Mearing Stones Part 7

ALL SUBTLE, SECRET THINGS

All subtle, secret things--the smell of bees, twilight on water, a woman's presence, the humming of a lime-tree in full leaf, a bracken stalk cut through to show the "eagle" in it--all speak to me as to an intimate. I know and feel them all.

A MADMAN

I pa.s.sed an old fellow to-day between Ardara and Narin, doubled up in the ditch with his chin on his knees, and staring at me out of two red eyes that burned in his head like candles.

"Who's that old fellow?" I asked of a stonebreaker, a perch further down the road.

"Oh, never heed him," says he--"he's mad. This is the sixth. There's a full moon the-night, and he ever goes off at the full o' the moon. Was he coughing at you? G.o.d, you'd think he was giving his last 'keeks,'

to hear him sometimes!"

LAGUNA

Under Crockuna; a thousand feet up. Interminable red bog. A cl.u.s.ter of hovels on the tableland; one set this way, another that, huddling together for company sake, it seems, in this abomination of desolation. A drift of young children play about on a green cleared s.p.a.ce between the holdings. (In Donegal one sees young children everywhere.) They run off like wild-cats at our approach, screaming loudly and chattering in Irish as they run. A rick of turf, thatched with winter-stales; a goat tethered; a flock of geese; tufts of dyed wool--red and green and indigo--spread on stones to dry; the clack of a loom from the house nearest us; a dog working sheep beyond.

NEAR LETTERKENNY

A sheepdog with a flock of geese (a most unusual charge, I'm sure) halted by a bridge on their way to market. The owner squats smoking under the parapet--a darkavis'd man, with the slouch hat, slow eye, and wide, mobile mouth of Donegal. I greet him, and pa.s.s on.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CLACHAN OF HOUSES.]

SHAN MAC ANANTY

Up Glengesh. The hills of the Pa.s.s close in darkly on either side of me. The brown road rises between them in devious loops and twists to the sky beyond. There is the smell of bog-myrtle and ling in the air, and the sound of running water. The silence is awful. I am going along quiet and easy-like, with hardly a thought in my head, when near a sodded shelter, almost hidden from view in a cl.u.s.ter of fuchsia bushes, I come on a little lad of about three years of age. He can't be older, I fancy, he is so small. He runs out in front of me, scared somewhat at my approach, as quaint a figure as ever I looked at. I shout at him and he stops, pulling the hat which he wears--and it is big enough to be his father's--over his face, and laughing shyly at me out of one corner of it. His hands are wet, I notice, a blae-red colour, and sticking with gra.s.s--as if he had been "feeling" for minnows in the stream which runs alongside the road. He has a pair of homespun jumpers on, very thick, and dyed a crude indigo colour, a shirt and vest, and his legs are bare and wet up to the knees. I ask him in English "where he comes from," "who is his father," "who is his mother," "where he lives?" He doesn't answer, only pulls the hat deeper over his head, and laughs into it. I put the question to him then in Irish..... The words were hardly out of my mouth when he gave a leap in the air. I felt as if something had struck me in the face--something soft and smothering, like a bag of feathers--and I was momentarily blinded. When I looked again who should I see but Shan Mac Ananty, my _leaprachan_ friend from Scrabo in Down, running out in front of me, in a whirl of dust, it seemed--a white, blinding cloud--giving buck-jumps in the air, and dancing and capering about in the most outlandish fashion possible.

"So it's you, Shan?" I said, when I had recovered my breath. I wasn't a bit afraid, only winded.

"Ay," says he. "I didn't know you at first. The English is strange to me." Then with a quaint grimace: "What are _you_ doing up here?"

"And what are you doing up here yourself, Shan?" says I. "I thought Scrabo was your playground."

"You're right, son," says he. "The old fort _is_ my playground, but the smoke--the smoke from the mill chimneys--chases me away at times, and I come up here for an airing. And, anyway, you mustn't forget that I'm king of the fairies of Leath-Chuinn," says he.

"And so you are," says I. "I clean forgot that. And do you be in Donegal often?" I asked.

"Once in a spell," says he. "I travel the townlands in turn from Uisneach to Malin," says he, "and it takes me a year and a day to do the round. I saw you at Scrabo in June last," says he, "but you didn't see me."

"When was that, Shan?" says I, thinking.

"On the night of the twenty-third," says he. "There wasn't a fire lighting as far as I could see; and I could see from Divis to the Horns of Boirche, and from that over to Vannin."

[Ill.u.s.tration: A GAP BETWEEN THE HILLS.]

A shadow darkened his queer little face. "Ah," says he, "they're changed times. I was an old man when Setanta got his hero-name,(3) and look at me now," says he, "clean past my time. No one knows me, barring yourself there. No one can talk to me; and at Scrabo it's worse than here. They're all planters there," says he, "all strange, dour folk, long in the jaw and seldom-spoken, and with no heart in the old customs. Never a John's-Fire lighted, never a dance danced, never a blessing said, never a ... ."

(3) Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, a contemporary of Conchubhair MacNea.s.sa, who was--so tradition has it--born on the same night as Christ.

He stopped, and I turned to answer ... . but Shan was gone! Nothing in sight for miles--nothing living--only a magpie walking the road, and a _toit_ of blue smoke from a cabin away down in the glen.

A POOR CABIN

A poor cabin, built of loose whin rubble; no mortar or limewash; thatch brown and rotting. Dung oozing out of door in pig-crew to north, and lying in wet heaps about causey stones. A brier, heavy with June roses, growing over south gable-end; rare pink bloom, filling the air with fragrance.

THE FLAX-STONE

Outside nearly every house in Donegal--at least in the north-western parts of it--is the _Cloch Lin_, or "Flax-Stone." This is a huge wheel of granite, half a ton or more in weight, revolving on the end of a wooden shaft which itself turns horizontally on an iron spike secured firmly in the ground. The purpose it serves is to "break"

the flax after it has been retted and dried. On the long arm of the shaft tackling is fixed for the horse supplying the motive power--much in the same way as it is in a pug-mill or puddling machine used in the old days by brick-makers. The flax is strewn in swaths under the wheel, which pa.s.ses over it repeatedly, disintegrating the fibre. The scutch-mill, of course, is a more expeditious way of doing the work, but Donegal folk are conservative and stick to the old method--which must be as old, indeed, as the culture of flax itself is in the country.

AFTER SUNSET

I was coming through Ardara wood the other evening just after sunset. There was a delightful smell of wet larch and bracken in the air. The road was dark--indeed, no more than a shadow in the darkness; but a streak of silver light glimmered through from the west side over the mountains and lay on the edge of the wood, and thousands of stars trembled in the branches, touching them with strangeness and beauty. As I approached the village I met an old woman--I knew she was old by her voice--who said to me: "Isn't it a fine evening, that?" "It is," said I. "And look," said she, "at all the stars hung up in the trees!" Farther on I came on a number of women and girls, all laughing and talking through other in the half-darkness. I was out of the wood now and almost into the village, and there was light enough to see that they were carrying water--some with one pail, others with two--from the spring well I pa.s.sed on my way up. This, I believe, is a custom in Ardara.(4) The grown girls of the village go out every evening after dark-fall, if the weather happens to be good. They meet at the well, spend half an hour or so chatting and talking together, and then saunter home again in groups through the darkness, carrying their pails, just as I saw them on this particular evening. When I got to the village the windows were nearly all lit up. The white and white-grey houses looked strange and unearthly in the darkness. The doors were open, and one could see a dark figure here and there out taking the air. Over the roofs the stars shone and the constellations swung in their courses--the Dog's Tail, the Dragon, the Plough, the Rule, and the Tailor's Three Leaps; and although there was no moon one could see the smoke from the chimneys wavering up into the sky in thin green lines. The fragrance of peat hung heavily on the senses. There wasn't a sound--only a confused murmur of voices, like the wind among aspen-trees, and the faint singing of a fiddle from a house away at the far end of the street. Even the dogs were quiet. I pa.s.sed through the Diamond, down the long main street next the sh.o.r.e, and like Red Hanrahan of the stories, into "that Celtic twilight, in which heaven and earth so mingle that each seems to have taken upon itself some shadow of the other's beauty."

(4) In fact, a "go of water" is a byword there--"Many a girl met her man in a go of water!"