Part 17 (2/2)

”That,” said Ascher, ”is not quite what my wife means. The gifts which a city or a country give to the world must be of a more permanent kind if they are to be of real value. s.h.i.+ps, linen, tobacco, we use them, and in using we destroy them. They have their value, but it is not a permanent value. Ultimately a city will be judged not by its perishable products, but by----”

”Art,” said Mrs. Ascher.

I might have known it. Mrs. Ascher would be sure to judge cities, as she judges men, by their achievement in that particular line. I was bound to admit that the reputation of Belfast falls some way short of that of Athens as a centre of literature and art.

”Or thought,” said Ascher, ”or criticism. It is curious that a community which is virile and fearless, which is able to look at the world and life through its own eyes, which is indifferent to the general consensus of opinion----”

”Belfast is all that,” I said. ”I never knew any one who cared less what other people said and thought than Malcolmson.”

”Yet,” said Ascher, ”Belfast has done nothing, thought nothing, seen nothing. But perhaps that is all to come. The future may be, indeed I think must be, very different.”

Ascher will never be a real leader of men. His habit of seeing two sides of every question is an incurable weakness in him. Mrs. Ascher does not suffer in that way. She saw no good whatever in Belfast, nor any hope for its future.

”Never,” she said, ”never. A people who have given themselves over to material things, who accept frankly, without even the hypocrite's tribute to virtue, the money standard of value, who ask 'Does it pay?'

and ask nothing else---- Have you ever been in Belfast?”

”Yes,” I said, ”often. The churches are ugly, decidedly ugly, though comfortable.”

Mrs. Ascher shuddered.

”Comfortable!” she said. ”Yes. Comfortable! Think of it. Churches, comfort! Irredeemable hideousness and the comfort of congregations as a set-off to it.”

Mrs. Ascher panted. I could see the front of her dress--she wore a very floppy scarlet teagown--rising and falling rapidly in the intensity of her pa.s.sion. I understood more or less what she felt. If G.o.d is at all what we think He is, sublime, then there is something a little grotesque about requiring a cus.h.i.+oned pew, a good system of heating and a nice fat footstool as aids to communion with Him. Yet I am not convinced that man is incapable of the highest emotion when his body is at ease. Some degree of physical comfort seems to be required if the excursions of the soul are to be successful. I cannot, for instance, enjoy the finest kinds of poetry when I am very thirsty; nor have I ever met any one who found real pleasure in a statue when he had toothache. There is something to be said for the theory of the sceptical bishop in Browning's poem, that the soul is only free to muse of lofty things

”When body gets its sop and holds its noise.”

”The whole Irish question,” said Mrs. Ascher, and she spoke with the most tremendous vehemence, ”is a struggle not between political parties--what are political parties?”

”Rotten things,” I said. ”I quite agree with you there.”

”Not between conceptions of religion---- What is religion but the blind gropings of the human soul after some divine perfection vaguely guessed?”

That is not what religion is in Ireland. There is nothing either dim or vague about it there, and n.o.body gropes. Every one, from the infant school child to the greatest of our six archbishops, is perfectly clear and definite in his religious beliefs and suffers no doubts of any kind.

That is why Ireland is recognised everywhere as an island of saints. But of course Mrs. Ascher could not be expected to know that.

”It is a struggle,” she said, getting back to the Irish question as the subject of her sentence, ”between a people to whom art is an ideal and a people who have accepted materialism and money for their G.o.ds, an atheist people.”

It has been the great misfortune of my life that I have never been able to escape from the Irish question. It was discussed round my cradle by a nurse whom my parents selected for her sound Protestant principles. The undertaker will give his views of the Irish question to his a.s.sistant while he drives the nails into the lid of my coffin. I should not have supposed that any one could have hit on an aspect of it wholly new to me. But Mrs. Ascher did. Never before had I heard the problem stated as she stated it.

”That,” I said, ”is an extraordinarily interesting way of looking at it.

The only difficulty I see is----”

”It is true,” said Mrs. Ascher.

That was precisely my difficulty. It was not true. I went back to my recollections of old Dan Gorman, a man as intensely interested in the struggle as ever any one was. I remembered his great pot belly, his flabby skin, his whisky-sodden face. I remembered his grasping meanness, his relentless hardness in dealing with those in his power. The most thoroughly materialised business man in Belfast has more spirituality about him than old Dan Gorman ever had. Nor did I believe that his son, Michael Gorman, would have accepted Mrs. Ascher's account of his position. He would have winked, humourously appreciative of an excellent joke, if any one had told him that he was a crusader, out to wrest the sacred sepulchre of art from the keeping of the Saracens of Ulster.

I did not, of course, attempt to reason with Mrs. Ascher. There is nothing in the world more foolish than trying to reason with a woman who is possessed by a cause. No good ever comes of it. But Mrs. Ascher is quite clever enough to understand a man even if he does not speak. She felt that I should have been glad to argue with her if I had not been afraid. She entered on a long defence of her position.

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