The Curse of the Wise Woman

by Lord Dunsany

  Well, Mary in tears told me what I knew well enough, that my father was gone, and saved me the trouble of telling her, but one thing she told me that I had never thought of, “We’ll never see him back again,” she wailed. Had I undervalued the four strange men’s persistence or the power of those that sent them? And then, in spite of everything, there suddenly dawned on my mind, the gloom of which had just been deepened by Mary, a thought like sunrise breaking on misty lands; I could go now to Lisronagh.

  So I dressed and hurried down. Did I tell you the date? No. Well, I never kept a diary, and I scarcely remember any dates; it is not they that shine in one’s memory after all these years. But this one date I do remember: it was December 26th. I remember it because the night that the four men came was Christmas. I don’t think it was chance that brought them then. I think that they were afraid of what others had told them to do, and that they found some sort of shelter in the sanctity of the day. But there’s no knowing.

  Well, I went down to breakfast; and the old butler was all silent. I suppose he saw in my face, he must have seen, some reflection of the joy with which my whole heart was turning now to Lisronagh; probably all my attitudes showed it too. It is not that I did not sympathise with my father, and the sympathies of youth are strong; but my longing for the quest in the wild lands was stronger, where heather and mosses and rushes and soft black earth, and a million pools, stretched away out of my sight and beyond my knowledge. So the old butler thought his thoughts to himself, and would not share them with me. I saw that the view that he took was a very grave one. But I did not want to discuss it; discussion could do no good, and the less I understood of my father’s going the better. Once more I looked round the library, trying to find the door to a secret passage; but soon I gave it up, deciding that if I kept out of politics I should never have any need of it. Soon I was off to the stables, whose grey buildings of large stone could have held over twenty horses and the men to take care of them, but there was only one man there, and, now that my father had gone away on his hunter, only one horse, the carriage-horse: sometimes a boy might be seen working there, and sometimes not; otherwise the man was alone. I went to get the carriage-horse so as to drive to Lisronagh bog. Ryan was the coachman’s name, and in conversation with him I began that morning the habit I increasingly held to, to talk about my father little and vaguely. Well, he put the horse into a light trap for me while I went round to the gun-room. God forgive me, I have sometimes hoped that there may be a gun-room in Heaven. Instead of taking one’s happiness there on trust, as one should, I used to be foolishly wondering if it could be complete without that deep contentment one knew as a boy in a gun-room in the morning, with the various implements of sport awaiting one, all the more mysterious for a rather dim light; outside, the north wind blowing, and the sky full of portents. It was like that now; but I needed no portents in a stormy sky, for Marlin had told me that the geese had actually come. We had a gamekeeper, who had taught me all I knew about shooting, so that it seems like ingratitude, looking back over the years, that anything Marlin told me I treated as some rare and wonderful knowledge, while old Murphy’s sayings, sound and wise as they were, seemed to lack magic. But then one had mostly to tell of orderly woods inside what we called “the demesne,” and the other of things that began where man’s cultivation ended, and sometimes even of things at the boundaries of man’s experience. And it’s queer that what is luring my memory back to those days is not our house nor the woods nor clear landmarks, that would be such good guides for one’s fancy travelling into the past, but things that he used to tell me of those that haunted the bog. He was bog-watcher for my father, which means, well, very little, except that he lived in a white thatched cottage by the side of the bog of which part was owned by my father, and Marlin’s mother lived with him. Where my father’s boundary ran I have no idea; the bog went on and on, over the horizon and out of my knowledge. Sometimes along the sides of it, or perhaps a quarter mile in, one saw small cottages of men who had rights in the bog, and sometimes the crumbling walls of those that the ancient desolation of that untilled space had defeated; but once one had gone ten minutes over the heather, all the things of man were behind one. Of all the enemies of man I think that the red bog, as we call in Ireland that wide wilderness of heather, seems the most friendly. It cannot be called a friend; it threatens him with death too often for that, and is against him and all his ways, and is untamed by him and unsubdued; only by utterly destroying it does man gain any victory over the bog, and eke from it a difficult living. But it lulls him and soothes him all his days, it gives him myriads of pieces of sky to look at about his feet, and mosses more brilliant than anything short of jewellery, and the great glow of the heather; and if ever it seize him, luring his step with its mosses, it so tends him and cherishes him, that those that chance upon him and dig him up find one whose face and skin are as of their own contemporaries, yet not the oldest in the district know him, for he may have been dead for ages. Well, I’ve said enough to show you that, though I was only driving four miles, I was going to as strange a land as you might find in a long journey, a land as different from the fields we inhabit as the Sahara or Indian jungles.

  I got my gun and cartridges and started off with Ryan, and we hadn’t gone down the road a hundred yards from the lodge when we met Marlin coming towards us. How news travels! I saw by his face, and by a certain carefulness about his silence, that he had heard already about my father. When he spoke it was to say: “I thought you might be coming to the bog, Master Char-les.” So he had walked a good three miles. We talked for a while about the geese: they were not in the bog now, but would be in by nightfall, his mother said. Ryan gazed down the road with all his mental powers obviously concentrated upon not overhearing our conversation. This duty he assumed partly out of politeness, but it taught me that there is between shooting and hunting that slight division that there is in religion between sects that seem almost identical: the educated faithful do not notice it, but the simpler folk that have only the faith, they see the rift and cherish it. And other rifts still wider there may have been, of which I knew nothing.

  Of my father’s departure Marlin did not speak. Politics are talked in certain times and places, but neither Marlin in the hearing of Ryan, nor Ryan in the hearing of Marlin, would say anything to me of anyone that had been touched by politics to the extent that my father had been. Then I got Marlin up into the dog-cart, and we drove on to Lisronagh. From then on, as we neared the bog, the land changed rapidly: no actual details that I could give, and my memory is full of them, would convey the sense of that change. Little white cottages, much smaller than those behind us, with scarred deep thatches, poplars with queer arms clawing, strange willows, those little lanes that we call bohereens, rambling busily on and fading away into moss; none of these actual things convey the sense of it. I can only say that if you neared World’s End, and fairyland were close to you, some such appearance might be seen in the earth and the light, and the people you passed on the way.

  A great north wind was blowing, driving the geese out of the Arctic lands, as I hoped, or, if all were gone already, sending them in from sea. There are two kinds of geese that come to these bogs, which are too far inland for the Barnacles; the great grey lag and the smaller white-fronted goose. And, as though it made any surer of the geese, I asked Marlin again about them and which kind he expected. And he answered: “My mother says that the grey lags are coming.”

  CHAPTER III

  We passed through the tiny village of Clonrue and then the bog was before us; rushy lands at first, such as we call the Black Bog; and, at the end of those marshy fields, rising twelve feet above them, and frowning at the top with withered heather, lowered the red bog. It seemed to me as I saw it then, all dark by the bright fields, to be threatening man and his cultivation; his hedges, his paths and his houses; with the might and the mystery of the ancient wildness that was before he came.

  Bright and white in the fields stood the Ma
rlins’ cottage; but, as the trap stopped in the bohereen, a field away from their door, having come as far as anything thus sophisticated could come down a path so doubtfully won from the waste and the wild, I saw Marlin’s mother come out of the cottage. And her tall, but bent, dark shape seemed to me as I saw it then, and always since, to be something not on the side of those that won those fields so arduously from the heather, but to be somehow akin to those forces that ruled, or blew over, the bog, and that cared nothing for man. She walked a little way and filled a bucket with water from a stream that ran by from the bog, and brought it back with her, flashing beside her darkness, and went in and shut the door. When she was back in her cottage it looked once more what actually it was, an outpost of man on the edge of the fields he had won, a fortress against the waste; but for a moment, as I saw her coming out with her pail, it almost seemed to my fancy as though the enemy held it, as though something in league with the waste dwelt in that cottage.

  I told Ryan to come back for me at seven, and set off with Marlin for the bog. It was not yet ten, and I had never had so long on the bog before as I planned to have to-day. My father used to make me come in for meals. I think hope lifted my steps more than cartridges weighed them down, but I certainly had too many; I could not deal with the game that hope pictured for me with less. Marlin carried my bag of snipe-shot, but my pockets were full of others.

  “Have you the B’s?” said Marlin.

  “I have,” said I.

  “Then don’t be ladening yourself, sir,” said he, “for you’ll not want them till nightfall.”

  And he carried the goose-shot to the cottage and left them there with my spare stockings and boots as we passed it. I still kept threes for duck, and a few fives. I found it pleasant to talk to Marlin of what shot I had brought, such trivial technicalities being still fresh to me and continually bringing the possibilities of sport closer to my imagination. But not till we reached the bog, and could be overheard by no one any longer from any hedge, did he speak to me of my father.

  “The duke is gone,” he said.

  “He is,” I answered.

  Marlin sighed and shook his head. “He mixed himself up in politics,” he said.

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  “You remember Maguire?” said Marlin.

  I did not; but that did not matter.

  “He was a policeman in Clonrue,” he said. “And there used to be a band of men in the hills. I won’t say if they’re still there, and I won’t say what they did, and then you’ll never know, and Begob that’s better. But Maguire knew, and he reported it. And the Duke got to hear they were going to kill Maguire. It’s not for me to say how he got to hear it, and it’s God’s blessed truth that I don’t know. But the Duke walked down the street of Clonrue that day, and threw a note in through an open crack of the window where Maguire’s wife sat knitting. And Maguire was gone that night, and his wife after him, and they got clean away out of Ireland. That was three years ago, but the Duke was never safe after that, and he knew it.”

  “Has my father got safe away?” I asked, for I felt Marlin would know.

  “He has that,” said Marlin, “and I’ll tell you for why. A man that’s prepared like that, and can get away at the start, he’s not going to be caught.”

  “I hope not,” I said.

  “Not he,” said Marlin.

  “There were four of them came,” I told him.

  And I saw Marlin pondering a moment, almost as though he were considering which four they would have been; but of that I could not be sure.

  “Did you help him to get away?” he asked.

  “I did not,” I replied.

  “That’s right,” he said. “They’ll have nothing against you then.” And he added, so as to soothe me: “Ah, but they wouldn’t have hurt you.”

  But I knew they would from the way they had lowered their aim to my stomach as I was taking the oath, so as not to hit the true Cross in case they should fire.

  We were speaking low, but the snipe heard us, and were beginning to get up. It seems a pity, but I’m afraid that the human voice is about the most dreaded sound in all nature. Soon I was shooting at the snipe, and missing them. But Marlin had not yet brought me to the point from which he wished to start our walk over the bog, with the north wind behind us; and he consoled me with the remark: “Sure there’s no man living could hit a snipe when he’s walking up wind.” This is not true, but was very comforting. And sure enough it’s a very difficult thing, especially on a red bog, to hit a snipe except when you are walking down wind. The bird gets up at forty or even fifty yards, and has done twenty more before you fire, straight away from you, and dark against the still darker earth and the twigs of the heather. But when you walk down wind on them it is as Marlin first explained to me; they fly across you so as to get into the wind to travel against it, and they show white as they turn, and you aim yards in front. I asked Marlin why the snipe fly against the wind. “Sure it’s the contrariety of the bird,” he said. “And, begob, there’s men like that.”

  We came after some while to a place at which the bog went down, with a soft black precipice twice the height of a man, to flat reaches of marsh and rushes, and the heather ended. And there we turned and got the north wind behind us, and walked away over the heather and moss to my heart’s content. I remember the low hills bounding two sides of the bog, and the horizon where it seemed boundless, and beyond the horizon; yes, I remember that as clearly; beyond the horizon where my imagination, fed by Marlin’s tales, saw the heather, the pools, and the mosses reaching endlessly on, till they came at last to lands that it was my joy to have heard of. Better, I think, to have heard of those lands beyond the horizon, and to have treasured some picture of them all these years, however wide that picture be from geography, than never to have cared or wondered what it was like over there. I remember too a brilliance that shone in the pale blue of the sky, as though the north wind had enchanted it. Before me in the South the sun was hidden, but behind me and to the East the dome of the sky seemed all washed clear and shining, so that often I find myself thinking that it may really be true that the days were brighter in Ireland when I was young. Under that luminous sky we walked straight for hours, with the flash of the snipe now and then, white as they flew across me, against the dark of that earth; walking, as I had already learned to walk, with both eyes watching for snipe, and yet with somehow or other a glance to spare, to see that one put one’s foot safe on the heather and never once on one of the glimmering mosses that make the bog so beautiful, and that let you through to deeps of which Marlin said there’s no sounding. Safe foothold and dangerous waters over unknown deeps of slime seem, from, what I remember, to have been just about equal. And all the way, as every bird got up, came Marlin’s tactful consolation, or rare praise, in his quiet voice, after my shot. How slowly I came to believe what Marlin told me about aiming in front of snipe, for it seemed absurd to fire so far from where there was any bird; but at last I began to kill one for every three that I missed, which is not bad for a boy. Once a woodcock got up, looking uncouthly slow, with his heavy body and large lazy wings, after the lightning flash of the snipe; but when I fired I was yards behind him, with both barrels, and began to learn then what it took some years to be sure of, that those large wings of the woodcock do at their ease what the little snipe has to hurry so much to equal. And a hare in his couch of heather heard us coming, and leaped away over the bog, with a shower of water behind him all the way, like a half of a silver wheel.

  “There goes a hare!” I exclaimed.

  “Aye. Likely,” said Marlin.

  “But it is a hare,” I protested.

  “Aye. Likely it is,” he repeated. “But you never know what shape may be took by a leprechaun.”

  It’s curious how far, as it seems to me now, when I walked the bog with Marlin, I had entered that country of which Tennyson seems to speak:

  “Not wholly in the busy world nor quite

  Beyond it
lies the garden that I love.”

  And of course all poets have been there, one time or another; one foot on earth and the other just touching elfland. Marlin, who knew so well all about shooting, and the habits of all the birds, and how to walk the bog, seemed also to have travelled a little further than heather grew or any road ran, and to have brought back for me, as a fairing, lore that is not of our fields.

  More snipe got up, and still we went on, with the north wind hard behind us.

  Once I met a man who said to me wonderingly: “But what do you do in the country?” Well, there is space there, for one thing; and what the use is of that I cannot say, unless to tell you that it is like drink, to one of those men who must have it and who die if you keep it away from them, as (likely as not) I am dying now, in this foreign town slowly, through not having the past to get back to nor the Irish bog. But I must not argue here with a man I met years later than that day of which I set out to tell you, and anyway argument is no good. I was arguing again yesterday with Monsieur Alphonse. But here I am only remembering. Remembering Ireland. Well, the snipe got up and we went down wind all the morning, and I had shot, I think, twelve; probably nearly as many as I had shot in all my life before. And there were still the geese before me, if that strange remark were true, that had haunted my mind all the morning: “My mother says that the grey lags are coming.”

  I suggested lunch. And Marlin said: “Ah, I’ll not trouble with anything to eat. But I’d like a little sup of whiskey.”

  So we found a comfortable bit of heather and I ate bread and cheese that I had brought, and handed my flask to Marlin. For a while we sat in silence under that brilliant sky. Then I looked up and saw Marlin’s eyes full of things that seemed far away and of which I knew nothing; and I chose that moment to ask him of the thing I had wondered at ever since hearing him say it. “How does your mother know,” I asked, “that the grey lags are coming?”