Part 42 (1/2)
For a mile or more my road lay back over the way we had come, mounting steadily toward the entrance to the Glenaan Valley; and I met many little carts coming in to market, for it was Sat.u.r.day; and every one who wasn't going into town was taking advantage of the fine day by working in the fields, or putting new coats of dazzling whitewash upon their houses, or digging in the little flower-gardens in front of them. And everybody was in cheerful humour and pa.s.sed the time of day with the heartiest good will.
And then I came to the entrance of the valley, and turned westward along the road which traverses it. The mountains soon began to close in on either hand, and the houses strung along the road or perched on narrow plateaus grew smaller and smaller; slate gave way to thatch, stone floors gave way to dirt ones, and the windows shrank to a single immovable sash of four small panes. In a word, as the land grew poorer, the people grew poorer, too; and the conditions of life seemed not so very different from those in far Connaught. Indeed it may very well be that this is one of those ”congested districts” which are scattered over the east of Ireland.
I stopped, at last, and asked an old man in a blue flannel smock if he could tell me the way to Ossian's grave; and he told me to fare straight on till I came to some stepping-stones, and to cross the stones and push right up the hill. So I went on happily, for the air was very sweet, and the sun just warm enough, and the great wind was driving white clouds before it across the sky, and the suns.h.i.+ne in the faces of the people I met added to the beauty of the day; and at last I came to a cl.u.s.ter of thatched cottages where the little river turned in close to the road and rippled between a row of stepping-stones; and I asked a pleasant-faced woman if that was the way to Ossian's grave, and she said it was; to cross the stones and go right up the hill, and I would find a house there where I could get further directions.
The road beyond the stones ran up the hill and into the yard of a farm-house; and in the yard there was a dog with a very savage bark; but there was also a blue-eyed girl who quieted him, while she stared at me curiously. I asked her the way to the grave, and she pointed up the hill, with a little motion of her hand toward the right, and I set off again. The road had dwindled to the merest mountain path, with a wall on either side of earth and stones, crested with p.r.i.c.kly gorse; but I came to a break in it, at last, opening to the right, and scrambled through; and then, a minute later, in the midst of a heather-carpeted field on the very summit of the hill, I saw the grave.
It is formed of standing stones, covered with lichen and crumbling under the storms of centuries, and the vestibule, so to speak, is a semi-circle some twenty feet in diameter opening toward the east. Back of this are two chambers, one behind the other, divided by two large uprights, and I suppose it was in one of these that the body of the bard was laid--if it was laid here at all. My own guess would be that these weather-beaten stones, like those others on the hill beside Lough Gill, antedate Ossian by at least two thousand years. But that is an unimportant detail; and it may be, indeed, that when the great singer died, his comrades could think of no more fitting place to lay him than within the guardian circle of this monument of an older race, looking down across the valley and out toward the sea.
Fact and fancy have been so mingled in the Ossianic legend that it is impossible to disentangle them, nor is it profitable to try. It is fairly certain that he was born somewhere about the middle of the third century after Christ, and legend has it that he spent two hundred years in the Land of Youth with Niam of the Golden-hair. When, homesick for Erin, he returned to it, it was to find his father's courts overgrown with gra.s.s and St. Patrick preaching there, and his disputes with Patrick are recorded at great length in the tales of the Fenian cycle; for Ossian bewailed the vanished days of those mighty fighters, and wished for nothing better than to join them, in whatever world they might be, while Patrick laboured to convert him from such heathen fancies and to save his soul. It is to this story reference is made in the stanza from Lionel Johnson's ”Ode to Ireland,” which I quoted on page 221.
Up there on the bleak hill-top the wind was roaring; but I found a nook between two of the great stones where it could not reach me, and I lighted my pipe and sat there and looked down over the valley and thought of the old days, and so spent a sweet half hour. The valley had changed but little, I fancied, with the rolling centuries; there were tiny, high-walled fields and low thatched houses on the lower slopes; but above them sprang the primal hills, clothed with heather, their bones of granite gleaming here and there, back and back over the Glens of Antrim, through which the red tide of tribal warfare had poured so many times. And over eastward lay Cushendall, nestling among its trees, with the gaunt, truncated ma.s.s of Lurigethan hill overshadowing it, and beyond that, faint and far and scarcely distinguishable from the blue sky, lay the blue sea.
That valley and those hills belong to the Earl of Antrim--his estate includes some thirty-five thousand acres of Irish soil, around which he may build walls and post notices and set guards; and as I sat there gazing out at them, I realised far more keenly than I had ever done the absurdity of the idea that any portion of this earth's surface can rightfully belong to any man. Trace any t.i.tle back, for a hundred years, or a thousand years, or two thousand years, and one finds that it started in a theft--theft on the part of an individual from the tribe which held the land in common; and the solemn farce of sale and transfer and inheritance after that was merely the pa.s.sing on of stolen goods.
Perhaps some day we may win through to the ideal of an earth belonging equally to all men, with private right only in the things man's industry creates.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GRAVE OF OSSIAN]
[Ill.u.s.tration: AN ANTRIM LANDSCAPE]
I knocked out my pipe, at last, reluctantly enough, and took the picture of the stones which is opposite this page, but which gives a poor idea of them; and then I started downward, through the break in the hedge, through the farmyard, going warily for fear of the dog, and so to the stepping-stones; and when I looked at them, I saw what a perfect picture they made, with the stream rippling through, and the thatched cottages beyond, with the smoke whipped from their chimneys, and a single tree bending before the wind. That picture in miniature is opposite this page; but I could not snare with my camera the tang of the turf, the softness of the air, the glory of the sun, nor the murmur of the water.
Those you will have to evoke for yourself, as best you can.
In the road beyond I found a mail-carrier, who had completed his morning-round among the hillside dwellings, and who was turning back to Cushendall; and we went on together. He was a tall, lithe lad, as he had need to be to get over his daily route among these hills; and, like every one else, he hoped some day to win his way to America. He knew many of its towns from the postmarks on the letters he carried. In the last month, he said, there had been fully a hundred from America, and welcome letters they were, for nearly all of them contained a bit of money. Many of the dwellers in these hills--like thousands more all over Ireland--would find life outside the work-house impossible but for the help from their sons and daughters in America; and it gives one a good feeling at the heart to think of those devoted boys and girls putting by every month a portion of the money which was hard to win and harder still to save, to send to the old people who were left at home.
By the side of the road, as we walked along, I saw a hovel more primitive and comfortless than most--just a tiny hut of a single room, dark and cold and bare; but against one end of it grew a great fuchsia bush, clothing it with glory. A wrinkled old woman, clad in filthy clothes, was standing in the doorway, and my companion pa.s.sed the time of day with her, while I unslung my camera, for I wanted a picture of the tiny house and the great bush. I would have liked a picture of the old woman, too; but she said she was too dirty, and went in until the picture was taken which is opposite the next page. Then she came out and asked if I would send her one. It was the first time, she said, that any one had thought her houseen worth a picture; so I promised she should have one, and she gave me her name, and the postman promised it should reach her.
We went on together, after that, and I asked him what the people of the neighbourhood thought about Home Rule.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A HUMBLE HOME IN ANTRIM]
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OLD JAIL AT CUSHENDALL]
”The truth is, sir,” he answered, ”that we don't know what to think, what with this man telling us one thing and that man another; but most of the poor people about here would be glad to see it, for they can't be worse off than they are, and a change might better them. Drilling and arming? Ah, there's none of that around here; there's no army of Ulster in these parts. That's just talk.”
He left me at the crossroads, for he had still a letter or two to deliver farther down the road, and I went on by myself toward the town.
There were more whitewashers out, and they were splas.h.i.+ng the lime about in the most reckless fas.h.i.+on, besprinkling the hedges and the shrubbery and even the road, somewhat to the danger of the pa.s.sers-by; and at the first houses of the town I met Betty. She had been talking to the caretaker of the churchyard about the true shamrock; and he said that it did not grow wild thereabouts, but that he had some in a pot at home and would be glad to bring her a spray; and he told her of a ruined church and an old Celtic cross out along the road above the cliffs, very near, he said--not over eight minutes' walk at the most.
So we determined to take a look at it; but first we walked about the town a little, and found it quite an ordinary town, except for a great square tower at the intersection of the princ.i.p.al streets--a tower erected, so the tablet on it says, ”as a place of confinement for rioters and idlers.” I suppose the town has a modern jail now--perhaps even with panoptic galleries! At any rate, the tower is no longer used. I took a picture of it, and if you will look at the picture closely, you will see a girl drawing water from the town pump just below the tower.
We started off finally for the ruins, first to the cliffs along the sea, and then on along the path which runs at their very edge. The view was very lovely, and we didn't notice how the time was flying; but I looked at my watch presently and found that we had been walking twenty minutes, with no ruins in sight. We pushed on ten minutes longer, and had about given them up, when some children directed us which way to go, and we finally found the few remaining fragments of Layd Church, so overgrown with ivy and embowered in trees that they were scarcely recognisable as ruins at all. The cross proved to be a very modern one; and the graveyard is sadly neglected, with the gra.s.s knee-deep among the tombs, which have fallen into sorry disarray. Most of them cover some long-dead MacDonnell--they were all MacDonnells, in the old days, who lived in the Glens of Antrim.
The ”eight minute walk” had taken more than half an hour, and we had need to hasten if we were to get back to the hotel in time for lunch, for the car which was to take us to Larne was to start at two; but we made it, and when the car drove up, we found it was a long outside-car with room for five people on each side. We chose the forward end of the side next the sea; and then the car proceeded to another hotel in the town, where five or six more people were waiting; and the two women who were condemned to the landward side complained bitterly. They were making the trip, they said, just to see the sea, and here they would be compelled to sit the whole way facing the blank cliff.
”Sure, there's nothing I can do, miss,” said the jarvey, who had listened sympathetically; ”I can't make the car any longer, now can I?
Maybe you might be glancin' over your shoulder from time to time; anyway I'm thinkin' you'll be seein' enough of the sea before you're home again.”