Just Irish Part 13

"Some one high up," Margaret said.

That evening came the news of the death of Queen Victoria.

Of course this is "merely" second sight, but if you don't believe in such things you don't feel like scoffing when people see visions that come true.

I was unfortunate enough not to meet a Galway woman, an ignorant peasant, who saw a vision that shaped itself around a ruined castle.

She said to my informant (one of the leaders in the Gaelic revival) that while she was looking at the castle one day a band of young gentlemen on horseback and strangely dressed came riding up to the castle, and in the windows of it were many handsome women, gayly dressed and with their hair brushed up from their foreheads, and they were laughing and talking.

And when the young hors.e.m.e.n came to the ditch that was around the castle a platform that was laid against the wall was let down by chains, and over the bridge thus made the gay young men rode and joined the chattering ladies.

This was a woman who would not have heard of moats and drawbridges, and but little of the castle remained save the four walls. She had seen a vision, so my informant, a woman of forceful intellect, told me--and I believed it then, and half believe it now. If one has visions why not see them? I wish I might myself.

But it is very hard for the traveler to get at these revelations. The natives are shy of strangers, who like as not do not believe in fairies--never having seen Tinker Bell--and they will not talk.

But for my part I hope the time will come when it will be proved beyond a doubt that there are fairies, and if the revelation ever does manifest itself at all, doubting Thomases and the rest, I am sure that their habitat will prove to be Ireland.

And when they are proved to exist, remember that I said I believed in them.

CHAPTER XIII

_In Galway with a Camera_

Galway comes as near as any Irish city that I ever saw to rivaling New York's East Side for dirtiness, and yet a fair-minded observer would be compelled to tell Galway, when the time for awarding the leather medal came, that she was only a close second.

This does not so much mean that New York is dirtier than I realized she was when I was there as it means that Ireland is not as dirty as English and Irish and American writers have pictured it.

Perhaps in some parts of Ireland the pig still sleeps in the room with the family, but as a faithful chronicler of actual sights I cannot say that I saw such a sight in any of the numerous slums and villages I visited in twenty counties. I hate to destroy so poetic an illusion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PICTURESQUE GALWAY]

There was something idyllic in the thought of a pink little pig and a pink little boy, the two of them the pink of neatness, lying side by side in a happy-hearted Irishman's cabin, while pig and boy and Irishman starved to death, but the truth was something better than that. There were pigs and little boys, but they were not neatly pink and they were not starving, and the old man did not swing a shillelagh or sing songs as I was pa.s.sing by.

Shillelaghs were never so plentiful as they are now, but they are made to supply the foreign demand for them, and the Irishman is amused and perhaps a bit contemptuous as he sees Americans, with never a drop of Irish blood in them, buying shillelaghs to take home for the sake of sentiment.

I wish I might write that I saw evidences of dest.i.tution on every side--it would please the sentimentalists--but I did not. There were beggars, but not so many as I had feared I would see, and they did not chase me any harder than youngsters have chased me in City Hall Park in New York demanding a cent to buy sterilized milk.

In Sligo I was followed by a poor woman carrying a baby, and as she raised her hand for alms her shawl dropped off and disclosed her nakedness to the waist, but I was a.s.sured by a Sligo gentleman that she was a professional beggar from out of town, and that possibly the baby was not hers, and I know for a fact that she went to a public house with the money I gave her.

And all the time I was fumbling in my pocket for coppers she was wishing me happy days. She stands out in my recollection as the most abject beggar I saw.

But in Galway there is dirt and squalor and it is picturesque. There in the Claddagh one meets with old hags who are hideous enough and Spanish looking enough to have just left Velasquez's studio, where one can imagine them posing as models for some masterpiece of the great realist.

Barefooted they are, and the homely ones have a great desire to be photographed. Many and many were the pretty women I saw in Ireland, but my camera recorded but few of their lineaments, while I was asked more than once by plain women to take their pictures.

One nailed me as I was pa.s.sing her vegetable shop in the Claddagh. She was cross-eyed, poor thing, and in a land where pretty features are as plentiful as blackberries, she was plain, but she besought me to take her picture.

Now, when a woman asks you to photograph her you don't feel like refusing her, and I was too much of a novice to make a feint at snapping the shutter and pa.s.sing on, so I stopped and tried to see a picture in the carrots and cabbages that were displayed at the door.

Such a simpering, conscious face as she displayed! I tried to engage her in talk so that she would at least look naturally homely, but it was no use. Every time my finger strayed up to the little lever her lips would become set in a smile, one eye would look at the camera and one would look at me, and she would become the incarnation of consciousness.

At last I snapped her and pa.s.sed on. After that I took good care to hurry past plain women.

The day before, at a railway station, I had gone in to get a bit of lunch and discovered that one of the waitresses was a little beauty.

The thought came into my head, What a model for "An Irish Beauty,"

just as one of the others, who had no claim to beauty, said, "Take me picture?"

I told her that I was not a professional, looking all the while at the pretty one, but she suggested that I take all three waitresses just for fun, and in order to get the beauty at any cost I a.s.sented, and the girls stood in expectant att.i.tudes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A STRING OF FISHERMEN, GALWAY]

The beauty was so luscious looking that the other two were simply obliterated in the finder, and I felt myself lucky at having such a chance to carry away a permanent impression of Irish maidenhood.

My hand was raised to the lever, in another instant the face would be mine, but just then the door opened and a man came in to buy a measly sandwich.

One of the girls left the group--I could see that in the finder, but I snapped hastily and then looked up.

It was the beauty.

I have the other two. They are undeveloped.

In the Claddagh a pretty little child came up to me and asked me to take her "piccher," hoping for some coppers in payment.

I nodded my head to her, but a barefooted derelict ahead of me heard her request, and wheeling around suddenly bade the child be off and offered to pose for me herself.

Velasquez would have jumped at the chance, but I am not Velasquez and I shook my head and hurried on.

The vehemence of the old woman's vituperative a.s.sault on the little girl had collected a lot of loungers of both s.e.xes, and I was besieged for pictures, the pretty little girl saying incessantly, "I as't you firrst. I as't you firrst. I as't you firrst."

I managed to make her understand that if she walked on far enough I would take her picture, and only one other heard her, another little girl who was pretty enough to grace a film.

These two kept on, while the others dropped away when they saw I was adamant.

And when my models were far enough from the others to enable me to get them before it was suspected what I was at I snapped them and put my hand into my pocket to get up a couple of coppers and found nothing but a sixpence.

Of course the children could not change it, and I could not very well divide it, so I appealed to some fishermen who were lounging on the quay, asking them if they could give me coppers for a sixpence.

They gave me to understand that both coppers and sixpences were strangers to them, and evidently felt that, as a "rich American" I could easily give each child a shilling. But this would have been to get the whole pack on me, for they already smelt money and were coming up.

So I gave the sixpence to the one who had first spoken to me and told her to keep fourpence for herself and to give tuppence to her little friend.

I'm afraid they came to blows over it. As for me, I left the picturesque Claddagh and saw it no more.

It was that same morning that I had seen the entire population lining one of the narrowest streets in that part of Galway, and there I got shot after shot of the picturesque groups.