A PLAYHOUSE IN THE WASTE
I had arranged to stay with Father MacTurnan till Monday, and I had
driven many miles along the road that straggles like a grey thread
through the brown bog. On either side there were bog-holes, and great
ruts in the road; the horse shied frequently, and once I was preparing
to leap from the car, but the driver assured me that the old horse
would not leave the road.
"Only once he was near leaving the road, and the wheel of the car must
have gone within an inch of the bog-hole. It was the day before
Christmas Day, and I was driving the doctor; he saw something, a small
white thing gliding along the road, and he was that scared that the
hair rose up and went through his cap."
I could not tell from the driver's face whether he was aware of his
extravagant speech. He seemed to have already forgotten what he had
said, and we drove on through the bog till the dismal distant mountains
and the cry of a plover forced me to speak again.
"All this parish, then," I said, "is Father MacTurnan's."
"Every mile of it, sir," he said, "every mile of it; and we see him
riding along the roads on his bicycle going to sick-calls buttoned up
in his old coat."
"Do you often come this way?"
"Not very often, sir. No one lives here except the poor people and the
priest and the doctor. It is the poorest parish in Ireland, and every
third or fourth year there's a famine; and they would have died long
ago if it had not been for Father James."
"And how does he help them?"
"Isn't he always writing letters to the Government asking for relief
works. Do you see those bits of roads? They are the relief works."
"Where do those roads lead to?"
"Nowhere. The road stops in the middle of the bog when the money is
out."
"But," I said, "surely it would be better if the money were spent upon
permanent improvements, on drainage, for instance."
The boy did not answer; he called to his horse, and I had to press him
for an answer.
"There's no fall, sir."
"And the bog is too big," I added, in hope of encouraging conversation.
"Faith it is, sir."
"But we are not very far from the sea, are we?"
"About a couple of miles."
"Well, then," I said, "couldn't a harbour be made?"
"They were thinking about that, but there's no depth of water, and the
engineer said it would be cheaper to send the people to America.
Everyone is against emigration now, but the people can't live here."
"So there is no hope," I said, "for home industries, weaving,
lace-making."
"I won't say that."
"But has it been tried?"
"The candle do be burning in the priest's window till one in the
morning, and he sitting up thinking of plans to keep the people at
home. Do you see that house, sir, fornint my whip, at the top of the
hill?" I said I did. "Well, that's the playhouse that he built."
"A playhouse," I said.
"Yes, sir; Father James hoped that people might come from Dublin to see
it. No play like it had ever been acted in Ireland before, sir."
"This carman of mine," I said to myself, "is an extraordinary
fellow,--he has got a story about everyone; he is certainly a
legitimate descendant of the old bards," and I leaned across the car
and said to him:--
"And was the play performed?"
"No, sir. The priest had been learning them all the summer, but the
autumn was on them before they had got it by rote, and a wind came and
blew down one of the walls."
"And couldn't Father MacTurnan get the money to build it up?"
"Sure he might have got the money, but where would be the use when
there was no luck in it."
"And who were to act the play?"
"The girls and boys in the parish, and the prettiest girl in all the
parish was to play Good Deeds."
"So it was a miracle play," I said.
"Do you see that man there, sir? That's the priest coming out of James
Burke's cabin."
We should overtake Father MacTurnan in a minute or more. There was no
time to hear the story, and I was sorry not to have heard the story of
the playhouse from the car-driver. Father MacTurnan got up beside me,
and told me we were about a mile from his house and that he had dinner
for me. He was a tall, thin man, and his pale, wandering eyes reflected
the melancholy of the distant mountains.
"I hope," said the priest, "that you're not wet; we have had some
showers here."
"We were caught in a shower coming out of Rathowen, but nothing to
signify."
Our talk then turned on the consecration of the cathedral. I told him
everything I thought would interest him, but all the while I was
thinking what kind of house he lived in; I had only seen mud huts for
many a mile; presently he pointed with his umbrella, and I saw a
comfortable whitewashed cottage by the roadside. The idea of the
playhouse was ringing in my head, and I began to wonder why he did not
train a rose-bush against its wall, and a moment after I felt that it
was well that he did not--a rose-bush could only seem incongruous
facing that waste hill. We passed into the house, and seeing the
priest's study lined with books, I said, "Reading is his distraction,"
and I looked forward to a pleasant talk about books when we had
finished our business talk; "and he'll tell me about the playhouse," I
said. After dinner, when we had said all we had to say on the
possibilities of establishing local industries, the priest got up
suddenly,--I thought he was going to take a book from the shelves to
show me, but he had gone to fetch his knitting, and, without a word of
explanation, he began to knit. I saw that he was knitting stockings,
and from the rapidity that the needles went to and fro I guessed that
he knitted every evening. It may have been only my fancy, but it seemed
to me that the priest answered the questions I addressed to him about
his books perfunctorily; it even seemed to me that he wished to avoid
literary conversation. Yielding to his wish, or what I believed to be
his wish, I spoke of practical things, saying that the worst feature of
the case was that the Irish no longer cared to live in Ireland.
"Even the well-to-do want to go away. The people are weary of the
country; they have suffered too much. I think that they wish to lose
themselves."
"It will be a pity," the priest said.
"A sort of natural euthanasia," I said. "A wish to forget themselves."
"It will be a pity," the priest said again, and he began to speak of
the seventh century, when Ireland had a religion of her own, an art of
her own, and a literature of her own.
We drew our chairs closer to the fire, and we spoke of the Cross of
Cong and Cormac's Chapel, and began to mourn the race, as is customary
in these times.
"The Celt is melting like snow; he lingers in little patches in the
corners of the field, and hands are stretched from every side, for it
is human to stretch hands to fleeting things, but as well might we try
to retain the snow."
But as I grew despondent the priest grew hopeful, "No fine race has
ever been blotted out." His eyes, I said, are as melancholy as the
mountains, but nature has destined him to bring hope to the hopeless,
and my delight in his character caused me to forget to ask him about
the playhouse. He had started a school for lace-making, but instead of
keeping them at home it had helped them to emigrate; I said that this
was the worst feature of the case. But the priest found excellent
reasons for thinking that the weaving industry would prove more
remunerative; he was sure that if the people could only make a slight
livelihood in their own country they would not want to leave it. He
instanced Ireland in the eighteenth century,--the population had been
killed off until only two millions remained, and in the nineteenth
century the population stood at eight millions. I listened, letting the
priest talk on, delighting in his incurable optimism; and when the
servant opened the door and told the priest he was wanted, I saw him
put on his old coat, grown green with age; I said to myself, "No man in
the world is better at his own job than this one; hope is what they
want;" and returning to the study after seeing him off I stopped
suddenly, seeing his eyes filled with kindness as he sat by the
deathbed and hearing his kind wisdom. That day I had seen a woman
digging in a patch of bog under the grey sky. She wore a red petticoat,
a handkerchief was tied round her head, and the moment she caught sight
of us she flung down the spade and ran to the hovel, and a man appeared
with a horn, and he blew the horn, running to the brow of the hill. I
asked the driver the reason of their alarm, and he told me that we had
been mistaken for the bailiff. This was true, for I saw two little
sheep hardly bigger than geese driven away. There was a pool of green
water about this hovel, and all the hovels in the district were the
same,--one-roomed hovels, full of peat smoke, and on the hearth a black
iron pot, with traces of some yellow meal stirabout in it. The dying
man or woman would be lying in a corner on some straw, and the priest
would speak a little Irish to these outcast Celts, "to those dim people
who wander like animals through the waste," I said.
The grey sky has blown over these people for so many generations that
it has left them bare as the hills. A playhouse for these people! What
defiance of nature's law! And watching the shapely sods of turf melting
into white ash I thought of the dim people building the playhouse,
obedient to the priest, unsuspicious of a new idea. A playhouse must
have seemed to them as useless as a road that leads nowhere. The priest
told them that people would come to see the play; but the idea of
pleasure did not find a way into their minds. The playhouse had fallen!
I piled more turf on the fire; the priest did not return, and the
moaning of the wind put strange fancies into my head. My driver had
spoken of a small white thing gliding along the road, and I regretted I
had not asked him more about the apparition, if it were an apparition.
A little later I wondered why the priest knitted. "His room is lined
with books. He does not read, he knits,--a strange occupation. He never
talks about books."
I crossed the room to investigate the mystery, and I discovered a heap
of woollen stockings. "All these he has knitted. But some strange story
hangs about him," I said; and I lay awake a long while thinking of the
people I should met on the morrow.
And never shall I forget the spectacle. There are degrees in poverty,
and I remember two men: their feet were bare, and their shirts were so
torn that the curling breast hair was uncovered. They wore brown
beards, and their skin was yellow with famine, and one of them cried
out: "The white sun of heaven does not shine upon two poorer men than
upon this man and myself." After the meeting they followed us, and the
poor people seemed to me strangely anxious to tell of their condition.
There were some women among them; they were kept back by the men, and
they quarrelled among themselves, disputing who should talk to me; they
had seen no one except each other for a long time, and I feared their
interest in the looms was a conversational interest--it amused them to
talk.
The priest brought a bundle of clothes out of the house, and when the
distribution was finished, I asked him to come for a walk up the hill
and show me the playhouse.
Again he hesitated, and I said, "You must come, Father MacTurnan, for a
walk. You must forget the misfortunes of those people for a while." He
yielded, and we spoke of the excellence of the road, and he told me
that when he had conceived the idea of a playhouse he had arranged with
the inspector that the road should go to the top of the hill.
"It will not make much difference," he said, "for if there is ever a
harbour made the road can be carried over the hill right down to the
sea, and the hill, as you say, is not a very steep one."
"There must be a fine view from the hill-top, and no doubt you often go
there to read your breviary."
"During the building of the playhouse I often used to be up here, and
during the rehearsals I was here every day."
I noticed that the tone of his voice never altered.
A grey, shallow sea had slowly eaten away the rotten land, and the
embay was formed by two low headlands hardly showing above the water at
high tide.
"I thought once," said the priest, "that if the play were a great
success a line of flat-bottomed steamers might be built."
"Pleasant dreams," I said to myself, "and he sitting here in the quiet
evenings, reading his breviary, dreaming of a line of steamships
crowded with visitors. He has been reading about the Oberammergau
performances." And I spoke about these performances, agreeing with him
that no one would have dared to predict that visitors would come from
all sides of Europe to see a few peasants performing a miracle play in
the Tyrol.
"Come," I said, "into the playhouse. Let me see how you built it."
The building was finished! The walls and the roof were finished, and a
stage had been erected at the end of the building. But half a wall and
some of the roof had fallen upon it, and the rubble had not been
cleared away.
"It would not cost many pounds to repair the damage," I said. "And
having gone so far, you should give the play a chance."
I was anxious to hear if he had discovered any aptitude for acting
among the girls and the boys who lived in the cabins.
"I think," said the priest, "that the play would have been very fairly
acted, and I think that, with a little practice we might have done as
well as they did at Oberammergau."
But he was more willing to discuss the play that he had chosen than the
talents of those who were going to perform it, and he told me that it
had been written in the fourteenth century in Latin, and that he
himself had translated it into Irish.
"I wonder if it would have been possible to organise an excursion from
Dublin. If the performance had been judiciously
advertised--'Oberammergau in the West.'"
"I used to think," said he, "it is eight miles from Rathowen, and the
road is a bad one, and when they got here there would be no place for
them to stay; they would have to go all the way back again, and that
would be sixteen miles."
"Yet it was as well to build this playhouse as to make a useless
road--a road leading nowhere. While they were building this playhouse
they thought they were accomplishing something. Never before did the
poor people do anything, except for bare life. Do you know, Father
MacTurnan, your playhouse touches me to the heart?" and I turned and
looked.
"Once Pleasure hovered over your parish, but the bird did not alight!
Let me start a subscription for you in Dublin!"
"I don't think," said the priest, "that it would be possible--"
"Not for me to get fifty pounds?"
"Yes," he said, "you might get the money, but I don't think we could
ever get up a performance of the play."
"And why not?" I said.
"You see, the wind came and blew down the wall, and I think they look
upon that wind as a manifestation of God's disapproval. The people are
very pious, and looking back I think they felt that the time they spent
in rehearsing might have been better spent. The idea of amusement
shocks those who are not accustomed to the idea. The playhouse
disturbed them in their ideas. They hear Mass on Sundays, and there are
the Sacraments, and they remember that they have to die. It used to
seem to me a very sad thing to see all the people going to America; it
seemed to me the saddest thing in the world to see the poor Celt
disappear in America, leaving his own country, leaving his language,
and very often his religion."
"And does it no longer seem to you sad that such a thing should happen?"
"No, not if it is the will of God. God has specially chosen the Irish
race to convert the world, no race has provided so many missionaries,
no race has preached the gospel more frequently to the heathen; and
once we realise that we have to die, and very soon, and that the
Catholic Church is the only true church, our ideas about race and
nationality fade from us. They come to seem very trite and foolish. We
are here, not to make life successful and triumphant, but to gain
heaven. That is the truth, and it is to the honour of the Irish people
that they have been selected by God to preach the truth, even though
they lose their nationality in preaching it. I do not expect you to
accept these opinions. I know that you think very differently, but
living here I have learned to acquiesce in the will of God."
The priest stopped speaking suddenly, like one ashamed of having
expressed himself too openly, and soon after we were met by a number of
peasants, and the priest's attention was engaged; the inspector of the
relief works had to speak to him; and I did not see him again until
dinner-time.
"You have given them hope," he said.
This was gratifying to hear, and the priest sat listening while I told
him of the looms already established in different parts of the country.
We talked about half an hour, and then, like one who suddenly
remembers, the priest got up and fetched his knitting.
"Do you knit every evening?"
"I have got into the way of knitting lately; it passes the time."
"But do you never read?" I asked, and looked towards the book-shelves.
"I used to read a great deal. But there wasn't a woman in the parish
that could turn a heel properly, so that I had to learn to knit."
"Do you like knitting better than reading?" I asked, feeling ashamed of
my curiosity.
"I have constantly to attend sick-calls, and if one is absorbed in a
book one experiences a certain reluctance in putting it aside."
"The people are very inconsiderate. Now, why did that man put off
coming to fetch you till eleven o'clock last night? He knew his wife
was ill."
"Sometimes one is apt to think them inconsiderate."
"The two volumes of miracle plays!"
"Yes, and that's another danger, a book puts all kinds of ideas and
notions into one's head. The idea of that playhouse came out of those
books."
"But," I said, "you do not think that God sent the storm because He did
not wish a play to be performed."
"One cannot judge God's designs. Whether God sent the storm or whether
it was accident must remain a matter for conjecture, but it is not a
matter of conjecture that one is doing certain good by devoting one's
self to one's daily task, getting the Government to start new relief
works, establishing schools for weaving--the people are entirely
dependent upon me, and when I am attending to their wants I know I'm
doing right. All the other is conjecture."
The priest asked for further information regarding our system of
payments, and I answered eagerly. I had begun to feel my curiosity to
be disgraceful, and it was unnecessary,--my driver would tell me
to-morrow why the playhouse had been abandoned.
I relied on him to tell me; he was one of those who had the faculty for
hearing things: he had heard that I had been up the hill with the
priest to see the playhouse; he knew all about my walk with the priest,
and was soon telling me that it was the curse of the Widow Sheridan
that had brought down the wind that had wrecked the playhouse. For it
was her daughter that the priest had chosen to play the part of Good
Deeds in the miracle play. And the story the driver told me seemed true
to the ideas of the primitive people who lived in the waste, and of the
waste itself. The girl had been led astray one evening returning from
rehearsal,--in the words of my car-driver, "She had been 'wake' going
home one evening, and when the signs of her 'weakness' began to show
upon her, her mother took the halter off the cow and tied the girl to
the wall and kept her there until the child was born. And Mrs. Sheridan
put a piece of string round its throat and buried it one night near the
playhouse. And it was three nights after that the storm rose, and the
child was seen pulling the thatch out of the roof."
"But, did she murder the child?"
"Sorra wan of me knows. She sent for the priest when she was dying, and
told him what she had done."
"But the priest would not reveal what he heard in the confession?" I
said.
"Mrs. Sheridan didn't die that night, not till the end of the week; and
the neighbours heard her talking about the child that she buried, and
then they all knew what the white thing was that had been seen by the
roadside. And the night that the priest left her he saw the white thing
standing in front of him; and if he hadn't been a priest he would have
dropped down dead. But he knew well enough that it was the unbaptised
child, and he took some water from the bog-hole and dashed it over it,
saying, "I baptise thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of
the Holy Ghost."
The driver told his story like one saying his prayers, and he seemed to
have forgotten that he had a listener.
"And the ghost hasn't been seen again?" I said.
"No, not that I know of."
"I don't like your story," I said. "I like the story about Julia Cahill
better."
"Well, they're both true; one's as true as the other; and Julia and
Margaret are in America. Once a woman is wake she must go to America."
"It must have been a great shock to the priest."
"Faith it was, sir, to meet an unbaptised child on the roadside, and
the child the only bastard that was ever born in the parish,--so Tom
Mulhare says, and he's the oldest man in the county of Mayo."
"It was altogether a very queer idea, this playhouse."
"It was indeed, sir, a queer idea; but you see he's a queer man. He has
been always thinking of something to do good; and it is said that he
thinks too much. Father James is a very queer man, your honour."
At the end of a long silence, interrupted now and then by the
melancholy cry with which he encouraged his horse, he began another
story, how Father James MacTurnan had written to the Pope asking that
the priests might marry, "so afeard was he that the Catholics were
going to America and the country would become Protestant. And there's
James Murdoch's cabin, and he is the man that got the five pounds that
the bishop gave Father James to buy a pig." And when I asked him how he
knew all these things, he said, "There isn't many days in the year that
the old grey horse and myself don't do five-and-twenty miles, and I'm
often in and out of Rathowen."
"There is no doubt," I said to myself, "that this car-driver is the
legitimate descendant of the ancient bards."