by J. M. Synge
When we reached Dublin I left my charge for a moment to see after my baggage, and when I came back I found her sitting on a luggage barrow, with her package in her hand, crying with despair because several cabmen had refused to let her into their cabs, on the pretext that they dreaded infection.
I could see they were looking out for some rich tourist with his trunks, as a more lucrative fare; so I sent for the head-porter, who had charge of the platform. When the porter arrived we chose a cab, and I saw my charge driven off to her hospital, sitting on the front seat, with her handkerchief to her eyes.
For the last few days — I am staying in the Kerry cottage I have spoken of already — the people have been talking of horse-races that were to be held on the sand, not far off and this morning I set out to see them with the man and woman of the house and two of their neighbours. Our way led through a steep boreen for a quarter of a mile to the edge of the sea, and then along a pathway between the cliffs and a straight grassy hill. When we had gone some distance the old man pointed out a slope in front of us, where, he said, Diarmuid had done his tricks of rolling the barrel and jumping over his spear, and had killed many of his enemies. He told me the whole story, slightly familiarized in detail, but not very different from the version everyone knows. A little further on he pointed across the sea to our left — just beyond the strand where the races were to be run — to a neck of sand where, he said, Oisin was called away to the Tir-na-nOg.
‘The Tir-na-nOg itself,’ he said, ’is below that sea, and a while since there were two men out in a boat in the night-time, and they got stuck outside some way or another. They went to sleep then, and when one of them wakened up he looked down into the sea, and he saw the Tir-na-nOg and people walking about, and side-cars driving in the squares.’
Then he began telling me stories of mermaids — a common subject in this neighbourhood.
‘There was one time a man beyond of the name of Shee,’ he said, ‘and his master seen a mermaid on the sand beyond combing her hair, and he told Shee to get her. “I will,” said Shee, “if you’ll give me the best horse you have in your stable.” “I’ll do that,” said the master. Then Shee got the horse, and when he saw the mermaid on the sand combing her hair, with her covering laid away from her, he galloped up, when she wasn’t looking, and he picked up the covering and away he went with it. Then the waves rose up behind him and he galloped his best, and just as he was coming out at the top of the tide the ninth wave cut off his horse behind his back, and left himself and the half of his horse and the covering on the dry land. Then the mermaid came in after her covering, and the master got married to her, and she lived with him a long time, and had children — three or four of them. Well, in the wind-up, the master built a fine new house, and when he was moving into it, and clearing the things out, he brought down an old hamper out of the loft and put it in the yard. The woman was going about, and she looked into the hamper, and she saw her covering hidden away in the bottom of it. She took it out then and put it upon her and went back into the sea, and her children used to be on the shore crying after her. I’m told from that day there isn’t one of the Shees can go out in a boat on that bay and not be drowned.’
We were now near the sandhills, where a crowd was beginning to come together, and booths were being put up for the sale of apples and porter and cakes. A train had come in a little before at a station a mile or so away, and a number of the usual trick characters, with their stock-in-trade, were hurrying down to the sea. The roulette man passed us first, unfolding his table and calling out at the top of his voice:
Come play me a game of timmun and tup,
The more you puts down the more you takes up.
‘Take notice, gentlemen, I come here to spend a fortune, not to make one. Is there any sportsman in a hat or a cap, or a wig or a waistcoat, will play a go with me now? Take notice, gentlemen, the luck is on the green.’
The races had to be run between two tides while the sand was dry, so there was not much time to be lost, and before we reached the strand the horses had been brought together, ridden by young men in many variations of jockey dress. For the first race there was one genuine race-horse, very old and bony, and two or three young horses belonging to farmers in the neighbourhood. The start was made from the middle of the crowd at the near end of the strand, and the course led out along the edge of the sea to a post some distance away, back again to the starting-point, round a post, and out and back once more.
When the word was given the horses set off in a wild helter-skelter along the edge of the sea, with crowds cheering them on from the sandhills. As they got small in the distance it was not easy to see which horse was leading, but after a sort of check, as they turned the post, they began nearing again a few yards from the waves, with the old race-horse, heavily pressed, a good length ahead. The stewards made a sort of effort to clear the post that was to be circled, but without much success, as the people were wild with excitement. A moment later the old race-horse galloped into the crowd, twisted too suddenly, something cracked and jolted, and it limped out on three legs, gasping with pain. The next horse could not be stopped, and galloped out at the wrong end of the crowd for some little way before it could be brought back, so the last horses set off in front for the final lap.
The lame race-horse was now mobbed by onlookers and advisers, talking incoherently.
‘Was it the fault of the jock?’ said one man.
‘It was not,’ said another, ‘for Michael (the owner) didn’t strike him, and if it had been his fault, wouldn’t he have broken his bones?’
‘He was striving to spare a young girl had run out in his way,’ said another. ‘It was for that he twisted him.’
‘Little slut!’ said a woman; ‘what did she want beyond on the sand?’
Many remedies were suggested that did not sound reassuring, and in the end the horse was led off in a hopeless condition. A little later the race ended with an easy win for the wildest of the young horses. Afterwards I wandered up among the people, and looked at the sports. At one place a man, with his face heavily blackened, except one cheek and eye — an extraordinary effect — was standing shots of a wooden ball behind a board with a large hole in the middle, at three shots a penny. When I came past half an hour afterwards he had been hit in the mouth — by a girl some one told me — but seemed as cheerful as ever.
On the road, some little distance away, a party of girls and young men were dancing polkas to the music of a melodeon, in a cloud of dust. When I had looked on for a little while I met some girls I knew, and asked them how they were getting on.
‘We’re not getting on at all,’ said one of them, ‘for we’ve been at the races for two hours, and we’ve found no beaux to go along with us.’
When the horses had all run, a jennet race was held, and greatly delighted the people, as the jennets — there were a number of them — got scared by the cheering and ran wild in every direction. In the end it was not easy to say which was the winner, and a dispute began which nearly ended in blows. It was decided at last to run the race over again the following Sunday after Mass, so everyone was satisfied.
The day was magnificently bright, and the ten miles of Dingle Bay were wonderfully brilliant behind the masses of people, and the canvas booths, and the scores of upturned shafts. Towards evening I got tired taking or refusing the porter my friends pressed on me continually, so I wandered off from the racecourse along the path where Diarmuid had tricked the Fenians.
Later in the evening news had been coming in of the doings in the sandhills, after the porter had begun to take effect and the darkness had come on.
‘There was great sport after you left,’ a man said to me in the cottage this evening. ‘They were all beating and cutting each other on the shore of the sea. Four men fought together in one place till the tide came up on them, and was like to drown them; but the priest waded out up to his middle and drove them asunder. Another man was left for dead on the road outside the lodges, and som
e gentleman found him and had him carried into his house, and got the doctor to put plasters on his head. Then there was a red-headed fellow had his finger bitten through, and the postman was destroyed for ever.’
‘He should be,’ said the man of the house, ‘for Michael Patch broke the seat of his car into three halves on his head.’
‘It was this was the cause of it all,’ said Danny-boy: ‘they brought in porter east and west from the two towns you know of, and the two porters didn’t agree together, and it’s for that the people went raging at the fall of night.’
I have been out to Bolus Head, one of the finest places I have met with. A little beyond Ballinskelligs the road turns up the side of a steep mountainy hill where one sees a brilliant stretch of sea, with many rocks and islands — Deenish, Scariff the Hog’s Head, and Dursey far away. As I was sitting on the edge of the road an old man came along and we began to talk. He had little English, but when I tried him in Irish we got on well, though he did not follow any Connaught forms I let slip by accident. We went on together, after a while, to an extraordinary straggling village along the edge of the hill. At one of the cottages he stopped and asked me to come in and take a drink and rest myself. I did not like to refuse him, we had got so friendly, so I followed him in, and sat down on a stool while his wife — a much younger woman — went into the bedroom and brought me a large mug of milk. As I was drinking it and talking to the couple, a sack that was beside the fire began to move slowly, and the head of a yellow, feverish-looking child came out from beneath it, and began looking at me with a heavy stare. I asked the woman what ailed it, and she told me it had sickened a night or two before with headache and pains all through it; but she had not had the doctor, and did not know what was the matter. I finished the milk without much enjoyment, and went on my way up Bolus Head and then back to this cottage, wondering all the time if I had the germs of typhus in my blood.
Last night, when I got back to the cottage, I found that another ‘travelling man’ had arrived to stay for a day or two; but he was hard of hearing and a little simple in his head, so that we had not much talk. I went to bed soon after dark and slept till about two o’clock in the morning, when I was awakened by fearful screams in the kitchen. For a moment I did not know where I was; then I remembered the old man, and I jumped up and went to the door of my room. As I opened it I heard the door of the family room across the kitchen opening also, and the frightened whispers of the people. In a moment we could hear the old man, who was sleeping on the settle, pulling himself out of a nightmare, so we went back to our beds.
In the morning the woman told me his story:
‘He was living above on a little hillside,’ she said, ‘in a bit of a cabin, with his sister along with him. Then, after a while, she got ailing in her heart, and he got a bottle for her from the doctor, and he’d rise up every morning before the dawn to give her a sup of it. She got better then, till one night he got up and measured out the spoonful, or whatever it was, and went to give it to her, and he found her stretched out dead before him. Since that night he wakes up one time and another, and begins crying out for Maurya — that was his sister — and he half in his dreams. It was that you heard in the night, and indeed it would frighten any person to hear him screaming as if he was getting his death.’
When the little man came back after a while, they began asking him questions till he told his whole story, weeping pitiably. Then they got him to tell me about the other great event of his life also, in the rather childish Gaelic he uses.
He had once a little cur-dog, he said, and he knew nothing of the dog licence; then one day the peelers — the boys with the little caps — asked him into the barracks for a cup of tea. He went in cheerfully, and then they put him and his little dog into the lock-up till some one paid a shilling for him and got him out.
He has a stick he is proud of, bound with pieces of leather every few inches — like one I have seen with a beggar in Belmullet. Since the first night he has not had nightmare again, and he lies most of the evening sleeping on the settle, and in the morning he goes round among the houses, getting his share of meal and potatoes.
I do not think a beggar is ever refused in Kerry. Sometimes, while we are talking or doing something in the kitchen, a man walks in without saying anything and stands just inside the door, with his bag on the floor beside him. In five or ten minutes, when the woman of the house has finished what she is doing, she goes up to him and asks: ‘Is it meal or flour?’ ‘Flour,’ says the man. She goes into the inner room, opens her sack, and comes back with two handfuls. He opens his bag and takes out a bundle carefully tied up in a cloth or handkerchief; he opens this again, and usually there is another cloth inside, into which the woman puts her flour. Then the cloths are carefully knotted together by the corners, put back in the bag, and the man mutters a ‘God bless you,’ and goes on his way.
The meal, flour and potatoes that are thus gathered up are always sold by the beggar, and the money is spent on porter or second-hand clothes, or very occasionally on food when he is in a neighbourhood that is not hospitable. The buyers are usually found among the coastguards’ wives, or in the little public-houses on the roadside.
‘Some of these men,’ said the woman of the house, when I asked her about them, ‘will take their flour nicely and tastily and cleanly, and others will throw it in anyway, and you’d be sorry to eat it afterwards.’
The talk of these people is almost bewildering. I have come to this cottage again and again, and I often think I have heard all they have to say, and then some one makes a remark that leads to a whole new bundle of folk-tales, or stories of wonderful events that have happened in the barony in the last hundred years. Tonight the people were unusually silent, although several neighbours had come in, and to make conversation I said something about the bull-fights in Spain that I had been reading of in the newspapers. Immediately they started off with stories of wicked or powerful bulls, and then they branched off to clever dogs and all the things they have done in West Kerry, and then to mad dogs and mad cattle and pigs — one incident after another, but always detailed and picturesque and interesting.
I have come back to the north of Dingle, leaving Tralee late in the afternoon. At the station there was a more than usually great crowd, as there had been a fair in the town and many people had come in to make their Saturday purchases. A number of messenger boys with parcels from the shops in the town were shouting for the owners, using many familiar names, Justin MacCarthy, Hannah Lynch and the like. I managed to get a seat on a sack of flour beside the owner, who had other packages scattered under our feet. When the train had started and the women and girls — the carriage was filled with them — had settled down into their places, I could see I caused great curiosity, as it was too late in the year for even an odd tourist, and on this line everyone is known by sight.
Before long I got into talk with the old man next me, and as soon as I did so the women and girls stopped their talk and leaned out to hear what we were saying.
He asked first if I belonged to Dingle, and I told him I did not.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you speak like a Kerry man, and you’re dressed like a Kerry man, so you belong to Kerry, surely.’
I told him I was born and bred in Dublin, and that I had travelled in many places in Ireland and beyond it.
‘That’s easy said,’ he answered, ‘but I’d take an oath you were never beyond Kerry to this day.’
Then he asked sharply: ‘What do you do?’
I answered something about my wanderings in Europe, and suddenly he sat up, as if a new thought had come to him.
‘Maybe you’re a wealthy man?’ he said. I smiled complacently.
‘And about thirty-five?’
I nodded.
‘And not married?’
‘No.’
‘Well then,’ he said, ‘you’re a damn lucky fellow to be travelling the world with no one to impede you.’
Then he went on to discuss the expense
s of travelling.
‘You’ll likely be paying twenty pounds for this trip,’ he said, ‘with getting your lodging and buying your tickets, till you’re back in the city of Dublin?’
I told him my expenses were not so heavy.
‘Maybe you don’t drink so,’ said his wife, who was near us, ‘and that way your living wouldn’t be so costly at all.’
An interruption was made by a stop at a small station and the entrance of a ragged ballad-singer, who sang a long ballad about the sorrows of mothers who see all their children going away from them to America.
Further on, when the carriage was much emptier, a middle-aged man got in, and we began discussing the fishing season, Aran fishing, hookers, nobbies, and mackerel. I could see, while we were talking, that he, in his turn, was examining me with curiosity. At last he seemed satisfied.
‘Begob,’ he said, ‘I see what you are; you’re a fish-dealer.’
It turned out that he was the skipper of a trawler, and we had a long talk, the two of us and a local man who was going to Dingle also.
‘There was one time a Frenchman below,’ said the skipper, ‘who got married here and settled down and worked with the rest of us. One day we were outside in the trawler, and there was a French boat anchored a bit of a way off. “Come on,” says Charley — that was his name— “and see can we get some brandy from that boat beyond.” “How would we get brandy,” says I, “when we’ve no fish, or meat, or cabbages or a thing at all to offer them?” He went down below then to see what he could get. At that time there were four men only working the trawler, and in the heavy season there were eight. Well, up he comes again and eight plates under his arm. “There are eight plates,” says he, “and four will do us; so we’ll take out the other four and make a swap with them for brandy.” With that he set the eight plates on the deck and began walking up and down and looking on them.
‘“The devil mend you,” says I. “Will you take them up and come on, if you’re coming?”
