Mearing Stones Part 5

Summer dusk. A fiddle is playing in a house by the sea. "Maggie Pickens" is the tune. The fun and devilment of it sets my heart dancing. Then the mood changes. It is "The Fanaid Grove" now, full of melancholy and yearning, full of the spirit of the landscape--the soft lapping tide, the dove-grey sands, the blue rhythmic line of hill and sky beyond. The player repeats it... . I feel as if I could listen to that tune forever.

A NOTE

Darkness, freshness, fragrance. Donegal fascinates one like a beautiful girl.

THE PEASANT IN LITERATURE

It has been said before that there is "too much peasant" in contemporary Irish literature, especially in the plays. The phenomenon is easily explained. Ireland is an agricultural country, a country of small farms, and therefore a nation of peasants; so that a literature which pretends to reflect the life of Ireland must deal in the main with peasants and the thoughts that peasants think. And peasants'

thoughts are not such dead and commonplace things that I, who have learnt practically all I know from them, can afford to ignore them now. The king himself is served by the field. Where there is contact with the unseen in this book, with the mysteries which we feel rather than understand, it is because of some strange thought dropped in strange words from a peasant's mouth and caught by me here, as in a snare of leaves, for everyone to ponder. Impressions, with something of the roughness of peasant speech in them and something of the beauty, phases of a moment breathless and fluttering, the mystery of the sea, the thresh of rain, the sun on a bird's wing, a wayfarer pa.s.sing--those are the things I sought to capture in this book.

AN INSLEEP

We were talking together the other evening--an old woman and myself--on a path which leads through the fields from Glengesh mountain to Ardara wood. We had got as far as the stream which crosses the path near the wood when she stopped suddenly. She looked west, and scratched her eyebrow. "I've an insleep," says she. "I hadn't one this long time!"

WATER AND SLaN-LUS

What is more beautiful than water falling, or a spray of _slan-lus_ with its flowers?

BY LOCHROS MoR

The heat increases. The osmunda droops on the wall. The tide is at full ebb. A waste of sea-wrack and sand stretches out to Dawros, a day's journey beyond. I see two figures, a boy and a girl, searching for bait--the boy digging and the girl gathering into a creel. The deep, purring note of a sandpiper comes to me over the bar. It is like the sound that air makes bubbling through water. I listen to it in infinite s.p.a.ce and quietness.

RIVAL FIDDLERS

I was talking with a fiddler the other evening in a house where there was a dance, up by Portnoo. I happened to mention the name of another fiddler I had heard playing a night or two before in Ardara. "Him, is it?" put in my friend. "Why, he's no fiddler at all. He's only an old stroller. He doesn't know the differs between 'Kyrie Eleison' and 'The Devil's Dreams'!" He became very indignant. I interrupted once or twice, trying to turn the conversation, but all to no purpose; he still went on. Finally, to quiet him, I asked him could he play "The Sally Gardens." He stopped to think for a while, fondling the strings of his instrument lovingly with his rough hands; then he said that he didn't know the tune by that name, but that if I'd lilt or whistle the first few bars of it, it might come to him. I whistled them. "Oh," says he, "that's 'The Maids of Mourne Sh.o.r.e.' That's the name we give it in these parts." He played the tune for me quite beautifully. Then there was a call from the man of the house for "The Fairy Reel," and the dancers took the floor again. The fiddlers in Donegal are "all sorts,"

as they say--farmers, blacksmiths, fisher boys, who play for the love of the thing, and strollers (usually blind men) who wander about from house to house and from fair to fair playing for money. When they are playing I notice they catch the bow in a curious way with their thumbs between the horsehair and the stick. At a dance it is no uncommon thing to see a "bench" of seven or eight of them. They join in the applause at the end of each item, rasping their bows together on the strings and stamping vigorously with their feet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MOUNTAINY FOLK.]

NATURE

A poor woman praying by a cross; a mountain shadowed in still water; a tern crying; the road ribboning away into the darkness that looks like hills beyond. Can we live every day with these aspiring things, and not love beauty? Can we look out on our broad view--as someone has said of the friars of the monastery of San Pietro in Perugia--and not note the play of sun and shadow? Nature is the "Time-vesture of G.o.d." If we but touch it, we are made holier.

SUNDAY UNDER SLIEVE LEAGUE

It is Sunday. The dawn has broken clear after a night's rain. The sunlight glitters in the soft morning air. The fragrance of peat, marjoram, and wild-mint hangs like a benediction over the countryside. A lark is singing; the swallows are out in hundreds. The road turns and twists--past a cabin, over a bridge--between fringes of wet gra.s.s. It dips suddenly, then rises sheer against a wisp of cloud into the dark bulk of Slieve League behind. I see the mountainy people wending in from all parts to Ma.s.s. I am standing on high ground, and can see the hiving roads--the men with their black coats and wide-awakes, and the women with their bright-coloured kerchiefs and shawls. Some of them have trudged in for miles on bare feet. They carry their brogues, neatly greased and cleaned, over their shoulders. As they come near the chapel they stop by the roadside or go into a field and put them on. The young girls--grey-eyed, limber slips from the hills--are fixing themselves before they go in of the chapel door. They stand in their ribboned heads and shawls pluming themselves, and telling each other how they look. The boys are watching them. I hear the fresh, nonchalant laugh and the kindly greeting in Irish--"_Maidin bhreagh, a Phaid_," and the "_Goide mar ta tu, a Chait?_" The men--early-comers--sit in groups on the chapel wall, discussing affairs--the weather, the crops, the new potato spray, the prospects of a war with Germany, the marrying and the giving in marriage, the letters from friends in America, the death and month's mind of friends. The bell has ceased ringing. The men drop from their perch on the wall, and the last of them has gone in. The road is quiet again, and only the sonorous chant of the priest comes through the open windows--"_Introibo ad altare Dei_," and the shriller response of the clerk, "_Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam_."

THE NIGHT HE WAS BORN

We were talking together, an old man and myself, on the hill between Laguna and Glen. The conversation turned on ages--a favourite topic with old men(2)--and on the degeneracy that one noticed all over Ireland, especially among the young. "And what age would you take _me_ for?" said he, throwing his staff from him and straightening himself up. "Well, I'm a bad hand at guessing," said I, "but you're eighty if you're a day." "I'm that," said he, "and more. And would you believe it," said he, "the night I was born my mother was making a cake!"

(2) He had the Old Age Pension.

THE LUSMoR

The _lusmor_, or "great herb"--foxglove,

That stars the green skirt of the meadow,

is known to the peasantry by a variety of other names, as for example, _sian sleibhe_, "sian of the hills" (it grows plentifully on the high, rough places); _mearachan_, "fairy-thimble"; _ros greine_, "little rose of the sun"; and _lus na mban-sidhe_, "herb of the elf-women, or witch-doctors," etc., etc. It is bell-shaped, and has a purplish-red colour. As Dr. Joyce observes, it is a most potent herb, for it is a great fairy plant; and those who seek the aid of the _Daoine Maithe_, or Good People, in the cure of diseases or in incantations of any kind, often make use of

Drowsy store, Gathered from the bright _lusmor_,

to add to the power of their spells. It is a favourite flower in Highland, otherwise Gaelic Scotland; and the clan Farquhar, "hither Gaels," have a.s.sumed it for their badge.