She had been digging hard in her potato-patch ever since breakfast-time, and her drills were now nearly finished, and she herself felt comfortably tired, and satisfied. There is no room for ploughs upon Inishmaan, since no horse or even pony could turn upon the tiny spots of tillage so hardly captured from its stones. Donkeys and ponies are, indeed, kept by many of the islanders, but chiefly to carry the loads of kelp to and from the coast. Grania O’Malley had neither one nor the other, though many poorer neighbours possessed both. She was so strong that it would have seemed to her a sheer waste of good fodder, and she carried her own loads of kelp and seaweed persistently up and down the hill, till towards evening she would often find her eyes shutting of themselves from sheer fatigue, and she would fall asleep before the cabin-fire like a dog that has been all day hunting.
She was only waiting now to begin her midday meal of cold potatoes and griddle-bread for little Phelim Daly, who came with the regularity of a winter-fed robin to share them with her. She wondered that he had not yet appeared, and sat down upon a piece of rock to wait for him. Before she had been sitting there many minutes she saw the wild little figure coming towards her, across the slabs of rock. He was rather tall for his age, with the air of some sickly, ill-thriven plant that has run to waste, his pale blue, restless eyes looking up with the piteous expression of a forlorn, neglected animal for which no one cares, and which has almost ceased to care about itself. He came and squatted down close to her side upon a smaller bit of rock which rose out of the sandy soil, his thin legs stretched out in front of him, his eyes looking piteously up at her out of his small white face.
‘Is it hungry you are, acushla?’ she asked, noticing his expression; then, without waiting for an answer, went and fetched a cake of griddle-bread tied up in a handkerchief which she had left at a little distance.
‘Phelim is hungry; yes, Grania O’Malley, Phelim is very, very hungry,’ the boy answered in a curiously forlorn, far-away voice, as if the subject had hardly any special reference to himself.
‘Here, then; God help the child! Here!’ and she thrust a large lump of griddle-bread into his limp, unchildish hands.
He began breaking off pieces from it and thrusting them into his mouth, but carelessly and as if mechanically, looking before him the while with the same vacant, far-away gaze.
‘Phelim’s legs hurt,’ he presently said dreamily. ‘The wind was bad to Phelim last night. Phelim was asleep and the wind came and said, “Get up, Phelim; get up, sonny.” So Phelim got up. It was dark—och, but it was dark; you couldn’t see anything only the darkness. Phelim wanted to crawl back to his bed again, but the wind kept calling and calling, “Come out, Phelim! Come out, Phelim!” so he went out. And when he got outside the clouds were all running races round and round the sky, and he set off running after them, and he ran and he ran till he had run all round Inishmaan. And when he could run no further he fell down. But the wind wouldn’t let him lie still, and kept saying, “Get up, sonny! Get up, Phelim!” Then when Phelim couldn’t get up it went away, quite away. So Phelim lay still a while, and thought he was back in his bed. But by-and-by big crawling things, white things and red things and black, came crawling, crawling up, one after the other, out of the sea and over the rocks and over the sands and over Phelim, up his legs and along his back and into his neck. Then Phelim let a great screech, for the fright had hold of him. And he screeched and he screeched and he screeched and—and that’s why Phelim’s legs are so bad to-day,’ and he began slowly rubbing them up and down with one skinny, claw-like hand.
Grania shivered and crossed herself. She knew it was all nonsense, that he had been only dreaming, still, everyone was aware that there often were wicked things about at night, and it made her uncomfortable to listen to him.
‘Och, ’tis just the cold that ails you; nothing else, avic,’ she said decisively. ‘Here, wrap yourself up in this. God help the child! ’tis a mere bundle of bones he is,’ she added to herself as she put the white flannel petticoat, which served her as a cloak, round the boy as he sat crouched in a bundle upon the bit of rock, the cold wind scourging his legs and blowing the sand into his weary-looking pale blue eyes.
She left him to go and fetch her spade, which was at the other end of the ridge. When she came back he had slipped behind the larger of the two pieces of rock, and, with her petticoat huddled about him like a shawl, was lying flat upon his stomach, engaged in picking out small morsels of white quartz which had got mixed with the other pebbles, and ranging them in a row, whispering something to each of them as he did so.