It is a pleasant descent to the village of Kilmurvey, down through the buoyant air of the hill side; the grass steals its way among the outposts of rock, till the foot travels with unfamiliar ease in level fields. Near Kilmurvey the Resident Magistrate's house shows a trim roof among young larch and spruce, a miracle of modernity and right angles after the strewn monstrosities of the ridge above; passing near it, a piano gave forth a Nocturne of Chopin's to the solitude, a patrician lament, a skilled passion, in a land where ear and voice have preserved the single threads of melody, and harmony is as yet unwoven.
With its barbaric novelties of colour, its wild, red-clad women, its background of grey rock, its glare of sunshine, Aran should be a place known to painters, but at the first sight of even 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. As it is the creed of Aran that any one that has his "likeness dhrew out" will die within the year, it seems unfeeling to urge the matter upon them. Here and there the mission shilling makes its convert; an old woman braced herself to the risk on the excellent ground that she would probably die before the year was out, and might as well make the most of her chances. She found the idea highly humorous, and so did several of the neighbours.
Our departure from Aran was not out of keeping with the general run of events there. Struggling with painting materials, plants of maidenhair fern, and the usual oversights and overflows of packing, scantily enveloped in newspaper, we made our way on foot from the Lodge to the bay below it, a distance of some two or three hundred yards, and there embarked, attended to the boat by Mrs. Holloran and her next of kin—in other words, a crowd of some twenty deeply interested persons. We had shoved off and were moving out towards the steamer over the transparent green deeps of the bay, when I remembered the little boy who had driven our portmanteaux down to the beach in a donkey cart, and I flung a shilling to one of the next-of-kin in settlement of the obligation. We saw the emissary present the tribute.
"He'll not take it!" was shouted from the shore.
I protested at the full pitch of my voice to the effect that he must not allow his magnanimity to interfere with his just dues, that I was very glad to give it to him.
"He'll take three!" travelled to us like a cannon ball across the translucent water.
Nothing travelled back. Nothing, that is, except the Galway steamer, which presently flapped its paddles into the falling tide, and took us away to regions where we ourselves were natives, and viewed the tourist with a proper hauteur.
Meditating on those May days, winnowed now of their husk of culinary difficulties, they seem the most purely lonely, the most crowded with impressions, that could befall. Habituated to the stillness of West Galway life, these stillnesses were vast and expressive beyond any previous experience of mine; in the shadeless brilliance, the bare grayness, I breathed a foreign and tingling air. The people's profoundly self-centred existence has "no thoroughfare" written across it; lying on the warm rocks, they see Ireland stretched silent, enigmatic, apart from them, and are content that it is so. Their poverty is known to many, their way of thought to a few; they remain motionless on the edge of Europe, with the dust of the saints beneath their feet.
PICNICS
A kettle seated decorously on a kitchen range is far less likely to be smoked than one propped precariously on a heap of smouldering sticks. It is also ordained by the forces of civilisation that it shall eventually boil; a point by no means to be taken for granted in the matter of the sticks. A sparcity of saucers, an apostolic community of teaspoons; no one would suspect the hidden humour in such disabilities if confronted with them at an ordinary "At Home," and however excellent the appetite brought to bear upon a chicken pie at a luncheon party, in the lack of knives and forks it would scarce nerve its possessor to eat with his fingers. And yet, so skin deep a fraud is civilisation, the chicken bone to which, through the years, I look back most fondly, was gnawed, warm from the pocket, on the top of one of the Bantry mountains.