“IT WAS THE BROAD WINDOW SEAT, IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE MOUNTAINS, THAT TURNED THE SCALE.”
“IT WAS THE BROAD WINDOW SEAT, IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE MOUNTAINS, THAT TURNED THE SCALE.”
“IT WAS THE BROAD WINDOW SEAT, IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE MOUNTAINS, THAT TURNED THE SCALE.”
them and their lawful share of the fire and the newspapers.
“SHE WAS AN AMERICAN LADY.”
“SHE WAS AN AMERICAN LADY.”
“SHE WAS AN AMERICAN LADY.”
Our most salient recollections of the rest of the evening are connected with the velvet delicacy of the lobster soup at dinner, and the tortured bashfulness of the English youth, who crept, mouse-like, into the room after the rest of the small party were seated, and raised neither his eyes nor his voice till the meal was ended. Directly he had finished, he hurried from the room and was seen no more. A lady who sat next us volunteered the information that he always acted just so, and that he spent his days, so far as anyone could guess, in slinking around the mountains. “He’s so shy,” she concluded, “that he’ll scrape a hole in his plate trying to get the last mite of butter off it rather than ask me to passthe cooler.” It appeared that she was an American lady who had come to Renvyle to inquire into the advantages of the Land League and other kindred institutions, which was perhaps why she was in the habit of noticing little things. She certainly seemed to have noticed the Englishman a good deal.
Given a sloping, sunshiny bank of shingle, a mass of yellow lichen-covered rocks between it and a purple-and-emerald streaked sea, a large empty morning, and a cock-shot, there is no reason why one should ever stop throwing stones. That is how my second cousin and I occupied ourselves the morning after our arrival at Renvyle. We had started early, with sketching materials and luncheon, full of a high resolve to explore several miles of coastline, beginning with the famous Grace O’Malley’s Castle, and ending with afternoon tea and well-earned repose.
No one can accuse these papers of a superfluity of local information. We have exercised a noble reticence in this respect, owing partly to a sympathetic dislike of being instructive, and partly also to the circumstance that we never seemed able to collect any facts. We have questioned waiters, and found that they came from Dublin, and bothered oldest inhabitants only to find that they were either deaf or “had no English.” But Grace O’Malley is a lady of too pronounced a type to be ignored, and even our very superficial acquaintance with her history compels us at least to express our regret that such a female suffragist as she would have made has been lost to our century. If she had lived now she would have stormed her way into the London County Council, and sat upon that body in every sense of the word; and had the University of Oxford refused to allow her to graduate as whatever she wished, she would indubitably have sacked the town, and borne into captivity all the flower of the Dons. In the reign of Elizabeth, however, her energies were confined to the more remunerative pursuit of piracy. She is known to have had a husband, but he does not seem to have occupied public attention to any extent, except secondarily, as when it is recorded that “the LadyGrace O’Malley went to England to make a treaty with the Queen, and took her husband with her.” One of her strongholds was this square tower, that looks down with such amiable picturesqueness on the waters of Renvyle Bay, and we were told that on those rare occasions when she condescended to sleep ashore instead of afloat, a hawser leading from her ship was fastened to her bedpost, and the skipper had orders to haul on it if anything piratically promising should turn up.
I think we had begun to discuss this energetic Grace and her probable action in modern politics as we strolled across the fields between Renvyle and the sea. At all events, something beguiled us to sit down upon that slope of small round stones, when we were as yet but a quarter of a mile from the hotel, and then a flaunting tuft of white bladder campion on a point of yellow rock offered itself irresistibly as an object for stone-throwing. As we write this we are sensible of its disappointing vulgarity. The word “sketch,” if not, indeed, “sonnet,” should have closed the sentence;but the humiliating fact remains that we simply lay there and pelted it till we had used up all the available pebbles, and stiffened our shoulders for the next three days, and still the bladder campion flaunted in our despite. We crawled from that too fascinating shingle beach to the grass above it, and stretched ourselves there in heated fractiousness. How hot the sun was! How blue and green the sea! And how enchantingly the purple gloom of the mountains showed between the grey hairy legs of the thistles! And after an interval of healing torpor, how admirable was luncheon!
But after luncheon Grace O’Malley’s tower seemed farther off than ever, and relinquishing the vigorous projects of our morning start, we began to drift along the shore towards the pale stretches of the sands. We dawdled luxuriously across a low headland, where the mouths of the rabbit-burrows made yellow sandy patches in the coarse grass, and we slid down the crumbling slope on to the hard, perfect surface of the sand. Its creamy smoothness had something of theromance of new-fallen snow, and none of its horrors. An insane and infantine ardour possessed us—to run, to build castles, to paddle! We came very near paddling, forgetful of our age, our petticoats, and the fact that no one ever yet was able to paddle as deep as they wanted to. In fact, we resolved that wewouldpaddle, and we set off down the slanting glistening plane towards the far-off line of foam. Here and there the blue sky lay reflected in the wet patches of sand, Achill Island was a cloudy possibility of the horizon, Croagh Patrick and Mweelrea, immense certainties of the north-eastern middle distance, and at our feet were laid lovely realities of long lace-like scarves of red seaweed, flattened out with such prim precision that we expected to find their Latin and English names written beneath them on the sand.
Another fifty yards would have brought us to the water’s verge, when suddenly crossing our path at right angles, we came upon a long line of footmarks, masculine in size, pointed in shape, fraught withsinister suggestion of spying eyes. A group of immense rocks, the leaders of a procession of boulders trailing glacier-wise from the mountains to the sea, easily suggested an ambush, and the footmarks, as far as we could see, led in their direction. The same thought of the hidden watcher struck us both, and instantly and for ever abandoning the paddling scheme, we resolved to follow up the track of the footprints until we had routed the unworthy foot-printer from his lair. Little prods, as of a stick in the sand, accompanied the boot-marks, and at one spot certain rudimentary efforts in both art and literature made me think that the wearer of the boots was guiltless of object in his retreat upon the rocks. Suddenly, however, the marks lost their almost complacent evenness, and became extended and irregular, as if their owner had given himself over to ungoverned flight.
“What did I tell you?” remarked my cousin; “he was rushing off to hide before we should see him!”
We reached the rocks, and, with eyes that must have imparted to herpince-nezthe destructive qualityof burning glasses, my cousin swept their weedy crevices to discover some indication of the spy.
“He must be at the other side,” she began, when our eyes simultaneously fell upon a small white object.
It was a sandwich.
It lay between two big rocks that leaned to each other, leaving just room for a slim person to squeeze through; and looking through the aperture, we saw a long narrow vista of the sands, and on them a solitary flying speck—the Englishman.
THE sound of the mowing-machine awakened us early on the morning that we were to leave Renvyle House Hotel. To and fro the rattle came, with a measured crescendo and diminuendo that slowly aroused our sleepy minds to the consciousness that the tennis ground was being mown, and that it was Monday, and that—this finally, after sluggish eyes had become aware of pink roses swaying in sunshine in and out of the open window—another fine day had been bestowed upon us whereon to make our journey. The clatter of the mowing-machine grew louder, and the smell of the cut grass came in at the window, blending sweetly with the strong language of the gardener to his underling, as the machine was steered in its difficult course among the flower beds.
THE RENVYLE DONKEY.
THE RENVYLE DONKEY.
THE RENVYLE DONKEY.
When we leaned out across the broad window sill, the business was almost finished, and the panniers of a donkey, who was standing on the gravel walk with his head drooped between his forelegs, in a half-doze were spilling over with the short green grass, and the chopped-off heads of the daisies. We stared at the donkey in a kind of bewilderment. The top of his head was tufted like a Houdan hen’s, but stare as we might we could not see his ears, and it was so astonishing a phenomenon that we went downstairs to investigate it.
It was a genuine summer morning at last; the sun shone hotly down on our bare heads as we passed the smooth lawn-tennis ground, with the long alternate grey and green lines ruled on it by the machine, and we stood for a moment or two in the shade of the thick fuchsia arch that led to the old-fashioned garden plot, and listened to the bees fussing in and out of the masses of blood-red blossom over our heads. The donkey was still dozing under his panniers as we came up to him, and we saw beyond any manner of doubting that the only ears he possessed were little circles no higher than napkin-rings, out of which sprouted thick tufts of wool and coarse brown hair. Just then the men neared us with the machine, and we asked them for an explanation.
“His ears was cut off in the time of th’ agitation,” the gardener replied, in a voice that showed that the fact had long ago ceased to have any interest for him, as he emptied the last boxful of grass into the panniers.“He was a rale good little ass thim times, faith he was.”
Probably our faces conveyed our feelings, for the gardener went on: “Indeed, it was a quare thing to do to him; but, whatever, they got him one morning in the field with the two ears cut off him as even with his head as if ye thrimmed them with that mow-sheen.”
We passed our hands over the mutilated stumps with a horror that evidently gratified the gardener. “There was one of the ears left hanging down when we got him,” he proceeded. “I suppose they thought it was the most way they could vex us. They grewn what ye see since then, and no more, and the flies has him mad sometimes.”
We went into breakfast with what appetite we might, and felt what terrible facts had conduced to the circumstance that we, tourists and strangers, were able to take our places in the old Renvyle dining-room, and partake of hot breakfast-cakes and coffee—coffee whose excellence alone was enough to make us forgetwe were in an hotel—as if we, and not the Blakes, had been its proprietors for centuries.
We spent the morning in making a final tour of the house, up and down the long passages, and in and out of the innumerable charming panelled rooms. We have left the library to the last, and now that we are face to face with the serious business of description, our consciences tell us that we are not competent to pronounce on ancient editions and choice bindings. It seemed to us that every book in the tall mahogany cases that stood like screens about the room was old and respectable enough to have been our great grandfather; we certainly had in our hands a contemporary edition of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “History of the World,” not to mention an awful sixteenth century treatise on tortures, with illustrations that are still good, handy, reliable nightmares when the ordinary stock runs short. My second cousin has, I fancy, privately set up a reputation as a book-fancier, among people who do not know her well, on the strength of her graphic descriptions of one massive tome, atreatise on Spain, written in Latin, with gorgeous golden hieroglyphics stamped on its white vellum cover, and a date far back in 1500 on its yellow title-page.
I am sure that Sibbie felt small gratitude to the sulphate of zinc that brought about the complete healing of her sore shoulder, which took place during her visit at Renvyle. Probably never before since her entrance into society had she spent three whole days in a stable on terms of delightful equality with real horses, and with at least two feeds a day of real oats. “Beggars can’t bear heat,” is a tried and trusted saying in Ireland, and it soon became apparent that the moral and physical temperature in which Sibbie had been living had been too high for her. When we went to the hall-door to superintend the stowage of our effects in the governess-cart, we found her on her hind legs, with a stable-boy dangling from her bit, and flat on his back in front of her lay the respectable butler, overwhelmed in the rugs which he had brought out on his arm. We hastened to the rescue;the butler got up, Sibbie got down, and we proffered apologies for her misconduct.
“Oh, thin that one’s the divil painted!” said the stable-boy, speaking, probably, on the principle of “Penny plain, tuppence coloured.” “He went to ate the face off me to-day, an’ I claning out his stall! Faith, ’twas hardly I had time to climb out over the side of the stall before he’d have me disthroyed.”
The miscreant’s appearance was that of a swollen sausage propped on hairpins, and, as having regretfully bade farewell to the hospitable house of Renvyle, we set off down the avenue at a showy canter, we promised ourselves that we would not strain the tender quality of mercy by any philanthropic nonsense of walking up hills.
Our route lay along our old acquaintance the switchback road for two or three miles, and then we said farewell to it, and turned to our left to follow the easterly line of the coast. It was not a bad little road in its way, but it was sufficient to chasten the exuberance of Sibbie’s gaiety before we had travelled veryfar along it; in fact, as a midshipman observed of Madeira, “The scenery was lovely, but very steep.” The coast thrust long rocky fingers into the sea, and we drove across the highly-developed knuckles; that is, if not picturesque, the most practical description that we can give of this stage of our journey. To try to convey the blueness of the sea, the variety and colour of the innumerable bays and creeks, the solemn hugeness of Lettergash mountain that towered on our right, is futility, and a weariness of the flesh. Rather let us speak of such things as we are able, of the dogs whose onslaught from each successive cabin made it advisable to keep a pile of stones in the trap, and justified the time spent in practice at the bladder campion; of the London Pride and the great bell-heather that ably decorated the rocks; and, lastly, the amenities of these are past. This tract of country had a baneful practice of tempting us to pass by a deferential retreat into the ditch, and of then instantly starting in emulous pursuit. On one of these occasions, after a stern-chase of half a mile, in despairof otherwise putting an end to it, my cousin and I pulled up at a moderate hill, and got out and walked, hoping that the cart that had been clattering hard on our heels would now pass us by. Far otherwise; it also pulled up, and one of its many occupants called out in tones of genial politeness: “Ah! don’t be sparin’ him that way, ladies. He’s well able to pull the pair of ye; nourish him wid the whip!”
Our destination was Leenane (pronounced Leenahn), but we had been advised to turn off the main road in order to see the Pass of Salruck. Slowly rounding the flank of Lettergash, we turned our backs to the sea and struck inland again into the now familiar country of lake and heather. We had been told that a fishing-lodge by a lake would be a sign unto us that we had arrived at the by-road to Salruck. Here was the lake, and here the fishing-lodge; but could this be the by-road? If so, it certainly was not promising; in fact, before we committed ourselves to its stony ferocities, my cousin alighted in order to collect information from the peasantry, a taskin which she believed herself to excel. In this instance the peasantry consisted of an elderly man, breaking stones by the side of the road, and the perspiring stare with which he received my cousin’s question was not encouraging. She repeated it. He stared up at the sun, wrinkled his face till it looked like a brown paper parcel too tightly tied with string, and replied, “I’d say it’d be somewhere about a quarther behind three—or thereabouts.”
“No,” said my cousin in her shrillest tones, “I asked you whether that is the road to Salruck?”
“Oh, it will—the day’ll be fine, thank God,” wiping his forehead with his sleeve, “but we’ll have rain on it soon—to-morrow, or afther to-morrow. Ye couldn’t put yer thumb bechuxt the shtarr and the moon lash’ night, an’ they’d reckon that a bad sign.”
“Stone deaf,” remarked my cousin to me in a “Just-Heaven-grant-me-patience” sort of voice; then, pointing towards the hill, “Is—Salruck—over—there?” she slowly screamed.
The echoes squealed the inquiry from rock to rock.Even Sibbie looked round with a cold surprise; but the stonebreaker had not heard.
“Oh, is itthrout?” in a tone of complete comprehension; “Divil sich throuts in all Connemara as what’s in that lake! Ye’d shtand in shnow to be looking at Capt’in Thompson whippin’ them out of it!”
“Thank you,” said my second cousin very politely; “Good morning!”
We thought it better to chance the by-road than to try conversation. It was the first really bad road we had come upon in Connemara; but, though there was only a mile of it, it was enough to throw discredit on the whole district. Half a mile of walking and of pushing the trap from behind brought us to the top of the hill, and when there an equally steep descent was in front of us before we could get down to the level of the little arrow-head shaped bay that thrust its long glittering spike between the mountains of Salruck. To hang on to the back of a trap as a kind of improvised drag is both exhausting and undignified, so much so that we did not drive quite down to the bottom of the valley, but paused on a perch of level ground outside the gates of a shooting-lodge, and asked a woman what the further road was like.
“Indeed, thin, God knows, it’s a conthrairy road,” she said, with a sympathetic glance at our heated faces, “but whether or no ye can go in it.”
We thanked her, but made up our minds to throw ourselves on the kindness of the shooting-lodge, at whose gates we were standing; and the trap and Sibbie having been hospitably given house room there, we were free to explore Salruck. We went down through a tunnel composed of about equal parts of trees and midges, and, following the conthrairy road over a bridge that crossed a little river, we sat ourselves down by the sea-shore and looked about us.
It may be said at once that Salruck is a place which would almost infallibly be described as “spot.” A spot should be wooded, sheltered, sunk between mountains if possible, and, failing a river, a brook of respectable size should purl or babble into a piece of
“DOWN THE HILL OF SALRUCK.”
“DOWN THE HILL OF SALRUCK.”
“DOWN THE HILL OF SALRUCK.”
water large enough to mirror the trees. A church is not an absolute necessity, but is generally included in the suite, and even down to this refinement Salruck was thoroughly equipped. Having formulated this theory to our satisfaction, we addressed ourselves to our duties as tourists. We climbed the heathery Pass of Salruck, a stiff windy climb; we viewed from the top of it the lovely harbour of the Killaries, and mountains and islands innumerable and unpronounceable; we came down again by a short cut suggested by my cousin, of a nature that necessitated our advancing in a sitting posture and with inconvenient rapidity down a species of glacier. The pass happily accomplished, we knew there was but one thing more to be done—the graveyard. Our benefactors at the shooting-lodge had told us how to find our way to it, and without such help we certainly should not have discovered it. It was hidden in the side of a wooded hill, a grassy cart-track was its sole approach, a pile of branches in a broken wall was its gate, and, instead of funereal cypresses, tall ash trees and sycamores stood thicklyamong the loose heaps of stones that marked the graves. At a first glance we might even have thought we had taken a wrong turn and strayed into a stony wood, but the kneeling figure of a woman told us that we had made no mistake. She got up as we came along the winding, trodden path among the trees, and we recognised her as the woman whom we had met on the hill an hour before.
“This is a quare place, ladies,” she said in a loud, cheerful voice. “There’s manny a one comes here from all sides of the world to see it.”
We agreed that it was a queer place, and proceeded without delay into a long conversation. We found out that the high square mound of stones, about the height and length of a billiard-table, was an altar, in which only priests were buried; and she pointed out to us under one of its stones some clay pipes and even a small heap of tobacco, which she told us had been left there by the last funeral for the use of “anyone that comes to say a prayer, like meself.” In fact, all the graves were littered with broken pipes andempty boxes for holding the tobacco—grocery boxes most of them labelled with glowing announcements of Colman’s Mustard and Reckitt’s Blue, lying about in all directions, and almost dreadful in their sordid garish poverty.
“There isn’t one that dies from all round the counthry but they’ll bury him here,” said our friend, “and with all that’s buried in it there’s not a worrum, nor the likes of a worrum in it.”
A little below where we were standing a circle of stones, like a rudimentary wall, stood round some specially sacred spot, and we stumbled over the ghastly inequalities of the ground towards it. Inside the stones the ground was bare and hard, like an earthern floor, and in the centre there was a small, round hole, with the gleam of water in it.
“That’s the Holy Well of Salruck,” said the woman, leaning comfortably against a great ash tree, one of whose largest limbs had been half torn from its trunk by lightning, and hung, white and stricken, above the little enclosure. “There’ll be upwards of thirty sitting round it some nights prayin’ till morning. It’s reckoned a great cure for sore eyes.” This with a compassionate glance towards my second cousin’spince-nez. “But what signifies this well towards the well that’s out on the island beyond!” went on the country woman, hitching her shoulders into her cloak, and preparing to lead the way out of the graveyard; “sure the way it is with that well, if anny woman takes so much as a dhrop out of it the wather’ll soak away out of it, ever, ever, till it’s dhry as yer hand! Yes faith, that’s as thrue as that God made little apples. Shure there was one time the priest’s sisther wouldn’t put as much delay on herself as while she’d be goin’ over to the other spring that’s in the island, and she dhrew as much wather from the holy well as’d wet her tay. I declare to ye, she wasn’t back in the house before the well was dhry!”
She paused dramatically, and we supplied the necessary notes of admiration.
“Well, when the priest seen that,” she went on, “he comminced to pray, and bit nor sup never crossed
THE HOLY WELL, SALRUCK.
THE HOLY WELL, SALRUCK.
THE HOLY WELL, SALRUCK.
his mouth for a night and a day but prayin’; there wasn’t a saint in Heaven, big nor little, he didn’t dhraw down on the head o’ the same well. Afther that thin ag’in, he got his books, and he wint back in the room, and he was readin’ within there till he was in a paspiration. Oh, faith! it’s not known what he suffered first and last; but before night the wather was runnin’ into the well the same as if ye’d be fillin’ it out of a kettle, and it’s in it ever and always since that time. The priest put a great pinance on the sisther, I’m told, but, in spite of all, he was bet by the fairies afther that till he was near killed, they were that jealous for the way he put the wather back. The curse o’ the crows on thim midges!” she continued, with sudden fury, striking at the halo of gnats that surrounded her head as well as ours, “the divil sich an atin’ ever I got.”
We had been slaughtering them with unavailing frenzy for some time, and at the end of her story we fled from the graveyard, and made for the high-road.
The hospitalities of the shooting-lodge did not end with Sibbie. Its hostess was waiting to meet the two strangers as they toiled, dishevelled and midge-bitten, to its gate, and with a most confiding kindness, brought them in and gave them the afternoon tea for which their souls yearned.
WE have never met Julius Cæsar, or the Duke of Wellington, or General Booth, but we are convinced that not one of the three could boast a manner as martial or a soul as dauntless as the sporting curate on a holiday. We came to this conclusion slowly at the Leenanetable d’hôte, and there also the companion idea occurred to us that in biting ferocity and headlong violence of behaviour the extra ginger-ale of temperance far exceeds the brandy-and-soda. Opposite to us sat three of them—not brandies-and-sodas—curates; and our glasses were filled with two of them—not curates—bottles of ginger-ale; and so the manners and customs of both classes were, as itwere, forced upon us conjointly. If our reflections appear unreliable we are not prepared to defend them; they were formed through the blinding mist of tears that followed each fiery sip of the ginger-ale.
The curates, as we have said, were three in number; and comprised three of the leading types of their class—the dark and heavily moustached, the red-whiskered and pasty, the clean-shaven and athletic. The two former sat together and roystered on a pint of claret, which they warmed in the palms of their hands, and smacked their lips over with a reckless jollity and dark allusions to swashbuckling days at Cambridge. The third sat apart from his cloth, among a group of Oxford undergraduates, with whom he interchanged reminiscences, and from the elevation of his three terms seniority regaled them with tales of hair-breadth escapes from proctors and bulldogs, and, in especial, of the enormities of one Greene, of Pembroke, in connection with a breakfast given by a man who had been sent “a big cake from home.” The story was long, and profusely decked with terms of the mostesoteric undergraduate slang, but we gathered that Greene, having become what the curate leniently termed “a little on,” had cast the still uncut cake out of the window at a policeman, upon the spike of whose helmet it became impaled. We have since heard with real regret that the Oxford police do not wear spikes on their helmets; but we adhere to the main facts of the story, and when we tell it ourselves we call the policeman a volunteer. The robust voice of the narrator clove its way into the loud current of the fishing talk, the table paused over its gooseberry pie and custard to laugh, and even the Cambridge curates were compelled to a compassionate smile. They were a good deal older than any of the Oxford clan, and it seemed to us that the superior modernity and flavour of the Oxford stories had a depressing effect upon them. They finished their claret unostentatiously, and talked to each other in lowered tones about pocket cameras and safety bicycles.
It was strange to feel at this hotel—as, indeed, at allthe others we stayed at—that we were almost the only representative of our country, and, casting our minds back through the maze of English faces and the Babel of English voices that had been the accompaniment of our meals for the last fortnight, two painful conclusions were forced on us—first, that the Irish people have no money to tour with; second, that it was Saxon influence and support alone that evoluted the Connemara hotels from a primitive feather-bed and chicken status alluded to in an earlier article. Not, indeed, that chickens are things of the past. Daily through Connemara rises the cry of myriad hens, bereft of their infant broods, and in every hotel larder “wretches hang that fishermen may dine.” Chickens and small brown mutton, mutton and small brown chickens—these, with salmon and trout of a curdy freshness that London wats not of, were theleit-motifof every hoteltable d’hôte, and so uniformly excellent were they that we asked for nothing more.
The whole of the next day was wet, utterly and solidly wet. The great mountains of Mayo on theother side of the bay looked like elephants swathed in white muslin, and the sea that came lashing up the embankment in front of the hotel was thick and muddy, and altogether ugly to look at. We sat dismally in the ladies’ drawing-room, with one resentful eye on the rain, and the other fixed in still deeper resentment on the wholly intolerable man who had taken up his position in front of the fire with a book the night before, and had, apparently, never stirred since. From the smoking-room on the other side of the hall came drearily at intervals the twanglings of a banjo; my second cousin read a hotel copy of “The Pilgrim’s Progress”; the general misery was complete, and I found myself almost mechanically working a heavy shower into a sketch that had been made on a fine day.
Towards evening we began to feel homicidal and dangerous, and putting on our mackintoshes started for a walk with a determination that found a savage delight in getting its feet wet. No incident marked that walk, unless the varying depths of puddles andthe strenuous clinging to an umbrella are incidents, but for all that we returned tranquillised and self-satisfied, and were further soothed by a cloudy vision caught, through the French window of the smoking-room, of blazers and white flannelled legs bestowed about the room in various attitudes of supine discontent. Before we sighted the window we had heard the melancholy metallic hiccupping of the banjo, but just as we passed by it ceased, and a furtive glance revealed the athletic curate, prone on a sofa, with his banjo propped upon the brilliant striped scarf that intervened between the clerical black serge coat and the uncanonical flannels.
“Now the hand trails upon the viol stringThat sobs, and the brown faces cease to sing,Sad with the whole of pleasure. Whither strayTheir eyes now, from whose lips the slim pipes creepAnd leave them pouting——”
“Now the hand trails upon the viol stringThat sobs, and the brown faces cease to sing,Sad with the whole of pleasure. Whither strayTheir eyes now, from whose lips the slim pipes creepAnd leave them pouting——”
“Now the hand trails upon the viol stringThat sobs, and the brown faces cease to sing,Sad with the whole of pleasure. Whither strayTheir eyes now, from whose lips the slim pipes creepAnd leave them pouting——”
misquoted my cousin, who has a slipshod acquaintance with Rossetti.
“I should think they strayed towards the Oughterard umbrella,” I suggested, as we furled the tent of evil-smelling gingham in the hall. “Since the stuff has come away from two of the spikes it has got the dissipated charwoman look that is so attractive.”
When we went to bed that night the rain was still dropping heavily from the eave-shoots, and, in the depressingly early waking that follows an early going to bed, it was the first sound that I recognised. The hotel was silent when we came down, and the coffee-room redolent of vanished breakfasts; the fishermen had evidently betaken themselves to their trade in an access of despair. The waiter was reserved on the subject of the weather; he neither blessed nor cursed, but hoped, with offensive cheerfulness, that it would improve, and we knew in our hearts that he was certain it would not. We watched him enviously as he came in and out with plates, and arranged long battalions of forks on a side table. What was the weather to him, with his house-shoes and evening clothes and absolute certainty of what he had to do next from now till bed-time? We would thankfullyhave gone into the kitchen and proffered our services to the cook, or even to the boots, but instead of that we had to wander to the abhorred ladies’ drawing-room, and there to mourn the fallacy of the statement that Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.
It did clear up in the afternoon, grudgingly and gloomily, but still conscientiously, and we ordered out Sibbie, with a view to seeing how much of the country was left above water. We drove along the Westport road till we had passed the last long bend of the Killaries, and looking across a wooded valley saw the rush of water and jumble of foam above the mouth of the Erriff river that marked the chosen resort of the fishermen. We got a man to hold Sibbie for a few minutes while we went down and stood on the slender fishing bridge, and looked at a solitary angler throwing his fly with the usual scientific grace, and with the usual total absence of result, till we felt it would be kinder to go away. The midges were not perhaps as giant or as insatiable as the Salruck variety,but we heard that night at dinner that they had been enough to drive the whole body of the hotel fishermen back from the river in the morning; and as we looked down the double row of faces, all apparently in the first stage of convalescence after small-pox, we gathered some idea of what their sufferings must have been. One youth, whose midge-bites had reached the point at which they might almost be termed confluent, told us that he had lain down on the ground in a kind of frenzy and covered himself with his mackintosh, and that the midges had crawled in through the buttonholes and devoured him as he lay.
We continued our drive towards Westport, with the river on one side, and on the other great green mountains speckled with thousands of sheep; the road was steep, but we persevered up its long shining grey slope, without any definite intention except that of seeing what was on the other side. We found out rather sooner than we had expected. There appeared suddenly over the top of the hill, where the road bent its back against the sky, the capering figures of threeyoung horses, and at that sight we turned Sibbie sharp round and fled down the hill. The young horses came galloping down after us with manes and tails flying, and visions of another runaway, with the final trampling of our fallen bodies by our pursuers, made us “nourish” Sibbie with the whip in a way that was scarcely necessary. She extended her long legs at a gallop; the trap swung from side to side; it seemed as if the horses gained nothing on us; and as the trees of Astleagh Lodge came nearer and nearer there flashed upon us in an instant the spectacle of a close finish at the hotel door, and the thought of the godsend that it would be to the smoking-room. But the smoking-room was fated not to behold it. As suddenly as the pursuit had begun so did it end. The three colts whirled up a bohireen towards a farmhouse, and we then became aware of a small girl running after them down the road with a stick in her hand. It was only the Connemara version of Mary calling the cattle home, written in rather faster time than is usual, and with a running accompaniment in two flats, supplied by ourselves. Sibbie was not thoroughly reassured even when we reached the hotel, and we drove past it along the road seaward till we reached a point from which we saw the whole of the long exquisite fiord of the Killaries, and beyond the furthest of its dark, over-lapping points the thin silver line of the open sea.
“Eight o’clock breakfast, please, and call us sharp at seven,” were our last words on our last night at Leenane. The final day of our tour had come, and two things remained imperatively for us to do. We had to see Delphi, and we had to accomplish the twenty Irish miles that lay between Sibbie and her home in Oughterard. Energy and an early start were necessary, and eight o’clock struck as we walked into the breakfast-room, expecting to find our twin breakfast-cups and plates stationed in lonely fellowship at one end of a long desert of tablecloth. What we did find was a gobbling, haranguing crowd of fishermen, full of a daily, accustomed energy that made ours seem a very forced and exotic growth.The waiter, who at 9.30 yesterday morning had been servilely attentive, now regarded us with a coldly distraught eye. Clearly he was of the opinion of the indignant housemaid who declared that “there never was a rale lady that was out of her bed before nine in the morning.” Breakfast after breakfast came in, but not for us. We saw with anguish the athletic curate make a clean sweep of the gooseberry jam, and the last of the hot cakes had disappeared before our coffee and chops were vouchsafed to us. Consequently it was a good deal later than we wanted it to be when we went down to the pier and got into the boat that was to take us across to Delphi.
The weather was grey and rough, and we asked the boatmen their opinion of it as we crept along in the shelter of the western shore of the bay, as close as possible to the seaweedy points of rock, the chosen playgrounds of the seals.
“There’s not much wind, but what there is is very high,” said the stroke. “Faith, it’s hardly we’ll get
“EIGHT O’CLOCK BREAKFAST, PLEASE, AND CALL US SHARP AT SEVEN.”
“EIGHT O’CLOCK BREAKFAST, PLEASE, AND CALL US SHARP AT SEVEN.”
“EIGHT O’CLOCK BREAKFAST, PLEASE, AND CALL US SHARP AT SEVEN.”
over to Delphi with the surges that’ll be in it when we’ll be out in the big wather.”
“Ah,na boclish!” struck in the bow, who, judging by his glowing complexion, was of the sanguine temperament. “I’d say it’ll turn up a grand day yet. What signifies the surges that’ll be in it?”
We began to think it signified a good deal when, after a pull of nearly two miles, we forsook the shore, and, turning out into the open water, met the full and allied strength of the wind and tide. The “surges” were quite as large as any that we want to see, and the progress of the boat was like a succession of knight’s moves at chess, two strokes towards the Delphi shore, and one stroke to bring her head to the advancing “surge.” Naturally, we took a long time to get across, and when we got there we had still a walk of two miles before us; only that it really did “turn up a grand day” our hearts would have failed us, as we felt the hours slipping from us, and remembered the journey that was before us in the afternoon.
Delphi was called so by some genius who saw in itslake and overhanging mountains a resemblance to the home of the oracle. The boatmen were not able to remember when the little lake had been converted and rebaptized, or who the missionary had been, but rumour pointed to a Bishop and a Dean of the Irish Church, who, within the recollection of old inhabitants, had been the first to impart civilisation to the Killaries; who had built the charming fishing-lodge at the head of the lake, and had fished its waters, attired in poke bonnets and bottle-green veils. We had not been more than five minutes there before we understood therationaleof the bonnets and veils, and wished that we had been similarly protected from the blood-thirsty midges, that made our wanderings by the lake and our lunch by the river a time of torture.
But the stings of the midges have died away, and the recollection of the glassy curve of the river, the mirrored wild flowers at its brim, the classical grove of pines and slender white birches, and the luminous purple reflection of the mountain lying deep in thestream beneath them are the things that come into our minds when we think of our last day in Connemara. As a companion picture, belonging, too, to that day, I seem still to see my cousin’s sailor hat flying from her head like a rocketing pheasant, in a gust that caught us as we crossed the Killaries on our return journey. It crested the “surges” gallantly for a few minutes, but finally filled and sank with all hands, that is to say, two most cherished hatpins, before we could reach it.
That moment was the beginning of the end. One of the most important members of the expedition had left it, and the general dissolution was at hand. The regret with which we paid our hotel bill was not wholly mercenary, but was blended with the finer pathos of farewell. The cup of bovril of which we partook when the first five miles of our journey had been accomplished was “strong as first love, and wild with all regret”; it was the last of a staunch and long-enduring little pot, and economy required that no scraping of it should remain at the final unpackingof the hamper. Gingerbread biscuits that had been hoarded like gold pieces were flungen masseto a passing tramp before even the preliminary blessing had flowed from her lips; and the last of the seedcake was forced into Sibbie’s reluctant mouth. The frugalities of a fortnight were dissipated in one hour of joyless, obligatory debauch.
It was eight o’clock that evening when, after five or six hours’ driving, we came down the long slope of the moor outside Oughterard. The mountains of Connemara were all behind us, in the pale distant guise in which we had first known them, and the only things that remained to us of our wanderings in their valleys were the governess-cart and the tired, but still dauntless, Sibbie. Even these would not be ours much longer; the door of Murphy’s hotel would soon witness our final separation, and to-morrow we should be, like any other tourists, swinging into Galway on the mail-car.
“Well, at all events,” said my cousin, as we said these things to each other, “we have converted Sibbie.