Given a sloping, sunshiny bank of shingle, a mass of yellow lichen-covered rocks between it and a purple-and-emerald streaked sea, a large empty morning, and a cock-shot, there is no reason why one should ever stop throwing stones. That is how my second cousin and I occupied ourselves the morning after our arrival at Renvyle. We had started early, with sketching materials and luncheon, full of a high resolve to explore several miles of coastline, beginning with the famous Grace O’Malley’s Castle, and ending with afternoon tea and well-earned repose.
No one can accuse these papers of a superfluity of local information. We have exercised a noble reticence in this respect, owing partly to a sympathetic dislike of being instructive, and partly also to the circumstance that we never seemed able to collect any facts. We have questioned waiters, and found that they came from Dublin, and bothered oldest inhabitants only to find that they were either deaf or “had no English.” But Grace O’Malley is a lady of too pronounced a type to be ignored, and even our very superficial acquaintance with her history compels us at least to express our regret that such a female suffragist as she would have made has been lost to our century. If she had lived now she would have stormed her way into the London County Council, and sat upon that body in every sense of the word; and had the University of Oxford refused to allow her to graduate as whatever she wished, she would indubitably have sacked the town, and borne into captivity all the flower of the Dons. In the reign of Elizabeth, however, her energies were confined to the more remunerative pursuit of piracy. She is known to have had a husband, but he does not seem to have occupied public attention to any extent, except secondarily, as when it is recorded that “the Lady Grace O’Malley went to England to make a treaty with the Queen, and took her husband with her.” One of her strongholds was this square tower, that looks down with such amiable picturesqueness on the waters of Renvyle Bay, and we were told that on those rare occasions when she condescended to sleep ashore instead of afloat, a hawser leading from her ship was fastened to her bedpost, and the skipper had orders to haul on it if anything piratically promising should turn up.
I think we had begun to discuss this energetic Grace and her probable action in modern politics as we strolled across the fields between Renvyle and the sea. At all events, something beguiled us to sit down upon that slope of small round stones, when we were as yet but a quarter of a mile from the hotel, and then a flaunting tuft of white bladder campion on a point of yellow rock offered itself irresistibly as an object for stone-throwing. As we write this we are sensible of its disappointing vulgarity. The word “sketch,” if not, indeed, “sonnet,” should have closed the sentence; but the humiliating fact remains that we simply lay there and pelted it till we had used up all the available pebbles, and stiffened our shoulders for the next three days, and still the bladder campion flaunted in our despite. We crawled from that too fascinating shingle beach to the grass above it, and stretched ourselves there in heated fractiousness. How hot the sun was! How blue and green the sea! And how enchantingly the purple gloom of the mountains showed between the grey hairy legs of the thistles! And after an interval of healing torpor, how admirable was luncheon!
But after luncheon Grace O’Malley’s tower seemed farther off than ever, and relinquishing the vigorous projects of our morning start, we began to drift along the shore towards the pale stretches of the sands. We dawdled luxuriously across a low headland, where the mouths of the rabbit-burrows made yellow sandy patches in the coarse grass, and we slid down the crumbling slope on to the hard, perfect surface of the sand. Its creamy smoothness had something of the romance of new-fallen snow, and none of its horrors. An insane and infantine ardour possessed us—to run, to build castles, to paddle! We came very near paddling, forgetful of our age, our petticoats, and the fact that no one ever yet was able to paddle as deep as they wanted to. In fact, we resolved that we would paddle, and we set off down the slanting glistening plane towards the far-off line of foam. Here and there the blue sky lay reflected in the wet patches of sand, Achill Island was a cloudy possibility of the horizon, Croagh Patrick and Mweelrea, immense certainties of the north-eastern middle distance, and at our feet were laid lovely realities of long lace-like scarves of red seaweed, flattened out with such prim precision that we expected to find their Latin and English names written beneath them on the sand.
Another fifty yards would have brought us to the water’s verge, when suddenly crossing our path at right angles, we came upon a long line of footmarks, masculine in size, pointed in shape, fraught with sinister suggestion of spying eyes. A group of immense rocks, the leaders of a procession of boulders trailing glacier-wise from the mountains to the sea, easily suggested an ambush, and the footmarks, as far as we could see, led in their direction. The same thought of the hidden watcher struck us both, and instantly and for ever abandoning the paddling scheme, we resolved to follow up the track of the footprints until we had routed the unworthy foot-printer from his lair. Little prods, as of a stick in the sand, accompanied the boot-marks, and at one spot certain rudimentary efforts in both art and literature made me think that the wearer of the boots was guiltless of object in his retreat upon the rocks. Suddenly, however, the marks lost their almost complacent evenness, and became extended and irregular, as if their owner had given himself over to ungoverned flight.
“What did I tell you?” remarked my cousin; “he was rushing off to hide before we should see him!”
We reached the rocks, and, with eyes that must have imparted to her pince-nez the destructive quality of burning glasses, my cousin swept their weedy crevices to discover some indication of the spy.
“He must be at the other side,” she began, when our eyes simultaneously fell upon a small white object.
It was a sandwich.
It lay between two big rocks that leaned to each other, leaving just room for a slim person to squeeze through; and looking through the aperture, we saw a long narrow vista of the sands, and on them a solitary flying speck—the Englishman.