The stirabout ready, the two sisters ate their meal together. Honor’s
was that of a blackbird. In vain Grania coaxed her with the best-mixed
corner of the pot; in vain added milk, breaking in little bits of
carefully-treasured white bread, brought from the mainland. The sick
woman pretended to eat, but in reality barely moistened her lips with
the milk and touched a corner of the bread. When she could persuade her
to take no more Grania settled down to her own share, and with the aid
of her yellow auxiliary speedily cleared the pot. With a man’s power of
work she had a man’s healthy appetite, and could often have disposed of
more food than fell to her share.
The meal over she got up, went to the door, and stood awhile looking
down the gully towards the seashore. It was getting dusk, and the night
was strangely cold. The wind sweeping in from the north-east felt rough
and harsh. No screen or protection of any sort was to be found upon this
side of the island. Worse still, fuel was scarce and dear. As a rule,
the poor suffer less in Ireland from cold than from most of the other
ills of life. A smoke-saturated cabin is warm if it is nothing else.
Turf, too, is generally abundant; often to be had for the trouble of
fetching it home. In the Aran isles there are no bogs, consequently
there is no turf, and the cost of carriage from the mainland has to be
added, therefore, to its price. The traffic, too, being in a few hands,
those few make their own profit out of it, and their neighbours are more
or less at their mercy.
Upon Inishmaan, the most retrograde of the three islands, turf is
scarcer and dearer than on either Aranmore or Inisheer. Sometimes the
supply vanishes utterly in the winter, and until fresh turf can be
fetched from the mainland the greatest suffering prevails; dried cowdung
and every other substitute having to be resorted to to supply its place.
Grania was always careful to lay in a good supply of turf in the autumn,
and the sisters’ rick was noted as the tallest and solidest on the
island. This year, however, it had melted mysteriously away, much
earlier than usual. They had burned a good deal, for the winter had been
a severe one, and the sick woman suffered greatly from cold. Still
Grania had suspicions that someone had been tampering with their rick,
though, so far, she had said nothing about the matter to Honor, not
wishing her to be troubled about it.
It was nearly time now to go down and see if the kelp fire was burning,
and to set it in order for the night--the last task always in the day
during the kelp-burning season. Murdough Blake had promised to meet her
there, and the consciousness of this made her feel dimly remorseful at
the thought of again leaving Honor, although the kelp fire had to be
seen to, and she had no intention of lingering a minute longer than she
could help. With this idea in her mind she turned to look at her sister,
a mere shadow now in her dusky corner, from which the hacking sound of a
cough broke, with mournful iteration, upon the silence. A sudden feeling
of pity, a sudden intense sense of contrast, swept over the girl’s mind
as she did so. She would have been incapable of putting the thought into
words, but she felt it, nevertheless. Herself and Honor! What a
difference! Yet why? Why should it be so? Honor so good, so patient, she
herself so much the contrary! With that strong pictorial faculty which
comes of an out-of-door life, she already saw herself racing down the
hill towards the shore where the kelp fire was built; already _felt_ the
gritty texture of the rocks under her feet, the peculiarly springy
sensation that the overhanging lip of one ledge always lent as you
sprang from it to the next beyond; saw herself arriving in the narrow
stony gorge where the kelp was burnt; saw the glow of its fire, a narrow
trough of red ashes half covered and smothered with seaweed; saw
Murdough Blake coming through the dusk to meet her. At this point a
mixture of sensations, too complicated to be quite comfortable, came
over her, and she left her momentary dreams for the reality, which at
least was straightforward enough.
‘Is there e’er a thing I can do, sister, before I go?’ she asked.
‘Ne’er a thing at all, child. ’Tis asleep you’ll find me most like when
you come back,’ Honor answered cheerfully.
Grania left a cup with water in it within the sick woman’s reach,
covered the fire with ashes, so that it might keep alight, laid her own
cloak over Honor, and went out.
She was already late, and Murdough, she knew, had the strongest possible
objections to being kept waiting; accordingly she hurried down the rocky
incline at a pace that only one accustomed from babyhood to its
intricacies could have ventured to go.
As she hurried along her own movements brought the blood tingling
through her veins, and her spirits rose insensibly. She felt glad and
light, she hardly herself knew why. Leaping from one rocky level to
another, her feet beat out a ringing response to the clink of the
grooved and chiselled rocks against which they struck. Once she stopped
a moment to clutch at a tuft of wood sorrel, springing out of a
fissure, and crammed it all, trefoiled leaves and half-expanded pale
grey flowers, into her mouth, enjoying the sweet sub-acid flavour as she
crunched them up between her strong white teeth.
Better fed than most of her class, her own mistress, without grinding
poverty, the mere joy of life, the sheer animal zest and intoxication of
living was keener in her than it often is in those of her own rank and
sex in Ireland. Of this she was herself dimly aware. Did others find the
same pleasure merely in breathing--merely in moving and working--as she
did, she sometimes wondered. Even her love for Honor--the strongest
feeling but one she possessed--the despair which now and then swept over
her at the thought of losing her, could not check this. Nay, it is even
possible that the enforced companionship for so many hours of the day
and night of that pitiful sick-bed, the pain and weakness which she
shared, so far as they could be shared, lent a sort of reactionary zest
to the freedom of these wild rushes over the rocks and through the cold
sea air. She did not guess it herself, but so no doubt it was.
The dusk lingers long in the far north-west, and upon the Aran islands
longer apparently than elsewhere, owing to their shining environment of
sea and still more to their treeless rain-washed surfaces, which reflect
every atom of light as upon a mirror. It was getting really dark now,
however, and the sea below her was all one dull purplish grey, barred at
long intervals with moving patches of a yet deeper shadow. Splashes of
white or pale yellowish lichens flung upon the dark rocks stood out here
and there, looking startlingly light and distinct as she neared them.
They might have been dim dancing figures, or strange grimacing faces
grinning at her out of the obscurity. Over everything hung an intense
sense of saltness--in the air, upon the rocks, on the short grass which
crisped under foot with the salty particles as with a light hoar-frost.
Fragments of dry crumpled-up seaweed, like black rags, lay about
everywhere, showing that the kelp fires were not far off.
She hastened her steps. Was Murdough already there? she wondered. He
was. As she came round the corner she saw him leaning against a big
boulder, a ‘Stranger’ like the one that blocked the mouth of their own
gully; ice-dropped granite blocks whose pale rounded forms stud by
thousands the darker limestone of the islands.
‘My faith and word, Grania O’Malley, but it is the late woman you are
to-night!’ he said, straightening himself from his lounging posture and
speaking in a tone of offence.
‘I know I am, Murdough agra!’
There was a tone of unusual submissiveness about the girl’s voice as she
advanced towards him through the dusk; a look almost of shyness in her
eyes as she lifted them to his in the dimness.
‘My faith and word but it is the long time, the _very_ long time, I have
been kept waiting. And it is the ugly lonely place for a man to be kept
waiting in!’ he continued in the same aggrieved tone. ‘And it was not to
please myself I came either. No, it was not, but just to help you with
the kelp fire. And it is not one foot of me I would have come--no, nor
the half of a foot--if I had thought you would have served me so.’
‘Honor kept me. ’Tis sick she is this evening, worse than common,’
Grania answered simply. ‘Was it wanting me very badly you were, Murdough
agra?’ she added, in the same tone as before.
‘Yes, it was wanting you _very_ badly I was, Grania O’Malley, for it was
the _Fear Darrig_ I could not help thinking of, and that it was just the
place to see him, and it was that made me want you, for they say two
people do never see him at the one time, and it is not I that want to
see him now, nor at any time--not at all, so I do not!’
‘My grandfather, he saw the _Fear Darrig_ many’s the time,’ Murdough
continued, presently, in a more amicable tone; ‘he would, maybe, be
setting his lines at night and it would look up at him sudden out of the
water. Once, too, he told my grandmother he was up near the big Worm
hole and it run at him on a sudden, and danced up and down before him,
for all the world like a red Boffin pig gone mad. Round and round it ran
as clear as need be in the moonlight, laughing and leaping and clapping
its hands, and he praying for the bare life all the while, and shutting
his eyes for fear of what he’d see, and not a single saint in the whole
sky minding him, no more than if he’d been an old black Protestant
bellringer!’
‘You have never seen the _Fear Darrig_, have you, Murdough?’ Grania
asked with a slightly mocking accent, as she began to busy herself with
collecting the dry seaweed and heaping it upon the smouldering fire.
‘Well, then, I have not, Grania O’Malley, but a man that is in Galway
and lives near Spiddal--a tall big man he is, by the name of
O’Rafferty--he told me that he had seen him not long since. He was going
to a fair to sell some chickens that his wife had been rearing--fine
young spring chickens they were--and he had them tied in an old basket
and it on his back. And he had to go across a place where the sea runs
bare, and the tide being out, there were big black rocks sticking up
everywhere. It was a strange, lonesome place, he said, full of big
hollows between the rocks, and he didn’t half like the look of it, for
the day was very dark and he was afraid every minute the tide might be
coming in on him, and the basket on his back kept slipping and slipping
with every step he made, and not another creature near him, good or bad.
“Arrah! what will I do now, at all, at all?” says he to himself, when,
all of a sudden, he heard a sort of a croaking noise behind him, and he
turned round, and there on the top of one of the rocks sat a little old
man with a face as red as a ferret, and an old red hat on his head, and
he croaking like a scald crow and squinting at him out of the two eyes.’
Murdough paused dramatically, but Grania merely went on stacking her
seaweed, and he had to continue his narrative without any special
encouragement.
‘Well, O’Rafferty, he just took one look he told me, no more, and with
that he dropped the basket that was on his back, with the spring
chickens in it and all, and he set to running, and he run and he run
till he was over the place, and away with him across the fields beyond,
and never stopped till he had run the breath all out of his body, and
himself right into the middle of the place where the fair was held! And
it was the devil’s own abuse he got from his wife, so it was, he said,
when he got home that night, for letting her fine spring chickens be
drowned on her, which she had been months upon months of rearing.’
‘Then it is the cowardly man I think he was,’ Grania said scornfully,
lifting her head from her work for a moment. ‘If it had been me, I would
have looked twice, so I would, and not anyway have let the young
chickens be lost and drowned in the sea.’
‘Then I do not think he was the cowardly man at all,’ Murdough replied
warmly; ‘and for chickens, what is the use of fine spring chickens or of
money itself, or of a thing good or bad, if a man’s life is all but the
same as lost with him being terrified out of his senses with looking at
what no man ought to be looking at? It is quite right, I think, Patrick
O’Rafferty was, and it is what I would have done myself--yes, indeed I
would.’
Grania answered nothing, but her face did not relax from its
indifferent, scornful expression, as with skilful hand she rapidly fed
the kelp fire from the big black heap of seaweed hard by.
Murdough, however, was by this time in the full swing of narrative. All
he cared for was an audience, whether sympathetic or unsympathetic
mattered little.
‘It is a very strange thing, so it is, a very strange thing, but it is
not the worst things that give a man often the worst frights, so it is
not,’ he said, in a tone of profound reflection. ‘I have been out in the
boats many and many a time when the sea would be getting up, and the
other boys about me would be screaming and praying, and in the devil’s
own fright, fearing lest they’d be drowned. Well, now, I was not
frightened then--no, not one little bit in the world, Grania O’Malley,
no more than if I had been at home and in my bed! The very worst fright
ever I got in my life--well, I cannot tell you what it was that
frightened me so, no, I can_not_! I was out by myself in Martin Kelly’s
curragh, fishing for the mackerel, and it was getting a bit dark, but
the sea was not wild, not to say wild at all; there was no reason to be
frightened, no reason in life, when all at once--like that--I took the
fright! I did not want to take it, you may believe me, and I cannot tell
you, no, I can_not_, to this day, nor never, what it was frightened me
so. It was just as if there were two people in the inside of me, and one
of them laughed at the other and said, “Why, Murdough Blake, man alive,
what the devil ails you to-day?” but the other he never answered a
single word, only shook and shook till it seemed as if the clothes on my
back would be all shaken to pieces.’
‘And what did you do?’ Grania asked, pausing in her stacking, and
leaning upon her fork to listen.
‘Well, then, I will tell you what I did, yes I will, Grania O’Malley. I
just shut my eyes tight, and I rowed, and I rowed. How I rowed and my
two eyes shut tight, I cannot tell you, but I did. If I had opened them
ever so little I made sure I should have seen--God alone knows what I
would have seen, but something worse than any living man ever saw
before. Once I heard a gull scream close to my head, and I screamed
myself too, yes, I did, my faith and honour, never a word of lie. The
clothes on my back they were wet as the sea itself with sweat, what with
the fright and the way I was rowing, and when I got close to the rocks I
just opened my eyes a little weeshy bit--like that--and peeped out
between my eyelids, trembling all the while from head to foot with what
I might see and saying every prayer I could remember, and---- Well!
there was nothing there--nothing at all, no more than there is on the
palm of my hand!’
And he opened it wide, dramatically, to demonstrate his assertion.
This time Grania listened without any protest, mental or otherwise. Like
every Celt that ever was born she perfectly understood these sudden
unexplainable panics, more akin to those that affect sensitive animals,
horses particularly, than anything often felt by more stolid and
apathetic bipeds. Though not overflowing in words, as Murdough’s did,
her imagination was perhaps even more alive than his to those dim
formless visions which people the dusk, and keep alive in the Celt a
sense of vague presences, unseen but realisable--survivals of a whole
world of forgotten beliefs, unfettered by logic, untouched by education,
hardly altered even by later and more conscious beliefs, which have
rather modified these earlier ones than superseded them.
The kelp fire was by this time made up, and after beating down the top
of it so that it might keep alight all night, they turned and walked
back together through the darkness. The wind, which had been rising for
an hour past, blew with a dreary raking noise over the naked platforms.
Stepping carefully, so as to avoid the innumerable fissures, slippery as
the crevasses upon a glacier, they presently reached a narrow track, or
‘bohereen,’ which led between two lines of loosely-piled walls back to
the neighbourhood of the O’Malleys’ cabin.
It was almost absolutely pitch dark. Below them the sea was one vast
indistinguishable moaning waste. A single tall standing stone--one of
the many relics of the past which cover the islands--rose up against it
like some vaguely-warning sign-post. Stars showed by glimpses, but the
clouds rolled heavily, and the night promised to be an unpleasant one.
Grania felt vaguely irritated and unhappy, she did not know why. That
sense of elation with which she had run down over the rocks an hour ago
had passed away, and was replaced by a feeling of discomfort quite as
frequent with her as the other, especially when she and Murdough had
been for some time together. Everything seemed to irritate her--the
wind; the stones against which she stumbled; the clouds tossing and
drifting over her head; even the familiar moan of the sea had an
unexplainable irritation that night for her ear. Looking up at him as he
strode along beside her, a dim but substantial shadow in the darkness,
this sense of intense, though causeless, vexation was especially strong.
There were moments when it would have given her the deepest satisfaction
to have fallen upon him and beaten him soundly then and there with her
fists, so irritated was she, and so puzzled, too, by her own irritation.
Of all this, fortunately, he knew and suspected nothing. His own private
and particular world--the one in which he lived, breathed, and
shone--was as far apart as the poles from hers. A vast untravelled sea
stretched between them, and neither could cross from one to the other.
They parted at last upon the top of the ridge, close to the head of the
sprawling monster which always lay there, half buried beneath the rocks,
Murdough keeping straight on along the bohereen towards Alleenageeragh,
Grama turning short off across the lower platform, which speedily
brought her home.