lonelier even than that of Saint Barrahane. Like most of the ancient burial places it is situated close to the sea, probably to permit of the funerals taking place by boat, in times when roads hardly existed. There, at the top of the cliffs, among the ruins of a church, and among the dreadful wreck of tombs too old even for tradition to whisper whose once they were, there took place, not long ago, the funeral of a certain woman, who was well known and well loved. I was told of an old beggar-woman who walked many miles to see the last of a friend.
“She rose early, and she hasted, and she was at the gate of the graveyard when the funeral was coming,” another woman told me; “an’ when she seen them, and they carrying in the corpse, she let the owld cloak back from her. And when she seen the corpse pass her, she threw up the hands, and says she, ‘That your journey may thrive wid ye!’”
That journey that we think to be so long and dark and difficult. Perhaps we may find, as in so many of our other journeys, that it is the preparation and the setting forth that are the hardest part of it.
In Ireland, at all events, it is certain that a warning to the traveller, or to the friends of the traveller, is sometimes vouchsafed. Things happen that are explainable in no commonsense, commonplace way; things of which one can only say that they are withdrawals for an instant of the curtain that veils the spiritual from the material. I speak only of what I have personal knowledge, and I will not attempt to justify my beliefs to anyone who may consider either that I have deceived myself, or that the truth is not in me. In the spring of 1886 one of my great-aunts died. She had been a Herbert, from the County Kerry, and had married my grandfather’s brother, Major John Somerville. Her age “went with the century,” and when heavy illness came upon her there was obviously but little hope of her recovery. I went late one afternoon to inquire for her. She lived in a small house just over the sea, and my way to it from Drishane lay through a dark little grove of tall trees; a high cliff shut out the light on one hand, below the path were the trees, straining up to the height of the cliff, and below the trees, the sea, which, on that February evening, strove, and tossed, and growled. The last news had been that she was better, but as I went through the twilight of the trees a woman’s voice quite near me was lifted up in a long howl, ending in sobs. I said to myself that Aunt Fanny was dead, and this was “Nancyco,” her ancient dairy-woman, keening her. In a moment I heard the cry and the sobs again, such large, immoderate sobs as countrywomen dedicate to a great occasion, and as I hurried along that gloomy path the crying came a third time. Decidedly Aunt Fanny was dead. Arrived at the house, it was quite a shock to hear that, on the contrary, she was better. I asked, with some indignation, why, this being so, Nancyco was making such a noise. I was told that Nancyco hadn’t been “in it” all day; that she was at home, and that there was no one “in it.” I said naught of my Banshee, but when, three days afterwards, the old lady slipped out through that opening in the curtain, I remembered her warning.
Such a thing has happened thrice in my knowledge; the second time on a lovely June night, the night of the eve of St. John, when every hill was alight with bonfires, and one might hope the powers of evil were propitiated and at rest. Yet, on that still and holy night, six boys and girls, the children of some of my father’s tenants, were drowned on their way home from a church festival that they had attended at Ross Carbery. The party of eight young people had rowed along the coast to Ross harbour, and of the eight but two returned. At “the mid-hour of night” my sister, who was then only a child, came running to my room for shelter and reassurance. She had been wakened by the crying of a woman, in the garden under her window; the crying came in successive bursts, and she was frightened. At breakfast the news of the drowning was brought to my father. It had happened near an island, and it was at just about the time that the voice had broken the scented peace of the June night that the boatload of boys and girls were fighting for their lives in the black water, and some of them losing the fight.
One other time also I know of, though the warning was not, as I might have expected, given to me personally. The end was near, and the voice cried beneath the windows of the room in which Martin lay. The hearing of it was, perhaps in mercy, withheld from me. The anguish of those December days of 1915 needed no intensifying.
There is, I imagine, some obscure connection between the Fairies and the Evil Eye. There was “an old Cronachaun of a fellow,” who lived in the parish of Myross, who was said to be “away with the Fairies” a great deal, and, whether as a resulting privilege or not I cannot say, he also had the Bad Eye. It was asserted that he could go to the top of Mount Gabriel, which is a good twenty miles away, in five minutes. It seems a harmless feat, but it must be said that Mount Gabriel, in spite of its name, is not altogether to be trusted. It is the sort of place where the “Fodheen Mara” might come on at any moment. The Fodheen Mara is a sudden loss of your bearings, and a bewilderment as to where you are, that prevails, like a miasma, in certain spots; but, Rickeen has told me, “if a person ’d have as much sense as to turn anything he’d have on him inside out, he’d know the way again in the minute.” Or the “Fare Gurtha” might assail you, and it is even more awful than the Fodheen Mara, being a sudden starvation that doubles you up and kills you, unless you can instantly get food. Also, on Mount Gabriel’s summit there is a lake, and it is well known that a heifer that ran into the lake came back to her owner out of the sea, “below in Schull harbour,” which implies something wrong, somewhere.
A neighbour of the old Cronachaun (which means a dwarfish cripple), and presumably a rival in the Black Arts, was accused by the Cronachaun’s wife of being “an owld wicked divil of a witch-woman, who is up to ninety years, but she can’t die because she’s that bad the Lord won’t take her! Sure didn’t she look out of her door and see meself going by, and says she ‘Miggera Murth’! (and that means ‘misfortune to ye’) and the owld daughther she has, she looked out too, and she says, three times over, ‘Amin-a-heerna!’ and after that what did I do but to fall off the laddher and break me leg!”
“Amin-a-heerna” is a reiterated amen. No wonder the curse operated.
I have myself, when pursuing the harmless trade of painter, been credited with the possession of the Evil Eye. In the Isle of Aran, Martin has told how “at the first sight of the sketch book the village street becomes a desert; the mothers, spitting to avert the Bad Eye, snatch their children into their houses, and bang their doors. The old women vanish from the door-steps, the boys take to the rocks.” We are too civilised now in West Carbery to hold these opinions, but I can recollect the speed with which an old man, a dweller in an unfashionable part of Castle Townshend, known as Dirty Lane, fled before me down that thoroughfare, declaring that the Lord should take him, and no one else (a jeu d’esprit which I cannot but think was unintentional).
Probably
all illness was attributed to ill-wishers. It is certain that charms and remedies, all more or less disgusting, are still relied on, and are exhibited with a faith that is denied to the doctor’s remedies, and that wins half the battle in advance.
“Ha, thim docthors!” said a dissatisfied patient on hearing of the death of his medical adviser. “They can let themselves die too!”
I think it advisable, for many reasons, to withhold such recipes as I can now recall, but I may offer a couple of samples that will possibly check any desire for more.
In typhoid fever: “close out” all the windows, and anoint the patient from head to foot with sheep’s butter.
In whooping-cough: the patient should be put “under an ass, and over an ass”; but a better method is to induce a gander to spit down the sufferer’s throat.
“A lucky hand” in doctor or nurse is of more value than many diplomas. There is an old woman whose practice has been untrammelled by the fetters or follies of science.
“The cratures!” she says of her clients. “They sends for me, and I goes to them, and I gives them the best help I can. And sure the Lord Almighty’s very thankful to me; He’d be glad of a help too.”
She is now “pushing ninety,” but she is still helping.
If a quack is not procurable, a doctor with a hot temper is generally well thought of. Martin made some notes of a conversation that she had with a countryman in West Carbery, which exemplified this fact. The “Old Doctor” referred to was noted for his potency in language as in physic, and it was valued.
“Lave him curse, Ma’am!” whispered a patient to the doctor’s expostulating wife, “For God’s sake, lave him curse!”
“I had to wait in a hayfield at the top of the Glen,” Martin’s notes record, “while E. was haranguing at a cottage about a litter of cubs, whose Mamma considered that chicken, now and then, was good for them. There was a man making the hay into small cocks, with much the same delicate languor with which an invalid arranges an offering of flowers. Glandore Harbour was spread forth below me, a lovely space of glittering water, and the music of invisible larks drifted down in silver shreds through air that trembled with heat. This, I thought, is a good place in which to be, and I selected a haycock capable of supporting me, and the haymaker and I presently fell into converse. The talk, I now forget why, turned to the medical profession.
“‘Thim Cork docthors was very nice,’ said the man, pausing from his labours, and seating himself upon a neighbouring haycock, ‘but sure docthors won’t do much for the likes of us, only for ladies and gentlemen. Ye should be the Pink of Fashion for them!’
“He surveyed me narrowly; apparently the thickness of the soles of my boots inspired him with confidence.
“‘Ye’re a counthry lady, and ye have understanding of poor people. Some o’ thim docthors would be sevare on poor people if their houses wouldn’t be—’ he considered, and decided that the expression was good enough to bear repetition, ‘—wouldn’t be the Pink of Fashion. Well, the Owld Docthor was good, but he was very cross. But the people that isn’t cross is the worst. There’s no good in anny woman that isn’t cross. Sure, you know yourself, my lady, the gerr’l that’s cross, she’s the good servant!’
“He looked to me, with his head on one side for assent. I assented.
“‘Well, as for the Owld Docthor,’ he resumed, ‘he was very cross, but afther he put that blast out of him he’d be very good. My own brother was goin’ into th’ Excise, and he went to the Owld Docthor for a certifi-cat. Sure, didn’t the Docthor give him back the sovereign! “You’ll want it,” says he, “for yer journey.” There was an old lady here, and she was as cross as a diggle.’ (‘A diggle,’ it may be noted, is a euphuism by which, to ears polite, the Prince of Darkness is indicated.) ‘She’d go out to where the men ’d be working, and if she’d be displeased, she’d go round them with a stick. Faith she would. She’d put them in with a stick! But afther five minutes she’d be all right; afther she had that blast put out of her.’
“It gives a comfortable feeling that ‘crossness’ is of the nature of a gas-shell, and can be eliminated from the system in a single explosion.”
Unfortunately the interview was interrupted here.
Dean Swift says somewhere that “Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse.” Martin had a very special gift of encouraging people to talk to her. There was something magnetic about her, some power of sympathy and extraction combined. Together with this she had a singular gift of toleration for stupid people, even of enjoyment of stupidity, if sincerity, and a certain virtuous anxiety, accompanied it. She was wont to declare that the personal offices of a good and dull person were pleasing to her. The fumbling efforts, the laboured breathing of one endeavouring—let us say—to untie her veil; a man, for choice, frightened, but thoroughly well-intentioned and humble. This she enjoyed, repudiating the reproach of effeteness, which, in this connection, I have many times laid to her charge.
In dealing with Rickeen, however, allowances for stupidity (she called it simplicity) had not to be taken into consideration. I have a letter from her, recounting another of her conversations with Rick, in which he discussed a “village tragedy” that occurred at Christmas time, a few years after she had returned to Ross. (The reference at the beginning of the letter is to the sudden death of an acquaintance.)
V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, January, 1894.)
“These sudden deaths are happy for the people who die them, but desperate for those who are left behind. Certainly it makes one feel that the thing to desire, beyond most heavenly things, is strength to face the dreadful thing that may be coming. For oneself, one could wish for the passion for death that was in a young fellow here. He disappeared on St. Stephen’s Day[10] and they found him at last in the Wood of Annagh, in an awful pond that is on your left, just after you get into the wood—Poulleen-a-férla. They hooked him up from among the sunken branches of trees, and found him by getting a boat on to the pool and staring down in all lights. Finally they wrapped a big stone in a white flannel ‘bauneen’ and dropped it in. They were just able to see where it lay, and it placed things for them, so that they at last recognised some dim companion shadow as what they were searching for, and got it out. He was a very religious and steady young man, but his mind was weak, and it turns out that what chiefly preyed on it was that one day some people called him from his work and deluded him somehow into shortening up the chain of the chapel bell, in order that when the new priest came to hold Mass next Sunday, the bell could not be rung. (I have told you that Father Z. has been forbidden to officiate, and a new priest is coming.)
“When this poor boy found out what he had done, he was miserable. He brooded over it and his people were alarmed, and watched him, more or less, but not enough. Never was a more bitter comment on a parish feud, and never was there a more innocent and godly life turned to active insanity by dastardly treatment. (The curs, who were afraid to meddle with the Chapel themselves!)”
Rickeen’s discussion of the matter with Martin and one of the “Nursies” is interesting in showing the point of view of an intelligent peasant, a man who had been to America, and who was, though illiterate, of exceptionally sound and subtle judgment. I copy it from the notes that Martin sent to me.
“Rickeen and Nurse Davin and I were talking about the poor boy who is believed to have drowned himself. Rick took up his parable.
“‘Sure you remember of him? Red Mike’s son, back in Brahalish? Him that used to be minding the hins for the Misthress?
“‘Always and ever he was the same; not a word o’ talk out of him the longest year that ever came, only talkin’ about God, and goin’ to Mass, and very fond of the work. Sure they say the mother wouldn’t let him to Mass this while back to Father X.’ (N.B. This is the lawful priest. Father Z., his predecessor, was suspended by the Church, but many of the parish still side with him.) ‘And Mortheen, the brother that’s in Galway, got an account he was frettin’ like, and he hired a car and took him to Galway to go to Mass there, and tellin’ him no one ’d be denyin’ him there. Faith, sorra Mass he’d go to in it! They say before he left home, a whileen back, himself was back in the room, and the people was outside, talkin’, and sayin’ he should be sent to Ballinasloe’ (the Lunatic Asylum) ‘and sorra bit but when they looked round, himself was there, leshnin’ to them! “What did I ever do to ye?” says he, “And aren’t ye damned fools,” says he, walkin’ over to them this way, “to think ye’ll put me in it!” says he. And sorra word more he spoke.
“‘The Lord save us! They’re lookin’ for him now since Stephenses Day, and I’m sure ’tis in Poulleen-a-férla he is. He was down lookin’ at it a while ago, and Stephenses Day they seen him runnin’ down through Bullywawneen, and they’re afther findin’ his Scafflin and his Agnus Di[11] on a flagstone that’s on the brink. Sure he took thim off him the ways he’d be dhrowned. No one could be dhrowned that had thim on him. Faith, he could not.
“‘Didn’t ye hear talk of the man back in Malrour, that wint down to the lake last Sunday, and jumped into it to dhrown himself? The people that seen him they ran, and they dhragged him out, an’ he lyin’ on his back, and the scafflin he got from the priest round his neck; and it dhry! God help the crature!’
“(Nurse Davin, weeping, ‘Amin! Amin!’)
“‘But sure what way can they find him in Poulleen-a-férla? I know well there’s thirty feet o’ wather in it. Maybe they’d see him down through the wather to-day, it’s that clear. God knows ’tis quare weather. The air’s like it ’d be comin’ up out o’ the ground, and no breeze in it at all! I’m thinkin’ it’s the weather as well as another that’s puttin’ the people asthray in their heads.’
“Rick paused here to take breath, and turned to Nurse Davin, who was peeling potatoes, and groaning at suitable intervals.
“‘Nurse, did ye ever hear tell o’ puttin’ a shave (sheaf) o’ oats on the wather where ye’d think a pairson ’d be dhrowned, an’ it ’ll stand up whin it ’d be over the place where he’s lyin’? They have a shave beyant, but it’s lyin’ on the wather always. I wouldn’t believe that at all.’
“Nurse Davin uttered a non-committal invocation of her favourite saint, but offered no opinion.
“‘Sure it was that that they coaxed him to do at the chapel that preyed on him entirely.’
“‘Lord ha’ mercy on him!’ said Nurse, wiping her eyes.
“‘When he knew then what he done,’ Rick resumed, turning to me again, ‘sorra Mass he’d ever go to again, and they knew by him he was watchin’ his shance to make off. They follied him a few days back, when they seen him sneakin’ off down through the wood, but sorra bit but he felt them afther him and he turned back.
“‘’Twas on Stephenses Day he wint cuttin’ a rope o’ ferns with his brother, and faith when the brother was talkin’ to a man that was in it, he shlipped away. The brother thought it was home he wint, till he got the rope o’ ferns threwn afther him on the ground.
“‘An’ that, now, was the time he got the shance.’
“Nurse Davin, who is the very salt of the earth, has felt it all very deeply. I cheered her by giving her your Christmas messages. She was overwhelmed with gratitude. ‘And would ye be pleased to wish her every sort of good luck and happiness, and the blessing o’ God on her! The crature! Indeed she was good, and clane, and quiet, and sensible! And her little dog—so nice and so clever!’” (This was the Puppet.) “‘She cried afther him, the crature! She could do no more.’”
I trust I may be pardoned for quoting this encomium. The virtues enumerated by Nurse Davin have not often been ascribed to me.
Taking the publication of “An Irish Cousin” as the beginning of our literary work, its next development was a series of short articles on Irish subjects that Martin wrote, single-handed, for the World.
The sap was beginning to run up; more and more things began with her to throw themselves, almost unconsciously, into phrases and forms. Her thoughts blossomed in the fit words, as the life in the tree breaks in leaves. Everything appealed to her in this new life at Ross, which was the old, and while she weeded the flower-beds in the garden, or painted doors in the house, or drove her mother for long miles on the outside car, she was meditating, and phrase-making, and formulating her impressions. These, presently, passing through her letters to me, as through a filter, developed into an article, which was primarily inspired by the death of one of the older retainers of Ross.
Mr. Edmund Yates then had the World at his feet, having created it not very many years before, and that he possessed the flair for good work was evident in the enthusiasm for her writing that, from the first, he did not attempt to conceal from Martin.
If, in things literary, the buyer would forget his traditional pose of saying “it is naught,” and would woo the thirsty, tremulous soul of the artist with appreciation, the bargain would not often work out to his disadvantage. Edmund Yates had the courage of his opinions, and the admiration that he was too generous to withhold more than counterbalanced the minuteness of the cheque that came from his cashier.
The first of these articles, “A Delegate of the National League,” appeared in July, 1889, and was received by our friends with mingled emotions. It is my mature conviction that they were horrified by its want of levity. That “a Shocker” should preach, that “one of the girls” should discourse on what was respectfully summarised by a young lady of my acquaintance as “Deep subjects of Life and Death,” was not quite what anyone enjoyed. Mrs. H. Ward’s book, “Robert Elsmere,” had just appeared; it was considered to be necessary to read it, and to talk intellectually about it, and it was found wearing that Martin should also be among the Prophets, and should write what one of her cousins called “Potted Carlyle.” None the less, she followed up “The Delegate,” in a month or two, with another article in the same vein, entitled “Cheops in Connemara.” In some of her letters of this period she speaks of these articles.
“I weed the garden a good deal,” she says, “and give meat to my household, and I got a sort of grip of the Education article to-day, and hope it may continue. But I am a fraud in the way of writing. I heap together descriptions, with a few carefully constructed moralities interspersed, and hide behind them, so that no one shall discern my ignorance and hesitation.
“I am ploughing along at an article, and have a most ponderous notion in my head for another about the poor women of the West of Ireland, their lives, their training, their characters, all with a view as to whether they would be the better for having votes, or would give a better or worse vote than the men. I feel overwhelmed and inadequate. I think I write worse every time I try” (which was obviously absurd).
“Mama has had a most kind letter from Sir William Gregory. He has many literary friends and so has Augusta” (Lady Gregory), “and he says they will both do their best for The Shocker, and that he hopes his conscience will allow him to praise it with trumpets and shawms. Poor Mama required a little bucking up after the profound gloom in which she was plunged by a letter from her oldest ally, Mrs. X., saying she thought the ‘Delegate’ was ‘high-flown and verbose’—‘merely, of course, the faults of young writing,’ says Mrs. X. Mama was absolutely staggered, and has gone about saying at intervals, ‘Knee-buckles to a Highlander!’ by which she means to express her glorious contempt for Mrs. X.’s opinion of the classics.”
The “ponderous notion” of which she spoke eventually developed into an article which she called “In Sickness and in Health.” It first appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine, and we reprinted it in “Some Irish Yesterdays.” It is, I think, a very delightful example of a class of writing in which she seems to me to be unequalled.
is a line that is entirely applicable to her, and to her outlook on the ways of Ross and its people. She loved them and she laughed at them, and even though she could hold Ross at arm’s length, to analyse, and to philosophise, and to make literature of it and of its happenings, she took it back to her heart again, and forgave what she could not approve, for no better reason than that she loved it.
I am aware that the prosperity of a letter, as of a jest, often lies in the ear of him that hears, or reads. Nevertheless I propose here and now to give a few extracts from her Ross letters. None of them have any connection with each other, or with anything else in particular, and anyone who fears to find them irrelevant or frivolous may, like Francie Fitzpatrick (when she eluded Master Whitty) “give a defiant skip and pass on.”
V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, 1895.)
“Nurse B. gave, yesterday, a fine example of using the feminine for animals to imply cunning.
“‘Didn’t a big rat walk in the lardher windy, and me lookin’ at her this ways, through the door, an’ she took a bit o’ bacon to dhrag it with her. She was that long’ (indicating as far as her elbow), ‘an’ not that high!’ (measuring half her little finger). ‘Faith, Bridgie dhrove her the way she came!’
“Bridgie is of undaunted courage, runs after rats to slay them, and fears ‘neither God nor devil, like the Black Prosbitarians.’ She is a Topsy, lies and steals and idles, and is as clever as she can be. Could you but see her with a pink bow in her cap, and creaking Sunday boots, and her flaming orange hair and red eyes you would not be the better of it. She is fifteen, and for some mysterious reason, unknown to myself, I like her.... I am working at an article, badly. I am very stupid, and not the least clever, except at mending blinds, and the pump. I am tired of turning away my eyes from iniquity that I cannot rectify, of trying to get the servants up in the morning, of many things, but let me be thankful, I have had the kitchen whitewashed. I laugh foolishly when I think of the Herculaneum and Pompeii episode from which the cat and three kittens barely escaped with their lives. The cat, being in labour, selected as her refuge the old oven in the corner of the kitchen, a bricked cavern, warm, lofty, and secluded. There, among bottles, rags, and other concealments of Bridgie’s, she nourished and brought up her young in great calm, till the day that Andy set to work at the kitchen chimney. No one knew that the old oven had a special flue of its own, and it was down this flue that the soot elected to come. I was fortunately pervading space that day, and came in time to see a dense black cloud issuing from the oven’s mouth into the kitchen. I yelled to a vague assembly of Bridgets in the servants’ hall, all of whom were sufficiently dirty to bear a little more without injury, and having rushed into the gloom they promptly slammed the door on the unfortunate family inside, on whom then rained without intermission, soot, bricks, and jackdaws’ nests. Having with difficulty got the door open again, the party was disinterred, quite unhurt, but black, and more entirely mortified than anything you can imagine. For the rest of the day ‘Jubilee’ cleaned herself and her children in the coldest parts of the house, with ostentatious fury. She was offered the top turf-box on the back stairs, but instantly refused, and finally settled herself in a stone compartment of the wine-cellar; a top berth this time, you bet!”
V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, 1901.)
“We did not achieve church this morning without some difficulty. I went round to the yard after breakfast, to see that things were en train, and was informed by Rickeen that he had not fed the grey pony, as he had found a weazel in the oats, ‘and sure there’s some kind of a pizen in thim.’ Being unable to combat this statement, I desired that the pony should be given hay. This was done, but at the last moment, just before she was being put into the shafts, she ‘sthripped a shoe.’ Mama’s old pony, Killola, was again a little lame—nothing for it but the monster Daisy, browsing in the lawn with her foal. It was then 10.45. I had on a voile skirt of stupendous length, with a floating train, my best gloves and other Sunday trappings, none the less must I help Rick to harness Daisy. Then the trouble was to shut her foal into the barn. In the barn was already immured the donkey, filled with one fierce determination to flee over to the White Field, where was Darcy’s donkey. I had to hold Daisy, and combat her maternal instincts, and endure her ceaseless shriekings; I also had to head off the donkey, which burst from the barn, with gallopings and capers, while Rickeen stuffed in the foal, who, like its mother, was shrieking at the top of its voice. I also was weak with laughing, as Rick’s language, both English and Irish, was terrific, and the donkey very ridiculous. Rick finally flailed it into what he called ‘the pig-shtyle,’ with many fervent ‘Hona-mig-a-dhiouls’ (Rick always throws in ‘mig,’ for pure intensity and rhythm). Then—(‘musha, the Lord save thim that’s in a hurry’)—the harness had to be torn off the grey, in the loose box, ‘for fear would she rub the collar agin the Major’ (which is what he calls the manger). Then we pitched Mama on to the car and got off. Daisy, almost invisible under her buffalo mane, as usual went the pace, and we got in at the First Lesson, and all was well.”
V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross.)
“I had a long walk on Thursday in search of turf, to burn with logs. A sunset, that was boiling up orange steam on to grey clouds, kept turning me round all the way to Esker. At the turn to Pribaun I heard a frightful ruction going on. Two men in a cart using awful language at the tops of their voices, and Pat Lydon, on the fence, giving it back to them, asserting with unnecessary invocations, that there was nothing he hated like ‘thim liars.’ The men drove on as I came up, still chewing the last mouthful of curses as they passed, and Pat came forward with his hat off and the sweetest smile.
“‘What was all that about?’ said I.
“‘Oh, thim was just tellin’ me the price o’ pigs in Ochtherard yesterday.’ (This in a tone of the barest interest.) ‘And how’s Mama? Divil a one in the counthry’s gettin’ fat, only Mama!’ This was, of course, the highest compliment, and I recognised that I was expected to enquire no more into the matter of the price of pigs. He then advised me to go to Jimmy X. (the song-maker) for turf, and I found him at Esker, dreamily contemplating an immense and haggard-looking sow, on whom, no doubt, he was composing a sonnet. He assured me that he would sell Mama a rick of turf. I asked how much was in the rick.
“‘Well, indeed Miss, of that matter I am quite ignorant, but Jimmy Darcy can value it—(stand in off the road for fear anyone would hear us!)’ (Then in a decorous whisper) ‘But him and me is not very great since he summonsed me little girl for pullin’ grass in the Wood of Annagh——’
“There followed much more, in a small and deprecating voice, which, when told to Jim Darcy, he laughed to scorn.
“‘There’s not a basket, no, nor a sod he doesn’t know that’s in that rick!’
“The end of it was that the two Jimmys wrangled down in the Bog of Pullagh the greater part of the next day, and nothing more than that has been accomplished.
“Poor old Kitty has been in trouble. I have not time now to give you the particulars, but will only note her account of the singular effects of remorse upon her, as unfolded to me by her, subsequent to the interview between her and her accuser and Katie.
“‘Faith the hair is dhroppin’ out o’ me head, and the skin rollin’ off the soles o’ me feet, with the frettin’. Whin I heard what Mrs. Currey said, I went back to that woman above, an’ she in her bed. I dhragged her from the bed,’ (sob) ‘an’ she shweatin,’ (sob) ‘an’ I brought her down to Mrs. Currey at the Big House——’
“I have been doctoring Honor Joyce up in Doone for some days. She has had agonising pain, which the poor creature bore like a Trojan. I asked her to describe it, and she said feebly,
“‘I couldn’t give ye any patthern of it indeed, but it’s like in me side as a pairson ’d be polishin’ a boot, and he with a brush in his hand.’ Which was indeed enlightening. Such a house! One little room, with some boards nailed together for a bed, in which was hay with blankets over it; a goat was tethered a few feet away, and while I was putting the mustard-leaf on, there came suddenly, and apparently from the bed itself, ‘a cry so jubilant, so strange,’ that indicated that somewhere under the bed a hen had laid an egg.
“‘God bless her!’ says Honor, faintly.
“Next I heard a choking cough in the heart of the blankets. It was a sick boy, huddled in there with his mother—quite invisible—buried in the bedclothes, like a dog.... A beautiful day yesterday, fine and clear throughout. To-day the storm stormeth as usual, and the white mist people are rushing after each other across the lawn, sure sign of hopeless wet. Poor Michael (an old tenant) died on Thursday night—a very gallant, quiet end, conscious and calm. His daughter did not mean to say anything remarkable when she told me that he died ‘as quiet, now as quiet as a little fish’; but those were her words. I went up there to see his old wife, and coming into a house black with people, was suddenly confronted with Michael’s body, laid out in the kitchen. His son, three parts drunk, advanced and delivered a loud, horrible harangue on Michael and the Martin family. The people sat like owls, listening, and we retired into a room where were whisky bottles galore, and the cream of the company; men from Galway, respectably drunk, and magnificent in speech.... The funeral yesterday to which I went (Michael was one of our oldest and most faithful friends) was only a shade less horrifying. At all events the pale, tranced face was hidden, and the living people looked less brutal without that terrific, purified presence——”
One other picture, of about the same period, may be given, and in connection with these experiences two things may be remembered. That they happened more than twenty years ago; also, that among these people, primitive, and proud, tenacious of conventions, and faithful to their dead, a want of hospitality at a funeral implied a want of respect for the one who had left them.
Unfortunately, it has not even yet been learnt that hospitality is not necessarily synonymous with whisky.
V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, 1895.)
“William L.’s wife died suddenly, having had a dead baby, two days ago, and was buried yesterday, up at the Chapel on the Hill. I went to the back gate and walked with the funeral from there. It was an extraordinary scene. The people who had relations buried there, roared and howled on the graves, and round the grave where Mrs. L. was being buried, there was a perpetual whining and moaning, awfully like the tuning of fiddles in an orchestra. Drunken men staggered about; one or two smart relations from Galway flaunted to and fro in their best clothes, occasionally crossing themselves, and three keeners knelt together inside the inmost ring by the grave, with their hands locked, rocking, and crying into each other’s hoods, three awful witches, telling each other the full horrors that the other people were not competent to understand. There was no priest, but Mrs. L.’s brother read a kind of Litany, very like ours, at top speed, and all the people answered. Every Saint in the calendar was called on to save her and to protect her, and there poor William stood, with his head down, and his hat over his eyes. It was impressive, very, and the view was so fresh and clean and delightful from that height. The thump of the clods and stones on the coffin was a sound that made one shudder, and all the people keened and cried at it.... There have been many enquiries for you since I came home. Rickeen thinks he never seen the like of a lady like you that would have ‘that undherstandin’ of a man’s work; and didn’t I see her put her hand to thim palings and lep over them! Faith I thought there was no ladies could be as soople as our own till I seen her. But indeed, the both o’ yee proved very bad that yee didn’t get marri’d, and all the places yee were in!’”
The adverse opinion of her old and once-trusted comrade, Mrs. X., in the matter of “The Delegate” was not the only trial of the kind that Mrs. Martin had to face. I imagine that few things in her life had given her as much pleasure as Violet’s success as a writer. She had a very highly cultured taste, and her literary judgment, builded as it was upon the rock of the classics, was as sound as it was fastidious. Had a conflict been pressed between it and maternal pride, I believe the latter would have been worsted. Fortunately, her critical faculty permitted her to extend to Martin’s writing the same entire approval that she bestowed upon her in all other regards. It is usual to make merry over a mother’s glorying in her young, but there are few things more touching than to see a brilliant creature, whose own glories are past, renew her youth, and yet forget it, in the rising sun of a child’s success.
No one expects to be a prophet in his own country, but when Martin and I first began to write, we have sometimes felt as if a mean might have been discovered between receiving our books with the trumpets and shawms, suggested by Sir William Gregory, and treating them as regrettable slips, over which a cloak of kindly silence was to be flung. My cousin Nannie and—though in less degree—my mother, were both out for trumpets, and the silence of their acquaintances (a silence that Martin and I did not fail to assure them was compassionate) filled them with wrath that only each other’s sympathy could assuage. (It is, I am sure, unnecessary to say that each was comfortingly aware that her own daughter had done all the work. But this did not invalidate the sympathy.)
The formula touching the superfluity of kneebuckles to the Highlander was, however, sustaining; and this was fortunate, as each of Martin’s articles, as they appeared in the World, called it into requisition. If “The Delegate” had staggered the Highlanders, they literally reeled when “Cheops in Connemara” was offered for their learning by Mrs. Martin, who had a pathetic hope, never realised, that some day they might find grace and understanding.
It was of “Cheops” that a lady, who may be called Mrs. Brown, said to my cousin Nannie,
“Oh, Mrs. Martin, I loved it! It was so nice! I couldn’t quite understand it, though I read it twice over, but I showed it to Mr. Brown, and he solved the problem!”
Wonderful man, as Martin commented when she wrote the story to me.
It was this same Mr. Brown whose criticism of the “Irish Cousin,” wrung from him by Mrs. Martin, was so encouraging.
“I found it,” he wrote, “highly imaginative, but not nonsensical, unusual in a work of legendary character. In fact, it is not bosh!”
The singular spring from the clouds to every day’s most common slang was typical of good Mr. Brown. He is now beyond the clouds, or, in any case, is, I am sure, where he will not be offended if I recall one or two of his pulpit utterances. In my diary at this time I find: “Interesting sermon. Mr. Brown told us that ‘a sin, though very great, is not as great as one that exceeds it; but remember that sin can only find entrance in a heart prepared for it, even as matches strike only on the box. And oh friends, it is useless to trust in those whose names are fragrant in Christian society to pull you through.’”
Martin was much attached to Mr. Brown, who was as kind a man, and as worthy a parson, as ever was great-grandson to Mrs. Malaprop. In a letter to me she says:
“Last Sunday’s sermon was full of ‘jewels five words long.’ I noticed first an allusion to Jacob’s perfidy to Esau. ‘Which of us, Beloved, would not have blushed if we had been in—in—in the shoes in which Jacob was then living? Or if we had been his mother?’
“There was something in this so suggestive of the tale of the Old Woman, who with her family, lived in a shoe, that I found my seat in the front row of the choir inconvenient, more especially when one recollected that in Jacob’s time sandals were the usual wear. Mr. B. then proceeded to tell us of ‘The Greek Chap’ who held the gunwale of the boat and ‘when his right hand was chopped off, held it with his left, and that being cut off, caught it in his teeth. Then his head was cut off! Think of him, Beloved, who, when his head was cut off, still with his teeth held the boat impossible!’
“The last word was doubtless the nearest he could get to ‘immoveable.’ At this two prominent members of the choir laughed, long and agonisingly, as did many others. I never smiled. Had you been there I might have been unequal to the strain, but I felt sorry for poor Mr. Brown, as it was only a slip to say ‘head’ for ‘hand.’ He got through the rest pretty well, only saying, a little later, that we should not ‘ask the Almighty for mercies to be doled out to us, like a pauper’s gruel, in half-pints.’ He gave us another striking metaphor, a few Sundays ago. ‘Dear friends, to what shall I liken the Day of Resurrection, and the rising of us, miserable sinners, from the grave? Will it not be like poor, wretched, black chimney-sweeps, sticking their heads up out of chimneys!’”
Martin’s pitifulness to incapacity, whether mental or physical, could be almost exasperating sometimes in its wide charity. Failure of any kind appealed to her generosity. Her consideration and tenderness for the limitations and disabilities of old age were very wonderful and beautiful things, and no one ever knew her to triumph over a fallen foe. For myself, I am of opinion that, with some foes, this is a mistake, akin to being heroic at a dentist’s. However, the question need not now be discussed.
That “An Irish Cousin” had satisfied Messrs. Bentley’s expectations was evidenced by a letter from Mr. R. Bentley in October, 1889, in which he suggested that we should write a three-volume novel for them, and offered us £100 down and £125 on the second 500 copies. We were then at work on a short novel that we had been commissioned to write. This was “Naboth’s Vineyard,” which, after various adventures, was first published by Spencer Blackett, in October, 1891. The story had had a preliminary canter in the Lady’s Pictorial Christmas number as a short story, which we called “Slide Number 42.” It was sufficiently approved of to encourage us to fill it up and make a novel of it. As a book it has had a curious career. We had sold the copyright without reservation, and presently it was passed on to Mr. Blackett. We next heard of it in the hands of Griffith and Farran. Then it appeared as a “yellow-back”