David. She realized that night that she had scarcely thought of him at all during the past several days. She had been too busy, rushing to experience the whole of rural Ireland, caught headlong in the legend and song of the nation. And yet he had never been far from her mind. Now she thought of him again and wondered what the trip would have been like if he had been able to accompany her.
So often she had found herself moved by one thing or another — the view from a particular hill, the speech of a particular man or woman, the throat-catching beauty of a particular sunset. And so often she had felt the lack of someone to share those beauties with. She had never been conscious of her loneliness, but looking back she could see that she had in fact been lonely. More than once she had found herself talking aloud to herself, as if in need of rendering a verbal reaction to the phenomena that moved her. It all stemmed, if not from loneliness, at least from aloneness. She recognized this now and thought of David Clare and wished she could see him again.
Nonsense, she told herself. She looked at the four walls of her little room and shivered. She got dressed and left the hotel and went to the pub next door for a drink.
She did not stay long at the pub. She was in no mood for drinking and in less of a mood for music or conversation, and she went only because her room was beginning to feel like a cell. She nursed one small glass of beer and smoked two cigarettes. Her American cigarettes were long gone now, and she had been experimenting with various English and Irish brands, none of which tasted particularly good to her. She had found one brand that lit themselves; you struck the tip of the cigarette against the side of the packet and the end ignited. It had seemed at first like a marvelous idea, and she couldn’t imagine why they didn’t have such cigarettes available in the States, but she found that the principle worked better in theory than in practice. Half the time the cigarette broke in the middle while she was trying to get it lit, and when lit it tasted foul anyway.
When she left the pub she got a slight shock. On her way to her hotel she caught a glimpse of a man’s face in a darkened doorway, and it looked exactly like the face of the man she had seen in London. The tall man, his long, hawklike nose bisecting his long wedge of a face, his deep, hollow eyes, his cruel, thin lips. She saw the face for only a second or two, but she found herself suddenly walking very fast, and she was short of breath as she entered her hotel. She could barely wait to be up the stairs and inside her room with her door bolted.
The whole memory of the mugging in London came back at her, sending shivers through her body. She held her hands in front of her and saw that her fingers were trembling.
Ridiculous, she told herself. Of course, it was not the same man at all, and if she got a good look at him in the light, she would probably discover that this man looked nothing like the London criminal who had choked her and stolen her purse. But her reaction was at least indicative of the impression that incident had left upon her mind. She was badly shaken.
It was ridiculous, she knew. It was not uncommon for total strangers to resemble persons whom one knew. This happened to her frequently in New York — a girl glimpsed on the street would look exactly like her college roommate, and when she ran to overtake the girl she would discover that the two looked not at all alike. And just a day ago, in Cork, she had seen a man in peasant’s clothing who had for a moment seemed the spitting image of the priest she had met on the plane to Dublin. The resemblance had so startled her that she had been on the point of hailing him, until she realized he could not possibly be Father Farrell. A priest did not suddenly put on an old tweed jacket and a battered cloth cap, any more than a London hoodlum turned up in the south of Ireland.
She guessed that it was all a symptom of loneliness. When one was among strangers, one looked for familiar faces and invented them when they did not exist.
She slept badly, haunted upon awakening by a formless but notably unpleasant dream. David had been in it, she knew, and Father Farrell, and her agent in New York, and the narrow-faced man from London, but just what they had all been doing in her dream was beyond recollection. She bathed and dressed and went down for breakfast, then packed her suitcase and checked out of the hotel. It was time to leave Cork, she had decided. She had to get to Tralee soon, and she did not want to spend any more time in a city that was beginning to give her unpleasant evidence of her loneliness.
Her bus carried her to Bantry and Glengarrif, then north to Kenmare in County Kerry. She had bought a ticket straight through to Killarney, but in Kenmare she left the bus and found a room. She spent two days making side trips through the wild hills of Kerry, where the scenery had a raw and rugged splendor that made the beauties of the rest of Ireland almost pallid in comparison. The deep green of the hillsides, the stark majesty of mountains rising boldly behind deep blue lakes, the touching simplicity of tiny white cottages with thatched roofs, all made her understand why everyone throughout the whole of Ireland had assured her how much she would like Kerry.
It was a poor county, and the years had been cruel to its people. The potato famine in the middle of the nineteenth century had devastated the countryside, reducing the population to literal starvation. Thousands had gone to their graves. Thousands more had boarded ship for America. And in the years that followed, the wars had placed new hardships upon Kerry. Some of the fiercest fighting of the Troubles and the Civil War had been waged in this county at the southwest corner of Ireland. It had always been a stronghold of Republicanism, and it boasted a record of massacres and reprisals, of homes and towns burned to the ground, of midnight ambushes and midnight arrests, of brutalities and outrages on both sides.
All that ferocious fighting, all that record of misery, seemed out of place against the backdrop of sheer physical beauty. But at the same time she could sense bitterness and old violence lurking in the magnificence of the hills and the sweet green of the valleys.
She sang some songs in the small towns of Kerry, and she learned more songs and put many of them on tape. She was moving close to a part of the Gaeltacht now, though it was far removed from Connemara, where David would go to learn Irish.
The people she met spoke in a thick brogue, and she had worlds of trouble making out what some of them were saying. But gradually she learned to follow their speech. She met many persons who spoke Gaelic as often as they spoke English, and some of them sang songs for her in that tongue. She had to budget her tape very carefully to make sure she would have enough left for Tralee and Dingle.
At last it was time, time for the festival in Tralee. She was barely looking forward to it by the time she had boarded the bus for that city. The trip so far, wholly unplanned, had been a joy. Now she was back on schedule again, with her activities quite strictly laid out and her timetable admitting little flexibility. She would be a few days in Kerry, then a few more days in Dingle, then a quick bus ride to Shannon Airport, then a plane all the way to Berlin. She hardly felt up to that last stage. Already she had bitten off more than she could chew, had swallowed more new experience than she could readily digest. The idea of taking in a whole new country was almost frightening.
She sat on the bus, guitar and suitcase and tape recorder stowed in the overhead rack, as the bus rolled on toward Tralee.
Seven
Tralee was half a delight and half a nightmare and all quite different from what she had expected. Folk festivals in the main were relatively tame affairs, with the attention focused on a few hours of singing and dancing. But the Festival of Kerry turned out to be a good deal more than this. It was built around a three-day race meeting, and the men and women who had come to watch the horses would have crowded the town by themselves. Besides this there was an outdoor circus, sheep-dog trials, terrier and donkey derbies, swimming and athletic competitions, street dances, marching bands parading through the little city, and a general mood of hilarity that summoned up images of New Orleans at Mardi Gras time. The folk singing was just a small portion of the total pageantry that filled Tralee to overflowing.