“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.”