The Red Hand of Ulster

by George A. Birmingham

I had never heard of the Unionist women before, and knew nothing of their wish to be spoken to. The Dean assured me that they were numerous and quite as enthusiastic as their husbands and brothers. Cahoon said that he was giving his mill hands a half holiday in order that the girls might go to listen to Lady Moyne. Babberly struck in with a characteristic speech.

“The influence of women,” he said, “can hardly be over-estimated. We must never forget that the most impressionable years of a man’s life are those during which he is learning to say his prayers beside his mother’s knee.”

This, as I recognized was a mere paraphrase of the proverb which states that the hand which rocks the cradle rules the world. The secret of Babberly’s great success as an orator is that he has a striking power of putting platitudes into new words.

I ventured to suggest that, so far as the present political situation was concerned it was hardly worth while trying to get at the children who were learning to say their prayers. The Home Rule Bill would be either rejected or passed long before any of that generation had votes. Lady Moyne was good enough to smile at me; but Babberly felled me at once.

“The women whom we expect to influence,” he said, “have fathers, brothers and husbands as well as young children.”

After dinner we had the speech. A secretary, who had once been Lady Moyne’s governess and still wore pince-nez, brought a quantity of type-written matter into the drawing-room. Moyne wanted me to slip away with him to the billiard room; but I refused to do so. I wanted to watch Lady Moyne making her speech. I am glad that I resisted his appeal. Lady Moyne not only read us the speech. She delivered it to us, treated us, indeed, to a rehearsal, I might even call it a dress rehearsal, for she described at some length the clothes she intended to wear. They must have been the most sumptuous in her wardrobe.

“The poor dears,” she said, “want something to brighten their lives. Besides, they’ll take it as a compliment to them if I’m like Solomon in all his glory.”

I gathered from this remark that the audience was to consist mainly of the wives and sisters of McConkey and other men of the same class. Cahoon’s wife, if he had one, would not require a display of Lady Moyne’s best clothes to seal her attachment to the Union.

The speech was an uncommonly good one. A phrase in it frequently repeated, appealed to me very strongly. Lady Moyne spoke about “our men.” I do not know why it is, but the phrase “our women” as used for instance by military officers who have been to India, always strikes me as singularly offensive. It suggests seraglios, purdahs and other institutions by which Turks, and Orientals generally, assert and maintain the rights of property with regard to the other sex. “Our men,” on the other hand, is redolent of sentimental domesticity. I never hear it without thinking of women who are mothers and makers of men; who sew on trouser buttons and cook savoury messes for those who are fighting the battle of life for them in a rough world, sustained by an abiding vision of noble womanhood and the sanctity of home. It is an extraordinarily appealing phrase and Lady Moyne used it for all it was worth. As addressed by her to wives and sisters of the Belfast working-men, it had a further value. The plural possessive pronoun bracketed McConkey with Lord Moyne. McConkey’s wife, assuming for the moment that he had not abstained from matrimony as he had from tobacco, shared his joys and sorrows, his hopes and fears, heartened him for his daily toil, would join no doubt in polishing the muzzle of the machine gun. So Lady Moyne in her gorgeous raiment, sustained Lord Moyne, her man. That was the suggestion of the possessive pronoun, and the audience was not allowed to miss it. Poor Moyne did miss it, for he was nearly asleep in a chair. But McConkey’s wife would not. Her heart would glow with a sense that she and Lady Moyne were sisters in their anxious care for the men entrusted to them.