And telling me stories while he worked.
He was a pilot when he was young, and we had great talk at first
about Germans, and Italians, and Russians, and the ways of seaport
towns. Then he came round to talk of the middle island, and he told
me this story which shows the curious jealousy that is between the
islands: -
Long ago we used all to be pagans, and the saints used to be coming
to teach us about God and the creation of the world. The people on
the middle island were the last to keep a hold on the
fire-worshipping, or whatever it was they had in those days, but in
the long run a saint got in among them and they began listening to
him, though they would often say in the evening they believed, and
then say the morning after that they did not believe. In the end the
saint gained them over and they began building a church, and the
saint had tools that were in use with them for working with the
stones. When the church was halfway up the people held a kind of
meeting one night among themselves, when the saint was asleep in his
bed, to see if they did really believe and no mistake in it.
The leading man got up, and this is what he said: that they should
go down and throw their tools over the cliff, for if there was such
a man as God, and if the saint was as well known to Him as he said,
then he would be as well able to bring up the tools out of the sea
as they were to throw them in.
They went then and threw their tools over the cliff.
When the saint came down to the church in the morning the workmen
were all sitting on the stones and no work doing.
'For what cause are you idle?' asked the saint.
'We have no tools,' said the men, and then they told him the story
of what they had done.
He kneeled down and prayed God that the tools might come up out of
the sea, and after that he prayed that no other people might ever be
as great fools as the people on the middle island, and that God
might preserve theft dark minds of folly to them fill the end of the
world. And that is why no man out of that island can tell you a
whole story without stammering, or bring any work to end without a
fault in it.
I asked him if he had known old Pat Dirane on the middle island, and
heard the fine stories he used to tell.
'No one knew him better than I did,' he said; 'for I do often be in
that island making curaghs for the people. One day old Pat came down
to me when I was after tarring a new curagh, and he asked me to put
a little tar on the knees of his breeches the way the rain wouldn't
come through on him.
'I took the brush in my hand, and I had him tarred down to his feet
before he knew what I was at. "Turn round the other side now," I
said, "and you'll be able to sit where you like." Then he felt the
tar coming in hot against his skin and he began cursing my soul, and
I was sorry for the trick I'd played on him.'
This old man was the same type as the genial, whimsical old men one
meets all through Ireland, and had none of the local characteristics
that are so marked on lnishmaan.
When we were tired talking I showed some of my tricks and a little
crowd collected. When they were gone another old man who had come up
began telling us about the fairies. One night when he was coming
home from the lighthouse he heard a man riding on the road behind
him, and he stopped to wait for him, but nothing came. Then he heard
as if there was a man trying to catch a horse on the rocks, and in a
little time he went on. The noise behind him got bigger as he went
along as if twenty horses, and then as if a hundred or a thousand,
were galloping after him. When he came to the stile where he had to
leave the road and got out over it, something hit against him and
threw him down on the rock, and a gun he had in his hand fell into
the field beyond him.
'I asked the priest we had at that time what was in it,' he said,
'and the priest told me it was the fallen angels; and I don't know
but it was.'
'Another time,' he went on, 'I was coming down where there is a bit
of a cliff and a little hole under it, and I heard a flute playing
in the hole or beside it, and that was before the dawn began.
Whatever anyone says there are strange things. There was one night
thirty years ago a man came down to get my wife to go up to his
wife, for she was in childbed.
'He was something to do with the lighthouse or the coastguard, one
of them Protestants who don't believe in any of these things and do
be making fun of us. Well, he asked me to go down and get a quart of
spirits while my wife would be getting herself ready, and he said he
would go down along with me if I was afraid.
