Then he goes down fasting and is
rowed across to the other island and has Mass again, so that it is
about midday when he gets a hurried breakfast before he sets off
again for Aranmore, meeting often on both passages a rough and
perilous sea.
A couple of Sundays ago I was lying outside the cottage in the
sunshine smoking my pipe, when the curate, a man of the greatest
kindliness and humour, came up, wet and worn out, to have his first
meal. He looked at me for a moment and then shook his head.
'Tell me,' he said, 'did you read your Bible this morning?'
I answered that I had not done so.
'Well, begod, Mr. Synge,' he went on, 'if you ever go to Heaven,
you'll have a great laugh at us.'
Although these people are kindly towards each other and to their
children, they have no feeling for the sufferings of animals, and
little sympathy for pain when the person who feels it is not in
danger. I have sometimes seen a girl writhing and howling with
toothache while her mother sat at the other side of the fireplace
pointing at her and laughing at her as if amused by the sight.
A few days ago, when we had been talking of the death of President
McKinley, I explained the American way of killing murderers, and a
man asked me how long the man who killed the President would be
dying.
'While you'd be snapping your fingers,' I said.
'Well,' said the man, 'they might as well hang him so, and not be
bothering themselves with all them wires. A man who would kill a
King or a President knows he has to die for it, and it's only giving
him the thing he bargained for if he dies easy. It would be right he
should be three weeks dying, and there'd be fewer of those things
done in the world.'
If two dogs fight at the slip when we are waiting for the steamer,
the men are delighted and do all they can to keep up the fury of the
battle.
They tie down donkeys' heads to their hoofs to keep them from
straying, in a way that must cause horrible pain, and sometimes when
I go into a cottage I find all the women of the place down on their
knees plucking the feathers from live ducks and geese.
When the people are in pain themselves they make no attempt to hide
or control their feelings. An old man who was ill in the winter took
me out the other day to show me how far down the road they could
hear him yelling 'the time he had a pain in his head.'
There was a great storm this morning, and I went up on the cliff to
sit in the shanty they have made there for the men who watch for
wrack. Soon afterwards a boy, who was out minding sheep, came up
from the west, and we had a long talk.
He began by giving me the first connected account I have had of the
accident that happened some time ago, when the young man was drowned
on his way to the south island.
'Some men from the south island,' he said, 'came over and bought
some horses on this island, and they put them in a hooker to take
across. They wanted a curagh to go with them to tow the horses on to
the strand, and a young man said he would go, and they could give
him a rope and tow him behind the hooker. When they were out in the
sound a wind came down on them, and the man in the curagh couldn't
turn her to meet the waves, because the hooker was pulling her and
she began filling up with water.
'When the men in the hooker saw it they began crying out one thing
and another thing without knowing what to do. One man called out to
the man who was holding the rope: "Let go the rope now, or you'll
swamp her."
'And the man with the rope threw it out on the water, and the curagh
half-filled already, and I think only one oar in her. A wave came
into her then, and she went down before them, and the young man
began swimming about; then they let fall the sails in the hooker the
way they could pick him up. And when they had them down they were
too far off, and they pulled the sails up again the way they could
tack back to him. He was there in the water swimming round, and
swimming round, and before they got up with him again he sank the
third time, and they didn't see any more of him.'
I asked if anyone had seen him on the island since he was dead.
'They have not,' he said, 'but there were queer things in it. Before
he went out on the sea that day his dog came up and sat beside him
on the rocks, and began crying. When the horses were coming down to
the slip an old woman saw her son, that was drowned a while ago,
riding on one of them, She didn't say what she was after seeing, and
this man caught the horse, he caught his own horse first, and then
he caught this one, and after that he went out and was drowned. Two
days after I dreamed they found him on the Ceann gaine (the Sandy
Head) and carried him up to the house on the plain, and took his
pampooties off him and hung them up on a nail to dry.
