We pass through a bewildering series of bedrooms. The damp has been coming in very copiously at Curriestown. Mrs. Quinlan points out the worst places in each apartment as we go along:
“Look athere, now! Just cast your eye on that, Miss Carrie, and sure it’s nothing to what’s behind the bed. If ye could see the way it is at the back of that press, Miss Carrie, you’d be hard set to believe it. Och, the house is in a tirrible state! Me heart’s broke pulling the furniture about, thrying to get them bad bits covered.”
Some one suggests that perhaps the owner will have it painted for the black lady. But Honoria Quinlan is still of opinion that you couldn’t tell what he’d be at.
On the way back we burst a tyre, not far from one of those hamlets which are typical of the western coast. Set in surroundings of the wildest beauty, it is practically deserted. The four walls of the ruined chapel gaping to the sky, and the long row of empty broken-down cottages testify still to the ruthless policy that laid the country waste in far Cromwellian times. Perhaps there are no more than fifteen smoking hearths left, beaten by passionate seas, guarded by the tremendous black cliffs. Life here, it would seem, must be hard won indeed from stony fields and treacherous waters.
Very soon, while the chauffeur worked at the wheel, a small knot of onlookers gathers about us; children with a tangled thatch of bleached hair, and eyes that look half-fiercely, half-appealingly out from under it. Black eyes they seem at first sight, set as they are with raven lashes. It is only on examination that you find them to be richly violet. There is an old man fantastically attired in a blanket laced with twine down to his knees. Such a creature of savage primitiveness he seems that one of the party is moved to ask him humorously if he has ever driven in a motor-car. He surveys us with his mild blue eyes that are as innocent as the child’s beside him, and shakes his shaggy white head.
“Bedad, I have,” he then says unexpectedly. “And sure it never touched the ground at all but an odd time between here and Connemara.”
CLARE ROADS
Yet motor-cars must be very rare apparitions along these Clare roads; for at their approach the people fling themselves sideways into the ditches and against the walls, when they cannot escape through a gap into the fields. Even the dogs will flee. One poor Collie flattened himself on a bank in a paroxysm of terror that we cannot forget. When I remember how along the English roads my heart is for ever in my mouth over the callous indifference of the British cur, I realize that canine folk are very much like human beings when all is said and done.
The Irish of the west have curious habits and customs which seem to link them with their forgotten eastern ancestral race. The women will draw their garments over their heads at the approach of a stranger, so closely that you may not get even a glimpse of their faces. Their husband is still “the master” to them, and they walk two steps behind him when they go abroad. But it is the old Catholic spirit that leads them to expect the greeting “God save all here!” when you enter their cottage, and “God bless the work!” when you pass them in the field.