As it seemed easier to tell Willie Fay the bad news than to write a letter I left a message with one of his friends asking him to call at my house. Any evening except Saturday would suit me. On Saturday evenings I received my friends, and it would be difficult to discuss the matter freely before them. So Willie Fay came to see me one Thursday night, and perching himself on the highest chair in the room in spite of my protests, he fidgeted in it like a man in a hurry, anxious to get through an interview which had no longer any interest for him, answering me with a yes and a no, receiving the suggestion very coldly that in a few months new members would be elected to the Coisde Gnotha.

Men, I said, who will take a different view from Father Riley. I suppose you wouldn't care to wait?

They'll go their way and I'll go mine, he answered, and with such a grand air of indifference that I began to suspect he had already heard of my failure to persuade the Gaelic League to accept him as the manager of a touring company and had gotten something else in view. The acoustics of Dublin are very perfect. But when I questioned him regarding his plans he gave a vague answer and took his leave as soon as he decently could.

A secret there certainly was, and I thought it over till AE mentioned on Saturday night that the Fays had come to ask him to allow them to perform his Deirdre.

Your Deirdre!

And forthwith he confided to me that one morning, about six weeks before, as he rose from his bed, he had seen her in the woods, where she lived with Levarcham. I saw the lilacs blooming in the corner of the yard, and herself running through the woods towards the dun. She came crying to her dear foster-mother, half for protection, half for glee—she had seen a young man for the first time, Naisi, who, in pursuit of a deer, had passed through the glen unperceived, though it was strictly guarded by the king's spearmen.

And what happens then? I asked, interested in the setting forth of the story.



So far have I written, AE said, and as soon as I get another free evening I shall finish the act for the Fays.

But he had to wait a long while for his next inspiration, and in great patience the actors and actresses continued to chant their parts through the winter nights until the third act was brought to them.

It was then discovered that AE's play was too short for an evening's entertainment, and Yeats was asked for his Cathleen ni Houlihan; he had met her last summer in one of the Seven Woods of Coole—in which, a future historian will decide; for me it is to tell merely that the two plays were performed on April 15 in St Teresa's Hall, Clarendon Street, before an enthusiastic and demonstrative crowd of men and women. A later historian will also have to determine whether AE took the part of the God Mananaan Mac Lir at this performance, or whether he only appeared in the part at the preliminary performance in Coffey's drawing-room. All I know for certain is that none will ever forget the terrible emphasis he gave to the syllables Man-aan-nawn MacLeer in Coffey's drawing-room. He very likely had something to do with the bringing over of Maud Gonne from France to play the part of Cathleen ni Houlihan. Or did she come for Yeats's sake? However, she came, and dreaming of the many rebel societies that awaited her coming she gave point to the line since become famous:

They have taken from me my four beautiful fields,

a line which I have no hesitation in taking from Lady Gregory and attributing to Yeats.

An Irish audience always likes to be reminded of the time when Ireland was a nation, and the Fays determined that some organisation must be started to keep the idea alive; the Presidency of the National Theatre Society was offered to AE, but he seemed to have considered his dramatic mission over, and contented himself with drawing up the rules and advising the members to elect Yeats as their President. He may have noticed that Yeats had been seeking an outlet for Irish dramatic genius ever since the break-up of the Irish Literary Theatre, and for sure the fact was not lost upon him that Yeats's ears pricked up only when the word play was mentioned, and that his eyes were never lifted from the ground in his walks except to overlook a piece of waste ground as a possible site for a theatre. He could not but have heard Yeats mutter on more than one occasion, Goethe had a theatre ... Wagner had a theatre; and he had drawn the just conclusion that Yeats was seeking an outlet for Irish dramatic talent, and would bring courage and energy to the aid of the new movement. Oh, the wise AE, for Yeats as soon as he was elected President took the Fays in hand, discovering almost immediately that their art was of French descent and could be traced back to the middle of the seventeenth century in France. Some explanation of this kind was necessary, for Dublin had to be persuaded that two little clerks had suddenly become great artists, and to confirm Dublin in this belief the newspapers were requested to state that Mr W. B. Yeats was writing a play for Mr William Fay on the subject of The Pot of Broth.

Well, the best of us are sometimes short-sighted and superficial, and let it be freely confessed that it seemed to me at the time disgraceful that the author of The Wanderings of Usheen should stoop to writing a farce, for the subject Yeats had chosen was farcical, and the word represented to me only the merely conventional drolleries that I had seen on the London stage. My excuse for my blindness is that I have spent much of my life in France among French writers: folklore was unknown in Montmartre in my time, and no French writer that I know of, except Molière and George Sand, has made use of patois in literature; we are only beginning to become alive to the beauty of living speech when living speech is fast being driven out by journalists. But to return to Yeats, whose claim to immortality is well founded, for he knew from the first that literature rises in the mountains like a spring and descends, enlarging into a rivulet and then into a river. All this is clear to me today, but when he spoke to me of The Pot of Broth, I asked him if he weren't ashamed of himself; and when he proposed that I should choose a similar subject and write a farce for Willie Fay, I rose from my chair, relying on gesture to express my abhorrence of his scheme. But not liking to be left out of anything, I consented, at last, to write half a dozen plays to be translated into Irish.

It may not be necessary to have them translated. Wouldn't it do you as well if Lady Gregory put idiom on them?

We shall get the idiom much better, I answered, by having the plays translated into Irish. I will publish the Irish text, and you can do what you like with the brogue.

The stupid answer of a man intellectually run down; but next day I was down at the Gaelic League unfolding my project to the secretary, who thought it a very good one for the advancement of the Irish language, and as soon as the plays were written the Coisde Gnotha would decide.

My good man, do you think that I came over from England to submit plays to the Coisde Gnotha?



Mr Edward Martyn is one of the judges of traditional singing; you'll see him. Mr Yeats and Lady Gregory are certain to be there. So I am going to interview the ancient Irish language in the historic town of Galway, I said to myself as the train rattled westward, and the pretty weather in which Ireland has attired herself is in keeping with the occasion. And on alighting from the train my thoughts ran on to the same tune, that the old grey city lay in the sun seemingly stirred in her sleep by the sound of her language, the remnant having come from the islands beyond the bay. The remnant surely, I repeated as I passed into a long low room pleasantly lighted by four square shining windows. A peasant sang uncouth rhythms, but Edward, the old melomaniac, sat with his hand to his ear.

How are you, Edward?

A traditional singer, he answered, come from the middle island. Listen to him.

And to please Edward I listened to the singer, but could catch only a vague drift of sound, rising and falling, unmeasured as the wind soughing among the trees or the lament of the waves on the shore, something that might go on all day long, and the old fellow thatching his cabin all the while. The singer was followed by a piper, and the music that Michael Fluddery, a blind man from Connemara, drew from his pipes was hardly more articulate, and I began to think that the doleful pipes, now and again breaking into a jig tune, represented the soul of the Irish people better than any words could do, music being more fundamental. A long wail from the pipes startled me, and I was awake again in the long low room with May sunlight streaming through the square windows; Edward's hand was still at his ear, just as if he was afraid of missing a note; and at a little distance away Yeats and Lady Gregory sat colloguing together, their faces telling me nothing. Dancers rushed in, hopped up and down, round about and back again, the women's petticoats whirling above grey worsted legs, the tails of the men's frieze coats flying behind them, their hobnails hammering a great dust out of the floor, and as soon as the jig was over the story-teller came in, and, taking a chair, he warmed his hands over an imaginary peat fire, and began to tell of a man lost in a field, who had to turn his coat inside out to rid himself of the fairy spell; and, glancing round the audience, I could see the eyes of the Irish speakers kindling (it was easy to pick them out), the wandering Celtic eye, pale as their own hills. Creatures of marsh and jungle they seemed to me, sad as the primitive Nature in which they lived. I had known them from childhood but was always afraid of them, and used to run into the woods when I saw the women coming with the men's dinners from Derrinanny (the name is like them), and the marsh behind the village and the dim line of the Partry Mountains were always alien from me.

Edward, let's get away. We're losing all the sunlight.

He could not leave the Feis just then, but if I would wait till the story-teller had finished he might be able to get away for an hour.

We're expecting a piper from Arran, the great piper of the middle island—

And a great number of story-tellers, Yeats added.

You see, I'm the President of the Pipers' Club, Edward broke in.

They should be here by now, only there is no wind in the bay, Yeats muttered.

I begged of him to come away, but he did not know if he could leave Lady Gregory. He leaned over her, and at the end of some affable murmuring she seemed satisfied to let him go, accepting his promise to come back to fetch her in time for lunch; and we three went out together for a walk through the town.

How happy the sunlight makes me! Don't you feel a little tipsy, Edward? How could you have wanted to sit listening any longer to that eternal rigmarole without beginning or end?

You mean the traditional singer? He wasn't very good, and only got poor marks, Edward said, and he asked me what I thought of the piper.

He recalled many memories and a landscape. But if you like folk-music how is it that you don't like folk-tales?

I do like folk-tales in the Irish language or in the English—

Folk is our refuge from vulgarity, Yeats answered, and we strolled aimlessly through the sunlight.

Where would you like to go? Edward asked me abruptly.

To see the salmon. All my life I've heard of the salmon lying in the river, four and five deep, like sardines in a box.

Well, you'll see them today, Yeats answered.

There were other idlers besides ourselves enjoying the fair weather, and their arms resting on the stone bridge they looked into the brown rippling water, remarking from time to time that the river was very low (no one had ever seen it lower), and that the fish would have to wait a long time before there was enough water for them to get up the weir. But my eyes could not distinguish a fish till Yeats told me to look straight down through the brown water, and I saw one, and immediately afterwards a second a third and a fourth. And then the great shoal, hundreds, thousands of salmon, each fish keeping its place in the current, a slight movement of the tail being sufficient.

But if they should get tired of waiting and return to the sea?

Yeats is a bit of a naturalist, and in an indolent mood it was pleasant to listen to him telling of the habits of the salmon which only feeds in the sea. If the fishermen were to get a rise it would be because the fish were tired of waiting and snapped at anything to relieve the tedium of daily life.

A lovely day it was, the town lying under a white canopy of cloud, not a wind in all the air, but a line of houses sheer and dim along the river mingling with grey shadows; and on the other bank there were waste places difficult to account for, ruins showing dimly through the soft diffused light, like old castles, but Yeats said they were the ruins of ancient mills, for Galway had once been a prosperous town. Maybe, my spirit answered, but less beautiful than she is today; and after this remark Yeats was forgotten in the fisherman who threw his fly in vain, for the fish were too absorbed in their natural instinct to think of anything but the coming flood which would carry them up the river. I saw him change his fly many times, and at last, with some strange medley of red and blue and purple, he roused a fish out of its lethargy. It snapped; the hook caught in its gills, and a battle began which lasted up and down the stream, till at last a wearied fish was drawn up to the bank for the gillie to gaff. The fisherman prepared to throw his fly again across the river. Another silly fish would be tempted to snap at the gaudy thing dragged across its very nose sooner or later.... But we had seen enough of fishing for one day, and Edward led us through a dusty, dilapidated square; we stopped by the broken railings of the garden, for in the middle of the grass-plot somebody had set up an ancient gateway, all that remained of some great house; and when we had admired it we followed him through some crumbling streets to the town house of the Martyns, for in the eighteenth century the western gentry did not go to Dublin for the season. Dublin was two long days' journey away; going to Dublin meant spending a night on the road, and so every important county family had its town house in Galway. My grandfathers must have danced in Galway, there being no important town in Mayo, and in fine houses, if one may judge from what remains of Edward's. We viewed it from the courtyard, and he told us it had been let out in tenements and was nearly a ruin when it came into his hands; the roof was falling, the police had ordered him to have it taken down, for it was a public danger, and we listened to him, and we considered the archway under which the four-horsed coach used to pass into the courtyard, whilst he pointed out some marble chimney-pieces high up on the naked walls, saying he had better have them taken away. I hoped he would leave them, for a scattered vision of ladies in high-peaked bodices and gentlemen with swords had just appeared to me, dancing in mid air—appeared to me, not to him.

Leave them, and these steps where the lackeys have set down sedan chairs; embroidered shoes have run up these steps, flowered trains following, to dance minuet or gavotte ... or waltzes.

And arguing whether the waltz had penetrated to Galway in the eighteenth century, we followed Edward to the cathedral. Edward likes arches, even when the service held beneath them is Anglican, and he made himself agreeable, telling us that the cathedral was built late in the fifteenth century, and we wandered down the aisles, deploring the vulgarity of the modern world.

It would be impossible, he said, to build as beautiful a cathedral today, and he called on us to remember that there could not have been much culture in Galway in the fifteenth century, yet Galway could build a cathedral.

Galway was then without knowledge, I answered. We corrupt in knowledge and purify ourselves in ignorance.

Who said that? Yeats asked sharply.

Balzac, but I cannot answer for the exact words.

True! How true! Edward repeated, and, leading us down a lane-way, he pointed out some stone carvings which seemed to him conclusive of the fifteenth, but which might be fourteenth-century sculpture, Ireland being always a century behind England, and England being always a century behind France. All the same he believed that the gateway was late fifteenth century, for at that time Galway was trading with Spain and the gateway bore traces of Spanish influence. He spoke of the great galleons that once came floating up the bay, their sails filled with the sunset, and called our attention to the wide sweeping outlines of the headlands stretching far away into the Atlantic. Not only in certain buildings but in flesh and blood are traces of the Spaniard to be found in Galway, I said, and pointed to a group of yellow-skinned boys basking among the brown nets drying along the great wharf. Edward told me that these were Claddagh boys, and that the Claddagh are all Irish speakers; and we stopped to question them as to what language they were in the habit of using, only to learn with sorrow that English and Irish were all the same to them.

That is how a language dies, Edward said. The parents speak it, the children understand it, but don't speak it, and the grandchildren neither speak nor understand. I like the English language and I like the Irish, but I hate the mixture.

Yeats sighed, and the boys told us that the hooker from Arran was lying out there in the west, becalmed, and we need not expect her before evening, unless the men put out the oars, and she was too heavy for rowing.

On a warm day like this, not likely, I answered, and the indolent boys laughed, and we continued our walk down the wharf, thinking of the great labour spent upon it. The bringing of all these stones and the building of them so firmly and for such a long way into the sea could only have been done in famine times. A long wharf, so long that we had not walked half its length when Yeats and Edward began to speak of returning to the Feis; and, leaving them undecided, staring into the mist, hoping to catch sight every moment of the black hull of the hooker, I strayed on ahead, looking round, wondering, tempted to explore the mystery of the wharf's end. Yet what mystery could there be? Only a lot of tumbled stones. But the wonder of the world has hardly decreased for me since the days when I longed to explore the wilderness of rocks at the end of Kingstown Pier, the great clefts frightening me, sending me back, ashamed of my cowardice, to where my uncles and aunts and cousins were seated, listening to the band (in the 'sixties fashionable Dublin used to assemble on the pier on Sunday afternoons). One day I was bolder, and descended into the wilderness, returning after a long absence, very excited, and telling that I had met the King of the Fairies fishing at the mouth of the cave. The story that I had brought back was that he had caught three fish when I had met him and had given me one. I was silent when asked why I had forgotten to bring it back with me, my interest in the adventure being centred in the fact that in answer to my question how far Fairyland was from Kingstown, he had told me that a great wave rises out of the sea every month, and that I must go away upon it, and then wait for another great wave, which would take me another piece of the way. I must wait for a third wave, and it would be the ninth that would throw me right up on to Fairyland.

But the story interested nobody but me; my uncles and aunts looked at me, evidently considering if I weren't a little daft; and one of the crudest of the Blakes, a girl with a wide, ugly mouth and a loud voice, laughed harshly, saying that I could not be taken anywhere, even to Kingstown Pier, without something wonderful happening to me. These Blakes were my first critics, and their gibes filled me with shame, and I remember coming to a resolve that night to avoid all the places where one would be likely to meet a fairy fisherman, and if I did come across another by ill chance, to run away from him, my fingers in my ears. But notwithstanding that early vow and many subsequent vows, I have failed to see and hear as the Blakes do, and I go on meeting adventures everywhere, even on the wharf at Galway, which should have been safe from them. By Edward one is always safe from adventures, and it would have been well for me not to have stirred from his side. I only strayed fifty yards, but that short distance was enough, for while looking down into the summer sea, thinking how it moved up against the land's side like a soft, feline animal, the voices of some women engaged my attention, and turning I saw that three girls had come down to a pool sequestered out of observation, in a hollow of the headland. Sitting on the bank they drew off their shoes and stockings and advanced into the water, kilting their petticoats above their knees as it deepened. On seeing me they laughed invitingly; and, as if desiring my appreciation, one girl walked across the pool, lifting her red petticoat to her waist, and forgetting to drop it when the water shallowed, she showed me thighs whiter and rounder than any I have ever seen, their country coarseness heightening the temptation. She continued to come towards me. A few steps would have taken me behind a hillock. They might have bathed naked before me, and it would have been the boldest I should have chosen, if fortune had favoured me. But Yeats and Edward began calling, and, dropping her petticoats, she waded from me.

What are you doing down there, George? Hurry up! Here's the hooker being rowed into the bay bringing the piper and the story-tellers from Arran.