The Charm Of Ireland Part 8

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. LAWRENCE'S GATE, DROGHEDA]

"Very good, sir," he said. "I'm the lad can take ye. Do you and your lady get right up."

"What is the fare?" I asked.

"One pound, sir."

"The legal fare is just half that," I pointed out.

"It may be," he agreed pleasantly.

We left him negligently flicking his horse with his whip, and presently we met a policeman, and told him we wanted to drive out to Monasterboice, and while we didn't mind being robbed, we didn't care to be looted, and we asked his advice. He scratched his head dubiously.

"Ye see it is like this, sir," he said; "there is no one to enforce the regulations, so the jarvies just charge what they please. I'm free to admit they have no conscience. There is one, though, who is fairly honest," and he directed us to his house. "Tell him you come from me, and he'll treat you well."

But that transaction was never closed. We found the house--grimy, dark, dirt-floored, trash-littered--with the man's wife and a.s.sorted children within; but the woman told us that "himself" had driven out into the country and would not be back till evening. And just then it began to drizzle most dismally.

"This is no day for the trip, anyway," I said. "Suppose we wait till we get to Belfast, and run down from there."

So it was agreed, and we made our way back to the station, through a sea of sticky mud, and presently took train again for Ireland's ancient capital.

We were ready to leave Dublin for a swing clear around the coast of Ireland, and late that afternoon, having sifted our luggage to the minimum and armed ourselves cap-a-pie against every vicissitude of weather, we bade our friends at the hotel good-bye (not forgetting the bell-boy), drove to the station, and got aboard a train, which presently rolled away southwards. It was very full--the third-cla.s.s crowded with soldiers in khaki bound for the camp on the Curragh of Kildare, and our own compartment jammed with a variety of people.

In one corner, a white-haired priest mumbled his breviary and watched the crowd with absent eyes, while across from him a loud-voiced woman, evidently, from her big hat and cheap finery, just home from America, was trying to overawe the friends who had gone to Dublin to meet her by an exhibition of sham gentility. In the seat with us was a plump and comfortable woman of middle age, with whom we soon got into talk about everything from children to Home Rule.

What she had to say about Home Rule was interesting. Her home was somewhere down in the Vale of Tipperary, and I judged from her appearance that she was the wife of a well-to-do farmer. She was most emphatically not a Nationalist.

"It isn't them who own land, or who are buyin' a little farm under the purchase act that want Home Rule," she said. "No, no; them ones would be glad to let well enough alone. 'Tis the labourers, the farm-hands, the ditch-diggers, and such-like people, who have nothin' to lose, that shout the loudest for it. They would like a bit of land themselves, and they fancy that under Home Rule they'll be gettin' it; but where is it to come from, I'd like to know, unless off of them that has it now; and who would be trustin' the likes of them to pay for it? Ah, 'tis foolish to think of! Besides, if everybody owned land, where would we be gettin'

labour to work it? No, no; 'tis time to stop, I say, and there be many who think like me."

"What wages does a labourer make?" I asked.

"From ten to twelve shillin's a week."

"All the year round?"

"There's no work in winter, so how can one be payin' wages then?"

"But how can they live on that?"

"They can't live on it," she said fiercely; "many of them ones couldn't live at all, if it wasn't for the money that's sent them from America.

But what can the farmers do? If they pay higher wages, they ruin themselves. Most of them have give up in disgust and turned their land into gra.s.s."

"What do the labourers do then?" I asked.

"They move away some'rs else--to America if they can."

"Perhaps Home Rule will make things better," I suggested.

"How, I'd like to know? By raisin' taxes? That same is the first thing will happen! No, no; the solid men hereabouts don't want Home Rule--they're afraid of it; but they know well enough they must keep their tongues in their mouths, except with each other. The world's goin'

crazy--that's what I think."

Now I look back on it, that conversation seems to me to sum up pretty well the situation in rural Ireland--the small farmer, handicapped by poverty and primitive methods, ground down in the markets of the world, and in turn grinding down the labourers beneath him, or turning his farm into gra.s.s, so that there is no work at all except for a few shepherds.

And I believe it is true that, as a whole, only the upper cla.s.s and the lower cla.s.s of Irishmen really want Home Rule--the upper cla.s.s from motives of patriotism, the lower cla.s.s from hope of betterment; while the middle cla.s.s is either lukewarm or opposed to it at heart. The middle cla.s.s is, of course, always and everywhere, the conservative cla.s.s, the cla.s.s which fears change most and is the last to consent to it; in Ireland, it is composed largely of small farmers, who have dragged themselves a step above the peasantry and who are just finding their feet under the land purchase act, and I think their liveliest fear is that a Home Rule Parliament will somehow compel them to pay living wages to their labourers. I can only say that I hope it will!

Outside, meanwhile, rural Ireland was unfolding itself under our eyes, varied, beautiful--and sad. The first part of it we had already traversed on our excursion to Clondalkin; beyond that village, the road emerged from the hills encircling Dublin, and soon we could see their beautiful rounded ma.s.ses far to the left, forming a charming background to meadows whose greenness no words can describe. Every foot of the ground is historic; for first the train pa.s.ses Celbridge where Swift's "Vanessa" dwelt, and just beyond is Lyons Hill, where Daniel O'Connell shot and killed a Dublin merchant named D'Esterre in a duel a hundred years ago--an affair, it should be added, in which D'Esterre was the aggressor; and presently the line crosses a broad and beautiful undulating down, the Curragh of Kildare, where St. Brigid pastured her flocks, and it was made in this wise:

One time, when Brigid, who was but a poor serving-girl, being the daughter of a bond-woman, was minding her cow, with no place to feed it but the side of the road, the rich man who owned the land for leagues around came by, and saw her and her cow, and a pity for her sprang into his heart.

"How much land would it take to give gra.s.s to the cow?" said he.

"No more than my cloak would cover," said she.

"I will give that," said the rich man.

"Glory be to G.o.d!" said Brigid, and she took off her cloak and laid it on the ground, and she had no sooner done so than it began to grow, until it spread miles and miles on every side.

But just then a silly old woman came by, bad cess to her, and she opened her foolish mouth and she said, "If that cloak keeps on spreading, all Ireland will be free."

And with that the cloak stopped and spread no more; but the rich man was true to his word, and Brigid held the land which it covered during all her lifetime, and it has been a famous grazing-ground ever since, though the creatures are crowded off part of it now by a great military camp.

Beyond the Curragh, the train rumbles over a wide bog, which trembles uneasily beneath it, and the black turf-cuttings stretch away as far as the eye can see; and then the Hill of Allen looms up against the horizon, where the Kings of Leinster dwelt in the old days, and the fields grow greener than ever, but for miles and miles there is not a single house.

And this is the sad part of it; for this fertile land, as rich as any in the world, supports only flocks and herds, instead of the men and women and children who once peopled it. They have all been driven away, by eviction, by famine, by the hard necessity of finding work; for there is no work here except for a few herdsmen, and has not been for half a century. For when the landlords found--or fancied they found--there was more money in grazing than in agriculture, they turned the people out and the sheep and cattle in--and the sheep and cattle are still there.

But the landscape grows ever lovelier and more lovely. Away on either hand, high ranges of hills spring into being, closing in the Golden Vale of Tipperary, and one realises it was a true vision of the place of his birth that Denis McCarthy had when he wrote his lilting verses in praise of it:

Ah, sweet is Tipperary in the springtime of the year, When the hawthorn's whiter than the snow, When the feathered folk a.s.semble and the air is all a-tremble With their singing and their winging to and fro; When queenly Slievenamon puts her verdant vesture on And smiles to hear the news the breezes bring; When the sun begins to glance on the rivulets that dance-- Ah, sweet is Tipperary in the spring!

Slievenamon is not in sight from the train--we shall see it to-morrow from the Rock of Cashel; but just ahead is a rugged hill with a singular, half-moon depression at the summit, for all the world as though some one had taken a great bite out of it--and that is precisely what happened, for once upon a time the Prince of Darkness pa.s.sed that way, and when he came to the hill, being pressed with hunger, he took a bite out of the top of it; but it was not to his taste, so he spat it out again, and it fell some miles away across the valley, where it lies to this day, and is called the Rock of Cashel, while the hill is known as the Devil's Bit.

And then we came to Thurles--and to earth.

Now Thurles--the word is p.r.o.nounced in two syllables, as though it were spelled Thurless--is a small town and has only two inns. We knew nothing of either, so we asked the advice of a bluff, farmer-looking man in our compartment, who was native to the place. He declined, at first, to express an opinion, saying it would ill become him to exalt one inn at the expense of the other, since the keepers of both were friends of his; but after some moments of cogitation, he said that he would recommend one of them, since it was kept by a poor widow woman. I confess this did not seem to me a convincing reason for going there; but our new-found friend took charge of us, and, having seen us safely to the platform, called loudly for "Jimmy," and an old man presently shambled forward, to whose care, with many wishes for a pleasant journey, we were committed.

The old man proved to be the driver of a very ramshackle omnibus, in which we were presently rumbling along a wide and dreary street. The hotel, when we got to it, proved bare and cheerless, with every corner crowded with cots. The landlady explained that the great horse-fair opened in a day or two, and that she was preparing for the crowds which always attended it; but finally she found a room for us away up in the attic, and left us alone with a candle. The weather had turned very cold, and we were tired and uncomfortable, and even our electric torch could not make the room look otherwise than dingy; and I think, for a moment, we regretted that we had come to Ireland--and then, presto!

change. . . .

For there came a knock at the door, and a soft-voiced maid entered with towels and hot water, and asked if there wasn't something else she could do for us; and then another came, to see if there was anything _she_ could do, and between them they lapped us in such a warmth of Irish welcome that we were soon aglow. I left them blarneying Betty and went down to the shining little bar, where I smoked a pipe in company with two or three habitues and the barmaid, and had a most improving talk about the state of the country. They were as hungry to hear about America as I was to hear about Ireland, and it was very late before I mounted the stairs again.

All through the night, we were awakened at intervals by the tramping and neighing of the horses arriving for the fair.

CHAPTER VII