Even after they had at last touched the shore; after she had got out of the boat and had helped Murdough to pull it up on the sands; after they had left it behind them, with that queer, twinkling greenish water still flapping fantastically around its sides; even then she seemed to herself to be still in a dream, still to be dazed, still to be walking amongst the clouds. She only came back fully to life and to ordinary reality again when they had left the sands, and the sea, and the green, uncanny phosphorescence behind them, and were mounting soberly, one after the other, up the narrow, shingle-covered track which led to the cabin.
CHAPTER VII
The road from Cashla Bay past Spiddal into Galway is as grim a one surely as is to be found in these three kingdoms. Mile after mile it runs through a grey world of boulders, varying from the size of a hencoop to that of an average cottage. Mile after mile, and still you say to yourself that the stony deluge must have reached its limits, that the stones will soon begin to cease; somewhere or other, a little farther on, at the next turn, there will be unencumbered fields again; grass, perhaps; possibly even trees; at the worst an earth free from this soul-wearying, this eternal, interminable incubus of stones.
But no; mile after mile, and still never a sign or hint of change, never the slightest diminution in their multitude. The straight road—good and level as all West Connaught roads are—runs on and on through this rock-encumbered wilderness as if it loved it. There are low drift-hills near at hand, stone-covered like the rest; there are a few nipped and draggled looking villages at long intervals; there is a more or less misty glimpse of Connemara mountains occasionally to be had; also a much nearer view of Clare and the hills of Burren; there is the bay, very near indeed, with, perhaps, a ‘pookhaun’ or a hooker upon it; now and then a stream dashes by, struggling with difficulty through its incubus of rock, and disappearing under a bridge; otherwise, save stones, stones, stones, there is nothing till the Galway suburbs grow, grey and unlovely, upon your sight.
It was the day of Galway fair, the last of the great western spring fairs, and a large party of Aranites were on their way to it. Grania and Murdough were amongst them. Grania had her calf to sell, also a couple of pigs. Murdough had nothing to sell and nothing to do, but any opportunity of escaping for a few hours from Inishmaan, any prospect of stir, bustle, and life was welcome to him. It was he, therefore, who had urged Grania to go this time herself to the fair, instead of entrusting the calf and pigs to Pete Durane, who usually sold them for her, charging a modest commission for his own benefit upon the transaction.
She had at first demurred. She did not want, she said, to leave Honor. This was a perfectly true reason, but there were others as well. An inborn reluctance, a touch of savage pride had always hitherto made her shrink from facing the crowds and the bustle of the mainland. Ever since those early days of her trips with her father in the old hooker she had hardly set foot outside their own islands. There had been for her a sense of great dignity and importance in those old, lost, but never-forgotten days. How, indeed, could there fail to be? To sail across the bay in one’s own private hooker; to enter a harbour in it; the fuss and bustle of embarkation; the loud talk of the other hooker-owners with her father; the stares of the open-mouthed, bare-legged beggars and loafers upon the pier—such details as these had naturally given a sense of vague but vast dignity and grandeur to a small person sitting bolt upright upon her ballast of stones, and looking with a sense of condescension at all these new houses and faces thus brought, as it were, officially, under her notice.
After this to land, like anyone else, from a curragh at Cashla Bay, and to tramp tamely along a road, was a descent not easy to bring the mind to. Murdough, however, had so urged the matter, had pictured the delights of the fair in such glowing colours, had undertaken to look after her so energetically, to aid her so indefatigably, that in the end—the glamour of that fishing evening being still upon her—she had consented. Honor, too, had wished her to go, had arranged that Molly Muldoon should come and sit with her while she was away, had disposed of every difficulty, and had herself waked her up at three o’clock that morning so as to be ready to start at dawn for the curragh, looking so much better than she had lately done that Grania had been able to start feeling as if all was really going well, and all would still go well with her and with all of them.
And in the morning all had gone well. The weather was very fine, though there was a suspicious movement and bustling up of clouds to eastward. As for the scenery, certainly a stranger would have seen little variation, save in point of size, between its stoniness and the stoniness of Inishmaan. To Grania, however, as to all whose eyes are not spoiled by too varied and too early an acquaintanceship with many landscapes, small differences made great ones, and there was enough variety in that morning tramp through those stone-encumbered pastures to cause an exhilarated sense of travel and enlarged acquaintanceship with a world as yet imperfectly known and visited.
To walk briskly along the wide, indefinitely extending road, with Murdough Blake beside her; to hear him expatiating, descanting, pointing out the different objects she was to notice; to look from right to left; to laugh and nod to other passers-by—all this surely was novelty, stir, and exhilaration enough for anyone! The group of Aranites tramped rapidly along in their cow’s-skin pampooties, their tongues keeping pace with their legs. In their homemade flannel clothes and queer shoes, with their quick, alert, yet shuffling tread, they formed a marked contrast to the ordinary peasants of the mainland, most of whom stopped short on encountering them, and a brisk interchange of guttural salutations took place. Yes, certainly, it was amusing, Grania thought. Murdough was right; it was a mistake to stay always in one place. One grew to be no better than a cow, or a goat, or a thistle growing upon the rocks. It was good to look abroad. The world, after all, was really a large place. Why, beyond Galway there were actually other towns; Dublin even; that Dublin which Murdough was always talking about and pining to get to. Who could tell but what she herself might some day see Dublin? Stranger things had happened.
Matters went less well when they at last reached Galway. The fair is held in the middle of the town, in its main square, the Belgrave or Grosvenor Square of its fashion and importance. The crowd was already great, all the people from the country round having streamed in long before our more distant Aranites could reach the scene. To Grania’s unaccustomed ears the noise seemed to echo and re-echo from every house around, big grey or white houses—enormously big in her eyes—and all strange, all full of people standing in the windows and looking out, laughing at the crowd below—that crowd of which she herself was but a solitary and an insignificant fragment.