Changing Winds / A Novel

by St. John G. Ervine

Harper was an Ulsterman, and so was George Russell, whom people called "A. E." Marsh and Galway, now almost inseparable, had taken Henry to hear George Russell speaking on some mystical subject at the Hermetic Club, and Henry, bewildered by the subject, had felt himself irresistibly attracted to the fiery-eyed man who spoke with so little consciousness of his audience. After the meeting was ended, he had walked part of the way home with Russell and had listened to him as he said the whole of his lecture over again ... and he left him with a feeling that Russell was unaware of human presences, that the company of human beings was not necessary to him, that his speech was addressed, not to the visible audience or the visible companion, but to an audience or a companion that no one but himself could see. Was there any one on earth less like the typical Ulsterman than George Russell, who preached mysticism and better business, or Ernest Harper who took penny tramrides to pay visits to the fairies?

No, this theory of some inherent difference between Ulstermen and other Irishmen would not work. There must be some other explanation of Henry's dislike of crowds, his silence in large companies, his inability to assert himself in the presence of strangers. Why was it that he was unable to talk about himself and the things he had done and the things he meant to do as Marsh talked? It was not because he was more modest, had more humility, than Marsh; for in his heart, Henry was vain.... And while he was asking himself this question, suddenly he found the answer. It was because he was afraid to talk about himself, it was because he had not got the courage to be vain and self-assertive in crowds. His inability to talk among strangers, to make people cease their own conversation in order to listen to him, was part of that cowardice that had prevented him from diving into the sea when he went with his father to swim at Cushendall and had sent him shivering into the shelter of the hedge when the runaway horse came galloping down the Ballymena road....

This swift, lightning revelation made him stand up in the carriage and gape at the photographs of Irish scenery in front of him.

"Oh, my God!" he said to himself, "am I always to be tortured like this?"

4

He sat back in his seat and lay against the cushions without moving. He saw himself now very clearly, for he had the power to see himself with the closest fidelity. He knew now that all his explanations were excuses, that the bitter things he had sometimes said of those who had qualities which he had not, were invented to prevent him from admitting that he was without courage. Any fight, mental or physical, unnerved him when it brought him into personal contact with his opponents. He could write wounding things to a man, but he could not say them to him without losing possession of himself and his tongue; and so he passed from the temper of a cool antagonist to that of an enraged shrew. He had tried to explain the garrulity of the Dublin people by saying that they were obliged to talk and to persist in talking because "otherwise they'd start to think!" but he knew now that that was not an accurate explanation, that it was an ill-natured attempt to cover up his own lack of force.

"And that's worse than cowardice," he said to himself, "to excuse my own funkiness by pretending that courage isn't courage!"

He remembered that he had invented a bitter phrase about Yeats one night when he had seen the poet in a house in Dublin. "Yeats is behaving as if he were the archangel Gabriel making the Annunciation!" he had said, and the man to whom he had said it had laughed and asked what Henry thought Yeats was announcing.

"A fresh revision of one of his lyrics," he had replied....

"And I'd give the world," he said now, "to be able to put on his pontifical air!"