'Soon as you lift the latch, little ones are meeting you,
Soon as you're 'neath the thatch, kindly looks are
greeting you;
Scarcely have you time to be holding out the fist to them--
Down by the fireside you're sitting in the midst of them.'
Francis Fahy.
Roothythanthrum Cottage,
Knockcool, County Tyrone.
Of course, we have always intended sooner or later to forsake this life
of hotels and lodgings, and become either Irish landlords or tenants,
or both, with a view to the better understanding of one burning Irish
question. We heard of a charming house in County Down, which could be
secured by renting it the first of May for the season; but as we
could occupy it only for a month at most we were obliged to forego the
opportunity.
“We have been told from time immemorial that absenteeism has been one of
the curses of Ireland,” I remarked to Salemina; “so, whatever the charms
of the cottage in Rostrevor, do not let us take it, and in so doing
become absentee landlords.”
“It was you two who hired the 'wee theekit hoosie' in Pettybaw,” said
Francesca. “I am going to be in the vanguard of the next house-hunting
expedition; in fact, I have almost made up my mind to take my third of
Benella and be an independent householder for a time. If I am ever to
learn the management of an establishment before beginning to experiment
on Ronald's, now is the proper moment.”
“Ronald must have looked the future in the face when he asked you to
marry him,” I replied, “although it is possible that he looked only at
you, and therefore it is his duty to endure your maiden incapacities;
but why should Salemina and I suffer you to experiment upon us, pray?”
It was Benella, after all, who inveigled us into making our first
political misstep; for, after avoiding the sin of absenteeism, we fell
into one almost as black, inasmuch as we evicted a tenant. It is part of
Benella's heterogeneous and unusual duty to take a bicycle and scour the
country in search of information for us: to find out where shops are,
post-office, lodgings, places for good sketches, ruins, pretty roads for
walks and drives, and many other things, too numerous to mention. She
came home from one of these expeditions flushed with triumph.
“I've got you a house!” she exclaimed proudly. “There's a lady in it
now, but she'll move out to-morrow when we move in; and we are to pay
seventeen dollars fifty--I mean three pound ten--a week for the house,
with privilege of renewal, and she throws in the hired girl.” (Benella
is hopelessly provincial in the matter of language: butler, chef, boots,
footman, scullery-maid, all come under the generic term of 'help.')
“I knew our week at this hotel was out to-morrow,” she continued, “and
we've about used up this place, anyway, and the new village that I've
b'en to is the prettiest place we've seen yet; it's got an up-and-down
hill to it, just like home, and the house I've partly rented is opposite
a fair green, where there's a market every week, and Wednesday's the
day; and we'll save money, for I shan't cost you so much when we can
housekeep.”
“Would you mind explaining a little more in detail,” asked Salemina
quietly, “and telling me whether you have hired the house for yourself
or for us?”
“For us all,” she replied genially--“you don't suppose I'd leave you?
I liked the looks of this cottage the first time I passed it, and I got
acquainted with the hired girl by going in the side yard and asking for
a drink. The next time I went I got acquainted with the lady, who's got
the most outlandish name that ever was wrote down, and here it is on a
paper; and to-day I asked her if she didn't want to rent her house for a
week to three quiet ladies without children and only one of them
married and him away. She said it wa'n't her own, and I asked her if she
couldn't sublet to desirable parties--I knew she was as poor as Job's
turkey by her looks; and she said it would suit her well enough, if she
had any place to go. I asked her if she wouldn't like to travel, and
she said no. Then I says, 'Wouldn't you like to go to visit some of your
folks?' And she said she s'posed she could stop a week with her son's
wife, just to oblige us. So I engaged a car to drive you down this
afternoon just to look at the place; and if you like it we can easy move
over to-morrow. The sun's so hot I asked the stableman if he hadn't got
a top buggy, or a surrey, or a carryall; but he never heard tell of any
of 'em; he didn't even know a shay. I forgot to tell you the lady is a
Protestant, and the hired girl's name is Bridget Thunder, and she's a
Roman Catholic, but she seems extra smart and neat. I was kind of in
hopes she wouldn't be, for I thought I should enjoy trainin' her, and
doin' that much for the country.”
And so we drove over to this village of Knockcool (Knockcool, by the
way, means 'Hill of Sleep'), as much to make amends for Benella's
eccentricities as with any idea of falling in with her proposal. The
house proved everything she said, and in Mrs. Wogan Odevaine Benella had
found a person every whit as remarkable as herself. She is evidently an
Irish gentlewoman of very small means, very flexible in her views and
convictions, very talkative and amusing, and very much impressed with
Benella as a product of New England institutions. We all took a fancy
to one another at first sight, and we heard with real pleasure that
her son's wife lived only a few miles away. We insisted on paying the
evicted lady the three pounds ten in advance for the first week. She
seemed surprised, and we remembered that Irish tenants, though often
capable of shedding blood for a good landlord, are generally averse
to paying him rent. Mrs. Wogan Odevaine then drove away in high good
humour, taking some personal belongings with her, and promising to drink
tea with us some time during the week. She kissed Francesca good-bye,
told her she was the prettiest creature she had ever seen, and asked if
she might have a peep at all her hats and frocks when she came to visit
us.
Salemina says that Rhododendron Cottage (pronounced by Bridget Thunder
'Roothythanthrum') being the property of one landlord and the residence
of four tenants at the same time makes us in a sense participators in
the old system of rundale tenure, long since abolished. The good-will
or tenant-right was infinitely subdivided, and the tiniest holdings
sometimes existed in thirty-two pieces. The result of this joint tenure
was an extraordinary tangle, particularly when it went so far as the
subdivision of 'one cow's grass,' or even of a horse, which, being owned
jointly by three men, ultimately went lame, because none of them would
pay for shoeing the fourth foot.
We have been here five days, and instead of reproving Benella, as we
intended, for gross assumption of authority in the matter, we are more
than ever her bond-slaves. The place is altogether charming, and here it
is for you.
Knockcool Street is Knockcool village itself, as with almost all Irish
towns; but the line of little thatched cabins is brightened at the far
end by the neat house of Mrs. Wogan Odevaine, set a trifle back in its
own garden, by the pillared porch of a modest hotel, and by the barracks
of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The sign of the Provincial Bank of
Ireland almost faces our windows; and although it is used as a meal-shop
the rest of the week, they tell us that two thousand pounds in money is
needed there on fair-days. Next to it is a little house, the upper part
of which is used as a Methodist chapel; and old Nancy, the caretaker, is
already a good friend of ours. It is a humble house of prayer, but Nancy
takes much pride in it, and showed us the melodeon, 'worked by a young
lady from Rossantach,' the Sunday-school rooms, and even the cupboard
where she keeps the jugs for the love-feast and the linen and wine for
the sacrament, which is administered once in three years. Next comes the
Hoeys' cabin, where we have always a cordial welcome, but where we never
go all together, for fear of embarrassing the family, which is a large
one--three generations under one roof, and plenty of children in the
last. Old Mrs. Hoey does not rightly know her age, she says; but her
daughter Ellen was born the year of the Big Wind, and she herself was
twenty-two when she was married, and you might allow a year between that
and when Ellen was born, and make your own calculation.
She tells many stories of the Big Wind, which we learn was in 1839,
making Ellen's age about sixty-one and her mother's eighty-four. The
fury of the storm was such that it forced the water of the Lough far
ashore, stranding the fish among the rocks, where they were found dead
by hundreds. When next morning dawned there was confusion and ruin on
every side: the cross had tumbled from the chapel, the tombstones were
overturned in the graveyard, trees and branches blocked the roadways,
cabins were stripped of their thatches, and cattle found dead in the
fields; so it is small wonder old Mrs. Hoey remembers the day of Ellen's
birth, weak as she is on all other dates.
Ellen's husband, Miles M'Gillan, is the carpenter on an estate in the
neighbourhood. His shop opens out of the cabin, and I love to sit by the
Hoey fireside, where the fan bellows, turned by a crank, brings in an
instant a fresh flame to the sods of smouldering turf, and watch a wee
Colleen Bawn playing among her daddy's shavings, tying them about her
waist and fat wrists, hanging them on her ears and in among her brown
curls. Mother Hoey says that I do not speak like an American--that I
have not so many 'caperin's' in my language, whatever they may be; and
so we have long delightful chats together when I go in for a taste of
Ellen's griddle bread, cooked over the peat coals. Francesca, meantime,
is calling on Mrs. O'Rourke, whose son has taken more than fifty bicycle
prizes; and no stranger can come to Knockcool without inspecting the
brave show of silver, medals, and china that adorn the bedroom, and
make the O'Rourkes the proudest couple in ould Donegal. Phelim O'Rourke
smokes his dudeen on a bench by the door, and invites the passer-by to
enter and examine the trophies. His trousers are held up with bits of
rope arranged as suspenders; indeed, his toilet is so much a matter of
strings that it must be a work of time to tie on his clothing in the
morning, in case he takes it off at night, which is open to doubt;
nevertheless it is he that's the satisfied man, and the luck would be
on him as well as on e'er a man alive, were he not kilt wid the cough
intirely! Mrs. Phelim's skirt shows a triangle of red flannel behind,
where the two ends of the waistband fail to meet by about six inches,
but are held together by a piece of white ball fringe. Any informality
in this part of her costume is, however, more than atoned for by the
presence of a dingy bonnet of magenta velvet, which she always dons for
visitors.
The O'Rourke family is the essence of hospitality, so their kitchen
is generally full of children and visitors; and on the occasion when
Salemina issued from the prize bedroom, the guests were so busy with
conversation that, to use their own language, divil a wan of thim clapt
eyes on the O'Rourke puppy, and they did not notice that the baste was
floundering in a tub of soft, newly made butter standing on the floor.
He was indeed desperately involved, being so completely wound up in the
waxy mass that he could not climb over the tub's edge. He looked comical
and miserable enough in his plight: the children and the visitors
thought so, and so did Francesca and I; but Salemina went directly home,
and kept her room for an hour. She is so sensitive! Och, thin, it's
herself that's the marthyr intirely! We cannot see that the incident
affects us so long as we avoid the O'Rourkes' butter; but she says,
covering her eyes with her handkerchief and shuddering: “Suppose there
are other tubs and other pup--Oh, I cannot bear the thought of it,
dears! Please change the subject, and order me two hard-boiled eggs for
dinner.”
Leaving Knockcool behind us, we walk along the country road between
high, thick hedges: here a clump of weather-beaten trees, there a
stretch of bog with silver pools and piles of black turf, then a sudden
view of hazy hills, a grove of beeches, a great house with a splendid
gateway, and sometimes, riding through it, a figure new to our eyes, a
Lady Master of the Hounds, handsome in her habit with red facings. We
pass many an 'evicted farm,' the ruined house with the rushes growing
all about it, and a lonely goat browsing near; and on we walk, until
we can see the roofs of Lisdara's solitary cabin row, huddled under
the shadow of a gloomy hill topped by the ruins of an old fort. All is
silent, and the blue haze of the peat smoke curls up from the thatch.
Lisdara's young people have mostly gone to the Big Country; and how
many tears have dropped on the path we are treading, as Peggy and Mary,
Cormac and Miles, with a wooden box in the donkey cart behind them, or
perhaps with only a bundle hanging from a blackthorn stick, have come
down the hill to seek their fortune! Perhaps Peggy is barefooted;
perhaps Mary has little luggage beyond a pot of shamrock or a mountain
thrush in a wicker cage; but what matter for that? They are used to
poverty and hardship and hunger, and although they are going quite
penniless to a new country, sure it can be no worse than the old. This
is the happy-go-lucky Irish philosophy, and there is mixed with it a
deal of simple trust in God.
How many exiles and wanderers, both those who have no fortune and
those who have failed to win it, dream of these cabin rows, these
sweet-scented boreens with their 'banks of furze unprofitably gay,'
these leaking thatches with the purple loosestrife growing in their
ragged seams, and, looking backward across the distance of time and
space, give the humble spot a tender thought, because after all it was
in their dear native isle!
'Pearly are the skies in the country of my fathers,
Purple are thy mountains, home of my heart;
Mother of my yearning, love of all my longings,
Keep me in remembrance long leagues apart.'
I have been thinking in this strain because of an old dame in the first
cabin in Lisdara row, whose daughter is in America, and who can talk of
nothing else. She shows us the last letter, with its postal order for
sixteen shillings, that Mida sent from New York, with little presents
for blind Timsy, 'dark since he were three years old,' and for lame
Dan, or the 'Bocca,' as he is called in Lisdara. Mida was named for the
virgin saint of Killeedy in Limerick. [*] “And it's she that's good enough
to bear a saint's name, glory be to God!” exclaims the old mother
returning Mida's photograph to a hole in the wall where the pig cannot
possibly molest it.
* Saint Mide, the Brigit of Munster.
At the far end of the row lives 'Omadhaun Pat.' He is a 'little
sthrange,' you understand; not because he was born with too small a
share of wit, but because he fell asleep one evening when he was lying
on the grass up by the old fort, and--'well, he was niver the same thing
since.' There are places in Ireland, you must know, where if you lie
down upon the green earth and sink into untimely slumber, you will 'wake
silly'; or, for that matter, although it is doubtless a risk, you may
escape the fate of waking silly, and wake a poet! Carolan fell asleep
upon a faery rath, and it was the faeries who filled his ears with
music, so that he was haunted by the tunes ever afterward; and perhaps
all poets, whether they are conscious of it or not, fall asleep on faery
raths before they write sweet songs.
Little Omadhaun Pat is pale, hollow-eyed, and thin; but that, his mother
says, is 'because he is over-studyin' for his confirmation.' The
great day is many weeks away, but to me it seems likely that, when the
examination comes, Pat will be where he will know more than the priests!
Next door lives old Biddy Tuke. She is too aged to work, and she sits
in her doorway, always a pleasant figure in her short woollen petticoat,
her little shawl, and her neat white cap. She has pitaties for food,
with stirabout of Indian meal once a day (oatmeal is too dear), tea
occasionally when there is sixpence left from the rent, and she has more
than once tasted bacon in her eighty years of life; more than once, she
tells me proudly, for it's she that's had the good sons to help her a
bit now and then,--four to carry her and one to walk after, which is the
Irish notion of an ideal family.
“It's no chuckens I do be havin' now, ma'am,” she says, “but it's
a darlin' flock I had ten year ago, whin Dinnis was harvestin' in
Scotland! Sure it was two-and-twinty chuckens I had on the floore wid
meself that year, ma'am.”
“Oh, it's a conthrary world, that's a mortial fact!” as Phelim O'Rourke
is wont to say when his cough is bad; and for my life I can frame no
better wish for ould Biddy Tuke and Omadhaun Pat, dark Timsy and the
Bocca, than that they might wake, one of these summer mornings, in the
harvest-field of the seventh heaven. That place is reserved for the
saints, and surely these unfortunates, acquainted with grief like
Another, might without difficulty find entrance there.
I am not wise enough to say how much of all this squalor and
wretchedness and hunger is the fault of the people themselves, how much
of it belongs to circumstances and environment, how much is the result
of past errors of government, how much is race, how much is religion. I
only know that children should never be hungry, that there are ignorant
human creatures to be taught how to live; and if it is a hard task,
the sooner it is begun the better, both for teachers and pupils. It is
comparatively easy to form opinions and devise remedies, when one knows
the absolute truth of things; but it is so difficult to find the truth
here, or at least there are so many and such different truths to weigh
in the balance,--the Protestant and the Roman Catholic truth, the
landlord's and the tenant's, the Nationalist's and the Unionist's truth!
I am sadly befogged, and so, pushing the vexing questions all aside, I
take dark Timsy, Bocca Lynch, and Omadhaun Pat up on the green hillside
near the ruined fort, to tell them stories, and teach them some of the
thousand things that happier, luckier children know.
This is an island of anomalies: the Irish peasants will puzzle you,
perplex you, disappoint you with their inconsistencies, but keep from
liking them if you can! There are a few cleaner and more comfortable
homes in Lisdara and Knockcool than when we came, and Benella has
been invaluable, although her reforms, as might be expected, are of
an unusual character, and with her the wheels of progress never move
silently, as they should, but always squeak. With the two golden
sovereigns given her to spend, she has bought scissors, knives, hammers,
boards, sewing materials, knitting needles, and yarn,--everything to
work with, and nothing to eat, drink, or wear, though Heaven knows there
is little enough of such things in Lisdara.
“The quicker you wear 'em out, the better you'll suit me,” she says to
the awestricken Lisdarians. “I'm a workin' woman myself, an' it's my
ladies' money I've spent this time; but I'll make out to keep you in
brooms and scrubbin' brushes, if only you'll use 'em! You mustn't take
offence at anything I say to you, for I'm part Irish--my grandmother was
Mary Boyce of Trim; and if she hadn't come away and settled in Salem,
Massachusetts, mebbe I wouldn't have known a scrubbin' brush by sight
myself!”