IX

My father read out to me, for the first time, when I was eight or nine

years old. Between Sligo and Rosses Point, there is a tongue of land

covered with coarse grass that runs out into the sea or the mud according

to the state of the tide. It is the place where dead horses are buried.

Sitting there, my father read me "The Lays of Ancient Rome." It was the

first poetry that had moved me after the stable-boy's "Orange Rhymes."

Later on he read me "Ivanhoe" and "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and they

are still vivid in the memory. I re-read "Ivanhoe" the other day, but it

has all vanished except Gurth, the swineherd, at the outset and Friar Tuck

and his venison pasty, the two scenes that laid hold of me in childhood.

"The Lay of the Last Minstrel" gave me a wish to turn magician that

competed for years with the dream of being killed upon the sea-shore. When

I first went to school, he tried to keep me from reading boys' papers,

because a paper, by its very nature, as he explained to me, had to be made

for the average boy or man and so could not but thwart one's growth. He

took away my paper and I had not courage to say that I was but reading and

delighting in a prose re-telling of the Iliad. But after a few months, my

father said he had been too anxious and became less urgent about my

lessons and less violent if I had learnt them badly, and he ceased to

notice what I read. From that on I shared the excitement which ran through

all my fellows on Wednesday afternoons when the boys' papers were

published, and I read endless stories I have forgotten as completely as

Grimm's Fairy Tales that I read at Sligo, and all of Hans Andersen except

the Ugly Duckling which my mother had read to me and to my sisters. I

remember vaguely that I liked Hans Andersen better than Grimm because he

was less homely, but even he never gave me the knights and dragons and

beautiful ladies that I longed for. I have remembered nothing that I read,

but only those things that I heard or saw. When I was ten or twelve my

father took me to see Irving play Hamlet, and did not understand why I

preferred Irving to Ellen Terry, who was, I can now see, the idol of

himself and his friends. I could not think of her, as I could of Irving's

Hamlet, as but myself, and I was not old enough to care for feminine charm

and beauty. For many years Hamlet was an image of heroic self-possession

for the poses of youth and childhood to copy, a combatant of the battle

within myself. My father had read me the story of the little boy murdered

by the Jews in Chaucer and the tale of Sir Topaz, explaining the hard

words, and though both excited me, I had liked Sir Topaz best and been

disappointed that it left off in the middle. As I grew older, he would

tell me plots of Balzac's novels, using incident or character as an

illustration for some profound criticism of life. Now that I have read all

the Comedie Humaine, certain pages have an unnatural emphasis, straining

and overbalancing the outline, and I remember how in some suburban street,

he told me of Lucien de Rubempre, or of the duel after the betrayal of his

master, and how the wounded Lucien had muttered "so much the worse" when

he heard someone say that he was not dead.

I now can but share with a friend my thoughts and my emotions, and there

is a continual discovery of difference, but in those days, before I had

found myself, we could share adventures. When friends plan and do

together, their minds become one mind and the last secret disappears. I

was useless at games. I cannot remember that I ever kicked a goal or made

a run, but I was a mine of knowledge when I and the athlete and those two

notoriously gentlemanly boys--theirs was the name that I remember without

a face--set out for Richmond Park, for Coomb Wood or Twyford Abbey to look

for butterflies and moths and beetles. Sometimes to-day I meet people at

lunch or dinner whose address will sound familiar and I remember of a

sudden how a game-keeper chased me from the plantation behind their house,

and how I have turned over the cow-dung in their paddock in the search for

some rare beetle believed to haunt the spot. The athlete was our watchman

and our safety. He would suggest, should we meet a carriage on the drive,

that we take off our hats and walk on as though about to pay a call. And

once when we were sighted by a game-keeper at Coomb Wood, he persuaded the

eldest of the brothers to pretend to be a school-master taking his boys

for a walk, and the keeper, instead of swearing and threatening the law,

was sad and argumentative. No matter how charming the place, (and there is

a little stream in a hollow where Wimbledon Common flows into Coomb Wood

that is pleasant in the memory,) I knew that those other boys saw

something I did not see. I was a stranger there. There was something in

their way of saying the names of places that made me feel this.

X

When I arrived at the Clarence Basin, Liverpool, (the dock Clarence Mangan

had his first name from) on my way to Sligo for my holidays I was among

Sligo people. When I was a little boy, an old woman who had come to

Liverpool with crates of fowl, made me miserable by throwing her arms

around me the moment I had alighted from my cab and telling the sailor who

carried my luggage that she had held me in her arms when I was a baby. The

sailor may have known me almost as well, for I was often at Sligo quay to

sail my boat; and I came and went once or twice in every year upon the ss.

_Sligo_ or the ss. _Liverpool_ which belonged to a company that had for

directors my grandfather and his partner William Middleton. I was always

pleased if it was the _Liverpool_, for she had been built to run the

blockade during the war of North and South.

I waited for this voyage always with excitement and boasted to other boys

about it, and when I was a little boy had walked with my feet apart as I

had seen sailors walk. I used to be sea-sick, but I must have hidden this

from the other boys and partly even from myself; for, as I look back, I

remember very little about it, while I remember stories I was told by the

captain or by his first mate, and the look of the great cliffs of Donegal

& Tory Island men coming alongside with lobsters, talking Irish and, if it

was night, blowing on a burning sod to draw our attention. The captain, an

old man with square shoulders and a fringe of grey hair round his face,

would tell his first mate, a very admiring man, of fights he had had on

shore at Liverpool; and perhaps it was of him I was thinking when I was

very small and asked my grandmother if God was as strong as sailors. Once,

at any rate, he had been nearly wrecked; the _Liverpool_ had been all but

blown upon the Mull of Galloway with her shaft broken, and the captain had

said to his mate, "mind and jump when she strikes, for we don't want to be

killed by the falling spars;" and when the mate answered, "my God, I

cannot swim," he had said, "who could keep afloat for five minutes in a

sea like that?" He would often say his mate was the most timid of men and

that "a girl along the quays could laugh him out of anything." My

grandfather had more than once given the mate a ship of his own, but he

had always thrown up his berth to sail with his old captain where he felt

safe. Once he had been put in charge of a ship in a dry dock in Liverpool,

but a boy was drowned in Sligo, and before the news could reach him he

wired to his wife, "ghost, come at once, or I will throw up berth." He had

been wrecked a number of times and maybe that had broken his nerve or

maybe he had a sensitiveness that would in another class have given him

taste & culture. I once forgot a copy of "Count Robert of Paris" on a

deck-seat, and when I found it again, it was all covered with the prints

of his dirty thumb. He had once seen the coach-a-baur or death coach. It

came along the road, he said, till it was hidden by a cottage and it never

came out on the other side of the cottage. Once I smelled new-mown hay

when we were quite a long way from land, and once when I was watching the

sea-parrots (as the sailors call the puffin) I noticed they had different

ways of tucking their heads under their wings, or I fancied it and said to

the captain "they have different characters." Sometimes my father came

too, and the sailors when they saw him coming would say "there is John

Yeats and we shall have a storm," for he was considered unlucky.

I no longer cared for little shut-in-places, for a coppice against the

stable-yard at Merville where my grandfather lived or against the gable at

Seaview where Aunt Micky lived, and I began to climb the mountains,

sometimes with the stable-boy for companion, and to look up their stories

in the county history. I fished for trout with a worm in the mountain

streams and went out herring-fishing at night: and because my grandfather

had said the English were in the right to eat skates, I carried a large

skate all the six miles or so from Rosses Point, but my grandfather did

not eat it.

One night just as the equinoctial gales were coming when I was sailing

home in the coastguard's boat a boy told me a beetle of solid gold,

strayed maybe from Poe's "gold bug," had been seen by somebody in Scotland

and I do not think that either of us doubted his news. Indeed, so many

stories did I hear from sailors along the wharf, or round the fo'castle

fire of the little steamer that ran between Sligo and Rosses, or from boys

out fishing that the world was full of monsters and marvels. The foreign

sailors wearing ear-rings did not tell me stories, but like the fishing

boys, I gazed at them in wonder and admiration. When I look at my

brother's picture, "Memory Harbour," houses and anchored ship and distant

lighthouse all set close together as in some old map, I recognize in the

blue-coated man with the mass of white shirt the pilot I went fishing

with, and I am full of disquiet and of excitement, and I am melancholy

because I have not made more and better verses. I have walked on Sinbad's

yellow shore and never shall another hit my fancy.

I had still my red pony, and once my father came with me riding too, and

was very exacting. He was indignant and threatening because he did not

think I rode well. "You must do everything well," he said, "that the

Pollexfens respect, though you must do other things also." He used to say

the same about my lessons, and tell me to be good at mathematics. I can

see now that he had a sense of inferiority among those energetic,

successful people. He himself, some Pollexfen told me, though he rode very

badly, would go hunting upon anything and take any ditch. His father, the

County Down Rector, though a courtly man and a scholar, had been so

dandified a horseman that I had heard of his splitting three riding

breeches before he had settled into his saddle for a day's hunting, and of

his first rector exclaiming, "I had hoped for a curate but they have sent

me a jockey."

Left to myself, I rode without ambition though getting many falls, and

more often to Rathbroughan where my great-uncle Mat lived, than to any

place else. His children and I used to sail our toy-boats in the river

before his house, arming them with toy-cannon, touch-paper at all the

touch-holes, always hoping but always in vain that they would not twist

about in the eddies but fire their cannon at one another. I must have gone

to Sligo sometimes in the Christmas holidays, for I can remember riding my

red pony to a hunt. He balked at the first jump, to my relief, and when a

crowd of boys began to beat him, I would not allow it. They all jeered at

me for being afraid. I found a gap and when I was alone in a field tried

another ditch, but the pony would not jump that either; so I tied him to a

tree and lay down among the ferns and looked up into the sky. On my way

home I met the hunt again and noticed that everybody avoided the dogs, and

because I wanted to find out why they did so I rode to where the dogs had

gathered in the middle of the lane and stood my pony amongst them, and

everybody began to shout at me.

Sometimes I would ride to Castle Dargan, where lived a brawling squireen,

married to one of my Middleton cousins, and once I went thither on a visit

with my cousin George Middleton. It was, I dare say, the last household

where I could have found the reckless Ireland of a hundred years ago in

final degradation. But I liked the place for the romance of its two ruined

castles facing one another across a little lake, Castle Dargan and Castle

Fury. The squireen lived in a small house whither his family had moved

from their castle some time in the 18th century, and two old Miss Furys,

who let lodgings in Sligo, were the last remnants of the breed of the

other ruin. Once in every year he drove to Sligo for the two old women,

that they might look upon the ancestral stones and remember their

gentility, and he would put his wildest horses into the shafts to enjoy

their terror.

He himself, with a reeling imagination, knew not what he could be at to

find a spur for the heavy hours. The first day I came there, he gave my

cousin a revolver, (we were upon the high road,) and to show it off, or

his own shooting, he shot a passing chicken; and half an hour later, when

he had brought us to the lake's edge under his castle, now but the broken

corner of a tower with a winding stair, he fired at or over an old

countryman who was walking on the far edge of the lake. The next day I

heard him settling the matter with the old countryman over a bottle of

whiskey, and both were in good humour. Once he had asked a timid aunt of

mine if she would like to see his last new pet, and thereupon had marched

a race-horse in through the hall door and round the dining-room table. And

once she came down to a bare table because he had thought it a good joke

to open the window and let his harriers eat the breakfast. There was a

current story, too, of his shooting, in the pride of his marksmanship, at

his own door with a Martini-Henry rifle till he had shot the knocker off.

At last he quarrelled with my great-uncle William Middleton, and to avenge

himself gathered a rabble of wild country-lads and mounted them and

himself upon the most broken-down rascally horses he could lay hands on

and marched them through Sligo under a land-league banner. After that,

having neither friends nor money, he made off to Australia or to Canada.

I fished for pike at Castle Dargan and shot at birds with a muzzle-loading

pistol until somebody shot a rabbit and I heard it squeal. From that on I

would kill nothing but the dumb fish.