Part 9

The Alpine fastness, already alluded to, was not gained for a further couple of days, during which an awakening distaste for Switzerland slowly grew in us, though it did not thoroughly mature till mellowed by a mule ride up a mountain. Reticence in narration is a quality that I endeavour to cultivate. It becomes a necessity in treating of the village and its surrounding slums from and through which our start was made. Having, in a state nearing starvation, been offered the sole refreshment available, namely, concentrated essence of typhoid in the guise of glasses of milk, and having retained sufficient self-control to refuse them, we started on mule-back for the mountain. Traversing, as I have every reason to believe, the open main drain of the village, our animals proceeded to totter up a narrow and precipitous watercourse.

"_La voie la plus directe_," explained the mule-driver, lashing his ancient cattle in a general way, and without animosity.

The cloud that accompanied our wanderings, as in the case of the Israelites, did not fail of its usual office. Even through the crown of a Panama straw hat the rain attained to my skin. Thence it descended, enveloping me, as it were an inner garment. Twice my mule fell down. I could not reproach it. Indeed, nothing but the fact that one of its parents had been an ass explained its readiness to pick itself up and go on again. It had, however, an incentive, supplied in the rear by its proprietor; we had naught save the fetish of Holiday to goad us onward, and its potency was beginning to weaken.

One week of the mountain hotel was as much as we were able to endure. The usual "exceptional" weather prevailed. How familiar is the formula, and how entirely unworthy of credence!

"For seventeen years"--the Landlord calls heaven to witness--"it has never been so wet, or so cold, or so stormy at this time. If Monsieur or Madame, had come but three weeks ago--or would wait but three days longer----"

There was a time when the glamour of holiday might have induced belief, might even have beguiled a further endurance of the age-long _table-d'hote_ repasts, of the aggressive muscularity of the English schoolmaster, who, during the progress of the _menu_ from the watery soup to the acrid Alpine strawberry, faced us, boasting at large and in detail; of the German bride, who practised the piano for four hours daily (her head upon her bridegroom's shoulder, his faithful arm round her waist). These things, though unattractive in themselves, might once have been submitted to as elements of the theoretical holiday (in Switzerland), as mere inevitable crumples in the rose-leaf.

But, on this occasion--it is possibly one of the compensations of advancing years--we found ourselves endowed with a juster sense of proportion. The close of the eighth day saw us heading for home with a speed that almost amounted to rout. The mule-driver's maxim, "_la voie la plus directe_" seemed good common sense; we drew neither breath nor bridle, Geneva, Paris, London were but names in the night, till we found ourselves facing America from the front doorstep of a certain remote hostelry in the far west of Connaught.

Then, and not till then, did something of the largeness, the leisure, the absurdity, the unconventionality, that should enter into all true holiday, begin for us.

I have said hostelry, and undoubtedly the words "Seaview Hotel," in letters large and green, were inscribed upon its pink-washed walls, but without this clue I do not think the closest observer would be able to detect its walk in life. It had but one storey; a dark and narrow passage led from the entrance to the kitchen, and therein, at (as subsequent experience showed us) any time of the day or night, the entire establishment might be found, massed, talking as though they had not met for years, and were to separate in an hour.

Thus we, led by our carman, an _habitue_ of the house, found them, and thus, with but brief intervals, they continued during the period we spent among them.

"What is it, Mike?" this to the car-driver from a very stout lady, whom we rightly assumed to be the proprietress. "Oh--the sitting-room," she exhibited a natural annoyance, having been interrupted in a pronouncement on, I gathered, the feeding of pigs. "Here! Mary Kate, show the sitting-room!" She re-addressed herself to her subject.

Mary Kate, a charming slattern with a profusion of fair hair, "showed" the sitting-room. It was small, but not unclean, and, in addition to the normal outfit of table and chairs, was remarkably equipped with a large double perambulator, whose use as a sideboard was sufficiently indicated by the fact that a cruet stand and a loaf of bread occupied one seat, while a piece of cold beef reclined on the other. The bedrooms, if I may quote a French guide-book's remarks upon the retreat of a hermit, "excited I know not what emotions of religious terror;" emotions that were not allayed by the suspicion, that deepened to certainty, that, in the absence of visitors, they were occupied by the staff.

"Hot wather? O _cerr*tainly!" said Mary Kate, kindly. "Beg your pardon--" she crushed past me to the chimney-piece, and proceeded to grope behind photograph frames and a crowded multitude of glass and china, *objets d'art_. "I left me hat pins--" here she giggled confidentially, while, so intimate was the arrangement of the _objets d'art_, that several of them fell off at the farther end of the chimney piece. "Ah! what matther! Sure they're all a little broke!" said Mary Kate, wedging them into their places again, and thrusting the recovered hat pins into her redundant locks. "Ye'll be wanting somethin' to eat now, I daresay," she went on, "I'll send granne'ma in to ye."

A brief interval ensued, during which we furtively examined the bedclothes, and indulged in disturbed conjecture as to the substance that stuffed the pillows. Their smell, though curious, offered no basis for theory.

There came a creeping sound without, and low down, a panel of the door was dealt a single blow.

I said "Come in!" not without a slight recurrence of religious terror.

A very little and ancient woman stood there, with the trade marks of soot and grease thick upon her. When she curtseyed she seemed to merge in the door mat, so small was she and so dingy.

There was reassurance in the discovery that she seemed as much in awe of us as we of her.

"How would I know what the likes o' ye would fancy?" she said, almost with despair, and went on to hope that our visit might prove an education into the ways of the aristocracy of which she had long stood in need, but she coupled the admission with a warning that she "was very owld and very dull."

It was a high responsibility, this position of exponents of an unknown type, and it is much to be regretted that we were forced to leave our venerable disciple under the impression that the upper classes usually cook their own food at hotels. It should here be said that this expedition had not been entered upon without a certain foreknowledge of what it was likely to involve, and amongst other precautions were provisions of a portable sort. These included sausages, and the sausages we confided to our old lady.

We sat in the parlour enjoying the appetite for dinner that is one of the bright features of a genuine holiday. After a delay of about half an hour, Mary Kate's head was thrust through a narrow opening of the door.

"Granne'ma says will the little puddings be split?"

Had the answer been Yes, and that it was usual to serve them with cream and sugar, I feel sure that grandmamma would have complied. As it was, after instructions to Mary Kate, of a lucidity unrivalled by Mrs. Beeton, the sausages appeared, pale, tepid, raw, in a pie-dish, just a-wash with luke-warm water.

The holiday appetite quailed at the sight, and the _chef_ was summoned from the conversazione still raging in the kitchen. A single glance at the guests told her of failure, and, with a masterly grasp of the position, she hurried back to the kitchen and returned with the frying-pan.

"Keep it now yersels," she said. "Didn't I say to ye I was too owld?"

From that time the parlour grate led a sullied life, but--which may have consoled it--a thoroughly useful one. We re-cooked the sausages upon it; the perambulator yielded its increase, toast, grilled beef, sausages, who could reasonably ask for more?

We spent two days and two nights there; days of perfect weather, spent in exploring a coast as wild and beautiful as the heart of holiday maker could desire, nights strangely, almost desolately devoid of the entomological excursions and pursuits usual to village inns, and, in spite of the peculiarities of the pillows, sleep was not difficult. Or rather, in candour it should be said, was difficult only after the rising of the sun. For with the dawn, a vagrant population was astir in the village; a street Arab community of hens, dogs, geese and donkeys, incessant and clarion-toned in their addresses to morn and to each other; creatures who slept under carts and in stray corners; who treated life as a lounge, and regarded their owners as suzerains merely, to whom occasional allegiance was to be rendered, or a tributary egg or two laid in an inaccessible place.

On the whole, the donkeys are those of whom I can speak least temperately. They had, for want, possibly, of other employment, adopted the position of town-criers to the village, or perhaps were its prophets, perhaps its Cassandras, and they uplifted their testimony from sunrise till nightfall with a poignancy that rent the very skies. Standing one evening on one of the low hills that hemmed the village into its corner by the sea, I counted easily, and with half a glance, four of these enthusiasts, planted each on a commanding rock or mound, and sending his wild voice abroad over the valley. It was a sunny evening, after a day of sad and opalescent beauty, and the sea had brightened into blue and silver; the white-washed gables and a far white lighthouse were radiant with recovered cheerfulness, but the jackasses were as despairful and implacable as Jeremiah.

There was but one disaster during our brief sojourn at the Sea View Hotel. A few sausages and a tin of sardines remained, "spared," as Mary Kate said, from the first repast. These she proposed to store, for safety and coolness, in one of our bedrooms. The idea not being well received, she finally deposited them in the Post Office, which was attached to the hotel. But even this hiding place was not improbable enough to hoodwink that skilled tactician, the hotel cat, and he, in some dark hour of the night, found and feasted on them with, no doubt, all the ravishing joy of a new experience.

We could not but sympathise with him. Thanks to the Sea View Hotel that subtle joy was also ours.

I began by saying that of the Summer holidays the times of anticipation and of retrospect were the times of truest pleasure. Yet I can remember long September days beside a sea of Mediterranean blue, the sea of Southern Ireland, when the perfect present asked nothing of either past or future. The long creek wound, blue-green as a peacock's breast, between deep woods. High places of rock and heather were there, where you could lie, "ringed with the azure world," and see the huge liners, yes, and hear them too, as they went throbbing and trampling along the sun's path westward.

Those who know this place of holiday are comparatively few, but there is at least one distinguished name of the company--Dean Swift, no less. A couple of hundred years or so ago, he spent a summer in West Carbery, (an ivy-covered ruin, known as Swift's Tower, testifies to the fact,) and he forthwith made a poem about it, a Latin poem, addressed to the Rocks of Carbery.

One gathers that it was of the nature of an encomium, though the points selected for description are not those that would tempt the effete holiday maker of to-day. Possibly it was the Dean's majestic eighteenth-century manner of thanking his host for "a very pleasant visit." I came upon it in the house of a descendant of that host, reverently quoted in a copy of Dr. Smith's history of the County Cork, dated 1749. Thanks to the sympathetic scholarship of a contemporary divine, the Revd. Dr. Donkin, who made a translation of it, I am able to give some quotations from it. Dr. Smith thinks that "the Dean's descriptions are as just as his numbers are beautiful." It is not for me to disagree with him. Let them--or some of them--dignify these unworthy pages.

"Lo! From the top of yonder cliff, that shrouds Its airy head amidst the azure clouds, Hangs the huge fragment, destitute of props, Prone on the waves the rocky ruin drops.

* * * * *

Oft too with hideous yawn, the cavern wide Presents an orifice on either side; A dismal orifice, from sea to sea Extended, pervious to the god of day.

* * * * *

High on the cliff their nests wild pigeons make, And sea calves stable in the oozey lake ... When o'er the craggy steep without controul, Big with the blast, the raging billows roll, ... The neighbouring race, tho' wont to brave the shocks Of angry seas and run along the rocks, Now pale with terror, while the ocean foams, Fly far and wide, nor trust their native homes. The goats, while pendant from the mountain top, The wither'd herb improvident they crop, Wash'd down the precipice with sudden sweep, Leave their sweet lives beneath th' unfathomed deep."

I am sorry to say that in these degenerate times the improvident goat has lost his ancient skill and is no longer pendant, and the oozey lake and stabling sea calf (the latter possibly a lingering survivor of the Deluge) may no more be found. None the less, I can confidently commend the scenes of these catastrophes to the holiday maker of to-day.

Even now, when the sunshine of last September has faded to a memory, and that of next September is too far away to be even a hope, I can still feel the soft lift of the western wind, still hear the booming of the waves in the deep and riven heart of the cliff.

*LOST, STOLEN, OR STRAYED*

"I couldn't find your apron, Ma'am," said the "Why not," imported a month before, with bare feet and a forelock like a Shetland pony. She belonged to the drift-weed of the household, and would, perhaps, now be ranked as a "tweeny"; her class derived its title from its genial habit of replying "Why not?" to any given order, without considering or knowing whether such were its business. The "Why not" was at present flushed with long search, and with that sub-resentment and assumption of being suspected that all servants run up like a flag when valuables are missing.

"There isn't one in the house, but I'm afther axing about it. It must be it was waylaid."

It may scarcely be necessary to explain that she meant mislaid, but in her limited skill in English she had expressed the real trend of the things in the establishment. They were not, as a rule, lost, nor in the strict sense of the word were they stolen; they were waylaid, snatched from their own walk of life and applied to some pressing necessity of the moment. The apron might have been taken to clean a bicycle, or to stay the flow of spilt ink, or to bandage the foal's leg, and the "Why not" probably had been a party to its fate.

It is on record that in past ages a punt, used by the master for his own pleasure, was waylaid after it had been suitably laid up in the coach-house for the winter. When Spring came, and the time of the singing of birds and the painting of boats set in, the punt was not.

It was "gone this long time;" it was "as rotten as that the boards was falling out of it undher the people's feet." "You couldn't tell what thim women in the laundhry would catch hold of when they'd be short of fire, an' God knows a person's heart would be broke that'd have to be lookin' for sticks for them."

Having arrived at the fact that his boat had been burned, the Master yielded to the inevitable.

"Begad!" he said, regarding the culprits through his spectacles, "I believe you'd burn myself if I'd light!"

The march of education has merely added scope to the art of waylaying. We have in the West of Ireland "heavy showers and showers in between," as an old woman put it when describing a wet day. In the course of one of the in-betweens a party from the Big House took refuge in a wayside cabin, and although it is not desirable or polite to observe too curiously the environment in wayside cabins, a glimpse of a green morocco-bound volume on a shelf, between a salt-herring and a hair-brush was too much for the visitor's good breeding. Averting our eyes from the hair-brush we identified the volume as a copy of Byron's "Marino Faliero," which had long since disappeared from the drawing-room book-case in which it had been wont to stand in the decorous neglect which, I imagine, is not uncommonly its portion.

No one knew anything about the book. It had apparently flown like a storm-beaten bird to the cabin door, and, out of pure compassion, was given house room. From internal evidence it would seem to have inspired considerable interest in a family of the name of Sweeny, whose autographs profusely adorned its wide margins. Later on we heard that one, Patsey Sweeny, when dying, had asked for the solace of a book. The Big House had been applied to for something suitable. We shall never know what influenced the "Why not" in her selection of "Marino Faliero;" we shall never know anything in that, or in any similar matter, with any certainty, but we do not expect certainty in the West of Ireland. "Marino Faliero" returned to its fellows, importing a rich odour of tobacco and turf smoke, but otherwise, unfortunately, dumb to its adventures.

Subsequently a daughter of the house of Sweeny showed much aptitude in the art of waylaying. A Confirmation was in prospect at the chapel, at which Miss Julia Sweeny, aged eleven, was to be presented as a candidate, the occasion requiring that she should be dressed in purest white from her oily curls to her nimble and naked feet. When the day of transformation arrived, the Young Ladies from the Big House turned out to view it, and as the candidate knelt in angelic decorum in the chapel, the youngest of the Young Ladies made the gratifying discovery that her new white canvas tennis shoes were on the feet of Miss Sweeny. On such a day it would have been a gross want of taste to have mentioned the matter, and that evening the tennis shoes re-appeared unostentatiously in their owner's room. No comment was made on either side, but with the sensitive perception of the clinical thermometer, the Sweeny family remained invisible for several weeks, after which Mrs. Sweeny arrived with a score of eggs as a present for the youngest Young Lady, and both sides felt that a disagreeable estrangement had been handsomely closed.

The adventures of the Gravy Spoon were of the simpler household variety, inexplicable, disconnected, yet following in a certain order a track familiar to all Irish householders. The gravy spoon was antique, slender of curve, and delicately ornamented along its graceful handle. Every servant connected with the spoon will now testify that the handle was cracked from the day it was made. One even asserts that "When ye'd strike it agin anything there'd be a roaring in it," which, of course, leaves no more to be said. That its prolonged absence from the table should have been unnoticed was well in the character of things: several months, in fact, passed before the lady of the house observed the cook skimming cream with a singular and dwarfish weapon, which proved to be the bowl and one inch of the handle of the gravy spoon. The explanation opened with the formula, "Sure that was broke always," followed almost inevitably by the statement that "it was broke when the young gentlemen was home." From the mouth of a third witness came the information that "Master Lionel broke it one day at luncheon helping curry." History was silent as to the composition of this remarkable curry. The cook entered no protest. Memory was not at any time her strongest point, judging at least from her own guileless confession on one of the many occasions when dinner was very late.

"Sure I mislaid the pudding, and there I was hunting the house for it, and where would it be afther all but in the oven!"

The search for the keys was, of course, a mere commonplace of every day. The storeroom was carefully locked up, and the bunch, an enormous and for the most part obsolete collection, was then taken severely upstairs and secreted. The next event was, usually, the departure beyond ken or call of the person who had secreted the keys, followed, at a greater or less interval, by the crisis when they became essential to the progress of things, by the opening scenes of the hunt, and its gradual broadening to full cry throughout the house. During this part of the comedy the servants, who were perfectly acquainted with every known hiding-place, remained coldly intent on their business, and the hunters deferred as long as possible the humiliating moment when their co-operation must be invited. When it came, the keys came with it.

To the lost and strayed the ashpit in the yard occasionally offered harbourage, where, among the hot turf ashes and evil smells, oblivion came quickly. Sometimes, when search ran high, as lately in the case of three errant postal orders, the ashpit was placed under martial law, and yielded strange spoils to its inquisitors. Instead of the postal orders came forth in the first instance a letter, dated 1805, from an historical personage, once Chief Justice of Ireland. The letter itself, in remarkably good preservation, described in choice and flowing English a fortnight spent in Bath, an experience in remarkable contrast to the ashpit. The second trophy was a cheque for eight pounds, recent and uncashed. The third was a tea cosy, of old gold and peacock blue satin, somewhat scorched by turf ashes, but new, and preserving in its quilted interior the label with which it emerged from its parent bazaar. There was other booty of an inconsiderable sort, but the postal orders were not found. The net result of the investigation was that every servant in the house hovered on the verge of giving warning, till the day when the postal orders arrived as stowaways in a letter from South Africa. The writer made no mention of their presence in the envelope, nor has he since been able to account for it, nor, to this hour, has any reasonable theory been brought forward to explain their wanderings.

Lest any hasty judgment should here be formed as to the conduct of Irish households, it is well to mention that other households, not Irish, have had experiences as remarkable.

A family of my acquaintance, blameless in domestic life and even notable in virtue, has established what must be, I think, a singular renown at Scotland Yard in the matter of lost valuables. During a stay of two nights under that hospitable roof, three several and severe disasters passed like winds through the establishment, causing much mental and physical stress, and a vast amount of cab hire.