Part 10

The first was the loss of a diamond star, to recover which Scotland Yard, much concerned, put forth detectives and established a network of theories. It was subsequently found under the owner's bed. The second was less showy but more acute, a purse lost while shopping. Scotland Yard (not perhaps without a memory of the diamond star) was guarded, but still sympathetic. Several purses had been brought in; would the owner describe hers? The owner now asks us to believe that on being confronted with this question she found herself unable to remember what her purse was like. Then perhaps she could mention the sum of money it contained? Lamentable to relate, on this point also memory was a blank. After so flagrant a breakdown the ordinary individual would have ended the interview in the lockup, but the claimant of the purse, in addition to being young and lovely, was by no means ordinary. As a matter of fact she was invited to try again, and this time was enabled to say that she believed the purse had a hole in it. Further details of the interview were withheld, but we were given to understand that though the purse was not restored, the excellent relations with the officials remained unimpaired.

The third catastrophe was the loss of a dressing-bag, containing much of value, and forgotten, in the customary way, in a cab. This was a trifling matter; a mere occasion for a morning call at Scotland Yard, where the officials, with the special and protective smile reserved for this family, produced the bag. It was taken airily home in a hansom, its recovery was announced to an admiring luncheon table, and the peculiar success of the family with Scotland Yard was discussed.

"But where is the bag?"

And even with the words came the grey dawn of the discovery that the bag had once more been left in the hansom.

To follow the subsequent events would be an unkindness. It is enough to indicate that even Scotland Yard and its special smile were on this occasion of no avail.

To lose things by accident is, as we all know, calamitously easy, to lose them designedly is not only difficult but takes nerve and, at the right moment, want of principle.

There was once a red silk parasol, of the genus known to the trade as an _en tout cas_, which, literally translated, meant that in sunny weather it was cumbrous and heavy, and that during showers it wept tears of indelible maroon upon its possessor. It passed through an unloved youth into an abhorred middle age, with a crooked nose, a swelled handle, and a mottled complexion, unfit for society, yet not sufficiently decayed for a jumble sale. I and another went to Dublin for a week, and on starting found that the red umbrella had been put on the car by the servants, who held it in high esteem. We did not give it a thought; it would, of course, return upon the car to its lair in the back hall. As the train moved out into sunlight the red umbrella revealed itself, looming upon us through the netting where a careful porter had placed it. Not as yet recognising the hand of Fate, we lightly regarded it, and determining that it should be left in the train, straightway forgot its existence until an equally attentive porter placed it respectfully in our cab in Dublin. Had we kept our heads we should have offered it to him, murmuring something about having no change. Like most inspirations, this, unfortunately, did not occur to us till some five minutes later, but it suggested the idea of giving it to a housemaid, and on this understanding it accompanied us to our destination. During a week it disgraced our host's umbrella stand, and during that week we discovered that the housemaid, who, from the first, was quelling, was a Plymouth Sister, and would probably have regarded such a gift as an attempt to sap her religious convictions. When, on departure, it was deliberately forgotten, it was the Plymouth Sister who snatched it from the umbrella stand and breathlessly hurled it into our cab. It was obvious that to throw it out of the window in streets crowded with traffic would merely have involved a heavy fee to an inevitable rescuer; we reserved it for the window of the train, confidently, even enjoyably. Yet, such was its inveteracy, in the train the spell of forgetfulness again held us. The moments when it was remembered were precisely when the train stopped at stations, or the windows were blocked with fellow passengers, who would probably have pulled the communication cord to retrieve it. As we neared the long bridge of Athlone a final resolve was made. The network of big girders glided by, the broad Shannon glittered far below. The red umbrella shot like a spear through the girders and dropped out of sight. "So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur--"

The train crept into Athlone Station and there entered upon a prolonged wait among roomy and silent platforms. We exulted at leisure over the reel umbrella. A hurrying foot was distantly heard; doors opened and shut in rapid succession down the length of the train. We disinterred our tickets. The door of our carriage was opened and a heated boy put in his face.

"Did anny one here lose a red umbrella?"

It was the supreme moment in a duel with Destiny.

I replied to his question with a firm and simple negative.

*CHILDREN OF THE CAPTIVITY*

The road to Connemara lies white across the memory, white and very quiet. In that far west of Galway, the silence dwells pure upon the spacious country, away to where the Twelve Pins make a gallant line against the northern sky. It comes in the heathery wind, it borrows peace from the white cottage gables on the hill side, it is accented by the creeping approach of a turf cart, rocking behind its thin grey pony. Little else stirs, save the ducks that sail on a wayside pool to the push of their yellow propellers; away from the road, on a narrow oasis of arable soil, a couple of women are digging potatoes; their persistent voices are borne on the breeze that blows warm over the blossoming boglands and pink heather.

Scarcely to be analysed is that fragrance of Irish air; the pureness of bleak mountains is in it, the twang of turf smoke is in it, and there is something more, inseparable from Ireland's green and grey landscapes, wrought in with her bowed and patient cottages, her ragged walls, and eager rivers, and intelligible only to the spirit.

Over in England there are clustered cottages half buried in rich meadows, covered with roses to the edge of their mellow roof tiles, shaded by venerable and venerated trees, pleasant resting-places for the memory. From one of them comes forth a mild-faced elderly woman in a mushroom hat, the embodiment of respectability and hard work. If you talk to her you will be impressed by her sincerity, her reticence, her reverence for cleanliness, and further, as the conversation progresses, by her total lack of humour, and her conscientious recital of details not essential to the story. You will admire and like her, and she will bore you; so will her husband, with the serious face and sober blue eyes, and you will be ashamed of being bored.

Approach one of these lonely cottages on a Connemara road, and you will find it crooked without quaintness, clumsy, dirty, distressful; yet there will come forth to you round the manure-heaps in front of the door a human being, probably barefooted, and better skilled in Irish than in English, who will converse with you in the true sense of the word, that is to say, with give and take, with intuition, and with easy and instant sense of humour. While you talk to her you can observe two elderly women in red petticoats and black cloaks advancing on the long road from Galway, carrying heavy baskets from the market: their eyes are quick, their faces clearly cut and foreign-looking. Were it in your power to listen to what they are saying, you would be entertained as you have seldom been, by highly seasoned gossip, narrative, both humorous and tragic, and wide and exhaustive criticism. A cart lumbers by, loaded with men and women, their teeth, one would say, loosened in their heads by the clattering and jolting, but their flow of ideas and language unshaken. The two women in the cloaks have arrived at a juncture at which they must stand still in the ecstasy of the story; the narrator shoots out a spike of a thumb, and digs her auditor in the chest to barb the point of the jest as it is delivered. The recipient swings backward from the waist with a yell of appreciation, they hitch their cloaks on their shoulders, and enter on the Committee stage of the affair as they move on again.

One might safely say that this bare and still country carries an amount of good talk, nimble, trenchant, and humorous, to the square mile, that the fat and comfortable plains of England could never rival. It has been so for centuries, and all the while the sons and daughters of Connemara have remained aloof and self-centred, hardly even aware of the marching life of England, least of all aware that Ireland holds the post of England's Court Jester. Others of their countrymen, more sophisticated, more astute, probably less agreeable, have not been slow to realise it. Perhaps they would have refused the Cap and Bells had they known the privilege entailed.

"As for our harps," said the Children of the Captivity, "we hanged them up upon the trees that are therein." That was when the songs of Zion were required of them in the strange land, and the strong Euphrates saw their tears. The sympathy of all the centuries has been theirs for that poignant hour; yet, as far as can be known, they were spared an extremer pang. It is nowhere recorded that the people of the strange land made any attempt to sing the songs of Zion to the Children of Israel.

When the Children of Erin hang up their harps in the Babylon of to-day, the last thing they wish to emulate is that passionate silence of the Israelites. They hang them up as those do who enter in and possess the land, and the songs of Zion have not faltered on their lips. A captive race they may be, but their national desire to "take the floor" has remained unshaken. They have discovered that an Irish brogue has a market value, and the songs of Zion have gone through many editions and held many audiences, since the days when Tom Moore exploited his country in London drawing-rooms. The moment of bitterness is when the English become fired with the notion of singing them for themselves.

Perhaps it comes about from English love of a theory, especially an hereditary theory, that has been handed down to them, well-thumbed by preceding generations. They have established a theory for the Irish, and particularly and confidently for Irish humour, and from owning the theory there is but a step to becoming proprietors also of the humour. Myself, when young, was nourished upon a work named "Near Home," and in the edition current at the time, I remember that the Irish were indulgently described as "a merry people, and fond of pigs." The hereditary theory could hardly have been better summarised. The average Englishman owns an Irish story or two, and is genially certain of his ability to tell it, with all necessary embellishment of accent and expression. As often as possible he tells it to an Irishman.

Elusive as running water is the brogue of the Irish peasant; hardly attained even by those who have known its tune from childhood. They, at least, know how it ought to be, and with this knowledge in their hearts, they have to sit in dreary submission while the stage Irishman convulses the English audience; they must smile, however galvanically, when friends, otherwise irreproachable, regale them with the Irish story in all its stale exuberance of Pat and the Pig, or expound for their benefit that epitome of _vieux jeu_, the Saxon conception of an Irish Bull.

As to Irish Bulls, it could be explained, were it of any avail, that they convey a finer shade of meaning than the downright English language will otherwise admit of.

"If ye were to be killed crossing a fence ye'd be all right!" said a looker-on to one whose horse had turned head over heels in the middle of a level pasture, "but if ye were killed on the flat o' the field ye'd never hold up your head again!"

Here was the effort of the true impressionist to create an effect regardless of the means.

"Jerry was a grand man. When he'd be idle itself he'd be busy!"

Had the author of this commendation merely said that Jerry's industry was unceasing, he would have been unassailable as to diction, but he would have left his audience cold. It is a melancholy fact that the English mind contrives to miss the artist's intention, and fastens unalterably on the obvious contradiction of terms.

As in converse, so, and with deeper disaster, is it in literature. There is scarcely a week in the life of the English comic papers that is guiltless of some heavy-handed caricature of Irish humour, daubed with false idiom and preposterous spelling, secure in its consciousness of being conventional. It is better to accuse a man of having broken a commandment than to tell him that his sense of humour appears to you defective, so, leaving that branch of the subject open, I will only mention that there are alive many excellent people who will never, on this side of the grave, be convinced that the Irish peasant does not say "indade" for "indeed," "belave" for "believe," or "swape" for "sweep." Inborn and ingrained knowledge of such points is essential; if, among many anomalies, a rule can be found, it seems to be that in an Irish brogue the diphthong "ea" changes to "a," as in "say" for "sea," while the double e remains untampered with; thus you might hear a person say "I was very wake last week."

Writers of fiction have done much that is painful in dealing with Irish people. Thackeray's Captain Costigan spoke like a stage edition of a Dublin car-driver, which is not what one would expect in a gentleman who, according to his own account, "bore his Majesty's Commission in the foighting Hundtherd and Third," and his introduction of Arthur Pendennis as "a person of refoined moind, emiable manners, and a sinsare lover of poethry" is not convincing or even very amusing. It is strange that the error of making Irish ladies and gentlemen talk like their servants should to this hour have a fascination for novelists. It is not so very long since that, in a magazine, I read of a high-born Irish Captain of Hussars, who, in a moment of emotion, exclaimed: "Howly Mither av Hiven!"

Dealing with present day writers is treading on delicate ground, and it is with diffidence that one arraigns one of the most enthralling of living story-tellers. Few of his works have been more popular than "Soldiers Three," yet to me and others of my country, it is the narratives of Private Mulvany that give least pleasure. "Gurl" for girl, "Thimber" for timber, and "Quane" for Queen, are conventions that have unfortunately proved irresistible; they are taken from a random page or two, and there is no page free of such.

But, after all, right or wrong, pronunciation and spelling are small things in the presentment of any dialect. The vitalising power is in the rhythm of the sentence, the turn of phrase, the knowledge of idiom, and of, beyond all, the attitude of mind. A laborious system of spelling exasperates the reader, jades the eye, and fails to convince the ear. If, in illustration, I again quote Mr. Kipling, it is because of the conspicuousness of his figure in literature; he can afford to occupy the position of target, indifferent alike to miss or bull's-eye.

Stripped of its curious and stifling superfluities of spelling, a sentence of Mulvaney's runs thus:

"Oh, boys, they were more lovely than the like of any loveliness in heaven; ay, their little bare feet were better than the white hands of a Lord's lady, and their mouths were like puckered roses, and their eyes were bigger and darker than the eyes of any living women I've seen."

With the exception of "the like" there is nothing in the wording of this panegyric that would even suggest it had been uttered by an Irishman. To stud the page with "ut" and "av" instead of "it" and "of" is of no avail. Irish people do not say these things; there is a sound that is a half-tone between the two, not to be captured by English voices, still less by English vowels. The shortcoming is, of course, trivial to those who do not suffer because of it, but want of perception of word and phrase and turn of thought means more than mere artistic failure, it means want of knowledge of the wayward and shrewd and sensitive minds that are at the back of the dialect.

The very wind that blows softly over brown acres of bog carries perfumes and sounds that England does not know: the women digging the potato-land are talking of things that England does not understand. The question that remains is whether England will ever understand.

*SLIPPER'S A B C OF FOX-HUNTING*

"A is for Alphabet. Faith! I'm in dhread It's hardly I'll battle it out up to Z."

"B is for Buck. Your best howlt is the spurs, And make sure they're dhruv home When ye're goin' through furze."

"C is for Check. If ye go any faster Ye'll be apt to be dhrawn into chat, With the Master."

"D was the Dhrain that the fox got inside in. Bad luck to the cowardly shkamer for hidin'!"

"E came from England, and wanted no guide. Now he's larning the lie o' the bogs, From inside!"

"F is Full Cry. And it's hard to say which This lad or the hounds Lets the powerfullest screech!"

"G stands for Geese. Look at Gollagher now, And himself in the thick of a Family Row!"

"H is for Horn. The few that can blow it Are born to the thrick, Just the same as a poet!"

"I is meself. No great shakes, as you see, But there's more than one gerr'l Is wishin' for me!"

"J is Jog Home. A dhry misht from the say Very often comes on, Just to soften the way!"

"K is the Kick that killed Kinahane dead. I'd be sorry to mention The words that he said!"

"M is the Master, Blaspheemious of habit; If you would catch hardship Cheer hounds to a rabbit!

"And L is the Lep That he threw in the passion. Be cripes! But thim dogs Got their 'nough of a thrashin'!"

"N was a Nanny-goat up on the hill. Faith! Some o' thim puppies Is hunting her still!"

"O's the Obstackle Tim met in the way. But the mare being free He got no great delay."

"P was the Price of a nate little bin That the foxes ate over and over agin. And bedad! if it comes to a Quarrel,

(that's Q) I'll back Biddy Burke To out-hucksther a Jew!

"R is for River. Young Reilly kept cool. If ye give him fair warning Young Reilly's no fool.

"And S was the Saxon That gave him the warning. I'm thinkin' he'll hardly be dhry Before morning."

"T is a Tenant About to vacate The site once well filled by his Family Sate.

"And U's the Umbrella That spilt the poor fella. What call have owld women To want an Umbrella?"

"V's the Vet. A nate surgeon, he'll 'knife it and chance it'! And he'll 'cut out the work' Without using his lancet!"

"Here's the Wrecker, and Earth Stopper, Bowld Willy Roche. Sure they say a fried egg's the one thing He can't poach!"

"I sthruggled this long time And couldn't find one Dacent, sportsmanlike word That thim letters begun.

"But at all events X is the finish of Fox. His Y Z ye can't see He's to ground in the rocks!"

_Printed by Ballantyne & Co. Limited, London_

* * * * * * * *

_*BY THE SAME AUTHORS*_

SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M. With 31 Illustrations by E. OE. SOMERVILLE. Crown 8vo, 6s.

ALL ON THE IRISH SHORE: Irish Sketches. With 10 Illustrations by E. OE. SOMERVILLE. Crown 8vo, 6s.

THE REAL CHARLOTTE Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.

THE SILVER FOX Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.

AN IRISH COUSIN Crown 8vo, 6s.

SLIPPER'S A B C OF FOX-HUNTING By E. OE. SOMERVILLE, M.F.H. With Illustrations in Colour by the Author. 4to, boards, 10s. 6d. net.

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