Part 34 (1/2)

”Look here, O'Grady,” said the Major, ”I'm as fond of a joke as any man; but I must draw the line somewhere. I'm hanged if I'll be mixed up in any way with a second-hand statue.”

”It's not second-hand,” said Dr. O'Grady, ”it's perfectly new. At this moment it isn't even finished; I wouldn't ask this committee to buy anything second hand. But you can surely see, Major?you do see, for you raised the point yourself, that with the very short time at our disposal we must, if we are to have a statue at all, get one that's more or less ready made.”

”But?Good Heavens! O'Grady,” said the Major. ”How can you possibly put up a statue of somebody else and call it General John Regan? It won't be the least like him. How can you?the thing's too absurd even for you. Who was this man that the statue was made for?”

”Who was he, Doyle?” said Dr. O'Grady. ”It doesn't really matter to us who he was; but you may as well tell the Major so as to satisfy him.”

”I disremember his name,” said Doyle, ”and I can't lay my hand on the letter; but he was a Deputy-Lieutenant of whatever county he belonged to.”

”There you are now, Major,” said Dr. O'Grady. ”A Deputy-Lieutenant!

Nothing could be more respectable than that. You're only a J.P.

yourself, and I don't believe you'll ever be anything more. You can't afford to turn up your nose at a Deputy-Lieutenant. We shan't be doing any injury to the General's reputation by allowing him to be represented by a man of high position, most likely of good family, who was at all events supposed to be well off before he died.”

”I wasn't thinking of the General's reputation,” said the Major. ”I don't care a hang??”

”I don't see that we are bound to consider the feelings of the Deputy-Lieutenant,” said Dr. O'Grady. ”After all, if a man deliberately leads his relatives to suppose that he is rich enough to afford a statue in a cathedral and then turns out to be too poor to pay for it, he doesn't deserve much consideration.”

”I wouldn't cross the road,” said Doyle, ”to do a good turn to a man that let my nephew in the way that fellow did. For let me tell you, gentlemen, that statue would have been a serious loss to him if??”

”I'm not thinking of him or Doyle's nephew either,” said the Major.

”I don't know who that Deputy-Lieutenant was, and I don't care if his statue was stuck up in every market town in Ireland.”

”If you're not thinking of the General,” said the doctor, ”and if you're not thinking of the Deputy-Lieutenant, what on earth are you grumbling about?”

”I'm grumbling, as you call it,” said the Major, ”about the utterly intolerable absurdity of the whole thing. Can't you see it? You can of course, but you won't. Look here, Father McCormack, you're a man of some sense and decency of feeling. Can we possibly ask the Lord-Lieutenant to come here and unveil a statue of General John Regan?whoever he was?when all we've got is a statue of some other man? Quite possibly the Lord-Lieutenant may have known that Deputy-Lieutenant personally, and if he recognises the statue where shall we be?”

”There's something in what the Major says,” said Father McCormack. ”I'll not deny there's something in what he says.”

”There isn't,” said Dr. O'Grady. ”Excuse my contradicting you flatly, Father McCormack, but there really isn't. We all know Doyle, and we respect him; but I put it to you now, Father McCormack, I put it to any member of the committee: Is Doyle likely to have a nephew who'd be able to make a statue that anybody would recognise?”

”There's something in that,” said Father McCormack. ”I'm not well up in statues, but I've seen a few in my time, and all I can say is that unless Doyle's nephew is a great deal better at the job than most of the fellows that makes them, n.o.body would know, unless they were told, who their statue's meant to be like.”

”My nephew's a good sculptor,” said Doyle. ”If he wasn't I wouldn't have brought his name forward to-day; but what the doctor says is true enough. I've seen heads he's done, for mural tablets and the like, and so far as anybody recognising them for portraits of the deceased goes, you might have changed the tablets and, barring the inscriptions, n.o.body would have known to the differ. Not but what they were well done, every one of them.”

”There now, Major,” said Dr. O'Grady. ”That pretty well disposes of your last objection.”

”That's only a side issue,” said the Major, speaking with a calm which was evidently forced. ”My point is that we can't, in ordinary decency, put up a statue of one man to represent another.”

”I don't know that I altogether agree with the Major there,” said Father McCormack, ”but there's something in what he says.”

”I can't see that there's anything,” said Dr. O'Grady.

”Deputy-Lieutenants have uniforms, haven't they? So have Generals.

n.o.body can possibly know what the uniform of a Bolivian General was fifty or a hundred years ago. All we could do, even if we were having the statue entirely made to order, would be to guess at the uniform.

It's just as likely to be that of a modern Deputy-Lieutenant as anything else.”

”That's true of course,” said Father McCormack.

”Anyway,” said Doyle, ”if we're to have a statue at all it'll have to be this one. There's no other for us to get, so what's the use of talking?”