John shook his head. "I wouldn't be surprised but they just put that bit in to make it look more like the thing. What was the piece you were reciting?" John repeated it to him again. "What's the sense of that?"

the boy exclaimed.

"Oh, don't you see? It's ... it's ..." He did not know how to explain the speech. "It's poetry," he said lamely.

"Oh" said the boy. "Portry. I see now. Ah, well, I suppose they have to fill up the piece some way! Do you think that woman, what's her name again?..."

"Portia?"

"Aye. D'you think she did live at Belmont? Some of them stories is true, you know, and there was quare things happened in the oul' ancient days in this neighbourhood, I can tell you. I wouldn't be surprised now!..."

But before he could say any more, the lights were lowered again, and there was a hushing sound, and then the play proceeded.

"Oh, isn't it grand?" John said to his neighbour when the trial scene was over.

But his neighbour remained unmoved. "D'you mean to tell me," he said, "that man didn't know his wife when he saw her in the Coort?"

"What man?"

"That fellow what-you-may-call-him? The man that was married on the girl with the red dress on her!..."

"Ba.s.sanio?"

"Aye. D'you mean to tell me that fellow didn't know her again, and him only just after leaving her!..."

John tried to explain. "It's a play," he said. "He's not supposed to recognize her!..."

"Och, what's the good of supposing a thing that couldn't be!" said John's neighbour. "Any man with half an eye in his head could have seen who she was. I wish I'd gone to the 'Lhambra. This is a d.a.m.n silly play, this!"

John was horrified. "Silly," he said. "It's by Shakespeare!"

"I don't care who it's by," was the reply. "It's d.a.m.n silly to let on a man doesn't know his own wife when he sees her. I suppose that's portry!" he sneered.

John did not answer, and his neighbour went on. "Well, if it is portry ... G.o.d help it, that's all!"

But John did not care whether Ba.s.sanio had recognized Portia in the court scene or not. He left the theatre in an exalted mood in which he had little thought for the realities. Next week he told himself, he would visit the Royal again. He would see two plays on the following Sat.u.r.day, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. The bills for the following week's programme were already pasted on the walls of the theatre when he came out, and he risked the loss of his train by stopping to read one of them. _Romeo and Juliet_ was to be performed in the afternoon, and _Julius Caesar_ in the evening.

He hurried down Ann Street and across the Queen's Bridge, and reached the railway station just in time to catch his train; and all the way across the bridge and all the way home in the train, one sentence pa.s.sed continually through his mind:

_...And her sunny locks Hang on her temples like a golden fleece._

VI

While he ate his supper, he spoke to his mother and his uncles of his intention to open a bookshop.

"I'm going to start a bookshop," he said. "I made up my mind in Belfast to-day!"

"A what?" Mrs. MacDermott demanded.

"A bookshop, ma. I'll have every book you can think of in it!..."

"In the name of G.o.d," his mother exclaimed, "who do you think buys books in this place?"

"Plenty of people, ma. Mr. McCaughan!..."

"Mr. McCaughan never buys a book from one year's end to another," she interrupted. "And if he did, you can't support a shop on one man's custom. The people of this town doesn't waste their time on reading: they do their work!"

John turned angrily on her. "It's not a waste of time to read books, ma. Is it, Uncle Matthew?"

"You may well ask him," she said before Uncle Matthew could answer.

"What do you think, Uncle William?" John went on.

Uncle William thought for a few moments. "I don't know what to think,"

he said. "It's not a trade I know much about, John, but I doubt whether there's a living in it in Ballyards."

"There's no living in it," Mrs. MacDermott exclaimed pa.s.sionately, "and if there was, you shouldn't earn your living by it!"

John gazed at her in astonishment. Her eyes were shining, not with tears, though tears were not far from them, but with resentment and anger.

"Why, ma?" he said.

"Because books are the ruin of people's minds," she replied. "Your da was always reading books, wild books that disturbed him. He was never done reading _The Rights of Man_. And look at your Uncle Matthew!..."

She stopped suddenly as if she realised that she had said too much.

Uncle Matthew did not speak. He looked at her mournfully, and then he turned away.

"I don't want to say one word to hurt anyone's feelings," she continued in a lower tone, "but my life's been made miserable by books, and I don't want to see my son made miserable, too. And you know well, Matthew," she added, turning to her brother-in-law, "that all your reading has done you no good, but a great deal of harm. And what's the use of books, anyway? Will they help a man to make a better life for himself?"

Uncle Matthew turned to her quickly. "They will, they will," he said, and his voice trembled with emotion. "People can take your work from you and make little of you in the street because you did what your heart told you to do, but you'll get your comfort in a book, so you will. I know what you're hinting at, Hannah, but I'm not ashamed of what I did for the oul' Queen, and I'd do it again, gaol or no gaol, if I was to be hanged for it the day after!"

He turned to John.

"I don't know what sort of a living you'll make out of selling books,"

he said, "and I don't care either, but if you do start a shop to sell them, let me tell you this, you'll never prosper in it if it doesn't hurt you sore to part with a book, for books is like nothing else on G.o.d's earth. You _have_ to love them ... you _have_ to love them!..."

"You're daft," said Mrs. MacDermott.

"Mebbe I am," Uncle Matthew replied wearily. "But that's the way I feel, and no man can help the way he feels!"

He sat down at the table, resting his head in his hands, and gazed hungrily at his nephew.

"You can help putting notions into a person's head," said Mrs.

MacDermott. "John might as well try to _write_ books as try to sell them in this town!"

"_Write_ books!" John exclaimed.

"Aye, write them!..."