When I had exhausted my news they told me theirs. A power of
strangers - four or five - a French priest among them, had been on the
island in the summer; the potatoes were bad, but the rye had begun
well, till a dry week came and then it had turned into oats.
'If you didn't know us so well,' said the man who was talking,
'you'd think it was a lie we were telling, but the sorrow a lie is
in it. It grew straight and well till it was high as your knee, then
it turned into oats. Did ever you see the like of that in County
Wicklow?'
In the cottage everything was as usual, but Michael's presence has
brought back the old woman's humour and contentment. As I sat down
on my stool and lit my pipe with the corner of a sod, I could have
cried out with the feeling of festivity that this return procured
me.
This year Michael is busy in the daytime, but at present there is a
harvest moon, and we spend most of the evening wandering about the
island, looking out over the bay where the shadows of the clouds
throw strange patterns of gold and black. As we were returning
through the village this evening a tumult of revelry broke out from
one of the smaller cottages, and Michael said it was the young boys
and girls who have sport at this time of the year. I would have
liked to join them, but feared to embarrass their amusement. When we
passed on again the groups of scattered cottages on each side of the
way reminded me of places I have sometimes passed when travelling at
night in France or Bavaria, places that seemed so enshrined in the
blue silence of night one could not believe they would reawaken.
Afterwards we went up on the Dun, where Michael said he had never
been before after nightfall, though he lives within a stone's-throw.
The place gains unexpected grandeur in this light, standing out like
a corona of prehistoric stone upon the summit of the island. We
walked round the top of the wall for some time looking down on the
faint yellow roofs, with the rocks glittering beyond them, and the
silence of the bay. Though Michael is sensible of the beauty of the
nature round him, he never speaks of it directly, and many of our
evening walks are occupied with long Gaelic discourses about the
movements of the stars and moon.
These people make no distinction between the natural and the
supernatural.
This afternoon - it was Sunday, when there is usually some
interesting talk among the islanders - it rained, so I went into the
schoolmaster's kitchen, which is a good deal frequented by the more
advanced among the people.
