by George Moore
And there was much more my grandfather used to tell of their adventures in the wilderness, how they came upon some women beating flax by a river-side, and how one laid down her scutch, saying she was feeling uneasy, as well she might, for she was going to have a child; and as she stood watching the river going by it dropped from her like an egg from a hen; there was no more about it. But your honour should have heard my grandfather tell of all the adventures that befell them in the monasteries on their way to the Shannon, how — but it would be wearisome to relate all the odds and ends: how they got across most of the road in safety from Magh Line to Magh Li, from Magh Li to Ana Liffey, and passed through the wooded brow of Sliabh Fuaird till they reached Rathmor, and over Magh Aoi and across bright Magh Luirg until they stepped across the mering of Cruachan, and how they footed it from Cruachan to Sliabh Cua and off again through Glaisgaile and southward through stony hills and curving paths until they were within a couple of days of the seaport.
A big ship will take us off there, he said, for now Luachet was sore in all her bones, and weary of the great wilderness they had been through, and weary of the monasteries they had rested in. Only one more forest, he said, lies between us and the sea; and after that the world is all fair valleys and pleasant hills and beautiful trees that we shall sleep under in comfort and in love. And so did he comfort her and encourage her to bear the fag end of the journey. Now we’re at the skirt of the last forest, he said. But he didn’t say that it was in that forest he had heard wolves howling and snarling when he came up from Waterford on his way to Crith Gaille, and that he might have left his bones there had it not been for the hounds that were with him. His hope was that the wolves might be seeking their food in some other forest, so he said nothing until, as the day drooped and the darkness gathered into the branches, he stopped to listen.
There’s a howling near by, she said; would that be a wolf or a dog? A wolf it is, he replied. It’s on our own tracks; and he’s calling to his fellows, and they’ll be after us soon. We must be looking round, Luachet said, for a tree to climb into. But this wood is a pine wood, said she, and there isn’t a branch of the branches within our grip. Oh, Marban, are we to be eaten and devoured by wolves?
CHAPTER 23.
SO LUACHET AND Marban were devoured by wolves, Alec?
I’m sorry for that. All the rest of your story I like very much — the Bregen monks sending to the Pyrenean monastery for hounds, they having themselves run out of hounds owing to a dispute with a king about a piece of land; that motive brings Ireland up before us — a quarrel over a piece of land! Excellent. And all the different episodes told faithfully and candidly without immodest insistence. Excellent! And the last, Marban’s vindication, a masterpiece! Your honour is very kind to speak to me like that, but tell me why you don’t like the end of the story as well as the beginning. Because, Alec, I suspect that an ecclesiastic unleashed the wolves. It would never do to allow a pair of lovers to go away to the Pyrenees to live happily in broken vows. So you think, your honour, that the story did not come down unchanged from father to son? I’m not saying it didn’t, Alec, only — But isn’t yourself the great story-teller, and should be knowing better than another what end a story should be taking? How would you have me alter the story? Faith and troth, Alec, in that question you have me bet, for Ireland was full of wolves at that time, and it would be well-nigh a miracle not to be overtaken by a pack of them fellows.... Let me think. The alternative is: babies in the Pyrenees. Marriage bells there could not be, unless Marban went to Rome and got relief from his vows. Now that I come to think of it the end of your story seems to me to be the right one. A sad and a cruel end; but it may have fallen out just as you relate it. The only thing I regret is that we have not all the adventures of the lovers in the wilderness before the end came.
Well, sir, I’ve told it the way I got it from the grandfather, just as he used to tell it when he was in the humour for dreaming over the old Ireland of long ago, and he had it from his father or from the old writings, for he was reading every evening in the National Libraries in Dublin, leaving me after his supper to go away to the library, or maybe taking me with him: ’tis many an hour I’ve spent sitting by him, kicking my heels and wearying of the place. Your grandfather — I began. — was away in the country looking after the farm. You see, sir, the grandfather was the second son, and the elder brother, Patrick, got the farm; and when he died without children he left it to his wife, and when she passed away, God be merciful to her soul, the farm came to the grandfather, who had been a clerk in Dublin ever since he was twenty. Before that he was a clerk in Castlebar, without knowledge of the country at all. He would have sold the lease, thirty-one years and three lives, only that my father, who was then a lad of seventeen, said: let me go down and work the farm for you. Which he did, making a fair profit from the first. He got married soon after that. I was born and reared on the farm, but was always a botch at a fair, and, seeing how it was, the father thought it would be better for me to follow after my grandfather, who got me a job in his office when I was about fifteen, and I was a messenger boy there till I was twenty. Then that grandfather died, leaving me just what took me to America in search of a fortune. At that time people used to be talking about America, and the great things that were doing there. So you went to America, Alec? I did, your honour, and was at all sorts of work, till the sun caught me in the nape of the neck, and I travelling in the dry goods line in Mexico.
But so empty is my mind of any Mexican memories that my attention must have been drawn from Alec’s narratives by the rising and falling lines of the Westport hills, all beyond reproach except perhaps the too symmetrical Croagh Patrick, for the next time I heard him he was saying that he didn’t believe that there was another such queer place as Ireland anywhere in the whole world. I replied: I am with you, and not less queer in the past than in the present. Ireland is a poor place, he said, compared with what she once was, and we talked politics for a while. But in no place, he interjected suddenly, has there been such grand saints as in Ireland. Where else would you find — ?
All the same, Alec, in the stories you’ve told me they’ve shown themselves as weak as ourselves might have been if we had been exposed to the same temptatations. Isn’t that so?
Alec seemed unwilling to commit himself to an opinion on this point, and, after some equivocation, began to tell me there had always been grand saints in Ireland, men who had gone into temptations, the temptation of food and drink and of women, and had resisted them all. Did your honour never hear of Father Scothine? he said suddenly.
I had to confess that I had not, and the admission, although given reluctantly, with apologies for long years of absence from Ireland, seemed to cause him some disappointment and drew from him the reflection that Irishmen live out of Ireland the best part of their lives usually. But Ireland, I said, is always with us wherever we are, and perhaps Ireland was never nearer to you than the years you were in Mexico. True for you, he interjected; and Ireland, I continued, is always in my mind, whether I live in Paris or in London. I’m sure it is, your honour, for your father was a good Irishman, God rest his soul.
And now will you be telling me the story of Father Scothine?
His eyes, of uncertain blue, were fixed upon me, and I said to myself: he is asking himself if he ought to tell the story of Father Scothine to a man who has been so long out of Ireland, who is no better than an Englishman; or is he, I continued, thinking the story out afresh, shaping it to the idea that holy Ireland entertains of herself, putting a good skin on the lie, as himself would word it; and to interrupt him in the fabrication of a homily, if he were engaged on one, I asked him suddenly if he could tell me what kind of man Father Scothine was. A story, I said, gains in interest if we can see the characters plainly; one should have them in one’s mind all the time whilst listening to a story.
CHAPTER 24.
I’VE ALWAYS HEARD my grandfather say, he answered, that Father Scothine was the strongest man in the
County Mayo in his young days, great at hurling and throwing the stone and in all the sports; six feet and some inches, he was, with a head on him as round as the balls that top the pillars before a landlord’s gateway. Big hands, long feet and the eyes of them that fear hell, for though he was the holiest man in or out of Ireland, Scothine lived in fear of hell always, and it was this fear sent him out of his village, and away from his chapel, into the wilderness.
And did he learn in the wilderness, I asked Alec, that he was not to go to hell, and was it the knowledge that he was saved brought him back to his village?
I’m not able to answer that question, sir, Alec answered. I can only tell you the story the way I got it from the grandfather, and from what he said I think Scothine didn’t bother himself a lot about miracles or visions, but that he was troubled with a great fear of hell that now and again slackened and left him in peace and at other times gripped him entirely and sent him climbing the trees for a lodging out of the way of the wolves. That was how he used to live out in the crags and up in the trees when the fear took hold of him, along with the thought that he was losing his soul in village idleness, doing nothing but saying a mass now and again when the people required it. But when the fear wasn’t on him he was as soft and quiet and sensible a man as you could meet in a long day’s walk. A thick, heavy lump of a lad, taking things easy and saying his mass like another priest on Sunday. The only difference between him and the other priest was that it was rare he missed saying Mass on weekdays. His eating and drinking, it’s true, was never the same as other men’s, for when he was in the village he lived very much as he did in the wilderness, his diet being seldom more than cress, which he would gather himself from the spring, and a few acorns from the oaks in autumn and a fistful of hazel nuts. When there were no more of these he lived on rye bread, and didn’t touch the meat except on Christmas Day. That puts me in mind of the leg of mutton. He ate one, and it tormented his conscience the way he took the pledge never to chew meat again, but not wishing to make Christmas Day like any other day, he would let you give him a trout from the river on Christmas Day or an eel out of a bog hole. The rest of the year he went meatless, lowering his health until he got sick, and it being dinned into his ears that he was killing himself, which no Christian is permitted to do, he let them give him a pot of broth. The same broth did him a power of good, and he got back the health in a few days, but no sooner was he on his legs again than his conscience began to worry him about the broth, and once more the thought caught hold of him that he must be hiding to save the soul he would be losing if he stayed another day in the village. Off he went to hide in a place called Glenn o’ Goshleen. You may have seen it, sir, for it was part of your father’s property; it was sold in the famine years; a beautiful place that was in Father Scothine’s time, with woods all over the Partry hills, and in these woods he hid himself; and there he lived for months, dodging away from everybody, afraid they might bring him things to eat, or put a roof over his head, which they might have done too if they could have found him, for he was well thought of. But being as artful as a pet fox, he was able to keep his distance, and when people began to think he was dead in the woods, and to forget him, he was making his way round the bend of the lake across the country, never stopping till he came to the naked crags above the salt water, a place that is now known as Oldhead, but what they called it in the time gone by I disremember. He lived there on gulls’ eggs and the mussels and winkles that he picked up on the shore, lying out every night on the naked crags, doing penance for his sins. What they were, sir, I cannot tell you: vapours of the brain, I’d say, and no more than that. One day the vapours left him, and he went back to his parish and did his share of shriving and saying Mass and reading the gospels, as quiet a man as you’d find in the whole of Ireland, and everybody thinking the old madness had left him. He was the same mind himself, if he thought about it at all. All we know is that his mother came to see him, and she said: everything must seem to you like a dream. And he said: like a dream it is, maybe, but our dreams are as much a part of ourselves as our waking moments. And a solemn look came into his face, and his big eyes rolled in their sockets. It would be better, mother, said he, according to the talk that’s going, not to be judging anything, but to be always doing something and mortifying this flesh, which will drag souls down into hell if we are not subduing it day in and day out. You see, sir, his mind was the same as it always had been, only hell wasn’t quite so plain to him as it was the time he ran off to Glenn o’ Goshleen or got among the crags at Oldhead. He was always a bit afraid that he was doing wrong, and it was at this time of quiet, the greatest he ever knew in his life, that a vision came to him, and he sitting underneath an oak-tree by the river-bank, watching the water go by. A pleasant place the same place is now, for that matter. The same oak may be standing yet, for I’ve heard tell that an oak will live a thousand years. A willow is not so lasting a tree, but belike them that are now standing are from the seed of those that were dropping to the river in Scothine’s day. That was his favourite place for hatching out his thoughts, and seeing him sitting there so much at home among the birds, the word went that he had learnt the talk of the birds in Glenn o’ Goshleen, which is a strange story enough, but not stranger than that a man should build himself a nest in the fork of a tree, and that the pigeons in the branch above him should come and go and feed their chicks without minding him. As much as the birds he loved the beasts — the foxes and the badgers — and they came to him out of their holes, and the gulls came to him from the sea; and there were ducks and geese and wild swans on the river, and he would listen to them chattering away at each other when the south wind blew. And there were otters in the stream, and he used to be sorry when the otter slid down into the water and came up with a fish in his mouth, but he never interfered with them. I take the water-grass and he takes the fish, he would say. But he liked the badgers that lived up in the woods better than the otters, for the badgers ate the roots and hurt no one. You see the sort of man he was, a gentle and happy lad, fearing his own kind more than he feared the wolves and the bears, for in Scothine’s days bears and wolves were as plentiful as weasels are nowadays, and martens were hopping from branch to branch in the pine-trees, and they after the birds. He was unhappy when he found the wings and the breast feathers of a wood-pigeon, and would look at them sadly, saying: was it a marten that did the deed, or was it a hawk? As for the robins, they never left him alone; the blackbirds and the thrushes knew him and trusted him, the way that they would take bread out of his hand when he had any to give, which was often enough, for he used to go without the bit himself so that he might have something for the shuler and the wandering rogues, and he’d only keep for his own jaw a few acorns that he’d pick up; a poor diet, and many’s the belly-ache he got on the head of it, I’d say. But he didn’t mind, claiming that God knew better what was good for him than he did himself. It was on one of the fast days, while sitting under the oak, with his eyes on the river, and he not seeing it at all, for his thoughts were away in the desert whither Jesus, our Lord, had gone to be alone, and where he met the devil, who told him he’d give him all the kingdom of earth if he’d fall down and adore him, a great lie, your honour, for the devil hadn’t got the kingdom of earth to give our Lord Jesus Christ, who is himself possessed of all that is in the heaven above and in the earth beneath and in the waters under the earth. I mayn’t have the devil’s own exact words, your honour, but I’m thinking the gist of it was that if our blessed Lord would bow down and worship him he could have whatever he liked in this world; perhaps no mention was made of heaven at the time. Scothine was thinking the devil must have been a bit artless that time, and should have known that Jesus would answer him: thou must not tempt the Lord thy God, the way he did answer him. All the same, said Scothine to himself, it must have been a great temptation to the Lord Jesus not to turn the stones into bread, and he doing a fast for forty days and forty nights, and hungry enough, I’ll go bail, at the end of it, bu
t he had promised his Father that the spirit should not yield to the flesh, and he wouldn’t go back on that, and his Father had promised to reward him by raising him from the dead after three days’ burial.
It was while thinking on this temptation that Scothine came to say to himself: I wish God would send the devil to tempt me, and I sitting here, so that I would make sure of resisting the temptation, and getting a high place in glory hereafter for my own self. Let the devil appear, he said, and I’ll manage somehow to give him a fall.
It was in the shape of a black man with goat’s feet and a scut of a tail that Scothine expected to see the devil, but the devil suits his shape to the job he’s on, and this time he took the shape of a beautiful woman, come up through the willow-trees from the river. She stood, in his vision, smiling, and beckoning him to follow her into the woods. Maybe his mind was wandering, and maybe he was upset by the hunger, but he got on his feet and took after her up the path. He hadn’t gone far before she disappeared into the willows, and he heard a mocking laugh that gave him the fright of his life, and set him wondering if God had answered his prayer and sent the devil to him indeed. He wasn’t sure either that he had rightly resisted the devil, for hadn’t he looked after the vision eagerly, and the one that looks after a woman hath committed adultery with her in his heart; the same being what our Lord said, or nigh to it. Scothine would have the words off better than I. He went home with his heart going pit-a-pat, like a duck’s foot in mud, from the fright he got, and he thinking and asking himself whether he ought to go back to the crag of the gulls and live there for a year on raw eggs or the leavings of the fish that the birds didn’t want, guts and the like; or if he ought to go to Glenn o’ Goshleen and eat water-grass and oak apples, and sleep up in a tree at the heel of the day out of harm’s way of the wolves, the prowlers. The morrow would settle all that, said he, but something ought surely to be done at once in the way of penance and mortification. He could not think of a thing except to strip himself to the buff and, going to his cupboard, he took out the scourge; but he could not do more, it seemed, than to tickle himself with the lash, and the man that he used to pay wages to beat him beforetimes, until the blood would run down his hams and his shanks, had gone back with himself to his own parts. Scothine had no mind, and no time, to go looking for another man to lay on with the scourge, he was that worried by the persecution going on in his head, one time his thoughts saying that it wasn’t water-grass and oak-falls, nor prayers at all hours of the night and day, nor scourgings and weltings by his own hand or the hand of another that he wanted, but a big temptation that he might be standing out against, and so be giving great pleasure to God Almighty. And the hunger of this great temptation became stronger day after day, till the prayer was never off his lips that God would send the devil back to him. Night and morning he would cry to God in his prayers: give me my chance now. Give me another chance. And he spent a deal of time thinking of the words he would utter out against the devil, and he didn’t take as much as a walk without a bottle of holy water to dash in the devil’s face, or without a rosary to cast over him if he came near enough. Scothine had a plan how he would lure the devil near till he could lasso him with the rosary, like they lasso and catch the wild cattle in Mexico. Won’t he give a kick and a lep when he feels it drooping over his ears, he kept saying to himself. For the rosary he had brought out with him had been blessed by the Pope of Rome, and while he was wriggling out of it Scothine thought that he’d spit in his face and jeer at him, and call him names.
