I will translate it
literally.
DEAR NOBLE PERSON, - I write this letter with joy and pride that you
found the way to the house of my father the day you were on the
steamship. I am thinking there will not be loneliness on you, for
there will be the fine beautiful Gaelic League and you will be
learning powerfully.
I am thinking there is no one in life walking with you now but your
own self from morning till night, and great is the pity.
What way are my mother and my three brothers and my sisters, and do
not forget white Michael, and the poor little child and the old grey
woman, and Rory. I am getting a forgetfulness on all my friends and
kindred. - I am your friend ...
It is curious how he accuses himself of forgetfulness after asking
for all his family by name. I suppose the first home-sickness is
wearing away and he looks on his independent wellbeing as a treason
towards his kindred.
One of his friends was in the kitchen when the letter was brought to
me, and, by the old man's wish, he read it out loud as soon as I had
finished it. When he came to the last sentence he hesitated for a
moment, and then omitted it altogether.
This young man had come up to bring me a copy of the 'Love Songs of
Connaught,' which he possesses, and I persuaded him to read, or
rather chant me some of them. When he had read a couple I found that
the old woman knew many of them from her childhood, though her
version was often not the same as what was in the book. She was
rocking herself on a stool in the chimney corner beside a pot of
indigo, in which she was dyeing wool, and several times when the
young man finished a poem she took it up again and recited the
verses with exquisite musical intonation, putting a wistfulness and
passion into her voice that seemed to give it all the cadences that
are sought in the profoundest poetry.
The lamp had burned low, and another terrible gale was howling and
shrieking over the island. It seemed like a dream that I should be
sitting here among these men and women listening to this rude and
beautiful poetry that is filled with the oldest passions of the
world.
The horses have been coming back for the last few days from their
summer's grazing in Connemara. They are landed at the sandy beach
where the cattle were shipped last year, and I went down early this
morning to watch their arrival through the waves. The hooker was
anchored at some distance from the shore, but I could see a horse
standing at the gunnel surrounded by men shouting and flipping at it
with bits of rope. In a moment it jumped over into the sea, and some
men, who were waiting for it in a curagh, caught it by the halter
and towed it to within twenty yards of the surf. Then the curagh
turned back to the hooker, and the horse was left to make its own
way to the land.
As I was standing about a man came up to me and asked after the
usual salutations: -
'Is there any war in the world at this time, noble person?' I told
him something of the excitement in the Transvaal, and then another
horse came near the waves and I passed on and left him.
Afterwards I walked round the edge of the sea to the pier, where a
quantity of turf has recently been brought in. It is usually left
for some time stacked on the sandhills, and then carried up to the
cottages in panniers slung on donkeys or any horses that are on the
island.
They have been busy with it the last few weeks, and the track from
the village to the pier has been filled with lines of
red-petticoated boys driving their donkeys before them, or cantering
down on their backs when the panniers are empty.
In some ways these men and women seem strangely far away from me.
They have the same emotions that I have, and the animals have, yet I
cannot talk to them when there is much to say, more than to the dog
that whines beside me in a mountain fog.
There is hardly an hour I am with them that I do not feel the shock
of some inconceivable idea, and then again the shock of some vague
emotion that is familiar to them and to me. On some days I feel this
island as a perfect home and resting place; on other days I feel
that I am a waif among the people. I can feel more with them than
they can feel with me, and while I wander among them, they like me
sometimes, and laugh at me sometimes, yet never know what I am
doing.
In the evenings I sometimes meet with a girl who is not yet half
through her teens, yet seems in some ways more consciously developed
than any one else that I have met here. She has passed part of her
life on the mainland, and the disillusion she found in Galway has
coloured her imagination.
As we sit on stools on either side of the fire I hear her voice
going backwards and forwards in the same sentence from the gaiety of
a child to the plaintive intonation of an old race that is worn with
sorrow. At one moment she is a simple peasant, at another she seems
to be looking out at the world with a sense of prehistoric
disillusion and to sum up in the expression of her grey-blue eyes
the whole external despondency of the clouds and sea.
