sailed the seven seas. But for racing ye have na' the gift. Alan Donn
had it. And 'twas Alan Donn had the gift for the golf, and the gift for
the horses. Just the gift. You must not blame yourself, _Shane na
fairrge_, there's few Alan Donns."
And thinking to himself in the lamp-lit room, Shane found what the old
man meant. Beneath the bronzed face, the roaring manner of Alan Donn,
there was a secret of alchemy. Rhythm, and concentration like white
fire. To the most acute tick of the stars he could get a boat over the
line with the gun. Something told him where breezes were. By will-power
he forced out the knowledge of a better tack. As to horses, where was
his equal at putting one over a jump? At the exact hair's-breadth of
time, he had changed from human being to spirit. It was no longer Alan
Donn and his horse when he dropped his hands on the neck. There was
fusion. A centaur sprang.... On the links he remembered him, the smiling
mask, the stance, the waggle, the white ball. The face set, the eyes
gleamed.... The terrific explosion.... Not a man and a stick and a piece
of gutta-percha, but the mind and will performing a miracle with
matter.... And Alan Donn was dead six years ... and yet he lived....
He lived because he had been of great use. He was a standard, a great
ideal. Children who had seen him would remember him forever, and seek to
emulate the fire and strength of him, having him to measure by as the
mariner has the star.... In foreign countries they would tell tales of
him: There was once a great sportsman in the North of Ireland, Alan Donn
Campbell by name....
His father, too, who had been dead so long--mortality had not conquered
him. Once in Ballycastle Shane had seen a shawled girl look out to sea
with great staring eyes and a wry mouth, and, half whispered, staccato,
not quite sung, her fingers twisting her shawl, came a song from her
white mouth:
_Tiocfaidh an samhradh agas fasfaidh an fear;
Agas tiocfaidh an duilleabhar glas do bharr nan gcraobh.
Tiocfaidh mo chead gradhle banaghadh an lae,
Agas bvailfidh se port ciuin le cumhaidh 'mo dhiaidh._
The summer will come, and the little grass will grow;
And there will come a green thickness to the tops of the trees.
And my hundred loves will arise with the dawning of the day,
And he will strike a soft tune out of loneliness after me.
A queer stitch came in Shane's heart--a song his father made! And
following the stitch came a surge of pride. Those songs of his father!
The light minor he had heard, and the others--the surge of _An Oig-bhean
Ruaddh_, the Pretty Red Maiden:
"_Se, do bheatha is an tir seo"_.... A welcome before you into this
country, O sea-gull more lovely than the queen, than the woman of the
West, whom Naesi, son of Usnach, held in the harbor. I could destroy all
Ireland, as far as the Southern sea, but in the end I would be destroyed
myself, when my eyes would alight on the white swan with the golden
crown....
Or the despairing cry of his poem _Ig Cathair nan g Ceo_: "In the City
of the Fogs"--he meant London--
"_A athair nan gras tabhair spas o'n eag domh_--O Father of the Graces,
give me a little respite from death. Let the ax not yet strike my
forehead, the way a goat or a pig or a sheep is slain, until I make my
humility and my last repentance."
Shane wished to God he had known his father, that the man had been
spared a little until he could have loved him.... He had the only
picture of him left.... Great throat and pale, liquor-harried face,
burning eyes, and black tossing hair.... The bald-headed bankers might
shake their heads and say: He was no good ... he was a rake ... he drank
... his relations with women were not reputable.... And old maids purse
their thin-blooded lips.... But when the little money of the bankers was
scattered through the world, and even their little chapels had forgotten
them, and the stiff bones of old maids were crumbling into an
unnecessary dust, his father's songs would be sung in Ireland, in Man,
in the Scottish Highlands, in the battered Hebrides. So long as sweet
Gaelic was spoken and men's hearts surged with feeling, there would be a
song of his father's to translate the effervescence into words of
cadenced beauty.... He had an irreverent vision of God smiling and
talking comfortably to his father while the bald-headed bankers cooled
their fat heels and glared at one another outside the picket-gates of
heaven.... The world had gained something with the last Gaelic bard....
And he had found out, too, that his other uncle, Robin More, had a great
importance in a certain circle. In Dublin he met an old professor, a
Jesuit priest, who seemed intensely excited that a nephew of Robin More
Campbell's should be present.
"Do you know, by any chance, what your uncle was working on when he
died?"
"I'm afraid I do not, sir."
"You know his manuscripts."
"Just casually, sentimentally."
"You don't know much about your uncle's work, then?"
"Not very much."
"Did you know," the old priest said--and his urbanity disappeared; there
was pique in his tones--"that your uncle was the man who definitely
decided for us that the Highlanders of Scotland migrated from Ireland to
Scotland? Did you know that?"
"No, sir, I did not."
"I don't suppose," the old man was sarcastic, "that seems important to
you."
"To confess, Dr. Hegan, it does not. Is it?"
"My child," the old priest smiled--it was so queer to be called "my
child" at forty-seven--"all knowledge is important. All details of
knowledge. We come we know not whence, and we go we hope we know
whither. Our history, our motives, our all, is vague. All we have is
faith, a great broad river, but knowledge is the little piers ..."
They had all been significant: Alan Donn, his father, even Uncle Robin,
whom he had thought only a bookworm in the fading sunshine. The world
was better, more mature, for their having lived....
And he had nothing. Here he was, drawing on to fifty, close on
forty-eight. And he had done, achieved nothing. He had no wife, no
child; had achieved no valorous unselfish deed. Had not--not even--not
even a little song....
§ 3
And then he said to himself: "I am too sensitive. I have always been too
sensitive. The stature of my family has dwarfed me in my own esteem.
Haven't I got as much right as others to the quiet of the glens?" And
again he said: "I sit here and I think. And my thought grows into a
maze. And I wander in it, as a man might wander through some old
gardener's fancy, having stumbled on it inadvertently, and now being in
it, now knowing the secret of exit." But a maze was nonexistent, did a
person regard it so, and if one were to walk on nonchalantly a little
turn would come, and he find himself in the wide sunshine and smiling
flowers. And he said: "Damn the subtleties! A person is born, lives,
dies. And what he does is a matter for himself alone." But some inner
antagonist said: "You are wrong."
And he said: "Look at the people around me. What more right have they
than I to this quiet Ulster dusk?" And the antagonist smiled: "Well,
look."
First were the farmers and the fisherfolk. Well, they didn't count. They
were natural to the soil, as grass was. They grew there, as the white
bog flower grew. An institution of God, like rain. And then there were
the summer visitors, honest folk from the cities. Well, they had a
right. They spent their winters and autumns and springs in mills and
counting-houses, clearing away the commercial garbage of the world. And
when the graciousness of summer came, they emerged, blind as moles,
peak-faced. And before them stretched the Moyle, a blue miracle. The
crisp heather, the thick rushes, the yellow of the buttercups, the black
bog waters. And when clouds came before the sun the mountains drew great
purple cloths over them. And in the twilight the cricket chirruped. And
at night the plover cried out against the vast silence of the moon. And
the hearts of the selling people turned from thoughts of who owed them
money and who was harrying them for money. And the tight souls opened,
just a little perhaps, but even that--Poor garbage men of the world, who
would begrudge them a little beauty?
Then there were the country people, the landlords, the owners of the
soil. Red-faced, sportsmen, connoisseurs of cattle, a sort of
super-farmer, they were as natural to the soil as the fisherfolk or the
tillers. Their stock remained from ancient tides of battle, centuries
before. The founders of the families had been Norman barons, Highland
chiefs, English squires; but the blood had adapted itself, as a plant
adapts itself in a strange country. And now they were Ulster squires.
Smiling, shy, independent. They had a great feeling for a horse, and a
powerful sense of fair play. They were very honest folk. A station had
been set them and they lived in it, honestly, uncomplainingly, quite
happily. But a meadow was a piece of land to them and a river a place
where trout could be caught, and snow was a good thing, because it kept
the ground warm. They were a folk whom Shane respected a great deal, and
who respected him--but they weren't his folk.
Above all these of his neighbors towered three figures, and the first of
these was the admiral.
He had a name. He had a title, too--Baron Fraser of Onabega. But to
everybody he was the admiral, and in speech plain "sir." A purple-faced
and terrible old man, with bushy white eyebrows and eagle's eyes. Very
tall, four inches over six feet, very erect for all his ninety years,
with his presence there thundered the guns of Drake, there came to the
mind the slash of old Benbow.... He had been a midshipman with Nelson at
Cape Trafalgar.
Silent and fierce, about his head clouds of majesty, all his life had
been spent with pursed lips and hooded eyes, keeping watch for England
... And never a great battle where he could prove himself the peer of
Benbow and Drake and Nelson ... Never a dawn when the fleet rolled down
to battle with polished guns and whipping flags ... And a day came when
he was too old ... So here he was in the Antrim glens ...
A great life, his, a great and serviceable life, frustrated of glory ...
And well he deserved the quiet of Ulster, where he sat and wrote his
long letters to archæological papers, proving, he thought, that the
Irish were a lost tribe of Israel and that the Ark of the Covenant was
buried on Tara Hill ... And there were none to laugh at him ... All
spirit he was; watchful, dogged, indomitable spirit with a little husk
of body ... Soon, as he had directed, his old bearded sailormen would
take his flag-covered casket out to sea in the night, and the guns would
thunder: A British admiral sails by ...
And there was Simon Fowler in his little cottage, who was dying by
inches from some tropical malady ... A small chunky man with white hair
and wide blue eyes ... He had been a missionary in Africa, in China, in
India--not the missionary of sentimental books, but a prophet whose calm
voice, whose intrepid eyes, had gained him a hearing everywhere ...
"Put fear away," he had preached in Africa; "let darkness flee. I come
to tell of the light of the world ... After me will come the sellers of
gin and of guns. But I shall give you a great magic against them ...
Little children love one another ..." In China his fire had shamed
philosophers: "I know your alms-giving. I know your benevolence. It is
selfishness. Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I
deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me
nothing. Unless ye become as little children ..." And in the sensuous
Indian lands, his voice rose in a great shout: "Subtle Greece is dead,"
he proclaimed, "and razed are the fanes of Ephesus. And the Unknown God
slinks only through the midnight streets ..." "Blessed are the pure in
heart ..." He had gone like a flame through the pagan places of the
world, and here he was dying in the Antrim glens, with the quiet of
Christ about him, the droning of God's little bees, and the lowing of
the cattle of Bethlehem ... He was a great man. He had only one
contempt: for hired clergymen.
There were three folk of heroic stature around him: the admiral, and
Simon Fowler, and the woman of Tusa hErin.
§ 4
A very small townland is Tusa hErin, the smallest in Ireland, it is
said. And a very strange name on it: Tusa hErin, the beginning of
Ireland. Why it is so called, none know. Possibly because some
Highlanders named it this on landing there. Probably because it was a
division between the Scottish and Irish clans. So it was called when the
Bruce fled to Ireland. So it is called to this day.
Twenty acres or so are in it--a wind and sea lashed little estate, a
great gray house and a garden of yew-trees. For ten years it had been
untenanted, until a Miss O'Malley had bought it, and opened the great
oak doors, and let the sea-air blow through the windows of it, and
clipped the garden of the yews. The country people knew little of her,
except that she had a great reserve. To the glensmen she was _Bean Tusig
Erin_, the woman of Tusa hErin.
"What kind of a person is she?" Shane asked.
"A strange woman is in it, your Honor; a strange and dark woman."
"An old lady?"
"If she was one of us, she would be an old woman, your Honor, what with
the bitter work and the hard ways. But being what she is, she is a young
woman, your Honor. I heard tell she said she was thirty-four."
"Is she good-looking?"
"Well, now, your Honor, that would surely be a hard thing to say. A
great dark face she has on her, and her head high, the like of a grand
horse. Barring her eyes, you might call her a fine woman."
"What's wrong with her eyes?"
"Hard eyes she has, your Honor, hating eyes. She's always looking at you
to see if it is an enemy is in it. A queer woman, your Honor; the like
of her was never known."
"But how?"
"The talk that's at her, your Honor. The great hatred she bes having of
England, and the talk of old Irish times."
"And she a lady?"
"You'd think it was a queen was in it, with the high head of her, and
the proud step of a racing horse. You would, your Honor, you would so."
He asked the admiral about her.
"Do you know this Miss O'Malley, sir, of Tusa hErin?"
"I had the honor to meet her twice, Campbell. A very great woman. A
great loss, Campbell, a great loss."
"Who is she, sir?"
"Good God! Do you mean to tell me you don't know who Grace O'Malley is?"
"No, sir, I don't."
"One of the greatest Shaksperian actresses, possibly, the English stage
ever knew--and you never heard of her. Good God! How abominably ignorant
you merchant marine men are!"
"Abominably so, sir ... But please tell me, sir, why does she hate
England so much?"
"Oh, these geniuses, Campbell! They must hate something, or love
something to excess ... Depths of feeling, I suppose ... Campbell, do
you know anything about Ogham writing?"
"Only that it's straight lines on the corners of stones, sir!"
"Well, now, I think I've discovered something important, most terribly
important ... You may have heard of the Babylonian cuneiform script ..."
and the old gentleman was off full gallop on his hobby ...
From Simon Fowler he extracted a little more information.
"Fowler, do you know Miss O'Malley of Tusa hErin?"
"I do, poor lady."
"Why poor lady?"
"Wouldn't you call any one poor lady who had just been widowed, then
lost her two children? Poor lady, I wish I could say something to
comfort her."
"You! Fowler! You couldn't say anything?"
"The wisdom of God, Shane, is sometimes very hard to see. Our physical
eyes can only see a little horizon, and yet the whole world is behind
it. Miss O'Malley is not a case for any of the ministers of God ... but
for Himself ..."
"You exaggerate, Fowler. Surely you are wrong ... They say she is young
and proud and beautiful."
"I don't know. I never noticed ... She may be young and proud and
beautiful ... I only thought of the dark harassed thing--inside all the
youth and pride and beauty ..."
§ 5
He met her for the first time at a neighboring fair ...
Eleven on a hot June morning, and the little town was crowded, like some
old-time immigrant ship. Women in plaid shawls and frilled caps, men in
somber black as befitted a monthly occasion. Squawking of ducks and
hens, trudging of donkeys, creaking of carts, unbelievably stubborn
bullocks and heifers being whacked by ash-plants, colts frisking. Girls
with baskets of eggs and butter; great carts of hay and straw.
Apple-women with bonnets of cabbage-leaves against the sun. Herring-men
bawling like auctioneers. Squealing of young pigs. An old clothes dealer
hoarse with effort. A ballad singer split the air with an English
translation of _Bean an Fhir Ruaidh_, "The Red-haired Man's Wife."
Ye Muses Nine,
Combine, and lend me your aid,
Until I raise
the praise of a beautiful maid--
The crash of a drover driving home a bargain:
"Hold out your hand now, by God! till I be after making you an offer.
Seven pound ten, now. Hell to my soul if I give you another ha' penny.
Wait now. I 'll make it seven pound fifteen."
"Is it insulting the fine decent beast you are?"
"Eight pounds five and ten shillings back for a luck-penny?"
"Is it crazy you've gone all of a sudden, dealing man. If the gentle
creature was in Dublin town, sure they'd be hanging blue ribbons around
her neck until she wilted with the weight of them."
"It's hanging their hats on the bones of her they'd be, and them
sticking out the like of branches from a bush."
"Yerra Jasus! Do you hear the man, and her round as a bottle from the
fine filling feeding. You could walk your shin-bones off to the knee,
and you'd not find a cow as has had the treatment of this cow. Let you
be on our way now."
"Look, honest man. Put out your hand, and wait till I spit on my fist--"
Through the doors of Michael Doyle's public house a young farmer walked
uncertainly. He gently swung a woman's woolen stocking in his right
hand, and in the foot of the stocking was a large round stone:
"I am young Packy McGee of Ballymoyle," he announced, "the son of old
Packy McGee of Ballymoyle, a great man in his day, but never the equal
of young Packy McGee. I have gone through Scotland and Ireland, Wales,
the harvest fields of England, and I have never yet found the equal for
murder and riot of young Packy McGee. I am young Packy McGee. I am young
Packy McGee of Ballymore, and I don't care who knows it. Is there any
decent man in this fair that considers himself the equal of young Packy
McGee?" And he walked through the fair, chanting his litany and gently
swinging the woman's woolen stocking with the large round stone in the
foot of it ...
The penny poet changed from the high grace notes of "The Red-Haired
Man's Wife" to the surge of a come-all-ye. There was the undercurrent of
a pipe drone to his voice:
Fare-you-well, Enniskillen, fare-you-well for a while,
All round the borders of Erin's green isle
And when the war 's over return I shall soon,
And your arms will be o-o-open for your Enniskillen Dragoon.
In the intervals between verses a black-bearded man with blue spectacles
announced solemnly that he was Professor Handley direct from English and
German universities, empowered by the Rosicrucian order to distribute a
remarkable panacea at the nominal sum of sixpence a bottle ...
Forests of cows' horns and drovers' sticks, clamor of frightened cattle,
emphatic slapping of palms. Clouds of dust where the horse fair was
carried on. Stands of fruit and cakes. Stalls of religious ornaments,
prayer-books, and rosary beads ... A shooting gallery ... A three-card
trickster, white and pimpled of face ... A trick-of-the-loop man, with
soap-box and greasy string ... A man who sold a gold watch, a
sovereign, and some silver for the sum of fifteen shillings ... An old
man with the Irish bagpipes, bellows strapped to arm, playing "The Birds
Among the Trees," "The Swallow-tail Coat," "The Green Fields of America"
... small boys regarding him curiously ... later young farmers and girls
would be dancing sets to his piping ... At the end of the street a
ballad-monger declaiming, not singing--his head thrown back, his voice
issuing in a measured chant ... "The Lament for the Earl of Lucan":
Patrick Sarsfield, Ireland's wonder!
Fought in the field like bolts of thunder!
One of Ireland's best commanders!
Now is food for the crows of Flanders!
Och! Ochone!
A knot of older people had gathered around him, white-headed farmers,
bent turf-cutters of the glens, a girl-child with eyes like saucers. A
priest stopped to listen ... The crude English of the ballad faded out,
until there was nothing but disheveled agony ... rhythm ... a wail ...
Somewhere a leaping current of feeling ... There was a woman on the edge
of the crowd, a lady ... She came nearer, as though hypnotized ...
The country bard stopped suddenly, exalted, and swung dramatically into
Gaelic ... Dropping the alien tongue he seemed to have dropped
fetters.... His voice rose to a pæan ... he took on stature ... he
looked straight in the eye of the sun ... And for Shane the clamor of
the drovers ceased ... And there was the plucked note of harpers ... And
fires of ancient oak ... and wolf-dogs sleeping on skins of elk ... And
there was a wasted place in the twilight, and grass through a split
hearthstone ... And a warrior-poet, beaten, thinking bitter under the
stars ...
_Do threasgar an saoghal agas do thainic an gaoth mar smal--
Alastrom, Cæsar, 's an mead do bhi da bpairt;
Ta an Teamhair na fear agas feach an Traoi mar ta!
'S na Sasanaigh fein, do b' fheidir go bhfaigh dis bas!_
A voice spoke excitedly, imperiously to Shane:
"What is he saying? Do you know Gaelic?"
"I'm afraid I've forgotten my Gaelic, but I know this song."
"Then what is it? Please tell me. I must know."
"He says:
"The world conquers them all. The wind whirls like dust.
Alexander, Cæsar, and the companies whom they led.
Tara is grass, and see how Troy is now!
And the English themselves, even they may die."
"How great!" she said. "How very great!" She turned to Shane, and as he
saw the dark imperious face, he knew intuitively he was speaking to the
Woman of Tusa hErin. She seemed puzzled for an instant. Something in
Shane's clothes, his carriage ...
"You don't look as if you understood Gaelic? How is it you can translate
this poem?"
"I knew it as a boy. My father was a Gaelic poet."
"Then you are Shane Campbell."
"And you are the woman of Tusa hErin!"
"You know Tusa hErin?"
"I know every blade of grass in the glens."
"If you are ever near Tusa hErin, come and see me."
"I should like to."
"Will you really?"
"Yes."
She left him as abruptly as she spoke to him, going over to the
ballad-monger. She left him a little dazed ... He was aware of vitality
... He was like a man on a wintry day who experiences a sudden shaft of
warm sun, or somebody in quiet darkness whose eye is caught by the
rising of the moon.
§ 6
As in a story from some old unsubtle book, in passing the gates of Tusa
hErin, he had gone into another world, a grave and courteous world, not
antique--that was not the word, but just older ... A change of tempo ...
A change of atmosphere ... The _Bois Dormant_, the Sleeping Wood of the
French fairy-tale?... Not that, for the Sleeping Wood should be a gray
wood, a wood of twilight, with the birds a-drowse in their nests ... And
here were clipped rich yew-trees, and turf firm as a putting-green's,
and rows of dignified flowers, like pretty gracious ladies; and a little
lake where a swan moved, as to music; and the sunshine was rich as wine
here ... all golden and green ... But the atmosphere? He thought of the
cave of Gearod Oge, the Wizard Earl in the Rath of Mullaghmast, and the
story of it ... A farmer man had noticed a light from the old fort, and
creeping in he had seen men in armor sleeping with their horses beside
them ... And he examined the armor and the saddlery, and cautiously half
drew a sword from its sheath ... And the soldier's head rose and:
"_Bhfuil an trath ann?_" his voice cried ... "Has the time come?" "It is
not, your Honor," the farmer said in terror, and shoved the sword back
and fled ... An old man said for a surety that had the farmer drawn the
blade from the scabbard, the Wizard Earl would have awakened, and
Ireland been free ... There was great beauty and great Irishness to that
story, but there was terror to it, and there was no terror on this sweet
place ...