THE GLENS OF ANTRIM
Thereare some caves at the Causeway which are said to be well worth visiting, but we found, next morning, that a stiff wind during the night had kicked up such a sea that it was impossible to get to them. So we spent the morning walking down to a beautiful beach some distance below the hotel, and building a driftwood fire there, and watching the waves roll in. Then, while Betty went in to read some just-arrived letters from home, I went on along the top of the cliffs above the Causeway.
There is a path which follows the edge of the cliff closely, and a more magnificent view I have never seen. At Chimney Point the rollers were breaking in especial violence over the black rocks, on which one of the galleons of the Armada went to pieces. Her name was the Gerona, and some of her guns were rescued from the surf and added to the armament of Dunluce castle. Legend has it that she brought her disaster upon herself by running in too near the coast to fire at the chimney rocks, which she mistook for the towers of Dunluce. The bay where the bodies of her crew were washed ashore has been called Port-na-Spania ever since.
A little farther on is the uttermost point of all, Pleaskin, where the view reaches its greatest grandeur, for one is here four hundred feet above the sea, and onthat bright, clear, wind-swept morning, I could see the purple peaks of the Donegal coast stretching far to the west, while to the northeast loomed the misty outline of the Scottish hills, scarcely discernible against the sky. And all between stretched the white-capped waters of the North Channel, with a tossing boat here and there, and at my feet were the last black basalt outposts of Erin, with the rollers curling over them in regular, heavy rhythm. If Ireland has anything to show more fair I did not see it.
I went slowly back, at last, along the path, over the springy heather; and an hour later we had said good-bye to the Causeway, and were rattling away along a pleasant road toward Ballycastle. We were the only voyagers, that day, so instead of the heavy bus, a side-car had been placed at our disposal. It was the first car we had mounted since our ride around Lough Gill; and how good it felt to settle back again into the corner of the seat, and swing along mile after mile!
Our jarvey was an old fellow who was loquacious enough, at first, and who stopped to show us, in a ravine not far from the Causeway, a crevice in the rock which he said was used as a pulpit by the first Presbyterian preacher in Ulster—for it should be remembered that for many years the Presbyterians and other nonconformists were treated as harshly by the established church as the Catholics were. And then we came to a little village where the children were gathering for school, and our jarvey stopped to water the horse, which gave us the opportunity to have a word with the children.
And fairly surprised we were when they began to talk, for they spoke a Scotch as broad as any to be heard in the Highlands. Their names were Scotch, too—Fergus and Angus; and the only thing we encountered on that drive which astonished us more were the sign-posts at the cross-roads, the directions on which are all in Gaelic. We had seen Gaelic sign-posts before, in the west, but they always had the direction in English, too. Here there was no English. It is a riddle that I have never unravelled, for I heard no Gaelic spoken here. Of course it is spoken; but so many wayfarers along this road speak only English that I cannot understand the contempt for them which the sign-boards indicate.
I have referred already to the Irishman's love for breakneck bridges, and the prize one of all is at the village of Ballintoy, into which the road drops down the steepest of hills. A little distance away along the cliffs is an isolated rock some sixty feet from the shore, and spanning the abyss between cliff and rock is the craziest bridge ever devised by man. Two rings, about eighteen inches apart, have been embedded in the rock on either side, and between these rings two ropes have been stretched. These are lashed together at intervals by transverse cords, and to these cords short lengths of narrow plank have been tied side by side. For a handrail, a slender rope has been stretched between two rings some three feet higher than the others—and there you are. It is hardly correct to say that any of the ropes have been "stretched," for they hang in a long curve, and in the wind that was blowing that morning the bridge swung to and fro in the dizziestfashion. There was a crowd of small boys at its land end, who offered to negotiate the passage for a penny each, but we refused to pay for the privilege of seeing them risk their lives.
And yet, probably, it would not have been risking them, for they were used to the bridge and thought nothing of crossing it. Nay, more, the men of the neighbourhood cross it carrying heavy burdens, for they are fishermen and keep all their ropes and nets and even their boats out on the rock, round which, at certain stages of the tide, the salmon circle, so that they can be caught by nets shot out from the rock. There is no harbour for the boats, so they have to be hoisted up to a terrace in the rock some twenty feet above the water by means of a windlass; and then, having made everything snug, the fishermen cross back over the bridge with the catch on their shoulders. It need scarcely be added that I, who had balked at the far more substantial bridges at Dromahair and Dunluce, never for an instant thought of crossing this one.
We climbed out to the top of the cliffs again, and jogged along with the beautiful sea to our left, and the beautiful rolling country to our right, its meadows brilliant with the lush green of the young flax; and then we turned back inland between high hedgerows; and the bright sun and the soft air proved too much for our jarvey, who dropped gently to sleep—a fact we didn't notice until the horse, after a backward glance, stopped to take a few bites from the hedge. The driver woke with a start and jerked the horse angrily back into the middle of the road, and then glanced guiltily at us, but we were gazing far away intothe distance; and then he dropped off again, and again the horse, feeling the slackened reins, stopped for a bite; and then, for fear that a motor-cycle or something might run into us, I filled my pipe and offered my pouch to the driver, and he filled up thankfully, and that kept him awake until we dropped down into the beautiful old town of Ballycastle, nestling under the high hills of Antrim. "Bally," which figures in so many Irish place-names, is from the Gaelic "baile," meaning town or village, and so Ballycastle is merely the Irish form of what in English would be prosaic Castletown.
We had tea at a clean and pleasant inn, and then spent an hour wandering about the place—to the site of the old abbey, near a sweet little river, and then down to the shore, which has been desecrated with golf-links; but the green slopes of Rathlin Island, just off the coast, are very lovely, and just outside the bay the cliffs culminate in a mighty bluff called Fairhead; and then back to the town along an avenue of beautiful trees, for a visit to the "Home Industry Depot," a room crowded with fantastic toys and some good wood-carving, all done in the neighbourhood—about the only industry of any kind, so the keeper of the shop said, now carried on in Ballycastle.
Time was when Ballycastle fancied it was destined for greatness, for a seam of coal was discovered in the hill above the town, and an enterprising Scotchman named Hugh Boyd leased the right to work it from the Earl of Antrim, and built foundries and tanneries and breweries to consume it; but unfortunately the seam turned down instead of up, Boyd died, and nobodywas found with sufficient energy to contend against so many difficulties; so the whole enterprise dropped dead. I don't know how the inhabitants came to turn to toy-making and wood-carving; perhaps some expatriated Swiss settled here,—that shop certainly did remind us of Lucerne!
There are far older memories which cluster around Ballycastle; for the stream which ripples past the abbey was in the old days called the Margy, and it was here, according to the most ancient of Irish legends, that the children of Lir, King of the Isle of Man, sought shelter after they had been turned into four white swans by their step-mother. I should like to tell that story, but there is no space here—besides, it has already been most nobly told by Mr. Rolleston. It will be found, with many others, in his "High Deeds of Finn," a book I most heartily recommend.
We were not yet at the end of our day's journey, for we had still to go on to Cushendall, sixteen miles away, and so we went back to the hotel, to find a long inside-car waiting. There were two other passengers, women of the neighbourhood, who had come in to town to do some shopping; and their gossip was most entertaining; but we dropped them before long, and then the road mounted up and up along the valley of a little river, which we could see gleaming far below us; and at last we came out upon a bog as wild and desolate as any in Connemara. There were again the familiar black cuttings, the piles of turf, and here and there a group of men and women labouring at the wet, back-breaking work. This bog, so our driver said, supplied the fuelfor the whole district, and nobody hereabouts ever thought of burning coal.
The road was quite deserted, save for a cart now and then, loaded high with turf, lumbering heavily down toward the town; and presently even these ceased, and there was no single sign of life as far as the eye could reach—only the silent bog, desolate, vast, impressive, rolling away into the distance with a beauty all its own—a beauty difficult to express, but very poignant.
How high we were upon that moor we did not realise until we came to the verge of one of the beautiful Glens of Antrim and saw, nestling away below us, the spires and roofs of Cushendall. They were perhaps half a mile away, but we travelled at least three miles to get down to them, winding back and forth along the side of the glen, crossing a great viaduct eighty feet high, past picturesque thatched houses, past the fairy thorn which no man in the village would touch for love or money, past a fragment of ruin which was once the castle where the MacDonnells stood off the English; and then we turned away to the right and began to climb again; and presently we had climbed out of Glendun into Glenaan, and I should hate to have to decide which is the more lovely.
We emerged, at last, into more open country, with high hills at our right pierced by shadowy valleys; and then the houses became more frequent, and we could see the people gathering down from the fields for the night. Twilight was at hand; but, though it must have been nearly nine o'clock, we were amused to see thatthe ducks and chickens were still pecking cheerfully about the door-steps, apparently with no thought of retiring. Poultry, in Ireland, leads a strenuous life, for in summer the sun rises at three and does not set till nine. Perhaps it is these long hours which give Irish chickens an indolent air, and which explain the frequent naps one sees them taking on the family doorstep.
The houses grew more and more frequent, until we were rattling down a wide street of them, under an avenue of lofty trees, and knew we were at Cushendall.
Some three miles west of the town, on the top of a bare and windy hill looking down over the Glenaan valley, is a circle of stones placed there, so legend asserts, to mark the grave of Ossian, son of Finn MacCool, and sweet singer of the Fianna of Erin; and it was to find this spot I set out next morning, through fine, windy weather. I knew where the valley of the Glenaan was, for we had passed its mouth the evening before, but as to the position of the grave itself I knew nothing. The guide-book devoted only a vague line to it; but I have a firm belief in my luck, and I knew I should find it somehow.
For a mile or more my road lay back over the way we had come, mounting steadily toward the entrance to the Glenaan Valley; and I met many little carts coming in to market, for it was Saturday; and every one who wasn't going into town was taking advantage of the fine day by working in the fields, or putting new coats of dazzling whitewash upon their houses, or digging in the little flower-gardens in front of them. Andeverybody was in cheerful humour and passed the time of day with the heartiest good will.
And then I came to the entrance of the valley, and turned westward along the road which traverses it. The mountains soon began to close in on either hand, and the houses strung along the road or perched on narrow plateaus grew smaller and smaller; slate gave way to thatch, stone floors gave way to dirt ones, and the windows shrank to a single immovable sash of four small panes. In a word, as the land grew poorer, the people grew poorer, too; and the conditions of life seemed not so very different from those in far Connaught. Indeed it may very well be that this is one of those "congested districts" which are scattered over the east of Ireland.
I stopped, at last, and asked an old man in a blue flannel smock if he could tell me the way to Ossian's grave; and he told me to fare straight on till I came to some stepping-stones, and to cross the stones and push right up the hill. So I went on happily, for the air was very sweet, and the sun just warm enough, and the great wind was driving white clouds before it across the sky, and the sunshine in the faces of the people I met added to the beauty of the day; and at last I came to a cluster of thatched cottages where the little river turned in close to the road and rippled between a row of stepping-stones; and I asked a pleasant-faced woman if that was the way to Ossian's grave, and she said it was; to cross the stones and go right up the hill, and I would find a house there where I could get further directions.
The road beyond the stones ran up the hill and intothe yard of a farm-house; and in the yard there was a dog with a very savage bark; but there was also a blue-eyed girl who quieted him, while she stared at me curiously. I asked her the way to the grave, and she pointed up the hill, with a little motion of her hand toward the right, and I set off again. The road had dwindled to the merest mountain path, with a wall on either side of earth and stones, crested with prickly gorse; but I came to a break in it, at last, opening to the right, and scrambled through; and then, a minute later, in the midst of a heather-carpeted field on the very summit of the hill, I saw the grave.
It is formed of standing stones, covered with lichen and crumbling under the storms of centuries, and the vestibule, so to speak, is a semi-circle some twenty feet in diameter opening toward the east. Back of this are two chambers, one behind the other, divided by two large uprights, and I suppose it was in one of these that the body of the bard was laid—if it was laid here at all. My own guess would be that these weather-beaten stones, like those others on the hill beside Lough Gill, antedate Ossian by at least two thousand years. But that is an unimportant detail; and it may be, indeed, that when the great singer died, his comrades could think of no more fitting place to lay him than within the guardian circle of this monument of an older race, looking down across the valley and out toward the sea.
Fact and fancy have been so mingled in the Ossianic legend that it is impossible to disentangle them, nor is it profitable to try. It is fairly certain that he was born somewhere about the middle of the third century after Christ, and legend has it that he spent two hundredyears in the Land of Youth with Niam of the Golden-hair. When, homesick for Erin, he returned to it, it was to find his father's courts overgrown with grass and St. Patrick preaching there, and his disputes with Patrick are recorded at great length in the tales of the Fenian cycle; for Ossian bewailed the vanished days of those mighty fighters, and wished for nothing better than to join them, in whatever world they might be, while Patrick laboured to convert him from such heathen fancies and to save his soul. It is to this story reference is made in the stanza from Lionel Johnson's "Ode to Ireland," which I quoted onpage 221.
Up there on the bleak hill-top the wind was roaring; but I found a nook between two of the great stones where it could not reach me, and I lighted my pipe and sat there and looked down over the valley and thought of the old days, and so spent a sweet half hour. The valley had changed but little, I fancied, with the rolling centuries; there were tiny, high-walled fields and low thatched houses on the lower slopes; but above them sprang the primal hills, clothed with heather, their bones of granite gleaming here and there, back and back over the Glens of Antrim, through which the red tide of tribal warfare had poured so many times. And over eastward lay Cushendall, nestling among its trees, with the gaunt, truncated mass of Lurigethan hill overshadowing it, and beyond that, faint and far and scarcely distinguishable from the blue sky, lay the blue sea.
That valley and those hills belong to the Earl of Antrim—his estate includes some thirty-five thousand acres of Irish soil, around which he may build wallsand post notices and set guards; and as I sat there gazing out at them, I realised far more keenly than I had ever done the absurdity of the idea that any portion of this earth's surface can rightfully belong to any man. Trace any title back, for a hundred years, or a thousand years, or two thousand years, and one finds that it started in a theft—theft on the part of an individual from the tribe which held the land in common; and the solemn farce of sale and transfer and inheritance after that was merely the passing on of stolen goods. Perhaps some day we may win through to the ideal of an earth belonging equally to all men, with private right only in the things man's industry creates.
THE GRAVE OF OSSIANTHE GRAVE OF OSSIANAN ANTRIM LANDSCAPE
I knocked out my pipe, at last, reluctantly enough, and took the picture of the stones which is opposite this page, but which gives a poor idea of them; and then I started downward, through the break in the hedge, through the farmyard, going warily for fear of the dog, and so to the stepping-stones; and when I looked at them, I saw what a perfect picture they made, with the stream rippling through, and the thatched cottages beyond, with the smoke whipped from their chimneys, and a single tree bending before the wind. That picture in miniature is opposite this page; but I could not snare with my camera the tang of the turf, the softness of the air, the glory of the sun, nor the murmur of the water. Those you will have to evoke for yourself, as best you can.
In the road beyond I found a mail-carrier, who had completed his morning-round among the hillside dwellings, and who was turning back to Cushendall; and we went on together. He was a tall, lithe lad, as hehad need to be to get over his daily route among these hills; and, like every one else, he hoped some day to win his way to America. He knew many of its towns from the postmarks on the letters he carried. In the last month, he said, there had been fully a hundred from America, and welcome letters they were, for nearly all of them contained a bit of money. Many of the dwellers in these hills—like thousands more all over Ireland—would find life outside the work-house impossible but for the help from their sons and daughters in America; and it gives one a good feeling at the heart to think of those devoted boys and girls putting by every month a portion of the money which was hard to win and harder still to save, to send to the old people who were left at home.
By the side of the road, as we walked along, I saw a hovel more primitive and comfortless than most—just a tiny hut of a single room, dark and cold and bare; but against one end of it grew a great fuchsia bush, clothing it with glory. A wrinkled old woman, clad in filthy clothes, was standing in the doorway, and my companion passed the time of day with her, while I unslung my camera, for I wanted a picture of the tiny house and the great bush. I would have liked a picture of the old woman, too; but she said she was too dirty, and went in until the picture was taken which is opposite the next page. Then she came out and asked if I would send her one. It was the first time, she said, that any one had thought her houseen worth a picture; so I promised she should have one, and she gave me her name, and the postman promised it should reach her.
We went on together, after that, and I asked himwhat the people of the neighbourhood thought about Home Rule.
A HUMBLE HOME IN ANTRIMA HUMBLE HOME IN ANTRIMTHE OLD JAIL AT CUSHENDALL
"The truth is, sir," he answered, "that we don't know what to think, what with this man telling us one thing and that man another; but most of the poor people about here would be glad to see it, for they can't be worse off than they are, and a change might better them. Drilling and arming? Ah, there's none of that around here; there's no army of Ulster in these parts. That's just talk."
He left me at the crossroads, for he had still a letter or two to deliver farther down the road, and I went on by myself toward the town. There were more whitewashers out, and they were splashing the lime about in the most reckless fashion, besprinkling the hedges and the shrubbery and even the road, somewhat to the danger of the passers-by; and at the first houses of the town I met Betty. She had been talking to the caretaker of the churchyard about the true shamrock; and he said that it did not grow wild thereabouts, but that he had some in a pot at home and would be glad to bring her a spray; and he told her of a ruined church and an old Celtic cross out along the road above the cliffs, very near, he said—not over eight minutes' walk at the most.
So we determined to take a look at it; but first we walked about the town a little, and found it quite an ordinary town, except for a great square tower at the intersection of the principal streets—a tower erected, so the tablet on it says, "as a place of confinement for rioters and idlers." I suppose the town has a modern jail now—perhaps even with panoptic galleries! Atany rate, the tower is no longer used. I took a picture of it, and if you will look at the picture closely, you will see a girl drawing water from the town pump just below the tower.
We started off finally for the ruins, first to the cliffs along the sea, and then on along the path which runs at their very edge. The view was very lovely, and we didn't notice how the time was flying; but I looked at my watch presently and found that we had been walking twenty minutes, with no ruins in sight. We pushed on ten minutes longer, and had about given them up, when some children directed us which way to go, and we finally found the few remaining fragments of Layd Church, so overgrown with ivy and embowered in trees that they were scarcely recognisable as ruins at all. The cross proved to be a very modern one; and the graveyard is sadly neglected, with the grass knee-deep among the tombs, which have fallen into sorry disarray. Most of them cover some long-dead MacDonnell—they were all MacDonnells, in the old days, who lived in the Glens of Antrim.
The "eight minute walk" had taken more than half an hour, and we had need to hasten if we were to get back to the hotel in time for lunch, for the car which was to take us to Larne was to start at two; but we made it, and when the car drove up, we found it was a long outside-car with room for five people on each side. We chose the forward end of the side next the sea; and then the car proceeded to another hotel in the town, where five or six more people were waiting; and the two women who were condemned to the landward side complained bitterly. They were making the trip,they said, just to see the sea, and here they would be compelled to sit the whole way facing the blank cliff.
"Sure, there's nothing I can do, miss," said the jarvey, who had listened sympathetically; "I can't make the car any longer, now can I? Maybe you might be glancin' over your shoulder from time to time; anyway I'm thinkin' you'll be seein' enough of the sea before you're home again."
And with that they had to be consoled.
The road runs inland for about a mile beyond Cushendall, and then turns down close to the shore of Red Bay, a vast amphitheatre of red sandstone cliffs, in whose face the road is cut. At the deepest point of the circle, where the Vale of Glenariff opens up into the mountains, is clustered a little village of white houses; and then the road runs on round the base of towering precipices; and suddenly the red sandstone changes to chalk, and the water washing against the shore, which has been a lovely green, turns milky white, with outstanding pinnacles of chalk, worn to fantastic shapes, keeping guard above it.
We had noticed an increasing crowd upon the road, all walking or riding southwards; and presently two barefooted boys jumped up on the footboard and asked if they might ride a little way; and they told us that there was a circus at Carnlough to which every one was going; and they each had the tuppence necessary for admission gripped in a grimy fist, and were very excited indeed. Carnlough, as we soon found, is a small town consisting principally of a curving beach, where a few people were bathing; and the white tent of Duffy's Circus—a much larger affair than Buff Bill's—waspitched close beside the road. The urchins dropped off and made for the entrance; and as we passed, we caught a strain of "The Stars and Stripes Forever," painfully rendered by the circus band.
We rolled on around another wide bay, and came to Glenarm, where we paused to change horses; and then on again, under the white cliffs, past quarries where flint and chalk are mined for the Belfast market; and always at our feet lay the Irish Sea, stretching away to the dim horizon, its colour changing with every passing cloud. In and out the road circled, following the long curves of the coast; past the ruins of a castle which O'Halloran, a famous outlaw, built for himself on the top of a small rock with the sea washing round it; past another amphitheatre where the rocks change back from chalk to basalt; through a short tunnel and so to Larne.
The most interesting thing about Larne is its handsome new harbour built for the express steamers which cross several times daily to Stranrear, the shortest of the routes to Scotland. Edward Bruce chose this route when he came over with an army of six thousand men to help the Irish drive the English from Ireland, as his brother Robert had driven them from Scotland the year before at Bannockburn. It was in May, 1315, that the Scotch drew up in battle array along this strand; and a year later Bruce was crowned King of Ireland; but though at first he drove the Normans before him, his own army was gradually worn down by privation and disease, and he himself was killed at the battle of Faughart. So ended one more Irish dream!
We changed at Larne from road to rail, and were soon rolling southward, still close beside the water, past a string of seaside resorts, each of which added its quota of passengers—perspiring men and women and tired but happy children; and so we came to the old town of Carrickfergus, with its magnificent castle overlooking Belfast Lough. Its great square keep, ninety feet high, looked most imposing in the gathering twilight—how many assaults had it withstood in the seven centuries of its existence! Bruce captured it, but the MacDonnells failed. Schomberg, William's general, had better luck, and it was on the quay below it that the great Orangeman first set foot in Ireland. It has some American associations, too; for John Paul Jones sailed his good shipRangerunder its walls in 1778, and captured the British ship-of-warDrake. Murray, good British guide-book that it is, refers to the founder of the American navy as "the pirate Paul Jones." But we can afford to smile at that!
Carrickfergus is doubtless worth a visit, though the castle is used as an ordnance depot now, and visitors are admitted only to the outer court. But even that would be worth seeing; and the town possesses an old church, and some fragments of its old walls, and doubtless many interesting old houses. I am sorry we did not spend a day there.
But our train rolled on, close beside the border of Belfast Lough, and presently, far ahead, we saw the gleaming spires and clustered roofs of the citadel of Ulster.
BELFAST
Ithad been on a Saturday evening that we first saw Dublin, and it was on a Saturday evening that we reached Belfast; and we had thought the streets of Dublin crowded, but compared with those of Belfast, they were nowhere. Even in our first ride up from the station, along York Street and Royal Avenue, it was evident that here was a town where life was strenuous and eager; there was no mistaking its air of alert prosperity; and when, after dinner, we sallied forth on foot to see more of it, we found the sidewalks so crowded that it was possible to move along them only as the crowd moved.
It was a better-dressed crowd than the Dublin one, but I fancied its cheeks were paler and its bodies less robust. Indeed, I am inclined to think the average stature in Belfast an inch or so under the average elsewhere. Great numbers of the men and women we saw on the streets that night were obviously undersized. I am by no means tall; five feet eight inches is, here in America, about the average; but when I walked among that Belfast crowd, I overtopped it by half a head. It was this strange sensation—the sensation of being a tall man, which I had never before experienced—which first drew my attention to the stature of the crowd.
There must be several regiments of British troopsstationed at Belfast, for soldiers were much in evidence that evening, and in a great diversity of uniform. They, too, for the most part, seemed undersized, in spite of their erect carriage; and they were, as is the way with soldiers everywhere, much interested in the girls; and the girls, after the fashion of girls everywhere, were much interested in the soldiers—and there was a great deal of flirting and coquetting and glancing over shoulders and stopping to talk, and walking about with clasped hands.
Next to the crowd, the most interesting feature of Belfast is the shops, which are very bright and attractive. The Scotch have a genius for fancy breads and cakes, and the bakers' shops here were extremely alluring. There seemed to be also an epidemic of auction sales and closing out sales and cut price sales, announced by great placards pasted all over the windows; but there were so many of them that I fancy most of them were fakes.
One notices also in Belfast the multiplicity of bands. It seemed to me that night that a band, playing doggedly away, was passing all the time. Sometimes the band would be followed by a body of marching men, sometimes by men and women together, sometimes it would be just playing itself along without any one behind it. Nobody in the crowd paid much attention, not even when a big company of boy scouts marched past, looking very clever in their broad hats with the little chin-straps, and grey flannel shirts and flapping short trousers showing their bare knees.
What I am setting down here are merely my first impressions of Belfast. I do not allege that they werecorrect impressions, or that they fairly describe the town, but, as we were fresh from many weeks in the south and west of Ireland, the sense of contrast we experienced that first evening is not without significance.
We went back to the hotel, finally, for we had had a strenuous day; but for long and long we could hear the bands passing in the street below; and then the martial rattle of drums and scream of fifes brought us to the window, and we saw a great crowd of children march past, with banners waving and tin buckets and shovels rattling. It was a Sunday School picnic, just back from a day at the seashore; and the air which the fifes and drums were playing with a vigour that made the windows rattle was "Work, for the Night is Coming!" I had never before realised what a splendid marching tune it is!
I am sorry we did not go to church, next morning, for the pulpits of Belfast were thundering against Home Rule, as we saw by the Monday papers. Instead, we walked down to the river, for a look at the harbour and custom house, and then about the streets to the city hall, with its dome and corner towers oddly reminiscent of St. Paul's Cathedral; and then we took a tram to the Botanical Gardens. The tram ran along a tree-embowered street, lined on either side with villas set in the midst of grounds so beautiful that any of them might have been the gardens; but when we reached the end of the line, we found we had come too far. The conductor was greatly chagrined that he had forgot to tell us where to get off, and sternly refused to accept any fare for the return trip.
The gardens, which we finally reached, are very attractively laid out, but far more interesting than the flowers and the shrubs was the crowd which was coming home from church. There seems to be a church on every square in Belfast, and I judge they were all full that day—as they no doubt are every Sunday, for church-going is still fashionable in the British Isles; and the crowd which poured along the walks of the gardens was as well-dressed and handsome as could be seen anywhere. It was a crowd made up of people evidently and consciously well-to-do, and one distinctive characteristic was a certain severity of aspect, a certain prevalence of that black-coated, side-whiskered, stern-lipped type which was much more common in America thirty years ago than it is now. Our type has changed—has softened and grown more urbane; but I should judge that the cold steel of Calvinism is as sharp and merciless as ever in Belfast.
The men walked slowly along in twos and threes, talking over the sermons they had just listened to; and the sermons, judging from the newspapers, were all cast in the same mould; and that mould gives so clearly the Orange attitude toward Home Rule, that I shall try to outline it here, quoting literally from the newspaper accounts.
Home Rule, then, according to the Belfast preachers, is a Papal-inspired movement, whose object is "to thrust out of their birthright over one million enterprising, industrious, and peaceable citizens, whose only crime was their loyalty to Crown and Constitution, and to put them under that Papal yoke from which their sires had purchased their liberty. Their beloved islandhome had never been more prosperous. They were grateful and they were satisfied, but their Roman Catholic fellow countrymen seemed to have no sense of satisfaction or gratitude. The Irish Nationalists had entered into a movement to sacrifice Protestantism upon the altar of Home Rule, but Orangemen and Protestants had entered into a covenant the object of which was the maintenance of their rightful heritage of British citizenship, of their commercial and industrial progress, and of their freedom. In the same spirit of patriotic Protestantism as was displayed at the siege of Derry, they would go forth to combat the onslaughts of Rome, and they would show that the same spirit lived in them as in their illustrious sires." Some of the services concluded with singing a new version of the National Anthem:
Ulster will never yield;God is our strength and shield,On Him we lean.Free, loyal, true and brave,Our liberties we'll save.Home Rule we'll never have.God save the King.
That last line is so perfunctory that it provokes a smile.
I am anxious to state the case against Home Rule as fairly as I can, the more so because, as the readers of this book must have suspected before this, I have little sympathy with the die-hard Unionists. I do not believe that they represent Ulster in any such absolute sense as they claim to do, for in the first place they hold only sixteen out of the thirty-three Ulster seatsin Parliament, and in the second place, even in the four counties which are largely Protestant, there is a very strong Nationalist sentiment. My own conviction is that the Orange Societies are being be-fooled by a clique of politicians and aristocrats whose quarrel is not with Home Rule but with the Liberal party. Nobody denies that the funds for the organisation and equipment of the Orange army have been supplied by the Conservative party, whose campaign chest has been sadly depleted by the immense sums needed to keep the agitation going. Certain leaders of that party have done their utmost to foment religious and racial hatred, not because of any religious convictions of their own, nor because of any special sympathy for Ulster, but in the hope of overthrowing the government and stopping the march of social reform. They might just as well try to stop the march of time—and some day, perhaps, they will realise it!
And yet—
These fighting preachers, these uncompromising, wrong-headed, upright old Calvinists, are undoubtedly in earnest. The congregations which sat in grim-faced silence that day listening to this oratory, were in earnest, too. But I cannot believe that, in their inmost heart of hearts, they really dread the subversion of Protestantism. What they dread is, in the first place, some diminution of their supremacy in Irish politics, and, in the second place, some diminution of their control of Irish industry. In other words, the attack they really fear is against their pocket-books, not against their creed. And it is not impossible that their pocket-books may suffer; indeed, I think it probablethat when the Home Rule Parliament has made its final adjustments of revenue, Ulster will be found to be bearing somewhat more of the burden than she now does, though perhaps not more than her just share. But this doesn't make the situation any the less serious, for ever since the world began it has been proved over and over again that the very surest way to drive men to frenzied resistance is to attack their pocket-books. As for the religious bogy, I personally believe most sincerely that itisa bogy. Such danger to Protestantism as exists comes, not from the Irish Catholics, but from the politicians who are using it as a football.
There was a sentence in one of the sermons preached that day to the effect that Irish Protestants laboured to help Irish Catholics to civil and religious liberty, when Irish Catholics were unable to help themselves, and this is a fact which I am sure Irish Catholics will be the last to forget. A century ago, Ulster was as fiercely Nationalist as she is fiercely Unionist to-day; it was in Belfast that the Society of United Irishmen was organised, and its leader was Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Protestant, and its first members were Presbyterians, and one of its objects was Catholic Emancipation. And, as a close to these disconnected remarks, I cannot do better than repeat an anecdote I saw the other day in theNineteenth Century. Some sympathetic neighbours called upon the mother of Sir David Baird to condole with her over her son's misfortunes, and they told her, with bated voices, how he had been captured by Tippoo Sultan, and chained to a soldier and thrust into a dungeon. Baird's mother listened silently, and then a little smile flitted across her lips.
"God help the laddie that's chained to my Davie!" she said softly.
And anybody that's chained to Ulster will undoubtedly have a strenuous time!
TheNews-Letteris the great Belfast daily, and while I was looking through it, Monday, for fear I had missed some of the pulpit and platform fulminations, I chanced upon another article which interested me deeply, as showing the Protestant attitude toward control of the schools. The article in question was a long account of the awarding of prizes at one of the big Belfast National schools, as a result of the religious education examination, and it was most illuminating.
The chairman began his remarks by saying that "nothing is pleasanter than to hear a pupil repeat faultlessly the answers to the one hundred and seven questions in the Shorter Catechism, without a stumble, placing the emphasis where it is due, and attending to the stops," and he went on to report that these one hundred and seven questions had been asked orally of each of 396 children, that there was not a single failure, and that practically all the children were in the first honour list—that is, had answered faultlessly the whole one hundred and seven.
And then another speaker, a clergyman, of course, like the first, told impressively of the meaning of education. It was, he said, the duty of every child to store his mind with all manner of knowledge and to seek diligently to gain information from day to day. But religion was the sum and complement of all education.Without it, all other acquirements would be little better than the beautiful flush upon the consumptive's cheek, the precursor of sure death and decay. He reminded them that even the very youngest there was guilty in the sight of God, for that awful word sinner described them all.
Then a third speaker remarked that while the staff of the school was doing a fine work in teaching the boys and girls to read and write and cast up accounts, that that wasn't nearly so fine as teaching them the catechism and encouraging them to study their Bibles. And then a fourth speaker emphasised this; and then there was a vote of thanks to all the speakers, and the prize Bibles were distributed, and everybody went away happy—at least, the adults were all happy, and I can only hope the children were.
From all which it is evident that the Presbyterians will fight for their schools as hard, if not harder, than the Catholics will for theirs. But to me, the thought of those poor children being drilled and drilled in the proper answers to the 107 questions of the Catechism, until they could answer them all glibly and without stopping to think, is a painful and depressing one. I suppose that is the way good Orangemen are made; but the Catechism has always seemed to me a rickety ladder to climb to heaven by.
I was fortunate enough to witness another peculiar symptom of Belfast's temper, that afternoon, when I went down to the Custom House, which stands near the river. It is a large building occupying a full block, and there is a wide esplanade all around it; and thisesplanade has, from time immemorial, been the platform which any speaker, who could find room upon it, was privileged to mount, and where he might promulgate any doctrine he could get the crowd to listen to.
There was a great throng of people about the place, that afternoon, and a liberal sprinkling of policemen scattered through it; and then I perceived that it wasn't one big crowd but a lot of smaller crowds, each listening to a different orator, whose voices met and clashed in the air in a most confusing manner. And I wish solemnly to assert that the list which follows is a true list in every detail.
At the corner of the building, a reformed drunkard, with one of those faces which are always in need of shaving, stood, Bible in hand, recounting his experiences. At least, he said he had reformed; but the pictures he painted of the awful depravity of his past had a lurid tinge which held his auditors spell-bound, and it was evident from the way he smacked his lips over them that he was proud of having been such a devil of a fellow.
Next to him a smartly-dressed negro was selling bottles of medicine, which, so far as I could judge from what I heard, was guaranteed to cure all the ills that flesh is heir to. The formula for this wonderful preparation, he asserted, had been handed down through his family from his great-great-grandmother, who had been a famous African voodoo doctor, and it could be procured nowhere else. The open-mouthed Belfasters listened to all this with a deference and patience which no American audience would have shown, and the fakir took in many shillings.
Next to him, a company of the Salvation Army was holding a meeting after the explosive fashion familiar all the world over; and at the farther corner, a white-bearded little fellow was describing the horrors of hell with an unction and exactitude far surpassing Dante. I don't know what his formula was for avoiding these horrors, for I didn't wait to hear his peroration.
Just around the corner, two blind men were singing dolefully, with a tin cup on the pavement before them, and straining their ears for the rattle of a copper that never came; and farther along, a sharp-faced Irishman was delivering a speech, which I judged to be political, but it was so interspersed with anecdote and invective and personal reminiscence, that, though I listened a long time, I couldn't make out who he was talking against, or which side he was on. His audience seemed to follow him without difficulty, however, and laughed and applauded; and then a little fellow with a black moustache advised the crowd, in a loud voice, not to listen to him, for he was a jail-bird. I saw the constables edge in a little closer; but the speaker took the taunt in good part, admitted that he had done twelve months for some offence, and thanked the crowd with tears in his voice because they had raised two pounds a week, during that time, for the support of his family. The crowd cheered, and the fellow who had tried to start trouble hastened to take himself off. Thinking over all which, now, it occurs to me that the speech may have been a labour speech, and not a political one at all.
I gave it up, at last, and moved on to where a man was making an impassioned plea for contributions foran orphan asylum. He had a number of sample orphans of both sexes ranged about him, and he painted a lively picture of the good his institution was doing; but how he hoped to extract donations from a crowd so evidently down at heel I don't see. Next to him, a frightful cripple, who could stand erect only by leaning heavily upon two canes, was telling the crowd how exceedingly difficult it was for a rich man to get into heaven. Next to him, a lot of women were holding some sort of missionary meeting; and just around the last corner, a roughly-dressed man, with coarse, red-bearded face, whose canvas placard described him as a "Medical Herbalist," was selling medicines of his own concoction.
He had no panacea, but a separate remedy for every ill; and I listened to his patter for a long time, though obviously he didn't welcome my presence. He proved that slippery-elm was harmless by eating some of it, and argued that plantain, "which ignorant people regarded as a weed, made the best medicine a man could put into his inside," and he proved this proposition by saying that it must be so because plantain had no other known use, and it was inconceivable that the Lord would have taken the trouble to create it without some purpose. He also proved that he was a capable doctor because he was not a doctor at all, but a working-man, and it was the working-man who made the world go round. Inconceivable as it may seem, this ignorant and maudlin talk was listened to seriously and even respectfully, and he sold a lot of his medicines. Medicine seems to be one of the dissipations of the Belfast folk.
The largest crowd of all was gathered before a manwho held the centre of the fourth side of the esplanade, and who was talking, or rather shouting, against Home Rule. He was garbed as a clergyman, and he wore an Orange badge, and he was listened to with religious attention as he painted the iniquity of the Catholic church and the horrible dangers of Catholic domination. His references to King Billy and the Boyne and the walls of Derry were many and frequent, and he had all sorts of newspaper clippings in his pockets, from which he read freely, and though he was very hoarse and bathed in perspiration, he showed no sign of stopping. He intimated that, once Home Rule was established, the revival of the inquisition would be but a matter of a short time, that no Protestant would be allowed to own property, that no Protestant labourer could expect employment anywhere until he had abjured his religion, that their children would be taken away from them and reared in Catholic schools, and he called upon them to arm and stand firm, to offer their lives upon the altar of their country, and not retreat a step before the aggressions of the Scarlet Woman. I don't know how much of this farrago his audience believed, but their faces were intent and serious, and I fear they believed much more than was good for them. I happened upon a song of Chesterton's the other day which brought those strained and intent faces vividly before me: