AUTHORS OF
"THE REAL CHARLOTTE," "SOME EXPERIENCES
OF AN IRISH R.M.," "ALL ON THE IRISH SHORE,"
ETC. ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
E. OE. SOMERVILLE
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY
1906
_All rights reserved_
*CONTENTS*
An Outpost of Ireland
Picnics
Boon Companions
The Biography of a Pump
Hunting Mahatmas
A Patrick's Day Hunt
Alsatia
"In Sickness and in Health"
Horticultural
Out of Hand
A Record of Holiday
Lost, Stolen, or Strayed
Children of the Captivity
Slipper's A B C of Fox-Hunting
_The Authors desire to thank the Editors of the Magazines and
Periodicals in which the following Sketches have appeared, for their
permission to reprint them here; and they wish also to acknowledge the
courtesy of Messrs. Constable & Co. in permitting the reproduction of "A
Patrick's Day Hunt."_
_October_ 1906
*ILLUSTRATIONS*
"*She found the idea highly humorous*" . . . _Frontispiece_
*Kilronan Bay*
*An Aran Fisherman*
"*White houses clustered round a fragment of bastion*"
"*The outline of Connemara was still sharp*"
*The Elder Turf-Boy*
*An August Afternoon*
*Rickeen*
*Ross Lake*
"*The hovering horde vacillates no longer*"
"*A voice fell like a falling star*"
"*I wash meself every Sathurday morning*"
"*It's all would be about it, she'd break the side car!*"
"*The like o' the crowd that was in Kyleranny*"
"*He's gone North agin!*"
"*The Widow Brinckley faced him the same as Jeffrey faced his cat*"
"*The villyan wheeled into the yard as nate as a bicycle*"
"*Sending his wild voice abroad*"
*Old Michael*
"*Ancient widowhood and spinsterdom*"
"*What have ye on yer noa-se*"
"*She's the liveliest of them, God bless her!*"
"*And cabbages!" said the mountainy man*
*The Candidate*
"*A man must wote the way his priest and bishop 'll tell him*"
*Facing America*
*In West Carbery*
*Patsey Sweeny*
*Mrs. Sweeny*
"*In a lonely cottage*"
*Children of the Captivity*
*Slipper's A B C of Fox-Hunting*
*AN OUTPOST OF IRELAND*
"Is it a bath on Twelfth Day? Sure no one would expect that, no more
than on a Sunday!"
Twelfth Day was accordingly added to Miss Gerraghty's list of Bath
Holidays--that is to say, the list allotted to Miss Gerraghty's
visitors. Judging from appearances, her private list was composed of
one infinite bath holiday; indeed, she has been heard in the kitchen
announcing in clear tones her opinion of "them thrash of baths" to an
audience whose hands and faces wore a sympathetic half-mourning.
Nature, we were given to understand, had intended Miss Gerraghty to be a
lady; a fate more blind to the fitness of things decreed that she should
serve tables in a Galway lodging-house, a position in which higher
destinies are likely to be overlooked. Some touches of dignity remained
hers by an immutable etiquette; no cap had ever found footing upon her
raven fringe; a watch chain took the place of the ignoble white apron.
Chiefest of all prerogatives, she was addressed as "Miss Gerraghty" by
the establishment, an example so carefully set by her brother, the
proprietor, as to suggest that her dowry was mingled with the funds of
the management.
With these solaces she doubtless fed her inner need of refinement, even
while she launched the thirteenth trump of repartee at the woman who
came to sell turkeys, or broke a lance in coquetry with the coal man.
Such episodes were freely audible to the sitting room by the
hall--indeed, the woman with the turkeys finally thrust her flushed face
and the turkey's haggard bosom round the door, in an appeal to Caesar
that made the rooftree ring. These things occur in Galway, with a
simplicity that is not often met with elsewhere.
There was an afternoon when a native of the Islands of Aran penetrated
to the hearth-rug of Miss Gerraghty's front sitting-room, in the
endeavour to plant upon its occupants a forequarter of mutton that smelt
of fish, and was as destitute of fat as the rocks of its birthplace.
Even the Aran man's assurance that it was "as sweet as sugar," could not
relax by a line the contempt with which Miss Gerraghty, when summoned to
judgment, surveyed the dainty and its owner. In course of the
discussion, she took occasion to inform the company that she herself
could only "eat ram mutton by the dint of the gravy," which bore, as it
seemed, somewhat darkly upon the matter, but had the effect of deepening
the complexion of the Aran man by quite two shades of maroon, as he
hoisted his unattractive burden to his frieze-clad shoulder and removed
himself.
Miss Gerraghty then stated that them Aran people had a way of their own
and a sense of their own, like the Indians, and that a gentleman friend
of hers who travelled in tea, had once been weather-bound in Aran and
had had a bad stomach ever since. She then retired to the kitchen,
where the narrative of the rout of the Aran Islander held, for the space
of ten enjoyable minutes, an audience swelled by the addition of the
washerwoman and the baker's boy.
The incident passed, yet the phrase "a way of their own, and a sense of
their own--like the Indians," hung hauntingly in the memory.
Any attempt to portray Marino Cottage would be incomplete without
mention of its consort, Ocean Prospect, an affiliated establishment,
spoken of in the household as "Opposite," from which, at any hour of the
day or night, uncertain numbers of Miss Gerraghty's nieces crossed the
road to Marino Cottage, laden, like ants, with burdens varying from a
feather bed to a kettle of boiling water. A flavour of the life of the
"Swiss Family Robinson" was thus imparted, Ocean Prospect filling the
position of the wreck, which, as the virtuously brought up should
remember, yielded fresh butter, kegs of gunpowder, and bedroom slippers
with equal promptness. Miss Gerraghty's nieces occupied undefined and
interchangeable positions in both households, from Bedelia, who played
the piano, and on Saturdays crimped her hood of auburn hair, to Bridget
Ellen, who at seven years of age could discern a stale herring and tell
the fishwoman so. Like Goldsmith, they left nothing untouched, and
there was nothing that they touched that they did not adorn, with genial
finger-mark or the generously strewn cinder. Their hats perched like
mange-stricken parakeets in the hall, their witticisms drew forth the
admiring yells of the kitchen audience from breakfast till bed time, the
creaking of their boots was as the innumerable rendings of glazed
calico, or the delirium of a corncrake. The Holy-days of the Roman
Catholic church were observed by them with every honour, and with many
varieties of evening party; and it is a matter for mingled thankfulness
and regret that they observed them, for the most part, "Opposite."
Assuredly Bedelia, with a clean face, playing dance music, would have
been a spectacle hardly less memorable than Miss Gerraghty and her
Sunday boots circling in a waltz and creaking through a quadrille, or
sipping a glass of port with the delicacy befitting the noblesse. Yet
with three Holy-days in one fortnight it might have proved excessive.
Miss Gerraghty rises irrepressibly into the foreground of these winter
days, but Christmas week in Galway Town remains an impression both
salient and characteristic. During its wet and miry days the country
people moved in a slow and voluble throng through streets and shops,
indifferent to weather, and time and space, while the sleety storm
roared of shipwreck above the rooftops, and the wearied young gentlemen
behind the counters held their own against the old women with a
philosophy perfected in the afflictions of many market days.
"Four an' tinpince!" shouts an old woman in a short scarlet petticoat
and a long blue cloak, scornfully thumbing a pair of boots and slapping
them down on the counter. She traduces them, minutely, to a party of
friends, who, being skilled in the _role_ expected of them, implore her
not to waste her valuable time on such unworthy objects. The salesman
has placed himself upon a bench, with his legs extended along it, his
eyes on the ceiling, and his arms folded; his lips repeat occasionally
the formula "Five shillins!" otherwise he remains as remote as the Grand
Lama of Tibet.
"You're too tight with me!" laments the proprietor of a cartload of
apples, in pathetic appeal to a customer. "God knows I'm not tight!"
responds the customer, with even superior pathos, "but the times is
scroogin' meself!"
It is, perhaps, the leading draper who endures most. All day long the
blue cloaks and the bony elbows jostle against his counters, disparaging
hands subject his calicoes and his flannels to gruesome tests, his plush
work-bags and scent-cases are handled uncomprehendingly and flung aside;
acrid jibes are levelled at his assistants, who, to do them justice,
show a practised tartness in rejoinder. Through the noise and the smell
of stale turf smoke a large musical-box hammers and tinkles forth the
"Washington Post."
Late in the wild darkness of the January evenings the cry "Will thu
gull-a-wallia?" (_sic_) ("Are you going home?") passes from group to
group in the streets. It is far on into the night before the carts with
their load of sleepy and drunken people cease to stagger and clatter
along the bleak roads that take them home. Beaten with snow, blinded
with rain, the holiday season wears itself out in darkness, dirt, and
inconvenience, after the manner of such seasons, churches and public
houses presenting the only open doors in the shuttered streets. All day
the electric light hung its fervid loops of white fire up in the roof of
the church of St. Nicholas, unearthly, coldly intense, suiting well the
spirituality of arches and pillars, loftily interclasping through the
storms of centuries. The tattered colours of the Connaught Rangers
droop on either side of the chancel arch, shreds of mellow colour
against the grey limestone; they say things that are moving to a Galway
heart. Out where the long Sea Road follows the shore of Galway Bay, the
great winds press heavily against the windows of Marino Cottage, and the
little one-horse trams glide on the desolate shining road like
white-backed beetles.
The year strengthened and the days lengthened over misty seas ridged
with angry white. Out where the murky west held the Islands of Aran in
its bosom, the sunsets came later day by day. Once, and memorably, a
dishevelled and flying pageant of green and lurid pink glowed, like the
torn colours in the church, beneath the darkening roof of cloud; in its
heart I saw the Aran steamer, labouring on the dark horizon of climbing
waves.
* * * * *
It was February when Circumstance took me in her hand and flung me
across two seas into the blue and gold weather and the purple and silver
mountains of the Department of "Pyrenees Orientales;" and May had come
before I was again in London, shivering in a cold rain that dropped
acridly out of the dirty fog, the orphan rain of London, that knows no
previousness of clouded hill, no dignity of broad-sailed mists moving up
along the moor, no hereafter of clean breezes sweeping the bounteous
heaven. Twenty hours later the mild yet poignant fragrance of Irish air
was in the window of my railway carriage, and the smell of turf smoke
came up out of the west across the stone walls of Roscommon.
Turf smoke lurked in concentrated staleness about the garb of the two
priests in the opposite corner, yet it was preferable to yesterday's raw
whiff of the Channel; the galloping whisper of the Daily Office in the
two Breviaries revealed the accents of Connaught, and were comfortable
to an ear already soothed by drowsiness. Let others roll and stagger to
foreign lands in front of the lashing fins of a screw, I was advancing
on an even axle into springtime in the County of Galway; in my mind's
eye I beheld the Aran steamer leisurely paddling upon a sea of satin
smoothness to the unknown islands, and in my ear sang the phrase "a way
of their own, and a sense of their own; like the Indians."
Two mornings later the door of my bedroom in a hotel in Eyre Square,
Galway, was dealt a fateful blow by the hand of the hotel cook, at 3.30
A.M., a blow weighted by lifelong combat with loins of mutton. It was
no less a person than she who placed the teapot on the breakfast table,
murmuring apologetically that "Gerrls was no good to rise early, but
owld ones like herself wouldn't ax to stay in bed." The sunshine of May
fell upon her grey locks as she stood at the portal to watch her guest's
departure, and her "God speed ye!" mingled with the bang of the
swing-door as it slammed upon the dark and sleeping house.
The laburnums of Eyre Square were fountains of gold, and the lilac was
delicate and cool; a perfect stillness lay upon Galway. Passing on
through the streets there was no sign of life, and the morning sunshine
smote on ranks of muffled windows: here and there on the old houses the
coats-of-arms of the Galway Tribes uplifted their melancholy witness to
bygone greatness, but the town spoke with no living voice. Emerging at
length from between blind-eyed house fronts, the docks were reached, and
in the large vacant spaces of water now to be found where was once the
second port of the United Kingdom, the smoke of a little steamer rose in
lonely activity, with the mountains of Clare and the glitter of Galway
Bay for a background.
There was some delay in departure, owing partly to a genial sympathy
with the unpunctual, partly to a question of precedence among a pig
family in the process of embarkation. The captain, a large clerical man
in a soft felt hat, bore it with the equanimity of one who has learned
in many journeys between Galway and Aran what is the full significance
of the devils having entered into the swine. The boat moved out at
length into the gleaming breadth of the bay; slowly the gray town
grouped itself in its low-lying corner, the spires rose, waist-deep in
roofs, and the heavy tower of St. Nicholas bore its associations of
seven hundred years in the brilliant youth of the spring sunlight. The
western suburbs stretched far along the bay, with slopes smoothly
wooded; white houses looked blankly out from their trim demesnes, like
alienated friends gazing an unmoved farewell. Even Marino Cottage,
attired in a summer wash of pink, seemed to regard us with a new and
strange exclusiveness. Inexpressibly pure of plumage, the gulls rode the
clear wavelets, and swooped from poise to poise with striding wing,
masters of art in two elements, with cold eyes observant of the cumbrous
creature that crawled on the face of the waters with smoke and foam and
splashing. Thirty miles away a low, blue mound on the horizon
represented those Islands of Aran described in the ancient "Book of
Rights" as "The Aras of the Sea;" the bows of the steamer swung to them,
gradually the brown and ragged coasts of Connemara opened away to the
north, and to the south the barren verge of the County of Clare was
shorn perpendicular to the sea at the thousand-foot drop of the cliffs
of Moher.
[Illustration: KILRONAN BAY]
The steamer plodded on at her ten miles an hour, the pig families below
uttered no more than an occasional yell of fractiousness or dolour, and
a party of Aran women sat and conversed under their red shawls with that
unflagging zest and seemingly inexhaustible supply of material that may
well be the envy of the cultured.
It was eight o'clock when the anchor was let go in Kilronan Bay,
opposite the principal village of the principal island, while the
changeless sunshine shone on shallow green water, on dazzling
whitewashed cottages, on dark hills and valleys of grey stone. Round
the steamer flocked battered punts and tarred canvas corraghs with their
bows high out of the water; tanned faces, puckered by the sunlight,
stared up from them, and in a storm of Irish the process of disembarking
began--the phrase but feebly expresses the spectacle of a kitchen table
lowered from the deck and laid on its back in a corragh, or the feat of
placing an old woman sitting in the table with a gander in her lap. The
corragh has no keel, and a sneeze is rightly believed to be fatal to its
equilibrium, but an Aran old woman and an Aran gander can rush in where
Sir Isaac Newton might fear to tread.
A crowd waited at the pier's end, as the boats came creaking and gliding
in to their feet; a crowd of large and angular people, their faces
strong and inquisitive, and instantly remarkable to any one accustomed
to the mild and half-bashful expression of West Galway eyes. There is
about them an air of a foreign race and of an earlier century. Under
circumstances less soul-stirring than the arrival of the Galway steamer,
their long composed faces express their monotony of mood; their eyes are
steady and far-looking, as those that from day to day measure the sweep
of great horizons. Men and women alike wear "pampooties"---slippers of
raw cowhide, with the hair outside--and walk with the alertness and
erectness that are learned from rocky ground and the absence of stiff
and high-heeled boots; the men affect short, full trousers, ending high
above the ankle, so that the pampootie is freely displayed in its
varieties of dun or black or speckled hide. Topping the costume is a
"Tam o' Shanter" cap, probably made in Birmingham. It is not a graceful
dress, but the square shoulders and flat backs would dignify a worse
one, and the mild and mottled pampootie loses its effeminacy with the
people's singularly emphatic tread.
[Illustration: AN ARAN FISHERMAN]
A hostelry of two whitewashed stories and a thatched roof faced the
pier, and we went thither in search of a car, ordered some days before.
The door was open, admitting a flood of sunshine to a narrow passage, on
one side of which was a kitchen, on the other a sitting-room, with a
wall paper of drab trellis-work starred with balls of Reckitt's blue--so
it seemed, at least, to eyes blinded by the outer glare. It contained
chiefly the smell of apples and sour bread proper to rooms of its class,
such as in the Isles of Aran seemed impossibly conventional. Train-oil
and sealskins would have shed a fitter perfume. Having invoked the
household in vain, I essayed the kitchen, where an old man in
shirt-sleeves was in the act of eating his breakfast. He regarded me,
not without aversion, and continued to share an egg with a child of
three years old who stood intent and dirty-faced at his elbow. I waited
till a precarious teaspoonful had been lowered into the wide open mouth,
and made my inquiry about the car.
"They're out since five o'clock looking for the horse." Another
spoonful of egg trembled in the balance, and entered the speaker's
mouth, not without disaster.