It is, perhaps, the leading draper who endures most. All day long the blue cloaks and the bony elbows jostle against his counters, disparaging hands subject his calicoes and his flannels to gruesome tests, his plush work-bags and scent-cases are handled uncomprehendingly and flung aside; acrid jibes are levelled at his assistants, who, to do them justice, show a practised tartness in rejoinder. Through the noise and the smell of stale turf smoke a large musical-box hammers and tinkles forth the "Washington Post."
Late in the wild darkness of the January evenings the cry "Will thu gull-a-wallia?" (sic) ("Are you going home?") passes from group to group in the streets. It is far on into the night before the carts with their load of sleepy and drunken people cease to stagger and clatter along the bleak roads that take them home. Beaten with snow, blinded with rain, the holiday season wears itself out in darkness, dirt, and inconvenience, after the manner of such seasons, churches and public houses presenting the only open doors in the shuttered streets. All day the electric light hung its fervid loops of white fire up in the roof of the church of St. Nicholas, unearthly, coldly intense, suiting well the spirituality of arches and pillars, loftily interclasping through the storms of centuries. The tattered colours of the Connaught Rangers droop on either side of the chancel arch, shreds of mellow colour against the grey limestone; they say things that are moving to a Galway heart. Out where the long Sea Road follows the shore of Galway Bay, the great winds press heavily against the windows of Marino Cottage, and the little one-horse trams glide on the desolate shining road like white-backed beetles.
The year strengthened and the days lengthened over misty seas ridged with angry white. Out where the murky west held the Islands of Aran in its bosom, the sunsets came later day by day. Once, and memorably, a dishevelled and flying pageant of green and lurid pink glowed, like the torn colours in the church, beneath the darkening roof of cloud; in its heart I saw the Aran steamer, labouring on the dark horizon of climbing waves.
* * * * *
It was February when Circumstance took me in her hand and flung me across two seas into the blue and gold weather and the purple and silver mountains of the Department of "Pyrénées Orientales;" and May had come before I was again in London, shivering in a cold rain that dropped acridly out of the dirty fog, the orphan rain of London, that knows no previousness of clouded hill, no dignity of broad-sailed mists moving up along the moor, no hereafter of clean breezes sweeping the bounteous heaven. Twenty hours later the mild yet poignant fragrance of Irish air was in the window of my railway carriage, and the smell of turf smoke came up out of the west across the stone walls of Roscommon.
Turf smoke lurked in concentrated staleness about the garb of the two priests in the opposite corner, yet it was preferable to yesterday's raw whiff of the Channel; the galloping whisper of the Daily Office in the two Breviaries revealed the accents of Connaught, and were comfortable to an ear already soothed by drowsiness. Let others roll and stagger to foreign lands in front of the lashing fins of a screw, I was advancing on an even axle into springtime in the County of Galway; in my mind's eye I beheld the Aran steamer leisurely paddling upon a sea of satin smoothness to the unknown islands, and in my ear sang the phrase "a way of their own, and a sense of their own; like the Indians."
Two mornings later the door of my bedroom in a hotel in Eyre Square, Galway, was dealt a fateful blow by the hand of the hotel cook, at 3.30 A.M., a blow weighted by lifelong combat with loins of mutton. It was no less a person than she who placed the teapot on the breakfast table, murmuring apologetically that "Gerrls was no good to rise early, but owld ones like herself wouldn't ax to stay in bed." The sunshine of May fell upon her grey locks as she stood at the portal to watch her guest's departure, and her "God speed ye!" mingled with the bang of the swing-door as it slammed upon the dark and sleeping house.
The laburnums of Eyre Square were fountains of gold, and the lilac was delicate and cool; a perfect stillness lay upon Galway. Passing on through the streets there was no sign of life, and the morning sunshine smote on ranks of muffled windows: here and there on the old houses the coats-of-arms of the Galway Tribes uplifted their melancholy witness to bygone greatness, but the town spoke with no living voice. Emerging at length from between blind-eyed house fronts, the docks were reached, and in the large vacant spaces of water now to be found where was once the second port of the United Kingdom, the smoke of a little steamer rose in lonely activity, with the mountains of Clare and the glitter of Galway Bay for a background.
There was some delay in departure, owing partly to a genial sympathy with the unpunctual, partly to a question of precedence among a pig family in the process of embarkation. The captain, a large clerical man in a soft felt hat, bore it with the equanimity of one who has learned in many journeys between Galway and Aran what is the full significance of the devils having entered into the swine. The boat moved out at length into the gleaming breadth of the bay; slowly the gray town grouped itself in its low-lying corner, the spires rose, waist-deep in roofs, and the heavy tower of St. Nicholas bore its associations of seven hundred years in the brilliant youth of the spring sunlight. The western suburbs stretched far along the bay, with slopes smoothly wooded; white houses looked blankly out from their trim demesnes, like alienated friends gazing an unmoved farewell. Even Marino Cottage, attired in a summer wash of pink, seemed to regard us with a new and strange exclusiveness. Inexpressibly pure of plumage, the gulls rode the clear wavelets, and swooped from poise to poise with striding wing, masters of art in two elements, with cold eyes observant of the cumbrous creature that crawled on the face of the waters with smoke and foam and splashing. Thirty miles away a low, blue mound on the horizon represented those Islands of Aran described in the ancient "Book of Rights" as "The Aras of the Sea;" the bows of the steamer swung to them, gradually the brown and ragged coasts of Connemara opened away to the north, and to the south the barren verge of the County of Clare was shorn perpendicular to the sea at the thousand-foot drop of the cliffs of Moher.
