CHAPTER XXVII
VARIOUS OPINIONS
While I have been writing this book the difficulty of deciding between the things that interested Martin and me, and those that might presumably interest other people, has been ever before me. In the path of this chapter there is another and still more formidable lion, accompanied—as a schoolchild said—by “his even fiercer wife, the Tiger.” By which I wish to indicate Irish politics, and Woman’s Suffrage. I will take the Tiger first, and will dispose of it as briefly as may be.
Martin and I, like our mothers before us, were, are, and always will be, Suffragists, whole-hearted, unshakable, and the longer we have lived the more unalterable have been our convictions. Some years ago we were honoured by being asked to join the Women’s Council of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association; she was a Vice-President of the Munster Women’s Franchise League, and I have the honour of being its President. Since speech-making, even in its least ceremonial and most confidential form, was to her, and is to me, no less appalling than would be “forcible feeding,” we can at least claim that our constitutional wing of the Movement has not been without its martyrs. The last piece of writing together that Martin and I undertook was a pamphlet, written at the request of the C.U.W.F.A., entitled “With Thanks for Kind Enquiries.” It set forth to the best of our power the splendid activities of the various suffrage societies after the Great War broke out, and it pleases me to think that our work together was closed and sealed with this expression of the faith that was and is in us.
This conscientiously and considerately condensed statement will, I trust, sufficiently dispose of the Tiger. But who could hope in half a dozen lines, or in as many volumes, to state their views about Ireland? No one, I fear, save one of those intrepid beings, wondrous in their self-confidence(not to say presumption), who lightly come to Ireland for three weeks, with what they call “an open mind,” which is an endowment that might be more accurately described as an open mouth, and an indiscriminate swallow. Some such have come our way, occasionally, English people whose honesty and innocence would be endearing, if they were a little less overlaid by condescension. It may be enlightening if I mention one such, who told us that he had had “such a nice car-driver.” “He opened his whole heart to me,” said the guileless explorer; “he told me that he and his wife and children had practically nothing to live on but the tips he got from the people he drove about!”
It was unfortunate that I had seen this heart-opening and heart-rending car-driver, and chanced to be aware that he was unmarried and in steady employment.
In my experience, Irish people, of all classes, are, as a rule, immaculately honest and honourable where money is concerned. I have often been struck by the sanctity with which money is regarded, by which I mean the money of an employer. It is a striking and entirely characteristic feature, and is in no class more invariable than in the poorest. But, to return to the car-driver, when a large, kind fish opens his mouth to receive a fly, and one sees within it a waiting coin, it is hardly to be expected that St. Peter’s example will not be followed.
As a matter of fact, the Irish man or woman does not open his or her “whole heart” to strangers. Hardly do we open them to each other. We are, unlike the English, a silent people about the things that affect us most deeply; which is, perhaps, the reason that we are, on the whole, considered to be good company. It is in keeping with the contradictiousness of Ireland that the most inherently romantic race in the British Isles is the least sentimental, the most conversational people, the most reserved, and also that Irish people, without distinction of sex or class, are pessimists about their future and that of their country. Light-hearted, humorous, cheerful on the whole, and quite confident that nothing will ever succeed.
Personally, I have a belief, unreasoning perhaps, but invincible, in the future of Ireland, which is not founded on a three weeks’ study of her potentialities. No one can “run a place,” or work a farm, or keep a pack of hounds, without learning something of those who are necessary to either of these processes. I have done these things for a good many years; the place may have walked more often than it ran, and the farm manager may have made more mistakes than money, and the M.F.H. probably owes it to her sex that she was spared some of the drawbacks that attend her office; but she has learnt some things in the course of the years, and one of them is that in sympathetic and intelligent service a good Irish servant has no equal, and another, that if you give an Irishman your trust he will very seldom betray it.
Not often does the personal appeal fail. Not in the country I know best, at any rate, nor in Martin’s. I have heard of a case in point. A property, it matters not where, west or south, was being sold to the tenants, “under the Act,” i.e. Mr. Gerald Balfour’s Land Purchase Act, that instrument of conciliation that has emulated the millennium in protecting the cockatrice from the weaned child, and has brought peace and ensued it. I remember the regret with which a woman said that she “heard that Mr. Balfour was giving up his reins”; a phrase that has something of almost Scriptural self-abnegation about it. On this property, all had been happily settled between landlord and tenants, when a sudden hitch developed itself; a hitch essentially Irish, in that it was based upon pride, and was nourished by and rooted in a family feud. A small hill of rock, with occasional thin smears of grass, divided two of the farms. It was rated at 9d. a year. Each of the adjoining tenants claimed it as appertaining to his holding. The wife of one had always fed geese on it, the mother of the other was in the habit of “throwing tubs o’ clothes on it to blaych.” A partition was suggested by the agent, and was rejected with equal contempt by James on the one hand, and Jeremiah on the other. The priest attempted arbitration; an impartial neighbour did the same; finally the landlord, home on short leave from his ship, joined with the other conciliators, and a step or two towards a settlement was taken, but there remained about fifty yards of rock that neither combatant would yield. The sale of the estate was arrested, the consequent abatement of all rents could not come into operation, and for their oaths’ sake, and the fractional value of fourpence-halfpenny, James and Jeremiah continued to sulk in their tents. At this juncture, and for the first time, the landlord’s sister, who may, non-committally, be called Lady Mary, seems to have come into the story. She interviewed James, and she held what is known as “a heart-to-heart” with Jeremiah. She even brought the latter to the point of conceding twenty yards; the former had already as good as promised that he would yield fifteen. There remained therefore fifteen yards, an irreducible minimum. Lady Mary, however, remained calm. She placed a combatant each on his ultimate point of concession. Then, in, so she has told me, an awful silence, she paced the fifteen yards. At seven yards and a carefully measured half, she, not without difficulty, drove her walking-stick into a crevice of the rock. Still in silence, and narrowly observed by the disputants, she collected a few stones, and, like a Hebrew patriarch, she built, round the walking-stick, a small altar. Then she stood erect, and looking solemnly upon James and Jeremiah,