“Certainly. But I shall ask leave to wait for you outside the gate, sir, on account of the League of course.——You may laugh at its verdict, not I.”
Ten minutes later, I was at Mr. Kennedy’s gate. A little country house rather decayed, in the middle of grounds which no gardener has seen for at least two years. Nobody in sight. I try the bell-rope. It remains in my hand. I am then reduced to an energetic tattoo on the plate which shuts the lower part of the gate.
Attracted by the unusual noise, a tall white-haired man makes his appearance at an upper window. Surprised at first, and even somewhat alarmed, he listens to my request, is reassured, and even comes to unbar the door. As I had hoped, he is not sorry to unloose his tongue a little, and with the best grace possible tells me the whole affair.
“Yes, I am boycotted for having, single among all his tenants, paid to my landlord the entire rent of those meadows you see yonder. How do I take my situation? Well, as a philosopher. At the beginning, I thought it inconvenient to be deprived of new bread, to do without meat, and worse still, to be left without servants. But I have learnt by degrees to accommodate myself to my new condition. I have made provisions for a siege. I have found a few servants, strangers to the district, and made my arrangements to send my butter to Cork by rail. On the whole, there is not much to complain of. I should, of course, prefer things to follow their usual course. It is tedious at times to find oneself out of the pale of humanity. But you end by discovering that solitude has its advantages. You develop accomplishments up to that time latent in you. For instance, I shoe my horses myself; I have learnt to set a window pane, to sweep a chimney. My daughters have improved in cooking. We eat a great many chickens; now and then we kill a sheep; when we want butcher-meat, we must send rather far for it. The same for beer, wine, and many other commodities. It is inconvenient—no more.”
At Listowel; a market day. Great animation on the market-place; tongues are busy; whisky seems to be flowing freely at every tap-room and tavern. But not much business is done, as far as I can judge. My guide calls my attention to two interesting phenomena that I should not, perhaps, have noticed otherwise.
The first is a man in breeches, with bare calves, a shillelagh under his arm, who seems to be a farmer in a small way. He approaches a wheel-barrow filled with big hob-nailed shoes, which a woman is dragging, and falls to examining them, evidently intent on buying a pair. Almost at the same moment, a boy of fifteen or sixteen comes to the other side of the woman and whispers something in her ear. She nods. At once the customer, turning very red in the face, lets go the pair of shoes and turns away. MacMahon says the man is a newly boycotted man and the boy an agent of the League, whose function consists in reporting the interdict to those who have not heard of it as yet.
The other phenomenon is more remarkable. It is a stout gentleman in a shooting-jacket, carrying a double-barrelled gun of the latest model, and followed by a constable who also carries his regulation gun. The stout gentleman stops before a door where a smart outside car with a servant in livery is waiting for him. He takes his seat; the constable jumps on after him. Is the stout gentleman under a writ of habeas corpus, I wonder, and is he going to be taken into the county jail? Not a bit of it. He is simply a landowner under threat of death, who has thought fit to indulge in a body-guard. He and the constable are henceforth inseparable.
A large tract of uncultivated land. It was farmed at £60 a year. The farmer was a sporting man, fond of races and the like. To simplify his work he had the whole property converted into pasture. But his expensive mode of living obliged him now and then to sell a few head of cattle. The hour came when he had not one calf left, and he found himself utterly incapable of paying his rent. He was evicted. Sure not to find another tenant, on account of the law laid down by the League that every evicted farm should be left unoccupied, the landlord had recourse to the only sort of métayage known in Ireland. (Métayage, it should be explained, is the kind of farming used in most French provinces, where the owner of the land enters into yearly partnership with his tenant, and advances the necessary capital in the shape of manure, seed, beasts of burden, and machinery, on the understanding that the crops be shared equally between himself and the tenant.) To return to my Kerry landlord: he set up on his meadows a caretaker, with a salary of twenty-five shillings a week and forty cows to keep. At the end of the first month the tails of ten cows had been chopped off, while two of them had died from suspicious inflammation of the bowels. It became necessary to put the cows, and the caretaker as well, under the protection of a detachment of police. Cost: two pounds a week for each constable. Nett loss at the end of the half-year: £60. The landlord wisely judged that it would be much better to send his cows to the slaughter-house, to pay off caretaker and police, and to forget that he ever was a landowner.