And he would probably go on to tell us of the garden o’ praties he had, and the “bumbles and the blozzums they had on them. Faith, I’d rather be lookin’ at them than ateing me dinner!” (The term “bumbles” referred, we gathered, to buds.)
Martin would contentedly spend a morning in scraping paths and raking gravel with Rickeen, and, having a marvellous gift of memory, would justify herself of her idleness by repeating to me, at length, one of his recitals. Some of these, as will presently be discovered, she has written down, but the written word is a poor thing. “When the lamp is shattered, the light in the dust lies dead.” For anyone who knew the perfection of Martin’s rendering of the tones of West Galway, of the gestures, the pauses, that give the life of a story, the words lying dead on the page are only a pain. Perhaps, some day, portable and bindable phonography will be as much part of a book as its pictures are.
Phonetic spelling in matters of dialect is a delusive thing, to be used with the utmost restraint. It is superfluous for those who know, boring for those who do not. Of what avail is spelling when confronted with the problem of indicating the pronunciation of, for example, “Papa”; the slurring and softening of the consonant, the flattening of the vowel sound—how can these be even indicated? And, spelling or no, can any tongue, save an Irish one, pronounce the words “being” and “ideal,” as though they owned but one syllable? Long ago Martin and I debated the point, and the conclusion that we then arrived at was that the root of the matter in questions of dialect was in the idiomatic phrase and the mental attitude. The doctrine of “Alice’s” friend, the Duchess, still seems to me the only safe guide. “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.”
There was a sunny spring afternoon at Ross, and Martin and Rickeen and I and the Puppet went forth together to erect a wall of “scraws,” i.e. sods, round the tennis ground. As soon as there was a sufficient elevation for the purpose, we seated ourselves on the scraws, and the business of conversation with Rickeen, that had, in some degree, been interfered with by his labours in scraw-cutting and lifting, was given full scope. The Puppet was a little below us, hunting young rabbits in the dead bracken. At intervals we could see him, proceeding in grasshopper springs through the bracken (which is the correct way to draw heavy covert, as all truly sporting little dogs know), throughout we could hear him. Rooks in the tall elms behind the stables, feeding their young ones, made a pleasing undercurrent of accompaniment to the Puppet’s soprano solo. There was a bloom of green over the larches; scraps of silver glinting between the tree stems represented the lake. The languor of spring was in the air, and it seemed exercise enough to watch Rickeen’s wondrous deftness in marking, cutting, and lifting the scraws on the blade of his narrow spade, and tossing them accurately on to their appointed spot on the rising wall.
Martin had a Maltese charm against the “Mal Occhio”; a curious silver thing, whose design included a branch of the Tree of Life, and clenched fists, and a crescent moon, and other symbolisms. This, and its uses, she expounded to Rickeen, and he, in his turn, offered us his experience of the Evil Eye, and of suitable precautions against it.
“Look now, Miss Wilet, if a pairson ’d say ‘that’s a fine gerr’l,’ or ‘a fine cow,’ or the like o’ that, and wouldn’t say ‘God bless him!’ that’s what we’d call ‘Dhroch Hool.’[9] That’s the Bad Eye. Maybe, then, the one he didn’t say ‘God bless them’ to would fall back, or dhrop down, or the like o’ that; and then, supposin’ a pairson ’d folly the one that gave the Bad Eye, and to bring him back, and then if that one ’d bate three spits down on the one that was lyin’ sthritched, and to say ‘God bless him,’ he’d be all right.”
Strange how wide is the belief in the protective power of this simple provision of Nature. From the llama to the cat, it is relied on, and by the cat, no doubt, it was suggested to the human being as a means of defiance and frustration. There was a beggar-woman who, as my mother has told me, did not fail on the occasion of any of our christenings to bestow upon the infant an amulet of this nature. She had a magnificent oath, reserved, I imagine, for great occasions.
“By the Life of Pharaoh!” she would say, advancing upon the baby, “I pray that all bad luck may be beyant ye, and that my luck may be in your road before ye!”
The amulet would then be administered.
Martin and Rickeen and I discoursed, I remember, for some time upon these subjects. The mysterious pack of white hounds who hunt the woods of Ross, whose music has been heard more than once, and the sight of which has been vouchsafed to some few favoured ones, was touched on, and Martin told of an Appearance that had come to her and some of her brothers and sisters, one dusky evening, in the Ross avenue. Something that was first like a woman walking quickly towards them, and then rose, vast and toppling, like a high load of hay, and then sank down into nothingness.