"I hope," I said, "that I haven't lit on an inconvenient evening. Had you any other engagement?"

I was eating a very small piece of fish when he spoke to me, and was trying to guess what the sauce was flavoured with. It occurred to me suddenly that I might have broken in upon some sort of private anniversary, a day which Ascher and his wife observed as one of abstinence. There was, I could scarcely fail to notice it, a sense of subdued melancholy about our proceedings.

"Oh, no," said Ascher, "but on Wednesdays we always have some music. I was inclined to think that you might have preferred to spend the evening talking, but my wife----"

He looked at Mrs. Ascher. I should very much have preferred talk to music. It was chiefly in order to hear Ascher talk that I had accepted the invitation.

"I know," said Mrs. Ascher, "that Sir James likes music."

She laid a strong emphasis on the word "know," and I felt that she was paying me a nice compliment. What she said was true enough. I do like music, some kinds of music. I had heard for the first time the night before a song, then very popular, with a particularly attractive chorus.

It began to run through my head the moment Ascher mentioned music. "I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it." I liked that song. I was not sure that I should like the Aschers' music equally well. However, I had no intention of contradicting Mrs. Ascher.

"I'm pa.s.sionately fond of music," I said.

Ascher is a singularly guileless man. I cannot imagine how any one so unsuspicious as he is can ever have succeeded as a financier, unless indeed people are far honester about money than they are about anything else. I do not think Mrs. Ascher believed that I am pa.s.sionately fond of music. Her husband did. The little shadow of anxiety which had rested on his face cleared away. He became almost cheerful.

"To-night," he said, "we are going to hear some of the work of----"

He said a name, but I utterly failed to catch it. I had never heard it before, and it sounded foreign, very foreign indeed, possibly Kurdish.

"------," said Ascher, "is one of the new Russian composers."

I heard the name that time, but I can make no attempt, phonetic or other, to spell it. I suppose it can be spelled, but the letters must be given values quite new to me. The alphabet I am accustomed to is incapable of representing that man's name.

"I daresay you know him," said Mrs. Ascher.

I strongly suspected that she was trying to entrap me. I have never been quite sure of Mrs. Ascher since the day she discovered that I was talking nonsense about the statuette of Psyche. Sometimes she appears to be the kind of foolish woman to whom anything may be said without fear.

Sometimes she displays most unexpected intelligence. I looked at her before I answered. Her narrow, pale-green eyes expressed nothing but innocent inquiry. She might conceivably think that I had already made a careful study of the music of the new Russian composer. On the other hand, she might be luring me on to say that I knew music which was to be played in her house that night for the first time. I made up my mind to be safe.

"No," I said, "I never even heard of him."

Then Ascher began to talk about the man and his music. He became more animated than I had ever seen him. It was evident that Russian music interested Ascher far more than finance did; that it was a subject which was capable of wakening real enthusiasm in him. I listened, eating from time to time the delicate morsels of food offered to me and sipping the delicious wine. I did not understand anything Ascher said, and all the names he mentioned were new to me; but for a time I was content to sit in a kind of half-conscious state, hypnotised by the sound of his voice and the feeling that Mrs. Ascher's eyes were fixed on me.

Not until dinner was nearly over did I make an effort to a.s.sert myself.

"I was talking to Gorman the other day," I said, "about Irish affairs and especially about the Ulster situation. I have also been hearing Malcolmson's views. Malcolmson is a colonel and an Ulsterman. You know the sort of views an Ulster Colonel would have."

Ascher smiled faintly. He seemed no more than slightly amused at the turn Irish affairs were taking. After all neither international finance nor Russian music was likely to be profoundly affected by the Ulster rebellion. (Malcolmson will not use the word rebellion, but I must.

There is no other word to describe the actions he contemplates.) No wonder Ascher takes small interest in the matter. On the other hand, Mrs. Ascher was profoundly moved by the mention of Ulster. I could see genuine pa.s.sion in her eyes.

"Belfast," she said, "stands for all that is vilest and most hateful in the world. It is worse than Glasgow, worse than Manchester, worse than Birmingham."

Belfast is, no doubt, the main difficulty. If there were no Belfast the resistance of the rest of Ulster would be inconsiderable. I admired the political instinct which enabled Mrs. Ascher to go straight to the very centre of the situation. But, in all probability, Gorman gave her the hint. Gorman does not seem to understand how real the Ulster opposition is, but he has intelligence enough to grasp the importance of Belfast.

What puzzled me first was the extreme bitterness with which Mrs. Ascher spoke.

"What has Belfast ever given to the world?" she asked.

"Well," I said, "ships are built there, and of course there's linen. I believe they manufacture tobacco, and----"

"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. Ships, 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 cushioned 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.