CONNEMARA

I have been highly recommended in the scholastic world, though that is not what I have set out to say. I left the London Board School with a caseful of certificates, and later I gained the highest honours at the Training College before entering my mission as a teacher. There was only one phrase in my final dossier which might be read in a derogatory sense. It was to the effect that my extreme common sense supplanted all trace of imagination. Heaven knows that no such deficiency can be laid to my credit now. I am even supposed to have imbibed a little madness. But to return!

After several years passed in the normal teaching curriculum I began to experience a desire for change, to which the steadiest and least neurotic are liable. But I did not feel that I was indulging in anything fantastic when I applied for the post of governess abroad. The Agency replied that no suitable place was on their books, but that if I cared to consider Ireland among exotics, they could offer me occupation with an old Irish family on the Connemara borders. Though entirely (I am not sure whether to say blissfully) ignorant of Ireland, I felt that any change would save my mind from becoming rutted in the monotonous. The terms were generous and the work promised to be light. I was expected to accompany three children in their play-hours. There was no specific mention of lessons. I forwarded my formal acceptance with a selection of diplomas. A week passed before I received an answer in Early Victorian copperplate with all the flourishes of our ancestral script. It was written by some local schoolmaster presumably in the hedge, if not the liquor-shop, and was intended to convey the instructions of the fine old Irish family aforesaid:

“Greek Kalends, May, 1888, “Gortinealy Schoolhouse.

“Revered Madam,

“I am instructed by my laudable and proficient patron, Mr. Sinnach, hereditary proprietor of Gortinealy and fundator optimus of the above seminary, to write you word that your letter has been by me examined and found syllabically correct. We have made trial of your enclosed diplomacies and pending special consideration by Mr. Halloran, our esteemed Curate, with whose sententious monograph on the Irish Round Towers the London School Board is doubtless acquainted, and by Mr. McGrath, the gombeen man down the road, we duly pronounce them creditable to yourself and printer. These ensigns of learning we duly return with our patron’s command to present yourself at a near date (next fairday preferred) at Gortinealy terminus.

“I remain your obedient and certificated frère,

Timotheus O’Hussey.

“Postscriptum ad demonstrandum.—I may divulge that I have had Mr. Sinnach’s children under mensal and manual instruction since last lambing. They are already acquaint with Copying, Mathematics and Dithyrambics.—T. O’H.”

I must say that I felt a little puzzled by this effusion and quite failed to perceive the pedantic jealousy of the local sage jutting between the lines. I went to our Carnegie library and read all I could discover about Irish Round Towers, including one of Moore’s Melodies which I learnt by heart. Mr. Halloran’s treatise was unfortunately unknown. I suspected that the Postscript was a variation of the poor old joke which includes Education under the three R’s, Reading, ’Riting, and ’Rithmetic. Mathematics no doubt corresponded with the latter. Copying was writing, but Dithyrambics was Greek to me. I hunted in a dictionary and found it really was Greek, in fact “an ancient Greek metre peculiar to Dionysian strains.” Even so it conveyed nothing to my mind. I afterwards discovered that it must have been meaningless to the writer no less, whose chief object had been to overawe a rival with his own knowledge.

Meantime I dispatched a telegram of acceptance, and shipped myself to a southern port of Ireland. I shall always remember arriving in the early dawn. It was a hot July, and a gossamer of greyish pink trailed from the inland mountains into the pearly bay. Behind the yellow tidal rocks the bright green branches of trees pierced the mist. It was like a picture at the Kensington Art School. As soon as it became day, it began to drizzle, and whether the sun was shining or not, it continued to drizzle at intervals all day. I realised that I had changed climates at least. I am prepared to admit that the Irish climate is as tropical as its admirers claim, but I add that it always remains at the rainy season!

On landing in the rain I discovered to my surprise that no inhabitant carried an umbrella. My sunshade (for it was July) was the only human contrivance besides the slates on the house-tops for baffling the elements. I passed down the unsheltered quays to a weather-beaten, groggy-looking building labelled TEMPERANCE HOTEL. A passing drayman kindly picked up my luggage, which would otherwise have been abandoned. At the hotel door I asked the host how much I should pay the driver. “Nothing at all!” he answered; “but come in and eat for the Glory of God, for you must be famished.” After breakfast I asked if I could be driven to the railway station, and again what fare I was expected to provide. “The old man will give ye a lift,” I was told, “he’s bound that way.” And as I stared in reply, my host continued: “’Tis a lone widdy woman he takes ye for, and he thinks it would be unlucky to take money off ye.” I thought of London busmen!

I was indignantly asserting my real state in life, but he explained that a fresh young woman travelling in black clothes could only be taken for a widow woman, and maybe seeking a mate! Again I expostulated as to my intentions, for he seemed interested in my welfare, and we chatted until my train was due and indeed long after, for he was sure that no train would ever be so inconvenient as to leave for Gortinealy at the right hour. By the time I was driven to the station I had learnt several lessons not often propounded in London Board Schools, including that of Irish Hospitality. I spent another hour at the station talking with the driver. I could not help asking him why we had not seen a single umbrella that day. Did nobody possess one? “Ye lie!” he answered kindly; “every son’s mother and mother’s daughter of them does trot out an umbrella on fairdays.”

“Why fairdays?” I asked.

“To keep the flour and the tea dry, of course,” was the reply. And I queried no more.

Then I boarded the train and after endless tours and detours, during which I vaguely dreamed I had crossed the Alps and the Steppes, I reached Gortinealy towards midnight. It was pitch dark and the atmosphere was filled with melting clouds. It was not till I saw it in the morning that I realised that it was not a place at all, at least not to London eyes, for it consisted of a sprawled line of cabins, some with thatch and some under slate, surrounded by driving mists and stationary swamps as far as the eye cared to reach. It was loose space rather than fixed locality.

A kind of deputation awaited me in the station. There was the Curate, and I felt that his bulging silk hat must be lined with the famous manuscript on the Round Towers. There were two grooms in faded hunting coats and top-boots, and a weird personage, whom I immediately recognised by the quill pens over each ear as my certificated frère, Timotheus O’Hussey. Their attentions overwhelmed me. The Curate patted my back, the grooms confiscated my luggage, and Timotheus burbled a little Latin. I heard him saying: “Salve Domina!” How I love the Irish, and yet I would rather teach conic sections to elfs in Hell than return as a governess to their country! They immediately offered me refreshment in their very refreshing way. When they discovered that I had found food at the port of entry they were immensely surprised, it not being a fairday. Still, they insisted on my eating home-made bread in the signalling box and gulping some tea as black as coaldust. “Is it far to the house?” I asked.

“Not far in daylight but a good step after midnight,” was the mystifying reply—“maybe getting on for ten miles.” And my heart sank, for I had been provided with the certain piece of mathematic knowledge that seven English miles went to five Irish. I climbed with set mouth into the high-braced trap. The Curate who had been sent to meet me made a charming little speech of welcome into the arms of the family, who, I was painfully aware, were still distant by fourteen miles. Then he stepped into the night. The two grooms threw my luggage into the rear and held it down as though it were a live thing. Timotheus sat at my side in front handling the reins as fantastically, I guessed, as the pen. And so we started to rock and crash through the night.

I immediately began to feel terribly silent and lonely. Thank heavens one of the axles creaked. It seemed like my last connection with the civilised world of streets and wheels. A trace of starlight struggled through the dripping cloudbanks, throwing a little silver gauze upon the country-side until I could discern a stretch of waste and wood on either side. One remote scrub was pointed out with a whip flick as the grandest corner in the world for finding a fox. There were no fences, but the road was lined by huge boulders, which so far from being there for macadamising purposes I learnt were lapidary trifles brushed out of the roadway itself. I began to wish I had taken a course of geology, which might have been more illuminating to me than geography at the moment. I was dead tired, but I pricked my ears when I heard Timotheus enlarging on the pleasures and magnificences of the Big House, to say nothing of the royal descents of his laudable patron, and his three children whom he alluded to as “bright-eyed Homerians.” With inspiring gravity he gave me to understand that he had recently introduced them to the Greek Syntax. I gathered as well that Mr. Sinnach was a mighty hunter and spent his time driving and tearing the foxes out of the woods and the mountains and the ditches. Timotheus assured me that he did not so much enjoy the fox-hunting as he hated the foxes “with the illustrious hate of a Lucifer crossed in love.”

For two hours we jogged and jolted through a stretch of that primitive void called Irish landscape before the carriage lights suddenly haled a whitewashed portico out of the gulf of night. “Welcome to Gortinealy,” I heard a soft voice say a minute later. It was Mr. Sinnach, the Master, as they called him. I shall never forget the first time I saw him standing with his red hunting coat in the lamplight. He had been waiting to receive me in all his war paint. He was a real gentleman, though I used often to shudder hearing him swear. As he led me courteously into his stronghold I looked round for my luggage. One of the grooms was throwing it to the other in the window. I looked back into the night. Between me and civilisation stretched a Sahara of Wet. Warm, however, was the oak-lined hall within, adorned with innumerable guns, skins and antlers. At the top of a rickety old stair they lit a silver candlestick for me and motioned me down a long passage. At the end was my room, which possessed a key that would have unlocked the Tower of London. I felt as tired as though I had been through examinations.

I was still in my travelling dress when I awoke the next morning and looked out of the window into a courtyard. Beyond the wall lay the end of the world. I changed and hurried downstairs, but there was no sign of human life. A servant appeared and familiarly informed me that my charges had celebrated my arrival by taking to the mountains on ponies, and that the Master himself always gave the clock a good start on mornings there was no hunt. Between his long hours in bed and his longer hours in the hunting field or among his horses and hounds, I used to see him very little during my stay at Gortinealy, for all his leisure time was divided between stables and kennel.

But the children, two boys and a girl, proved more delightful company than a whole Board School of London Cockneys. They knew more queer things about Natural History than a double course in Biology could have taught them. They must have been running wild for years, and certainly they were not guilty of the least education. They may have passed very learned hours studying Dithyrambics with Timotheus, but I had to begin by teaching them to spell English. I don’t think the London County Council inspector would have approved of them entirely. They seemed to have been taught to boycott correct English. But I grew to love them more than I can say, which is always the way in Ireland. There is very little lost there between loving and hating. Nothing is tepid except the soft rain, and the soft tepid rain—it raineth every day.

As soon as the children discovered that I could not ride or fish or shoot, they took a kind of pity for me and consented to appear on certain hours to hear what I had to say for myself. Apparently I interested them, for they consented to appear fairly often. In the evening I read them books of Natural History, which proved my sole means of winning their attention. Punishments were always out of the question, and they took no notice of my praise. I suppose I taught them something. But they could always be trusted and did not appear to get into trouble like most other children. They could shift amazingly well for themselves. The mornings were at the hazard of lessons, but every afternoon we went on the bogs or mountains. I gradually forgot the feel of the pavement and lost my street legs. I learnt the art of bog-trotting instead. But my real adventures were played in the minds of the children themselves. They had been brought up without playmates and had grown almost uncanny in their relations with animals and birds. The elder boy seemed to be able to charm them by his eyes. As for the girl, I used to call her Pocahontas, for she was more Indian of the woods than girl of the schoolroom. Their minds were quite uncramped by education, and the whispers of nature were audible to them. Their father took very little interest in their welfare. If he wandered out for a walk he always took one of his grooms or walked a couple of his horrible hounds—but never a child.

I could not understand his intense feeling for his smelly hounds, with their horrible yelping and slobbing mouths. One morning coming along the passage, I discovered that he actually kept one in his bedroom at night. He used to make me think that he was a lost soul for ever in search of his lost time. I never saw so much time lost as in that household. Mr. Sinnach had no real occupation unless you count fox-hunting, and between the hunts he showed no sense of rest. To me he was as gentle and harmless as a child. I sometimes thought his life was the life of a man who was followed, except there was nothing that would dare follow him in those woods and hill-sides, over which he was sovereign and squire. He never made the least inquiry as to the progress of his children’s lessons. Their sport alone interested him. I believe that the boys had never been punished for anything except for not riding straight or for spoiling a puppy. He must have been one of the world’s authorities on horses. Personally I had no interest in that direction except for a home for old bus-horses to which I used to subscribe. I once made this deserving charity the subject of conversation at dinner, but he only sniffed very fiercely and said “Dogsmeat! dogsmeat!” I am afraid I could guess what he meant, and it horrified me.

He became a different character when the fox-hunting began. His step grew smarter and his hoarse voice could be heard roaring in the small hours before sunrise as he shouted to the grooms and hounds out of his window. The hunt used to arrive from all quarters and all the early morning there was pandemonium getting them started for the distant meet. How often I was awoken by their stamping horses! How often I listened to the yelping hounds as the huntsmen flicked them into seething order! At night the Master used to return wearied out in body but a raging lion in his heart. I could always tell whether success had attended him by the sound of his voice. After a blank day he would curse man and hound, but if Reynard was dead he would ride up to the house cheering like a schoolboy. His hatred for the fox was almost inhuman. He used to brandish some blood-stained relic of the unfortunate animal through the house. Sometimes he used its fresh pad to stir the wine for his friends. I always stayed upstairs when they were drinking orgies over their success. At first I was excited enough by what our Board School Inspector would have called “giving vent to the passions of Neolithic Man,” but it became monotonous in the hunting season. I lived, worked and felt well, but I rather lost the sensation of time. Time stood rather still at Gortinealy and typically indeed there was only one motionless hand hanging on the face of the old clock on the stairs. The only use for clockwork in that strange old house was for timing the length of their runs after the wretched foxes. The number of minutes in each run was carefully scribbled in some loose sheets of paper that were generally left between the leaves of the Family Bible. I found them there one afternoon and spent an hour pasting them neatly into a copybook. But the Master was wild, when he returned that night, and for the first and only time he used bad language to me personally. He questioned me very carefully. Why had I been opening the Family Bible? Had I read anything besides the records of family sport? Had I read the private family entries? and so forth, until my curiosity was thoroughly aroused. He seemed scarcely to believe my denial. When I tried to find the Bible the next day it had disappeared. It was not for two weeks that I found it by chance lying at the back of a shelf of books. I opened it at the flyleaf. There were columns of births, marriages, and deaths. The death column was curiously divided into two sections and puzzled me. In some years there had been as great a mortality as fifty written in numbers, but I could not believe the clan was so considerable to include so many deaths. The other column was clear enough, a long list of ordinary entries. But two struck me with an odd thrill because I could not grasp their meaning:

“Edward Sinnach—1848—killed by them.

John Edward Sinnach—1871—killed and eaten.”

This was all I had time to read before the Master came in and began looking furtively at the shelf behind which I had replaced the Bible. I spent the whole night lying awake and trying to think sense or read purpose into those words. I went to sleep with a mild conviction that my employer was the degenerate descendant of a remarkable missionary family, one of whom had been killed by the heathen in the forties and another a generation later had not only been killed but eaten, as the familiar rhyme puts it;

For nights I wept silently for those two uncanonised martyrs. I used to picture their travels and their adventures, their sermons and their catechisms, and in more terrible moments the details of their deaths. But in what countries were they killed? It could only have been in the Cannibal Islands. And naturally my mind, which always seeks facts perpetually, returned to the one awful question: “Was Edward eaten as well as John?” It so preyed upon my mind that I used to wake with the grim query on my lips. It was a month before I gained additional information. I had asked the elder boy if he had ever seen his grandfather John. He replied that he had died when he was quite a baby and his father would never allow his name to be mentioned. I asked why? It was because he had died a disgraceful death. In a bed upstairs instead of in the hunting field or fighting or travelling abroad, like every other true member of the family. Of course this revelation put an end to my romance about a young and earnest missionary in the wilds of Africa and I could only conclude that Family Bibles, like so much else in Ireland, were used as vehicles for rather gruesome practical jokes.

Winter was fully and icily fledged, and snow made a welcome variation to rain. The winds swept the last leaves off the trees and ripped open the loaded clouds till they dropped in hail and flake out of the firmament. But between frosts the hunting continued, for the Master seemed unable to sleep if he had failed to have a run in the day. I think he was only happy after he had seen a fox torn to shreds on the fangs of his hounds. One stormy evening he returned in a terrible humour. Though they had enjoyed a wonderful run the fox had escaped, and the Master alone of the hunt had returned furiously dissatisfied, railing and roaring. I heard him snarling up and down the long passage all that evening. When I chanced to pass him he lowered his head, it seemed to me shamefacedly. The boys crept away from him and came to hear me read stories in my own room. They were afraid of him, though in his way he was fond of them. The first time they had been in at the death of the fox he had gone wild with praise and had dabbled their faces with gore. He used to say that they had not been properly baptised till that moment, which made them his true children. I don’t believe he would have recognised them as legitimate if they had not been hard riders before they were out of their teens.

On the following day there was a meet at the other end of the county, and the Master was out and riding long before I came down to breakfast. I remember hearing him shout to his hounds while I was still in bed, and their deep belling note in reply. I lay in a drowsy stupor, for sunrise was still two hours to eastward. Once again the house was full of stamping boots and clicketing spurs. Once again the old staircase creaked and rattled to the heavy sound of feet and I heard horses pawing the courtyard below. Then the whole party rode away, and I fell back into profound sleep. It was the last time that I ever slept in that terrible house at peace.

When I came down in the morning the children were waiting for me, as chivalrous and charming as ever. They condescended to listen to all I had to say in defence of the awkward rules of spelling which govern the English language. They were curious children. I could not call them wise or foolish, backward or advanced. They had had no education and yet they were grown up. They were little savages outwardly and yet angels to me. My heart always reaches to them with a sudden ache. That day I gave them the last lesson I was ever to give them.

All the morning the mist mildewed the window pane, slowly flushing the roof and choking the gutters and creating tiny waterfalls and leakages in every direction. I used to think that we were in that part of the universe where the rain itself is brewed. The sound of water dripping or running filled every corner of the old house. It was one of those days which cause sympathy with Noah. The whole afternoon I spent blinking over a book before a fire in the hall, while the children sat round me in their charming, chattering way. It had been too wet for them to hunt that day and they were soon yawning. They made no objection when I seized a chance to send them to bed early. There was nobody in the house except the old cook, for the whole household had departed the previous night, including the old gardener, with spade and terrier, to be in time at the meet. Darker and darker grew the evening while the turf fire flickered brighter and brighter until it collapsed into a tiny avalanche of white ash. It was late when I finally lost the thread of my reading and was roused by suddenly hearing a long, distinct howl outside.

I had passed so many months in the country listening to the same series of noise, the wind, the leaves, the birds of night or day and the rain, that I had become keenly sensitive or suspicious of the advent of a new sound. This was a wail such as I had never heard before. I listened again and caught the same curious shrieking. It was not, as I thought at first, a dog’s howling. It contained too wild a note. I could not guess what animal could have uttered it, but I sat assuring myself that wolves had been extinct for two hundred years in Ireland. I crept to the door, when the sound came again, and started down the long passage of the ground floor. I had not gone half-way when I heard a sound that thrilled the blood in my brain. It was not one howl but many, a horrible chorus that rose and rang, which neither the wind nor the rain could drown. As the sound sank my courage sank with it. I began to shake like a reed and a gust of wind might have overthrown me. But I felt that I had to look out into the night to locate the source of the sound or I should never have slept. I entered the kitchen. The old cook had retired to bed and I was alone with only a wooden door between me and the outer court. I had the strength to struggle to the window and look into the night. It was not too dark for me to see that the place was alive with wild animals, a dozen, twenty, thirty lithe, slender creatures running round in a quivering, coiling crowd. When one halted all halted. When one raised his thin snout into the air and howled, every living animal howled in echo. All the Diplomas attesting my character for common sense could not prevent me dropping into a dead faint.

It must have been an hour later that I was brought to my senses by a deluge of cold water. A sound of low voices hummed round me, and I heard an Irish voice say: “She must have taken it to heart, but there’s no harm done.” I was led slowly into the passage and to my own room, where I found to my surprise that the children were in an agony of grief. I strove to comfort them as well as I could. I pleaded, and told them stories, but it was all in vain. I had a vague feeling that they wept for me and because I had swooned in the kitchen. I had forgotten for the moment all that preceded the swoon. When I assured them that all was all right, they cried; “But no, Dad is dead, dead; fell from his horse and was found in the wood.” Then my memory began to start from its subconscious lair and I gradually remembered everything.... After putting them to bed I crawled into mine and remained there for that awful night. I could close my eyes but not my ears, and from time to time I heard the howling recommence outside. And within the house I heard the agitated steps of the servants and the men of the hunt, who had returned, bringing the Master’s body. They heard the howling as well as I did, for they stopped dead each time the wild sound recommenced. I knew then that I was not mad alone but that it was a house of the mad. Gradually the howling died down to a wail and passed away into the thin dark of the night. But I could hear men moving all night in the house, and when I came downstairs in the morning, lights were still burning in every room. Hunting men, men of the house and neighbours lay huddled in the arm-chairs just as they had ridden in from the previous day. With blazing fires and copious liquor they had kept grief or fear at bay during the night. I dared only then to look into the courtyard. It was empty!

My nerves had suffered such a strain that I wished to return to England immediately, in spite of my affection for the children. But their grief for their father was pathetic and I decided to remain for a few days trying to soothe them one moment and to fit them into black cotton clothes the next. The remaining days I spent at Gortinealy brought me however a climax of unexplained mystery and horror. The body was being waked and I continually overheard the conversation of the servants and neighbours, who were camped in the house and making the fullest use of the cellars. I gathered that I was far from being the only one to have seen the uncanny visitors of the day. But the amazing thing was that they seemed to have expected those wild howling animals as naturally as they expected the undertaker at the approach of death. All had seen or heard what I had heard or seen and yet nobody was going mad except myself. I heard one voice saying casually enough: “Aren’t they saying there’s no foxes in the other end of the county this fortnight? Every cover drawn blank and the old women saying all the foxes are gone to Gortinealy to see the old man dead!”

Every night for nearly a week they waked the Master’s corpse, sitting and smoking in relays and telling tales of his great charity to his hounds and kindred spirits and of his prowess in the field from evening till dawn. I avoided what seemed to me a painful form of heathen orgies except one night when I was asked to look upon the poor Master’s face once more before it was lowered into the grave for ever. I could not refuse, and old Timotheus offered to take me into the big room where it was laid out in the sickly candlelight.

We went down the creaking stairs and I peeped into half-darkness. The room gave me the feeling of being full of people or things. The candles had mostly guttered out but, when my eyes caught their focus, I thought at first that I saw mourners kneeling round the coffin, tiny, sharp-faced hob-goblins but no! they sprang up like noiseless and beautiful cats and leaped over the furniture and out of the open window into the courtyard. But they were not cats! I could make no mistake what they were, for too often I had seen their mangled pieces brought home after a day’s hunting. They were slender live foxes! wriggling through the furniture like maggots! God have mercy!

Timotheus had dropped to his knees and was reciting prayers at fever heat. Not until the last vestige of fur had slipped from the room did I dare take even a first step forward. Timotheus rose and went before me, but I was not ready for the next shock. I saw him lean over the visage of the dead and stay riveted. I did not look myself, thank God! but I heard the words he gasped. It was only one sentence, the last words I heard in that terrible house, but they will be the last words I shall have the happiness and relief to forget if ever I lose my memory. For all that Timotheus let past his lips was: “Holy of Holy! but they have the face ate off him!”