The Aran Islands | Page 6

talk to me. They spoke
at first of their poverty, and then one of them said--'I dare say you do
have to pay ten shillings a week in the hotel?' 'More,' I answered.
'Twelve?'
'More.'
'Fifteen?'
'More still.'
Then he drew back and did not question me any further, either thinking
that I had lied to check his curiosity, or too awed by my riches to
continue.
Repassing Killeany I was joined by a man who had spent twenty years
in America, where he had lost his health and then returned, so long ago
that he had forgotten English and could hardly make me understand
him. He seemed hopeless, dirty and asthmatic, and after going with me
for a few hundred yards he stopped and asked for coppers. I had none

left, so I gave him a fill of tobacco, and he went back to his hovel.
When he was gone, two little girls took their place behind me and I
drew them in turn into conversation.
They spoke with a delicate exotic intonation that was full of charm, and
told me with a sort of chant how they guide 'ladies and gintlemins' in
the summer to all that is worth seeing in their neighbourhood, and sell
them pampooties and maidenhair ferns, which are common among the
rocks.
We were now in Kilronan, and as we parted they showed me holes in
their own pampooties, or cowskin sandals, and asked me the price of
new ones. I told them that my purse was empty, and then with a few
quaint words of blessing they turned away from me and went down to
the pier.
All this walk back had been extraordinarily fine. The intense insular
clearness one sees only in Ireland, and after rain, was throwing out
every ripple in the sea and sky, and every crevice in the hills beyond
the bay.
This evening an old man came to see me, and said he had known a
relative of mine who passed some time on this island forty-three years
ago.
'I was standing under the pier-wall mending nets,' he said, 'when you
came off the steamer, and I said to myself in that moment, if there is a
man of the name of Synge left walking the world, it is that man yonder
will be he.'
He went on to complain in curiously simple yet dignified language of
the changes that have taken place here since he left the island to go to
sea before the end of his childhood.
'I have come back,' he said, 'to live in a bit of a house with my sister.
The island is not the same at all to what it was. It is little good I can get
from the people who are in it now, and anything I have to give them
they don't care to have.'
From what I hear this man seems to have shut himself up in a world of
individual conceits and theories, and to live aloof at his trade of
net-mending, regarded by the other islanders with respect and
half-ironical sympathy.
A little later when I went down to the kitchen I found two men from
Inishmaan who had been benighted on the island. They seemed a

simpler and perhaps a more interesting type than the people here, and
talked with careful English about the history of the Duns, and the Book
of Ballymote, and the Book of Kells, and other ancient MSS., with the
names of which they seemed familiar.
In spite of the charm of my teacher, the old blind man I met the day of
my arrival, I have decided to move on to Inishmaan, where Gaelic is
more generally used, and the life is perhaps the most primitive that is
left in Europe.
I spent all this last day with my blind guide, looking at the antiquities
that abound in the west or north-west of the island.
As we set out I noticed among the groups of girls who smiled at our
fellowship--old Mourteen says we are like the cuckoo with its pipit--a
beautiful oval face with the singularly spiritual expression that is so
marked in one type of the West Ireland women. Later in the day, as the
old man talked continually of the fairies and the women they have
taken, it seemed that there was a possible link between the wild
mythology that is accepted on the islands and the strange beauty of the
women.
At midday we rested near the ruins of a house, and two beautiful boys
came up and sat near us. Old Mourteen asked them why the house was
in ruins, and who had lived in it.
'A rich farmer built it a while since,' they said, 'but after two years he
was driven away by the