Changing Winds: A NovelErvine, St. John G. (St. John Greer)
General
Changing Winds: A Novel
Ervine, St. John G. (St. John Greer)
Fiction
Lurigedan was hardly "on his own doorstep," and Mr. Quinn himself only
knew of it because he had once, very breathlessly, climbed to its
summit, but an Irish hill was of more consequence to him than the
highest mountain in the world; and so he descended upon the master of
the school, a dreepy individual with a tendency to lament the errors of
Rome, and damned him from tip to toe so effectually that the alarmed
pedagogue gladly consented to the immediate termination of Henry's
career at his establishment. Thereafter, Henry was educated in England,
for Mr. Quinn did not propose to sacrifice efficiency to patriotism.
"An' if you come back talkin' like a damned Cockney," he said to his son
as he bade good-bye to him, "I'll cut the legs off you!"
When Henry came home in the holidays, Mr. Quinn would spend hours in
testing his tongue.
"Sound your _r_s," he would say repeatedly, because he regarded one's
ability to say the letter _r_ as a test of a man's control of the
English language. "If you were to listen to an Englishman talkin' on the
telephone, you'd hear him yelpin' _'Ah yoh thah?'_ just like a big buck
nigger, 'til you'd be sick o' listenin' to him! Say, '_Are you there?_',
Henry son!"
And Henry would say _"Are you there_, father?" very gravely.
"That's right," the old man would exclaim, listening with delight to the
rolling _r_s. "Always sound your _r_s whatever you do. I'll not own you
if you come home sayin,'_Ah yoh thah?_' when you mean '_Are you there?_'
Do you mind me, now?"
"Yes, father."
"Well, be heedin' me, then! Now, how are you on the _h_s. Are you as
steady on them as you were when you were home before?"
Then Henry would protest. "But, father," he would say, "they don't all
drop their _h_s. It's only the common ones that drop them!...
"They're all common, Henry ... the whole lot, common as dirt!" Mr. Quinn
retorted once to that, and then began to tell his son how the English
people had lost the habits and instincts of gentlemen in the eighteenth
century ... "where Ireland still is, my son!" ... and had become
money-grubbers. "The English," he said, lying back in his chair and
delivering his sentences as if he were a monarch pronouncing decrees,
"ceased to be gentlemen on the day that Hargreaves invented the
spinnin'-jenny, and landlords gave way to mill-owners." He stopped for a
second or two and then continued as if an idea had only just come into
his head. "An' it was proper punishment for Hargreaves," he said, "that
the English let him die in the workhouse. Proper punishment. What the
hell did he want to invent the thing for?..."
Henry looked up, startled by the sudden anger that swept over his
father, replacing the oracular banter with which he had begun his
discourse on the decadence of manners in England.
"But, father," he said, "you aren't against machinery, are you?"
"Yes, I am," Mr. Quinn replied, banging the arm of his chair with his
fist. "I'd smash every machine in the world, if I were in authority."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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