Part 17
“My dear,” said I to my companion, “let us talk and drown the outcries of this shameless and abandoned woman.”
Fortunately I had a companion with whom conversation is always as easy as it is interesting. We began to enjoy our own pleasant humour very much, and did not allow a moment’s silence to fall between us, lest—
We were travelling by North Wall; and when the placidity of the Liffey odoriferously enfolded us, we emerged cheerfully on deck to join some friends, for the sake of whose agreeable company we had chosen this particular route.
The dear little lady who was about to be our hostess we found charitably administering dry biscuits to a very dilapidated-looking, green-faced young woman with the unmistakable appearance of—but again, no!
“Poor Mrs. Saunders has been feeling so faint,” said our friend, with the cheerful sympathy of the good sailor.
We were introduced to the languid one.
“Poor thing,” we said, “you do look bad! Have you been ill?”
One is very crude in one’s questions on board ship.
“Oh, no; not ill!” She flung the suggestion from her with an acid titter. Then rolling a jaundiced eye upon us:
“Were you ill?”
“Oh, no,” we said; “we quite enjoyed the passage.”
The sufferer turned her glance from our brutality to the sympathetic neighbour.
“If I could have slept,” she said plaintively. Then she looked back darkly at us. “There were some horrible people in the cabin next me, who would talk, and talk, and talk.”
“Well,” we exclaimed, and it was indeed in all innocence, “you were at least better off than we were. For there was a creature in the cabin next to us—the most disgusting—the most unbridled—”
It was not till we saw the dreadful rage in her eyes that we realized! It is a horrible little anecdote, but it started us laughing even before we set foot on the quays.
[Sidenote: IRISH VIGNETTES]
The next incident partakes of the tragi-comedy in which every Irish problem is set. All Ireland stands like one of those figures of mimes on an old drop-curtain; a laughing face behind a tragic mask—or indeed the reverse. We laughed while our hearts grew sad at the sight of a stalwart devil-may-care individual in a frieze coat who strolled up to a group of jarvies while we sat in the cab waiting for our luggage to be loaded. The whole business was conducted with a fine artful carelessness. Now one, now another of the standing group of cab-drivers would lurch up against him of the frieze coat or clasp him jovially by the hand, and there would ensue a passage of coppers from one grimy palm to another. Then out of a deep side-pocket of the frieze coat a black bottle would be drawn, with all the _désinvolture_ of the conjuring trick. No doubt some four yards away on either side stood a policeman; the illicit traffic was conducted, so to speak, under his nose. But, splendid fellow as he is, is he not, too, an Irishman? He knows when to sniff in another direction.
‹And here we may parenthetically remember a charming and typical spectacle which once met our eyes in the County Wicklow: a local police station, a large placard commanding that all dogs shall be muzzled, and five or six curs of different low degrees snapping untrammelled in the sunshine at the feet of two smiling members of the constabulary.
Some brutish Saxon member of our party stops to point out the discrepancy.
“Unmuzzled, is it?” says the elder policeman genially. “And, begorra, so it is, ma’am. But, sure, isn’t that Tim Connolly’s little dog? Sure, what ’ud we be muzzling him for? Thim orders is only for stray dogs!”›
* * * * *
[Sidenote: DRIVEN IN STYLE]
We drove away across the cobbled Dublin streets at a hand gallop. Whether the poor animal that drew us had to be kept at this unnatural speed lest it should collapse altogether, or whether our “jarvey” had had more than one pull at the black bottle I know not; certainly we went in peril of our lives. Shaving off corners, striking the edge of the curb, oscillating violently from side to side, the antique vehicle threatened at every leap and bound to break into fragments like a pantomime joke. The Dublin cab is a thing apart. From the musty straw upon which your feet rest, to the dilapidated blue velveteen cushion upon which you leap, to its wooden walls and rattling windows, you would not find its like upon any other point of the globe. It searches you to your least bone socket; and the noise of its career deafens your wails on the principle of the “painless extractor” at the fair, who blows a trumpet for every wrench.
It was useless for us to thrust our heads out of the window, like “Bunny come to town”; the frightful clatter of an arrest, a grunt, and a start at fresh speed were the only result. We trembled in every limb and so did the poor horse, as we were at last flung out in front of our hotel with a jerk that nearly broke the bottom of the cab in two.
We tendered what we knew to be considerably more than the fare. The driver surveyed it and looked at us, then rolled a disgusted glance back to the coins, and dropped them into his pocket.
“Is that all? And me afther dhriving you in such style!”
XXXVIII
Humours pursued us during our brief sojourn in the hotel. We are very fond of that hotel. It is associated with the repeated charm of its hospitable reception on each of our visits. We were glad to see we were given the same set of rooms as on a previous occasion; and when we found the same broken lock on the door, we felt indeed that we were among old friends.
When our tea was brought—we were lying down to rest—we had however to ring and protest.
“Look at this spoon!” we exclaimed dramatically.
The soft-voiced maid looked at it quizzically.
“What is it?” Then she smiled. “It’s apt to have been in the honey, by the look of it,” she observed dispassionately.
“Please take it away,” we said, “and bring another.”
She thought us strange and dull of wit. There was a clean napkin on every plate. But—no doubt with a mental “Ah, God help us. Travellers is queer folk!”—she departed, we feel sure, no farther than the passage, there to wipe the honey off on the inside of her apron.
[Sidenote: A GARDEN IN MEATH]
The next day saw us landed at a small wayside station in the rich flat land of Meath, where we were met by a charming old-fashioned “turn out,” a handsome waggonette and a sturdy pair of carriage horses. At least we thought the waggonette old-fashioned and delightful, in these motor times; but it seems it was on the contrary new and wonderful.
The coachman surveyed us tentatively two or three times while our divers small goods were being collected, magisterially directing the footman with the butt end of his whip. Presently he broke into speech:
“Will you be noticing the carriage, sir?” he remarked, addressing the head of the party. “Her Ladyship’s just bought it. I chose it for her meself, so I did. It’s a grand contrivance. You can have it the way it is now, and it’s real comfortable, isn’t it, sir? But sure, you can turn it into an omnibus. And you’d never believe now, how many it would hold. I drove six ladies to a ball in it the other night, and not one of them crushed on me—And fine large ladies they were,” he observed admiringly.
“We do wish he would not tell every one that,” observed one of the “large ladies” a little later. “Every time he’s gone to the station in the new waggonette this summer he’s told that story.”
But she was quite good-humoured and amused. Indeed, her largeness was of the beautiful order. It was no wonder the coachman was proud of conveying it uncrushed.
The gardens where these hostesses dwelt were pleasantly green and flowery. There was the usual high-walled garden. Villino Loki, with its absurd terraces, can never dream of attaining to such an enclosure of antique charm. For if we walled in the Kitchen and Reserve Garden at the foot of our hill we should wall out the moor from below, and obstruct our sweeping vision from above. But my heart yearns to an old walled garden. A place quite apart, with its mingled odours of herb and flower and ripening fruit; with its perpetual murmur of bees, its tangled walks, its old bushes of Rosemary and Lavender, its mossy Apple-trees, its crisp Parsley beds, its tumble-down greenhouses.
[Sidenote: CURBED AMBITIONS]
This particular walled garden was a very good specimen of its kind. It was here that our ignorance first made acquaintance with the invaluable Cosmia; that treasure of the herbaceous border that keeps on blooming in the face of adversity from June till November. There was also a huge bed of Salvias, one sheet of gentian blue. ‹Why cannot we grow Salvias like that?› It ran at the foot of an overgrown, very old rose plot, the trees of which had developed into fairy-tale luxuriance. And opposite, across the gravelled path, which from old associations we prefer to any other species of walk, was a field of Snap-dragon against the high wall where the leaves of the plum branches were reddening as they clung. Duly mossed was this old wall, and richly lichened; overtopped by the great trees without. These swayed to the mild Irish wind, with long, pleasant, choiring sounds, the rooks cawing as they circled in them. It was small wonder that I should have felt content and at peace as I stood there—if only my heart had not swelled with envy over those Salvias! But one can’t be the owner of an Italian Villino on a Surrey Highland and encompass the antique peace of a centuries-old Irish home. One must be reasonable—as a French governess of our youth used to say to us when she began her most lengthy harangues. “_Voyons—de deux choses l’une ..._”
The park was typically Irish, and possessed some wonderful trees. Amongst others a chestnut, four or five immense branches of which, sweeping to the ground, had taken root again and started fresh trees, forming a singular tropical-looking grove. How children would have delighted in such a leafy palace, roofed in and pillared of its own stateliness!
* * * * *
Memories of laughter pursue us at every stage of those weeks. There was the visit to a neighbouring castle; a genuine old castle this, but irretrievably “restored” in that bygone period of history when Pugin reigned supreme.
[Sidenote: AN IRISH CHATELAINE]
It was Sunday, and we found the Châtelaine—a little lady renowned for her vivacity and charm—out in the field with her children and her lord, energetically teaching hockey to the young men and women of the village. Her little boy was running up and down after her, wringing his hands and ejaculating, “Mamma, ye’ll be kilt! Mamma, ye’ll be kilt!” to perfectly regardless ears.
In a whirl of energy we were rushed into tea; and, while drawing off her loose gloves and flinging them at random into a corner, our hostess’s tongue, which was as nimble as her little feet, never ceased wagging:
“I hope you don’t mind the smell! Oh, it’s a terrible smell. But it’s only the dogs, ye know. We’ve been washing them. They’re sick, poor things. Not infectious, ye needn’t be a bit afraid. Only mange, or something. It’s the sulphur in the soap, ye know. Come in, come in!—Oh, I do hope we have got something fit to eat! Katie, Katie! ‹Katie’s me eldest daughter› Katie, what have we got? Ah, it’s horrid!—Ah, I don’t know what’s the matter with them.—Yes, it’s a fine big room. We were dancing here last week. You wouldn’t think it to look at it now, would you? ’Pon my word! I was thinking to meself that night, ‘It’s a queer world we live in, with all those saints looking down at us with their bare legs, and we with our bare backs!’ Oh, yes, they’re very grand old paintings, I dare say! But there is a deal of bare legs about them.—Will you have any more? Ah, no, ye can’t eat it!—I don’t wonder, I can’t meself.—Will you come into the garden? I’d like to be showing you the garden. Where’s me gloves?—Where’s me yellow gloves? Katie, did ye see me yellow gloves? Ah, never mind! This way.—I’ve been making a new herbaceous border. Ah, ’pon me word, if they’ve not gone and locked the garden door! Sunday’s the mischief! Never mind, I’ll ring the bell. Green! Green, Johnny Green, are ye there? Is Mrs. Green there? Is Patsy there? Where’s young Condren? Ah, they’re all out! But I’ll not be beaten.—Maybe I’ll get it open. Will ye push, now? I’ll turn the handle. Give a good shove. It’s an old lock. Ah, devil a bit of it! Will ye give me your stick.—No, thank ye. I’d rather hit it meself.”
Even to her it was impossible to continue talking, while she was, as she herself would have expressed it, “laying on to the garden door.” Scarlet, panting, dishevelled, but still completely fascinating, she desisted at last and handed back the stick with a smile and gasp, and a resigned: “Ah, I clean forgot, I see how it is now. They’re all off to the funeral of the priest’s brother’s sister.”
XXXIX
From the rich plains of Meath to the barren lands of Galway, it is a far cry and an unforgettable journey. The country grows more and more desolate, and grand in desolation, as one approaches the Atlantic. There was an orange sunset that evening, over an illimitable stretch of bog, a vision of savage, haunting beauty that went with us into the darkness of the fast closing day like a strain of wild music.
Ireland has always been as a living creature to her children. She has taken, in their fanciful minds, a distinct personality. To get such a glimpse of her as that, is to understand the passionate ardour of fealty which she has had the power to inspire; to understand how she has come to be “Kathleen na Hoolihan,” and “My dark Rosaleen,” to those poet hearts. We were speeding now to that very corner of land from which her younger lovers have chiefly sprung.
It was pitch dark when we alighted at a town which had once been large and prosperous and was now forlornly sunk in decay; mute witness, like so many others, to that act of tyranny—blunder and crime—the effects of which England can never wipe away.
Our kind friends had ordered “a carriage from the hotel” to meet us. We had a long cross-country drive before us. Looking doubtfully by the light of the station lamp at the two emaciated animals that were to draw us, we wondered, in our tired brains, if two bad horses are not worse than one. It had begun to drizzle rain, a fine soft rain that is like a caress in the air.
[Sidenote: A TYPICAL JARVEY]
If anything could beat the Dublin cab, it was that Galway carriage. We set off lurching and rattling; and soon, the wind catching us from over the fields, the rain began to strike in across the open windows. To have a window up seemed the simple remedy; but things simple elsewhere are not so in the West of Ireland. One window was as impossible to lift out of its socket as the oyster out of its closed shells, for it was strapless. We fell upon the other strap and instantly the window shot outwards at right angles, with the evident intention of casting itself on the road, had we not held it despairingly by its shabby appendage. If you have ever tried to hold a window in that position by its strap you will know how agonizing is the process. The driver was hailed.
“Look here! Your window’s loose!—You’d better stop and put it back.”
The slogging trot of the horses slackened, and over his shoulder the man of Galway demanded:
“Is it the windy on the left, or the wan to the right of ye?”
“The left, the left! Oh, do be quick!”
“The left, is it? Sure, isn’t that the wan with the sthrap?” He jerked his reins and clucked at his horses. What more could we want? Wasn’t that the one with the “sthrap?”
With great difficulty, with imminent risk to the life of the window and our own safety, we got the recalcitrant pane back into its socket, and discovered that by dint of judicious manipulation, and a tight hold of the “sthrap,” it was possible to shelter the most neuralgic of the party.
A ten Irish miles’ drive along the stoniest of roads, through complete darkness—for there was only a partial glimmer from one carriage-lamp half the way, which then became extinct altogether—it is something of an enterprise! But it was worth it to find such a welcome at the end!
[Sidenote: A GALWAY DEMESNE]
A “Gothic” mansion, dating from the early part of last century, Kilcoultra is outwardly a very grand pile and stands nobly in the midst of a rolling park, reclaimed from the wild stony land of Galway. And inside, the first impression is like stepping in to the glories of a missal page. The whole house is homogeneous and entirely successful in its mediæval colouring. On the walls are gorgeous enamel blues, peacock greens or yet carmine crimsons appropriately set with fleurs-de-lis, maltese cross or some other conventional device in gold; ceiling and cornices are richly illuminated to correspond. To find this glow of colour in the midst of the melancholy greys and greens of the western landscape, under the low drifting cloud-ridden skies, has a great charm; it has a poetic Maeterlinckian atmosphere.
There is something too of the delicate sadness of an old romance in the lives of these kindly ladies who rule so wisely over the lands left to them by their brother—the last of his name. He was a man round whom justly centred unusual hopes and ambitions. Now he, who had so great a heart and so splendid a mind, lies in the ruined chapel in the park, alone. The chapel is roofless. It is a nobly solitary and fit resting-place for one who was nobly apart from the petty aims of his contemporaries; who lived and died true to his ideals; whose work still prospers in the freed lands of his people. He gave up much for Ireland, and Ireland gave him nothing at all in return ... except that wonderful sleeping-place with the changing sky overhead.
They say there is no such word in the Irish language as gratitude, and yet—
My Kilcoultra hostess drove me round the property on the day after my arrival, and drew the pony to the standstill on a height that finely dominated the park and house. When I had duly admired the view she pointed with her whip to a little white cottage that stood a few yards away and began a kindly tale of the old woman who had long lived there and had but recently passed away.
“When I’d come round to see her, I used to find her, times out of number, leaning over the wall, gazing down at Kilcoultra. Always she’d be leaning over the wall, staring down at the house. And one day I said to her, ‘Mary, what in the world makes you stand there like that?’ And she answered me, ‘I’m looking down on the roof that shelters me lovely master!’”
“My lovely master!” A fragrant thing to have become to the poor that live on your soil! When we reach a sphere where things are judged by different standards and higher measures than we can now conceive, how far will not such a title outweigh any paltry worldly honour!
Yet if the memory of its lost master dominates and haunts all Kilcoultra house and lands, there is nothing to sadden one in the thoughts it inspires; and our stay there is altogether full of charm and pleasure.
Not only are the ladies a fund of anecdote, racy of the soil; not only do they live delightfully in touch with their peasantry, with eye and ear ever ready to catch the humour and the pathos about them; but they are cultured, far-travelled beings. Not much in the outer world escapes their knowledge and shrewd apprehension.
Home topics, however, are what appeals to their visitors most.
[Sidenote: IRISH WITS]
“Carrie,” the younger sister will say to the elder, “I heard Whalen the guard, and Tim Rooney the porter, at Athenmore Station, talking together. And Tim is thinking of making up to a young lady, you know, and I suppose he’s always talking about it, for Whalen was saying to him just as I came up: ‘’Pon me word, I wish you were married, and had your family rared on me!’ They had a great jollification at our station the other night,” she goes on, turning to us. “And they brewed the punch in the station bell! Whalen’s a very humorous man,” she proceeds. “They used to stop the express from Galway at Athenmore when required; but there were complaints of the delay and orders came from Dublin it wasn’t to be done on any account. But it’s a recent regulation and everybody doesn’t know about it. And the other day there was terrible work, for there was Father Blake and the Doctor both counting on it for an urgent sick call—dying, they said the poor man was.
“‘You’ll have to stop the train for this once, Whalen,’ says Father Blake.
“‘I’ll maybe save him yet,’ says the doctor.
“‘I couldn’t, yer riverence,’ says Whalen; ‘it’s as much as me place is worth. Don’t you be askin’ me, doctor. It ’ud be me ruin. The company’s very strict.’
“‘Think of his poor soul,’ says the priest.
“‘I’ll hold ye responsible for his life,’ says the doctor.
“‘Wirra, I can’t,’ says poor Whalen, and calls up Tim. ‘Tell his riverence, Tim,’ says he, ‘tell his riverence and the doctor that I can’t be disobeying orders.... And begorra, she’s due this minute! Up into the signal-box with you. And down with that signal, so the express can get by,’ says he. And as Tim starts off at a great pace, Whalen shouts after him, ‘And I’m sure I hope ye’ll get it to work, Tim, for it’s terrible stiff it is, that same signal, and it at danger!’
“Well, whether he had winked at Tim, or what, but Tim worked and worked.
“‘I can’t get it to move,’ he says. ‘Will you come up yourself, Mr. Whalen, sir, and have a try?’
“And, oh,” says Miss Margaret, in fits of laughter, “the way the two of them went on in that signal-box, and the way Whalen pumped and pulled, and at last he cries, ‘There’s no help for it, it’s stuck! And sure the company can’t blame me, if the machinery’s out of order,’ says he. ‘Well, there’s wan good thing, your riverence, the thrain ’ull have to stop now, anyhow.’”
We laugh a good deal during those pleasant meals at Kilcoultra. Not one dull moment does the house hold for us, and we don’t want any better company than that of the two dear ladies.
“We’ve got,” Miss Caroline, the elder, explains to me carefully, “a very careful coachman, a very steady man, so you needn’t be the least nervous driving out with us. He was selected, indeed, because he could be trusted. It wouldn’t do for us unprotected women, you know,” she says in all seriousness, “to be risking our necks with a tipsy coachman.”
Two days we are driven by this paragon. The third day there sits a stranger on the box.
“I hope,” says Miss Carrie apologetically, “that you don’t mind his being out of livery.”
“The fact is, Regan had an accident last night,” explains Miss Margaret. “He fell into the old gravel pit going back home and cut his head open, and——”
“It was my fault entirely,” interrupts Miss Caroline in distressed accents. “I had to send him in to Galway town, and to tell him to wait and bring back Captain Blake. And that meant loitering an hour.”
“Dear, dear!” Miss Margaret clacks her tongue. “That was very unfortunate! He—such a steady man! But an hour in Galway town...!”
“It’s only what might have been expected,” Miss Caroline concludes. “I blame myself entirely.—I generally,” she adds, turning to me, “avoid leaving him any time in the town, you know.”
[Sidenote: A STEADY MAN]
And the best of it is that Regan remains in their minds “the steady man.” How impossible it is for the stranger to understand Ireland and Ireland’s ways! How much humour must you have—and what unlimited patience! There is nothing, of course, that so conduces to patience as a pleasant sense of humour.