near the ruins of a house and two beautiful boys came up and sat near us. Old Mourteen asked them why the house was in ruins and who had lived in it.
‘A rich farmer built it a while since,’ they said, ‘but after two years he was driven away by the fairy host.’
The boys came on with us some distance to the north to visit one of the ancient beehive dwellings that is still in perfect preservation. When we crawled in on our hands and knees and stood up in the gloom of the interior, old Mourteen took a freak of earthly humour and began telling what he would have done if he could have come in there when he was a young man and a young girl along with him.
Then he sat down in the middle of the floor and began to recite old Irish poetry with an exquisite purity of intonation that brought tears to my eyes though I understood but little of the meaning.
On our way home he gave me the Catholic theory of the fairies.
When Lucifer saw himself in the glass he thought himself equal with God. Then the Lord threw him out of Heaven, and all the angels that belonged to him. While He was ‘chucking them out’, an archangel asked Him to spare some of them, and those that were falling are in the air still, and have power to wreck ships and to work evil in the world.
From this he wandered off into tedious matters of theology and repeated many long prayers and sermons in Irish that he had heard from the priests.
A little further on we came to a slated house and I asked him who was living in it.
‘A kind of a schoolmistress,’ he said; then his old face puckered with a gleam of pagan malice.
‘Ah, master,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t it be fine to be in there, and to be kissing her?’
A couple of miles from this village we turned aside to look at an old ruined church of the Ceathrar Alainn (The Four Beautiful Persons), and a holy well near it that is famous for cures of blindness and epilepsy.
As we sat near the well, a very old man came up from a cottage near the road and told me how it had become famous.
‘A woman of Sligo had a son who was born blind, and one night she dreamed that she saw an island with a blessed well in it that could cure her son. She told her dream in the morning, and an old man said it was of Aran she was after dreaming.
‘She brought her son down by the coast of Galway, and came out in a curagh, and landed below where you see a bit of a cove.
‘She walked up then to the house of my father – God rest his soul – and she told them what she was looking for. ‘My father said that there was a well like what she had dreamed of, and that he would send a boy along with her to show her the way.
‘ “There’s no need, at all,” said she, “haven’t I seen it all in my dream?”
‘Then she went out with the child and walked up to this well, and she kneeled down and began saying her prayers. Then she put her hand out for the water, and put it on his eyes, and the moment it touched him he called out: “O mother, look at the pretty flowers!” ‘
After that Mourteen described the feats of poteen drinking and fighting that he did in his youth, and went on to talk of Diarmaid, who was the strongest man after Samson, and of one of the beds of Diarmaid and Grainne, which is on the east of the islands. He says that Diarmaid was killed by the druids, who put a burning shirt on him, a fragment of mythology that may connect Diarmaid with the legend of Hercules, if it is not due to the ‘learning’ in some hedge-school master’s ballad.
Then we talked about Inishmaan.
‘You’ll have an old man to talk with you over there,’ he said, ‘and tell you stories of the fairies, but he’s walking about with two sticks under him this ten year. Did ever you hear what it is goes on four legs when it is young, and on two legs after that, and on three legs when it does be old?’
I gave him the answer.
‘Ah, master,’ he said, ‘you’re a cute one, and the blessing of God be on you. Well, I’m on three legs this minute, but the old man beyond is back on four; I don’t know if I’m better than the way he is; he’s got his sight and I’m only an old dark man.’
I am settled at last on Inishmaan in a small cottage with a continual drone of Gaelic coming from the kitchen that opens into my room.
Early this morning the man of the house came over for me with a four-oared curagh – that is, a curagh with four rowers and four oars on either side, as each man uses two – and we set off a little before noon.
It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction to find myself moving away from civilisation in this rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went on the sea.
We had to stop for a moment at a hulk that is anchored in the bay, to make some arrangements for the fish-curing of the middle island, and my crew called out as soon as we were within earshot that they had a man with them who had been in France a month from this day.
When we started again, a small sail was run up in the bow and we set off across the sound with a leaping oscillation that had no resemblance to the heavy movement of a boat.
The sail is only used as an aid, so the men continued to row after it had gone up, and as they occupied the four cross-seats I lay on the canvas at the stern and the frame of slender laths, which bent and quivered as the waves passed under them.
When we set off it was a brilliant morning of April and the green, glittering waves seemed to toss the canoe among themselves, yet as we drew nearer this island a sudden thunderstorm broke out behind the rocks we were approaching and lent a momentary tumult to this still vein of the Atlantic.
We landed at a small pier from which a rude track leads up to the village between small fields and bare sheets of rock like those in Aranmor. The youngest son of my boatman, a boy of about seventeen, who is to be my teacher and guide, was waiting for me at the pier and guided me to his house, while the men settled the curagh and followed slowly with my baggage.
My room is at one end of the cottage, with a boarded floor and ceiling, and two windows opposite each other. Then there is the kitchen with an earth floor and open rafters, and two doors opposite each other opening into the open air, but no windows. Beyond it there are two small rooms of half the width of the kitchen with one window apiece.
The kitchen itself, where I will spend most of my time, is full of beauty and distinction. The red dresses of the women who cluster round the fire on their stools give a glow of almost Eastern richness, and the walls have been toned by the turf-smoke to a soft brown that blends with the grey earth-colour of the floor. Many sorts of fishing-tackle, and the nets and oilskins of the men, are hung upon the walls or among the open rafters; and right overhead, under the thatch, there is a whole cowskin from which they make pampooties.
Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life. The curaghs and spinning-wheels, the tiny wooden barrels that are still much used in the place of earthenware, the home-made cradles, churns and baskets, are all full of individuality, and being made from materials that are common here, yet to some extent peculiar to the island, they seem to exist as a natural link between the people and the world that is about them.
The simplicity and unity of the dress increases in another way the local air of beauty. The
