by J. M. Synge
‘What was satisfactory?’ I asked, still dwelling on my dreams.
‘The operation,’ she replied.
‘D — the operation,’ I groaned. ‘If I could only remember, I’d write books upon books; I’d teach all earth of delight.’
Every moment the recollection of my dreams was going off from me, being replaced by drunken exhilaration.
I was still suffering a good deal from nausea, but was so impressed with my wit that my drunken vanity left no room for low spirits. At this stage I began to regain power over my body; I remember moving each limb in succession, calling out in delight as I did so:
‘There goes one leg. There’s the other. There’s one hand. There’s the other.’
Then I tried to raise my head but failed, and apostrophised it in language too racy to repeat.
Presently the nurses left me for their dinner, putting a hand-bell in easy reach.
The nausea returned and I rang lustily. My hand was still weak, and the bell slipped from my hold, tumbling nearly into my mouth. When the nurses ran in I cried out in mock anger:
‘Why the devil do you leave a fellow alone like that, I’ve been sick into the bell!’
This was my last joke, and for the rest of the afternoon and evening I lay quiet enough.
The next day I felt unenterprising enough but in no pain or uneasiness. My weakness made it most natural and agreeable of all things to lie still and be talked to. The room I occupied opened from a hall, so a pleasant stir outside kept me gently alert. The doctors looked in during the forenoon, and now that the ordeal was over, threw aside their gravity, and were as jovial as one could desire.
When they left me I looked vaguely through some books that were brought to me, and here became aware of my own collapse, for all allusion to sadness or affairs of the heart sent up a dew into my eyes. That afternoon my friends were admitted to see me, and my weakness came still more to the front. From five o’clock deep drowsiness came over me, and I lay as in lethargy with the lights carefully lowered. A faint jingle of tram-bells sounded far away, and the voices of Sunday travellers sometimes broke into my room. I took notice of every familiar occurrence as if it were something I had come back to from a distant country. The impression was very strong on me that I had died the preceding day and come to life again, and this impression has never changed.
IN WICKLOW
AN AUTUMN NIGHT IN THE HILLS
A FEW YEARS ago a pointer dog of my acquaintance was wounded by accident in a wild glen on the western slope of County Wicklow. He was left at the cottage of an under-keeper, or bailiff — the last cottage on the edge of two ranges of mountains that stretch on the north and west to the plain of Kildare — and a few weeks later I made my way there to bring him down to his master.
It was an afternoon of September, and some heavy rain of the night before had made the road which led up to the cottage through the middle of the glen as smooth as a fine beach, while the clearness of the air gave the granite that ran up on either side of the way a peculiar tinge that was nearly luminous against the shadow of the hills. Every cottage that I passed had a group of rowan trees beside it covered with scarlet berries that gave brilliant points of colour of curious effect.
Just as I came to the cottage the road turned across a swollen river which I had to cross on a range of slippery stones. Then, when I had gone a few yards further, I heard a bark of welcome, and the dog ran down to meet me. The noise he made brought two women to the door of the cottage, one a finely made girl, with an exquisitely open and graceful manner, the other a very old woman. A sudden shower had come up without any warning over the rim of the valley, so I went into the cottage and sat down on a sort of bench in the chimney-corner, at the end of a long low room with open rafters.
‘You’ve come on a bad day,’ said the old woman, ‘for you won’t see any of the lads or men about the place.’
‘I suppose they went out to cut their oats,’ I said, ‘this morning while the weather was fine.’
‘They did not,’ she answered, ‘but they’re after going down to Aughrim for the body of Mary Kinsella, that is to be brought this night from the station. There will be a wake then at the last cottage you’re after passing, where you saw all them trees with the red berries on them.’
She stopped for a moment while the girl gave me a drink of milk.
‘I’m afraid it’s a lot of trouble I’m giving you,’ I said as I took it, ‘and you busy, with no men in the place.’
‘No trouble at all in the world,’ said the girl, ‘and if it was itself, wouldn’t any one be glad of it in the lonesome place we’re in?’
The old woman began talking again:
‘You saw no sign or trace on the road of the people coming with the body?’
‘No sign,’ I said, ‘and who was she at all?’
‘She was a fine young woman with two children,’ she went on, ‘and a year and a half ago she went wrong in her head, and they had to send her away. And then up there in the Richmond asylum maybe they thought the sooner they were shut of her the better, for she died two days ago this morning, and now they’re bringing her up to have a wake, and they’ll bury her beyond at the churches, far as it is, for it’s there are all the people of the two families.’
While we talked I had been examining a wound in the dog’s side near the end of his lung.
‘He’ll do rightly now,’ said the girl who had come in again and was putting tea-things on the table. ‘He’ll do rightly now. You wouldn’t know he’d been hurted at all only for a kind of a cough he’ll give now and again. Did they ever tell you the way he was hit?’ she added, going down on her knees in the chimney-corner with some dry twigs in her hand and making a little fire on the flag-stone a few inches from the turf.
I told her I had heard nothing but the fact of his wound.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘a great darkness and storm came down that night and they all out on the hill. The rivers rose, and they were there groping along by the turf track not minding the dogs. Then an old rabbit got up and run before them, and a man put up his gun and shot across it. When he fired that dog run out from behind a rock, and one grain of the shot cut the scruff off his nose, and another went in there where you were looking, at the butt of his ribs. He dropped down bleeding and howling, and they thought he was killed. The night was falling and they had no way they could carry him, so they made a kind of a shelter for him with sticks and turf, and they left him while they would be going for a sack.’
She stopped for a moment to knead some dough and put down a dozen hot cakes — cut out with the mouth of a tumbler — in a frying pan on the little fire she had made with the twigs. While she was doing so the old woman took up the talk.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘there do be queer things them nights out on the mountains and in the lakes among them. I was reared beyond in the valley where the mines used to be, in the valley of the Lough Nahanagan, and it’s many a queer story I’ve heard of the spirit does be in that lake.’
‘I have sometimes been there fishing till it was dark,’ I said when she paused, ‘and heard strange noises in the cliff.’
‘There was an uncle of mine,’ she continued, ‘and he was there the same way as yourself, fishing with a big fly in the darkness of the night, and the spirit came down out of the clouds and rifted the waters asunder. He was afeared then and he run down to the houses trembling and shaking. There was another time,’ she went on, ‘a man came round to this county who was after swimming through the water of every lake in Ireland. He went up to swim in that lake, and a brother of my own went up along with him. The gentleman had heard tell of the spirit but not a bit would he believe in it. He went down on the bank, and he had a big black dog with him, and he took off his clothes.
‘“For the love of God,” said my brother, “put that dog in before you go in yourself, the way you’ll see if he ever comes out of it.” The gentleman said he would do that and they threw in a stick or a stone and the dog leapt in a
nd swam out to it. Then he turned round again and he swam and he swam, and not a bit nearer did he come.
‘“He’s a long time swimming back,” said the gentleman.
‘“I’m thinking your honour’ll have a grey beard before he comes back,” said my brother, and before the word was out of his mouth the dog went down out of their sight, and the inside out of him came up on the top of the water.’
By this time the cakes were ready and the girl put them on a plate for me at the table, and poured out a cup of tea from the teapot, putting the milk and sugar herself into my cup as is the custom with the cottage people of Wicklow. Then she put the tea-pot down in the embers of the turf and sat down in the place I had left.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I was telling you the story of that night. When they got back here they sent up two lads for the dog, with a sack to carry him on if he was alive and a spade to bury him if he was dead. When they came to the turf where they left him they saw him near twenty yards down the path. The crathur thought they were after leaving him there to die, and he got that lonesome he dragged himself along like a Christian till he got too weak with the bleeding. James, the big lad, walked up again him first with the spade in his hand. When he seen the spade he let a kind of a groan out of him.
‘That dog’s as wise as a child, and he knew right well it was to bury him they brought the spade. Then Mike went up and laid down the sack on the ground, and the minute he seen it he jumped up and tumbled in on it himself. Then they carried him down, and the crathur getting his death with the cold and the great rain was fading. When they brought him in here you’d have thought he was dead. We put up a settle bed before the fire, and we put him into it. The heat roused him a bit, and he stretched out his legs and gave two groans out of him like an old man. Mike thought he’d drink some milk so we heated a cup of it over the fire. When he put down his tongue into it he began to cough and bleed, then he turned himself over in the settle bed and looked up at me like an old man. I sat up with him that night and it raining and blowing. At four in the morning I gave him a sup more of the milk and he was able to drink it.
‘The next day he was stronger, and we gave him a little new milk every now and again. We couldn’t keep him near the fire. So we put him in the little room beyond by the door and an armful of hay in along with him. In the afternoon the boys were out on the mountain and the old woman was gone somewhere else, and I was chopping sticks in the lane. I heard a sort of a noise and there he was with his head out through the window looking out on me in the lane. I was afraid he was lonesome in there all by himself, so I put in one of our old dogs to keep him company. Then I stuffed an old hat into the window and I thought they’d be quiet together.
‘But what did they do but begin to fight in there all in the dark as they were. I opened the door and out runs that lad before I could stop him. Not a bit would he go in again, so I had to leave him running about beside me. He’s that loyal to me now you wouldn’t believe it. When I go for the cow he comes along with me, and when I go to make up a bit of hay on the hill he’ll come and make a sort of bed for himself under a haycock, and not a bit of him will look at Mike or the boys.’
‘Ah,’ said the old woman, as the girl got up to pour me out another cup from the tea-pot, ‘it’s herself will be lonesome when that dog is gone, he’s never out of her sight, and you’d do right to send her down a little dog all for herself.’
‘You would so,’ said the girl, ‘but maybe he wouldn’t be loyal to me, and I wouldn’t give a thraneen for a dog as wasn’t loyal.’
‘Would you believe it,’ said the old woman again, ‘when the gentleman wrote down about that dog Mike went out to where she was in the haggard, and says, “They’re after sending me the prescription for that dog,” says he, “to put on his tombstone.” And she went down quite simple, and told the boys below in the bog, and it wasn’t till they began making game of her that she seen the way she’d been humbugged.’
‘That’s the truth,’ said the girl, ‘I went down quite simple, and indeed it’s a small wonder, that dog’s as fit for a decent burial as many that gets it.’
Meanwhile the shower had turned to a dense torrent of mountain rain, and although the evening was hardly coming on, it was so dark that the girl lighted a lamp and hung it at the corner of the chimney. The kitchen was longer than most that I have met with and had a skeleton staircase at the far end that looked vague and shadowy in the dim light. The old woman wore one of the old-fashioned caps with a white frill round the face, and entered with great fitness into the general scheme of the kitchen. I did not like leaving them to go into the raw night for a long walk on the mountains, and I sat down and talked to them for a long time, till the old woman thought I would be benighted.
‘Go out now,’ she said at last to the girl, ‘go out now and see what water is coming over the fall above, for with this rain the water’ll rise fast, and maybe he’ll have to walk down to the bridge, a rough walk when the night is coming on.’
The girl came back in a moment.
‘It’s riz already,’ she said. ‘He’ll want to go down to the bridge.’ Then turning to me: ‘If you’ll come now I’ll show you the way you have to go, and I’ll wait below for the boys; it won’t be long now till they come with the body of Mary Kinsella.’
We went out at once and she walked quickly before me through a maze of small fields and pieces of bog, where I would have soon lost the track if I had been alone.
The bridge, when we reached it, was a narrow wooden structure fastened up on iron bars which pierced large boulders in the bed of the river. An immense grey flood was struggling among the stones, looking dangerous and desolate in the half-light of the evening, while the wind was so great that the bridge wailed and quivered and whistled under our feet. A few paces further on we came to a cottage where the girl wished me a good journey and went in to wait for her brothers.
The daylight still lingered but the heavy rain and a thick white cloud that had come down made everything unreal and dismal to an extraordinary degree. I went up a road where on one side I could see the trunks of beech trees reaching up wet and motionless — with odd sighs and movements when a gust caught the valley — into a greyness overhead, where nothing could be distinguished. Between them there were masses of shadow, and masses of half-luminous fog with black branches across them. On the other side of the road flocks of sheep I could not see coughed and choked with sad guttural noises in the shelter of the hedge, or rushed away through a gap when they felt the dog was near them. Above everything my ears were haunted by the dead heavy swish of the rain. When I came near the first village I heard a loud noise and commotion. Many cars and gigs were collected at the door of the public-house, and the bar was filled with men who were drinking and making a noise. Everything was dark and confused yet on one car I was able to make out the shadow of a coffin, strapped in the rain, with the body of Mary Kinsella.
CONTINUOUS wet weather in the early autumn is hurtful enough to the interests of the farmer, but in it Ireland becomes worthy in a wonderful way of the epithet given her by St. Columcille. It is not so much the few well known waterfalls like those of Deer Park and the Devil’s Glen that one thinks of as giving the old saint his image but rather places like Glenmacnas and Glenmalure where after a stormy night’s rain the whole valley is filled with a riot of waterfalls. Sometimes these sudden rainfalls are followed by a singularly beautiful morning and then each of these glens can be seen at its moment of most direct and wonderful colour and beauty. Glenmacnas, in particular, has a variety of streams and turns and vegetation. The moment Laragh is left behind several long curves of the river can be seen all leaping with a white exuberance in the sunshine. No English word seems to describe the swift gaiety of the water, but the musical ‘brio’ rises at once in one’s mind. At one side of the river there is a thick oak wood — probably one of the survivals of old forest that are still found in this locality, and on the other between the river and the road a strip of bog which is
covered at this season I am thinking of — the early autumn — with flowering dwarf furze-bushes, and flowering heath both set in masses of rushes and bog grasses of wonderful colour. Such patches of growth come out on these mornings after rain with extraordinary purity and richness of tint, and for the eye that is sensitive to colour there is nothing, I think, that is more beautiful.
All up the glen one can see as a background curving hills of bracken and mountain grass with wonderful lights and shadows from the clouds while at the very end of what one is able to see a blue mountain — blue with a luminous living blue like that of a precious stone — stands across the glen half covered up by a soft streamer of cloud. A little farther on one comes in sight of a river leaping over the left side of the glen and we are in Waterfall Land. This river — it is a mere rivulet running on naked rocks inFrom the beginning, Notebook 33 (probably written in 1907) is used. Synge here has a heading, ‘The Waterfall Land’. It probably links with the epithet given by St. Columcille. dry weather — comes from a peat covered table land between this glen and the next, and its water takes so much boggy substance with it that when it turns to foam the whiteness has a golden volume in the sunshine that is extraordinarily rich. At one place we can nearly see the line where it leaps into the valley.
Nearly opposite this faller there is another of a quite different nature. The right side of the glen in this place slopes up and ends with slightly overhanging rock that shows a blackened underside in ordinary weather. In flood time, however, thin sheets of water fall everywhere across it and form as they change endlessly in their shape a silvery lace-work of undreamable fineness against the black background of rock.
At one place the main river of the valley passes through a steep gulley with a pool — a devil’s punch-bowl — and then it runs for a while through a flat alluvial space where it has shallow banks. Just here every flood covers nearly the whole surface of the valley and the road itself is ankle or even knee deep for nearly a quarter of a mile. Haycocks stand in a forlorn ring above their tanned reflections in a passing lake of blue. The cottages — this valley is rather thickly populated — are all placed on a high enough level to be beyond the reach of any ordinary flood but their soaked thatch gives a yellow counter note to the wet haycocks and the drowned oat-field that try to ripen in one or two places. The central waterfall when in full flood shows the golden tint I have already spoken of and brings wonderful life to an otherwise rather dead grey and green end of this exquisite glen.
