Messer Marco Polo | Page 4

in Ulster, there
is a gey foolish thing. . ."
But the harsh logic of Ulster left me, and the soft mood of Ulster came
on me as I remembered him, and I going into the town on the train.
And the late winter grass, of Westchester, spare, scrofulous; the
jerry-built bungalows; the lines of uncomely linen; the blatant
advertising boards -- all the unbeauty of it passed away, and I was
again in the Antrim glens. There was the soft purple of the Irish
Channel, and there the soft, dim outline of Scotland. There was the
herring school silver in the sun, and I could see it from the crags where
the surf boomed like a drum. And underfoot was the springy heather,

the belled and purple heather. . .
And there came to me again the vision of the old man's thatched
farmhouse when the moon was up and the bats were out, and the winds
of the County Antrim came bellying down the glens. . .The turf fire
burned on the hearth, now red, now yellow, and there was the golden
light of lamps, and Malachi of the Long Glen was reciting some poem
of Blind Raftery's, or the lament of Pierre Ronsard for Mary, Queen of
Scots: Ta ribin o mo cheadshearc ann mo phocs sios. Agas mna Eirip ni
leigheasfadaois mo bhron, faraor! Ta me reidh leat go ndeantar comhra
caol! Agas gobhfasfaidh an fear no dhiaidh sin thrid mo lar anios!
There is a ribbon from my only love in my pocket deep, And the
women of Europe they could not cure my grief, alas! I am done with
you until a narrow coffin be made for me. And until the grass shall
grow after that up through my heart!
And I suddenly discovered on the rumbling train that apart from the
hurling and the foot-ball and the jumping of horses, what life I
remembered of Ulster was bound up in Malachi Campbell of the Long
Glen. . .
A very strange old man, hardy as a blackthorn, immense, bowed
shoulders, the face of some old hawk of the mountains, hair white and
plentiful as some old cardinal's. All his kinsfolk were dead except for
one granddaughter. . .And he had become a tradition in the glens. . . It
was said he had been an ecclesiastical student abroad, in
Valladolid. . .and that he had forsaken that life. And in France he had
been a tutor in the family of MacMahon, roi d' Irlande. . .and
somewhere he had married, and his wife had died and left him
money. . .and he had come back to Antrim. . .He had been in the Papal
Zouaves, and fought also in the American Civil War. . .A strange old
figure who knew Greek and Latin as well as most professors, and who
had never forgotten his Gaelic. . .
Antrim will ever color my own writing. My Fifth Avenue will have
something in it of the heather glen. My people will have always a
phrase, a thought, a flash of Scots-Irish mysticism, and for that I must

either thank or blame Malachi Campbell of the Long Glen. The stories
I heard, and I young, were not of Little Rollo and Sir Walter Scott's, but
the horrible tale of the Naked Hangman, who goes through the Valleys
on Midsummer's Eve; of Dermot, and Granye of the Bright Breasts; of
the Cattle Raid of Maeve, Queen of Connacht; of the old age of
Cuchulain in the Island of Skye; grisly, homely stories, such as yon of
the ghostly foot-ballers of Cushendun, whose ball is a skull, and whose
goal is the portals of a ruined graveyard; strange religious poems, like
the Dialogue of Death and the Sinner:
Do thugainn loistin do gach deoraidh treith-lag -- I used to give lodging
to every poor wanderer; Food and drink to him I would see in want, His
proper payment to the man requesting reckoning, Och! Is not Jesus
hard if he condemns me!
All these stories, of all these people he told, had the unreal, shimmering
quality of that mirage that is seen from Portrush cliffs, a glittering city
in a golden desert, surrounded by a strange sea mist. All these songs, all
these words he spoke, were native, had the same tang as the turf smoke,
the Gaelic quality that is in dark lakes on mountains summits, in
plovers nests amid the heather. . .And to remember them now in New
York, to see him. . .
Fifteen years had changed him but little: little more tremor and
slowness in the walk, a bow to the great shoulders, an eye that flashed
like a knife.
"And what do you think of New York, Malachi?"
"I was here before, your honor