It is the Gulf Stream, they say, that makes Kerry so wet. All the
reservoir of the Atlantic, at any rate, lies to the west and south, and
the prevailing winds come laden with its moisture. Kerry lifts its
mountains to those impinging winds--mountains that in the sunlight are a
living colorful presence on every side, but cruelly denuded by the
constant rains. For usually the winds flow slowly from the sea, soft
voluminous clouds gathered in their arms, and as they pass they sweep
their drooping veils down over the silent and somewhat melancholy land.
In the night-time a light or two may be seen dotted at great intervals
on those lonely hillsides, but for the most part the habitations are in
the cooms or hollows grooved by nature between the parallel hills. The
soil on the mountains is washed away. The vestiture that remains is a
watery sedge, and it is only by garnering every handful of earth that
the tenants can attain cultivation even in the cooms. Their fields,
often held in common, are so small as to be laughable, and deep drainage
trenches are dug every few yards. Sometimes in the shifting sunlight
between showers a light-green patch will loom magically in the distance,
witness to man's indefatigable effort to achieve a holding amid the
rocks. An awkward boreen will climb to that holding, and if one goes
there one may find a typical tall spare countryman, bright of eye and
sharp of feature, housing in his impoverished cottage a large brood of
children. To build with his own hands a watertight house is the ambition
for which this man is slaving, and the slates and cement may be ready
there near the pit which he himself has dug for foundation. A yellowish
wife will perhaps be nursing the latest baby in the gloomy one-roomed
hovel, and as one talks to the man, respectful but sensible, and
admirable in more ways than he can ever dream of, one elf after another
will come out, bare-legged, sharp-eyed, shy, inquisitive, to peer from
far off at the stranger. He may be illiterate, this grave hillside man,
but his starvelings go down the boreen to the bare cold schoolhouse, to
be taught whatever the pompous well-meaning teacher can put into their
minds of an education designed for civil service clerks. The children
may be seen down there if one passes at their playtime, kicking a rag
football with their bare feet, as poor and as gay as the birds.
There was a time when the iron was deep in these farmers' souls. Eking
the marrow from the bones of the land, they were so poor that they had
nothing to live on but potatoes and the milk of their own tiny cattle,
the Kerry-Dexter breed of cattle that alone can pick a living from that
ground. Until twenty-five years ago, I was told, some of the hillside
men had never bought a pound of tea in their lives, or known what it was
to spend money for clothes. To this day they wear their light-colored
homespun, and one will meet at the fairs many fine sturdy middle-aged
farmers with a cut to their homemade clothes that reminds one of the
Bretons. It was from these simple and ascetic men, fighting nature for
grim life, that landlords took their rackrents--one of them, the Earl of
Kenmare, erecting a castle at near-by Killarney that thousands of
Americans have admired. The fight against landlordism was bitter in
Kerry. I met one countryman who was evicted three times, but finally,
despite the remorseless protests of the agent, was allowed to harbor in
a lean-to against the wall of the church. There were persecutions and
murders, the mailed hand of the law and the stealthy hand of the
assassin. Even to-day if that much-evicted tenant had not been sure of
me he would not have spoken his mind. But when he was sure, he confided
with a winning smile that at last he had something to live for and work
for, a strip of land that was an "economic holding," determined by an
Estates Commission which has shouldered the landlord to one side and
estimated with its own disinterested eyes the large nutritive
possibilities of gorse and heather and rock and bog.
Why do they stay? But most of them have not stayed. Kerry has not
one-third the people to-day that it had seventy years ago. The
storekeeper in a seaside village where I stopped in Kerry, a little
father of the people if there ever was one, yet had acted the dubious
role of emigration agent, and had passed thousands of his countrymen on
to America. A few go to England. "For nine years," one hard-working
occupier mentioned to me, "I lived in the shadow of London Bridge." But
for Kerry, the next country to America, America is the land of golden
promise. In a field called Coolnacapogue, "hollow of the dock leaves," I
stopped to ask of a bright lad the way to Sneem, and he ended by asking
me the way to America. It is west they turn, away from the Empire that
"always foul-played us in the past, and I am afeard will foul-play us
again."
"The next time you come, please God you'll bring us Home Rule." That is
the way they speak to you, if they trust you. They want government where
it cannot play so easily the tricks that seared them of old.
I went with a government inspector on one mission in Kerry. At the foot
of the forbidding western hills there was a bleak tongue of land cut off
by two mountain streams. At times these streams were low enough to ford
with ease, but after a heavy rain the water would rise four or five feet
in a few hours and the streams would become impassable torrents. For the
sake of a widow whose hovel stood on this island the Commission
consented to build a little bridge. The concrete piers had been set at
either side successfully, but the central pier, five tons in weight, had
only just been planted when a rain came, and a torrent, and the unwieldy
block of cement had toppled over in the stream. This little catastrophe
was the first news conveyed by the paternal storekeeper to the inspector
on our arrival in town, and we walked out to see what could be done.
Standing by the stream, we were visible to the expectant woman on the
hill. In the soft mournful light of the September afternoon I could see
her outlined against the gray sky as she came flying to learn her fate.
She came bare of head and bare of foot, a small plaid shawl clasped to
her bosom with one hand. Her free hand supported her taut body as she
leaned on her own pier and bent her deep eyes on us across the stream.
As she told in the slow lilting accent of Kerry the pregnant story of
the downfall of the center pier, she would cast those eyes to the
inanimate bulk of concrete, half submerged in the water, as if to
contemn it for lying there in flat helplessness. But she was not excited
or obsequious. A woman of forty, her expression bespoke the sternness
and gravity of her fight for existence, yet she was a quiet and valiant
fighter. She was, I think, the most dignified suppliant I have ever
beheld.
If the pier could not be raised, she foresaw the anxieties of the
winter. She seemed to look into them through the grayness of the failing
light. She foresaw the sudden risings of the stream, the race for her
children to the schoolhouse, the risk of carrying them across on her
back. And she clung to her children.
"You have had trouble, my poor woman?" the inspector said, knowing that
her husband two years before had been drowned in the torrent.
"Aye, indeed, your honor, 'tis I am the pity of the world. One year ago
my child was lost to me. It was in the night-time, he was taken with a
hemorrhage, with respects to your honor. I woke the children to have
them go for to bring the doctor, but it was too late an they returned.
He quenched in my arms, at the dead hour of night."
"The pity of the world" she was in truth. The inspector could do nothing
until the ground was firm enough to support horses and tackle in the
spring. We walked back through the somber bog, the mountains seeming to
creep after us, and we speculated on the bad work of the contractor. To
the storekeeper we took our grievance, and there we came on another
aspect of that plaintive acquiescence so strong in the woman. Yes, the
storekeeper admitted with instant reasonableness, the inspector was
right: Foley had failed about the bridge. "I'll haul him over," he said,
full of sympathy for the woman. And he would haul him over. And the pier
would lie there all winter.
If the people could feel that this solicitude of the Estates Commission
were national, it would bind them to the government. But most of the
inspectors are of the landlord world, ruling-class appointees,
well-meaning, remote, superior, unable to read between the lines. And so
Kerry remains with the old tradition of the government, suspicious of
its intentions, crediting what genuine services there are to the race of
native officials who alone have the intuition of Kerry's kind.
They want army recruits from Kerry, to defend the Empire; that Empire
which meant landlords and land agents and rackrents for so many blind
and crushing years. They want those straight and stalwart and manly
fellows in the trenches. But Kerry knows what the trenches of Empire are
already. It has fought starvation in them, dug deep in the bogs between
sparse ridges of potatoes, for all the years it can remember. It is no
wonder Kerry cannot grasp at once why it should go forth now to die so
readily when it has only just grudgingly been granted a lease to live.