Mearing Stones Part 6

DERRY PEOPLE

Donegal is what I call "county-proud." Speaking of Derry--the marching county--an old woman said to me the other day: "Och, there's no gentility about the Derry people. They go at a thing like a day's work!"

A CLOCK

I was going along the road this evening when I came on a clock (some would call it a black beetle), travelling in the direction of Narin. The poor thing seemed to have its mind set on getting there before dark--a matter of three miles, and half an hour to do it in! The sense of tears in me was touched for the clock, and I stooped down to watch it crawling laboriously along in the dust, over a very rough road, tired and travel-stained, as if it had already come a long way; climbing stones (miniature Errigals) twenty times as high as itself; circ.u.mventing others, falling into ruts headlong, and rising again none the worse for its awful experience; keeping on, on, on, "with a mind fixed and a heart unconquered." I couldn't help laughing at first, but after five minutes I felt a sort of strange kinship with the clock--it was a wayfarer like myself, "a poor earth-born companion and fellow-mortal"--and I stood watching it, hat in hand, until it disappeared out of view. The last I saw of it was on the top of a stone on rising ground, silhouetted against the sunset. Then it dropped over ... and I resumed my journey, thinking.

CARRICK GLEN

Here there is quiet; quiet to think, quiet to read, quiet to listen, quiet to do nothing but lie still in the gra.s.s and vegetate. The water falls (to me there is no music more beautiful); a wayfarer pa.s.ses now and again along the road on his way into Carrick; the sea-savour is in my nostrils; the clouds sail northward, white and luminous, far up in the sky; their shadows checker the hills. If the Blue Bird is to be found this side of heaven, surely it must be here!

[Ill.u.s.tration: A WAYFARER.]

A SHUILER

I was talking to a stonebreaker on the road between Carrick and Glen when a shuiler pa.s.sed, walking very fast. "A supple lad, that," says the stonebreaker. "The top o' the road's no ditch-shough to him. Look at him--he's lucky far down the hill already." He dropped his hammer, and burst into a fit of laughing. "He's as many feet as a cat!" says he.

TURKEYS IN THE TREES

One of the gruesomest sights I ever saw in my life--turkeys roosting among the branches of the trees at a house above Lochros. You would think they were birds with evil spirits in them, they kept so quiet in the half-darkness, and looked so solemn.

A PARTY OF TINKERS

A party of tinkers on the high road--man, wife, children, a.s.s and cart. A poor, back-gone lot they are surely. The man trails behind carrying one of the children in a bag over his back. The woman pushes on in front, smiling broadly out of her fat, drunken face. "Oh, G.o.d love ye for a gentleman," she whines in an up-country _barrog_ which proclaims her a stranger to the place. "Give us the lucky hand, gentleman, and may the Golden Doors never be shut against ye. Spare a decent poor body a copper, and I'll say seven 'Hail Mary's' and seven 'Glory be to the Father's' for ye every night for a week. Give us the lucky hand, gentleman." I throw her a penny, not so much out of charity as to get rid of her, and the cavalcade moves on. Over the hill I hear her voice raised in splendid imprecation on the husband. Such coloured speech one only hears from peasants and strolling folk, who are in touch with the elemental things--the wonders and beauties and cruelties of life.

TEELIN, BUNGLa.s.s, AND SLIEVE LEAGUE

It is a lovely summer's day, warm and fragrant and sunny. We have just come from Ma.s.s at Carrick chapel, and are following the road that leads south by the harbour up to Teelin village. Numbers of people are on the road with us--mostly women and girls, for the men have remained behind to smoke and to talk over the week's happenings in the different ends of the parish. The groups go in ages--the old women with the old women, the marriageable girls with the marriageable girls, the younger girls with the girls of their own age. There is a crowd of little boys, too--active as goats, dressed in corduroys or homespuns, and discussing in Irish what they will do with themselves in the afternoon. Some will go bathing in the harbour, others will go up to the warren by Loch O'Mulligan to hunt rabbits, others will remain in the village to watch the men and bigger boys play at skittles in a cleared s.p.a.ce by the high road. I pick up with a quiet-eyed lad--the makings of a priest or a scholar, by his look--and in a short time I am friends with the crowd. If one could see me behind I must look like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, so many children have I following alongside me and at my heels. They come to know by my talk that I am interested in Irish--an enthusiast, in fact--and they all want to tell me at once about the Feis at Teelin, and about the great prizes that were offered, and how one out of their own school, a little fellow of eight years, won first prize for the best telling of a wonder-tale in the vernacular. The quiet-eyed lad asks me would I like to see Bungla.s.s and the great view to be had of Slieve League from the cliff-head. I tell him that I am going there, and in an instant the crowd is running out in front of us, shouting and throwing their caps in the air--delighted, I suppose, at the prospect of a scramble for coppers on the gra.s.s when we get to the end of our journey. For boys are boys the world over, let the propagandists carp as they will! and when I was young myself I would wrestle a ghost under a bed for a halfpenny--so my grandmother used to tell me, and she was a very wise and observant woman. We have come to Teelin village--a clean, whitewashed little place on a hill, built "all to one side like Clogher"--and from there we strike up to the right by a sort of rocky, gra.s.s-covered loaning which leads to the cliffs. We pa.s.s numbers of houses on the way, each with a group of gaily-dressed peasants sunning themselves at the door. The ascent is gradual at first, but as we go on it gets steeper, and after a while's climbing we begin to feel the sense of elevation and detachment. The air is delightfully warm, and the fragrance of sea and bracken and ling is in our hearts. In time we reach Carrigan Head, with its martello tower, seven hundred feet odd over the Atlantic. Southwards the blue waters of Donegal Bay spread themselves, with just the slightest ripple on their surface, glinting in the warm sunlight. In the distance the heights of Nephin Beag and Croagh Patrick in Mayo are faintly discernible, and westwards the illimitable ocean stretches to the void. From Carrigan Head we follow a rough mountain trail, and in a short time reach Loch O'Mulligan, a lonely freshwater tarn, lying under the shadow of Slieve League. Back of the loch a gra.s.sy hill rises. We climb this, the younger boys leading about fifty yards in front, jumping along the short gra.s.s and over the stones like goats. Arrived at a point called in Irish _Amharc Mor_, or "Great View," a scene of extraordinary beauty bursts on us. We are standing on Scregeighter, the highest of the cliffs of Bungla.s.s. A thousand and twenty-four feet below us, in a sheer drop, the blue waters of Bungla.s.s advance and recede--blue as a sapphire, shading into emerald and white where they break on the spit of gra.s.s-covered rock rising like a _sceilg-draoidheachta_, or "horn of wizardy," out of the narrow bay. Right opposite us is Slieve League, its carn a thousand feet higher than the point on which we stand. In the precipitous rock-face, half-way up, is a scarped streak called _Nead an Iolair_, or the Eagle's Nest. The colouring is wonderfully rich and varied--black, grey, violet, brown, red, green--due, one would think, to the complex stratification and to the stains oozing from the soft ores, clays, and mosses impinging between the layers. We step back from the cliff-edge, and sit down on a flat slab of stone, the better to enjoy the view, and the boys spread themselves out in various att.i.tudes over the short gra.s.s before and behind us. They are conversing among themselves in Irish, speaking very rapidly, and with an intonation that is as un-English as it can possibly be. The thickened l's and thrilled r's are especially noticeable. To hear these children speak Irish the way they do makes one feel that the language of Niall Naoi Giallach is not dead yet, and has, indeed, no signs of dying.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HORN.]

One could spend a day in this place sunning oneself on the cliff-head, or loafing about on the gra.s.s, enjoying the panorama of mountain and sea and sky spread in such magnificence on all sides. But we have promised to be back in Carrick for lunch, and already the best part of the forenoon is gone. "_Cad a-chlog e anois?_" I ask one of the boys. He looks into the sky, calculates for a while, and answers: "_Ta se suas le h-aon anois. Feach an ghrian_." (It is upwards of one o'clock now. Look at the sun.) In a remote, open country like this the children are wonderfully astute, and well up in the science of natural things. Coming up the hill I had noticed a number of strange birds, and when I asked the crowd the names of them in Irish they told me without once having to stop to think. We are ready to go now, but before setting out we decide on having a scramble. My friend, R. M., takes a sixpence from his pocket, puts it edge down on the turf, and digs it in with his heel, covering it up so that no sign of it is visible. He then brings the boys back over the gra.s.s about a hundred yards, handicapping them according to age and size. One boy, the youngest, has boots on, and he is put in front. At a given signal--the dropping of a handkerchief--the race is started, and in the winking of an eye the crowd is mixed up on the gra.s.s, one boy's head here, another's heels there, over the spot where the sixpence is hidden. Five minutes and more does the scramble last, the boys pushing and shoving for all they are worth, and screaming at the top of their voices. Then the lad who reached the spot first crawls out from underneath the struggling ma.s.s, puffing and blowing, his hair dishevelled, the coat off him, and the sixpence in his hand!

We have got back to Carrick, an hour late for lunch, and with the appet.i.tes of giants. We met many people on the road as we returned, all remarkably well-dressed--young men in the blue serge favoured by sailors, and girls in white; a clerical student, home on holidays from Maynooth, discussing the clauses of Mr. Birrell's latest Land Bill with a group of elderly folk; big hulking fellows with bronzed faces, in a uniform that I hadn't seen before, but which a local man told me was that of the Congested Districts Board; and pinafored children. One young man we noticed sitting on a rock over the water with his boots off, washing his feet, and several boys sailing miniature boats made out of the leaves of flaggers.

THE SHOOTING STAR

I was out the other evening on the sh.o.r.e to the northward of Lochros, watching the men taking in the turf from the banks where it had been footed and dried. The wind was quiet, and there was a great stir of traffic on the road--men with creels, horses and carts, a.s.ses and children driving them. An old woman (a respectable beggar by her look) came by, and we started to talk. We were talking of various things--the beauty of the evening, the plentifulness of the turf harvest, the sorrows of the poor, and such like--when she stopped suddenly, and looked up into the sky. She gripped my arm. "Look, look," she said, "a shooting star!" She blessed herself. There was a trail of silver light in the air--a luminous moment--then darkness. "That's a soul going up out of purgatory," she said.

SUNDAY ON THE ROAD BETWEEN CARRICK AND GLENGESH

Sunday on the road between Carrick and Glengesh. It is drawing near sunset. We pa.s.s a group of country boys playing skittles in the middle of the road--quite a crowd of them, big, dark fellows, of all ages between twenty and thirty-five. Some are lolling on the ditch behind, and one has a flute. Farther on we come on a string of boys and girls paired off in twos with their arms about each other's waists, like a procession on Bride's Sunday. The front pair are somewhat ill-matched. The man is old and awkward in his walk, yet cavalierly withal; the girl is young and pretty, with a charming white laundered dress and flowers in her hair. As our car pa.s.ses they wave their hands to us as a sign that they are enjoying the fun quite as much as we are. We are rising gradually towards the Pa.s.s. Below us the road ribbons away through miles of bog to Slieve League. There is a delightful warmth and quietness in the air. The smoke of the cabin chimneys, as far as one can see, rises up in straight grey lines, "pillaring the skies of G.o.d." The whole landscape is suffused with colour--browns and ambers and blues--melting into infinity.

A ROANY BUSH

"Do you see that bush over there?" said an old man to me one day on the road near Leckconnell--a poor village half-way between Ardara and Gull Island. "It's what they call a roany bush. Well, it's green now, but in a month's time it'll be as red as a fox's diddy, and you wouldn't know it for berries growing all over it."

AUGUST EVENING

August evening, moonrise. A drift of ponies on the road. I heard the neighing of them half an hour ago as I came down the glen, and now I can see them, a red, ragged cavalcade, and a cloud of dust about their heels. There are some fourteen ponies in the drift, and three young fellows with long whips are driving them. They give me the time of day as I pa.s.s. One of them turns back and shouts after me: "Would you happen to have a match on you, gaffer?" He is a stout-built lad, with a red face, and a mat of black hair falling over his eyes. I feel in my pocket for a box, and give him share of what I have. He thanks me, and I pa.s.s on. The air is damp and fragrant, and wisps of fog lie along the ditches and in the hollow places under the hills. The newly-risen moon touches them with wonder and colour.

NEAR INVER

A yellow day in harvest. A young girl with a piece of drawn-thread work in her lap, sunning herself in the under wisp of her father's thatch. I come on her suddenly round a bend in the road. She is taken by surprise (almost as completely as _I_ am) ... draws her legs in, settles her clothing, half smiles, then hangs her head, blushing with all the _pudor_ of abashed femininity. I pa.s.s on.