Cover art
"SHE FOUND THE IDEA HIGHLY HUMOROUS"
SOME IRISH
YESTERDAYS
BY
E. OE. SOMERVILLE
AND
MARTIN ROSS
AUTHORS OF
"THE REAL CHARLOTTE," "SOME EXPERIENCES
OF AN IRISH R.M.," "ALL ON THE IRISH SHORE,"
ETC. ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
E. OE. SOMERVILLE
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY
1906
All rights reserved
CONTENTS
[An Outpost of Ireland]
[Picnics]
[Boon Companions]
[The Biography of a Pump]
[Hunting Mahatmas]
[A Patrick's Day Hunt]
[Alsatia]
["In Sickness and in Health"]
[Horticultural]
[Out of Hand]
[A Record of Holiday]
[Lost, Stolen, or Strayed]
[Children of the Captivity]
[Slipper's A B C of Fox-Hunting]
The Authors desire to thank the Editors of the Magazines and Periodicals in which the following Sketches have appeared, for their permission to reprint them here; and they wish also to acknowledge the courtesy of Messrs. Constable & Co. in permitting the reproduction of "A Patrick's Day Hunt."
October 1906
ILLUSTRATIONS
["*She found the idea highly humorous*"] . . . Frontispiece
["*White houses clustered round a fragment of bastion*"]
["*The outline of Connemara was still sharp*"]
["*The hovering horde vacillates no longer*"]
["*A voice fell like a falling star*"]
["*I wash meself every Sathurday morning*"]
["*It's all would be about it, she'd break the side car!*"]
["*The like o' the crowd that was in Kyleranny*"]
["*The Widow Brinckley faced him the same as Jeffrey faced his cat*"]
["*The villyan wheeled into the yard as nate as a bicycle*"]
["*Sending his wild voice abroad*"]
["*Ancient widowhood and spinsterdom*"]
["*What have ye on yer noa-se*"]
["*She's the liveliest of them, God bless her!*"]
["*And cabbages!" said the mountainy man*]
["*A man must wote the way his priest and bishop 'll tell him*"]
[*Slipper's A B C of Fox-Hunting*]
AN OUTPOST OF IRELAND
"Is it a bath on Twelfth Day? Sure no one would expect that, no more than on a Sunday!"
Twelfth Day was accordingly added to Miss Gerraghty's list of Bath Holidays—that is to say, the list allotted to Miss Gerraghty's visitors. Judging from appearances, her private list was composed of one infinite bath holiday; indeed, she has been heard in the kitchen announcing in clear tones her opinion of "them thrash of baths" to an audience whose hands and faces wore a sympathetic half-mourning. Nature, we were given to understand, had intended Miss Gerraghty to be a lady; a fate more blind to the fitness of things decreed that she should serve tables in a Galway lodging-house, a position in which higher destinies are likely to be overlooked. Some touches of dignity remained hers by an immutable etiquette; no cap had ever found footing upon her raven fringe; a watch chain took the place of the ignoble white apron. Chiefest of all prerogatives, she was addressed as "Miss Gerraghty" by the establishment, an example so carefully set by her brother, the proprietor, as to suggest that her dowry was mingled with the funds of the management.
With these solaces she doubtless fed her inner need of refinement, even while she launched the thirteenth trump of repartee at the woman who came to sell turkeys, or broke a lance in coquetry with the coal man. Such episodes were freely audible to the sitting room by the hall—indeed, the woman with the turkeys finally thrust her flushed face and the turkey's haggard bosom round the door, in an appeal to Cæsar that made the rooftree ring. These things occur in Galway, with a simplicity that is not often met with elsewhere.
There was an afternoon when a native of the Islands of Aran penetrated to the hearth-rug of Miss Gerraghty's front sitting-room, in the endeavour to plant upon its occupants a forequarter of mutton that smelt of fish, and was as destitute of fat as the rocks of its birthplace. Even the Aran man's assurance that it was "as sweet as sugar," could not relax by a line the contempt with which Miss Gerraghty, when summoned to judgment, surveyed the dainty and its owner. In course of the discussion, she took occasion to inform the company that she herself could only "eat ram mutton by the dint of the gravy," which bore, as it seemed, somewhat darkly upon the matter, but had the effect of deepening the complexion of the Aran man by quite two shades of maroon, as he hoisted his unattractive burden to his frieze-clad shoulder and removed himself.
Miss Gerraghty then stated that them Aran people had a way of their own and a sense of their own, like the Indians, and that a gentleman friend of hers who travelled in tea, had once been weather-bound in Aran and had had a bad stomach ever since. She then retired to the kitchen, where the narrative of the rout of the Aran Islander held, for the space of ten enjoyable minutes, an audience swelled by the addition of the washerwoman and the baker's boy.
The incident passed, yet the phrase "a way of their own, and a sense of their own—like the Indians," hung hauntingly in the memory.
Any attempt to portray Marino Cottage would be incomplete without mention of its consort, Ocean Prospect, an affiliated establishment, spoken of in the household as "Opposite," from which, at any hour of the day or night, uncertain numbers of Miss Gerraghty's nieces crossed the road to Marino Cottage, laden, like ants, with burdens varying from a feather bed to a kettle of boiling water. A flavour of the life of the "Swiss Family Robinson" was thus imparted, Ocean Prospect filling the position of the wreck, which, as the virtuously brought up should remember, yielded fresh butter, kegs of gunpowder, and bedroom slippers with equal promptness. Miss Gerraghty's nieces occupied undefined and interchangeable positions in both households, from Bedelia, who played the piano, and on Saturdays crimped her hood of auburn hair, to Bridget Ellen, who at seven years of age could discern a stale herring and tell the fishwoman so. Like Goldsmith, they left nothing untouched, and there was nothing that they touched that they did not adorn, with genial finger-mark or the generously strewn cinder. Their hats perched like mange-stricken parakeets in the hall, their witticisms drew forth the admiring yells of the kitchen audience from breakfast till bed time, the creaking of their boots was as the innumerable rendings of glazed calico, or the delirium of a corncrake. The Holy-days of the Roman Catholic church were observed by them with every honour, and with many varieties of evening party; and it is a matter for mingled thankfulness and regret that they observed them, for the most part, "Opposite." Assuredly Bedelia, with a clean face, playing dance music, would have been a spectacle hardly less memorable than Miss Gerraghty and her Sunday boots circling in a waltz and creaking through a quadrille, or sipping a glass of port with the delicacy befitting the noblesse. Yet with three Holy-days in one fortnight it might have proved excessive.
Miss Gerraghty rises irrepressibly into the foreground of these winter days, but Christmas week in Galway Town remains an impression both salient and characteristic. During its wet and miry days the country people moved in a slow and voluble throng through streets and shops, indifferent to weather, and time and space, while the sleety storm roared of shipwreck above the rooftops, and the wearied young gentlemen behind the counters held their own against the old women with a philosophy perfected in the afflictions of many market days.
"Four an' tinpince!" shouts an old woman in a short scarlet petticoat and a long blue cloak, scornfully thumbing a pair of boots and slapping them down on the counter. She traduces them, minutely, to a party of friends, who, being skilled in the rôle expected of them, implore her not to waste her valuable time on such unworthy objects. The salesman has placed himself upon a bench, with his legs extended along it, his eyes on the ceiling, and his arms folded; his lips repeat occasionally the formula "Five shillins!" otherwise he remains as remote as the Grand Lama of Tibet.
"You're too tight with me!" laments the proprietor of a cartload of apples, in pathetic appeal to a customer. "God knows I'm not tight!" responds the customer, with even superior pathos, "but the times is scroogin' meself!"
It is, perhaps, the leading draper who endures most. All day long the blue cloaks and the bony elbows jostle against his counters, disparaging hands subject his calicoes and his flannels to gruesome tests, his plush work-bags and scent-cases are handled uncomprehendingly and flung aside; acrid jibes are levelled at his assistants, who, to do them justice, show a practised tartness in rejoinder. Through the noise and the smell of stale turf smoke a large musical-box hammers and tinkles forth the "Washington Post."
Late in the wild darkness of the January evenings the cry "Will thu gull-a-wallia?" (sic) ("Are you going home?") passes from group to group in the streets. It is far on into the night before the carts with their load of sleepy and drunken people cease to stagger and clatter along the bleak roads that take them home. Beaten with snow, blinded with rain, the holiday season wears itself out in darkness, dirt, and inconvenience, after the manner of such seasons, churches and public houses presenting the only open doors in the shuttered streets. All day the electric light hung its fervid loops of white fire up in the roof of the church of St. Nicholas, unearthly, coldly intense, suiting well the spirituality of arches and pillars, loftily interclasping through the storms of centuries. The tattered colours of the Connaught Rangers droop on either side of the chancel arch, shreds of mellow colour against the grey limestone; they say things that are moving to a Galway heart. Out where the long Sea Road follows the shore of Galway Bay, the great winds press heavily against the windows of Marino Cottage, and the little one-horse trams glide on the desolate shining road like white-backed beetles.
The year strengthened and the days lengthened over misty seas ridged with angry white. Out where the murky west held the Islands of Aran in its bosom, the sunsets came later day by day. Once, and memorably, a dishevelled and flying pageant of green and lurid pink glowed, like the torn colours in the church, beneath the darkening roof of cloud; in its heart I saw the Aran steamer, labouring on the dark horizon of climbing waves.
* * * * *
It was February when Circumstance took me in her hand and flung me across two seas into the blue and gold weather and the purple and silver mountains of the Department of "Pyrénées Orientales;" and May had come before I was again in London, shivering in a cold rain that dropped acridly out of the dirty fog, the orphan rain of London, that knows no previousness of clouded hill, no dignity of broad-sailed mists moving up along the moor, no hereafter of clean breezes sweeping the bounteous heaven. Twenty hours later the mild yet poignant fragrance of Irish air was in the window of my railway carriage, and the smell of turf smoke came up out of the west across the stone walls of Roscommon.
Turf smoke lurked in concentrated staleness about the garb of the two priests in the opposite corner, yet it was preferable to yesterday's raw whiff of the Channel; the galloping whisper of the Daily Office in the two Breviaries revealed the accents of Connaught, and were comfortable to an ear already soothed by drowsiness. Let others roll and stagger to foreign lands in front of the lashing fins of a screw, I was advancing on an even axle into springtime in the County of Galway; in my mind's eye I beheld the Aran steamer leisurely paddling upon a sea of satin smoothness to the unknown islands, and in my ear sang the phrase "a way of their own, and a sense of their own; like the Indians."
Two mornings later the door of my bedroom in a hotel in Eyre Square, Galway, was dealt a fateful blow by the hand of the hotel cook, at 3.30 A.M., a blow weighted by lifelong combat with loins of mutton. It was no less a person than she who placed the teapot on the breakfast table, murmuring apologetically that "Gerrls was no good to rise early, but owld ones like herself wouldn't ax to stay in bed." The sunshine of May fell upon her grey locks as she stood at the portal to watch her guest's departure, and her "God speed ye!" mingled with the bang of the swing-door as it slammed upon the dark and sleeping house.
The laburnums of Eyre Square were fountains of gold, and the lilac was delicate and cool; a perfect stillness lay upon Galway. Passing on through the streets there was no sign of life, and the morning sunshine smote on ranks of muffled windows: here and there on the old houses the coats-of-arms of the Galway Tribes uplifted their melancholy witness to bygone greatness, but the town spoke with no living voice. Emerging at length from between blind-eyed house fronts, the docks were reached, and in the large vacant spaces of water now to be found where was once the second port of the United Kingdom, the smoke of a little steamer rose in lonely activity, with the mountains of Clare and the glitter of Galway Bay for a background.
There was some delay in departure, owing partly to a genial sympathy with the unpunctual, partly to a question of precedence among a pig family in the process of embarkation. The captain, a large clerical man in a soft felt hat, bore it with the equanimity of one who has learned in many journeys between Galway and Aran what is the full significance of the devils having entered into the swine. The boat moved out at length into the gleaming breadth of the bay; slowly the gray town grouped itself in its low-lying corner, the spires rose, waist-deep in roofs, and the heavy tower of St. Nicholas bore its associations of seven hundred years in the brilliant youth of the spring sunlight. The western suburbs stretched far along the bay, with slopes smoothly wooded; white houses looked blankly out from their trim demesnes, like alienated friends gazing an unmoved farewell. Even Marino Cottage, attired in a summer wash of pink, seemed to regard us with a new and strange exclusiveness. Inexpressibly pure of plumage, the gulls rode the clear wavelets, and swooped from poise to poise with striding wing, masters of art in two elements, with cold eyes observant of the cumbrous creature that crawled on the face of the waters with smoke and foam and splashing. Thirty miles away a low, blue mound on the horizon represented those Islands of Aran described in the ancient "Book of Rights" as "The Aras of the Sea;" the bows of the steamer swung to them, gradually the brown and ragged coasts of Connemara opened away to the north, and to the south the barren verge of the County of Clare was shorn perpendicular to the sea at the thousand-foot drop of the cliffs of Moher.
KILRONAN BAY
The steamer plodded on at her ten miles an hour, the pig families below uttered no more than an occasional yell of fractiousness or dolour, and a party of Aran women sat and conversed under their red shawls with that unflagging zest and seemingly inexhaustible supply of material that may well be the envy of the cultured.
It was eight o'clock when the anchor was let go in Kilronan Bay, opposite the principal village of the principal island, while the changeless sunshine shone on shallow green water, on dazzling whitewashed cottages, on dark hills and valleys of grey stone. Round the steamer flocked battered punts and tarred canvas corraghs with their bows high out of the water; tanned faces, puckered by the sunlight, stared up from them, and in a storm of Irish the process of disembarking began—the phrase but feebly expresses the spectacle of a kitchen table lowered from the deck and laid on its back in a corragh, or the feat of placing an old woman sitting in the table with a gander in her lap. The corragh has no keel, and a sneeze is rightly believed to be fatal to its equilibrium, but an Aran old woman and an Aran gander can rush in where Sir Isaac Newton might fear to tread.
A crowd waited at the pier's end, as the boats came creaking and gliding in to their feet; a crowd of large and angular people, their faces strong and inquisitive, and instantly remarkable to any one accustomed to the mild and half-bashful expression of West Galway eyes. There is about them an air of a foreign race and of an earlier century. Under circumstances less soul-stirring than the arrival of the Galway steamer, their long composed faces express their monotony of mood; their eyes are steady and far-looking, as those that from day to day measure the sweep of great horizons. Men and women alike wear "pampooties"—-slippers of raw cowhide, with the hair outside—and walk with the alertness and erectness that are learned from rocky ground and the absence of stiff and high-heeled boots; the men affect short, full trousers, ending high above the ankle, so that the pampootie is freely displayed in its varieties of dun or black or speckled hide. Topping the costume is a "Tam o' Shanter" cap, probably made in Birmingham. It is not a graceful dress, but the square shoulders and flat backs would dignify a worse one, and the mild and mottled pampootie loses its effeminacy with the people's singularly emphatic tread.
AN ARAN FISHERMAN
A hostelry of two whitewashed stories and a thatched roof faced the pier, and we went thither in search of a car, ordered some days before. The door was open, admitting a flood of sunshine to a narrow passage, on one side of which was a kitchen, on the other a sitting-room, with a wall paper of drab trellis-work starred with balls of Reckitt's blue—so it seemed, at least, to eyes blinded by the outer glare. It contained chiefly the smell of apples and sour bread proper to rooms of its class, such as in the Isles of Aran seemed impossibly conventional. Train-oil and sealskins would have shed a fitter perfume. Having invoked the household in vain, I essayed the kitchen, where an old man in shirt-sleeves was in the act of eating his breakfast. He regarded me, not without aversion, and continued to share an egg with a child of three years old who stood intent and dirty-faced at his elbow. I waited till a precarious teaspoonful had been lowered into the wide open mouth, and made my inquiry about the car.
"They're out since five o'clock looking for the horse." Another spoonful of egg trembled in the balance, and entered the speaker's mouth, not without disaster.
I averted my eyes, and asked where the horse was usually kept.
"He does be out on the rocks." The spoon was pointed out of the window, somewhat peevishly.
Looking in the direction indicated, we saw the arid shore of the bay, where, instead of sands, grey stone in platforms and pavements met the blue and glittering tide. From the shore the country rose in haggard slopes of gray stone with rifts of green; cresting the height, one of Aran's many ruined oratories lifted a naked gable in the deep of the sky. A narrow road followed the bend of the bay, glaring white for two shelterless miles; no living thing was visible; the pursuit of the horse must be raging on the other side of the island. It continued for another hour, with what episodes of crag and crevasse can scarcely be imagined; finally a dejected and shaggy captive was led in and was thrust into the shafts of a car.
The drive that followed is not easily forgotten. There were moments when the car seemed to open at all its joints, as if falling asunder from exhaustion; and the shafts swayed and swung like twin bowsprits, the wheels creaked ominously, and one tyre left an undulating line in the gritty dust of the road. On either side spread floors of stone, on which sat parliaments of boulders; we passed a stone platform so large and so level that the addition of three walls has made a creditable ball-alley of it. The walls are said to have been built with money given for the relief of distress in Aran; if so, relief money has often been worse spent in the West of Ireland. The road kept in touch with the coast, the car mounted to higher ground, with the shafts pointing heavenward on either side of the horse's touzled mane. Pale green fields and pale tracts of sand mitigated the tyranny of rock, as the island sloped south-eastward into the rich and wide azure of the sea. A village straggled along the shore, the chief mass of the low, white houses clustered round a fragment of bastion and buttress that tells of the days when Cromwell's arm was long enough to grasp even Aran and build a stronghold there, what time the iron entered into the soul of Galway.
"WHITE HOUSES CLUSTERED ROUND A FRAGMENT OF BASTION"
The builders of the castle had not far to seek for their cut stone. Four churches and a lofty and slender Round Tower were close at hand, a constellation in the devotional system of "Ara the Holy," the mother of many saints and many churches, and therefore peculiarly suited to the purpose of the Cromwellians. The churches were demolished, the topmost stones of the Tower were utilised, and its "Sweet bell" lost in the sand. Today but twelve feet of the beautiful masonry remain to testify to the fervid skill of its builders.
Red-shawled women sat by the white-washed doorways of the village, red petticoated children pattered barefoot on the hot rocks by the roadside, and behind them burned the sea's leagues of lapis lazuli; the green of the grass lands intervened suavely in the delicious jangle of colour. We were at our journey's end so far as the car was concerned; the artless islander, having extorted a payment of four shillings for a drive of two miles, retired, and we pursued our way on foot to the Lodge above the village, which was our destination.
"THE OUTLINE OF CONNEMARA WAS STILL SHARP"
Life at the Lodge on the hill during the ten days that followed had aspects that were wholly ideal, and aspects that were unreservedly scullion. The chief windows faced north-east, framing a splendid outlook across a plain of sea to where the Connemara mountains have pitched their tents in a jagged line, pale in the torpid heat of morning, dark at evening against some lengthening creek of sunset. When, at some ten of the clock the rooms in the lonely house had passed from gloaming to darkness, and the paraffin lamp glared smokily at the semi-grand piano and the horsehair sofa, the wild and noble outline of Connemara was still sharp, the gleam behind it still a harbourage for the daylight.
The more elementary needs of the establishment were coped with by a henchwoman from the village below, a middle-aged and taciturn widow, wearing a red-checked shawl over her broad chest, a smaller red shawl over her head, an excessively short red homespun skirt, and pampooties. In the early hours of the summer morning her step, muffled in cowhide, traversed the house weightily; in due time followed the entrance of the stable bucket, borne with a slow stride that showed to admiration the grey woollen ankles under the short skirt: her eye rested askance, and not without saturnine humour, upon the weakling of a later civilisation who still lay in bed. As the bucket was set down a deep and serious voice uttered the monosyllable "bath," as colourlessly as the bleat of a sheep, and, with the exit of her sallow face and dreamy blue eyes, the strange, arduous, trifling day began.
Breakfast was not its least achievement, prepared by our own hands at a turf fire that added an aroma of its own to the coffee, and delicately flavoured the hot milk. Owing to a scarcity of saucepans the eggs must be boiled in a portly iron pot and fished from its depths with the tongs, and through all, and impeding all, went the flushed pertinacity of the amateur toast-maker. Dinner was a more serious affair, a strenuous triumph of mind over matter and over the Widow Holloran, a daily despair, by reason of potatoes whose hearts remained harder than Pharaoh's, and chiefly by reason of the dearth of pie-dishes.
"Why wouldn't ye ax Miss O'Regan down in the town for the loan of a pie-dish? Sure she's full up of pie-dishes." This remarkable information came from Mrs. Holloran, but was not acted upon.
After twenty four hours of the ministry of the Widow Holloran, we found the conclusion forced upon us that the Simple Life was far more complicated, and infinitely more exacting than the normal existence of the worldling. To us, nurturing a sulky flame in a gloomy pile of turf, the truly Simple Life resolved itself into two words: good servants. Even the least of Miss Gerraghty's nieces would have been a Godsend; the thought of mutton chops, procurable at any instant, all but brought a dimness to the eye that foresaw a dinner—the third in succession—of American bacon and eggs that tasted of fish. It was in one of the long May twilights that we were waited upon by the man who had, on the hearthrug of Marino Cottage's Front Sitting-room, offered us mutton, sweet as sugar. This time he offered not mutton, but sheep; he produced a sort of subscription list, and invited us to put down our names for any piece we might prefer of an animal which was at the moment nibbling the dainty grass among the boulders. We subscribed, with a shudder which was, as it proved, superfluous. The subscription list did not fill, and two days afterwards we were told that the matter had fallen through, and if we wanted "buttcher's mate" we must telegraph to Galway.
I have heard, in another part of Ireland, described slightingly as "a wild westhern place in Cork," of a somewhat similar, but more elaborate process. "When they goes to kill a cow there, they dhrive her out through the sthreet, and a man in front of her ringing a bell, and another man with her, and he having a bit o' chalk (and it should be a black cow). Every one then can tell what bit of her they want, and the man dhraws it out on her with the chalk. But it should be a black cow." I think it was a relative of this butcher who, when remonstrated with about his meat, on the ground that it had not been properly killed, replied unanswerably, "I declare to ye, the one that had the killing of that cow was the Lord Almighty."
Meals at the Lodge were not things done in a corner. Sheep cropped the grass to the edge of the window sill, village children loitered observantly on their way to the well, tall brindled dogs, in whom must lurk some strain of the old Irish wolfhound, gnawed sapless bones in the porch, as in an accustomed sanctuary. The cuckoo, that pretended recluse, passed and repassed in clumsy flight, even perching on the roof of the house, and sending a hoarse and hollow cry down the chimney. Sitting on the rock ledges in the long morning, the chiefest concern of idleness was to note his short and graceless flittings from boulder to wall, his tactless call, coarsened by nearness and the lack of illusion. Not thus does the spirit voice poise the twin notes in tireless mystery, among the wooded shores of Connemara lakes.
Below the Lodge, to the south-east, the restless sand has smothered many a landmark, obliterated many a grave. Lie down in it, it is a soft bed; let it slip through your fingers, dry and fine and delicate, while the sea line is high and blue above you, and the light breaker strikes the slow moments in rhythm. Saint and oratory, cloghaun and cromlech, lie deep in its oblivion, their memory living faintly and more faintly from lip to lip through the years; around the saints their halos still linger, pale in this age's noonday, and the fishermen still strike sail at the corner of the island to the little crumbling tower that is supposed to mark the grave of Saint Gregory.
The ridge of the island runs in table lands of rock, dropping in cliffs to the sea along its south-western face. These heights are level deserts of stone, streaked with soft grass where the yellow vetch blazes and a myriad wild roses lay their petals against the boulders. Yet even these handmaids of the rock are not the tenderest of its surprises. Look down the slits and fissures as you step across them on a May day, and you will see fronds of maiden hair climbing out of the darkness and warm mud below. A month later they will be strong and tall above the surface; the clots of foam may often strike them when, below their platform, the piled-up Atlantic rolls its vastness to the attack, with the cruel green of the up-drawn wave, with the hurl of the pent tons against crag and cliff. But for us, on that May morning, land and sea lay in rapt accord, and the breast of the brimming tide was laid to the breast of the cliff, with a low and broken voice of joy.
The walk here became finally and definitely a steeplechase, and those not bred in Galway had better think twice before attempting an Aran stone wall; indeed, when five feet of ponderous and trembling stone lattice work has to be dealt with, the native himself will probably adopt the simple course of throwing it down, building it up again or not, according to the dictates of conscience. If the explorer survives two hours of this exercise, he will have reached the fort of Dun Ængus, built in days when Christianity, a climbing sunrise, was as yet far below the Irish horizon. Of its kind, it is reputed to be as perfect as anything in Europe, but it is an unlovely kind. Three invertebrate walls of loose stones, eighteen feet high and fifteen feet thick, sprawl in a triple horseshoe to the edge of a cliff, which, with its sheer drop of three hundred feet to the sea, completes the line of defence. The innermost of the three ramparts encloses a windy plateau where, in times of siege, the Firbolg Prince Ængus, son of Huamor, probably enjoyed the society of all the cattle in the island, and of an indefinite number of wives. The outermost rampart girdles eleven acres of rocky hillside, and here the unwearied savage labour constructed a chevaux-de-frise by wedging slabs and splinters of stone into every crevice. Hardly now, in the intelligent calm of sight-seeing, can the invader make a way through the ankle-breaking confusion, where, in the gloaming centuries before St. Patrick, bloody hands clutched the limestone edges in the death stagger, and matted heads crashed dizzily down, in unrecorded death and courage and despair.
After those days Danes and Irish and English plundered in their turn, but the stillness of the rock and the loneliness of the sea closed in again on the islands, while on the mainland rebellion and conquest alternated in a various agony, and the civilisation thrust on Ireland was a coat of many colours, dipped in blood. These Aras of the Sea rest in their primitive calm, nurturing a strong, leisurely people, with the patience and hardiness of the rock in their blood; equipped physically for any destiny, equipped mentally with the quick financial ability and shrewdness of the Irish, yet slow to imitate, slow in the adoption of what others initiate, regarding, I fear, their country as the invalid and ill-used wife of the British ogre, a wife of the admired Early Victorian type, unoriginative, prolific, and unable to support herself.
Looking down from Dun Ængus there is little expression of the three thousand lives that are hemmed in this floating parish. No wheel is audible along the nine miles of Irish moor; the other two islands lie gray and still, rimmed by fawning and flashing tides, lifeless save where the smoke of burning kelp creeps blue by the water's edge.
It is a pleasant descent to the village of Kilmurvey, down through the buoyant air of the hill side; the grass steals its way among the outposts of rock, till the foot travels with unfamiliar ease in level fields. Near Kilmurvey the Resident Magistrate's house shows a trim roof among young larch and spruce, a miracle of modernity and right angles after the strewn monstrosities of the ridge above; passing near it, a piano gave forth a Nocturne of Chopin's to the solitude, a patrician lament, a skilled passion, in a land where ear and voice have preserved the single threads of melody, and harmony is as yet unwoven.
With its barbaric novelties of colour, its wild, red-clad women, its background of grey rock, its glare of sunshine, Aran should be a place known to painters, but at the first sight of even the sketch book the village street becomes a desert; the mothers, spitting to avert the "bad eye," snatch their children into their houses, and bang their doors. The old women vanish from the door steps, the boys take to the rocks. As it is the creed of Aran that any one that has his "likeness dhrew out" will die within the year, it seems unfeeling to urge the matter upon them. Here and there the mission shilling makes its convert; an old woman braced herself to the risk on the excellent ground that she would probably die before the year was out, and might as well make the most of her chances. She found the idea highly humorous, and so did several of the neighbours.
Our departure from Aran was not out of keeping with the general run of events there. Struggling with painting materials, plants of maidenhair fern, and the usual oversights and overflows of packing, scantily enveloped in newspaper, we made our way on foot from the Lodge to the bay below it, a distance of some two or three hundred yards, and there embarked, attended to the boat by Mrs. Holloran and her next of kin—in other words, a crowd of some twenty deeply interested persons. We had shoved off and were moving out towards the steamer over the transparent green deeps of the bay, when I remembered the little boy who had driven our portmanteaux down to the beach in a donkey cart, and I flung a shilling to one of the next-of-kin in settlement of the obligation. We saw the emissary present the tribute.
"He'll not take it!" was shouted from the shore.
I protested at the full pitch of my voice to the effect that he must not allow his magnanimity to interfere with his just dues, that I was very glad to give it to him.
"He'll take three!" travelled to us like a cannon ball across the translucent water.
Nothing travelled back. Nothing, that is, except the Galway steamer, which presently flapped its paddles into the falling tide, and took us away to regions where we ourselves were natives, and viewed the tourist with a proper hauteur.
Meditating on those May days, winnowed now of their husk of culinary difficulties, they seem the most purely lonely, the most crowded with impressions, that could befall. Habituated to the stillness of West Galway life, these stillnesses were vast and expressive beyond any previous experience of mine; in the shadeless brilliance, the bare grayness, I breathed a foreign and tingling air. The people's profoundly self-centred existence has "no thoroughfare" written across it; lying on the warm rocks, they see Ireland stretched silent, enigmatic, apart from them, and are content that it is so. Their poverty is known to many, their way of thought to a few; they remain motionless on the edge of Europe, with the dust of the saints beneath their feet.
PICNICS
A kettle seated decorously on a kitchen range is far less likely to be smoked than one propped precariously on a heap of smouldering sticks. It is also ordained by the forces of civilisation that it shall eventually boil; a point by no means to be taken for granted in the matter of the sticks. A sparcity of saucers, an apostolic community of teaspoons; no one would suspect the hidden humour in such disabilities if confronted with them at an ordinary "At Home," and however excellent the appetite brought to bear upon a chicken pie at a luncheon party, in the lack of knives and forks it would scarce nerve its possessor to eat with his fingers. And yet, so skin deep a fraud is civilisation, the chicken bone to which, through the years, I look back most fondly, was gnawed, warm from the pocket, on the top of one of the Bantry mountains.
"THE ELDER TURF-BOY"
The first picnic in which I clearly recall taking part was, like many that succeeded it, illicit. It unconsciously adhered to the great and golden precept that picnics should be limited in number and select in company. It consisted, in fact, of no more than four, which, with a leggy deerhound, a turf fire, and the smoke from the turf fire, were as much as could be fitted in. Why a ruinous lime-kiln should have been chosen is not worth inquiring into. It probably conformed best with those ideals of cave-dwelling, secrecy, and rigorous discomfort that are treasured by the young. We were, indeed, excessively young, and should have been walking in all godliness with the governess; two of us at least should. The other two were turf-boys, who should have been carrying baskets of turf on their backs into the kitchen, and submitting themselves reverently to the innumerable oppressions of the cook, who, they assured us, had already pitched them to the Seventeen Divils three times that same day. The lime-kiln was sketchily roofed with branches, thatched with sedge and was entered by the hole at which the smoke came out. It was a feat of some skill to lower oneself through this hole, avoid the fire, grope for the table—a packing-case—with one toe, and thence fall on top of the rest of the party. Except in the item of sociability I do not think that the deerhound can have enjoyed himself much; he spent most of the time in dodging the transits of the kettle, and it was our malign custom to wipe the knives on his back, in places just beyond the flaps of a tongue as long and red as a slice of ham. What we ate is best forgotten. Something disgusting with carraway seeds in it, kneaded by our own filthy hands, lubricated with lard, and baked in a frying pan in the inmost heart of the turf smoke. The drink was claret, stolen from the dining-room, and boiled with a few handfuls of the snow that lay sparsely under the fir trees round the lime-kiln. Why the claret should have been boiled with snow is hard to explain. I think it must have been due to its suggestion of Polar expeditions and Roman Feasts; subjects both of them, that lent themselves to learned and condescending explanation to the turf-boys. Afterwards, when the elder turf-boy, Sonny Walsh, produced a pack of cards from a cavity in his coat that had begun life as a pocket, and dealt them out for "Spoilt Five" it was the turf-boy's turn to condescend. "Spoilt Five" is not in any sense child's play; its rules are complicated, and its play overlaid with weird usages and expressions. For the uninitiated it was out of the question to distinguish kings from queens, or the all-important "Five-Fingers" from any other five, through the haze of dirt with which all were befogged. The turf-boys knew them as the shepherd knows his flock, and at the end of the game had become possessors of our stock-in-trade, consisting of a Manx halfpenny, a slate pencil with plaid paper gummed round its shank, two lemon drops, and a livery button.
This was a good and thoroughly enjoyable picnic, containing within itself all the elements of success, difficult as these may be to define, and still more difficult as they are to secure.
AN AUGUST AFTERNOON
I remember an August afternoon, and a long island that lay sweltering in a sea of flat and streaky blue. Two heated boatloads approached it at full speed, each determined to get there first, and equally determined not to seem aware of any emulation. Simultaneously the keels drove like ploughs into the hot shingle, the inevitable troop of dogs flung themselves ashore—it is noteworthy that all dogs dash into a boat as if they were leading a forlorn hope, and leave it as if they were escaping from a fire—the party spread itself over the beach in cheerful argument as to the most suitable place for the repast, and while the contention was still hot as to the relative merits of a long disused churchyard, with an ancient stone coffin lid for a table, or a baking corner of the strand, where a thin stream trickled over the cliffs to the sea, one came from the boats with a stricken face, and said that all the food had been left behind. There was silence for a space. Then, while the accusers answered one another, the remembrance of Mrs. Driscoll's cottage shone like a star on a stormy night into the minds of the castaways. Under happier circumstances the metaphor might have seemed inappropriate, but there is a time for everything, and the time for Mrs. Driscoll's cottage to pose as a star of hope and deliverance had arrived. Mrs. Driscoll herself, emerging from her cowhouse, sympathetic, hospitable, and very dirty, was equal to the occasion. Would she lend us a skillet? Sure, why not! An' eggs is it? an' praties? an' a sup o' milk, and the sign o' butther? Well, well! the cratures! An' they come to this lonesome place to ate their dinner, an' to lave it afther them afther! Glory be to mercy! Well, the genthry is quare, but for all they're very good! She led the foraging party in to her cottage. It was the only house on the island, and, in rough weather, as solitary and cut off from humanity as was Noah's Ark. Indeed, solitariness was not the only point wherein a resemblance to the Ark was suggested. A cloud of hens screeched forth over the half door in our faces; two cats and a pig sped out as we opened it; a small but determined mother goat dared us to force the fortalice of the inner chamber in which her offspring were, no doubt, in laager; a gander lifted his clattering bill from a skillet—the skillet, I may say, in which our subsequent meal was to be prepared—to hiss alarmingly at us; two children and, I think, a calf, shuddered noiselessly out of sight into the brown vault of the fireplace, and through it all, as Mrs. Browning sings, "The nightingales" (or, strictly speaking, the ducks) "drove straight and full their long clear call."
Mrs. Driscoll drove, headlong as an ocean steamer, through her ménage. The skillet was snatched from the gander; with one sweeping cuff a low-growling, elderly dog was dashed from its seat on the potato sack under the table. The dresser yielded a bowl full of eggs; from the bedroom came milk and butter (happily, none of us, save the goat, was made free of the mysteries of their place of keeping), and a little girl was plucked from the depths of the chimney and commanded to "run away to the well for a pitcher of water."
"Not from the well in the bohireen," we said quickly, "it doesn't look very—"
"Sure that's grand wather, asthore," replied Mrs. Driscoll, "if ye'll take the green top off it there's no better wather in the globe of Ireland, nor in Carbery nayther!"
We accepted the reassurance. When one is less than twenty and more than half-starved, one accepts a good deal, and I cannot remember that any of us were any the worse for the water. At all events the potatoes were boiled in it, the eggs nestling amicably among them (this to save time and fuel). Ultimately there was made a comprehensive blend of everything—eggs, potatoes, milk and butter, the whole served hot, on flat stones, and eaten with pocket knives and cockleshells.
Over our heads the unsophisticated seagulls swooped and screamed—I remember that one of them nearly knocked my hat off on that island one day—the air quivered like hot oil between us and the purple distance of the mainland, and yet there was the island freshness in it; we lay on our backs on the heathery verge of the cliffs and drowsed off the potatoes. There were no plates to wash, no forks to clean. It was an admirable picnic. So every one thought, save the dogs, who found egg-shells and potato-skins a poor substitute for chicken bones.
There is, I think, in the matter of picnics no middle course endurable. If they cannot attain to the untrammelled simplicity of the savage, they require all the resources of civilisation to justify them. Let there be men-servants, and maid-servants, and cattle—for carting purposes—and, in fact, all the things enumerated in the Tenth Commandment, including your neighbour's wife. Let there also be champagne—and yet, not even champagne will alleviate much if your neighbour's wife be dull and greedy, and how often, how almost invariably is she, at a picnic, both these things! There certainly is something in the conditions of set feasts out of doors that induces an unusual measure of gluttony. Primarily, of course, there is the lack of other occupation, but chiefly, I think, there is the instinctive wish to lessen the labours of packing up. Packing up is the dark feature of the best picnic. I have often pitied the Apostles for the seven basketfuls that they found left on their hands.
If an instance of all that is worst in a picnic be required I may lightly record some of the features of an entertainment which, one summer, I was by Heaven's help and a little lower diplomacy, enabled to evade. The drag-net of the African war had gone heavily over the neighbourhood, and to the forty women who had unflinchingly accepted, but two men were found to preserve the just balance of the sexes. These numbers are not fictitious. They may be found seared upon the heart of the hostess.
The forty, with a singular fatuity, seem to have been as tenacious of their dignity as jurymen at a Coroner's inquest. It was theirs, as females, to sit still and be fed, and this they did, even though the feeding process was conducted solely by the two heroes of the afternoon, and was necessarily of the most gradual character. The kettle, or rather kettles, were—it is the only bright spot in the affair—ably manipulated by serfs in the background, and in their hands was also the grosser conduct of the feast, the unpacking, the setting forth on the grass of a table cloth of about half an acre in area, and the placing on its unattainable central plateaux those matters—such as cream-jugs and fruit salads—in greatest request and most prone to disaster. They, also, had been the selectors of a ruined cottage as the site of the camp fires, and it was only when these were being prepared that a swarm of bees discovered itself in the chimney. Fortunately, however, before it went on to discover the picnic, some one, with the Irish gift of using the wrong thing in the right place, stopped the flue with a hamper and a carriage rug, thus heading off the worst of the bees, while the fires were relit in the corners of the cottage. The two men faced the position. Through smoke and bees they did their duty, carting back and forth the eighty cups of tea which the occasion demanded; but they said afterwards that more than patriotism barbed the regret that their country had deemed them too old for active service. As for the forty ladies, they sat and fulfilled what was for them the primary, if not the only object of the picnic, by eating and drinking, without haste, without rest, till the kettles gave out. Then, like a flock of gorged birds, they rose heavily, and unaffectedly begged to be allowed to order their carriages, and so went home. The hostess had held a walk and a view in reserve, in case of emergencies, but it was not for her to complain. The two men then had their tea.
It has been my fate to take part in several yachting picnics. They have all had one common and hideous feature—even as a cocked-nose or a squint will run in families—the yachts have invariably been becalmed. Their other conditions have been various. Sometimes the food was sent by land to meet the yachters at the chosen rendezvous; sometimes the picnicking contingent rode bicycles and sent the food by sea, and sometimes the yacht alone took the whole outfit, food and feeders, and putting forth to sea, incontinently fell upon flat calms, and the slow pulsing swell of the Atlantic, and thus, though the direct cause varied, the net result was ever the same—starvation. There is hidden away in West Cork a most lovely and lonely lake. It is joined with the sea by a narrow neck, up which at high water boats can come. To landward is a great hill, thickly grown with firs, and aboriginal oaks, and hollies, wherein on a still night you may hear the wild screech of the martin-cats, ripping the darkness blood-curdlingly, like a woman's scream. From its summit is a view of wondrous beauty and expanse (not necessarily synonymous terms, though often reckoned so), and it was there that we were to picnic, bicycling as near the top as might be, while hirelings from the yacht were to carry provisions up the hill for us. It was a luncheon picnic, the blackest kind of all. The yacht started at daybreak; all was to be ready on the hill top by our arrival.
I should think the least intelligent would have already gathered the dénouement of this "Cautionary Tale," as Mrs. Sherwood would call it, and I need do no more than indicate the closing scene of the day's tragedy. On a sea of turquoise, far-away sails, saffron-coloured, and motionless in the afternoon sunlight. On the mud floor of a roadside public house, a small company of bicyclists, drearily preserving life by means of sour porter, flat, sweet lemonade, and probably the stalest biscuits in the wide province of Munster.
Many high authorities, including, I am told, Mr. Herbert Spencer, assure us that it is the inherited influences of prehistoric ancestors that breed in otherwise decent and home-keeping souls the love of the lawless freedom of a picnic, and, to be sure, the pleasure that we had in our island orgy, with its plateless, spoonless indecorums, can best be explained on some such theory. None the less, I maintain that the ideal picnic is only achieved by the most super-civilised elimination and selection. Two, or at most four, congenial souls, and a tea basket of latest device and most expert equipment—these things, and thoroughly dry grass, and I ask no more of heaven.
BOON COMPANIONS
"D'ye remember of Gill and Poor Fellow, greyhounds that was in it long ago?"
I did not. In the long and tear-stained annals of the family dogs but one greyhound was in my memory, the saintly and beautiful Gazelle, own niece to "Master McGrath," as was recited with bated breath to new governesses and other of the unenlightened, coupled with large statements as to her uncomputable value had not her tail in youth been shut into a stable door and given a double angle like a bayonet.
Rickeen was occupied, to some extent, in felling a young ash tree. He swung in half a score of blows that made it shiver, and presently came to the expected pause.
"Faith thim was the dogs—! My brother Tom was butler here the same time. B'leeve me 'twas himself was souple! He'd run home any minute in the day, two miles, and ye wouldn't hardly feel him gone."
This remarkable accomplishment on the part of the butler was allowed to sink in, as it deserved.
"He had a tarrier, and one day going through the Wood of Annagh himself and the tarrier wakened a hare, and the two o' thim was hunting her through and fro, and he cursing the full of a house on the tarrier. He shtud then on the big rock that's in it, and he let a whistle on his two fingers. The two greyhounds was sthretched within at the kitchen fire up at the Big House, and sorra word of lie I'm tellin', but Poor Fellow put an ear on him, and the two of them legged it out of the kitchen and away with them to the wood, and they never stopped nor stayed till they found Tom, and themselves and the tarrier killed the hare."
The big rock and the Big House were severed by an Irish mile of tree trunks and briars, but criticism is the last thing required from a listener, and I hope I played my part.
RICKEEN
Rickeen was again possessed by a spasm of industry: the chips flew out, the tall young ash cracked, and sank into the arms of its neighbours. There was a singular simplicity about the forestry of the establishment. When the bitter cry of the cook went forth for wood wherewith to cook the impending meal, Rickeen prayed that the divil might roast and baste all the women in Ireland, and cut down a convenient young tree. By this means the plantations were lightly thinned at the ends nearest the house, and as a general thing the cook gave notice every three weeks, which prevented any unwholesome stagnation.
"But as for dogs," continued Rickeen, a little later, as he snicked off the greeny-grey branches, "the grandest dog ever was in this counthry was Mullowny's. Ye couldn't know what kind of a breed was in him, but ye'd have to like him, he was that spotted."
Here a long-drawn yell came forth from the yard, resolving itself gradually into a statement to Rickeen that the Misthress wanted her keys, and himself was the last one she seen them with.
Rickeen put down his hatchet in fateful silence. His dog, couched in a brake where the young bracken stems curled like bishops' croziers round her crafty snout, raised one yellow eyebrow out of what was apparently deep sleep, arose, and followed him with her wonted gravity. Her cold manner was the next thing to good breeding; in spite of a family tree exclusively composed of crosses, in spite of a coat suggestive of a badger skin that has been used as a door mat, there was that in her pale eyes and in the set smile at the corners of her mouth that discouraged familiarity, and induced other dogs to feign a sudden interest in their own affairs as she approached. To follow Rickeen she gnawed ropes, and swam lakes, and ate her way through doors, and Rickeen never to my knowledge addressed her, except with the command to drive in the cows. In her next incarnation she will probably be the ideal colonist's wife.
I remained sitting on a stump in the silence, and thought of my first love, Bran. Through the tree stems I could see a grassy hill sloping to the lake side, where, at the age of nine, I grovelled one morning among the cowslips and mopped my soaking tears with my holland waggoner, and wished for death, because Bran had been drowned. Bran was a cur, half silky and gracious Gordon setter, half woolly vulgarian of the Irish cottage breed, and to us, his comrades, a hero, an object of passionate faith, and, as such, the victim of many well-meant but excruciating honours. He wore, with docile consciousness of his absurdity, ornamental harness of strangling complications, and with it drew at a foot pace a grocer's box, mounted on wheels, while we walked before and after with fixed bayonets and all the gravity befitting a guard of honour operating in shrubberies teeming with banditti. It was not till an attempt was made to put the new bull dog into double harness with him that Bran showed symptoms of resentment, and the battle that then raged in the tangle of the shoulder straps and traces placed him, if possible, higher in our respect. The matter was patched up with the bull dog, who, though instant in quarrel, was not without good feeling, and next morning, at an early hour, I saw his frightful face protruding from under the bedclothes of my brother's bed, framed in a poke bonnet of sheet, while two long tails, languidly waving in welcome, hung down over the valance like bell-ropes, and witnessed to the presence of Bran and of the young deerhound, Kilfane, hidden in the deepest heart of the bed.
Perhaps Sunday was the day that Bran was most satiating to us. To go to church on the top of the family omnibus was at any time the summit of ambition; with Bran speeding easily in front, or slackening for a hurried exchange of ferocities with cabin acquaintances, the five miles (invariably driven in the teeth of a north-westerly wind) were all too short. Those inside, whose turn it would be to sit on top coming home, yearned with crooked necks through the side windows, and stimulated by glimpses of the hero, were enabled to struggle successfully with the hideous tendency of childhood to be sea-sick in covered vehicles. During church time Bran was immured in the lock-up at the police station, and many a wriggling half-hour's endurance of the sermon was gilded by expectancy of the moment when the sorrowful sighing of the prisoner would turn to ardent sniffing under the door of the lockup, and the hand of the sergeant would restore to us "life's greatest possibility."
One summer night, at about this time, as I lay in my bed, the spirits of prophecy and of poesy came upon me hand in hand, quite inexplicably. Bran was in his usual health, and, as I afterwards found, was at that very hour engaged in stealing mutton hash from the back hall: but it was decreed that I should compose an ode fatefully commemorating his violent death.
"Oh, Bran, thou wert gentle and sweet," I began, without an effort, while Mattel's Valse swung and crashed its way up through two ceilings from the drawing-room,
But now thou art past and gone,
Like a wave on the ocean so fleet,
And the deed of death was done.
Even here inspiration did not flag.
'Tis no use to wail or to weep.
For oh, alas and alack!
Thou'st gone to that eternal sleep,
From which none can bring thee back.
The magnificence of the close was almost stupefying to the author; even the second line of the verse had seemed full of a rending passion. I sank to sleep, aware that I had taken my place in literature.
A year afterwards came the miserable tears among the cowslips, the first taste of the bitter core of sentiment, and the discovery that the prophetic ode did not express the position.
Bran occupies the whole foreground of the history of pets, but there were many of a lesser sort. There was even another elegy, beginning:
Stranger, with reverence draw near,
A Linnet lies below.
But birds were not our foible.
Rabbits followed each other in bewildering succession, and travelled to their doom by the same track. We fed them with milk and water out of eggspoons, with daisies, and with clover, but the morning always came when the foundling lay stiff in its hay, its black eyes glazed, and the limp daisies untouched beside it. One notable exception is recorded, a young rabbit brought in with a broken leg, who out of pure contrariety and improbability lived for a year. It became precocious beyond belief, and sat all day observing life from the arm of its proprietor. At night it slept, or affected to sleep, in a box in her room, biding its time till the candle was put out. Under cover of darkness it would then stealthily come forth and would buck with precision from the floor on to the face of the sleeper, repeating the feat as often as repulsed, until a burrow in some corner of the bed was granted. (It is not out of place here to mention that its nails were cut with extreme care and regularity.) Its diet presented no difficulty, save in the matter of restriction. It partook of the family meals as they came: porridge, marmalade, bread and butter, meat; uncooked green vegetables were not so much as mentioned in its presence. It even, horrible to confess, frequently ate rabbit-pie, and cracked and crunched the bones of its relatives with cannibal glee. On these scandalous foods it throve, but remained dwarfish and uncanny. It had moods of suspicion and brooding, when it sat in the chimney of an empty room. Once, under the protection, no doubt, of the evil spirits with whom it was in league, it leaped from a window sill forty feet above the ground, alighted with a flop, and greeted those who rushed to pick up the corpse with a cold stare of inquiry as to what the excitement was about. It met its death by presuming in the open field upon the long-suffering of the dogs whom it terrorised in the house.
Outside the inner circle of pets, and within the outer circle of the donkeys whom we partly loved, partly scorned, and daily martyrised, kids held a certain position of their own. They are not to be commended, being skittish, peevish, tactless and strong, but they were not without attraction. One of them, black and white, with oblique barley-sugar eyes, showed much inclination towards the profession of house dog, and learned many essentials of that trade; the doors that were worth waiting at, the perils and rich prizes of the kitchen passages, the moment to intrude, the moment to fly. An incident of its career can best be told in the words of a certain Bridget, a notable member of the long dynasty of Bridgets that passed processionally through the establishment en route for America.
"The Misthress was below in the hall and she heard one above on the top landin', walkin' as sthrong as a man. 'Bridget!' says she," (the voice of command was given with great elegance and hauteur), "and what was in it but the young goat, and it commenced walkin' down the stairs. 'Come here, Bridget!' says the Misthress, and sure of course the goat said nothing, but goin' on always from step to step. 'Arrah musha! The divil go from ye,' says the Misthress, 'why don't ye spake? What sort of hoppin' is it ye have up there?'" (The elegance of the imitation here yielded to the narrator's sense of what was fitting.) "Faith, the goat stood then, like it'd be afraid. 'The Lord save us, it's the fairies!' says the Misthress, an' there wasn't one in the house but she called, and what did they get in it but the goat, an' it having a stocking half ate!"
Not long afterwards (next day probably) the kid was sent back on an outside car to its native place, a region of bog and rock and scrub, where its lamentations for the schoolroom fire had ample scope. It was escorted to its Siberia by a large party from the schoolroom, filled with curiosity to see how it would be received in its family circle. The boy who was left to hold the horse became also impelled to see the meeting, with the result that the horse and car were found a little later on their backs in a bog ditch, which conclusion is not to this hour known to the authorities.
It was in the winter that the Reign of Terror of the Monkeys began. The first of them, large and grey, wearing the name of Lizzie, and a red flannel coat, arrived in December, and it was humanely arranged that she should live close to the kitchen fire on the flour bin. It was also enacted that she was to be chained to the wall "until she got to know people a little."
There are Northern stories, Eastern ones, too, I believe, of houses in which evil spirits having once gained entrance, remained in immutable possession. Thus it was with us. In a short time Lizzie got to know every one very thoroughly. She bit each visitor indiscriminately, and having analysed the samples, she arranged a sliding scale of likes and dislikes, on the negative principle. That is to say, she would tolerate A till B arrived, when she bit A. On C's appearance she bit both A and B, and so on up to Z. The master of the house was Z. (Herein she showed her infernal cunning.) Z was never bitten. The kitchenmaid, in whose control were the dainties that Lizzie's soul loved, was Y, i.e., she was only bitten on the arrival of the master. Lizzie's bad life had the sole merit of brevity. One of her customs was to strike a match, and having burnt the hair on her grimy, nervous little arm, to eat the frizzled remains. (Thus invalidating the vaunt that man is the only animal that cooks.) Having on several occasions nearly set the house on fire, matches were forbidden to her, but one fortunate day a new boxful somehow fell into her possession, and, varying her wonted practice, she ate off the heads of most of the matches. Therewith her spirit passed; but only temporarily. In less than a year she was with us again. This time in the guise of a small brown monkey, that went by the name of Jack. A clear proof of obsession by the spirit of Lizzie was afforded in the fact that precisely the same sliding scale of hatred was observed, culminating as before in the master of the house. Jack was in some particulars less repellent than his predecessor. He was smaller, and was given to fits, which gave a hope that his life might not long be spared. By this time the flour-bin from long camping would have supplied the germs of enteric to an entire army corps. (I hasten to say that, being in Ireland, it was never used as a flour-bin having been thus temporarily styled as a concession to convention during the brief reign of an English cook who had long before fled to her native land.) Between the flour-bin and the wall Jack's fits usually took place, and it was the wont of the tender-hearted kitchenmaid (known to this day among her fellows as "Mary-the-Monkey." The suffix "the Monkey" being a distinguishing mark; as "Philippe-le-Bel," "Robert-the-Lion") to unchain him after one of these seizures and to sit before the fire with him on her lap. No experience seemed to teach her that his first act on recovery was to bite her suddenly and then escape. The alarm was spread in precisely the same manner on each successive occasion. First a shrill and piercing scream from "Mary-the-Monkey," usually coupled with an appeal to her God. Then an answering yell from the next victim in the pantry. Then a shouting, and an earthquake slamming of doors through the house as its occupants one and all sped to safety. Finally the voice of the master assuring the invisible household that all was well, and that the monkey would never bite any one if they did not show that they were afraid of him.
Jack died in a fit, and was mourned only by the master and the faithful kitchenmaid. Yet had he and his fellow had any desire for social success it would have been easy for them to have achieved it in a family so inured to pets as ours.
But monkeys are worse than tactless. They understand their own hideousness and unpopularity, yet will not make a step towards amiability. A little leaning to the pathetic would have made us adore them, but they prefer to remain malevolent, remote, uttering coarse, mysterious grunts and screeches, out of hearts full of cold devilry. It is in keeping with their vulgarity that they should thrust their way into an assemblage of pets; an insult even to the kid and the rabbit, an outrage to the memory of Bran.
THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PUMP
The date of its birth is uncertain. A torpid tradition places it in the Early Victorian Era, but the Regency is more probable; even the Rebellion of '96 may not have been beyond its ken. Being a native of West Galway, neither Regency nor Early Victorian Era was likely to be an epoch in its surroundings. It belonged to the period when
"... Dick Martin ruled
The trackless wilds of Connemara;"
and the men who put it in its place scarcely knew whether king or queen ruled in an England that was as remote from them as the India of to-day.
It is probable that in the youth of the pump its labours were light. Baths were the eccentricity of a few, a revival of the corrupt days of the Roman Empire; and the process by which the stalwart fox-hunter of the beginning of this century got into his clothes was one that it might be well to slur over, invaluable as he and his costume have been to the Christmas numbers. Vast and simple cooking operations, conducted on an open grate four feet long; vats of meat pickle lying in cellars where the light came greenly through ivied windows; cauldrons of potatoes, and possibly cauldrons of punch; these formed the highest claims on the water-supply before the dynasty of the bath was proclaimed in the establishment. The deathless discontent that followed the innovation has produced many stirring household episodes, none of them more sudden and complete than that which occurred on the day when one of those vessels of wrath, the bath, was repainted for the first time. The local carpenter had arrived for the purpose, with what disdain for such trifling can be imagined. Arriving early, he discovered the bath as yet unemptied, an added insult to a man whose time was much occupied with fishing on the lake, and other serious matters. The housemaid, with ill-timed coquetry, put out her tongue at him when approached on the subject. In silence more bodeful than repartee he returned to the bath, carried it to the door, and emptied its contents down the passage. A stupefied stillness fell upon the bystanders, then arose outcry almost choked by rage, while behind a locked door the carpenter whistled and audibly chuckled over his work.
In those days the turf-boy was an institution, oppressive, but necessitated by an establishment where coal had never been seen, and an armful of turf burned away in an hour. All day they plied bare-foot between the turf-house and the various fuel depots of the house with baskets of the long, hard sods on their backs, and guile and mutiny in their hearts, because that with the office of turf-boy was linked the hated one of water-carrier. About this latter clustered battles of endless variety, involving the sacred person of the cook, and frequently topped as with a banner by her giving of warning. After long warfare it was lightly thought that the exodus of cooks might be stayed by the introduction of a self-filling boiler supplied from a small tank, which must, by Median and Persian law, be replenished every morning. It was done, and for an incredible fortnight the charm of novelty retained its hold on the turf-boys; the tank was filled, the ball-cock did its work like a book, and the Dublin cook was fain to seek another grievance. The inevitable hour drew on when the tank, like any other entertainment, must cease to amuse, the hour in which it ebbed unreplenished to its dregs, while the turf-boys, much preoccupied with making a wicker snare for blackbirds, known as a cradle-bird, sat round the fire, and dismissed the boiler from their minds with a calm, native trust in Providence. It was in the meridian of this peace that the boiler burst, with a single and shattering report. What followed on that crack of doom it is not necessary to record; the imagination of any householder can shadow forth the attitude of the cook, and no living pen could reproduce the flight of the turf-boys.
It is more agreeable to turn to another scene, in which the pump played its part to a limited extent, when, on the last night of the old year, the coach-house was garlanded with holly and ivy, and "Pete-een bawn," the Albino fiddler, sat on high on a window-sill, twitching out jigs and reels from the fiddle that he played on his knee, while the thick boots of a roomful of dancers kept light and unflagging time. As the crowning hour of twelve drew on, preparations began for the brew of punch that was to usher in the new year, and a tasting committee, formed of the gamekeeper and the kitchenmaid, was met by the supreme question of what to brew it in. A bucket was considered too small, the churn was rejected because it had "an ugly smell." Finally some genius bethought him of a hip-bath. The bath was snatched from the nearest bedroom by a bevy of turf-boys, the stone jar of John Jameson was emptied into it, and followed with more reticence by kettles of boiling water; all that remained was to provide each guest with a cup to dip into the reeking pool. Ten minutes later the bath was empty, and a ring of boys radiated from it at full length, lapping the last drops, and even licking the enamel, while the dancing was resumed with startling emphasis. Outside, a light snow was on the ground, the north wind blew dark in that bitter midnight, and the ice on the lake uttered strange sounds—hollow, musical shocks with the voice of the imprisoned water in them. Every tree in the woods stood separate in white silhouette, the rime sifting through the branches in a dry whisper. Upon this subtle mood of winter came forth from the open doors of the coach-house the light of lamps with tin reflectors, the shrewish scream of the fiddle as Pete-een bawn jerked his white head in accord with "The hare was in the corn," the aroma of punch and of clothes seasoned in turf smoke. It is better to withdraw from these early hours of the new year, before the uncertain homeward footsteps blotted the thin snow, and the exponents of the genial first stage of drunkenness assisted the exponents of the aggressive second stage to pull themselves together for early Mass.
ROSS LAKE
It has been mentioned that the pump was subject to chronic and mysterious ailments, on which every skilled opinion in the country was brought to bear, while the water famine was sore in the land, and the turf-boys plied with buckets and bewailings between the lake and the cook, and unearthly pronged creatures gyrated in the water-bottles. It was during one of these visitations, when the back yard was torn up into entrenchments, and the pump lay two miles away at the forge, that the Garrygillihy horse races were held, and with this event the revolt of the turf-boys broke forth. On the previous day they concealed themselves in an old limekiln and mended their trousers; on the morning itself they made the simple statement that "if the servants was to die dancing for turf and wather they'll not get it to-day," after which ultimatum they were seen no more. Many things happened in their absence, not at first sight connected with it; the cook went to bed in the afternoon, the hens walked upstairs to the pantry, and picked out the inside of a plum cake, and a cow got into the coach-house, and ate the cushion of the car. The cook gave warning next day, the kitchenmaid, in tears, followed suit, because the cook had called her a "jumper" (i.e., a pervert to Protestantism); the housemaid, also in tears, asserted that the kitchenmaid "had a spleen agin her," and the stableman was heard darkly soliloquising over the cleaning of the bits that "a lie was something, but there was no dealing with a d—d lie." All these things were subsequently traced by tortuous ways to the grand central fact that the turf-boys had gone to the Garrygillihy races.
There came at length a notable crisis, when the pump showed that it had, like most of its countrymen, a power of rising to the occasion. It was on a bright morning in May that the kitchen chimney caught fire, an event of yearly occurrence, and by no means displeasing to the authorities. The big shaft roared with furnace heat up its eighty feet, the ugly blaze wavered from the chimney top; a few buckets of water were poured down, and all became quiet. It had happened in the immemorial manner, but just once too often. Four hours later, in the stillness of the hot afternoon, the voice of the fire was heard again, a soft, busy crackling in the timbers of the roof, a muffled booming sound that grew above it; a tongue of flame through the slates, a drip of melted lead from the eaves, and the house was full of shouts and rushing feet. An hour afterwards the battle was over, and the toilers could fling themselves down, breathless, to realise an incredible escape, and the clang of the pump handle ceased. Throughout that hour of stress none of the pump's repertoire of evil symptoms was exhibited, nor did it fail to respond to the astonishing variety of receptacles presented to its grim beak. Next day it gasped forth the mud of the bottom of the well, and fell into a fractious disorder from which it has never rallied; but none the less the old house at its back owes its life to the allegiance of its comrade of a hundred years.
HUNTING MAHATMAS
Many people have learnt from "Kim" what it is to be a "Chela," and there was a time, not long ago, when every self-respecting evening paper and most of the magazines had something sufficiently—or self-sufficiently—illuminating to say about Karma or the Mahatma. I am not skilled in Buddhism, but I have assimilated a fact or two about Mahatmas, and in so doing have become aware of wider issues.
A Mahatma, I believe, implies primarily a teacher, an instructor, a sage or hermit with intermittently social tendencies; it also implies the possession of many useful endowments. Matter and space appear to be negligible accidents to the competent Mahatma. As a mere after-dinner triviality he will summon you a cigarette from infinity and will materialise it on the table; moving to higher things, he can produce a copy of the Times in the remoter parts of Tibet on the day on which it appears in London, advertisements and all, but exclusive, I fancy, of library privileges. Transcending these lighter accomplishments, however, is his power of transporting himself to a chosen place at a chosen time without visible means of progression. He, we are assured, can fade from the landscape with the beautiful elusiveness of a rainbow, and can develop himself elsewhere, in or out of the landscape, with a precision with which the rainbow cannot hope to compete.
There is a matter that seems to me to have escaped observation—it certainly is not generally admitted—that in society not notably occult, in what, in fact, are often spoken of as Hunting Circles (though why circles, save with a very bad fox, it is hard to say), these privileged beings are found. Unsuspected, unappreciated, his high gifts often despised, even disliked, the Mahatma blooms in what might seem the uncongenial soil of many a hunting country.
There is a difference, distinct and, in my mind, well defined, between the people who hunt and the people who go hunting. The people who hunt are the professionals; serious, impassioned even, but with subdued emotion; fanatics who live only to conjugate the verb To Hunt in all its moods and tenses; recognising implicitly the force of its imperative, accepting its future with joy, its past with loquacity. For them hunt numbers are compiled, and runs recorded with geographical accuracy and microscopic detail; they cut out the work, they give the time. Yet it is not among their thrusting ranks that the Mahatma is found. He is evolved, in perfect response to the need for him, among the wider brotherhood of those who go hunting. These are the true free lances of the chase. Having cast off the fear of public opinion, and purged themselves of the love of display, they have no conventions to respect and no position to lose. Hand in hand with their devotion to sport goes the most saving good sense. How despicable to these enfranchised minds must be the meaningless twists, the desperate endeavours of the zealots who, infatuated as a string of ants, surmount unwaveringly every obstacle that lies in their path! As, from a pleasant hill side, the Mahatma views these struggles, he must surely feel how well it is with him, and how useful a thing it is to combine moral courage with intelligence.
"THE HOVERING HORDE VACILLATES NO LONGER"
But in a hilly and gateless country, such as Ireland excels in, moral courage and intelligence will not suffice; inspiration is needed, and straightway, out of a hovering and uncertain horde of riders, the Mahatma materialises. The hour has come, and the man. (These things, it may be noted, often synchronise with the interposition of the class of fence that is like an east wind, in being neither good for man nor beast.) Without a shadow of hesitation the Mahatma turns his horse at a right angle from the line the hounds are running, possibly even in a diametrically opposite direction. It matters not; the result will justify him. The hovering horde vacillates no longer; no word is spoken, no allegiance sworn; his sovereignty is as instant and unquestioned as that of the queen bee; one telepathic moment has transformed them into his disciples.
It is here that the superiority of the hunting Mahatma to the religious variety makes itself felt. Like the Magic Carpet in the "Arabian Nights" he has the mystic power of transporting not only himself but his adherents. One moment and you may see him skilfully "knocking a gap" (i.e., unbuilding a wall) or opening a gate, as the case may be, while the disciples wait respectfully; the next they are lost, swallowed up in the Fifth Dimension, or wherever it is that Mahatmas move and have their being. It may be a quarter of an hour afterwards, it may be twenty minutes; the hunt arrives, heated, something blown, and very proud of itself, at a road where there is a momentary check. There, drawn up, calm and omniscient, is the Mahatma, with the disciples. He has seen the fox (who, it may not be out of place to note, is on these occasions always the largest dog-fox that the country has ever produced). He advises the huntsman, with perfect knowledge, where to cast his hounds, and once more betakes himself, with his party, to the Fifth Dimension. During the various turns and chances of the average hunting run in rough country, he is met with on every road that is crossed by the hunt. He is a directory of the most obscure and unsuspected gaps, an amateur of padlocks, a Samson who can lift from their hinges the gates of Gaza, or any other gates that may intervene. He is present at all disasters, and acts as a sort of convalescent home for their victims, and as a rallying-place for those who have been thrown out.
As I muse over his gifts, and the benevolence with which they are exercised, my heart warms to him and his compeers. Had I my way no hunt establishment should be without its own accredited Mahatma. He should be entitled to the letters M.F.H. as unquestioningly as the Master. I would blazon them on his broad back (the Mahatma's figure is wont to be a fine one), plain for all men to see, and brand them on his ample sandwich-case. "Mahatma to the Meaths!" Any man might be pleased to have some such an inscription on his tombstone. "Mahatma to the Blazers" might hold some hint of incongruity; yet, however blazing one may be, there are moments——
It has happened to me, in a remote part of the County Waterford, to have lost the hounds, and at the same moment to find myself confronted by a frowning bank, hollow-faced, afforested with furze, wholly, as it seemed to me, impassable. While I surveyed it in dejection the cry of the hounds was borne to me on the wind; the music had a dying fall, they were running hard, and away from me. It was then that the voice of the local Mahatma fell like a falling star from the hillside above me.
"Go on a small piece to the right and ye'll get a passage."
I obeyed, and saw that hoof marks of cattle led to a cleft in the bank, so masked with furze bushes as to be invisible. I squeezed through it, and found the valley smiling before me, and the hounds still within reach. But the Mahatma had gone.
I met him at the next check, cool and unruffled, silent as to the miraculous nature of his transit.
"Ye're barefooted," he said briefly.
"A VOICE FELL LIKE A FALLING STAR"
I found that I had indeed lost a foreshoe.
Strange that such faculties as his should command so little general admiration! Upon his final manifestation, which occurred after the fox had gone to ground, I heard the Master say brutally:
"How the devil did you get here?"
The Master had given his horse two bad cuts.
The Mahatma maintained a Druid silence; it was not for him to comment on the eternal supremacy of Mind over Matter.
A PATRICK'S DAY HUNT
I wash meself every Sathurday morning, whether I want it or no and 'twas washing my face I was when William Sheehan came in the door, and it no more than ten o'clock in the morning.
"I WASH MESELF EVERY SATHURDAY MORNING"
That's the way I remember 'twas a Sathurday, and Pathrick's Day was Monday.
"God bless the work!" says he.
"You too," says I.
"Would ye lend me the loan of a harness," says he, "to drive Anne Roche"—(that's his wife)—"to town on Pathrick's Day?"
The dear knows, says I to meself, if I walked two mile asking a harness it isn't to drive that one I'd ask it!
"I will to be sure," says I, "and welcome, but is it to town you're going on Pathrick's Day in place of going to Kyleranny? Sure you know yourself there's the fun of Cork in Kyleranny when the Hunt's in it on a Holy-day!"
"I believe so indeed," says he.
"Faith you do believe it," says I. "D'ye remember one time," I says, "when the Hunt was in it, Stephen's Day it was, you comin down Knockranny Hill hoppin' a quarther of a mile on your one leg, and the other foot fasht in the stirrup, and the owld mare you had that time throttin' on always. The Smith said it was the pleasantest thing ever he seen!"
"God be with the owld days!" says William, "that was long ago times, before I was married," says he.
"Thrue for you!" says I.
"Will ye lend me the harness?" says he to me again.
"Come here now William," says I, "you an' me is friends this many a year. There isn't one in the counthry I have as much wish for as yourself. The Divil sweep ye!" says I. "Sure it's follying the Hunt you should be, in place of goin' drivin' a side-car to town like a servant boy!" says I, "and you that was careing a puppy all the winter for the Hunt, the same as meself!"
"Ah, that was the grand pup!" says he. "'Twas a pity he died, and God knows," says he, "I dunno in the world what killed him, if it wasn't a bottle of varnish he dhrank one morning."
Faith, says I to meself, it's aisy known what killed the poor pup. It isn't long ourselves'd live if we didn't get our victuals!
I drew out then, and I gave William a puck in the chest.
"I'm tellin' you now," says I. "Dang the harness ye'll get from me on Pathrick's Day! No! But you'll throw the saddle on the pony a' Monday morning and you'll come out to the Hunt to jolly yourself!"
"Sure the pony has the colour o' lameness on him since I had him at Cappagh Fair last Tuesday, under pigs," says he. "That was thirty mile on him."
"Arrah! what signifies that?" says I, "that little horse is as tough as an eel!"
"And he have a sore place on his shesht, about as big as a thimble," says he.
"And is it on his shesht you'd go put the saddle?" says I.
"Well, it is not," says he.
"And as to go putting a collar and harness on a crayture that has the skin sthripped," says I, "if it was an ass itself the polis'd be afther ye for it."
"Indeed I'm told so," says he.
"Musha, Divil's cure to ye!" says I, "isn't it what ye can be tellin' your wife?" says I. "How simple ye are!" says I.
Not another word he spoke but to walk away out o' the house.
"Ye have the man annoyed with your thricks, Conny," says me wife, "why wouldn't ye give him what he was axing and not to be blackguarding that way? Maybe yerself wouldn't be so ready to go borrowing a harness for your wife?" says she.
"Maybe if I was married to Anne Roche it isn't me razor she'd take to go cuttin' spuds for seed?" says I.
"Arrah, sit down to your breakfast, Conny," says she, "and have done with your chat!"
"I'm tellin' you," says I, "if Anne Roche goes to town on Pathrick's Day, it's her own two legs'll carry her!"
"Glory be to God!" says me wife, "she'll be mad altogether! She'll tear iron!" says she.
"Divil mend her!" says I.
Now as for the foxy mare I had that time, I declare to ye if ye had her within in the stable, and to be keeping oats to her for two days, she'd have as much thricks and tashpy in her, and she'd be as anxious for the road as a lad that'd be goin' to a fair.
If she was to be kept within always and getting what she'd ax of hay and oats, it's all would be about it she'd break the sidecar! (and faith, she was nigh handy to doin' that same one time!) But what can a crayture do that's working always, and getting black potatoes for her diet?
I went to her St. Pathrick's morning early, and the full up of a tin basin of oats in my hand. The very minute I opened the door:
"Ah—hem!" says she to me, this way.
"The Divil go from you!" says I, "wasn't the year long enough for you to get a cough, and not to be sick on Pathrick's Day? And if ye were coughing the full o' the house ye'll not stop within to-day!" says I, "ye can have your choice thing of coughing to-morrow!" says I.
And b'lieve me, 'tis she that had that same.
I rode her out quite and aisy, it's no more than five mile to Kyleranny, and the two lads of sons I have was legging it out before me.
"What have ye in the bottles?" says I to the eldest little fella when I passed them out.
"Milk, Sir!" says he.
"And what have ye in the bag?" says I to the other lad.
"Me boots, Sir," says he.
I knew well that was a lie for them, but I said nayther here nor there to them.
"IT'S ALL WOULD BE ABOUT IT SHE'D BREAK THE SIDE CAR!"
When I was passing Macarthy's, coming into Kyleranny, what was in it but William Sheehan's yella horse—"Shan Bui" is the name we has in this counthry for them yella horses with the black sthripe on their back—and he outside the door, and a bag on his nose.
Musha, more power to ye William! says I to meself, ye stole away clever! But indeed it's aisy known that Herself had the kay of the bin!
Himself came out then; he was afther drinkin' a couple or three glasses o' portlier to hearten himself, the poor fella, and he was 'long with me from that out from first to last, but not a word good nor bad he spoke of the wife.
"THE LIKE O' THE CROWD THAT WAS IN KYLERANNY"
The like o' the crowd of people that was in Kyleranny that day never you seen—side-cars, and carts, and phaytons, and all sorts, let alone them that was goin' huntin'. Ye wouldn't hardly know there was hounds in it at all with the dint of the people that'd be around them, and it'd be as good for you to thry to get into Heaven as to get past the cross roads. Ye'd lose your life cursin' before the owld women'd stand out from under your feet. Ye'd have to be going around them this way, the same as a person that'd be winding a watch.
"Is it sick the Major is, that he's not in it?" says I to Tim Hurley the Whip (that's the son of an Aunt of mine by the mother), when I got to come at him, "and Johnny Daly riding Monaloo?"
"He has the 'fluenzy," says Tim.
"Is it bad with him?" says I.
"He's bad enough to-day," says he, "but yesterday he was clear dead altogether."
"It's a pity anything would ail him," says I.
The Major was a fine man, always, and his family was a fine family. Sure me father used to say that in owld times if ye went to the Big House ye'd get the smell o' roast beef when ye'd be no more than half way up the avenue, and there'd be dhrinkin' all day and knockin' all night, and if ye axed the change of a half-crown, it wasn't in it.
Faith, I said to John Daly, there wouldn't be any fun, nor no cursin' nor nothing, when the Major wouldn't be in it.
"Maybe I might please ye yet before the day's out," says he, lookin' at me ugly enough. "Time's up!" says he then, and with that he comminced to bugle, and away with himself and Tim and the dogs, out north for Dempsey's Gorse.
Well, you'd have to pity William Sheehan if ye seen him that time follyin' the hounds out the road from Kyleranny to Dempsey's Gorse. As soon as me bowld Shan Bui felt the horses throttin, and batthering, and belting the road afther him, he made all sorts of shapes and forms of himself, and as for William, if it wasn't for the almighty howlt he cot of the crupper of the owld saddle, he was a dead man.
"Blasht your sowl, William!" says owld Dan Donovan to him, "if you would save your bones," says he, "you will lead him out now for a mile till you're coming up to Dempsey's, and when ye have the hill agin him then's the time ye'll get satisfaction!"
Well, William had great courage the same day. He held his howlt on the little horse out to Dempsey's, and when we come to the gap into the southern field, below the house, Johnny Daly went away in up through the land. Well, at the third field west of where Dempsey had the turnips two years ago, there was about three foot of a stone wall before us. The yella pony jumped it very crabbed, but the minute he landed, and he havin' the fall o' the ground before him, he made a ball of himself, and he bet a lash on Dan Donovan's owld white mare that wasn't sayin' a word, only goin' from step to step over the wall, like a Christian, and with that he legged it away down the hill!
B'lieve me, William was promising God that time that if he come safe out of it he'd howld to the side-car and not ax to go huntin' agin! But indeed poor William had great courage all through, only for the wife.
"Whatever way it is," says I to Dan Donovan, and we wheeling round the brink o' the hill, "every horse that's in it will have his 'nough of grass ate before the dogs'll have them furze bushes rattled out, and, I'm tellin'ye, that'll quieten them."
"The divil a fox is there in it at all," says Dan.
"Well, now," says William, "there's a woman of the Sullivans' that has a little house beyond, is afther tellin' me a while ago himself and his pups has a nest in it some place. Last week she seen them walkin' in and out of it, like young pigs."
"Maybe she didn't tell ye what way her sons has them pairsecuted with greyhounds and bulldogs and all sorts!" says Dan.
Well, divil such screechin' ever ye heard as what the dogs comminced then down in the furze.
"That's Fiddler!" says Dan, "that's a great hound! Maybe it's a cat he have nooked in it!"
"Faith, well is he called Fiddler!" says I, "he roars most furious."
"Look over! Look over at Johnny Daly!" says William, "what bugling he have now! If it's a cat itself, what harm would it do them to ate her! It's little ateing there is in the like of her; them poor craytures of dogs does be starved with the hunger; and that's what has them yowling this way."
"Look at Johnny skelpin' round the bog!" says I, "mind ye, he's souple yet, and he as gross as a bullock, and a back on him as long as a double-ditch!"
"Whisht!" says Dan, "that's the Whip man screechin' to the dogs! They have a fox surely!"
"Ye lie!" says William, "that's Jeremi'h Drishcoll's screech, I seen him within in the furze. Hi cock! Jeremi'h! Bate him out of it boy!"
"Ah, that's a fine sober fox," says owld Dan, "he'll not lave his den for them. It's a pity now," says he, "that the Major wouldn't have a fox keeping in a stable, and on a holiday, or the like o' that, to put a halter on him and lead him out before the hounds. Begob, he'd give them a nice chase!"
With that all the lads on the hills around let a roar out o' them.
"Hulla! Hulla! Hulla!" says they. "Look at the cat! Look at he! Look at he! Down him! Land him!"
Every dog that was in it legged it to the roar.
Well, if ye seen Johnny Daly comin' down the hill that time ye'd think the fairies was afther him. He'd jump the house, he was that mad!
"Plase God he'll not come our way!" says I.
I declare to ye now, if you seen Jeremi'h Driscoll leppin' the furze bushes, and Johnny Daly afther him with the whip, ye'd as soon be lookin' at it as ateing your dinner. And as for Tim Hurley, you'd have to pity him, sthrivin' to go around every hound that was in it.
"The dogs have her ate! More power! They have the owld cat ate!" says Smartheen, that was sitting up on the wall behind us. "She was dam cute! I thought she'd besht them! The shkamer!"
'Twasn't long afther that till Tim Hurley had all the dogs gothered and counted, and 'tis he that got his own trouble with them! Them poor fellas of Whips catches great hardship. Johnny Daly faced away up the hill agin them, and the whole o' thim afther him.
"It's for Bludth he's making," says I, "and if that's to be the way, it's there ye'll see leppin!" says I. "Tighten yerself now Dan!" says I, "thim banks above in Bludth does be made up very crabby, and as for walls, it's not stones at all they has in them, but bog mould and slates!"
Well, for all, poor William Sheehan had great courage that day.
"Your sowl to the divil, Smartheen!" says he. "Knock a few o' thim stones, boy!"
With that he gives the yella pony a salamandher of a belt, and he coorsed him about three turns around the field the way he'd knock the wind out o' him, in regard of he being out on grass always, and when he thought he felt him jaded it's then he faced him in at the wall. But in spite of all he jumped it very sevare and very ugly. Them Shan Buies is very piggish that way.
Meself, I don't like them flippant leppers; I'd like a horse that will put his two forefeet into the butt o' the wall, and give ye time to say two Aves and a Father before he leps out.
"As for my mare," says I to Dan, the same time, "she boxed her knee a fortnight ago, and it's big with her yet, and faith she's avouring it always. And indeed that's a cross place in any case," says I. "God bless ye, Smartheen," says I, "throw down a couple more o' them stones!"
I'm tellin' ye Smartheen was a decent civil boy always.
We follied on the bohireens afther that, ye'd think 'twas a wedding with all that was in it! Throttin' and steppin' their horses, and the hounds and the ladies and gentlemen and all out before us.
"Faith," says I, "they'd get as nice a shweat this way as what they'd get in any quadhreel whatever in Dublin Castle," says I, "and as for jogglin' and jowltin'," says I, "any one'd be the better o' this in his health while he'll live," says I.
Indeed, all that was in it was teeming down with the heat before we were up into Bludth at all.
Comin' up out o' the bohireen there was a stick left across in the end of it, keepin' in calves; a middlin' heavy pole, and the two ends fasht. If it was in the Cork Park races ye wouldn't see as much fun as what we knocked out of it with young Tom Dennehy! Sure he was ridin' the Docthor's grey mare, an' he dhressed out, and grand yalla gaiters on him, and he in dhread of his life!
"Dennehy took great use out o' the bohireens all through!" says one of the lads "'tis time for him to throw a lep for us now!"
It's well the Docthor wasn't looking at them that time, and they weltin' the mare with switches and stones, and Dennehy howlding her back from the lep when she'd be gethered for it.—Begob! he fell heavy when the crayture jumped in the spite of him! And there's where the fun was!
Ye wouldn't blame him to be afraid if it wasn't for the dirty little boasting he has always. But indeed 'twould stun any one to hear the talk of the Dennehys.
"Mind yourself now, William," says Dan, afther the three of us had a place made out above on the hill for ourselves to stand aisy. "The hill tops is lakes afther the rain," says he, "though be Jingo!" says he, "that little horse went over the hill very knacky!"
"Look at Smartheen comin' down the bohireen over!" says I, "what have he in the bag? Ye'd say it was a side o' bacon with all the dogs that's snortin' afther it."
"Be dom!" says William, "but it's a fox! Look at Johnny Daly that has all his own dogs dhrove in under the wall. B'lieve me, them two has it settled out! We'll see sport now," says he, "afther Smartheen'll throw down the owld bag and give the fox a couple of kicks for to rise his heart for him!"
Well, what it was vexed Johnny Daly I dunno, but he was mad altogether! He lepped out the wall before him, and he as wicked with the passion as that he didn't roar, nor say a word, till he had Smartheen cot by the coat and the whip ruz to him to sthrike him! Ye wouldn't know what was the two o' thim sayin', but Smartheen thought to run, and 'twas then Johnny cot the bag secondly to take it from him. Every lad that was in it comminced to cheer and to bawl when they seen the two o' thim in howlts. I believe meself let a few screeches, but as for William, if it was his father that he seen took by the polis, an' he dhrunk, he wouldn't have more nature for him than what he showed to that boy.