In Ireland, at all events, it is certain that a warning to the traveller, or to the friends of the traveller, is sometimes vouchsafed. Things happen that are explainable in no commonsense, commonplace way; things of which one can only say that they are withdrawals for an instant of the curtain that veils the spiritual from the material. I speak only of what I have personal knowledge, and I will not attempt to justify my beliefs to anyone who may consider either that I have deceived myself, or that the truth is not in me. In the spring of 1886 one of my great-aunts died. She had been a Herbert, from the County Kerry, and had married my grandfather’s brother, Major John Somerville. Her age “went with the century,” and when heavy illness came upon her there was obviously but little hope of her recovery. I went late one afternoon to inquire for her. She lived in a small house just over the sea, and my way to it from Drishane lay through a dark little grove of tall trees; a high cliff shut out the light on one hand, below the path were the trees, straining up to the height of the cliff, and below the trees, the sea, which, on that February evening, strove, and tossed, and growled. The last news had been that she was better, but as I went through the twilight of the trees a woman’s voice quite near me was lifted up in a long howl, ending in sobs. I said to myself that Aunt Fanny was dead, and this was “Nancyco,” her ancient dairy-woman, keening her. In a moment I heard the cry and the sobs again, such large, immoderate sobs as countrywomen dedicate to a great occasion, and as I hurried along that gloomy path the crying came a third time. Decidedly Aunt Fanny was dead. Arrived at the house, it was quite a shock to hear that, on the contrary, she was better. I asked, with some indignation, why, this being so, Nancyco was making such a noise. I was told that Nancyco hadn’t been “in it” all day; that she was at home, and that there was no one “in it.” I said naught of my Banshee, but when, three days afterwards, the old lady slipped out through that opening in the curtain, I remembered her warning.

Such a thing has happened thrice in my knowledge; the second time on a lovely June night, the night of the eve of St. John, when every hill was alight with bonfires, and one might hope the powers of evil were propitiated and at rest. Yet, on that still and holy night, six boys and girls, the children of some of my father’s tenants, were drowned on their way home from a church festival that they had attended at Ross Carbery. The party of eight young people had rowed along the coast to Ross harbour, and of the eight but two returned. At “the mid-hour of night” my sister, who was then only a child, came running to my room for shelter and reassurance. She had been wakened by the crying of a woman, in the garden under her window; the crying came in successive bursts, and she was frightened. At breakfast the news of the drowning was brought to my father. It had happened near an island, and it was at just about the time that the voice had broken the scented peace of the June night that the boatload of boys and girls were fighting for their lives in the black water, and some of them losing the fight.

One other time also I know of, though the warning was not, as I might have expected, given to me personally. The end was near, and the voice cried beneath the windows of the room in which Martin lay. The hearing of it was, perhaps in mercy, withheld from me. The anguish of those December days of 1915 needed no intensifying.

CHAPTER XVI
BELIEFS AND BELIEVERS

There is, I imagine, some obscure connection between the Fairies and the Evil Eye. There was “an old Cronachaun of a fellow,” who lived in the parish of Myross, who was said to be “away with the Fairies” a great deal, and, whether as a resulting privilege or not I cannot say, he also had the Bad Eye. It was asserted that he could go to the top of Mount Gabriel, which is a good twenty miles away, in five minutes. It seems a harmless feat, but it must be said that Mount Gabriel, in spite of its name, is not altogether to be trusted. It is the sort of place where the “Fodheen Mara” might come on at any moment. The Fodheen Mara is a sudden loss of your bearings, and a bewilderment as to where you are, that prevails, like a miasma, in certain spots; but, Rickeen has told me, “if a person ’d have as much sense as to turn anything he’d have on him inside out, he’d know the way again in the minute.” Or the “Fare Gurtha” might assail you, and it is even more awful than the Fodheen Mara, being a sudden starvation that doubles you up and kills you, unless you can instantly get food. Also, on Mount Gabriel’s summit there is a lake, and it is well known that a heifer that ran into the lake came back to her owner out of the sea, “below in Schull harbour,” which implies something wrong, somewhere.

A neighbour of the old Cronachaun (which means a dwarfish cripple), and presumably a rival in the Black Arts, was accused by the Cronachaun’s wife of being “an owld wicked divil of a witch-woman, who is up to ninety years, but she can’t die because she’s that bad the Lord won’t take her! Sure didn’t she look out of her door and see meself going by, and says she ‘Miggera Murth’! (and that means ‘misfortune to ye’) and the owld daughther she has, she looked out too, and she says, three times over, ‘Amin-a-heerna!’ and after that what did I do but to fall off the laddher and break me leg!”

“Amin-a-heerna” is a reiterated amen. No wonder the curse operated.

I have myself, when pursuing the harmless trade of painter, been credited with the possession of the Evil Eye. In the Isle of Aran, Martin has told how “at the first sight of the sketch book the village street becomes a desert; the mothers, spitting to avert the Bad Eye, snatch their children into their houses, and bang their doors. The old women vanish from the door-steps, the boys take to the rocks.” We are too civilised now in West Carbery to hold these opinions, but I can recollect the speed with which an old man, a dweller in an unfashionable part of Castle Townshend, known as Dirty Lane, fled before me down that thoroughfare, declaring that the Lord should take him, and no one else (a jeu d’esprit which I cannot but think was unintentional).

Probably

“In the dacent old days
Before stockings and stays
Were invented, or breeches, top-boots and top-hats,”