Penelope's Irish Experiences Part 11

** A name given by the Druids to St. Patrick.

'Ah, happy is Lir's bright home today With mirth and music and poet's lay; But gloomy and cold his children's home, For ever tossed on the briny foam.

Our wreath-ed feathers are thin and light When the wind blows keen through the wintry night; Yet oft we were robed, long, long ago, In purple mantles and robes of snow.

On Moyle's bleak current our food and wine Are sandy seaweed and bitter brine; Yet oft we feasted in days of old, And hazel-mead drank from cups of gold.

Our beds are rocks in the dripping caves; Our lullaby song the roar of the waves; But soft, rich couches once we pressed, And harpers lulled us each night to rest.

Lonely we swim on the billowy main, Through frost and snow, through storm and rain; Alas for the days when round us moved The chiefs and princes and friends we loved!'+

+Joyce's translation.

The Fate of the Children of Lir is the second of Erin's Three Sorrows of Story, and the third and greatest is the Fate of the Sons of Usnach, which has to do with a sloping rock on the north side of Fair Head, five miles from us. Here the three sons of Usnach landed when they returned from Alba to Erin with Deirdre--Deirdre, who was 'beautiful as Helen, and gifted like Ca.s.sandra with unavailing prophecy'; and by reason of her beauty many sorrows fell upon the Ultonians.

Naisi, son of Conor, king of Uladh, had fled with Deirdre, daughter of Phelim, the king's story-teller, to a sea-girt islet on Lough Etive, where they lived happily by the chase. Naisi's two brothers went with them, and thus the three sons of Usnach were all in Alba. Then the story goes on to say that Fergus, one of Conor's n.o.bles, goes to seek the exiles, and Naisi and Deirdre, while playing at the chess, hear from the sh.o.r.e 'the cry of a man of Erin.' It is against Deirdre's will that they finally leave Alba with Fergus, who says, "Birthright is first, for ill it goes with a man, although he be great and prosperous, if he does not see daily his native earth."

So they sailed away over the sea, and Deirdre sang this lay as the sh.o.r.es of Alba faded from her sight:--

"My love to thee, O Land in the East, and 'tis ill for me to leave thee, for delightful are thy coves and havens, thy kind, soft, flowery fields, thy pleasant, green-sided hills; and little was our need of departing."

Then in her song she went over the glens of their lords.h.i.+p, naming them all, and calling to mind how here they hunted the stag, here they fished, here they slept, with the swaying fern for pillows, and here the cuckoo called to them. And "Never," she sang, "would I quit Alba were it not that Naisi sailed thence in his s.h.i.+p."

They landed first under Fair Head, and then later at Rathlin Island, where their fate met them at last, as Deirdre had prophesied. It is a sad story, and we can easily weep at the thrilling moment when, there being no man among the Ultonians to do the king's bidding, a Norse captive takes Naisi's magic sword and strikes off the heads of the three sons of Usnach with one swift blow, and Deirdre, falling p.r.o.ne upon the dead bodies, chants a lament; and when she has finished singing, she puts her pale cheek against Naisi's, and dies; and a great cairn is piled over them, and an inscription in Ogam set upon it.

We were full of legendary lore, these days, for we were fresh from a sight of Glen Ariff. Who that has ever chanced to be there in a pelting rain but will remember its innumerable little waterfalls, and the great falls of Ess-na-Crubh and Ess-na-Craoibhe? And who can ever forget the atmosphere of romance that broods over these Irish glens?

We have had many advantages here as elsewhere; for kind Dr. La Touche, Lady Killbally, and Mrs. Colquhoun follow us with letters, and wherever there is an unusual personage in a district we are commended to his or her care. Sometimes it is one of the 'grand quality,' and often it is an Ossianic sort of person like Shaun O'Grady, who lives in a little whitewashed cabin, and who has, like Mr. Yeats's Gleeman, 'the whole Middle Ages under his frieze coat.' The longer and more intimately we know these peasants, the more we realise how much in imagination, or in the clouds, if you will, they live. The ragged man of leisure you meet on the road may be a philosopher, and is still more likely to be a poet; but unless you have something of each in yourself, you may mistake him for a mere beggar.

"The practical ones have all emigrated," a Dublin novelist told us, "and the dreamers are left. The heads of the older ones are filled with poetry and legends; they see nothing as it is, but always through some iridescent-tinted medium. Their waking moments, when not tormented by hunger, are spent in heaven, and they all live in a dream, whether it be of the next world or of a revolution. Effort is to them useless, submission to everybody and everything the only safe course; in a word, fatalism expresses their att.i.tude to life."

Much of this submission to the inevitable is a product of past poverty, misfortune, and famine, and the rest is undoubtedly a trace of the same spirit that we find in the lives and writings of the saints, and which is an integral part of the mystery and the traditions of Romanism. We who live in the bright (and sometimes staring) sunlight of common-sense can hardly hope to penetrate the dim, mysterious world of the Catholic peasant, with his unworldliness and sense of failure.

Dr. Douglas Hyde, an Irish scholar and staunch Protestant, says: "A pious race is the Gaelic race. The Irish Gael is pious by nature. There is not an Irishman in a hundred in whom is the making of an unbeliever.

The spirit, and the things of the spirit, affect him more powerfully than the body, and the things of the body... What is invisible for other people is visible for him... He feels invisible powers before him, and by his side, and at his back, throughout the day and throughout the night... His mind on the subject may be summed up in the two sayings: that of the early Church, 'Let ancient things prevail,' and that of St.

Augustine, 'Credo quia impossibile.' Nature did not form him to be an unbeliever; unbelief is alien to his mind and contrary to his feelings."

Here, only a few miles away, is the Slemish mountain where St. Patrick, then a captive of the rich cattle-owner Milcho, herded his sheep and swine. Here, when his flocks were sleeping, he poured out his prayers, a Christian voice in Pagan darkness. It was the memory of that darkness, you remember, that brought him back, years after, to convert Milcho.

Here, too, they say, lies the great bard Ossian; for they love to think that Finn's son Oisin, [++] the hero poet, survived to the time of St.

Patrick, three hundred years after the other 'Fianna' had vanished from the earth,--the three centuries being pa.s.sed in Tir-nan-og, the Land of Youth, where the great Oisin married the king's daughter, Niam of the Golden Hair. 'Ossian after the Fianna' is a phrase which has become the synonym of all survivors' sorrow. Blinded by tears, broken by age, the hero bard when he returns to earth has no fellows.h.i.+p but with grief, and thus he sings:--

'No hero now where heroes hurled,-- Long this night the clouds delay-- No man like me, in all the world, Alone with grief, and grey.

Long this night the clouds delay-- I raise their grave carn, stone on stone, For Finn and Fianna pa.s.sed away-- I, Ossian left alone.'

++ p.r.o.nounced Isheen' in Munster, Osh'in in Ulster.

In more senses than one Irish folk-lore is Irish history. At least the traditions that have been handed down from one generation to another contain not only the sometimes authentic record of events, but a revelation of the Milesian temperament, with its mirth and its melancholy, its exuberant fancy and its pa.s.sion. So in these weird tales there is plenty of history, and plenty of poetry, to one who will listen to it; but the high and tragic story of Ireland has been cherished mainly in the sorrowful traditions of a defeated race, and the legends have not yet been wrought into undying verse. Erin's songs of battle could only recount weary successions of Flodden Fields, with never a Bannockburn and its nimbus of victory; for, as Ossian says of his countrymen, "they went forth to the war, but they always fell"; but somewhere in the green isle is an unborn poet who will put all this mystery, beauty, pa.s.sion, romance, and sadness, these tragic memories, these beliefs, these visions of unfulfilled desire, into verse that will glow on the page and live for ever. Somewhere is a mother who has kept all these things in her heart, and who will bear a son to write them. Meantime, who shall say that they have not been imbedded in the language, as flower petals might be in amber?--that language which, as an English scholar says, "has been blossoming there unseen, like a hidden garland of roses; and whenever the wind has blown from the west, English poetry has felt the vague perfume of it."

Chapter XVIII. Limavady love-letters.

'As beautiful Kitty one morning was tripping With a pitcher of milk from the fair of Coleraine, When she saw me she stumbled, the pitcher it tumbled, And all the sweet b.u.t.termilk watered the plain.'

Anonymous.

We wanted to cross to Rathlin Island, which is 'like an Irish stockinge, the toe of which pointeth to the main lande.' That would bring Francesca six miles nearer to Scotland and her Scottish lover; and we wished to see the castle of Robert the Bruce, where, according to the legend, he learned his lesson from the 'six times baffled spider.' We delayed too long, however, and the Sea of Moyle looked as bleak and stormy as it did to the children of Lir. We had no mind to be swallowed up in Brecain's Caldron, where the grandson of Niall and the Nine Hostages sank with his fifty curraghs, so we took a day of golf at the Ballycastle links.

Salemina, who is a neophyte, found a forlorn lady driving and putting about by herself, and they made a match just to increase the interest of the game. There was but one boy in evidence, and the versatile Benella offered to caddie for them, leaving the more experienced gossoon to Francesca and me. The Irish caddie does not, on the whole, perhaps manifest so keen an interest in the fine points of the game as his Scottish brother. He is somewhat languid in his search for a ball, and will occasionally, when serving amiable ladies, sit under a tree in the sun and speculate as to its whereabouts. As for staying by you while you 'hole out' on your last green, he has no possible interest in that proceeding, and is off and away, giving his perfunctory and half-hearted polish to your clubs while you are pa.s.sing through this thrilling crisis. Salemina, wis.h.i.+ng to know what was considered a good score by local players on these links, asked our young friend 'what they got round in, here,' and was answered, 'They tries to go round in as few as possible, ma'am, but they mostly takes more!' We all came together again at luncheon, and Salemina returned flushed with victory. She had made the nine hole course in one hundred and sixty, and had beaten her adversary five up and four to play.

The next morning, bright and early, we left for Coleraine, a great Presbyterian stronghold in what is called by the Roman Catholics the 'black north.' If we liked it, and saw anything of Kitty's descendants, or any nice pitchers to break, or any reason for breaking them, we intended to stop; if not, then to push on to the walled town of Derry,--

'Where Foyle his swelling waters Rolls northward to the main.'

We thought it Francesca's duty, as she was to be the wife of a Scottish minister of the Established Church, to look up Presbyterianism in Ireland whenever and wherever possible, with a view to discoursing learnedly about it in her letters,--though, as she confesses ingenuously, Ronald, in his, never so much as mentions Presbyterianism.

As for ourselves, we determined to observe all theological differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics, but leave Presbyterianism to gang its ain gait. We had devoted hours--yes, days--in Edinburgh to the understanding of the subtle and technical barriers which separated the Free Kirkers and the United Presbyterians; and the first thing they did, after we had completely mastered the subject, was to unite. It is all very well for Salemina, who condenses her information and stows it away neatly; but we who have small storage room and inferior methods of packing must be as economical as possible in ama.s.sing facts.

If we had been touring properly, of course we should have been going to the Giant's Causeway and the swinging Bridge at Carrick-a-rede; but propriety is the last thing we aim at in our itineraries. We were within wors.h.i.+pping distance of two rather important shrines in our literary pilgrimage; for we had met a very knowledgeable traveller at the Sorley Boy, and after a little chat with him had planned a day of surprises for the academic Miss Peabody. We proposed to halt at Port Stewart, lunch at Coleraine, sleep at Limavady; and meantime Salemina was to read all the books at her command, and guess, we hoped vainly, the why and wherefore of these stops.

On the appointed day, the lady in question drove in state on a car with Benella, but Francesca and I hired a couple of very wheezy bicycles for the journey. We had a thrilling start; for it chanced to be a fair day in Ballycastle, and we wheeled through a sea of squealing, bolting pigs, stupid sheep, and unruly cows, all pursued on every side by their drivers. To alight from a bicycle in such a whirl of beasts always seems certain death; to remain seated diminishes, I believe, the number of one's days of life to an appreciable extent. Francesca chose the first course, and, standing still in the middle of the street, called upon everybody within hearing to save her, and that right speedily. A crowd of 'jibbing' heifers encircled her on all sides, while a fat porker, 'who (his driver said) might be a prize pig by his impidence,' and a donkey that was feelin' blue-mouldy for want of a batin', tried to poke their noses into the group. Salemina's only weapon was her scarlet parasol, and, standing on the step of her side-car, she brandished this with such terrible effect that the only bull in the cavalcade put up his head and roared. "Have conduct, woman dear!" cried his owner to Salemina. "Sure if you kape on moidherin' him wid that ombrelly, you'll have him ugly on me immajently, and the divil a bit o' me can stop him."

"Don't be cryin' that way, asth.o.r.e," he went on, going to Francesca's side, and piloting her tenderly to the hedge. "Sure I'll nourish him wid the whip whin I get him to a more remoted place."

We had no more adventures, but Francesca was so unhinged by her unfortunate exit from Ballycastle that, after a few miles, she announced her intention of putting her machine and herself on the car; whereupon Benella proclaimed herself a competent cyclist, and climbed down blithely to mount the discarded wheel. Her ideas of propriety were by this time so developed that she rode ten or twelve feet behind me, where she looked quaint enough, in her black dress and little black bonnet with its white lawn strings.

"Sure it's a quare footman ye have, me lady," said a genial and friendly person who was sitting by the roadside smoking his old dudeen. An Irishman, somehow, is always going to his work 'jist,' or coming from it, or thinking how it shall presently be done, or meditating on the next step in the process, or resting a bit before taking it up again, or reflecting whether the weather is on the whole favourable to its proper performance; but however poor and needy he may be, it is somewhat difficult to catch him at the precise working moment. Mr. Alfred Austin says of the Irish peasants that idleness and poverty seem natural to them. "Life to the Scotsman or Englishman is a business to conduct, to extend, to render profitable. To the Irishman it is a dream, a little bit of pa.s.sing consciousness on a rather hard pillow; the hard part of it being the occasional necessity for work, which spoils the tenderness and continuity of the dream."

Presently we pa.s.sed the Castle, rode along a neat quay with a row of houses advertising lodgings to let; and here is Lever Cottage, where Harry Lorrequer was written; for Lever was dispensary doctor in Port Stewart when his first book was appearing in the Dublin University Magazine.

We did not fancy Coleraine; it looked like anything but Cuil-rathain, a ferny corner. Kitty's sweet b.u.t.termilk may have watered, but it had not fertilised the plain, though the town itself seemed painfully prosperous. Neither the Clothworkers' Inn nor the Corporation Arms looked a pleasant stopping-place, and the humble inn we finally selected for a brief rest proved to be about as gay as a family vault, with a landlady who had all the characteristics of a poker except its occasional warmth, as the Liberator said of another stiff and formal person. Whether she was Scot or Saxon I know not; she was certainly not Celt, and certainly no Barney McCrea of her day would have kissed her if she had spilled ever so many pitchers of sweet b.u.t.termilk over the plain; so we took the railway, and departed with delight for Limavady, where Thackeray, fresh from his visit to Charles Lever, laid his poetical tribute at the stockingless feet of Miss Margaret of that town.

O'Cahan, whose chief seat was at Limavady, was the princ.i.p.al urraght of O'Neill, and when one of the great clan was 'proclaimed' at Tullaghogue it was the magnificent privilege of the O'Cahan to toss a shoe over his head. We slept at O'Cahan's Hotel, and--well, one must sleep; and wherever we attend to that necessary function without due preparation, we generally make a mistake in the selection of the particular spot.

Protestantism does not necessarily mean cleanliness, although it may have natural tendencies in that direction; and we find, to our surprise ( a surprise rooted, probably, in bigotry), that Catholicism can be as clean as a penny whistle, now and again. There were no special privileges at O'Cahan's for maids, and Benella, therefore, had a delightful evening in the coffee-room with a storm-bound commercial traveller. As for Francesca and me, there was plenty to occupy us in our regular letters to Ronald and Himself; and Salemina wrote several sheets of thin paper to somebody,--no one in America, either, for we saw her put on a penny stamp.

Our pleasant duties over, we looked into the cheerful glow of the turf sods while I read aloud Thackeray's Peg of Limavady. He spells the town with two d's, by the way, to insure its being rhymed properly with Paddy and daddy.

'Riding from Coleraine (Famed for lovely Kitty), Came a c.o.c.kney bound Unto Derry city; Weary was his soul, s.h.i.+vering and sad he b.u.mped along the road Leads to Limavaddy.

Limavaddy inn's But a humble baithouse, Where you may procure Whisky and potatoes; Landlord at the door Gives a smiling welcome To the s.h.i.+vering wights Who to his hotel come.

Landlady within Sits and knits a stocking, With a wary foot Baby's cradle rocking.

Presently a maid Enters with the liquor (Half a pint of ale Frothing in a beaker).

Gads! I didn't know What my beating heart meant: Hebe's self I thought Entered the apartment.