[F] The people and faeries in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are,
sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet
high. The old Mayo woman I so often quote, thinks that it is something
in our eyes that makes them seem big or little.
‘AND FAIR, FIERCE WOMEN’
ONE day a woman that I know came face to face with heroic beauty, that
highest beauty which Blake says changes least from youth to age, a
beauty which has been fading out of the arts, since that decadence we
call progress, set voluptuous beauty in its place. She was standing at
the window, looking over to Knocknarea where Queen Maive is thought to
be buried, when she saw, as she told me, ‘the finest woman you ever saw
travelling right across from the mountain and straight to her.’ The
woman had a sword by her side, and a dagger lifted up in her hand, and
was dressed in white, with bare arms and feet. She looked ‘very strong,
but not wicked,’ that is, not cruel. The old woman had seen the Irish
giant, and ‘though he was a fine man,’ he was nothing to this woman,
‘for he was round, and could not have stepped out so soldierly’; ‘she
was like Mrs. ——’ a stately lady of the neighbourhood, ‘but she had
no stomach on her, and was slight and broad in the shoulders, and was
handsomer than any one you ever saw; she looked about thirty.’ The old
woman covered her eyes with her hands, and when she uncovered them
the apparition had vanished. The neighbours were ‘wild with her,’ she
told me, because she did not wait to find out if there was a message,
for they were sure it was Queen Maive, who often shows herself to
the pilots. I asked the old woman if she had seen others like Queen
Maive, and she said, ‘Some of them have their hair down, but they
look quite different, like the sleepy-looking ladies one sees in the
papers. Those with their hair up are like this one. The others have
long white dresses, but those with their hair up have short dresses,
so that you can see their legs right up to the calf.’ After some
careful questioning I found that they wore what might very well be
a kind of buskin; she went on, ‘They are fine and dashing looking,
like the men one sees riding their horses in twos and threes on the
slopes of the mountains with their swords swinging.’ She repeated
over and over, ‘There is no such race living now, none so finely
proportioned,’ or the like, and then said, ‘The present Queen[G] is a
nice, pleasant-looking woman, but she is not like her. What makes me
think so little of the ladies is that I see none as they be,’ meaning
as the spirits. ‘When I think of her and of the ladies now, they are
like little children running about without knowing how to put their
clothes on right. Is it the ladies? Why, I would not call them women
at all.’ The other day a friend of mine questioned an old woman in a
Galway workhouse about Queen Maive, and was told that ‘Queen Maive was
handsome, and overcame all her enemies with a hazel stick, for the
hazel is blessed, and the best weapon that can be got. You might walk
the world with it,’ but she grew ‘very disagreeable in the end—oh, very
disagreeable. Best not to be talking about it. Best leave it between
the book and the hearer.’ My friend thought the old woman had got some
scandal about Fergus son of Roy and Maive in her head.
And I myself met once with a young man in the Burren Hills who
remembered an old poet who made his poems in Irish and had met when he
was young, the young man said, one who called herself Maive, and said
she was a queen ‘among them,’ and asked him if he would have money or
pleasure. He said he would have pleasure, and she gave him her love for
a time, and then went from him, and ever after he was very mournful.
The young man had often heard him sing the poem of lamentation that he
made, but could only remember that it was ‘very mournful,’ and that he
called her ‘beauty of all beauties.’
1902.