The Mermaid of Inish-Uig

Chapter I

I can scarcely promise a coherent story here. Possibly a genius, with the help of his more able imagination, might trick it out into three volumes, or, still better, compress it into three pages. I will tell what there is to tell as it came to me. Whenever I have thought over this matter, pieced together these conversations, tried to arrange these stray coincidences, it has seemed to me that I have had glimpses of a story in it all. Perhaps an indulgent reader may also see some thread of tale in it. I can scarcely even recollect when it was that the mermaid of Inish-uig first had a nucleus of existence in my imagination. I remember lying kicking up my heels in the sunshine one day, years ago, on the highest cliff of Inish-uig, alongside of Doolie; I mean Doolie Wee Nally, i.e., that particular one of the score of Doolie Dougans on the island whose mother was the younger of the only two Nellies therein.

Doolie's limited English was no let or hindrance to his flow of talk, though it some what "queered" his tenses. He had told me much about the island ; of St. Columba and the Holy Clay, of which he might some day be the owner ; of King Balor and his basilisk eye, and of his battles, wherein I recognised a fight that was an eddy of the Ulster Plantation conflict (see Calendar of State Papers relating to Ireland, vol. ix.). We had talked much of the seals, for whom the burrowing Atlantic has made caves and breeding-places around and under the island. I made futile attempts to explain them as mammalia to Doolie, which I dare say seemed as sensible to him as I thought his knowledge of their dealings with the fairies. According to Doolie, seals love music — which is true —and the fairies come to play to them after dusk.

He had heard it himself, and had rolled stones down the cliff to stop it ; for Doolie, though a heathen, has enough of the human instinct to kill seals and fairies alike. The seals are curious neighbours to the in habitants of Inish-uig. If you look into their large inquisitive eyes, you can think that in their caves they speculate as much about human beings as the islanders round their turf-fires about seals. Doolie spoke mysteriously about their caves, which he would as soon have thought of entering as a seal of putting in an appearance at chapel. " Can't we paddle your coragh up one of these caves ?" I asked. " No," he said decidedly. " There do be strange things in them caves. I would be frighted to go in one of them places." " Fairies ?" He shook his head. "You know as much as I," he said.

This was his favourite answer when cornered as to the basis of some superstition. And I knew that if I pressed him there would come the disarming " You know all t'ing," which always made me feel such a humbugging Stephano to this very gentle Caliban. One very good reason I knew for an islander never entering a seals' cave — that the seals could in general themselves only enter their homes by diving to a submarine opening, never exposed, even at the lowest of spring-tides. One such i — cave, or the upper gallery of it, with an unmistakably sealy smell about it, I had penetrated to some distance at lowwater. There, on a wet slab overhanging a deep and restless caldron of imprisoned sea, I had lain for some hours listening to the sobbing and heaving of the waters, and trying to distinguish the heavy breathing, grunting, and bleating of the inhabitants beyond.

I had whistled and sung till the waters were stirred, and a wistful whiskered face peered up in the half-light — half affrighted, half inquisitive — and I had, I am sorry to con fess, sent a bullet through the head of a harm less cow-seal who came to listen. Doolie was interested in the rifle as a means of killing seals. To him a seal killed meant a few shillings for its skin, and a year's supply of excellent lighting oil for the evenings at home. With infinite pains he had manufactured clumsy bullets for his own deadly flintlock, and would lie watching over the cliff, with trigger cocked, for a whole morning, to catch sight of a phocal nose above the waters ; but to intrude on their domestic arrangements would be out of the question. " Hasn't anyone been in a seals' cave ?" I asked. " Ay, there has.

My father is the man that has been in those places. Himself and a man Doohan tell of it. The seals were all standing round, and my father and Doohan could have killed ten, twelve, twenty of them as easy as I would be killing brazhers on the rocks." "And didn't they?" " They did not. At that time they were not allowed. Besides, they could not have done it — not ten of them. It was like this : The seals rolled round like, and scrambled up the gravel with their hands in the air, till the murther was in it. And my father and Doohan came out very quick." How did they effect an entrance ?" Well ?" How did they get into the cave at all ?' " Ah ! there would be a way into the cave at that time. My father knew it. See Torahauv yonder ?" Doolie pointed to a grand turf covered rock that lay only about thirty yards to sea, but separated from the island by a deep frothy gulf.

" The seals do breed greatly under Torahauv. At that time I would t'ink there would be holes all through the rocks from the top. Torahauv was differ in those days." I put my face to the ground and meditated. I believed Doolie was right, and that many of those caves could be approached from inland, if one only knew the way. I knew of one par ticular spot of ground, westward, some forty yards from the sea, near the little enclosure where the bodies washed ashore from the wrecked gunboat were buried, at which you could distinctly smell seal. I had tried to follow up the smell, as if it might be carried by the wind, but I always lost it except at this spot. And now I felt sure that at this spot was a seals' cave. The existence of such places easily explained itself to me. The Atlantic ate out huge long narrow " scolts " or creeks in the island ; at the upper end of these sand and gravel silted and a dry beach was formed.

In time the weather-worn sides of the scolt would crumble in at the top, immense fragments of rock would roll down, get jammed between the narrow walls lower down, and so bridge over the scolt. More rubbish slipping, a porous casing of loose stones and earth, through which the rain and air would percolate, would form, and be covered over with a top coating of luxuriant turf ; and if an adventurous person were to dig through the rubble of the top he might find a narrow gangway between the stones to the cave beneath. Such I believed — and I found after wards I was correct — was the way Doolie's father found access to the seals' abode. But I felt curiously exercised as to what could have taken him and his companion there. " They didn't have guns, then, to kill the seals ?" I asked. "They did not," said Doolie; "they were not allowed.

There will be no priest on this island at that time. Father Doherty says we may kill the seals at high-water to get plenty oil to give mans for the winter." " But how was it that they were not exten sively killed before that ?" " They were not allowed," Doolie replied, rather insistently, and not looking straight at me. He chewed dulse reflectively, and then added, " She would turn the stone on any man that would kill the seals," and fell a-musing. I felt that we were close to another super stition, and pondered in my mind on the best and most delicate way of extracting and dis tilling it from Doolie's imagination. To have shown any amusement or scepticism would have ruined any chance of studying his talk ; so that, from repeatedly assuming an air of credulity and desire for knowledge, my well-meant in tentions of doing some good to these benighted heathen were rapidly slipping away.

This time I lay low, till Doolie repeated, " She would thai." " She " is an unsatisfactory pronoun on Inish-uig, "he" and "she" being used arbi trarily, and rather with regard to euphony than gender. I had never, however, noticed it as the highland substitute for " I," but thought in this case I might try the effect of assuming it to be so. " Wouldjj/<?M turn the stone on anyone?" I said. Doolie's lip quivered with surprise. " Me have the turning of the stone ?" he asked. " It's not me that has it, nor my sister — glory be to God! — nor my mother." " Who has it, then ?" " You know as much as I," Doolie muttered impenetrably. " The old woman know what one of them. When she dies, she will give it to the next one. But there, you know as much I)) "Well, Doolie," I said, "did you ever know of anyone having the stone turned on him."

" I did." He lowered his voice, and pointed over to the mainland, ten miles across the sea. " Stewart Vaughan," here he mentioned the name of a man a few months dead, a noted landlord, who had been a regular target for moonlighters, and had even attained the dignity of posing in a highly-coloured cartoon in the Weekly Freeman, " Stewart Vaughan was the last one that had the stone turned on him. There would be a man from the mainland, too, that died that way one time. Anger was on him by reason that they told him not to move the stone to build the lighthouse wall up. He brought a cart and horse to carry it, and the horse, that had always been quiet, went mad, and the man died soon.' I could never get quite at the bottom of this superstition. I found that the shrewdest of the islandmen believed in it.

However, Mr. Vaughan, the landlord, died of old age ; but the horse had bolted and overturned the cart, and the mason had been drowned about a year after wards. They were all evasive, with the usual "You know as much as I," when asked which particular stone it was, and all I could gather about Doolie's histories was that some ancient virago, that dwelt alone, judged the islanders at that time, and for some purpose had issued an edict in defence of the seals. As to why his father and the man Doohan had gone into the cave, Doolie could tell me nothing. Superstition is not altogether a matter of teaching, but considerably of temperament. Educate a human being of a certain type out of his superstition, and let him retire to himself to find his mind swept and garnished, and the probability is that he will take unto himself seven devils, and the last state of that man will be worse than the first.

No one knows this better than a wise priest. Better a clay floor than a dirty wooden one ; and with cabin dwellers he is the best guide who will keep out the seven fierce devils of a little knowledge. I must own to having had some elevated ideas, at first, of showing an exemplary con tempt for the supernatural, in which my friends, the islanders, so firmly believed ; but as I knew more of Father Doherty and his flock, I was the more rejoiced that I had not foolishly interfered. As we lay there, I wondered if Doolie's fish fed brain could compass the idea of a material origin for his curious beliefs. Strange beings in caves might arise from some interview with an octopus or cuttle-fish in days gone by. If I could get him to see such a beginning for one of his traditions, he might of his own knowledge of island life be able to supply the foundations of others.

I accordingly began : " Did you ever hear of mermaids on Inish uig ?" I knew that the mermaid myth was somehow traceable to seals. " Well ?" interrogated Doolie. "Mermaids — mermen and mermaids. A mermaid is a strange, being in the fairy story books : half a woman, half a fish. She lives at the bottom of the sea for three hundred years, and then becomes the foam on the surface. Her upper part," I went on, drawing largely on my recollections of Hans Andersen, "is that of a beautiful woman, with long hair and melting eyes and the voice of a siren ; but below her waist she tapers into a silvery fish-tail, more graceful than the legs of the Venus of Milo." " Well, wells said Doolie, filled with intense interest. He rolled on the ground, laughed ecstatically, and drew closer to hear more of the mermaids.

Encouraged by his appreciation, and more by his laughter, I went on : " Some say the mermaids come often to the surface, and watch human beings and listen to their music ; and before a storm the wicked ones go before a ship, and beckon the sailors into dangerous seas. They have no souls ; but if a mermaid can get the love of a man, she will have a soul. Pretty story, isn't it, Doolie ? No doubt the idea originated with the seals, you know." Doolie was rolling with laughter again ; he laughed long and loudly, showing a row of sound Milesian eye-teeth. But I found he was not laughing at anything ludicrously super stitious. It was the laughter of a vivid imagi nation, tickled by something new to feed upon, and he turned to me and said : ' Did you see them, Edward ?" ' Good gracious, no, Doolie !" ' Then how did you know ?"

"Why, Doolie, it's nothing but a story in a fairy-book." " In a book," mused Doolie, " then it be to be true. The schoolmaster that died told me parts of that story ;" and he laughed again, gently. And as he rose to join the crew of fishermen who had been watching for the mackerel from the brow of Bullig, and were now whistling for him, outscreaming the gulls, and pointing to a patch of sea where the pitchy sound was flecked with commas of silver, I realized that I had, for good or evil, unwittingly given Doolie a new superstition.

Chapter II

Late that evening a barefooted urchin came silently to the cottage, walked in, and laid six fine mackerel on the table, and I knew that Doolie was safely back from the fishing, and had not forgotten me. I thought how affronted he would be if I offered to pay for them. " Sure, the sea would not give us fish, nor the cows milk, if we took money for them from our friends," he had said once. Nevertheless, I perceived with a twinge of conscience that the next seal that showed itself in the Port-na-glass would be at the mercy of Doolie and my rook rifle. The day following I first made the acquaint ance of Doolie's father. Old Doolie — Doolie Inish as he was called — was perhaps the man of the east end, and it was amusing to contrast the knowingness of manner and facial expression that the consciousness of this gave him with the absolute simplicity of his mind as [ 13 ] regarded from an outsider's point of view.

He was the possessor and distributor of the Holy Clay, by virtue of having recently become the oldest of the clan Dougan. He was a fairly fluent English speaker, having in prehistoric ages harvested in Peeblesshire for two or three seasons, although this latter experience I am bound to say does not necessarily affect in the slightest the language of many of his country men who still cross the Channel ; but he had also been in Liverpool for a little time, and this had furnished his vocabulary with a noun and an adjective of the strength of which he was totally unaware. But what gave him more real interest in my eyes was that he was a sober old man who could remember days on Inish-uig when every man must have done, more or less, that which was right in his own eyes ; when there was no judge in the land save an occasional wild Deborah or Samson ; when the only visitors from the mainland were lawless Fanad-men who came, with cargoes of barley, to distil whisky in the dry caves where I had found their rusty implements, or perhaps to plot against an unpopular landlord, or to hide from the " polis " after some agrarian outrage.

Old Doolie must have seen the R.I.C. barracks rise, to be rapidly deserted ; he must have seen more than several fine ships dashed to pieces on the rocks, to furnish the islanders with not unwelcome wreckage. He must have seen many a golden summer wasting golden surfeits of fish, and many a leaden winter smothering it with starvation and misery. I was surprised, after certain impressions Doolie had given me of his father's gigantic strength and daring, to find a frail-looking little old man, some inches less tall than his son. I hinted this to Doolie, and found he had never noticed it before ; he said "Well, well!" several times, and was immediately convinced that his father had grown rapidly downwards for some years. Doolie Inish must have known me by name and appearance for some time, though I had never noticed him before.

He came forward now with his son, and introduced himself as the man that had been in the seals' cave on Torahauv. He had very nice manners, and expressed a pretty wish that my bones were in good order, the wording of which I regret that I cannot remember. We talked a good deal about the island, about which he was very enthu siastic. " It was a wholesome place in summer, a coose place in winter, God knows ; but I would rather live on Inish-uig than in America or one of them places." " Have you been here long ?" Doolie Inish laughed gently. " Born and bred on this island. 'Twill be getting on for sixty-five years, maybe more. " Then, you know all about it ?" " Every scolt, every port, every tor — from the Stake round to the Anvil, ay." We lay down on the grass. " And how did you get into the seals' cave ?"

" There was a way at that time from the top of Torahauv, but it is choked up now since the fall of a rock. You see that green lump near the top ? That is the rock, covered over with green turf now. Under there is a crack they call Balor's Fishtub. That crack goes down, down, down, sideways, till you come to the water ; but then the crack goes forward to the sea and backward into Torahauv, and you can go along over the water till you come to the sand, and there is the cave with the seals." " And how did you get down ?" " We tied a long rope to a beam and put it across the crack at the top, and slid down the rope till we come to the place where the water was ; and then we put one foot on each side of the crack, and that way we pressed against the sides with our hands and feet, and went slowly in till we got to the dry sand."

" But why didn't you go into the crack from the sea outside in your coragh ?" " The crack is too narrow where the sea comes in — five fingers wide, maybe. The seals get in down below where it is wider. Come this way, and you can see where." We moved up to the top of the cliff, and looked down on Torahauv. Doolie pointed out a recess between two jutting rocks covered at low-tide with a pavement of mussels. " We got into the cave, but they were too many, and they made all as one as if they were swimming, and the air was filled with stones and seaweed. We hasted back, and, begod ! Doohan fell into the water, and I had to hould him up till we got to where the rope was. And Doohan was frighted that a seal would be after us." " Then you didn't kill any ?" " We did not. No. It was not allowed at that time."

" What did you go for, then ?" " Indeed I cannot tell you. No. I cannot tell you. Doohan said there was something. I cannot tell ; I promised to go with him, and he was frighted sooner than I was." " And was there no one else who ever went ?" Doolie Inish meditated for a time. Then he turned to young Doolie, and said some thing in Irish. Young Doolie got up and went home. " No," said Doolie, fixing his eye on the peak of Errigal on the opposite mainland. " No, niver a man that went down there but one ; and that," he almost whispered, " was a woman." " What !" I said, too hastily, " she that had the turning of the stone ?" Old Doolie turned quite pale with surprise. " How did you know that ?" he asked. I felt, from his manner, as if I knew too much. "Oh, I guessed that," I said. " You are the second that has guessed that," old Doolie said gravely, " and the first came to no good.

That was Doohan, God rest his soul ! I never say, and I never think. When they did be saying that she had the turning of the stone, I was keeping qui't. It is no use talking. No. No use at all. I was younger at that time, and would do anything; but now, if Doohan was alive, would I be going down in them places ? No. I would not, sor ; not for all treasure, not for the king's goldian palaces." "Surely," I said, after a pause, "what a woman can do, a man can do." " There is them that can do what others can not," said Doolie. "There is, surely. Doohan said she went down there." 'By herself?" ' By herself, and sorra one else." ' Without a rope ?" " With niver a wisp, nor a strand, nor a hair of rope. No. That's what Doohan was telling me. I know as little as you. She could things that others could not."

" Who could ?" " Kate Phadrig Golany. She could go the length of the island at night without beads, when the stoutest man of us would be feared by reason of the spirits. Niver a man that crossed the sound in a coragh ; but Kate did it, twiste she did it : when she took the lighthouse man over, and when she kem back. Myself saw her carrying the coragh up on her back, like a man, when she kem back, and the blackness was in my heart to see her at that time." The old man mused gloomily, and I did what I could by sympathetic silence and an occasional word or two to elicit the story from him. " The blackness was in my heart, as we saw her all alone down there " — he pointed to the 2 — shingle — "making fast the coragh with stones. We seen it was wee Phadrig's coragh, when she was away out like a wee speck on the waves, not bein' Rosses-built like the most of the coraghs that is on this island.

She came up the scolt there, fornint the turf-stack, a shawl to her head, and going as if she had a load on her back. A score of us, maybe, was gathered at the place where you and I are now, watchin' her as we might be in these days watching a school of mackerel in the sound on a Sunday before Mass, but not going out. We seen her walk into her father's house, next that wee house of Dim'nic's yonder, but we knew that the hearth was cowld and the room empty. She kem out and looked round, and says Doohan, ' Holy Christ keep us,' says he, ' but she's coming this way.' And he shouts very loud, but with a sort of shake in his voice. ' Dead !' says he ; ' he's dead !' ' Ay, dead,' says we, for we had buried him a week back, and she dropped on her knees agin the door-post an' niver a one of us stirred to go down and help her, for the blackness that was in our hearts."

A cloud rested on old Doolie's puckered face as he dwelt on the scene he had called up. "And the old man had died," I said "How?" "Ah, the cratur !" said Doolie, in a tone of infinite pity, the cloud on his face melting. " He just failed after she went. Wee Phadrig O'Donnell was not of Inish-uig, but kem from Gola when the famine was on them. That was before iver I was born, but I mind of wee Phadrig, a little man, light and tidy, that had the pride of the blood in him, for the O'Donnells were kings of all Donegal, they say. Ay, and a well man, too, when he could be fishing or makin' kelp ; and when the creature was past that, he still had his daughter, and as long as he could go out in the coragh of a fine day, he would be having plenty fish. But the day she went away in the coragh with the lighthouse man he was wholly bate.

Whiles we would be comin' in to make him a cup of tay or mend the fire, but he just dozed there, and took no notice, waiting for her to come back. One day —it might be in three weeks — he got up and went to the door, and looked out over the sound. The say was calm, and not a speck to be seen on it. We left him sitting against the wall watching, and when we came back he was dead." I think it is the authoress of " Irish Idylls" who first made known to Saxon ears the pathos of that Irish word "cratur." I had thought it, until I had read Miss Barlow's work, peculiar to the community of Inish-uig, where a hard hand-to-mouth life often brings the sudden turning-point, where the " bhoy " becomes the "cratur," and from helping, "lending," and tending, becomes the helped, lent, and tended to, and, without any outward semblance of charity being shown, shares the " male, the fish, and the tay" of the others.

One such "cratur" I knew already, childless and grand childless ; and my imagination depicted wee Phadrig O'Donnell on the same lines : small and shrunken, but not bent ; with dim eyes smiling feebly from a bleached and crumpled face in a setting of thin white hair ; silent for the most part, with now and then a turn of broken fluency. The daughter, too — his only relation — I seemed to see, with downcast looks, picking her way barefoot up the shingle to her father's house. A well-knit figure, innocent of the hideous hyperboloid known as a waist, a shawl nearly closing in her face. The face I could not so easily picture. Among the island maidens' faces I had never seen a dark expression such as I felt sure that shawl concealed. The habitual downward glance, which resulted from their never wearing shoes, gave them a certain Madonna-like gravity of expression ; and a sweet staidness — which was very likely the result of stupidity — was equally convincing of virtue.

But Kate O'Donnell's eyes, I felt, were bowed with shame as she turned to go to her deserted father. What but sin could have been the end of that crossing in the coragh ? And what but repentance could have brought her back ? And was there a hardness and strength in her nature that forbade the sympathy of the others ? The affections of these islanders are a very vital part of their being. I have known a woman of them — elderly, but in no way infirm — die instantly of the shock of the news that her sister's son was drowned. When sickness and death come among them, their fragile wits scamper like a startled flock of sheep. They know not which way to turn, and will rush palpitatingly from destruction to destruction. When that old woman died, it was simply that one of them ran to her straight from the scene of the drowning, screaming out the news.

When the " mazle " visited them one spring, good Father Doherty was at his wits' end, for the well needed more care than the sick, lest the affrighted souls hastened the end of a feverish patient with their waitings and lamentations over him. So I supposed it would be if a sin, hitherto heard of but unknown, reared itself in their midst. The agony of the innocent would be more intense than the torture of the guilty. " How long did she live among you, Inish ?" I asked. " Many years," he said ; " I cannot tell. For two years, as I know, she lived alone, and not one word did we speak to her, nor did she seek us. All the day she lived in the house, and at night she would be wandhering up and down the island, or cutting herself the bit turf in the bog, or maybe fishing brazhers from the rocks. Whiles they did be saying she would go out in the coragh to fish lythe, or get dulse on Tora hauv.