“I quite agree with you,” said Bob. “I merely mentioned politics because Clithering said—”
“Besides,” said Conroy, “it wouldn’t be my politics. England isn’t my country.”
“It would be rather exciting,” said Bob, “to run a revolution somewhere. There are lots of small states, in the Balkans, you know, which could be turned inside out and upside down by a man with the amount of money you have.”
“There’s something in that notion,” said Conroy. “Get a map, will you?”
Bob Power did not want to go wandering round the house at half-past one o’clock in the morning looking for a map of the Balkan States. It seemed to him that the idea—the financing of a revolution was of course a joke—might be worked out with reference to some country nearer at hand, the geographical conditions of which would be sufficiently well known without the aid of a map.
“Why not try Ireland?” he said.
Then a very curious thing happened. Conroy’s appearance, not merely his expression but his actual features seemed to change. Instead of the shrewd face of a successful American financier Bob Power saw the face of an Irish peasant. He was perfectly familiar with the type. It was one which he had known all his life. He knew it at its best, expressive of lofty idealisms and fantastic dreams of things beyond this world’s experience. He knew it at its worst too, when narrow cunning and unquenchable bitterness transform it. The change passed over Conroy’s face and then quickly passed away again.
“By God!” said Conroy, “it’s a great notion. To buck against the British Lion!”
Bob remembered the things which he had heard and half heeded about Conroy’s ancestry. In 1850 another Conroy, a broken peasant, the victim of evil fate and gross injustice, had left Ireland in an emigrant ship with a ragged wife and four half starved children clinging to him, with an unquenchable hatred of England in his heart. The hate, it appeared, had lived on in his son, had broken out again in a grandson, dominating the cynical cosmopolitanism of the financial magnate. Bob was vaguely uneasy. He did not like the expression he had seen on Conroy’s face. He did not like the tone in which he spoke. But it was obviously absurd to suppose that any one could take seriously the idea of financing an Irish revolution.
Then Conroy began to talk about Ireland. He knew, it appeared, a great deal about the history of the country up to a certain point. He had a traditional knowledge of the horrors of the famine period. He was intimately acquainted with the details of the Fenian movement. Either he or his father had been a member of the Clan na Gael. He understood the Parnell struggle for Home Rule. But with the fall of Parnell his knowledge stopped abruptly. Of all that happened after that he knew nothing. He supposed that the later Irish leaders had inherited the traditions of Mitchel, O’Leary, Davitt and the others. Bob laughed at him.