Read Online Dorothy Eden by Never Call It Loving - Free Book Online
Authors: Never Call It Loving
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tumultuous applause had died down, and then said with his quiet reasonableness:
“I think I heard someone say shoot him, but I wish to point out to you a very much better way—a more Christian and a more charitable way—which will give the lost sinner an opportunity of repenting.”
The crowd stirred restlessly, but such was the man’s magnetism that no one interrupted.
The voice, with its devastating logic, went on: “When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show him in the fair and in the market-place, and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a moral Coventry, by isolating him from his kind as if he were a leper of old—you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed, and you may depend upon it that there will be no man so full of avarice, so lost to shame, as to dare the public opinion of all right-thinking men and to transgress your unwritten code of laws.”
The eternal soft misty rain was falling, shining on the uplifted faces, blurring the distances. When Mr. Parnell had finished speaking he wiped the moisture off his cheeks and no one knew whether it was rain or tears. All they knew was that this man with the pale face and eloquent dark eyes was the man they would follow and on whom they would lavish their untidy emotional but total love.
The speech at Ennis was no pointless meandering in the House of Commons designed merely to obstruct business. There was nothing negative or defensive about this. It was oratory in the best parliamentary tradition. It merited comparison with Mr. Gladstone. The seventy-year-old Prime Minister was forced into an uneasy new contemplation of the troublesome Irish question. If Parnell, a man of only thirty-four, could command his audience so effectively now, what would he do in ten years or twenty years, or when he had the white hair of his Prime Minister?
Stories began to drift across the Irish Channel about the adulation the young man was receiving; people mobbing him in the street, kissing his hand, carrying him shoulder high. If it didn’t ruin him, and they said it wouldn’t because he was too calm and level-headed, then he was becoming a force to be reckoned with. The Irish party would no longer be amiably dismissed as a fairly negligible factor in the government of the British Isles.
Of course the Celts made everything larger than life, especially a man like this, composed, proud, unknowable. They could invent romantic stories about him, they could already see in him the making of one of their revered martyrs. So the English had better be careful in their treatment of the new Irish leader. Should there be signs of martyrdom, a fire would be kindled in the emerald isle that might smoulder and burn for a century.
It was all very well for the Queen to sigh with exasperation and say that she found her tiresome Irish subjects becoming too tedious with their constant rebellion. How could the people expect mercy when they defied all laws, and drove poor Mr. Forster distracted? He must make an example of more of them. The gallows was a terrible thing, but perhaps a few judicious hangings would at least put the fear of God into the rest of the populace, since it was too much to hope that they would ever learn good sense. No, the Queen had never seen the Dublin slums, or the disastrous cabins that housed the poorer of her subjects, but she believed the descriptions of these places to be greatly exaggerated. And anyway couldn’t the people do more to help themselves?
The troublesome thing was that they did, incited by Mr. Parnell, and in entirely the wrong way.
The famous speech at Ennis had been taken to heart, and was put into practice three days later. Captain Boycott, an Englishman, agent to Lord Erne in Connaught, was offered what was considered a
“I think I heard someone say shoot him, but I wish to point out to you a very much better way—a more Christian and a more charitable way—which will give the lost sinner an opportunity of repenting.”
The crowd stirred restlessly, but such was the man’s magnetism that no one interrupted.
The voice, with its devastating logic, went on: “When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show him in the fair and in the market-place, and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a moral Coventry, by isolating him from his kind as if he were a leper of old—you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed, and you may depend upon it that there will be no man so full of avarice, so lost to shame, as to dare the public opinion of all right-thinking men and to transgress your unwritten code of laws.”
The eternal soft misty rain was falling, shining on the uplifted faces, blurring the distances. When Mr. Parnell had finished speaking he wiped the moisture off his cheeks and no one knew whether it was rain or tears. All they knew was that this man with the pale face and eloquent dark eyes was the man they would follow and on whom they would lavish their untidy emotional but total love.
The speech at Ennis was no pointless meandering in the House of Commons designed merely to obstruct business. There was nothing negative or defensive about this. It was oratory in the best parliamentary tradition. It merited comparison with Mr. Gladstone. The seventy-year-old Prime Minister was forced into an uneasy new contemplation of the troublesome Irish question. If Parnell, a man of only thirty-four, could command his audience so effectively now, what would he do in ten years or twenty years, or when he had the white hair of his Prime Minister?
Stories began to drift across the Irish Channel about the adulation the young man was receiving; people mobbing him in the street, kissing his hand, carrying him shoulder high. If it didn’t ruin him, and they said it wouldn’t because he was too calm and level-headed, then he was becoming a force to be reckoned with. The Irish party would no longer be amiably dismissed as a fairly negligible factor in the government of the British Isles.
Of course the Celts made everything larger than life, especially a man like this, composed, proud, unknowable. They could invent romantic stories about him, they could already see in him the making of one of their revered martyrs. So the English had better be careful in their treatment of the new Irish leader. Should there be signs of martyrdom, a fire would be kindled in the emerald isle that might smoulder and burn for a century.
It was all very well for the Queen to sigh with exasperation and say that she found her tiresome Irish subjects becoming too tedious with their constant rebellion. How could the people expect mercy when they defied all laws, and drove poor Mr. Forster distracted? He must make an example of more of them. The gallows was a terrible thing, but perhaps a few judicious hangings would at least put the fear of God into the rest of the populace, since it was too much to hope that they would ever learn good sense. No, the Queen had never seen the Dublin slums, or the disastrous cabins that housed the poorer of her subjects, but she believed the descriptions of these places to be greatly exaggerated. And anyway couldn’t the people do more to help themselves?
The troublesome thing was that they did, incited by Mr. Parnell, and in entirely the wrong way.
The famous speech at Ennis had been taken to heart, and was put into practice three days later. Captain Boycott, an Englishman, agent to Lord Erne in Connaught, was offered what was considered a
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