Chapter 4: The Secrets of the Bog

Some six weeks elapsed before my visits to Irish friends were completed, and I was about to return home. I had had everywhere a hearty welcome; the best of sport of all kinds, and an appetite beyond all praise—and one pretty well required to tackle with any show of success the excellent food and wine put before me. The west of Ireland not only produces good viands in plenty and of the highest excellence, but there is remaining a keen recollection, accompanied by tangible results, of the days when open house and its hospitable accompaniments made wine merchants prosperous—at the expense of their customers.

In the midst of all my pleasure, however, I could not shake from my mind—nor, indeed, did I want to—the interest which Shleenanaher and its surroundings had created in me. Nor did the experience of that strange night, with the sweet voice coming through the darkness in the shadow of the hill, become dim with the passing of the time. When I look back and try to analyse myself and my feelings with the aid of the knowledge and experience of life received since then, I think that I must have been in love. I do not know if philosophers have ever undertaken to say whether it is possible for a human being to be in love in the abstract—whether the something which the heart has a tendency to send forth needs a concrete objective point! It may be so; the swarm of bees goes from the parent hive with only the impulse of going—its settling is a matter of chance. At any rate I may say that no philosopher, logician, metaphysician, psychologist, or other thinker, of whatsoever shade of opinion, ever held that a man could be in love with a voice.

True that the unknown has a charm—omne ignotum pro magnifico. If my heart did not love, at least it had a tendency to worship. Here I am on solid ground; for which of us but can understand the feelings of those men of old in Athens, who devoted their altars “To The Unknown God?” I leave the philosophers to say how far apart, or how near, are love and worship; which is first in historical sequence, which is greatest or most sacred! Being human, I cannot see any grace or beauty in worship without love.

However, be the cause what it might, I made up my mind to return home viâ Carnaclif. To go from Clare to Dublin by way of Galway and Mayo is to challenge opinion as to one’s motive. I did not challenge opinion, I distinctly avoided doing so, and I am inclined to think that there was more of Norah than of Shleenanaher in the cause of my reticence. I could bear to be “chaffed” about a superstitious feeling respecting a mountain, or I could endure the same process regarding a girl of whom I had no high ideal, no sweet illusive memory.

I would never complete the argument, even to myself—then; later on, the cause or subject of it varied!

It was not without a certain conflict of feelings that I approached Carnaclif, even though on this occasion I approached it from the South, whereas on my former visit I had come from the North. I felt that the time went miserably slowly, and yet nothing would have induced me to admit so much. I almost regretted that I had come, even whilst I was harrowed with thoughts that I might not be able to arrive at all at Knockcalltecrore. At times I felt as though the whole thing had been a dream; and again as though the romantic nimbus with which imagination had surrounded and hallowed all things must pass away and show that my unknown beings and my facts of delicate fantasy were but stern and vulgar realities.

The people at the little hotel made me welcome with the usual effusive hospitable intention of the West. Indeed, I was somewhat nettled at how well they remembered me, as for instance when the buxom landlady said:—

“I’m glad to be able to tell ye, sir, that yer carman, Andy Sullivan, is here now. He kem with a commercial from Westport to Roundwood, an’ is on his way back, an’ hopin’ for a return job. I think ye’ll be able to make a bargain with him if ye wish.”

I made to this kindly speech a hasty and, I felt, an ill-conditioned reply, to the effect that I was going to stay in the neighbourhood for only a few days and would not require the car. I then went to my room, and locked my door muttering a malediction on officious people. I stayed there for some time, until I thought that probably Andy had gone on his way, and then ventured out.

I little knew Andy, however. When I came to the hall, the first person that I saw was the cheerful driver, who came forward to welcome me:—

“Musha! but it’s glad I am to see yer ‘an’r. An’ it’ll be the proud man I’ll be to bhring ye back to Westport wid me.”

“I’m sorry Andy,” I began, “that I shall not want you, as I am going to stay in this neighbourhood for a few days.”

“Sthay is it? Begor! but it’s more gladerer shtill I am. Sure the mare wants a rist, an’ it’ll shute her an’ me all to nothin’; an’ thin whilst ye’re here I can be dhrivin’ yer ‘an’r out to Shleenanaher. It isn’t far enough to intherfere wid her rist.”

I answered in, I thought, a dignified way—I certainly intended to be dignified:—

“I did not say, Sullivan, that I purposed going out to Shleenanaher or any other place in the neighbourhood.”

“Shure no, yer ‘an’r, but I remimber ye said ye’d like to see the Shiftin’ Bog; an’ thin Misther Joyce and Miss Norah is in throuble, and ye might be a comfort to thim.”

“Mr. Joyce! Miss Norah! who are they?” I felt that I was getting red and that the tone of my voice was most unnatural.

Andy’s sole answer was as comical a look as I ever saw, the central object in which was a wink which there was no mistaking. I could not face it, and had to say:

“Oh yes, I remember now! was not that the man we took on the car to a dark mountain?”

“Yes, surr—him and his daughther!”

“His daughter! I do not remember her. Surely we only took him on the car.” Again I felt angry, and with the anger an inward determination not to have Andy or anyone else prying around me when I should choose to visit even such an uncompromising phenomenon as a shifting bog. Andy, like all humourists, understood human nature, and summed up the situation conclusively in his reply—inconsequential though it was:—

“Shure yer ‘an’r can thrust me; its blind or deaf an’ dumb I am, an’ them as knows me knows I’m not the man to go back on a young gintleman goin’ to luk at a bog. Sure doesn’t all young min do that same? I’ve been there meself times out iv mind! There’s nothin’ in the wurrld foreninst it! Lukin’ at bogs is the most intherestin’ thin’ I knows.”

There was no arguing with Andy; and as he knew the place and the people, I, then and there, concluded an engagement with him. He was to stay in Carnaclif whilst I wanted him, and then drive me over to Westport.

As I was now fairly launched on the enterprise, I thought it better to lose no time, but arranged to visit the bog early the next morning.

As I was lighting my cigar after dinner that evening Mrs. Keating, my hostess, came in to ask me a favour. She said that there was staying in the house a gentleman who went over every day to Knockcalltecrore, and as she understood that I was going there in the morning, she made bold to ask if I would mind giving a seat on my car to him as he had turned his ancle that day and feared he would not be able to walk. Under the circumstances I could only say “yes,” as it would have been a churlish thing to refuse. Accordingly I gave permission with seeming cheerfulness, but when I was alone my true feelings found vent in muttered grumbling:—”I ought to travel in an ambulance instead of a car.” “I seem never to be able to get near this Shleenanaher without an invalid.” “Once ought to be enough! but it has become the regulation thing now.” “I wish to goodness Andy would hold his infernal tongue—I’d as lief have a detective after me all the time.” “It’s all very well to be a good Samaritan as a luxury—but as a profession it becomes monotonous.” “Confound Andy! I wish I’d never seen him at all.”

This last thought brought me up standing, and set me face to face with my baseless ill-humour. If I had never seen Andy I should never have heard at all of Shleenanaher. I should not have known the legend—I should not have heard Norah’s voice.

“And so,” said I to myself, “this ideal fantasy—this embodiment of a woman’s voice, has a concrete name already. Aye! a concrete name, and a sweet one too.”

And so I took another step on my way to the bog, and lost my ill-humour at the same time. When my cigar was half through and my feelings were proportionately soothed, I strolled into the bar and asked Mrs. Keating as to my companion of the morrow. She told me that he was a young engineer named Sutherland.

“What Sutherland?” I asked. Adding that I had been at school with a Dick Sutherland, who had, I believed, gone into the Irish College of Science.