by J. M. Synge
The other day the men of this house made a new field. There was a slight bank of earth under the wall of the yard, and another in the corner of the cabbage garden. The old man and his eldest son dug out the clay, with the care of men working in a gold-mine, and Michael packed it in panniers — there are no wheeled vehicles on this island — for transport to a flat rock in a sheltered corner of their holding, where it was mixed with sand and seaweed and spread out in a layer upon the stone.
Most of the potato-growing of the island is carried on in fields of this sort — for which the people pay a considerable rent — and if the season is at all dry, their hope of a fair crop is nearly always disappointed.
It is now nine days since rain has fallen, and the people are filled with anxiety, although the sun has not yet been hot enough to do harm.
The drought is also causing a scarcity of water. There are a few springs on this side of the island, but they come only from a little distance, and in hot weather are not to be relied on. The supply for this house is carried up in a water-barrel by one of the women. If it is drawn off at once it is not very nauseous, but if it has lain, as it often does, for some hours in the barrel, the smell, colour, and taste are unendurable. The water for washing is also coming short, and as I walk round the edges of the sea, I often come on a girl with her petticoats tucked up round her, standing in a pool left by the tide and washing her flannels among the sea-anemones and crabs. Their red bodices and white tapering legs make them as beautiful as tropical sea-birds, as they stand in a frame of seaweeds against the brink of the Atlantic. Michael, however, is a little uneasy when they are in sight, and I cannot pause to watch them. This habit of using the sea water for washing causes a good deal of rheumatism on the island, for the salt lies in the clothes and keeps them continually moist.
The people have taken advantage of this dry moment to begin the burning of the kelp, and all the islands are lying in a volume of grey smoke. There will not be a very large quantity this year, as the people are discouraged by the uncertainty of the market, and do not care to undertake the task of manufacture without a certainty of profit.
The work needed to form a ton of kelp is considerable. The seaweed is collected from the rocks after the storms of autumn and winter, dried on fine days, and then made up into a rick, where it is left till the beginning of June.
It is then burnt in low kilns on the shore, an affair that takes from twelve to twenty-four hours of continuous hard work, though I understand the people here do not manage well and spoil a portion of what they produce by burning it more than is required.
The kiln holds about two tons of molten kelp, and when full it is loosely covered with stones, and left to cool. In a few days the substance is as hard as the limestone, and has to be broken with crowbars before it can be placed in curaghs for transport to Kilronan, where it is tested to determine the amount of iodine contained, and paid for accordingly. In former years good kelp would bring seven pounds a ton, now four pounds are not always reached.
In Aran even manufacture is of interest. The low flame-edged kiln, sending out dense clouds of creamy smoke, with a band of red and grey clothed workers moving in the haze, and usually some petticoated boys and women who come down with drink, forms a scene with as much variety and colour as any picture from the East.
The men feel in a certain sense the distinction of their island, and show me their work with pride. One of them said to me yesterday, ‘I’m thinking you never saw the like of this work before this day?’
‘That is true,’ I answered, ‘I never did.’
‘Bedad, then,’ he said, ‘isn’t it a great wonder that you’ve seen France and Germany, and the Holy Father, and never seen a man making kelp till you come to Inishmaan.’
All the horses from this island are put out on grass among the hills of Connemara from June to the end of September, as there is no grazing here during the summer.
Their shipping and transport is even more difficult than that of the homed cattle. Most of them are wild Connemara ponies, and their great strength and timidity make them hard to handle on the narrow pier, while in the hooker itself it is not easy to get them safely on their feet in the small space that is available. They are dealt with in the same way as for the bullocks I have spoken of already, but the excitement becomes much more intense, and the storm of Gaelic that rises the moment a horse is shoved from the pier, till it is safely in its place, is indescribable. Twenty boys and men howl and scream with agitation, cursing and exhorting, without knowing, most of the time, what they are saying.
Apart, however, from this primitive babble, the dexterity and power of the men are displayed to more advantage than in anything I have seen hitherto. I noticed particularly the owner of a hooker from the north island that was loaded this morning. He seemed able to hold up a horse by his single weight when it was swinging from the masthead, and preserved a humorous calm even in moments of the wildest excitement. Sometimes a large mare would come down sideways on the backs of the other horses, and kick there till the hold seemed to be filled with a mass of struggling centaurs, for the men themselves often leap down to try and save the foals from injury. The backs of the horses put in first are often a good deal cut by the shoes of the others that arrive on top of them, but otherwise they do not seem to be much the worse, and as they are not on their way to a fair, it is not of much consequence in what condition they come to land.
There is only one bit and saddle in the island, which are used by the priest, who rides from the chapel to the pier when he has held the service on Sunday.
The islanders themselves ride with a simple halter and a stick, yet sometimes travel, at least in the larger island, at a desperate gallop. As the horses usually have panniers, the rider sits sideways over the withers, and if the panniers are empty they go at full speed in this position without anything to hold to.
More than once in Aranmor I met a party going out west with empty panniers from Kilronan. Long before they came in sight I could hear a clatter of hoofs, and then a whirl of horses would come round a corner at full gallop with their heads out, utterly indifferent to the slender halter that is their only check. They generally travel in single file with a few yards between them, and as there is no traffic there is little fear of an accident.
Sometimes a woman and a man ride together, but in this case the man sits in the usual position, and the woman sits sideways behind him, and holds him round the waist.
Old Pat Dirane continues to come up every day to talk to me, and at times I turn the conversation to his experiences of the fairies.
He has seen a good many of them, he says, in different parts of the island, especially in the sandy districts north of the slip. They are about a yard high with caps like the ‘peelers’ pulled down over their faces. On one occasion he saw them playing ball in the evening just above the slip, and he says I must avoid that place in the morning or after nightfall for fear they might do me mischief.
He has seen two women who were ‘away’ with them, one a young married woman, the other a girl. The woman was standing by a wall, at a spot he described to me with great care, looking out towards the north.
Another night he heard a voice crying out in Irish, ‘mhathair ta me marbh’ (‘O mother, I’m killed’), and in the morning there was blood on the wall of his house, and a child in a house not far off was dead.
Yesterday he took me aside, and said he would tell me a secret he had never yet told to any person in the world.
‘Take a sharp needle,’ he said, ‘and stick it in under the collar of your coat, and not one of them will be able to have power on you.’
Iron is a common talisman with barbarians, but in this case the idea of exquisite sharpness was probably present also, and, perhaps, some feeling for the sanctity of the instrument of toil, a folk-belief that is common in Brittany.
The fairies are more numerous in Mayo than in any other county, though they are fond of certain districts in Galway, where the following story is
said to have taken place.
‘A farmer was in great distress as his crops had failed, and his cow had died on him. One night he told his wife to make him a fine new sack for flour before the next morning; and when it was finished he started off with it before the dawn.
‘At that time there was a gentleman who had been taken by the fairies, and made an officer among them, and it was often people would see him and him riding on a white horse at dawn and in the evening.
‘The poor man went down to the place where they used to see the officer, and when he came by on his horse, he asked the loan of two hundred and a half of flour, for he was in great want.
‘The officer called the fairies out of a hole in the rocks where they stored their wheat, and told them to give the poor man what he was asking. Then he told him to come back and pay him in a year, and rode away.
‘When the poor man got home he wrote down the day on a piece of paper, and that day year he came back and paid the officer.’
When he had ended his story the old man told me that the fairies have a tenth of all the produce of the country, and make stores of it in the rocks.
It is a Holy Day, and I have come up to sit on the Dun while the people are at Mass.
A strange tranquility has come over the island this morning, as happens sometimes on Sunday, filling the two circles of sea and sky with the quiet of a church.
The one landscape that is here lends itself with singular power to this suggestion of grey luminous cloud. There is no wind, and no definite light. Aranmor seems to sleep upon a mirror, and the hills of Connemara look so near that I am troubled by the width of the bay that lies before them, touched this morning with individual expression one sees sometimes in a lake.
On these rocks, where there is no growth of vegetable or animal life, all the seasons are the same, and this June day is so full of autumn that I listen unconsciously for the rustle of dead leaves.
The first group of men are coming out of the chapel, followed by a crowd of women, who divide at the gate and troop off in different directions, while the men linger on the road to gossip.
The silence is broken; I can hear far off, as if over water, a faint murmur of Gaelic.
In the afternoon the sun came out and I was rowed over for a visit to Kilronan.
As my men were bringing round the curagh to take me off a headland near the pier, they struck a sunken rock, and came ashore shipping a quantity of water, They plugged the hole with a piece of sacking torn from a bag of potatoes they were taking over for the priest, and we set off with nothing but a piece of torn canvas between us and the Atlantic.
Every few hundred yards one of the rowers had to stop and bail, but the hole did not increase.
When we were about half way across the sound we met a curagh coming towards us with its sails set. After some shouting in Gaelic, I learned that they had a packet of letters and tobacco for myself. We sidled up as near as was possible with the roll, and my goods were thrown to me wet with spray.
After my weeks in Inishmaan, Kilronan seemed an imposing centre of activity. The half-civilized fishermen of the larger island are inclined to despise the simplicity of the life here, and some of them who were standing about when I landed asked me how at all I passed my time with no decent fishing to be looking at.
I turned in for a moment to talk to the old couple in the hotel, and then moved on to pay some other visits in the village.
Later in the evening I walked out along the northern road, where I met many of the natives of the outlying villages, who had come down to Kilronan for the Holy Day, and were now wandering home in scattered groups.
The women and girls, when they had no men with them, usually tried to make fun with me.
‘Is it tired you are, stranger?’ said one girl. I was walking very slowly, to pass the time before my return to the east.
‘Bedad, it is not, little girl,’ I answered in Gaelic, ‘It is lonely I am.’
‘Here is my little sister, stranger, who will give you her arm.’
And so it went. Quiet as these women are on ordinary occasions, when two or three of them are gathered together in their holiday petti-coats and shawls, they are as wild and capricious as the women who live in towns.
About seven o’clock I got back to Kilronan, and beat up my crew from the public-houses near the bay. With their usual carelessness they had not seen to the leak in the curagh, nor to an oar that was losing the brace that holds it to the toll-pin, and we moved off across the sound at an absurd pace with a deepening pool at our feet.
A superb evening light was lying over the island, which made me rejoice at our delay. Looking back there was a golden haze behind the sharp edges of the rock, and a long wake from the sun, which was making jewels of the bubbling left by the oars.
The men had had their share of porter and were unusually voluble, pointing out things to me that I had already seen, and stopping now and then to make me notice the oily smell of mackerel that was rising from the waves.
They told me that an evicting party is coming to the island tomorrow morning, and gave me a long account of what they make and spend in a year and of their trouble with the rent.
‘The rent is hard enough for a poor man,’ said one of them, ‘but this time we didn’t pay, and they’re after serving processes on every one of us. A man will have to pay his rent now, and a power of money with it for the process, and I’m thinking the agent will have money enough out of them processes to pay for his servant-girl and his man all the year.’
I asked afterwards who the island belonged to.
‘Bedad,’ they said, ‘we’ve always heard it belonged to Miss — and she is dead.’
When the sun passed like a lozenge of gold flame into the sea the cold became intense. Then the men began to talk among themselves, and losing the thread, I lay half in a dream looking at the pale oily sea about us, and the low cliffs of the island sloping up past the village with its wreath of smoke to the outline of Dun Conor.
Old Pat was in the house when I arrived, and he told a long story after supper: —
There was once a widow living among the woods, and her only son living along with her. He went out every morning through the trees to get sticks, and one day as he was lying on the ground he saw a swarm of flies flying over what the cow leaves behind her. He took up his sickle and hit one blow at them, and hit that hard he left no single one of them living.
That evening he said to his mother that it was time he was going out into the world to seek his fortune, for he was able to destroy a whole swarm of flies at one blow, and he asked her to make him three cakes the way he might take them with him in the morning.
He started the next day a while after the dawn, with his three cakes in his wallet, and he ate one of them near ten o’clock.
He got hungry again by midday and ate the second, and when night was coming on him he ate the third. After that he met a man on the road who asked him where he was going.
‘I’m looking for some place where I can work for my living,’ said the young man.
‘Come with me,’ said the other man, ‘and sleep to-night in the barn, and I’ll give you work to-morrow to see what you’re able for.’
The next morning the farmer brought him out and showed him his cows and told him to take them out to graze on the hills, and to keep good watch that no one should come near them to milk them. The young man drove out the cows into the fields, and when the heat of the day came on he lay down on his back and looked up into the sky. A while after he saw a black spot in the north-west, and it grew larger and nearer till he saw a great giant coming towards him.
He got up on his feet and he caught the giant round the legs with his two arms, and he drove him down into the hard ground above his ankles, the way he was not able to free himself. Then the giant told him to do him no hurt, and gave him his magic rod, and told him to strike on the rock, and he would find his beautiful black horse, and his sword, and his fine suit.
The young man
struck the rock and it opened before him, and he found the beautiful black horse, and the giant’s sword and the suit lying before him. He took out the sword alone, and he struck one blow with it and struck off the giant’s head. Then he put back the sword into the rock, and went out again to his cattle, till it was time to drive them home to the farmer.
When they came to milk the cows they found a power of milk in them, and the farmer asked the young man if he had seen nothing out on the hills, for the other cow-boys had been bringing home the cows with no drop of milk in them. And the young man said he had seen nothing.
The next day he went out again with the cows. He lay down on his back in the heat of the day, and after a while he saw a black spot in the north-west, and it grew larger and nearer, till he saw it was a great giant coming to attack him.
‘You killed my brother,’ said the giant; ‘come here, till I make a garter of your body.’
The young man went to him and caught him by the legs and drove him down into the hard ground up to his ankles.
Then he hit the rod against the rock, and took out the sword and struck off the giant’s head.
That evening the farmer found twice as much milk in the cows as the evening before, and he asked the young man if he had seen anything. The young man said that he had seen nothing.
The third day the third giant came to him and said, ‘You have killed my two brothers; come here, till I make a garter of your body.’
And he did with this giant as he had done with the other two, and that evening there was so much milk in the cows it was dropping out of their udders on the pathway.
The next day the farmer called him and told him he might leave the cows in the stalls that day, for there was a great curiosity to be seen, namely, a beautiful king’s daughter that was to be eaten by a great fish, if there was no one in it that could save her. But the young man said such a sight was all one to him, and he went out with the cows on to the hills. When he came to the rocks he hit them with his rod and brought out the suit and put it on him, and brought out the sword and strapped it on his side, like an officer, and he got on the black horse and rode faster than the wind till he came to where the beautiful king’s daughter was sitting on the shore in a golden chair, waiting for the great fish.
