we have never met julius c?sar, or the duke of wellington, or general booth, but we are convinced that not one of the three could boast a manner as martial or a soul as dauntless as the sporting curate on a holiday. we came to this conclusion slowly at the leenane table d’h?te, and there also the companion idea occurred to us that in biting ferocity and headlong violence of behaviour the extra ginger-ale of temperance far exceeds the brandy-and-soda. opposite to us sat three of them—not brandies-and-sodas—curates; and our glasses were filled with two of them—not curates—bottles of ginger-ale; and so the manners and customs of both classes were, as it{180} were, forced upon us conjointly. if our reflections appear unreliable we are not prepared to defend them; they were formed through the blinding mist of tears that followed each fiery sip of the ginger-ale.
the curates, as we have said, were three in number; and comprised three of the leading types of their class—the dark and heavily moustached, the red-whiskered and pasty, the clean-shaven and athletic. the two former sat together and roystered on a pint of claret, which they warmed in the palms of their hands, and smacked their lips over with a reckless jollity and dark allusions to swashbuckling days at cambridge. the third sat apart from his cloth, among a group of oxford undergraduates, with whom he interchanged reminiscences, and from the elevation of his three terms seniority regaled them with tales of hair-breadth escapes from proctors and bulldogs, and, in especial, of the enormities of one greene, of pembroke, in connection with a breakfast given by a man who had been sent “a big cake from home.” the story was long, and profusely decked with terms of the most{181} esoteric undergraduate slang, but we gathered that greene, having become what the curate leniently termed “a little on,” had cast the still uncut cake out of the window at a policeman, upon the spike of whose helmet it became impaled. we have since heard with real regret that the oxford police do not wear spikes on their helmets; but we adhere to the main facts of the story, and when we tell it ourselves we call the policeman a volunteer. the robust voice of the narrator clove its way into the loud current of the fishing talk, the table paused over its gooseberry pie and custard to laugh, and even the cambridge curates were compelled to a compassionate smile. they were a good deal older than any of the oxford clan, and it seemed to us that the superior modernity and flavour of the oxford stories had a depressing effect upon them. they finished their claret unostentatiously, and talked to each other in lowered tones about pocket cameras and safety bicycles.
it was strange to feel at this hotel—as, indeed, at all{182} the others we stayed at—that we were almost the only representative of our country, and, casting our minds back through the maze of english faces and the babel of english voices that had been the accompaniment of our meals for the last fortnight, two painful conclusions were forced on us—first, that the irish people have no money to tour with; second, that it was saxon influence and support alone that evoluted the connemara hotels from a primitive feather-bed and chicken status alluded to in an earlier article. not, indeed, that chickens are things of the past. daily through connemara rises the cry of myriad hens, bereft of their infant broods, and in every hotel larder “wretches hang that fishermen may dine.” chickens and small brown mutton, mutton and small brown chickens—these, with salmon and trout of a curdy freshness that london wats not of, were the leit-motif of every hotel table d’h?te, and so uniformly excellent were they that we asked for nothing more.
the whole of the next day was wet, utterly and solidly wet. the great mountains of mayo on the{183} other side of the bay looked like elephants swathed in white muslin, and the sea that came lashing up the embankment in front of the hotel was thick and muddy, and altogether ugly to look at. we sat dismally in the ladies’ drawing-room, with one resentful eye on the rain, and the other fixed in still deeper resentment on the wholly intolerable man who had taken up his position in front of the fire with a book the night before, and had, apparently, never stirred since. from the smoking-room on the other side of the hall came drearily at intervals the twanglings of a banjo; my second cousin read a hotel copy of “the pilgrim’s progress”; the general misery was complete, and i found myself almost mechanically working a heavy shower into a sketch that had been made on a fine day.
towards evening we began to feel homicidal and dangerous, and putting on our mackintoshes started for a walk with a determination that found a savage delight in getting its feet wet. no incident marked that walk, unless the varying depths of puddles and{184} the strenuous clinging to an umbrella are incidents, but for all that we returned tranquillised and self-satisfied, and were further soothed by a cloudy vision caught, through the french window of the smoking-room, of blazers and white flannelled legs bestowed about the room in various attitudes of supine discontent. before we sighted the window we had heard the melancholy metallic hiccupping of the banjo, but just as we passed by it ceased, and a furtive glance revealed the athletic curate, prone on a sofa, with his banjo propped upon the brilliant striped scarf that intervened between the clerical black serge coat and the uncanonical flannels.
“now the hand trails upon the viol string
that sobs, and the brown faces cease to sing,
sad with the whole of pleasure. whither stray
their eyes now, from whose lips the slim pipes creep
and leave them pouting——”
misquoted my cousin, who has a slipshod acquaintance with rossetti.
“i should think they strayed towards the oughte{185}rard umbrella,” i suggested, as we furled the tent of evil-smelling gingham in the hall. “since the stuff has come away from two of the spikes it has got the dissipated charwoman look that is so attractive.”
when we went to bed that night the rain was still dropping heavily from the eave-shoots, and, in the depressingly early waking that follows an early going to bed, it was the first sound that i recognised. the hotel was silent when we came down, and the coffee-room redolent of vanished breakfasts; the fishermen had evidently betaken themselves to their trade in an access of despair. the waiter was reserved on the subject of the weather; he neither blessed nor cursed, but hoped, with offensive cheerfulness, that it would improve, and we knew in our hearts that he was certain it would not. we watched him enviously as he came in and out with plates, and arranged long battalions of forks on a side table. what was the weather to him, with his house-shoes and evening clothes and absolute certainty of what he had to do next from now till bed-time? we would thankfully{186} have gone into the kitchen and proffered our services to the cook, or even to the boots, but instead of that we had to wander to the abhorred ladies’ drawing-room, and there to mourn the fallacy of the statement that satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.
it did clear up in the afternoon, grudgingly and gloomily, but still conscientiously, and we ordered out sibbie, with a view to seeing how much of the country was left above water. we drove along the westport road till we had passed the last long bend of the killaries, and looking across a wooded valley saw the rush of water and jumble of foam above the mouth of the erriff river that marked the chosen resort of the fishermen. we got a man to hold sibbie for a few minutes while we went down and stood on the slender fishing bridge, and looked at a solitary angler throwing his fly with the usual scientific grace, and with the usual total absence of result, till we felt it would be kinder to go away. the midges were not perhaps as giant or as insatiable as the salruck variety,{187} but we heard that night at dinner that they had been enough to drive the whole body of the hotel fishermen back from the river in the morning; and as we looked down the double row of faces, all apparently in the first stage of convalescence after small-pox, we gathered some idea of what their sufferings must have been. one youth, whose midge-bites had reached the point at which they might almost be termed confluent, told us that he had lain down on the ground in a kind of frenzy and covered himself with his mackintosh, and that the midges had crawled in through the buttonholes and devoured him as he lay.
we continued our drive towards westport, with the river on one side, and on the other great green mountains speckled with thousands of sheep; the road was steep, but we persevered up its long shining grey slope, without any definite intention except that of seeing what was on the other side. we found out rather sooner than we had expected. there appeared suddenly over the top of the hill, where the road bent its back against the sky, the capering figures of three{188} young horses, and at that sight we turned sibbie sharp round and fled down the hill. the young horses came galloping down after us with manes and tails flying, and visions of another runaway, with the final trampling of our fallen bodies by our pursuers, made us “nourish” sibbie with the whip in a way that was scarcely necessary. she extended her long legs at a gallop; the trap swung from side to side; it seemed as if the horses gained nothing on us; and as the trees of astleagh lodge came nearer and nearer there flashed upon us in an instant the spectacle of a close finish at the hotel door, and the thought of the godsend that it would be to the smoking-room. but the smoking-room was fated not to behold it. as suddenly as the pursuit had begun so did it end. the three colts whirled up a bohireen towards a farmhouse, and we then became aware of a small girl running after them down the road with a stick in her hand. it was only the connemara version of mary calling the cattle home, written in rather faster time than is usual, and with a running accom{189}paniment in two flats, supplied by ourselves. sibbie was not thoroughly reassured even when we reached the hotel, and we drove past it along the road seaward till we reached a point from which we saw the whole of the long exquisite fiord of the killaries, and beyond the furthest of its dark, over-lapping points the thin silver line of the open sea.
“eight o’clock breakfast, please, and call us sharp at seven,” were our last words on our last night at leenane. the final day of our tour had come, and two things remained imperatively for us to do. we had to see delphi, and we had to accomplish the twenty irish miles that lay between sibbie and her home in oughterard. energy and an early start were necessary, and eight o’clock struck as we walked into the breakfast-room, expecting to find our twin breakfast-cups and plates stationed in lonely fellowship at one end of a long desert of tablecloth. what we did find was a gobbling, haranguing crowd of fishermen, full of a daily, accustomed energy that made ours seem a very forced and exotic growth.{190} the waiter, who at 9.30 yesterday morning had been servilely attentive, now regarded us with a coldly distraught eye. clearly he was of the opinion of the indignant housemaid who declared that “there never was a rale lady that was out of her bed before nine in the morning.” breakfast after breakfast came in, but not for us. we saw with anguish the athletic curate make a clean sweep of the gooseberry jam, and the last of the hot cakes had disappeared before our coffee and chops were vouchsafed to us. consequently it was a good deal later than we wanted it to be when we went down to the pier and got into the boat that was to take us across to delphi.
the weather was grey and rough, and we asked the boatmen their opinion of it as we crept along in the shelter of the western shore of the bay, as close as possible to the seaweedy points of rock, the chosen playgrounds of the seals.
“there’s not much wind, but what there is is very high,” said the stroke. “faith, it’s hardly we’ll get{191}
over to delphi with the surges that’ll be in it when we’ll be out in the big wather.”
“ah, na boclish!” struck in the bow, who, judging by his glowing complexion, was of the sanguine temperament. “i’d say it’ll turn up a grand day yet. what signifies the surges that’ll be in it?”
we began to think it signified a good deal when, after a pull of nearly two miles, we forsook the shore, and, turning out into the open water, met the full and allied strength of the wind and tide. the “surges” were quite as large as any that we want to see, and the progress of the boat was like a succession of knight’s moves at chess, two strokes towards the delphi shore, and one stroke to bring her head to the advancing “surge.” naturally, we took a long time to get across, and when we got there we had still a walk of two miles before us; only that it really did “turn up a grand day” our hearts would have failed us, as we felt the hours slipping from us, and remembered the journey that was before us in the afternoon.
delphi was called so by some genius who saw in its{194} lake and overhanging mountains a resemblance to the home of the oracle. the boatmen were not able to remember when the little lake had been converted and rebaptized, or who the missionary had been, but rumour pointed to a bishop and a dean of the irish church, who, within the recollection of old inhabitants, had been the first to impart civilisation to the killaries; who had built the charming fishing-lodge at the head of the lake, and had fished its waters, attired in poke bonnets and bottle-green veils. we had not been more than five minutes there before we understood the rationale of the bonnets and veils, and wished that we had been similarly protected from the blood-thirsty midges, that made our wanderings by the lake and our lunch by the river a time of torture.
but the stings of the midges have died away, and the recollection of the glassy curve of the river, the mirrored wild flowers at its brim, the classical grove of pines and slender white birches, and the luminous purple reflection of the mountain lying deep in the{195} stream beneath them are the things that come into our minds when we think of our last day in connemara. as a companion picture, belonging, too, to that day, i seem still to see my cousin’s sailor hat flying from her head like a rocketing pheasant, in a gust that caught us as we crossed the killaries on our return journey. it crested the “surges” gallantly for a few minutes, but finally filled and sank with all hands, that is to say, two most cherished hatpins, before we could reach it.
that moment was the beginning of the end. one of the most important members of the expedition had left it, and the general dissolution was at hand. the regret with which we paid our hotel bill was not wholly mercenary, but was blended with the finer pathos of farewell. the cup of bovril of which we partook when the first five miles of our journey had been accomplished was “strong as first love, and wild with all regret”; it was the last of a staunch and long-enduring little pot, and economy required that no scraping of it should remain at the final unpacking{196} of the hamper. gingerbread biscuits that had been hoarded like gold pieces were flung en masse to a passing tramp before even the preliminary blessing had flowed from her lips; and the last of the seedcake was forced into sibbie’s reluctant mouth. the frugalities of a fortnight were dissipated in one hour of joyless, obligatory debauch.
it was eight o’clock that evening when, after five or six hours’ driving, we came down the long slope of the moor outside oughterard. the mountains of connemara were all behind us, in the pale distant guise in which we had first known them, and the only things that remained to us of our wanderings in their valleys were the governess-cart and the tired, but still dauntless, sibbie. even these would not be ours much longer; the door of murphy’s hotel would soon witness our final separation, and to-morrow we should be, like any other tourists, swinging into galway on the mail-car.
“well, at all events,” said my cousin, as we said these things to each other, “we have converted sibbie.{197}
i have noticed several little things about her lately that make me sure she regards us with a stern affection. i daresay,” she went on, “that she will detest going back to her old life and surroundings.”
my second cousin looked pensively at sibbie as she said this, and whipped up through the streets of oughterard with a kind of melancholy flourish. nothing was further from her expectations or from mine than the eel-like dive which, just as the sympathetic reflection was uttered, sibbie made into the archway leading to mr. johnny flanigan’s stable; and we have ever since regretted that, owing to our both having fallen on to the floor of the governess-cart, mr. flanigan could not have credited the brilliant curve with which we entered his yard to our coachmanship. in fact, what he said was:
“well, now, i’m afther waiting these two hours out in the sthreet the way i’d be before her to ketch her when she’d do that, and, may the divil admire me,{200} but she picked the minnit i was back in the house for a coal to light me pipe, and she have me bet afther all. but ye needn’t say a word, when she hasn’t the two o’ ye desthroyed!”
