The Charm Of Ireland Part 14

"Hm-m-m!" grunted the salesman sceptically.

"I'll admit," went on the other, "that there are and always have been many Irishmen only too eager to take alms--more shame to them. There have always been many ready to sell themselves for a good position under government, and to sell their country too, if need be. We have our share of patriots, but we have more than our share of traitors, I sometimes think. But it isn't by them the country should be judged. What true Irishmen want is the right to stand alone like men and fight their own battles, and in fighting them, the north and south will forget their foolish quarrel and become friends again as they should be. They aren't half as far apart, even now, as some would have you believe. Most of this talk about Ulster is the black work of men who make their living out of it, who care nothing for Ireland, and take advantage of every little by-election to stir the fire and keep the pot bubbling."

I remarked that this ceaseless agitation over elections was unknown in America, where all the elections were held on one day, after which there were no more elections for a year.

The priest stared at me in astonishment.

"Did I understand you to say," he asked, "that the elections all over your country are held on the same day?"

"Yes," I said; "on a day early in November, fixed by law."

"I don't see how you manage it."

"It isn't hard to manage--it's really very simple."

"But where do you get enough police?"

"Enough police?"

"Yes. Here in Ireland, when we have an election, we have to send in the police from all the country round to keep the peace. If we tried to have all our elections on one day, there would be riots everywhere."

"What about?" I asked.

"I don't know--the people wouldn't know themselves, most likely; but there's many of them would welcome the chance for a s.h.i.+ndy, if the police wasn't there. Isn't it the same in America?"

I told him I had been an election officer many times, but had never seen any serious disorder at the polls.

"Aren't there many riots next day?" he asked.

"Why," I said, "the day after election is the quietest day in the year.

Everybody goes to work as though nothing had happened."

"I don't think there is much danger of riots," put in the salesman, "but we couldn't have your system over here because with us a man has a right to vote wherever he owns property and pays taxes, and if all the elections were held on one day, he couldn't get around."

"Ah, yes," nodded the priest; "I did not think of that. How do you manage it in America?"

"With us," I explained, "every man has one vote and no more."

Again his eyes goggled.

"Would you be telling me," he gasped, "that your millionaires, your men of vast properties, have no more votes than the poor man?"

And when I told him that was so, I think he was by way of pitying our millionaires, as men deprived of their just rights--as, perhaps, in some respects, they are.

And then the salesman told me that he had been to America, as far west as Kansas, where he had visited some friends. He had gone over, he said, with that sort of good-natured contempt for everything American so common in England, but he had come away convinced that there was no country on earth to match it.

"The only thing I saw to criticise in America were the roads," he added.

"Why don't you take a leaf from Lloyd George's book? He has put a tax of three-pence a gallon on gasoline used by pleasure cars, and this tax goes into a fund for the upkeep of the highways, proportioned according to the number of cars in each county. Gasoline used in commercial cars pays a tax of three-ha'-pence a gallon. A great sum is collected in this way, and the upkeep of the highways is thrown upon the people who do them the most damage. If you'd do the same in America, your roads would soon be as good as ours; and n.o.body could complain that the tax was unjust."

I agreed that it was a clever idea, and I hereby call it to the attention of our lawmakers.

"Well," said the priest, who had been listening attentively to all this, "I am glad to know the truth about this tax. I had heard of it, and had thought it another English exaction laid upon Ireland. Now I see that I was wrong; for, as you say, it is a just tax."

And then he told us some stories of the old days, of famine and persecution and eviction, of the hard fight for life on the rocky hillsides, while the fertile valleys were given over to grazing or ringed with high walls and turned into game preserves. There were lighter stories, too, of the humorous side of Irish character, and one of them, though I suspect it is an old one, I will set down here.

The southwest coast of Ireland, of which Bantry Bay forms a part, is one of the most dangerous in the world, because of the rugged capes which stretch far out into the ocean and the small islands and hidden reefs which lie beyond. It is just the sort of coast where fish abound, and so little villages are scattered all along it, whose men-folks fish whenever the weather lets them, and at other times labour in the tiny potato patches up on the rocky hillsides. Naturally they are familiar with all the twists and turnings of the coast, and are always on the lookout to add to their scanty incomes by a job of piloting.

One day the crew of a fis.h.i.+ng-boat perceived a big freighter nosing about in a light fog, rather closer insh.o.r.e than she should have been, and at once lay alongside and put a man aboard.

"Will you be wantin' a pilot, sir?" he asked the captain, who was anxiously pacing the bridge.

The captain stared a moment at the dirty and tattered visitor.

"Who the devil are you?" he demanded, at last.

"Me name's McCarthy, sir. I'm a pilot, sir."

"A pilot!" and the captain looked at McCarthy again. "I don't believe it."

"'Tis the truth I'm tellin' you, sir," protested McCarthy.

"Well," said the captain, "if it's the truth, you can easily prove it.

Let me hear you box the compa.s.s."

McCarthy was nonplussed. More than once, sitting over a pot of ale in some public house, he had heard old sailors proudly rattle off the points of the compa.s.s, but, though he remembered how the rigmarole sounded, he had no idea how to do it, nor even any very clear idea of what it meant.

"Faith, I can't do it, sir," he admitted.

"Can't do it?" roared the captain. "Can't box the compa.s.s! And yet you call yourself a pilot."

McCarthy did some rapid thinking, for he saw a good job, which he could ill afford to lose, slipping through his fingers.

"It's like this, sir," he said, finally, "in our small place, it's the Irish we would be using, niver a word of English, and all the English any of us knows is just the little we might pick up from bein' after the s.h.i.+ps. I can't box the compa.s.s in English, but I can box it in the Irish, sir, if that will do."

The captain looked into the speaker's guileless eyes and also did some rapid thinking. He knew no Gaelic, but he needed a pilot badly, and he reflected that, in any language, it ought to be possible to tell whether the compa.s.s was being boxed correctly, because the words would have to follow each other with a certain similarity of sound, as north, north-and-by-east, north-north-east, north-east-by-north, and so on.

"All right," he growled, "go ahead and let's hear you."

"My father," McCarthy began solemnly in his homely Gaelic; "my grandfather, my grandfather's grandmother, my grandmother's grandfather, my great grandfather, my great grandfather's grandmother, my great grandmother's great. . . ."

"Hold on," shouted the captain, quite convinced. "I see you know how.

Take charge of the s.h.i.+p!"

And McCarthy thereupon proved he knew how by getting the vessel safely past Cape Clear!

It was pouring rain, next morning, a steady, driving rain, which looked as though it might last forever, and we were confronted by the problem which so often confronts the traveller in Ireland, whether to go or stay. To go meant the possibility of having the most beautiful drive in Ireland obscured in mist; to stay meant a dreary day at the hotel, with no a.s.surance that the next day would be any better, or the next, or the next. At last we decided to go.