The great field or marsh before Harlech stretched there to landward; and, on its splendid defiant height, the old castle watched us as we went; the place where they hid poor Henry the Saint when the true Plantagenet was pacing for his blood.
Here is a landscape inhabited everywhere by things not of this world; by the gods of these hills whom our God has ousted; by the memory of great men dead and their wraiths, I suppose; and by the troops of the Empire, marching up the inland road, and by the chieftains, and by the very saintly men who cast their spell fifteen hundred years ago over the islands and the rocks of Lyonesse.
So we sailed on and on, heading over to the Atlantic southern corner of Wales. Then, far away in the midst of the sea, we heard the tolling of a bell. …
The tolling of the bell was not only mournful (and at the same time terrible), but had in it an odd quality of message; as though it were not of the world through which we moved. For a bell is a land thing, and even in salt water we think of it as sounding upon a buoy near shore, or as the companion and regulator of human things, like the bell on board ship. For Mr. Masefield is very just when he notes how the clang of the ship’s bell by accident in the swoop of a ship down the great waves of an Atlantic storm, has an unnatural call: being rung without the aid of men’s hands.
Now this bell, as I heard it plainting away deeply, unable as yet to see the thing on which it swung, mixed up its noise in my mind with the great story of Saint Patrick: a story I had designed to write many years ago in Arras, where I went to see the manuscript which most vividly recalls him. But of that task I found myself incapable. However, I did visit his staff in Rome.
For the bell thus swinging on its buoy far out to sea swings on the western edge of that strange, long undersea road which they call the “Sarn Badrig” (which means “The Causeway of Saint Patrick”) and cannot but awake the great story of the coming of Europe to Ireland.
How right they were to call that sunken ridge pointing straight to Ireland “The Roman Road of Patrick”! And how its sudden cessation symbolises the break, the wound, the rupture, by which this island was cut off from that: more than two hundred years ago! The ridge ends suddenly in deep water and continues no more. But the bell tolls on, appealing.
Saint Patrick is the second of those witnesses which remain to us of the more than natural quality of Ireland. The first is the old pagan story of the western harbours from which the dead were ferried over by night to their felicity. The second is that undying phrase in the “Confessio,” where Saint Patrick himself says that at night and in dreams “he heard the voices of the Irish calling.”
It is gloom upon the mind to remember that the magnitude of the task set to Britain (a Roman land) in the matter of Holy Ireland, has been so missed: as though a man, having to encounter a mountain a little before the day thought it no more than a slight hill against the dawn. Here was the difficult land—but inspired—which Agricola said (and he knew his business) he could have mastered for Rome and right order with one legion. That legion was not given him, any more than the divisions were given that might have made the break through before Cambrai. Would that the officials at Rome had listened to him! Here was Ireland that most difficult of subjects, most intriguing of friends, most tenacious of enemies, set up against the western shores of Britain, of Roman land; and through all those centuries nothing was done to enrich the subject, to acquire the friend, to reconcile the enemy. But I am weak enough to believe that this failure also was in the Providence of God.
The mountains look upon the mountains: the mountains of Britain to the mountains of Ireland; from the east to the west, over a magic sea. But they look in wrath and remain sullen giants. Nor is the battle concluded.
As we sail past the bell very slowly (that Mark having come into sight) we discovered it to be enclosed in a sort of great cage which swung with slow dignity and bowed backwards and forwards upon the large swell, unaffected by the light breeze which gave us our two knots through sluggish water. My companion said to me, brutally enough, “How would you like to be shut up in that cage, and left there to the night and to the wind?” I answered, “Not at all,” and in this I told the truth. But the bell did not repine, for it was fulfilling its function, expiating its sins, pursuing its end, and consonant to the will that is behind this world. It tolls there beyond the seaward end of the Sarn Badrig to warn mariners of that long ledge submerged: barring the sea ways.
My mind returned to that great Causeway, that shelf of rock and shingle behind us, just hidden by the waves, pointing westward into the deep, mile after mile, like some drowned giant’s pier: the beginning of a bridge, as it were, between Britain and the Other Island; the marriage of Britain with the older island, whence the dead are ferried over to their repose.
But that Causeway was never completed: that bridge was never built; and the weight, the future consequence, of such a failure lies not upon Ireland, but (alas!) upon England.
For how many years did I not see the tragedy played out!
I knew its roots as well as any man. I knew that
