[image]"AND CABBAGES!" SAID THE MOUNTAINY MANThe Queen of Sheba herself was not a more gratifying audience. Mr. Whoolley seems to have observed the parallelism of the cases, and assuming that the visitor, in spite of the funeral, had no more spirit left in him, the couple adjourned to a convenient public house and were no more seen.On the whole, I think I may say that I give Bat satisfaction. He is generous in judging rather by intention than achievement, and he sees the advantages of fostering a disposition to weed. Only once has he been tried too high, and that was when I planted out a bed with what he calls "pushoch-bui," a most pestilent weed whose English equivalent is, I fancy, charlock. To me he passed over the error in a very handsome manner, but I heard him the same afternoon say to the subordinate who was making good my misdoing:"Is it that one! Sure he's no more good than a feather!"Another act of folly of mine, however, carried with it more serious consequences. I was so far left to myself as to give permission to a Sunday School excursion of unknown dimensions to disport itself in my domains. Dates were discussed, and times arranged, and then a sponge of kindly oblivion wiped the affair from my mind. It was a couple of months afterwards—I was inspecting my wall fruit in the kitchen garden at eleven o'clock in the morning, and being eaten by midges in a way that foretold immediate rain, when there was a sound of thunderous driving on the avenue. Just then the rain began to fall, and almost at the same moment there arrived to me a rushing messenger from the house saying "there were ladies in the drawing-room."I am a lone man, and there is no one to share with me the brunt of such a moment. I hurried in, and was confronted as I neared the hall door by four huge yellow brakes, full of children, and roofed with umbrellas. Two, already empty, were emulously pressing towards the yard, one taking a short cut across a strip of lawn, and two more were disgorging their burdens at large. I went into the drawing-room and found it lined with ladies in black. It was explained to me that on account of the rain the party, which comprised the Patrons, Teachers, and Pupils of four Sunday Schools, had "taken the liberty of coming to the house for shelter." Even as they spoke a strange murmuring sound arose from beneath my feet—the hum as of an angry hive. The house, like many old country houses in Ireland, stands upon a basement storey, and I realised that its cavernous recesses were being utilised as a receptacle for the Amalgamated Sunday Schools.I cannot clearly recall the varied events of that day of nightmare. I remember finding, at one juncture, one of my subordinates stemming the rush of the Sunday Schools up the back-stairs with the kitchen table and an old driving whip. At another, my honoured presence was requested in a cave-like place, once a laundry, wherein a shocking meal was being partaken of. I noticed a teacher with a "cut" of cold salmon, wrapped in newspaper. She ate it with her fingers, quaffing raspberry vinegar the while. Kettles, capacious as the boiler of a man-of-war, steamed on the ancient fireplace; the air reeked of damp children and buns. Later on it cleared, and I led a company of female patrons forth to see the garden. Already the sward of the tennis ground looked like Epsom Downs on the day after the Derby, and an animated game of Hide-and-Seek was in progress among my young rhododendrons. I averted my eyes. In the flower garden the usual amusement of leaping the beds had taken place, with the usual results of chasm-like footprints in the centre of each. The first endurable incident of the day was the discovery that Bat had locked the kitchen garden gate, and that my strollings with the patronesses were perforce ended. But even as I was expressing my regrets (coupled, mentally, with a resolve to raise Mr. Whoolly's wages) there arose from within the walls cries of the most poignant, accompanied by roars comparable only to those of a wounded tiger. On the top of the wall, just above us there shot into view the face of a boy, a face scarlet with exertion, vociferous in lamentation. Quickly following it there appeared down the length of the wall other faces, equally agitated, while from within came a sound as of the heavy beating of carpets. Other sounds came also. Sounds of indignation too explicit to be printable. I blushed for the patronesses. None the less I endorsed every word of it as I realised that my best peach trees were being used as ladders by the Amalgamated Sunday Schools.I think that was about the last act in the tragedy. Not long afterwards, in a yellow glow of late, repentant sunlight, the four brakes drove—with further cuttings of grassy corners—up to the hall door. The Sunday Schools were condensed into them, each child receiving an orange as it took its seat, and thin cheers arose in my honour. Simultaneously the brakes snowed forth orange peel upon the gravel; the procession swept out of sight, still cheering, still snowing orange peel.For reasons darkly and inextricably mixed up with the Sunday School excursion, dinner that night was served at nine o'clock, and as I was aware that every servant in the house was in a separate and towering passion, I refrained from inquiry.Yet, even through the indigestion following on this belated repast, I was upheld by the remembrance of Bat's face, as he glared at me through the bars of the kitchen garden gate, and said:"Thanks be to God, I'm after breaking six pay-sticks on their backs!"OUT OF HANDSoldiers were there to keep the peace. The redcoats and the bayonets moved in a rigid line through the crowd that blocked the two streets of the town. They guarded a small body of voters that had come across Lough Corrib, and was making its way to the polling-booths, headed by a Galway landlord, on whose arm leaned an old man, decrepit, and unnerved by the storm of opposition through which they passed.Another Galway landlord was ranging through groups of men who turned their backs on him, and hid behind each other, his tenants, personal friends all of them, who, for the first time on record, had voted in opposition to his wishes."Every one of them!" he said, while the atmosphere that surrounds suffering and strong emotion made itself felt, "all but two or three. They have all gone against me."It was a memorable election, marking the new departure in Irish politics, and it broke the hearts and practically ended the lives of two at least of the Galway landlords. Till that time the landlords took their tenants to the pollen masse; thenceforward they were to advance under the banner of the Church.The epoch that here found its close was memorable, too, in its way. It held, far back in it, the brave days when the Galway elections lasted for a month, and the actual voting for a week, days to which the pages of Lever bear witness. As that week of delightful warfare strove on the electors became more fastidious about their drinks, and would accept nothing less aristocratic than mulled port and claret. These restoratives were brewed in fish-kettles on the big fireplaces of the ballroom in Kilroy's hotel, an agreeable incident, not, we think, commemorated by Lever.* * * * *Twenty years afterwards a Galway village lay mute in the sunshine, drowsy with respectability, assertive of rectitude in every slant of its slate roofs. To view it thus from the waste altitudes of the moor above it, on a Sunday morning of July, with the call of a cock straining up through the silence, was to endue it with all the stillness and strictness of the day itself, even to credit it with a Presbyterian rigour of Sabbaticism that was at variance with the traditions of the County Galway. Down on its own level, and approaching it through the aisle of shade that lay between broken demesne walls and under the lofty embrace of demesne trees, the glare of its whitewash closed the vista blatantly, and with a self-righteousness that suppressed the romantic as a thing of libertine irrelevance. Therefore, to an eye accustomed, during many Sundays, to the recognition of the barren street, with its strings of ducks in moody reverie about the unremunerative gutters, and its dogs asleep outside the closed doors, it was startling beyond the merit of the occasion to be confronted with a staring crowd of people that filled the street loosely from end to end. Every face was turned towards the new-comer, till the whole slope of the hill was flushed with them; then it darkened, as the people realised that nothing worthy of further notice was occurring, and turned their heads again towards Galway.The crowd was a representative one. Wizened old men in swallow-tailed coats and knee-breeches, degenerate youth in check suits and pot-hats, tanned women in deep-hooded cloaks, girls with shawls over their heads, freckled and ubiquitous children—all smelling heavily of turf smoke, some modernised with the master smell of hair-oil. The anti-Parnellite candidate was expected to arrive at any moment from Galway, to address those who had come to the village for Mass; and though the people had now been out of chapel for an hour there seemed to be no wish to disperse, or any sign of impatience. They even appeared to be enjoying themselves as thoroughly as was compatible with the fact that the public-houses had not yet been opened. Anything so fascinating as a little political excitement was worth waiting for, especially while Providence was liberal of fresh arrivals on outside cars, and invention failed not of the personal allusion wherewith to greet them; so that time passed healthfully, and expectation was no more than pleasantly ripe when outposts on the hill heralded at length the approach of the candidate.A blended roar of execration and encouragement went out to meet him—a greeting sustained on every note of the human compass in a savagely inarticulate mass of discord. He seemed to cleave his way through it as he passed, his figure moving pompously along on its car above the shoulders of the people, in black coat and white waistcoat, while a deft hand manipulated a tall hat in recognition of every crumb of welcome. He passed on down a by-road towards the chapel, followed by a few dozen people, and by the booing and hooting of the rest of the assemblage. Clearly the materials for the meeting were elsewhere.It was not far to the chapel, four hundred yards or thereabouts of dusty road, that lay hot and quiet between loose stone walls, dropping to a hollow and rising again to the low height where stood the unmistakable building that is the heart and fountain of parish politics, its plaster and whitewash veiled a little by the kindly churchyard trees, and the stone cross on its gable standing strong and keen under the melting sky.On nearing the churchyard the candidate's voice was audible through the trees in fluent, opening sentences, each point duly weighted with a "Hee'rr, hee'rr!" as businesslike as the "Amen" of the parish clerk. His car was waiting outside in the shade, and the carman, who was perhaps a littleblaséin the matter of speeches, was smoking an unemotional pipe beside it."Indeed, you may say the town of Galway is in a quare way," he said, putting his hand to a cheek that was just perceptibly more purple than the other. "Look at meself, the figure I am, that wasn't spakin' a word to a Christhian, good nor bad, and lasht night a fishwoman comes down to me in the sthreet this ways"—squaring his elbows and strutting—"'Hi for Lynch!' says she, hittin' me a puck in the jaw with her skib (basket). The Lord save us! 'tis hardly I ran from her before she had the town gethered afther her. Begob, the women's the most that'd frighten ye!"At the churchyard gate a couple of long-tailed colts were tied up, saddle-horses evidently, but bare-backed, and bridled with a halter, their bodies bloated with summer grass out of all proportion to their long legs, and their countrified ears pricking occasionally at the cheers that did not by the blink of an eyelid affect the doze of the Galway car-horse. The company inside was a small one as compared with that in the street, and had in it a much larger proportion of women and old men, to which was perhaps due the superior calm of the proceedings. The churchyard was a spacious one, depressingly roomy indeed for the present occasion, for which any suburban back garden would have sufficed. Most of the audience had mounted on the tombstones, great slabs of limestone that formed the lids of the boxes placed over the more distinguished dead, blackish grey, and ringing under the hobnailed-boots like metal. The candidate stood on the highest tombstone, and all around him leaned and clung these strange groups of men and women, looking like the wooded islands in the lake close by; while between them the quiet background of the graveyard was visible, with its bent and musing trees, and array of low head-stones gazing blindly at the concourse.The bald top of the candidate's head formed the focus-point of the gathering, giving back the sun's glare like glass as it swung and jerked with the flow of oratory, and beside it the immense shovel-hat of the old priest moved occasionally in accord, italicising for the benefit of the flock such phrases as seemed especially edifying. The curate was nowhere to be seen; rumour said that his political theories were not formed on those of his superior. A remembrance recurred of meeting, that morning, a severely contemplative young priest, walking alone and away from the village, with the green flicker of the leaves overhead playing strangely across the gloom of his sallow face.[image]THE CANDIDATEThe candidate's speech seemed, indeed, to require a little driving home. It was, for the most part, an explanation to his constituents of the reasons that made it necessary for him to forego the happiness of acquainting himself with them in any intimate degree. He was, he said, in his temperately florid manner, closely connected with a large firm in England and, deplorable to relate, his income depended on his living in the bosom of the English firm. "Sure we know that—we know that!" yelled the half-dozen most chosen supporters, crushing precariously round the candidate on the edge of the tombstone platform, with their wild, combative faces pressing, all on fire, towards him. Perhaps he might yet be roused to say the right things about the rival candidate, the things that would wring forth a cheer in reply to those distant ones that came maddeningly at intervals from the crowd in the street.But the speaker kept his eloquence well in hand, confining himself to such blind alleys of assertion as the remarkable success of his own career, his confidence that his constituents would re-elect him, and his desire to benefit them in some immeasurable way if they did so. A permissive cynicism curved the wrinkles on the faces of the old men who stood on the grassy graves behind him, with their hands under their coat-tails, and their grizzled chins sunk in their shirt-collars; they knew how they were going to vote, and their own powers (matured in the sale of many a heifer and rood of bog) of taking a part and sustaining it, with a perfectness that would deceive the elect, made them sceptical as to the ends of speech-making. The women were tittering and whispering under their shawls; but were certainly impressed by the candidate's Sunday attire, his well-kept grey moustache, and his affable way of saying "ladies and gentlemen" every now and then.The speech ambled to its close, through a peroration of an uncertain conversational tone, assisted at critical points by one or other of the supporters, who would ungovernably supply the needed word out of the bursting fulness of his own repertoire. It was the sole outlet for their enthusiasm, except for the cheer that caught at the ravelled edge of the final sentence, as the candidate put on his hat and bowed himself from the tombstone."Be prayin' for the meetin', gerrls," said the old priest, leading the way to the vestry, with rusty skirts floating widely. The door closed on him and his protégé, the clumps on the tombstones fell apart, mingling in a laughing and talking stream towards the churchyard gate, and the prayers of the young ladies were apparently deferred to a more convenient season.The chapel door stood open, showing the barren squareness of the interior; a zinc tub, half-full of Holy-water, stood in the porch, with the flags all round it wet from the splash of dipping hands; the altar gleamed gaudily at the further end; and a tall confession-box stood solitary in the seatless expanse of floor, fraught with the inseparable mystery and suggestiveness of its kind, and holding within its curtained rails the knowledge of what things are counted for unrighteousness in that twilight place, the conscience of the Western peasant. The air inside was warm, and still laden with the smell of frieze coats and stale turf smoke; but, except for this furnishing, the blankness was complete. Sunday and its Mass were over and done with for a week, and priest and congregation were striving factors in the carnal toils of election.The people dispersed slowly, discussing the absorbing topic of the day, some in their native tongue, but for the most part in English, so pronounced as to be in the distance scarcely distinguishable from the liquid and guttural flow of Galway Irish.[image]"A MAN MUST WOTE THE WAY HIS PRIEST AND BISHOP'LL TELL HIM""Sure, a man must wote the way his priest and bishop'll tell him," says a tall supporter, with the air of a person repeating a truism."Well, meself'd say," says another, whose handsome eyes shone in the shadow of his soft felt hat, while his hands helped out his words with picturesque gesture, "the man I'd have a wish for to wote for him, is the man that'd rise out o' his bed in the night and give hay and oats to yer horse, and yerself fotever ye'd ax, when any one else'd leshen (listen) in their bed if ye were battherin' there till mornin'."This argument referred to the well-known good nature of the Parnellite candidate, a general dealer and publican in a neighbouring village."Well, indeed, he's no scholar, I suppose," says a young fellow, still in reference to the Parnellite. "He has no learnin' nor way of spakin' no more than meself, but becripes! he's a fine sthrong man, and he'll be well able to fight and box in Parliament."This was said in entire good faith, and was listened to with respect."Come on back the road!" bawls a supporter, beckoning authoritatively from the distance, "let yees come on now, the whole o' yee, the way we'd be before the car and it going up!"The reason for this manoeuvre was presently apparent, on returning to the village street. As the candidate's car left the chapel the Parnellite crowd thronged the corner by which it must pass; a battery of threatening faces, waiting with unknown purpose; a gauntlet to run or to run away from. The car came slowly up the hill, preceded by a party of supporters; the candidate on one side, looking anxious the old priest on the other, bare-headed, and looking still more anxious, but waving his hand as if in greeting, while the interwoven yells became a thrilling mass of sound.It was well for the candidate that his companion was one of the oldest and most popular of the Galway priests. That prestige had shielded the churchyard meeting from disturbance, and but for its influence now the future M.P. might have returned to England with an appearance not advantageous to the firm of which he was a member. A forest of clenched fists and sticks seemed to leap up towards him, the scream of hatred never took breath, and there was entreaty in the face of the priest as his wrinkled hands waved repressively above the tumult. There was a long moment of uncertainty, but in the next the car was through in safety, and was gone in the twinkling of an eye, the supporters running in its wake till the last waving gleam of the candidate's silk hat had been garnered.It was then that things began to look, to an Irish eye, most promising and attractive. The supporters turned, formed into a solid body of perhaps forty men and boys, and marched with inimitable swagger straight back into the crowd, all together, in a kind of chant, shouting, "To hell with ——!" (the rival candidate) at the utmost strength of their lungs. The theme was a simple one, but magnificently vocalised, and was instantly replied to in thetu quoquemanner by the opposite party. Sticks went up, the women rushed outwards for safety, looking, with their floating shawls, like a flock of frightened turkeys; and at this point the four constabulary men who represented that force made themselves felt. The dangerous moment yielded easily and unresentfully to these judicious hands, and the excitement sputtered out in a little bragging and hustling, without so much as a black eye to commemorate it. In half an hour the ducks were again waddling in line along the empty street, and a muffled hum proceeding from the shuttered public houses, told that thebonâ fidetravellers had at length reached their journey's end. It was a lamentable falling off from the days of the fish kettles and the mulled port of Kilroy's Hotel.The episode had expired in the way that might have been expected, and was at best an indeterminate, shapeless thing, full of unripe revolt that it was too childish to express. But that moment when the little flame first flickers in the gorse, feeling its naked way among the thorns and affluent blossom, has a wonder of birth in it that is forgotten when the blazing hillside jars the noonday, and the smoke rolls monotonously from strongholds of conflagration.A RECORD OF HOLIDAYOf summer holidays it may at least be contended that they involve two periods of undiluted enjoyment; the time of anticipation, and the calm—if sometimes chastened—season of retrospect.I am glad; now that the mice are nesting in my trunks, and the spiders weaving fresh straps round my hold-all, that I have been to Switzerland, that the greasy Visitors' books of several West of Ireland hotels hold my name. Also, I remember how very cheerful it was to study a scarlet-hued Bradshaw, and to reflect that, with certain financial restrictions, the Continent of Europe lay smiling before me. (I remember also, that I lent that entertaining work to an American friend, and found the utmost difficulty in recovering it from him. It was only restored, indeed, on the morning of my departure, and my friend mentioned that he had sat up all night reading it, "Just to see how it ended," he said.)Between, however, these seasons of satisfaction, there stretches the actual time of holiday, and as I reflect upon it, I am struck by the fact that its more salient features are misfortunes. From a literary point of view this has its advantages; the happy traveller has no history. If the converse is true it would need Gibbon or Macaulay to deal with our transit from the County Cork to that Alpine fastness for which we had trustingly, fearlessly labelled our luggage.It began with fog in the Channel—the Irish Channel—solid, tangible fog, through which our bewildered steamer stumbled, uttering large, desolate cries of distress, stopping every now and then to bellow like a lost cow, sometimes, even, going astern, while muffled hootings told of another wanderer who had drawn nearer than was convenient."When I heard 'em giving the signal to go astern," said a sailor officer of high degree, next morning, as he gobbled a belated mouthful of breakfast, "I thought it was about time to get up and put on my clothes. Said nothing about it to m' wife, though!"I wonder if he has realised yet why everyone smiled.In London, rain; in Paris, blinding heat. Dizzily we staggered round the elder Salon, and through its innumerable small square rooms, with their lining of flagrant canvases; it was like exploring the brain-cells of a fever patient in delirium. One healing instant was ours, when at the public baths in the Boulevard Mont Parnasse, the waters of a "Bain Complet" closed over the exhausted person; but that, even, was speedily poisoned by the discovery that towels and soap, being extras, were not left in theCabinet de Bain, and the bather, having with dripping hands explored the pocket for the needed coins, had then to tender them to the attendant through a difficult slit of doorway, receiving in exchange a small fragment of slightly scented marble and a gauze veil.After that, the night journey to Geneva. Heat, sardine-like proximity of fellow travellers, two dauntless English ladies, who turned the long night into one unending and clanking tea-party; a nightmare interlude ofdouaniers, then, when a troubled sleep had at length been bestowed, Geneva; and all the horrors that attend the finish of a long train journey.At breakfast, at our hotel, a survey of what we had hitherto endured in the pursuit of pleasure stung us to a brief revolt. This was a holiday, we told ourselves, why hurry? Fortified by a principle, theoretically unassailable, we strolled about Geneva. It was cold and very wet; still, in our newly realised leisure, we made a point of strolling. On our return to our hotel most of the staff were on the pavement, seemingly very much excited. Avoiture, laden with our luggage, stood at the door. It appeared that our steamer left for Villeneuve in eight minutes. I imagine that the hotel staff's agitation arose from the fear that we should not have time to tip them all. This was, alas, unfounded.The driver took us first to the wrong steamer. He then turned his machine too short, and locked the fore carriage. Then he shambled across the long bridge to the other steamboat quai, while we sat forward, like the coxswains of racing eights, in sweating agony, watching our boat getting up steam and preparing for instant departure.We caught the boat by springing, like Spurius Lartius and Herminius, across the widening chasm between her deck and the shore, and therewith fell into a species of syncope. Mists shrouded the mountains; a chilled rain swept the lake. For our parts, slowly recovering, we kept the cabin, and swept the tea-table. It was almost our first moment of enjoyment.The Alpine fastness, already alluded to, was not gained for a further couple of days, during which an awakening distaste for Switzerland slowly grew in us, though it did not thoroughly mature till mellowed by a mule ride up a mountain. Reticence in narration is a quality that I endeavour to cultivate. It becomes a necessity in treating of the village and its surrounding slums from and through which our start was made. Having, in a state nearing starvation, been offered the sole refreshment available, namely, concentrated essence of typhoid in the guise of glasses of milk, and having retained sufficient self-control to refuse them, we started on mule-back for the mountain. Traversing, as I have every reason to believe, the open main drain of the village, our animals proceeded to totter up a narrow and precipitous watercourse."La voie la plus directe," explained the mule-driver, lashing his ancient cattle in a general way, and without animosity.The cloud that accompanied our wanderings, as in the case of the Israelites, did not fail of its usual office. Even through the crown of a Panama straw hat the rain attained to my skin. Thence it descended, enveloping me, as it were an inner garment. Twice my mule fell down. I could not reproach it. Indeed, nothing but the fact that one of its parents had been an ass explained its readiness to pick itself up and go on again. It had, however, an incentive, supplied in the rear by its proprietor; we had naught save the fetish of Holiday to goad us onward, and its potency was beginning to weaken.One week of the mountain hotel was as much as we were able to endure. The usual "exceptional" weather prevailed. How familiar is the formula, and how entirely unworthy of credence!"For seventeen years"—the Landlord calls heaven to witness—"it has never been so wet, or so cold, or so stormy at this time. If Monsieur or Madame, had come but three weeks ago—or would wait but three days longer——"There was a time when the glamour of holiday might have induced belief, might even have beguiled a further endurance of the age-longtable-d'hôterepasts, of the aggressive muscularity of the English schoolmaster, who, during the progress of theménufrom the watery soup to the acrid Alpine strawberry, faced us, boasting at large and in detail; of the German bride, who practised the piano for four hours daily (her head upon her bridegroom's shoulder, his faithful arm round her waist). These things, though unattractive in themselves, might once have been submitted to as elements of the theoretical holiday (in Switzerland), as mere inevitable crumples in the rose-leaf.But, on this occasion—it is possibly one of the compensations of advancing years—we found ourselves endowed with a juster sense of proportion. The close of the eighth day saw us heading for home with a speed that almost amounted to rout. The mule-driver's maxim, "la voie la plus directe" seemed good common sense; we drew neither breath nor bridle, Geneva, Paris, London were but names in the night, till we found ourselves facing America from the front doorstep of a certain remote hostelry in the far west of Connaught.[image]FACING AMERICAThen, and not till then, did something of the largeness, the leisure, the absurdity, the unconventionality, that should enter into all true holiday, begin for us.I have said hostelry, and undoubtedly the words "Seaview Hotel," in letters large and green, were inscribed upon its pink-washed walls, but without this clue I do not think the closest observer would be able to detect its walk in life. It had but one storey; a dark and narrow passage led from the entrance to the kitchen, and therein, at (as subsequent experience showed us) any time of the day or night, the entire establishment might be found, massed, talking as though they had not met for years, and were to separate in an hour.Thus we, led by our carman, anhabituéof the house, found them, and thus, with but brief intervals, they continued during the period we spent among them."What is it, Mike?" this to the car-driver from a very stout lady, whom we rightly assumed to be the proprietress. "Oh—the sitting-room," she exhibited a natural annoyance, having been interrupted in a pronouncement on, I gathered, the feeding of pigs. "Here! Mary Kate, show the sitting-room!" She re-addressed herself to her subject.Mary Kate, a charming slattern with a profusion of fair hair, "showed" the sitting-room. It was small, but not unclean, and, in addition to the normal outfit of table and chairs, was remarkably equipped with a large double perambulator, whose use as a sideboard was sufficiently indicated by the fact that a cruet stand and a loaf of bread occupied one seat, while a piece of cold beef reclined on the other. The bedrooms, if I may quote a French guide-book's remarks upon the retreat of a hermit, "excited I know not what emotions of religious terror;" emotions that were not allayed by the suspicion, that deepened to certainty, that, in the absence of visitors, they were occupied by the staff."Hot wather? Ocerr*tainly!" said Mary Kate, kindly. "Beg your pardon—" she crushed past me to the chimney-piece, and proceeded to grope behind photograph frames and a crowded multitude of glass and china, *objets d'art. "I left me hat pins—" here she giggled confidentially, while, so intimate was the arrangement of theobjets d'art, that several of them fell off at the farther end of the chimney piece. "Ah! what matther! Sure they're all a little broke!" said Mary Kate, wedging them into their places again, and thrusting the recovered hat pins into her redundant locks. "Ye'll be wanting somethin' to eat now, I daresay," she went on, "I'll send granne'ma in to ye."A brief interval ensued, during which we furtively examined the bedclothes, and indulged in disturbed conjecture as to the substance that stuffed the pillows. Their smell, though curious, offered no basis for theory.There came a creeping sound without, and low down, a panel of the door was dealt a single blow.I said "Come in!" not without a slight recurrence of religious terror.A very little and ancient woman stood there, with the trade marks of soot and grease thick upon her. When she curtseyed she seemed to merge in the door mat, so small was she and so dingy.There was reassurance in the discovery that she seemed as much in awe of us as we of her."How would I know what the likes o' ye would fancy?" she said, almost with despair, and went on to hope that our visit might prove an education into the ways of the aristocracy of which she had long stood in need, but she coupled the admission with a warning that she "was very owld and very dull."It was a high responsibility, this position of exponents of an unknown type, and it is much to be regretted that we were forced to leave our venerable disciple under the impression that the upper classes usually cook their own food at hotels. It should here be said that this expedition had not been entered upon without a certain foreknowledge of what it was likely to involve, and amongst other precautions were provisions of a portable sort. These included sausages, and the sausages we confided to our old lady.We sat in the parlour enjoying the appetite for dinner that is one of the bright features of a genuine holiday. After a delay of about half an hour, Mary Kate's head was thrust through a narrow opening of the door."Granne'ma says will the little puddings be split?"Had the answer been Yes, and that it was usual to serve them with cream and sugar, I feel sure that grandmamma would have complied. As it was, after instructions to Mary Kate, of a lucidity unrivalled by Mrs. Beeton, the sausages appeared, pale, tepid, raw, in a pie-dish, just a-wash with luke-warm water.The holiday appetite quailed at the sight, and thechefwas summoned from the conversazione still raging in the kitchen. A single glance at the guests told her of failure, and, with a masterly grasp of the position, she hurried back to the kitchen and returned with the frying-pan."Keep it now yersels," she said. "Didn't I say to ye I was too owld?"From that time the parlour grate led a sullied life, but—which may have consoled it—a thoroughly useful one. We re-cooked the sausages upon it; the perambulator yielded its increase, toast, grilled beef, sausages, who could reasonably ask for more?We spent two days and two nights there; days of perfect weather, spent in exploring a coast as wild and beautiful as the heart of holiday maker could desire, nights strangely, almost desolately devoid of the entomological excursions and pursuits usual to village inns, and, in spite of the peculiarities of the pillows, sleep was not difficult. Or rather, in candour it should be said, was difficult only after the rising of the sun. For with the dawn, a vagrant population was astir in the village; a street Arab community of hens, dogs, geese and donkeys, incessant and clarion-toned in their addresses to morn and to each other; creatures who slept under carts and in stray corners; who treated life as a lounge, and regarded their owners as suzerains merely, to whom occasional allegiance was to be rendered, or a tributary egg or two laid in an inaccessible place.On the whole, the donkeys are those of whom I can speak least temperately. They had, for want, possibly, of other employment, adopted the position of town-criers to the village, or perhaps were its prophets, perhaps its Cassandras, and they uplifted their testimony from sunrise till nightfall with a poignancy that rent the very skies. Standing one evening on one of the low hills that hemmed the village into its corner by the sea, I counted easily, and with half a glance, four of these enthusiasts, planted each on a commanding rock or mound, and sending his wild voice abroad over the valley. It was a sunny evening, after a day of sad and opalescent beauty, and the sea had brightened into blue and silver; the white-washed gables and a far white lighthouse were radiant with recovered cheerfulness, but the jackasses were as despairful and implacable as Jeremiah.There was but one disaster during our brief sojourn at the Sea View Hotel. A few sausages and a tin of sardines remained, "spared," as Mary Kate said, from the first repast. These she proposed to store, for safety and coolness, in one of our bedrooms. The idea not being well received, she finally deposited them in the Post Office, which was attached to the hotel. But even this hiding place was not improbable enough to hoodwink that skilled tactician, the hotel cat, and he, in some dark hour of the night, found and feasted on them with, no doubt, all the ravishing joy of a new experience.[image]IN WEST CARBERYWe could not but sympathise with him. Thanks to the Sea View Hotel that subtle joy was also ours.I began by saying that of the Summer holidays the times of anticipation and of retrospect were the times of truest pleasure. Yet I can remember long September days beside a sea of Mediterranean blue, the sea of Southern Ireland, when the perfect present asked nothing of either past or future. The long creek wound, blue-green as a peacock's breast, between deep woods. High places of rock and heather were there, where you could lie, "ringed with the azure world," and see the huge liners, yes, and hear them too, as they went throbbing and trampling along the sun's path westward.Those who know this place of holiday are comparatively few, but there is at least one distinguished name of the company—Dean Swift, no less. A couple of hundred years or so ago, he spent a summer in West Carbery, (an ivy-covered ruin, known as Swift's Tower, testifies to the fact,) and he forthwith made a poem about it, a Latin poem, addressed to the Rocks of Carbery.One gathers that it was of the nature of an encomium, though the points selected for description are not those that would tempt the effete holiday maker of to-day. Possibly it was the Dean's majestic eighteenth-century manner of thanking his host for "a very pleasant visit." I came upon it in the house of a descendant of that host, reverently quoted in a copy of Dr. Smith's history of the County Cork, dated 1749. Thanks to the sympathetic scholarship of a contemporary divine, the Revd. Dr. Donkin, who made a translation of it, I am able to give some quotations from it. Dr. Smith thinks that "the Dean's descriptions are as just as his numbers are beautiful." It is not for me to disagree with him. Let them—or some of them—dignify these unworthy pages."Lo! From the top of yonder cliff, that shroudsIts airy head amidst the azure clouds,Hangs the huge fragment, destitute of props,Prone on the waves the rocky ruin drops.* * * * *Oft too with hideous yawn, the cavern widePresents an orifice on either side;A dismal orifice, from sea to seaExtended, pervious to the god of day.* * * * *High on the cliff their nests wild pigeons make,And sea calves stable in the oozey lake ...When o'er the craggy steep without controul,Big with the blast, the raging billows roll, ...The neighbouring race, tho' wont to brave the shocksOf angry seas and run along the rocks,Now pale with terror, while the ocean foams,Fly far and wide, nor trust their native homes.The goats, while pendant from the mountain top,The wither'd herb improvident they crop,Wash'd down the precipice with sudden sweep,Leave their sweet lives beneath th' unfathomed deep."I am sorry to say that in these degenerate times the improvident goat has lost his ancient skill and is no longer pendant, and the oozey lake and stabling sea calf (the latter possibly a lingering survivor of the Deluge) may no more be found. None the less, I can confidently commend the scenes of these catastrophes to the holiday maker of to-day.Even now, when the sunshine of last September has faded to a memory, and that of next September is too far away to be even a hope, I can still feel the soft lift of the western wind, still hear the booming of the waves in the deep and riven heart of the cliff.
[image]"AND CABBAGES!" SAID THE MOUNTAINY MAN
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"AND CABBAGES!" SAID THE MOUNTAINY MAN
The Queen of Sheba herself was not a more gratifying audience. Mr. Whoolley seems to have observed the parallelism of the cases, and assuming that the visitor, in spite of the funeral, had no more spirit left in him, the couple adjourned to a convenient public house and were no more seen.
On the whole, I think I may say that I give Bat satisfaction. He is generous in judging rather by intention than achievement, and he sees the advantages of fostering a disposition to weed. Only once has he been tried too high, and that was when I planted out a bed with what he calls "pushoch-bui," a most pestilent weed whose English equivalent is, I fancy, charlock. To me he passed over the error in a very handsome manner, but I heard him the same afternoon say to the subordinate who was making good my misdoing:
"Is it that one! Sure he's no more good than a feather!"
Another act of folly of mine, however, carried with it more serious consequences. I was so far left to myself as to give permission to a Sunday School excursion of unknown dimensions to disport itself in my domains. Dates were discussed, and times arranged, and then a sponge of kindly oblivion wiped the affair from my mind. It was a couple of months afterwards—I was inspecting my wall fruit in the kitchen garden at eleven o'clock in the morning, and being eaten by midges in a way that foretold immediate rain, when there was a sound of thunderous driving on the avenue. Just then the rain began to fall, and almost at the same moment there arrived to me a rushing messenger from the house saying "there were ladies in the drawing-room."
I am a lone man, and there is no one to share with me the brunt of such a moment. I hurried in, and was confronted as I neared the hall door by four huge yellow brakes, full of children, and roofed with umbrellas. Two, already empty, were emulously pressing towards the yard, one taking a short cut across a strip of lawn, and two more were disgorging their burdens at large. I went into the drawing-room and found it lined with ladies in black. It was explained to me that on account of the rain the party, which comprised the Patrons, Teachers, and Pupils of four Sunday Schools, had "taken the liberty of coming to the house for shelter." Even as they spoke a strange murmuring sound arose from beneath my feet—the hum as of an angry hive. The house, like many old country houses in Ireland, stands upon a basement storey, and I realised that its cavernous recesses were being utilised as a receptacle for the Amalgamated Sunday Schools.
I cannot clearly recall the varied events of that day of nightmare. I remember finding, at one juncture, one of my subordinates stemming the rush of the Sunday Schools up the back-stairs with the kitchen table and an old driving whip. At another, my honoured presence was requested in a cave-like place, once a laundry, wherein a shocking meal was being partaken of. I noticed a teacher with a "cut" of cold salmon, wrapped in newspaper. She ate it with her fingers, quaffing raspberry vinegar the while. Kettles, capacious as the boiler of a man-of-war, steamed on the ancient fireplace; the air reeked of damp children and buns. Later on it cleared, and I led a company of female patrons forth to see the garden. Already the sward of the tennis ground looked like Epsom Downs on the day after the Derby, and an animated game of Hide-and-Seek was in progress among my young rhododendrons. I averted my eyes. In the flower garden the usual amusement of leaping the beds had taken place, with the usual results of chasm-like footprints in the centre of each. The first endurable incident of the day was the discovery that Bat had locked the kitchen garden gate, and that my strollings with the patronesses were perforce ended. But even as I was expressing my regrets (coupled, mentally, with a resolve to raise Mr. Whoolly's wages) there arose from within the walls cries of the most poignant, accompanied by roars comparable only to those of a wounded tiger. On the top of the wall, just above us there shot into view the face of a boy, a face scarlet with exertion, vociferous in lamentation. Quickly following it there appeared down the length of the wall other faces, equally agitated, while from within came a sound as of the heavy beating of carpets. Other sounds came also. Sounds of indignation too explicit to be printable. I blushed for the patronesses. None the less I endorsed every word of it as I realised that my best peach trees were being used as ladders by the Amalgamated Sunday Schools.
I think that was about the last act in the tragedy. Not long afterwards, in a yellow glow of late, repentant sunlight, the four brakes drove—with further cuttings of grassy corners—up to the hall door. The Sunday Schools were condensed into them, each child receiving an orange as it took its seat, and thin cheers arose in my honour. Simultaneously the brakes snowed forth orange peel upon the gravel; the procession swept out of sight, still cheering, still snowing orange peel.
For reasons darkly and inextricably mixed up with the Sunday School excursion, dinner that night was served at nine o'clock, and as I was aware that every servant in the house was in a separate and towering passion, I refrained from inquiry.
Yet, even through the indigestion following on this belated repast, I was upheld by the remembrance of Bat's face, as he glared at me through the bars of the kitchen garden gate, and said:
"Thanks be to God, I'm after breaking six pay-sticks on their backs!"
OUT OF HAND
Soldiers were there to keep the peace. The redcoats and the bayonets moved in a rigid line through the crowd that blocked the two streets of the town. They guarded a small body of voters that had come across Lough Corrib, and was making its way to the polling-booths, headed by a Galway landlord, on whose arm leaned an old man, decrepit, and unnerved by the storm of opposition through which they passed.
Another Galway landlord was ranging through groups of men who turned their backs on him, and hid behind each other, his tenants, personal friends all of them, who, for the first time on record, had voted in opposition to his wishes.
"Every one of them!" he said, while the atmosphere that surrounds suffering and strong emotion made itself felt, "all but two or three. They have all gone against me."
It was a memorable election, marking the new departure in Irish politics, and it broke the hearts and practically ended the lives of two at least of the Galway landlords. Till that time the landlords took their tenants to the pollen masse; thenceforward they were to advance under the banner of the Church.
The epoch that here found its close was memorable, too, in its way. It held, far back in it, the brave days when the Galway elections lasted for a month, and the actual voting for a week, days to which the pages of Lever bear witness. As that week of delightful warfare strove on the electors became more fastidious about their drinks, and would accept nothing less aristocratic than mulled port and claret. These restoratives were brewed in fish-kettles on the big fireplaces of the ballroom in Kilroy's hotel, an agreeable incident, not, we think, commemorated by Lever.
* * * * *
Twenty years afterwards a Galway village lay mute in the sunshine, drowsy with respectability, assertive of rectitude in every slant of its slate roofs. To view it thus from the waste altitudes of the moor above it, on a Sunday morning of July, with the call of a cock straining up through the silence, was to endue it with all the stillness and strictness of the day itself, even to credit it with a Presbyterian rigour of Sabbaticism that was at variance with the traditions of the County Galway. Down on its own level, and approaching it through the aisle of shade that lay between broken demesne walls and under the lofty embrace of demesne trees, the glare of its whitewash closed the vista blatantly, and with a self-righteousness that suppressed the romantic as a thing of libertine irrelevance. Therefore, to an eye accustomed, during many Sundays, to the recognition of the barren street, with its strings of ducks in moody reverie about the unremunerative gutters, and its dogs asleep outside the closed doors, it was startling beyond the merit of the occasion to be confronted with a staring crowd of people that filled the street loosely from end to end. Every face was turned towards the new-comer, till the whole slope of the hill was flushed with them; then it darkened, as the people realised that nothing worthy of further notice was occurring, and turned their heads again towards Galway.
The crowd was a representative one. Wizened old men in swallow-tailed coats and knee-breeches, degenerate youth in check suits and pot-hats, tanned women in deep-hooded cloaks, girls with shawls over their heads, freckled and ubiquitous children—all smelling heavily of turf smoke, some modernised with the master smell of hair-oil. The anti-Parnellite candidate was expected to arrive at any moment from Galway, to address those who had come to the village for Mass; and though the people had now been out of chapel for an hour there seemed to be no wish to disperse, or any sign of impatience. They even appeared to be enjoying themselves as thoroughly as was compatible with the fact that the public-houses had not yet been opened. Anything so fascinating as a little political excitement was worth waiting for, especially while Providence was liberal of fresh arrivals on outside cars, and invention failed not of the personal allusion wherewith to greet them; so that time passed healthfully, and expectation was no more than pleasantly ripe when outposts on the hill heralded at length the approach of the candidate.
A blended roar of execration and encouragement went out to meet him—a greeting sustained on every note of the human compass in a savagely inarticulate mass of discord. He seemed to cleave his way through it as he passed, his figure moving pompously along on its car above the shoulders of the people, in black coat and white waistcoat, while a deft hand manipulated a tall hat in recognition of every crumb of welcome. He passed on down a by-road towards the chapel, followed by a few dozen people, and by the booing and hooting of the rest of the assemblage. Clearly the materials for the meeting were elsewhere.
It was not far to the chapel, four hundred yards or thereabouts of dusty road, that lay hot and quiet between loose stone walls, dropping to a hollow and rising again to the low height where stood the unmistakable building that is the heart and fountain of parish politics, its plaster and whitewash veiled a little by the kindly churchyard trees, and the stone cross on its gable standing strong and keen under the melting sky.
On nearing the churchyard the candidate's voice was audible through the trees in fluent, opening sentences, each point duly weighted with a "Hee'rr, hee'rr!" as businesslike as the "Amen" of the parish clerk. His car was waiting outside in the shade, and the carman, who was perhaps a littleblaséin the matter of speeches, was smoking an unemotional pipe beside it.
"Indeed, you may say the town of Galway is in a quare way," he said, putting his hand to a cheek that was just perceptibly more purple than the other. "Look at meself, the figure I am, that wasn't spakin' a word to a Christhian, good nor bad, and lasht night a fishwoman comes down to me in the sthreet this ways"—squaring his elbows and strutting—"'Hi for Lynch!' says she, hittin' me a puck in the jaw with her skib (basket). The Lord save us! 'tis hardly I ran from her before she had the town gethered afther her. Begob, the women's the most that'd frighten ye!"
At the churchyard gate a couple of long-tailed colts were tied up, saddle-horses evidently, but bare-backed, and bridled with a halter, their bodies bloated with summer grass out of all proportion to their long legs, and their countrified ears pricking occasionally at the cheers that did not by the blink of an eyelid affect the doze of the Galway car-horse. The company inside was a small one as compared with that in the street, and had in it a much larger proportion of women and old men, to which was perhaps due the superior calm of the proceedings. The churchyard was a spacious one, depressingly roomy indeed for the present occasion, for which any suburban back garden would have sufficed. Most of the audience had mounted on the tombstones, great slabs of limestone that formed the lids of the boxes placed over the more distinguished dead, blackish grey, and ringing under the hobnailed-boots like metal. The candidate stood on the highest tombstone, and all around him leaned and clung these strange groups of men and women, looking like the wooded islands in the lake close by; while between them the quiet background of the graveyard was visible, with its bent and musing trees, and array of low head-stones gazing blindly at the concourse.
The bald top of the candidate's head formed the focus-point of the gathering, giving back the sun's glare like glass as it swung and jerked with the flow of oratory, and beside it the immense shovel-hat of the old priest moved occasionally in accord, italicising for the benefit of the flock such phrases as seemed especially edifying. The curate was nowhere to be seen; rumour said that his political theories were not formed on those of his superior. A remembrance recurred of meeting, that morning, a severely contemplative young priest, walking alone and away from the village, with the green flicker of the leaves overhead playing strangely across the gloom of his sallow face.
[image]THE CANDIDATE
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THE CANDIDATE
The candidate's speech seemed, indeed, to require a little driving home. It was, for the most part, an explanation to his constituents of the reasons that made it necessary for him to forego the happiness of acquainting himself with them in any intimate degree. He was, he said, in his temperately florid manner, closely connected with a large firm in England and, deplorable to relate, his income depended on his living in the bosom of the English firm. "Sure we know that—we know that!" yelled the half-dozen most chosen supporters, crushing precariously round the candidate on the edge of the tombstone platform, with their wild, combative faces pressing, all on fire, towards him. Perhaps he might yet be roused to say the right things about the rival candidate, the things that would wring forth a cheer in reply to those distant ones that came maddeningly at intervals from the crowd in the street.
But the speaker kept his eloquence well in hand, confining himself to such blind alleys of assertion as the remarkable success of his own career, his confidence that his constituents would re-elect him, and his desire to benefit them in some immeasurable way if they did so. A permissive cynicism curved the wrinkles on the faces of the old men who stood on the grassy graves behind him, with their hands under their coat-tails, and their grizzled chins sunk in their shirt-collars; they knew how they were going to vote, and their own powers (matured in the sale of many a heifer and rood of bog) of taking a part and sustaining it, with a perfectness that would deceive the elect, made them sceptical as to the ends of speech-making. The women were tittering and whispering under their shawls; but were certainly impressed by the candidate's Sunday attire, his well-kept grey moustache, and his affable way of saying "ladies and gentlemen" every now and then.
The speech ambled to its close, through a peroration of an uncertain conversational tone, assisted at critical points by one or other of the supporters, who would ungovernably supply the needed word out of the bursting fulness of his own repertoire. It was the sole outlet for their enthusiasm, except for the cheer that caught at the ravelled edge of the final sentence, as the candidate put on his hat and bowed himself from the tombstone.
"Be prayin' for the meetin', gerrls," said the old priest, leading the way to the vestry, with rusty skirts floating widely. The door closed on him and his protégé, the clumps on the tombstones fell apart, mingling in a laughing and talking stream towards the churchyard gate, and the prayers of the young ladies were apparently deferred to a more convenient season.
The chapel door stood open, showing the barren squareness of the interior; a zinc tub, half-full of Holy-water, stood in the porch, with the flags all round it wet from the splash of dipping hands; the altar gleamed gaudily at the further end; and a tall confession-box stood solitary in the seatless expanse of floor, fraught with the inseparable mystery and suggestiveness of its kind, and holding within its curtained rails the knowledge of what things are counted for unrighteousness in that twilight place, the conscience of the Western peasant. The air inside was warm, and still laden with the smell of frieze coats and stale turf smoke; but, except for this furnishing, the blankness was complete. Sunday and its Mass were over and done with for a week, and priest and congregation were striving factors in the carnal toils of election.
The people dispersed slowly, discussing the absorbing topic of the day, some in their native tongue, but for the most part in English, so pronounced as to be in the distance scarcely distinguishable from the liquid and guttural flow of Galway Irish.
[image]"A MAN MUST WOTE THE WAY HIS PRIEST AND BISHOP'LL TELL HIM"
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"A MAN MUST WOTE THE WAY HIS PRIEST AND BISHOP'LL TELL HIM"
"Sure, a man must wote the way his priest and bishop'll tell him," says a tall supporter, with the air of a person repeating a truism.
"Well, meself'd say," says another, whose handsome eyes shone in the shadow of his soft felt hat, while his hands helped out his words with picturesque gesture, "the man I'd have a wish for to wote for him, is the man that'd rise out o' his bed in the night and give hay and oats to yer horse, and yerself fotever ye'd ax, when any one else'd leshen (listen) in their bed if ye were battherin' there till mornin'."
This argument referred to the well-known good nature of the Parnellite candidate, a general dealer and publican in a neighbouring village.
"Well, indeed, he's no scholar, I suppose," says a young fellow, still in reference to the Parnellite. "He has no learnin' nor way of spakin' no more than meself, but becripes! he's a fine sthrong man, and he'll be well able to fight and box in Parliament."
This was said in entire good faith, and was listened to with respect.
"Come on back the road!" bawls a supporter, beckoning authoritatively from the distance, "let yees come on now, the whole o' yee, the way we'd be before the car and it going up!"
The reason for this manoeuvre was presently apparent, on returning to the village street. As the candidate's car left the chapel the Parnellite crowd thronged the corner by which it must pass; a battery of threatening faces, waiting with unknown purpose; a gauntlet to run or to run away from. The car came slowly up the hill, preceded by a party of supporters; the candidate on one side, looking anxious the old priest on the other, bare-headed, and looking still more anxious, but waving his hand as if in greeting, while the interwoven yells became a thrilling mass of sound.
It was well for the candidate that his companion was one of the oldest and most popular of the Galway priests. That prestige had shielded the churchyard meeting from disturbance, and but for its influence now the future M.P. might have returned to England with an appearance not advantageous to the firm of which he was a member. A forest of clenched fists and sticks seemed to leap up towards him, the scream of hatred never took breath, and there was entreaty in the face of the priest as his wrinkled hands waved repressively above the tumult. There was a long moment of uncertainty, but in the next the car was through in safety, and was gone in the twinkling of an eye, the supporters running in its wake till the last waving gleam of the candidate's silk hat had been garnered.
It was then that things began to look, to an Irish eye, most promising and attractive. The supporters turned, formed into a solid body of perhaps forty men and boys, and marched with inimitable swagger straight back into the crowd, all together, in a kind of chant, shouting, "To hell with ——!" (the rival candidate) at the utmost strength of their lungs. The theme was a simple one, but magnificently vocalised, and was instantly replied to in thetu quoquemanner by the opposite party. Sticks went up, the women rushed outwards for safety, looking, with their floating shawls, like a flock of frightened turkeys; and at this point the four constabulary men who represented that force made themselves felt. The dangerous moment yielded easily and unresentfully to these judicious hands, and the excitement sputtered out in a little bragging and hustling, without so much as a black eye to commemorate it. In half an hour the ducks were again waddling in line along the empty street, and a muffled hum proceeding from the shuttered public houses, told that thebonâ fidetravellers had at length reached their journey's end. It was a lamentable falling off from the days of the fish kettles and the mulled port of Kilroy's Hotel.
The episode had expired in the way that might have been expected, and was at best an indeterminate, shapeless thing, full of unripe revolt that it was too childish to express. But that moment when the little flame first flickers in the gorse, feeling its naked way among the thorns and affluent blossom, has a wonder of birth in it that is forgotten when the blazing hillside jars the noonday, and the smoke rolls monotonously from strongholds of conflagration.
A RECORD OF HOLIDAY
Of summer holidays it may at least be contended that they involve two periods of undiluted enjoyment; the time of anticipation, and the calm—if sometimes chastened—season of retrospect.
I am glad; now that the mice are nesting in my trunks, and the spiders weaving fresh straps round my hold-all, that I have been to Switzerland, that the greasy Visitors' books of several West of Ireland hotels hold my name. Also, I remember how very cheerful it was to study a scarlet-hued Bradshaw, and to reflect that, with certain financial restrictions, the Continent of Europe lay smiling before me. (I remember also, that I lent that entertaining work to an American friend, and found the utmost difficulty in recovering it from him. It was only restored, indeed, on the morning of my departure, and my friend mentioned that he had sat up all night reading it, "Just to see how it ended," he said.)
Between, however, these seasons of satisfaction, there stretches the actual time of holiday, and as I reflect upon it, I am struck by the fact that its more salient features are misfortunes. From a literary point of view this has its advantages; the happy traveller has no history. If the converse is true it would need Gibbon or Macaulay to deal with our transit from the County Cork to that Alpine fastness for which we had trustingly, fearlessly labelled our luggage.
It began with fog in the Channel—the Irish Channel—solid, tangible fog, through which our bewildered steamer stumbled, uttering large, desolate cries of distress, stopping every now and then to bellow like a lost cow, sometimes, even, going astern, while muffled hootings told of another wanderer who had drawn nearer than was convenient.
"When I heard 'em giving the signal to go astern," said a sailor officer of high degree, next morning, as he gobbled a belated mouthful of breakfast, "I thought it was about time to get up and put on my clothes. Said nothing about it to m' wife, though!"
I wonder if he has realised yet why everyone smiled.
In London, rain; in Paris, blinding heat. Dizzily we staggered round the elder Salon, and through its innumerable small square rooms, with their lining of flagrant canvases; it was like exploring the brain-cells of a fever patient in delirium. One healing instant was ours, when at the public baths in the Boulevard Mont Parnasse, the waters of a "Bain Complet" closed over the exhausted person; but that, even, was speedily poisoned by the discovery that towels and soap, being extras, were not left in theCabinet de Bain, and the bather, having with dripping hands explored the pocket for the needed coins, had then to tender them to the attendant through a difficult slit of doorway, receiving in exchange a small fragment of slightly scented marble and a gauze veil.
After that, the night journey to Geneva. Heat, sardine-like proximity of fellow travellers, two dauntless English ladies, who turned the long night into one unending and clanking tea-party; a nightmare interlude ofdouaniers, then, when a troubled sleep had at length been bestowed, Geneva; and all the horrors that attend the finish of a long train journey.
At breakfast, at our hotel, a survey of what we had hitherto endured in the pursuit of pleasure stung us to a brief revolt. This was a holiday, we told ourselves, why hurry? Fortified by a principle, theoretically unassailable, we strolled about Geneva. It was cold and very wet; still, in our newly realised leisure, we made a point of strolling. On our return to our hotel most of the staff were on the pavement, seemingly very much excited. Avoiture, laden with our luggage, stood at the door. It appeared that our steamer left for Villeneuve in eight minutes. I imagine that the hotel staff's agitation arose from the fear that we should not have time to tip them all. This was, alas, unfounded.
The driver took us first to the wrong steamer. He then turned his machine too short, and locked the fore carriage. Then he shambled across the long bridge to the other steamboat quai, while we sat forward, like the coxswains of racing eights, in sweating agony, watching our boat getting up steam and preparing for instant departure.
We caught the boat by springing, like Spurius Lartius and Herminius, across the widening chasm between her deck and the shore, and therewith fell into a species of syncope. Mists shrouded the mountains; a chilled rain swept the lake. For our parts, slowly recovering, we kept the cabin, and swept the tea-table. It was almost our first moment of enjoyment.
The Alpine fastness, already alluded to, was not gained for a further couple of days, during which an awakening distaste for Switzerland slowly grew in us, though it did not thoroughly mature till mellowed by a mule ride up a mountain. Reticence in narration is a quality that I endeavour to cultivate. It becomes a necessity in treating of the village and its surrounding slums from and through which our start was made. Having, in a state nearing starvation, been offered the sole refreshment available, namely, concentrated essence of typhoid in the guise of glasses of milk, and having retained sufficient self-control to refuse them, we started on mule-back for the mountain. Traversing, as I have every reason to believe, the open main drain of the village, our animals proceeded to totter up a narrow and precipitous watercourse.
"La voie la plus directe," explained the mule-driver, lashing his ancient cattle in a general way, and without animosity.
The cloud that accompanied our wanderings, as in the case of the Israelites, did not fail of its usual office. Even through the crown of a Panama straw hat the rain attained to my skin. Thence it descended, enveloping me, as it were an inner garment. Twice my mule fell down. I could not reproach it. Indeed, nothing but the fact that one of its parents had been an ass explained its readiness to pick itself up and go on again. It had, however, an incentive, supplied in the rear by its proprietor; we had naught save the fetish of Holiday to goad us onward, and its potency was beginning to weaken.
One week of the mountain hotel was as much as we were able to endure. The usual "exceptional" weather prevailed. How familiar is the formula, and how entirely unworthy of credence!
"For seventeen years"—the Landlord calls heaven to witness—"it has never been so wet, or so cold, or so stormy at this time. If Monsieur or Madame, had come but three weeks ago—or would wait but three days longer——"
There was a time when the glamour of holiday might have induced belief, might even have beguiled a further endurance of the age-longtable-d'hôterepasts, of the aggressive muscularity of the English schoolmaster, who, during the progress of theménufrom the watery soup to the acrid Alpine strawberry, faced us, boasting at large and in detail; of the German bride, who practised the piano for four hours daily (her head upon her bridegroom's shoulder, his faithful arm round her waist). These things, though unattractive in themselves, might once have been submitted to as elements of the theoretical holiday (in Switzerland), as mere inevitable crumples in the rose-leaf.
But, on this occasion—it is possibly one of the compensations of advancing years—we found ourselves endowed with a juster sense of proportion. The close of the eighth day saw us heading for home with a speed that almost amounted to rout. The mule-driver's maxim, "la voie la plus directe" seemed good common sense; we drew neither breath nor bridle, Geneva, Paris, London were but names in the night, till we found ourselves facing America from the front doorstep of a certain remote hostelry in the far west of Connaught.
[image]FACING AMERICA
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FACING AMERICA
Then, and not till then, did something of the largeness, the leisure, the absurdity, the unconventionality, that should enter into all true holiday, begin for us.
I have said hostelry, and undoubtedly the words "Seaview Hotel," in letters large and green, were inscribed upon its pink-washed walls, but without this clue I do not think the closest observer would be able to detect its walk in life. It had but one storey; a dark and narrow passage led from the entrance to the kitchen, and therein, at (as subsequent experience showed us) any time of the day or night, the entire establishment might be found, massed, talking as though they had not met for years, and were to separate in an hour.
Thus we, led by our carman, anhabituéof the house, found them, and thus, with but brief intervals, they continued during the period we spent among them.
"What is it, Mike?" this to the car-driver from a very stout lady, whom we rightly assumed to be the proprietress. "Oh—the sitting-room," she exhibited a natural annoyance, having been interrupted in a pronouncement on, I gathered, the feeding of pigs. "Here! Mary Kate, show the sitting-room!" She re-addressed herself to her subject.
Mary Kate, a charming slattern with a profusion of fair hair, "showed" the sitting-room. It was small, but not unclean, and, in addition to the normal outfit of table and chairs, was remarkably equipped with a large double perambulator, whose use as a sideboard was sufficiently indicated by the fact that a cruet stand and a loaf of bread occupied one seat, while a piece of cold beef reclined on the other. The bedrooms, if I may quote a French guide-book's remarks upon the retreat of a hermit, "excited I know not what emotions of religious terror;" emotions that were not allayed by the suspicion, that deepened to certainty, that, in the absence of visitors, they were occupied by the staff.
"Hot wather? Ocerr*tainly!" said Mary Kate, kindly. "Beg your pardon—" she crushed past me to the chimney-piece, and proceeded to grope behind photograph frames and a crowded multitude of glass and china, *objets d'art. "I left me hat pins—" here she giggled confidentially, while, so intimate was the arrangement of theobjets d'art, that several of them fell off at the farther end of the chimney piece. "Ah! what matther! Sure they're all a little broke!" said Mary Kate, wedging them into their places again, and thrusting the recovered hat pins into her redundant locks. "Ye'll be wanting somethin' to eat now, I daresay," she went on, "I'll send granne'ma in to ye."
A brief interval ensued, during which we furtively examined the bedclothes, and indulged in disturbed conjecture as to the substance that stuffed the pillows. Their smell, though curious, offered no basis for theory.
There came a creeping sound without, and low down, a panel of the door was dealt a single blow.
I said "Come in!" not without a slight recurrence of religious terror.
A very little and ancient woman stood there, with the trade marks of soot and grease thick upon her. When she curtseyed she seemed to merge in the door mat, so small was she and so dingy.
There was reassurance in the discovery that she seemed as much in awe of us as we of her.
"How would I know what the likes o' ye would fancy?" she said, almost with despair, and went on to hope that our visit might prove an education into the ways of the aristocracy of which she had long stood in need, but she coupled the admission with a warning that she "was very owld and very dull."
It was a high responsibility, this position of exponents of an unknown type, and it is much to be regretted that we were forced to leave our venerable disciple under the impression that the upper classes usually cook their own food at hotels. It should here be said that this expedition had not been entered upon without a certain foreknowledge of what it was likely to involve, and amongst other precautions were provisions of a portable sort. These included sausages, and the sausages we confided to our old lady.
We sat in the parlour enjoying the appetite for dinner that is one of the bright features of a genuine holiday. After a delay of about half an hour, Mary Kate's head was thrust through a narrow opening of the door.
"Granne'ma says will the little puddings be split?"
Had the answer been Yes, and that it was usual to serve them with cream and sugar, I feel sure that grandmamma would have complied. As it was, after instructions to Mary Kate, of a lucidity unrivalled by Mrs. Beeton, the sausages appeared, pale, tepid, raw, in a pie-dish, just a-wash with luke-warm water.
The holiday appetite quailed at the sight, and thechefwas summoned from the conversazione still raging in the kitchen. A single glance at the guests told her of failure, and, with a masterly grasp of the position, she hurried back to the kitchen and returned with the frying-pan.
"Keep it now yersels," she said. "Didn't I say to ye I was too owld?"
From that time the parlour grate led a sullied life, but—which may have consoled it—a thoroughly useful one. We re-cooked the sausages upon it; the perambulator yielded its increase, toast, grilled beef, sausages, who could reasonably ask for more?
We spent two days and two nights there; days of perfect weather, spent in exploring a coast as wild and beautiful as the heart of holiday maker could desire, nights strangely, almost desolately devoid of the entomological excursions and pursuits usual to village inns, and, in spite of the peculiarities of the pillows, sleep was not difficult. Or rather, in candour it should be said, was difficult only after the rising of the sun. For with the dawn, a vagrant population was astir in the village; a street Arab community of hens, dogs, geese and donkeys, incessant and clarion-toned in their addresses to morn and to each other; creatures who slept under carts and in stray corners; who treated life as a lounge, and regarded their owners as suzerains merely, to whom occasional allegiance was to be rendered, or a tributary egg or two laid in an inaccessible place.
On the whole, the donkeys are those of whom I can speak least temperately. They had, for want, possibly, of other employment, adopted the position of town-criers to the village, or perhaps were its prophets, perhaps its Cassandras, and they uplifted their testimony from sunrise till nightfall with a poignancy that rent the very skies. Standing one evening on one of the low hills that hemmed the village into its corner by the sea, I counted easily, and with half a glance, four of these enthusiasts, planted each on a commanding rock or mound, and sending his wild voice abroad over the valley. It was a sunny evening, after a day of sad and opalescent beauty, and the sea had brightened into blue and silver; the white-washed gables and a far white lighthouse were radiant with recovered cheerfulness, but the jackasses were as despairful and implacable as Jeremiah.
There was but one disaster during our brief sojourn at the Sea View Hotel. A few sausages and a tin of sardines remained, "spared," as Mary Kate said, from the first repast. These she proposed to store, for safety and coolness, in one of our bedrooms. The idea not being well received, she finally deposited them in the Post Office, which was attached to the hotel. But even this hiding place was not improbable enough to hoodwink that skilled tactician, the hotel cat, and he, in some dark hour of the night, found and feasted on them with, no doubt, all the ravishing joy of a new experience.
[image]IN WEST CARBERY
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IN WEST CARBERY
We could not but sympathise with him. Thanks to the Sea View Hotel that subtle joy was also ours.
I began by saying that of the Summer holidays the times of anticipation and of retrospect were the times of truest pleasure. Yet I can remember long September days beside a sea of Mediterranean blue, the sea of Southern Ireland, when the perfect present asked nothing of either past or future. The long creek wound, blue-green as a peacock's breast, between deep woods. High places of rock and heather were there, where you could lie, "ringed with the azure world," and see the huge liners, yes, and hear them too, as they went throbbing and trampling along the sun's path westward.
Those who know this place of holiday are comparatively few, but there is at least one distinguished name of the company—Dean Swift, no less. A couple of hundred years or so ago, he spent a summer in West Carbery, (an ivy-covered ruin, known as Swift's Tower, testifies to the fact,) and he forthwith made a poem about it, a Latin poem, addressed to the Rocks of Carbery.
One gathers that it was of the nature of an encomium, though the points selected for description are not those that would tempt the effete holiday maker of to-day. Possibly it was the Dean's majestic eighteenth-century manner of thanking his host for "a very pleasant visit." I came upon it in the house of a descendant of that host, reverently quoted in a copy of Dr. Smith's history of the County Cork, dated 1749. Thanks to the sympathetic scholarship of a contemporary divine, the Revd. Dr. Donkin, who made a translation of it, I am able to give some quotations from it. Dr. Smith thinks that "the Dean's descriptions are as just as his numbers are beautiful." It is not for me to disagree with him. Let them—or some of them—dignify these unworthy pages.
"Lo! From the top of yonder cliff, that shroudsIts airy head amidst the azure clouds,Hangs the huge fragment, destitute of props,Prone on the waves the rocky ruin drops.
"Lo! From the top of yonder cliff, that shroudsIts airy head amidst the azure clouds,Hangs the huge fragment, destitute of props,Prone on the waves the rocky ruin drops.
"Lo! From the top of yonder cliff, that shrouds
Its airy head amidst the azure clouds,
Hangs the huge fragment, destitute of props,
Prone on the waves the rocky ruin drops.
* * * * *
Oft too with hideous yawn, the cavern widePresents an orifice on either side;A dismal orifice, from sea to seaExtended, pervious to the god of day.
Oft too with hideous yawn, the cavern widePresents an orifice on either side;A dismal orifice, from sea to seaExtended, pervious to the god of day.
Oft too with hideous yawn, the cavern wide
Presents an orifice on either side;
A dismal orifice, from sea to sea
Extended, pervious to the god of day.
* * * * *
High on the cliff their nests wild pigeons make,And sea calves stable in the oozey lake ...When o'er the craggy steep without controul,Big with the blast, the raging billows roll, ...The neighbouring race, tho' wont to brave the shocksOf angry seas and run along the rocks,Now pale with terror, while the ocean foams,Fly far and wide, nor trust their native homes.The goats, while pendant from the mountain top,The wither'd herb improvident they crop,Wash'd down the precipice with sudden sweep,Leave their sweet lives beneath th' unfathomed deep."
High on the cliff their nests wild pigeons make,And sea calves stable in the oozey lake ...When o'er the craggy steep without controul,Big with the blast, the raging billows roll, ...The neighbouring race, tho' wont to brave the shocksOf angry seas and run along the rocks,Now pale with terror, while the ocean foams,Fly far and wide, nor trust their native homes.The goats, while pendant from the mountain top,The wither'd herb improvident they crop,Wash'd down the precipice with sudden sweep,Leave their sweet lives beneath th' unfathomed deep."
High on the cliff their nests wild pigeons make,
And sea calves stable in the oozey lake ...
When o'er the craggy steep without controul,
Big with the blast, the raging billows roll, ...
The neighbouring race, tho' wont to brave the shocks
Of angry seas and run along the rocks,
Now pale with terror, while the ocean foams,
Fly far and wide, nor trust their native homes.
The goats, while pendant from the mountain top,
The wither'd herb improvident they crop,
Wash'd down the precipice with sudden sweep,
Leave their sweet lives beneath th' unfathomed deep."
I am sorry to say that in these degenerate times the improvident goat has lost his ancient skill and is no longer pendant, and the oozey lake and stabling sea calf (the latter possibly a lingering survivor of the Deluge) may no more be found. None the less, I can confidently commend the scenes of these catastrophes to the holiday maker of to-day.
Even now, when the sunshine of last September has faded to a memory, and that of next September is too far away to be even a hope, I can still feel the soft lift of the western wind, still hear the booming of the waves in the deep and riven heart of the cliff.