Part 2
The more elementary needs of the establishment were coped with by a henchwoman from the village below, a middle-aged and taciturn widow, wearing a red-checked shawl over her broad chest, a smaller red shawl over her head, an excessively short red homespun skirt, and pampooties. In the early hours of the summer morning her step, muffled in cowhide, traversed the house weightily; in due time followed the entrance of the stable bucket, borne with a slow stride that showed to admiration the grey woollen ankles under the short skirt: her eye rested askance, and not without saturnine humour, upon the weakling of a later civilisation who still lay in bed. As the bucket was set down a deep and serious voice uttered the monosyllable "bath," as colourlessly as the bleat of a sheep, and, with the exit of her sallow face and dreamy blue eyes, the strange, arduous, trifling day began.
Breakfast was not its least achievement, prepared by our own hands at a turf fire that added an aroma of its own to the coffee, and delicately flavoured the hot milk. Owing to a scarcity of saucepans the eggs must be boiled in a portly iron pot and fished from its depths with the tongs, and through all, and impeding all, went the flushed pertinacity of the amateur toast-maker. Dinner was a more serious affair, a strenuous triumph of mind over matter and over the Widow Holloran, a daily despair, by reason of potatoes whose hearts remained harder than Pharaoh's, and chiefly by reason of the dearth of pie-dishes.
"Why wouldn't ye ax Miss O'Regan down in the town for the loan of a pie-dish? Sure she's full up of pie-dishes." This remarkable information came from Mrs. Holloran, but was not acted upon.
After twenty four hours of the ministry of the Widow Holloran, we found the conclusion forced upon us that the Simple Life was far more complicated, and infinitely more exacting than the normal existence of the worldling. To us, nurturing a sulky flame in a gloomy pile of turf, the truly Simple Life resolved itself into two words: good servants. Even the least of Miss Gerraghty's nieces would have been a Godsend; the thought of mutton chops, procurable at any instant, all but brought a dimness to the eye that foresaw a dinner--the third in succession--of American bacon and eggs that tasted of fish. It was in one of the long May twilights that we were waited upon by the man who had, on the hearthrug of Marino Cottage's Front Sitting-room, offered us mutton, sweet as sugar. This time he offered not mutton, but sheep; he produced a sort of subscription list, and invited us to put down our names for any piece we might prefer of an animal which was at the moment nibbling the dainty grass among the boulders. We subscribed, with a shudder which was, as it proved, superfluous. The subscription list did not fill, and two days afterwards we were told that the matter had fallen through, and if we wanted "buttcher's mate" we must telegraph to Galway.
I have heard, in another part of Ireland, described slightingly as "a wild westhern place in Cork," of a somewhat similar, but more elaborate process. "When they goes to kill a cow there, they dhrive her out through the sthreet, and a man in front of her ringing a bell, and another man with her, and he having a bit o' chalk (and it _should_ be a black cow). Every one then can tell what bit of her they want, and the man dhraws it out on her with the chalk. But it _should_ be a black cow." I think it was a relative of this butcher who, when remonstrated with about his meat, on the ground that it had not been properly killed, replied unanswerably, "I declare to ye, the one that had the killing of that cow was the Lord Almighty."
Meals at the Lodge were not things done in a corner. Sheep cropped the grass to the edge of the window sill, village children loitered observantly on their way to the well, tall brindled dogs, in whom must lurk some strain of the old Irish wolfhound, gnawed sapless bones in the porch, as in an accustomed sanctuary. The cuckoo, that pretended recluse, passed and repassed in clumsy flight, even perching on the roof of the house, and sending a hoarse and hollow cry down the chimney. Sitting on the rock ledges in the long morning, the chiefest concern of idleness was to note his short and graceless flittings from boulder to wall, his tactless call, coarsened by nearness and the lack of illusion. Not thus does the spirit voice poise the twin notes in tireless mystery, among the wooded shores of Connemara lakes.
Below the Lodge, to the south-east, the restless sand has smothered many a landmark, obliterated many a grave. Lie down in it, it is a soft bed; let it slip through your fingers, dry and fine and delicate, while the sea line is high and blue above you, and the light breaker strikes the slow moments in rhythm. Saint and oratory, cloghaun and cromlech, lie deep in its oblivion, their memory living faintly and more faintly from lip to lip through the years; around the saints their halos still linger, pale in this age's noonday, and the fishermen still strike sail at the corner of the island to the little crumbling tower that is supposed to mark the grave of Saint Gregory.
The ridge of the island runs in table lands of rock, dropping in cliffs to the sea along its south-western face. These heights are level deserts of stone, streaked with soft grass where the yellow vetch blazes and a myriad wild roses lay their petals against the boulders. Yet even these handmaids of the rock are not the tenderest of its surprises. Look down the slits and fissures as you step across them on a May day, and you will see fronds of maiden hair climbing out of the darkness and warm mud below. A month later they will be strong and tall above the surface; the clots of foam may often strike them when, below their platform, the piled-up Atlantic rolls its vastness to the attack, with the cruel green of the up-drawn wave, with the hurl of the pent tons against crag and cliff. But for us, on that May morning, land and sea lay in rapt accord, and the breast of the brimming tide was laid to the breast of the cliff, with a low and broken voice of joy.
The walk here became finally and definitely a steeplechase, and those not bred in Galway had better think twice before attempting an Aran stone wall; indeed, when five feet of ponderous and trembling stone lattice work has to be dealt with, the native himself will probably adopt the simple course of throwing it down, building it up again or not, according to the dictates of conscience. If the explorer survives two hours of this exercise, he will have reached the fort of Dun AEngus, built in days when Christianity, a climbing sunrise, was as yet far below the Irish horizon. Of its kind, it is reputed to be as perfect as anything in Europe, but it is an unlovely kind. Three invertebrate walls of loose stones, eighteen feet high and fifteen feet thick, sprawl in a triple horseshoe to the edge of a cliff, which, with its sheer drop of three hundred feet to the sea, completes the line of defence. The innermost of the three ramparts encloses a windy plateau where, in times of siege, the Firbolg Prince AEngus, son of Huamor, probably enjoyed the society of all the cattle in the island, and of an indefinite number of wives. The outermost rampart girdles eleven acres of rocky hillside, and here the unwearied savage labour constructed a chevaux-de-frise by wedging slabs and splinters of stone into every crevice. Hardly now, in the intelligent calm of sight-seeing, can the invader make a way through the ankle-breaking confusion, where, in the gloaming centuries before St. Patrick, bloody hands clutched the limestone edges in the death stagger, and matted heads crashed dizzily down, in unrecorded death and courage and despair.
After those days Danes and Irish and English plundered in their turn, but the stillness of the rock and the loneliness of the sea closed in again on the islands, while on the mainland rebellion and conquest alternated in a various agony, and the civilisation thrust on Ireland was a coat of many colours, dipped in blood. These Aras of the Sea rest in their primitive calm, nurturing a strong, leisurely people, with the patience and hardiness of the rock in their blood; equipped physically for any destiny, equipped mentally with the quick financial ability and shrewdness of the Irish, yet slow to imitate, slow in the adoption of what others initiate, regarding, I fear, their country as the invalid and ill-used wife of the British ogre, a wife of the admired Early Victorian type, unoriginative, prolific, and unable to support herself.
Looking down from Dun AEngus there is little expression of the three thousand lives that are hemmed in this floating parish. No wheel is audible along the nine miles of Irish moor; the other two islands lie gray and still, rimmed by fawning and flashing tides, lifeless save where the smoke of burning kelp creeps blue by the water's edge.
It is a pleasant descent to the village of Kilmurvey, down through the buoyant air of the hill side; the grass steals its way among the outposts of rock, till the foot travels with unfamiliar ease in level fields. Near Kilmurvey the Resident Magistrate's house shows a trim roof among young larch and spruce, a miracle of modernity and right angles after the strewn monstrosities of the ridge above; passing near it, a piano gave forth a Nocturne of Chopin's to the solitude, a patrician lament, a skilled passion, in a land where ear and voice have preserved the single threads of melody, and harmony is as yet unwoven.
With its barbaric novelties of colour, its wild, red-clad women, its background of grey rock, its glare of sunshine, Aran should be a place known to painters, but at the first sight of even the sketch book the village street becomes a desert; the mothers, spitting to avert the "bad eye," snatch their children into their houses, and bang their doors. The old women vanish from the door steps, the boys take to the rocks. As it is the creed of Aran that any one that has his "likeness dhrew out" will die within the year, it seems unfeeling to urge the matter upon them. Here and there the mission shilling makes its convert; an old woman braced herself to the risk on the excellent ground that she would probably die before the year was out, and might as well make the most of her chances. She found the idea highly humorous, and so did several of the neighbours.
Our departure from Aran was not out of keeping with the general run of events there. Struggling with painting materials, plants of maidenhair fern, and the usual oversights and overflows of packing, scantily enveloped in newspaper, we made our way on foot from the Lodge to the bay below it, a distance of some two or three hundred yards, and there embarked, attended to the boat by Mrs. Holloran and her next of kin--in other words, a crowd of some twenty deeply interested persons. We had shoved off and were moving out towards the steamer over the transparent green deeps of the bay, when I remembered the little boy who had driven our portmanteaux down to the beach in a donkey cart, and I flung a shilling to one of the next-of-kin in settlement of the obligation. We saw the emissary present the tribute.
"He'll not take it!" was shouted from the shore.
I protested at the full pitch of my voice to the effect that he must not allow his magnanimity to interfere with his just dues, that I was very glad to give it to him.
"He'll take three!" travelled to us like a cannon ball across the translucent water.
Nothing travelled back. Nothing, that is, except the Galway steamer, which presently flapped its paddles into the falling tide, and took us away to regions where we ourselves were natives, and viewed the tourist with a proper hauteur.
Meditating on those May days, winnowed now of their husk of culinary difficulties, they seem the most purely lonely, the most crowded with impressions, that could befall. Habituated to the stillness of West Galway life, these stillnesses were vast and expressive beyond any previous experience of mine; in the shadeless brilliance, the bare grayness, I breathed a foreign and tingling air. The people's profoundly self-centred existence has "no thoroughfare" written across it; lying on the warm rocks, they see Ireland stretched silent, enigmatic, apart from them, and are content that it is so. Their poverty is known to many, their way of thought to a few; they remain motionless on the edge of Europe, with the dust of the saints beneath their feet.
*PICNICS*
A kettle seated decorously on a kitchen range is far less likely to be smoked than one propped precariously on a heap of smouldering sticks. It is also ordained by the forces of civilisation that it shall eventually boil; a point by no means to be taken for granted in the matter of the sticks. A sparcity of saucers, an apostolic community of teaspoons; no one would suspect the hidden humour in such disabilities if confronted with them at an ordinary "At Home," and however excellent the appetite brought to bear upon a chicken pie at a luncheon party, in the lack of knives and forks it would scarce nerve its possessor to eat with his fingers. And yet, so skin deep a fraud is civilisation, the chicken bone to which, through the years, I look back most fondly, was gnawed, warm from the pocket, on the top of one of the Bantry mountains.
The first picnic in which I clearly recall taking part was, like many that succeeded it, illicit. It unconsciously adhered to the great and golden precept that picnics should be limited in number and select in company. It consisted, in fact, of no more than four, which, with a leggy deerhound, a turf fire, and the smoke from the turf fire, were as much as could be fitted in. Why a ruinous lime-kiln should have been chosen is not worth inquiring into. It probably conformed best with those ideals of cave-dwelling, secrecy, and rigorous discomfort that are treasured by the young. We were, indeed, excessively young, and should have been walking in all godliness with the governess; two of us at least should. The other two were turf-boys, who should have been carrying baskets of turf on their backs into the kitchen, and submitting themselves reverently to the innumerable oppressions of the cook, who, they assured us, had already pitched them to the Seventeen Divils three times that same day. The lime-kiln was sketchily roofed with branches, thatched with sedge and was entered by the hole at which the smoke came out. It was a feat of some skill to lower oneself through this hole, avoid the fire, grope for the table--a packing-case--with one toe, and thence fall on top of the rest of the party. Except in the item of sociability I do not think that the deerhound can have enjoyed himself much; he spent most of the time in dodging the transits of the kettle, and it was our malign custom to wipe the knives on his back, in places just beyond the flaps of a tongue as long and red as a slice of ham. What we ate is best forgotten. Something disgusting with carraway seeds in it, kneaded by our own filthy hands, lubricated with lard, and baked in a frying pan in the inmost heart of the turf smoke. The drink was claret, stolen from the dining-room, and boiled with a few handfuls of the snow that lay sparsely under the fir trees round the lime-kiln. Why the claret should have been boiled with snow is hard to explain. I think it must have been due to its suggestion of Polar expeditions and Roman Feasts; subjects both of them, that lent themselves to learned and condescending explanation to the turf-boys. Afterwards, when the elder turf-boy, Sonny Walsh, produced a pack of cards from a cavity in his coat that had begun life as a pocket, and dealt them out for "Spoilt Five" it was the turf-boy's turn to condescend. "Spoilt Five" is not in any sense child's play; its rules are complicated, and its play overlaid with weird usages and expressions. For the uninitiated it was out of the question to distinguish kings from queens, or the all-important "Five-Fingers" from any other five, through the haze of dirt with which all were befogged. The turf-boys knew them as the shepherd knows his flock, and at the end of the game had become possessors of our stock-in-trade, consisting of a Manx halfpenny, a slate pencil with plaid paper gummed round its shank, two lemon drops, and a livery button.
This was a good and thoroughly enjoyable picnic, containing within itself all the elements of success, difficult as these may be to define, and still more difficult as they are to secure.
I remember an August afternoon, and a long island that lay sweltering in a sea of flat and streaky blue. Two heated boatloads approached it at full speed, each determined to get there first, and equally determined not to seem aware of any emulation. Simultaneously the keels drove like ploughs into the hot shingle, the inevitable troop of dogs flung themselves ashore--it is noteworthy that all dogs dash into a boat as if they were leading a forlorn hope, and leave it as if they were escaping from a fire--the party spread itself over the beach in cheerful argument as to the most suitable place for the repast, and while the contention was still hot as to the relative merits of a long disused churchyard, with an ancient stone coffin lid for a table, or a baking corner of the strand, where a thin stream trickled over the cliffs to the sea, one came from the boats with a stricken face, and said that all the food had been left behind. There was silence for a space. Then, while the accusers answered one another, the remembrance of Mrs. Driscoll's cottage shone like a star on a stormy night into the minds of the castaways. Under happier circumstances the metaphor might have seemed inappropriate, but there is a time for everything, and the time for Mrs. Driscoll's cottage to pose as a star of hope and deliverance had arrived. Mrs. Driscoll herself, emerging from her cowhouse, sympathetic, hospitable, and very dirty, was equal to the occasion. Would she lend us a skillet? Sure, why not! An' eggs is it? an' praties? an' a sup o' milk, and the sign o' butther? Well, well! the cratures! An' they come to this lonesome place to ate their dinner, an' to lave it afther them afther! Glory be to mercy! Well, the genthry is quare, but for all they're very good! She led the foraging party in to her cottage. It was the only house on the island, and, in rough weather, as solitary and cut off from humanity as was Noah's Ark. Indeed, solitariness was not the only point wherein a resemblance to the Ark was suggested. A cloud of hens screeched forth over the half door in our faces; two cats and a pig sped out as we opened it; a small but determined mother goat dared us to force the fortalice of the inner chamber in which her offspring were, no doubt, in laager; a gander lifted his clattering bill from a skillet--the skillet, I may say, in which our subsequent meal was to be prepared--to hiss alarmingly at us; two children and, I think, a calf, shuddered noiselessly out of sight into the brown vault of the fireplace, and through it all, as Mrs. Browning sings, "The nightingales" (or, strictly speaking, the ducks) "drove straight and full their long clear call."
Mrs. Driscoll drove, headlong as an ocean steamer, through her _menage_. The skillet was snatched from the gander; with one sweeping cuff a low-growling, elderly dog was dashed from its seat on the potato sack under the table. The dresser yielded a bowl full of eggs; from the bedroom came milk and butter (happily, none of us, save the goat, was made free of the mysteries of their place of keeping), and a little girl was plucked from the depths of the chimney and commanded to "run away to the well for a pitcher of water."
"Not from the well in the bohireen," we said quickly, "it doesn't look very--"
"Sure that's grand wather, asthore," replied Mrs. Driscoll, "if ye'll take the green top off it there's no better wather in the globe of Ireland, nor in Carbery nayther!"
We accepted the reassurance. When one is less than twenty and more than half-starved, one accepts a good deal, and I cannot remember that any of us were any the worse for the water. At all events the potatoes were boiled in it, the eggs nestling amicably among them (this to save time and fuel). Ultimately there was made a comprehensive blend of everything--eggs, potatoes, milk and butter, the whole served hot, on flat stones, and eaten with pocket knives and cockleshells.
Over our heads the unsophisticated seagulls swooped and screamed--I remember that one of them nearly knocked my hat off on that island one day--the air quivered like hot oil between us and the purple distance of the mainland, and yet there was the island freshness in it; we lay on our backs on the heathery verge of the cliffs and drowsed off the potatoes. There were no plates to wash, no forks to clean. It was an admirable picnic. So every one thought, save the dogs, who found egg-shells and potato-skins a poor substitute for chicken bones.
There is, I think, in the matter of picnics no middle course endurable. If they cannot attain to the untrammelled simplicity of the savage, they require all the resources of civilisation to justify them. Let there be men-servants, and maid-servants, and cattle--for carting purposes--and, in fact, all the things enumerated in the Tenth Commandment, including your neighbour's wife. Let there also be champagne--and yet, not even champagne will alleviate much if your neighbour's wife be dull and greedy, and how often, how almost invariably is she, at a picnic, both these things! There certainly is something in the conditions of set feasts out of doors that induces an unusual measure of gluttony. Primarily, of course, there is the lack of other occupation, but chiefly, I think, there is the instinctive wish to lessen the labours of packing up. Packing up is the dark feature of the best picnic. I have often pitied the Apostles for the seven basketfuls that they found left on their hands.
If an instance of all that is worst in a picnic be required I may lightly record some of the features of an entertainment which, one summer, I was by Heaven's help and a little lower diplomacy, enabled to evade. The drag-net of the African war had gone heavily over the neighbourhood, and to the forty women who had unflinchingly accepted, but two men were found to preserve the just balance of the sexes. These numbers are not fictitious. They may be found seared upon the heart of the hostess.