Hyacinth. George A. Birmingham
Mr. O’Rourke ignored the suggestion, and passed on to sharpen his wit upon the landlords. He described them as ‘ill-omened tax-gatherers who suck the life-blood of the country, and refuse to disgorge a penny of it for any useful purpose.’ Mr. O’Rourke was not a man who shrank from a mixed metaphor, or paused to consider such trifles as the unpleasantness which would ensue if anyone who had been sucking blood were to repent and disgorge it. ‘Where,’ he went on to ask, ‘do they spend their immense revenues? Is it in Ireland?’ Here he made one of those dramatic pauses for which his oratory was famous. The audience waited breathlessly for the denunciation which was to follow. They were treated, unexpectedly, to a well-conceived anticlimax. A voice spoke softly, but quite clearly, from the back of the hall:
‘Bedad, and I shouldn’t wonder if it was in the London restaurants.’
A roar of laughter followed. The orator might no doubt have made an effective reply, but every time he opened his mouth minor wits, rending like wolves the carcase of the original joke, yelled ‘turtle-soup’ at him, or ‘champagne and oysters.’ He got angry, and consequently flurried. He tried to quell the tumult by thundering out the denunciation which he had prepared. But the delight which the audience took in shrieking the items of their imaginary bill of fare was too much for him. He forgot what he had meant to say, floundered, attempted to pull himself together, and brought out the stale jest about providing each landlord with a single ticket to Holyhead.
‘And that same,’ said his original tormentor, ‘would be cheaper than giving you a return ticket to London.’
The audience was immensely tickled. So far the entertainment, if not precisely novel, was better than anything they had hoped for, and everyone had an agreeable conviction that there was still something in the way of a sensation in store. Perhaps it was eagerness for the expected climax which induced them to keep tolerably quiet during the remainder of Mr. O’Rourke’s speech. He set forth at some length the glorious achievements of his party in the past, and explained the opportunities of future usefulness which lay to be grasped if only the necessary funds were provided. He sat down to make way, as he assured the audience, for certain tried and trusty soldiers of the cause who were waiting to propose important resolutions. So far as these warriors were concerned, he might as well have remained standing. Their resolutions are to this day unproposed and uncommended—a secret joy, no doubt, to those who framed them, but not endorsed by any popular approval.
Hyacinth Conneally was not admitted to the secret councils of Augusta Goold and her friends. He knew no more than the general public what kind of a coup was meditated, but he gathered from Miss O’Dwyer’s nervous excitement and Tim Halloran’s air of immense and mysterious importance that something quite out of the common was likely to occur. By arriving an hour and a half before the opening of the meeting he secured a seat near the platform. He enjoyed the discomfiture of O’Rourke, whom he had learnt from the pages of the Croppy to despise as a mere windbag, and to hate as the betrayer of O’Neill. A sudden thrill of excitement went through him when O’Rourke sat down. The whole audience turned their faces from the platform towards the door at the far end of the hall, and Hyacinth, without knowing exactly what he expected, turned too. There was a swaying visible among the crowd near the door, and almost immediately it became clear that someone was trying to force a way through the densely-packed people. Curses were to be heard, and even cries from those who were being trodden on. At last a way was made. Augusta Goold, followed by Grealy, Halloran, and Mary O’Dwyer, came slowly up the hall towards the platform. Those of the audience whose limbs had not been crushed or their feet mangled in preparation for her progress cheered her wildly. Indeed, she made a regal appeal to them. Even amidst a crowd of men her height made her conspicuous, and she had arrayed herself for the occasion in a magnificent violet robe. It flowed from her shoulders in spacious folds, and swept behind her, splendidly contemptuous of the part it played as scavenger amid the accumulated filth of the floor. Her bare arms shone out of the wide sleeves which hung around them. Her neck rose strong and stately over the silver clasp of a cloak which she had thrown back from her shoulders. She wore a hat which seemed to hold her hair captive from falling loose around her. One great tress alone escaped from it, and by some cunning manipulation was made to stand straight out, as if blown by the wind from its fastenings. In comparison her suite looked commonplace and mean. Poor Miss O’Dwyer was arrayed—‘gowned,’ she would have said herself in reporting the scene—in vesture not wanting in splendour, but which beside Miss Goold’s could not catch the eye. Thomas Grealy, awkward and stooped, peered through his glasses at the crowd. Tim Halloran walked jauntily, but his eyes glanced nervously from side to side. He was certainly ill at ease, possibly frightened, at the position in which he found himself.
A hurried consultation took place among the gentlemen on the platform, which ended in Mr. O’Rourke stepping forward with a smile and an outstretched hand to welcome Augusta Goold as she ascended the steps. The expression of his face belied the smile which he had impressed upon his lips. His eyes had the same look of furtive malice as a dog’s which wants to bite but fears the stick. Augusta Goold waved aside the proffered hand, and stepped unaided on to the platform. Mr. O’Rourke placed a chair for her, but she ignored it and stood, with her followers behind her, facing the audience. O’Rourke and two of his tried and trusty members of Parliament approached her. They stood between her and the audience, and talked to her for some time, apparently very earnestly. Augusta Goold looked past them, over them, sometimes it seemed through them, while they spoke, but made them no answer whatever. At last Mr. O’Rourke shrugged his shoulders, and withdrew to his chair with a sulky scowl.
‘I wish,’ said Augusta Goold, ‘to ask a simple question of your chairman.’
Mr. O’Rourke rose.
‘This meeting,’ he said, ‘is convened for the purpose of raising funds for the carrying on of the national business in the House of Commons. If Miss Goold’s question relates to the business in hand, I shall be most happy to answer it. If not, I am afraid I cannot allow it to be asked here. At another time and in another place I shall be prepared to listen to what Miss Goold has to say, and in the meantime if she will take her seat on the platform she will be heartily welcome.’
‘My question,’ said Augusta Goold, ‘is intimately connected with the business of the meeting. It is simply this: Are you, Mr. O’Rourke, prepared to give any portion of the money entrusted to you by the Irish people to assist the Boers in their struggle for freedom?’
It was manifestly absurd to ask such a question at all. Mr. O’Rourke had no intention of collecting money for the Boers, who seemed to have plenty of their own, and he could not without breach of trust have applied funds subscribed to feed and clothe members of Parliament to arming volunteers. Nevertheless, it was an awkward question to answer in the presence of an audience excited by Augusta Goold’s beauty and splendid audacity. A really strong man, like, for instance, O’Rourke’s predecessor, John O’Neill, might have faced the situation, and won, if not the immediate cheers, at least the respect of the Irish people. But Mr. O’Rourke was not a strong man, and besides he was out of temper and had lost his nerve. He took perhaps the worst course open to him: he made a speech. He appealed to his past record as a Nationalist, and to his publicly reiterated expressions of sympathy with the Boer cause. He asked the audience to trust him to do what was right, but he neither said Yes nor No to the question he was asked.
Augusta Goold stood calm and impassive while he spoke. A sneer gathered on her lips and indrawn nostrils as he made his appeal for the people’s confidence. When he had finished she said, very slowly, and with that extreme distinctness of articulation which women speakers seem to learn so much more easily than men:
‘Are you prepared to give any portion of the money entrusted to you by the Irish people to assist the Boers in their struggle for freedom?’
Mr. O’Rourke was goaded into attempting another speech, but the audience was in no mood to listen to him. He was interrupted again and again with shouts of ‘Yes or no!’ ‘Answer the question!’ The bantering tone with which they had plied him earlier in the evening with suggestions for a menu had changed now into angry insistence. He passed his hand over his forehead with a gesture of despair, and sat down. At once the tumult ceased, and the people waited breathless