'Ah, it's a queer place,' she said: 'I wouldn't choose to live in
it. It's a queer place, and indeed I don't know the place that
isn't.'
Another evening we talked of the people who live on the island or
come to visit it.
'Father is gone,' she said; 'he was a kind man but a queer man.
Priests is queer people, and I don't know who isn't.'
Then after a long pause she told me with seriousness, as if speaking
of a thing that surprised herself, and should surprise me, that she
was very fond of the boys.
In our talk, which is sometimes full of the innocent realism of
childhood, she is always pathetically eager to say the right thing
and be engaging.
One evening I found her trying to light a fire in the little side
room of her cottage, where there is an ordinary fireplace. I went in
to help her and showed her how to hold up a paper before the mouth
of the chimney to make a draught, a method she had never seen. Then
I told her of men who live alone in Paris and make their own fires
that they may have no one to bother them. She was sitting in a heap
on the floor staring into the turf, and as I finished she looked up
with surprise.
'They're like me so,' she said; 'would anyone have thought that!'
Below the sympathy we feel there is still a chasm between us.
'Musha,' she muttered as I was leaving her this evening, 'I think
it's to hell you'll be going by and by.'
Occasionally I meet her also in the kitchen where young men go to
play cards after dark and a few girls slip in to share the
amusement. At such times her eyes shine in the light of the candles,
and her cheeks flush with the first tumult of youth, till she hardly
seems the same girl who sits every evening droning to herself over
the turf.
A branch of the Gaelic League has been started here since my last
visit, and every Sunday afternoon three little girls walk through
the village ringing a shrill hand-bell, as a signal that the women's
meeting is to be held, - here it would be useless to fix an hour, as
the hours are not recognized.
Soon afterwards bands of girls - of all ages from five to
twenty-five - begin to troop down to the schoolhouse in their reddest
Sunday petticoats. It is remarkable that these young women are
willing to spend their one afternoon of freedom in laborious studies
of orthography for no reason but a vague reverence for the Gaelic.
It is true that they owe this reverence, or most of it, to the
influence of some recent visitors, yet the fact that they feel such
an influence so keenly is itself of interest.
In the older generation that did not come under the influence of the
recent language movement, I do not see any particular affection for
Gaelic. Whenever they are able, they speak English to their
children, to render them more capable of making their way in life.
Even the young men sometimes say to me -
'There's very hard English on you, and I wish to God I had the like
of it.'
The women are the great conservative force in this matter of the
language. They learn a little English in school and from their
parents, but they rarely have occasion to speak with any one who is
not a native of the islands, so their knowledge of the foreign
tongue remains rudimentary. In my cottage I have never heard a word
of English from the women except when they were speaking to the pigs
or to the dogs, or when the girl was reading a letter in English.
Women, however, with a more assertive temperament, who have had,
apparently, the same opportunities, often attain a considerable
fluency, as is the case with one, a relative of the old woman of the
house, who often visits here.
In the boys' school, where I sometimes look in, the children
surprise me by their knowledge of English, though they always speak
in Irish among themselves. The school itself is a comfortless
building in a terribly bleak position. In cold weather the children
arrive in the morning with a sod of turf tied up with their books, a
simple toll which keeps the fire well supplied, yet, I believe, a
more modern method is soon to be introduced.
I am in the north island again, looking out with a singular
sensation to the cliffs across the sound. It is hard to believe that
those hovels I can just see in the south are filled with people
whose lives have the strange quality that is found in the oldest
poetry and legend. Compared with them the falling off that has come
with the increased prosperity of this island is full of
discouragement. The charm which the people over there share with the
birds and flowers has been replaced here by the anxiety of men who
are eager for gain. The eyes and expression are different, though
the faces are the same, and even the children here seem to have an
indefinable modern quality that is absent from the men of Inishmaan.
My voyage from the middle island was wild. The morning was so
stormy, that in ordinary circumstances I would not have attempted
the passage, but as I had arranged to travel with a curagh that was
coming over for the Parish Priest - who is to hold stations on
Inishmaan - I did not like to draw back.
I went out in the morning and walked up the cliffs as usual. Several
men I fell in with shook their heads when I told them I was going
away, and said they doubted if a curagh could cross the sound with
the sea that was in it.
