When he went away, a little barefooted girl was sent up with turf and the bellows to make a fire that would last for the evening.
She was shy, yet eager to talk, and told me that she had good spoken Irish and was learning to read it in the school, and that she had been twice to Galway, though there are many grown women in the place who have never set a foot upon the mainland.
The rain has cleared off, and I have had my first real introduction to the island and its people.
I went out through Killeany – the poorest village on Aranmor – to a long neck of sandhill that runs out into the sea towards the south-west. As I lay there on the grass, the clouds lifted from the Connemara mountains and, for a moment, the green undulating foreground, backed in the distance by a mass of hills, reminded me of the country near Rome. Then the dun top-sail of a hooker swept above the edge of the sandhill and revealed the presence of the sea.
As I moved on, a boy and a man came down from the next village to talk to me, and I found that here, at least, English was imperfectly understood. When I asked them if there were any trees in the island they held a hurried consultation in Gaelic, and then the man asked if ‘tree’ meant the same thing as ‘bush’, for if so there were a few in sheltered hollows to the east.
They walked on with me to the sound which separates this island from Inishmaan – the middle island of the group – and showed me the roll from the Atlantic running up between two walls of cliff.
They told me that several men had stayed on Inishmaan to learn Irish, and the boy pointed out a line of hovels where they had lodged running like a belt of straw round the middle of the island. The place looked hardly fit for habitation. There was no green to be seen and no sign of the people except these beehive-like roofs and the outline of a Dun3 that stood out above them against the edge of the sky.
After a while my companions went away and two other boys came and walked at my heels, till I turned and made them talk to me. They spoke at first of their poverty, and then one of them said, ‘I dare say you do have to pay ten shillings a week in the hotel?’
‘More,’ I answered.
‘ Twelve?’
‘More.’
‘Fifteen?’
‘More still.’
Then he drew back and did not question me any further, either thinking that I had lied to check his curiosity, or too awed by my riches to continue.
Repassing Killeany, I was joined by a man who had spent twenty years in America, where he had lost his health and then returned, so long ago that he had forgotten English and could hardly make me understand him. He seemed hopeless, dirty and asthmatic, and after going with me for a few hundred yards he stopped and asked for coppers. I had none left, so I gave him a fill of tobacco and he went back to his hovel.
When he was gone, two little girls took their place behind me and I drew them in turn into conversation.
They spoke with a delicate exotic intonation that was full of charm, and told me with a sort of chant how they guide ‘ladies and gintlemins’ in the summer to all that is worth seeing in their neighbourhood, and sell them pampooties and maidenhair ferns, which are common among the rocks.
We were now in Kilronan, and as we parted they showed me holes in their own pampooties, or cowskin sandals, and asked me the price of new ones. I told them that my purse was empty, and then with a few quaint words of blessing they turned away from me and went down to the pier.
All this walk back had been extraordinarily fine. The intense insular clearness one sees only in Ireland, and after rain, was throwing out every ripple in the sea and sky and every crevice in the hills beyond the bay.
This evening an old man came to see me and said he had known a relative of mine who passed some time on this island forty-three years ago.4
‘I was standing under the pier-wall mending nets,’ he said, ‘when you came off the steamer, and I said to myself in that moment, if there is a man of the name of Synge left walking the world, it is that man yonder will be he.’ He went on to complain in curiously simple yet dignified language of the changes that have taken place here since he left the island to go to sea before the end of his childhood.
‘I have come back,’ he said, ‘to live in a bit of a house with my sister. The island is not the same at all to what it was. It is little good I can get from the people who are in it now, and anything I have to give them they don’t care to have.’
From what I hear, this man seems to have shut himself up in a world of individual conceits and theories and to live aloof at his trade of net-mending, regarded by the other islanders with respect and half-ironical sympathy.
A little later when I went down to the kitchen I found two men from Inishmaan who had been benighted on the island. They seemed a simpler and perhaps a more interesting type than the people here, and talked with careful English about the history of the Duns, and the Book of Ballymote and the Book of Kells and other ancient MSS, with the names of which they seemed familiar.
In spite of the charm of my teacher, the old blind man I met the day of my arrival, I have decided to move on to Inishmaan, where Gaelic is more generally used and the life is perhaps the most primitive that is left in Europe.
I spent all this last day with my blind guide, looking at the antiquities that abound in the west or north-west of the island.
As we set out, I noticed among the groups of girls who smiled at our fellowship – old Mourteen says we are like the cuckoo with its pipit – a beautiful oval face with the singularly spiritual expression that is so marked in one type of the West Ireland women. Later in the day, as the old man talked continually of the fairies and the women they have taken, it seemed that there was a possible link between the wild mythology that is accepted on the islands and the strange beauty of the women.
At midday we rested near the ruins of a house and two beautiful boys came up and sat near us. Old Mourteen asked them why the house was in ruins and who had lived in it.
‘A rich farmer built it a while since,’ they said, ‘but after two years he was driven away by the fairy host.’
The boys came on with us some distance to the north to visit one of the ancient beehive dwellings that is still in perfect preservation. When we crawled in on our hands and knees and stood up in the gloom of the interior, old Mourteen took a freak of earthly humour and began telling what he would have done if he could have come in there when he was a young man and a young girl along with him.
Then he sat down in the middle of the floor and began to recite old Irish poetry with an exquisite purity of intonation that brought tears to my eyes though I understood but little of the meaning.
On our way home he gave me the Catholic theory of the fairies.
When Lucifer saw himself in the glass he thought himself equal with God. Then the Lord threw him out of Heaven, and all the angels that belonged to him. While He was ‘chucking them out’, an archangel asked Him to spare some of them, and those that were falling are in the air still, and have power to wreck ships and to work evil in the world.
From this he wandered off into tedious matters of theology and repeated many long prayers and sermons in Irish that he had heard from the priests.
A little further on we came to a slated house and I asked him who was living in it.
‘A kind of a schoolmistress,’ he said; then his old face puckered with a gleam of pagan malice.
‘Ah, master,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t it be fine to be in there, and to be kissing her?’
A couple of miles from this village we turned aside to look at an old ruined church of the Ceathrar Alainn (The Four Beautiful Persons), and a holy well near it that is famous for cures of blindness and epilepsy.
As we sat near the well, a very old man came up from a cottage near the road and