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Language Server Protocol and Implementation: Supporting Language-Smart Editing and Programming Tools 1st Edition Nadeeshaan Gunasinghe download

The document discusses the Language Server Protocol (LSP) and its implementation for enhancing language-smart editing and programming tools. It covers various aspects such as developer tools, communication models, and the structure of language servers. The content includes detailed chapters on diagnostics, smart editing, refactoring, and code navigation, aimed at providing a comprehensive understanding of LSP and its applications.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
74 views

Language Server Protocol and Implementation: Supporting Language-Smart Editing and Programming Tools 1st Edition Nadeeshaan Gunasinghe download

The document discusses the Language Server Protocol (LSP) and its implementation for enhancing language-smart editing and programming tools. It covers various aspects such as developer tools, communication models, and the structure of language servers. The content includes detailed chapters on diagnostics, smart editing, refactoring, and code navigation, aimed at providing a comprehensive understanding of LSP and its applications.

Uploaded by

aouanishufei35
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Language Server
Protocol and
Implementation
Supporting Language-Smart Editing and
Programming Tools

Nadeeshaan Gunasinghe
Nipuna Marcus
Language Server Protocol
and Implementation
Supporting Language-Smart
Editing and Programming Tools

Nadeeshaan Gunasinghe
Nipuna Marcus
Language Server Protocol and Implementation: Supporting Language-Smart Editing
and Programming Tools
Nadeeshaan Gunasinghe Nipuna Marcus
Walahanduwa, Sri Lanka Mawathagama, Sri Lanka

ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-7791-1 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-7792-8


https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7792-8

Copyright © 2022 by Nadeeshaan Gunasinghe and Nipuna Marcus


This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the
material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
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a role model
Table of Contents
About the Authors����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������xv

About the Technical Reviewer�������������������������������������������������������������������������������xvii


Acknowledgments��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������xix

Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������xxi

Chapter 1: Developer Tools and Language Services������������������������������������������������� 1


Early Programmable Computers��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 1
Code Forms and Punched Cards��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 2
Text Editors vs. Source Code Editors�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 3
Why IDEs��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 5
Language Intelligence������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 7
Summary�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 9

Chapter 2: Understanding the Language Server Protocol�������������������������������������� 11


Understanding JSON-RPC����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 13
Request Object���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 13
Response Object�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 15
Batch������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 17
Understanding the Base Protocol������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 18
Header Part���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 18
Content Part��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 18
Communication Model���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 19
General Messages����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 20
$/������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 20
window���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 20
telemetry������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 21

v
Table of Contents

workspace����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 21
textDocument������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 21
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 22

Chapter 3: Implementing a Language Server��������������������������������������������������������� 23


Tools and Dependencies������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 24
Building the Project��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 25
Compatibility with Ballerina�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 27
Debugging the Client and the Server������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 27
Understanding the Main Components����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 27
Server API������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 28
Server Core���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 31
Client Implementation����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 33
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 33

Chapter 4: General Messages��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 35


General Messages����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 35
Initialize��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 35
Initialized������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 43
Shutdown������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 43
Exit����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 44
Window Operations��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 45
ShowMessage����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 45
ShowMessageRequest���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 46
ShowDocument��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 48
LogMessage�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 48
Progress/Create��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 49
Progress/Cancel�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 49
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 50

vi
Table of Contents

Chapter 5: Text Synchronization����������������������������������������������������������������������������� 51


General Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 52
didOpen��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 53
Indexing and Project Initialization����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 55
didChange����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 56
willSave��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 59
willSaveWaitUntil������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 60
didSave��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 61
didClose�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 62
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 63

Chapter 6: Diagnostics, Smart Editing, and Documentation����������������������������������� 65


Diagnostics��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 65
Initialization and Capabilities������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 65
Publishing the Diagnostics���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 67
Completion���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 72
Initialization and Capabilities������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 72
Completion Resolve�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 89
Signature Help���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 92
Initialization and Capabilities������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 92
Hover������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 97
Initialization and Capabilities������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 97
Generating the Hover������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 97
Summary���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 100

Chapter 7: Refactoring and Code Fixes���������������������������������������������������������������� 101


Rename������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 101
Initialization and Capabilities����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 102
Generating the Workspace Edit������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 103
Prepare Rename����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 107

vii
Table of Contents

Formatting�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 109
Initialization and Capabilities����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 109
Generating the Formatting TextEdits����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 110
Range Formatting��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 111
Initialization and Capabilities����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 112
Generating the Range Formatting TextEdits������������������������������������������������������������������������ 112
On Type Formatting������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 114
Initialization and Capabilities����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 114
Generating the On Type Formatting TextEdits���������������������������������������������������������������������� 115
Code Actions����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 117
Initialization and Capabilities����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 118
Generating the CodeAction�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 120
Code Actions Resolve���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 125
CodeLens���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 126
Initialization and Capabilities����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 126
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 127
CodeLens Resolve��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 128
CodeLens Refresh��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 128
Summary���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 129

Chapter 8: Code Navigation and Navigation Helpers�������������������������������������������� 131


Reference���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 131
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 132
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 132
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 132
Definition����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 134
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 134
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 135
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 135

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Type Definition�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 138


Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 139
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 139
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 140
Implementation������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 141
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 142
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 142
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 142
Declaration�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 143
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 143
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 143
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 144
Document Symbol��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 144
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 144
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 145
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 146
Document Highlight������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 150
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 150
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 150
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 151
Document Link�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 153
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 153
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 153
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 153
Document Link Resolve������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 155
Summary���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 156

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Chapter 9: Presentation and Selection����������������������������������������������������������������� 157


Semantic Tokens����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 157
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 159
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 159
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 160
Document Color������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 165
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 165
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 165
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 165
Color Presentation��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 167
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 168
Folding Range��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 169
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 170
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 170
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 170
Selection Range������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 172
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 172
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 172
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 172
Linked Editing Range���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 174
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 174
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 174
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 174
Prepare Call Hierarchy�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 176
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 176
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 176
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 177
Call Hierarchy Incoming������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 178
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 179

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Call Hierarchy Outgoing������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 180


Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 180
Summary���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 181

Chapter 10: Workspace Operations���������������������������������������������������������������������� 183


Workspace Folders������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 184
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 184
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 184
Sending the Request����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 185
Workspace Folders Change Notification����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 185
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 186
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 186
Processing the Notification������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 186
Notification of Configuration Change���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 187
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 188
Processing the Notification������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 188
Configuration���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 191
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 191
Generating the Request������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 191
Watched Files Change Notification������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 192
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 193
Registration Options������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 193
Processing the Notification������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 194
Workspace Symbol������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 196
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 196
Server Capabilities and Registration Options���������������������������������������������������������������������� 197
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 197
Execute Command�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 199
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 199
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 199
Executing the Command����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 200

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Apply Edit���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 200


Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 201
Sending the Request����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 202
Will Create Files������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 203
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 204
Registration Options������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 204
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 204
Did Create Files������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 205
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 205
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 205
Handling the Notification����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 205
Will Rename Files��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 205
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 206
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 206
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 206
Did Rename Files���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 206
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 206
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 207
Handling the Notification����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 207
Will Delete Files������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 207
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 207
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 207
Generating the Response���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 208
Deleted Files Notification���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 208
Client Capabilities���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 208
Server Capabilities�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 208
Handling the Notification����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 208
Summary���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 209

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Chapter 11: Advanced Concepts��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 211


Work Done Progress����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 211
Begin Progress�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 214
Report Progress������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 215
End Progress����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 215
Implementing the Server-Initiated Progress������������������������������������������������������������������������ 215
Partial Result Support��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 218
Working with Launchers����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 218
Extension Points������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 223
Implementing and Extending Protocol Services������������������������������������������������������������������ 223
Supporting Multiple Languages������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 226
Summary���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 230

Index��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 233

xiii
About the Authors
Nadeeshaan Gunasinghe is Technical Lead at WSO2
and has more than five years of experience in enterprise
integration, programming languages, and developer
tooling. He leads the Ballerina Language Server team and
is a key contributor to Ballerina, which is an open source
programming language and platform for the cloud, and he is
an active contributor to the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus.

Nipuna Marcus is Technical Lead at WSO2 and has more


than five years of experience in front-end development,
programming languages, and developer tooling. He was a
member of the Ballerina Language Server team and a key
contributor to the Ballerina programming language.

xv
About the Technical Reviewer
Andres Sacco has been working as a developer since
2007 in different languages including Java, PHP, Node.js,
and Android. Most of his background is in Java and the
libraries or frameworks associated with this language, for
example, Spring, Hibernate, JSF, and Quarkus. In most
of the companies that he worked for, he researched new
technologies in order to improve the performance, stability,
and quality of the applications of each company.

xvii
Other documents randomly have
different content
this talk about money and fine horses, and the quality, and what he would
have done if he himself had been one of the quality was a mere fairy tale,
and moreover a very tiresome fairy tale to her. There was nothing about it
that she could attach any idea to; nothing which seemed to have any
connection with themselves, or their own life present or future. She went on
steadily cleaning out her drills, scraping the small stones in front of her and
laying them in heaps at the side. Murdough meanwhile, having finished
everything he had to say upon the subject of horsemanship, had travelled
away to another topic, explaining, expounding, elaborating, pouring forth a
flood of illustrations such as his native tongue is rich in. It was a torrent to
which there was apparently no limit, and which, once started, could flow as
readily and continue as long in one direction as in another.
Grania was hardly listening. She wanted—she hardly herself knew what
she wanted—but certainly it was not words. Why would Murdough always
go on talk, talk, talking? she thought irritably. She admired his interminable
flow of words of course—she would not have been Irish had she not done
so—at the same time she was conscious of a vague grudge against them.
They seemed always to be coming between them. They were her rivals after
a fashion, and she was not of a temper to put up patiently with rivals, even
invisible ones.
‘Man above! but it is late ’tis getting!’ she suddenly exclaimed. ‘And I,
that ought to have gone home before this!—yes indeed,’ she added, looking
up at the sky, in which the light had shifted considerably towards the west
since they had been there together. ‘Honor will wonder not to see me. It is
half an hour ago I should have gone, so it is.’
‘Is it worse than common she is to-day?’ Murdough inquired carelessly,
getting up from his rock and stretching himself with an air of immeasurable
fatigue.
‘It is not better any way,’ the girl answered curtly.
A great heap of seaweed which she had brought up from the shore was
lying close under the low lacework wall of the little enclosure. Taking up
her fork she stuck it into the whole mass, twisting it about so as to make it
adhere; then with a sudden lift she raised the fork with all its dangling
burden and laid it against her shoulder, and so burdened prepared to mount
the hill.
Murdough watched her proceedings with an air of impartial approval.
‘Monnum a Dhea! but it is yourself that is the powerful strong girl, Grania
O’Malley. There is not many of the boys, I tell you, on Inishmaan that is
stronger than you—no, nor as strong either, so there is not,’ he observed
appreciatively.
Grania smiled proudly. She knew that she was strong, and took an
immense pride in her own strength; moreover, speeches like these were
about the nearest approaches to compliments that Murdough ever paid her,
and she treasured them accordingly.
They walked on together over the rocky platform till they had reached its
edge, where a low cliff or single gigantic stair rose perpendicularly, leading
to the one beyond. Here Murdough, who was a little in front, clambered
leisurely up, catching at the overhanging lip of the step with his hand, and
pulling himself easily upwards with its aid till he stood upon the higher
level. Then he waited for Grania.
With her dangling burden of seaweed depending from her shoulder it
was not quite so easy for her to do the same. To have handed the whole
thing, fork and all, to Murdough until she had in her turn climbed to where
he stood would have been the simplest course, but then it was not a course
that would have occurred to either of them. 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.
They might and did have differences about other matters, but so far they
were absolutely at one.
Now, therefore, as usual, the rule held. Grania lowered the fork on her
shoulder, so as to reduce its weight, bringing it down until its burden of
seaweed covered her back and head. Then, exerting her muscles to the
utmost, she scrambled up, half blinded by the sticky black stuff which
dangled over her eyes, helping herself as best she could with her left hand
and wedging her knees into the small clefts as they rose one above the
other, till at last, her face red and bathed in perspiration though the day was
cold, she stood upon the ridge above.
This time Murdough did not compliment her in words upon her strength,
but his glance seemed to say the same thing, and she was content.
From this point they had no more steps to climb, though they had to
make a slight circuit to avoid a second and steeper one which lay just below
the gully. Following the course of a small valley, grass-grown and boulder-
dotted, they presently found themselves in the street, if street it could be
called, of a tiny hamlet, consisting of some five or six stone cabins upon
one side and three or four upon the other, minute cabins, built of materials
so disproportionately big that two or three of the stone slabs sufficed for the
length of a wall, which walls were grey as the still living rocks around
them, and, like them, might have been seen on inspection to be covered
with a close-fitting suit of lichens, sedums, and such small crops, with here
and there something taller sprouting where a chink gave it foothold, or a
piece of earth, fallen from the decaying thatch above, offered a temporary
home.
This was Ballinlisheen, second or third largest of the towns of
Inishmaan. A good many of its citizens—most of them apparently very old
women—were sitting upon their heels at the doorsteps as the two young
people came up the track, Murdough sauntering leisurely along with his
hands in his pockets, Grania with her black load of seaweed dangling half-
way down her back. The latter did not stop to speak to anyone. She was in a
hurry to get back to Honor, being conscious of having already delayed too
long. Murdough, though a young man generally open to all social advances,
was beginning to get hungry, so he, too, kept on steadily beside her, giving
only an occasional nod or word of greeting as first one and then another
head craned forward into the narrow space between the opposing doorways.
Conversation, which had lagged a little in Ballinlisheen before their
coming, began to stir and grow brisk again after they had passed on and
were moving along the top of the nearest ridge.
‘She is the big girl, Grania O’Malley! the powerful big girl, my
conscience, yes,’ said old Stacia Casey, Mick Halliday’s wife, stretching out
a neck long and scraggy as a turkey’s and looking after them with an air of
contemplation.
‘Murdough Blake tops her by the head,’ replied her neighbour Deb
Cassidy from the opposite side of the street, in a tone of contradiction.
‘He does not, then, nor by the half of it,’ retorted the other in the same
spirit. ‘Is it marrying him she’ll be, I wonder?’ she added after a minute’s
pause.
‘Is it eating her dinner she’ll be?’ exclaimed her friend with a laugh.
‘Wurrah! wurrah! but ’tis the real born fool you must be, woman, to be
asking such a question.’
‘Ugh! ugh! but ’tis the real born fool she will be if she does marry him!’
grunted an enormously big old woman, much older than any of the other
speakers, Peggy Dowd by name, the professional story teller, and at that
time the oldest inhabitant of Inishmaan. She was supposed to live with a
widowed daughter, herself a woman of nearly sixty, but was to be found
anywhere else in preference, her great age and standing reputation making
her everywhere acceptable, or at all events accepted.
‘Murdough Blake, wisha!’ she went on, emptying the small black pipe
she was smoking with a sharp rap upon the stones. ‘Trath, ’tis the poor lot
those Blakes of Alleenageeragh are, and always have been, so they have!
There was this one’s grandfather—myself remembers him when he was no
older than this one—no, nor so old by a year—a fine bouchaleen you’d say
to look at him—broad and bulky, and a clean skin, and a toss to his head as
if all the rest in the place were but dirt and he picking his steps about
amongst them. Well, what was he? He was just nothing, that is what he was,
and so I tell you, women, not worth a thraneen, no, nor the half of a
thraneen. Ugh! ugh! ugh! don’t talk to me of the Blakes of Alleenageerah,
for I tell you I know them—I know them, those Blakes of Alleenageeragh.
St. Macdara! I do know them, and have reason to know them! There was
another—Malachy Blake his name was—a great man, full of gosther and
brag; you’d think it was the world he must have for himself, the whole
world, no less, from Liscanor Head to Renvyle Point out yonder, and farther
still. Well, I will tell you now about Malachy Blake. The heart of him was
no better than the heart of a pullet—of a sick pullet, when the eyes of it
begin to turn up, and it squeaks when you take it in your hand and turns
over and dies on the floor. That was what Malachy Blake’s heart was like—
no better! I have heard him one day so you’d think the wind flying over the
top of the island or the stars shining up in the sky would stoop down to
listen to him, and the very next minute I have seen a little pinkeen of a man
not up to his shoulder give him the go-by and abuse him before the girls,
and he never showing no spirit nor a thing, no more than if he was dead.
Phoo! phoo! phoo! I know them, those Blakes of Alleenageeragh. There is a
story that I could tell you about that same Malachy Blake would make the
very eyes of you start out of your head, so it would. But there—’tis a poor
case, God knows, to be telling stories to them that knows nothing; a poor
case, a very poor case! A fine man he was anyway to look at, I’ll say that
for him, Malachy Blake, finer than this one, or six of him! and there was a
many a girl in the place liked him well enough, though ’tis flat and low in
his grave he is now, and has been these thirty years. Phoo! phoo! flat and
low in his grave he is. Yes, indeed, flat and low for all his boasting! But I
shall be sorry for Grania O’Malley and for that good woman her sister if
she marries young Murdough Blake, so I shall; very sorry! very sorry!’
‘It is not long Honor O’Malley will be in this world, marrying or no
marrying,’ said another old woman, many years younger than the last
speaker, Molly Muldoon by name, a brisk, apple-faced little spinster of
fifty-seven or thereabouts. ‘It was only yesterday I was with her at their
own house yonder, and it was the death-streak I saw plainly under her left
eye, the death-streak that no one can live two months once it comes out on
them. Oh, a good woman Honor O’Malley is, as you say, Mrs. Dowd,
ma’am, none better in this world, nor beyond it either—a real saint, and a
credit to Inishmaan and all belonging to her. It is myself has promised to be
with her at the last, and at her laying out and at everything, so I have. “Keep
Grania away,” says she to me only yesterday. “ ’Tis broke the child’s heart
will be any way, and what good is it to be tearing the life out of her and I
past knowing anything about it? Send for Murdough Blake,” says she, “the
minute the breath is out of my body, and bid him take her with my blessing
and comfort her.” Those were the very words she said. Oh, yes, a good
woman, and a kind woman, and a tender woman is Honor O’Malley, a real
saint. It is the loss she will be to Inishmaan, the great loss entirely.’
Mrs. Dowd grunted. She was not much of a devotee of saints, certainly
not of contemporary ones.
‘And if it isn’t the real out-and-out right wake and funeral she gets it will
be the shame of the place, no better,’ Molly Muldoon went on in a tone of
enthusiasm. ‘Candles—the best wax ones—with tobacco and spirits for the
men, and a plate of white salt to lay on her breast, and the priest, or may be
two priests, over from Aranmore. That is the least she should have, so it is,
for none ever deserved it better than Honor O’Malley, so they did not.’
‘They’re rich too, the O’Malleys,’ remarked Deb Cassidy from her side
of the path—‘money laid by, and warm people always from first to last, no
warmer anywhere. 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! ’tis eight days in the week she’ll find
herself working for all her money if she means to keep a roof over her head
and Murdough Blake under it—yes, and going a shaughraun most like at
the tail of it all, so she will. Mark my words, women, so she will, so she
will!’
No one ventured to contradict this prophecy, Peggy O’Dowd’s age and
reputation making the course perilous. There was a few minutes’ silence,
after which Molly Muldoon was the first to break up the conclave. She was
the chief rearer of chickens on Inishmaan, and now got up briskly to see
after the various broods to which every corner of her cabin was dedicated.
One by one, most of the other women, too, got up and moved indoors on
various domestic duties, till at last only old Peggy herself remained behind.
She had no household duties to see to. She was a mere visitor, a sitter
beside other people’s hearths and a sharer of other people’s victuals. She
remained, therefore, squatting in the same place upon the doorstep, her big
blue patched cloak hitched about her shoulders, her knees nearly on a level
with her big projecting chin, her broad face, once immensely fat, now fallen
into deep furrows and hollows, growing gradually impassive as the
momentary excitement of recalling her old grudge against the Blakes faded
away or got merged in other and probably equally long-remembered
grudges. Sitting there hunched in her big cloak, she might at a little distance
have been taken for some sort of queer vegetable growth—a fungus, say, or
toadstool, which had slowly drawn to itself all the qualities—by preference
the less benignant ones—of the soil from which it had sprung. In places like
Inishmaan, where change has hardly any existence, the loves, hates, feuds,
animosities of fifty or sixty years ago may often be found on examination to
be just as green and just as unforgotten as those of yesterday.

CHAPTER III
Grania and Murdough had parted meanwhile upon the top of the ridge
close to the old Mothar Dun, he going west, she east. When she reached
home she found the cabin door still shut, a hen and clutch of chickens
sitting upon the step waiting to be let in. It was evident that no one had been
either in or out since she left it five or six hours before.
Inside the cabin was very dark, and Honor’s thin white face showed
ghost-like against this setting. She was half sitting, half lying, upon her bed,
with her eyes closed, though she was not asleep, a board and a pillow
covered with a bit of old striped cotton supporting her. Everything around
had the peculiarly chocolate hue of peat. The cabin was clean—for an Irish
cabin commendably clean—but the whole had the deeply-dyed, almost
black, hue of a Rembrandt background. The face of the sick woman herself
might have come from the canvas of quite a different master. Early Italian
painters have all tried their hands at it. How well we know it!—that peculiar
look, a look of toil-worn peace—peace caught as it were out of the inmost
heart of pain;—the hollow cheek, the deeply-marked eye-sockets, the eyes
looking out as prisoners’ eyes look from their dungeon bars;—we all
recognise it when great art shows it to us, though rarely, if ever, otherwise.
Upon a canvas Honor O’Malley’s face might have been the face of a saint
or a martyr. It was the face of a saint or a martyr, as saints and martyrs find
their representation in these days of ours. Three long years the poor woman
had lain there dying. Consumption had its hold upon her. It had been very
slow and deliberate in its approaches—nay, in its earlier stage might have
been arrested altogether had there been any means at hand of attempting
anything of the sort, which, of course, there were not. Who can say what
hours of pain had worn themselves out in that smoke-dyed corner? Who can
say how many supplications had risen out of its recesses, how often the
eternal complaint of the sea licking the base of the cliffs had seemed to
Honor the voice of her own silent complaining, the unresting cry of the
night wind her own dumb cries made audible? She had won peace now. She
was dying comparatively quickly. Mercy was fast coming nearer and nearer,
and would presently touch her with its wings.
Grania’s step sounded on the rocks without, and she looked up suddenly,
a smile of welcome waking in her hollow eyes.
‘Is it yourself, it is, allanah?’ she exclaimed joyfully as the younger sister
came quickly in, pushed upon the shoulders of the gust which always lurked
in the throat of that gully.
‘ ’Tis myself, and ’tis wanting me you have been this while back, Honor,
I know,’ the girl replied in quick tones of self-reproach.
‘Augh, no, child, ner a bit; ’twas only I—’ here her voice was stopped by
an access of coughing, which shook her from head to foot and brought a
momentary flush to her poor sunken cheeks.
Grania stood by penitently, helpless till the paroxysm was exhausted and
the coughing had ceased.
‘ ’Twas the potatoes,’ she said apologetically when Honor again lay
back, white and dry-lipped. ‘ ’Tis a bitter while they take this year,
whatever the reason is; and then Phelim, the creature, came, and I got
listening to him, and then Murdough Blake and—’
‘Wurrah! whist with the tongue of you, and don’t be telling me, child! Is
it within the four walls of a house I would be keeping my bird all the long
day?’ the sick woman said with tender impatience. ‘ ’Tis the uselessness of
me, I was going to say, kills me. Never a pot cleaned nor a thing done since
morning. But there! God knows, and He sent it; so ’tis all for the best, sure
and certain.’
Grania without another word picked up the three-legged black pot, and
ran to fill it at the well outside, setting it down on the fire when she
returned, and beginning to mix in the oatmeal by handfuls for the stirabout
which was to serve for their evening meal.
Honor lay watching her, her face still flushed from the last fit of
coughing, the perspiration standing out in drops on her forehead and under
her hollow eye-sockets, but a great look of content gradually spreading over
her face as her eyes followed her sister’s movements.
As long as it had been possible she had gone on working, long, indeed,
after she ought to have ceased to do so. Her spinning wheel still stood near
her in a corner, though it was nearly a year since she had been able to touch
it. Her knitting lay close at hand. That she still occasionally worked at, and
even managed to mend her own clothes and Grania’s, and to keep her own
immediate surroundings sweet and clean.
Irish cabins are not precisely bowers of refinement, yet this corner,
where Honor O’Malley’s life had been for years ebbing slowly away, told a
tale in its way of a purity which, if it did not amount to refinement,
amounted to something better. 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.
Besides the two owners, and not counting an itinerant population of
chickens varying in ages and degrees of audacity, the cabin boasted one
other inmate. The dog tax being unknown, nearly every Irish cabin has its
cur, and on the Aran isles the dogs are only less numerous than the babies.
The O’Malleys, however, had no dog, and their house-friend (the r in the
last word might appropriately have been omitted) was a small yellow, or,
rather, orange-coloured, cat, noted as having the worst temper of any cat
upon Inishmaan. Whether in consequence of this temper, or in spite of it,
there was no cat who appeared to have also so constant a train of feline
adorers. Remote as the O’Malleys’ cabin stood, it was the recognised
rendezvous of every appreciative Tom upon the island, so that at night it
was sometimes even a little startling to open the door suddenly and catch
the steady glitter of a row of watchful eyes, or to see three, four, or five
retreating forms creeping feloniously away over the rocks.
‘ ’Tis the milk she does be tasting already, the little snaking beast,’
Honor said, pointing to it, as it sat furtively licking its lips close to the
hearth.
Grania struck the cat a light tap on the nose with the iron spoon she was
stirring the pot with, an insult to which it responded with a vicious spitting
mew, and a backward leap, which seemed to set all its orange-coloured coat
on edge in a moment.
‘Was it along by the sea-way you were to-day, allanah?’ Honor pursued
presently.
‘I was, sister.’
‘Did you pass by the old chapel?’
‘I did, Honor.’
‘Then you said, I’ll be bound, a prayer at the little old cross for me, as I
bade you do?’
‘Well, then, Honor, I will not tell you a lie—no, I will not—but I never
once thought of it,’ Grania replied penitently. ‘You see, Murdough Blake he
was with me, and we got colloguing. But sure, sister asthor, don’t fret, and
I’ll go to-morrow by the first streak of day and say as many as ever you tell
me, so I will, Honor.’
Honor for answer sighed and lay back against the wooden settle as if
some habitual source of trouble was weighing upon her mind.
‘Grania, it is a bad thing for you that there is no priest on Inishmaan, a
very bad thing,’ she said, earnestly, an ever-present source of anxiety
coming to the front, as it often did when she and Grania were alone. ‘How
is a young girsha to learn true things if there is no one in it to teach her?
When I lie at night in bed thinking, thinking, I think of you Grania, and I
pray to God and the Holy Mother, and to all the tender saints, that it may
not be laid against you. Sure how can the child know, I say, and she never
taught? The Holy Mother will know how ’twas, and may be when I get
there, Grania, she’ll let me say the word, and show that it was no fault of
yours, allanah, for how could you know and none here to teach you, only
me that knows nothing and less than nothing myself?’
Grania’s fierce grey eyes filled for a moment. Then with a sudden
impulse she flung her head back, lifting the iron spoon she had just tapped
the cat’s nose with, and holding it defiantly in front of her.
‘Then I don’t want none of them to be learning me, only you, Honor—
so, I do not,’ she said irritably. ‘I couldn’t bear to be driven or bid by any of
them—so, I couldn’t!’
‘Is it a priest, Grania? My God! child, you don’t know what you’re
saying! A priest! Why, everyone that ever was born into this world, man or
woman, must obey a priest. You know that right well yourself, and what
would be the end of them if they didn’t, so you do.’
‘I don’t care. I would not be bid, no, not by anyone,’ Grania answered
defiantly. ‘And the priests arn’t all so good as you say, Honor, so they are
not. I mind me there was a young girl over by Cashla way told me of the
priest where she lived—Father Flood his name was—a terrible hard man he
was, and carried a big stick, so he did, and beat the children frightful when
they were bould—yes indeed. And one day she was going herself to the
chapel and hurt her foot on the way, and couldn’t get in till Mass was half
over. And Father Flood he saw her coming up, and he frowned at her from
the altar to stop by the door, and not dare come nearer. So she waited,
trembling all over, and wanting to tell him what happened. But presently he
come down the chapel, and when he got close to her he caught her without
a word by the side hair—just here, Honor, she told me, above the ear—as he
was passing by to the door, and pulled her by it right after him out of the
chapel. And when they were outside he shook her up and down and
backwards and forwards as hard as he could, yes, indeed, as hard as ever he
could, she told me, and she crying all the time, and begging and praying of
him to stop, and every time she tried to tell him what hindered her he just
shook the harder, till it was time for him to be going in again, when he gave
her a great push which laid her flat on the grass, and back with him himself
into the chapel again. And she only ten years old and a widow’s child!’
Honor sighed. ‘ ’Tis hard, God knows, ’tis hard,’ she said. ‘The world is
a cruel place, especially for them that’s weak in it. There is no end to the
pain and the trouble of it, no end at all,’ she said in a tone of
discouragement. ‘But, Grania dear, sure isn’t it what we suffer that does us
the good? “Pains make saints!” I heard a good woman I used to know, that’s
dead now, say that often. “Pains make saints,” “Pains make saints,” ’ she
repeated softly over and over to herself.
‘ ’Tisn’t the hurting I’d care about,’ Grania said scornfully. ‘I’ve hurt
myself often and never minded. ’Tis being bid by them that have no call or
care to you. If one done to me what was done to that girl at Cashla I’d hit
him back, so I would, let him be ten times a priest.’
Honor gave a sudden scream of dismay. ‘Och then, whist! and whist!
and whist, child!’ she cried, piteously. ‘What are you saying at all, at all?
Saints be above us, Grania, and keep you from being heard this day, I pray,
amen! Sure a priest’s not a man! You know that well enough. Wurrah!
wurrah! that you would speak so! And I that learned her from the start!
Holy Virgin, ’tis my fault, all my fault. The child’s destroyed, and all
through me! My God, my God, what will I do? Och, what will I do? Och,
what will I do, at all, at all?’
Grania ran remorsefully and put her arms about her sister, whose thin
form was shaken as if it would fall to pieces by the sudden violence of her
trouble. Honor let herself be soothed back to quietness, but her face still
worked painfully, and on her pale brow and moving lips it was easy to read
that she was still inwardly offering up petitions calculated to appease the
wrath thus rashly evoked.
Grania’s penitence was real enough so far as Honor was concerned, but
it did not alter her private opinion as regards the matter in dispute. ‘I’d think
him a man if he hit me, let him be what he would!’ she repeated to herself
as she ran into the next room to fetch the milk set out of reach of the cat
since the morning’s milking.

CHAPTER IV
The stirabout ready, the two sisters ate their meal together. Honor’s was
that of a blackbird. In vain Grania coaxed her with the best-mixed corner of
the pot; in vain added milk, breaking in little bits of carefully-treasured
white bread, brought from the mainland. The sick woman pretended to eat,
but in reality barely moistened her lips with the milk and touched a corner
of the bread. When she could persuade her to take no more Grania settled
down to her own share, and with the aid of her yellow auxiliary speedily
cleared the pot. With a man’s power of work she had a man’s healthy
appetite, and could often have disposed of more food than fell to her share.
The meal over she got up, went to the door, and stood awhile looking
down the gully towards the seashore. It was getting dusk, and the night was
strangely cold. The wind sweeping in from the north-east felt rough and
harsh. No screen or protection of any sort was to be found upon this side of
the island. Worse still, fuel was scarce and dear. As a rule, the poor suffer
less in Ireland from cold than from most of the other ills of life. A smoke-
saturated cabin is warm if it is nothing else. Turf, too, is generally abundant;
often to be had for the trouble of fetching it home. In the Aran isles there
are no bogs, consequently there is no turf, and the cost of carriage from the
mainland has to be added, therefore, to its price. The traffic, too, being in a
few hands, those few make their own profit out of it, and their neighbours
are more or less at their mercy.
Upon Inishmaan, the most retrograde of the three islands, turf is scarcer
and dearer than on either Aranmore or Inisheer. Sometimes the supply
vanishes utterly in the winter, and until fresh turf can be fetched from the
mainland the greatest suffering prevails; dried cowdung and every other
substitute having to be resorted to to supply its place. Grania was always
careful to lay in a good supply of turf in the autumn, and the sisters’ rick
was noted as the tallest and solidest on the island. This year, however, it had
melted mysteriously away, much earlier than usual. They had burned a good
deal, for the winter had been a severe one, and the sick woman suffered
greatly from cold. Still Grania had suspicions that someone had been
tampering with their rick, though, so far, she had said nothing about the
matter to Honor, not wishing her to be troubled about it.
It was nearly time now to go down and see if the kelp fire was burning,
and to set it in order for the night—the last task always in the day during the
kelp-burning season. Murdough Blake had promised to meet her there, and
the consciousness of this made her feel dimly remorseful at the thought of
again leaving Honor, although the kelp fire had to be seen to, and she had
no intention of lingering a minute longer than she could help. With this idea
in her mind she turned to look at her sister, a mere shadow now in her
dusky corner, from which the hacking sound of a cough broke, with
mournful iteration, upon the silence. A sudden feeling of pity, a sudden
intense sense of contrast, swept over the girl’s mind as she did so. She
would have been incapable of putting the thought into words, but she felt it,
nevertheless. Herself and Honor! What a difference! Yet why? Why should
it be so? Honor so good, so patient, she herself so much the contrary! With
that strong pictorial faculty which comes of an out-of-door life, she already
saw herself racing down the hill towards the shore where the kelp fire was
built; already felt the gritty texture of the rocks under her feet, the peculiarly
springy sensation that the overhanging lip of one ledge always lent as you
sprang from it to the next beyond; saw herself arriving in the narrow stony
gorge where the kelp was burnt; saw the glow of its fire, a narrow trough of
red ashes half covered and smothered with seaweed; saw Murdough Blake
coming through the dusk to meet her. At this point a mixture of sensations,
too complicated to be quite comfortable, came over her, and she left her
momentary dreams for the reality, which at least was straightforward
enough.
‘Is there e’er a thing I can do, sister, before I go?’ she asked.
‘Ne’er a thing at all, child. ’Tis asleep you’ll find me most like when you
come back,’ Honor answered cheerfully.
Grania left a cup with water in it within the sick woman’s reach, covered
the fire with ashes, so that it might keep alight, laid her own cloak over
Honor, and went out.
She was already late, and Murdough, she knew, had the strongest
possible objections to being kept waiting; accordingly she hurried down the
rocky incline at a pace that only one accustomed from babyhood to its
intricacies could have ventured to go.
As she hurried along her own movements brought the blood tingling
through her veins, and her spirits rose insensibly. She felt glad and light, she
hardly herself knew why. Leaping from one rocky level to another, her feet
beat out a ringing response to the clink of the grooved and chiselled rocks
against which they struck. Once she stopped a moment to clutch at a tuft of
wood sorrel, springing out of a fissure, and crammed it all, trefoiled leaves
and half-expanded pale grey flowers, into her mouth, enjoying the sweet
sub-acid flavour as she crunched them up between her strong white teeth.
Better fed than most of her class, her own mistress, without grinding
poverty, the mere joy of life, the sheer animal zest and intoxication of living
was keener in her than it often is in those of her own rank and sex in
Ireland. Of this she was herself dimly aware. Did others find the same
pleasure merely in breathing—merely in moving and working—as she did,
she sometimes wondered. Even her love for Honor—the strongest feeling
but one she possessed—the despair which now and then swept over her at
the thought of losing her, could not check this. Nay, it is even possible that
the enforced companionship for so many hours of the day and night of that
pitiful sick-bed, the pain and weakness which she shared, so far as they
could be shared, lent a sort of reactionary zest to the freedom of these wild
rushes over the rocks and through the cold sea air. She did not guess it
herself, but so no doubt it was.
The dusk lingers long in the far north-west, and upon the Aran islands
longer apparently than elsewhere, owing to their shining environment of sea
and still more to their treeless rain-washed surfaces, which reflect every
atom of light as upon a mirror. It was getting really dark now, however, and
the sea below her was all one dull purplish grey, barred at long intervals
with moving patches of a yet deeper shadow. Splashes of white or pale
yellowish lichens flung upon the dark rocks stood out here and there,
looking startlingly light and distinct as she neared them. They might have
been dim dancing figures, or strange grimacing faces grinning at her out of
the obscurity. Over everything hung an intense sense of saltness—in the air,
upon the rocks, on the short grass which crisped under foot with the salty
particles as with a light hoar-frost. Fragments of dry crumpled-up seaweed,
like black rags, lay about everywhere, showing that the kelp fires were not
far off.
She hastened her steps. Was Murdough already there? she wondered. He
was. As she came round the corner she saw him leaning against a big
boulder, a ‘Stranger’ like the one that blocked the mouth of their own gully;
ice-dropped granite blocks whose pale rounded forms stud by thousands the
darker limestone of the islands.
‘My faith and word, Grania O’Malley, but it is the late woman you are
to-night!’ he said, straightening himself from his lounging posture and
speaking in a tone of offence.
‘I know I am, Murdough agra!’
There was a tone of unusual submissiveness about the girl’s voice as she
advanced towards him through the dusk; a look almost of shyness in her
eyes as she lifted them to his in the dimness.
‘My faith and word but it is the long time, the very long time, I have
been kept waiting. And it is the ugly lonely place for a man to be kept
waiting in!’ he continued in the same aggrieved tone. ‘And it was not to
please myself I came either. No, it was not, but just to help you with the
kelp fire. And it is not one foot of me I would have come—no, nor the half
of a foot—if I had thought you would have served me so.’
‘Honor kept me. ’Tis sick she is this evening, worse than common,’
Grania answered simply. ‘Was it wanting me very badly you were,
Murdough agra?’ she added, in the same tone as before.
‘Yes, it was wanting you very badly I was, Grania O’Malley, for it was
the Fear Darrig I could not help thinking of, and that it was just the place to
see him, and it was that made me want you, for they say two people do
never see him at the one time, and it is not I that want to see him now, nor at
any time—not at all, so I do not!’
‘My grandfather, he saw the Fear Darrig many’s the time,’ Murdough
continued, presently, in a more amicable tone; ‘he would, maybe, be setting
his lines at night and it would look up at him sudden out of the water. Once,
too, he told my grandmother he was up near the big Worm hole and it run at
him on a sudden, and danced up and down before him, for all the world like
a red Boffin pig gone mad. Round and round it ran as clear as need be in the
moonlight, laughing and leaping and clapping its hands, and he praying for
the bare life all the while, and shutting his eyes for fear of what he’d see,
and not a single saint in the whole sky minding him, no more than if he’d
been an old black Protestant bellringer!’
‘You have never seen the Fear Darrig, have you, Murdough?’ Grania
asked with a slightly mocking accent, as she began to busy herself with
collecting the dry seaweed and heaping it upon the smouldering fire.
‘Well, then, I have not, Grania O’Malley, but a man that is in Galway
and lives near Spiddal—a tall big man he is, by the name of O’Rafferty—he
told me that he had seen him not long since. He was going to a fair to sell
some chickens that his wife had been rearing—fine young spring chickens
they were—and he had them tied in an old basket and it on his back. And he
had to go across a place where the sea runs bare, and the tide being out,
there were big black rocks sticking up everywhere. It was a strange,
lonesome place, he said, full of big hollows between the rocks, and he
didn’t half like the look of it, for the day was very dark and he was afraid
every minute the tide might be coming in on him, and the basket on his
back kept slipping and slipping with every step he made, and not another
creature near him, good or bad. “Arrah! what will I do now, at all, at all?”
says he to himself, when, all of a sudden, he heard a sort of a croaking noise
behind him, and he turned round, and there on the top of one of the rocks
sat a little old man with a face as red as a ferret, and an old red hat on his
head, and he croaking like a scald crow and squinting at him out of the two
eyes.’
Murdough paused dramatically, but Grania merely went on stacking her
seaweed, and he had to continue his narrative without any special
encouragement.
‘Well, O’Rafferty, he just took one look he told me, no more, and with
that he dropped the basket that was on his back, with the spring chickens in
it and all, and he set to running, and he run and he run till he was over the
place, and away with him across the fields beyond, and never stopped till he
had run the breath all out of his body, and himself right into the middle of
the place where the fair was held! And it was the devil’s own abuse he got
from his wife, so it was, he said, when he got home that night, for letting
her fine spring chickens be drowned on her, which she had been months
upon months of rearing.’
‘Then it is the cowardly man I think he was,’ Grania said scornfully,
lifting her head from her work for a moment. ‘If it had been me, I would
have looked twice, so I would, and not anyway have let the young chickens
be lost and drowned in the sea.’
‘Then I do not think he was the cowardly man at all,’ Murdough replied
warmly; ‘and for chickens, what is the use of fine spring chickens or of
money itself, or of a thing good or bad, if a man’s life is all but the same as
lost with him being terrified out of his senses with looking at what no man
ought to be looking at? It is quite right, I think, Patrick O’Rafferty was, and
it is what I would have done myself—yes, indeed I would.’
Grania answered nothing, but her face did not relax from its indifferent,
scornful expression, as with skilful hand she rapidly fed the kelp fire from
the big black heap of seaweed hard by.
Murdough, however, was by this time in the full swing of narrative. All
he cared for was an audience, whether sympathetic or unsympathetic
mattered little.
‘It is a very strange thing, so it is, a very strange thing, but it is not the
worst things that give a man often the worst frights, so it is not,’ he said, in
a tone of profound reflection. ‘I have been out in the boats many and many
a time when the sea would be getting up, and the other boys about me
would be screaming and praying, and in the devil’s own fright, fearing lest
they’d be drowned. Well, now, I was not frightened then—no, not one little
bit in the world, Grania O’Malley, no more than if I had been at home and
in my bed! The very worst fright ever I got in my life—well, I cannot tell
you what it was that frightened me so, no, I cannot! I was out by myself in
Martin Kelly’s curragh, fishing for the mackerel, and it was getting a bit
dark, but the sea was not wild, not to say wild at all; there was no reason to
be frightened, no reason in life, when all at once—like that—I took the
fright! I did not want to take it, you may believe me, and I cannot tell you,
no, I cannot, to this day, nor never, what it was frightened me so. It was just
as if there were two people in the inside of me, and one of them laughed at
the other and said, “Why, Murdough Blake, man alive, what the devil ails
you to-day?” but the other he never answered a single word, only shook and
shook till it seemed as if the clothes on my back would be all shaken to
pieces.’
‘And what did you do?’ Grania asked, pausing in her stacking, and
leaning upon her fork to listen.
‘Well, then, I will tell you what I did, yes I will, Grania O’Malley. I just
shut my eyes tight, and I rowed, and I rowed. How I rowed and my two
eyes shut tight, I cannot tell you, but I did. If I had opened them ever so
little I made sure I should have seen—God alone knows what I would have
seen, but something worse than any living man ever saw before. Once I
heard a gull scream close to my head, and I screamed myself too, yes, I did,
my faith and honour, never a word of lie. The clothes on my back they were
wet as the sea itself with sweat, what with the fright and the way I was
rowing, and when I got close to the rocks I just opened my eyes a little
weeshy bit—like that—and peeped out between my eyelids, trembling all
the while from head to foot with what I might see and saying every prayer I
could remember, and—— Well! there was nothing there—nothing at all, no
more than there is on the palm of my hand!’
And he opened it wide, dramatically, to demonstrate his assertion.
This time Grania listened without any protest, mental or otherwise. Like
every Celt that ever was born she perfectly understood these sudden
unexplainable panics, more akin to those that affect sensitive animals,
horses particularly, than anything often felt by more stolid and apathetic
bipeds. 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.
The kelp fire was by this time made up, and after beating down the top
of it so that it might keep alight all night, they turned and walked back
together through the darkness. The wind, which had been rising for an hour
past, blew with a dreary raking noise over the naked platforms. Stepping
carefully, so as to avoid the innumerable fissures, slippery as the crevasses
upon a glacier, they presently reached a narrow track, or ‘bohereen,’ which
led between two lines of loosely-piled walls back to the neighbourhood of
the O’Malleys’ cabin.
It was almost absolutely pitch dark. Below them the sea was one vast
indistinguishable moaning waste. A single tall standing stone—one of the
many relics of the past which cover the islands—rose up against it like
some vaguely-warning sign-post. Stars showed by glimpses, but the clouds
rolled heavily, and the night promised to be an unpleasant one.
Grania felt vaguely irritated and unhappy, she did not know why. That
sense of elation with which she had run down over the rocks an hour ago
had passed away, and was replaced by a feeling of discomfort quite as
frequent with her as the other, especially when she and Murdough had been
for some time together. Everything seemed to irritate her—the wind; the
stones against which she stumbled; the clouds tossing and drifting over her
head; even the familiar moan of the sea had an unexplainable irritation that
night for her ear. Looking up at him as he strode along beside her, a dim but
substantial shadow in the darkness, this sense of intense, though causeless,
vexation was especially strong. There were moments when it would have
given her the deepest satisfaction to have fallen upon him and beaten him
soundly then and there with her fists, so irritated was she, and so puzzled,
too, by her own irritation. Of all this, fortunately, he knew and suspected
nothing. His own private and particular world—the one in which he lived,
breathed, and shone—was as far apart as the poles from hers. A vast
untravelled sea stretched between them, and neither could cross from one to
the other.
They parted at last upon the top of the ridge, close to the head of the
sprawling monster which always lay there, half buried beneath the rocks,
Murdough keeping straight on along the bohereen towards Alleenageeragh,
Grama turning short off across the lower platform, which speedily brought
her home.

CHAPTER V
Honor was not asleep. Her cough had kept her awake; the restlessness,
too, and weariness of illness making it difficult for her to find any position
endurable for more than a minute or two at a time.
Grania lifted her up and remade the bed. It was a fairly good one,
consisting of a mattress stuffed with sea-grass, a small feather bed over that
again, with blankets and a single sheet, coarse but clean. This done, and the
sick woman settled again, she pulled off her own pampooties and stockings,
unfastened her skirt, muttered a prayer, and tossed herself without further
ceremony upon her own pallet.
The howl of the wind grew as the night wore on. It was not as loud as it
often was, but it had a peculiarly teasing, ear-wearying wail. Now shrill and
menacing; now sinking into a whisper—an angry whisper filled with a deep
sense of wrong and injury and complaint. Then, as if that sense of wrong
was really too strong to be suppressed any longer, it swelled and swelled
into a loud waspish tone—one which, like some scolding tongue, appeared
to rise higher and higher the less it was opposed; then, when at its highest
pitch, it would suddenly drop again to meanings and mutterings, full, it
seemed, of impotent rage and dull unuttered malice.
Despite her day’s work Grania could not sleep. She lay staring up at the
blackened rafters, lit here and there by a dim reddish flicker from the almost
dead turf. She could hear ‘Moonyeen’ stirring in her own private cabin hard
by. Now and then came the rattle of her horns against a beam, or a pulling
noise as the rope slipped up and down the stake to which it was tied. A
stealthy scratching, apparently from a mouse, caught her ear, while Honor’s
laboured breathing, broken now and then by a hard, agonising cough,
seemed to fill every pause left momentarily by the wind.
She was beginning to get drowsy, but she still saw the rafters and heard
the scraping noise of the cow on the other side of the partition, only the
rafters seemed to be part of a boat, and there were fish now amongst the
hay, and nets and tackle dangling overhead. Murdough was there, throwing
out a line, and turning round to tell her that he was going to be made king of
Ireland. She herself was leaning over the boat’s side, looking into the water,
deeper, deeper, deeper, watching something like a red spark that was
coming up nearer and nearer to meet her. And as it came close she saw that
it was a red hat, and was upon the head of an old man, and then she knew
that it was the Fear Darrig. She tried to turn away her eyes, but could not,
for they seemed caught somehow and dragged down. And Murdough
shrieked, and pulled her petticoat to draw her back, but, when he found that
he couldn’t draw her back, he left off pulling, and got out of the boat, and
ran away from her across the sea. Then she, too, tried to get out of the boat,
and follow him over the water; but something held her fast, and she could
only stretch out her arms to him and beg him to come back. But he never
once turned his head, only ran faster and faster, and she could hear his feet
going patter, patter, patter, and getting farther and farther away from her
over the sea as he ran.
Suddenly she was wide awake, but that patter of footsteps was still going
on. She could hear them quite distinctly—bare feet they seemed to be,
moving across the flags outside, rapidly and stealthily, as if some one was
passing along under a heavy load. Her thoughts instantly flew to the stolen
turf, and, leaping from her bed, she applied her face to the little narrow
square of window which opened above it. She was not mistaken. The
silhouette of a man’s figure was clearly distinguishable, showing black for a
moment against the white of the granite boulder beyond. He was close to
the mouth of the gully when she first caught sight of him; another instant
and he had passed beyond it, and it had swallowed him up from her sight.
Grania never hesitated. Barefooted as she was, her clothes hanging
loosely around her, she opened the door and ran down the track, calling to
the man to stop. It was bound to be an invisible chase as long as she was in
the gully, but she expected to see the thief, whoever he was, at the other end
of it, and possibly to be able to catch him. To her surprise, however, when
she emerged breathless on the other side of the gully not a living thing was
to be seen. A flare of wild moonlight was gleaming upon the stunted thorn-
bushes; the platform of rock on which she stood stretched away, grey and
level, but living creature of any sort or kind there was none. Overhead the
clouds swept to and fro in bewildering masses; the wind blew coldly; the
moon, which for a moment had shone so vividly, disappearing suddenly
between rolling clouds, so that the whole platform became
indistinguishable.
Grania waited a while, peering eagerly round into all the fissures, hoping
for another gleam of moonlight which might enable her to discover the
delinquent. Instead of this a violent storm of rain suddenly burst upon her as
she stood there, drenching her to the skin in a moment. So sudden and
violent was it, and so quickly had it followed the former gleam, that it had
the effect of momentarily confusing her, almost as if it had formed part of
her dream.
Reluctantly she turned and retraced her steps through the gully. To right
and left as she now went up it the rain was beating with a furious pattering
noise, dashing upon the flat rocks, shooting out in small spurts of spray, and
forcing its way in all directions through a thousand tortuous channels. As
she emerged upon the other side of the gully it seemed to her that someone
was moving stealthily in the direction from which she had come. There was
so much noise around her, however, that it was impossible to make certain,
and, after pausing for a moment, she came to the conclusion that she had
been mistaken.
Turning once more before entering the cabin, it was curious to see how
in an instant the whole ground, a minute before dry, had become converted
into one vast streaming watercourse. Every little hole and fissure within
sight was already choked with water, the supply from above coming down
quicker than it could be disposed of, so that hollow groans and chuckles of
imprisoned air were heard rising on all sides as from a seashore suddenly
invaded by the advancing tide. It seemed as if the fierce little gully itself
must at this rate be utterly dissolved and melted away to a mere pulp by the
morning.

CHAPTER VI
But the atmospheric surprises of such spots as Inishmaan are
inexhaustible. When next morning she again opened the cabin-door, leaving
Honor asleep, the rain and storm had vanished utterly, and serenity reigned
supreme over everything. The sky was such a sky as one must go to Ireland
—nay, to west Ireland—to see: great rolling masses of clouds above, black
or seemingly black by contrast with the pale opaque serenity beneath.
Parallel with and immediately above the horizon spread a belt of sky filled
with silvery clouds, pale as ghosts, rising one over the other, tier on tier, like
the circles of some celestial amphitheatre. Now and then fragments of the
darker region would detach themselves and go floating across this silvery
portion, their shadows flung down one after the other as they went.
Nowhere any direct sunlight, yet the play of light and shadow was endless;
tint following tint, line following line, shade following shade in an
interminable gradation of light and movement. What gave tone and
peculiarity to the scene was that, owing to the wetness of the rocks and to
their absolute horizontality, the whole drama of the sky was repeated twice
over; the same shaft of light, seen first far off upon the most remote
horizon, telling its story again and again with absolute faithfulness upon the
luminous planes of rock as in a succession of enchanted mirrors.
Grania sat down on her accustomed seat, a bit of the upper ledge which
ran close to the great boulder and just at the mouth of the gully. She had
hardly slept at all, for Honor had awakened coughing, probably on account
of the open door, and for hours her cough had hardly ceased, the oppression
having been so great that twice it had seemed as if she must suffocate
before relief came. Grania had accordingly sat the greater part of the night
with her arm around her, supporting her in a sitting posture, and it was not
till towards six o’clock that Honor had fallen into a doze, and that she had
then been able to lie down.
She was tired out, therefore, as well as vexed by her unsuccessful chase
of the night before, and her mind was now busily going over what was to be
done about the turf. Already a large hole had been made in the rick, and if
this went on there would not be enough left to carry them on till they got a
fresh supply in the autumn. She ran over in her mind all the evil-doers of
the island, trying to fix upon the one most likely to be the culprit. At first
her thoughts had fixed themselves upon Shan Daly, the black sheep par
excellence, and as it were officially, of Inishmaan. But Shan Daly was
believed to be away at present, though no one knew where, and on the
whole she inclined to think that it was more likely to have been Pete
Durane, who lived on the other side of the island, a little above Allinera,
and whose record was by no means a blameless one in the matter of petty
larceny. The figure of which she had momentarily caught a glimpse seemed
more like that of Pete Durane, too, than of Shan. Having come to this
conclusion she decided to go round to the Duranes’ house that morning, and
see if, in the course of conversation, any suspicious circumstances came to
light. She also made up her mind to watch again herself that evening.
Perhaps Murdough Blake would come and watch with her too. If so, they—
At this point a cough and faint stirring sound made itself heard from the
cabin, and she got up and went in.
Honor was lying upon her back, her face drawn and white with the long
conflict of the night. Her eyes opened, however, and turned, as they always
did, with a loving look upon her sister as she entered. Grania lifted her up,
propping her on her arm, and proceeded to arrange her for the day. There
was only one pillow in the cabin, so that the foundation of the support by
means of which she was enabled to sit erect had to be made with the aid of
an old fishing kish, which Grania had adapted for the purpose. Raised upon
this and the pillow over it, Honor could see quite comfortably through the
open door, here, as in every Irish cabin, the chief means of observation with
the outer world.
The sun had now struggled through the clouds and shone in at the
entrance with a sleepy radiance. In every direction the sound of tinkling
water was to be heard, as the residue of last night’s deluge dripped from a
thousand invisible chinks, falling with a soft, pattering noise upon the
platform which served as a sort of natural terrace to the cabin. Against the
steep, wet sides of the gully the light broke in soft, prismatic gleams, which
played up and down its fluted edges and over the big face of the boulder in
an incessant dance of colour. The poor little weatherbeaten spot seemed
filled for the moment to an almost unnatural degree with soft movement
and tender, playful radiance.
Honor gazed at it all from her bed, an expression of vague yearning
growing in her patient eyes.
Presently the brown sail of a hooker showed for a moment passing
between the rocks in the direction of the mainland.
Her eyes turned to follow it till it had passed beyond their reach.
‘That will be the Wednesday boat for Galway, Grania!’ she said in a tone
of mild excitement.
Grania was not looking. Her thoughts were still with the turf, and she
was going over in her mind the plan for that evening’s campaign. She
would tell her suspicions, she decided, to Murdough, and they would watch
behind the big boulder, or perhaps at the bottom of the gully.
‘Maybe, sister,’ she replied indifferently. ‘It is up to the Duranes’ house I
must be going this morning,’ she added presently. ‘And, Honor, it is not the
kelp I need watch this evening. Will I—will I ask Murdough Blake to come
over, and sit with us a bit? It is not for a long time, he says—no, not for a
long, long time—that he has seen you.’
Honor suddenly reddened, and a curious look of embarrassment came
into her face.
‘Well, then, honey sweet, of course you can,’ she said, but in a tone of
such evident reluctance that Grania could not fail to observe it.
‘What is it ails you about Murdough?’ she asked curiously. ‘It is not the
first time, not the first by many, that you did not want him to come here. Is
it that you think anyway ill of him? Is it, Honor? Say, is it?’ she persisted
anxiously.
‘Auch! child, no. Ill? Why would I think ill of him? Tis just—auch, ’tis
just—’tis nothing in life but my own foolishness—nothing in life but that.
Heart of my soul! what wouldn’t I do if you asked me? and of course he can
come. But, ’tis just—— Auch, ’tis laughing at me you’ll be, Grania—but
you know when the fit takes me I must cough, and then the phlegm—and—
and—well, ’tis shamed I am, dear, shamed outright to be sitting and
spitting, you know, and a young man looking at me. That’s just it, and
nothing else in life, only that!’
Grania stared at her for a second open-eyed, then she, too, reddened
slightly. Such a reason would certainly never have dawned upon her mind.
Modest she was—no girl more so—but she took far too sturdy and out-of-
doors a view of life for any such fantastic notions of delicacy as this to
trouble her—notions which could only, perhaps, lurk and grow up in such a
nature as Honor’s, conventual by instinct, and now trebly, artificially
sensitive from ill health. Honor’s wishes were to be respected, however,
even when they were mysterious.
‘Well, indeed, sister, I never gave thought to that,’ she replied, humbly
enough.
‘Auch! and why would you give thought to it? Sure, why would a young
colleen like you, that’s niver known ache or sickness, think of such things,
no more than the young flowers out there coming up through the rocks?’ the
other answered with eager, loving tenderness. ‘And my prayer to God and
the Holy Virgin is that you never may have to think of them, Grania
dheelish, alannah, acushla oge machree,’ she went on coaxingly, heaping up
one term of endearment upon another. She was afraid that her reason,
although a perfectly true and, to her mind, a perfectly reasonable one, might
somehow have offended Grania. With this idea she presently went on,
having first waited long enough to regain her breath.
‘Think ill of Murdough Blake? Wisha! of Murdough Blake is it? a right
brine-oge of a boy and a credit to all that owns him! A likely story that,
when it is a joy to me to think of the two, him and yourself, coming and
living here in the old house and I dead and gone—yes, indeed, and your
little children growing up round you—my blessing and the blessing of
Heaven be upon them, night and day, be they many or be they few! And if it
was not the next thing to a sin, ’tis fretted and vexed I’d be to be stopping
on in the way I am. What for? Only to be hindering two young creatures
that’s wanting and wishing to settle down, as is only natural, and they not
able to do it, and all because of me! Sure, sister dear, ’tis begging your
pardon I do be often inclined to do—yes, indeed, many’s the time; only
there—’tis God sends it, you know, and it can’t be different, whether or no.’
Grania’s face had run through several variations while Honor was
speaking. By the time she had finished, however, her eyes were gentle and
misty.
‘A right brine-oge of a boy,’ the other continued complacently,
smoothing down her blanket. ‘And love is a jewel that’s well known all the
world over’—this observation cannot be said to have been uttered with any
very fervent conviction, merely in the tone of one who utters an adage,
sanctioned by usage, and therefore respectable—‘ ’tisn’t every colleen,
either, gets the one she likes best, so it isn’t, and no trouble; nothing to do
but to settle down, and all ready, no questions, nor money wanted, nor a
thing. ’Tis hard for a girl to have to marry a man and he nothing to her, or
worse perhaps—a black stranger out of nowhere—and all for no reason but
because of his wanting so many cows, or her father setting his mind on it, or
the like of that. I mind me when I was a slip of a child—thirteen years old
maybe, or less—there was a little girl—Mary O’Reilly her name was—
barely seventeen years, no more: a soft-faced, yellow-haired little girsha, as
slight and tender to look at as one of those fairy-ferns out there, when they
come up first through the cracks. And there was a man belonging to
Inisheer, whom they called Michael Donnellan—well, he wasn’t, to say
rightly, old, but he was a big, set-looking man, with a red hairy face on him,
and a nasty look, somehow. Well, he and Mat Reilly—that’s Mary
O’Reilly’s father—settled it up between them one night, over at the
“Cruskeen Beg,” and the number of cows fixed, and not a word, good or
bad, only the wedding-day settled, and the priest told and all. As for Mary,
all the notice she got was four days’, not one more! And sure enough when
the day came they all went over to Aranmore chapel, and married they were
—a grand wedding—and back they came in the boats, and up to the house,
and the height of eating and drinking going on, and the neighbours all asked
in, and every thing! I was looking in at the back window, by the same
token, and half the other girshas in the place with me, and sorry I was, too,
for I was fond of poor Mary O’Reilly, though I didn’t rightly understand
what it all meant, being only a child at the time myself. Well, they were just
setting out from the cabin, and the neighbours had all gathered round to bid
them “God speed!” when all at once poor Mary, that was standing there
quiet and decent as a lamb, gave a sudden screech, and she ran and she
twisted her arms round the top of the doorway, that had a little space, mind
you, between it and the head of the door, so she could get her arm in. And
when they went to unloose her she struck out at them and fought and kicked
and bit—the innocent, peaceable creature that never lifted her hand to man
or mouse before in her life!—and she cried out to them that she wouldn’t
leave her mammy, no, she would not, and that they might tear her into little
pieces but she’d never loose hold of the door. Just think of it! the shame and
the disgrace before the whole country! Her mother tried to unloose her,
though she was crying fit to burst all the time herself. And the man that was
her husband since the morning went up to her, and spoke rough to her—the
beast!—and told her she must come with him at once. And she cried out
that she would not go with him, no, not unless he took her away in little
pieces, for that she hated the sight of him and his red face, and that she
would kill herself, and him too, rather than go a foot with him! Och, vo, vo!
that was a day—my God! that was a day! However, take her away with him
he did, somehow or other, and ugly and sulky he looked in his new clothes,
and his face redder than ever, being made such a baulgore[7] before them all
—and she crying and screaming to her mammy to keep her, and the old man
holding back his wife that was fighting to get to her—and away with the
two of them in a curragh to Inisheer, where he lived!’
‘And what did she do when he got her there? Did she kill him? ’Tis I
would have killed him, no fear of me but I would!’ Grania exclaimed
eagerly, her upper lip raised as she used to raise it when she was a child,
showing the white teeth below.
‘ “Kill him”? Arrah! nonsense, girl alive; the creature hadn’t it in her to
kill a fly, no, nor the hundredth part of the half of a fly. What did she do?
Sure, she did as every other woman has done since the world began; what
else had she to do, God help her? Och, vo, vo! marrying is a black job for
many and many a one, and so I tell you, child, though it’s little, I dare say,
you believe me. I often think that it was seeing poor Mary that same day
gave me the first strong turn against it myself—so I do,’ Honor ended
meditatively.
Grania frowned till her brows met, but made no further comment on the
story.
‘Yes, indeed, I do think that ’twas seeing Mary O’Reilly hanging on to
that old door, and her mother crying and all, set me so against it then, I do
really!’ Honor went on complacently. ‘It wasn’t that I couldn’t have married
well enough if I had wanted it, mind you! There was an old man—you’ve
often heard me talk of him—up by Polladoo way; rich he was—oh, my
God! he was rich!—nigh upon two cantrells of land he rented, not a foot
less, and my father was mad with me to marry him—said once he’d turn me
out of the house on to the bare sea rocks if I didn’t! But your mother,
Grania, that wasn’t long in it then herself, helped me, so she did—may her
bed in Glory be the sweeter and the easier for it this day I pray! That was
the worst time ever I had at all, at all!—the very worst time of all,’ Honor
added reflectively.
Grania looked up. A new idea, a sudden curiosity, was stirring in her
mind.
‘But did you never care for e’er a one, Honor?’ she asked, reddening and
speaking quickly: ‘never for e’er a one at all—not when you were young?
Sure, Honor, you must! Think a bit, sister, and tell me. Arrah! why wouldn’t
you tell me? Isn’t it all past and done now?’
‘ “Care”? Is it I, child? “Care”! God keep you, no! What would ail me to
care?’ the elder sister asked in tones of genuine astonishment. ‘Auch! men
is a terrible trouble, Grania, first and last. What with the drink and the
fighting and one thing and another, a woman’s life is no better than an old
garron’s down by the seashore once she’s got one of them over her driving
her the way he chooses.’ She paused, and a new look, this time a look of
unmistakable passion, came into her face. ‘Oh, no, Grania asthore, ’tis a
nun I would have loved to be; oh, my God! yes, that is the beautiful life!
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. ’Tis on that little bed you do be sleeping on now I’d be lying, and
father and poor Phil, that’s dead, snoring one against the other as if it was
for money, and the wind blowing, and the sea and rocks grinding against
each other the way they do, and I would think of the big world and the cruel
things that do be going on in it, and the ugly ways of men that frightened
me always, and then of the convent, and the chapel and the pictures and the
garden—for I saw it all once, at Galway, at the Sisters of Mercy there—and
my heart would go out in a great cry: “Oh, my God, make me a nun! Oh,
my God, won’t You let me be a nun! My God! my God! You’ll let me be a
nun, won’t You? Arrah my God! won’t You? won’t You?” ’
She lay back in the bed, her face flushed, her breath came fast; old
passion was stirring vehemently within her. For such passion as this,
however, Grania had no sympathy, Honor’s aspirations in this respect
having all her life been a source of irritation to her.
‘Then it is not myself would like to be a nun,’ she exclaimed defiantly.
‘And I think it was real bad of you, Honor, so I do, to have wanted to go
away. What would have become of any of us without you, and of me most
of all? Did you never think of that? Say, Honor, did you never think of
that?’
‘Arrah! whist! child, I know it, I know it. You needn’t be telling me, for
I’ve told myself so a hundred times,’ Honor answered eagerly. ‘And maybe
it’s all for the best now the way it is; anyhow, the end is not far off, and God
and the Holy Virgin will know it was not my fault. I had the heart in me to
be a nun, if ever a woman had, and it’s the heart that’s looked to there—the
heart and nothing else. And as to my not thinking of you! why, you little
rogora dhu, you black rogue of the world, God forgive me if I’ve thought of
anything else, child, since the first hour I had you to myself! ’Twasn’t in it
nor thought of, you were at all, in those times I’m speaking of, nor would
have been but for father seeing your mother, a stranger come over from the
Joyce country, dancing at old Malachy O’Flaherty’s wake, and all the young
fellows in the place after her. 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. Somehow, once I got you into my arms,
and no one near you but myself, I disremember ever wanting again to be a
nun, so I do.’
Grania’s fierce look softened. ‘ ’Tis a mother you’ve been to me, sure
enough, all my life, sister,’ she said gently.
‘ “Mother”! Wisha! child, with your “mother”! ’Tisn’t much I think of
mothers, I can tell you! 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. Sure, if I could only feel easy about that I’d
die the happiest woman ever yet had a footboard laid on her face. Oh, my
pet, my bird, my little deerfoor asthore, won’t you try to turn to Him when
I’m gone? Remember, I’ll be near, maybe, though you won’t see me. Sure,
if it was to do you any good, I’d stop a hundred years longer than need be in
the place Father Tom tells of, or a thousand either, for I don’t mind pain,
being so used to it, and think it all joy and sweetness.’ Honor lifted her head
a little in the bed and raised her soft brown eyes imploringly towards her
sister. ‘Oh, Grania dheelish, pulse of my soul, what’s this life at all, at all,
short or long, easy or hard—what is it, what is it but a dream? just a dream,
no better!’ she cried with sudden passion, that sisterly passion into which
everything else had long been merged. ‘If I could only make sure of
meeting my bird in heaven, if it was a thousand years off and a thousand on
the top of that, and ten thousand more at the hinder end of that, sure, what
would it matter? Oh, child asthore, think of us two, you and me, standing up
there together, holding one another by the two hands, and knowing we’d
never be separated no more!—never, never, sun or shine, winter or summer
—never as long as God lived, and that’s for ever and ever! Oh, child, child!
when that thought comes over me, ’tis like new life in my veins and new
blood in my poor heart. I feel as if I could get out of my bed, and go leaping
and dancing over the rocks to the sea, or up into the air itself like the birds,
so I do.’
Her strength, momentarily sustained, suddenly broke down, and her
voice sank so as to be almost inaudible. ‘You wouldn’t disappoint me,
Grania, dear? Sure you wouldn’t disappoint your poor old Honor, that never
loved man or woman, chick or child, only yourself?’ she whispered, the
words coming out one by one with difficulty.
Grania’s eyes filled, and she let Honor take her hand and hold it in her
two worn ones, which were grown so thin that they seemed made of a
different substance from her own toil-roughened one. But though she was
touched and would have done anything to please Honor, she could not even
pretend to respond to the sick woman’s eager longing. She would have done
so if she could, but it was impossible. The whole thing was utterly foreign
and alien to her. There was nothing in it which she could catch hold of,
nothing that she could feel to attach any definite idea to. Fond as she was of
Honor, unwilling as she was to vex her, her whole attitude, her excessive
urgency, worried her. What ailed her to talk so, to have such queer ways and
ideas? Was it because she was sick, because she was dying? Did all sick
people talk and feel like that? Was it possible that she would ever feel
anything of the sort if she were sick, if she were going to die? She did not
believe it for a minute. The youth in her veins cried for life, life! sharp-
edged life, life with the blood in it, not for a thin bloodless heaven that no
one could touch or prove.
Turning away, she made an excuse, therefore, of having to go and see
after the calf, and ran hastily out of the cabin door into the sunlight, leaving
it open behind her.
Left alone, Honor’s eyes kept dreamily following the yellow bands of
light as they spread in ever-widening streams across the rocks. Over the top
of the gully she could see a space of sky, which seemed to her to be not
only bluer, but also higher than usual. She tilted her head a little backwards
so as to be able to look farther and farther up, higher and higher still, into
this dim, mysterious distance, gradually forgetting all troubles, vexations,
hindrances, as her eyes lost themselves in that untravelled region.
‘Augh, my God! what will it be like at all, at all, when we get there?’ she
whispered, looking up and smiling, yet half abashed at the same time by her
own audacity.
CHAPTER VII
At the extreme south-eastern end of the island, upon the same step or level
of rock, but about half a mile farther on than the O’Malleys, lived the
Duranes. Their cabin was the smallest and worst, next to Shan Daly’s, on
Inishmaan, but then they were Duranes, and Durane is one of the best
established names on the island. The family consisted of a father, a mother,
five children, a grandfather and an orphan niece. There was only one room
in the whole house, and that room was about twenty feet long by twelve or
perhaps fourteen feet wide. The walls had, seemingly, never been coated
with plaster, and even the mortar between the blocks of stone had fallen out,
and been replaced from the inside by lumps of turf or mud as necessity
occurred.
When the family were collected together, space, as may be guessed, was
at a premium, since even upon the floor they could hardly all sit down at the
same time. There was, however, a sort of ledge, covered with straw, about
three feet from the ground, upon which four of the five children slept, and
where, when food was being distributed, all that were old enough to sit
alone were to be seen perched in a row, with tucked-up legs and open
mouths, like a brood of half-fledged turkeys. At other times they gathered
chiefly upon the doorstep, which, in all Irish cabins, is the coveted place,
and only ceases to be so in exceptionally cold weather, or after actual
darkness has set in.
There was no land belonging to the cabin beyond a strip of stony potato-
ground, and Peter, or Pete, Durane was forced therefore to earn what he
could as day-labourer to his luckier neighbours. Not much employment was
given, as may be imagined, on Inishmaan, and had there been Pete would
hardly have been able to profit by it. He was a thin dried-up little man,
looking old already, though he was not yet forty, with soft appealing eyes
and a helpless, vacillating manner. His wife Rose, or Rosha, on the contrary,
though in reality a year or two older than himself, was a fine-looking
woman still, with hard red cheeks and round black eyes, who had only
accepted him, as she often loudly asserted, for the sake of charity, and to
hinder the creature from throwing himself into the sea.
Poor Pete had certainly not been regarded as the pearl of bachelors, and
had had to seek far and ask often before finding anyone willing to accept
him. He was a well-meaning, harmless little man, full of the best intentions,
and incapable of hurting a fly. Unfortunately for himself he bore a poor
reputation in the somewhat important matter of honesty, and it was this that
had made Grania think of him in connection with the stolen turf.
About a year before there had been a scandal about some straw which
had been missed by one of the neighbours, and which was finally traced to
Pete’s door, and although the amount taken had been a trifle, still in so
small and so poverty-stricken a community as Inishmaan small things, it
will be understood, are readily missed. No steps had been taken to
prosecute the culprit—indeed, the ties of kindred are so closely woven and
interwoven all over the island that the law is rarely resorted to. The straw
had been duly returned to the owner’s door early one morning, and it was
one of the many jokes against Pete Durane that he had been soundly
thrashed by his wife for the theft—possibly because of the detection of it.
When Grania entered, the children were still eating their midday meal,
an old table having been pushed against their ledge for the purpose—a very
old table, almost shapeless from years of ill-usage, but still solid, and the
chief article of furniture in the house. Rosha was busily ladling out a fresh
supply of potatoes from the big black pot, laying them down in heaps upon
the table in sizes varying according to the age, or possibly the merits, of the
recipient. They were not allowed to get cold, the children snatching them up
and beginning to eat them almost before they were out of the pot.
What with the all but total absence of glass in the paper-patched
windows, and what with the smouldering eddies of turf-smoke which rolled
overhead like some dull domestic cloud, it was at first so dark that Grania
could see nothing except the piles of potatoes and the children, or rather the
children’s hands, which, being fitfully lit by the fire, kept darting into the
light and out again, like things endowed with some odd galvanic existence
of their own. After awhile, as her eyes got more accustomed to the
atmosphere, she made out that besides the mistress of the house, there were
two other women sitting there, one of them an aunt of Rosha’s from the
opposite side of the island, the other our previous acquaintance, Peggy
Dowd, who had dropped in as usual about meal time.
No sooner was that meal snatched up and swallowed down than the
children rushed out of doors again in a body, tumbling one over the other as
they did so, the eldest girl clutching up her mother’s flannel petticoat as she
went. A spare petticoat—one, that is to say, not invariably worn upon the
person of the mistress of the house—is a highly important article in an Irish
cabin, and fulfils more functions than could be guessed at first sight. It is a
quilt by night, a shawl by day, a head-gear, an umbrella for an entire brood
of children to run out under in the rain—nay, the man of the house himself
will often not disdain to take a turn of it, especially on occasions which do
not bring him too directly into the light of publicity. This last, by the way,
was a privilege which poor Pete Durane had never dared to claim.
Even after the children had been got rid of Grania felt it impossible for
her to enter upon the subject of her visit—a delicate one in any case—while
there were strangers present. Accordingly she did not remain in the cabin
many minutes, contenting herself with begging Rosha to ask Pete to come
over and speak to her that evening as soon as his day’s work was finished.

CHAPTER VIII
Her silence did not hinder her from becoming the subject of vigorous
controversy and criticism the instant her back was turned.
‘Auch, my word, just look at the length of her! My word, she is the big
girl that Grania O’Malley, the big girl out and out!’ Rosha exclaimed,
looking after her as she ran down the steep path, her tall vigorous figure
framed for a few minutes by the doorway of the room she had just left. ‘It is
the mighty queer girl that she is, though! God look down upon us this day,
but she is the queerest girl ever I knew on this earth yet, that same Grania
O’Malley. Yes, indeed, yes!’ A long-drawn smack of the palate gave
emphasis and expansion to the words.
‘Auch, Rosha Durane, don’t be overlooking the girl! ’Tis a decent
father’s child she is any way,’ said the aunt from the other side of the island,
apparently from an impulse of amiability, in reality by way of stimulating
Rosha to a further exposition of what Grania’s special queerness consisted
in.
‘Did I say Con O’Malley was not a decent man? Saints make his bed in
heaven this day, when did I say it?’ the other answered, apparently in her
turn in hot indignation, but in reality perfectly understanding the motive of
her aunt’s remark. ‘What I do say, and what is well known to all Inishmaan,
and that it is no invention of mine nor yet thought of by me, is that he was a
very wild queer man. And Grania is just the same; she is a very wild queer
girl, and a bold one too, and so I suppose I may say even in my own house
and before you, Mrs. O’Flanagan, though you are my poor mother’s sister
that’s these seven years back gone to glory! I tell you there is no end to her
queerness, and to the bold things she does be doing. It is well known to all
Inishmaan, yes and to Aranmore, too, that she goes out to the fishing just
like a man, so she does, just like a man, catching the plaice and the mullets
and the conger eels, and many another fish beside I shouldn’t wonder; and
if that is not a very bold thing for a young girl to do, then I do not know
what a bold thing is, although I am your own niece, Mrs. O’Flanagan. But
that is only the half of it. She has no fear of anything, not of anything at all,
I tell you, neither upon the earth nor under it either—God keep us from
speaking of harm, amen! She will as soon cross a fairies’ ring as not! just
the same and sooner, and it is not two months, or barely three at the most,
that I saw her with my own eyes walk past a red jackass on the road, and it
braying hard enough to split at the time, and not crossing herself, no, nor a
bend of the head, nor spitting even! It is the truth I am telling you, Mrs.
O’Flanagan, ma’am, though you may not choose to believe me, the truth
and no lie!’
‘Ugh! ugh! ugh! ’Tis a bad end comes to such ways as those, a bad end,
a bad end,’ said old Peggy Dowd, who up to this had been busily occupied
in eating up the scraps left in the pot, but had now leisure to take her part,
and accordingly entered upon the subject with all the recognised weight of
her years and authority. ‘Did I ever tell you women both, about Katty
O’Callaghan, that lived over near Aillyhaloo when I was a girl? From the
time she was the height of that turf kish there she would not be bid by
anyone, no, not by the priest himself. The first time ever I saw her she was
close upon eighteen years old, for she was not born on the island, but came
from Cashla way to help an uncle of hers that had a small farm up near
Aillyhaloo. A fine big girl she was, just the moral of that Grania there, with
a straight back, and a wide chest, and the two eyes of her staring up big and
bold at you—the very same. But, Man Above, the impudence of her! She
had no proper respect not for anything, so she had not. She would laugh
when you talked of the good people, and she would say that she would as

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