Chapter 11

They had left the station, and were now walking along the unfinished road above the shingle. There was a heat haze hanging over the smooth blue sea, so that sky and water merged into each other imperceptibly. In front of them, they could see the white cliffs of Boveyhayne shining in the descending sun. There were great stalks of charlock, standing out of the grass on the face of the cliffs, giving them a golden head.

"If Marley's on Whitcombe beach, we'll row over to Boveyhayne," said Ninian. "You'd like to get on to the sea, wouldn't you, Quinny?"

Henry nodded his head.

"No," said Gilbert, "we won't. We'll sit here for a while, and I'll read my play to Quinny. I carry it about with me, Quinny, so that I can read it to Ninian whenever his spirits are low!"

"I never saw such a chap!" Ninian mumbled.

"This great, hairy, beefy fellow," Gilbert went on, seizing hold of Ninian's arm with his disengaged hand, "does not love literature!..."

Ninian broke free from Gilbert's grip. "Marley is on the beach," he said, and ran ahead to engage the boat.

"Well, Quinny!" said Gilbert, when Ninian had gone.

"Well, Gilbert!" Henry replied.

"How's Ireland? Still making an ass of itself?"

Henry made no answer to Gilbert's question because he knew that an answer was not expected. Had any one else spoken in that fashion to him, any other Englishman, he would probably have angered instantly, but Gilbert was different from all other people in Henry's eyes, and was privileged to say whatever he pleased.

"Gilbert," he said, "I want to have a long jaw with you about something!..."

The English way of speaking came naturally to him, and he said "a long jaw about something" as easily as if he had never been outside an English public school.

"What?" Gilbert said.

"Oh, everything. Ireland and things!"

"All right, my son!"

"You see!..."

"Wait though," said Gilbert, "until we catch up with Ninian. He ought to hear it, too. He has a wise old noddle, Ninian, although he's such a fat 'un.... My God, Quinny, isn't he getting big? If he piles up any more muscle, hell have to go to Trinity Hall and join the beefy brutes and get drunk and all that kind of manly thing!" They came up with Ninian as he spoke. "Won't you, Ninian?"

"Won't I what?" Ninian replied.

"Have to go to Trinity Hall if you go on being a beefy Briton. Hilloa, Marley!"

"Good-evenin', sir!" said old Marley.

They got into the boat, and Ninian rowed them round the white cliff to Boveyhayne beach, where they left the boat and walked up the village street to the lane that led to Boveyhayne Manor.

"Henry wants to talk about the world, Ninian!" said Gilbert as they left the beach. "We'd better have a good old gabble after dinner to-night, hadn't we?"

"It doesn't matter what I say," said Ninian, "you'll gabble anyhow. Anything to keep him from reading his blooming play to me!" he added, turning to Henry.

5

He had a sense of disappointment when he met Mary. In his reaction from Sheila Morgan, he had imagined Mary coming to greet him with something of the alert youthfulness with which she had met him when he first visited Boveyhayne, but when she came into the hall, a book in her hand, he felt that there was some stiffness in her manner, a self-consciousness which had not been there before.

"How do you do?" she said, offering her hand to him like any well-bred girl.

She did not call him "Quinny" or show in her manner or speech that he was particularly welcome to her.

"I suppose," he thought to himself, "she's cross because I didn't answer her letter!"

He resolved that he would bring her back to her old friendliness....

"I expect you're tired," she said. "We'll have tea in a minute or two. Mother's lying down. She's not very well!"

She would have said as much to a casual acquaintance, Henry thought.

"Not well!" he heard Ninian saying. "What's the matter with her?"

"She's tired. I think she's got a headache. There was a letter from Uncle Peter!" Mary answered, and her tone indicated that the letter from Uncle Peter accounted for everything.

"Oh!" said Ninian, scowling and turning away.

They went into the drawing-room to tea, and Henry had a sense of intruding on family affairs, mingled with his disappointment because Mary was not as he had expected her to be. It might be, of course, that the letter from Uncle Peter had affected Mary almost as much as it seemed to have affected Mrs. Graham, and that presently she would be as natural as she had been that other time ... but then he remembered that Gilbert had said that she was "being very femaley at present." She poured out tea for them as if she were a new governess, and she reproved Ninian once for saying "Damn!" when he dropped his bread and butter....

"Mary's turned pi!" said Ninian.

She frowned at him and told him not to be silly.

"She calls the Communion Service the Eucharist, and crosses herself and flops and bows!..."

"You're very absurd, Ninian!" she said.

Almost unconsciously, he began to compare her to Sheila Morgan. He remembered the free, natural ways of Sheila, and liked them better than these new, mannered ways of Mary. How could any one prefer this stiltedness to that ease, this self-consciousness to that state of being unaware of self?... In Belfast, when he had left John Marsh, and in his loneliness had thought of the way Sheila had humiliated him, he had had a sharp sense of revulsion from her, a loathing for her, a desire never to see her again; but now, sitting here looking at Mary and oppressed by her youngladyishness, his longing for Sheila came back to him with greater strength, and he resolved that he would write to her that night and beg her to forgive him for his cowardice and let him be her sweetheart again....

"Will you have some more tea!" Mary was saying to him, and he started at the sound of her voice.

"Oh, thanks!" he said, passing his cup to her.

"Thinking, Quinny?" Gilbert exclaimed, reaching for a bun.

"Eh? Oh, yes! I was thinking!" he answered. "What time does the evening post go out?" he said to Ninian.

"Six-twenty-five," Ninian answered.

"Thanks. I just want to write to Ireland!..."

"It'll get there just as soon if you post it to-morrow," said Gilbert.

Mary left them. "I'm going up to mother," she said, as she got up from the tea table. "She's awfully sorry she couldn't be down to welcome you," she added to Henry who had moved to open the door for her.

"I hope she'll soon be better," he answered.

When she had gone, Ninian got up and cursed lustily.

"Damn and blast him," he said.

They did not speak. They knew that Ninian's anger had some relation to Mrs. Graham's headache and the letter from Uncle Peter, and they felt that it was not their business to speak, even though Ninian had drawn them into the affair.

"I'm sorry," said Ninian, sitting down again. "I ought not to have broken out like that before you chaps, but I couldn't help it."

Henry coughed as if he were clearing his throat, but he did not speak, and Gilbert sat still and gazed at the toe of his shoe.

"He always upsets mother, damn him!" Ninian looked up at them. "My Uncle Peter married a girl in a confectioner's shop at Cambridge. He's that kind of ass! He never writes to mother except when he's in a mess, and he always expects her to get him out of it. I can't stand a man who does that sort of thing. She's an awful bitch, too ... his wife! We had them here once!... My God!"

Ninian lay back in his seat and remained silent for a while as if he were contemplating in his mind the picture of Uncle Peter and his wife on that awful visit to Boveyhayne. They waited for him to continue.

"I used to feel ashamed to go into the village," he said at last. "The way she talked to the fishermen--one minute snubbing them, and the next, talking to them as if she were a servant-girl. They didn't like it. Jim Rattenbury hated it, I know. She wasn't one of us and she wasn't one of them. A damned in-between, that's what she was. And Uncle Peter used to get drunk!... I'm awfully sorry, you chaps, I oughtn't to be boring you like this!"

"That's all right," said Gilbert.

"I was jolly glad when they went," Ninian went on. "Jolly glad! Poor mother had a hell of a time while they were here!"

"I suppose so," Henry murmured, hardly knowing what to say.

"I can't understand a man marrying a woman like that," Ninian said. "I mean, I can understand a fellow ragging about with a girl, but I can't understand him marrying her and ... and upsetting things!"

It was on the tip of Henry's tongue to say something about Ninian's belief in democracy, for he remembered that Gilbert, in one of his letters, had declared that Ninian had become a I'm-as-good-as-you-and-a-damn-sight-better-politician, but he did not say it.

"The girl isn't happy. Anybody can see she isn't happy, and Uncle Peter isn't happy, and between them they make us damn miserable. That kind of marriage is bound to fail, _I_ think. People ought to marry in their own class!..."

"Unless they're big enough to climb out of it," said Gilbert.

"_She_ isn't!"

It came to Henry suddenly that he was proposing to do what Ninian's Uncle Peter had done: marry a girl who was not of his class. He listened to Ninian and Gilbert as they talked of this intimate mingling of classes, and wondered what they would say if they knew of Sheila. Gilbert and Ninian were agreed that on the whole it was foolish for a man to marry that kind of girl. "It doesn't work," said Gilbert, and he told a story of a man whom his father had known, an officer in the Indian army who developed communist beliefs when he retired and had married his cook. "It's a ghastly failure," said Gilbert.

"I'm all for equality," Ninian said, "but it's silly to think that we're always equal now. We're not!..."

"And never will be," Gilbert interjected.

"I don't agree with you, Gilbert. I think that things like habits and manners can be fairly equalised!..."

"Minds can't!"

"No, of course not; but decent behaviour can, and it's silly to start mingling classes until you've done that. You rub each other the wrong way over little things that don't really matter, but that irritate like blazes. I've talked about it with mother. She used to think I was the sort of chap who'd do what Uncle Peter did. Uncle Peter frightened me off that kind of thing!"

It was absurd, Henry thought, to think that all women were like Uncle Peter's wife. Sheila was not that sort of girl at all. She would not make a man feel ashamed!...

He broke off in the middle of his thoughts to listen to Gilbert who was enunciating a doctrine that was new to Henry.

"There are aristocrats and there are plebs," said Gilbert, "and they won't mingle. That's all about it. I believe that the majority of the working people are different from us, not only in their habits ... that's nothing ... just the veneer ... but in their nature. We've been achieved somehow ... evolution and that sort of thing ... because they needed people to look after them and direct them and control them. We're as different from working people as a race-horse is from a cart-horse. Things that are quite natural to us are simply finicky fussy things to them. I wish to God talking like this didn't make a fellow feel like a prig!..."

He broke off almost angrily.

"Let's go out," he said. "I want to smoke!"

"But it's true all the same," he went on when they got outside, almost as if he had not broken his speech. "Whether we tried for it or not, we've got people separated into groups, and we'll never get them out of them. Some of us are servants and some of us are bosses, and we've developed natures like that, and we can't get away from them!" Henry reminded them of men who had climbed from low positions to high positions. "They're the accidents," Gilbert went on. "They prove nothing, and I'm certain that if you could go back into their ancestry, you'd find they sprang from people like us, who had somehow slithered down until the breed told and a turn up was taken!..."

They argued round and round the subject, admitting here, denying there....

"Anyhow," Gilbert ended, "it is true that a man who marries a village girl makes a mistake, isn't it?"

"Not always," Henry replied.

"Nearly always," said Gilbert.

"Uncle Peter made a mistake anyhow," Ninian said.

6

He went to his room, pleading that he was tired, to write his letter to Sheila before dinner. As he was going upstairs, Mary began to descend, and he saw that her look was brighter.

"Go back," she called to him, waving her hand as if to thrust him down the stairs again. "It's unlucky to pass people on the stairs. Don't you know that?"

He descended again as she bade him, laughing as he did so, and waited until she had come down.

"Mother's much better now," she said when she had reached his side. "She's coming down to dinner."

"I'm awfully glad," he replied. He hesitated for a second or two, standing with one foot on the last step of the stairs. "I say, Mary," he said.

"Yes, Quinny!" she answered, turning to him.

So she had not forgotten that she had called him by his nick-name.

"I say, Mary," he said again, still undecided as to whether he should speak his mind or not.

"Yes?" she repeated.

He went up a step or two of the stairs. "Oh, I don't know," he exclaimed. "I only wanted to say how nice it is to be here again!"

"Oh, yes!" Mary said, and he imagined that her tone was one of disappointment.

"I'll be down presently," he went on, and then he ran up the stairs to his room.

"I don't know," he said to himself, as he closed his door. "I'm damned if I know!"

He sat down at the writing-table and spread a sheet of notepaper in front of him. "I wish I knew!..." he murmured, and he wrote down the date. "Mary is awfully nice, and I like her of course, but Sheila!..."

He put the pen down again and sat back in his chair and stared out of the window. Out in the farmyard, he could hear the men bedding the horses, and there was a clatter of cans from the dairy where the women were turning the milk into cream. He could hear a horse whinnying in its stall ... and as he listened he seemed to see Sheila, as he had seen her on her uncle's farm before he had failed in courage, standing outside the byre with a crock in her hands and a queer, teasing look in her eyes. "You're the quare wee fella!" she was saying, and then, "I like you quaren well!..."

He seized the pen again and began to write.

7

He had almost finished the letter when Gilbert knocked on his door and shouted, "Can I come in, Quinny?"

He put the letter under the blotting paper, and called, "Yes, Gilbert!" in reply.

"Aren't you ready yet?" Gilbert asked.

"No, not yet, but I won't be long changing!"

"Righto!" said Gilbert, going to the other window and looking across the fields. "Rum go about Ninian's uncle, isn't it?" he said, playing with the tassle of the blind.

"Eh?" said Henry.

"There must be something low in a man who marries a woman like that, don't you think?"

"Oh, I don't know. Why should there be?"

"Obvious, isn't it? I mean, there can't be much in common otherwise, can there? Unless the man's a sentimental ass. It's as if you or I were to marry one of the girls out there in the yard, milking the cows. She'd be awfully useful for that job ... milking cows ... but you wouldn't want her to be doing it all the time. It depends, I suppose, on what you want to do. If you've got any ambition!..."

He did not finish the sentence, but Henry understood and nodded his head as if he agreed with him.

"I must trot off," Gilbert said suddenly, going towards the door. "I'm keeping you!..." He paused with his fingers on the handle of the door. "I say, Quinny," he said, "do you know anything about women?"

"No, not much," Henry answered. "Do you?"

"No. Funny, isn't it?" he replied, and then he went out of the room.

Henry sat still for a moment, staring at the closed door, and then turned back to the writing-table and took the letter to Sheila from beneath the blotting-paper. He read it through and sat staring at it until the writing became a dancing blur.... He got up, carrying the letter in his hand, and went to the door and opened it. He tried to call "Gilbert!" but the name came out in a whisper, and before he could call again, he heard the noise of laughter and then the sound of a young voice singing. Mary was downstairs, teasing Ninian. He could hear Ninian, half laughing, half growling, as he shouted, "Don't be an old ass, Mary!"

He shut the door and went back to the writing-table, still holding the letter in his hand, and while he stood there, a gong was sounded in the hall.

"Lord!" he said, "I shall have to hurry!" and he tore up the letter and put it in the waste-paper basket.

8

They passed their time in bathing and boating and walking, and sometimes Mary was with them, but mostly she was not. They went out in the mornings, soon after breakfast, taking food with them, and seldom returned until the evening. They took long tramps to Honiton and Lyme Regis and Sidmouth, and once they walked to Exeter and returned home by train. Mary liked boating and bathing, but she did not care for walking, and the distances they travelled were beyond her strength; and so it came about that gradually, during Henry's stay at Boveyhayne, she ceased to take part in their outings. It seemed odd to him that she did not make any reference to their love-making. She called him "Quinny" and was friendly enough, but she called Gilbert by his Christian name and was as friendly with him as she was with Henry. He felt hurt when he thought of her indifference to him. "You'd think she'd forgotten about it!" he said to himself one evening when he was sitting alone with her in the garden, and he oscillated between the desire to ignore her and the desire to have it out with her; but he dallied so long between one desire and the other that Gilbert and Ninian and Mrs. Graham had joined them before he had made a decision. He could not understand Mary. She seemed to have grown shy and quiet and much less demonstrative than she had been when he first knew her.

"Mary's growing up," Mrs. Graham said to him one evening, irrelevantly; and of course she was, but she had not grown up so much that there should be all this difference between Mary now and Mary then.

"Oh, well!" he generally concluded when his thoughts turned to her, "she's only a kid!"

And sometimes that explanation seemed to satisfy him. There were other times when it failed to satisfy him, and he told himself that Mary was justly cold to him because he had not been loyal to their compact. He had not answered her letters and he had made love to Sheila Morgan. "I suppose," he said to himself, "I'd be at Ballymartin now, making love to Sheila, if it hadn't been for that horse!"

He tried on several occasions to talk to Mary about her unanswered letter, to invent some explanation of his neglect, but always he failed to say anything, too nervous to begin, too afraid of being snubbed, too eager to leave the explanation over until the next day; and so he never "had it out" with her.

"I am a fool!" he would say to himself in angry rebuke, but even while he was reproaching himself, his mind was devising an excuse for his behaviour. "We're really too young," he would add. "It's silly of me to think of this sort of thing at all, and Mary's still a schoolgirl!..."

"I'll just say something to her before I go away," he thought. "Something that will ... explain everything!"

Then Mr. Quinn wrote to him to say that he was in London on business. He was anxious that Henry should come to town so that they could return to Ireland together. "We'll go to Dublin," he wrote, "and I'll leave you there. You needn't come to Ballymartin until the end of the first term."

He felt strangely chilled by his father's letter. This jolly holiday at Boveyhayne was to be the end of one life, and the journey to Dublin was to be the beginning of another; and he did not wish to end the one life or begin the other. He could feel growing within him, an extraordinary hatred of Trinity College, and he almost wrote to his father to say that he would rather not go to a University at all than go to T. C. D. It was cruel, he told himself, to separate him from his friends and compel him to go to a college that meant nothing on earth to him.

"I shan't know any one there," he said to Gilbert and Ninian, "and I probably won't want to know any one. It's a hole, that's what it is, a rotten hole. If the dons were any good, they'd be at Oxford or Cambridge!..."

"You're not much of a patriot," Ninian said.

"I don't want to be a damned patriot. I want to be with people I like. I don't see why I should be compelled to go and live with a lot of people I don't know and don't care about, just because I'm Irish and they're Irish, when I really want to be with you and Gilbert and Roger.... I haven't seen Roger since I left Rumpell's and I don't suppose I shall see him for a long time!"

Gilbert tried to mock him out of his anger. "This emotion does you credit, young Quinny!" he said, "and we are touched, Ninian and I. Aren't we, Ninian! But you must be a man, Quinny! Four years hence, we shall all meet in London, _Deo volente_, and we'll be able to compare the education of Ireland with the education of England. Oh, Lordy God, I sometimes wish we hadn't got minds at all. I think it must be lovely to be a cow ... nothing to do but chew the damned cud all day. No soul to consider, no mind to improve, no anything!..."

Gilbert and he left Boveyhayne together, but Gilbert was only going as far as Templecombe with him, where he was to change on his way to Cheltenham. Ninian and Mary saw them off at Whitcombe, and when he remembered the circumstances in which she had seen him off before, Henry had a longing to take hold of her arm and lead her to the end of the platform, as he had done then, and tell her that he was sorry for everything and beg her to start again where they had left off that day ... but Gilbert was there and Ninian was there, and there was no opportunity, and the train went off, leaving the explanation unmade.

9

"Good-bye, Quinny!" Gilbert said at Templecombe.

"Good-bye, Gilbert!" Henry answered in a low tone.

"I suppose you'll write to me some day?"

"I suppose so. Yes, of course!..."

"Ripping day, isn't it? Shame to be wasting it in a blooming train!"

"Yes!"

He wished that the train would break down so that he need not part from Gilbert yet, but while he was wishing, it began to move. Gilbert stood back from the carriage and waved his hand to him, and Henry leant with his head through the window of his carriage, smiling....

"Damn Trinity," he said, sitting back in his seat, and letting depression envelop him. "Damn and blast Trinity!..."

THE SECOND BOOK

OF

CHANGING WINDS

I write of Youth, of Love, and have Accesse By these, to sing of cleanly-Wantonnesse.

HERRICK.

THE FIRST CHAPTER

1