XVII

At Sligo, where I still went for my holidays, I stayed with my uncle,

George Pollexfen, who had come from Ballina to fill the place of my

grandfather, who had retired. My grandfather had no longer his big house,

his partner William Middleton was dead, and there had been legal trouble.

He was no longer the rich man he had been, and his sons and daughters were

married and scattered. He had a tall, bare house overlooking the harbour,

and had nothing to do but work himself into a rage if he saw a mudlighter

mismanaged or judged from the smoke of a steamer that she was burning

cheap coal, and to superintend the making of his tomb. There was a

Middleton tomb and a long list of Middletons on the wall, and an almost

empty place for Pollexfen names, but he had said, because there was a

Middleton there he did not like, "I am not going to lie with those old

bones;" and already one saw his name in large gilt letters on the stone

fence of the new tomb. He ended his walk at St. John's churchyard almost

daily, for he liked everything neat and compendious as upon shipboard, and

if he had not looked after the tomb himself the builder might have added

some useless ornament. He had, however, all his old skill and nerve. I was

going to Rosses Point on the little trading steamer and saw him take the

wheel from the helmsman and steer her through a gap in the channel wall,

and across the sand, an unheard-of-course, and at the journey's end bring

her alongside her wharf at Rosses without the accustomed zigzagging or

pulling on a rope but in a single movement. He took snuff when he had a

cold, but had never smoked or taken alcohol; and when in his eightieth

year his doctor advised a stimulant, he replied, "no, no, I am not going

to form a bad habit."

My brother had partly taken my place in my grandmother's affections. He

had lived permanently in her house for some years now, and went to a Sligo

school where he was always bottom of his class. My grandmother did not

mind that, for she said, "he is too kind-hearted to pass the other boys."

He spent his free hours going here and there with crowds of little boys,

sons of pilots and sailors, as their well-liked leader, arranging donkey

races or driving donkeys tandem, an occupation which requires all one's

intellect because of their obstinacy. Besides he had begun to amuse

everybody with his drawings; and in half the pictures he paints to-day I

recognise faces that I have met at Rosses or the Sligo quays. It is long

since he has lived there, but his memory seems as accurate as the sight of

the eye.

George Pollexfen was as patient as his father was impetuous, and did all

by habit. A well-to-do, elderly man, he lived with no more comfort than

when he had set out as a young man. He had a little house and one old

general servant and a man to look after his horse, and every year he gave

up some activity and found that there was one more food that disagreed

with him. A hypochondriac, he passed from winter to summer through a

series of woollens that had always to be weighed; for in April or May or

whatever the date was he had to be sure he carried the exact number of

ounces he had carried upon that date since boyhood. He lived in

despondency, finding in the most cheerful news reasons of discouragement,

and sighing every twenty-second of June over the shortening of the days.

Once in later years, when I met him in Dublin sweating in a midsummer

noon, I brought him into the hall of the Kildare Street Library, a cool

and shady place, without lightening his spirits; for he but said in a

melancholy voice, "how very cold this place must be in winter time."

Sometimes when I had pitted my cheerfulness against his gloom over the

breakfast table, maintaining that neither his talent nor his memory nor

his health were running to the dregs, he would rout me with the sentence,

"how very old I shall be in twenty years." Yet this inactive man, in whom

the sap of life seemed to be dried away, had a mind full of pictures.

Nothing had ever happened to him except a love affair, not I think very

passionate, that had gone wrong, and a voyage when a young man. My

grandfather had sent him in a schooner to a port in Spain where the

shipping agents were two Spaniards called O'Neill, descendants of Hugh

O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who had fled from Ireland in the reign of James

I; and their Irish trade was a last remnant of the Spanish trade that had

once made Galway wealthy. For some years he and they had corresponded, for

they cherished the memory of their origin. In some Connaught burying

ground, he had chanced upon the funeral of a child with but one mourner, a

distinguished foreign-looking man. It was an Austrian count burying the

last of an Irish family, long nobles of Austria, who were always carried

to that half-ruined burying ground.

My uncle had almost given up hunting and was soon to give it up

altogether, and he had once ridden steeple-chases and been, his

horse-trainer said, the best rider in Connaught. He had certainly great

knowledge of horses, for I have been told, several counties away, that at

Ballina he cured horses by conjuring. He had, however, merely great skill

in diagnosis, for the day was still far off when he was to give his nights

to astrology and ceremonial magic. His servant, Mary Battle, who had been

with him since he was a young man, had the second sight and that, maybe,

inclined him to strange studies. He would tell how more than once when he

had brought home a guest without giving her notice he had found the

dinner-table set for two, and one morning she was about to bring him a

clean shirt, but stopped saying there was blood on the shirt-front and

that she must bring him another. On his way to his office he fell,

crossing over a little wall, and cut himself and bled on to the linen

where she had seen the blood. In the evening, she told how surprised she

had been to find when she looked again that the shirt she had thought

bloody was quite clean. She could neither read nor write and her mind,

which answered his gloom with its merriment, was rammed with every sort of

old history and strange belief. Much of my "Celtic Twilight" is but her

daily speech.

My uncle had the respect of the common people as few Sligo men have had

it; he would have thought a stronger emotion an intrusion on his privacy.

He gave to all men the respect due to their station or their worth with an

added measure of ceremony, and kept among his workmen a discipline that

had about it something of a regiment or a ship, knowing nothing of any but

personal authority. If a carter, let us say, was in fault, he would not

dismiss him, but send for him and take his whip away and hang it upon the

wall; and having reduced the offender, as it were, to the ranks for

certain months, would restore him to his post and his whip. This man of

diligence and of method, who had no enterprise but in contemplation, and

claimed that his wealth, considerable for Ireland, came from a brother's

or partner's talent, was the confidant of my boyish freaks and reveries.

When I said to him, echoing some book I had read, that one never knew a

countryside till one knew it at night, (though nothing would have kept him

from his bed a moment beyond the hour) he was pleased; for he loved

natural things and had learnt two cries of the lapwing, one that drew them

to where he stood and one that made them fly away. And he approved, and

arranged my meals conveniently, when I told him I was going to walk round

Lough Gill and sleep in a wood. I did not tell him all my object, for I

was nursing a new ambition. My father had read to me some passage out of

"Walden," and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island

called Innisfree, and Innisfree was opposite Slish Wood where I meant to

sleep.

I thought that having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my

mind towards women and love, I should live, as Thoreau lived, seeking

wisdom. There was a story in the county history of a tree that had once

grown upon that island guarded by some terrible monster and borne the food

of the gods. A young girl pined for the fruit and told her lover to kill

the monster and carry the fruit away. He did as he had been told, but

tasted the fruit; and when he reached the mainland where she had waited

for him, was dying of its powerful virtue. And from sorrow and from

remorse she too ate of it and died. I do not remember whether I chose the

island because of its beauty or for the story's sake, but I was twenty-two

or three before I gave up the dream.

I set out from Sligo about six in the evening, walking slowly, for it was

an evening of great beauty; but though I was well into Slish Wood by

bed-time, I could not sleep, not from the discomfort of the dry rock I had

chosen for my bed, but from my fear of the wood-ranger. Somebody had told

me, though I do not think it could have been true, that he went his round

at some unknown hour. I kept going over what I should say if I was found

and could not think of anything he would believe. However, I could watch

my island in the early dawn and notice the order of the cries of the

birds.

I came home next day unimaginably tired & sleepy, having walked some

thirty miles partly over rough and boggy ground. For months afterwards,

if I alluded to my walk, my uncle's general servant (not Mary Battle, who

was slowly recovering from an illness and would not have taken the

liberty) would go into fits of laughter. She believed I had spend the

night in a different fashion and had invented the excuse to deceive my

uncle, and would say to my great embarrassment, for I was as prudish as an

old maid, "and you had good right to be fatigued."

Once when staying with my uncle at Rosses Point where he went for certain

months of the year, I called upon a cousin towards midnight and asked him

to get his yacht out, for I wanted to find what sea birds began to stir

before dawn. He was indignant and refused; but his elder sister had

overheard me and came to the head of the stairs and forbade him to stir,

and that so vexed him that he shouted to the kitchen for his sea-boots. He

came with me in great gloom for he had people's respect, he declared, and

nobody so far had said that he was mad as they said I was, and we got a

very sleepy boy out of his bed in the village and set up sail. We put a

trawl out, as he thought it would restore his character if he caught some

fish, but the wind fell and we were becalmed. I rolled myself in the

main-sail and went to sleep for I could sleep anywhere in those days. I

was awakened towards dawn to see my cousin and the boy turning out their

pockets for money and to rummage in my own pockets. A boat was rowing in

from Roughley with fish and they wanted to buy some and would pretend they

had caught it, but all our pockets were empty. It was for the poem that

became fifteen years afterwards "The Shadowy Waters" that I had wanted the

birds' cries, and it had been full of observation had I been able to write

it when I first planned it. I had found again the windy light that moved

me when a child. I persuaded myself that I had a passion for the dawn, and

this passion, though mainly histrionic like a child's play, an ambitious

game, had moments of sincerity. Years afterwards when I had finished "The

Wanderings of Oisin," dissatisfied with its yellow and its dull green,

with all that overcharged colour inherited from the romantic movement, I

deliberately reshaped my style, deliberately sought out an impression as

of cold light and tumbling clouds. I cast off traditional metaphors and

loosened my rhythm, and recognizing that all the criticism of life known

to me was alien and English, became as emotional as possible but with an

emotion which I described to myself as cold. It is a natural conviction

for a painter's son to believe that there may be a landscape symbolical

of some spiritual condition that awakens a hunger such as cats feel for

valerian.