The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 21 April 1921, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By William O’Brien.)

WHEN WE WERE BOYS

CHAPTER XXl.—(Continued.) ~ “Bully for Mrs. Motherwell !’l observed the American Captain. ' They were bowling along merrilly through the Pass • of Keiman-Eigh on their way to a picnic of Miss Westropp’s demising. The chatter and laughter of the younger folk in the waggonette in front came back in melodious echoes from crag to crag, to the amazement of the mountain goats, who shook their scandalised beards gravely from their heights at the disturbers of the lonely pass. ’ “We have .'behaved cruellyinfamously, to the Irish people in the past,” pursued the ironmaster. “That’s right; pitch into your grandfather!” said tho Rector. “No, it’s yours I am pitching into,” said Neville, much gratified with his retort. “My grandfather was a Horne Tooke man. He might as well have been a Council of Trent man so far as the loaves and fishes were concerned. He was a stubborn kind of man as stubborn as if he was an Irish Papist. By his will he directed that he should be' buried in his own back garden, as the law would not allow him to be buried to his liking. But I don’t damp down my furnaces because my grandfather was put into ’York Jail for his opinions.” “It must be a fine thing to have the furnaces, anyway,” remarked Father Phil, offering his snuffbox all round. “Yes, but that is just it. Why don’t you have the furnaces?” “Wisha, my dear, a morsel of live turf is good enough for poor people.” But there is no penal law now against furnaces. There is no penal law against the Irish acquiring property, education, and industry. You have our law; you have the British Constitution.” “Well, then, so I am told,” said the old Curate, musingly. “We are never transported now for looking for education, if we only knew where to look for it. There is nothing to prevent every g or soon in the country aspiring to be a judge or a deputy lieutenant—not a ha’porth in life, except, maybe, the want of a pair of shoes to the poor g or soon’s feet or so.” God bless my soul! You don’t mean toargue that Catholic Emancipation itself is a failure?” asked the ironmaster, in deep perplexity. v Eh? I didn’t say that, did I?” cried Father Phil, in alarm. “It’s just like my sense to go knocking my old muddled head against Catholic Emancipation; God forgive me my sins! No, indeed, Mr. Neville, Catholic Emancipation is a grand mouthful of a word, and thankful we are to the kind gentlemen that sent it to us; but—but—well, it’s a foolish old man that says it—but I wonder some one don’t bring in a law to leave the people a meal of potatoes in peace and the cabin to cover them. That don’t sound a very unreasonable programme, does it, sir? . As far as I can make out, our unfortunate race has spent seven hundred years looking for that much, and • we haven't got it yet.” ‘‘Quite, right,” exclaimed the Rector. “And if you’ll only pass that little Bill of Father Phil’s, you’ll have the Glensmen the happiest dogs alive,- without blast-furnaces and steam-ploughs and all the rest of the modern apparatus for blinding and deafening people. My dear Mr. Neville, when I came to Ireland first I could teach every peasant around here how to grow three times the amount of his crops ,and live’ in a rose-trellised cottage, but I soon found that the simplest way to teach Darby how to manage his farmwould be to put myself in Darby’s shoes and show what a sumptuous - livelihood for Mrs. Motherwell and the little Mqtherwells I could knock ' out 1 of ; Darby’s,

■-,' few acres jof rocks with Hans Harman's whip over my back. Mrs. Motherwell had not sufficient confidence-in my superior economic theories to give up the Rectory and try the experiment, and she showed her customary good sense, for I have long ago discovered that I had , more to learn from Darby than Darby had from me. He's the only person in these parts who is not a humbug or a plunderer. Every ear of corn that grows it's he that raises it and it's we who blast it. We build a pier in the spot where it's most convenient for the sea to come and swallow it, and we taunt him with his genius for bungling. We 'run up ridiculous chimney-shafts where there is no ore, and we have the impudence to twit him with his lack of enterprise in mining." "You surely do not deny that copper is to be found, or that the people would be the better for working it?" said Mr. Neville. "Talk of your trumpery copper-mine'! Why these peasants have created a gold-mine where nature never intended one. They have beaten the alchemists. With their bare hands they have scraped gold out of the granite rocks, and the moment we could catch a few glistening grains with them, we, superior people, knocked them down and robbed them. They have just three little possessions that they value in life — cabins, their faith, and their day-dreams about an impossible Ireland. What visible function does English rule perform in their eyes, except,^ subsidising Hans Harman to hover at their door, his excellent sister to poison their faith, and the police to send their boys into penal servitude for being boys ? Why, the principal fault of the Irish as a nation is that they have not cut our throats many a day ago. I don't know what saved us, except their superior sense of humor—they hate us less because they very properly laugh at us more— our airs and our ignorance, and our cant and our hectoring; our broken-backed piers and our copper-mines that won't work! Father Phil, give me a pinch of your snuff if you can't give me a pinch of your patience." "Rector, let me have the privilege, sir, of dipping in that snuff-box after you on behalf of the Irish race at home and,abroad," said the American Captain, with majestic grace. "My dear sir," said Joshua Neville, "I trust you will permit me to make a short memorandum of your views. I am only anxious for light. I should much rather be shown to be in the wrong than that the Irish people should suffer by my being in the right. But do I . understand _ you to hold—really, you know—charges of indolence and improvidence now, for example, are purely the creation of ignorance or malice?" "Not a bit of it. Hans Harman quite properly calls them indolent. Their rent is three times Griffith's valuation"three Griffiths," as they call it. They could increase it to four Griffiths if they were more industrious. They're not such fools. Indolence is one of the best products of this country. Irish indolence is Nature's anaesthetic for Irish misery. Only for the comfortable feeling it diffuses through the bones, they would have died long ago under the knife of operators like our friend Harmafi. You think an Irish peasant is wasting his time when you see him lolling in the sun, sucking a black pipe ? My dear sir, you never made a greater mistake. He is a Bank of England Director, counting his treasures. He is a ragged philosopher up among his stars. He is a barefotted anchoret of the desert beholding visions. When you think he is idling, he is really quitting the rocks and the "three Griffiths"' of his miserable present, for the boundless ' estates which he holds, rent free, in the past and in the future. Ask Father Phil!—is there a hut amongst these hills where/you won't find a family who can look back upon a genealogy of kings and saints, and forward to the joys of heaven with a firmer' faith than they can count upon their breakfast? Believe me, a people who can get that much bliss out. of a black pipe are.more, sensibly employed than in getting up an additional pound of flesh for us, landlords and parsons, to slice away at."- . ;'";; ' ,ooo s iX?u,?ia x>hm* ~..

*l<-, "Oh come, that would bs, an argument for the lotos-eater," said the ironmaster, gravely shaking his head. " : 'l'-- '■}■"■' "There is a great deal to be kid for the lotos.eater. s I could never understand what was wrong with lotos-eating. What more blessed esculent than lotos does your nineteenth century produce for you, with all its thundering steam-ploughs and puffing and blowing's That gospel of work for work sake, and noise for noise sake, is the greatest superstition of an age that turns up its impudent little nose at the Pentateuch. I can understand St. Peter of Alcantara preferring to walk . bare-footed on .sharp thorns, during a life which he regarded as a mere hop-skip-and-a-jump to an eternity of joy unutterable; but here is an age of fanatics, whose highest heaven it is to live in the boiler of a steamengine, and go shrieking about the world, tearing through everything sacred and peaceable, and scorching up every bright green thing in nature, for no earthly object that I could ever see, except to make all the world as uncomfortable, hot, and mad as themselves. I do verily believe men and women endure as many torments in the course of a London season in outmanoeuvring, outshining, and out-boring each other as would have entitled them to canonisation in the ages of faith, if their penances had been offered up with the proper dispositions. So it is with your Parliament men, so it is with the whole pushing, brawling, pack of reformers, scientists, and hydra-headed quacks, who are the boast of their age. Let us alone! Time driveth onward fast, ■ And in a little time our lips are mute. Let us alone! With all my heart I echo that immortal song of the . lotos-eaters—for lam a bit of a lotos-eater myself—(a tobacco pipe and fishing-rod happen to be my own particular vehicle for imbibing the aroma). If Hans Harman could find out where the Irish peasant grows his lotos crop, he would rack-rent it most unmercifully But that is where Paddy has the advantage over his oppressors— within that smoky cabin of his and within those lean four bones of his he possesses a gleaming paradise of hope and memory, and his high and mighty lord away in London, who abuses Paddy as a lazy-bones, in reality envies him his knack of lying on •his back m fields of asphodel, dreaming of past glories and future heavens, and only wishes that yawning in the bow-windows of a club in St. James's Street were as delicious a way of idling." ? "I hope you will not publish a volume of sermons m praise of idling," laughed Mr. Neville. "I am too idle to do anything of the sort: but my dear sir, idling is one of the lost arts. It is almost as extinct in Western Europe as the Greek and Roman- c assies were in the days of Attila and Genseric. Christendom flocked to Ireland as to a university in those days to learn the alphabet and the Apostles' breed, lake care the nineteenth century may not have to resort to Ireland again to dip its fevered brow in our cool mountain streams, and relearn the ancient art of idling like a gentleman and dreaming like' an angel 011 a regimen of potatoes in a palace of thatch " Hands up, there, Rector; you are laughing at us now, ( observed the American Captain, reproachfully. At least I practice what I preach. Ask Deborah Harman if I am not the most abandoned lotos-eater-ask that .excellent creature how I have neglected a ; divine call for the purchase of little Papists Our boys can starve or lounge agen any born nation that ever I bored for .He in," said Captain Mike: but bust me if I ever ondherstood before that slow starvation was such a rosy means of livelihood/ Likely « » Vft t 7. all t ißd ? the famine times as tame as a Dakotah flat, when they could have gorged themfnriT^ ra . tlon^° f . pr i me Pork; and hot co ™ if,theytook half the trouble in fighting that the did in dying I see it all now-'twas only their way of enjoying lift ' and I'm bound r to say the British Constitooshun pro! vided -on the most liberal terms for that peculiar species '

of national recreation. I never see'd the fun of it bef|^Slti^ I \ '"""" **•■ " jr., "It was horrible,'.' said-Neville, in a deep voice. "No, no, Rector. Our crowd starve pretty, considerable— idle all they can— have no more energy than the smoke of their pipes but don't you domesticate the hallucination that it's because their catechism sets down laziness as one of the theological virtues. It's not because they finds it uncommon exhilaratin' to be buried up to the chin in a pit of eternal stagnation. No, sir, their limbs are idle just for the same reason that their jaws were idle in the famine —because there's nothin' much to keep them exercised. iJust you drop Paddy down upon any plank road in our Re-public, and observe how he'll skip ! Meet him loafin' around any Irish town you please to nominate, he'll tell you: "Ballyforlornmpre may have the light coming through the roof of its hat, but this is the Godforsaken est hole the sky ever drizzled on !" Meet him in a timber city three weeks old, up Minnesota way—if 'twas the darnedest insane settlement that ever frisked in a swamphe'll tell you in an accent entered according to Act of Congress: "This, sir, is going to be the queen city of this hull God-dam section, and don't you forget it!" And, sir, the Queen City that black-avised swamp will be, bet your choicest book of sermons! and 'twill have its four daily journals, with staff correspondence from Washington, an' its baseball team, and its hydraulic elevators in the hotels; and the next time you pass the de-pot goin' West you'll likely hear the conductor informing the citizens in the cars that this is Garryowen-na-Gloria City." "And is it so hopeless to look for a spirit like that at home?" "You '■ see, you've changed the name of our old Isle-of. Saints into ( Leper Island, and your Pharisees and Sadducee. chaps are scandalised that them lazy lepers don't hurry up, and make their doomed quarantine station of a country hop around in polkas of civilisation. No, sir, I guess—subject to the correction of reverend practitioners presentit don't transpire from - the sacred volume that these lepers were ever par-ticularly lively locomotors except about advancin' in force on the Pool of Bethsaida. The Atlantic Ocean is our Irish Pool of Bethsaida. Sir, the angel of Amurrican freedom agitates these three thousand miles of salt water every voyage for all the woundecf critters of the airth. Your Irish emigrant, when he leaves the Cove of Cork, may be the wofullest churchyard phe-nomenon whose burial was ever neglected. By the time he passes. Fire fsland, he's got the Declaration of Independence hummin' through his blood, and as he absorbs his first measure of Bourbon whisky in the saloon of a free country he is fit to run an elevated railroad over the Rockies. Yes, sir-r-r!" \ ,;. (To be continued.)