Ireland Under Coercion Volume I Part 8

I walked up to the Bunbeg road with Lord Ernest to call upon some peasants whom he knows. In one stone cabin, very well built and plastered, standing sidewise to the road, with doors on either side, we found the house apparently in charge of a little girl of nine or ten years, a weird but pretty child with very delicate well-cut features, who lay couchant upon her doubled-up arm on a low bed in a corner of the main room, and peered at us over her elbow with sparkling inquisitive eyes.

By her side sat a man with his cap on, who might have been the "young Pretender," or the "old Kaiser," so far as his looks went towards indicating his age. He never rose or welcomed us, being, as we afterwards found out, only a visitor like ourselves, and a kinsman of Mrs. M'Donnell, the head of the house. "Mrs. M'Donnell," he said, "is gone to the store at Bunbeg."

This main room rose perhaps ten feet in height to the open roof. It had one large and well-glazed window. When Lord George Hill came here there were not ten square feet of window-gla.s.s in the whole parish outside of the Church, the national school, and the residence of the chief police-officer.

Windows when there were any were closed with dried sheepskins, through which the cats ran in and out as freely as through the curious tunnel which the kindly Master of Blantyre has constructed at Sheba's Cross for their special benefit.

There were two beds in the main room; rather high than low, one of rushes, on which lay the child of whom I have spoken, and one of greater pretensions vacant in another corner.

The door stood wide open, but the cabin was warm and comfortable, and a peat fire smouldered, sending up, to me, most agreeable odours. An inner room seemed to be a sort of granary, full of hay and straw. There the cow is kept at night. "It's handy if you want a drink of milk," said the visitor. In comparison with the dwellings of small farmers in Eastern France or in Southern Italy this Donegal cabin was not only clean but attractive. It was more squalid perhaps, but less dreary than the extemporised and flimsy dwellings of settlers in the extreme Far West of the United States, and I should say decidedly a more wholesome habitation than the hermetically sealed and dismal wooden houses of hundreds of struggling farmers in the older Eastern States. I am sure my old friend Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, who made the only thorough surveys of agricultural life in the United States before the Civil War, would have p.r.o.nounced it in all respects superior, so far as health and comfort go, to the average home of the average "poor buccra," between the Chesapeake and the Sabine. I am afraid a great deal of not wholly innocuous nonsense has been written and spoken about this part of the United Kingdom by well-meaning philanthropists who have gauged the condition of the people here by their own standards of comfort and enjoyment. Most things in this life of ours are relative. I well remember hearing an American millionaire, who began life in New York as the patentee of a mouse-trap, express his profound compa.s.sion for a judge of the Supreme Court condemned to live "upon a pittance of eight thousand dollars a year."

These dwellers in the cabins of Donegal are millionaires, so far as those essentials of life are concerned, which we call room and air and freedom to move and breathe, in comparison with hundreds and thousands of their own race in the slums of New York and Chicago and Liverpool and London.

Mrs. M'Donnell's cousin, however, took dark views of things. The times "were no good at all."

The potatoes, I had heard, were doing well this year.

"No! they wouldn't keep the people; indeed, they wouldn't. There would have to be relief."

"Why not manure the land?"

"Manure? oh yes, the sea-stuff was good manure, but the people couldn't get it. They had no boats; and it cost eighteenpence a load to haul it from Bunbeg. No! they couldn't get it off the rocks. At the Rosses they might; the Rosses were not so badly off as Derrybeg or Gweedore, for all they might say."

"But Father M'Fadden had urged me," I said, "to see the Rosses, because the people there were worse off than any of the people."

"Well, Father M'Fadden was a good man; he was a friend of the people; and they were bad indeed at the Rosses, but they could get the sea-stuff there, and hadn't to pay for cartage. And indeed, if you put the sea-stuff on the bogland, the land was better in among the rocks' at the Rosses than was the bogland, it was indeed: the stuff did no good at all the first year. The second and the third it gave good crops--but then you must burn it--and by the fourth year and the fifth it was all ashes, and no good at all! This was G.o.d's truth, it was; and there must be relief."

"But could the people earn nothing in Scotland or in Tyrone?"

"Oh no, they could earn nothing at all. They could pay no rent."

So he sat there, a Jeremiah among the potsherds, quite contented and miserable--well and hearty in a ragged frieze coat, with his hat over his eyes.

While we talked, a tall l.u.s.ty young beggar-girl wandered in and out unnoticed. Chickens pecked and fluttered about, and at intervals the inevitable small dog suddenly barked and yelped.

On our way back we met the elder daughter of Mrs. M'Donnell, a girl of sixteen, the "beauty of Gweedore." A beauty she certainly is, and of a type hardly to have been looked for here.

Her lithe graceful figure, her fine, small, chiselled features, her shapely little head rather defiantly set on her sloping shoulders, her fair complexion and clear hazel eyes, her brown golden hair gathered up behind into a kind of tress, all these were Saxon rather than Celtic.

Her trim neat ankles were bare, after the mountain fashion, but she was prettily dressed in a well-fitting dark blue gown, wore a smartly trimmed muslin ap.r.o.n, with lace about her throat, and carried over her arm a new woollen shawl, very tasteful and quiet in colour. She greeted us with a self-possessed smile.

"No," she had not, been shopping with her mother. The shawl was a present from one of her cousins. Did we not think it very pretty? She was only out for a walk, and had no notion where her mother might be. A stalwart red-bearded man who lounged and loitered behind her on the road was "only a friend," she said, "not a relation at all!" Nor did she show, I am sorry to say, any compa.s.sion for the evident uneasiness with which, from a distance, he regarded her long and affable parley with two strangers.

We asked her whether she expected and wished to live in Gweedore, or would like to follow elsewhere some calling or trade. "Oh yes," she unhesitatingly replied, "I should like to be a dress-maker in Deny; but," she added pensively, "it's no use my thinking about it, for I know I shouldn't be let!"

"Wouldn't you like Dublin as well?" I asked.

"Perhaps; but I shouldn't be let go to Dublin either!"

Would she like to go to America?

"No!" she didn't think much of "the Americans who came back," and America must be "a very hard country for work, and very cold in the winter."

Now this was a widow's daughter, living in such a cabin as I have described, and upon a small holding in a parish reputed to be the most "distressful" in Donegal![15]

Returning to the hotel we found our car ready for Falcarragh. Our driver was a quiet, sensible fellow, who did not seem to care sixpence about the great Nationality question, though he knew the country very well.

Iron was visible in the rocks as we drove along, and we pa.s.sed some abandoned mining works, "lead and silver mines;" he said, "they were given up long before his time." We got many fine views of the mountains Errigal, Aghla More, and Muckish. Lough Altan, a wild tarn, lies between Errigal and Aghla More.

The peasants we met stared at us curiously, but, were very civil, even at a place bearing the ominous name of Bedlam, against which Mr. Burke had warned us as the most troublesome on the way. All the countryside was there attending a fair, and we drove through throngs of red-shawled, barelegged women, ponies, horses, cattle, and sheep. Of Tory Island, with its famous tower, dating back to the fabled "Fomorians," we had some grand glimpses. The white surf, flashing and leaping high in the air on the nearer islets accented and gave life to the landscape.

In one glorious landlocked bay, we saw not a single boat riding. Our driver said, "The fishermen all live on Tory Island, and send their fish to Sligo. The people on the mainland don't like going out in the boats."

Lord Ernest tells me there is a movement to have a telegraph station set up on Tory Island, to announce the Canadian steamers coming into Moville for Deny.

We found Falcarragh, or "Cross-Roads," a large clean-looking village, consisting of one long and broad street, through which horses and cattle were wandering in numbers, apparently at their own sweet will.

Ballyconnell House, the seat of Mr. Wybrants Olphert, is the manor house of the place. As we drew near, no signs appeared of the dreadful "Boycott." The great gates of the park stood hospitably open, and we drove in unchallenged past a pretty ivy-clad lodge, and through low, but thickly planted groves. A huge boulder, ruddy with iron ore, bears the uncanny and unspellable name of the "Clockchinnfhaelaidh," or "Stone of Kinfaele." Upon this stone, tradition tells us, Balor, a giant of Tory Island, chopped off the head of an unreasonable person named Mackinfeale, for complaining that Balor, under some prehistoric "Plan of Campaign," had driven away his favourite cow, Glasgavlan.

Ballyconnell House, a substantial mansion of the Georgian era, stands extremely well. Over a fine sloping lawn in front, you have a glorious view of the sea, and of a very fine headland, known as "the Duke's Head," from the really remarkable resemblance it bears to the profile of Wellington. The winds have such power here that there are but few well-grown trees, and those near the house. About them paraded many game-hens, spirited birds, looking like pheasants. These, as we learned, never sleep save in the trees.

The "boycotted" lord of the manor came out to greet us--a handsome, stalwart man of some seventy years, with a kindly face, and most charming manners. His family, presumably of Dutch origin, has been established here since Charles II. He himself holds 18,133 acres here, valued at 1802 a year; and he is a resident landlord in the fullest sense of the term. For fifty years he has lived here, during all which time, as he told us to-day, he has "never slept for a week out of the country." His furthest excursions of late years have been to Raphoe, where he has a married daughter. "Absenteeism" clearly has nothing to do with the quarrel between Mr. Olphert and his tenants, or with the "boycotting" of Ballyconnell.

The dragoons from Dunfanaghy had just ridden away as we came up. They had come over in full fig to show themselves, and to encourage the respectable Catholics of Falcarragh, who side with their parish priest, Father M'Fadden of Glena, and object to the vehement measures, promoted by his young curate, Father Stephens, recently of Liverpool. The people had received them with much satisfaction. "They had never seen the cavalry before, and were much delighted!"

Before we sat down to luncheon young Mr. Olphert came in. It was curious to see this quiet, well-bred young gentleman throw down his belt and his revolver on the hall table, like his gloves and his umbrella. "Quite like the Far West," I said. "And we are as far in the West as we can get," he replied laughingly.

Our luncheon was excellent--so good, in fact, that we felt a kind of remorse as if we had selfishly quartered ourselves upon a beleaguered garrison. But Mr. Olphert said he had no fear of being starved out.

Personally he was, and always had been, on the best terms with the people of Falcarragh. The older tenants, even now, if he met them walking in the fields when no one was in sight, would come up and salute him, and say how "disgusted" they were with what was going on. It was the younger generation who were troublesome--more troublesome, he added, to their own parish priest than they were to him. Three or four years ago a returned American Irishman, an avowed unbeliever, but an active Nationalist and one of Mr. Forster's "suspects," had come into the neighbourhood and done his worst to break up the parish. He used to come to Falcarragh on a Sunday, and get up on a stone outside the chapel while Father M'Fadden was saying Ma.s.s or preaching, and harangue such people as would listen to him, and caricature the priest and the sermon going on within sound of his own voice. "I am myself a Protestant,"

said Mr. Olphert, "but I have a great respect for priests who do their duty; and the conduct of Father M'Fadden of Gweedore, in countenancing this man, who tried to overthrow the authority of Father M'Fadden of Glena, excited my indignation. As to what is going on now," said Mr.

Olphert, "it is to Father M'Fadden of Gweedore, and to Father Stephens here, that the trouble is chiefly to be charged." This tallies with what I heard at Gweedore from my Galwegian acquaintance. He thought Mr.

Olphert, and Mr. Hewson, the agent, ought to have made peace on the terms which Father Stephens said he was willing to accept for the tenants, these being a reduction of 3s. 4d. in the pound, if Mr. Olphert would extend the reduction to the whole year. My Galwegian thought this reasonable, because in this region the rent, it appears, is only collected once a year. With this impartial temper, my Galwegian still maintained that but for the two priests--the parish priest of Gweedore and the curate of Falcarragh--there need have been no trouble at Falcarragh. There had been no "evictions." When the tenants first went to Mr. Olphert they asked a reduction of 4s. in the pound on the non-judicial rents, and this Mr. Olphert at once agreed to give them.

The tenants had regularly paid their rents for ten years before. That they are not going down in the world would appear from the fact that the P.O. Savings Banks' deposits at Falcarragh, which stood at 62, 15s.

10d. in 1880, rose in 1887 to 494, 10s. 8d. A small number of them had gone into Court and had judicial rents fixed; and it was on the contention promoted by the two priests, through these judicial tenants, he said, that all the difficulty hinged. Father M'Fadden of Glena, who thought the quarrel unjustifiable and silly, had an interview with Mr.

Blane, M.P., and with Father Stephens, and tried to arrange it all. He would have succeeded, my Galwegian thought, had not the agent, Mr.

Hewson, obstinately fought with the obstinate curate, Father Stephens, over the suggestion made by the latter, that the terms granted on the fine neighbouring estate of Mr. Stuart of Ards--a man of wealth, who lives mainly at Brighton, though Ards is one of the loveliest places in Ireland--should be extended by Mr. Olphert for a whole year to his own people, who had never asked for anything of the kind!

Mr. Olphert said he knew Gweedore well. He owns a "townland"[16] there, on which he has thirty-five tenants, none of them on a holding at more more than 4 a year. Father M'Fadden of Gweedore, he said, finding that the people on Mr. Olphert's townland were going back to the "Rundale"

practices, tried to induce Mr. Olphert to return all these subdivisions as "tenancies." This he refused to do. As to the resources of the peasantry, he thought them greater than they appeared to be. "This comes to light," said Mr. Olphert, "whenever there is a tenant-right for sale.

There is never any lack of money to buy it, and at a round good price."

The people also, he thinks, spend a great deal on what they regard as luxuries, and particularly on tea. "A cup of tea could not be got for love or money in Gweedore, when Lord George Hill came there. You might as well have asked for a gla.s.s of Tokay."

Now they use and abuse it in the most deleterious way imaginable. They buy the tea at exorbitant rates, often at five shillings a pound, and usually on credit, paying a part of one bill on running up another, put it into a saucepan or an iron pot, and boil, or rather stew, it over the fire, till they brew a kind of h.e.l.l-broth, which they imbibe at odd moments all day long! Oddly enough, this is the way in which they prepare tea in Cashmere and other parts of India, with this essential difference, though, that the Orientals mitigate the astringency of the herb with milk and almonds and divers ingredients, tending to make a sort of "compote" of it. Taken as it is taken here, it must have a tremendous effect on the nerves. Mr. Olphert thinks it has had much to do with the increase of lunacy in Ireland of late years. From his official connection with the asylum at Letterkenny, he knows that while it used to accommodate the lunatics of three counties, it is now hardly adequate to the needs of Donegal alone.

Everything about Ballyconnell House is out of key with the actual military conditions of life here. It is essentially what Tennyson calls "an ancient home of ordered peace." In the ample hall hang old portraits and trophies of the chase. The large and handsome library, panelled in rich dark wood, is filled full of well-bound books. Prints, busts, the thousand and one things of "bigotry and virtue" which mark the dwelling-place of educated and thoughtful people are to be seen on every side. Mr. Olphert showed us a cabinet full of bronzes, picked up on the strand of the sea. Among these were brooches, pins, clasps, buckles, two very fine bronze swords, and a pair of bronze links engraved with distinctly Masonic emblems, such as the level, the square, and the compa.s.ses. When were these things made, and by what people?

So far as I know, Masonry in the British Islands cannot be historically traced back much, if at all, beyond the Revolution of 1688.

Mr. Olphert and his son walked about the place with us. They have no fears of an attack, but think it wise to keep a force of police on the premises. The only demonstration yet made of any kind against the house was the march from Falcarragh some time ago of a mob of young men, who promptly withdrew on catching sight of half-a-dozen policemen within the park gates. As to getting his work done, some of his people had steadily refused to acknowledge the "boycott," and they were now strengthened by the att.i.tude of those who had surrendered to the pressure, and were now sullen and angry with the League which had given them nothing to do, and no supplies.