I smoked one pipe, and I leaned out and took another off the table.
I was smoking it with my hand on the back of my chair - the way you
are yourself this minute, God bless you - and I looking on the dead
man, when he opened his eyes as wide as myself and looked at me.
'Don't be afraid, stranger,' said the dead man; 'I'm not dead at all
in the world. Come here and help me up and I'll tell you all about
it.'
Well, I went up and took the sheet off of him, and I saw that he had
a fine clean shirt on his body, and fine flannel drawers.
He sat up then, and says he -
'I've got a bad wife, stranger, and I let on to be dead the way I'd
catch her goings on.'
Then he got two fine sticks he had to keep down his wife, and he put
them at each side of his body, and he laid himself out again as if
he was dead.
In half an hour his wife came back and a young man along with her.
Well, she gave him his tea, and she told him he was tired, and he
would do right to go and lie down in the bedroom.
The young man went in and the woman sat down to watch by the dead
man. A while after she got up and 'Stranger,' says she, 'I'm going
in to get the candle out of the room; I'm thinking the young man
will be asleep by this time.' She went into the bedroom, but the
divil a bit of her came back.
Then the dead man got up, and he took one stick, and he gave the
other to myself. We went in and saw them lying together with her
head on his arm.
The dead man hit him a blow with the stick so that the blood out of
him leapt up and hit the gallery.
That is my story.
In stories of this kind he always speaks in the first person, with
minute details to show that he was actually present at the scenes
that are described.
At the beginning of this story he gave me a long account of what had
made him be on his way to Dublin on that occasion, and told me about
all the rich people he was going to see in the finest streets of the
city.
A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense
of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day,
yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of
surf, and then a tumult of waves.
The slaty limestone has grown black with the water that is dripping
on it, and wherever I turn there is the same grey obsession twining
and wreathing itself among the narrow fields, and the same wail from
the wind that shrieks and whistles in the loose rubble of the walls.
At first the people do not give much attention to the wilderness
that is round them, but after a few days their voices sink in the
kitchen, and their endless talk of pigs and cattle falls to the
whisper of men who are telling stories in a haunted house.
The rain continues; but this evening a number of young men were in
the kitchen mending nets, and the bottle of poteen was drawn from
its hiding-place.
One cannot think of these people drinking wine on the summit of this
crumbling precipice, but their grey poteen, which brings a shock of
joy to the blood, seems predestined to keep sanity in men who live
forgotten in these worlds of mist.
I sat in the kitchen part of the evening to feel the gaiety that was
rising, and when I came into my own room after dark, one of the sons
came in every time the bottle made its round, to pour me out my
share.
It has cleared, and the sun is shining with a luminous warmth that
makes the whole island glisten with the splendor of a gem, and fills
the sea and sky with a radiance of blue light.
I have come out to lie on the rocks where I have the black edge of
the north island in front of me, Galway Bay, too blue almost to look
at, on my right, the Atlantic on my left, a perpendicular cliff
under my ankles, and over me innumerable gulls that chase each other
in a white cirrus of wings.
A nest of hooded crows is somewhere near me, and one of the old
birds is trying to drive me away by letting itself fall like a stone
every few moments, from about forty yards above me to within reach
of my hand.
Gannets are passing up and down above the sound, swooping at times
after a mackerel, and further off I can see the whole fleet of
hookers coming out from Kilronan for a night's fishing in the deep
water to the west.
As I lie here hour after hour, I seem to enter into the wild
pastimes of the cliff, and to become a companion of the cormorants
and crows.
Many of the birds display themselves before me with the vanity of
barbarians, performing in strange evolutions as long as I am in
sight, and returning to their ledge of rock when I am gone. Some are
wonderfully expert, and cut graceful figures for an inconceivable
time without a flap of their wings, growing so absorbed in their own
dexterity that they often collide with one another in their flight,
an incident always followed by a wild outburst of abuse.
