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Title: The Godstone and the Blackymor
Author: White, T. H. [Terence Hanbury] (1906-1964)
Date of first publication: 1959
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Jonathan Cape, 1960
   [second impression]
Date first posted: 26 February 2015
Date last updated: 26 February 2015
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1237

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

In the printed edition, a Gaelic typeface was used for
several instances of the word "naomhg".  We have indicated
these instances as follows: [Gaelic: naomhg].

Because of copyright considerations, the illustrations
by Edward Ardizzone (1900-1979) have been omitted from
this ebook.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






  THE GODSTONE
  AND THE BLACKYMOR

  by T. H. WHITE

  illustrated by EDWARD ARDIZZONE



  JONATHAN CAPE
  Thirty Bedford Square London




  FIRST PUBLISHED 1959
  SECOND IMPRESSION 1960


  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN THE CITY OF OXFORD
  AT THE ALDEN PRESS
  BOUND BY A. W. BAIN & CO. LTD, LONDON




  Contents

  LOSING A FALCON
  THE BLACKYMOR
  THE BIRD LIFE
  THE FAIRY FIRE
  LETTER FROM A GOOSE SHOOTER
  THE GODSTONE
  SNOW IN ERRIS
  A LOVE AFFAIR
  A NEW BOY IN THE SCHOOL OF DEATH
  GIVING UP SHOOTING
  A PILGRIM SON
  NOT CLOWNS




_Love to Dawn_




LOSING A FALCON


Fraoch was a shooting lodge which had belonged to a whisky baron.  For
fifty pounds a month whoever rented it was monarch of about ten
thousand acres which claimed to be a grouse moor, and of several pools
in a preserved salmon river.  The salmon were there.  You could see
them leaping, leaping, from the low, warm, crystal water--like
interplanetary rockets--and toppling back into it with a
heart-thumping, sidelong swash.  But they were impossible to catch,
because of the golden weather.  We basked by the river in a cloud of
midges, tormented by the insects and by the unattainable fish.  As for
the famous grouse, at a generous estimate there may have been a hundred
in all those thousands of acres.  Several guns, ranging the mountains
industriously all day behind a passable setter, might end with three or
four brace.  This made Fraoch a first-rate place for hawking.

If you are on one of the lordly Yorkshire grouse moors, where you can
hardly walk ten paces without tripping over a pack of birds, it is
redundant to use a setter.  You find more grouse than you would ever
carry, simply by walking forward.  So you sit in a butt with a bottle
of champagne, while the birds are driven over in bullet-paced streams.
If you are on the starved tops of Mayo, however, you need a
wide-ranging dog to find a shot at all.  The same sort of thing applies
to falconry.  Different terrains suit different kinds of activity.  It
is no use flying merlins in strong heather or peregrines in woodland,
because in each case the quarry can hide itself from the pursuer too
easily to give a chance of catching it.  Merlins need downland like
Salisbury Plain, and peregrines need the moor.  On the other hand, a
peregrine on a well-stocked moor would not be interesting.  She would
have killed her maximum in half an hour or less, too easily, and it
would be time to go home.

At Fraoch, where the rare, crafty and ancient grouse used to hobble
about on crutches or sit before their heather cottages smoking broken
clay pipes, with steel-rimmed spectacles over their rheumy eyes,
spitting in the turf ashes and exchanging folklore about Niall of the
Nine Hostages, it needed strong thighs to march the mountains and a
high heart to circumvent them.

The Lodge stood at the end of a two mile drive or side road, in a bower
of rhododendrons and fuchsias, looking out between their thick leaves
across a dozen miles of bog to Crossmolina.  No tree or house was
visible from the overgrown lawn.

It was a charming, gimcrack house--shabbily, sparsely, comfortably
furnished.  It even had a working bathroom which worked with a roar, on
some kind of geyser understood by the cook and the housemaids.  Perhaps
it was worked by Calor gas.  The old-fashioned, broken-springed,
second-hand, chintz-covered, welcoming armchairs had been brought
somehow or other all the way from Dublin.  As usual in Ireland, the
ugly furniture was leavened here and there by a fine eighteenth-century
piece, or by a cut-glass decanter.  On the wall of the sitting room
there was an amateur tracing of the outline of a fifteen-pound salmon.
On a side table lay the game book with its few entries.  The
wash-hand-stands of the bedrooms were of the nineteenth century, and
the old beds were deep and comfortable.

Surrounded by a sort of circular ambulatory or tunnel through the shiny
leaves, which took twenty minutes or so to get round the lodge, Fraoch
had two unsurpassable beauties.

On the mountain behind it, outside the shaded grounds in the sunshine,
there was a minute waterfall or glide of water.  The soft, tart,
ale-coloured stream slid over the smooth stones from step to step, cool
and glistering in the late August heat.  And the bogland plain which
stretched to Crossmolina was held in a horseshoe of barren mountains
which rose to about 2,500 feet.  Behind us, Slieve Fyagh, Benmore and
Maumakeogh nourished the grouse.  Opposite the dining-room windows,
Corslieve and the Nephin Beg range carried a loving eye to the distant
sugar loaf of Nephin, 2,646 feet, whose summit I had once reached in
solitude, carrying a peregrine tiercel panting in the sunlight.

Several of these heights had cairns on them.  On Corslieve there was a
laborious pile of stones called Leaghtdauhybaun--Fair David's
Cairn--which was either in memory of a King Dathi who had been killed
there by lightning in the year 427 or else of a blond robber called
David, also slain there but by the military some thirteen hundred years
later.  Probably it was a prehistoric erection, taken over by the king
and by the robber in their turns.  It stood aloof, incredibly old and
distant, against the lonely skyline.

It was an ancient landscape, which had few contacts with modern
history.  Away to the north-east, near Sligo, was the Rath where Eoghan
Bel had been buried, killed in battle by the Ulstermen, fourteen
hundred years before.  He had been buried upright, standing with his
spear in hand.  After that, the Ulstermen had always been defeated when
they reached his tumulus--until they had the presence of mind to dig
him up again, and bury him upside down.

I liked to think that Slieve Fyagh, on which the lodge stood, was the
place where Aillilbannda King of Connaught had fallen in the sixth
century, at the battle of Cuilconaire.  It was just possible to think
so, for half the place names of Carra were interchangeable with those
of Erris.

'As touching Ailillbannda, King of Connaught,' said the Book of
Leinster about this monarch, 'the matter whereby he had the Lord's
peace was this: the battle of Cuilconaire it was, which he fought
against Clann Fiachrach and in which he was defeated, when he said to
his charioteer: "Cast now, I pray thee, a look to the rear, and
discover whether the killing be great and the slayers near us."  The
driver looked behind him and replied: "The slaughter that is made of
the people is intolerable!"  "Not their own guilt, but my pride and
unrighteousness it is that comes against them," said the king:
"wherefore turn we now the chariot to face the pursuers; for if I be
slain, it will be the redemption of many."  Then Ailill did earnest act
of penance, and by his foemen fell.  "That man therefore," said
Columcille, "attained to the Lord's peace."'

At twice the distance of Nephin from us to the eastward, there was a
different Corslieve in the Curlew Mountains.  It also had a cairn, near
which Young Donn had been killed in the year 1230, fighting against the
foreigners.  'Donn Og, being then alone, was proclaimed and recognized;
and many soldiers took aim, and five arrows were lodged in him; and one
horseman came up with him afterwards; and though he had no weapon but
an axe, he did not allow the horseman to close with him; and the
horseman would drive his lance into him occasionally.  The other
soldiers surrounded him from the east and west, and he fell by the
superior power that overtook him there.'


For a view like this, which shared the Lord's peace with the derring-do
of Ailill King of Connaught, fifty pounds a month did not seem too
much.  The Lodges which I sometimes rented were incidental to life in
the West, not essential to it.  But they were nice incidents.


'How many of these creatures have you trained?' Bunny asked, munching a
sandwich in the high, bright air, as we rested for lunch.

'It depends what you mean by trained.'

I counted them on my fingers.

'If you include owls, and the ones I failed with, I have had thirteen.
The most distinguished was a gyr-falcon.  But I was only her owner on
paper.  I only saw her once.  A sister of hers was flown to Germany as
a present for General Goering, in one of those corrugated aeroplanes.
He received her with pomp and circumstance.'

'Was she one of the ones which Ernest Vesey collected in Iceland?'

'I might have guessed you would know all about it.'

Bunny was the kindest, most educated, most formidable person I knew.
Whenever I began to explain something to him, it was discouraging to
find that he knew it already, and generally knew more than I did.
Perhaps his dynasty was the last we shall see in literature, of
altruistic, scholarly gentlemen of genius, who for generations had
sought out the struggling authors like D. H. Lawrence, and selflessly
assisted them.

He smiled with asymmetrical, frightening eyes--his grey hair fluffing
in a slight movement of the hill breeze.

'One of the many things I know nothing about is falconry.  You must
explain it to me.'

'It would take six months.'

'Then tell me about the ones you had.'

He was always able to give me a feeling of pleasure and importance.

'Oh, Bunny, don't ask.  If I start talking about hawks I go on for
ever.'

He fixed me with the eye of Balor.

'Very well.  The one I started with was a kestrel.  It belonged to a
friend.  You couldn't train it for much, except catching mice.  It had
a high voice--kee, kee, kee--and its talons were like needles.  We
loosed it when it was grown up.  Then I got involved with two goshawks
from Germany--who taught me a lot.  They were enormous, short-winged
hawks and you flew them from the glove.  After them, I had a pair of
merlins--absolute darlings.  They were tiny creatures, hardly as big as
a pigeon.  They were half-way between hawks and falcons.  They flew
from the fist like hawks, but the chase generally went into the sky,
like the old-fashioned chase of peregrines after herons.  By, they were
glorious!  I tried to call them Balin and Balan.  But they were
identical to look at, so I had to give one of them red jesses and the
other one black ones.  The result was that in the end they got called
Red and Black.  You fly them at larks.  The lark goes straight up,
singing, like a helicopter.  The merlin swings away in sweeping circles
like a spitfire, often in the opposite direction, to gain height.  Do
you remember the question in _Hamlet_?  "Why do you go about to recover
the wind of me, as if you would drive me into a toil?"  A merlin has to
get upwind of the lark and above it.  It's a tremendous aerial combat.
They go so high that they are just dots.  It ends with a downward
streak like a meteor, when they both dive.  I made a success with the
merlins.  They taught me twice as much as the goshawks.  One of the
nice things about merlins is that you have to loose them before the
winter.  They are the friendliest hawks.  You like setting them free.
After that I thought I was ready to start on peregrines.  I have lost
three of them so far--by stupidity.  Now we have Cressida and the
tiercel.

'Bunny, listen.  What I learnt from the merlins was this.  May I tell
you about it?  Am I boring you?  It was a sort of illumination--you
know, a sort of Pentecost.  The atmosphere became phosphorescent when
it dawned on me, like finding the Holy Grail.

'You see, with merlins, you loose the young ones in a barn to begin
with.  You take in their chopped-up food on a board.  After a few days
they feed in front of you and will even fly down to the board, while
you are chopping the food.  Then you capture them, and tie them to
their perches out of doors on a leash.

'When you take out their food on the board, they still fly towards it.
The next step is to offer the food in your hand.

'But, when I did this, they flew in the opposite direction, as if they
were terrified.  I tried again and again and again and again.  I was in
despair.  Then the Holy Ghost descended.  I thought--it was an effort
of thought, like giving birth to something--I thought: They associate
food with board, not with hand.  How can I make my hand like a board?
So I held the hand flat, palm downwards, and laid the food on the back
of it.  They understood instantly, and came.

'You see, in training a hawk--which has an absolutely different brain
structure from yours--you are stringing together a series of
conditioned reflexes.  Food--Board--Flat Hand--Hand--Me.  Eventually
they must come to the trainer, even when loose, because they associate
him with food.  But the gaps between the reflexes must not be too wide.
They couldn't bridge the gap from board to hand.  So I had to put in a
half-way step--the flat hand.

'Do you know, training hawks and training setters are the two most
fascinating things in the world?  You have to control setters at a
distance too.  A fool in a fog could train retrievers.  But setters!
But falcons!'

'How did you lose the peregrines?'

'I miscalculated their age when I got them.  I put them out to hack too
late and they just cleared off.  I am only a learner, Bunny.  I am
terrified about Cressida and the tiercel.'

A few yards away from us, with his back turned, the keeper Joyce was
eating his own sandwiches.  He was a noble retainer, one of the
old-fashioned kind who believed in being polite to his laird.  He was
eating separately by his own choice, not by ours.  Beside him was the
cadge which he carried, with the two peregrines seated on it
motionless, extinguished by their hoods.

'The terrifying thing about Cressida is that sooner or later she is
going to have to "wait on".  You don't fly peregrines from the glove.
You just throw them away into the air, and they go up and up.  Five
hundred feet, perhaps?  Quite loose.  Then they circle above you,
almost out of sight, and you go forward with the setter, searching for
a pack of grouse.  When you find a pack, you put them up, and the
peregrine dives like a thunderbolt.

'The trouble is, Cressida had her first training with a friend of mine.
I have not had her from the beginning.  I don't know her properly.  But
the dreadful moment has to come when I toss her away, with no quarry in
sight, and leave her to climb to heaven.  Suppose she is not ready to
wait-on?  Suppose she just clears off like those three eyasses?
Suppose it takes us a long time to find a pack of grouse, and she gets
bored, and goes?  That's why I have been fiddling about all morning,
carrying her on the cadge, looking for a good set.  If only Brownie
would give us a firm point, I would throw her off, wait till she was
up, and spring the birds.  But Brownie is being wild today, as you saw.
She's running in.  I daren't trust Cressida to hang about the sky.  I
don't know what to do.  When you have lost three eyasses, it is apt to
shake your nerve.'

'Well, what's the answer?'

'Oh, God!  I wonder if I could try flying her from the fist?  I shall
have to think up something.  Suppose I carried her like a merlin, with
the hood off, and then, if Brownie runs in on the set, I could let her
try to overtake from ground level?  What do you think?'

'I don't know anything about it.'

'God!'

I put my head in my hands and stared between my knees at a small
carnivorous plant, which catches flies on the mountain bog and digests
them.


Cressida was a peregrine falcon, at least two years old, who had been
trained by one of the greatest of falconers.  This gentleman was
breaking up his family of hawks and dogs, and had given her to me.  She
was a crafty old devil, with a distinct character of her own--partly
ill-tempered, partly pussy-like if in a good humour, and at times you
could almost swear that she had a distorted sense of fun.  The trouble
was that I did not understand her.  I had no means of knowing how
thoroughly she had been trained, and she had been spending the winter
and spring without work.  She had been on holiday in the mews.  This
was her first day's work for me on a war footing, and I did not know
how much she remembered of her previous education.  I did not know how
much she accepted my control, or whether she was rightly in condition
to fly.  In any case I was an ignoramus about peregrines.

Falconry is not a hobby or an amusement: it is a rage.  You eat it and
drink it, sleep it and think it.  You tremble to write of it, even in
recollection.  It is, as King James the First remarked, an extreme
stirrer up of passions.  Every falconer who reads this book will write
angry and contemptuous letters to me, calculated to laud his own
abilities and to decry mine.  It will be cruelly reviewed in an
exclusive little magazine called The Falconer, by somebody who has
scarcely troubled to read it--if he can read--but who wishes to
establish that he is a better falconer than I am--not a difficult thing
to establish.  In the review, each of my mistakes, which I have
carefully pointed out, will be as carefully and tauntingly brought to
my attention.  So I had better explain at once that what I was going to
do was ridiculous.

I ought to have waited till I was sure that Cressida remembered her
training and was sharp-set.  I ought to have let the setter settle down
for a day or two, until I could rely on a steady point.  She was a
young bitch.  Then, on a firm set, I ought to have cast her off until
she had reached her altitude, put up the birds as quickly as possible,
and enjoyed our triumph.

But I was a learner and no pundit.  I had been shaken by the recent
loss of the eyasses.  I had only been successful with merlins, so I
tried to fly her like a merlin.  I am not boasting about this, kind
falconers, I am confessing it.


'Let's go.'

We moved up wind in the roasting sunshine, stumbling, sweating, angry
and bothered, on the tussocky hill.  I took off Cressida's hood, and
she was as pettish as we were.  She was perfectly trained, though I had
no means of knowing it.  She expected to be thrown off as usual.
Instead, she was held to the glove by her jesses, which she could not
understand.  She bated in the hot air, panting with rage, her beak
open, frowning upon me with her burnt-umber eye.

The humans began to quarrel among themselves, upbraiding each other on
assorted topics.  We accused each other of going too fast, or going too
slow, or being clumsy, or annoying the hawk, or forgetting where the
wind was, or anything else which proved handy.  The setter, as wild as
everybody else, quartered in front of us, out of contact.  She had
already sent away three packs of grouse that morning, by running in
before we could catch up with her.  She had also chased a hare.  It was
the kind of day on which peppery colonels will shout at dogs and thrash
them and dance up and down on the mountainside, shaking their fists at
heaven.  Sometimes, if the dog is far enough away, they discharge their
guns upon it.

We were scarcely a mile from Fraoch when Brownie got her set.

She held it.

We hurried.

She was hundreds of yards ahead.  She looked over her shoulder at us.
I began fatally to yell, 'Steady, steady!'  Cressida recognized the
point and wanted to take the air, but I checked her.  She bated in fury.

Brownie looked over her shoulder a second time, and took one pace.

'Steady, steady!'

She began to snake forward, low to the ground, head and tail in a
straight line, slowly, then less slowly, then faster.  'Steady,
steady!'  Encouraged by the uproar and stampede behind her, she dashed
in.

They were off, flickering and whickering, close to the heather.

Cressida flew, half checked by me in a last second of indecision,
stumbled in the air and was away.  Perhaps they had a hundred yards
start of her.  She had no altitude and was out of training, because of
her long holiday and moult.

Everybody seemed to be running or flying or barking or cursing as the
grouse vanished in the distance.

And Cressida, defeated, threw up into the cobalt sky.


I swung the lure round and round my head at intervals till sunset.  I
blew the whistle.  I went over in my mind all the things I ought to
have done or ought not to have done.  I sulked, with my tail between my
legs, and could not encounter Bunny's eye.  I tried to invent reasons
why it was his fault, or Joyce's, or the dog's.  There was nothing to
be seen of Cressida--nothing in the wide world.

Before we went to dinner, I left some meat tied to the falcon's block,
in case she should grow hungry and come home for it.  I also
constructed a special trap out of feathers and fishing line, which I
had once before used successfully on her.  It was not her first escape.

Dinner was a gloomy meal, though everybody tried to talk of something
else.  Bunny and Ray and their two children were experts at not blaming
people for mischances, and they were also sensitive to feelings.

The sun set behind Slieve Fyagh, and a bright star lit itself beyond
the shoulder of Corslieve, before I went bitterly to bed.


In the morning, the meat which was tied to the block had not been
touched.  The tiercel sat on his own block, alone, sometimes cocking
his head sideways to gaze at the sky--a fact which I ought to have
noticed.  Everything felt loose or abandoned, like a tug-of-war in
which the other team has let go the rope.  I wandered about the garden
after breakfast, feeling pointless.

But there must have been something at the back of my mind--an
unconscious recollection of a trick I had once read about.  I did not
remember the trick consciously until I had played it.  It developed by
itself.

'Well, Joyce, we've lost her.  We had better go and shoot some grouse
for dinner.  In any case, I want Brownie to settle down.  Mr Garnett
says he is going to try the river.'

'Very good, sir.'

Brownie had been wild because we were wild--anxiety is catching--and
because she was confused by the falcons.  She had been asked to work
with no guns visible--which had muddled her--and it was the beginning
of the season, and she was young, and Fraoch was a new place.  Now that
we were carrying guns instead of hawks and the place was more familiar,
she began to behave.  She found us a nice set in the flat bog below the
Lodge and held it.

We caught up with her, gently patting the rigid rump to urge it very
slowly forward, pace by pace.  The birds did not want to fly--and I
ought to have noticed that too.  Trembling, on tiptoe almost, the tail
straight and one front paw in the air, she crept with us right among
them.

Then they were off.  At the first bang, she dropped like a veteran.  I
chose the second bird and massacred that too.

Is it possible--for it seems so in retrospect--that Cressida struck the
second bird before it touched the ground?

When a peregrine stoops from her pitch, you can actually hear the wind
in her feathers--a sort of FFFFRP as she hurtles by.  When she strikes
a flying grouse, she bowls it over in a cloud of feathers, head over
heels, exactly as if it had been shot.  You can hear the thump.  Then
she sweeps upward in a stall turn and binds to the body.

So there she was--my beautiful, my crazy Cressida--clutching the dead
bird in the heather and glaring at us with an expression I could not
decypher.  She mantled over the quarry, shielding it with greedy wings
as if to keep us away.  She began to pluck and toss away the feathers,
starting at the head--for she had been superbly educated by the
falconer who gave her to me, Gilbert Elaine.  A peregrine is allowed
the head for a reward, but the body goes to the kitchen.

I began to tremble like Brownie.  I motioned to Joyce, to stay where he
was and hold the bitch.

It was important not to approach too quickly.  I waited till she was
well into the brains and settling down to them.  Then I walked to her
slowly, rather circuitously, stood for a few moments, squatted, held
out my glove.  I lifted her, grouse and all--she not making the
faintest protest--and with agonized fingers felt for the jesses which,
once held, would bring her into my possession once again.

Joyce and I sighed simultaneously, deeply.  I straightened up.  We
smiled warmly upon one another.  God was in his heaven and all was
right with the world.


She had been there since we started--out of human sight in the dazzling
sky above our heads and beautifully waiting-on.  I remembered at last
that this was a recognized way of reclaiming a lost falcon--to shoot a
grouse for her, in case she was in the offing.

Joyce and I began talking quickly, both at once, telling each other all
about it.

We detached the carcase from her talons when she had eaten the head,
praising her and helping her to feed meanwhile.  It was odd to see that
the heather tops in the dead bird's crop were new and undigested.

Joyce collected the other bird and brought it back, after patting
Brownie very much.  He showed me something which I had not known
before--that you can tell the age of a grouse by letting its weight
hang from the lower jaw.  If it is a young bird, the beak will break.


That evening, after the roast grouse and beautiful claret, with the
same star beaming over Corslieve and the cairn of dead King David, I
wrote these verses.

  This sooty grouse, yet tawny and touched with red,
  Weighs handsome on my hand, although he's dead.
  One whig reflects the sky.  A steely light
  Gleams from the primaries he oiled last night,
  The twelve bright swords on which he wove his flight.
  His crop of heather, which my falcon split
  In footing him, spills on my hand.  Each bit
  Is cleaner than cook's salad, fresh and green
  With lilac buds surprising to be seen.
  Such was his simple craft, to snip all day and seek
  His livelihood of leaves with agricultural beak.

  Joyce says: 'An old cock?'  But some tint I see.
  Reminding me of youth, I disagree.
  'I think he's this year's bird.' Joyce takes him, dumb,
  Opens the bleeding beak, inserts a thumb,
  And weighs him by the lower jaw--which breaks.
  'Quite right: this year's.'  'Why so?'  'Well, sir, it takes
  An old bird to stand this.  He's got more pate.
  The young bird's jaw will break with his own weight.'
  How did Man find this out?  Who first took heart
  To lift his grouse by that unlikely part
  And go on lifting till he learned the art?
  Seeing how stupid Man is, it's unnerving
  To think how long he must have been observing.




THE BLACKYMOR


In this village, on the west coast of Ireland, the population was about
five hundred.  There were two hotels.  I stayed at the small one.  So
did the school-mistress, Miss Keily, and the representative of the Land
Commission.  We had our meals at the same table in the dining-room,
with occasional transients who were passing through.  There were the
Hen Woman, a few commercial travellers, and the usual Inspectors of
this and that.  Tea-time was about six o'clock.

One evening in the middle of July, I walked down the passage to the
dining-room, thinking about two things at the same time.  One was, the
relationship between Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinever: the other was,
whether the slight rain of that morning would have brought enough water
into the river, where I had a stretch of salmon fishing.  It is
possible to think about two things at the same time, as it is possible
to love two women at the same time, and I was absorbed in both topics
as I turned the chromium-plated handle in the door, which was painted
to represent the grain of deal.

I went into the room, and, for one half of a heartbeat, the world stood
still.  I stood--I saw myself from outside, standing--with the door
knob in my right hand, my left or advancing foot two inches from the
floor, my eyes widening and my mouth open.  Then I shut my mouth,
narrowed my eyes, put down my foot, closed the door with an effort and
advanced as graciously as possible upon the tea-table.  I was
determined not to seem discourteous.

For there, at the snow-white linen table cloth, vis--vis with Miss
Keily, who sat spell-bound, like a rabbit confronting a rattle-snake,
at tea-time in Eire, in the parish nearest to America, there sat and
jauntily conversed a coal-black cannibal.

If only I could give you the impact of him, in that humdrum, customary
hotel: of his sharp teeth, actually filed to points, and of his pink,
parrot tongue, munching lettuce: of his retreating conical forehead
capped with fuzzy hair like black sheepskin cut close: of the thick,
ebon back of his neck, like a motor tyre: of his small eyes, like a
pig's, but toffee-coloured and only able to meet the European eye up to
a certain point.  Like a dog he did not face you eye-to-eye for long.
His nose suddenly gave up the effort to have a bony shape.  It curled
over at the end in a fat blob which hid the nostrils, and sank down
resignedly upon the upper lip, as if it were a black wax nose which had
been left out in the sun.  Then there were his great shooting simian
lips, only much plumper than an ape's--and the scar on his right
cheek--and the tattoo scars on his temples, giving him such a savage
look--and his long, dark, shiny fingers, pink inside--and his very good
taste in dress, which recognized that sultry blues with a touch of
chocolate, in the shirt and tie, were the becoming colours for a Moor.
His beautiful, bony, well-built body was over six feet two inches in
height (he told me later) and he weighed 174 pounds.  His wrist-watch
covered a scar on the left wrist, inside, but it was difficult to be
sure, on the dark skin, whether it was a scar or some horribly greasy
patch--which it certainly was not.  There was a huge single glass
diamond in his gold ring.  He was utterly, Nigerianly black.  He was
not a brown man, or a coloured man, or a crooner.  He was absolutely a
sable savage, a strong, bony, black, cannibal negro.  And there he
munched away at his lettuce, voraciously, so that we felt that he might
suddenly lean across the tea-table and plunge his fork into Miss Keily,
and gobble her up with bold, sinuous, strange movements of his blueish
lips, and savour her trotters with circular turns of his small,
round-ended, repellent, pink tongue.  Looking into his mouth was like
having a private view of somebody's intestines.

It was our Fair Day in the village, and that was why he was there.  He
was some sort of quack or witch-doctor or racing tipster, like the
people you see at horse races, crying, 'I have a horse!'  He sold
patent medicine.

I sat down meekly before him, noting at the same time that Miss Keily
was about to faint.

Mr Montgomery-Majoribanks--for that was his name--summed me up in a
flash.  Before you could say Jack Robinson--or, better still, Man
Friday--he was off again with a phony Oxford accent, which he put on
for my benefit.  The accent was just on the Music-Hall side of
Public-School.  He had guessed that I would be interested in doctors,
and had noted the red setter which entered the eating-room at my heels.
He gabbled away in this Old-School-Tie voice, about materia medica and
nature cures and how he was madly fond of dogs--for which he obviously
had a supreme, savage contempt.  He told us how he had paid fabulous
sums to a vet, to keep one of his dogs alive: and how he kept
Alsatians--a whole kennel of them--all of the utmost pedigree and all
doted upon.  ('Dogs?' Miss Keily must have thought, 'to eat?'  At this
point she fled the room.)

Then there was the handshake with which we parted after tea.  Mr
Montgomery-Majoribanks just perceptibly hesitated to offer me his hand:
which I thereupon seized emphatically, determined not to be a sahib,
curling my palm round his collection of chocolate-pink fingers with a
sort of electric shock, and letting go with relief.

I drove out in the Jaguar, to see about the salmon water.


Looking back on him after many years, it was the setting of that
Blackymor which made him such a vivid figure--the incongruous setting
of the West.  For now, as I flogged the unyielding river in the late
afternoon, I was in the centre of the desolate Irish scene:

The river, shallow with summer, rippled in herring-bone patterns, like
the roof of your mouth, the colour of weak beer, cutting its winding
way six feet below the level of the bog.  And the bog stretched flat
for miles and miles, a landscape out of Browning's _Childe Roland_.
Round the rim of the saucer, there were the mountains, as bare, calm
and empty as the bog.  Perhaps all beauty is melancholy.  It seems sad
to be lovely.

There were half a dozen cottages along the miles of river, and one
abandoned shooting-lodge.  The cottages were two-roomed blocks of
white-washed material, thatched.  The thatch was held down by straw
ropes with rocks tied to them.  In these, there was a population of old
people and grandchildren.  Nobody seemed to be middle-aged.

The cottagers took an interest in me.  They were kind, and spoke
English very well, although their natural speech was Gaelic.  Mrs Neary
knitted long stockings to go under my waders, with wool from her own
sheep, spun on her own wheel, warm and waterproof with the natural
lanolin still in them, and shamefully cheap.  Paddy Barrett, who was
getting on for eighty and bent into a hoop with rheumatism, would
hobble down to discuss world politics.  Dennis Burke, who was only
seventy and not quite so stiff, had elected himself to be my unpaid
ghillie.  He was a volatile, wizened, bird-like, scarecrow figure, with
a wide sense of wonder and curiosity--who had begun by calling me Your
Honour, but soon got over it.  We were a source of interest and
surprise to one another.  For instance, at one time I bargained to rent
the empty shooting-lodge, of which he was the caretaker.  In this
bargain, I ignorantly offered three times its real value--while at the
same time vehemently asserting that I would not pay a penny more--a
situation which baffled him.  On the rare times when we hooked a fish,
he would leap about behind me, crying 'Take yer time, now', 'Don't
stir'--all the while taking no time himself, and stirring like mad, as
he hopped on his stiff leg.

It was he who sang, and later wrote laboriously for me in his own hand,
the following song about the island of Inniskea:


  SONG CALLED THE PRIDE OF INNISKEA

  One Evening fine,
  I did incline
  To leave my native home
  To iniskea

  I took my way,
  I carelessly did roam.
  She was modest mild,
  loving and kind,
  She is the Pride of iniskea.

  I quickly stepped up to her,
  and saluted this fair maid.
  Said I my dear
  What brought you here,
  I Pray from whence you came,
  or was it Cupid,
  Sent you here,
  with his swords so bright this day?
  I am in despair,
  for you my dear,
  Sweet Pride of iniskea.

  She quickly made an Answer,
  Saying young Man don't me annoy,
  for I am but A simple maid,
  therefore Pass me by,
  my father is A Fisherman,
  and he is away at Sea,
  my dwelling Place,
  lies but A space,
  so young man, go your way.

  Said I my Pretty fair maid,
  I hope you will me excuse.
  As you are A fisherman's daughter,
  Oh do not me refuse,
  I am A wealthy farmer,
  I came bathing to the sea,
  and when my month is over,
  with me you'll come away,

  and if it's to the sea you came,
  young man where are your pains,
  or are you Parilised she said,
  or are you blind or lame?
  if you have Patience Kind sir,
  she said,
  yonder lies the main,
  and you may swim there like a Duck,
  and it will cure you of your Pain.

  all the water in that sea,
  from here to Achill Sound,
  would not cure me of my Pains,
  or heal me of my wounds,
  since I have seen your loving face,
  from you I cannot go,
  I live near Crossmolina town,
  in the County of Mayo.

  Kind sir
  you might be A foreigner,
  that came here for to bathe,
  although you do pertend to me
  Your riches it is Great,
  I'd rather have A fisherman
  that would Sail and Plough the Sea,
  and rowell me on his arms
  when crossing over the deep.

  Farewell, farewell
  to iniskea,
  as now my month is over,
  although I came to Cure my pains,
  I am worse A Great dale more,
  if I could Gain that lovely maid
  so Beautiful and fair,
  its forever I'd live Content,
  with my love in Ineskea.


Another of Dennis Burke's accomplishments was to tell stories about
local history.  One of his best stories went like this: 'In Kildun
there is a stone, marked with a cross, which is said to cover the
resting place of the Giant of Kildun.  This giant was shaving one day,
and had the half of his face shaved, when a white hare burst into his
dwelling and ran about.  It leaped up into his arms, and he clutched
it, and surveyed it.  Then it ran out of the door and made off in the
direction of the Fort of Drumgollagh.  At this fort there lived another
giant, a friend of the giant's at Kildun.  The shaving giant, laying
down his razor, determined to follow the magic hare, and did so.  It
led him to Drumgollagh, where the giant of that place, his friend, told
him to leave off chasing the hare, because he claimed it for himself.
At this, the two giants had high words.  Each said that he was as good
a man as the other, and was as much entitled to the hare as he was, and
finally they fell to fighting.  The giant of Kildun hit the giant of
Drumgollagh upon the forehead and made him dead.  Then he returned to
his home in Kildun, a broken man, _finished shaving_, and committed
suicide from the remorse that was at him.'

It was Dennis Burke also, this elderly, bright, jerky, patched rag-bag
of a bard, who told me the features of the river.  He shewed me the
Mass Pool, beside which, in the old days of persecution, the Catholic
peasants used to come for their worship.  He shewed the ruins of the
church of Tean, which had been built by St Tean, with the aid of some
religious sheep.  They carried the stones for him.

In return for his entertainment and instruction, I did my best for the
rheumatism of Dennis and Paddy, bringing them celery pills and Fynnon's
salt and other nostrums.

So now, with our cannibal in the offing, I began to have one of my
schemes.  Whatever his qualifications as a doctor, the black man had
claimed that he was, and had shewn himself by his conversation to be,
an enthusiastic masseur.  Perhaps they might have perfected some
massage of their own, in the hinterlands of Nigeria?

I confided to my two friends that I would try to bring Mr
Montgomery-Majoribanks with me, to treat their aching joints next
evening.  Paddy, in his old, beautiful, soft, assuring voice, said that
I was a kind man.  He said 'kind' kindly.  Dennis became excited.

When it was time to reel in and leave the river, with nothing caught,
Dennis said angrily to the fishes something like 'Marbh faiscithe ar an
iasc'--a death tightening on the fish.  Perhaps he referred to the band
with which they tie up a corpse's chin.  He was cross with them for not
having been caught.

I packed up and left the heart of Ireland for the heart of Africa.


On the second day of the Fair, Mr Montgomery-Majoribanks turned up to
tea once more, and we were alone.  He said that he had had a
'disastrous' day.  (Probably he had had a good one.) But he looked
tired, and was quieter.  He did not lecture about medicine and
manipulation, but now accepted me as an intellectual equal.  I began to
feel a warmth for him--though it was still a strange feeling.  He only
told two lies, and he dropped the Music-Hall accent.  I asked about the
colour bar.

He said stoically that he 'could take it'.  He took no notice of the
sahib business, he said, as he was tough enough to ignore it, and 'had
good nerves'.  All human beings were horrible, he thought, and one form
of horribleness was much the same as another.  So he took the horrors
of the white men philosophically.  (I was surprised to notice that he
was talking like a grown-up.) Questioned about his present life--it did
not seem right to probe the pre-civilized era of his tattoo marks, for
his attitude had made it plain that he did not want to be seen in that
light--he told me that he had been 'trained' in England, 'practised' in
various parts, 'choosing the place carefully, to avoid prejudice'.  He
told how he had been in Ireland for four years and had a big round--how
he had been run out of some place by the local talent--how he had
insured his massaging hands for 25,000.  (He was as poor as a church
mouse, of course, and could not have insured them for anything.  Or
could he--as a kind of panacea, as a kind of gesture to keep his
courage up, like the glass diamond ring?)  He told how he now toured
the country from fair to fair, selling medicine.  He intended to set up
a practice in Cork, and had just come from there, a terrible journey,
in one day, by car, to be at our tiny festival.  Then he rambled on a
bit about dogs and his love for them, to please me.  He observed at
last that he had 'always kept himself neat and decent'.

It dawned on me then what a splendid fellow he was, this lone savage so
bold in the civilized jungle.  He was infinitely poor, bearing up
against the unrelenting stares and hostility, keeping himself 'neat and
decent' in his fighting colours of blue and chocolate.  He only had one
suit, which he sponged and cleaned every night.  He was not welcome in
hotels.  They would not give him sheets, believing his colour to be
dirty.  I suddenly saw him in his bare, enemy, empty bedroom, much
cleaner than I was--surgically clean--pressing his one suit under the
mattress, a lone wolf.  He did physical jerks, morning and evening, and
banted on vegetables whenever his weight rose above twelve stone six.
He kept himself fit and neat and tried 'to take it'.  He had to.  Like
a white man in the depths of the jungle, depending upon his fitness, he
was a jungle man in the depths of civilization, a leopard stepping
catlike, dainty, through the traffic of Oxford Circus.

What a noble front to life!  How brave!  And think of that nightmare
drive from Cork, to collect a few shillings among us.  For, when I
shewed him a road map, discussing the best route, I found that he could
not read it.  'Is this all Ireland?' he asked, looking at a large-scale
map of Mayo.  Then he read with pleasure the name of a bay.
'Blacksod!' he exclaimed with delight.

'Don't you get very tired,' I asked, 'driving from fair to fair like
this?'

'I have Good Nerves.  I can Take It.'

'But all those people standing round you this afternoon, and staring
like cattle, while you shouted and lectured.  Doesn't all that
lecturing exhaust you?'

'I only lecture for half an hour.  Then I sit in the car and have a
cigarette.  I try to sell them bottles.  Then I lecture again.'

I had a vivid picture of his passionate bawling, waving his arms like a
tipster, in the dirty, dung-spattered market place, among the scared,
drivelling bullocks, and I said again: 'Well, I would not be able to
keep it up.'

He suddenly admitted comically: 'It is dreadful.  Nobody goes to fairs
to buy medicine.  They go to enjoy themselves, and they don't want
medicine a bit.  I have to make them want it.'

'What a wicked profession!'

'It's diabolical,' he said, with satisfaction.  'I take strong, healthy
men, and make them feel ill, and then I sell them a bottle!'

'Don't you get mixed up in a lot of fights?  I mean, everybody is
always drunk at fairs, and...'

But I did not like to mention the tipsy white people, wanting to mob
him because he was not white.

'I am a Tiger in the North,' he said proudly.  'We have better
facilities in the North.'

Then, more proudly: 'If a drunk man hits me there, I let him have it.
And the police will protect you.  But here, in the South, the guards
can't protect you.  So I can't hit back here.'

How valiant these fellows must be, I thought--the Indians and others
who circulate through Europe--explorers in a strange, hostile,
dangerous forest of civilization, far more dangerous than the Amazon,
selling us cheap rugs, living on a bit of rice, risking their
bronze-skinned lungs in fogs not understood.  What Livingstones and
Stanleys meet in Whitechapel I wonder?

Reflecting on the subject of drink, he confided that only two bottles
of stout would make him 'stinking' drunk--there came a strong revulsion
in my mind when he used this adjective--but he said that when he was
drunk he was not quarrelsome, only very sleepy.

He agreed to visit our patients in the evening, and he questioned me
shrewdly enough about their age and about how long they had had their
rheumatics.  Obviously he had little hope of doing anything for them.

'Will they keep to a diet?'

'No, of course not.  They can't afford to have diets.  They have to eat
what they have.  But you might relieve them for the moment, and cheer
them up.'

He insisted that I should go with him, either fearing to lose his way
or else being bashful.  Bashful?  That warrior?  Well, yes, it was the
barrier about his colour--faced dauntlessly but it was there.  He was
an energetic, enthusiastic, athletic, brave, simple and honest
charlatan, and he was sensitive.  I never asked how old he was.  He was
in the prime of life, probably about thirty.


I went across the road to the Garage, to ask Jack whether he wanted to
come.  There were two businessmen from Dublin with him, something to do
with motor cars, who were on their way back from a holiday in Donegal.
They wanted to come too.  They said it would be 'something not to
miss', to see the darkie massaging the simple crofters.  This made me
feel uncomfortable, for I had not been meaning any kind of joke.  I
wanted to give Mr Montgomery-Majoribanks a chance of earning a little
money, and to pay my friends Dennis and Paddy a delicate attention.
However, the subtle Dublin mind saw it as an elaborate trap or hoax or
lampoon, which made me unhappy.

There were the usual troubles about getting our party en route.  Its
members kept breaking off to have tea, or another drink, or to fetch
something.  It was getting on for evening.  The Guardai had already
dispersed three fair-day fights in the main street--though it was too
early yet for the baton charge.  At last we managed to fix it that the
masseur should go in his own car with Jack, while I followed in their
car with the Dubliners, taking rods in case we wanted to fish
afterwards.  At the last moment a drunk sea-fisherman from the islands
saluted me.  'Conas ta tu?'  'Ta me go mait, go raibh mile mait agat.'
'How are you?' he wanted to know.  'I am doing fine, thank you very
much.'  What sort of weather was it going to be, we asked each other.
He wanted to talk, to share the warmth of his heart.  He threw his arms
round my neck, saying that he had heard I was a Russian, and, as for
him, he would rather have the Russians here than the English.  This was
to flatter me, on the supposition that I might be a Russian, and partly
to find out if I was.  I mentioned that it would be better not to have
either.  He agreed, readily, but reverted to his previous proposition.
He was a large, whiskery man.  I pacified him at last and
escaped--while he staggered off to wait for the baton charge, satisfied
as to my nationality.  It was now eight o'clock.


Great was the welcome which waited us at the home of Dennis, who had
given us up and was dressed in his working clothes.  For that matter,
he had never really expected us.  There was such a lot of blarney in
Eire that people put little reliance on each other's word, and did not
fret about disappointments.

We stepped into the stone-floored room of the cottage, with its
built-in bed and black chimney, holding a turf fire.  Mysterious
articles hung from the rafters of the roof.  There was a gramophone
with a tin horn.  Everybody dashed about shyly.  Neighbours began to
arrive to share the excitement.  The gramophone was started, and a
little girl of three or four began to dance.  She hopped or shuffled
gravely round and round, her bare feet whispering on the wet floor, her
gaze fixed upon us, not very much in time with the metal music.

Jack called her to him.  'Here is a present for you.  Open your hand
and let me put it in.'  But she held the cold paw tight shut, staring
with big, expressionless eyes.  'Don't be afraid now.' 'Sweets,' said
Dennis's sister.  So the paw opened, and sixpence was put in.

Chickens, nephews and others entered.  A boy was sent to fetch old
Paddy from the other side of the river--kind Jack volunteering to carry
the old man over.  The Dubliners and I sat in a row by the window,
conversing with the company, admiring the pot-hook and the strong tea
in a metal pot at the fire, with its rusty ashes.  Mr
Montgomery-Majoribanks, a towering, ebon figure, stood proudly in the
background, silent, important, professionally reserved.  All agreed
that Dennis would soon be supple.

It was an impressive moment when he was laid upon the bed, chirping,
protesting feebly as his trousers were taken down.  And impressive it
was too, in the lamplight and the gathering dusk, as the huge,
double-jointed, umbrageous fingers seized him by the ankles and twisted
and yanked his knotted white legs in every possible direction, and
spanked and chopped and rubbed his stomach and his spine, in deadly
serious taciturnity.  Every eye was fixed upon the scene, the hush
broken only by the squeaks, remarks and muffled exclamations of the
patient.  ('Sure, I could jump me own heighth wance.  Ow!')  Excitement
grew as the limbs began to seem more elastic.  The fingers kneaded into
him, probing into the roots of his bones.  Jack came over the river
with ancient Paddy pick-a-back, entered ('Good avening, ma'am'), and
set him down.  The eighty-year-old gentleman, small, gentle, pleased,
impressed, watched the final stages of the operation, shrunk into
himself.  It was evident that every angle of Dennis was bending and
folding better than it had done for twenty years.

The maestro paused, relented.  He was enjoying himself tremendously,
showing off.  There was no patter now, no fair-ground spieling, but
only a genuine manipulator--he was really good--soaking his ego in the
admiration which I was happy to lend him.  He was play-acting for me to
the top of his bent, being mysterious, monosyllabic, withdrawn.  He was
bubbling inside, wanting to shout with pleasure at himself, but the act
was lofty grandeur--Sir James Montgomery-Majoribanks, the eminent
surgeon!  Well, he had been kicked round Ireland as a quack for four
years, so it was high time that somebody loved him.

The eminent surgeon did me the honour of calling me into consultation.

We withdrew to a corner of the room and whispered.  The trouble was
deep seated, he said.  He could do nothing more without his lamp.  (It
was one of those round, copper, electric radiators, and he had it in
the car.)  I mentioned to my leader that the cottage was not wired for
electricity, but he fetched the radiator all the same.  It was obvious
that he was longing to get at Dennis with it while he was still supple.
He was succeeding, and he wanted to do a good job.  It was also obvious
that he did not understand about electricity.  The lamp was like the
maps to him.  He held it in loving reverence.  It was his fetish.

Everybody began to discuss the whereabouts of the nearest electricity,
and whether the two old gentlemen would feel it worth while, so late at
night, to be driven the ten miles to our hotel, where we knew there was
some.  The atmosphere had to be tested cautiously.  If we had suggested
that they ought to come, they would have done so out of politeness.  It
was important to be allusive, sensitive, tangential, important not to
suggest anything.  We wagged our antennae at each other with delicate
inquiry, like ants meeting.  Eventually it turned out that they did
want to come.  Dennis was awe-struck by the fact that he could bend his
stiff knee at last.  Both were fervent patients and believers already,
and they had been holding back only for fear that they might be a
nuisance to the gentry.

So it was decided that the Blackymor should drive them to the village
and back again, for their electric treatment, while we, the anglers,
went off to fish at the Pool of Peace.

If it seems odd that we should go fishing at this time of night, it has
to be remembered that it was Fair Day.  We had taken a couple of
bottles of Jameson to entertain the neighbourhood, being determined to
do some good to the patients, one way or another, and the bottles were
now empty.


The Pool of Peace, an inlet of the sea, communicated with the Main
through a narrow race.  The passage flowed at a tremendous rate of
knots, and the right moment for the big sea-trout was at the turn of
the tide.  There was a ferry, operated by a wild Gaelic family called
McMennamin--who had some sort of fishing rights with a salmon net, and
who used to provide us, if warned, with sand-eels for bait.

But it was late, and we had not warned them, and the family themselves
were hauling on their net.  We flogged away with the wet fly for a
while, in the turmoiling water, and the summer twilight drew in with
rain and mist, as the salmon and sea-trout jumped with surprising plops
that raised a fever in the blood.  Then we went over to watch the men
at the net.

This inlet was many miles from the home of Dennis, and we had no rights
in it.  Who had?  The sporting rights of Eire were claimed by
proprietors of the richer classes, but denied by the locals.  Since
prehistory, the rights of hunting had been common to all.  You paid for
them or did not pay for them in proportion as you were locally
accepted.  Jack and I were more or less accepted, and had never paid,
and did not know whom to pay.  It was enough to tip the McMennamins for
the sand-eels, or to hire their boat.  Now some message or other had
been left for us by a distant water bailiff, saying naughtily that we
were to hand over five shillings or give our names.  We all stood about
in the drizzle, plunged once more in the sensitive, receptive,
interrogative reserve of Irish silence, our antennae rigid.  Ought we
to pay or was this bailiff cheating us and what exactly was the
intrigue?  Being in Eire was rather like being married.  You had to
concentrate and be wide awake, to recognize what the lady meant.  Can
you have rights in tidal water?  Who, if so, was actually the absent
proprietor?  Were we local or were we gentry?  What prehistoric brehon
law was the one which did in fact prevail?  We pondered severally,
while the foreman of the net, who had delivered the message half in
Gaelic, stood non-committally by, with a soft kind of laissez-faire or
laissez sentir.

The net came shorewards the last few yards, and the still scene
exploded into action.  The taut, brown, sinewy, speechless, taciturn
haulers burst into a wild hilarity of barbarism, leaped in among the
slashing, arching, silver bodies, grabbed them and bashed them savagely
with bits of wood, clumsily, hitting the wrong places, shouting,
grinning, ferocious, hysterical, more Italian than anything north of
Sicily.

There were eleven salmon.

Then there was the long drive home in the pouring dark, with more
whisky discovered in the boot of the car.  There was the village street
abandoned to the aftermath of the Fair, cow-pats and tattered paper and
broken wands for beating the cattle, gleaming in the headlights and the
rain.  The Blackymor's car stood empty outside the hotel.  The annual
baton charge was over, and it was midnight.

Jack invited us in, and produced a crate of Guinness.  Our faces
glowing with liquor, our eyes more flashing, our tongues volubly
tripping and repeating, we had great concert of talk and narrative,
admiring ourselves and one another with warm, welcoming, smiling,
appreciative, comradely, rosy hearts.  We talked of motor engines and
Henry Ford, of poithn and the fairy fire, of famous poachers and deeds
of blood and all the subtle stratagems of the Gael.

At 2 a.m. I went across the road to bed.  I was feeling tired now, and
pettish.  That attempt to extract five shillings from us at the race!
Everybody swindled me all the time, I thought, and all the people I
tried to help ended by stinging me.  The Blackymor had driven at least
forty miles on his errands of mercy, had seriously improved the
patients, and would have to be paid.  He was leaving next morning--or
rather this one.  I sat down and wrote him a note, enclosing two pound
notes: 'Dear Mr Montgomery-Majoribanks, I hope this will be all right?
Yours sincerely.'  Well, he would be certain to kick up a shindy about
it, to claim that his usual fee was five guineas, to clamour for
more--the eternal parasitic avaricious treacherous beggary which was
everywhere in Ireland!  Besides, he was a quack, a trickster.  He would
know that I was soft, and would behave like all the other predators in
the jungle of civilization, who seek their prey.  He would have me
routed out of bed at an early hour, to create a scene.  But I was
feeling drunk, and wanted a long sleep.

Our landlady was still up.  I gave her the envelope.

'Mrs Corduff, please give this to the blackymor.  It's his fee.  He's
bound to ask for more, but make him take it.  Don't wake me up.  Just
make him take it and go away.  You see?'


So I was wrong as usual.

In the morning, there was a neat note on the breakfast table.  It said:


Dear Mr White

Many thanks for enclosed fee, but honestly I did not expect so much
being we are friends.

    Sincerely yours,
JAMES MONTGOMERY-MAJORIBANKS


I suddenly felt happy about him, and also about the sufferers.  Even if
it did no permanent good to their rheumatism, perhaps it was good for
their spirits.  It gave them something to think about in the boundless
bog, gave them mental fuel.  It had made them for a brief space the
centre of interest and importance.  It was a change.




THE BIRD LIFE


Nobody could say that his had been a successful life.  It pointed no
moral--unless it was the moral of humility.  He must have been one of
the few humans who did not go about admiring themselves for being God's
greatest product.  But, except for the wives he married, his humbleness
seems to have made him happy.

There is no medical definition for insanity.  Legally speaking, being
insane means thinking differently from other people.  For us, Einstein
is a raving lunatic--while all women are maniacs to all men, and vice
versa.  Birds often behave as if they were slightly crazy.

Desmond seems to have been right about the world in which he lived.  He
fitted it.  'You have to wait a long time yet,' he once pondered,
summing things up.  'It isn't people at all, it's birds.'


It was Jack of the Garage who told me about him, during one of the long
evening visits of talk and stories and Guinness by the generous turf
fire--almost a ceilidhe--which often ended our expeditions.  Jack and I
used to shoot or fish on most Wednesdays and Saturdays, and on Sunday
after Mass.  Jack was a man of unquenchable optimism.  He always hoped
that the wind would be right or that the rain would hold off or that
there would be enough petrol, or that, whatever the threatened calamity
was, it would not happen.  This made him a bad guide in practical
decisions, for the calamity usually did happen.  But it made it
impossible not to love him.  He was in the prime of life, a
middle-sized, smiling man with crow's-feet round his warm eyes, and
nut-brown cheeks.  His hair was carefully oiled flat, but thinning--his
hands often smeared with the dark, metallic products of the garage.
His strong and amiable wife was older and richer than himself.  They
were childless.  In some ways he had the kindness and willingness of a
spaniel, without its fawning, and the fact that he was lovable was
matched by the fact that he loved other people, or perhaps was due to
it.  His one obstinacy was a conscious refusal to speak ill.  On
politics, or English tyranny, or religious differences, or merely on
the ill-nature of neighbours, he shut his soft mouth in a hard line and
refused to utter.

This hopefulness about his fellow men resulted in his having a wide
circle of friends, its radius about twenty miles round the village.
They came from all walks of life--such as the walks were in Mayo.  His
own class was presumably the Middle one.  He was the richer kind of
shop-keeper and proprietor of the only garage.  But a hundred
cottages--in a few of which English was scarcely understood and the
income of a large family as little as ten shillings a week--had a
welcome for him as a friend and equal.  He seemed to prefer the
peasants to the shop-keepers.  On market days, you could be sure of
some gnarled, voluble figure in flannel and dark cloth flapping wide,
brandishing a drover's stick, embracing Jack, quaffing the best thing
that ever came out of Ireland--Irish whisky, which makes people
brilliant rather than besotted.  They bought it, preferring a brand
inferior to the best, at the small bar and grocery which masked the
garage and which was attended by his firm wife.

Their house was along the yard, between the bar and the garage.  The
living-room was solidly furnished with heavy pieces like the mahogany
side-board and the gleaming, black-leaded kitchen-range.  The pictures
of the Pope and of the Sacred Heart were in stout frames.  The little,
permanent red lamp in front of the latter was a rarity--an electric
one, run from the generator in the garage.  The massive armchairs and
the hard couch were Victorian or Edwardian.  It was a house-proud room,
rather unusual in Eire, for everything was dusted and polished.  Its
crowning feature was a fungus.

Goodness knows what it was a fungus of, or whether it was vegetable or
mineral.  It existed under a glass dome, like the wax fruits of
Victoria's day, and it grew, and it had to be fed sometimes on liquids.
By colouring these liquids, its own colour could be altered.  It was
horrible and frightening, a malignant growth like some disease in a
bottle from a dissecting room.  It was convuluted and cellular like a
fossil sponge or the lungs of some dread Martian--filamented, mycelian,
sporous.  It was vividly, odiously coloured with electric blues,
arsenical greens, evil violets and sick-room pinks.  It had a
personality.  It was proudly and solicitously tended by Jack's wife.  I
never saw its like elsewhere.

In this bright, solid, cosy, overcrowded room--one of the few houses in
the village with electric light because it made its own--we passed the
winter evenings of hospitality.  We sat there tired after great winds
in the sunset behind stone walls flighting duck, sustained by Guinness
or Jameson, presided over by the Thing.  Jack was a great narrator,
with a relish for character in his stories.  He had an enthusiasm for
odd people.  He drew them out, coaxing them to reveal themselves,
noticing and remembering and afterwards being able to reproduce
them--always affectionately.  He was not that chronic kind of Irish
bore--the witty anecdotalist--nor was he the misty, constipated bard,
with glazed eyes like the younger Yeats, pompously hypnotizing himself
with legendary rubbish about the Fianna.  He was not self-conscious,
and he put on no false acts, It was simply that he enjoyed real people
or nice events, and loved to bring them alive by telling about them,
and he was good at doing it.  His round face would glow with urgency,
as he tried to re-create for me this person or that adventure.  His
wife, usually silent, would sometimes remember a trait and add it to
the picture.

One evening, before going to bed, I scribbled a few pencil notes about
one of his character-sketches.  It was the story of Desmond.  Here they
are--a hasty and sleepy memorandum just as it was written down.  It is
not poetical in a humbug way.  and has no witty point.  It is the
ordinary, unedited, not literary conversation, which pours out
naturally all over the West of Ireland.


Jack's friend, the old peasant who thinks he is 'in the bird life'.

He is 75.

Every Christmas he came to the village for his annual gift of drink,
tobacco and matches from Jack.  He had looked forward to this since ten
years.  He is bed-ridden now and lies in bed singing like a bird.  He
has promised Jack entry to 'bird life' and only his bosom friends will
he have admitted.

Often has Jack taken him fishing to Kiltean, and in the summer, on
homeward trips, the moths have been all about the lights of the car.
Then Jack says, 'Look at those things.'  'Don't be afraid,' says he.
'They are looking after you and I, and keeping us company.'  Or when
Jack and he have gone to preserved waters, he has consoled Jack,
saying: 'If anyone molests you, tell me what happened, and I will deal
with them very soon.'  'And how would you deal with them, Desmond?' 'I
will get those people evicted from their homes, if they're not very
careful, because they are not in the bird life.'

He sings now like a parrot in bed, and, when visited by somebody, he
says: 'When did you change your clothes?' (this is the moult).  'Hello,
hello,' he can say, like a polly.

He always would watch the birds in the air, and ask: 'Did you ever see
me up there, Jack?' Before being bed-ridden he would feed them from his
little back kitchen, and, him being a bird himself, he thought they
understood him better than a human.  Now that he is bed-ridden, he is a
caged bird.  But, like caged birds, he sings better than ever.

He would never go in a car with anyone, only with Jack.  (My peregrines
won't let anybody drive except me.)

'I'm expecting 'em tonight.'

'Who?'

'You don't know.'

Great trouble in making him tell.  Then he revealed that he was
expecting the migration from the South of France.

'I'll be going with them tonight, but I'll be back again in the
morning.'  The earth-bound, injured bird could fly in dreams.  He used
to become uneasy at migration times, and would go out to look at the
sky.  'Tell me, is he above?' Did he mean God, or the leader of the
geese?  (Here Jack's wife put in that he would sometimes migrate
himself, in actuality, being absent for three or four months.  Perhaps
he went as a labourer to England?  Nobody knew.)

He could become other creatures.

'Jack,' he says to Jack, 'did ye ever see me in the water?'

'No, Desmond, I never did.'  'Well,' he says, 'if you did see, you'd be
frightened.  Because one day I saw myself in the water and I was so big
I was frightened.'  (He had seen his reflection and thought he was a
fish.) Once, when in old age he was fishing a pool, Jack was afraid he
would be drowned, and tried to interfere.  'Jack,' he says, 'you don't
know what I can do.  If I fell in, I would be out again with a swish.'
(The salmon leaping.)

He always got worse at full moon.

He had been twice married to 'the wrong kind of people'.  I asked whom?
But both were firmly reticent about badness--just 'the wrong kind of
people'.  He had taken to drink.

On the world:

One day in the sunset, Jack says to him: 'That's a beautiful sunset.'
He looked at Jack and laughed.  'That's not a sunset at all,' he said.
'They are lighting,' says he, 'the lamps in Castlebar.'  (There is a
mental hospital in Castlebar.)  'That's very funny.'  'You don't
understand the world at all, because, if ye did, ye'd be terrible
frightened.  The world is spinning on a big axle, and that axle is
suspended from the heavens on a spider's web.  There's men oiling that
axle day in and day out.  And the colours you see, there are men
painting all day and night, and they use millions of gallons of paints,
painting those paints, and the clouds and everything.'

'And when you die, you won't be dead at all.  You'll still be flying
around.'

He was thinking of angels.

'You have to wait a long time yet.  It's not people at all, it's birds.'




THE FAIRY FIRE


Wild Fowling used to be one of the few sports left which were still
done the hard way.  It might mean getting up at four o'clock in the
morning, with gummy eyes, driving the car for twenty miles to where you
thought the geese were going to cross the coast line, plodding for a
couple of miles in winter darkness across the sea-marsh at risk of your
life (from the tide), digging yourself a shallow grave in the freezing
sand and lying in its icy-harsh water for half an hour or more, like a
doll in a cardboard box.  Then you saw the lovely battalions pass out
of range, drove home for breakfast, and spent the daylight hours spying
for the creatures with binoculars, with a view to the next sortie.  You
went down to the salt-marsh again for the evening flight and possibly
had one glass too many after dinner at the inn.  Goose-shooters used to
resemble the White Knight in _Alice in Wonderland_.  They had his
idealism.  They seldom shot any geese.  They were hung about, like him,
with gadgets.  No goose-man ever went out without a magnum shotgun, or
some even more cumbrous firearm of vasty calibre--which went off with a
Boom and whose recoil gently but firmly pushed the shooter over
backwards, when it was discharged.  There were hand-made cartridges for
the same in all sizes of shot, a goose-bag into which the dead goose
was in theory going to be put--and for sitting on, in the puddles, for
it was oiled to be waterproof--a tide-table, a compass, an electric
torch, a flask of spirits, and a small kitchen shovel for digging the
grave.  These were the minimum needs.

It was possible to pursue this fantasy in the West of Ireland, among
the boundless bogs of the County Mayo.  Geese were more difficult
there, because they did not necessarily cross the coast at all.  They
might fly from bog to lake or vice versa.  But there was a rare variety
of whitefront at a place which had better not be named.  These weighed
25 per cent more than other whitefronts, and, in my opinion, did not
migrate.  I was mad to shoot some, to weigh them for statistics.

To get the feeling of my story, you will need some picture of the West.

When Cromwell evicted the native Irish from the more fertile lands, to
settle his own adventurers, he told them to get to Hell or Connaught.
Perhaps he did not actually identify Hell with Connaught.  But any
Cockney, New Yorker or society figure would do so, even now.  In those
days the almost prehistoric settlements were inaccessible by road.
There were no roads.  The treacherous parts of the bog, on routes known
only to the inhabitants, like the footpaths of animals, could only be
crossed by throwing down brushwood.  The culture of the huge district
was prehistoric--like a La Tne culture of lake dwellings.  It is still
possible to drive fifteen or twenty miles on a modern road across the
level, russet plain, without seeing more than a dozen dwellings.  Round
the great provinces of turf and heather, whose peat-soil, when wet, is
a gleaming roast-coffee blancmange, the abrupt, lonely mountains make
an eternal skyline.  On the coast, the anfractuous cliffs are dotted
with a series of promontory forts made long before the dawn of history.
The earth is hospitable only to the potato, the fuchsia and the
rhododendron.  A fisherman from Belmullet, so Jack told me, once walked
the endless miles to Ballina.  When he saw his first tree, he fell down
and worshipped it.

In winter, this was a hardy, starving territory, a melancholy steppe.
On the few sunny days of summer, it was so beautiful that your gorge
rose in your throat--coming across a lovely tarn, bluer than the sky,
solid cobalt, a secret jewel dropped from heaven, and bluer than
heaven.  At sunset, in some atmospheric conditions, the horizontal rays
would for a few moments turn everything saffron--but everything.  The
earth, the sky, the turf stacks, the white-washed cottage, all
momentarily would glow into glory, like the bars of an electric fire
warming up, and the same copper colour.


On this particular evening, in the winter, we drove to the farthest
settlement--it could hardly be called a village--at the most isolated
fold of the vastest bog there was.  It was called in Gaelic, the Cow
Bog.  Although it was fifteen miles away, Jack as usual knew the
people.  He was popular with them, and they spoke to him in English,
though they spoke their own language among themselves and one or two of
the very old ones could speak nothing else.  They were as hardy as
snipe.

We arrived before darkness, a freezing evening, with the Atlantic wind
unchecked by a single perpendicular thing between there and America.
There were about half a dozen thatched cottages, with their black turf
ricks.  There was a kind of track between them.

The people of Shanataggle received us with stately, almost Spanish
courtesy.  The music-hall caricature of an Irishman as a sort of funny
gorilla, with a pig on a string and a clay pipe stuck in his hat--which
is fiercely resented by the real Irish--is their own fault.  The people
of the east coast clowned it like that about a hundred years ago, to
diddle the English, and now the picture has stuck to them.  But the
true Gael was never funny.  A spare, gaunt hidalgo of a figure,
reserved and sensitive and subtle and wicked in many ways--talkative
only when drunk or in emotional release or to mask an anxiety-neurosis
by buffoonery--innocently brutal or beautiful by turns.  He lives in
direct, not artificial, immediate response to circumstances, rightly
despising the blunt, uncomprehending codes of the Saxon.  There is an
intuitive, realistic, feminine ferocity in his mind--for women are
ruthlessly real.  The Gael is a Spaniard, a Malvolio, no comic.  For
that matter, when the Armada was driven north around the coasts of
Scotland, some galleons did come to wreck among the stony fangs of
western Ireland.  Who can tell what sallow don, escaping massacre, has
left his fiery blood among the black-haired, blue-eyed, stately savages
of Shanataggle?

They ushered us into the best house and set us down with ceremony to
drink strong tea, incomparably brewed in a metal pot with the turf
ashes raked round it.  The tea had a faint, pleasant tang of peat.  It
became obvious that there was only one egg in the house.  This was
presented to me, lightly boiled, with home-baked bread and sweet
butter.  It would have been churlish not to accept the egg, or to have
made even the most allusive attempt to pay for it.  If you had given a
shilling or two to the smallest child present, under the pretence of
making a gift, it would have been identified at once as a trick, an
ungentlemanly and obtuse rejection of the hospitality meant by the egg.
Also, it would have been churlish not to sit down to the unwanted meal,
although the daylight was slipping away and we still had far to walk.
Everything in Eire always was late so the best thing was to accept the
fact.

A certain amount of nonsense gets written about the hospitality of
peasants.  The true reason for it, if you face it without being
sentimental, is that a stranger is precious to them.  The
entertainment, the novelty, the something-to-think-about, the mental
pabulum, the refreshment of a new ingredient in the cud of one
another--which is all they have to chew through winter nights from
birth to death--these made me well worth an egg to them.  The
hospitality was an effort to detain me.  Although it may seem that they
were conferring something on me, it was I who was really conferring a
refill of subject matter for their strong, starved, intelligent minds.
I was like a new book to some scholar, marooned away from libraries.
This was why it would have been unthinkable not to linger with their
egg, submitting to be absorbed.

Jack soon had the flow of talk in motion.  He related how, on a
previous visit some years since, after a whole bottle of poithn, the
octogenarian of the neighbourhood had leapt a ten foot rivulet, his
coat-tails flying.  This story led to anecdote and speculation, to
politics and legend and philology, while every eye watched every motion
of the Englishman, a cynosure, to store him up for future nourishment.
On the subject of eggs and Gaelic, which I was doing my best to learn,
I gleaned for my own interest one piece of information.

It seems that the great Irish pirate-queen Grnia O Mhaille, once
attracted the attention of Queen Elizabeth--to whom, incidentally, she
tried without success to refuse any form of homage.  Grnia's
headquarters before capture were at a stronghold on Clare Island in
Clew Bay.  Elizabeth, interested by her savage rival, made inquiries
about the Irish and their tongue.  An illustration of the barbaric
language was given to her, thus: 'd'it damh dubh ubh amh ar neamh.'
She thought it sounded very peculiar--not so peculiar, however, as
Grnia O Mhaille considered a similar English sentence: 'Beg a big egg
from Peg.'

A thin boy of about nineteen came in, while we were conversing on
subjects of similar interest, and sat down without speaking in the
corner.  He was evidently exhausted by his day's work, and was given a
hunk of bread to revive him.

He was a person of startling beauty.  He had those lovely, curved
shins--skeletal--which made you long to be a timber wolf and gnaw them
in some den, or an archaeologist to unwrap them from a mummy.  They
curved like a Persian bow.  His lengthy, fragile fingers were
ducal--no, they were princely.  The blue-black hair fell over sapphire
eyes.  He was tired, hungry, so shy in his dignity that I do not think
he looked at me or spoke directly to me the whole evening.  He was a
Masai warrior.  He should have leaned on a spear in a leopard skin,
drinking bullock's blood, with one leg curled round the other, his body
painted a rusty colour, like the turf ashes.  He was the son of the
house, and was to be our guide.

Jack was the merry fellow who got on well with everybody.  The Masai
trusted him enough to speak in monosyllables.  Such conversation as he
was willing or able to exchange with me had to be carried on through
Jack, as if the latter were an interpreter.  Probably the boy did not
understand a word I said, having hypnotized himself into the belief
that he would not be able to.  (Once, driving into Galway with an Irish
speaker next to me in the long Jaguar, we had drawn up beside one of
those black-hatted peasants in a bainn, to ask the way.  Although
spoken to in his own language by a compatriot, he had understood
nothing.  He had been convinced by the sight of the car that he would
not be able to understand.)  Besides, with our spearman, there was the
vaulting ambition and superbity of youth, which made him
self-conscious, confused, proud and ashamed, friendly and resentful.
He had that struggling look of somebody who is sulking and does not
want to sulk, the eyes saying tormentedly, I am stuck in this: please
help me out.  He was a nobleman in hated chains.

When the decencies had been observed, I managed to get the party on
foot towards the small mountainy lake at which we hoped to ambush the
geese.  It was late.  We could not be there by twilight.  We had a mile
or more to walk, skipping from tussock to tussock over the chocolate
bog.

They stowed me away at last in a neat round hole in the turf, which had
the shape of a large keg or small barrel.  No wonder it was shaped so,
for it had been dug to house a barrel.

In the old days, when poithn was illegally brewed in Eire, the makers
had to conceal their kegs of the true, smoky, water-coloured,
dangerous, vintage whisky--which was best taken either hot from the
still or else, so rarely possible, after being matured.  In between
these dates, it was a lethal drink, which made people drunk for the
second time if they took a glass of water for their thirst next
morning.  There was a slight blueness in its colour, like the faintest
wood smoke.  The best way to hide the kegs from the excisemen and the
guards was to dig a hole in some hundreds of square miles of bog, and
to bury them.  I was squatting in such a hole.  It was next to the tarn
at which we expected the geese, and it made an excellent ambush.  My
comrades went to other places of concealment.

Incidentally, there was a good economic reason for illicit brewing in
distant parts like these.  If you had a patch of corn fifteen miles
from the nearest market, across bad tracks, and had to carry your
harvest there on your shoulders, it was convenient to reduce its bulk.
Brewed down at home, it could be carried in one keg on one journey as
spirits: in sacks as grain, it might take four journeys.

The geese did come.  In fact, they had come already.  But it was pitch
dark now, without a trace of moon.  We could hear their wings, their
gabbling on the little pocket-handkerchief of water, but we could not
see an inch of them.  I was furious with our party of three, including
myself, for being a quarter of an hour too late.  We could have
poniarded those geese by touch, but we could not pistol them.  They
were invisible.

Like a mad terrapin in a mud-puddle, I glared into the frozen darkness
in all directions, my implements clattering about me.  And, by, it was
cold!  In the midwinter poithn-hole, with my shooting mittens and
various dodges, I was protected from the icy air a little: but what of
Jack and what of that foodless warrior who had no hole to protect them?
The boy had such a thin suit over his bird bones, his best one.  He was
a Spartan with long fingers under his arm-pits, at whose slim breast
the fox of January gnawed unprotested.

Eventually they came to fetch me.

Jack said with chattering teeth: 'Come along now, we can go.  It is too
late.  Nothing can be done now.'

They extended gelid hands to help me out of the keg, while I unbent my
bone-blue joints, like the round knobs which butchers hack with
hatchets, and muttered about the geese.  The setter Brownie, who had
been trembling in it with me, was released to scamper.

'We must come again.  We must come before sunset, properly.  Did you
hear them?'

'Yes, yes.'

We blew out our words, beating our arms for circulation.  It will be
important to tell this story with clinical accuracy.  It is not a
fairy-story, and not fiction.

Evidently Jack and his bashful prince of the Gaels must have noticed
the things as they came to collect me.  But the first of them had heard
of it and the second had seen it often before, so they must have
decided to find out what effect it would have on the Saxon.

As we tottered the first uneven paces from that agonizing hidey-hole,
Jack said, with exaggerated concern and a touch of mischief: 'Look,
what is this?  Look at this!'  He pointed, half teasing, half scared
himself, to our feet.  And there, at our very boots, a crumbling series
of phosphorescent green worms--about as bright as the end of a
cigarette--but green instead of red--were tumbling back into the soggy
footprints.  They were a miniature landslide of light, like a football
crowd of crumb-sized spectators pouring out of the exits, all on fire.

It is alarming, whatever you may say, to find that your footprints have
turned into glow-worms, in the black night, in the red bog, fifteen
miles from anywhere.

I said: 'Well, it might be anything.  Come along; let's go home.'

We were in a country which believed in fairies--not fairies with gauzy
wings sitting on toad-stools, but supernatural beings, largely
malevolent.  When your individual unconscious is submerged in the
subconsciousness of a place and race, it tends to be influenced by its
surroundings.

The nervousness of me, the materialist, grew contagious.  The other
two, a prehistoric believer and a more modern half-believer, now caught
the scare.  What had started as one of Jack's jokes turned into a
subdued, silent panic.  We began to hop and shamble away, from tussock
to tussock, in the direction of the darkling settlement where human
beings lived.

But, after a hundred yards or so, shame and the scientific attitude
triumphed.

They were ahead, more nimble and more accustomed to the moorland.  I
called to them: 'Jack, wait for me.  Stop a minute.  Don't leave me
alone.  I must find out about it.'

They stopped to wait, and we turned.

For a hundred yards back, exactly like the black footsteps of good King
Wenceslas in the white snow, there were three chains of glow-worm
footsteps in the sable night.  We looked from side to side, and now
there circled or arc'd us at a distance, a cantering, high-stepping
circumference of green fire.  It was made by the feet of my beautiful
setter bitch, and it moved with her.

'No, wait.  Don't go away.  We must find out.'

I lifted my boot: it was on fire.

I put my finger to the welt of it and scooped a piece: it stuck to the
finger, without burning it.

I smelt it: it did not smell, except of bog.

I gingerly licked it: it tasted of wet turf, nothing else.

It was tasteless, scentless, soundless, warmthless, visible.

We stumbled off through the oceanic night, leaving these same
footprints behind us, circled by the flaming setter, gradually going
quicker and quicker.  We joked at ourselves, partly clowning our
uneasiness, but feeling inside a real wish to get out of here, out of
the whelming winter darkness and the pursuing fire.  We took to the bed
of a burn, where the going was better than on the hummocky heather.  We
were in a hurry.  We slid and tripped and fell.

Towards the relief-giving end of this eerie treck, whose direction in
the ink of evening depended on our guide, I did manage to pass a few
messages through Jack to the grandee.

'Do you often get this?'

'Yes.'

'Is it the Will-o'-the-Wisp?'

'No.  That one is a different thing.  Often we see him too, but he is
more like a tower of flame.'

'What do you call it?'

'We call it the _solas sidh_ (the Fairy Fire).'

And the gauche, courtly, resentful caballero looked distantly, with
dignity into the darkness.  He was afraid that I was going to make a
mock of him.


We went to the car, not to the dwellings.  It was parked at the foot of
the track which led to them.  We wanted to go away.

No tip was given to our proud conductor.  Perhaps, when sufficient time
had passed to make it decent, he could be entertained on his next visit
to market, with drink or smokes.

We switched on the inside light of the car, like royalty going to the
theatre, but for us it was to banish the night.  We wanted a bright,
small, cosy interior--a shell of civilization to defend us against
prehistory, against the principalities of races long defeated.  Ireland
is a melting pot of conquered cultures, of stone men and bronze men and
iron men, of Celts and Vikings and Anglo-Normans, driven remorselessly
westward by the volcano of European history, pressed finally together
against the rim of the Atlantic in their promontory forts, between the
devil of the New Weapon and the deep sea.  Their gods go with them.
Duk-Duk dancers and Druids, Fir Bolg and Tuatha De Danann, Baal and
Beltaine, Crom Cruach and Cromwell, the conquered conquerors, enslaved,
revengeful, charged with ancient powers--they pressed heavily in the
wind against the weak, lit windows of our motor, tight shut.

We took some whisky from the flask, and drove home thoughtfully, in
silence at first.


There seems to be a theory that the _solas sidh_ is some kind of
phosphorescence--like the lights in tropical oceans--and that it
depends on atmospheric conditions.  It is not caused by methane or
marsh-gas--which may account for the other 'tower of flame' which the
boy mentioned--since it does not burn or smell.  It is no good going to
the Cow Bog in the hope of viewing it, because it only comes when the
conditions have happened to suit each other.

Then it is there, glowing like a forgotten kipper in the darkened
pantry, but much more so--stepping with the wayfarer, step for
step--galloping with his dog in cusps and curlicues of ice-green
fire--not shewing itself dispersedly, but only on the foot or where the
foot has been--cold, corpse-lit, and brighter than the figures on
wrist-watches which have been painted with luminous paint.

On other nights, which are the usual ones, no frightful fiend doth
tread so closely behind the wildfowler.




LETTER FROM A GOOSE SHOOTER


I felt lonely standing on the white sand in the twilight.  The rowers
in the currach cried a farewell to me as they left.  Then, in the
quickly falling darkness, shot with the goose cries, I went into the
broken house on man's first duty--to make fire.  When this was burning
with wreckage, I set out to search for the well.  But it was dark now,
and the electric torch had broken somehow, so I could not find it.  I
went to the drinking place for cattle and got water there.

I was alone on the island, and it was mid-winter.

The Inniskeas are islands off the west coast, once inhabited by men.
But ten were drowned in 1927, in what was called the Inniskea Disaster,
and--the land being too exhausted by a thousand years of 'sea-manure'
(sea-weed) to grow potatoes any longer--they had been abandoned.  The
little village stood quite silent beside its anchorage, the roofs
fallen, the stones of the walls in the street.  In twelve years it
seemed to have lost all human origin.  No people were expected by its
broken doors.  A few black bullocks sheltered there at night, the seals
came into the harbour, two small black birds visited it in the
mornings, two ravens cronked higher up, and all the time you heard the
eternal geese, which, driven away during man's thousand years of
residence, had now returned.

The people in the currach had been afraid to leave me, because it was a
bad coast.  There was a chance that they might not be able to come back
in six weeks, as sometimes happened on the next-door neighbour, the
Black Rock Light.  Also they feared the dead of the disaster and
perhaps a certain old god of the island, venerated until the last
generation, of whom I was to hear more.

Brownie, the red setter, kept me awake for all but two hours, the first
night, shivering.  Such bed as we could make was strange.  The feelings
and thoughts have gone with people about me.  But if I had had paper,
and could have written, it would have been a fountain of feeling about
eternal things.  I did write on an envelope, during the strange and
sleepless night, a message of propitiation to the god.  The romancing
mainlanders had told me about him already, and I had seen some Inniskea
stones in the Dublin Museum, and I believed what I had been told.

  On Inniskea, long before Patrick came,
  Stood the stone idol of the secret name:
  The magic people made him.  No surprise,
  No threat, no question lit his two round eyes,
  Nor had he other features.  Consciousness
  Was all his feeling, all his creed 'I wis.'
  He watched the wild geese twenty centuries.

  Inniskea is an island.  Ten years gone
  The human race lived here, the windows shone
  With candles over the water, and men
  Fished currachs, women wellwards went from ben.
  There was a King to rule the island then,
  Chosen for might, who had his admiral
  Of all the Inniskeas.  The priest's sick call
  Was this cold pasture's only festival.

  Mass was so far off, with such storms between,
  And in the dark nights moved so much unseen
  On the wild waters, that Man's beating heart
  Still sometimes turned towards the old God's art.
  Much magic was made with the dew.  The wells
  Secretly stirred with strange internal spells.

  To keep the Agent off, or the Excise,
  Fires were lit before the God of Eyes
  And dances made around his stone, sunwise.
  Their old cold Godstone they, for comfort, dressed
  In one new suit each year: his Sunday best.

  Then the remorseless sea, the all-beleaguring,
  The crafty, long-combed sea, the stark and whistling,
  The savage, ancient sea, master at waiting,
  Struck once.

          Two hours later the mainland
  Received one man, a saucepan in his hand,
  Astride an upturned currach.  At the Inn
  They gave him clothes without, whisky within,
  Such as they could: but he nor left nor right
  Altered his eyes.  Only, with all his might,
  This man bailed with his saucepan all that night.
  In half one hour of squall, from calm to calm, the Main
  Holding his ten mates drowned had fallen on sleep again.

  Nobody painted the houses after.
  The islanders lost all heart for laughter.
  Work was a weariness, dances were done,
  On the island whose pride of Man was gone.

  Now I am all alone on Inniskea,
  All alone with the wind and with the sea.
  The corrugated iron, rusted brown,
  Gives a burnt look to the abandoned town.
  The roofs are ruins and the walls are down.

  The Land Commission took the people ashore.
  King Phillip Lavell is here no more.
  They have even taken away the God Who Saw,
  To stand in Dublin Museum.  From ten till four
  He eyes the opposite wall.

          Oh God of Eyes,
  Bound there in darkness and deprived of skies,
  Know that your Geese are back.  Know that their cries
  Lag on the loud wind as, by candlelight,
  At Inniskea's one fire, I, your last subject, write:
  Lulled by their laughter, cradled in their night.


It was something I can't explain now, to write this by the popping of
the salty firelight, in the one-roomed house, alone.  The crayfish pots
were piled high in the corner, with spherical lobster pots on top of
them, twisted out of heather roots.  A bed of hay stood in another
corner with damp quilts on it.  The room was crammed with wreckage
(there was a goodish roof to keep it dry).  There were two wooden
stools, some seine nets, a bag of flour hanging in the window for
castaways, a billy-can, a candle stuck in a bottle, the trembling dog.
And outside, within twenty yards, there was the lonely sea, the goose
music, the heathen god, the winter night of stormy solitude.

The flames of the fire in this primeval cave shone on a brown ceiling
of boards.

Three mildewed religious pictures, without frames or glass, hung from a
piece of timber beside the bed of straw.  They were as necessary to the
place, when two or three of the islanders slept there, waiting for
wreckage, as lifeboats are necessary to a liner.  But to a soul alone,
possibly to stay six weeks if the weather broke, beleagured by cold and
ghosts and darkness and the sea of night, they were the lifebelt
itself.  One was of the Sacred Heart, in the middle of a cross.  One
was of some choristers singing with unnaturally goody-goody faces.  And
one, in colour, was of Joseph holding lilies and the Infant Christ.
His beard was cut like mine.  Brownie, a pagan, could find no comfort
in these, and that was why she trembled.  I stoked the fire and laid
her before it, stretching my body across her to give by contact such
Christian safety as I could.  We slept, in three plaids, on the stone
floor, two hours--waking at intervals to keep the fire bright.

At half past five it was too much trouble to pretend sleeping.  I
brewed tea in the billy-can, with a tot of fiery west-coast rum, and
ate slices of bread and butter.  The tea, boiled together with sugar,
was fine.  Then, a little after six, we opened the windy door and
stepped into the night.

This door had opened itself once in the middle of the night, and once
the candle and fire had simultaneously burned low for a moment, and the
spirits, whistling like otters, had swung round the deserted homes.

Now, stepping out, I found myself face to face with the Devil.

He was black, motionless, a darkness silhouetted against the darkness,
considering me with ears and horns.  I stopped also, and considered
him.  The horns took shape against the night.

When the door had opened itself, I had stood for two heartbeats, then
firmly shut it.  When the lights had dimmed, I had sat for two
heart-beats, waiting for them to burn again.  To the cries of otters I
had turned a defiant ear.  Now, face to face with Satan, I stood as
quietly as himself, for many heart-beats.

We watched each other with curiosity, in the calm of aidless spirits.
You can only be afraid when you are clothed with civilization, when you
have liens of succour.  You can only be frightened when you have a
chance of escape.  Now that I had no human ties, no roof over my head,
no means of escape, I had no fears.  The Devil, with the same dignity
as I felt myself, moved off quietly in the shape of one of the few
black bullocks which were left all winter on the island.  I had not
frightened him--he did not gallop away with the sudden panic of
half-wild cattle--and he had not frightened me.

I stepped on slowly over the fallen stones of the village walls, stones
which man could hardly detect except by touch and by the wild sense of
animals.  The thing was to walk with the patience of prehistory, moving
with a balanced body between shapes, at half a mile an hour, knowing
only the stones, the fallen roofs, the choked drains, the wreckage, the
rocks, and the feeling pace of night.

I was half-way to the place which I had chosen, imagining landmarks
which themselves consisted only of the dark, when a thing flew up from
under our feet.  It circled two or three times invisible, braying like
a donkey.  The strange cry of the ass does have some quality of
levitation about it, and perhaps the ruined walls may have reflected
the noise in various directions.  There were donkeys on the island,
too--but my heart knew it was not these.  With the beads in my pocket
and the magnum in my hand, I did not fear it.  It was possibly a
shearwater.

By seven o'clock we were at the fallen gable, and, almost
simultaneously, almost directly overhead, there was the first low quack
of the geese.  I could not see them.

The sun, when he was eventually resounding on Achill and Duvillaun and
Innisglora and the distant kingdom of Erris, found us collecting six
dead Barnacles and chasing two runners.  We were sated with what then
seemed a glorious victory, the first time we had killed so many at one
flight.  Fixed in the memory, now, is the first meteor of a darker
darkness, streaking down out of the superb squadron--the
soul-satisfying Thump with which he bounced upon the salty land.  Then,
as the light grew, there had been the crouching under the wall, the
white breasts advancing with their thrilling cries and ordered ranks,
Brownie ruthlessly held down in cover, the body straightening and the
two bangs, the second almost coinciding with the thump of the first
goose.  This was the first time, out of some three hundred sunrises or
sunsets, that I had had what I could truly call a left-and-right at
geese.  Those two White-Fronts on Carrowmore the previous week, for
instance: I had been between them and the wind, had had time to reload,
and had killed two geese out of four shots.  But today, for the first
time in my life, it was Bang-Thump, Bang-Thump--the real McCoy.  Twenty
years later, I can add with pleasure that it was also my last
left-and-right.

The Barnacle Goose was a species I had not handled before.  She was
earlier in her flight than the grey ones.  She had a lower, more
monotonous, taciturn, disyllabic, quacking note.  She had great
vitality from the killing point of view, was as cunning as the grey
goose, but did not raise herself in the air when shot at with the same
rapid climb as her cousins.  This heaviness in soaring was one of her
chief differences.  In appearance she reminded me of the sixty-year-old
spinster aunts who used to frequent England in my childhood.  She had
the same black shiny gloves, the jet beads, the dress of black and
dove-grey garnished with white, the high collar which was introduced by
the wife of Edward VII, and she probably kept her toque on with a long
black hat pin.  The average weight of eight birds--I gave one away and
did not weigh it--was four and a half pounds.  You thought of her as
female, but of all the other geese as male.  In the hand she was
female.  In the air, like all these grand creatures, at whom I could
not bear to shoot nowadays, she was a male.

Sleepy and satisfied with murder, we plodded the clean sand back to our
burrow, and made more tea and bread and butter.  The interior of the
little house was a surprise in daylight, for, as the bullocks were
liable to break glass windows, the owners of this, the soundest
building on the isle, had covered the windows with corrugated iron.  It
was dark inside, both day and night, a sort of cave-life refuge among
the straw and looming lobster pots and smoke.

The forenoon passed pleasantly in a long but profitless stalk of a
large party on the other side of the hill.  I was filled with
happiness, watching them for half an hour.  With a good appetite from
this, we came back to dinner, which was to be a cold roast chicken we
had brought.  I had a bite from the breast and plenty of bread and tea,
but Brownie had the two legs, the two wings and the carcase.  I could
not persuade her to eat bread and butter.  So, as she had had an
unhappy night, I let her have the meat we owned.  Chicken bones are not
so bad for dogs as people say.

Eating the good bread by the quayside, I heard geese taking a trip, and
ducked into a broken door.  Peering out with one eye, I saw the main
party turn back.  But one, evidently a raw recruit, came on over my
head.  I was half ashamed at killing so many in the morning, and,
thinking that there was moderation in all things, particularly in
regard to Edwardian spinsters, I had decided to slay no more.  But this
was too much of a temptation.  I stood up, pointed the gun at him with
a second's hesitation, saw every feather of his breast in the frosted
winter sunlight, and the white-scarfed head turning hither and thither
as he looked about to discover why he was alone.  Then the temptation
was too great, and, taking my finger from the choke trigger to the
cylinder (where I knew there was a small cartridge of No. 2 shot) I let
him have it with the proper lead.  Smack!  He struggled madly in the
air, with one wing broken at the elbow, turned four or five
somersaults, and landed thumping on the white sand of the
harbour--where Brownie was waiting to receive him.  She brought him to
me, his live snake head curling upright on one side of her mouth, and,
hating the business of screwing the tough neck, I thumped his head on
the door post to break his brains.

These geese had been sent over by two men in a currach, who, in fishing
the bay, had made a visit to the North Island to brew tea.  Now, when I
wanted to snatch an hour's sleep, the two rowers of the currach arrived
to pay a visit.  They were Irish-speakers.  They apologized for having
the English badly.  They danced round me like pleased dogs, delighted
by the strange beard-man who had dared the ghosts, giving loud joyful
cries of hospitality to their old kingdom, where they had been born in
the last century.  They had been born on the flat North Island,
however, and disapproved my choice of the featured south.

We had high pleasure with each other.  I bid them welcome to the south
with a glass of rum.  They watched me finish my dinner, sitting
interested in the dark den, watching my eating manners.  We made long
talk.  The elder of the two always addressed me affectionately, laying
his hand upon my sleeve, as 'my _good_ man'.

I was told about the Godstone, his yearly suit of new clothes--I
gathered they were of blue serge--and how the South Island, once
growing jealous of the North's holy possession, stole him away to the
South in a currach on a dark night.  At about this time a barrel of
paraffin was washed ashore, and the King of the South had it brought
into the house where the Godstone stood, hidden away behind a curtain
at the hinder end.  They were experimenting with the paraffin--a
novelty to them--in the hope that it would be something to drink, when
a child set fire to it, and the house was consumed.  One man was burned
to death in the flames.  But the fire halted at the curtain of the
Godstone, and he was untouched.  'You may say what you like, my _good_
man, but there was something strange about that, wasn't there?'

I expressed my indignation at his having been taken in chains to
Dublin, and asked what he was like.  'We do not know,' said the elder
man (Reilly).  'He was in my father's time.  A priest,' he added
indignantly, 'then came and broke him.  But the Godstone hurted his
foot, and he was dead within the twelve-month.'  'Do you mean that it
fell on the priest's foot?'  'No, no,' cried Reilly testily: 'it hurted
his foot.'  I was left with a confused guess that there might have been
a verse of Scripture, distorted by translation from Irish into English,
at the back of his strong mind.  He probably had no idea about its
being in the Bible: 'Thou shalt bruise his head, but he shall bruise
thy heel.'

'Where,' I asked, 'was the Godstone kept when they stole him?'  'Why,
in the house you are in now, my _good_ man; did you not hear anything
last night?'

In the course of great compliments upon staying alone with the spirits,
the younger man said strongly: 'If they were to offer me three million
pounds, I would not stay alone on the islands.  If I had travelled the
world a bit' (here he bowed courteously to me) 'perhaps I would stay.
But in my present state I would not stay a night alone, no, not for
three million pounds.'  He giggled at the thought of anybody offering
him this sum.

We discussed the thing which brayed, from under my feet.  The
whistling, they thought, was otters or seals.  I whistled in imitation,
and the old man, cocking his head on one side, said 'Otters'
emphatically.  But the braying stumped them.  Donkeys could not fly
over your head, geese did not bray, and the Godstone would have been
too heavy to fly.  Anyway, he was supposed to be in Dublin, though I
doubted whether he spent the nights there.

Were there any other stones on the island?  Yes, plenty.  There was a
very good one quite close to here, which they would show me when they
were showing the well after I had finished dinner.  It had photygraphs
on it.

The photygraph stone was a thin slab of limestone stuck upright above
the harbour.  It had a circular cross, like a consecration cross, upon
it, and underneath, beautifully carved, the kind of wriggle which you
find in the Book of Kells.

There followed conversation about the North Island, dear to them, as
yet unvisited by me.  They eagerly urged me to come across to it in
their currach, but I would not go.  A currach is a primeval water
vehicle with no keel, kept upright in the sea by faith.  It is said to
be safe.  But I did not care for it, after coming in one of them on
this long-rolling sea the day before, and I thought the motor-boat
might arrive to take me home while I was away, and at any rate I had
taken a dislike for the North Island.  It seemed too flat to be
interesting.  Trying to provoke my interest they pointed out one high,
symmetrical, lonely sandhill--the landmark of the island.  What did I
think it was made of?  It was not a sandhill at all.  It was made of
three things, with the sand piled round them: the three things were
stones, shells and bones.  'Bones of what?' I asked, thinking of some
prehistoric kitchen midden.  'Men's bones, of course.'  'Good gracious,
what sort of men?'  'Oh, it would be those Danes, I suppose,' said the
elder Reilly off-handedly.  'A lady came here in the summer,' he added,
'from Dublin.  She was digging them up, you know.'  Considering the
matter, he reported with awe: 'She put a wire fence all round them.'

We had other interesting talk, about the two public houses there had
once been (one was a shebeen), and about the dragging home of
brides--how only the younger people could go to Mass, and then only on
fine days, because it was not safe to take the old people in boats for
fear of storm--about the last King of the Island, a big man with a
voice like thunder, who was killed by drinking crude rum washed ashore,
who spent a month in the Belmullet hospital, but was brought back to
his island to die--about a man who had hanged himself from a
rafter--about Columkille's church on the North Island--about the
whaling station which the Norwegians once made here, and the great Iron
they had left.

Then, seeking a little information for themselves, the old man
mentioned that the Germans were very thorough men.  I agreed.  Was I an
Englishman, he asked, with hesitation.  'My mother was certainly an
Englishwoman,' I said, 'and I was educated in England.'  'Well, that's
the way it goes,' said he, rubbing his hands together with delight.  A
man who could bring himself to live alone with the spirits of Inniskea
was to Reilly worth considering.

We arranged to come out to the North Island in a three-man currach in
January, there to spend some weeks together in amity.  They promised to
give me the Gaelic properly ('Fuil Gaedhilge agat?' they had inquired,
and I, with stammering tongue and shame, had wrongly made up an answer,
'Ni ta agam').  I was to give them change of thought I suppose.  Then,
waving their caps gaily in farewell, they pulled out of the harbour,
and the currach dwindled over the sea.

The barnacles made no evening flight that sunset.  They were upset by
the moon, now growing.  I guessed that on moonless nights they spent
the day on the South Island, the night on the lake of the North, but
that when the moon was strong they would fly at whim.  I had caught the
flight in the morning partly because it was the first quarter of a
growing moon--they were not yet taking it for granted--and partly
because the clouds had killed the light.  Or did the sea-geese have no
regular hours?

In our dark home I carefully dried two of the fishermen's quilts before
a big fire, hard-boiled four eggs, of which I chopped up two for
Brownie (who thought me no cook), drank tea, and made a bed with loving
thought.  Then I put the beads over my head, to wear them as a talisman
which would not need holding, and slept in their protection, half
believing.  After an hour's deep unconsciousness I woke at eight
o'clock, in an agony of cramp.  Disposed again in better position--the
priest's position for sleep, called 'in Grace'--we sank into the deep
world again till midnight: then woke with the roar of the wind outside,
and its whistle under the door.

I revived the fire in the now freezing room, and lay listening.  They
had not wanted to leave us on the island, and I had been forced,
pointing to the sack which bulged mostly with the rugs and two
saucepans, to say that I had food for a fortnight.  But there were only
four loaves of bread, two pounds of butter, and a little sugar and tea,
with twelve eggs and a pot of Bovril.  Brownie was too pampered for
these things.  I was not troubled about starving, but the dog would
lose condition, and a long stay might be a bore.  There were enough
geese to live on for the rest of the winter.  Considering how I would
fix up a wooden spit to roast the birds, and how I could eat a green
plant from one of the streams, which looked a little like watercress, I
fell into a blissful sleep for the third time, till I had slept eleven
hours.

I had no geese the third day.  The moon had put them off.  With so many
dead, it did not seem right to stalk them.  Going out to the morning
flight, I found the wind had dropped.  In the afternoon the motor-boat
called for us, on her way from relieving the lighthouse at Black Rock.
By the evening I was back in a hot bath at our village of five hundred
souls on the mainland, feeling as if I was in London, but feeling also
a sense of loss in Bedlam.  The equanimity and reality which I had
collected on the last day, exploring the caverns and strong
promontories of the west coast of the island--all the deep racial
thoughts I had felt there and a temporary conviction of the relation of
God to man--the cairn I had made for the bodies of two of my shot
geese, which had been found by the herring gulls before I found
them--all the hours on high places, with only a pair of ravens above
me: all my strength was momently crumbling away.  I can only remember
that the North Island was said to be inhabited by one cat, and that, on
the last morning, when I was standing by the glorious, lonely Atlantic
harbour, wondering whatever other Christmas-present God could think of
for me, I had looked up to find a pair of young ravens playing a few
feet above my head.  They were quite small, only about the size of
jackdaws, and every feather on their bodies was perfect.  I watched in
rapture, admiring the strong re-curve of their glossy primaries and the
way they wagged their feather-perfect tails.  I thought how strange
that young ravens should be as small as jackdaws, that they should have
this thin and almost curlew beak.  I looked earnestly upon the beak,
and upon the feet.  My heart bounded as I distinguished the redness,
even against the sky.  No wonder they were so trim, so much lovelier
than any of the black-guard I had previously known.  They were not
ravens at all.  They were the red-beaked choughs of legend, looking on
Man for the first time--as I on them.




THE GODSTONE


We went to the island again, in a three-man currach.  We got there and
back between the weathers.  A heron wove her way to the deserted haven
as we left it, low and labouring over the slaty sea.

The Godstone had begun to fascinate me.  It had become a wild goose
chase of its own.

I had started a confused, archaeological quest for it--which was
unwelcome to the inhabitants of Erris.

They did not want to be investigated as idolaters by an infidel.  It
had happened before, in the case of some interfering Protestant
missionaries from Achill, and the search had resulted in calamity.
They were partly ashamed of the stone and partly anxious to defend it.
My heavy mind--too blunt, direct and Saxon--was bejingled with ideas
about paganism and phallic pillars and the claptrap of a half-baked
archaeologist.  Their reaction therefore, unless carefully stalked, was
to maintain that the image never had been worshipped, and was in fact
an ordinary Catholic statue before which Creeds, Our Fathers and Hail
Marys might be recited.  In this, they were not being quite frank.

The thing was called in English the Godstone.  In Gaelic, so far as I
could catch it by ear, it was called the Naomhg--that not very secret
name, mentioned in the verses which I had written on the island before
starting the quest in earnest.  Now 'naomhg' could mean a canoe or a
cot.  But 'naomh' meant 'saint or holy one' and 'g' was the adjective
for 'young'.  The Little Holy One.  Incidentally, the word--which looks
as if it would sound horrid in English script--looked and sounded
beautiful in Gaelic: [Gaelic: naomhg].  They pronounced it 'nee-vogue'.
Scrabbling about in a dictionary, I found that 'neamh' meant 'heaven'
and 'nam' 'brightness'; but also that 'neamh' was a negative prefix,
so that 'neamh-g', unless I had gone astray in the grammar, might mean
the reverse of young: the Old One.  In any case, pursuing the word by
ear at first, and not knowing how to spell it, made dictionaries
unhelpful.

I chased that Naomhg for five months all together--a tortuous, Irish
trail which is now too complicated to straighten out.  The only way to
tell it would be as it went.


It was said in one of the country legends that St Patrick failed to
bless Erris when he blessed all Ireland from the top of the Reek.  It
was a low peninsula, mainly of sand-dunes and marram grass, about ten
miles long, which formed the outer arm of Blacksod Bay.  Its dreadfully
poor inhabitants lived mainly by fishing--though there was a small
doll-factory--and their gardens were of sand.  By digging these gardens
with alternate layers of sand and sea-weed, they were able to grow
potatoes.  They mostly spoke Gaelic.  They had abandoned the two
narrow, rocky islands of Inniskea, which covered a stretch of about
four miles, three miles out to sea, because of the 'disaster' in 1927
and because life on them was said to be 'slavery'.  All commodities,
including religion and fuel, had had to be imported by boat, for there
was no priest.  Two other islands, Innisglora and Duvillaun (the Black
Island), were also deserted.  All had been inhabited by 'saints'--that
is to say, by monks--in the seventh century, and long before that by
other races, stretching back to people perhaps like Esquimaux, who
lived on shellfish.  Vikings had raided their waters, as the French
lobster-fishermen still did.  The islands bristled with prehistory with
shell-mounds and beehive huts and stone circles and the graves of
saints.  Within living memory they had had their own admirals and
kings.  It was by no means improbable that they should have had their
demi-gods, particularly since the nearest priest was over the sea.  If
a man died on the islands, he was left untouched where he lay, even in
the turf ashes--for many days if the weather kept the priest from
coming--because to touch him before the Church did so was dangerous.

It will madden the Irish Nationalist, and perhaps the fanatical
Catholic also, to be told that the people of the islands were
primitive.  However, they were.  They lived in the primitive conditions
of nature and were moulded by their surroundings.  Nor, I might
suggest, did they need to be ashamed of this.  If they were barbarous,
it was a barbarism less lethal than ours, and if they did reverence a
Godstone, at least they gave it reverence.  Being primitive need not
mean being worse--nor better, for that matter.


Rowing back from our second visit, we held converse with the boatmen of
the currach.

I asked Pat Reilly of Glosh why the oars of a currach had no blades.
When we had succeeded in explaining what a blade was, he replied--not
what an Englishman might have said, 'Oh, we have tried all those, but
they are no good: we find these more convenient'--but: 'Well, we have
never seen one.'

He told us, as he tugged at the rough pole, that May was the worst
month for basking sharks.  They did not attack currachs unless struck
with an oar, but sometimes they would follow them.  The way to 'banish'
sharks, when they did so, was to pour in front of them some of the
fishy bilge from the boat.  This caused them to sink at once.

Disposed to conversation by these more general topics, it was possible
to coax him round to the naomhg.

He said that it was able to stimulate the growth of potatoes.  This was
why the South Island had stolen it from the North, which had the better
soil.  His statement sent me off at once on the trail of a fertility
god, and some of the questions which I was to ask later were based on
it.  He repeated most of what had been put in my verses--verses which,
I was beginning to see, were inaccurate as to facts, but could not be
altered because of rhyme.  He advised us to question his uncle at
Belmullet.

Another rower mentioned that the priest who threw the Godstone into the
sea was called Father O'Reilly.

We were also told to seek out an old man called Anthony McGinty.

We slithered over the bottle-green sea, gay and conversible, creaking
and knocking at the makeshift rowlocks, sitting carefully because there
was no keel to balance us, practically feeling the sliding waters
caressing our buttocks--through the eighth of an inch of tarred canvas
which separated us from the Atlantic Ocean, on which we rose and fell
like puffins.


Pat Reilly's uncle proved to be seventy-five years of age, a native of
the North Island.  He stated proudly that he himself was practically an
idiot, and that he could remember nothing whatever about the naomhg.
We could get little further out of him.  What we did gather was, (1)
the Godstone was destroyed fifty years ago; (2) it had been stolen and
kept by the South Island before the old man's time, but he confirmed
the story of the fire; (3) it was given three suits of clothes every
year; (4) it was in the likeness of a man; (5) it was sunk by the
priest in the home harbour--Portavally on Ordnance Survey, i.e.
Abhaile, the Village Haven.

The uncle did not seem reliable.  He had a tendency to talk about
shooting, about St Patrick (the shamrock kind) and on any other
subjects which he thought would be suitable for an English Gintleman.
Probably he did not want to tell me about the stone.  It was generally
the better-educated witnesses who felt ashamed of the Godstone,
vehemently asserting that it was an ordinary Catholic statue never
'worshipped', and these suspected me of trying to prove that Roman
Catholics were idolaters--which I am not trying to prove.


It turned out that there was no such person as Anthony McGinty.

After a long drive round the peninsula, we finally ran to earth an
eighty-year-old gentleman called Owen McGinty--who did not correspond
to Anthony's description in any particular.  He was not able to speak
English.  Luckily the huge, good-natured Land Commissioner, San Glynn,
who could speak Irish perfectly, had come with us.

The grubby, hardy, snot-nosed children crowded round the long car
agape, while ancient Owen, invited into it and regaled with a dram or
two from a flask whose neck he courteously wiped before returning it,
looked straight in front of him into the past, with dimming,
oyster-coloured eyes.

His account was fuller and clearer than the uncle's, perhaps because he
could give it in his own language, through San's translation and tact.

The naomhg, he said, was a small stone, weighing two or three pounds.
It was about as long as your hand.  It was shaped like 'an iron' (?
smoothing iron).  It was of greenish stone.  It had originally been
'broken by a pirate'.  (An author called Knight, writing in 1834,
stated that 20,000 worth of smuggled goods were annually landed on the
shores of Erris.  But pirates could be anything on the peninsula--could
be Vikings or Elizabethan privateers or Spaniards from the Armada or
French fishermen or raiders from another island or anybody not
understood.  History and prehistory and the present existed in these
parts on the same plane.)  The pirate, who was to us a new character in
the story--and we were to hear more of pirates as it unfolded--broke
the image very long ago, not within family memories, at the foot of the
photygraph stone on the South Island.  The photygraph stone, probably a
grave-stone cut for himself by one of the anchorites in the seventh
century, was called the Grave of Taidhg.  The naomhg was brought
originally from Columkille's church on the North Island.  Because it
had been broken, it had to be kept together with something, and hence
the 'suits of clothes'.  They were of red flannel.  It was stolen by
the South Island from the North, but there was no fight about this.  On
the South Island it was lodged high in the gable of a house--the one I
had slept in--in a sort of niche.  It was taken out of the house if the
weather was required to be fine.  It caused potatoes to multiply.
There was a prayer which could be said to it in case of sickness.  Our
informant was actually in the house on the night of the paraffin fire.
He confirmed that a man was burnt to death in it, but that the flames
halted at the gable of the naomhg.  He was impressed by the fact that
the thatch at this end of the roof-tree did not burn.  Finally, when
McGinty was about ten years of age, a priest called Father O'Reilly
cast the Godstone into the sea.  He walked out to the rock called
Carrigeenduff, in the jargon of the map-makers, and threw it out from
there.  Ever since then, it had been calm in the sea off this point.
Father O'Reilly was dead within the year.

'_N.B._,' I thought to myself, 'if we can find out when this priest was
buried, whose name has been mentioned twice, we can find out when the
naomhg was committed to the deep.'  And I noted also that the virtues
of the object were connected with fertility, fire and storm.

Owen McGinty impressed me as being a tired old man, but sharp and not
anxious to tell too much.  Any miracles?  No, none in particular.  Any
particular person who looked after the naomhg or was responsible for
taking it out?  No, anybody could take it out.  Any particular day
associated with it, any Saint's Day?  No.

On the way home, San tried vainly to get my mind in tune with the
realities of the West.  I was suffering from theories, enthusiasms,
exaggerations.  Besides, I was a foreigner, and was feeling the
situation wrong.  I wanted the naomhg to be a romantic discovery, like
the god in my verses.  I wanted it to be some pagan idol dragged away
from its island to the museum in Dublin--though it was becoming
increasingly clear that the stone had not been taken there.[1]  I
wanted him to be pre-Christian, druidical, limitlessly old and
powerful, if possible even priapic.  Of course our informants had
detected this tendency of mine at once, and reacted in the opposite
direction.  San was trying to put me on a middle course.


[1] Mlle Henry had taken two grave-stones to Dublin not the Godstone.


It was not that I was quite insensitive.  At least I did have the sense
to refrain from thrusting phallic theories upon the gentle, simple,
chaste and pious primitives who talked to us.  I did try to frame
questions of this sort with obliquity, and not to be offensive.


I woke in the middle night with an inspiration.  The place-names on the
map were written phonetically by cartographers who could not speak
Gaelic.  Duvillaun was Dubh oilen.  What was Inniskea?  Was it the
island of St Kay or Cay or Gedh, as some said, and how was it really
spelt?  If it was Inis-sgeithe, could it mean the Island of Fear; or,
if it was Inis-c, could it mean the Island World, like Atlantis?  And
Inis-sgthe might mean the Island of Rest.

With the Island of Rest, I was off at full tilt.  Why could it not be
Tir-na-n-g, the Island of Youth, where the mythological hero
Oisn--the Ossian of the eighteenth century--was taken by the
golden-haired, immortal beauty whose name was Niamh?  Niamh!  And the
'g' in Tir-na-n-g!  Niamh-ighe!  Was it possible, could it be
possible, let it be possible, that Inniskea was the veritable Land of
Youth which coloured so much of Irish legend, and let my naomhg be
none other than the girl Niamhighe, Young Neave, who took Oisn on his
wanderings!  So far as I could remember the wonderful rendering of this
legend by W. B. Yeats, she took him to three islands.  They went to the
Island of Youth, where everybody danced and was eternally young; to the
Island of Battle, where he fought the demon of the cave; and to the
Island of Sleep or Forgetfulness, where the giants rested.

There were exactly three main island-groups off the coast of Erris!
There was Innisglora, where the soil had the property of preserving
bodies from decay--and what could correspond better with the legendary
island of immortality, the Land of Youth?  There was Duvillaun, the
Black Island--and surely a black island suited well with the Island of
Battle?  Finally there was Inniskea, which might mean the Isle of
Rest--and what more extraordinary than that there should be a real
naomhg on it, which pronounced itself so much like Naimh-ighe, the
conductress of Oisn?

What were Yeat's sources?  Presumably they derived through Michael
Comyn from the Fenian cycle and the voyage of Bran.  What was the date
of the Fenian cycle, what of Bran--for St Brendan really was connected
with the neighbour isle of Innisglora--and with what parts of Ireland
were they hitched up?

I fell asleep in a rapture of discovery, deciding to get books and
books from Dublin and to write to the Irish Folklore Commission.  It
was a sleep sweetened by the sound of the Bell Branch, among the
drowsing, feather-ear'd giants of Yeats, in whose beards and hair the
colonies of owls had built their nests, 'fining the fibrous dimness
with long generations of eyes'.


Our next contact poured cold water on such fancies.

It had dawned on me that we could not get much farther by questioning
the old people ourselves.  I was too strange for them, too dangerous,
too mixed with the tradition of oppressors, and my car was much too
grand.  Their natural speech was Gaelic, and even in the gentle
translations of San they were not at home.  Their tender, primitive,
suspicious minds were unhappy in forthright cross-examination.  They
were not suspicious in a mean way.  They were like antelopes in the
presence of some other animal, possibly carnivorous.

In these circumstances, I had a second inspiration.  I would offer a
small money prize to the schoolchildren of the peninsula, for the best
set of answers to a questionnaire, and another prize, as camouflage,
for the best essay in Gaelic on Inniskea.  We would advise the
children, avid for the great reward and honour of prize-winning, to
extract the facts from their grandparents--who might talk more freely
to their own blood, in their own homes and language.

To put this plan into action, I needed the help of the school-mistress.

Miss Cronin was a strong-minded, admirable, not hostile, middle-aged,
dedicated, educated but not scholarly woman, of high Catholic
principle.  She would do anything for the children.  She wanted them to
have the excitement of the competition.  But she was determined not to
let me get away with any heretical interpretations, derogatory to the
islanders.

This brought up another side of the detective story.  Every statement
on the subject of the Godstone was liable to be tainted by two or three
slants, apart from natural suspicions against myself.  The creature had
been mentioned once or twice in print, as we were to find later, and
these mentions were not unknown to the locals.  They might at any
moment read the published statements back to me, not giving their own
observations, but reproducing the printed word.  The second taint was
that Miss Cronin herself was liable to impose her strong character and,
may I say without unkindness, her prejudices, on the very children who
were answering the questionnaire.  Finally, the islanders had a
delicacy of mind which tended to suppress unwelcome information.  They
were aware of the schoolmistress's orthodox feelings, and, to her, they
were unwilling to dwell on matters of piseg (sorcery).

Here was Miss Cronin's attitude to the subject.

The naomhg was not pagan at all.  Canon O'Reilly, who took a great
interest in it, proved this.  No, she was not referring to the Father
O'Reilly who threw it into the sea but to a Canon O'Reilly, who came
afterwards.  He proved that the naomhg was an Italian terracotta
statuette of the Infant Jesus.  This was brought to Inniskea long, long
ago, nobody knows how.  But some pirates arrived who set fire to all
the houses on the island.  The only one which would not burn was the
one which had the Infant Jesus in it.  The pirates inquired why the
house would not burn, and the islanders informed them of the reason.
So the pirates took the statuette out and broke it.  But, when they
were gone, the islanders collected the pieces and fitted them together.
It did not look quite so nice, now that it was broken, so they made a
red flannel dress for it.  They made a new dress each year, out of
reverence.  A strange feature was that whenever they came to put on the
new dress, they would find the old one worn out, just as if it had been
worn by a living man.  Then there came some Protestants, who were very
kind to the islanders and gave them food, etc. and the result was that
the trustful islanders told them all about their naomhg, and the
Protestants went away, promising to come back in six months with plenty
more food.  No sooner had they arrived in Dublin, however, than they
wrote to the _Irish Times_, saying that on the island of Inniskea there
were people who called themselves Catholics who worshipped a pagan
idol.  Father O'Reilly was at that time the P.P. on the mainland--not
the Canon O'Reilly who came after and proved things, but Father
O'Reilly, called Big Father Pat O'Reilly, to distinguish him.  When he
read this article in the _Irish Times_ he went straight out to the
island and destroyed the statuette of the Infant Jesus.  All this
happened at the time of the Famine.  No, it need not necessarily have
been the great famine year: there were several famines in Inniskea.
Big Father Pat O'Reilly's grave had a tablet in Binghamstown Church, so
you could find out the date of his death.  After he was dead, Canon
O'Reilly came to Belmullet, and took a great interest in the naomhg.
He proved it was a terracotta statue of the Blessed Infant.  He asked
the islanders to dive for it, at the place where it had been thrown
into the sea, and, after great trouble, they managed to bring up the
pedestal of the statue.  Canon O'Reilly kept this.  Miss Cronin did
hear that he gave it to the Dublin Museum, but when she went there she
could not find it.  Canon O'Reilly wrote something about the holy
statue.  Perhaps you could find out what he wrote from the
O'Reillys-at-the-corner-by-the-Post-Office, in Belmullet.  She believed
they kept or disposed of his books.  Yes, she did hear that prayers
could be said in front of it, for stormy (to keep off pirates) or fair
weather, but they were Christian prayers.  No, she did not hear about
the fertility of potatoes.  No, it had no connection with St Martin.
(Miss Cronin knew as well as I did the antecedents of St Martin.)  No,
she did not hear that Big Father O'Reilly was dead within the year.

Now Miss Cronin was kindly disposed towards me and she was not trying
to falsify the evidence--which she had gleaned from the Canon.  But her
opinions and his opinions and the terracotta bambino which he had
piously wished on himself left several questions unanswered.  It
remained a fact that the English name for the naomhg, used by the
islanders themselves, was Godstone--surely a meaningful name: that it
was connected with fertility and weather and fire: and that it had been
destroyed by a Catholic priest.  I still do not think that I was being
tiresome in questioning its nature.  I wanted to know how big it was,
whether it was worked stone or perhaps a meteorite, whether it was all
or part of a statue or grave slab, whether it was connected with spring
or autumn, what miracles or virtues resided in it, and why people had
thought it important.

Miss Cronin agreed to distribute the questionnaire.


A trip to Dublin confirmed the fact that the image was not there.  I
also got hold of some books of reference--to which a letter from San 
Suilleabhin of the Folklore Commission had given a clue.  Here are the
known printed references which seem to bear on the subject.

Caesar Otway, a Protestant cleric, wrote in 1839 (_Tour in Connaught_):
'One of the company mentioned his having visited Inniskea; and that, as
usual, the people are beset with gross superstition.  They have a
wooden idol there, left by a holy priest, who said that as long as it
was preserved with reverence, no loss of life by shipwreck would happen
to any of the islanders, who always worshipped the idol before
venturing to sea.  He said that (as he was informed) this idol was once
stolen by smugglers, who supposed that they carried their palladium
while they kept this wooden saint on board; but from the day they stole
it until it was returned, which, with all repenting speed, they
hastened to do, they were persecuted by a revenue cruiser, and vexed by
storms, and driven up and down on the ocean; for how could they have
luck when they had no grace, and stole from the Inniskeans their
teraphim, their little god.'

The author of _Sketches in Erris and Tyrawley_ (1841) said: 'The
information I have been able to collect from Mr Crampton and others,
concerning Inniskea is limited (Mr Crampton not having had any
opportunity, more than I did, of landing there).  There are two ancient
sepulchral mounds on it, and it contains a few inhabitants, who know
nothing of the fated crane, that old writers say is to stand there till
the "crack of doom".  He may be there, but no one in these days ever
saw him; but they have what is better, called by some the Neevoge, or,
as others pronounce it, Knaveen; both mean "the little saint" and I
prefer the latter pronunciation, which may not be a bad derivation from
the English word Knave, Latin, gnavus--a knowing fellow.  For the
knaveen of Inniskea must be a knowing one indeed, for, by his
instrumentality, the natives consider they can raise or allay a
tempest; raise a storm when a ship nears the island, and so they may
get in a wreck; or allay it when their own boats are out at sea in a
gale of wind.  The knaveen is a stone image of the rudest construction,
attired in an undyed flannel dress, which is every New Year's Day
renewed.  Of course the knaveen has his annals, one event of which may
be worth stating:--Some years ago, a pirate happening to land on the
island, amused himself by setting fire to the houses of the people, all
of which burned but too readily, save one; and the ferocious leader
thus seeing one house untouched, urged on with menaces his followers to
consummate their destructive doings by burning _this_ also; but they
could not; as often as they applied fire to it, it went out; they might
as well burn one of the ocean rocks.  Observing this, he ordered the
house to be diligently searched, and finding the "knaveen", he
commanded that the holy image should be smashed to pieces with a
sledge.  Perhaps he was told of the "knaveen's" power not only of
arresting fire, but of raising wind, and, as he often roved along the
coast, he of course did not desire to leave the storm-compeller in the
hands of those to whom he had been so cruel.  Thus, having had his
wicked will, the pirate sailed away, it is hoped never to return.  But
the natives, the moment he was gone, collected the fragments of the
Saint, bound them together with thongs of skeepskin, and to keep him
warm and pleasant, dressed him out in a suit of flannel, which, as we
have already stated, is renewed from year to year.  It is, however,
considered that the "knaveen" has never fully recovered the treatment
he received from the pirate's sledge-hammer, nor are they quite so sure
of his power over the elements.  Perhaps, after all, this is not so
much the fault of the idol as of their failing faith.  He still,
however, is fervently kissed, and had in reverence by all.'

The Godstone was mentioned superficially in _Further Memories of the
West_ by Sir Charles Robinson, somewhere about the eighteen eighties.

Finally, a Mrs Padden,[2] once a teacher on Inniskea and in 1939 living
in Belmullet, aged about 75, kindly wrote this down for me:


[2] Mrs Padden is represented by F in the questionnaire later on.


'There was a stone in Inniskea shaped like a pillow, and the natives
treasured it, as the relic of a saint who lived one time on the island,
they said it was the saint's pillow worn in the middle like the shape
or mark of a head.  Some tourists went in to visit the island, and
after they left this place they published in foreign journals that the
Islanders of Inniskea were pagans and worshipped idols.  The Catholic
Church ordered the parish priest to go in and destroy that relic and
cast it into the sea.  The islanders recovered it and the priests were
told of it and they went in again and found the relic or neevogue as it
was called dressed in a robe of flannel made from the first fleece of
the year.  They took the robe off it and burned it in the house of a
man named Keane, and broke up the neevogue and cast it into the depth
of the sea.  The curate died some time after, and the parish priest
contracted a cold in his head (coming from the island) as he thought,
which turned out to be a serious disease called "Polypus".  He had an
operation and never recovered consciousness.  The man named Keane was
called the King of the island, and himself and all his family died
except two girls, their mother brought them into the nearest town
Belmullet and they also died.  The islanders used this Neevogue praying
to it that the saint who used it for a pillow, and who was now in
heaven would intercede with Almighty God to calm the seas to get help
and aid in sickness and foodstuffs in Hunger.'


On Ash Wednesday, while the population of Belmullet walked the streets
with an ash cross drawn on their foreheads, I called at
Reilly's-next-the-Post-Office after Mass, to ask whether they possessed
any of the supposed papers, mentioned by Miss Cronin as having been
left by Canon O'Reilly-who-came-after- (the priest who invented the
terracotta bambino).  It seemed probable that the canon had looked up
'naomhg' in the dictionary, found that one of its meanings was 'crib
or cradle' and that he had constructed his theory of the Infant Jesus
on this basis.

Mr Reilly-next-the-Post-Office, a courtly, continental sort of
gentleman, soon broke me of my English manners.  I had gone breezily
into his back-shop, and was already stating my business, when Mr
Reilly, who had risen to welcome me, said politely: 'Mr White, I
believe?'  'Mr Reilly?'  'The same.'  So we bowed, shook hands and
began again.

No, Mr Reilly did not think he had any of the papers left by the canon,
but he would make a careful search.  Father Lavelle of Pollatomish
might quite possibly have some, and I had better write to him.  The
naomhg was an interesting subject.  Big-Father-Pat O'Reilly, who
destroyed it, was an uncle of Mr Reilly-next-the-P.O.  He, the Big
Father, died very suddenly shortly after destroying the naomhg, and
the innocent islanders said there was a connection between the two
events.  We laughed at this.  But did he die actually within the year,
I asked, just as the islanders said?  Mr Reilly was not prepared to say
this for sure, but certainly he died soon after, and unexpectedly.  I
forgot to ask what of.

In Mr P.O. Reilly's back-shop there were two good maps, of Belmullet as
projected and of the Barony of Erris, by Knight in 1834.  There was
also an excellent reproduction of a peregrine stooping on a mallard,
and a stuffed Tawny Owl, mouldering.  Mr Reilly escorted me to the
front door, and the last I saw of him was his neat bow tie, his keen,
pale, Italian face, and the black cross smudged disconcertingly on his
courteous forehead.

I went home and wrote to Father Lavelle.

I drove to the graveyard at Binghamstown and found that Big Father Pat
had died on the 19th of November, 1876.


By now, the answers to the questionnaire had come in.  There were
twenty-eight mimeographed questions, which had been answered by six
children, after consulting their elders.  The elders were: Sorcha bean
n Maoineachan (then aged 76), Brgid n Maoineachan (60), Sorcha bean
n Maolfabhail (70), San  Maoineachin (65), Antoine  Maoineachin
(68), Brigd bean nic Phaidin (73).  Call them A, B, C, D, E and F.

1. _What shape was it?_  A: A spotted stone, white and brown, an altar
stone, like a cross.  B: Shape of a human corpse resembling the Blessed
Virgin.  C: Shape of a nun.  D: Like a woman.  E: Like a woman, F: A
smoothing iron.

2.  _How much did it weigh?_  A: One and a half pounds.  B: No idea.
C: One stone.  D: Two stone.  E: Two stone.  F: Two stone.

3. _How long was it?_  A: No idea.  B: Two foot, six inches.  C: One
foot by half a foot.  D: Two foot.  E: No idea.  F: Three foot.

4. _What colour was it?_  A: Brown outside and white spots inside.  B:
Grey-green.  C: Grey-green, but red within when broken.  D: Grey-green.
E: Grey-green.  F: Colour grey-green that was in it, but when a little
bit was broken off, she was red inside.

5. _Was it any kind of stone?_  A: Limestone.  B: No idea.  C:
Limestone.  D: Don't know.  E: No idea.  F: Clay that was in it.[3]


[3] Perhaps a trace of the Canon's terracotta?


6. _Was it a broken part of a statue?_  A: Not an image, but a cross.
B: No.  C: Not a statue, but a stone with a picture of a Virgin cut on
it.  D: Entire statue.  E: Entire (literally, 'they say that it was all
made that was in it').  F: No.

7. _Was it polished or rough?_  A: Smooth.  B: Polished.  C: Polished.
D: Polished.  E: Smooth.  F: Smooth.

8. _Any writing or carving on it?_  A: No.  B: No carving.  There was
something written on it.  C: Picture of person cut on stone, no
writing.  D: No writing or carving.  E: No writing or carving.  F: No
writing, but person cut out on the face of the stone.

9. _Was it a meteorite?_  A: No.  B: No.  C: No.  D: No.  E: No.  F: No.

10. _Did it do any miracles?_  A: Yes.  If the day was bad and the
people took it out and said prayers that the storm would abate, when
the prayers were said, it would.  When the sea-pirates[4] were coming
they would start and say the prayers and the sea would rise and the
pirates would not be able to come ashore.  Some people say that it was
Deacon Lyons (Diagan Laiginns)[5] who threw it into the sea at
Carraign Dubh and that he did not live for a year after.  'The sea is
always calm at the place where it was thrown out.'  B: 'It is the first
miracle she made and this is the reason they found out that anything
miraculous pertained to her.  For there were people coming inside on
the island one time, and their name was pirates.  They came to the
island and they put fire within every roof but they were not able to
put a burning on the roof in which the naomhg was.  They searched
inside and found the naomhg in it in a window.  They took her and
broke her with a stone and they lit the roof.  Then they went away.
When the people of the island went back to their homes they gathered up
the naomhg and put the three pieces together and a piece of red
flannel and they hung her up again.  The second miracle.  They were
starting to distribute a barrel of oil and they put fire to the house
and when the fire came to the room where the naomhg was, the fire went
out.'  (Then follows third miracle, as related by A.)  C: Almost
identical with A.  D: Identical with A plus B, but 'the pirates threw
the naomhg over the Grave of Taidlig and when the pirate turned round
he broke his foot.'  E: Identical, but stresses that the potatoes
flourished best in whichever island the stone was on--a statement also
made by A, B, C, D and F.  F: 'It was as follows the way that they
found out miracles were with her.'  (Otway's story of the pirates is
then related, almost in Otway's words.)  When they found the naomhg
within the house, in a window, a pirate named Seinn[6] 'threw it over
a grave that is on the island of the south in Iniscidhe[7] that is
called the Grave of Taidhg and it broke in three pieces.  No sooner was
she broken at him than he fell over and made two pieces of his back.'
(Then follows the story of the putting together, the thongs, and the
flannel which got worn out in the right places every year.)


[4] Could these have been Excisemen?

[5] Archdeacon Lyons was a cultured Catholic priest living locally in
1840.

[6] Often a contemptuous nickname applied to the Saxon, like Fritz or
Jerry to a German.

[7] Note spelling.


11. _Did it increase fertility of anything besides potatoes?_  A: Not
answered.  B: Not answered.  C: Not answered.  D: Only potatoes.  E:
Only potatoes.  F: Potatoes and wheat.

12. _Was any Saint's day connected with it?_  A, B, C, D, E and F: No.

13. _Was it taken out in spring or autumn?_  A: Only when needed.  B:
In spring for potatoes.  C: Only when needed.  D: No.  E: In time of
storm only.  F: In time of need for potatoes or storm.

14. _Any particular ritual or any particular day?_  A, B, C, D, E and
F: No.

15. _Where was it thrown in the sea?_  A, B, C and D: Carraigin Dubh.
E: 'Into the ship's pool at Carraigin Dubh.'  F: 'From Carraigin Dubh,
a couple of yards into the sea.'

The sixteenth question was about the meaning of a name on Ordnance
Survey, and turned out to be beside the point.

17. _Where did the naomhg come from?_  A: From the church of Cuilm
Cille (North Island).  B: They say that a saint made it.  C: As A plus
B.  D: Nobody knows.  E: 'They say that it was from the hospice
graveyard that the naomhg first came.'  F: 'It is not fixed what place
she came from.'

18. _What do you think the word means?_  A: 'They say it was a holy
woman who was in it long ago.'  B: Don't know.  C: As A.  D: Don't
know.  E: 'There was the shape of a saint in it, and this was why it
was called the naomhg.'  F: Don't know.

19. _What were the words of its prayer?_  A, B, C, D, E and F: Seven
Our Fathers, Seven Hail Marys, Seven Glorias.  E and F added one Creed.

20. _Did any particular person have to look after it?_  A, B, C, D, E
and F: No.  F added: 'There was no caretaker at all, but they always
kept her in the same house.'

21. _Who were the pirates who first broke it and whence came they?_  A:
'It is said that it was people from the colony of Achill who broke it
first and the man who broke it when he turned round he broke his foot
and he did not live a year.'[8]  B: 'The people of Achill, and they
broke her in summer.'  C: 'They say that the people of Achill put anger
on the priest which caused him to throw it.'  D: Don't know.  E:
'Sea-pirates broke her at the Grave of Taidhg.'  F: Nobody knows.


[8] The colony of Achill was a Protestant colony founded to convert
Catholics by a man called Nangle in the early years of the nineteenth
century.  It still existed.


22. _Why was it dressed in clothes, and what sort of clothes?_ A: After
the women had put the pieces together it did not look too good.  B: Red
flannel.  C: After being put together, 'there was not much tidiness in
it.'  D: Red flannel to hold it together.  E: A yard of red flannel to
keep it together.

23. _Did it have a different suit at different seasons?_  A, E, C, D, E
and F agreed that it did not, but had a new one yearly.

The twenty-fourth question resembled the sixteenth.

25. _Was the naomhg more useful to women than to men?_[9]  A, B, C, D,
E and F: Either No or No Answer.

The twenty-sixth question resembled the twenty-fourth and sixteenth.

27. _Any connection with St Martin?_[9]  A, C and E: No answer.  B and
D: No.  E (who was a firm adherent of orthodoxy): No connection at all.


[9] A tactful question.


28. _How would you spell it?_  A, C, E and F: No answer.  B and D:
[Gaelic: naomhg].


After translating all these and the children's essays--with help, a
dictionary and painful toil--I took Miss Cronin's advice and divided
the prize between a boy and girl who had collected F and B.  We also
awarded a bonus of one shilling's worth of sweets to all entrants.

In Miss Cronin's comfortable home, we came to grips once more on the
subject of our discoveries up to date.  The school teacher, although
she was pleased that the prize had gone to an orthodox entry, was still
my enemy.  She was a strong and generous enemy, not mean or bigoted,
unusually well-informed, and she surprised me by one courageous
admission.  Although she had herself sent the Irish Folklore Commission
an account of the naomhg which fitted the Canon's story, she now
agreed, after examining the old people's evidence, that the Infant
Jesus theory (terracotta) was not tenable any longer.  This did not
make her relax her hostility to pagan interpretations.

We were now sure that, whatever the nature of the Godstone, it had a
verifiable history.  Within the past century at any rate, we knew that
it had been dressed in red flannel to keep it together, had been
sneered at by the Rev. Caesar Otway in 1839 and by Nangle's Protestant
colony from Achill, on famine relief, at a later date.  The news of
Protestant carping had caused a Catholic priest to throw it into the
sea from a named rock just before 1876.

But we were in no agreement on the nature of the object.

'The naomhg _must_ have been a statue of a Christian saint,' said Miss
Cronin, 'otherwise it could not have performed all these miracles which
we know of.'

'But, Miss Cronin...'

'And in any case, Oisn was a real person.  I have seen his grave.'

'Well, all right, even if he was a real person.  What I am trying to
say...'

'These fires and storm-quellings were miracles.  They happened when the
people recited seven Our Fathers, seven Hail Marys and seven Glorias
before the naomhg.  If the naomhg had merely been a grave-stone from
the North Island, or if it had been something out of mythology, God
would not have allowed the miracles.  Therefore the naomhg was the
statue of a saint.  _I feel sure_.'

'Miss Cronin, now listen.  It is you who are behaving like a Protestant
and me who is talking like a Catholic.  The Church has not pronounced
the miracles to be authentic: in fact, it has done the very opposite.
It was a Catholic priest who threw it in the sea.'

'I know,' she said, and the end of this story will show whether she was
right or wrong, 'that the naomhg was an article of Christian
veneration.  It had _nothing_ to do with Niamh or the Land of Youth.
The islanders, Mr White, are not like what you think.'

'Even if it was a Christian relic, don't you see that rumours about it,
on the mainland, might have given rise to a garbled story about Niamh?
Crampton does say that the enchanted land was between Inniskea and
Innisglora, and I think I read somewhere that Michael Comyn was no
stranger to Connaught.  Besides, what about the island being called
Inis-sgthe, the Island of Repose, just like in the Niamh legend?'

'It could just as well be Inis-kedhe, the island of St Kay.  She was a
_real_ saint.

'And besides,' added Miss Cronin, 'the Island of Repose could be meant
in a religious sense, like a Retreat.  It could be the island where
hermits went to repose.'

'Very well, we had better have another questionnaire, based on the
first one.  We'll narrow it still further, now that we have got as far
as this.'

She said firmly: 'Oh, we won't bother the children any more: I can find
out all these things for you myself.'

I could have torn my hair.  I did not want any part of what she was
Likely to find.  I wanted the direct evidence of elderly eye-witnesses.
I did not know that I had it under my hand already.  I was allergic to
derivatives from terracotta bambini.  Miss Cronin was truthful,
sincere, willing to waste her time on me, and generous enough to drop
that Canon's Infant Jesus when faced with the evidence.  But she was
bound, I thought to myself despairingly, bound to colour her findings
unconsciously, because of her acute, strong, prejudiced mind.  We shall
see how far she was prejudiced, in the sequel.


Meanwhile, the pursuit of Canon O'Reilly's supposed papers, left by
will, was proceeding through the Post Office.  Mr
Reilly-next-the-Post-Office, whose nickname turned out to be Tossie,
had mentioned Father Lavelle--who, being eventually run to earth,
turned me over to Father Durkin--who turned me back to Lavelle--who
played me on Father Munnelly--who, presumably thinking that I had
better be diverted from the district, revealed the existence of a Mrs
O'Donnell of Newport--to whose deceased husband the Canon's Inniskea
papers were said to have been left.  In order to stop that earth
quickly, I may as well say here and now that Mrs O'Donnell proved to be
a dead end.

It was blowing hard, and I was looking at the sky.  Mr Tossie Reilly,
smiling politely from his shop door, observed that it was 'real naomhg
weather'.  I asked about the idiom, and he told me that the last few
days of March--I think he said the last two--were called naomhg days,
and wind was expected on them.  Why was I interested in the weather?

I explained that I had become fascinated by the Inniskeas, and went
there whenever I could.  I had contracted for a currach next morning,
to explore the northern island, and was wondering about the sea.

Mr Reilly advised me to try Padden's motor-boat, and wished me a
pleasant excursion.


Padden's second-best motor-boat took a party of us, hastily gathered
together, to both the islands.  We visited the South Island first.  I
gave the slip to the others and made off to search for a 'nunnery'
marked on Ordnance Survey, and to take photographs.

I wish I could give a picture of those deserted shores, at this
distance of time.  Going south from the lonely Home Port of the
southern island, you soon came upon a landscape of stone.  You seemed
to be leaping or stumbling or limping or scrambling over a terrain like
some sort of Giant's Causeway, under the gentle, ancient, smoothed,
poor, featureless, sheep-nibbled swell of the island's one hillock,
with its sea-mark and stone walls.  Below, the pilgrim was in a chaos
of stone.  I was back in the lovely solitude of my first visit.

At what the map called Ooghnabraddagh--a chasm in the small cliffs
framing an inlet of the Atlantic--I gazed upon the largest seal I had
ever seen.  He floated abstractedly, sinking for a few seconds every
now and then, considering my personality with grand, voluptuous,
oafish, idle detachment.  Sloth was his deadly sin, if he had one.  His
head seemed as big as a horse's.  The long, round, grey skull, with its
non-committal bulging eyes, looked like a gas-mask floating on the sea.
We watched each other for ten minutes., without passing any message.  I
gave him neither fear nor love nor speculation, and he did not succeed
in conveying thoughts to me.  It was a pure examination, something on a
par with pure mathematics.  I could have wounded him dreadfully with
the gun on my forearm, for we were less that fifty yards apart.  Rising
and sinking, ruminating with soup-dark eyes in the grey dog-head, I
left him to his Blimp-like oceanic siesta.

I had built a goose-cairn to house the bodies of two barnacle geese,
shot during that despicable battue on the previous Christmas, but found
by herring gulls before I found them.  It was still there.

Everything on the Inniskeas was a cairn.  Everything was a monument.
Westminster Abbey was a babe-in-arms to many things there.

In the ages of prehistory, which were somehow on the same plane as
today for most of the natives of Erris, perhaps the barren earth had
been a gracious one, cohering with grass.  Some sort of ancient people
Like the inhabitants of Greenland had once accumulated their
kitchen-middens here, erected their megoliths--Stonehenge itself,
incidentally, was a modern import from the west--and had watched the
ages of stone and bronze and iron pass out of date into the Atlantic
mist.  One of the evacuated islanders once said to me in a
matter-of-fact voice, while discussing the evacuation of 1927: 'We have
gone, but there will be another Race.'

Later, when the islands had separated from the coast, and the green
soil, like some dust-bowl in America, had begun to fall apart, there
had come a colony of Christian hermits between the sixth and the tenth
centuries--centuries very long before 1066, the date at which
Englishmen assume the world to have begun.  These hermits, or religious
communities of monks, or saints, had lived humbly on top of the
middens, still firm enough with grass to hold the foundations of stone
beehive-huts in the encroaching sand, until another race of raiding
Vikings smashed them up.

The Viking pirates, driven back or assimilated after they had ruined or
mated with the Christian community, had produced a new culture of
complications, upon which the Norman invasion of Ireland had impinged.
Coins had been found here of Henry II and Richard I.  For centuries the
now 'Irish' inhabitants had slaughtered and raided and betrayed among
themselves.  Then Englishman had overlaid Norman, and persecutions of
religion had overlaid one another, so that a seventeenth-century
chalice, pectoral cross and pyx of silver, dated 1669, had been left by
some priestly refugee, to be dug up in recent times.

History had grown towards the nineteenth century, from which,
backwards, grew my naomhg, now a historical reality.

But it was all cairns and monuments and mementoes.  When a Christian
hermit found a pagan pillar, he baptized it with a cut cross.  He
inoculated it thus with innocence and adopted it to himself.  The god
Baal turned into Balor or into Beelzebub, a devil.  Prometheus the
fire-bringer turned into Satan, on fire.

There was practically nothing on the islands which had not been
hallowed from some other thing, which was not a memorial to something
else--a relic, adapted, a cairn.  My goose cairn, though I was not
aware of it then, was exactly on top of a monument called Laghta
Wirraid in Ordnance Survey--'Margaret's Stones'.  I had adapted the
memorial of some saintly Margaret to the memory of two geese.

Imagine all this abandoned.  Imagine in the rocky, almost Galapagos
landscape, nothing but the wondering Englishman and his setter bitch,
and the controversial ghosts of Norman and Saxon and Gael and
Scandinavian, and St Brendan (who discovered America and dwelled upon
the next door crag of Innisglora) and various Esquimaux with bone pins,
perhaps cannibals, gnawing fibulas cracked for marrow, and a seal, and
a basking shark, and a whale--there was plenty of whale-bones on the
islands--and the supernal geese, who were immortal.

Nothing else.


Over the thymey short grass I got back to our shooting picnic, and we
chugged away in the motor-boat to the North Island.

Now the force of history hit me in the face.

On this small area of desertion, scarcely a mile and a half long, there
were the remains of a promontory fort, a tiny drystone church dedicated
to St Columba, three main bailey-mounds of fabulous antiquity, and
about five kitchen middens.

Promontory forts were among the most touching and terrible
constructions of Gaelic prehistory.  Driven always farther and farther
west by the new weapons springing up behind them in the breeding
grounds of European strife, the defeated races had thronged or huddled
or been hustled to the outer rims of the world--in this case to the
Atlantic ocean.  And there, literally with their backs to the sea,
between the devil and it, they would choose a cliffy promontory jutting
into the deep and they would build a gigantic wall of unmortared stones
across its base.  Behind this wall, their rear defended by the ultimate
rollers, they hoped to make a final stand.  The sea had demolished most
of the one on North Inniskea.

The three main mounds were called the Bailey mr, the Bailey beag and
the Bailey dighte: the big, the little and the burnt settlements.
They were sand-dunes now, based perhaps on kitchen middens, or on
previous hearths.  When the eremitic saints took them over, there had
been enough grass to hold the foundations of their single-celled, stone
beehives--like igloos.  The great bailey was about sixty feet high.

Standing on top of it in the drifting sand, among the etiolated, clean
relics of a monastery which had perhaps been founded by a disciple of
St Columba, we gazed upon crucifixion slabs like the one shown on page
90, cut thirteen or fourteen centuries ago--upon the skull, rolled
carelessly on the golden, salty, aseptic ground, of him who perhaps cut
it--on bits of bone and ashes--on the white quartz stones which, except
for clay pipes, are all the ornaments still afforded for the dead by
western graveyards--on ruined igloos--on Columba's roofless church to
the westward, hardly five paces long, with its holy-water stoup cut
from the living stone, and its fitting lid from the same rock--on the
modern village with its skeleton roof-beams, inhabited till 1927, now
abandoned like everything else.  It was a soul-satisfying abandonment,
not a desolate one.  The peace and cleanness of desertion had been
replenished, had been filled to the brim with calm.  It was still the
isle of hermits.

The beehives or igloos were perhaps twelve feet in diameter.  They had
hearths and bed places for short men, enclosed by upright slabs, and
stone pillows.  The roofs had fallen in.

Looking down ruefully--rueful for this century, not for theirs--on that
holy, desiccated, pleasant skull, I began to understand Miss Cronin.  I
picked up a rib of a sheep or a saint--it did not seem to matter
which--for a keepsake, and, on the way back to the motor-boat,
extracted two sharp teeth from the entire skeleton of a basking shark.
Then, with teeth and bones, which really symbolized the islet, and with
a tranquillity about saints who to me no longer seemed to need to be
connected with fertility gods or phallic symbols, we spluttered home,
sleepy and hungry, to the real world.


It was time to begin setting things straight.

Suppose that old Mrs Padden, the school-teacher so condescendingly
represented as F in the questionnaire, had been right in almost every
particular?

Then the naomhg would have had a history something like this.

A hermit of the sixth or seventh century may have dwelt in one of the
igloos, using a stone for a pillow.  The answers as to size and weight
in the questionnaire had mostly fitted with this, and Mrs Padden had
said that it was shaped like a smoothing iron.  His head might have
worn a depression or shape in this stone, or he might have chosen it
because it had such a depression, or it might have had a cross cut on
it.  The original pirates might have been those very Vikings who came
from the north with their long swords of iron, round about the tenth
century, to shatter the early Christian monastic settlements of learned
Ireland.  During the sack of the Island of Retreat, fire had been used.
The third of the baileys was still called the burnt one.  Perhaps the
fire had stopped at the hermit's pillow?  Reverence being now attached
to his relic, and the Scandinavians settling down with their victims,
perhaps it had begun to be venerated for its properties against fire.
Storm would have followed naturally, on these ferocious seas, and after
that the fertility of potatoes.  Food, fire and storm had always been
the main measures of life for the islanders.  Could a new form of
pirate, centuries later, Taidhg or Seinn, privateer or revenue man or
raider from Achill, have been the one who smashed it up with a
sledge-hammer, to stop its influence on the weather?  Then came the
thongs and flannel to keep it together: then the derogatory clergymen
Otway and Nangle to mock it, and the priest O'Reilly to scotch the
cause of scandal in the sea.  When Canon O'Reilly caused them to fish
it out again, a few yards from Carraigin dubh, the Black Rock--and a
black day it must have been when they were made to throw it thence--he
had found only _pedestal_.  If this 'pedestal' was really the little
saint's pillow, more than a millennium old, I doubt whether the
well-meaning canon was really allowed to impound it or to take it to
the Dublin Museum.  If the islanders of the 1870s resembled their
descendants in simplicity, subtlety and natural piety: and if they
knew, as they did know, and as Miss Cronin knew, that their naomhg was
a genuine object of Christian veneration: and if they had already
retrieved and repaired it twice or three tunes: then surely, if that
canon did go away with a stone, it was any stone, to keep his reverence
happy, and their [Gaelic: naomhg]; itself is probably back again
today--I hope so--in its proper niche behind the lobster pots of
Padden's cottage.

Incidentally, it has kept the cottage roofed and habitable.


In 1945, some years after the end of this story, Mlle Henry, the
excavator of Inniskea, published her findings.  She made no mention of
the Godstone and did not seem to have heard of it, but she quoted from
Adamnan's Life to the effect that a certain Cormac, grandson of Lethan
and disciple of St Columba, once sailed from the region called Eirros
Domno to seek a 'solitude in the ocean'.

Of her own finds she wrote: 'Both in Houses A and C[10] there were,
lying on both sides of the "bed-posts", at the head of the sleeping
space, two pebbles of red[11] stone about 10 ins. to 1 ft. long,
egg-shaped and polished, most probably by the action of the sea.  Their
presence is certainly not accidental, but what was their function?  Two
possible explanations occur to me.  They may have been primitive
foot-warmers ... but ... such a sybaritical notion is hardly consistent
with the atmosphere of early Irish monasteries ... Another solution
lies in the suggestion that these stones were ascetics' pillows.  There
is for that hypothesis a very interesting analogy, that of a stone of
about the same shape as the Inishkea ones, also a sea-pebble but about
twice as big, which is at present preserved in the Cathedral of Iona.
It was found lying on the ground within twenty yards of the large
granite boulder beneath which, according to tradition, St Columba was
buried.  Commenting upon it, Joseph Anderson called attention to the
passage of Adamnan's Life of St Columba where the death of the saint is
described: "... he returns to his cell, and sits up throughout the
night on his bed, where he had the bare rock for pallet, and a stone
for pillow which to this day stands by his grave as his monumental
pillar."  The stone has a cross carved on it, and the identification
seems quite plausible.  There is another stone of the same type but of
unknown origin in the Cathedral of Iona; it is nearly as big as the
first one and has a cross with expanded arms carved on it.  St Ciaran,
apparently, had a similar stone pillow.  It is mentioned in his Irish
Life, but the reference to it is much more elaborate in the Latin Life:


    St Kiaranus used greatly to crucify his body, and we write here an
    example of this.  He even had a stone pillow beneath his head,
    which, till today, remains in the monastery of St Kiaranus, and is
    reverenced by every one.  Moreover, when he was growing weak he
    would not have the stone removed from him, but commanded it to be
    placed to his shoulders, that he should have affliction to the end
    for the sake of an everlasting reward in heaven.'



[10] Beehive houses.

[11] Mrs Padden had said it was red.  Notice also the sizes given and
the statements about polishing.


Bathing on summer days in the lace-work of the Atlantic rollers, frothy
like milk just spurted in the pail, or stretched among the snail-shells
on the sand dunes of Drumreagh, I often thought kindly of St Cormac or
whoever he may have been, with his solitude and holy head-rest.  His
islands of repose stood lonely in the distance, their hazy silhouette
topped by the sea-mark of the south one--a finger pointing to the
heaven he had longed for.  I never went to the islands again.  For all
I know, his skull still rolls in the golden sand, rewarded with his own
kind of peace which passed all understanding, and as contented to be
pillowed there, as it was with its godstone when living.[12]


[12] It only dawned on me while correcting the proofs of this chapter,
that [Gaelic: naomhg] may actually _mean_ a pillow.  At least it does
mean a 'cot', and we still _cradle_ our heads on pillows.



SNOW IN ERRIS


There had been snow in Erris.  It had brought the woodcock from the
mountains and the bogs, into a few groups of rhododendrons or stunted
trees which adorned the sparse landscape.  The frost had lasted too.
In the meagre spinneys at Glencastle you could hardly move five paces
without stepping on a small, dead bundle of fluffed feathers, weighing
a gramme or two.

It was a Sunday evening, and Jack and I were sitting in the car on the
Glen road, eating sandwiches.  We had been driving over a wide area,
from covert to covert, where we had shot six snipe and eight and a half
brace of woodcock.  This was a lot of cock for one afternoon, so we
were pleased.  But, since we were fairly good shots, we were also
slightly cross with each other for missing some of them.  I was also
feeling a little relieved that my setter was still alive.  The
technique for shooting these birds in those parts was to put the
wildest dog you could find into a clump of rhododendrons and then shoot
very quickly at whatever came out, in whatever direction.  The setter
was the one who stood in most peril from this manoeuvre.  I had had the
whole rhyme about 'never, never let your gun' spanked into me at an
early age, but I doubted whether Jack had.  You had to rely on the
excellence of his aim, and also on the fact that his boundless
good-nature generally took him into the bushes, along with the wild
dog, to create a commotion--which often prevented him from shooting.

Glencastle was several miles from the village, but it was the nearest
thing approaching a wood.  On Sunday afternoons the adolescents of the
district would congregate there for a strange, shy, stilted
mating-ceremony, which was anything but sexual.  For at least an hour
the two genders would lean against the walls in separate flocks, the
boys about fifty yards from the girls and mostly silent.  Then one boy
would approach one girl and lead her off with awkward gallantry, for a
promenade among the short trees.  They might as well have been storks,
or courting peacocks, shy of their feet.  If they ever got as far as
holding hands, I should be surprised to hear of it.  They seemed more
likely to present each other with twigs or stones, laying them before
one another with hopeful beaks.  It was pretty.

The sexual life of Mayo amazed me, but I tried to believe what I was
told.  San gave me several lectures.  The difference between Gael and
Gall, he said, was in the temperature of the blood.  No Gael could
understand cold-blooded sin.  He could understand rape or murder or any
spontaneous ferocity--indeed, rather to my disgust, one of the heroes
of the west was famous for suddenly having bitten off an Englishwoman's
nose--but to him it was inconceivable that a man should coolly say, 'I
will keep a mistress,' and do so.  It was the English who did this, the
logical, dispassionate nation of shop-keepers.  The Irish might
conceivably violate a woman, but they would never keep her.  And, said
Glynn, the crofter in whose cottage I was so often welcomed with tea
not only did not sleep with his neighbour's wife, but did not think of
her nor even entertain the idea.  San asserted positively that
masturbation happened only between the ages of sixteen and twenty--and
this, in a countryside where economic necessity often kept men
unmarried until their fifties.  That was why the Irish branch of the
Catholic Church had a monomania on the subject of sex.  The rarity of
sexual sins mentioned at confession made them stand out in the priest's
mind, gave them a scarcity value such as the phalarope has for the
ornithologist, and consequently made them important.

Could it be that the Irish were more feminine than the
English--frigider, less logical, less given to constructive fantasy?

Whatever the explanation, the boys at Glencastle were chaste.

And yet, Jack now told me as we munched our sandwiches and watched the
innocent, speechless ceremony, one of the priests of this district had
been accustomed to drive out on Sundays, actually with a stick, to
disperse the gatherings.  When he found a boy and a girl together, he
would whack the boy and snatch the girl's hat and decamp with it.  As
it was generally her only hat, she had to go to the presbytery to ask
for it, and take her scolding.

How unlike, observed Jack, this attitude was to the conduct of Donald
Doolwee and his wife--two Viking giants who had once lived in this very
glen.

Donald Doolwee?

Why, yes.  Did I not know that they had a castle here?  That was why it
was called Glencastle.  There were the remains of it on that hill in
front of us, where we had been shooting, built to defend the pass.  He
had several other castles along Broadhaven.

Well?

Oh, well, said Jack, this Donald Doolwee had a war with another giant
who had invaded his fiefs, and finally he got driven into the castle
there, where he was besieged.  It was a strong fort on a steep
hill-top, as you see, and the other giant could not get him out.  The
siege went on for many years, until one day Donald's wife, the ogress,
looked over the castle wall and saw the besieger.  He had flaxen hair.
Hers was black and her eyes were grey.

They looked upon one another steadfastly, and that was that.

Well now, this Donald Doolwee I was telling you about, he had a secret
of his strength.  One time there was a witch on Inniskea called Morna,
whom he had loved.  She had given him a hank of her hair to tie about
his loins, and, while he had this lock about him, he was invincible.
That was why the other giant could not get into the castle.  Everybody
knew he had some piseg, but nobody knew what it was.

So, when the ogress had looked upon the other ogre, she went out to him
over the wall, and they held one another.  She promised to find out for
him what the secret of her husband's might was.

She went on at Donald night and day from that time forth, until at last
he produced a skull.  He made her put her hand on this skull and swear
by terrible oaths against her soul and body that she would not betray
his secret if he revealed it to her.  She swore, and he did reveal it,
and she did betray.  She cut away that hank of hair, and the
flaxen-headed giant captured the castle, and Donald Doolwee was
slaughtered in his blood.

They cut off his head and rolled it down the steep side of the
dun--just there were the woodcock rolled, you remember, the one which
Brownie found for us.

Then the wicked giantess went off with her fancy ogre according to his
promise, Mr White, but little good did it do her.  He knew her value, I
can tell you!  He drowned her next day in the Munhin river which flows
out of Carrowmore, and her soul flapped away in the shape of a crane,
shrieking for Revenge.  It flew to Inniskea.


But, good God, Jack, I exclaimed: this is the fated crane of Inniskea,
which I know all about because of those searches for the Godstone, and
which we saw hoisting herself across the ocean with her reflection
flying under her, upside down, and which was probably the Thing Which
Brayed that flew up under my feet in the darkness when I was alone to
shoot the barnacles--and wait--oh listen!  I think I can quote you some
Latin about her from O'Flaherty's _Ogygia_.

  Insul Iniske, Scriptis ut fama priorum
  Credula commendat, regis qua prominet Irras
  Oceani in fluctus, grus est ab origine rerum
  Unica Syderibus minime consumpta coaevis.

Well, God help ye, Mr White, said Jack, impressed, with that head of
yours!

Listen, it means more or less this:


    There is a crane or heron in the island of Inniskea--so the
    credible tradition in writings of the ancients tells us--I mean
    that region where Erris sticks out into the billows of the
    ocean--and this crane has been there since the beginning of things.
    It is the only one of its kind, eternal with the eternal stars.


If it was that crane of Donald Doolwee's, it could not have been there
since the beginning of things, said Jack.

But I was too far flown by now to listen to any objections.

Jack, I can give you another verse out of _Ogygia_.  Listen now:

  Cernere Inisglori est pelago, quod prospicit Irras
  Insul avos, at avosque solo post fata Sepultos
  Effigies servare suas, vegetisque vigere
  Unguibus, atque comis.  Hominum caro nulla putrescit.

Well, then?

Jack had no objection to my talking Latin, enjoyed the noise, believed
in my enthusiasms, and knew I was not showing off.

It is this, I said.  I have probably got it wrong.  I only have the
1685 edition.  I don't know whom he was quoting--if he was quoting--and
I think the accents or punctuation may be misprinted in it.  Anyway I
don't understand Latin much.  But it's this, more or less:


    In the sea which Erris looks across, there is to be seen an island
    called Inisgloria.  In it, they say that grandfathers and
    great-grandfathers, once they are dead and buried, preserve their
    forms and remain quick, with growing hair and nails.  No human
    flesh putrifies.


Well, said Jack, everybody knows and always has known that corpses do
not corrupt on Innisglora.  Why do you suppose that St Brendan was
still there and his wooden statue in the beehive cell?  Or was it St
Molaise?

But, Jack, I don't know these things.  I am supposed to be a
Protestant.  You must be merciful to my ignorance and explain about
them.

It is possible to walk out to Inniglora, he said patiently, but only at
the lowest springs, and no woman must go there, perfectly true that
corpses do not corrupt in the peat-soil of the island, which is acid,
like tannin, and no scientist has ever disputed this simple fact.  You
know yourself of the church in Dublin where you can put your finger
into the leathery wound of a crusader.  They give me to understand that
some herdsman or other of the Stone Ages was lately dug up in Sweden or
some place, and the peat had preserved the weave of his garments.
Besides this, what about that east-coast butcher who murdered his
brother and buried the joints in a bog, only to have them dug up again
and reassembled, in perfect preservation?

But, Jack...

All that is of no importance.  Anybody can prove it.  The interesting
thing is that no woman may go to Innisglora.

Well, it was a monastery.  Perhaps it was St Brendan's monastery...

Look, my good man, said he, laying his hand on my thigh in the
motor-car, if you go to Inniglora as a male, you will find that bodies
are imperishable.  Rats--but not mice--can live there, and earth from
the island will banish them from your house if taken to the
mainland.[1]  In 1841, he added, rather startling me because I thought
I was the only person who was interested in dates, there was a saint's
beehive there, in fine preservation.  You can still see the ruin.
People who entered his igloo had to take bread with them.  Each,
holding the piece of bread in his right hand, had to break the bread
and eat it.  They could only be males.

[1] Jack could not possibly have known that rats were a late
importation into Europe.  Rats, like cats, came in historic times.  In
medieval bestiaries, there were few cats, some mice, no rats.  But
there were mice.  And the ancient anecdotes talked a bout the _mice_ of
Innisglora.

In that monastic island of Innisglora, from which the discoverer of
America was said to have come, about eight centuries before Columbus,
it was true that women were not admitted.  There was a well there.  If
a woman drew water from this well, it turned blood red and was full of
scarlet worms.  When their menfolk were away from the island, fishing,
there was only one thing to do.  The woman could draw the water, but
she then had to hand it to any little boy.  He, although his virility
was not mature, could make it right by touching the bucket.


Driving home rather silently, through the shy boys and more frigid
girls, I wondered about the West.

You came there with scientific prejudices against fairies and against
the claptrap of the Dublin poeticals--and the inhabitants patiently
repeated their legends.  There really was a Fairy Fire, which I had
seen and indeed licked with my own physical tongue.  There really was a
naomhg, a minor deity who turned out to be the pillow of a Christian
hermit.  There really was an island, just as O'Flaherty and indeed
Giraldus in the twelfth century had related, where bodies did not decay
because of some property in the soil, and where women were not
welcome--because it had been a monastery.  Here was a vast complex of
traditional history, much richer than anything remembered by the
English prior to 1066, and something real always seemed to turn up
under the legend.

Why not bring some earth from Innisglora, and try it on rodents?
D.D.T. would have been a magic powder a few years ago, and penicillin a
disgusting and superstitious mould.  Were there red worms in the well?
What did Innisglora mean?  Who was the chief saint originally famous on
this system of islets--Brendan, Cormac, Kay, or all of them?  Had there
been a nunnery on South Inniskea to match the monasteries to the north?
It was marked on Ordnance Survey, just as Glencastle was.  And if
Glencastle were real, why not Donald Doolwee--and whence came his
garbled name?  His fort, Glencastle, really had been called Dundonnell
in the sixteenth century.  And if Donald were real, why not his wife,
the fated crane who cried Revenge, and what connection had she with the
witch Morna of the naomhg island?

One of the commonest birds in the waters of Inniskea was the shag or
perhaps cormorant, whose Gaelic name was cailleachdubh--the Black Hag.

What, in short, was the Link between Grus, the crane--which is now the
Irish name for the heron--and Inniskea, where, by day and night, you
still came across the modern version of these birds?  Could the island
have been on a route of some migration?

To my shame, I never did collect any of the soil to banish mice.  But I
did chase the Grus through medieval bestiaries, which date back to the
fifth century.

The only immortal birds known to ancient naturalists were the Eagle and
the Phoenix.  Both had a faint plausibility for Erris.  Eagles had once
been common there, just as the chough was still to be found--and the
Phoenix, it is strange to relate, may well have been the Purple Heron.
All over Ireland, herons are called cranes.

An immortal heron, crane or stork--immortal since she was always seen
to return on migration, but never to breed, as indeed the sunbird did
to Heliopolis--might well have fitted with the phoenix, half-remembered
by some learned monk in this country district where the peasants were
notoriously confused in their local bird names.  The 'Grus' itself,
according to the bestiarists, was a great migrator.  If Donald's wife,
that faithless sentinel, had been forced to emigrate, and if there had
been some ancient route of 'Grus'-migration through the islands,
perhaps she might have betaken herself to Inniskea?

Country people are as bad at ornithology as they are at history.
Phoenices can turn into storks or cranes or herons as easily as Viking
pirates or Norman invaders can turn into giants--as easily, in fact, as
the crane has already turned into the heron, for the Irish.  If these
two, why not the similar stork also, and was there ever a stork route
up the west coast of Ireland?

The bestiarists are nearly as bad as the country people, and you are
never perfectly certain that you are rightly translating Ciconia, Grus
and Ardea as Stork, Crane and Heron.  Incidentally, Ardea ought to have
something to do with 'ardeo', burning up--and there we were again, back
with the Phoenix, who used to burn herself up at Heliopolis.

There was one other migratory bird in the bestiaries who might have had
slight affinities with witches and fated 'cranes'.  This was Coturnix,
the Quail.  She lived on poisonous seed, for which reason the ancients
forbade her to be eaten, and she was 'the only other animal which
suffers from the falling sickness like man'.

I mentioned the falling sickness to Jack, who said: But does it not be
known to everybody that you can make a crane (heron) faint by stalking
her?  If you can creep up on a crane without her seeing you, and jump
up with a shout close by, she will fall in a fit.

Good gracious, said I, I have done it myself without realizing what I
was doing!  I stalked a heron once and gave her one barrel, and she
fell down, but then she got up again and I had to give her another.  I
wish I had not shot that heron.  Such a beautiful lemon eye, and her
wet bill, and her exquisite, ruffled, untidy grey hackles.  It was pure
ferocity, Jack, needless and beastly.  One day I shall have to give up
shooting altogether.




A LOVE AFFAIR


I got out of the bus in a bad temper--bored, exhausted, and angry about
being driven across Ireland in these bloody vehicles, which had remarks
written on them in Gaelic that nobody could understand.  Korus Umpar
Airan: that was what it sounded like.  Ridiculous.  And Ireland, the
once individualistic place, which of all places ought not to be
nationalized, had turned its transport over to the Farewell State of Mr
De Valera.  'Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness.'

But damn the Nationalists for making me change at half a hundred stops,
as it seemed--for writing Telefon on telephone boxes which could just
as well have been described in the words of the Italian who invented
them--and, more than all, and even more unreasonably, double-damn them
for making me bring these two untrained shooting dogs a couple of
hundred miles.  I had a setter and a pointer, and they had to be taught
shooting.  Both had been sick more than once, and we were not welcome
in nationalized conveyances, and we had had to suck up to ten thousand
bus-conductors for mere tolerance.  The thing was to get the dogs to be
sick on the step of the bus.  Some conductors could put up with this.
Some could not.  Through Mullingar, through the various bishoprics, we
had pressed on, with bloody, green-hatted energy.  My less rabid
companion in the journey was a schoolmaster from the east.

This teacher or ollamh, who had taught me whatever I knew of his
beautiful but infuriating language, was a real person.  He was a short,
determined master--a teaching man, who had somehow married a bird-like
woman, who might have been a ballet dancer.  His wife once told me
that, if he drank a dram too much of whisky, his heart would actually
throb the bed.  His heart, like a bird's, really shook his frame, and
so it did hers, and so did hers his.  They were two angels who had got
married.  It might have been Toscanini who had married some famous
duchess from Knole.

He got out of the bus behind me and watched with amusement, while I
fussed with bags and baggage.  It was night by now, and the vehicle
took itself off, diminishing across the boundless turf and under the
boundless skies of Mayo, burrowing along in its own cocoon of light
between the two, until its bright windows were only a glow-worm of the
vasty moorland--but still full of women from market and drunk farmers
and black shawls and untidy parcels, all of which I equally loathed for
the time being.  As a matter of fact, the deeper we had got into the
lovely province, the more we had been recognized by friend after
friend, the less the busmen had persecuted us, and the better we had
been teased or quizzed or welcomed, until the final conductor had
practically been tugging my famous whiskers, in good-humour and warmth
of heart.

I was in no mood for all this.  Many months in the east, among the
fillers-up-of-forms, had reduced me to the natural meanness of
civilization.  I was convinced that we had caught the wrong connection
at Mullingar, lost our cartridges or guns at Ballina, been robbed
somewhere intermediately, and probably had not got the right kind of
ration books or passports or identity cards or dog licences or shooting
permits or practically anything else for where we were meant to be.
Those months had made me forget that the body can't be nourished on
bits of paper.  I had forgotten that man only needs water, food, fire
and sleep--in that order--none of which are well represented by printed
forms.  I had forgotten that in the west this fact was remembered.
Also, I had forgotten that if you were robbed, you were robbed.  The
world did not come to an end because you were.  And the incidence of
larceny at Piccadilly Circus was about five thousand per cent higher
than it was anywhere west of Ballina.

Samus O'Flynn, the teacher who was taking a fortnight's holiday at my
shooting-lodge to help with the dogs, for he was a passionate shooter
and trainer of animals too, examined my gyrations with sympathetic
amusement.  I had been bullying him for the last fifty miles, about
where the cartridges were.  He knew they were either where they were,
or else they were not.  He came from the south of Ireland.  Although he
did not quite share the same bias, he did share the same culture as the
western Gael.  He looked down upon me with a friendly smile, though his
eyes were about on a physical level with my chin, rather as the giant
Gulliver must have examined the Lilliputians.

Incidentally, in the troubles, Samus had been on the run.  He had been
chased by the race and policy then represented and still represented by
me.  His life had been in his own hands then, and in the hands of his
compatriots.  I disagreed with his political views, as he disagreed
with mine.  We kept a neutrality of esteem on these subjects.  I think
he would have shot me, if he had been told to do so by
Authority--because he was a Catholic, and therefore conditioned to
accept orders.

I do not think that anything would have persuaded me to shoot Samus,
because I had been brought up as a Protestant, to protest against
authority.  I might, as an armed guard detailed to take him away and
execute him, have said: Well, run, you ass, while I pretend to do up my
bootlace.  But I would not have given him this law, I admit, if there
had been a sergeant watching, who could shoot me for sparing Samus.

These heart-searchings were getting us no farther towards solving the
situation in the now ill-lit hamlet--the bus had been the main
illumination--in which I was dashing about, like a cockchafer in a hat
box, proclaiming that the imaginary skis and the pemmican and the
snow-glasses and the pitons and the important parts of the oxygen
apparatus and the infra-red camera and every single file of the
card-index had been lost, stolen or strayed, so that we should never
get up my mental Everest.

Some amused silence on the part of the observers must have brought me
to my senses, for I looked up at last.  There was Cathal Barrett
standing in the light of the grocer's window--where he had been taking
a glass of whisky while waiting to meet us.  He was a wiry fellow of
sixty or more, with a drooping blond moustache and faded blue eyes, out
of which he regarded me with the wonderful, polite, protective
attention which only the best ghillies in Scotland can offer to their
lairds.

He had taken over both dogs the moment we alighted, and was holding
them on tight leads, so that their forelegs were almost on tiptoe with
immobility.  This maddened me still further.  The Irish, I thought:
barbarians: cruel to animals!  As a matter of fact, it was far the best
way to hold headstrong puppies--who, if allowed a long leash simply
throttle their windpipes on the end of it, while, if they are only
given an inch or two, they support their jaw-bones on the collar.  It
was to be at least ten days before it dawned on me that Cathal had been
handling setters when my own nannie was handling safety pins.

I took the dogs from him insultingly, signifying that, robbed and
benighted as I was, I was ready to mount the local taxi--which he had
hired for us--with what remained of our luggage.

As to the luggage--what a good word 'luggage' is, by the way: we had
_lugged_ it across Ireland--the few pieces not there at the time were
delivered, without charge, before breakfast next morning.

We ascended the taxi.


Five miles farther into the bog, wedged together with dogs and gunboxes
and the faintly anxious-looking Cathal--he was anxious not to be rude
to me in return for my rudeness--our headlights turned to the right
through a broken gateway into a tunnel of overgrown rhododendrons: and
into, precisely, the year 1889.


In Guernsey, in the Channel Islands, the City of Paris has preserved
Victor Hugo's ridiculous home exactly as he pompously left it.  For a
small fee, it is possible to enter the house and to have the uneasy
feeling that, at any moment, the old gentleman may open the front door
with his own key, stump upstairs smelling faintly of tobacco, and sit
down on his water-closet--which has blue cabbage roses on the enormous
bowl, and the sort of piston which you have to pull upwards in a
cataract of Hugo-like noises.

Glenaffron Lodge was like this, and for good reason.

In 1889, when Cathal Barrett was scarcely born, its absentee landlords
had walked out of it, perhaps because of some minor unpleasantness
about being shot by the locals, and they had never come back.  For all
anybody seemed to know, they might have become extinct--though their
heirs and assignees did have a solicitor somewhere in Kent, from whom I
had hired the mansion.

Cathal's parents and he himself had, since that momentous day, farmed
the land and studiously inhabited only the kitchen, dusting the other
rooms fairly often, preserving everything _in situ_--against the
never-coming day of the master's return.

How glorious, in the era of atomic weapons and of proximity fuses, to
be able to step straight into a Smoking Room of the 'nineties, dank and
musty, with mildewed leather fringes on the bookshelves, and to pick up
the calabash pipe set down by some indignant sportsman in a Norfolk
jacket and spats, his backside still tingling from the traditional
charge of buckshot inflicted by the tenantry!  There, on the round
mahogany table, was the very latest number of the _Strand Magazine_
with the globe of its street-lamp on the cover.  There, for the more
high-brow ladies, if I am not getting my dates mixed, was an
_avant-garde_ periodical calling itself _The Nineteenth Century_, and
in it--could it have been?--an article by some subaltern called
Churchill or by the new writer Kipling.  The smoking-cap, unless this
is an exaggeration, hung on the door, Certainly the deerstalker hung in
the hall, among the antlers.  In the female bedrooms there were curling
tongs and rolls of false hair and red books with their covers licked,
in lieu of rouge, and bits of rice paper for face powder.  In the male
bedrooms there were cycling breeches and dancing pumps, with bows on
them, and cut-throat razors marked for the days of the week.  Yes, and
there was a half-empty bottle of Rowland's Macassar Oil, still sporting
its astonishing list of patrons.

The advertisements in the magazines were entrancing.  In blacker ink
than we now have, on shinier paper, they displayed babies reaching for
cakes of soap out of hip baths, cones or pyramids of some mysterious
substance which could be ignited against asthma, ladies in bloomers
leaning on bicycles, dress-makers' busts with knobs instead of heads
and cages instead of legs and undivided bosoms leaning forward.  The
illustrations of the stories were engraved with wonderful detail,
showing coy maidens with masses of high hair being grasped in moonlit
woods by inhibited gentlemen in high collars.  In the Irish stories
there were fairies here and there, with dragon-fly wings and toadstools
and bits of shamrock and plenty of jolly Paddies leading pigs on
strings.  By the way, what an excellent word 'shamrock' is too: its
first syllable is definitive.  Nobody in the west cared a fig about its
symbolism.

Then there were ancient salmon flies in the drawers, with eyes of gut,
now unreliable, and bushy hackles, but still recognizable as Jock
Scotts or Alexandras--and machines for turning over the tops of
cartridges or measuring their charges--and heavy, wooden reels with
brass fittings--and glove-stretchers of ivory, with tarnished,
silver-topped bottles--and a letter or two from Tommy at Simla--and a
dance programme with its white pencil still attached--and a game-book
in which somebody had defiantly entered 3 brace of grouse.

In the drawing-room there were fans and peacock feathers and pampas
grass.

Among the kerosene lamps and plush chairs, and table cloths with
bobbles on them, and stereoscopic holders for viewing three-dimensional
pictures of the Sphinx, and stuffed pheasants, and moth balls, and
albums with clasps, and carriage whips, and enormous hats with
sea-gulls transfixed by jet hatpins, and boot-trees, and dangerous
engines for making aerated water, and little flower vases for button
holes, and golf balls of gutta-percha and a cleek--among these--since
it was Ireland--there were inevitably two or three pieces of
eighteenth-century silver, candlesticks and such like, with good
cut-glass and several empty bottles of claret.

Over everything there was a microscopic film of dust.

So forgotten, so lost, so distant, so remote from shops was this
blissful abode of peace that the Barretts had killed a sheep for our
provision.  And this, without a refrigerator, we were gradually to
consume from top to toe during the next fortnight of summer weather.


Yes, the word was sanctum or sanctuary.  Into this sanctum, Cathal
ushered us with deference--by the soft light of an oil lamp with a
smoked chimney.


He was a man, we slowly discovered, who was as singular as the house
which he inhabited.  He was a poet.


There is a secret world of literature, unknown to professional writers,
and even to collectors of folklore, which covers the globe in an
infinitely thin veneer.  All the people in this coating know each
other, but are unknown outside the layer.

They publish their works in the back pages of _Old Moore's Almanack_.

From Chicago to Calcutta to Cork, under signatures or initials or names
of the pen, 'Erin Go Braw' addresses his melodious rhymes to P.J.W.,
while Evan Williams tunes a note of exhortation to 'Aussie Boy'.  Their
subjects are Spring, Moonlight, Patriotism, Colleens, Mother Love, or
the merits of one another.  They often set versified riddles or
anagrams or conundrums.  Their interests are studious, their
craftsmanship complicated, their minds similar to those of
chess-players, and their courtesy--if sometimes inclined to a learned
dig or leg-pull--invariably above suspicion.  Presumably they are
lonely people, with infinite leisure, living in lighthouses and
weatherships and wigwams and igloos and Irish bogs, looking forward to
the publication of next year's _Old Moore_, doing all the puzzles of
this year, inventing the most subtle diversions and 'cracks' and
'teazers', with which to encourage, improve, reprove or entertain their
friends.

Cathal was one of them.

He was one of the chief bards of the _Almanack_.  He frequently set a
conundrum to 'Semper Fidelis' in the Antipodes, was locally famous and
spoken of with awe for having appeared in print, and he was certain
that I, as a professional writer, would make fun of him.  I do not mean
to do so.  It is difficult to rise to the top of any profession, and,
the more recondite the profession is, the greater the competition.  If
I have any claim to be the equal of Cathal, it is that I, in open
struggle, heat after heat, on Radio Eireann, was once acclaimed the
leading Bard of Erin myself, and was awarded more than one prize of
five shillings.


The chastity of the Irish is a subject which never ceases to baffle the
Anglo-Saxon.  Perhaps they mature later, perhaps it has something to do
with their very ancient cenobitic form of Christianity, perhaps there
is an economic reason tied up with the poverty of small, unfruitful
farms--but the fact is that the Gael marries late.  It is difficult in
the modern world to imagine people who do not divorce one another and
who wait to be married until they are fully grown--indeed, until they
are middle-aged.  Perhaps it is because they mate for life, and expect
to be continent and faithful, that they marry so slowly and with such
precaution.  Perhaps also the occasional violence of the Irish--their
eruptions--may be due to repression of the carnal instincts.

Until they are wedded, the menfolk of Mayo are called 'boys'.  Cathal
had remained a boy until the last decade of his life.

Imagine that lifetime on the heathery mountains, and the keen eyes once
brilliantly blue, missing no movement of sheep or cattle, wild goose or
hare, hawk or infrequent neighbour.  What secret longings must Cathal
have had, what thwarted and complicated puzzles or day-dreams, as he
shepherded on the high shoulders of Slieve Fyagh in the lonely
sunlight?  He was noticeably gentle with animals.  He had held the dogs
that evening on the short leash to help them, not to punish.  To beat a
shooting dog--and this was rare among keepers--would have struck him as
madness.  For forty-five years, since the beginning of manhood, he had
loitered above Glenaffron in rain or shine, often with his still hand
on the dog's head which helped with his herding--patient, waiting for
something, silent and watchful as the dog beside.


So there we were in this astonishing house, with its faithful and
accomplished game-keeper, who had bided sixty years for his master to
come home, and had dusted the calabash or meerschaum at least once a
week.  He was slightly on the defensive, could not quite make us out
for not being cross about that charge of buckshot in his employer's
trousers, knew perfectly well that I was a brighter light than he was
in the literary world, and, while expecting the Saxon insult which he
had every reason to foresee after our first meeting, he still watched
me with grave and accommodating politeness--while I trained the setter
and the pointer quite amiss.  The most difficult thing in the world is
to know how to do a thing, and to watch somebody else doing it wrong,
without comment.  Cathal managed it.

After nearly twenty years, now that I know better about dogs, I realize
that he was training me, just as I thought myself to be training them.


But the point of this story is a love affair.  It was over the course
of more than one year that I finally discovered its features.  He
concealed them from me, with the sensitive reticence of the Gael, and I
made no particular efforts to ferret them out.

Perhaps it was a commonplace in Mayo.

At one time, when over sixty and a bachelor, it had struck this
sandy-moustached, moist-eyed bard and ghostly ghillie, that he was now
in an economic position to get married.

So he had put into action the existing machinery.

He had sent for the local matchmaker, had provided him with a bottle of
whisky to take away, and had stated his financial position with its
possibilities.  Leave you all to me, the matchmaker had said, for I
have the very girl you need.

The matchmaker had then put the necessary bottle in his pocket, had
walked across the mountain into the next glen, and had set the bottle
on the table.  Glens are as separate from one another as fjords are.

On sight of the matchmaker and the bottle, which had not to be broached
until the decent moment, the daughter of the house, a strong and pretty
girl about eighteen, had been sent out to count the chickens.  It had
been stated, after ceremonious nuances, that Cathal had such and such
assets, while the girl herself might expect in dowry a pig and a cow.
The bottle had then been uncorked.

Cathal, over sixty, met his bride, under twenty, for the first time,
actually at the altar where they were married.

A deplorable state of affairs!

The only trouble about it was that my schoolmaster and myself were a
bit of a bore to the Barretts, during our harvest stay, eating the
putrefying sheep.  They could never be sure of being alone together,
and, however tactful we were about absenting ourselves on mountains or
coughing when approaching their small hay-field, they had too little
time, what with suckling the happy babies and dodging behind the
haycocks for another heart-warming hug, to attend to the less lovely
and gentle duties of hospitality.




A NEW BOY IN THE SCHOOL OF DEATH


Charlie Plunkett was on the far side of middle age, but he was not
elderly yet.  Soon after his marriage--which had taken place many years
before--he had found that he detested his wife and that she detested
him.  So he had given her all his possessions, had shaken the domestic
dust of Erris from his feet--or rather the sand of it--and had taken
ship for Australia.  He had been there more than thirty years.

For thirty years he had knocked about the good-on continent as an
engineer or something of that sort--picking up a little money here and
there, solitary, self-sufficient, not complaining out loud.  He had a
mathematical mind--the kind that engineers do have--with which he
pondered useless statistics, such as the population of New South Wales
or the circumference of the globe at the equator or the distance to the
moon and the tonnage of ships.  He did not rant about his wife, and,
being a good Catholic, he did not seek to replace her.  He was a
silent, enduring, patient fellow, obviously in need of love or
friendship.  He was a bit of a bore.  I thought he must once have loved
his wife a great deal.  Where women were concerned, he gave the
impression of being drained or exhausted, like a hospital patient who
had given up the effort to be convalescent.  But he made no bids for
sympathy.  In fact, he tried to conceal his loneliness.  Often, when he
longed to talk to me about Australia or shipping companies or the
distance to the moon, I could see him check himself.  He spent a lot of
time wandering on the sandy beaches, a sole figure in the distance,
collecting something.  We never knew what.

Among the fortune-seekers of the Antipodes, he may have been a failure.
Among his neighbours of Erris, he was a minor success.  For he had
saved enough money to live on--just enough--and he had returned to his
birthplace.  He was boarding at his sister's cottage--a few miles from
the wife of whom he still spoke neither good nor ill--while he looked
about him for a cottage of his own.  People do tend to go back to their
beginnings when they are ready to die.

A wise man once said that all the middle-aged people in the world are
living lives of quiet desperation.  My own life was difficult enough to
carry forward, without the encumbrance of a stranger's troubles.  I
tried to give him a little of the company he pined for--but we both
knew that, if we went too far, he would clamp himself on my shoulders
like the Old Man of the Sea.  So we rationed our meetings, as it were,
by common consent.  Once or twice a week I listened for an hour or two
to his 'yarns' about waltzing Matildas.  At other times, he was careful
not to take advantage.

We took him to Inniskea that day in the motor-boat, for the jaunt, and
he was pleased and excited.  He even became voluble, and told, almost
vauntingly, a long, dull story about some wallabies.

He always walked slowly.  I was trying to bustle him from St Columba's
tiny church up the slope of the Bailey mr, when he turned pale and
stopped altogether.  He explained that he had a weak heart.  I was
involved in my own excitements about the antiquities of the island and
was impatient with him.  He looked healthy enough to me, was by no
means an old man, and I suppose I was for the time being a little tired
of being used by him as a source of sympathy--however carefully he did
it.  So we sat him down on a stone wall to rest--since the shell-mound
of loose sand was obviously too steep for him to conquer--and we
scrambled up the incline by ourselves.  Afterwards, we collected him
from the wall on which he had been sitting and panting, and I remember
feeling disappointed in him, or perhaps reproachful.  I felt that he
had stupidly missed a great treat, by not climbing up to see those
ancient grave-stones and the prehistoric igloos.  He did not talk in
the boat on the way home.

A week later, Mr Plunkett sat up in bed at 4 a.m., wearing his
night-shirt, swung his legs over the side, put on his trousers, and
died.


Jack of the Garage took me to the wake.  It would have been hateful to
go as a tripper from curiosity, but we had known him personally--had
been, I suppose, not quite unkind to him--and I felt a compassion for
this spent life, its solitude patiently borne.  Jack said that it would
not only be right for us to go there, but wrong not to go.

The cottage, at which we arrived on foot in the evening, was like most
of the others in Erris.  A handful of rather tatterdemalion figures in
dark serge--the women with black shawls over their heads--were drifting
towards or round its not recently whitewashed walls.  The thatched roof
had been replaced by corrugated iron.  Jack whispered instructions
about what we ought to do.

We went into the little porch, to be welcomed solemnly by the sister in
mourning, with whom we shook hands.  There seemed to be three or four
rooms in the house, which was bigger than many.  He was in the front
room.

We knelt beside the coffin to say the expected prayer, glancing
fearfully at the wax face, in whose nostrils the stiff hair looked
blacker than in life.  The pinched nose was arrogant and stilly, bleak
with the cool contempt of death.  He had covered the whole distance
from alpha to omega--was in this great matter more experienced than any
of us.

The room stretched up to the rafters, without a ceiling.  At one end,
the embrasure for the turf fire was deep enough to hold an ingle seat.
There were tins of tea or other groceries on the high shelf.  The
coffin stood along the inner wall, its lid upright at the head of it,
lit by three candles in a branched candlestick.  Two cheap religious
prints and a plaster statuette of the Virgin Mary presided over it.
Three benches or forms, such as one finds in poor schoolhouses, had
been ranged on the opposite side of the room, facing the corpse.  In
front of them was a plain kitchen table, on which there lay a couple of
dozen clay pipes already filled with shag.  We fumbled our way to the
hindmost bench and sat down reverently, to survey the company.

An old man was smoking in the ingle nook.  Two women sat at the foot of
the coffin with their shawls hiding their faces, so that they looked
like nuns.  On the benches in front of us, an assortment of fishermen
with strong, individual expressions--one of them with the profile of
Punch--sucked the blue shag-smoke through the new, suffocating pipes.
We were given a clay each and offered porter or whisky, of which we
chose whisky.  As each newcomer came in, he knelt beside the coffin.

I was determined to behave with proper solemnity.  So it was startling
when the old man in the nook took the pipe out of his mouth and shouted
some teasing quip about the weather to Jack.  It was still more
startling when the Punch-and-Judy figure and the old man fell to work,
telling anecdotes about the scandalous adventures and the pretended
sexual prowess of the deceased.  Vulgar stories, jolly reminiscences,
animated conversations on all kinds of subjects--so far as I can
remember even secular songs--began to liven the assembly.  I was
surprised, if not shocked.


The point was, of course, that everybody was trying to amuse Charlie
Plunkett.

Otherwise, why 'wake' him?  We were there to give him company, support,
help, love, during his first lost hours straying beside the body.  That
was why we were sitting up with him.  Obviously the best possible
treatment was to entertain him--to flatter him, to keep his heart up,
to take his mind from his troubles--and this we did, for pity and
protection, by means of song and vulgarity.  We were clowning, to
hearten Mr Plunkett.  We were codding him along.  We were there so that
he should not be lonely and homesick as a new boy on his first night in
the school of death.


In the last century, and perhaps at the beginning of this one, a wake
lasted for two or three days, during which the poor tyro at dissolution
was never left to suffer his novelty alone.  On the second night, Jack
said, the young men and maidens of the village played games in the room
to keep him cheerful.  Some of them were acting-games of great
antiquity, in which the ferry boat of the Styx was acted out according
to a traditional mode.  Some were like Blindman's Buff or Forfeits.  In
one of them, each blindfold 'he' was slapped by a girl until he guessed
her name.  Earlier still, the wakes were said to have ended in
something not unlike an orgy.  On the third day, at the burial, the
caoineadh which was pronounced 'keen' would be raised by hired women at
the graveside--a howl of terrible poignancy, said Jack.

Nowadays, the coffin went to the chapel after the first night, and
there it was left alone.  Presumably this was to prevent the orgies.
It seemed to me a colder and less compassionate way of doing things.


When Mr Plunkett had spent his second night in solitude on holy
ground--the sharp, disdainful nose, battened down by the coffin lid,
silently expressing his valuation of life as a completed whole--his
neighbours carried him on their shoulders to the grave.

Some of the graveyards of Erris, like many others in Eke, were shocking
from an Anglo-Saxon point of view.  They were Shakespearian--suitable
for Yorick.  Tombs which were above ground might have their sides
broken.  On those below, the earth might have caved.  Shattered
coffins, scattered thigh bones or skulls coloured like the soil which
had held them, were common objects.  At Termoncarragh there was a
box-like sepulchre whose lid had fallen off.  The coffins inside had
rotted away and the two skeletons lay side by side--their faces turned
towards each other in touching companionship.  Rabbit burrows
communicated with the dead.  In one of the graves, half full of drifted
sand, there was only a mummified seagull.  The matter of
adipocere--which in the case of at least one hallowed cadaver in Mayo
had once been collected and eaten as a medicine by sufferers from
tuberculosis--was rather a horrible one.

Yet this attitude to death, after the first shock, was not repulsive.

It was the unbelievers who had to cosset their corpses with fireproof
vaults of eternal concrete in Hollywood.  They had nothing else to
tend.  For believers--and the peasants of Erris were absolute
believers--it did not matter much what happened to the body, after the
soul had been waked away to Purgatory.  They could afford to leave the
dry ribs in the rabbit holes nonchalantly, because the important part
was under care elsewhere.  The Irish Catholic, indeed, with his
reliance on the hereafter, always was less concerned about death,
bloodshed, war or murder than his English cousin, who secretly doubted
the future life.  Murder, to a Saxon, was the great sin: it took away
the greatest thing he could think of, life.  The Catholic Gael regarded
murder only as an incident in the existence of the eternal spirit,
which could not be destroyed.  For him, adultery was the greatest sin,
because it was dangerous to salvation.

So Mr Plunkett was carried shoulder-high to his clean, sandy lot in one
of the tidier graveyards, while his handful of friends, but not his
wife, followed silently behind.  He went in, that Ulysses, that
circumnavigator, that antipodean, that cheated husband, that diffident
student of the distance to the moon.  It was hardly a generous hand
which life had dealt to him, poor digger.  Many millions of sheep he
must have seen, under many torrid suns, and drank many a billy-can of
wood-smoked tea.  What wood?  Eucalyptus, blue gum?  Anyway, trees: of
which there were none in Erris.  He had come from here, and come back
here, broken-backed in the middle by the bitter words of a woman.  Now,
on his salty grave, there would be no flowers or vegetation, none of
the green of New South Wales.  The only ornaments on the sepulchres of
Erris were round white stones, collected and lovingly placed there by
remembering mourners--those, and always a cardboard boot-box, holding
the clay pipes which had been smoked at the wake.

These were a proof, by their numbers, of how many people had liked him
well enough to bear him company, during his first night of bewilderment.

They must have been valued by the ghosts of Erris, who may have taken
precedence in a kind of pecking-order, by virtue of the number of pipes
which they could claim.  The chieftain ghosts, as they sat among the
tumbled grave-stones sucking their clays with broken teeth at midnight,
might often have shown two boxes full.  Charlie Plunkett's box had few.




GIVING UP SHOOTING


I was involved in some confusion with an octopus made of red pepper,
when the dream tilted sideways in the brutal frenzy of the alarm clock.

The linoleum was icy.  There was a skin of ice in the chamber pot.  The
garish, glaring, pitiless light of the electric bulb searched out the
sparse, winter bedroom too brilliantly for gummed eyes--absolutely
drunk with sleep.  It showed black night through the window glass.
Fluff moved on the lino in the north wind under the door.  The red
setter, curled warmly on the foot of the bed, opened one optic upon me
as I stumbled to the raving clock, hopping from mat to mat because of
the freezing floor.  She still had time for a few more winks.

I dressed with hasty fingers, fumbling the buttons, dashing the cold
water from the wash basin on haggard eyes, hissing like a groom.

There was a Thermos in the empty eating room, which seemed debauched by
memories of the previous evening.  A chair was crooked, ash-trays were
full, a motionless book lay face downward, untidy in the sterile light.
The turf fire was a rou of tarnished ash.  I put rum in the hot tea
and munched unwanted biscuits, gradually coming alive.  Actions till
now automatic began to become logical and purposive.

Termoncarragh.  I looked at the wrist-watch.  Five-thirty.  Yes, we
would get there in plenty of time.  The wind would be blowing down the
lake.  It was to be hoped that the car would start without a fuss.

In the early mornings, people are zombies.  They obey themselves
mechanically, performing what the other and reasoning mind has plotted
to do before it went to sleep.  My zombie was beginning to live.

I offered Brownie tea and biscuits, which she refused.  I began to
check, in the awakening brain, the numerous gadgets of the
wildfowler--the cartridges of various loads and so forth.

The Jaguar, relieved of its rugs and radiator lamp, started at a touch.
I clambered into it, hustled by the pleased dog, and the headlights
created the cobbled yard, while the car's petrol pump continued to tick.

The mounting road towards Corclogh and Armagh was an unfrequented one
at the best of times.  In the hours before dawn it was desolation
itself, running between turf walls.  The lights wound it under the
spool of the car bumpers, as I blew on mittened fingers to warm them up.

I was alive.  I began to hug myself as usual, at the delight of being
awake and living, while others of the western world were all asleep and
dead.  There was a stealthiness, a sense of power and virtue common to
huntsmen and burglars.  It was a silent glee.  Every bit of my body was
healthy and younger than it is now, alas, and tingling with
superiority.  I thought with pity or condescension of the sleeping
bodies in the few cottages by the roadside, of the dull, defenceless,
sparkless clay.  They were wasting the glorious chance of life.  Why
did anybody ever sleep at all?  Surely, if we were only to have seventy
years of it, it would be better not to miss a minute?  And yes, I
thought, I could switch off this engine, and walk up your boithrn, my
lads, seeing in the dark, and lift your latch with the silence of a
panther and slit your leaden throats without a sound.  The powerful
world of night belonged to me.


Termoncarragh was one of the characteristic lakes of Erris.  It stood
towards the root of the peninsula called Kilmore, as Termon Kilmore
stood at the tip of it.  'Tearmann' meant a sanctuary, a place of
security, a shelter.  They were the boundary marks of the peninsula.

It was a private theory of mine that Erris, possibly the least known
quarter of Ireland and the one with the smallest amount of documented
history, had in the early days of Christianity been a vast eremitical
sanctuary or diocese, possibly converted by a saint called Coman.  The
inland section of Erris, if one regarded it as having been converted
from the sea, was called Kilcommon--surely the church or diocese of
Coman, just as one speaks of the 'church' of Laodicea.  The seaward
section, that of the peninsula, was called Kilmore--the Great Church,
using 'church' in the same sense.  And the very node or seamost shrine
of the mission was, I believed, then and now the island of
Inniskea--the island of repose or retreat, in the religious meaning of
the word.  Probably St Coman had originally landed on or near the
island from the sea, had extended his beachhead to include the
peninsula, and had finally pushed forward his holy boundaries to
include the mainland of Kilcommon, which completed Erris.

Another name for the barony in the sixteenth century had been
Invermore--which was Inbhear mr, the Great Harbour--not only the sea
harbour of Blacksod Bay, but a harbour for holy men, a haven for souls.

One of the reasons why Erris had so little history was that it lay at
the back of beyond, defended by quagmires.  But another reason may have
been this particular ecclesiastical tradition.  I thought of it as a
real sanctuary, in the technical sense, like the churches of the Middle
Ages in which even murderers might claim refuge.  And in Erris, for
that matter, many a murderer had there been.

The actual land of Termoncarragh, where I was now parking the Jaguar in
the windy darkness, belonged in the sixteenth century to the Bishopric
of Killala.  Cattle had been driven there in 1536 'for protection'
during one of the local raids or wars.  The protection had, as usual,
been violated.  But this was a land of violence. Why not, thought I, in
the commando mood before dawn.


We crouched on the stiff goosebag in the crackling reeds at the edge of
the lake, trying to identify its inhabitants by ear.  There was a party
of white-fronts muttering occasionally.  Almost certainly there would
be some widgeon, though they were now silent in the darkness.  A
mallard uttered an interjection once or twice.  The wind was away from
us, so noises came by gusts.  Brownie trembled beside me, more from
excitement than cold.  She was a rarity--for setters were not supposed
to be steady if allowed to retrieve, yet she was fairly good at both.
We loved each other more than anything else in the world.  The only
thing she could not do was to retrieve from water.

Patience is one of the virtues attributed to fishermen and wildfowlers,
but of course no patience is necessary.  If anything, we were liable to
be suffocated by impatience, by the breathless thrill.  We tautened in
the frozen ambush like assassins, like thugs, like the first and second
moorland murderers of Banquo, while Erris, invisible, asserted its lone
and ancient personality about us.


Everything in Erris came from the sea, not out from the land.  The
anseriforms did, which we were there to slaughter, but so had the
pirates and the Vikings and the hermits of St Coman.  The whole barony
was a kind of promontory fort, defended on the landward side from the
mainland by its bogs.  What little history it had came from the ocean.

For instance, the Armada had passed these stone-fanged cliffs.  I knew
rather more than most of the locals about this subject, because I had
read about it in books, and now, waiting for the sunrise in a
bloodthirsty landscape of desolation, bloodthirsty myself, I fell to
pondering the story.

In the first Queen Elizabeth's day, the Norman barons who had
originally penetrated to the west of Ireland as conquerors had already
'gone native'.  The chieftains of Connaught had consisted of the Irish
ones like the Donnells or Connors--who claimed descent from goodness
knows what races of the Fir Bolg--and the Norman-Irish ones who were
descended from William de Burgo.  The latter had divided the territory
between its two great chiefs, MacWilliam Eighter and MacWilliam Oughter.

Astonishing people!  Hooligans is what they are called in
America--indeed, there was a Connaught clan called O Huallachain.
These gangsters, brawlers, Tammany bosses of the dark ages, had passed
the time in local wars which were little more than gang fights or
riots, in assassinations and raids for cattle.  Big Terence O'Connor,
for instance, whose poetical Irish name was Toirdelbhach Mor
O'Conchobhair, had twenty-three sons.  His son Rory had blinded his own
son Murrough, had been deposed by another son Conor--who was himself
murdered--and had died in religion, aged 82.  Of Big Terence's first
twenty-six descendants through Cathal Crobhderg (Charlie Red-Claw),
eleven had died by violence.  Of the first nineteen descendants through
Muircheantaigh Muimhnaigh, twelve did so.  The Bourkes or de Burgos who
squabbled with the Connors had been just the same.  Their original
MacWilliam, Scotty Sir Edmond, had lost five of his first get by the
sword.  His Elizabethan descendant, the third Richard, had four sons.
All four had died suddenly--one of them on the gallows.  Another Bourke
of this period, Lanky Walter, had eight descendants.  Six of them were
hanged.

One of the charms of these jokers lay in their nicknames.  There was
the Blind Abbot, there was Iron Dick, there was the Devil's Hook and
the Devil's Hook's Son.  Peevish Edmond, Horsy David, Lame Thomas,
Swarthy Richard, Learned John, Grey William, Redmond the Whiskers--they
would have made up an excellent crew for Long John Silver.

It was among these embattled anarchists that Queen Elizabeth had been
trying to extend the royal peace of England by the hand of her
Governor, Sir Richard Bingham--when the shattered Armada limped and
staggered past, in 1588.

The Spanish soldiers, with their modern arms and military training,
were immediately recognized as valuable assets by the mobsters of Mayo,
where they were wrecked.  Those who had not been massacred by the
locals the moment their ship ran ashore were collected by the nearest
chieftain--a gentleman probably dressed in serge and pampooties--so
that they might be used as fighting slaves.  They were unpaid mercenary
troops--a melancholy pressed gang.  Their alternatives had been to be
slain at once on the beaches by the Irish, or to be slain at a later
date fighting for the Irish against the English.  A certain Sir
Murrough O'Flaherty had set great store by a band of about twenty of
them, which he had collected.

By December 1588--that same cold month in which we were crouching among
the reeds of Termoncarragh, but three hundred and fifty years
before--twelve ships had been lost upon the coast of Connaught.  Two or
three had sunk at sea outside the islands.  1,100 men had been put to
the sword.  4,600 had been drowned.  Don Lewis de Cordova had been
collected with his nephew, to await the Queen's orders.  The Queen
killed Spaniards at once.  The chiefs killed them likewise, or
conscripted them for future use.

In Tirawley, one ship was taken with four hundred men.  Mclaughlin Mac
an Ab, the son of Angus the Abbot, distinguished himself by
slaughtering eighty unarmed castaways with his own Galloglass axe.  In
Erris itself, there came ashore two vessels.  The bewildered, the
harried and hopeless southerners were scattered about Broadhaven and
Ballycroy.  They were trying to band together for self-protection.
They were trying to rescue their crews by sea.  They were marching
hither and thither in pitiful confusion, trying to fortify themselves
in primitive castles at Doona and Donamona.  A few names have come down
to us--Don Alonso de Leyva, who made a stand in Ballycroy, and a
certain Giovanni Avancini, who deserted from him with fourteen Italians.

The whole country was up, stirred like an ant's nest.  A complicated
quarrel about the succession to the MacWilliamship--which Elizabeth had
abolished--had been touched off by the arrival of the Armada.
England's difficulty had as usual been Ireland's opportunity.  Sir
Richard Bingham already had his hands full with a different part of the
rebellion in Ulster, and the piratical nicknames of Connaught were
forth in strength--some killing the dons, some enrolling them against
the Queen, some conspiring against one another.  The sons of the Blind
Abbot were out, with those of Iron Dick and Lanky Walter and the
Devil's Hook's Son.  Mac an Demain an Chorain was his name, literally
the Son of the Demon of the Reaping Hook.  His hook or sickle may
possibly have been a clan talisman or tribal fetish, like the pruning
knife of the O'Connells in Kerry.

The troubles continued until the peace of 1589--complicated, gory and
barbarous.  Bingham caught a certain Justin MacDonnell, tried him by
martial law for having helped to bring Don Alonso inland, and hanged
him there and then.  A loyal Mr Browne was ambushed and slain by the
Son of the Demon.  Sir Murrough O'Flaherty's son, having been captured,
was held as a hostage.  But Sir Murrough's fellow rebels offered him
300 to raise a bodyguard, 300 to break down the castle of Aughnanure,
and 300, in compensation, if his hostage son was hanged.  These terms
proving acceptable to Sir Murrough, he took the 900, did break down
the castle, and his son was hanged--at a profit of 300 to himself.
Everybody thought the arrangement reasonable--everybody, perhaps,
except his twenty Spanish mercenaries, 'who', it is said, 'could not
endure the hardships of Irish life.'

A Lieutenant Francis Bingham slew a hundred at castle Annacare on March
30th, executing most of the wounded and prisoners, and 'there was
gotten of their furniture 63 pieces, besides other furnitures, as
morions, swords, sculls and targets, and four guidons.'

Sir Richard Bingham, who finally dealt with the rebellion with skill
and energy, like most colonial administrators, was hampered and
betrayed by the intrigues of his own government.  Appeasement of the
rebels, dictated to him from home, was assumed by the enemy to be a
sign of weakness.  It was not until 1589 that the rising was brought to
a submission.  Then the third clause of the treaty, signed by seven
Englishmen with their names and by ten Irishmen with their marks--for
they were all illiterate, including Sir Murrough and the Blind
Abbot--stated that they, the Irish, should 'forthwith deliver to the
Lord Deputy such Spaniards, Portagalls, and other foreigners of the
Spanish fleet as are now amongst them.'


Thinking of those unlucky dagoes, as we crouched by the lakeside which
had refused them sanctuary or compassion, I began to think too about
the taking of life.  I never minded much about the killing of
humans--provided they were adult, male and other than myself.  After
all, Homo Sapiens was the most successful and most terrible of the
raptors--far more terrifying and destructive than the wolves and tigers
which almost always fled at the sight of him.  He was the only animal
from which everything else ran away.  Foxes could walk by river banks
without frightening fish, and fish could swim without scaring the
passing birds.  When man passed, there was a hush in every element.
Also, out of about half a million species, he was one of the only eight
kinds I could think of that indulged in warfare.  Six of the eight were
ants.  True warfare meant joining together in bands to fight against
bands of the same species--it was not war if a band of wolves attacked
a band of sheep--and, out of all those hundreds of thousands, only man
and a few insects did it.  In the animal world, warfare was a much
rarer vice than incest or cannibalism or the everyday simplicity of
murder.

Very well, if man was that kind of creature, he could hardly complain
when he sometimes got butchered himself.  He was able to look after his
own life.  He was self-competent.  Wisely enough, he seldom trusted his
fellow men.

It seemed to me that the unpardonable kind of killing was when you
killed something which was not self-competent and which did trust you.
Women or children or horses or dogs or even domestic cattle, which
reposed their faith in the protection of man: it did seem, even when I
was a shooter, that there was something monstrous in betraying their
confidence.  It was an outrage on the dignity of the beast to refuse
mercy, after the wonderful compliment of being expected to give it.

So what about those Spaniards, whose gaunt forgotten ghosts now wheeled
about us in the winter wind?  They had hardly been competent, poor
shipwrecked sods, and perhaps, like all castaways who have survived the
forces of nature, they did hope for compassion from their fellow men.
Or perhaps they did not expect it?  Perhaps, in the days of Elizabeth
the First, they only expected to be 'put to the sword'.  It was a
condition of warfare then, by no means confined to Ireland.

'Put to the sword.'  Why was this phrase active, as it were, instead of
passive?  Surely the sword was put to them?  And yet there was a
horrible vividness about it--the shrinking flesh thrust forward
struggling to the point which pierced it.


And what about the wild geese of Termoncarragh?  Most habitual shooters
console themselves for the massacres they perpetrate by a series of
clichs.  Sometimes they claim that they only 'shoot for the pot', i.e.
that everything killed by them is for the useful and necessary purpose
of being eaten.  Others seem to be compensated by the remark that 'a
man must kill the thing he loves.'  I myself used to claim that it was
so difficult to achieve a goose that the achievement was itself
beautiful, more beautiful than the living goose--a piece of casuistry
which does not consider the feelings of the victim.

Geese like rats, are among the most intelligent and affectionate of
animals, and they seem to have a moral sense.  There is a true goose
story in W. H. Hudson, which is always worth repeating.  It concerns an
island off the coast of Norway, whose farmer's poultry suffered from a
plague of foxes.  He had to collect the fowls at night to lock them up,
and he set a fox trap against his adversary.  Instead of a fox, this
trap caught a wild goose on migration, breaking its leg.  It was an
elderly white-front--evidently, by the massive bars on its breast, a
patriarch and leader of the squadron.  The farmer took it home, made a
splint for the leg, and released it with clipped wings among his
domestic birds.  Some time later, after it had recovered, he began to
notice on his evening rounds that the fowls were already collected in
the chicken house when he went to lock them up.  Watching to discover
the reason, he found that that old admiral--that captive marshal of the
air--had assumed the leadership of his fellow prisoners.  By his own
intelligence, watching the farmer, he had understood the process of the
nightly lock-up, and now he himself was collecting the chickens at the
right time, to parade them for bed.

There is another story in Hudson about a man who shot a teal, breaking
its wing.  For some reason, he took it home and made a pet of it,
though it could no longer fly.  It forgave the injury and became
devoted to him.  He was a business man, and it used to meet him every
evening at the end of the street, on foot, as he came home from work.

Such were the creatures for whom Brownie and I laid wait before dawn
that morning, fingering a B.S.A. magnum charged with BB shot.  It was
right for Brownie: it was her nature.  But I was beginning to wonder if
it was right for me.


A red line like a streak of blood between the black, horizontal,
menacing clouds, tattered at their tops, showed that it was time for
sunrise.  Out at sea, beyond the sandy graveyard of Termoncarragh where
the white clay pipes lay in cardboard boxes among the coffins, the
leaning wind was slicing the tips from the waves in a haze which was
half sea, half air.  On the low, sheep-nibbled down of Armagh, which
was beginning to loom into a grey daylight, stood the abandoned home of
Bingham Lodge--named after those same Binghams, now Earls of Lucan, who
had fought the Armada and later charged at Balaclava.  The sleepy
farmer of the inland hillside, in his white cottage with the black
turf-stacks, lay still abed.

On the choppy lake and around it, there began to be a coming and going,
like the stir of an early market.  A party of widgeon, whistling
whee-oo, whee-oo, careered along the stream of air, out of range.
White-fronts, well aware of the human presence, hoved at the further
margins, or, taking a trip, toured the middle air beyond gunshot.  A
thrilling consort of swans, whom I had not seen there before, came
beating in against the gale.  They were not mute swans, but smaller
ones, either Bewicks or Whoopers, whose cry was a smothered sort of
yapping.  Probably they were Bewicks.  The bending reeds combed the
wind's hair, the thin ice crackled or grated, and Brownie trembled,
trembled, her eyes fixed on the sky.

A single swan, not a Bewick or Whooper, came head-on towards us,
labouring against the element, hardly fifteen feet above the water.
With black nares and frowning eye, her great wings twanging and the
long neck sighted on her destination, she made her way along the lake,
well within range.  The noise of her wings was plangent and regular
like somebody hammering with a pliable hammer, or like the measured
swishing of some terrible cane, but metallic and melodious too, like a
Hawaiian guitar or a musical saw.

Ever since I had learned to fly an aeroplane I had wondered, for this
was before the second world war, what it would be like to shoot down a
Heinkel.  That swan, that vast and snowy wingspread, was a bomber, not
a bird.

I stood up when she was abreast of us, slipping the safety-catch, and
hesitated with the gun half raised.

There was a superstition in Ireland, probably connected with the
legendary children of Lir--who were supposed to have been turned into
swans--that it was unlucky to shoot these creatures.  In England, it
was illegal.  Besides, what was the use of shooting swans?  Although
they had been eaten in the Middle Ages, it was doubtful whether anybody
would know how to cook them now.  Also, even at that moment, I dimly
perceived that beauty did not only exist to be destroyed.

However, the temptation was too strong.  I had never shot a swan.  All
shooters are really trying to prove their doubted manhood, the gun
being their virility.  I did not want to go home unfulfilled.  I did
want to find out about the Heinkels.  In my mind's eye, I could imagine
the great neck hurtling down head foremost into a cloud of spray.

When I shot the swan, she did not make a nose dive.  It dawned on me,
while she was still in the air, that her centre of gravity must be
astern, not ahead.  She paused in the wind, all aback, surprised,
hanging on the stall with the ailerons of her secondary feathers going
soggy--then slid down backwards, on an ungainly tail-slip, into the
water.  The gale, blowing away from us, carried the useless corpse
further and further from the shore.


Brownie, no water-dog, stood beside me watching it, as the choppy
wavelets dandled it out of reach.  Two or three white feathers danced
beside the soggy hulk, curled into dainty cusps like wood shavings.
What had once been beautiful was as dead as a dago--and as pointlessly.




A PILGRIM SON


We started from the little village at six o'clock in the morning,
passing through Westport at about nine.  We drove the Jaguar into a
two-shilling enclosure and climbed out, the four of us, leaving poor
Brownie inside.  It was felt that it would not be respectful to take a
dog to the holy mountain, on the 28th of July.  The Catholic dogma was
that animals have no souls.  Peasants in the west, on entering a house,
would sometimes say with exactness: 'God save all here, barring the dog
and the cat.'  Well, at least they recognized the presence of domestic
animals in the home--which English peasants on a similar visit might
not be polite enough to notice, perhaps.

There was Jack, gentle, friendly, smiling and optimistic, stating that
he was 'as happy as Larry'.  There was Mrs O'Callaghan, fervent,
loving, tall, thin, humble and frequently exclaiming that everything
was 'loverlay'.  It was a tremendous day for her who lived half her
life in simple dreams of holiness and miracles and soothsayers.  There
was her stout sister Mrs Reilly, the grocer's wife, humorous, bold,
selfish, prolific, good company--a joky woman who was able to look
after herself in any circumstances.  And I was there, the driver,
beginning to blink awake.  We wore stout shoes or boots and carried
blackthorn walking-sticks.

The two east-coast women, whom I had fetched the previous day from
Kildare on an old promise, looked at the great Croagh with interest and
complacency.  They had no standards in their minds by which to judge
mountains.  Even looking at it, they had no idea what they were in for.
A blanched statue of St Patrick was before them, past which the endless
trail of pilgrims wound up the slope like ants.  Two thousand five
hundred and ten feet they ascended--the last part up a cone shaped like
a pyramid, and nearly as steep as one.  On the top, a minute cube, was
the saint's chapel, on the saint's own alp, named after him, and this
was the day when Ireland went to visit him.  It nearly always misted or
poured with rain on the 28th, but our visit was to be blessed
unusually.  The weather was superb.

Jack and I, accustomed to long days on the heather in pursuit of grouse
or wildfowl, found it difficult to keep back with the ladies.  We
waited for them twice, dawdled, went back for them--but the third time
Jack said with a shake of his head, 'They will never do it.'  The last
mass on top was at noon, and he wanted to be there in time.  We
returned along the line of climbers to the toiling women, already after
a few hundred feet practically foundered, and broke the news.  We were
going on, to be in time for mass, and the females were to take it easy.
They were to rest often, and to give in, if forced, at the first
Station.  In their Dublin clothes, but fortunately with low heels, they
waved the menfolk on.  They were speechless.  Mrs O'Callaghan, as thin
as a rake from doing Lough Deag the previous week, was a buttered
parsnip in the growing heat of the morning.  The sweat stood out on
each side of her nose.  She was white at her cheek bones.  We knew she
had a weak heart, and felt frightened.  But she, no believer in dying
for a good cause, knew that the good cause would preserve her from
dying.  She was indomitable.  Her hat was crooked.

Mrs Reilly, a mountain climbing a mountain, stumped in her wake, fifty
yards behind, weeping and sweating in black satin.  She had already
fallen down twice and cut her knee, but she forged ahead with an
expression of martyrdom--with plaintive, ceaseless petitions to God, or
to Mrs O'Callaghan, or to all and sundry.  She was full of courage too,
inside her balloon of a bosom, although imploring with every other
breath to be allowed to sit down.  'Oh, holy mother of God, does it be
much furder?'  We had hardly begun.  Her tall, staunch sister, refusing
to waste breath on words, merely shook the crooked hat.  Excelsior.  We
left them to it.

The first two thousand feet were easy, like any other mountain.  We
took them flippantly, relishing and marking our fellow pilgrims, into
whose line we had become absorbed.  They scrambled up, five or six
yards apart, in ones and twos and threes, while a thinner line of
returning visitors swung freely down, accomplished, hallowed, pleased
with themselves or amused at us climbers.

It dawned on me that we were back in the Canterbury Tales.  No wonder
Chaucer was good-humoured.  For the mountainside was in a state of
fellowship--it was happy, bonhommous, mutually congratulating.
Although the population of Eire was counted in millions, people kept
meeting others whom they knew.  And when they met, they stopped.  They
encountered with a great handshake.  They teased and joked and laughed,
far from holy or hushed.  They were the very characters out of Chaucer,
vulgar and surprising.  There was the Wif of Bath, closely resembling
Mrs Reilly, but now black in the face with agony and determination.
And there, coming down, was an acquaintance from our own village,
Inspector Ryan, saluting us with welcome.  Six elderly peasants from
Shrataggle, friends of ours and famous for having won some money in the
Irish Sweepstake, were tramping gaily past.  The eldest, the actual
holder of the winning ticket, shook my hand with compliment, averring
that after this we should doubtless meet in heaven.  He qualified it by
adding that--at least--one of us might get there.  This was a beautiful
tease.  He had said it as if he meant that I was the good one, he the
reprobate.  Yet he knew quite well that I was a Protestant, and thus he
could leave me, in high good-humour and a slight aura of whisky, to
puzzle it out.  Then there was the bookie from Belfast!  There was no
slightness about his aura.  It rose from him in a visible mist, which
would have exploded in a blue flame if he had struck a match.  He was
wearing a thick winter overcoat, which he had forgotten--and this was
the sunniest pilgrimage in the forty-odd years since the chapel had
been built.  He reeled from side to side of the break-neck path,
singing and exhorting himself.  His scarlet face was covered with
carbuncles.  He had been drinking whisky in the train since midnight.
When we asked him whether he thought he would get there safely, he
replied: 'I'm from Belfast, I am.  Och aye!'  Next there was the old,
old lady going down.  She was past eighty, and could not put one foot
in front of the other.  She could advance a foot, and draw the other up
to it, but that was all she could do.  Or was this perhaps for a vow?
She had started at one o'clock the previous night, heard mass at dawn,
and would be home at about ten.  There she went softly and surely, foot
up to foot, carrying her eighty years patiently down a gradient of one
in four--such a morsel of light old bones that she strayed and drifted
like thistledown.  There was also the photographer from Dublin, a young
fellow of thirty or so, but a city man with feet as tender as your
face.  He had been on the pilgrimage fourteen times, and loved the
mountain.  This time, he had decided to go barefoot.  We stopped beside
him for breath, and noticed that the naked foot which he was putting
down on the sharp flints was trembling from the pain.  It shook in an
ague of agony, as he, at a snail's pace, moved on in torment.

The last five hundred feet were the worst.  The tireless Jack, always
as fit as a flea, led up like a will o' the wisp, while I dragged my
clumsier body over the torrent of flint which had to be taken on hands
and knees.  Jack said, 'Don't look up.  If you look, you will lose
heart.'  The pilgrims, slithering down, seemed likely to sweep us back
to the foot.

I began to pray.

People _in extremis_, even agnostics we are told, generally do
pray--but I was not so far gone as that.  I had not come on the
pilgrimage for exalted motives.  I enjoyed mountains, I wanted to see
what the festival was like, and, in a moment of aberration, I had once
mentioned to Mrs O'Callaghan that one day I would take her.  The
beatific expression on her face, when she heard this promise, had
seemed impossible to disappoint.

But I was praying all the same.  It was partly like the curses uttered
by men in desperate struggles, and partly, I am ashamed to say, it was
to impress Jack.  I moved my lips so that he could see.  On the other
hand, less ignoble, how could one not pray when everybody else was
doing so?  Surely it is better to be with people than against them, and
would it not have been churlish to resist the hospitality of faith
which surrounded us?

At last there was the blessed top--all 2,500 feet of it--with the tiny,
weather-worn chapel on its small table-land, and the whole world at
prayer also in the sunlight above Clew Bay.

We parted and began to make our circuits of the chapel separately.  We
were supposed to go round seven times, saying the rosary.  Five hundred
people were doing the same thing, in a whirligig of worship, people of
every age, in every kind of suit, lost in their own errands of petition
or atonement.

It must have been the altitude which made me pray, or the glorious
weather, or the superabundant feeling of health and happiness which
comes after exertion, or the vastness of the view, or the common
unconsciousness in which my miniature ego was now submerged.  At all
events I sauntered along with a rosary, presenting my soul and all
others to the God in whom I did not believe at sea level.

The point was that it was not possible in that bright air to pray for
yourself or for other individuals: not even for Mrs O'Callaghan, who
was always praying for me.  It was hardly possible to pray for the
human race even--for its peace or forgiveness or anything like
that--because it seemed wrong to pray for anything.  You could hold it
out to its maker--like a man who has been run over, mutely displaying
his maimed stumps.  As we moved round and round so strangely, with the
three hundred and sixty-five islands of the bay like toys at our feet,
and Clare island a peep-show and the White Cow island beyond--with
Corslieve fifty miles to the north, and Achill hinting a shoulder, and
the universal sea about, it was only possible to hold out the tragic
filth of the human race for God to see--not feeling contempt for them,
nor expecting anything to be done for them--without petition or sarcasm
or confusion of mind.

I thought how the world had never been at peace.  Even when Europe was
not at war, China would be fighting.  If China had peace, the strife
would move to South America or somewhere else.  Such was the human
species that the whole globe had probably never been bloodless since
men invented agriculture.  And here we were, members of it along with
the other members, revolving the top of a holy hill and not knowing
what to ask.  It was possible to think of the unfathomable wickedness
of man, his carnivorous ferocity.  It was possible to think of the
other beasts, rooks and ants and mackerel and bees and wolves, five
hundred thousand species perhaps, among whom there were only about
eight kinds who indulged in warfare like man.  It was not possible to
feel superior or bitter to one's fellows about it, for we were all in
the same boat.  But, in the high sunshine, it did seem within the
bounds of possibility that we who were there walking, now innocently
occupied for the few moments of this pilgrimage, might humbly and not
despairingly regard ourselves as presentable.  Presentable.  There was
nothing we could ask.  But now, for this moment in the year, those of
us who had got there could presume to draw attention to our condition.
At any other time, it would be wiser to hide.  But there, today,
together, perhaps men could say: Look.  Look at the pickle we are in,
please God.

So I tramped round, telling the beads and presenting my species to the
infinity which surrounded us, and which also governed the half-moon,
just visible in daylight, hanging part way up the dazzling blue over
remote Nephin.


I noticed from the tail of my eye that the Archbishop of Tuam was
darting round a circle near the chapel, offering his ring to be kissed.

We had known that he would be there.  Half-way up the mountain, we had
heard the rumour.  'The Archbishop is on the top!'  It was scarcely
nine-thirty when we heard it, and he had reached the top at scarcely
nine-thirty, yet the whole concourse had known at once, with
exultation.  The Reek had transfigured itself by knowing that its
archbishop was at the focus as their captain, and everybody had told
everybody else.

A circle of serge and fishermen's jerseys was jostling inward to kiss
the ring of Tuam, rather as a rugby-football scrum presses in, but on
their knees, and the good man at the centre, rapidly flirting his hand
hither and thither above the bowed heads, bestowed it among them.

I gave up my circumambulation to join the throng.  I was exalted with
the pilgrimage and I wanted to kiss the ring--without reservations or
double meanings and not from curiosity and not so that I could say that
I had done so and not, oddly enough, because I had any belief in it as
a source of blessing.  But it was a source of virtue and affection.  It
was right, at this altitude of common union with the species, to do
what was being done.  In Ireland, on that particular day, feeling at
one with the race, it was good, right, proper and your bounden duty to
accept the symbol of unity.  I dumped myself down on the outskirts of
the scrum and began to shuffle forward on aching knees.

The Archbishop had to offer the ring--an insanitary practice, the
faithless might sourly think--to several thousand people.  The
newspapers, hopelessly exaggerating as ever, said that there were forty
thousand on the peak.  There could not have been less than fifteen
thousand during the day.  An Archbishop, in these circumstances, could
hardly be interested in individuals or in particular blessings.  All he
could do was to press the ring to one mouth after another, at the same
time rapidly muttering such general good wishes as he could muster in
benediction.  Round went the hard and not very expensive jewel: the
words, sharing themselves among so many, were a hasty but warmly
intended jabber.  He was blessing them racially, not as units, and his
strength was taxed.

When I got there, I kissed like the others.  My heart suddenly
overflowed for all the people in the world, and I bussed it like a
lover.  It was not a peck on the cheek, but a good hug--on the mouth,
as it were.

For a fraction of a second the startled old clergyman, who must have
been feeling giddy as he revolved, saw an individual in sharp focus.
He said to me personally, 'God bless you,' as if from his heart.

Numbed by this electric contact, I hoisted myself from my knees to
resume the circles round the chapel.  I stumbled off over the loose
stones, warning myself not to exaggerate and to realize that the
private moment must have been an illusion.

After another turn, a bright and perky young chaplain, walking
widdershins against the revolutions which the crowd was making, caught
me and fished me out.  'Who are you, and what is your profession?  His
Grace would like to talk to you.'

The situation had ceased to be real.  The merry chaplain had called the
Archbishop 'His Grace', so I knew that this was the right thing to call
him.  I told the chaplain awkwardly that I would come whenever I was
told to, but that surely His Grace would be too busy?  I was overcome
with shame inside myself, for not being a Catholic, for being where I
had no business to be, for being a land of Judas, loved in treachery.
I lied to the chaplain, saying that I was a convert.  It was a strange
lie.  It was not to save myself from humiliation, but to save the
Archbishop.  It seemed impossible to disappoint _him_.

The chaplain told me to present myself at any time.  He said that His
Grace would be there till afternoon.  He minced away.

I did not, did not, did not want to meet the prelate.  I did not want
to be found out as a foreigner and a humbug, to be cast out from the
communion.  I did not want to let the old man down after our flash.  I
knew that I must not deceive him.

I put the tangle aside and went to look for Mrs O'Callaghan.


Each time that we had made a circuit, I had spent a few minutes looking
down the last, precipitous incline, in case the two dauntless female
escalators of our party might have made good.  This time, I found Mrs
O'Callaghan at the second station, white-faced, perspiring, pallid,
unbeatable.  I made her get up from her knees, insisting that she must
walk gently round the chapel once or twice to cool off, before she
kneeled again in the high breeze.  She was reluctant to do this.  So I
tied up her scarf, lent her my mackintosh, and left her to her own
devices.  Before I went, I could not resist telling her gruffly, like a
small boy boasting of a cricketer's autograph, that I had been sent for
by the Archbishop.  Mrs O'Callaghan's heart missed a beat.  She had
always known that Mr White was a saint!

When I had finished my rounds, I kneeled on the cruel stones in front
of the chapel where they were saying mass, and beat my breast.

There was a confused time while I wondered what to do.  I ran into the
bookie from Belfast, now safely at the top and stone-cold sober.  I
smiled at Jack in the passing whirligig.  Mrs Reilly in black satin,
still alive, limping as she cooled, carried her portly bosom affably
by.  I talked to the unshod photographer, with his ugly, bony, ivory,
trembling feet.  I was shirking the rendezvous.

The next thing was a sermon by another bishop.  He was a tub of lard
whom you could willingly have pushed over a cliff.  In his mauve hat
and scarlet facings he stood on a table, like a pig's face cooked by a
first-class chef and powdered with flour--with the sour lemon of his
sermon in his mouth--and there he preached away with three stock
gestures his loveless, nationalistic, anti-British, political oratory
about Ireland and St Patrick.  His facts about the patron
saint--whichever three people the latter may have been--were
misrepresented.  His consciousness of humanity and of love and of the
griefs of the wide world was _nil_.  His slightly menacing conclusion
seemed to be that the ambition of Jesus Christ was to be an Irishman
and a castrato.

Tired by this plump, proud, futile and scholiastic porker, I looked
round the lovely faces which were listening to him in simple faith--and
there, suddenly, I saw that we were not alone.  Wheeling round the apex
of the reek, while the fat man babbled with his three play-actor's
movements, there was a pair of ravens.  Not crows, ravens.  In the
midst there was the purple man.  Round him there were the dumb humans,
at their best.  And round them, wheeling in the free air of Padraig's
mountain, were the two exquisite, interested birds--coal-black,
primaries bending, septuagenarian, monogamous, at home.

A priest, standing behind me during the sermon, had decided that my
strange beard and questing nose would make a good subject for a
photograph.  Others began to photograph me.  I stood patiently for
them, bashful, at a loss, like a sheep, for several pictures.
Interrogated, I repeated the lie about being a convert.  I repeated it
emphatically, for a hideous suspicion had begun to grow in my mind.

Could they--was it possible--could they suspect that I was St Patrick?

We were in the atmosphere of miracles at that altitude, and country
people do believe in miracles.  There was the beard.  There was
the--well, you could almost say holiness, certainly a kind of
elevation, with which I had lately been behaving--and the Archbishop
had sent for me.  Everybody in Ireland notices everything at once.
Every sidelong glance, I now realized, must have seen the kiss, the
chaplain.  Every subtle ear on the grape-vine must have known of the
message.  I blundered off in an agony of shame--to find myself eye to
eye with Tuam.

God, let him not think so too!

He asked: 'Did you come up fasting?'

'Yes.'  It was not true.  I had drunk some tea and eaten
bread-and-butter at half-past five, but truth and falsehood were
confused.  I only felt that I must tell him what he wanted to be told.

It was an Irish trait.  The sacred mountain had quite transmogrified
the Englishman.

'Then you must come with me and have a cup of tea.'

The cameras clicked on us as we were ushered into the chapel.  The
worshippers, crowded against the altar rail, made way for us, all eyes,
as we shoved our way past the rail, past where benediction was going
on--to the minute vestry behind it.  They were waiting for the miracle.

The vestry, already overcrowded by three women and several priests
standing, was occupied by the pork-bishop, eating the leg of a cold
chicken at a table which just had room for three.  'Who is this
fellow?' he asked his chaplain--more worldly and less spiritual than
Tuam.  He glanced at me with hostile, patriotic eye-slit, scarcely
saluting his superior.  A practical politician, living acutely in his
realistic arrangement of facts, he knew the visitor at once for an
alien and a spy.  His thoughts were as plain as if they had been
written on his forehead: 'What on earth has the old fool got hold of
now?'  He gobbled in silence, in silence packed up his traps, and
shortly afterwards departed with his chaplain, after a terse goodbye,
not looking or speaking to the infidel.  I miserably mumbled a chicken
wing and sucked cool tea in the third seat at this distinguished table.

But the Archbishop was not an old fool.  Now that there was a pause in
the march of events, and in the picnic vestry less action over the
passing of plates, it was possible to examine him covertly.  He was a
small man of about seventy, with a pronounced chin and nose,
wedge-shaped, almost like Mr Punch's, compact of character.  I
remembered that there was a carved figure of a bishop on a small pillar
at Killadera, Fermanagh, which resembled him minutely.  There was a
slight blemish on the bridge of his nose.  In spite of his evident
charity, and indeed his sanctity, the nose and chin were not the ones
to stand any nonsense.  He was hospitable, simple, pleased, direct,
keen, receptive, unselfconscious, interested in people: but he treated
his guest as an Archbishop should, familiarly, by no means vulgarly.
It was a penetrating eye, if a warm one, which sparkled behind the
great nose, well able to rebuke sin firmly with silence, by being sorry
about it.

I was over-awed, charmed, flattered and wretched.  The worshippers
could partly see us through the altar door, which I hated, and now
there was this about having to confess that I was not a convert.  I had
been instructed as a Catholic, but had rejected the faith at the last
moment.  My delicacy or honour or whatever it ought to be called was
wound in a knot.

It was like this.  If a man falls in love with a woman who actually
dislikes him, she does not tell him so, but temporizes in an awkward
way, not wishing to hurt his feelings.  In the same way, the
crestfallen excursionist (me) who had set foot upon Croagh Patrick as
if on a Cook's Tour, could not now bring himself to hurt a trusting
friend, by telling him that he was an agnostic.  It was not shame.  It
was the Archbishop that I was protecting.

To my astonishment, I was spared all explanation.  With the exit of the
purple man, an air of gaiety--positively of levity and disrespect--came
over the little vestry.  The Archbishop said teasingly to his perky
chaplain, pretending to bully him, 'Of course, you haven't done this
pilgrimage at all.  Look at all those people going round and doing
their stations.'  The chaplain calmly replied, unless my shocked ears
deceived me: 'My dear sir, I carried up that _bag_!'  And he pointed to
the vestments.  While the priests at the altar on the other side of the
partition blessed beads and the people kneeling at the rails peered
through the door, His Grace talked cheerfully about Oberammergau, where
he had been on this day last year--about one of the women handing round
the chicken, who, like Mrs O'Callaghan, had only come out of Loch Deag
on Friday--about myself and the village I came from and the West of
Ireland and what I did in it, for he was an interested Grace, willing
to be informed about everything--about his own main trouble in getting
up the mountain--which had been, being impeded by having to bless
people.  He asked more than he talked.  I told him with a loving heart
how he must always come up the Reek, every year, because the whole
mountain had known of his presence the moment he was there, and I told
him what pleasure he had given.  It was agreed that he would come.
Then I told about the naomhg of Inniskea, and got permission to fish
it out of the sea if I could.  At last the spry, noble old shepherd
began to drift towards the door.  I kneeled to be blessed, and was
surprised to hear the natural, conversational voice, coming from over
my head afterwards, inviting me for a visit at his palace in Tuam.


There were some booths on the summit, where it was possible to buy
sixpenny lemonade at half a crown a bottle or sausage rolls or tea at a
shilling a cup.  Received back into the real world with silent awe by
my friends, I sat with Jack and Mrs O'Callaghan and Mrs Reilly on a
pile of stones, radiating sanctity and consuming tea.  They were all
dewy with fulfilment, like the freshness of the earth after a
thunderstorm and rain.  The people of the pilgrimage, now more or less
over, paraded about, laughed, joked, codded and haggled at the booths.
('Half a dollar for a bottle of lemonade!'  'Let ye carry up a bottle
yerself, ma'am, and I'll slip ye three shillings for it.')  We pulled
ourselves together reluctantly, to leave the superb view and our
spiritual pleasure, for the happy journey down the mountainside to find
poor Brownie baking in the car.


In the public house on level ground, where women were not welcome, Jack
and I had two drinks, and took two out to our friends.  The interior
was full of drunk men, celebrating their happiness on the hill.  They
had been drunk with God up there, and now, by a perfectly natural
transition, they were carrying on with porter down here.  Nothing could
have been more reasonable and simple than this.  They were hardy and
thirsty from their exertions, which made them hanker for the
gullet-swelling gulp of stout, and they were also, for these few
moments, as innocent as Adam before the fall.  Their sins had been left
on the summit when they went to the altar, so there was plenty of room
for new ones.  Also, they had loved each other on high, and they wanted
to prolong the comradeship, with loving cups.

One man, with a voice of velvet, sang 'The Rose of Tralee' so that it
would make a chasm of the heart.  Another, an accomplished _diseur_,
related a ghost story with the mastery of an artist, to the whole bar,
silent as mice.

It was about a rich farmer who had a haunted room, and anybody who
slept in it was dead by the morning.  He offered his daughter's hand in
marriage to any person who could survive the night.  So poor Paddy, the
conquering under-dog of all Irish folklore, said that he would be able
for the adventure.  When midnight came, a sepulchral voice sang through
the roof: 'I'm falling!  I'm falling!'  'Fall away then,' said Paddy.
Whereat, down came a pair of boots: into them fell a pair of legs: on
to the legs dropped a body: a head tumbled down and clapped on top.
Two others came like that (the ghost's father and grandfather) and all
were dressed in leggings and three-cornered hats.  At last down came a
football, and they began to play.  Paddy joined the game to make an
even number, and there they played all night until the sweat ran down
his back.  Towards cockcrow he plucked up courage to address their
honours, asked if he could do anything for them, and was told that by
this question he had saved his life.  It turned out that these ghosts
had been misers and debt-defaulters during their lifetime, and he was
to pull out an indicated secret drawer.  With the money and the old
debt-accounts in it, he was to make restitution for the wrongs they had
done.  At that they vanished, and when the surprised farmer came to
Paddy, he found the room as empty as a burner (saucepan) turned upside
down.  Restitution was made, and Paddy married the daughter.

This good story was told according to a mode, obviously in an
invariable word-form, although the narrator was tipsy.


Back in our home village, at seven or eight o'clock that evening, the
pilgrims had great welcome.  People seemed anxious to have contact,
i.e. in conversation, with us, as though we brought back a goodness
which they could share.  Jack's wife had cooked us a banquet, after
which there was a sing-song and many stories.  We went to bed at
midnight, replenished with our happy day.  I was determined to
regularize my spiritual relations with the Archbishop, by being
baptized as soon as possible.  Of course I never was.


Just as I went to sleep, I remembered an incident on the return
journey, at the foot of the Reek.  They were asking money there, for
the expenses of the chapel.  After I had given some silently, they had
thanked me.  'Thank you very much indeed, sir.'  When I was still
silent, they tried again.  'Go raibh mile maith agat.'

But I had only bowed.  I had not wanted them there, at that time, to
hate my English accent.




NOT CLOWNS


'If you write about Irishmen as if they were clowns, like those Irish
R.M. books, they resent it.  We want to be taken seriously.'

'I should be more likely to write about you as if you were villains.'

'Well, that's better than being a clown, anyway.  But it is not true.'

'What is true?'

'Ah, Jaysus,' he said, putting on the accent, 'sure, isn't everybody in
Eire explaining what we are to everybody else?  And all the
explanations are different.'

He smiled from the chair on the opposite side of the turf fire, an
enormous hulk of manhood.  I am not a small man myself, being well over
six feet, but he could have cracked me in one hand like a walnut.  He
was one of the few Gaels who never blamed people for being English.  He
was open-minded and well-read and as friendly as he was huge.  He was
as intelligent as he was friendly.

'In the West,' he said, 'we are simple.'

'Simple, my foot!  You are so damned subtle--you see round so many
corners--that you spend half the time gazing up your own backsides.'

'That's true too.'

'They can't both be true.'

'Why not?'

He thought hard and added slowly: 'By simple, I mean that we respond to
facts, not theories.'

'Like women do?'

'Or children.'

'All children are savages.'

'I never said we were not savages.  If you include women and children,
I am glad to be a savage.  In the West we are innocent.'

'Innocent!  Good God!  You spend the other half of your time shooting
the landlords from behind hedges.'

'Ach, that's an innocent occupation anyway.  Besides, we nearly always
miss.  Did I tell ye the time we shot the parish priest?  They were
driving home together in his lordship's pony-trap after dark...'

'Now you are giving me the Irish R.M. stuff yourself, Sen.'

He paused.

'Well,' he said eventually, 'we _are_ innocent and we _are_ simple.
With innocent simplicity we respond directly to facts--which are often
complex and subtle.  Don't you see how much more difficult it is to go
on responding sensitively to fresh facts, rather than to live by rule
of thumb like the English?  Englishmen are lazy and dull.  They make
themselves ten commandments or regulations which you could write out on
a sixpenny bit, and then they stolidly live by them.  Irishmen and all
women and children, yes, and savages too, tend to live practically,
alertly, according to the delicate situation--not according to ten
theories.  We are spontaneous.  It is far more difficult.'

'Sen, you and your Land Commission--you are a sort of landlord
yourself now.  Don't they shoot at you nowadays?'

He put his hand in his pocket and threw me a letter two days old.

'I have an album full,' he said.

It was an incoherent, anonymous, threatening scrawl, beginning, 'We are
eigh tennants Ballybawneen...' and ending with 'so watch yourself.'  I
read it with dismay.

'What are you going to do about it?'

'Put it in the album.'

'Oughtn't you to tell the police--the guards?'

He was delighted.

'What for?'

'Well...'

'I have to go to Ballybawneen next week at all events and I'll find out
what it's all about.  Come too, if you like.  There's a wee lake in the
bog there which is supposed to have great trout in it, and you could
fish while I am doing the business.'

'I should like to.'

'They don't mean any harm.'

I read it again with revulsion, like suddenly finding an adder on one's
path.

'May I keep this letter?  Could you spare it?  To stick in my diary?'

'Why not?  We have plenty more.'

'Sen, it's all very well being spontaneous and so on, but sometimes it
revolts me.  It is so ... so untidy.  You never know where you are.'

'All the more interesting to be there.'

'Look,' I said.  'I wouldn't say this to anybody except you, so don't
be cross with me.  But sometimes the Irish stick in my gullet.  I
suppose I stick in theirs.  It is difficult for different races to get
on with each other.'

'It is like being married.  It needs forbearance on both sides.'

'But all this whining about the English.  All this rot about English
tyranny and the holy, innocent Irish that butter wouldn't melt in the
mouth of.  All this falsification of history.  Do you know that the
ignorant bigot De Valera has publicly stated how he bases his interest
in history on the works of A. M. Sullivan?'

'And who was Sullivan, may I ask?'

'I can tell you who he was not.  He was so well educated that he was
not even a Bachelor of Arts.'

'Education is not everything.'

'Look, Sen.  History is an important thing.  It is serious--like
science.  Emotion is a bad guide to it.  You have to know the facts,
and be true to them--dispassionately.  Do you know about Laudabiliter?'

'Is that the bull by which some Pope or other gave Ireland to the
English?'

'Yes, and Sullivan's story about how it happened makes me so angry that
I can remember several bits of it by heart.  May I recite them to you?'

'Go ahead.'

'He says that Henry the Second wanted to add Ireland "to his English
crown" and "an Englishman, Pope Adrian, now sat in the chair of St
Peter".  "The cunning and politic Henry saw his opportunity" and
applied to the holy father for permission to invade the island.  Then
we get: "Pope Adrian is said to have complied by issuing a bull
approving of Henry's scheme ... There is no such bull now to be found
in the Papal archives, yet it is credited that some such bull was
issued; but its contents, terms and permissions have been absurdly
misrepresented and exaggerated."  Am I boring you?'

'Not a bit.'

'Well now, will you look at this tissue of false hints?  In the first
place, there were _no_ Englishmen at the time of Laudabiliter.  The
_Normans_ had conquered the _Saxons_ in a frightful pogrom only ninety
years before, and the two races hated each other.  Henry was a Norman
who talked French and the Pope was a Saxon who did not talk what we
call English.  If there was one man in the world who ought not to have
wanted to help King Henry, it was Adrian.  So much for the "English"
king who got Ireland from an "English" pope.'

'You surprise me.'

'And now about "is said" to have been issued, and "no such bull to be
found in the Papal archives".  The reason why it is not to be found in
the archives is that very few of the bulls of the twelfth century _are_
to be found there anyway.  They have paid the price of age and vanished
in the course of eight hundred years.  But, Sen--_but_--we do have a
contemporary version given by Giraldus Cambrensis--a Welshman--and in
any case _the next Pope, Alexander III, renewed the grant of Ireland to
England in 1172 and his letters on the subject do exist_!  Why did the
learned Mr Sullivan leave all this out?'

'Dear me!'

'What's more,' said I in triumph, 'another Pope, John XXII, repeated
the terms of Laudabiliter to Edward II in 1317.  Does this look like
"is said" to have been issued?'

'The point being,' explained Sen cheerfully, 'that it is difficult for
the Catholic Irish to make out a logical case against the heretic
English, without being rude to the Catholic Pope.'

'I'll say it's difficult.'

'But I have just been explaining to you that we are not logical.'

'Then why do you argue at all?  You can't argue without being logical.'

'Doesn't everybody argue?  Don't women argue?  It seems to me that you
are in the position of trying to explain something to a wife.  You may
as well give it up.'

'Women...'

'Look, Tim,' he said, throwing me a cigarette, 'are you putting this
forward as an argument for England governing Ireland in the twentieth
century because of something which happened in the twelfth?'

'Certainly not.  I don't want to govern Ireland a bit.  It is much too
troublesome.  I only wish they would stop moaning about wrongs which
never happened.  The number of Irishmen massacred by the English is
probably exactly equal to the number of Englishmen massacred by the
Irish.  Why keep sneering about it?'

'Because we have an inferiority complex.'

'Why?'

'Jesus, Mary and Joseph!  Have we not been living next door to an
Empire for eight hundred years?  If your cottage was semi-detached to
Buckingham Palace, wouldn't you have an inferiority complex?  Wouldn't
you have to keep your courage up by repeating that you were quite as
good as the Queen?'

'I do see that.'

'And what is biting you, anyway?  Are you disliking the Irish because
of something which Dev repeats from Mister Sullivan?'

'I do not dislike the Irish.'

'Has anybody here disliked you?'

'Everybody has been absolutely charming to me.'

'Then what's it all about?  Don't you realize that all these
politicians are ignorant bigots?  I might as well denounce the English
because I disapprove of Aneurin Bevan.'

('Who isn't an Englishman,' I said promptly.)

'The point is, that whatever the political tub-thumpers may
say--whatever bad blood it may suit them to stir up--the ordinary
people in the West are what I told you.  Simple and innocent.  Perhaps
it is because they are innocent that the politicians manage to get them
excited with that kind of cod.'

'Do you know, Sen, if I did write a book about the West, there would
be an odd thing about it.'

'What is that?'

'No comics.'

He thought this over.

'In the East, I daresay there are comical Irishmen, for all I know.
They rather exploit their reputation for "Irish bulls" and funny
anecdotes.  In the South too.  Look at those wonderfully funny stories
which my friend Frank O'Connor can write.  You know the kind of
thing--the horses bolting with the hearse and the coffin full of porter
and the corpse abandoned at the left-luggage-office.  I never come
across anything like that in Mayo.'

'It's a literary tradition which started in the early nineteenth
century.  The upper classes were writing the novels and the Paddies
were the comic relief.'

'But you are melancholy people really.  Have you read Joyce's
_Ulysses_?'

'I have so.'

'Except for that one passage when the hierarchy of heaven comes down to
the Dublin pub, I think it's the most humourless book I ever read.
There is wit and farce and burlesque and satire and irony and all the
other kinds of bitter fun, and infinite learning and insight, but not
one drop of kindness.  Humour has to be kind.  Joyce's heart was as
cold as a dead fish.'

'There is little compassion in him, perhaps.'

'An austere compassion?'

'It is a tremendous book, for all you say.'

'Yes, and it is true to Ireland.  I don't believe that the real Irish
do spend all their time filling coffins with porter.  They spend a
large part of it in sadness and brooding and desperation.'

'We have a hard life in the West.'

'Do you think people will be angry if I say this?'

'No.  I think they would be pleased to be treated as grown-ups, instead
of babies.'

'As a matter of fact, I agree with what you say about simplicity and
innocence and being spontaneous.  Will you let me mention another side
of the Irish character, which may hurt your feelings?'

'You will mention it in any case.'

'Sen, I suppose you know that ninety per cent of the assassins in
America are either Irishmen or Italians?  And all the cops are.  What
on earth is this affinity for violence?'

'It probably has something to do with the desperation you were talking
about.'

'Children and savages do smash things.'

'You were not going to treat us as children.'

'Is it some sort of anxiety-neurosis, like what makes people get drunk?'

'It is absolutely true,' said Sen after a bit, 'that the Irish do set
less store on the value of human life than the English do.  It may be
because their lives are actually harder--less valuable.  Also, being
Catholics, they don't believe that death means extinction.  Or perhaps
it is just a characteristic of the race.'

'One reason may be that the Romans never penetrated to Ireland.  The
vast, logical, competent structure of Latin law and civilization was
never imposed here.  The Gall got it, but the Gael did not.  You never
had that early training in the habit of discipline and respect for
other people's lives.'

'Very well.  We are sad, simple, subtle, spontaneous savages, who kill
people.  What else?'

'You are making it sound horrible.'

'You do not make it sound very complimentary yourself.'

'Are you trying to have a row about it?'

'If you like.'

'Of course I don't like.  I would prefer to stay alive.'

'Then what about mentioning something complimentary for a change?'

'I can do that with a will.  In the first place, this spontaneity of
yours--the continuous, fresh reaction to facts--it makes you more
sensitive than the Saxon is.  Our laws and discipline make us
phlegmatic.  We are far too blunt, compared with you.  The penetration
and finesse of an Irish peasant are ten times sharper than the
Englishman's.  You are better educated than we are.

'In a way,' I added slowly, 'perhaps you are more civilized.'

'There's a paradox,' said Sen, looking pleased, 'for describing the
savages, isn't it?'

'You certainly have an older civilization.'

'Ah, Tim, maybe we'll civilize yourself in the end.  I will say you
seem to be learning.'

'You are better educated in feelings.  Or is it that you have a wider
range of feelings?  So touchy.  But that means you are sensitive to the
touch.  It's a good thing to be sensitive, isn't it?'

'I would think so.'

'The Irish are more scholarly than the English, more grown-up, more
blas, less credulous.  How very strange!  I am saying that savages are
more adult than civilized people!'

'Civilized people have to have rules, like children at school.  We have
left the school for children, Tim.'

'Much good has it done you.'

'You are angry yourself, now.'

'No.  I must not be.  You have been patient with my criticisms, so I
must be with yours.'

'It is because,' said Sen teasing, 'my race was civilized by the High
Kings of Erin, while yours was hopping about in woad.'

'I will overlook that.'

'Our bards...'

'Oh, bother your bards--and also "the island of saints and scholars".
You bleat too much about them.  It is bad history too.  Shall I tell
you the most overpowering and unexpected impression which an Englishman
gets when he first lands in Dublin?'

The thumb in the soup plate?'

'Not at all.  You know how we always expect you to be dancing a jig
with a pig and bashing each other over the head with shillealaghs?'

'Yes.'

'The surprising thing is the silence.'

He looked interested.

'Go to Dublin, and look in the shops and the hotels and the fashionable
streets.  You will hear loud, exhibitionist cries, hailing and howling
at each other in strident voices.  All of them are English or American.
The quiet talkers, the modest speakers who keep their conversation to
themselves, the silent and critical watchers in the corner of the
room--these are the native Irish.  When an English debutante stops
screaming in Jammet's, there is an absolute hush.'

'Perhaps it is the caution of bitter experience,' he said.

'Experience of what?'

'History?  Old age?  Don't forget, Tim, that we are an ancient race.
An Englishman is a recent novelty, compared with the Gael--even if he
has outstripped him.  When the Americans have finally taken over the
British Empire, the English will probably begin to feel a bit elderly
too, like us.'

'Are you telling me that you are more grown-up than we are?'

'What do you think?'

I pondered the strange relationships of humanity, gazing into the turf
fire.  It had stopped smoking.  It glowed softly, like an incandescent
rose petal, its lovely scent tickling the inside, upper tips of our
noses.  The amber, Irish whisky in our glasses was tart and
bracing--not sugary like the adulterated Scotch.

'There is another thing I want to get off my chest.  You know those
hateful books about the Troubles, like the one...'

'Leave out its name,' he said.  'Don't think about it.  Don't write
about these things.  Besides, what did the Black and Tans and the
I.R.A. do to each other, compared with the fascists and communists and
the Jewish massacres we have now?  Leave it to the swine to dig up the
swinishness.  Don't start arguments which can only be bitter.
Civilized people have to forget and try to be decent.

'After all,' he added kindly, 'your people did not do so badly as a
master race--not compared with Stalin and Hitler.  I'll admit that.
Yes, I'll admit that.'




      *      *      *      *      *




  Other books by T. H. White

  THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING
  THE MASTER
  THE ELEPHANT AND THE KANGAROO
  MISTRESS MASHAM'S REPOSE
  THE GOSHAWK
  FAREWELL VICTORIA
  ENGLAND HAVE MY BONES

  THE BOOK OF BEASTS
  A translation of a Latin Bestiary
  of the twelfth century






[End of The Godstone and the Blackymor, by T. H. White]
