’s hotel and he had been very sound asleep.
“Say,” said the stranger, “are you the proprietor?”
“I am,” said Doyle.
“Can I register?” said the motorist.
The word was strange to Doyle, Guests at his hotel were very few. A commercial traveller stopped a night with him occasionally, trying to push the sale of drapery goods or boots in Ballymoy. An official of a minor kind, an instructor in agriculture, or a young lady sent out to better the lot of domestic fowls, was stranded now and then in Ballymoy and therefore obliged to spend the night in Doyle’s hotel. But such chance strangers merely asked for rooms and food. They did not want to “register.”
“Can you what?” said Doyle.
“Register,” said the stranger.
“I don’t know can you,” said Doyle. “This is a backward place, but you might try them at the police barrack. The sergeant’s an obliging man, and if the thing can be done I wouldn’t doubt but he’d do it for you.”
“You don’t kind of catch on to my meaning,” said the stranger. “What I want is to stop a day or two in your hotel.”
Doyle suddenly realised the possibilities of the situation.
“You can do that of course,” he said, “and welcome. I’d be glad if we had a gentleman like yourself every day of the week.”
He turned as he spoke and shouted for Mary Ellen.
“Business pretty stagnant?” said the stranger.
“You may say that. Mary Ellen, Mary Ellen! Come here, I say.”
The stranger got out of his car. He looked up and down the empty street.
“Guess,” he said, “since I travelled in this slumbrous old country of yours I’ve seen considerable stagnation, but this licks the worst I’ve struck yet. Your town pretty well fathoms the depths. Are the folks here alive at all?”
“They are, of course.”
Doyle looked round him as he spoke. He saw a good deal that the stranger missed. Sergeant Colgan and Constable Moriarty standing well back inside the barrack door, were visible, dim figures in the shadow, keenly alert, surveying the stranger. Young Kerrigan, the butcher’s son, crouched, half concealed, behind the body of a dead sheep which hung from a hook outside the door of his father’s shop. He too was watching. One side of the window blind of the Connacht Eagle office was pulled aside. Thaddeus Gallagher was without doubt peering at the motor-car through a corner of the window. Three small boys were lurking among the packing cases which stood outside a shop further down the street. Doyle felt justified in repeating his statement that many of the inhabitants of Ballymoy were alive.
“There is,” he said, “many a one that’s alive enough, though I don’t say but that business might be brighter. Mary Ellen, I say, come here.”
Mary Ellen appeared at the door of the hotel. She had improved her appearance slightly by putting on an apron. But she had not found time to wash her face. This was not her fault. Washing is a serious business. In Mary Ellen’s case it would have taken a long time if it were to be in the least effective. Doyle’s call was urgent.
“Why didn’t you come when you heard me calling you?” he said.
Mary Ellen looked at him with a gentle tolerant smile. She belonged to a race which had discovered the folly of being in a hurry about anything. She knew that Doyle was not really in a hurry, though he pretended to be.
“Amn’t I coming?” she said.
Then she looked at the stranger. He, being a stranger and apparently a man of some other nation, might perhaps really be in a hurry. Such people sometimes are. But his eccentricities in no way mattered to Mary Ellen. The wisdom of the ages was hers. The Irish have it. So have eastern peoples. They will survive when the fussy races have worn themselves out. She gave the stranger one glance of half contemptuous pity and then looked at the motorcar.
“Now that you are here,” said Doyle severely, “will you make yourself useful?”
Mary Ellen stared at the motor-car. Her beautiful brown eyes opened very wide. Her mouth opened slightly and expanded in a smile. A long line of the black transferred from the kitchen kettle to her cheek reached from her ear to the point of her chin. It was broken as her smile broadened and finally part of it was lost in the hollow of a dimple which appeared. Mary Ellen had never before seen so splendid a motor.
“Will you stop grinning,” said Doyle, “and take the gentleman’s things into the house?”
“My name,” said the stranger, “is Billing, Horace P. Billing.”
“Do you hear that now?” said Doyle to Mary Ellen.
She approached the motor-car cautiously, still smiling. Mr. Billing handed out two bags and then a photographic camera with tripod legs, strapped together. Doyle took one of the bags. Mary Ellen took the other. Mr. Billing himself carried the camera.
“It occurs to me,” said Mr. Billing, “that this town kind of cries out to be wakened up a bit.”
“I wouldn’t say,” said Doyle, “but it might be the better of it.”
Mary Ellen turned round and looked at Mr. Billing. She felt that he was likely, if he were really bent on waking up the town, to begin with her. It did not please her to be wakened up. She looked at Mr. Billing anxiously. She wanted to know whether he were the kind of man who would be able to rouse her to unusual activity.
“Where I come from,” said Mr. Billing, “I’m reckoned to hustle quite considerable. I’d rather like to try if I could get a move on your folks.”’
“You can try,” said Doyle. “I’d be glad if you’d try, for the place wants it.”
No harm could possibly come of the effort; and it was likely to occupy Mr. Billing for several days. The prospect was gratifying to Doyle. A guest who travelled in a very large motor-car might be made to pay heavily for his rooms and his meals.
Five small boys came out of different houses up and down the street. When Mr. Billing, Doyle and Mary Ellen entered the hotel the boys drifted together towards the motor-car. They walked all round it. They peered cautiously into it. The boldest of them prodded the tyres with his fingers. The window of the office of the Connacht Eagle was opened, and Mr. Thaddeus Gallagher looked out Young Kerrigan emerged from the shelter of the body of the dead sheep and stood outside the shop. His father joined him. Both of them stared at the motor-car. Sergeant Colgan, followed by Constable Moriarty, stepped out of the police barrack and stalked majestically across the street. The sergeant frowned heavily at the small boys.
“Be off out of that, every one of yez,” he said.
The small boys retreated at once. The law, in spite of all that is said to the contrary, is greatly respected in the west of Ireland. Sergeant Colgan would have made it respected anywhere. His appearance was far more impressive than that of any judge in his robes of office. Constable Moriarty, who was more than six feet high, was impressive too.
“That’s a fine car,” said the sergeant.
“It is,” said Moriarty, “as fine a one as ever I seen.”
“The man that owns it will be a high up man,” said the sergeant.
“He will,” said Moriarty.
The sergeant looked into the car. He gazed at the steering-wheel with interest. He glanced intelligently at the levers. His eyes rested finally on a speedometer.
“The like of that,” he said, pointing it out to Moriarty, “is what I never seen before.”
“I’ve heard of them,” said Moriarty.
“There’s a clock along with it,” said the sergeant.
“The man that owns it,” said Moriarty, “must have a power of money.”
CHAPTER II
Doyle came out of the hotel. He joined the sergeant and Moriarty at the motor-car.
“Good-morning, sergeant,” he said. “It’s a fine day, thanks be to God. The people will only have themselves to thank if they don’t get their hay saved this weather.”
“What I’m after saying to Constable Moriarty,” said the sergeant, “is that that’s a fine car.”
“You may say that,” said Doyle.
“It’ll be some high up gentleman that owns it,” said the sergeant.
He paused. It was plainly the duty of Doyle to give some information about his guest. But Doyle remained silent.
“He’ll have a power of money, whoever he is,” said Moriarty.
He and the sergeant looked at Doyle and waited. Doyle still remained silent. The door of the office of the Connacht Eagle opened and Thaddeus Gallagher shambled along the street. He was a tall, grizzled man, exceedingly lean and ill-shaven. His clothes, which were shabby, hung round him in desponding folds. His appearance would have led a stranger to suppose that the Connacht Eagle was not a paying property. He greeted Sergeant Colgan and Moriarty with friendly warmth. When he had nothing else to write leading articles about he usually denounced the police, accusing them of various crimes, from the simple swearing away of the liberties of innocent men to the debauching of the morals of the young women of Ballymoy. But this civic zeal did not prevent his being on perfectly friendly terms with the members of the force. Nor did his strong writing rouse any feeling of resentment in the mind of the sergeant. He and Moriarty welcomed the editor warmly and invited him to inspect the car.
Thaddeus Gallagher looked at the car critically. He rubbed his hand along the dusty mud guard, opened and shut one of the doors, stroked the bulb of the horn cautiously, and then turned to Doyle.
“Is it the Lord-Lieutenant you have within in the hotel?” he asked.
He spoke with a fine suggestion of scorn in his voice. As a prominent local politician Thaddeus Gallagher was obliged to be contemptuous of Lords-Lieutenant. Doyle looked offended and at first made no reply. Sergeant Colgan, acting as peacemaker, spoke in a noncommittal, but soothing tone.
“It might be,” he said, “it very well might be.”
“It is not then,” said Doyle. “Nor it’s not the Chief Secretary.”
“If it’s not,” said Gallagher, “it’s some other of them fellows out of Dublin Castle.”
“It’s a high up gentleman surely,” said Sergeant Colgan.
“And one that has money to spare,” added Constable Moriarty. “It could be that he’s one of the bosses of the Congested Districts Board. Them ones is well paid and has motors kept for them along with their salaries, so they tell me anyway.”
Then Mary Ellen came out of the hotel. She stood at a little distance and smiled pleasantly at Constable Moriarty. Doyle turned on her.
“What is it that you want now, Mary Ellen?” he said. “Why aren’t you within attending on the gentleman?”
“Sure I am,” said Mary Ellen.
“You are not,” said Doyle. “Don’t I see you standing there grinning at Constable Moriarty?”
“He’s after asking for his dinner,” said Mary Ellen.
She referred of course to Mr. Billing. The suggestion that she was grinning at Moriarty was unworthy of her notice.
“And if he is,” said Doyle, “why don’t you give it to him?”
“What’ll I give him?”
“Give him chops,” said Doyle. “And if there’s no chops in the house—and there may not be—run across to Kerrigan the butcher and ask him for a couple. It’ll be quicker than killing a chicken; but that’s what you’ll have to do in the latter end if Kerrigan has no chops.”
“It was only this morning,” said Sergeant Colgan hopefully, “that Kerrigan killed a sheep.”
Mary Ellen crossed the street towards Kerrigan’s shop. Constable Moriarty winked at her as she passed. Mary Ellen was a good girl. She took no notice of the wink. The sergeant, unfortunately, did.
“Come along out of this, Constable Moriarty,” he said. “Have you no duties to perform that you can afford to be standing there all day making faces at Mary Ellen? Come along now if you don’t want me to report you.”
Sergeant Colgan, though Gallagher insinuated evil things about him, was a man with a strict sense of propriety. He must have wanted very much to hear something more about Doyle’s guest, but he marched off up the street followed by Moriarty. Doyle and Gallagher watched them until they were out of sight. Then Gallagher spoke again.
“If he isn’t the Lord-Lieutenant,” he said, “and if he isn’t the Chief Secretary, will you tell me who he is?”
“It’s my opinion,” said Doyle, “that he’s a Yank.”
“I don’t know that I’ve much of an opinion of Yanks,” said Gallagher. “It’s in my mind that the country would be better if there was fewer of them came back to us. What I say is this: What good are they? What do they do, only upset the minds of the people, teaching them to be disrespectful to the clergy and to use language the like of which decent people ought not to use?”
“It’s my opinion that he is a Yank anyway,” said Doyle.
Mary Ellen returned from Kerrigan’s shop. She carried a small parcel, wrapped in newspaper. It contained two chops for Mr. Billing’s dinner.
“Mary Ellen,” said Doyle, “is it your opinion that the gentleman within is a Yank?”
“He might be,” said Mary Ellen.
“Go you on in then,” said Doyle, “and be cooking them chops for him. Why would you keep him waiting for his dinner and him maybe faint with the hunger?”
“And why would you say he was a Yank?” said Gallagher.
“Why would I say it? You’d say it yourself, Thady Gallagher if so be you’d heard the way he was talking. ‘Is there a live man in the place at all?’ says he, meaning Ballymoy. ‘It’s waking up you want.’ says he.”
“Did he? The devil take him,” said Gallagher.
“‘And I’ve a good mind to try and wake you up myself,’ said he. ‘I’m reckoned middling good at waking people up where I come from,’ says he.”
“Let him try,” said Gallagher. “Let him try if it pleases him. We’ll teach him.”
Gallagher spoke with an impressive display of truculent self-confidence. He had at the moment no doubt whatever that he could subdue Mr. Billing or any other insolent American. His opportunity came almost at once. Mr. Billing appeared at the door of the hotel. He looked extraordinarily cool and competent. He also looked rather severe. His forehead was puckered to a frown. It seemed that he was slightly annoyed about something. Gallagher feared that his last remark might have been overheard. He shrank back a little, putting Doyle between him and Mr. Billing.
“Say,” said Mr. Billing, “is there any way of getting a move on that hired girl of yours? It’ll be time for breakfast to-morrow morning before she brings my lunch if some one doesn’t hustle her a bit.”
“Mary Ellen,” shouted Doyle. “Mary Ellen, will you hurry up now and cook the gentleman’s dinner?” Then he sank his voice. “She’s frying the chops this minute,” he said. “If you was to stand at the kitchen door you’d hear them in the pan.”
Thaddeus Gallagher, reassured and confident that Mr. Billing had not overheard his threat, stepped forward and stood bowing, his hat in his hands. Wealthy Americans may be objectionable, but they are rare in the west of Ireland. Gallagher felt that he would like to know Mr. Billing. Doyle introduced him.
“This is Mr. Gallagher,” he said. “Mr. Thaddeus Gallagher, J. P.”
Mr. Billing bowed courteously and shook hands with Mr. Gallagher.
“Proud to meet you, sir,” he said. “Proud to meet any prominent citizen of this section.”
“Mr. Thady Gallagher,” said Doyle, “is the proprietor of the Connacht Eagle, our principal newspaper.”
The Connacht Eagle was, in fact, the only newspaper in Ballymoy. It was the only newspaper published within a radius of forty miles from Ballymoy.
It could therefore be quite truthfully called the principal one. Mr. Billing shook Thady Gallagher’s hand again.
“I’m a newspaper man myself,” he said. “I control two-thirds of the press in the state where I belong.”
Thady Gallagher seemed greatly impressed by this statement. Doyle felt more than ever that his new guest was a man who ought to be treated with all possible consideration.
“It could be,” he said, “that them chops would be ready for you now, and if you’ll tell the girl what it is you’d like to drink——”
“When I’ve finished my lunch,” said Mr. Billing, “I’d like to take a stroll round this section. There are some things I want to see. Perhaps Mr. Gallagher will come with me, if he can spare the time.”
“Thady Gallagher will be pleased,” said Doyle. “And as for sparing the time, he has plenty of that. You’ll go with the gentleman, won’t you, Thady?”
“I will, of course,” said Gallagher.
“And there’s no man knows the neighbourhood better,” said Doyle. “There isn’t one in it, man, woman, or child, that he isn’t acquainted with, and anything there might be to tell about their fathers or mothers before them, Thady Gallagher is well fit to tell it to you.”.
“What I’d like to be shown first,” said Mr. Billing, “is the statue to the memory of General John Regan.”
Doyle looked at Gallagher doubtfully. Gallagher edged away a little. He seemed inclined to take shelter again behind Doyle.
“The statue?” said Doyle.
“Statue or other memorial,” said Mr. Billing.
“With regard to the statue——” said Doyle slowly.
Then he turned round and caught Gallagher by the arm.
“Speak up, Thady Gallagher,” he said, “and tell the gentleman about the statue.”
“With reference to the statue——” said Gallagher.
“Yes,” said Mr. Billing encouragingly, “the statue to General John Regan.”
“With reference to the statue of the deceased general,” said Gallagher.
“What he’s wanting to say,” said Doyle, “is that at the present time there’s no statue to the General, not in Ballymoy, anyway.”
“You surprise me some,” said Mr. Billing.
“It’s what there ought to be,” said Doyle, “and that’s a fact.”
“Is Ballymoy such a nursery of heroes,” said Mr. Billing, “that you can afford to neglect the memory of the great General, the patriot statesman, the deliverer of Bolivia?”
“Speak up, Thady,” said Doyle, “and tell the gentleman why there’s no statue to the General in Ballymoy.”
Gallagher cleared his throat and began to speak. At first his words came to him slowly; but as he warmed to his subject he became fluent and even eloquent.
“It’s on account of the way we find ourselves situated in this country at the present time,” he said. “It’s not the hearts of the people that’s at fault. There isn’t one, not the poorest man among us, that wouldn’t be willing to do honour to the memory of the great men of the past that died on the scaffold in defence of the liberty of the people. It’s the cursed system of Castle Government and the tyranny of the landlords, and the way the people is driven off their farms by the rack-renting flunkeys of the rent office. How is the country to prosper, and how is statues to be erected to them that deserve statues, so long as the people isn’t able to call their souls their own? But, glory be to God, it won’t be so for long! We have Home Rule as good as got, and when we have it——”
Gallagher might have gone on speaking for a long time. He was a man of tried and practised eloquence. He had arrived without much effort at his favourite subject. Fragments of old speeches, glowing periods, oft-repeated perorations thronged confusedly on his memory. Mr. Billing seemed to be listening with sympathy and admiration. It might be a long time before such a favourable opportunity for making a speech came to Gallagher again. Unfortunately he was interrupted. Mary Ellen had come, unperceived, out of the hotel. She was at Mr. Billing’s elbow just when Gallagher reached his prophecy about Home Rule. She spoke without the slightest regard for the orator’s feelings.
“The chops is fried,” she said.
Doyle had often heard his friend make speeches before. He had no wish to be subjected to unnecessary oratory on a very hot day. He supported Mary Ellen’s appeal.
“It would be as well for you,” he said, “to go and eat them, the way they won’t be getting cold on you.”
Mr. Billing saw the wisdom of this advice at once. He turned to go into the hotel. But he evidently wanted to hear more of Thady Gallagher’s speech.
“When I’ve finished my lunch,” he said, “I shall look forward to a long talk with Mr. Gallagher. I want to gather together all the local traditions which survive about the boyhood of the great General. I’m writing his biography, gentlemen. I need say no more.”
“Mary Ellen,” said Doyle, “whatever the gentleman fancies in the way of a drink, will you see that he gets it?”
Mary Ellen, smiling pleasantly, walked in front of Mr. Billing and conducted him to the small ill-lighted room which Doyle called the Commercial Room of his hotel. There, on a very dirty table cloth, were a knife and fork, a plate which held two chops with a quantity of grease round them, and a dish with five pallid potatoes in it. The meal was not appetising. On a very hot day it was almost repulsive. But Mr. Billing was either really hungry or he was a man of unusual determination. He sat down to his chops with a smile.
“I guess,” he said, “that whisky is the drink you’re most likely to have in this hotel?”
“There’s porter,” said Mary Ellen, “and there’s minerals, and there’s ginger cordial.”
“If I’m here for a week,” said Mr. Billing, “I’ll put you wise in the matter of making cocktails. A Saratoga cocktail is a drink——”
“Is it whisky I’ll bring you now?” said Mary Ellen.
She was a girl of sense and wisdom. She was no more inclined to listen to Mr. Billing’s panegyric of the Saratoga cocktail than to Thady Gallagher’s patriotic denunciation of the flunkeys of the rent office. Without waiting for an answer she went away and brought Mr. Billing the usual quantity of Irish whisky in the bottom of a tumbler with a bottle of soda water.
Doyle and Thady Gallagher, left alone in the street, stared at each other in silence. It was Doyle who spoke first:
“What you want, Thady,” he said, “is a drop of something to drink, to revive the courage in you.”
“What sort of a fellow is that at all?” said Thady hoarsely.
“A pint of porter, now,” said Doyle, “or a drop of spirits. You want it this minute, and you’ll want it more before, you’re through with the job that you have on hand.”
He led the way into the bar and provided Thady with a satisfying draught. Thady emptied the tumbler without drawing breath. Then he took his pipe from his pocket and lit it.
“Mr. Doyle,” he said, “you’re a man I’ve a liking for and always had. What’s more, you’re a man I respect, and it isn’t everyone that I would say that to.”
“The same to you,” said Doyle, “and may you live long to enjoy it. Will you have another drop?”
“I don’t mind if I do,” said Thady.
Doyle filled up the empty tumbler. As he did so Gallagher spoke with serious deliberation.
“Seeing that you’re a man I’ve every confidence in, I’d be glad if you’d tell me this. Who was General John Regan? For I never heard tell of him.”
“It’ll be better for you, Thady, to know something about him be the same more or less, before the gentleman within has finished his dinner. He’ll be asking questions of you the whole of the rest of the day.”
“Let him ask.”
“And you’ll have to be answering him, for he’ll not rest contented without you do.”
“There’s no Regans here,” said Gallagher, “and what’s more there never was.”
“There’s no statue anyway,” said Doyle, “nor there won’t be.”
“I don’t know that there’d be any harm in a statue,” said Gallagher. “What has me bothered is who the General was.”
“There’ll be no statue,” said Doyle. “It’s all very well to be talking, but the rates is too high already without an extra penny in the pound for a statue that nobody wants.”
“I wouldn’t be in favour of a statue myself,” said Gallagher, “unless, of course, the gentleman was to pay for it himself, and he might.”
“Of course if he was to pay for it, it would be different. By the look of the motor-car he came in I’d say he’d plenty of money.”
The idea that Mr. Billing could pay for a statue was a pleasant one, and it was always possible that he might do so. He appeared to be very anxious that there should be a statue.
“There’s some men,” said Doyle hopefully, “that has no sense in the way they spend what money they’ve got.”
Mr. Gallagher admitted with a sigh that there are such men. He himself had no money, or very little. If, as he hoped, he succeeded in becoming a Member of Parliament, he would have money, large quantities of it, a full £400 a year. He would have more sense than to spend any of it in erecting statues. Doyle, on the other hand, had money. He lent it freely, at a high rate of interest, to the other inhabitants of Ballymoy. This was his idea of the proper use of money. To spend it on works of public utility or sentimental value, struck him as very foolish.
“I’d be glad, all the same,” said Gallagher, “if I knew who the General was that he’s talking about.”
“It could be,” said Doyle hopefully, “that he was one of them ones that fought against the Government at the time of Wolfe Tone.”
“He might, of course. But the gentleman was saying something about Bolivia.”
“Where’s that at all?” said Doyle.
Thady Gallagher did not know. Editors of newspapers are supposed to know everything and have succeeded in impressing the public with the idea that they do, but there are probably a few things about which even the ablest editor has to refer to encyclopedias; and Gallagher was not by any means at the top of his profession. The Connacht Eagle was indeed a paper which exercised a very great influence on the minds of those who read it, more influence, perhaps, than even The Times has on its subscribers. For the readers of Gallagher’s leading articles and columns of news were still in that primitive stage of culture in which every statement made in print is accepted as certainly true, whereas the subscribers to The Times have been educated into an unworthy kind of scepticism. Also the readers of the Connacht Eagle read little or nothing else, while those who read The Times usually glance at one or two other papers as well, and even waste their time and unsettle their minds by dipping into books. Thus, in spite of the fact that The Times appears every day, and the Connacht Eagle only once a week, it is likely that the Irish paper exercises more real influence than the English one—produces, that is to say, more definite effect upon the opinions of men who have votes. The editor of The Times would perhaps scarcely recognise Thady Gallagher as a fellow journalist. He may know—would probably in any case be ashamed to admit that he did not know—where Bolivia is. Thady Gallagher did not know, and was prepared to confess his ignorance in private to his friend. Yet Gallagher was in reality the more important man of the two.
“I know as much about Bolivia,” he said, “as I do about the General, and that’s nothing at all.”
“I’m glad it’s you and not me,” said Doyle, “that he took the fancy to go out walking with.”
“I suppose now,” said Gallagher, “that you wouldn’t come along with us.”
“I will not,” said Doyle, “so you may make your mind easy about that.”
“I don’t see what harm it would do you.”
“I’ve things to look after,” said Doyle, “and anyway I don’t fancy spending my time talking about a dead General that nobody ever heard of.”
“It’s what I feel myself,” said Gallagher.
“You may feel it,” said Doyle, “but you’ll have to go with him. It was you he asked and not me.”
CHAPTER III
Dr. Lucius O’Grady is the only medical man in Ballymoy. Whatever money there is to be won by the practice of the art of healing in the neighbourhood, Dr. O’Grady wins and has all to himself. Unfortunately it is not nearly sufficient for his needs. He is not married and so cannot plead a wife and family as excuses for getting into debt. But he is a man of imaginative mind with an optimistic outlook upon life. Men of this kind hardly ever live within their incomes, however large their incomes are; and Dr. O’Grady’s was really small. The dullard does not want things which the man of lively imagination feels that he must have. The sour man of gloomy disposition is forever haunted by the possibility of misfortune. He hoards whatever pittance he may earn. Dr. O’Grady had good spirits and a delightful confidence in life. He spent all, and more than all he had, feeling sure that the near future held some great good fortune for him—a deadly epidemic perhaps, which would send all the people of Ballymoy flocking to his surgery, or a post under the new Insurance Act The very qualities of mind which made him improvident made him also immensely popular. Everybody liked him. Even his creditors found it hard to speak harshly to him. He owed money to Doyle; but Doyle, though as keen as any man living on getting what was due to him, refrained from hurrying Dr. O’Grady over much. He grumbled a great deal, but he allowed the account in the shop attached to the hotel to run on. He even advanced sums of hard cash when some distant creditor, a Dublin tailor, for instance, who did not appreciate the doctor’s personal charm, became importunate. Between what was due in the shop for tea, sugar, whisky, tobacco, and other necessaries, and the money actually lent, Dr. O’Grady owed Doyle rather more than £60. He owed Gallagher more than £1, being five years’ subscription to the Connacht Eagle. He owed a substantial sum to Kerrigan, the butcher. He owed something to every other shopkeeper in Ballymoy. The only people to whom he did not owe money were Major Kent, Mr. Gregg, the District Inspector of Police, and Mr. Ford, the stipendiary magistrate. No one could have owed money to Mr. Ford because he was a hard and suspicious man who never lent anything. Nobody could have borrowed from Mr. Gregg, because Mr. Gregg, who had just got married, had no money to lend. Major Kent had a little money and would have lent it to Dr. O’Grady, would, in fact, have given it to him without any hope of ever getting it back again, but the doctor refused to borrow from him. He had a conscientious objection to victimising his personal friends. Doyle, so he explained, lived very largely by lending money, and therefore offered himself as fair game to the impecunious borrower. The shopkeepers throve on a system of credit. They were fair game too. Major Kent was in a different case. To borrow from him was to take a mean advantage of the good nature of a simple, unprofessional man.
Major Kent and Dr. O’Grady walked into Ballymoy together at about half past two on the day of Mr. Billing’s arrival. They had lunched at Portsmouth Lodge, the Major’s house. Dr. O’Grady had given his opinion of a new filly which the Major had bought a few days before. It was a very unfavourable opinion, and the Major, who had the greatest confidence in the doctor’s judgment, was duly depressed.
“If I were you, Major,” said the doctor, “I’d sell that one at once. She’s no good.”
“I’d sell her fast enough,” said the Major gloomily, “if I could find a buyer.”
“It was £30 you gave for her in the fair?” said the doctor.
“It was; and if you’re right about her she’s not worth the half of it. She’s not worth £12.”
“I happen to know that fellow Geraghty,” said the doctor. “The man who stuck you with her. He’s a patient of mine. I pulled him through his last attack of d. t.‘s so I know all there is to know about him. He’d stick an archangel. If he happened to be selling him a pair of wings it would turn out afterwards that the feathers were dropping out.”
“If you know him,” said the Major, “you know a blackguard.”
“After sticking you with the filly,” said the doctor, “he spent the evening drinking in the hotel.”
“He would.”
“And the more he drank the bigger the price was that he said he got from you. When Doyle turned him out in the end he was saying that he had your cheque for £60 in his pocket. I don’t suppose Doyle believed that. Nobody would. But he probably thinks you gave £40 or £45.”
“All I gave was £30. But I don’t see that it matters what Doyle believes.”
“It does matter,” said Dr. O’Grady. “If Doyle believes you gave £40 for the filly, and if you were to offer her to him for £35 he’d think he was getting a bargain and he’d jump at it. Doyle’s just the kind of fool who thinks he knows all about horses and so he’s quite an easy man to stick. Come on now, and we’ll try.”
Major Kent was in all ordinary affairs of life a strictly honourable man. But horses are not ordinary affairs. It is on record that a bishop, an Irishman and therefore intensely religious, once sold a thoroughly unsound horse to an archdeacon for a large price. The archdeacon had a high opinion of the bishop beforehand, regarding him as a saintly man of childlike simplicity. He had a much higher opinion of him after he understood the failings of the animal he had bought. He then respected the bishop for his shrewdness. Horse-dealing is a thing apart from all other buying and selling. Honesty, in the common sense of the word, does not enter into it. Therefore, Major Kent was quite ready to defraud Doyle if he could. He and Dr. O’Grady walked into Ballymoy together for the purpose.
They reached the corner of the market square and caught sight of Mr. Billing’s large motor-car standing outside the hotel. Doyle and Gallagher, who had stopped drinking, were standing near it.
“If Doyle’s bought that motor,” said the Major, “he won’t look at the filly.”
“He hasn’t,” said the doctor. “What would he do with the motor if he had it? All the same it’s queer. I don’t know what it’s doing there. Nobody with money enough to own a car like that could possibly be stopping at Doyle’s Hotel. Come along and let’s find out about it.”
They hurried across the square and greeted Doyle and Gallagher.
“Whose is the big motor?” said Dr. O’Grady.
“It belongs to an American gentleman,” said Doyle, “who’s within in the hotel. We’re waiting for him this minute. He’s getting his camera, and when he has it got he’s going round with Thady Gallagher to photograph the town.”
Gallagher took Major Kent by the arm and drew him apart.
“Major,” he said, “can you tell me who was General John Regan?”
“Never heard of him,” said the Major, “but if he owns that car he must be a middling well-off man.”
“Look here, Doyle,” said Dr. O’Grady, “you know that filly the Major bought at the fair.”
“I’ve heard of her,” said Doyle.
“Well, as it happens,” said Dr. O’Grady, “she turns out to be a bit too good for what he wants. His idea was to get something to do a bit of carting, and it turns out that this one is—well, she has breeding. Now, look here, Doyle———”
He led Doyle apart just out of earshot of the Major and Gallagher.
“I owe you a trifle, don’t I, Doyle?”
“As near as I can go to it without looking at my books,” said Doyle, “you owe me £60, and I’d be thankful if so be that it’s quite convenient to you——”
“It isn’t a bit convenient,” said Dr. O’Grady, “but I quite admit that I owe the money. Now what I suggest is this. I’ve persuaded the Major to let you have that filly cheap, dirt cheap. It will be found money to you, Doyle, if you get her at the price the Major’s going to name, and you may be able to knock a pound or two off that. Under these circumstances and seeing that I’m putting the chance in your way—it isn’t everyone that could, but I’m a friend of the Major’s and he trusts me—I think you ought to stop talking about the trifle I owe you. I’m sick of the subject.”
“You’re not near as sick of it as I am,” said Doyle, “and I don’t know that I want the filly.”
“You do want her,” said Dr. O’Grady. “You want anything that you can make money out of. Hullo! Who’s that?”
Mr. Billing, carrying his camera, appeared at the door of the hotel.
“It’s the American gentleman that owns the motorcar,” said Doyle. “Tell me this now, doctor. Did ever you hear of General John Regan?”
“Of course I did,” said Dr. O’Grady. “He’s a well-known millionaire, just the sort of man to be touring the country in a big motor. Go you off now and settle with the Major about the filly. I’ll entertain the General for you.”
“For God’s sake, doctor, be careful what you say,” said Doyle in a whisper. “The General’s dead this twenty years and it’s a statue there ought to be to his memory. So that fellow’s after saying, any way.”
“Oh, all right,” said Dr. O’Grady. “It’s just the same thing. I’ll manage. You go and settle with the Major.”
He approached Mr. Billing jauntily.
“Delighted to meet you, sir,” he said. “Delighted to welcome you to Ballymoy. You’ll find it a most interesting locality. My name is O’Grady, Lucius O’Grady, M.D.”
Mr. Billing took off his hat, laid down his camera, and shook hands with the doctor.
“Mine is Billing,” he said. “Horace P. Billing. I come from America. My object in visiting Ballymoy——”
“The poor old General, of course,” said Dr. O’Grady. “We thought you’d be sure to come sooner or later. Your uncle, wasn’t he, or great uncle? I forget.”
Mr. Billing seemed surprised, very much surprised. He dropped Dr. O’Grady’s hand abruptly and stared at him. Then he recovered himself with an effort.
“I can’t claim relationship with that great man,” he said.
“That’s a pity,” said Dr. O’Grady.
“I’m his biographer,” said Mr. Billing. “I’m engaged in writing the first complete life of the founder of the Bolivian Republic. I have come to Ballymoy——”
“You couldn’t possibly have come to a better place.”
Dr. O’Grady was not a literary man, but he had an idea that people who write books seek out quiet places in which they are not likely to be over excited while engaged in their trying work. Ballymoy seemed to him a suitable place for anyone engaged in writing a biography.
“It surprises me some,” said Mr. Billing, “to find that you’ve no statue erected to the memory of the General. I’d have thought——”
“The matter is under discussion,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Our Urban District Council is alive to its duty in the matter. At the last meeting—let me see now, was it the last meeting? Gallagher! Thady Gallagher! Come here for a minute.”
Thady Gallagher, who had been acting as umpire in an animated wrangle between Doyle and Major Kent, shambled across to the door of the hotel where Dr. O’Grady and Mr. Billing were standing.
“Was it the last meeting of the Urban District Council,” said Dr. O’Grady, “or was it the last but one, that you were discussing the erection of a statue to General John Regan?”
He did not venture to wink as he asked the question, but Gallagher was quite quick-witted enough to give the proper answer.
“It was the last meeting,” he said.
“There was a slight difference of opinion among the members,” said Dr. O’Grady, “as to the form which the memorial was to take. Some of them wanted a life-size statue in white marble. Mr. Gallagher here was more in favour of a drinking fountain. It was you who wanted the fountain wasn’t it, Thady?”
“It was,” said Gallagher.
“As a cheaper form of memorial,” said Dr. O’Grady, “so as to spare the rates as far as possible.”
“That’s right,” said Gallagher.
“If you will allow me to say so,” said Mr. Billing, “the question of expense ought not to be allowed to stand in your way. I myself will gladly promise——”
Mr. Billing hesitated for a moment. It was not clear whether he meant to promise a handsome subscription or merely to say that he would help in collecting the necessary money. Dr. O’Grady thought it well to assume at once that a subscription had been promised.
“Good,” he said, “take note of that, Thady, and announce it to the Urban District Council at the next meeting. Mr. Billing will hand over his subscription to the treasurer as soon as one is appointed. You can arrange about a proper vote of thanks being passed.”
Mr. Billing seemed quite pleased at this interpretation of his unfinished sentence. He went on to make another promise.
“And I think I may safely guarantee,” he said, “on behalf of the people of Bolivia——they can never forget——”
“They oughtn’t to,” said the doctor. “After all he did more for them than he ever did for us.”
“He was born here,” said Mr. Billing, “and that’s something to be proud of.”
“And we are proud of it. Thady Gallagher is having an article in his paper next week saying how much we appreciate the dear old General. Aren’t you, Thady?”
“I am, of course,” said Gallagher.
Then, lest he should be committed any further, Gallagher slipped away and joined Major Kent and Doyle. They were standing together near the motorcar in high debate as to whether the price of the filly was to be £30 or £34. The Major had abated one pound of the price he asked at first. Doyle had, so far, resisted every effort to induce him to make an advance upon his original offer. They were both enjoying themselves greatly. But Gallagher interrupted them.
“The doctor knows all about him,” he said, “thanks be to God he’s——”
“She’s a filly,” said Doyle, “and I know as much about her as the doctor does.”
He had for the moment forgotten his American guest, and was thinking only of the animal which Major Kent was trying to sell him.
“It’s the General I’m talking about,” said Gallagher in an aggrieved tone, “and the doctor says there’s to be an article on the paper about him next week. But if there is the doctor may write it himself. It’ll be easy for him seeing he knows who the General was.”
“He does not know any more than the rest of us,” said Doyle. “Didn’t he say a minute ago he was a well-known millionaire?”
“He knows now, anyway,” said Gallagher, “and what’s more he says that the Urban District Council has been talking about erecting a statue to him.”
“Erecting a statue to who?” said the Major.
“To General John Regan, of course,” said Gallagher.
“But sure there was no such talk,” said Doyle, “not that I heard of, anyway.”
“There was not,” said Gallagher, “but there will be now; and there might have been. There’s no denying that there might have been.”
“Doyle,” said the Major anxiously. “We must finish settling the price of the filly later on. I’m nervous, I’m confoundedly nervous about what the doctor may be doing. You never know what wild idea he may take into his head, or what he may let us all in for.”
“He’s all right,” said Gallagher. “Don’t I tell you he’s arranging with the American gentleman?”
“He may be getting us all into some mess or other. You never know what the doctor will be at. He’s so infernally imaginative.”
Mr. Billing and Dr. O’Grady had left the door of the hotel. They were standing together in the middle of the square almost opposite the police barrack. Major Kent hurried towards them. Doyle and Gallagher followed him slowly.
“What’s this talk about a statue?” said Doyle. “Didn’t I tell you before that I’d agree to no statue? Isn’t the rates high enough already without that? And don’t I have to pay more of them than any other man in the town?”
“There’ll be no addition to the rates,” said Gallagher. “The way the doctor was fixing it up it’ll be the American gentleman that’ll pay for the statue. He’s just after saying he will, and the Urban District Council is to pass a vote of thanks to him, which is what they’ll be glad to do, and I’ll draw it up myself.”
“Of course,” said Doyle, slightly mollified, “if he pays the cost of it there’ll be no objection to the statue. But are you sure now that he’s fit? Statues cost a deal.”
“Look at the motor-car he came in,” said Gallagher.
The motor seemed conclusive evidence. It was a very splendid vehicle. Doyle hurried forward. A stranger who proposed to spend large sums of money in the town deserved to be treated with every kind of politeness and respect. A statue still struck Doyle as an exceedingly useless thing; but he was not without hope that Mr. Billing might be persuaded to give his money, if he really wanted to give money, to some more sensible object.
Dr. O’Grady introduced Major Kent to Mr. Billing.
“Our principal resident gentleman,” he said, “a J. P. and a strong Unionist. Gallagher, of course, is a Home Ruler. But these little political differences of opinion don’t really matter. They’re both equally keen on doing their duty to the memory of the great General.”
“What’s that?” said the Major. “What General are you talking about?”
“General John Regan,” said Dr. O’Grady.
“Who? What?” said the Major.
“Don’t give yourself away now, Major,” said Dr. O’Grady, in a whisper. “Don’t let Mr. Billing find out that you’ve never heard of the General. You ought to have heard of him. The Major,” he said aloud, “isn’t as well up in the General’s history as he might be. He hasn’t studied the details of his campaigns; but he quite agrees with the rest of us that there ought to be a statue to his memory.”
“Dr. O’Grady has just informed me,” said Mr. Billing, “that the centre of this square is the site that has been selected by your Urban District Council.”
“The very spot we’re standing on at the present moment,” said Dr. O’Grady. “The Major has promised £5, which shows how keen he is on the project. Don’t say you haven’t, Major. We all know that you’re a modest man, doing good by stealth and blushing to find it known. But a public subscription can’t be kept secret. Sooner or later the list of subscribers will have to be published. Doyle,” he looked round as he spoke and saw Doyle and Gallagher standing near him. “Doyle has promised another £5. He ought to be giving more, and I daresay he will in the end. He’s a much richer man than the Major, though he doesn’t look it. Gallagher is good for another pound. It doesn’t sound much from a newspaper editor, but it’s as much as he can afford. Half the advertisements in his paper aren’t paid for at all. Father McCormack—he’s the parish priest, and we haven’t asked him yet, but he’ll put down his name for £10 at least. He always supports every kind of good work liberally.”
“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Billing, “you may put me down for five hundred dollars.”
Doyle and Gallagher drew pieces of paper and pencils from their pockets. They did sums rapidly, Doyle on the back of an old envelope, Gallagher on a sheet of paper already covered with shorthand notes. Dr. O’Grady worked his sum in his head. He arrived at his answer first.
“A hundred pounds!” he said. “A generous subscription!”
“It’s more than a hundred,” said Doyle. “What do you make it, Thady?”
“Counting 4s. 2d. to the dollar,” said Gallagher, “it comes to———”
“There’s a halfpenny along with that,” said Doyle, “as often as not.”
“Anyway,” said Gallagher, “it won’t be less than £104 3s. 4d.”
“The Urban District Council,” said Doyle, “will take a delight in passing that vote of thanks to Mr. Billing at its next meeting, and it’ll be a good strong vote, won’t it, Thady?”
“As strong as ever any one that was passed about the landlords,” said Gallagher, “only different, of course, mighty different.”
“Look here, O’Grady,” said Major Kent. “What do you mean by saying that I’m going to subscribe £5? Who is this General you’re all talking about?”
“Do shut up, Major,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Everything’s all right if you’ll only keep quiet. As you’ve got a camera with you, Mr. Billing,” he went on, “you might like to take a photograph of that house opposite you. It was there that the great General——”
“Glory be to God,” said Gallagher, “it’s the police barrack!”
“The birthplace of the great General?” said Mr. Billing, taking off his hat.
“Not exactly,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Thady Gallagher will show you his birthplace this afternoon. This is the house in which he spent his early youth, up to the age of eleven years.”
“Excuse me,” said Mr. Billing. “I’ll just get my camera. A view of that house will be most interesting. I certainly ought to have it for my biography.”
He crossed the road to the hotel and picked up his camera. He carried it to the middle of the square and set up the tripod legs. Then he screwed the camera into its place.
“O’Grady,” said Major Kent, angrily. “I don’t want to make a public exposure of you before a total stranger, but if you don’t stop trying to make fools of us all———”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Major,” said the doctor. “I’m not making a fool of anyone. I’m helping to persuade Mr. Billing to erect a statue in this town. You can’t deny that a statue would be an improvement to the place.”
“A statue!” said the Major. “Who to?”
“Good Heavens!” said Dr. O’Grady, “haven’t you grasped that yet? To General John Regan.”
Mr. Billing had his head under a black cloth. He was screwing the lens of his camera backwards and forwards and appeared to be entirely absorbed in his photography.
“Tell me now, doctor,” said Doyle, “before we go further into the matter—— Mind you, I’m not saying a word against what you’re doing, but I’d be glad to know who was General John Regan.”
“If I’m to show the American gentleman the birthplace of the General,” said Gallagher, “I’ll need to know where it is. Will you tell me this now, doctor, where was the General born?”
“I haven’t time,” said Dr. O’Grady, “to give you all elementary lectures on modern history; and I certainly haven’t the temper to spend all day hammering into your heads simple facts which——”
“Facts!” said the Major.
“Go home, Major,” said Dr. O’Grady. “You’ve no tact, and in an affair of this kind where the highest kind of diplomacy is necessary, you’re not only useless, you’re actually dangerous. Now, Doyle, do you or do you not want to have the handling of that American gentleman’s £100? You do, of course. Very well then. Leave the matter in my hands and don’t annoy me by asking frivolous questions. Thady, the birthplace of the General is one of those ruined cottages—it doesn’t in the least matter which—on the grass farm where Doyle has his cattle ever since you and your League prevented anyone else taking the place. You ought to have known that without bothering me. Good Heavens! Here’s the police sergeant coming to ask questions now.”
Sergeant Colgan and Constable Moriarty were approaching at a rapid walk.
“Begging your pardon, doctor,” said the sergeant, “but is that a camera that the gentleman has, and is he thinking of taking a picture of the barrack?”
“He is,” said the doctor, “but he’s not photographing it as a barrack at all. He’s doing it in an entirely different spirit. So there’s no necessity for you to start any theory about his being a German spy, or to raise stupid objections.”
“I wasn’t thinking of objecting,” said the sergeant. “It makes no matter to me what notion he has in his head. But what Constable Moriarty was saying to me this minute——” he hesitated, and then added, “speak up now, Moriarty.”
“What the sergeant said to me,” said Moriarty, “as soon as ever he seen the gentleman with the camera——”
“It wasn’t me passed the remark,” said the sergeant, “but yourself. I’ll not have it put out that I was the one——”
Mr. Billing, standing bare-headed beside his camera, squeezed a yellow bulb and clicked the shutter of his lens. He turned smiling.
“A successful photograph, I hope, gentlemen,” he said. “The people of Bolivia will be interested to see it. It will adorn the first volume of the General’s life.”
“There!” said Dr. O’Grady to Sergeant Colgan. “That comes of not speaking out promptly. The photograph is taken now and whatever remark it was that you or Moriarty made will be entirely wasted.”
“It’s a pity, so it is,” said the sergeant, “for what Constable Moriarty was after saying——”
“What the sergeant said,” said Moriarty, “is that he’d be glad if the gentleman would take him along with the barrack.”
“It’s not often,” said the sergeant, “that we have anyone taking photographs round in these parts, and Constable Moriarty would have been pleased to be took on account of being able to send the photo after to a young lady that he is acquainted with up in Dublin.”
“There’s no young lady up in Dublin,” said Moriarty sulkily.
Dr. O’Grady was a man of quick sympathy and a kind heart. He realised at once that both Sergeant Colgan and Constable Moriarty wanted to have their photographs taken.
“Go over to the door of the barrack,” he said, “and arrange yourselves in such a way as to look as ornamental as possible. I’ll try to get the gentleman to take another photograph.”
Mr. Billing had slipped his dark slide into his pocket, and was unscrewing his camera from its stand. Dr. O’Grady called to him.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “that you got your photograph wrong.”
“Mistake about the house,” said Mr. Billing. “Well, it can’t be helped. Which is the right one?”
“Not exactly that,” said Dr. O’Grady. “You’ve got the proper house, but the Major has just reminded me——”
“I did not,” said Major Kent.
“Well, if it wasn’t you it was Thady. Thady Gallagher has just reminded me that the top storey wasn’t built when the General lived there. The Government added it afterwards when the place was bought for a police barrack. What you ought to do if you want to get the thing absolutely right is to take another photograph and make sure that the top storey doesn’t come into it.”
“I’m greatly obliged to you,” said Mr. Billing. “I’ll expose a second plate.”
He arranged his camera again. Sergeant Colgan and Moriarty settled themselves in stiff attitudes, one on each side of the barrack door.
“Am I to take the two policemen as well?” said Mr. Billing, looking out from beneath his black cloth.
“You may as well,” said Dr. O’Grady. “It will interest the Bolivians to see how this country is overrun with what Thady Gallagher calls the armed forces of an alien power.”
“What I say is this,” said Thady Gallagher, grasping at his opportunity, “so long as the people of this country is kept in subjection and the cursed system of landlordism is supported——”
“Look here, O’Grady,” said Major Kent, angrily, “I can’t be expected to stand this.”
“It’s all right, Major,” said Dr. O’Grady. “It’s only poor old Thady. You know jolly well he doesn’t mean a word of it.”
“As long as the sacredness of our homes is invaded,” said Gallagher, “and the virtues of our families corrupted by the overfed minions of the landlord class——”
“Oh, do shut up, Thady,” said the doctor. “We all know that stuff off by heart, and you must try to recollect that the Major’s a Unionist. He can’t be expected to listen to you peaceably; and if we don’t run this statue business on strictly non-political lines we’ll never be able to carry it through.”
“Whisht now, Thady, whisht,” said Doyle soothingly; “sure the sergeant is doing you no harm.”
Mr. Billing clicked his shutter again. Sergeant Colgan and Constable Moriarty relapsed from their strained attitudes and breathed freely.
“Got the lower storey all right?” said Dr. O’Grady. “Good. I daresay now you’d like to toddle around with Thady Gallagher and see the General’s birthplace. I’m sorry I can’t go with you myself, but I happen to be rather busy. There are two old women with rheumatism expecting bottles from me in the course of the afternoon.”
“I’ll fold up the camera,” said Mr. Billing, “and start at once.”
“Doctor,” said Gallagher anxiously, “what’ll I do when he starts asking me questions about the General?”
“Answer him, of course,” said Dr. O’Grady.
“How can I, when I never heard tell of the General till to-day. For the love of God, doctor dear, will you tell me who he was?”
“Thady,” said the doctor, “I’m ashamed of you. Aren’t you a politician? You are, and well you know it. Aren’t you a newspaper editor? You are, there’s no use denying it. Don’t you spend your whole life either talking or writing on subjects that you know nothing about? You do. And what on earth’s the use of your pretending now that you can’t answer a few simple questions about General John Regan? There now, he’s got his camera folded up and he’s waiting for you. Be off at once.”
CHAPTER IV
Motor-cars are even yet far from common in the west of Ireland. They are not, for instance, used in elections as they are in England. There very seldom are elections in the west of Ireland; but even if these entertainments were, as frequent as elsewhere motor-cars would not be used in them. This is partly because the Irish voter is recognised as incorruptible, not the kind of man who would allow his vote to be influenced by a ride in an unaccustomed vehicle; partly because the west of Ireland candidate for Parliament is not rich enough to keep a motor-car himself, and has no friends or supporters who could lend him anything more expensive than a horse. Therefore motor drives are an unknown luxury to most Connacht men. Thady Gallagher, though he was a newspaper editor, had never travelled even in the side car of a motor-cycle. When Mr. Billing made it clear that he meant to go to the General’s birth-place in his large car everybody felt slightly envious of Gallagher, and Doyle wished that he had not refused to join the expedition. Gallagher himself was not elated by his good fortune. He was embarrassed and depressed. He cast an appealing glance at Doyle.
“What am I to do, at all?” he said. “What am I to say to him when——?”
“If you’ve any sense,” said Doyle, “you’ll take a good long drive now you have the chance. He doesn’t know the way. What’s to hinder you from taking him round every road within ten miles of the town?”
But the prospect did not cheer Gallagher. He tried to grasp Dr. O’Grady’s arm as he passed him. But the doctor shook him off impatiently. He even attempted an appeal to Major Kent, quite vainly. The Major was still smarting under the rhetorical denunciation of landlords. He would not at that moment have gone a step out of his way to rescue Gallagher from drowning.
The moment the motor-car was out of sight Major Kent and Doyle turned hotly on Dr. O’Grady.
“What the devil do you mean, O’Grady,” said the Major, “by talking in this absurd way? You know perfectly well——”
Doyle spoke at the same time.
“It’s a curious thing, so it is, doctor,” he said. “It’s a curious thing that you’d be letting me in for £5 when you know the loss I’m in on account of you already. I’d have thought——”
Dr. O’Grady interrupted them both.
“Suppose you agree to split the difference,” he said, “and say £32 10s. for the filly. It’s a pity to see two men like you losing your tempers over a bargain.”
“It’s not the bargain,” said Doyle, “that has my temper riz. It’s——”
“Doyle can have the filly if he likes,” said the Major, “at £32 10s. I don’t want to go on wrangling about that. What I want to know——”
“I’ll take her,” said Doyle.
Major Kent smiled faintly. He was getting out of what threatened to be a very bad bargain with an actual gain of £2 10s. He began to recover command of his temper. Doyle also smiled. He believed that he was buying for £32 10s. an animal for which Major Kent had paid £40 three days before. He felt kindly disposed towards Dr. O’Grady, who had put the chance of such a bargain in his way.
“Now, Major,” said the doctor, “you trot along to my house while I speak a word or two to Doyle. I’ll be round with you in about ten minutes, and give you some tea.”
“But about that General?” said the Major, “I’d rather like to know——”
He still wanted to know about General John Regan. But the tone in which he asked for information had changed. He no longer seemed to threaten.
“I’ll explain all that to you if you’ll only do as I tell you,” said Dr. O’Grady. “At present I can’t because I’m going to explain it to Doyle.”
“Why can’t you explain it to both of us at once?” said the Major. “That is to say if there is any explanation of the way you’ve been going on.”
“There are two explanations,” said Dr. O’Grady, “one for you and one for Doyle. I can’t give them both at once, because they’re different. I should have thought you’d have seen that for yourself.”
“I don’t see how there can be two explanations,” said the Major, “not two true ones. But of course they’re neither of them that.”
“They’re both quite true,” said Dr. O’Grady, “but they’re different, of course, because you and Doyle look at everything from such different points of view. Now do trot along, Major, and don’t interrupt me any more. That American may be back at any moment. I don’t believe Gallagher will be able to keep him in play for very long.”
He took Major Kent by the shoulders as he spoke and pushed him some little way along the street. Then he returned to Doyle.
“Now then, Doyle,” he said, “you’ve done pretty well over that filly. Strictly speaking, you owe me £7 10s. But I’m not going to say a word about that.”
“Seeing that you owe me £60,” said Doyle, “it’ll maybe be as well for you not.”
“What I do want to talk about,” said Dr. O’Grady, “is General John Regan.”
“If you tell me who he was,” said Doyle, “I’ll be content.”
“I don’t see that it matters in the least to you who he was. Look here now, Doyle. You’re a business man, and among other things you sell whisky. Now suppose someone was to walk into your hotel and tell you to forward ten dozen bottles of whisky—the best you had—to his aunt, and supposing that he told his aunt’s name was Regan, would you go questioning and cross-questioning every man you met as to whether there really was an old lady called Miss Regan at the address he gave you?”
“I would not,” said Doyle. “So long as I got my money I wouldn’t care whether the fellow ever had an aunt, or what sort of a name there might be to her if he had.”
“Well, this is exactly the same sort of case. Here’s a man who wants a statue for a dead General, and is perfectly willing to pay for it. Why should you bother your head about who the statue is supposed to represent? £100 is £100, I suppose, even if there never was a Regan in the world; and there have been, plenty of them.”
“I see that,” said Doyle. “I see that, now you put it to me. And I don’t deny but there’s a lot in what you say. But what I don’t see is this: I’d make something out of the whisky for the gentleman’s aunt, but I don’t understand how I’m to make a penny out of the statue.”
“You’ll be treasurer of the fund,” said Dr. O’Grady, “and I needn’t tell you that in all these cases the treasurer—well, there might be a little balance in hand at the end. There often is. Nobody ever inquires about those balances. If the treasurers are fools they lie in the banks and nobody ever gets any good of them. But you’re not a fool, Doyle.”
“I am not; and of course, there has been balances of the kind you speak of before now. I wouldn’t say but—looking at the matter in that way—and besides there’d be a commission from the fellow that got the contract for the statue. And with regard to the £5 that my name’s down for——”
“Come now, Doyle. Don’t pretend to be stupider than you are. You know perfectly well that every public fund has to be started by somebody with a respectable looking subscription. I put it to you now as a business man, did you ever hear of a case in which a subscription of that kind was actually paid? It appears in the published list and it encourages other people, but——”
“Say no more, doctor,” said Doyle. “Say no more.”
“I shall count on you then, Doyle, to help me in every way you possibly can. It’s all for your own good. And you won’t be doing anybody any harm.”
“There’s just one thing more,” said Doyle.
“Out with it. And be as quick as you can. I’ve still got to soothe the Major’s scruples.”
“If you don’t mind my asking the question,” said Doyle, “what are you going to make out of it yourself?”
“That’s a delicate point. I might tell you I’m going into the business for the fun of the thing; but you wouldn’t believe that.”
“I would not,” said Doyle, winking slowly.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t. It’s true, as it happens. That’s just exactly why I am running this statue. It offers me a little excitement and variety. But as you won’t believe it I’ll have to make up some sort of a lie that you will believe. I owe you about £60, don’t I?”
“You do, doctor, but I’d be the last man in Ireland to press you for the money if——”
“Very well. If I put £20 into your pocket over this statue, in addition to the £7 10s. you’re making on the filly, I’ll expect you to stop talking about what I owe you for the next six months. You see some sense in that, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“And it satisfies you as a reason for my taking all the trouble that I’m going to take.”
“It does, of course. Why wouldn’t it?”
“Very well. Believe it. But if the matter ever comes up again you’ll remember, Doyle, that I offered you the truth and you wouldn’t have it. I didn’t attempt to impose on you with that lie until you insisted that I should.”
Doyle grinned. He did not for a moment believe that Dr. O’Grady was going to give himself a great deal of trouble in the matter of General John Regan’s statue without gaining something by it. But he admired the way in which the doctor, even when apparently cornered, succeeded in keeping up appearances.
“If Gallagher gets tangled up in any difficulty,” said Dr. O’Grady, as he said good-bye to Doyle, “send him straight round to me. Don’t you attempt to extricate him or you’ll make matters worse. I shall be at home for the next two hours. It will take me that time at least to talk sense into the Major.”
When he got back to his own house Dr. O’Grady found his friend in a state of badly repressed impatience.
“That seems to have been a pretty long explanation which you gave to Doyle,” said the Major. “I hope mine will turn out to be a bit shorter.”
“That,” said Dr. O’Grady, “will entirely depend on yourself, Major. If you were a really intelligent man no explanation whatever would be necessary. You’d grasp the situation for yourself. If you were even fairly intelligent a short explanation would be quite sufficient. If, as I fear, you are downright stupid I may have to spend an hour or two talking to you.”
“I don’t see the slightest necessity for that,” said the Major. “You’ve only got to give a simple answer to a perfectly plain question. Who was General John Regan? You answer that, and no further explanation will be necessary.”
“I’m afraid it will,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Even if I tell you all I know about the General you’ll still want to heckle me and generally upset my plans.”
“No, I won’t, O’Grady. I promise you I won’t. Just tell me all you know about this General and I won’t say another word.”
“Very well,” said Dr. O’Grady. “I don’t know anything at all about the General. I never heard of him in my life until to-day.”
Major Kent gasped. Then he grew suddenly red in the face. Then he spluttered explosively. Then he burst into violent speech.
“And what the devil do you mean, O’Grady, by ——? I’m hanged if I ever heard of such——”
“There you are,” said Dr. O’Grady. “I knew you wouldn’t be satisfied. I’ve told you all I know about the General, and so far from saying nothing more, you begin to curse in the most frightful way.”
“That’s all very well,” said the Major, “but if there’s no such person as that General——”
“I didn’t say that. I said I knew nothing about him. I’m a well educated man, Major, far better educated than you are. But there are thousands and thousands of quite eminent people still alive whose names I’ve never heard, and when it comes to dead people there are probably millions, scattered up and down through history books, whom I know nothing about. They may all be quite famous in their own localities and may thoroughly deserve statues. It’s not their fault that I know nothing about them.”
“But we don’t any of us know anything about this General. I don’t. Doyle doesn’t. You don’t. Why on earth should we put up a statue to him?”
“Why shouldn’t we allow that American—Billing or whatever his name is—to put up a statue if he likes? He wants to. Why shouldn’t he?”
“Why should he put it up here?” said the Major. “What brings him to Ballymoy?”
“I expect,” said Dr. O’Grady—“mind, I don’t know for certain—but I expect that he’s come to the wrong place, mixed up Ballymoy with some other town, with the town in which Regan was really born. This General of his was evidently a pretty big pot in his way, and if he had been born in Ballymoy some of us would have heard of him.”
“In that case,” said the Major, “we ought to tell Billing of his mistake.”
“Certainly not. In the first place that would be a very unkind thing to do. Nobody likes being told of their mistakes, especially when they’re as full of bounce and self-confidence as this fellow Billing. It’s not right to be maliciously and wantonly unkind, Major, even to dumb animals; and I can’t imagine anything more cruel than to tell Billing that he’s made a mistake. In the next place, why on earth should we miss the chance of getting a statue in Ballymoy? We haven’t got one at present, and a good statue—we’ll get quite a respectable one for Billing’s £100, even if we don’t subscribe a penny ourselves—will be a great ornament to the town. You may not care for statues, Major, but all really cultivated people love them. Look at Dublin! It’s a city with two universities in it, and the consequence is that it’s simply spotted all over with statues. Look at ancient Athens, the most cultured city the world has ever seen. The number of statues the Athenians had would surprise you. Why shouldn’t we have one? It’ll do us all good.”
“I call it a fraud,” said the Major. “It’s getting money out of this fool of an American under false pretences. If this General of his wasn’t born here——”
“Now do you suppose, Major, that the General himself, the original John Regan, cares a pin where his statue is?”
“Of course he doesn’t. The one thing we do know about him is that he’s dead. Why should he care?”
“Quite so. Then there’s no fraud so far as he’s concerned.”
“I wasn’t talking about him. I was talking about the American.”
“I’m just coming to him. Billing wants a statue to the General. He wants it so much that he’s prepared to pay £100 for it. He also believes that the General was born here. I think myself that he’s mistaken about that; but there’s no doubt he believes it. He’ll be quite satisfied if we have the statue here. If we don’t he’ll have to go to a lot of trouble and expense looking up another birthplace for the General. When he finds one the people there may not be as civil and obliging as we are. Or they may have as many statues as they want already. I cannot for the life of me see that we’re committing any kind of fraud when we’re saving Billing a lot of expense, possibly a great disappointment, and allowing him to do exactly what he wants.”
Major Kent sighed hopelessly.
“It’s no use arguing with you,” he said, “but you’ll get us all into trouble before you’ve done. You’re absolutely certain to be found out.”
“Now you’re beginning to talk sense,” said Dr. O’Grady. “There is a certain risk of being found out. I don’t deny that. What we have to do is to minimise it as far as possible. We must take care not to commit ourselves to any statement about the General’s public career until we’ve found out all we can about him. I intend to write to Dublin to-night for every book there is about Bolivia, which is the country he liberated. In the meanwhile we’re fairly safe in working up any kind of local tradition we can think of. If that sort of thing is well done there’s practically no risk of discovery. Even if the stories don’t exactly fit in with what’s known about the General’s later life, it doesn’t matter. The things that are told about the boyhood of great men are all invented afterwards. Nobody expects them to be true; but biographers have to put them in to satisfy the curiosity of the public. There must be a chapter headed ‘Early Days,’ or ‘Home Life,’ or something of that kind in every biography. That’s the stuff Billing expects us to supply in exchange for the statue. At the same time men like Gallagher and Doyle are appallingly stupid, and I can’t say you’re exactly brilliant, Major. Any of you may, in an unguarded moment——”
“I shan’t,” said the Major, “because I’m going straight home and don’t mean to leave the house again till this whole business is over.”
“I wish that were possible,” said Dr. O’Grady. “I should be much easier in my mind if you weren’t here at all. But unfortunately we must have you. You give an air of solid respectability to the proceedings. You inspire confidence. We can’t do without you. I’ll get Gregg, the District Inspector, dragged into it too, and Ford, the Resident Magistrate, if I can.”
“You won’t get him. He has too much sense.”
“I’ll get his wife anyway. She loves a fuss of any kind.”
“Some of them will give you away,” said the Major. “You’ll be found out.”
“If Gallagher gets through this afternoon,” said Dr. O’Grady, “I shall feel pretty safe. I wish I hadn’t been obliged to send Gallagher off alone with Billing. Poor Thady is such an ass. But what could I do? I couldn’t go myself because I had to explain the situation to you and Doyle. I shall feel deeply thankful when Thady is safely home again.”
“By the way,” said the Major, “what was the explanation that you gave to Doyle? It was different from my one I know. I’d rather like to hear it.”
“Poor Doyle!” said Dr. O’Grady. “Do you know I felt quite sorry for him about that filly. He probably won’t find out what’s wrong with her for about a fortnight or three weeks. He’ll be so busy over this General John Regan business that he won’t have time to do anything with her. But when he does find out——”
“He’ll not be the first man in Ireland,” said the Major, “who’s been let in over a horse, and I don’t pity him.”
“I do,” said Dr. O’Grady, “I pitied you, Major, when you were stuck and I helped you to get out I don’t see why I shouldn’t pity Doyle too.”
“How do you mean to get him out?” said the Major. “Perhaps you intend to palm off that filly on your American.”
“Not at all,” said Dr. O’Grady. “My idea is to get Doyle’s money back for him out of the statue.”
The Major thought this statement over and gradually came to suspect that O’Grady contemplated some dishonourable use of public money. He was just beginning to make a violent protest when the door of the room in which they were sitting opened, and Gallagher came in.
“Doctor,” he said, “will you oblige me by coming over to the hotel at once and pacifying the American gentleman?”
“I thought as much,” said Dr. O’Grady, jumping up. “You’ve muddled things somehow, Thady.”
“I did the best I could,” said Gallagher, “but he wouldn’t rest content with young Kerrigan’s wife.”
“Good heavens!” said Dr. O’Grady, “what on earth have you said? Young Kerrigan hasn’t got a wife.”
“Sure I know that. But what was I to do? What I said was for the best. But anyway you’d better come round to the hotel, till you see for yourself the way we’re in.”
“Come along, Major,” said Dr. O’Grady. “You’ll enjoy watching us get out of this entanglement, whatever it is.”
“I’m not going with you,” said the Major. “I don’t see any fun in standing still and listening to you telling lies to that American. It’s not my idea of spending a pleasant afternoon.”
“Come along,” said Dr. O’Grady, taking him by the arm. “I may want you. I can’t tell yet whether I shall or not, for I don’t know yet what’s happened. But I may.”
The Major hung back.
“I’m not going,” he said.
“If you don’t,” said Dr. O’Grady in a whisper, “I’ll tell Doyle about the filly, all about her, and as you haven’t got the money for her yet—well, you know what Doyle is. He’s not the kind of man I’d care to trust very far when he finds out that—Oh, do come on.”
It may have been this threat which overcame Major Kent’s reluctance. It may have been a natural curiosity to find out what trouble Gallagher had got into with Mr. Billing: It may simply have been Dr. O’Grady’s force of character which vanquished him. He allowed himself to be led away.
CHAPTER V
“Now Thady,” said Dr. O’Grady, “tell me exactly what happened and what the trouble is.”
“It was on account of my mentioning young Kerrigan’s wife,” said Gallagher.
“Young Kerrigan hasn’t got a wife,” said the Major.
“Better begin at the beginning,” said Dr. O’Grady. “If we knew how you arrived at whatever statement you made about young Kerrigan’s wife we’d be in a better position to judge what has to be done about it, Start off now at the moment when you went away in the motor-car. You went to Doyle’s farm, I suppose, as I told you, so as to show Mr. Billing the General’s birthplace.”
“In the latter end we got there,” said Gallagher, “but at the first go off I took him along the road past the workhouse.”
“That wasn’t quite the shortest route,” said Dr. O’Grady. “In fact you began by going in exactly the opposite direction.”
“After that we went round by Barney’s Hill,” said Gallagher, “and along the bohireen by the side of the bog, me telling him the turns he ought to take.”
“What on earth did you go there for,” said the Major, “if you wanted to get to Doyle’s farm?”
“When we’d passed the bog,” said Gallagher, “we took a twist round, like as we might be trying to cut across to the Dunbeg Road.”
“You seem to have gone pretty well all around the town,” said Dr. O’Grady. “I suppose you enjoyed driving about in a large motor. Was that it?”
“It was not,” said Gallagher, “but I was in dread to take him to Doyle’s farm not knowing what questions he might be asking about the General when we got there. I’d be glad now, doctor, if you’d tell me who the General was, for it’s troublesome not knowing.”
“There isn’t time,” said Dr. O’Grady, “to go into long explanations simply to satisfy your morbid curiosity. Go on with your story. What happened when you did get to the place? I suppose you got there in the end?”
“We did of course,” said Gallagher, “and I showed him the ruin of the little houseen, the same as you told me to. ‘And was it there,’ says he, ‘that the great General, the immortal founder of the liberties of Bolivia, first saw the light?’ ‘It was,’ says I. So he took a leap out of the motor-car and stood in front of the old house with his hat in his hand. So I told him about the way the landlords had treated the people of this country in times past, and the way we are meaning to serve them out as soon as we have Home Rule, which is as good as got, only for the blackguards of Orangemen up in the North. I told him——”
“I’m sure you did,” said Dr. O’Grady, “but you needn’t go over all that to us, particularly as the Major hates that kind of talk.”
“Nobody,” said Gallagher, “would want to say a word that was displeasing to the Major, who is well liked in this locality and always was. If only the rest of the landlords was like him, instead of——”
“Go on about the American,” said Dr. O’Grady, “did he throw stones at you while you were making that speech about Home Rule?”
“He did not,” said Gallagher, “but he stood there looking at the houseen with the tears rolling down the cheeks of him——”
“What?” said Dr. O’Grady, “do you mean to tell me he cried?”
“It was like as if he was going to,” said Gallagher, “and ‘the patriot statesman,’ says he, ‘the mighty warrior,’ says he, and more to that, the same as if he might be making a speech about the land and the league boys cheering him.”
“I’m rather bothered about that American in some ways,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Are you telling me the truth now, Thady, about what he said?”
“I am,” said Gallagher. “I’d take my oath to every word of it.”
“Either he’s a much greater fool than he looks,” said Dr. O’Grady, “or else—but I’ll find that out afterwards. Go on with your story, Thady. What happened next?”
“Well, after he’d cried about a saucerful——”
“I thought you said he didn’t actually cry?”
“It was like as if he was going to cry. I told you that before.”
“Come on, O’Grady,” said the Major. “What’s the use of listening to this sort of stuff?”
“Be quiet, Major,” said Dr. O’Grady. “We’re just coming to the point. Go ahead, Thady. You’d just got to the saucerful of tears. When he’d emptied that out, what did he do?”
“He asked me,” said Gallagher, “was there any relatives or friends of the General surviving in the locality? He had me beat there.”
“I hope you told him there were several,” said Dr. O’Grady.
“I did, of course. Is it likely I’d disappoint the gentleman, and him set on finding someone belonging to the General? ‘Who are they?’ said he. ‘Tell me their names,’ Well, it was there I made the mistake.”
“It was a bit awkward,” said Dr. O’Grady, “when you didn’t know who the General was.”
“What I thought to myself,” said Gallagher, “was this. There might be many a one in the locality that would be glad enough to be a cousin of the General’s, even if there was no money to be got out of it, and it could be that there would. But, not knowing much about the General, I wasn’t easy in my mind for fear that anybody I named might be terrible angry with me after for giving them a cousin that might be some sort of a disgrace to the family——”
“I see now,” said Dr. O’Grady. “You thought it safer to name somebody who didn’t exist. But what made you think of a wife for young Kerrigan?”
“It was the first thing came into my head,” said Gallagher, “and I was that flustered I said it without thinking.”
“Well, how did he take it?”
“He was mighty pleased, so he was. ‘Take me to her,’ he said. ‘Take me to see her this minute,’ Well, to be sure I couldn’t do that.”
“You could not,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Could he, Major?”
“I don’t see why not. He might have hired some girl for half an hour.”
“No decent girl would do it,” said Gallagher, “and anyway I wouldn’t have had the time, for he had me in the motor again before I knew where he was and ‘Show me the way to the house,’ says he. ‘You can’t see her at the present time,’ says I, ‘though you may later,’ ‘And why not?’ says he. ‘The reason why you can’t,’ says I, ‘is a delicate matter,’ ‘Oh!’ says he. ‘That’s the way of it, is it? I’m glad to hear of it. The more of the stock of the old General there are in the world the better.’ Well, when I seen him so pleased as all that, I thought it would be no harm to please him more. ‘It’s twins,’ I said, ‘and what’s more the both of them is boys,’ ‘Take me to see the father,’ says he. ‘I’ll be able to see him anyway. I’d like to shake him by the hand.’”
“Has he seen young Kerrigan?” said Dr. O’Grady.
“He has not; but he won’t rest easy till he does. I wanted to run round and tell young Kerrigan the way things are, so as he’d be ready when the gentleman came. But Doyle said it would be better for me to tell you what had happened before worse came of it.”
“Doyle was perfectly right Kerrigan would stand over your story all right as long as he could, but in the end he’d have had to produce the twins. That’s the awkward part. If you hadn’t said twins we might have managed. But there isn’t a pair in the town.”
“Couldn’t you telegraph to Dublin?” said the Major. “For a man of your resource, O’Grady, mere twins ought not to prove a hopeless obstacle. I should think that one of the hospitals where they go in for that kind of thing would be quite glad to let you have a brace of babies in or about the same age.”
O’Grady knew that this suggestion was not meant to be helpful. The Major had an objectionable habit of indulging in heavy sarcasm. He turned on him sharply.
“You’d better go home, Major. When you try to be facetious you altogether cease to be useful. You know perfectly well that there’s no use talking about importing babies. What would we do with them afterwards? You couldn’t expect young Kerrigan to keep them.”
“I offered to go home some time ago,” said the Major, “and you wouldn’t let me. Now that I’ve heard about young Kerrigan’s twins I mean to stop where I am and see what happens.”
“Very well, Major. Just as you like. As long as you don’t upset Billing by rolling up any of those heavy jokes of yours against him I don’t mind. Here we are. I expect Doyle has Billing in the bar trying to pacify him with whisky. You’d better stay outside, Thady.”
“I’d be glad of a drop then,” said Gallagher wistfully. “After all the talking I did this afternoon——”
“Oh, go in if you like,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Probably the safest thing for you to do is to get drunk. Here’s Billing crossing the street He’s just come out of Kerrigan’s shop. Why on earth Doyle couldn’t have kept him in play till I came.... He’s sure to have found out now that young Kerrigan isn’t married. This will make my explanation far more difficult than it need have been.”
“It will make it impossible, I should imagine,” said the Major.
Mr. Billing, his hands in his coat pockets and a large cigar between his teeth, came jauntily across the street. Dr. O’Grady greeted him.
“Good-evening, Mr. Billing,” he said. “I hope you’ve had a pleasant and satisfactory afternoon.”
Sergeant Colgan and Constable Moriarty came out of the barrack together. They joined the group opposite the hotel. Constable Moriarty was grinning broadly. He had evidently heard some version of the story about young Kerrigan’s twins.
“I am sorry to find,” said the doctor, “that Thady Gallagher made a mistake, and a bad one, this afternoon.”
“I reckon,” said Mr. Billing, “that he kind of wandered from the path of truth.”
“Young Kerrigan isn’t married,” said the doctor.
“The twins,” said Mr. Billing, “were an effort of imagination. I am a man of imagination myself, so I’m not complaining any.”
“Being a newspaper editor you have to be, of course,” said Dr. O’Grady. “But Gallagher’s story wasn’t pure imagination. It was rather what I’d call prophetic. The fact is young Kerrigan is going to be married. Gallagher only anticipated things a bit. I daresay he thought the ceremony had really taken place. He didn’t mean to deceive you in any way. Did you, Thady?”
He looked round as he spoke. He wanted Gallagher to confirm what he said.
“He’s within,” said Constable Moriarty, grinning, “and I wouldn’t say but he’s having a drink. Anyway, here’s Mr. Doyle.”
Doyle, having supplied Gallagher with a bottle of porter, came out of the hotel. He was naturally anxious to hear Dr. O’Grady’s explanation.
“The twins,” said Mr. Billing, “were considerable previous.”
“Not so much as you might think,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Once people get married, you know, Mr. Billing, it often happens—generally in fact—not necessarily twins, but more or less that kind of thing. I can quite understand Thady making the mistake. And the girl young Kerrigan’s going to marry really is a grandniece of the General’s. Thady was quite right there.”
“I’d like to see her,” said Mr. Billing. “I’d like to take a photograph of her. The Bolivian public will be interested in a photograph of General John Regan’s grandniece.”
“Run and get your camera then,” said Dr. O’Grady. “I’ll have her ready for you by the time you’re back.”
Mr. Billing, looking very well satisfied and quite without suspicion, went into the hotel.
“Doyle,” said Dr. O’Grady, “fetch Mary Ellen as quick as you can.”
“Is it Mary Ellen?”
“It is. Get her at once, and don’t argue.”
“But sure Mary Ellen’s not the grandniece of any General.”
“She’s the only grandniece we can possibly get on such short notice,” said Dr. O’Grady.
“I don’t know,” said Sergeant Colgan, “will Mr. Gallagher be too well pleased. Mary Ellen’s a cousin of his own.”
“Thady will have to put up with a little inconvenience,” said Dr. O’Grady. “He got us all into this mess, so he can’t complain.”
“I beg your pardon, doctor,” said Constable Moriarty, who had stopped grinning and looked truculent, “but I’ll not have it put out that Mary Ellen’s going to marry young Kerrigan. He’s a boy she never looked at, nor wouldn’t.”
“Shut up, Moriarty,” said Dr. O’Grady. “If you won’t call her, Doyle, I must do it myself. Mary Ellen, Mary Ellen, come here!”
“What’s the use of calling Mary Ellen?” said Doyle. “The girl knows well enough she’s not the niece nor the grandniece of any General. As soon as ever you face her with the American gentleman she’ll be saying something, be the same more or less, that’ll let him know the way things are with her.”
“If I know anything of Mary Ellen,” said Dr. O’Grady, “she’ll not say a word more than she need on any subject. I never could drag anything beyond ‘I did,’ or ‘I did not,’ or ‘I might,’ out of her no matter how hard I tried, Mary Ellen! Mary Ellen! Ah! here she is.”
Mary Ellen came slowly through the door of the hotel. She smiled when she saw Dr. O’Grady, smiled again and then blushed when her eyes lit on Constable Moriarty. Her face and hands were a little dirtier than they had been earlier in the day, but she had added a small, crumpled, white cap to the apron which she put on in honour of Mr. Billing. The sight of her roused all Constable Moriarty’s spirit.
“I’ll not have it done, doctor,” he said, “so there it is for you plain and straight. I’ll not stand by and see the character of a decent girl——”
“Whisht, can’t you,” said Mary Ellen.
“Sergeant,” said Dr. O’Grady, “this isn’t a matter in which the police have any business to interfere. No one is committing a crime of any sort. You’d far better send Moriarty back to the barrack before he makes a worse fool of himself than he has already.”
“Get along home out of that, Moriarty,” said the sergeant. “Do you want me to have to report you to the District Inspector for neglect of duty?”
The threat was a terrific one. Moriarty quailed before it. He did not actually go back to the barrack; but he retired to the background and did no more than look reproachfully at Mary Ellen whenever he thought she was looking his way.
“It’s a great pity,” said Dr. O’Grady, “that we haven’t time to wash her face. I might do something, even without soap and water, if I had a pocket-handkerchief. Major, just lend me—— Oh hang it! I can’t. Here comes Billing with his camera. Pull yourself together now, Mary Ellen, and try to look as if you were proud of your distinguished relative. It isn’t every girl of your age who has a General for a great uncle.”
Mr. Billing approached. The corners of his lips were twitching in a curious way. Dr. O’Grady looked at him suspiciously. A casual observer might have supposed that Mr. Billing was trying hard not to smile.
“This,” said Dr. O’Grady, pointing to Mary Ellen, “is the grandniece, the only surviving relative, of General John Regan.”
“You surprise me,” said Mr. Billing. “When I recollect that she cooked chops for my luncheon to-day I’m amazed.”
“The General wouldn’t have thought a bit the worse of her for that,” said Dr. O’Grady. “A true democrat, the General, if ever there was one. I daresay he often cooked chops himself, when campaigning I mean, and was jolly glad to get chops to cook.”
“So you,” said Mr. Billing, addressing Mary Ellen, “are the grandniece of the great General?”
“I might be,” she said.
“And I am to have the privilege—gentlemen, please stand a little aside. I wish to——”
Mr. Billing set up his camera and put his head under the black cloth. Constable Moriarty sidled up to Major Kent. Nothing had been said about Mary Ellen’s marriage with young Kerrigan. He felt that he had been unnecessarily alarmed.
“I beg your pardon, Major,” he said, “but maybe if you asked the gentleman he’d give me a copy of the photo when it’s took.”
“Talk to the doctor about that,” said the Major. “He’s managing this show. I’ve nothing to do with it.”
“I’d be backward about asking the doctor,” said Moriarty, “on account of what passed between us a minute ago when I thought he was wanting to take away the girl’s character.”
Mr. Billing completed his arrangements and stood beside his camera ready to release the shutter.
“You’re quite sure,” said Dr. O’Grady, “that you wouldn’t care to have her face washed?”
“Certain,” said Mr. Billing. “The General was a genuine democrat if ever there was one. He wouldn’t have thought a bit the worse of her for having a dirty face.”
Dr. O’Grady started slightly and then looked questioningly at Mr. Billing. It struck him that there was something suspicious about this repetition of his words. He glanced at the Major, at Doyle, and then at the two policemen. They all seemed completely absorbed in the taking of the photograph. Mr. Billing’s last remark had not struck them as in any way odd.
The shutter clicked. One of Mary Ellen’s sweetest smiles was secured on the sensitive plate. Constable Moriarty, greatly daring, asked Mr. Billing for a print of the photograph. Mr. Billing promised him a copy of the life of General John Regan when it appeared. He said that there would be a full page reproduction of Mary Ellen’s portrait in the second volume.
“The Major and I must be off,” said Dr. O’Grady, “but if I may call on you to-morrow morning, Mr. Billing, I should like to make arrangements about the public meeting. We want to have you at it.”
“The meeting?” said Doyle.
“The meeting about the statue,” said Dr. O’Grady. “By the way, Doyle, you might call on Father McCormack this evening.” He spoke with a glance at Mr. Billing which he hoped that Doyle would interpret correctly. “You’d better remind him that he’s to take the chair. He promised a week ago, but he may have forgotten. That’s the worst of these good-natured men,” he added, speaking directly to Mr. Billing. “They promise anything, and then it’s ten to one they forget all about it.”
“I’m not quite sure,” said Mr. Billing, “that my arrangements will allow me——”
“Oh, they will if you squeeze them a bit. Arrangements are extraordinary pliable things if you handle them firmly, and we’d like to have you. A speech from you about the General would be most interesting. It would stimulate the whole population. Wouldn’t it, Major?”
“I’d like to hear it,” said the Major.
“Good-bye then, for the present,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Come along, Major. By the way, Doyle, if Thady takes a drop too much to drink, and he may, don’t let him start boring Mr. Billing about Home Rule.”
He took Major Kent by the arm and walked off. Until they passed the end of the street and were well out on the lonely road which led to the Major’s house, neither of them spoke. Then the Major broke the silence.
“I hope, O’Grady, that you’re satisfied with that performance.”
“To tell you the truth, Major, I’m not.”
“I’m surprised to hear that,” said the Major. “You’ve told the most outrageous lies I ever heard. You’ve—-”
“I gave the only possible explanation of a rather difficult situation.”
“You’ve made a laughing stock of a respectable girl.”
“I’ve given Mary Ellen a great uncle that she ought to be proud to own. That’s not what’s bothering me.”
“What is, then?”
“That American,” said the doctor. “I don’t at all like the way he’s going on. He’s not by any means a fool——”
“He must be or he wouldn’t have swallowed all those lies you told him in the way he did. How could Mary Ellen possibly be———?”
“That’s just it,” said Dr. O’Grady. “He swallowed what I said far too easily. The situation, owing to Thady Gallagher’s want of presence of mind, was complex, desperately complex. I got out of it as well as any man could, but I don’t deny that the explanation I gave—particularly that part about Mary Ellen being engaged to young Kerrigan, was a bit strained. I expected the American would have shied. But he didn’t. He swallowed it whole without so much as a choke. Now I don’t think that was quite natural. The fact is, Major, I’m uneasy about Billing. It struck me that there was something rather odd in the way he repeated my words about the General being a genuine democrat. He gave me the impression that he was—well, trying to make fools of us.”
“You were certainly trying to make a fool of him.”
“I don’t quite understand his game,” said Dr. O’Grady, “if he has a game. I may be wronging him. He may be simply an idiot, a well-meaning idiot with a craze for statues.”
“He must be,” said the Major. “Nothing else would account for——”
“I doubt it,” said Dr. O’Grady. “He doesn’t look that kind of man. However, there’s no use talking any more about it to-night. I’ll be in a better position to judge when I’ve found out all there is to know about this General of his. I’ll write for the books I’ve mentioned, and I’ll write to a man I know in the National Library. If there’s anything known about the General on this side of the Atlantic he’ll ferret it out for me.”
Dr. O’Grady stopped speaking. The Major supposed that he had stopped thinking about Mr. Billing’s curious conduct. The doctor did indeed intend to stop thinking about it. But it is difficult to bridle thought. After walking half a mile in silence Dr. O’Grady spoke again, and his words showed that his mind was still working on the same problem.
“Americans have far too good an opinion of themselves,” he said. “Billing may possibly think he’s playing some kind of trick on us. He may be laughing at us in some way we don’t quite understand.”
“I don’t know whether he’s laughing or not,” said the Major, “but everybody else will be very soon if you go on as you’re going.”
CHAPTER VI
It is very difficult to do anything of importance to the community without holding a public meeting about it. In Ireland people have got so accustomed to oratory and the resolutions which are the immediate excuse for oratory, that public meetings are absolutely necessary preliminaries to any enterprise. This is the case in all four provinces, which is one of the things which goes to show that the Irish are really a single people and not two or three different peoples, as some writers assert. The hard-headed, commercially-minded Ulsterman is just as fond of public meetings as the Connacht Celt. He would hold them, with drums and full dress speechifying, even if he were organising a secret society and arranging for a rebellion. He is perfectly right. Without a public meeting it would be impossible to enrol any large number of members for a society.
Dr. O’Grady, having lived all his life in Ireland, and being on most intimate terms with his neighbours, understood this law. He also understood that in order to make a success of a public meeting in Connacht and therefore to further the enterprise on hand, it is necessary that the parish priest should take the chair and advisable that a Member of Parliament should propose the first resolution.
He began by sending Doyle to Father McCormack. Doyle, foreseeing a possible profit for himself, did his best to persuade Father McCormack to take the chair. Father McCormack, who was a fat man and therefore good-natured, did not want to refuse Doyle. But Father McCormack was not a free agent. Behind him, somewhere, was a bishop, reputed to be austere, certainly domineering. Father McCormack was very much afraid of the bishop, therefore he hesitated. The most that Doyle could secure, after a long interview, was the promise of a definite answer the next day.
Father McCormack made use of the twenty-four hours’ grace he had secured by calling on Major Kent. The Major was a Protestant, with strong anti-Papal convictions, and therefore was not, it might have been supposed, a good man to advise a priest on a delicate question of ecclesiastical etiquette. But the Major was eminently respectable, and his outlook upon life was staidly conservative. Father McCormack felt that if Major Kent thoroughly approved of the erection of a statue to General John Regan it was likely to be quite a proper thing to do.
“I’m not sure,” said Father McCormack, “whether it will suit me to take the chair at this meeting the doctor’s getting up or not. I’m not sure, I say. Can you tell me now, Major Kent, who’s this American gentleman they’re all talking about?”
“I don’t know anything about him,” said the Major, “but I’m bound to say he looks like a Protestant. I don’t know whether that will make any difference to you or not.”
“From the little I’ve seen of him—just across the street from the window of the Presbytery—I’d say you were right about his religion, but I needn’t tell you, Major Kent, that I’m not a bigoted man. It wouldn’t stop me taking the chair if he was a Protestant. It wouldn’t stop me if he was a Presbyterian, and I can’t say more than that. You know very well that I’d just as soon be sitting on a committee alongside of a Protestant as any ordinary kind of man. I’m not one that would let religion interfere too much.”
“He seems quite respectable,” said the Major. “He’s been here three days now, and I never saw him drunk.”
“It’s not that either that’s troubling me,” said Father McCormack. “There’s many a man gets drunk when he can, and I’d be the last to make too much out of that.”
“I can’t tell you any more about him,” said the Major, “for that’s all I know, except that he appears to be rich.”
“The difficulty I’m in is on account of the bishop. He’s getting to be mighty particular. I don’t say he’s wrong, mind you; only there it is. But sure, if no one in the place has anything to say against the American gentleman it’s likely he’ll turn out to be all right. But what about the fellow they want to put up the statue to?”
“General John Regan,” said the Major.
“What about him? I never heard tell of him before.”
“For the matter of that, nor did I.”
“Who was he at all?”
“You’ll have to ask Dr. O’Grady that. He’s the only man who professes to know anything about him.”
“As I was saying to you this minute,” said Father McCormack, “I wouldn’t mind if he was a Protestant.”
“He hardly could be,” said the Major, “with that name.”
“There’s many a Protestant that might be just as well deserving of a statue as maybe a bishop. But what I’m afraid of is that this fellow might be worse. For let me tell you, Major, there’s worse things than Protestants, and I’m not saying that just because I’m talking to you. I’d say it to anyone.”
This gratified Major Kent, but it did not enable him to give any information about General John Regan.
“There’s no use asking me about him,” he said wearily. “Ask Dr. O’Grady.”
“If it was to turn out at the latter end,” said Faflier McCormack, “that he was one of those French atheists, or if he had any hand in hunting the nuns out of Portugal, the bishop wouldn’t be too well pleased when he heard that I’d been helping to put up a statue to him.”
“You’ll have to ask Dr. O’Grady. It’s no good asking me.”
“Will you tell me this, Major Kent, and I won’t ask you another question. Are you going to the meeting yourself?”
“I am.”
“Well now, you’re a man with a position in the place and you wouldn’t be going to a meeting of the sort unless it was all right. I’m inclined to think now that if you’re going—I wouldn’t give a thraneen for what Doyle might do. If that fellow saw half a chance of making sixpence by going to a meeting he’d go, if it was held for the purpose of breaking the windows of the Presbytery. That’s the sort of man Doyle is. And I wouldn’t mind Thady Gallagher. Thady is a kind-hearted poor fellow, though he’s a bit foolish at times; but he’s not the sort of man you could trust. He’s too fond of politics, and that’s a fact. Give Thady the opportunity of making a speech and you wouldn’t be able to keep him at home from a meeting, whatever sort of a meeting it might be. But it’s different with you, Major Kent.”
The Major was deeply touched by this eulogy; so deeply touched that he felt it wrong to leave Father McCormack under the impression that he was going to the meeting out of any feeling of admiration for General John Regan.
“The fact is,” he said, “that I wouldn’t go near the meeting if I could help it.”
“Is there anything against that General then?”
“It’s not that. It’s simply that I loathe and detest all public meetings, and I wouldn’t go to this one or any other if I could get out of it.”
“And why can’t you get out of it? A man needn’t go to a meeting unless he likes.”
“He must,” said the Major, “I must; any man must, if Dr. O’Grady gets at him.”
“That’s true, too,” said Father McCormack, “and I don’t mind telling you that I’ve been keeping out of the doctor’s way ever since Doyle asked me. I’d rather not see him till I have my mind made up the one way or the other.”
It was unfortunate for Father McCormack that Dr. O’Grady should at that moment have walked into the Major’s study without even knocking at the door. He had just received answers to his letters from four of the most eminent Irish Members of Parliament He had asked them all to attend a meeting at Ballymoy and make speeches about General John Regan. They had all refused, offering the very flimsiest excuses. Dr. O’Grady was extremely indignant.
“I don’t see what on earth use there is,” he blurted out, “in our keeping Members of Parliament at all. Here we are paying these fellows £400 a year each, and when we ask for a perfectly simple speech—— Oh, I beg your pardon, Father McCormack, I didn’t see you were here. But I daresay you quite agree with me. Every one must.”
“Father McCormack came here,” said the Major, “to ask about General John Regan.”
“Who is he at all?” said the priest.
“A general,” said Dr. O’Grady, “Irish extraction. Born in Ballymoy. Rose to great eminence in Bolivia. Finally secured the liberty of the Republic.”
“Father McCormack seems to think,” said the Major, “that he was some kind of anti-clerical socialist.”
“I said he might be,” said Father McCormack. “I didn’t say he was, for I don’t know a ha’porth about him. All I said was that if he turned out to be that kind of a man it wouldn’t suit me to be putting up statues to him. The Bishop wouldn’t like it.”
“My impression is———” said Dr. O’Grady. “Mind, I don’t say I’m perfectly certain of it, but my impression is that he built a cathedral before he died. Anyhow I never heard or read a single word against his character as a religious man. He may have been a little——” Dr. O’Grady winked slowly. “You know the kind of thing I mean, Father McCormack, when he was young. Most military men are, more or less. I expect now that the Major could tell us some queer stories about the sort of thing that goes on——”
“No, I couldn’t,” said the Major.
“In garrison towns,” said Dr. O’Grady persuasively, “and of course it’s worse on active service. Come now, Major, I’m not asking you to give yourself away, but you could——”
“No, I couldn’t,” said the Major firmly.
“What you mean is that you wouldn’t,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Not while Father McCormack is listening to you anyhow. And you may take my word for it that the old General was just the same. He may have been a bit of a lad in his early days——”
“I wouldn’t mind that,” said Father McCormack. “I wouldn’t mind that if it was twice as much, so long——”
“But he’d never have said anything really disrespectful in the presence of a clergyman of any denomination. Whatever his faults were—and he had faults, of course—he wasn’t that kind of man. So you needn’t hesitate about taking the chair at the meeting, Father McCormack. I defy the most particular bishop that ever wore a purple stock to find out anything really bad about the General.”
“If I have your word for that,” said Father McCormack, “I’m satisfied.”
“I’m not a rich man,” said Dr. O’Grady. “I can’t afford to lose money, but I’ll pay down £50 to any man who proves anything bad about the General. And when I say bad I don’t, mean things like——”
“I understand you,” said Father McCormack.
“I mean,” said Dr. O’Grady, “atheism of a blatant kind, or circulating immoral literature—Sunday papers, for instance—or wanting to turn the priests out of the schools, or not paying his dues——”
“I understand you,” said Father McCormack.
“I know what I’m talking about,” said Dr. O’Grady, “for I’ve had a man looking up all that’s known about General John Regan in the National Library in Dublin.”
CHAPTER VII
At the very bottom of the main street of Ballymoy, close to the little harbour where the fishing boats nestled together in stormy weather, there is a disused mill. Corn was ground in it long ago. The farmers brought it from the country round about after the threshing was over, and the stream which now flows idly into the sea was then kept busy turning a large wheel. Since the Americans have taken to supplying Ireland with flour ready ground, bleached, and fit for immediate use, the Irish farmers have left off growing wheat. Being wise men they see no sense in toiling when other people are willing to toil instead of them. The Ballymoy mill, and many others like it, lie idle. They are slipping quietly through the gradual stages of decay and will one day become economically valuable to the country again as picturesque ruins. Few things are more attractive to tourists than ruins, and the country which possesses an abundance of them is in a fair way to grow rich easily. But it is necessary that the ruins should be properly matured. No man with an educated taste for food will eat Stilton cheese which is only half decayed. No educated tourist will take long journeys and pay hotel bills in order to look at an immature ruin. The decaying mills of Ireland have not yet reached the profitable stage of development. Their doors and windows are still boarded up. Their walls are adorned with posters instead of ivy. No aesthetic archaeologist has as yet written a book about their architecture.
The Ballymoy mill was the property of Doyle. He bought it very cheap when the previous owner, a son of the last miller, lapsed into bankruptcy. He saw no immediate prospect of making money out of it, but he was one of those men—they generally end in being moderately rich—who believe that all real property will in the end acquire a value, if only it is possessed with sufficient patience. In the meanwhile, since buildings do not eat, and so long as they remain empty are not liable for rates, the mill did not cost Doyle anything. He tried several times to organise schemes by means of which he might be able to secure a rent for the mill. When it became fashionable, eight or ten years ago, to start what are tailed “industries” in Irish provincial towns, Doyle suggested that his mill should be turned into a bacon factory. A public meeting was held with Father McCormack in the chair, and Thady Gallagher made an eloquent speech. Doyle himself offered to take shares in the new company to the amount of £5. Father McCormack, who was named as a director, also took five £1 shares. It was agreed that Doyle should be paid £30 a year for the mill. At that point the scheme broke down, mainly because no one else would take any shares at all.
A couple of years later Doyle tried again. This time he suggested a stocking manufactory. Stockings are supposed to require less capital than bacon curing, and, as worked out on paper, they promise large profits. Doyle offered the mill for £25 a year this time, and was greatly praised by Thady Gallagher in the columns of the Connacht Eagle for his patriotic self-sacrifice. Another large meeting was held, but once more the public, though enthusiastic about the scheme, failed to subscribe the capital. A great effort was made the next year to induce the Government to buy the building for a £1,000, with a view to turning it into a Technical School. A petition was signed by almost everyone in Ballymoy setting forth the hungry desire of the people for instruction in the arts of life. Several Members of Parliament asked the Chief Secretary searching questions on the subject of the Ballymoy Technical School. But the Chief Secretary declared himself quite unable to wring the money out of the Treasury. Thady Gallagher wrote articles and made speeches which ought to have caused acute discomfort to the Prime Minister. But Doyle found himself obliged to give up the idea of a Technical School. He waited hopefully. In the end, he felt sure, some way of utilising the old mill would be found. In the meanwhile the building, though unprofitable to Doyle was not entirely useless. Its walls, boarded doors and windows, formed the most excellent place for the display of advertisements. The circuses which visited the town in summer covered a great deal of space with their posters. When retiring members of the Urban District Council wanted to be re-elected they notified their desire by means of placards pasted on the walls of Doyle’s mill. All public meetings were advertised there. Doyle himself made nothing out of these advertisements; but Thady Gallagher did. He printed the posters, and it was admitted by everyone that he did it very well.
Two days after his arrival in Ballymoy, Mr. Billing strolled down to the harbour. He was a man of restless and energetic disposition, but the visits which he received from Dr. O’Grady, and the speeches about Home Rule to which Gallagher subjected him, began to worry him. In order to soothe his nerves he used to spend an hour or two morning and evening looking at the fishermen who spent the day in contemplating their boats. There is nothing in the world more soothing than the study of a fisherman’s life on shore. When he is at sea it is probably strenuous enough. But then he very seldom is at sea, and when he is he is out of sight. Having, so to speak, drunk deeply of the torpor of Ballymoy harbour, Mr. Billing turned his face towards the shore and looked at the wall of Doyle’s mill. He was startled to find six new posters stuck on it in a row. They were all bright green. Mr. Billing read them with interest.
The announcement opened with a prayer, printed in large type:
“GOD SAVE IRELAND,”
GENERAL JOHN REGAN
This was repeated at the bottom of each poster in the Irish language, which Mr. Billing could not read. Next to the prayer, in very much larger type, came the words:
“A PUBLIC MEETING,”
Then, in quite small letters:
“WILL BE HELD ON TUESDAY NEXT AT 3 P. M.
IN THE MARKET SQUARE, OPPOSITE THE ‘IMPERIAL HOTEL.’”
Mr. Billing read on and learned that Father McCormack would take the chair, that several distinguished Members of Parliament would address the meeting, that Mr. T. Gallagher, Chairman U. D. C., would also speak, and that—here the letters became immense—Mr. Horace P. Billing, of Bolivia, would give an account of the life of General John Regan, in whose honour it was proposed to erect a statue in Ballymoy.
Mr. Billing smiled. Then he turned and walked briskly to the hotel. He found Doyle and Thady Gallagher seated together on the bench outside the door. He addressed them cheerfully:
“Say, gentlemen,” he said, “that doctor of yours seems to have got a move on this locality. The announcement of the meeting is a good thing, sure.”
“The doctor,” said Doyle, “is a fine man; but it would be better for him if he’d pay what he owes. I’m tired, so I am, of trying to get my money out of him.”
“The doctor,” said Gallagher, “has the good of the locality at heart, and whatever it might be that he takes in hand will be carried through. You may rely on the doctor.”
Thady Gallagher had not yet been paid for printing the green posters. But he had every hope he would be when Mr. Billing handed over his subscription to the statue fund. He felt, it right to do all in his power to encourage Mr. Billing. Doyle, on the other hand, was becoming despondent. He did not like to see money which ought to be his frittered away on posters and the other necessary expenses of a public meeting. He was much less inclined to admire, the doctor’s enterprise.
“I guess,” said Mr. Billing, “that these Congressmen will draw some.”
“If you mean the Members of Parliament,” said Doyle, “the doctor told me this morning that they said they’d more to do than to be attending his meetings.”
“It could be,” said Gallagher hopefully, “that one of them might.”
“They will not,” said Doyle.
“We’ll do without them,” said Mr. Billing.
“That’s what the doctor said to me,” said Gallagher. “‘We’ll do without them, Thady,’ said he, ‘so long as we have Mr. Billing and Father McCormack and yourself,’ meaning me, ‘we’ll have a good meeting if there never was a Member of Parliament near it.’ And that’s true too.”
“If the doctor,” said Doyle, “would pay what he owes instead of wasting his time over public meetings and statues and the like it would be better. Not that I’d say a word against the statue, or, for the matter of that, against the doctor, who’s well liked in the town by all classes.”
The Tuesday fixed for the meeting was a well chosen day. It was the occasion of one of the largest fairs held in Ballymoy during the year. The country people, small farmers and their wives, flock into the town whenever there is a fair. The streets are thronged with cattle lowing miserably. “Buyers,” men whose business it is to carry the half-fed Connacht beasts to the fattening pastures of Meath and Kildare, assemble in large numbers and haggle over prices from early dawn till noon. No better occasion for the exploitation of a cause could possibly be chosen. And three o’clock was a very good hour. By that time the business of the fair is well over. The buying and selling is finished. But no one has gone home, and no one is more than partially drunk. It is safe to expect that everybody will welcome the entertainment that a meeting affords during the dull time which must intervene between the finishing of the day’s business and the weary journey home.
The green posters were distributed far and wide. They adorned every gatepost and every wall sufficiently smooth to hold them within a circle of three miles radius around the town. There was some talk beforehand about the meeting. But on the whole the people displayed very little curiosity about General John Regan. It was taken for granted that he had been in some way associated with the cause of Irish Nationality, and one or two people professed to recollect that he had fought on the side of the Boers during the South African War. Whoever he was, the people were inclined to support the movement for erecting a statue to him by cheering anything which Thady Gallagher said. But they did not intend to support it in any other way. The Connacht farmer is like the rest of the human race in his dislike of being asked to subscribe to anything. He is superior to most other men in his capacity for resisting the pressure of the subscription list.
On the Saturday before the meeting Gallagher published a long article on the subject of the General in the Connacht Eagle. It was read, as all Gallagher’s articles were, with respectful attention. Everybody expected to find out by reading it who the General was. Everyone felt, as he read it, or listened to it read aloud, that he was learning all he wanted to know, and did not discover until he came to talk the matter over afterwards with his friends that he knew no more when he had read the article than he did before.
It was not Thady Gallagher but Dr. O’Grady who wrote the article. Thady made several attempts and then gave up the matter in despair. Dr. O’Grady, though he was extremely busy at the time, had to do the writing. It was very well done, and calculated to heat to the boiling point the enthusiasm of all patriotic people. He began by praising Thomas Emmet. He passed from him to Daniel O’Connell. He recommended everyone to read John Mitchell’s “Jail Journal.” He described the great work done for Ireland by Charles Stewart Parnell. Then he said that General John Regan was, in his own way, at least the equal, possibly the superior, of any of the patriots he had named. He wound up the composition with the statement that it was unnecessary to recapitulate the great deeds of the General, because every Irishman worthy of the name knew all about them already.
No one read the article with more eagerness and expectation than Gallagher himself. As the day of the meeting drew nearer he was becoming more and more uncomfortable about his speech. He had not been able to find out either from Doyle or from Father McCormack anything whatever about the General. He did not want much. He was a practised orator and could make a very small amount of information go a long way in a speech, but he did want something, if it was only a date to which he might attach the General’s birth or death. Doyle and the priest steadily referred him to Dr. O’Grady. From Sergeant Colgan he got nothing except a guess that the General might have been one of the Fenians. Dr. O’Grady, before the appearance of the article, promised that it would contain all that anyone needed to know. After the article was published Gallagher was ashamed to ask for further information, because he did not want to confess himself an Irishman unworthy of the name.
Doyle also was dissatisfied and became actually restive after the appearance of Saturday’s Connacht Eagle. He was not in the least troubled by the vagueness of the leading article. He was not one of the speakers at the meeting, and it did not matter to him whether he knew anything about General John Regan or not. What annoyed him was the publication, in the advertisement columns of the paper, of a preliminary list of subscribers. In the first place such an advertisement cost money and could only be paid for out of Mr. Billing’s subscription, thus further diminishing the small balance on which he was calculating as some compensation for the irrecoverable debt owed to him by Dr. O’Grady. In the second place his name appeared on the list as a donor, not of £5, but of £10. He knew perfectly well that he would not be expected to pay any subscription, but he was vaguely annoyed at the threat of such a liability.
On Sunday afternoon he called on Dr. O’Grady.
“Wasn’t it agreed,” he said, “that I was to be the treasurer of the fund for putting up the statue?”
“It was,” said Dr. O’Grady, “and you are the treasurer. Didn’t you see your name printed in the Connacht Eagle, ‘Secretary, Dr. Lucius O’Grady. Treasurer, J. Doyle’?”
“If I’m the treasurer it’s no more than right that I should have some say in the way the money’s being spent, for let me tell you, doctor—and I may as well speak plain when I’m at it—I’m not satisfied. I’ve had some correspondence with a nephew of mine who’s in that line of business himself up in Dublin, and he tells me that £100 is little enough for a statue of any size. Now I’m not saying that I want to close the account with a balance in hand——”
“It’s what you do want, Doyle, whether you say it or not.”
“But,” said Doyle ignoring this interruption, “it wouldn’t suit me if there was any debt at the latter end. For it’s myself would have to pay it if there was, and that’s what I’d not be inclined to do. The way you’re spending money on posters and advertisements there’ll be very little of the American gentleman’s £100 left when it comes to buying the statue.”
“I see your point all right, Doyle, but——”
“If you see it,” said Doyle, “I’m surprised at you going on the way you are; but, sure, I might have known that you wouldn’t care how much you’d spend or how much you’d owe at the latter end. There’s that £60——”
“Don’t harp on about that miserable £60,” said Dr. O’Grady, “for I won’t stand it. Here I am doing the very best I can to make money for you, taking no end of trouble, and all you do is to come grumbling to me day after day about some beggarly account that I happen to owe you.”
“It’s what I don’t see is how I’m going to make a penny out of it at all, the way you’re going on.”
“Listen to me now, Doyle. Supposing—I just say supposing—the Government was to build a pier, a new pier, in Ballymoy, who do you think would get the contract for the job?”
“I would, of course,” said Doyle, “for there’d be no other man in the town fit to take it.”
“And how much do you suppose you’d make out of it?”
“What’s the use of talking that way?” said Doyle. “Hasn’t the Government built us two piers already, and is it likely they’d build us another?”
“That’s not the point. What I’m asking you is: Supposing they did build another and you got the contract for it, how much do you suppose you’d make?”
“Well,” said Doyle, “if it was a good-sized pier and if the engineer they sent down to inspect the work wasn’t too smart altogether I might clear £100.”
“Now, suppose,” said Dr. O’Grady, “that you were able to sell the stones of that old mill of yours——”
“They’re good stones, so they are.”
“Exactly, and you’d expect a good price for them. Now suppose you succeeded in selling them to the Government as raw material for the pier——”
“They’d be nice and handy for the work,” said Doyle. “Whoever was to use those stones for building the pier would save a devil of a lot of expense in carting.”
“That, of course, would be considered in fixing the price of the stones.”
“It would,” said Doyle. “It would have to be, for I wouldn’t sell them without it was.”
“Under those circumstances,” said Dr. O’Grady, “what do you suppose you’d make?”
“I’d make a tidy penny,” said Doyle.
“Very well. Add that tidy penny to the £100 profit on the pier contract and it seems to me that it would pay you to lose a couple of pounds—and I don’t admit that you will lose a penny—over the statue business.”
The mention of the statue brought Doyle back from a pleasant dream to the region of hard fact.
“What’s the good of talking?” he said. “The Government will build no more piers here.”
“I’m not so sure of that. If we were to get a hold of one of the real big men, say the Lord-Lieutenant, if we were to bring him down here and do him properly—flags, you know, Doyle, and the town band, and somebody with a bouquet of flowers for his wife, and somebody else—all respectable people, Doyle—with an illuminated address—and if we were all to stand round with our hats in our hands and cheer—in fact if we were to do all the things that those sort of fellows really like to see done——”
“We could have flags,” said Doyle, “and we could have the town band, and we could have all the rest of what you say; but what good would they be? The Lord-Lieutenant wouldn’t come to Ballymoy. It’s a backward place, so it is.”
“I’ll get to that in a minute,” said Dr. O’Grady. “But just suppose now that we had him and did all the things I say, do you think he’d refuse us a simple pier when we asked for it?”
“I don’t know but he would. Hasn’t the Government built two piers here already? Is it likely they’d build a third?”
“Those two piers were built years and years ago,” said Dr. O’Grady. “One of them is more than ten years old this minute, and they were both built by the last Government The present Lord-Lieutenant has probably never so much as heard of them. We shouldn’t go out of our way to remind him of their existence. Nobody else in Ireland will remember anything about them. We’ll start talking about the new pier as if it were quite an original idea that nobody had ever heard of before. We’d get it to a certainty.”
Doyle was swept away by the glorious possibilities before him.
“If so be the Lord-Lieutenant was to come, and the Lady-Lieutenant with him, and more of the lords and ladies that does be attending on them up in Dublin Castle——”
“Aides-de-camp, and people of that sort,” said Dr. O’Grady. “They’d simply swarm down on us.”
“There’d have to be a luncheon for them,” said Doyle.
“And it would be in your hotel. I forgot about the luncheon. There’ll be a pot of money to be made out of that.”
“With drinks and all,” said Doyle, with deep conviction. “There would. The like of them people wouldn’t be contented with porter.”
“Champagne,” said Dr. O’Grady, “is the recognised tipple for anybody high up in the Government service. It wouldn’t be respectful not to offer it.”
“But he won’t come,” said Doyle. “What would bring him?”
“The statue will bring him.”
“The statue! Talk sense, doctor. What would the like of him want to be looking at statues for? Won’t he have as many as he wants in Dublin Castle, and better ones than we’d be able to show him?”
“You’re missing the point, Doyle. I’m not proposing to bring him down here simply to look at a statue. I’m going to ask him to unveil it. Now as far as I know the history of Ireland—and I’m as well up in it as most men—that would be an absolutely unprecedented invitation for any Lord-Lieutenant to receive. The novelty of the thing will attract him at once. And what’s more, the idea will appeal to his better nature. I needn’t tell you, Doyle, that the earnest desire of every Lord-Lieutenant is to assist the material and intellectual advancement of Ireland. He’s always getting opportunities of opening technical schools and industrial shows of one sort or another. They’ve quite ceased to attract him. But we’re displaying an entirely new spirit. By erecting a public statue in a town like this we are showing that we’ve arrived at an advanced stage of culture. There isn’t another potty little one-horse town in Ireland that has ever shown the slightest desire to set up a great and elevating work of art in its midst. You may not appreciate that aspect of the matter, Doyle, but——”
“If I was to give my opinion,” said Doyle, “I’d say that statues was foolishness.”
“Exactly. But the Lord-Lieutenant, when he gets our invitation will give you credit for much finer feeling. Besides he’ll see that we’ve been studying up our past history. The name of General John Regan will mean a great deal to him although it conveys very little to you.”
“It’s what Thady Gallagher is always asking,” said Doyle, “who was the General?”
“Gallagher ought to know,” said Dr. O’Grady, “and I’ve told him so.”
“He does not know then. Nor I don’t believe Father McCormack does. Nor I don’t know myself. Not that it would trouble me if there never was a General, only that you have Mary Ellen’s head turned with the notion that she’ll be coming into a big fortune one of these days——”
“Is she not doing her work?” said Dr. O’Grady.
“Devil the tap she’s done these two days, but what she couldn’t help. Not that that bothers me, for it’s nothing strange. She never was one for doing much unless you stood over her and drove her into it. But what has annoyed me is the way Constable Moriarty is never out of the kitchen or the back yard. He was after her before, but he’s fifty times worse since he heard the talk about her being the niece of the General. Besides the notion he has that young Kerrigan wants her, which has made him wild.”
“Moriarty ought to have more sense,” said Dr. O’Grady.
“He ought,” said Doyle, “but he hasn’t. The tunes he whistles round the house would drive you demented if so be that you listened to them; but I needn’t tell you I don’t do that.”
“You’ll have to put up with it,” said Dr. O’Grady. “It won’t be for very long, and you needn’t mind what Mary Ellen neglects so long as she attends properly on Mr. Billing.”
“She’ll attend him right enough,” said Doyle. “Since ever she got the notion that he was going to make a lady of her, attending on him is the one thing that she will do.”
“Then you needn’t bother your head about anything else.”
CHAPTER VIII
There are men in the world, a great many of them—who are capable of managing details with thoroughness and efficiency. These men make admirable lieutenants and fill subordinate positions so well that towards the end of their lives they are allowed to attend full dress evening parties with medals and stars hung round their necks or pinned on their coats. There are also a good many men who are capable of conceiving great ideas and forming vast plans, but who have an unconquerable aversion to anything in the way of a detail. These men generally end their days in obscure asylums, possibly in workhouses, and their ideas, after living for a while as subject matter for jests, perish unrealised. There is also a third kind of man, fortunately a very rare kind. He is capable of conceiving great ideas, and has besides an insatiable delight in working out details. He may end his days as a victorious general, or even as an emperor. If he prefers a less ostentatious kind of reward, he will die a millionaire.
Dr. Lucius O’Grady belonged to this third class. In the face of Doyle’s objection to his expenditure on posters, he was capable of conceiving on the spur of the moment and without previous meditation, the audacious and magnificent plan of bringing the Lord-Lieutenant to Ballymoy and wrestling from a reluctant treasury a sufficient sum of money to build a third pier on the beach below the town. There may have been other men in Ireland capable of making such a plan. There was certainly no one else who would have set himself, as Dr. O’Grady did, with tireless enthusiasm, to work out the details necessary to the plan’s success.
As soon as Doyle left him he mounted his bicycle and rode out to the Greggs’ home. Mr. Gregg, being the District Inspector of Police, was usually a very busy man. But the Government, though a hard task-master in the case of minor officials, does not insist on anyone inspecting or being inspected on Sunday afternoons. Mr. Gregg had taken advantage of the Government’s respect for revealed religion, and had gone out with a fishing rod to catch trout. Mrs. Gregg was at home. Being a bride of not more than three months’ standing she had nothing particular to do, and was yawning rather wearily over the fashion-plates of a ladies’ paper. She seemed unaffectedly glad to see Dr. O’Grady, and at once offered to give him tea. The doctor refused the tea, and plunged into his business.
“I suppose,” he said, “that you’ll have no objection to presenting a bouquet to Lady Chesterton when she comes to Ballymoy?”
“Is she coming?” said Mrs. Gregg. “How splendid!”
Before marrying Mr. Gregg she had lived in a Dublin suburb. Accustomed to the rich and varied life of a metropolis she found Ballymoy a little dull. She recognised Major Kent as “a dear old boy,” but he was quite unexciting. Mrs. Ford, the wife of a rather morose stipendiary magistrate, had severely snubbed Mrs. Gregg. There was no one else, and the gay frocks of Mrs. Gregg’s bridal outfit were wasting their first freshness with hardly an opportunity of being worn.
“Yes,” said Dr. O’Grady. “She’s coming with the Lord-Lieutenant to unveil the new statue.”
“How splendid!” said Mrs. Gregg again. “I heard something about the statue, but please tell me more, Dr. O’Grady. I do so want to know.”
“Oh, there’s nothing particular to tell about the statue. It’s to be to the memory of General John Regan, and will be unveiled in the usual way.”
This did not add much to the information which Mr. Gregg, who himself had gleaned what he knew from Sergeant Colgan, had already given her. But Mrs. Gregg was quite content with it. She did not, in fact, want to know anything about the statue. She only asked about it because she thought she ought to. Her mind was dwelling on the dazzling prospect of presenting a bouquet to Lady Chesterton.
“Of course I should love to,” she said. “But I wonder if I could—really, I mean.”
Dr. O’Grady was a man of quick intelligence. He realised at once that Mrs. Gregg had not been listening to his account of the statue, but that she was replying to his original suggestion.
“It’s not the least difficult,” he said. “Anyone could do it, but we’d like to have it done really well. That’s the reason we’re asking you.”
“Don’t you have to walk backwards?” said Mrs. Gregg. “I’d love to do it, of course, but I never have before.”
“There’s no necessity to walk at all. You simply stand in the front row of the spectators with the bouquet in your hand. Then, when she stops opposite you and smiles—she’ll be warned beforehand, of course—and she’s had such a lot of practice that she’s sure to do it right—you curtsey and hand up the bouquet. She’ll take it, and the whole thing will be over.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Gregg, “is that all?”
Dr. O’Grady was conscious of a note of disappointment in her voice. He felt that he had over-emphasized the simplicity of the performance. Mrs. Gregg would have preferred a longer ceremony. He did his best to make such amends as were still possible.
“Of course,” he said, “your photograph will be in all the illustrated papers afterwards, and there will be a long description of your dress in The Irish Times.”
“I’d love to do it,” said Mrs. Gregg.
“Very well, then,” said Dr. O’Grady, “we’ll consider that settled.”
Leaving Mrs. Gregg, he rode on to Major Kent’s house. The Major, like all men who are over forty years of age, who have good consciences and balances in their banks, spent his Sunday afternoons sleeping in an armchair. No one likes being awakened, either in a bedroom by a servant, in a railway carriage by a ticket collector, or on a Sunday afternoon by a friend. The Major answered Dr. O’Grady’s greeting snappishly.
“If you’ve come,” he said, “to ask me to make a speech at that meeting of yours on Tuesday, you may go straight home again, for I won’t do it.”
“I’m not such a fool,” said Dr. O’Grady pleasantly, “as to ask you to do any such thing. I know jolly well you couldn’t. Even if you could and would, we shouldn’t want you. We have Father McCormack, and Thady Gallagher, besides the American. That’s as much as any audience could stand!”
“If it isn’t that you want,” said the Major, “what is it?”
“It’s a pity you’re in such an uncommonly bad temper, Major. If you were even in your normal condition of torpid sulkiness you’d be rather pleased to hear what I’m going to tell you.”
“If you’re going to tell me that you’ve dropped that statue folly, I shall be extremely pleased.”
“The news I have,” said Dr. O’Grady, “is far better than that. We’ve decided to ask the Lord-Lieutenant down to unveil the statue.”
“He won’t come,” said the Major, “so that’s all right.”
“He will come when it’s explained to him that——”
“Oh, if you offer him one of your explanations———”
“Look here, Major. I don’t think you quite grasp the significance of what I’m telling you. Ever since I’ve known you you’ve been deploring the disloyalty of the Irish people. I don’t blame you for that. You’re by way of being a Unionist, so of course you have to. But if you were the least bit sincere in what you say, you’d be delighted to hear that Doyle and Thady Gallagher—Thady hasn’t actually been told yet, but when he is he’ll be as pleased as everyone else—you ought to be simply overjoyed to find that men like Doyle are inviting the Lord-Lieutenant down to unveil their statue. It shows that they’re getting steadily loyaler and loyaler. Instead of exulting in the fact you start sneering in a cynical and altogether disgusting way.”
“I don’t believe much in Doyle’s loyalty,” said the Major.
“Fortunately,” said Dr. O’Grady, “Doyle thoroughly believes in yours. He agrees with me that you are the first man who ought to be asked to join the reception committee. You can’t possibly refuse.”
“I would refuse if I thought there was the slightest chance of the Lord-Lieutenant coming. Do you think I want to stand about in a tall hat along with half the blackguards in town?”
“Mrs. Gregg is going to present a bouquet,” said Dr. O’Grady.
“Looking like a fool in the middle of the street, while you play silly tricks with a statue?”
“You won’t be asked to do all that,” said Dr. O’Grady.
“I am being asked. You’re asking me this minute, and if I thought it would come off——”
“As you think it won’t you may as well join the committee.”
“I won’t be secretary,” said the Major, “and I won’t have hand, act, or part, in asking the Lord-Lieutenant to come here. We don’t want him, for one thing.”
“You’ll not be asked so much as to sign a paper,” said Dr. O’Grady. “If your name is required at the bottom of any document I’ll write it for you myself.”
“I wish to goodness,” said the Major, “that Billing—if that’s the man’s name—had stayed in America attending to his own business, whatever it is, instead of coming here and starting all this fuss. There’ll be trouble before you’ve done, O’Grady, more trouble than you care for. I wish to God it was all well over.”
Nothing is more gratifying to the prophet of evil than the fulfilment of his own prediction. When the fulfilment follows hard on the prophecy, when not more than half an hour separates them, the prophet ought to be a very happy man. This was Major Kent’s case. He foretold trouble of the most exasperating kind for Dr. O’Grady, and he was immediately justified by the event. Unfortunately he did not expect an immediate fulfilment of his words. Therefore he turned round in his chair and went to sleep again when the doctor left him. If he had been sanguine enough to expect that the doctor would be entangled in embarrassments at once, he would probably have roused himself. He would have followed Dr. O’Grady back to Ballymoy and would have had the satisfaction of gloating over the first of a long series of annoying difficulties. But the Major, though confident that trouble would come, had no hope that it would begin as soon as it did.
Dr. O’Grady was riding back to Ballymoy on his bicycle when he met Mrs. Ford, the wife of the stipendiary magistrate. She was walking briskly along the road which led out of the town. This fact at once aroused a feeling of vague uneasiness in the doctor’s mind. Mrs. Ford was a stout lady of more than fifty years of age. She always wore clothes which seemed, and probably were, much too tight for her. Her husband’s position and income entitled him to keep a pony trap, therefore Mrs. Ford very seldom walked at all. Dr. O’Grady had never before seen her walk quickly. It was plain, too, that on this occasion Mrs. Ford was walking for the mere sake of walking, a most unnatural thing for her to do. The road she was on led nowhere except to Major Kent’s house, several miles away, and it was quite impossible to suppose that she meant to call on him. She had, as Dr. O’Grady knew, quarrelled seriously with Major Kent two days earlier.
Dr. O’Grady, slightly anxious and very curious, got off his bicycle and approached Mrs. Ford on foot. He noticed at once that her face was purple in colour. It was generally red, and the unaccustomed exercise she was taking might account for the darker shade. Dr. O’Grady, arriving within a few yards of her, took off his hat very politely. The purple of Mrs. Ford’s face darkened ominously.
“Nice day,” said Dr. O’Grady. “How’s Mr. Ford?”
Mrs. Ford acknowledged this greeting with a stiff, scarcely perceptible bow. Dr. O’Grady realised at once that she was angry, very seriously angry about something. Under ordinary circumstances Mrs. Ford’s anger would not have caused Dr. O’Grady any uneasiness. She was nearly always angry with someone, and however angry she might be she would be obliged to call on Dr. O’Grady for assistance if either she or her husband fell ill. There was no other doctor in the neighbourhood. The simplest and easiest thing, under the circumstances, would have been to pass on without comment, and to wait patiently until Mrs. Ford either caught influenza or was so deeply offended with someone else as to forget her anger against him. Society in small country towns is held together very largely by the fact that it is highly inconvenient, if not actually impossible, to keep two quarrels burning briskly at the same time. When, a week or two before, Mrs. Ford had been seriously angry with Mrs. Gregg, she confided her grievances to Dr. O’Grady. Now that she was annoyed with him she would be compelled to condone Mrs. Gregg’s offence in order to tell her what Dr. O’Grady had done. In due time, so Dr. O’Grady knew, he would be forgiven in order that he might listen to the story of the quarrel, which by that time she would have picked with Major Kent. Therefore the doctor’s first impulse was to imitate the Levite in the parable, and, having looked at Mrs. Ford with sympathy, to pass by on the other side.
But Dr. O’Grady was engaged in a great enterprise. He did not see how Mrs. Ford’s anger could make or mar the success of the Lord-Lieutenant’s visit to Ballymoy, but he could not afford to take risks. No wise general likes to leave even a small wood on the flank of his line of march without discovering whether there is anything in it or not. Dr. O’Grady determined to find out, if he could, what Mrs. Ford was sulking about.
“I daresay you have heard,” he said, “about the Lord-Lieutenant’s visit to Ballymoy. The date isn’t fixed yet, but——”
Mrs. Ford sniffed and walked on without speaking. Dr. O’Grady was not the kind of man who is easily baffled. He turned round and walked beside her.
“I needn’t tell you,” he said, “that the visit may mean a good deal to Mr. Ford. We’ve all felt for a long time that his services and ability entitle him to some recognition from the Government.”
Mrs. Ford was quite unmollified. She walked on without looking round. She even walked a little quicker than she had been walking before. This was a foolish thing to do. She was a fat and elderly lady. Some of her clothes, if not all of them, were certainly too tight for her. The doctor was young and in good condition. She could not possibly hope to outstrip him in a race.
“My idea is,” said Dr. O’Grady, “that when the Lord-Lieutenant meets Mr. Ford and becomes personally acquainted with him—there’s to be a lunch, you know, in the hotel. A pretty good lunch, the best Doyle can do. Well, I confidently expect that when the Lord-Lieutenant finds out for himself what an able and energetic man Mr. Ford is—— After all, there are much nicer places than Ballymoy, besides all the jobs there are going under the Insurance Act, jolly well paid some of them, and you’d like living in Dublin, wouldn’t you, Mrs. Ford?”
Mrs. Ford stood still suddenly. She was evidently going to say something. Dr. O’Grady waited. He had to wait for some time, because the lady was very-much out of breath. At last she spoke.
“Dr. O’Grady,” she said, “I believe in plain speaking.”
Neither Dr. O’Grady nor anyone else in Ballymoy doubted the truth of this. Nearly everybody had been spoken to plainly by Mrs. Ford at one time or another. Kerrigan, the butcher, was spoken to with uncompromising plainness once a week, on Saturday mornings.
“Quite right,” said Dr. O’Grady, “there’s nothing like it.”
“Then I may as well tell you,” said Mrs. Ford, “that I think it was due to my position—however much you may dislike me personally——”
“I don’t. On the contrary——”
“——Due to my position as the wife of the resident magistrate that I, and not that Mrs. Gregg, should have been invited to present the bouquet to Lady Chesterton.”
Dr. O’Grady gasped. Then he realised that he had made a fearful blunder.
“Half an hour ago,” said Mrs. Ford, “that woman, who isn’t even a lady, bounced into my house, giggling, and told me to my face that you had asked her——”
“Silly little thing, isn’t she?” said Dr. O’Grady. “But of course, you have far too much sense to be annoyed by anything she said.”
“Don’t imagine for a moment,” said Mrs. Ford, “that I am vexed. The slight, although it was evidently intentional, does not affect me in the least. If you knew me a little better than you do, Dr. O’Grady, you would understand that I am not at all the sort of person who cares about presenting bouquets.”
“Of course not,” said Dr. O’Grady. “We quite realised that. We understood that in your position, as wife of the resident magistrate of the district, the presentation of a bouquet would have been infra dig. After all, what’s a bouquet? Poor little Mrs. Gregg! Of course it’s a great promotion for her and she’s naturally a bit above herself. But no one would dream of asking you to present a bouquet. We have far too high a respect for Mr. Ford’s position.”
“I think,” said Mrs. Ford, “that I ought to have been consulted.”
“Didn’t you get my letter?”
“I got no letter whatever. The first news I had of his Excellency’s intention of visiting Ballymoy came to me from that Mrs. Gregg half an hour ago, when she rushed into my drawing-room with her hair tumbling about her ears——”
“That’s the worst of Doyle. He means well, but he’s frightfully careless.”
“What has Mr. Doyle to do with it?”
“I gave him the letter to post. Did you really not get it?”
“I got no letter whatever.”
“I don’t know what you must have thought of us. I don’t know what Mr. Ford must have thought. I don’t know how to apologise. But the first thing we did, the very first——Mrs. Gregg and the bouquet were a mere afterthought, we just tacked her on to the programme so that the poor little woman wouldn’t feel out of it. She is a silly little thing, you know. Not more than a child after all. It was better to humour her.”
“What was in the letter which you say you posted?” said Mrs. Ford.
“I didn’t say I posted it. I said Doyle forgot to. It’s in his pocket at this moment, I expect.”
“What was in it?”
“Can you ask? There is only one thing which could possibly be in it. It expresses the unanimous wish of the committee—the reception committee, you know—Major Kent’s on it—that you should present an illuminated address of welcome to His Excellency.”
“If such a letter were really written——”
“My dear Mrs. Ford! But I don’t ask you to take my word for it. Just walk straight into Ballymoy yourself. I’ll stay here till you come back. Go into the hotel. You’ll find Doyle in his own room drinking whisky and water with Thady Gallagher. Don’t say a word to him. Don’t ask him whether he was given a letter or not. Simply put your hand into his breast pocket and take it out.”
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Ford. “I do not care to have anything to do with Mr. Doyle when he is drunk.”
“He won’t be. Not at this hour. It takes a lot to make Doyle drunk.”
“When the letter arrives, if it ever does, I shall consult Mr. Ford as to what answer I shall give.”
“I can tell you what he’ll say beforehand,” said Dr. O’Grady. “He’ll realise the importance of the illuminated address. He’ll understand that it’s the thing and that the bouquet——”
“Good-bye, Dr. O’Grady,” said Mrs. Ford.
The doctor mounted his bicycle. His face was very nearly as purple as Mrs. Ford’s. He had, with the greatest difficulty survived a crisis. He rode at top speed into Ballymoy, and dismounted, very hot, at the door of the hotel. It was shut. He ran round to the back of the house and entered the yard. Constable Moriarty and Mary Ellen were sitting side by side on the wall of the pig-stye. They were sitting very close together. Moriarty was whistling “Eileen Allan-nah” softly in Mary Ellen’s ear.
“Where’s Mr. Doyle?” said Dr. O’Grady.
“As regards the visit of the Lord-Lieutenant,” said Constable Moriarty rousing himself and moving a little bit away from Mary Ellen, “what I was saying this minute to Mary Ellen was——”
“Where’s Mr. Doyle?” said Dr. O’Grady.
“He’s within,” said Mary Ellen. “Where else would he be?”
“As regards the Lord-Lieutenant,” said Constable Moriarty, “and seeing that Mary Ellen might be a near friend of the gentleman that the statue’s for——”
Dr. O’Grady hurried through the back door. He found Doyle sitting over account books in his private-room. That was his way of spending Sunday afternoon.
“A sheet of notepaper,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Quick now, Doyle. I have my fountain pen, so don’t bother about ink.”
“Where’s the hurry?” said Doyle.
“There’s every hurry.”
He wrote rapidly, folded the letter, addressed it to Mrs. Ford, and handed it to Doyle.
“Put that in your trousers’ pocket,” he said, “and roll it round a few times. I want it to look as if it had been there for two or three days.”
“What’s the meaning of this at all?” said Doyle.
“Now get your hat. Go off as fast as you can pelt to Mr. Ford’s house. Give that letter to the servant and tell her that you only found out this afternoon that you’d forgotten to post it.”
“Will you tell me——?”
“I’ll tell you nothing till you’re back. Go on now, Doyle. Go at once. If you hurry you’ll get to the house before she does. She was two miles out of the town when I left her and too exhausted to walk fast. But if you do meet her remember that you haven’t seen me since yesterday. Have you got that clear in your head? Very well. Off with you. And, I say, I expect the letter will be looking all right when you take it out again, but if it isn’t just rub it up and down the front of your trousers for a while. I want it to be brownish and a good deal crumpled. It won’t do any harm if you blow a few puffs of tobacco over it.”
CHAPTER IX
An hour later Doyle entered the doctor’s consulting room.
“I have it done,” he said. “I done what you bid me; but devil such a job ever I had as what it was.” Doyle had evidently suffered from some strong emotion, anger perhaps, or terror. He felt in his pocket as he spoke, and, finding that he had no handkerchief, he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He looked at his hand afterwards and sighed. The hairs on the back of it were pasted down with sweat “Have you such a thing as a drop of anything to drink in the house?”
“I have not,” said Dr. O’Grady, “how could I? Do you think I’ve lost all my self-respect? Is it likely I’d order another bottle of whisky out of your shop when you’re dunning me every day of my life for the price of the last I got? Tell me what happened about the letter?”
Doyle passed a parched tongue across his lips. The inside of his mouth was quite dry. Extreme nervous excitement often produces this effect.
“If it was even a cup of tea,” he said, “it would be better than nothing. I’ve a terrible thirst on me.”
“Sorry,” said Dr. O’Grady, “but I’ve no tea either. Not a grain in the house since last Friday. I hope this will be a lesson to you, Doyle, and will teach you not to ballyrag your customers in future. But I don’t want to rub it in. Get on with your story.”
“It could be,” said Doyle, “that there’d be water in your pump. I’m not sure will I be able to speak much without I drink something.”
“The pump’s all right,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Just sit where you are for a moment and I’ll fetch you some water. It may give you typhoid. I wouldn’t drink it myself without boiling it, but that’s your look out.”
He left the moor and returned a few minutes later with a large tumbler of cold water. Doyle looked at it mournfully. He knew perfectly well that the doctor had both whisky and tea in the house, but he recognised the impossibility of getting either the one or the other. He raised the glass to his mouth.
“Glory be to God,” he said, “but it’s the first time I’ve wetted my lips with the same this twenty years!”
“It will do you a lot of good if it doesn’t give you typhoid,” said Dr. O’Grady. “How did you get so frightfully thirsty?”
The question was natural. Doyle drank the whole tumbler of water at a draught. There was no doubt that he had been very thirsty.
“Will you tell me now,” he said, “what had that one in the temper she was in?”
“Mrs. Ford,” said Dr. O’Grady, “was annoyed because she thought she wasn’t going to be given a chance of making herself agreeable to the Lord-Lieutenant.”
“If she speaks to the Lord-Lieutenant,” said Doyle, “after the fashion she was speaking to me, it’s likely that she’ll not get the chance of making herself agreeable to him a second time. Devil such a temper I ever saw any woman in, and I’ve seen some in my day.”
“I know she’d be a bit savage. I hoped you wouldn’t have met her.”
“I did meet her. Wasn’t she turning in at the gate at the same time that I was myself? ‘There’s a letter here, ma’am,’ says I, ‘that the doctor told me I was to give to you,’ ‘I suppose it was half an hour ago,’ said she, ‘that he told you that,’ Well, I pulled the letter out of my pocket, and I gave it a rub along the side of my pants the same as you told me. ‘I suppose you’re doing that,’ said she, ‘to put some dirt on it, to make it look,’ said she, ‘as if it had been in your pocket a week.’”
“You wouldn’t think to look at her that she was so cute,” said Dr. O’Grady. “What did you say?”
“I said nothing either good or bad,” said Doyle, “only that it was to get the dirt off the letter, and not to be putting it on that I was giving it a bit of a rub. Well, she took the letter and she opened it. Then she looked me straight in the face. ‘When did you get this letter from the doctor?’ says she. So I told her it was last Friday you give it to me, and that I hadn’t seen you since, and didn’t care a great deal if I never seen you again. ‘You impudent blackguard,’ says she, ‘the letter’s not an hour written. The ink’s not more than just dry on it yet,’ ‘I’m surprised,’ said I, ‘that it’s that much itself. It’s dripping wet I’d expect it to be with the sweat I’m in this minute on account of the way I’ve run to give it to you.’”
“Good,” said Dr. O’Grady. “If there was a drop of whisky in the house I’d give it to you. I’ll look in a minute. There might be some left in the bottom of the bottle. A man who can tell a lie like that on the spur of the moment——”
“It was true enough about the sweat,” said Doyle. “You could have wrung my shirt into a bucket, though it wasn’t running did it, for I didn’t run. It was the way she was looking at me. I’m not overly fond of Mr. Ford, and never was; but I don’t know did ever I feel as sorry for any man as I did for him when she was looking at me.”
The doctor rose and took a bottle of whisky from the cupboard in the corner of the room. There was enough in it to give Doyle a satisfactory drink and still to leave some for the doctor himself. He got another tumbler and two bottles of soda water.
“You needn’t be opening one of them for me,” said Doyle, “I have as much water drunk already as would drown all the whisky you have in the bottle. What I take now I’ll take plain.”
“She may be a bit sceptical about the letter,” said Dr. O’Grady, “but I expect when she’s talked it over with Ford she’ll see the sense of presenting the illuminated address.”
“Is it that one present the address? Believe you me, doctor, if she does the Lord-Lieutenant won’t be inclined for giving us the pier. The look of her would turn a barrel of porter sour.”
“She’ll look quite different,” said Dr. O’Grady, “when the time comes. After all, Ford has to make the best of his opportunities like the rest of us. He can’t afford to allow his wife to scowl at the Lord-Lieutenant.”
“Was there no one else about the place, only her?” said Doyle.
“There were others, of course; but—the fact is, Doyle, if we got her back up at the start her husband would have written letters to Dublin Castle crabbing the whole show. Those fellows up there place extraordinary confidence in resident magistrates. They’d have been much more inclined to believe him than either you or me. If Ford was to set to work to spoil our show we’d probably not have got the Lord-Lieutenant down here at all. That’s why I was so keen on your getting the letter to her at once, and leaving her under the impression that you’d had it in your pocket for two days.”
“Devil the sign of believing any such thing there was about her when I left.”
“She may come to believe it later on,” said Dr. O’Grady, “when she and Ford have had time to talk the whole thing over together.”
The doctor’s servant came into the room while he spoke.
“Constable Moriarty is outside at the door,” she said, “and he’s wishing to speak with you. There’s a young woman along with him.”
“Mary Ellen, I expect,” said Dr. O’Grady.
“He’s upset in his mind about that same Mary Ellen,” said Doyle, “ever since he heard she was the niece of the General. It’s day and night he’s round the hotel whistling all sorts and——”
“You told me all about that before,” said Dr. O’Grady. “Bring him in, Bridgy, bring in the pair of them, and let’s hear what it is they want.”
Constable Moriarty entered the room, followed at a little distance by Mary Ellen. He led her forward, and set her in front of Dr. O’Grady. He looked very much as Touchstone must have looked when he presented the rustic Audrey to the exiled Duke as “a poor virgin, sir, an ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own.”
“If you want a marriage license,” said Dr. O’Grady, “you’ve come to the wrong man. Go up to Father McCormack.”
“I do not want a marriage license,” said Constable Moriarty, “for I’m not long enough in the force to get leave to marry. And to do it without leave is what I wouldn’t care to risk.”
“If you don’t want to marry her,” said Doyle, “I’d be glad if you’d let her alone the way she’d be able to do her work. It’s upsetting her mind you are with the way you’re going on.”
“Is it true what they tell me,” said Moriarty, “that the Lord-Lieutenant’s coming to the town?”
“I think we may say it is true,” said Dr. O’Grady.
“To open the statue you’re putting up to the General?”
“‘Open’ isn’t the word used about statues,” said Dr. O’Grady, “but you’ve got the general idea right enough.”
“What I was saying to Mary Ellen,” said Moriarty, “is that seeing as she’s the niece of the General——”
“She’s no such thing,” said Doyle, “and well you know it.”
“The doctor has it put out about her that she is,” said Moriarty, “and Mary Ellen’s well enough content. Aren’t you, Mary Ellen?”
“I am surely,” said Mary Ellen. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Look here, Moriarty,” said Dr. O’Grady, “if you’ve got any idea into your head that there’s a fortune either large or small coming to Mary Ellen out of this business you’re making a big mistake.”
“I wasn’t thinking any such thing,” said Moriarty. “Don’t I know well enough it’s only talk?”
“It will be as much as we can possibly do,” said Dr. O’Grady, “to pay for the statue and the incidental expenses. Pensioning off Mary Ellen afterwards is simply out of the question.”
“Let alone that she doesn’t deserve a pension,” said Doyle, “and wouldn’t get one if we were wading up to our knees in sovereigns.”
“So you may put it out of your head that Mary Ellen will make a penny by it,” said Dr. O’Grady.
“It wasn’t that I was thinking of at all,” said Moriarty, “for I know you couldn’t do it. My notion—what I was saying to Mary Ellen a minute ago—is that if the Lord-Lieutenant was to be told—at the time that he’d be looking at the statue—whenever that might be—that Mary Ellen was the niece of the General——”
“If you’re planning out a regular court presentation for Mary Ellen,” said Dr. O’Grady, “the thing can’t be done. No one here is in a position to present anyone else because we have none of us been presented ourselves. Besides, it wouldn’t be the least use to her if she was presented. The Lord-Lieutenant wouldn’t take her on as an upper housemaid or anything of that sort merely because she’d been presented to him as General John Regan’s niece.”
“It wasn’t a situation for Mary Ellen I was thinking of,” said Moriarty.
“In the name of God,” said Doyle, “will you tell us what it is you have in your mind?”
“What I was thinking,” said Moriarty, “was that if the matter was represented to the Lord-Lieutenant in a proper manner—-about Mary Ellen being the General’s niece and all to that—he might, maybe, see his way to making me a sergeant. It was that I was saying to you, Mary Ellen, wasn’t it, now?”
“It was,” said Mary Ellen.
“The idea of trotting out Mary Ellen on the occasion isn’t at all a bad one,” said Dr. O’Grady. “I’ll see what can be done about it.”
“I’m obliged to you,” said Moriarty.
“But I don’t promise that you’ll be made a sergeant, mind that now.”
“Sure I know you couldn’t promise that,” said Moriarty. “But you’ll do the best you can. Come along now, Mary Ellen. It’s pretty near time for me to be going on patrol, and the sergeant will check me if I’m late.”
“There’s something in that idea of Moriarty’s,” said Dr. O’Grady, when he and Doyle were alone again.
“I don’t see what good will come of it,” said Doyle, “and I’m doubting whether Thady Gallagher will be pleased. Mary Ellen’s mother was a cousin of his own.”
“She’s a good-looking girl,” said Dr. O’Grady. “If we had her cleaned up a bit and a nice dress put on her she’d look rather well standing at the foot of the statue. I expect the Lord-Lieutenant would be pleased to see her.”
“And who’d be getting the lunch for the Lord-Lieutenant,” said Doyle, “when Mary Ellen would be playing herself?”
“We’ll get someone to manage the lunch all right. The great thing for us is to be sure of making a good general impression on the Lord-Lieutenant, and I think Mary Ellen would help. I daresay you’ve never noticed it, Doyle—it would be hard for you when she will not wash her face—but she really is a good-looking girl. The Lord-Lieutenant will want something of the sort to look at after he’s faced Mrs. Ford and her illuminated address. She’s not exactly—-”
“The man that would run away with that one,” said Doyle vindictively, “would do it in the dark if he did it at all.”
“Besides,” said Dr. O’Grady, “we ought to think of poor little Mary Ellen herself. It’ll be a great day for her, and she’ll enjoy having a new dress.”
“Who’s to pay for the dress?” said Doyle.
“The dress will be paid for out of the general funds. I’ll ask Mrs. Gregg to see about having it made. She has remarkably good taste. I’ll tell her not to get anything very expensive, so you need not worry about that. And now, Doyle, unless there’s anything else you want to settle with me at once, I think I’ll write our invitation to the Lord-Lieutenant.”
“It would be well if you did,” said Doyle, “so as we’d know whether he’s coming or not.”
“Oh, he’ll come. If he boggles at it at all I’ll go up to Dublin and see him myself. A short verbal explanation—— We’ll let him choose his own date.”
Doyle lit his pipe and walked back to the hotel. He found Thady Gallagher waiting for him in his private room.
“What’s this I’m after hearing,” said Gallagher, “about the Lord-Lieutenant?”
“He’s coming down here,” said Doyle, “to open the new statue.”
He spoke firmly, for he detected a note of displeasure in the tone in which Thady Gallagher asked this question.
“I don’t know,” said Gallagher, “would I be altogether in favour of that.”
“And why not? Mustn’t there be someone to open it? And mightn’t it as well be him as another?”
“It might not as well be him.”
“Speak out, Thady, what have you against the man?”
“I’m a good Nationalist,” said Gallagher, “and I always was, and my father before me was the same.”
“I’m that myself,” said Doyle.
“And I’m opposed to flunkeyism, whether it’s the flunkeyism of the rent office or———”
“Well and if you are, isn’t it the same with all of us?”
“What I say is this,” said Gallagher, “as long as the people of Ireland is denied the inalienable right of managing their own affairs I’d be opposed to welcoming into our midst the emissaries of Dublin Castle, and I’d like to know, so I would, what the people of this locality will be saying to the man that’s false to his principles and goes back on the dearest aspirations of our hearts?”
He glared quite fiercely while he spoke, but Doyle remained serenely unimpressed.
“Talk sense now, Thady,” he said. “Nobody’ll say a word without it’d be yourself and you making a speech at the time. It’s for the good of the town that we’re getting him down here.”
“What good?” said Gallagher, “tell me that now. What good will come of the like?”
Doyle was unwilling to confide the whole pier scheme to Gallagher. He contented himself with a vague reply.
“There’s many a thing,” he said, “that would be for the good of the town that might be got if it was represented properly to the Lord-Lieutenant.”
“If I thought that,” said Gallagher, “I might——”
He was in a difficult position. He did not want to quarrel with Doyle, who provided him with a good deal of bottled porter, but he did not want to identify himself with a public welcome to the Lord-Lieutenant, because he had hopes of becoming a Member of Parliament. The idea of conferring a benefit on the town attracted him as offering a way out of his difficulty.
“I might———” he repeated slowly. “I wouldn’t say but it’s possible that I might.”
“And you will,” said Doyle soothingly, “you will.”
“I’ll not be a party to any address of welcome from the Urban District Council,” said Gallagher.
“We wouldn’t ask it of you. Doesn’t everybody know that you wouldn’t consent to it?”
“It’s the Major put you up to it,” said Gallagher.
“It was not then.”
“If it wasn’t him it was Mr. Ford, the R.M.”
“If you’d seen Mrs. Ford when she heard of it,” said Doyle, “you wouldn’t be saying that. Tell me this now, Thady. Have you your speech ready for the meeting on Tuesday? Everybody’s saying you’ll be making a grand one.”
“I haven’t it what you’d call rightly ready,” said Gallagher, “but I have it so as it will be ready when the time comes.”
“It’s you the people will be wanting to hear,” said Doyle. “It’s you they’d rather be listening to than any other one even if he was a member of Parliament: It’s my opinion, Thady, and there’s more than me that says it—it’s my opinion there’s better men that isn’t in Parliament than some that is. I’ll say no more presently; but some day I’ll be doing more than say it.”
CHAPTER X
The public meeting was a very great success, in spite of the absence of the Members of Parliament, who certainly gave poor value for their salaries. The town band, headed by young Kerrigan, who played the cornet, paraded the streets for half-an-hour before the meeting. It played “The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond” three times over, “The Boys of Wexford” twice, and “God Save Ireland” four times. This served to remind the people that something of an interesting and patriotic kind was going to happen. A band is much more effective in attracting public attention than a town crier, and it ought, one may suppose, to arrange a kind of code of tunes by means of which people would be able to tell at once without verbal inquiry what sort of event was intended. For an auction of household furniture, for instance, a thing which takes place when a family leaves the locality, the band might play “The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Halls.” Everybody would recognise the appropriateness of the words about the banquet hall deserted, and the departure of the people who had used it. For the other kind of auction, that at which the cows of men who refuse to pay their rents are sold, “God Save Ireland,” would be suitable, and anyone who heard it would know that though he might attend the auction he had better not bid. An ingenious musician would have no difficulty in finding tunes which would suggest the presentation of illuminated addresses to curates or bank managers. Meetings convened for the purpose of expressing confidence in the Members of Parliament, of either the Nationalist or the Unionist parties, would naturally be announced by a performance of Handel’s fine song “Angels ever Bright and Fair.” There might be a difficulty about unusual events like the erection of statues, but a tune might be kept for them which would at all events warn people not to expect an auction, a presentation or a political meeting.
Nearly half the people who were doing business in the fair assembled at three o’clock in the square outside Doyle’s hotel. According to the estimate printed afterwards in the Connacht Eagle there were more than two thousand persons present. Of these at least twenty listened to all the speeches that were made. The number of those who heard parts of some of the speeches was much larger, amounting probably to sixty, for there was a good deal of coming and going, of moving in and out of the group round the speakers. The rest of the audience stood about in various parts of the square. Men talked to each other on the interesting questions of the price of cattle and the prospects of a change in the weather. Women stood together with parcels in their hands and looked at each other without talking at all. But everyone was so far interested in the speeches as to join in the cheers when anything which ought to be cheered was said. The twenty stalwart listeners who stood out all the speeches attended to what was said and started the cheers at the proper moments. The stragglers who, hearing only a sentence or two now and then, were liable to miss points, took up the cheers which were started. The mass of the men, those who were talking about cattle, very courteously stopped their conversations and joined in whenever they heard a cheer beginning. There was, so Gallagher said in the next issue of the Connacht Eagle, an unmistakable and most impressive popular enthusiasm for General John Regan.
Father McCormack, standing on a chair borrowed from Doyle’s Hotel, opened the proceedings. He said that Ireland had always been famed for its hospitality to strangers and its courtesy to women. He hoped that it always would be. Looking round on the faces of the men gathered in front of him, he felt quite certain that it always would be. Mr. Billing, who was to address the meeting that day, was a stranger, a very distinguished stranger, one whose name was a household word wherever the deeds of General John Regan were remembered, one whose name would be still better known when his forthcoming life of the General appeared. He was proud and pleased to extend to Mr. Billing on behalf of the audience a hearty Caed Mille Failthe. He hoped that Mr. Billing would carry back with him a pleasant recollection of Irish hospitality when he returned to—
Here Father McCormack hesitated and looked round. Dr. O’Grady, who was standing behind him whispered the word “Bolivia.” Father McCormack repeated the word “Bolivia” aloud and everybody cheered. Father McCormack moistened his lips and went on to say that Mr. Billing was not a woman, but Irish courtesy, though always extended to women, was not confined to women. In the name of the audience he promised Mr. Billing some Irish courtesy.
A further reference to Mr. Billing’s literary work gave Father McCormack an opportunity of warning his audience against Sunday newspapers published in England, which, he said, reeked of the gutter and were horribly subversive of faith and morals. Ireland, he added, had newspapers of her own which no one need be ashamed or afraid to read. As an evidence of the confidence he felt in the elevating character of Irish newspapers he called upon Mr. Thaddeus Gallagher, the distinguished editor of the Connacht Eagle, to address the meeting. Then with the assistance of Dr. O’Grady, he stepped off the chair. Having reached the ground safely he sat down on the chair. He had a perfect right to do this because he was chairman of the meeting; but a slight delay followed. Another chair had to be brought from the hotel for Gallagher to stand on.
Gallagher’s speech was an eloquent paraphrase of the leading article which Dr. O’Grady had written for him the previous week. Once or twice he broke away from his original and said some very good things about the land question and Home Rule. But he always got back to Emmet, O’Connell, or one of the other patriots mentioned by Dr. O’Grady. Now and then, in a very loud tone, he said the name of General John Regan. Whenever he did so the audience was greatly pleased. He ended by announcing the names of the gentlemen who were to form “The Statue Committee.” Father McCormack came first on the list. Mr. Billing was second. Major Kent, Dr. O’Grady, Doyle and Gallagher himself made up the number. He said that it was unnecessary for him to say anything about the fitness of these gentlemen for the high and responsible position to which they were being elected by the unanimous voice of their fellow countrymen.
Gallagher descended from his perch, but he was not allowed to sit down. He wanted to, because sitting down is a far more dignified way of ending a speech than slouching into the background. It was Doyle who interfered with him.
“Get up out of that, Thady,” he said. “Don’t you know the chair’s wanted for the American gentleman? How is he to make a speech if you don’t give him something to stand on?”
Gallagher, who had not actually succeeded in sitting down, left his chair with a protest.
“It would suit you better to be getting another chair,” he said.
“It would not,” said Doyle. “Would you have all the chairs that’s in it brought out to the street?”
Mr. Billing stood up and smiled pleasantly. Father McCormack’s exhortation had its effect. More than forty people gathered to hear what the stranger had to say. This was courtesy. The hospitality, it was presumed, had already been shown by Doyle. Gallagher, who still had hopes of finding out something about General John Regan, and Dr. O’Grady, who was equally anxious to hear the speech, leaned forward eagerly. Father McCormack crossed his legs and settled himself as comfortably as possible in his chair.
Mr. Billing proved a disappointment as a speaker. The substance of what he said was quite admirable, but he only spoke for five minutes. Now an audience, even if it is not listening and does not want to listen, is apt to complain that it is treated with a want of respect if a speaker gives it no more than five minutes.
“I reckon,” said Mr. Billing, “that what’s required of me is not oratory but dollars.”
This was true but nude. In Ireland we have a sure instinct in such matters, and we know that the nude is never decent. We like everything, especially Truth, to have clothes on.
“Five hundred dollars is the amount that I’m prepared to hand over to your treasurer. As I understand, gentlemen, your doctor has secured the services of the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland to unveil the statue. We don’t figure much on fancy titles on our side, but I guess it’s different here, and your doctor is a smart man. I may not see that Lord-Lieutenant, gentlemen, and I may not see the statue. I shall be researching in the principal libraries of the continent of Europe for documents bearing on the life of the great general. Whether I am here or not will depend on the date which that Lord-Lieutenant and your doctor fix up between them. But I’ll be along for the occasion if I can.”
The first sentence of Mr. Billing’s speech was indecently nude. The remainder of it was offensively bald. There was once an elderly and cantankerous farm labourer who complained that he could not hear the curate when he preached. He was on the next occasion set in the forefront of the congregation and the curate spoke directly into his ear. The old man was unable to say that he did not hear, but he maintained an aggrieved attitude. “I heard him,” he complained afterwards, “but what good was it to me? What I want is to have the Gospel druv well home to my soul.” The feeling of most audiences is very much the same as his was. Unadorned statements of fact, or what is meant to be taken as fact, do not satisfy them. They like to have something, fact or fiction, driven thunderously home into their souls. The only one of Mr. Billing’s hearers who was thoroughly well satisfied with his speech was Doyle. The statement that five hundred dollars were to be handed over to him was, in his judgment, of more value than many resonant periods.
But the Irish courtesy, praised by Father McCor-mack, prevailed against the general feeling of disappointment. When Mr. Billing ceased speaking there was a moment of doubtful silence. No one quite realised that he had really stopped. He had indeed descended from his chair, and, except for the top of his head, was invisible to most of the audience. But everyone expected him to get up again and start fresh. It seemed quite incredible that a public speaker, with an audience ready found for him, could possibly throw away a valuable opportunity and content himself with a simple five minutes of plain talk. It was not until Father McCormack rose from his chair with a sigh and began to make his way towards his presbytery that the people understood that the meeting was really at an end. Then they cheered quite heartily. Mr. Billing crossed the square and walked over towards the hotel. He smiled and nodded right and left as he went. An outburst of cheering pursued him through the door.
Sergeant Colgan and Constable Moriarty had stood during the speeches in a quiet corner near their barrack. When Father McCormack went home and Mr. Billing entered the hotel, they marched with great dignity up and down through the people. They looked as if they expected someone to start a riot It is the duty of the police in Ireland on all occasions of public meetings to look as if there might be a riot, and as if they are quite prepared to quell it when it breaks out. It is in this way that they justify their existence as a large armed force.
Occasionally Sergeant Colgan spoke a word of kindly advice to anyone who looked as if he had drunk more than two bottles of porter.
“It would be as well for you, Patsy,” he would say, “to be getting along home.”
Or, “I’m thinking, Timothy John, that you’d be better this minute if you were at home.”
There are no stronger believers in the value of the domestic hearth than the police. They always want everyone to go home.
No one, least of all the individuals who received the advice personally, was inclined to leave the square. The meeting might be over, but there was still hope that young Kerrigan would muster the town band again and play “The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond” once or twice more. He did not do so, but the waiting people were rewarded for their patience by two events of some interest. Mr. Gregg came out of the barrack and crossed the square rapidly. He caught Dr. O’Grady and Major Kent just as they were turning to follow Mr. Billing into the hotel. Mr. Gregg was in uniform, and the determined way in which he took Dr. O’Grady by the arm would have made most people uncomfortable. It is not pleasant, even if your conscience is quite clear, to be grabbed suddenly by a police officer in the middle of the street. But Dr. O’Grady did not seem to mind. He went, though not very willingly, with Mr. Gregg into the police barrack. Major Kent followed them. Several men, perhaps a dozen, drifted across the square towards the barrack door. They had some hope of finding out what Mr. Gregg wanted with the doctor. They were not, however, given the opportunity of peering through the barrack windows. Sergeant Colgan saw them in good time and dispersed them at once.
“Get along home now out of that,” he said, “every one of yez.”
Then another event of great interest occurred. Mr. Billing backed his large motor-car along the lane which led from Doyle’s back yard, and emerged into the square. There the car growled angrily while he shifted the levers and twisted the steering wheel. The people scattered this way and that while the machine, darting backwards and forwards, was gradually turned round. A splendid burst of cheering pursued him when he finally sped down the street and disappeared. It was understood by those who heard his speech that he had gone off at more than twenty miles an hour to ransack the great European libraries for information about General John Regan. Everyone felt that the splendid eagerness of his departure reflected a glory on Ballymoy.
Mr. Gregg led Dr. O’Grady and Major Kent into his office. He shut the door, offered his two guests chairs, and then lit a cigarette.
“It’s rather an awkward business,” he said, “and perhaps I oughtn’t to say anything about it.”
“If it hasn’t anything to do with me personally,” said the Major, “I think I’ll leave you and the doctor to settle it together. I want to get home as soon as I can.”
“Well, it does affect you more or less,” said Mr. Gregg. “But of course you’ll regard anything I say to you now as strictly confidential.”
“Out with it, Gregg,” said Dr. O’Grady. “I know by the look in your eye that you can’t possibly keep it to yourself, whatever it is. You’re simply bursting to tell it, whatever it is, whether we promise to keep it secret or not.”
“All the same,” said Gregg, “it wouldn’t suit my book to have it generally known that I told you. It wouldn’t suit at all. That fellow Ford is a vindictive sort of beast.”
“Oh, it’s Ford, is it?” said Dr. O’Grady. “I was afraid he might turn nasty. What an ass he is! Why can’t he see that we’re giving him the chance of his life?”
“He’s doing his best to put a spoke in your wheel, O’Grady.”
“Has he got anything against the statue?”
“Not exactly the statue.”
“Or found out anything discreditable about the General?”
The doctor asked this question a little anxiously.
“No,” said Gregg, “I don’t think he knows a thing about the General. He asked me this morning who he was.”