CHAPTER XIII

_In Galway with a Camera_

Galway comes as near as any Irish city that I ever saw to rivaling New York's East Side for dirtiness, and yet a fair-minded observer would be compelled to tell Galway, when the time for awarding the leather medal came, that she was only a close second.

This does not so much mean that New York is dirtier than I realized she was when I was there as it means that Ireland is not as dirty as English and Irish and American writers have pictured it.

Perhaps in some parts of Ireland the pig still sleeps in the room with the family, but as a faithful chronicler of actual sights I cannot say that I saw such a sight in any of the numerous slums and villages I visited in twenty counties. I hate to destroy so poetic an illusion.

There was something idyllic in the thought of a pink little pig and a pink little boy, the two of them the pink of neatness, lying side by side in a happy-hearted Irishman's cabin, while pig and boy and Irishman starved to death, but the truth was something better than that. There were pigs and little boys, but they were not neatly pink and they were not starving, and the old man did not swing a shillelagh or sing songs as I was passing by.

Shillelaghs were never so plentiful as they are now, but they are made to supply the foreign demand for them, and the Irishman is amused and perhaps a bit contemptuous as he sees Americans, with never a drop of Irish blood in them, buying shillelaghs to take home for the sake of sentiment.

I wish I might write that I saw evidences of destitution on every side--it would please the sentimentalists--but I did not. There were beggars, but not so many as I had feared I would see, and they did not chase me any harder than youngsters have chased me in City Hall Park in New York demanding a cent to buy sterilized milk.

In Sligo I was followed by a poor woman carrying a baby, and as she raised her hand for alms her shawl dropped off and disclosed her nakedness to the waist, but I was assured by a Sligo gentleman that she was a professional beggar from out of town, and that possibly the baby was not hers, and I know for a fact that she went to a public house with the money I gave her.

And all the time I was fumbling in my pocket for coppers she was wishing me happy days. She stands out in my recollection as the most abject beggar I saw.

But in Galway there is dirt and squalor and it is picturesque. There in the Claddagh one meets with old hags who are hideous enough and Spanish looking enough to have just left Velasquez's studio, where one can imagine them posing as models for some masterpiece of the great realist.

Barefooted they are, and the homely ones have a great desire to be photographed. Many and many were the pretty women I saw in Ireland, but my camera recorded but few of their lineaments, while I was asked more than once by plain women to take their pictures.

One nailed me as I was passing her vegetable shop in the Claddagh. She was cross-eyed, poor thing, and in a land where pretty features are as plentiful as blackberries, she was plain, but she besought me to take her picture.

Now, when a woman asks you to photograph her you don't feel like refusing her, and I was too much of a novice to make a feint at snapping the shutter and passing on, so I stopped and tried to see a picture in the carrots and cabbages that were displayed at the door.

Such a simpering, conscious face as she displayed! I tried to engage her in talk so that she would at least look naturally homely, but it was no use. Every time my finger strayed up to the little lever her lips would become set in a smile, one eye would look at the camera and one would look at me, and she would become the incarnation of consciousness.

At last I snapped her and passed on. After that I took good care to hurry past plain women.

The day before, at a railway station, I had gone in to get a bit of lunch and discovered that one of the waitresses was a little beauty. The thought came into my head, What a model for "An Irish Beauty," just as one of the others, who had no claim to beauty, said, "Take me picture?"

I told her that I was not a professional, looking all the while at the pretty one, but she suggested that I take all three waitresses just for fun, and in order to get the beauty at any cost I assented, and the girls stood in expectant attitudes.

The beauty was so luscious looking that the other two were simply obliterated in the finder, and I felt myself lucky at having such a chance to carry away a permanent impression of Irish maidenhood.

My hand was raised to the lever, in another instant the face would be mine, but just then the door opened and a man came in to buy a measly sandwich.

One of the girls left the group--I could see that in the finder, but I snapped hastily and then looked up.

It was the beauty.

I have the other two. They are undeveloped.

In the Claddagh a pretty little child came up to me and asked me to take her "piccher," hoping for some coppers in payment.

I nodded my head to her, but a barefooted derelict ahead of me heard her request, and wheeling around suddenly bade the child be off and offered to pose for me herself.

Velasquez would have jumped at the chance, but I am not Velasquez and I shook my head and hurried on.

The vehemence of the old woman's vituperative assault on the little girl had collected a lot of loungers of both sexes, and I was besieged for pictures, the pretty little girl saying incessantly, "I as't you firrst. I as't you firrst. I as't you firrst."

I managed to make her understand that if she walked on far enough I would take her picture, and only one other heard her, another little girl who was pretty enough to grace a film.

These two kept on, while the others dropped away when they saw I was adamant.

And when my models were far enough from the others to enable me to get them before it was suspected what I was at I snapped them and put my hand into my pocket to get up a couple of coppers and found nothing but a sixpence.

Of course the children could not change it, and I could not very well divide it, so I appealed to some fishermen who were lounging on the quay, asking them if they could give me coppers for a sixpence.

They gave me to understand that both coppers and sixpences were strangers to them, and evidently felt that, as a "rich American" I could easily give each child a shilling. But this would have been to get the whole pack on me, for they already smelt money and were coming up.

So I gave the sixpence to the one who had first spoken to me and told her to keep fourpence for herself and to give tuppence to her little friend.

I'm afraid they came to blows over it. As for me, I left the picturesque Claddagh and saw it no more.

It was that same morning that I had seen the entire population lining one of the narrowest streets in that part of Galway, and there I got shot after shot of the picturesque groups.

I asked what they were waiting for, and one of the mackerel selling and barefooted Velasquez women told me that an American circus was coming.

I felt it was worth waiting to see an American circus in Galway.

The circus was called "Buff Bill's Wild West Show." Not Buffalo Bill, mind you, but Buff Bill.

For a long time I waited and at last my patience was rewarded.

I knew just what it would be. There would be fifty or sixty cowboys on their broncos, a bevy of female sharpshooters, and the Deadwood stage; and for the circus part of it an elephant or two and the $10,000 beauty, followed up by dens of wild beasts and representatives of all the countries of the world.

At last music was heard. The band was approaching. Around a bend in the street came the usual crowd of small boys and girls running ahead.

Then came a yellow wagon, with a cowboy band discoursing the latest New York favorite.

Next came one dreadful dwarf, made up as a hideous clown. Behind him rode an ordinary negro, not costumed in any special manner. He was enough novelty as he was.

And behind these two rode a man of the toothpowder vender type, with long hair, _boiled shirt_, sombrero, and no necktie.

He was Buff Bill.

And that made up the parade.

It was worth waiting for, if only to see what it is that constitutes a wondrous spectacle to a small boy.

Fifty years from now some prosperous Chicagoan will take his grandson to see a four-mile parade of some great circus of the period, with half a hundred elephants, a thousand noble horsemen, and scores of gilded chariots; and when the small boy voices his rapture the old man will say with sincerity:

"It's pretty good, I suppose, but you ought to have seen the circus that came to Galway when I was a boy of eight. That beat any circus I've ever seen since. I couldn't sleep for weeks thinking about it."

XIV

_The New Life in Ireland_

No one can be in Ireland long without realizing that when sturdy, practical John Bull forcibly married dreamy Hibernia, with her artistic temperament, it was a very foolish marriage, and as a good American I could have predicted trouble from the very start. John Bull is accustomed to be obeyed at the drop of the hat, and Hibernia, for all her dreaminess, is a lady of spirit and will not become a willing slave.

John Bull has no more knowledge of the real needs and capabilities of this Irish wife of his than the average American has of the real needs and capabilities of an Indian, and the result of the union has been a series of bickerings that show John up in his worst light and that do not serve to call out the most agreeable aspects of his unfortunate wife's nature.

He suspects her, and what good woman will stand being suspected by her husband without resentment? In her temperamental qualities--qualities that could be cultivated to express something noble--he sees only idleness and shiftlessness. He treats his wife as a child, and the wife who is treated as a child becomes a mighty poor mother.

That Hibernia is a failure as a mother is shown by the fact that thousands of her sons are still willing and even anxious to leave her instead of staying and showing by their industry and sobriety and willingness to make the most of the opportunities that undoubtedly exist in Ireland, that they are capable of developing and governing their native land without interference of any kind from John Bull.

Ordinarily I'm quite opposed to divorce, and I know that Catholics abhor it, but it seems as if Hibernia ought to get a decree against John Bull on the plea of incompatibility of temper. And I wouldn't advise Hibernia to rush into marriage again after she gets her freedom.

But through what courts she is to get her decree is beyond my knowledge. She's a most attractive lady and she has fertile farms and some say undeveloped mines, and there is certainly land enough, setting aside the fact of ownership, to support all the sons who have stayed by her.

Every Irishman in America who loves Ireland, and I can't imagine that there are any who do not, ought to advise against further immigration. Ireland needs every able-bodied man to help carry on the work there is to do--a work that the Gaelic League is doing so much to foster.

The Gaelic League with its fostering of the artistic spirit that is dormant in the Irish nature, and that already finds expression in the weaving of rugs and in embroidery and in bookbinding and the making of stained glass, and the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, with its introduction of modern scientific methods of farming, its model hospitals and schoolhouses and dwellings--these movements are waking great interest among the younger people. And Ireland cannot afford to part with a single man or woman from now on.

The study of Gaelic increases year by year, and whereas in former times Irishmen, subdued by the English spirit, punished their children if they were caught talking Gaelic, now Irishmen encourage them and they are freely learning Gaelic in all parts of Ireland. This movement cannot help revivifying a national spirit.

In a railway carriage I talked with some young women who, with their brothers, were returning from a three days' fast and an all night vigil at a little village near Bundoran. They were of course Roman Catholics. They asked me if I was going to the national festival about to be held in Dublin, the Oireachtas, and when I found out what it meant I told them that I was, and asked them if they were members of the Gaelic League.

"Indeed we are," said one, and her eyes glowed with enthusiasm as she said it.

"And do you speak Gaelic?"

"Oh, yes. We've learned it, you understand, learned it since growing up."

They were heart and soul in the new movement that it is hoped will regenerate and cultivate and spiritualize Ireland, and while I was talking to them and felt their sincerity and ardor, I was sure that the Gaelic League was doing more than all the politicians ever could.

It is not the Catholics only that have joined this movement; it is non-sectarian. I talked with a young drug clerk in a northern town and he "had the Irish" (could talk Gaelic), and wrote his name in Gaelic characters, but he was a Protestant. He offered to give me a line to a well-known Dublin literary man, which shows how democratic the movement is.

To-day you'll meet with a land-owning aristocrat who is interested in what the league is doing, and to-morrow you'll meet a jarvey who is learning Gaelic, and the next day a young lady of gentle birth who is teaching the poor children of the neighborhood how to weave rugs, and then you'll meet an artist who was formerly a land owner and a Protestant, and who was one of the first to sell his property to his tenants under the Wyndham act--and being an artist and not a business man he got ruinous prices for it--and has been forced ever since to rely on his brush for his support. He, too, is heart and soul in the movement.

Now when the yeast permeates the lump to such an extent there is bound to be a rising--but of the peaceful kind.

"Pat," in his "Economics for Irishmen," says, "Were I a priest, I should, I think, regard it as a sin on my soul every time a young person emigrated from my parish while I might have shown him how he could have made an excellent living at home."

It must strike every American, no matter whether he is a Protestant, an atheist, an agnostic, or a Roman Catholic, so long as he is open minded, that the size and evident costliness of the churches in the country districts is out of all proportion to the costliness of the houses of the peasants.

In a poor community money that is put into costly bricks and stone that might have been put into books and bread is money inadequately expended, even if Ruskin rise from his grave to contradict me. A better temple to God than a granite church is a granite constitution, and the light of health and sanity and cheerful industry in the eye of an Irish lad is better than the light of a thousand candles.

This is not a question of religion, but of common sense. If all the money that has been spent upon the extra embellishment of churches of all denominations in Ireland had been spent on the physical and educational and moral betterment of Irishmen, they would have ceased to emigrate long since.

But this is thin ice, and as I can't swim I'll give up the skating on it until the weather is colder.

But the priests are also interested in this Gaelic revival of which Americans have already heard so much, and which is non-sectarian and non-political. And the nuns are doing a blessed work all over Ireland.

Let me close this somewhat serious chapter--one can't help being serious in Ireland when he sees that her regeneration is at hand--with a parable that I made all by my lonesome:

Once there was a man who had a sugar maple, and there being a demand for maple sugar he allowed the sap to run early and late, and disposed of the sugar thus obtained. But there came by a man who said:

"Why, you're ruining that tree. The sap that is being made into sugar for the whole United States is the life blood of that green old tree. If you keep on, your tree will wither and die."

And the man took the advice and the tree renewed its youth.

Close up the sap holes and keep in the sap, for the sap is the life blood of Ireland, and we in America have learned how to make sugar out of many things--even out of beets--and we no longer need the Irish young man. But the old tree needs her young blood in order to keep her fresh and green.

Transcriber's Note:

Archaic and inconsistent spelling and punctuation retained.