As Grania and Murdough pursued their way side by side over the rocks little Phelim gradually lagged behind, and at last drifted away altogether, stopping dreamily first at one patch of sand, then at another, and becoming more and more merged in the general hue of the rocks, till he finally disappeared from sight in the direction of his mother’s cabin.
The other two kept on upon the same level till they had got back to Grania’s potato-patch. Here she picked up her spade, and at once resumed her work of clearing out stone-encumbered ridges, Murdough Blake perching himself meanwhile comfortably upon a boulder, where he sat swinging his pampootie-shod feet over the edge and complacently surveying her labours.
The girl drove her spade vehemently into the ground with a sort of fierce impatience, due partly to a sense of having wasted time, but more to a vague feeling of irritation and disappointment which, like the former feeling, had a fashion of recurring whenever these two had been some time together. The sods sprang from before her spade; the light sandy soil flew wildly hither and thither; some of the dust of it even reached Murdough as he lounged upon his boulder: but he only sat still and watched her complacently, utterly unaware that he had anything himself to say to this really unnecessary display of energy.
The theory that love would be less felt if it was less talked about certainly finds some justification in Ireland, and amongst such well-developed specimens of youthful manhood as Murdough Blake. It is seldom talked of there, and apparently in consequence seldom felt. Marriages being largely matters of barter, irregular connections all but unknown, it follows that the topic loses that predominance which it possesses in nearly every other community in the world. Politics, sport, religion, a dozen others push it from the field. Physiologically—you would have said to look at him—he was of the very material out of which an emotional animal is made, and yet—explain the matter how you like—he was not in the least an emotional animal, or rather his emotional activity was used up in quite other directions than the particular form called love-making. Of his conversational entertainment, for instance, to do him justice, he was rarely lacking.
‘Begorrah, tis the wonderful girl you are for the work, Grania O’Malley!’ he observed, when the silence between them had lasted about three minutes. ‘Is it never tired you do be getting of it; never at all, summer or winter, say, Grania?’
She shook her head. ‘And what else would I be doing upon Inishmaan if I did get tired of it itself, Murdough Blake?’ she asked pertinently.
There being no very easy answer to this question, Murdough was silent again for another minute and a half.
‘It is myself that gets tired of it then, so it is,’ he replied candidly. ‘I would give a great deal if I had it, I would, Grania O’Malley, to be out of Inishmaan, so I would, God knows!’ he continued, looking away towards the line of coast, low to the south, but rising towards the north in a succession of pallid peaks, peering one behind the other till they melted into the distance. ‘It is a very poor place, Inishmaan, for a young man and a man of spirit to be living in, always, week-days and Sundays, fine days, rain days, always the same. How is he to show what is in him, at all, at all, and he always in the same place? It is, yes, my faith and word, very hard on him. He might as well be one of these prickly things down there that do take a year to crawl from one stone to another, so he might, every bit as well, my faith and word!’
‘You do go to Galway most weeks in Peter O’Donovan’s turf boat,’ the girl rejoined, stooping to pick up a stone and tossing it impatiently away from the drill.
‘And if I do, Grania O’Malley, what then? It is not a very great affair Peter O’Donovan’s turf boat. And it is not much time either—not more than three or four hours at the most—that I get in the town, for there is the fastening of the boat to be done, and helping to get the turf on board, and many another thing too. And Peter O’Donovan he is a very hard man, so he is; yes, indeed, God knows, very. And when I am in the town itself, and walking about in the streets of it, why, you see, Grania deelish, I’ve got so little of the English—— Bad luck to my father and to my mother too for not sending me to be learnt it when I was a bouchaleen! A man feels a born gomoral, so he does, just a gomoral, no better—when he hasn’t got the good English. And there are a great many of the quality too in the town of Galway, and it is not one word of the Irish that they will speak—no, nor understand it either—so they will not, Grania, not one word.’