RICKEEN
The journey from Drishane to Ross was first made by me in February,
1889. As the conventional crow flies, or as, on the map, the direct line
is drawn, the distance is no more than a hundred miles, but by the time
you have steered east to Cork, and north-west to Limerick, and north to
Ennis, and to Athenry, and to Galway, with prolonged changes (and always
for the worse), at each of these places, you begin to realise the
greatness of Ireland, and to regard with awe the independent attitude of
mind of her railway companies. It would indeed seem that the Sinn Fein
movement, “Ourselves Alone,” might have been conceived and brought forth
by any one of the lines involved in the _trajet_ from Cork to Galway. I
cannot say what are the conditions now, but there was a time when each
connecting link was separated by an interval of just as many minutes as
enabled the last shriek of the train as it left the station to madden
the ear of the traveller. Once I have been spared this trial; it was at
Limerick; a member of the staff was starting with his bride on their
honeymoon. The station palpitated; there were white satin ribbons on the
engine, a hoar-frost of rice on the platform; there was also a prolonged
and sympathetic delay, while the bride kissed the remainder of the
staff. And thus, with the aid of a fleet porter, and by travelling in
“fateful Love’s high fellowship,” I succeeded in shortening my journey
by some two hours, and in taking unawares the train at “The Junction”
(which, as everyone in Munster knows, is the Limerick Junction).
February is a bad month for the West of Ireland, but there are places,
like people, that rely on features and are independent of complexion.
Ross was grey and cold, windy, rainy, and snowy, but its beauty did not
fail. Martin and I heeded the occasional ill-temper of the weather as
little as two of the wild duck whom we so assiduously strove to shoot.
We had been lent a boat and a gun, and there are not many pleasanter
things to do in a still February twilight than to paddle quietly along
the winding waterways among the tall pale reeds of Ross Lake; in the
thrilling solitude and secrecy of those dark and polished paths anything
may be expected, from a troop of wild swans, or the kraken, down to the
alternative thrill of the splashing, swishing burst upwards of the duck,
as the boat invades their hidden haven. We walked enormously; visiting
the people in the little villages on the estate, making exciting and
precarious short cuts across bogs; getting “bushed” in those strange
wildernesses, where hazel and blackthorn scrub has squeezed up between
the thick-sown limestone boulders of West Galway, and a combination has
resulted that makes as impenetrable a barrier as can well be imagined.
We wandered in the lovely Wood of Annagh, lovely always, but loveliest
as I saw it later on, in April, when primroses, like faint sunlight,
illumined every glade and filled the wood with airs of Paradise. We
explored the inmost recesses of Tully Wood, which is a place of mystery,
with a prehistoric baptismal “bullán” stone, and chapel, in its depths.
There are quagmires in Tully, “shwally-holes” hidden in sedge among the
dark fir-trees, and somewhere, deep in it, you may come on a tiny lake
among the big, wildly-scattered pine-stems, and a view between them over
red and brown bog to the pale, windy mountains of Connemara.
I was having a holiday from writing, and was painting any model, old or
young, that I could suborn to my use. We searched the National Schools
for red-haired children, for whom I had a special craving, and, after
considerable search, were directed to ask in Doone for the house of one
Kennealy, which harboured “a Twin,” “a foxy Twin”; and there found “The
Twin,” _i.e._ two little girls of surpassing ugliness, but with hair of
such burnished copper as is inevitably described by the phrase “such as
Titian would have loved to paint.”
There are few evasions of a difficulty more bromidic and more
unwarrantable. “A sunset such as Turner would have loved to paint.” “A
complexion such as Sir Joshua would have loved to paint.” The formula is
invariable. It is difficult to decide whether the stricken incapacity of
description, or the presumption of a layman in selecting for a painter
his subject, is the more offensive.
“Oh, what a handsome sunset you have!”
I have heard at a garden party a lady thus compliment the proprietor of
the decoration.
“I know,” she turned to me, “that you’re delighting in it! What a pity
you haven’t your easel with you!” (Nothing else, presumably, was
required.) The attitude of mind is the same, but there is much in the
way a thing is said.
A special joy was imparted to Martin’s and my wanderings about Ross by
the presence of the Puppet. I had brought him to Paris (and Martin and I
had together smuggled him home under the very nose of the _Douane_); he
had accompanied me on a yachting excursion (in the course of which I
walked on deck in my sleep, and very nearly walked overboard, the Puppet
following me faithfully; in which case we should neither of us have ever
been heard of again, as the tide-race in Youghal Harbour is no place for
a bad swimmer). He had paid many and various visits with me, and had
passed from a luxury into a necessity. Naturally he came with me to
Ross. He was a very small fox terrier, rather fast in manner, but
engaging; with a heart framed equally for love or war, and a snub nose.
His official name was Patsey; a stupid name, I admit, and conventional
to exhaustion, but of a simplicity that popularised him. There are a few
such names, for humans as for dogs. I need give but one instance, Bill.
(I do not refer to the Bills of humbler life, though I am not sure that
the rule does not apply there also.) The man who hails his friend as
“Bill” feels himself, in so doing, a humourist, which naturally endears
Bill to him.
It was Fanny Currey, by the way, who called Patsey “The Puppet” (as a
variant of “The Puppy”). There are not many people with any pretensions
to light and leading who did not know Miss Fanny Currey of Lismore. She
is dead now, and Ireland is a poorer place for her loss. I will not now
try to speak of her brilliance and versatility. She was, among her many
gifts, a profound and learned dog-owner, and though her taste had been
somewhat perverted by dachshunds (which can degenerate into a very
lowering habit), it was an honour to any little dog to be noticed by
her.
The Puppet had various accomplishments. He wept when rebuked, and,
sitting up penitentially, real tears would course one another down his
brief and innocent nose. He could walk on his fore-legs only; he could
jump bog-drains that would daunt a foxhound; even the tall single-stone
walls of Galway, that crumble at a touch, could not stop him. The
carpenter at Ross was so moved by his phenomenal activity that he
challenged me to “lep my dog agin his.” His dog, a collie, was defeated,
and the carpenter said, generously, that he “gave it in to the Puppet
that he was dam’ wise.”
Many were the vicissitudes through which that little dog came safely. A
mad dog in Castle Haven missed him by a hair’s breadth. (The hair, one
supposes, of the dog that did _not_ bite him.) Distemper fits in Paris
were only just mastered. (It is worthy of note that the cure was
effected by strong coffee, prescribed by a noted vet. of the Quartier
Latin.) In battles often, in perils of the sea; nor shall I soon forget
a critical time in infancy, when, as my diary sourly relates, “Jack and
Hugh” (two small and savage brothers) “rushed to me in state of frantic
morbid delight, to tell me that the puppy had thrown up a huge worm, and
was dying.”
And all these troubles he survived only to die of poison at Ross. But
this came later, during my second visit, and during that first and happy
time the Puppet and Martin and I enjoyed ourselves without let or
hindrance.
It is long now since I have been in Galway, and I know that many of the
poor people with whom Martin and I used to talk, endlessly, and always,
for us, interestingly, have gone over to that other world where she now
is. Of them all, I think the one most beloved by her was the little man
of whom she discoursed in one of the chapters of “Some Irish Yesterdays”
as “Rickeen.” This was not his name, but it will serve. Rickeen was of
the inmost and straitest sect of the Ross tenants. His farm, which was
a very small one, was, I imagine, run by his wife and children; he,
being rightly convinced that Ross House and all appertaining to it would
fall in ruin without his constant attention, spent his life “about the
place,” in the stables, the garden, the house; and wherever he was, he
was talking, and that, usually and preferably, to “Miss Wilet.”
The adoration that was given to her by all the people found its highest
expression in Rickeen. She was his religion, the visible saint whom he
worshipped, he gave her his supreme confidence. I believe he spoke the
truth to her. More can hardly be said.
Rickeen was a small, dark fellow, with black whiskers, and a pale,
sharp-featured face. We used to think that he was like a London
clergyman, rather old-fashioned, yet broad in his views. He had a
passion for horses and dogs, and was unlike most of his fellows in a
certain poetic regard for such frivolous by-products of nature as
flowers and birds. I can see Rickeen on a fair May morning pulling off
his black slouch hat to Martin and me, with the shine of the sun on his
high forehead, on which rings of sparse black hair straggled, his dark
eyes beaming, and I can hear his soft-tuned Galway voice saying:
“Well, glory be to God, Miss Wilet, this is a grand day! And great
growth entirely in the weather! Faith, I didn’t think to see it so good
at all to-day, there was two o’ thim planets close afther the moon last
night!”
And he would probably go on to tell us of the garden o’ praties he had,
and the “bumbles and the blozzums they had on them. Faith, I’d rather be
lookin’ at them than ateing me dinner!” (The term “bumbles” referred, we
gathered, to buds.)
Martin would contentedly spend a morning in scraping paths and raking
gravel with Rickeen, and, having a marvellous gift of memory, would
justify herself of her idleness by repeating to me, at length, one of
his recitals. Some of these, as will presently be discovered, she has
written down, but the written word is a poor thing. “When the lamp is
shattered, the light in the dust lies dead.” For anyone who knew the
perfection of Martin’s rendering of the tones of West Galway, of the
gestures, the pauses, that give the life of a story, the words lying
dead on the page are only a pain. Perhaps, some day, portable and
bindable phonography will be as much part of a book as its pictures are.
Phonetic spelling in matters of dialect is a delusive thing, to be used
with the utmost restraint. It is superfluous for those who know, boring
for those who do not. Of what avail is spelling when confronted with the
problem of indicating the pronunciation of, for example, “Papa”; the
slurring and softening of the consonant, the flattening of the vowel
sound--how can these be even indicated? And, spelling or no, can any
tongue, save an Irish one, pronounce the words “being” and “ideal,” as
though they owned but one syllable? Long ago Martin and I debated the
point, and the conclusion that we then arrived at was that the root of
the matter in questions of dialect was in the idiomatic phrase and the
mental attitude. The doctrine of “Alice’s” friend, the Duchess, still
seems to me the only safe guide. “Take care of the sense, and the sounds
will take care of themselves.”
There was a sunny spring afternoon at Ross, and Martin and Rickeen and I
and the Puppet went forth together to erect a wall of “scraws,” _i.e._
sods, round the tennis ground. As soon as there was a sufficient
elevation for the purpose, we seated ourselves on the scraws, and the
business of conversation with Rickeen, that had, in some degree, been
interfered with by his labours in scraw-cutting and lifting, was given
full scope. The Puppet was a little below us, hunting young rabbits in
the dead bracken. At intervals we could see him, proceeding in
grasshopper springs through the bracken (which is the correct way to
draw heavy covert, as all truly sporting little dogs know), throughout
we could hear him. Rooks in the tall elms behind the stables, feeding
their young ones, made a pleasing undercurrent of accompaniment to the
Puppet’s soprano solo. There was a bloom of green over the larches;
scraps of silver glinting between the tree stems represented the lake.
The languor of spring was in the air, and it seemed exercise enough to
watch Rickeen’s wondrous deftness in marking, cutting, and lifting the
scraws on the blade of his narrow spade, and tossing them accurately on
to their appointed spot on the rising wall.
Martin had a Maltese charm against the “_Mal Occhio_”; a curious silver
thing, whose design included a branch of the Tree of Life, and clenched
fists, and a crescent moon, and other symbolisms. This, and its uses,
she expounded to Rickeen, and he, in his turn, offered us his experience
of the Evil Eye, and of suitable precautions against it.
“Look now, Miss Wilet, if a pairson ’d say ‘that’s a fine gerr’l,’ or ‘a
fine cow,’ or the like o’ that, and wouldn’t say ‘God bless him!’ that’s
what we’d call ‘Dhroch Hool.’[9] That’s the Bad Eye. Maybe, then, the
one he didn’t say ‘God bless them’ to would fall back, or dhrop down, or
the like o’ that; and then, supposin’ a pairson ’d folly the one that
gave the Bad Eye, and to bring him back, and then if that one ’d bate
three spits down on the one that was lyin’ sthritched, and to say ‘God
bless him,’ he’d be all right.”
Strange how wide is the belief in the protective power of this simple
provision of Nature. From the llama to the cat, it is relied on, and by
the cat, no doubt, it was suggested to the human being as a means of
defiance and frustration. There was a beggar-woman who, as my mother has
told me, did not fail on the occasion of any of our christenings to
bestow upon the infant an amulet of this nature. She had a magnificent
oath, reserved, I imagine, for great occasions.
“By the Life of Pharaoh!” she would say, advancing upon the baby, “I
pray that all bad luck may be beyant ye, and that my luck may be in your
road before ye!”
The amulet would then be administered.
Martin and Rickeen and I discoursed, I remember, for some time upon
these subjects. The mysterious pack of white hounds who hunt the woods
of Ross, whose music has been heard more than once, and the sight of
which has been vouchsafed to some few favoured ones, was touched on, and
Martin told of an Appearance that had come to her and some of her
brothers and sisters, one dusky evening, in the Ross avenue. Something
that was first like a woman walking quickly towards them, and then rose,
vast and toppling, like a high load of hay, and then sank down into
nothingness.
“Ah sure, the Avenue!” said Rickeen, as one that sets aside the thing
that is obvious. “No one wouldn’t know what ’d be in it. There was one
that seen fairies as thick as grass in it, and they havin’ red caps on
them!”
He turned from us, and fell to outlining the scraws that he was going to
cut. We watched him for a space, while the afternoon shadow of the
house crept nearer to us down the slope, and Martin began to talk of the
coach that drives to Ross when the head of the house dies. At the death
of her grandfather she had been too little to comprehend such things.
“I can only remember ‘The Old Governor’ in snatches,” she said.
From across the lake the rattle of the mail car on the Galway road came,
faintly, and mysterious enough to have posed as the sound of the ghostly
coach. The staccato hunting yelps of the Puppet had died down, and from
among the boughs of a small beech tree, a little hapless dwarf of a
tree, twisted by a hundred thwarted intentions, a thrush flung a spray
of notes into the air, bright and sudden as an April shower. Rickeen
paused.
“Ye’d like to be leshnin’ to the birds screechin’,” he remarked
appreciatively; “But now, Miss Wilet, as for the coach, I dunno. There’s
quare things goin’; ye couldn’t hardly say what harm ’d be in them, only
ye’d friken when ye’d meet them.” He gave his white flannel bauneen,
which is a loose coat, an extra twist, stuffing the corners that he had
twisted together inside the band of his trousers, and entered upon his
narration.
“I remember well the time the Owld Governor, that’s yer grandfather,
died. Your father was back in Swineford, in the County Mayo, the same
time, and the Misthress sent for me and she give me a letther for him.
‘Take the steamer to Cong,’ says she, ‘and dhrive then, and don’t rest
till ye’ll find him.’
“But sure Louisa Laffey, that was at the Gate-house that time, she says
to me, ‘Do not,’ says she, ‘take the steamer at all,’ says she. ‘Go
across the ferry,’ says she, ‘an’ dhrive to Headford and ye’ll get
another car there.’
“I was a big lump of a boy that time, twenty years an’ more maybe, and
faith, I didn’t let on, but God knows I was afraid goin’ in it. ’Twas
night on me when I got to Headford, and when I wint to th’ hotel that
was in it, faith sorra car was before me; but the gerr’l that was
mindin’ th’ hotel says, ‘D’ye see the house over with the light in it?’
‘I do,’ says I. ‘Maybe ye’d get a car in it,’ says she. Faith, the man
that was there ruz out of his bed to come with me!”
A pause, to permit us to recognise the devotion of the man.
“We went dhrivin’ then,” resumed Rickeen, with a spacious gesture,
“dhrivin’ always, and it deep in the night, and we gettin’ on till it
was near Claremorris, back in the County Mayo. Well, there was a hill
there, and a big wood, and when we come there was a river, and it up
with the road, and what ’d rise out of it only two wild duck! Faith, the
horse gave a lep and threwn herself down, an’ meself was thrown a-past
her, and the man the other side, and he broke his little finger, and the
harness was broke.”
He dwelt for a moment on the memory, and we made comment.
“What did we do, is it?” Rickeen went on. “To walk into the town o’
Swineford we done. ‘It’s hardly we’ll find a house open in it,’ says the
fella that was dhrivin’ me. But what ’d it be but the night before the
Fair o’ Swineford, and there was lads goin’ to the fair that had boots
for mendin’, and faith we seen the light in the shoemaker’s house when
we come into the town.”
“That was luck for you,” said Martin.
Rickeen turned his dark eyes on her, and then on me, with an expression
that had in it something of pity, and something of triumph, the triumph
of the story-teller who has a stone in his sling.
“‘Twas a half door was in it,” he went on, “and when I looked over the
door, faith I started when I seen the two that was inside, an’ they
sewin’ boots. Two brothers they were, an’ they as small--!” He spread
forth his two lean brown hands at about three feet above the ground,
“an’ not as much mate on them as ’d bait a mouse thrap, an’ they as
quare--!” He turned aside, and secretly spat behind his hand. “Faith, I
wasn’t willin’ to go in where they were. ’Twasn’t that they were that
small entirely, nor they had no frump on thim----”
“No _what_, Rick?” we ventured.
“No frump like, on their shoulder,” Rick said, with an explanatory hand
indicating a hump; “but faith, above all ever I seen I wouldn’t wish to
go next or nigh them!
“The man that was with me put a bag on the horse’s head. ‘Come inside,’
says he, ‘till they have the harness mended.’ ‘I’ll stay mindin’ the
horse,’ says I, ‘for fear would she spill the oats.’ ‘I know well,’ says
he, ‘ye wouldn’t like to go in where thim is!’ ‘Well then, God knows I
would not!’ says I, ‘above all ever I seen!’”
“And had they the Bad Eye?” said Martin.
Rickeen again turned aside, and the propitiatory or protective act was
repeated.
“I dunno what way was in thim,” he replied, cautiously, “but b’lieve me
’twas thim that could sew!”
At this point a long and seemingly tortured squeal from the Puppet told
that the rabbit had at long last broken covert. I cannot now remember if
he or the rabbit had the pre-eminence--I think the rabbit--but the
immediate result was that for us the story of those Leprechaun brethren
remained unfinished, which is, perhaps, more stimulating, and leaves the
imagination something to play with.