I recognized a countryman of my own in London when I asked a policeman the way and demurred from his instructions, remarking that I had been told to approach by a different way. “Sure you can, if you like,” he said, looking at me with his head on one side, “but I wouldn’t if I was you; it ’ud be a terrible long way round.”
An Irishman will always agree with you if he can—or even if he can’t. It is the Irish politeness. If you were to say to him, “Three years ago to-day I had as bad a cold as ever I had in my life,” he will say, “To be sure you had; I remember it well. ’Twas a terrible dose of a cowld, all out.” This makes the Irish a very agreeable people to live with if you have not offended them.
There are one or two virtues, not of the shining sort, which are hardly virtues at all, but rather vices to the Irish. Thrift is one of these. Another is its cousin, punctuality. No Irishman holds punctuality in honour. Irish time is twenty-five minutes later than English time and takes a deal longer than that to come up with English time. Any time at all will do for an Irishman. “Punctuality is the thief of time” is one of his axioms. Above all things, he despises punctuality about meal-times, and this, I know, will wring an Englishman’s withers. An Irish meal is served whenever it is ready; and if it is never ready at all, the Irishman will take a snack when he feels he really wants it. No Irishman is ill-tempered because his meals are late. He prides himself on his indifference to food as one of the things that set him apart from the unspiritual Saxon. You could hardly offend an Irishman more than by accusing him of having a hearty appetite. His meals are all movable feasts. Oddly enough, the Anglo-Irishman is quite as unpunctual as the Celt, if not more so. He assimilates the ways of the Celt, while the Celt remains untouched by his. The Anglo-Irishman is often as good a trencherman as his English brother, but he would never think of disturbing the machinery of Irish life so far as to expect his dinner at a given time. I have been asked to dine in Dublin and have arrived punctually, only to find the tradesmen’s carts delivering the dinner; and, having grown accustomed to English ways, I have made a frantic effort to arrive at the appointed hour for a luncheon-party, only to find the hostess lying down with toothache, and the drawing-room fire still unlit.
To be sure, you may arrive at a house at any hour of the day in Ireland and fall in for a meal. If you arrive at a time within at all measurable distance of meal-time, you shall not go forth unfed, although you be press-ganged to stay. I shall never forget the horror of my Irish friends when they heard that one was allowed to leave an English house with the dinner-bell in one’s ears. “It must be an awful country,” they said; then, detecting something of guilt, perhaps, in my air, they ventured: “But that wouldn’t happen in an Irish house—not in yours.” When I confessed that it had happened in mine they changed the subject. If they had allowed themselves to speak, they would have said too much.
I know an Irishman settled in England—a North of Ireland, that is to say a Scotch-Irishman, and a man of business—who always has the motor round for a spin as soon as the dinner-bell rings. He cannot keep his English servants, and is grieved at their perversity, which would keep him chained to a hot dining-room on an ideal evening for a motor-run. His guests stay their hunger with sherry and biscuits while they await his return.