“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.