Part 33 (1/2)
”If one could take it all, and do to it as I've done to Tusa hErin. By the way,” she asked suddenly, ”is Tusa hErin haunted?”
”No, I never heard. Did you see anything?”
”I think I heard something a few times. A piper piping when the storms rose. A queer little tune--like that thing about McCrimmon.”
”_Cha till, cha till, cha till McCrimmon._”
”Are there words to it?”
”_Le cogadh mo sidhe cha till McCrimmon._”
Never, never, never, will return McCrimmon.
With war or peace never will come McCrimmon.
For money or spoil never will return McCrimmon.
He will come no more till the Day of the Gathering.
”A lamenting tune like that, I heard.”
”The drone was just the grinding of the waves, the air the wind among the yews.”
”That's possible. But isn't a phantom piper possible, too, in a land of ghosts?”
-- 8
”A land of ghosts”; the phrase remained with him. And the lighted lamp and the burning peat fire seemed to invoke like some necromantic ritual.
How often, and he a young boy, had the names trumpeted through his being. Brian Boru at Clontarf, and the routed red Danes. And with the routing of the Danes, Ireland had come to peaceful days, and gentle white-clothed saints arose and monasteries with tolling bells, and great Celtic crosses.... And gone were the Druids, their cursing stones, their Ogham script.... Gone old Celtic divinities, Angus of the Boyne, and Manannan, son of Lir, G.o.d of the sea ... and the peace of Galilee came over the joyous hunting land.... The little people of the hills, with their pygmy horses, their pygmy pipes, cowered, went into exile, under the thunder of Rome.... And the land was meek that it might inherit the kingdom of heaven.... And the English came.... The Earls of Ulster fled into Spain.... And only here and there was a memory of old-time heroes, of Cuchulain of the Red Branch; of Maeve, queen of Connacht, in her fighting chariot, her great red cloak; of Dermot, who abducted Grania from the king of Ireland's camp, and knew nine ways of throwing the spear.... The O'Neils remembered Shane, who brought Queen Elizabeth to her knees with love and terror.... And Owen Roe, the Red.... And the younger Hugh O'Neil, with his hardbitten Ulstermen at Benburb.... They had to bring the greatest general of Europe, Cromwell, the lord protector, to subdue the Ulster clans.... Sullen peace, and the Stuarts came back, and again Ireland was lulled with their suave manners, the scent of the white rose.... The crash of the Boyne Water, and King James running for his life.... And Limerick's siege, and the Treaty, and Patrick Sarsfield and the Wild Geese setting wing for France.... France knew them, Germany, Sweden, even Russia.... Ramillies and the Spaniard knew Lord Clare's Dragoons.... And Fontenoy and the thunder of the Irish Brigade.... And Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, dead at the end of the day.... Even to-day Europe knew them: O'Donnel, Duke of Tetuan and grandee of Spain; and Patrice McMahon, Duke of Magenta, who had been made president of the Republic of France--they were of the strain of Lucan's wild Geese....
[Ill.u.s.tration]
And again a sullen peace, and Ulster rang to the trumpet of American freedom, and the United Irishmen arose in Belfast.... And Napper Tandy at Napoleon's court, and Hoche with his s.h.i.+ps in Bantry Bay.... Wolfe Tone's mangled throat, and Lord Edward Fitzgerald murdered by his captors....
What had made these men, sane men--Ulstermen mostly--risk life and face death so gallantly? What brought out the men of '48 and the men of '67?
What was making little Bigger fight so savagely in Parliament, blocking the legislation of the empire? What had got under their skins, into their blood? Surely not for a gray half-deserted city? Surely not for little bays and purple mountains? Surely not for an illiterate peasantry, half crazed by the fear of h.e.l.l?
He tried to see Ireland as a personality, as one sees England, like the great Britannia on a copper penny, helmeted, full-breasted, great-hipped, with sword and s.h.i.+eld, a bourgeois concept of majesty, a ponderous, self-conscious personality:
When Britain first, at Heaven's command Arose from out the azure main,--
Just like that!
And Scotland he could see as a young woman, in kilt and plaid and Glengarry cap, a shrewd young woman though, with a very decisive personality, clinching a bargain as the best of dealers might, a little forward. He could think of her as the young girl whose hand Charles the Young Pretender kissed, and who had said to him directly: ”I'd liefer hae a buss for my mou'.” ”I'd rather have a kiss on my mouth.” Scotland knew what she wanted and got it, a pert, a solid, a likable girl.
But Ireland, Ireland of the gray mists, the gray towns. How to see her?
The country ballad came to him. The ”Shan Van Vocht,” the poor old woman, gray, shawled, pitiable, whom her children were seeking to reinstate in her home with many fields:
And where will they have their camp?
Says the Shan Van Vocht.
And where will they have their camp?
Says the Shan Van Vocht.