Grania, The Story of an Island (Complete)

by Emily Lawless

This time Murdough did not compliment her in words upon her strength, but his glance seemed to say the same thing, and she was content.

From this point they had no more steps to climb, though they had to make a slight circuit to avoid a second and steeper one which lay just below the gully. Following the course of a small valley, grass-grown and boulder-dotted, they presently found themselves in the street, if street it could be called, of a tiny hamlet, consisting of some five or six stone cabins upon one side and three or four upon the other, minute cabins, built of materials so disproportionately big that two or three of the stone slabs sufficed for the length of a wall, which walls were grey as the still living rocks around them, and, like them, might have been seen on inspection to be covered with a close-fitting suit of lichens, sedums, and such small crops, with here and there something taller sprouting where a chink gave it foothold, or a piece of earth, fallen from the decaying thatch above, offered a temporary home.

This was Ballinlisheen, second or third largest of the towns of Inishmaan. A good many of its citizens—most of them apparently very old women—were sitting upon their heels at the doorsteps as the two young people came up the track, Murdough sauntering leisurely along with his hands in his pockets, Grania with her black load of seaweed dangling half-way down her back. The latter did not stop to speak to anyone. She was in a hurry to get back to Honor, being conscious of having already delayed too long. Murdough, though a young man generally open to all social advances, was beginning to get hungry, so he, too, kept on steadily beside her, giving only an occasional nod or word of greeting as first one and then another head craned forward into the narrow space between the opposing doorways.

Conversation, which had lagged a little in Ballinlisheen before their coming, began to stir and grow brisk again after they had passed on and were moving along the top of the nearest ridge.

‘She is the big girl, Grania O’Malley! the powerful big girl, my conscience, yes,’ said old Stacia Casey, Mick Halliday’s wife, stretching out a neck long and scraggy as a turkey’s and looking after them with an air of contemplation.

‘Murdough Blake tops her by the head,’ replied her neighbour Deb Cassidy from the opposite side of the street, in a tone of contradiction.

‘He does not, then, nor by the half of it,’ retorted the other in the same spirit. ‘Is it marrying him she’ll be, I wonder?’ she added after a minute’s pause.

‘Is it eating her dinner she’ll be?’ exclaimed her friend with a laugh. ‘Wurrah! wurrah! but ’tis the real born fool you must be, woman, to be asking such a question.’

‘Ugh! ugh! but ’tis the real born fool she will be if she does marry him!’ grunted an enormously big old woman, much older than any of the other speakers, Peggy Dowd by name, the professional story teller, and at that time the oldest inhabitant of Inishmaan. She was supposed to live with a widowed daughter, herself a woman of nearly sixty, but was to be found anywhere else in preference, her great age and standing reputation making her everywhere acceptable, or at all events accepted.

‘Murdough Blake, wisha!’ she went on, emptying the small black pipe she was smoking with a sharp rap upon the stones. ‘Trath, ’tis the poor lot those Blakes of Alleenageeragh are, and always have been, so they have! There was this one’s grandfather—myself remembers him when he was no older than this one—no, nor so old by a year—a fine bouchaleen you’d say to look at him—broad and bulky, and a clean skin, and a toss to his head as if all the rest in the place were but dirt and he picking his steps about amongst them. Well, what was he? He was just nothing, that is what he was, and so I tell you, women, not worth a thraneen, no, nor the half of a thraneen. Ugh! ugh! ugh! don’t talk to me of the Blakes of Alleenageerah, for I tell you I know them—I know them, those Blakes of Alleenageeragh. St. Macdara! I do know them, and have reason to know them! There was another—Malachy Blake his name was—a great man, full of gosther and brag; you’d think it was the world he must have for himself, the whole world, no less, from Liscanor Head to Renvyle Point out yonder, and farther still. Well, I will tell you now about Malachy Blake. The heart of him was no better than the heart of a pullet—of a sick pullet, when the eyes of it begin to turn up, and it squeaks when you take it in your hand and turns over and dies on the floor. That was what Malachy Blake’s heart was like—no better! I have heard him one day so you’d think the wind flying over the top of the island or the stars shining up in the sky would stoop down to listen to him, and the very next minute I have seen a little pinkeen of a man not up to his shoulder give him the go-by and abuse him before the girls, and he never showing no spirit nor a thing, no more than if he was dead. Phoo! phoo! phoo! I know them, those Blakes of Alleenageeragh. There is a story that I could tell you about that same Malachy Blake would make the very eyes of you start out of your head, so it would. But there—’tis a poor case, God knows, to be telling stories to them that knows nothing; a poor case, a very poor case! A fine man he was anyway to look at, I’ll say that for him, Malachy Blake, finer than this one, or six of him! and there was a many a girl in the place liked him well enough, though ’tis flat and low in his grave he is now, and has been these thirty years. Phoo! phoo! flat and low in his grave he is. Yes, indeed, flat and low for all his boasting! But I shall be sorry for Grania O’Malley and for that good woman her sister if she marries young Murdough Blake, so I shall; very sorry! very sorry!’