From the rich plains of Meath to the barren lands of Galway, it is a far
cry and an unforgettable journey. The country grows more and more
desolate, and grand in desolation, as one approaches the Atlantic. There
was an orange sunset that evening, over an illimitable stretch of bog, a
vision of savage, haunting beauty that went with us into the darkness of
the fast closing day like a strain of wild music.
Ireland has always been as a living creature to her children. She has
taken, in their fanciful minds, a distinct personality. To get such a
glimpse of her as that, is to understand the passionate ardour of fealty
which she has had the power to inspire; to understand how she has come
to be “Kathleen na Hoolihan,” and “My dark Rosaleen,” to those poet
hearts. We were speeding now to that very corner of land from which her
younger lovers have chiefly sprung.
It was pitch dark when we alighted at a town which had once been large
and prosperous and was now forlornly sunk in decay; mute witness, like
so many others, to that act of tyranny—blunder and crime—the effects of
which England can never wipe away.
Our kind friends had ordered “a carriage from the hotel” to meet us. We
had a long cross-country drive before us. Looking doubtfully by the
light of the station lamp at the two emaciated animals that were to draw
us, we wondered, in our tired brains, if two bad horses are not worse
than one. It had begun to drizzle rain, a fine soft rain that is like a
caress in the air.
[Sidenote: A TYPICAL JARVEY]
If anything could beat the Dublin cab, it was that Galway carriage. We
set off lurching and rattling; and soon, the wind catching us from over
the fields, the rain began to strike in across the open windows. To have
a window up seemed the simple remedy; but things simple elsewhere are
not so in the West of Ireland. One window was as impossible to lift out
of its socket as the oyster out of its closed shells, for it was
strapless. We fell upon the other strap and instantly the window shot
outwards at right angles, with the evident intention of casting itself
on the road, had we not held it despairingly by its shabby appendage. If
you have ever tried to hold a window in that position by its strap you
will know how agonizing is the process. The driver was hailed.
“Look here! Your window’s loose!—You’d better stop and put it back.”
The slogging trot of the horses slackened, and over his shoulder the man
of Galway demanded:
“Is it the windy on the left, or the wan to the right of ye?”
“The left, the left! Oh, do be quick!”
“The left, is it? Sure, isn’t that the wan with the sthrap?” He jerked
his reins and clucked at his horses. What more could we want? Wasn’t
that the one with the “sthrap?”
With great difficulty, with imminent risk to the life of the window and
our own safety, we got the recalcitrant pane back into its socket, and
discovered that by dint of judicious manipulation, and a tight hold of
the “sthrap,” it was possible to shelter the most neuralgic of the
party.
A ten Irish miles’ drive along the stoniest of roads, through complete
darkness—for there was only a partial glimmer from one carriage-lamp
half the way, which then became extinct altogether—it is something of an
enterprise! But it was worth it to find such a welcome at the end!
[Sidenote: A GALWAY DEMESNE]
A “Gothic” mansion, dating from the early part of last century,
Kilcoultra is outwardly a very grand pile and stands nobly in the midst
of a rolling park, reclaimed from the wild stony land of Galway. And
inside, the first impression is like stepping in to the glories of a
missal page. The whole house is homogeneous and entirely successful in
its mediæval colouring. On the walls are gorgeous enamel blues, peacock
greens or yet carmine crimsons appropriately set with fleurs-de-lis,
maltese cross or some other conventional device in gold; ceiling and
cornices are richly illuminated to correspond. To find this glow of
colour in the midst of the melancholy greys and greens of the western
landscape, under the low drifting cloud-ridden skies, has a great charm;
it has a poetic Maeterlinckian atmosphere.
There is something too of the delicate sadness of an old romance in the
lives of these kindly ladies who rule so wisely over the lands left to
them by their brother—the last of his name. He was a man round whom
justly centred unusual hopes and ambitions. Now he, who had so great a
heart and so splendid a mind, lies in the ruined chapel in the park,
alone. The chapel is roofless. It is a nobly solitary and fit
resting-place for one who was nobly apart from the petty aims of his
contemporaries; who lived and died true to his ideals; whose work still
prospers in the freed lands of his people. He gave up much for Ireland,
and Ireland gave him nothing at all in return ... except that wonderful
sleeping-place with the changing sky overhead.
They say there is no such word in the Irish language as gratitude, and
yet—
My Kilcoultra hostess drove me round the property on the day after my
arrival, and drew the pony to the standstill on a height that finely
dominated the park and house. When I had duly admired the view she
pointed with her whip to a little white cottage that stood a few yards
away and began a kindly tale of the old woman who had long lived there
and had but recently passed away.
“When I’d come round to see her, I used to find her, times out of
number, leaning over the wall, gazing down at Kilcoultra. Always she’d
be leaning over the wall, staring down at the house. And one day I said
to her, ‘Mary, what in the world makes you stand there like that?’ And
she answered me, ‘I’m looking down on the roof that shelters me lovely
master!’”
“My lovely master!” A fragrant thing to have become to the poor that
live on your soil! When we reach a sphere where things are judged by
different standards and higher measures than we can now conceive, how
far will not such a title outweigh any paltry worldly honour!
Yet if the memory of its lost master dominates and haunts all Kilcoultra
house and lands, there is nothing to sadden one in the thoughts it
inspires; and our stay there is altogether full of charm and pleasure.
Not only are the ladies a fund of anecdote, racy of the soil; not only
do they live delightfully in touch with their peasantry, with eye and
ear ever ready to catch the humour and the pathos about them; but they
are cultured, far-travelled beings. Not much in the outer world escapes
their knowledge and shrewd apprehension.
Home topics, however, are what appeals to their visitors most.
[Sidenote: IRISH WITS]
“Carrie,” the younger sister will say to the elder, “I heard Whalen the
guard, and Tim Rooney the porter, at Athenmore Station, talking
together. And Tim is thinking of making up to a young lady, you know,
and I suppose he’s always talking about it, for Whalen was saying to him
just as I came up: ‘’Pon me word, I wish you were married, and had your
family rared on me!’ They had a great jollification at our station the
other night,” she goes on, turning to us. “And they brewed the punch in
the station bell! Whalen’s a very humorous man,” she proceeds. “They
used to stop the express from Galway at Athenmore when required; but
there were complaints of the delay and orders came from Dublin it wasn’t
to be done on any account. But it’s a recent regulation and everybody
doesn’t know about it. And the other day there was terrible work, for
there was Father Blake and the Doctor both counting on it for an urgent
sick call—dying, they said the poor man was.
“‘You’ll have to stop the train for this once, Whalen,’ says Father
Blake.
“‘I’ll maybe save him yet,’ says the doctor.
“‘I couldn’t, yer riverence,’ says Whalen; ‘it’s as much as me place is
worth. Don’t you be askin’ me, doctor. It ’ud be me ruin. The company’s
very strict.’
“‘Think of his poor soul,’ says the priest.
“‘I’ll hold ye responsible for his life,’ says the doctor.
“‘Wirra, I can’t,’ says poor Whalen, and calls up Tim. ‘Tell his
riverence, Tim,’ says he, ‘tell his riverence and the doctor that I
can’t be disobeying orders.... And begorra, she’s due this minute! Up
into the signal-box with you. And down with that signal, so the express
can get by,’ says he. And as Tim starts off at a great pace, Whalen
shouts after him, ‘And I’m sure I hope ye’ll get it to work, Tim, for
it’s terrible stiff it is, that same signal, and it at danger!’
“Well, whether he had winked at Tim, or what, but Tim worked and worked.
“‘I can’t get it to move,’ he says. ‘Will you come up yourself, Mr.
Whalen, sir, and have a try?’
“And, oh,” says Miss Margaret, in fits of laughter, “the way the two of
them went on in that signal-box, and the way Whalen pumped and pulled,
and at last he cries, ‘There’s no help for it, it’s stuck! And sure the
company can’t blame me, if the machinery’s out of order,’ says he.
‘Well, there’s wan good thing, your riverence, the thrain ’ull have to
stop now, anyhow.’”
We laugh a good deal during those pleasant meals at Kilcoultra. Not one
dull moment does the house hold for us, and we don’t want any better
company than that of the two dear ladies.
“We’ve got,” Miss Caroline, the elder, explains to me carefully, “a very
careful coachman, a very steady man, so you needn’t be the least nervous
driving out with us. He was selected, indeed, because he could be
trusted. It wouldn’t do for us unprotected women, you know,” she says in
all seriousness, “to be risking our necks with a tipsy coachman.”
Two days we are driven by this paragon. The third day there sits a
stranger on the box.
“I hope,” says Miss Carrie apologetically, “that you don’t mind his
being out of livery.”
“The fact is, Regan had an accident last night,” explains Miss Margaret.
“He fell into the old gravel pit going back home and cut his head open,
and——”
“It was my fault entirely,” interrupts Miss Caroline in distressed
accents. “I had to send him in to Galway town, and to tell him to wait
and bring back Captain Blake. And that meant loitering an hour.”
“Dear, dear!” Miss Margaret clacks her tongue. “That was very
unfortunate! He—such a steady man! But an hour in Galway town...!”
“It’s only what might have been expected,” Miss Caroline concludes. “I
blame myself entirely.—I generally,” she adds, turning to me, “avoid
leaving him any time in the town, you know.”
[Sidenote: A STEADY MAN]
And the best of it is that Regan remains in their minds “the steady
man.” How impossible it is for the stranger to understand Ireland and
Ireland’s ways! How much humour must you have—and what unlimited
patience! There is nothing, of course, that so conduces to patience as a
pleasant sense of humour.
The ladies are the Providence of the district. There is a room at the
back of the great gallery filled nearly to the ceiling with rolls of
homespun made by the peasant women in the villages. Whenever a cottage
mother is in want of money she runs up to Miss Margaret or Miss
Caroline, bringing or promising the product of her loom. A good deal of
money is advanced; a good deal paid in this manner, chiefly out of the
ladies’ generous pockets.
“Of course, poor things, you must know the way to take them,” says Miss
Caroline in her Irish way. “One of them will come up and declare they’ll
all be ‘lost entirely, ruined out and out’ for the want of five pounds.
‘Are you sure you couldn’t do with thirty shillings, now?’ I say to
them. ‘Oh, Miss Caroline’—it will be then—‘as thrue as I’m a living
woman, I couldn’t do with less than two pound ten!’ ... I get at the
truth that way,” she adds.
It is Miss Margaret who undertakes the sale of goods which have already
cost Kilcoultra so dear, and no one can say that she shows a commercial
spirit.
“Let me see now,” she will say, fingering the stuff—and splendid stuff
it is—with tentative finger and thumb. “I think we paid
three-and-tenpence a yard for this, or maybe it was four shillings,
but”—with a delighted smile—“I’ll let you have it for one-and-six, if
you’re sure—really sure—you want it.”
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