Emily Lawless

“ They had to feel their way as they best could round the outlying reefs, all but grinding against them, till they finally ran the curragh ashore upon the single spit of firm sand just below the old church of Cill-Cananach. Dark or light, hot or cold, sunlight, starlight, moonlight, it was all one that evening to Grania. The world itself seemed to have changed; to stand still; to be a new world. Everything about and around her had changed—the sea, the sky, the boat, the rocks, the shore—above all, herself; herself and Murdough. ”

“ Why should people go on living so? she thought. Why should they go on living at all, indeed? Why, above all, should they marry and bring more wretched creatures into the world, if this was to be the way of it? How stupid, how useless, how horrible it all was! Yes, Honor was right, the priests were right, the nuns were right, they were all right—there was no happiness in the world, none at all—nowhere! Murdough Blake?—well, Murdough Blake would be just like the rest of them, just like every other husband—worse, perhaps, than some. ”

“ Honor opened her mild brown eyes to their widest possible extent, and half raised herself up in bed in wonder at such questionings.
‘Sure, child! isn’t God everywhere?’ she exclaimed simply. ‘And happiness! Why, saints above! who ever heard of such talk! Happiness? God love the child! what were any of us, and women specially, sent into the world for, except to save our souls and learn to bear what’s given us to bear? Augh, Grania, Grania! don’t be looking for happiness, child, for I tell you you won’t get it—not married nor single, sick nor well, rich nor poor, young nor old ”

“ Grania for all answer thrust her foot again amongst the turf, making it flare and sputter like a Catherine wheel.
‘Then I don’t believe it—nor want to believe it—nor to hear it, what’s more—not though every priest in Ireland or the world were to say it!’ she suddenly burst out angrily. ‘And it is all very well for you, Honor, a saint born, wanting nothing and caring for nothing, only just the bit to keep you alive and the spot to pray on. But all women are not made like that. ”

“ Grania shivered and felt sick. Something in the look and extraordinary apathy of the woman, something in the hideous squalor of the house, affected her as no poverty—not even that of the Dalys at home—had ever done before. She raked together the embers, and put a few fresh sods of turf on the fire—seeing that the woman of the house was either too ill or too indifferent to do anything—then sat down on a low creepy opposite to her, feeling chilled to the bone and utterly miserable. ”

“ There being no earth for it to dry into, it poured over the level slabs, sweeping from slab to slab almost as the sea swept over the rocks between the tide-marks. Watching it at such moments, it would have seemed to you as if the whole island would shortly become one great waterfall, or scarcely perceptible reef for the Atlantic to roll over, the water, as it descended upon the slabs, falling into the troughs or tunnels laid ready for it, and out of them again until it found rest in the final trough awaiting it at the bottom. ”

“ As far as her own sensations went, she might have been rowing there the whole live-long night, so benumbing and sleep-like was that torpor. How long she really had been rowing she could not in the least have told, but her thoughts or her dreams were suddenly cut short—cut into as it were—by another wild cry from Phelim. This time it was much more than a cry, it was an actual scream; a shrill, discordant screech, such as some animals give when they are in the intensest throes of terror. Grania on her side started violently, and turned round. ”

“ That Grania would seriously dream of marrying Teige he did not for a moment believe, but that, even in anger, she should throw such a rival in his teeth was an insult very difficult to stomach. Murdough had never asked himself for a moment whether he cared for Grania or not, the question would probably have seemed to him utterly superfluous. Of course he cared for her. Had she not always been there; always, in a fashion, belonged to him? Why in the world wouldn’t he care for her? ”

“ Murdough! Murdough!’ she whispered, and her breath fanned his cheek fiercely. ‘Och, Murdough, look at me! Murdougheen, speak to me! Is there never one bit of love for me in all that big strong body of yours? Never one bit of love for your poor Grania, that’s loved you, and none but you, all her life long, ever since she was a little bit of a girsha? Sure, heart of my{v.2-244} heart, wouldn’t I die any day in the week gladly just to please you, or any night of it for that matter either, if you asked me? and is there nothing you’d do for me in return—nothing? nothing? Arrah! ”

“ Murdough’s astonishment and delight burst out then and there like a fountain; burst into a torrent of words—vague, iridescent, incoherent. Projects of every sort—races to be won, victories over rivals, money, much money, to be earned in the future—they all poured forth; flew and hurtled through the air; one golden scheme jostling against another in its hurry to express itself. Grania listened, but her eyes never lost that oddly intent, wistful expression. ”

“ Oh, a real rich girl is Grania O’Malley—my God! yes, rich. There are not three girls on Inishmaan as rich as she is—no, not two, nor any other at all, I am thinking.’
‘Trath, and it is none too rich she’ll find herself when she is married to Murdough Blake!’ old Peggy Dowd said bitterly. ‘’Tis down from the sky or up from the sea those Blakes of Alleenageeragh do expect the money to be coming to them. A gosthering, spending, having brood they are and always have been. Rich is it? Gorra! ”

“ Not a ripple anywhere; only that same slow{v.2-297} internal movement, a movement hardly to be perceived upon the surface; only the gradual undertow of the tide drawing everything stealthily in one direction. Sea, sky, land, water, everything seemed alike to be lapped in the drowsiest, the most complete and immovable repose. Sleep seemed everywhere to be the order of the hour, to have taken possession of all things. The very atoms of seaweed as they floated along appeared to partake and be half conscious of that placidity.
Grania had ceased now to struggle. ”

“ To turn to a more cheerful subject. Murdough Blake had grown up, as he had promised to do, into a tall, active, lissom young fellow. In his archaic clothes of yellowish flannel, spun, woven, bleached, made upon the island, in the cow’s skin pampooties which give every Aranite his peculiarly shuffling and at the same time swinging step, he ought to have rejoiced the inmost heart of a painter, had a painter ever thought of going to the Aran isles in search of subjects, a ridiculous supposition, for who would dream of doing so? ”

“ Wurrah! wurrah! but it did make the noise, I tell you, Grania, and the people all turning round to look at him, and he pretending not to see one of them. My God! but a horse is a wonderful beast! I would sooner have a horse of my own, of my very own, that I could ride all over the world upon the back of, than I would have a ship or anything! ”

“ Yes, certainly, it was amusing, Grania thought. Murdough was right; it was a mistake to stay always in one place. One grew to be no better than a cow, or a goat, or a thistle growing upon the rocks. It was good to look abroad. The world, after all, was really a large place. Why, beyond Galway there were actually other towns; Dublin even; that Dublin which Murdough was always talking about and pining to get to. Who could tell but what she herself might some day see Dublin? ”

“ What ailed him to think of marrying her I never could fancy! A man past forty years of age and a widower, too! An extraordinary thing and scarce decent! No fortune to her, neither, nothing but a pair of big black eyes—the very same as those two shining in your own head this minute—and the walk, so people said, of a queen. A good girl she was—I’m not saying anything against her, poor Delia—and I cried myself sick the day she died, for she was a kind friend to me. But there was yourself, Grania, screeching and kicking, and making the devil’s own commotion with wanting to be fed. ”

“ Grania stood for a moment on the edge of the cliff, staring down at it; her black brows almost meeting in the intensity of her gaze, her arms locked one over the other on her chest, her face working. Suddenly she turned with a gesture of impatience, and looked away from it towards the other side, the side where there was no villa, and where there was nothing to be seen, nothing, that is, but the sea and the bare sea-washed sheets of limestone. Ledge above ledge, layer above layer, these last rose ”

“ Grania, a born aristocrat—all children are born aristocrats—shared this feeling in the strongest degree, and was well aware that Teige was in some way or other immensely inferior to herself, and therefore a person only to be tolerated when no more attractive company was to be had. She sat for some time longer with her feet dangling over the top of the fort, a quaint little red-petticoated figure, the solitary spot of colour in all that desolate greyness. ”

“ A momentary qualm as to Honor came to cross these delights, quickly dispersed, however, by the reflection that Honor had her prayers and her cross, and that she really wanted nothing else, whereas she, Grania, wanted many things, while as for Murdough Blake, that hero’s wants were simply insatiable—grew and multiplied, in fact, with such rapidity that even his most faithful admirer could hardly keep pace with them. ”

“ She was floating towards it as fast as ever she could float; hurrying breathlessly, as a stream hurries when it nears the sea. Long before the fog had completely melted away, long before ordinary matter-of-fact daylight had returned to Inishmaan, her journey thither was accomplished. Already, even while the priest stood beside her, while the prayers she had so longed for, those prayers which Grania had died to obtain for her, were being uttered, she was drifting across its borderland ”

“ Our probes are too short, and we simply miss the point we aim at. We know them each in our own turn, recognise them more or less silently, more or less unwillingly, and there is an end of the matter. Grania, at any rate, did so. She recognised, silently and unwillingly, that she had been a fool; recognised it grimly and with bitterness. Bitterly too and silently she repeated to herself that Honor’s way of looking at the matter had been the true one. ”

“ His future had always held her as a matter of course, just as hers had always held him, and use, more than all the other ingredients of existence, possesses a tremendous leverage upon beings of Murdough’s type. The end of his brooding was that one evening, about a fortnight after their quarrel, and a couple of days after the scene between Grania and Shan Daly, he waylaid her as she was coming back from the kelp fire, hiding for that purpose in an old clump of hawthorn bushes till she should pass by. ”

“ Already the bottom of the boat was half full. In the first impulse of the moment Grania had snatched up her flannel petticoat and stuffed it into the hole, holding it there with both hands as she felt the pressure growing greater and greater. It was like trying, however, to stop the course of a river—hopeless to absurdity. To get out somewhere, no matter where; to reach the shore if possible; if not, to reach some rock ”

“ After her long probation, after her tedious waiting, she was at last upon the verge of that looked-for, that intensely-desired country; a country which, if to most of us it seems but a dream within a dream, a floating mirage, a{v.2-303} phantom made up of love and faith, of hope and of yearning desire—unthinkable, untenable, all but impossible—was to Honor, and is to such as Honor, no phantom, no mirage, but the soberest and solidest of solid realities; the thing for which they live, the hope for which they die. ”

“ And if I do not go with you, it is upon the rocks you will go this night, my fine captain, you and all your poor men—yes, indeed, upon the rocks this night, and be drowned every one of you—for there is no other man on Inisheer, no, nor on any of the islands, that dare bring you into Galway upon such a night, only myself alone. And I will not bring you in for less than my full price, so you need not think it. No, indeed, for why would I venture my life for nothing? Great King of Glory! that would be a foolish thing for any man to do—a very foolish thing! ”

“ Murdough was supposed by Honor and the rest of the world to help Grania at her work, not having any work in particular of his own to do, but in reality their mutual share of that work was always exactly what it had been that afternoon. Habits grow as rapidly as ragweeds, especially where life is of the simplest, and where two people are practically agreed as to how that life is to be carried on; and that Murdough should trouble himself about anything that it was possible for her to do single-handed had long seemed to both of them a sheer absurdity. ”

“ Though not overflowing in words, as Murdough’s did, her imagination was perhaps even more alive than his to those dim formless visions which people the dusk, and keep alive in the Celt a sense of vague presences, unseen but realisable—survivals of a whole world of forgotten beliefs, unfettered by logic, untouched by education, hardly altered even by later and more conscious beliefs, which have rather modified these earlier ones than superseded them. ”

“ Yet Grania had never ill-used Teige O’Shaughnessy. At least, had she? The question is not so easily answered as may at first sight seem. Given a woman with a larger share of plain human affection than she can conveniently dispose of—an impatient woman, hot tempered and vehement—let her have given away that affection where it is, to say the least, indifferently responded to; let her have someone else at hand to whom she is as the sun, moon, and stars shining in their glory{v.2-42}—as wonderful and hardly less unapproachable—what sort of treatment is she likely to mete out to that person? ”

“ There’s mothers enough in the world and to spare, too! Anyone can be a mother—small thanks to them! Oh, no, Grania sweet, acushla machree, love of my heart, ’tis your soul, ’tis the precious, precious soul of you that I’ve always wanted, and cried after, and longed for, ever since first I had you to myself. ”

“ Who so realising it can resist the wish to become, for a moment even, that dream of philanthropists—a benevolent despot, and, swooping suddenly upon the islands, carry off their whole population—priests, people, and all—and set them down in a new place, somewhere where Nature would make some little response, however slight, to so much toil, care, love, so fruitlessly and for so many centuries lavished upon her here? ”

“ Outside the wind howled, sweeping with a vicious whirl over the long naked ledges, loosening here and there a thin flake of stone, which spun round and round for a moment like a forest leaf, then fell with a light pattering noise upon the ridge below. Inside the sods crackled dully, as the fire blown by Grania ran along their ragged brown sides, or shot into a flame whenever a stray fibre helped it on. ”

“ Pulse of my heart, sister avilish, there’s nothing for a woman like being a nun—nothing, nothing! Praying and praying from morning till night, and nought to do, only what you’re bid, and a safe fair walk before you to heaven, without a turn, or the fear of a turn, to right or left! Sure, ’tis all over now, as you say, but many’s the time, och many’s and many’s the time, Grania, and for years upon years, I cried myself to sleep because I couldn’t be a nun. ”

“ SEPTEMBER CHAPTER I A mild September afternoon, thirty years ago, in the middle of Galway Bay.
Clouds over the whole expanse of sky, nowhere showing any immediate disposition to fall as rain, yet nowhere allowing the sky to appear decidedly, nowhere even becoming themselves decided, keeping everywhere a broad indefinable wash of greyness, a grey so dim, uniform, and all-pervasive, that it defied observation, floating and melting away into a dimly blotted horizon, an horizon which,{v.1-2} whether at any given point to call sea or sky, land or water, it was all but impossible to decide. ”