In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our
minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities;
people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce.
Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge.
When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your
favourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share it.
We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle all
the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on
unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all
our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb
multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering
through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers
wrote across unexplored regions, “Here are lions.” Across the villages
of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us,
we can write but one line that is certain, “Here are ghosts.”
My ghosts inhabit the village of H-----, in Leinster. History has in
no manner been burdened by this ancient village, with its crooked
lanes, its old abbey churchyard full of long grass, its green
background of small fir-trees, and its quay, where lie a few tarry
fishing-luggers. In the annals of entomology it is well known. For a
small bay lies westward a little, where he who watches night after
night may see a certain rare moth fluttering along the edge of the
tide, just at the end of evening or the beginning of dawn. A hundred
years ago it was carried here from Italy by smugglers in a cargo of
silks and laces. If the moth-hunter would throw down his net, and go
hunting for ghost tales or tales of the faeries and such-like children
of Lillith, he would have need for far less patience.
To approach the village at night a timid man requires great strategy.
A man was once heard complaining, “By the cross of Jesus! how shall I
go? If I pass by the hill of Dunboy old Captain Burney may look out on
me. If I go round by the water, and up by the steps, there is the
headless one and another on the quays, and a new one under the old
churchyard wall. If I go right round the other way, Mrs. Stewart is
appearing at Hillside Gate, and the devil himself is in the Hospital
Lane.”
I never heard which spirit he braved, but feel sure it was not the one
in the Hospital Lane. In cholera times a shed had been there set up to
receive patients. When the need had gone by, it was pulled down, but
ever since the ground where it stood has broken out in ghosts and
demons and faeries. There is a farmer at H-----, Paddy B----- by name-a
man of great strength, and a teetotaller. His wife and sister-in-law,
musing on his great strength, often wonder what he would do if he
drank. One night when passing through the Hospital Lane, he saw what he
supposed at first to be a tame rabbit; after a little he found that it
was a white cat. When he came near, the creature slowly began to swell
larger and larger, and as it grew he felt his own strength ebbing away,
as though it were sucked out of him. He turned and ran.
By the Hospital Lane goes the “Faeries Path.” Every evening they
travel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. At the sea
end of their path stands a cottage. One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who lived
there, left her door open, as she was expecting her son. Her husband
was asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. After he
had been sitting there for a while, the woman said, “In the name of
God, who are you?” He got up and went out, saying, “Never leave the
door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.” She woke her husband
and told him. “One of the good people has been with us,” said he.
Probably the man braved Mrs. Stewart at Hillside Gate. When she lived
she was the wife of the Protestant clergyman. “Her ghost was never
known to harm any one,” say the village people; “it is only doing a
penance upon the earth.” Not far from Hillside Gate, where she haunted,
appeared for a short time a much more remarkable spirit. Its haunt was
the bogeen, a green lane leading from the western end of the village. I
quote its history at length: a typical village tragedy. In a cottage at
the village end of the bogeen lived a house-painter, Jim Montgomery,
and his wife. They had several children. He was a little dandy, and
came of a higher class than his neighbours. His wife was a very big
woman. Her husband, who had been expelled from the village choir for
drink, gave her a beating one day. Her sister heard of it, and came and
took down one of the window shutters--Montgomery was neat about
everything, and had shutters on the outside of every window--and beat
him with it, being big and strong like her sister. He threatened to
prosecute her; she answered that she would break every bone in his body
if he did. She never spoke to her sister again, because she had allowed
herself to be beaten by so small a man. Jim Montgomery grew worse and
worse: his wife soon began to have not enough to eat. She told no one,
for she was very proud. Often, too, she would have no fire on a cold
night. If any neighbours came in she would say she had let the fire out
because she was just going to bed. The people about often heard her
husband beating her, but she never told any one. She got very thin. At
last one Saturday there was no food in the house for herself and the
children. She could bear it no longer, and went to the priest and asked
him for some money. He gave her thirty shillings. Her husband met her,
and took the money, and beat her. On the following Monday she got very
W, and sent for a Mrs. Kelly. Mrs. Kelly, as soon as she saw her, said,
“My woman, you are dying,” and sent for the priest and the doctor. She
died in an hour. After her death, as Montgomery neglected the children,
the landlord had them taken to the workhouse. A few nights after they
had gone, Mrs. Kelly was going home through the bogeen when the ghost
of Mrs. Montgomery appeared and followed her. It did not leave her
until she reached her own house. She told the priest, Father R, a noted
antiquarian, and could not get him to believe her. A few nights
afterwards Mrs. Kelly again met the spirit in the same place. She was
in too great terror to go the whole way, but stopped at a neighbour’s
cottage midway, and asked them to let her in. They answered they were
going to bed. She cried out, “In the name of God let me in, or I will
break open the door.” They opened, and so she escaped from the ghost.
Next day she told the priest again. This time he believed, and said it
would follow her until she spoke to it.
She met the spirit a third time in the bogeen. She asked what kept it
from its rest. The spirit said that its children must be taken from the
workhouse, for none of its relations were ever there before, and that
three masses were to be said for the repose of its soul. “If my husband
does not believe you,” she said, “show him that,” and touched Mrs.
Kelly’s wrist with three fingers. The places where they touched swelled
up and blackened. She then vanished. For a time Montgomery would not
believe that his wife had appeared: “she would not show herself to Mrs.
Kelly,” he said--“she with respectable people to appear to.” He was
convinced by the three marks, and the children were taken from the
workhouse. The priest said the masses, and the shade must have been at
rest, for it has not since appeared. Some time afterwards Jim
Montgomery died in the workhouse, having come to great poverty through
drink.
I know some who believe they have seen the headless ghost upon the
quay, and one who, when he passes the old cemetery wall at night, sees
a woman with white borders to her cap[FN#2] creep out and follow him.
The apparition only leaves him at his own door. The villagers imagine
that she follows him to avenge some wrong. “I will haunt you when I
die” is a favourite threat. His wife was once half-scared to death by
what she considers a demon in the shape of a dog.
[FN#2] I wonder why she had white borders to her cap. The old Mayo
woman, who has told me so many tales, has told me that her brother-in-
law saw “a woman with white borders to her cap going around the stacks
in a field, and soon after he got a hurt, and he died in six months.”
These are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their
tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.
One night a Mrs. Nolan was watching by her dying child in Fluddy’s
Lane. Suddenly there was a sound of knocking heard at the door. She did
not open, fearing it was some unhuman thing that knocked. The knocking
ceased. After a little the front-door and then the back-door were burst
open, and closed again. Her husband went to see what was wrong. He
found both doors bolted. The child died. The doors were again opened
and closed as before. Then Mrs. Nolan remembered that she had forgotten
to leave window or door open, as the custom is, for the departure of
the soul. These strange openings and closings and knockings were
warnings and reminders from the spirits who attend the dying.
The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature. It is
put up with as long as possible. It brings good luck to those who live
with it. I remember two children who slept with their mother and
sisters and brothers in one small room. In the room was also a ghost.
They sold herrings in the Dublin streets, and did not mind the ghost
much, because they knew they would always sell their fish easily while
they slept in the “ha’nted” room.
I have some acquaintance among the ghost-seers of western villages.
The Connaught tales are very different from those of Leinster. These
H----- spirits have a gloomy, matter-of-fact way with them. They come to
announce a death, to fulfil some obligation, to revenge a wrong, to pay
their bills even--as did a fisherman’s daughter the other day--and then
hasten to their rest. All things they do decently and in order. It is
demons, and not ghosts, that transform themselves into white cats or
black dogs. The people who tell the tales are poor, serious-minded
fishing people, who find in the doings of the ghosts the fascination of
fear. In the western tales is a whimsical grace, a curious extravagance.
The people who recount them live in the most wild and beautiful scenery,
under a sky ever loaded and fantastic with flying clouds. They are
farmers and labourers, who do a little fishing now and then. They do not
fear the spirits too much to feel an artistic and humorous pleasure in
their doings. The ghosts themselves share in their quaint hilarity. In
one western town, on whose deserted wharf the grass grows, these spirits
have so much vigour that, when a misbeliever ventured to sleep in a
haunted house, I have been told they flung him through the window, and
his bed after him. In the surrounding villages the creatures use the
most strange disguises. A dead old gentleman robs the cabbages of his
own garden in the shape of a large rabbit. A wicked sea-captain stayed
for years inside the plaster of a cottage wall, in the shape of a snipe,
making the most horrible noises. He was only dislodged when the wall was
broken down; then out of the solid plaster the snipe rushed away whistling.
“DUST HATH CLOSED HELEN’S EYE”
I
I have been lately to a little group of houses, not many enough to be
called a village, in the barony of Kiltartan in County Galway, whose
name, Ballylee, is known through all the west of Ireland. There is the
old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a
cottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a little
mill with an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upon
a little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or three
times last year to talk to the miller about Biddy Early, a wise woman
that lived in Clare some years ago, and about her saying, “There is a
cure for all evil between the two mill-wheels of Ballylee,” and to find
out from him or another whether she meant the moss between the running
waters or some other herb. I have been there this summer, and I shall
be there again before it is autumn, because Mary Hynes, a beautiful
woman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there sixty
years ago; for our feet would linger where beauty has lived its life of
sorrow to make us understand that it is not of the world. An old man
brought me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long,
narrow boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and he
said, “That is the little old foundation of the house, but the most of
it is taken for building walls, and the goats have ate those bushes
that are growing over it till they’ve got cranky, and they won’t grow
any more. They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was
like dribbled snow”--he meant driven snow, perhaps,--“and she had
blushes in her cheeks. She had five handsome brothers, but all are gone
now!” I talked to him about a poem in Irish, Raftery, a famous poet,
made about her, and how it said, “there is a strong cellar in
Ballylee.” He said the strong cellar was the great hole where the river
sank underground, and he brought me to a deep pool, where an otter
hurried away under a grey boulder, and told me that many fish came up
out of the dark water at early morning “to taste the fresh water coming
down from the hills.”
I first heard of the poem from an old woman who fives about two miles
further up the river, and who remembers Raftery and Mary Hynes. She
says, “I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will
till I die,” and that he was nearly blind, and had “no way of living
but to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the
neighbours would gather to hear. If you treated him well he’d praise
you, but if you did not, he’d fault you in Irish. He was the greatest
poet in Ireland, and he’d make a song about that bush if he chanced to
stand under it. There was a bush he stood under from the rain, and he
made verses praising it, and then when the water came through he made
verses dispraising it.” She sang the poem to a friend and to myself in
Irish, and every word was audible and expressive, as the words in a
song were always, as I think, before music grew too proud to be the
garment of words, flowing and changing with the flowing and changing of
their energies. The poem is not as natural as the best Irish poetry of
the last century, for the thoughts are arranged in a too obviously
traditional form, so the old poor half-blind man who made it has to
speak as if he were a rich farmer offering the best of everything to
the woman he loves, but it has naive and tender phrases. The friend
that was with me has made some of the translation, but some of it has
been made by the country people themselves. I think it has more of the
simplicity of the Irish verses than one finds in most translations.
Going to Mass by the will of God,
The day came wet and the wind rose;
I met Mary Hynes at the cross of Kiltartan,
And I fell in love with her then and there.
I spoke to her kind and mannerly,
As by report was her own way;
And she said, “Raftery, my mind is easy,
You may come to-day to Ballylee.”
When I heard her offer I did not linger,
When her talk went to my heart my heart rose.
We had only to go across the three fields,
We had daylight with us to Ballylee.
The table was laid with glasses and a quart measure,
She had fair hair, and she sitting beside me;
And she said, “Drink, Raftery, and a hundred welcomes,
There is a strong cellar in Ballylee.”
O star of light and O sun in harvest,
O amber hair, O my share of the world,
Will you come with me upon Sunday
Till we agree together before all the people?
I would not grudge you a song every Sunday evening,
Punch on the table, or wine if you would drink it,
But, O King of Glory, dry the roads before me,
Till I find the way to Ballylee.
There is sweet air on the side of the hill
When you are looking down upon Ballylee;
When you are walking in the valley picking nuts and blackberries,
There is music of the birds in it and music of the Sidhe.
What is the worth of greatness till you have the light
Of the flower of the branch that is by your side?
There is no god to deny it or to try and hide it,
She is the sun in the heavens who wounded my heart.
There was no part of Ireland I did not travel,
From the rivers to the tops of the mountains,
To the edge of Lough Greine whose mouth is hidden,
And I saw no beauty but was behind hers.
Her hair was shining, and her brows were shining too;
Her face was like herself, her mouth pleasant and sweet.
She is the pride, and I give her the branch,
She is the shining flower of Ballylee.
It is Mary Hynes, this calm and easy woman,
Has beauty in her mind and in her face.
If a hundred clerks were gathered together,
They could not write down a half of her ways.
An old weaver, whose son is supposed to go away among the Sidhe (the
faeries) at night, says, “Mary Hynes was the most beautiful thing ever
made. My mother used to tell me about her, for she’d be at every
hurling, and wherever she was she was dressed in white. As many as
eleven men asked her in marriage in one day, but she wouldn’t have any
of them. There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbecanty one night, sitting
together drinking, and talking of her, and one of them got up and set
out to go to Ballylee and see her; but Cloon Bog was open then, and
when he came to it he fell into the water, and they found him dead
there in the morning. She died of the fever that was before the
famine.” Another old man says he was only a child when he saw her, but
he remembered that “the strongest man that was among us, one John
Madden, got his death of the head of her, cold he got crossing rivers
in the night-time to get to Ballylee.” This is perhaps the man the
other remembered, for tradition gives the one thing many shapes. There
is an old woman who remembers her, at Derrybrien among the Echtge
hills, a vast desolate place, which has changed little since the old
poem said, “the stag upon the cold summit of Echtge hears the cry of
the wolves,” but still mindful of many poems and of the dignity of
ancient speech. She says, “The sun and the moon never shone on anybody
so handsome, and her skin was so white that it looked blue, and she had
two little blushes on her cheeks.” And an old wrinkled woman who lives
close by Ballylee, and has told me many tales of the Sidhe, says, “I
often saw Mary Hynes, she was handsome indeed. She had two bunches of
curls beside her cheeks, and they were the colour of silver. I saw Mary
Molloy that was drowned in the river beyond, and Mary Guthrie that was
in Ardrahan, but she took the sway of them both, a very comely
creature. I was at her wake too--she had seen too much of the world.
She was a kind creature. One day I was coming home through that field
beyond, and I was tired, and who should come out but the Poisin Glegeal
(the shining flower), and she gave me a glass of new milk.” This old
woman meant no more than some beautiful bright colour by the colour of
silver, for though I knew an old man--he is dead now--who thought she
might know “the cure for all the evils in the world,” that the Sidhe
knew, she has seen too little gold to know its colour. But a man by the
shore at Kinvara, who is too young to remember Mary Hynes, says,
“Everybody says there is no one at all to be seen now so handsome; it
is said she had beautiful hair, the colour of gold. She was poor, but
her clothes every day were the same as Sunday, she had such neatness.
And if she went to any kind of a meeting, they would all be killing one
another for a sight of her, and there was a great many in love with
her, but she died young. It is said that no one that has a song made
about them will ever live long.”
Those who are much admired are, it is held, taken by the Sidhe, who
can use ungoverned feeling for their own ends, so that a father, as an
old herb doctor told me once, may give his child into their hands, or a
husband his wife. The admired and desired are only safe if one says
“God bless them” when one’s eyes are upon them. The old woman that sang
the song thinks, too, that Mary Hynes was “taken,” as the phrase is,
“for they have taken many that are not handsome, and why would they not
take her? And people came from all parts to look at her, and maybe
there were some that did not say ‘God bless her.’” An old man who lives
by the sea at Duras has as little doubt that she was taken, “for there
are some living yet can remember her coming to the pattern[FN#3] there
beyond, and she was said to be the handsomest girl in Ireland.” She
died young because the gods loved her, for the Sidhe are the gods, and
it may be that the old saying, which we forget to understand literally,
meant her manner of death in old times. These poor countrymen and
countrywomen in their beliefs, and in their emotions, are many years
nearer to that old Greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain of
things, than are our men of learning. She “had seen too much of the
world”; but these old men and women, when they tell of her, blame
another and not her, and though they can be hard, they grow gentle as
the old men of Troy grew gentle when Helen passed by on the walls.
[FN#3] A “pattern,” or “patron,” is a festival in honour of a saint.
The poet who helped her to so much fame has himself a great fame
throughout the west of Ireland. Some think that Raftery was half blind,
and say, “I saw Raftery, a dark man, but he had sight enough to see
her,” or the like, but some think he was wholly blind, as he may have
been at the end of his life. Fable makes all things perfect in their
kind, and her blind people must never look on the world and the sun. I
asked a man I met one day, when I was looking for a pool na mna Sidhe
where women of faery have been seen, bow Raftery could have admired
Mary Hynes so much f he had been altogether blind? He said, “I think
Raftery was altogether blind, but those that are blind have a way of
seeing things, and have the power to know more, and to feel more, and
to do more, and to guess more than those that have their sight, and a
certain wit and a certain wisdom is given to them.” Everybody, indeed,
will tell you that he was very wise, for was he not only blind but a
poet? The weaver whose words about Mary Hynes I have already given,
says, “His poetry was the gift of the Almighty, for there are three
things that are the gift of the Almighty--poetry and dancing and
principles. That is why in the old times an ignorant man coming down
from the hillside would be better behaved and have better learning than
a man with education you’d meet now, for they got it from God”; and a
man at Coole says, “When he put his finger to one part of his head,
everything would come to him as if it was written in a book”; and an
old pensioner at Kiltartan says, “He was standing under a bush one
time, and he talked to it, and it answered him back in Irish. Some say
it was the bush that spoke, but it must have been an enchanted voice in
it, and it gave him the knowledge of all the things of the world. The
bush withered up afterwards, and it is to be seen on the roadside now
between this and Rahasine.” There is a poem of his about a bush, which
I have never seen, and it may have come out of the cauldron of fable in
this shape.
A friend of mine met a man once who had been with him when he died,
but the people say that he died alone, and one Maurteen Gillane told
Dr. Hyde that all night long a light was seen streaming up to heaven
from the roof of the house where he lay, and “that was the angels who
were with him”; and all night long there was a great light in the
hovel, “and that was the angels who were waking him. They gave that
honour to him because he was so good a poet, and sang such religious
songs.” It may be that in a few years Fable, who changes mortalities to
immortalities in her cauldron, will have changed Mary Hynes and Raftery
to perfect symbols of the sorrow of beauty and of the magnificence and
penury of dreams.
1900.