II

One day someone spoke to me of the voice of the conscience, and as I

brooded over the phrase I came to think that my soul, because I did not

hear an articulate voice, was lost. I had some wretched days until being

alone with one of my aunts I heard a whisper in my ear, "what a tease you

are!" At first I thought my aunt must have spoken, but when I found she

had not, I concluded it was the voice of my conscience and was happy

again. From that day the voice has come to me at moments of crisis, but

now it is a voice in my head that is sudden and startling. It does not

tell me what to do, but often reproves me. It will say perhaps, "that is

unjust" of some thought; and once when I complained that a prayer had not

been heard, it said, "you have been helped." I had a little flagstaff in

front of the house and a red flag with the Union Jack in the corner. Every

night I pulled my flag down and folded it up and laid it on a shelf in my

bedroom, and one morning before breakfast I found it, though I knew I had

folded it up the night before, knotted round the bottom of the flagstaff

so that it was touching the grass. I must have heard the servants talking

of the faeries for I concluded at once that a faery had tied those four

knots and from that on believed that one had whispered in my ear. I have

been told, though I do not remember it myself, that I saw, whether once or

many times I do not know, a supernatural bird in the corner of the room.

Once too I was driving with my grandmother a little after dark close to

the Channel that runs for some five miles from Sligo to the sea, and my

grandmother showed me the red light of an outward-bound steamer and told

me that my grandfather was on board, and that night in my sleep I screamed

out and described the steamer's wreck. The next morning my grandfather

arrived on a blind horse found for him by grateful passengers. He had, as

I remember the story, been asleep when the captain aroused him to say they

were going on the rocks. He said, "have you tried sail on her?" and

judging from some answer that the captain was demoralised took over the

command and, when the ship could not be saved, got the crew and passengers

into the boats. His own boat was upset and he saved himself and some

others by swimming; some women had drifted ashore, buoyed up by their

crinolines. "I was not so much afraid of the sea as of that terrible man

with his oar," was the comment of a schoolmaster who was among the

survivors. Eight men were, however, drowned and my grandfather suffered

from that memory at intervals all his life, and if asked to read family

prayers never read anything but the shipwreck of St. Paul.

I remember the dogs more clearly than anyone except my grandfather and

grandmother. The black hairy one had no tail because it had been sliced

off, if I was told the truth, by a railway train. I think I followed at

their heels more than they did at mine, and that their journeys ended at a

rabbit-warren behind the garden; and sometimes they had savage fights, the

black hairy dog, being well protected by its hair, suffering least. I can

remember one so savage that the white dog would not take his teeth out of

the black dog's hair till the coachman hung them over the side of a

water-butt, one outside and one in the water. My grandmother once told the

coachman to cut the hair like a lion's hair and, after a long consultation

with the stable-boy, he cut it all over the head and shoulders and left

it on the lower part of the body. The dog disappeared for a few days and I

did not doubt that its heart was broken. There was a large garden behind

the house full of apple-trees with flower-beds and grass-plots in the

centre and two figure-heads of ships, one among the strawberry plants

under a wall covered with fruit trees and one among the flowers. The one

among the flowers was a white lady in flowing robes, while the other, a

stalwart man in uniform, had been taken from a three-masted ship of my

grandfather's called "The Russia," and there was a belief among the

servants that the stalwart man represented the Tsar and had been presented

by the Tsar himself. The avenue, or as they say in England the drive, that

went from the hall door through a clump of big trees to an insignificant

gate and a road bordered by broken and dirty cottages, was but two or

three hundred yards, and I often thought it should have been made to wind

more, for I judged people's social importance mainly by the length of

their avenues. This idea may have come from the stable-boy, for he was my

principal friend. He had a book of Orange rhymes, and the days when we

read them together in the hay-loft gave me the pleasure of rhyme for the

first time. Later on I can remember being told, when there was a rumour

of a Fenian rising, that rifles had been served out to the Orangemen and

presently, when I had begun to dream of my future life, I thought I would

like to die fighting the Fenians. I was to build a very fast and beautiful

ship and to have under my command a company of young men who were always

to be in training like athletes and so become as brave and handsome as the

young men in the story-books, and there was to be a big battle on the

sea-shore near Rosses and I was to be killed. I collected little pieces of

wood and piled them up in a corner of the yard, and there was an old

rotten log in a distant field I often went to look at because I thought it

would go a long way in the making of the ship. All my dreams were of

ships; and one day a sea captain who had come to dine with my grandfather

put a hand on each side of my head and lifted me up to show me Africa, and

another day a sea captain pointed to the smoke from the Pern mill on the

quays rising up beyond the trees of the lawn, as though it came from the

mountain, and asked me if Ben Bulben was a burning mountain.

Once every few months I used to go to Rosses Point or Ballisodare to see

another little boy, who had a piebald pony that had once been in a circus

and sometimes forgot where it was and went round and round. He was George

Middleton, son of my great-uncle William Middleton. Old Middleton had

bought land, then believed a safe investment, at Ballisodare and at

Rosses, and spent the winter at Ballisodare and the summer at Rosses. The

Middleton and Pollexfen flour mills were at Ballisodare, and a great

salmon weir, rapids and a waterfall, but it was more often at Rosses that

I saw my cousin. We rowed in the river mouth or were taken sailing in a

heavy slow schooner yacht or in a big ship's boat that had been rigged and

decked. There were great cellars under the house, for it had been a

smuggler's house a hundred years before, and sometimes three loud raps

would come upon the drawing room window at sun-down, setting all the dogs

barking, some dead smuggler giving his accustomed signal. One night I

heard them very distinctly and my cousins often heard them, and later on

my sister. A pilot had told me that, after dreaming three times of a

treasure buried in my uncle's garden, he had climbed the wall in the

middle of the night and begun to dig but grew disheartened "because there

was so much earth." I told somebody what he had said and was told that it

was well he did not find it for it was guarded by a spirit that looked

like a flat iron. At Ballisodare there was a cleft among the rocks that I

passed with terror because I believed that a murderous monster lived

there that made a buzzing sound like a bee.

It was through the Middletons perhaps that I got my interest in country

stories and certainly the first faery stories that I heard were in the

cottages about their houses. The Middletons took the nearest for friends

and were always in and out of the cottages of pilots and of tenants. They

were practical, always doing something with their hands, making boats,

feeding chickens, and without ambition. One of them had designed a steamer

many years before my birth and long after I had grown to manhood one could

hear it--it had some sort of obsolete engine--many miles off wheezing in

the Channel like an asthmatic person. It had been built on the lake and

dragged through the town by many horses, stopping before the windows where

my mother was learning her lessons, and plunging the whole school into

candle-light for five days, and was still patched and repatched mainly

because it was believed to be a bringer of good luck. It had been called

after the betrothed of its builder "Janet," long corrupted into the more

familiar "Jennet," and the betrothed died in my youth having passed her

eightieth year and been her husband's plague because of the violence of

her temper. Another who was but a year or two older than myself used to

shock me by running after hens to know by their feel if they were on the

point of dropping an egg. They let their houses decay and the glass fall

from the windows of their greenhouses, but one among them at any rate had

the second sight. They were liked but had not the pride and reserve, the

sense of decorum and order, the instinctive playing before themselves that

belongs to those who strike the popular imagination.

Sometimes my grandmother would bring me to see some old Sligo gentlewoman

whose garden ran down to the river, ending there in a low wall full of

wallflowers, and I would sit up upon my chair, very bored, while my elders

ate their seed-cake and drank their sherry. My walks with the servants

were more interesting; sometimes we would pass a little fat girl and a

servant persuaded me to write her a love-letter, and the next time she

passed she put her tongue out. But it was the servant's stories that

interested me. At such and such a corner a man had got a shilling from a

drill sergeant by standing in a barrel and had then rolled out of it and

shown his crippled legs. And in such and such a house an old woman had hid

herself under the bed of her guests, an officer and his wife, and on

hearing them abuse her, beaten them with a broomstick. All the well-known

families had their grotesque or tragic or romantic legends, and I often

said to myself how terrible it would be to go away and die where nobody

would know my story. Years afterwards, when I was ten or twelve years old

and in London, I would remember Sligo with tears, and when I began to

write, it was there I hoped to find my audience. Next to Merville where I

lived, was another tree-surrounded house where I sometimes went to see a

little boy who stayed there occasionally with his grandmother, whose name

I forget and who seemed to me kind and friendly, though when I went to see

her in my thirteenth or fourteenth year I discovered that she only cared

for very little boys. When the visitors called I hid in the hay-loft and

lay hidden behind the great heap of hay while a servant was calling my

name in the yard.

I do not know how old I was (for all these events seem at the same

distance) when I was made drunk. I had been out yachting with an uncle and

my cousins and it had come on very rough. I had lain on deck between the

mast and the bowsprit and a wave had burst over me and I had seen green

water over my head. I was very proud and very wet. When we got into Rosses

again, I was dressed up in an older boy's clothes so that the trousers

came down below my boots and a pilot gave me a little raw whiskey. I drove

home with the uncle on an outside car and was so pleased with the strange

state in which I found myself that for all my uncle could do, I cried to

every passer-by that I was drunk, and went on crying it through the town

and everywhere until I was put to bed by my grandmother and given

something to drink that tasted of black currants and so fell asleep.