"Oh, great and merciful Lord God!" said Mrs. Twomey. She said it without either irreverence or reverence. She merely wished to express to John Brien her comprehension of the importance of his statement.
Larry had flung himself into electioneering as an alternative to drink. That was how he put it to himself. He took rooms at Hallinan's Hotel, in Cluhir, in order to be on top of the railway station, and the situation generally, and he had, moreover, a standing invitation to No. 6, The Mall, for any meal, at any hour of the day or night, that he found suitable. The district to be canvassed was a wide one, and day after day Larry and the faithful Barty went forth to interview "People of importance"; darkly-cautious publicans, with wives lurking at hand to make sure that "Himself" should do nothing rash; uninterested farmers, who "had their land bought," and were left cold by the differences 'twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee; and visits to "The Clergy" of all denominations, productive of much artificially friendly converse and no very definite promises.
Of Larry's own Communion, Father Tim Sweeny alone announced himself, unhesitatingly, as being of Larry's camp. Father Tim's hostility had not been proof against Larry's charms, more especially since these were combined with a substantial proof of the young candidate's interest in the decoration of the new chapel; and, at the gate of that chapel, (the site of which he did not forget that he owed to Larry) he attended one of Larry's meetings, and shook his bovine head at his flock, and bellowed ferocious commendation of the young man, who, he thundered, had not failed in his duty by the Church and the people. There was a downright, fighting quality in Father Sweeny that was large and stimulating. Larry felt that he had, at least, his own parish firmly at his back, and wished that he had a few more such as Father Tim to stand by him.
The Rev. Matthew Cotton (stiffened by Mrs. Cotton) said that to enter a hustings for a Home Ruler, of any variety, would be for him an unauthorised bowing down in the House of Rimmon, a simile that conveyed little to Larry, and nothing at all, allegorically, to his agent, Barty Mangan, though its practical interpretation presented no difficulties to either of them.
The Reverend Mr. Armstrong, Pastor of the Methodists, admitted to a preference for an "All-for-Irelander," as opposed to an Official Nationalist; but evaded the responsibility of a promise by saying that he would lay the matter before the Lord, and would write later.
Neither did young Mr. Coppinger receive much encouragement from his own class. Bill Kirby, indeed, undertook to support him and even volunteered to go round with him on his canvassing expeditions, but this was considered by Larry's Committee as being of questionable advantage, even, possibly, affording to the enemy an occasion to blaspheme, and the offer (made, it may be said, at Judith's instigation) was declined.
Nor, as a matter of fact, was Larry himself disposed to take Bill Kirby's proffered hand. He told himself that he was done with that lot. He was bitterly angry with Christian. He said to himself that he would never forgive her; would never, if he could help it, see one of them again. At a word from her father she had chucked him; without a moment of hesitation, without a word to show that she was even sorry for her father's treatment of him. "Apparently it's the only thing to do!" she had said. That was all she thought of keeping a promise! What about leaving father and mother and sticking to your husband, he would like to know! These Protestants who talked such a lot about reading the Bible! It was quite true what old Mangan had said: "When all comes to all, a man must stick to his own Church!" All these others, these St. Georges, and Westropps, and old Ardmore, and the rest of them, had only been waiting to jump on him as soon as he put a foot out of the rut they all walked in. They had waited for the chance to make him a pariah. Now they had it. All right! He could face that. They should soon see how little he thought of them!
He pitched himself headlong into the contest. The weather had fallen from grace. October, having been borne in on the wings of a gale, was storming on through wind and wet, and the game of canvassing, that had seemed, on that sunny day when he had written to Christian, so "frightfully interesting," was beginning to pall. Boring as were the personal interviews, and exhausting the evening oratory in town halls and school-houses, the Sunday meetings at the gates of the chapels were still more arduous. On each Sunday, during the period between the death of Daniel Prendergast and the election of his successor, did young Mr. Coppinger, with chosen members of his "Commy-tee"—he had learnt to accept the inflexible local pronunciation—splash from chapel to chapel, to meet the congregations, and to shout platitudes to them. Larry began to feel that no conviction—however fervently held—could survive the ordeal of being slowly yelled to a bored crowd from the front seat of a motor car. He told himself that he had become a gramophone, and a tired gramophone, badly in want of winding up, at that.
It would be of little avail to attempt to define the precise shade of green of young Mr. Coppinger's political flag; whether, as a facetious supporter put it, it was "say-green, pay-green, tay-green, or bottle." It is enough to say that it varied sufficiently from that of Mr. Burke to provide their respective followers with a satisfactory casus belli. The shades of political opinion in Ireland change, and melt and merge into each other as the years pass, even as the colours of her surrounding seas vary, deepening and paling with the changing clouds, yet affecting only the surface, leaving the sullen depths unchanged. Larry knew no more of Ireland than a boy can learn in his school holidays; it was only by degrees that he realised that in Ireland, as he now found it, the single element of discord that remained ever unchanged was Religion. He had spent the four most recent and most receptive years of his life in an atmosphere in which religion had no existence. The hem of its raiment might, perhaps, have been touched, when, as sometimes happened, the subject of a studio composition was taken from the Bible, or the Apocrypha. Then, possibly, would the young pagans of Larry's circle discover as much acquaintance with the Scriptures as would point a jest, and give an agreeable sensation of irreverence in discussing the details of the subject.
"There," thought Larry, "no one thought about your religion. No one cared if you had one, and the presumption was that you hadn't." But here, in these little Irish towns, the question of a man's private views on a matter that might be supposed to concern only himself, appeared of paramount importance. He listened to denunciations of Protestants until he felt, as he told the faithful Barty, that "for tuppence" he would change over himself; just as in some sections of the rival camp, he would have heard to weariness of the bigotry and errors of Romanism. He was brought, as many people more God-fearing than he have been brought, to debate the question as to whether a common atheism were not the only panacea for the mutual hatreds that, as appeared to him from his present point of view, ruled the Island of Saints. He and Barty would sit up over the dying embers of the dining-room fire of No. 6, The Mall, talking; wrangling, in a sort of country-dance of argument, in which they advanced and retired, and joined hands, and flung away from each other again; ending, generally, in such agreement as might be found in a common determination to lay all the blame for all the malice and uncharitableness at the door of the clergy of the two creeds; a comprehensive decision, and a consoling one, from the point of view of two laymen.