Where the Atlantic meets the land

by H. Caldwell Lipsett

'Well, and how do you find your new parish, Fairchild?' said the elder of the two men, throwing a piece of rock-slate at a passing gull, 'slightly different from anything you ever came across in England, isn't it?'

'Yes, this is an entirely new experience for me. Of course six months is a very short time to justify a wholesale opinion, but I never imagined previously that quite such a primitive people could exist anywhere in these islands.'

The speaker was a young English curate, only recently appointed to this out-of-the-way parish of Kilcross. His companion was a young ship's doctor home on leave. The two girls were the granddaughters of the vicar, one of the few clergymen in Ireland who refused to commute at the time of the disestablishment of the Irish Church, and who now, at the advanced age of ninety, was still enjoying the fruits of his obstinacy. It could be seen from the bundles beside them that the girls were on their way to a bathe, when they had met the two men and fallen into conversation with them.

'Primitive is just the word to describe them,' replied the doctor, 'it is curious how utterly our civilization has passed them by in this remote corner of the world, and left them exactly the same as their earliest forefathers must have been generations back. A fisher folk are proverbially benighted, but shut in here between the seriousness of the barren soil on the one hand and the melancholy of the Atlantic upon the other, the inhabitants of these highland villages upon the seaboard are utterly barbarous. And they possess all the virtues and vices of uncivilized types. Hospitable, good-natured, treacherous and superstitious, they have the unreflecting cruelty common to the child and the savage—I could tell you some horrible stories about that if I liked—joined to—what shall I call it?—their want of solidarity of character.'

'I don't quite understand, though you are saying things that I have often dimly tried to puzzle out for myself,' interrupted the elder girl.

'I suppose you refer to my last phrase, Miss Ruth. I mean that there is no common element running through their natures and joining their different moods and emotions together, harmonizing them or shading them off one into the other. There is no coherence about them, no compromise, they are a mere medley of odd passions, all in the raw and without sequence, each following crudely and logically from its own peculiar premises. None of their moods ever has reference to any previous mood.'

'I suppose, Seymour,' said the clergyman thoughtfully, 'that is why I have found I could never get any grip of them. I have often thought I was progressing favorably, making an impression, and then at some sudden turn, as they express it themselves, I have "come a jundy up agin'" a blank-wall in their character, and had to confess myself baffled again.'

'Yes, that is it. I have been brought up among them and been familiar with them since childhood, and I can safely say that with the exception of Miss Ruth here, I have never known any one not of their own race and religion obtain any hold over them, or exercise the slightest effect upon their conduct in any one way, and even her influence stops short with the women. The difficulty is that there is no central point to work upon. There is no use trying to argue with them or soften them. One mood can only be exorcised by another. Their obstinacy or their superstition can only be cast out by an appeal to their cupidity or their fear. It is there that the hold of the Roman Catholic Church over them comes in. The priest has the power to excommunicate any one at any time, which means not only destruction for them in the next world, but also discomfort in this. We Protestants have no such deterrents. If you take my advice you won't remain here long. You don't sympathize enough with the people ever to understand them. They want a stern, determined, coarse-grained nature to drive them. You are too delicate and subtle for them. Your work is all thrown away here.'

'The people are not necessarily the only attraction,' returned the curate a little sullenly.

'Oh, do come and look at this wee bubbly bit,' broke in the younger girl, who, unlike her more mature and graver sister had ceased to pay any further attention to the conversation, as soon as she found that it had turned upon the 'Parish.'