says she, “don’t be living on here when I am dead,” says she; “it’d be too lonesome.” And now I wouldn’t wish to go again’ my mother, and she dead – dead or alive I wouldn’t go again’ my mother – but I’m after doing all I can, and I can’t get away by any means.’ As I was moving on she heard, or thought she heard, a sound of distant thunder.
‘Ah, your honour,’ she said, ‘do you think it’s thunder we’ll be having? There’s nothing I fear like the thunder. My heart isn’t strong – I do feel it – and I have a lightness in my head, and often when I do be excited with the thunder I do be afeard I might die there alone in the cottage and no one know it. But I do hope that the Lord – bless His holy name! – has something in store for me. I’ve done all I can, and I don’t like going again’ my mother and she dead. And now good evening, your honour, and safe home.’
Intense nervousness is common also with much younger women. I remember one night hearing someone crying out and screaming in the house where I was staying. I went downstairs and found it was a girl who had been taken in from a village a few miles away to help the servants. That afternoon her two younger sisters had come to see her, and now she had been taken with a panic that they had been drowned going home through the bogs, and she was crying and wailing, and saying she must go to look for them. It was not thought fit for her to leave the house alone so late in the evening, so I went with her. As we passed down a steep hill of heather, where the nightjars were clapping their wings in the moonlight, she told me a long story of the way she had been frightened. Then we reached a solitary cottage on the edge of the bog, and as a light was still shining in the window, I knocked at the door and asked if they had seen or heard anything. When they understood our errand three half-dressed generations came out to jeer at us on the doorstep.
‘Ah, Maggie,’ said the old woman, ‘you’re a cute one. You’re the girl likes a walk in the moonlight. Whist your talk of them big lumps of childer, and look at Martin Edward there, who’s not six, and he can go through the bog five times in an hour and not wet his feet.’
My companion was still unconvinced, so we went on. The rushes were shining in the moonlight, and one flake of mist was lying on the river. We looked into one bog-hole, and then into another, where a snipe rose and terrified us. We listened: a cow was chewing heavily in the shadow of a bush, two dogs were barking on the side of a hill and there was a cart far away upon the road. Our teeth began to chatter with the cold of the bog air and the loneliness of the night. I could see that the actual presence of the bog had shown my companion the absurdity of her fears, and in a little while we went home.
The older people in County Wicklow, as in the rest of Ireland, still show a curious affection for the landed classes wherever they have lived for a generation or two upon their property. I remember an old woman, who told me, with tears streaming on her face, how much more lonely the country had become since the ‘quality’ had gone away, and gave me a long story of how she had seen her landlord shutting up his house and leaving his property, and of the way he had died afterwards, when the ‘grievance’ of it broke his heart. The younger people feel differently, and when I was passing this landlord’s house, not long afterwards I found these lines written in pencil on the door-post:
In the days of rack-renting
And land-grabbing so vile
A proud, heartless landlord
Lived here a great while.
When the League it was started,
And the land-grabbing cry,
To the cold North of Ireland
He had for to fly.
A year later the door-post had fallen to pieces, and the inscription with it.
On the Road
❖
One evening after heavy rains I set off to walk to a village at the other side of some hills, part of my way lying along a steep heathery track. The valleys that I passed through were filled with the strange splendour that comes after wet weather in Ireland, and on the tops of the mountains masses of fog were lying in white, even banks. Once or twice I went by a lonely cottage with a smell of earthy turf coming from the chimney, weeds or oats sprouting on the thatch, and a broken cart before the door, with many straggling hens going to roost on the shafts. Near these cottages little bands of half-naked children, filled with the excitement of evening, were running and screaming over the bogs, where the heather was purple already, giving me the strained feeling of regret one has so often in these places when there is rain in the air.
Further on, as I was going up a long hill, an old man with a white, pointed face and heavy beard pulled himself up out of the ditch and joined me. We spoke first about the broken weather, and then he began talking in a mournful voice of the famines and misfortunes that have been in Ireland.
’
There have been three cruel plagues,’ he said, ‘out through the country since I was born in the West. First, there was the big wind in 1839, that tore away the grass and green things from the earth. Then there was the blight that came on the ninth of June in the year 1846. Up to then the potatoes were clean and good; but that morning a mist rose up out of the sea, and you could hear a voice talking near a mile off across the stillness of the earth. It was the same the next day, and the day after, and so on for three days or more; and then you could begin to see the tops of the stalks lying over as if the life was gone out of them. And that was the beginning of the great trouble and famine that destroyed Ireland. Then the people went on, I suppose, in their wickedness and their animosity of one against the other; and the Almighty God sent down the third plague, and that was the sickness called the choler. Then all the people left the town of Sligo – it’s in Sligo I was reared – and you could walk through the streets at the noon of day and not see a person, and you could knock at one door and another door and find no one to answer you. The people were travelling out north and south and east, with the terror that was on them; and the country people were digging ditches across the roads and driving them back where they could, for they had a great dread of the disease.
‘It was the law at that time that if there was sickness on any person in the town of Sligo you should notice it to the Governors, or you’d be put up in the gaol. Well, a man’s wife took sick, and he went and noticed it. They came down then with bands of men they had, and took her away to the sick-house, and he heard nothing more till he heard she was dead, and was to be buried in the morning. At that time there was such fear and hurry and dread on every person, they were burying people they had no hope of, and they with life within them. My man was uneasy a while thinking on that, and then what did he do, but slip down in the darkness of the night and into the dead-house, where they were after putting his wife. There were beyond two score bodies, and he went feeling from one to the other. Then I suppose his wife heard him coming – she wasn’t dead at all – and “Is that Michael?” says she. “It is then,” says he, “and, oh, my poor woman, have you your last gasps in you still?” “I have, Michael,” says she, “and they’re after setting me out here with fifty bodies the way they’ll put me down into my grave at the dawn of day.” “Oh, my poor woman,” says he, “have you the strength left in you to hold on my back?” “Oh, Micky,” says she, “I have surely.” He took her up then on his back, and he carried her out by lanes and tracks till he got to his house. Then he never let on a word about it, and at the end of three days she began to pick up, and in a month’s time she came out and began walking about like yourself or me. And there were many people were afeard to speak to her, for they thought she was after coming back from the grave.’
Soon afterwards we passed into a little village and he turned down a lane and left me. It was
