CORRESPONDENCE.
THE REAPING OF ULSTER. [To THE EDITOR OP THY " SPECTATOR."] Sin,—It was somewhere towards the middle of Munster that an old woman with lace to sell thrust her face in at the door of the railway carriage, and vociferated at a customer who was cheapening her wares, " I'll get good prices when Home Rule comes." I was travelling diagonally from the South of Ireland to the North, and the hum of summer was still in the south- west, though the stubble fields were empty and the winnowed grain was home, and the political situation rested like a cap of snow on the far Province of Ulster. The milky mildness of the southern climate still clung in the air, soft-eyed vampire of energy, and foster-mother of the slug-a-bed; we have fought it long, and with a varying success. With the com- fortable prophecy of the lace seller following me in the hardening air of evening I negotiated Dublin, where the lighted trains ran by the Liffey, trailing through the tar-black water reflections like iridescent fringe. In the morning, when the train moved out of the northern station, a few tall chimneys with their thongs of smoke stood bravely against the resigned sadness of the Dublin mountains; as we travelled up the coast into Ulster the sea came in green and snarling, and the dingy clouds flew laden before the stern south-easter ; rain, and cold rain, mast be in their packs, and up here, where the shivering harvest of the north was still in the fields, there was work to do that, no less than the harvest, cried out for sunshine.
Here, already, was Lisburn, where last night the crowds shouted round Sir Edward Carson; already on the platforms and in the carriages was a new type of face, a square jaw, a prominent chin, broad cheek-bones, a thick and intrepid nose, an onward eye, not averse from combat. To me, born and bred among the grave and dreamy faces of the West, apprenticed to Dublin life, seasoned in the South, these eyes and voices told a new story. Not an imaginative story, or a very sympathetic one; certainly not a long one; it would seem as if time were of more value here than conversation. They are quick movers, going about their business at a pace that is on equal terms with their brains ; we can console ourselves down in the South with the entirely true reflection that if we moved as fast as our ideas we should be invisible to the naked eye. The grey wind persecuted the streets of Belfast; seen from a cab window, with its ponderous public buildings looming in the haze, it might have been a glimpse of some great English manufacturing town. Then the wide water beside the train that took me North again; the dim shore, where the ' Titanic' was cradled; later on the new and paralyzing odours of drying flax. With the pastures of Munster still borne on the retina, the country seemed a sour and marshy one, and with October and its mists only ten daya.away, the stooks were still in the
fields, the turf was still drying, and there were sheets of oats uncut and not yet fully ripe. A few hours earlier Sir Edward Carson had passed with acclamations up the line on his way to Derry, through this half-familiar and half-strange land- scape, that wore the green and brown and sad raiment of the West, and carried turf ricks, and steam-rolled roads, and cottages profuse and ostentatious of whitewash, and inhabi- tants who spoke boldly and bluntly in the accents of Scotland. That night the drum of the Orangemen made a distant and vigorous rhythm in the motionless moonlight, announcing to all whom it might concern that these were the loyal men of Ulster.
Next day the Union Jacks brandished the same statement to heaven, in the hard, cool sunshine. The first that caught the eye strained at its leash above the gable of a cottage by the roadside; a blood-red blur against the humility of thatch and whitewash, a vaunt of loyalty, and also a very pitiful appeal to Caesar. The long white road to Coleraine clove through deserted countryside, where the oats stood uncut or lay reaped, or peopled the fields with stooks, abandoned at their most vulnerable moment by workers who counted every working hour like a coin. The farm horses were in the shafts of market carte, tugging the square-jawed farmers and their families along the straight and well-made roads ; the inevit- able donkey cart of the South is not seen in this speedy Antrim. In Coleraine the face of the town quivered with tense flags, and the hard-faced men tramped in the streets, and Orange collars and blue collars glowed in the sun at the railway station, and the mustering drum was not idle. The guard of honour waited in a double line for Sir Edward Carson, muscular young men, filling out their dark Sunday suits remarkably well; a company of capable persons, taking themselves and the position with entire seriousness, very independent individuals, strenuously agreeing to make them- selves into rank and file. It conveyed suddenly the anxiety of heart, the tough self-confidence, the elements of agony that are in this phenomenon of Ulster.
The marching town emptied itself on to a grassy bill by the river B,ann, where, with its back to the broad water and its flags braced against the strong east wind, was set the speaker's pavilion ; and over the bridge tramped the Orangemen, with the tall banners above them and the drums bumping on through the whistling storm of fifes, and ranged themselves on the slope. The river was grimly blue and coldly chiselled into furrows by the wind ; it is a stalwart river, with loaded trucks moving on its banks and steamers lying at its wharves, and these things were appropriate to the sentiment of the picture. The speakers looked up the hill of faces, and in anxious stillness the words of Sir Edward Carson were absorbed by an audience well versed in religious and political discussion, and gleaned to the7nrthest possibility of earshot ; beyond that there was still complete silence, and attentive faces fixed on their leader. Beyond them again was the myriad, unseen audience that would next morning scan every syllable and sift every phrase, and the words were chosen and weighty, and the sentences were laid with line and plummet till the position stood like a fort, and the cheering flung its arms round it like a flood tide. The members of Parliament spoke, and to all of them the meeting gave that unfaltering heed that was like the steady stretch of the long Union Jacks against the east wind. Sometimes the bunches of lesser flags made a fluttering that was like the clapping of hands, sometimes the cheering broke out in a crash, but the dominant note was attention of a deter- mined sort. Last of all Mr. F. E. Smith rose in his place, with his boyish face heavily set. I have seen such a face, so inscrutably youthful, so immutably serious, in a deal at the Dublin Horse Show, when a man bad so good a horse to sell that he was lifted above any mere trivialities or panegyrics. Sir Edward Carson's speech was like masonry ; the speech of Mr. F. E. Smith was like the flight of a strong bird. After it, of course, the National Anthem, and the empty. town swallowed up the meeting; later on, when the sun had set, the dark figures and the Orange collars converged upon the railway station, and the crowd swayed and strove on the platform as the speakers struggled through ; the Northerners were letting themselves go. They cheer with a brazen resonance : down in the South we yell as if hounds were going 'away; ae samples of the strangest, most generous of human manifestations, either will do. The face and shoulders- of Sir Edward Carson- were suddenly
raised above the hurricane, the face that is a blend of North and South, the powerful jaw was Ulster, the eye was receptive and communicative, like a Southerner's. He told his fol- lowers of his confidence in them, and his voice revealed his fatigue and added to the force of his words. Into the mass of cheering that filled the air there crept a sibilant sound; they were calling for Smith, and he in turn appeared above the heads, out of breath, and moved beyond his impassivity. " When the history of this movement comes to be written," he called out, "it will be said of Ulster that she saved herself by her exertions, and England by her example." The train was coming slowly in at his back, with the engine veiled in steam-clouds that had the red stain of the fire in them.
After the day of exaltation followed the Sunday of humilia- tion and intercession, and in the churches the hard and virile voices rumbled the confession of sin, and sang the National Anthem like a challenge. Next morning the congregations were back to the land, and the east wind blew straight and dry, and the country rustled with the handling of the sheaves. These are quick workers and fast movers; on the roads the girls walk in step, with their heads in the air and their hardy eyes alert; in the stack-yards they fork up the straw to the stack builder with an easy and rapid swing. Throughout the week of struggle with the lagging harvest went, like the wind among the sheaves, the talk of Ulster Day and of the signing of the Covenant, and, as if on the wind, came the far-away thunder of the big meetings. " I couldn't go to the meeting," said a man whose strength of body was not great, " but I'll go to the signing. That's my duty." His duty ; that was a new kind of motive to hear of. Not his revenge, or his fear, or the galling of a secret fetter, but, shortly and sufficingly, his duty.
The conclusion of the matter was, as I saw it, no less simple and complete. It took place in a clean, whitewashed village of a single street; the Union Jacks were thrust out at the windows, and a dark group of men and women was outside the little Orange Hall, under a strip of canvas that bore the un- qualified statement that these people would not have Home Rule. They know what their statement means; every mile of this ground has been fought over and died for, many times. At the back of the Hall was an enclosed patch of grass, and here the unprecedented and quiet ceremonial began. The women sat on benches, the Orangemen in sashes marched softly in, two and two, and stood in a semicircle behind. Against a gray gable-end was a table, with the gaudy flags on either side, and here the tall rector took his place. "O God our Help " was sung, and all knelt on the grass, and repeated the General Confession. Belfast has spoken in might this day, but the line of kneeling men in the well-worn suits and the Orange sashes, with their heads bent and their lips mov- ing, will not, in its profound pathos, be excelled. The sweet turf-smoke drifted across them from a cottage chimney, and bewildered the Southern sense, that has ineffaceable asso- ciations of its own for that scent, pathetic ones too, and cherished. " These men will die in their last ditch, if such there be in this business," says the correspondent of the Daily News, lifted off his feet and into prophecy, like Balaam the son of Zippor, and it was there, where his words have taken it, that the scene caught at the throat of the onlooker. The village was perfectly silent, and bare- footed children looked in at the entrance under the Union Jacks that played with their hair. The tall rector spoke, with that same note of deep anxiety and desperate trust that has penetrated this epoch in Ulster ; as he stood, with the Lion of England wrestling against the flagstaff at his side, there was but one thing to realize, that " they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain." When all was over the congregation filed into the Orange Hall and proceeded to the signing of the Covenant. There was no excite- ment whatever, and no hesitation ; four at a time the men stooped and affixed their signatures, and were quickly replaced by the next batch. Down the street, in a market house, the women were signing, women who had come in flagged motors, and on bicycles, and on foot, and the Lion of England looked on from his place above their heads. In the Ulster Hall the people were signing at about the rate of a hundred and fifty a minute ; here there was no hypnotic force of dense masses, no whirlwinds of emotion, only the unadorned and individual action of those who had left their fields, and
taken their lives and liberties in their hands ; laying them forth in the open sunshine as the measure of their resolve.—I
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