The Curse of the Wise Woman

by Lord Dunsany

  In a few more days I went to those fields again, while a young moon shone in the evening. Longer and longer it hung in the evening sky, lighting my quest for pigeons or golden plover, until it came round to the opposite side from the sun and was nearly full again, and it was time to look for snipe once more on the red bog. That was the February moon. On a morning that looked too bright for February, and that brought the snowdrops flashing out in large clusters, I drove to Lisronagh again; and Marlin came to meet me at the end of the bo­hereen. “I knew you’d come, Master Char-les,” he said, “with the moon at the full. It’s a great day to be going after snipe.”

  “And I want you to drive some teal for me too, Marlin,” I said, “from the pools out in the bog.”

  “And so I will,” said Marlin.

  And with high hopes I set off with Marlin down to the bog. The sky was bright and clear and the wind full of a splendour, a strength that one felt in one’s blood as one breathed it in. When I asked Marlin after his mother he said: “She is in the house, cursing.”

  And then I heard for the first time of the Peat Development (Ireland) Syndicate, and how a man had come only that morning and looked at the low lands lying under the bog and had taken some measurements. And when Mrs. Marlin had come running out to ask him what he was doing, he had spoken of huts and machinery and so much Progress, that it had seemed to her that all the blight that there was in civilisation, threatened those willowy lands. She must have felt as a townsman would feel if he learned that brambles and bracken were about to cover his pavements. As we passed the cottage she came out. And the first words that she called to me were: “What is it at all that they are going to do, Master Char-les?”

  “I know nothing about it,” said I. For Marlin had not yet told me even all he knew.

  “They are going to put down machinery,” she wailed, “and to take the turf from the bog, and to cut my willows down. What is it all about at all?”

  “Are they going to work the machinery by using the stream?” I asked.

  “Ah, that great river of Ireland,” she cried. “They shall never touch it. It’s not the will of the hills, nor the bog, nor the north wind. They shall not harm Ireland’s river. The storm and the hills and the night will never allow it. There’s no blessing on such a notion from sun or stars or heather. And sure your father would never allow it, Master Char-les?”

  “Not on our side of the stream,” I answered. For I felt sure that he would not have allowed any company to come and spoil the bog.

  “There’s a power,” she said, “that is hid in the heart of the bog, that is against all their plans.”

  What she meant I did not know, and as I knew little at all of the scheme of these people from what I had heard as yet, I went on with Marlin to the bog. And, being full of the zest of sport on that bright morning, I asked no more of the mechanical scheme, in which I scarcely believed, and came to the steep bog’s edge; and there we were with the heather all before us, and the wind, as the smoke from the Marlins’ chimney showed, exactly right for a walk straight on to the low horizon. Thither we started, a look on Marlin’s face bright perhaps with that gleaming morning, but, as I thought, brightened from being turned in that direction in which, beyond the horizon, he believed lay Tir-nan-Og. Perhaps my own face was as bright with the hopes of sport and with all that glittering air.

  We had not gone fifty yards, when suddenly, out of the sky, we heard a sound like a kid bleating in the emptiness over our heads. Or it was like a harp-string that has been touched and left to vibrate in B flat. More like a kid than a harp-string perhaps, because it was like nothing human or aught from the hand of man. The sky thrilled with it; the bog seemed changed by it; and so it was, for that sound heralded another season. It was the whisper of Spring. The snipe were drumming.

  There was another ten days to go of the shooting season, but I turned round at once.

  “The snipe are drumming,” I said to Marlin, “I’ll stop.”

  “Well, begob,” said Marlin a little reluctantly, “when you hear that sound it’s spring sure enough.”

  “It is,” I said; “and they’re nesting.”

  “Begob,” said he, “maybe they’ll be grateful to you next year, and give you easy shots.”

  Another and another drummed as we spoke, and spring seemed coming across the sky with a rush. I have seen in Japa­nese temples the carvings of little gods with drums and harps and flutes, running and flitting through clouds, and have wondered if this same strange and wandering music that I heard heralding spring had woken in priest or poet on the other side of the earth that vision of demon musicians in air above Fusi-Yama.

  And still they beat the air with their spread tail-feathers that made this haunting sound. Looking up I saw one soaring and dropping, and soaring and dropping again, beating this music out of the air as it dropped, as though the air were a harp-string; and with all the sky ringing with spring I said good-bye to the Marlins; and set off for Eton next day.

  CHAPTER XX

  I said good-bye to Murphy, Ryan, Young Finn and a few others, and had a final talk with Brophy. Brophy always spoke as though my father would never return, or even write again, a view that I never held, but I gave him instructions on all points that he asked me about, pending the return of my father, and then left him to run the place. I said no farewells to Laura on account of my infection, such as it was. I had less scruple about bringing the infection to Eton, as I was doing for I was returning some days before the full period had expired; and it was while explaining to my tutor that I was no longer infectious, that I became involved in questions that led me to the old oaken block on which expiation is made for error at Eton.

  Days passed, during which I acquired such education as I have, and learned something of the world in which I have travelled since; but Homer gave to one’s fancy a world in which it travelled there and then, for the Odyssey is a mighty fairyland, along whose shores seafarers rollicked, a long while since, and hugely enjoyed themselves while they were able to keep on the right side of the gods, but were overtaken by deadly adventures whenever they were unable to delude authority any longer and the gods caught them out; but at all times they were quite untainted by the dullness and complexity of Greek verbs, so that I almost wondered how these jovial and lawless people came to be permitted in schoolrooms. And while my fancy had that old world of floating islands and monsters to roam in, my feet had the fields along the left bank of the Thames, wherever the beagles led them; a flat land with heavy soil I should say, and deep wide ditches, and white mists always rising up at evening; that is as my memory sees it; but the mud and the mist and the ditches may have entangled my memory unduly, as obstacles once surpassed have a way of doing. Certainly grand old willow-trees used to stand there: I can see them still with their huge shapes dim in the evening, but quite unhidden by time. And then I have memories of tea, which somehow out­shine memories of banquets that I have attended since. And banquets remind me of some passages from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, which seem to have been missed by those that sometimes abuse Eton. As I feel sure that these passages would give them pleasure, I quote one here, leaving those for whom I quote them the excitement of proving them true. It is from a story called William Wilson, and tells of life at Eton:

  “After a week of soulless dissipation, I invited a small party of the most dissolute students to a secret carousal in my chambers. We met at a late hour of the night, for our debaucheries were to be faithfully protracted until morning. The wine flowed freely, and there were not wanting other and perhaps more dangerous seductions, so that the grey dawn had already faintly appeared in the east, while our delirious extravagance was at its height. Madly flushed with cards and intoxication, I was in the act of insisting upon a toast of more than wonted profanity when my attention was suddenly diverted by the violent, although partial, unclosing of the door of the apartment, and by the eager voice of a servant from without. He said that some person, apparently in great haste, demanded to spe
ak with me in the hall.”

  There is more, but the earnest student should consult the original.

  Often in those days I was asked of my strange holidays, to whose startling events an even additional interest seemed to be lent by my visit to the block. At first I answered all the questions they asked me, but soon I saw that the English boys could not understand. Why not write at once to Scotland Yard, they said: why not leave the whole matter in the hands of the police: why not let the law take its course? Only the Irish boys understood.

  I gave up answering questions, gave up talking at all of Ireland to those who were so little able to understand. Later I think they understood better. For one day, walking down town to buy various things for tea, and thinking of Ireland, I saw Brophy just as I crossed Barnes bridge. For a moment he seemed a vision, so remote did my home appear to me. And then I saw the wind in his unmistakable beard, and the look on his face. And the appearance of Brophy there, and that look on his face, told me that my father was dead. He had been murdered in Paris.

  For an awful moment I feared that I might have been guilty of this by letting the four men free. Then I remembered how they had sworn, and knew that their oath would bind them as the administrators of the law would never have done. Nevertheless I told my fears to Brophy; and, looking round from old habit to see that none overheard him, he said: “It was not those men.” I do not think he would have told me, but that he saw how distressed I looked, for far more is known in Ireland than anyone speaks of. He told me that the people believed that one of those four men had been told to go to Paris himself, either alone or leading the other three, and that he had refused and had been shot; and that the rest of them were still in the country, as all the people seemed to know, though the police could not find them. The funeral was to be that day in Paris, or had already been. News had come slowly, because my father had been living quietly there, probably not under his own name, and his address was not known until the French police discovered it two or three days after the murder. I fear that the address he gave me for letters may perhaps have been the means whereby he was traced; he might have been followed when he went to get the letters; but one can never know. It was all the more of a shock to me because I had supposed that once my father had got abroad he was safe, but, with plenty of money at their disposal, it was no harder for the men that were after him to follow him to Paris than London.

  Everyone at Eton seemed to understand better after this, even though the English boys said little, and the Irish boys hardly anything at all, the latter having come by the habit, even thus early, of avoiding talk in public about religion or politics, and so much in Ireland comes under these two headings. I was offered leave to go home, to look after things there, for a few days; but I would not take it, for there was nothing there that I could attend to better than Brophy, and I was a little ashamed of the leave that I had taken already, to see the end of the shooting.

  But when the short Easter half was over I returned to Ireland, and stood once more on the platform of that railway station that the joy of arrivals and the sorrow of departures have stamped more vividly on my mind than many worthier objects, and the soft south-west wind met me, and the low hills seemed to beckon to me, and two or three outside-cars were waiting for my choice. A good deal of iron, a quantity of whitewash, and ferns hanging out from cracks in a wall wherever the whitewash had crumbled, how can it seem so beautiful to me? The station-master welcomed my arrival as though trains ran for that purpose, and a couple of porters, coming towards me full of leisure and greeting, gave the impression of having rested on that platform since I had left for Eton, waiting quietly for my return. I picked the best-looking horse, and my luggage was piled up in the middle of the outside-car, and some on the right-hand side, where the driver sat, while I sat on the left, and soon we were off down the road between two stone walls that had been gathered there from the fields to give the grass a good chance to grow, and to guide the road on its way and to prevent it from ever being lost in the bog. Sometimes a blackthorn leaned over a wall, all a mass of white blossom, like a lady of some enchanted people dwelling beyond the hills, who had strayed to take this look at human folk going by; clearly a blackthorn as you look at it, but what may it not have been a moment before?

  Heather and ruined towers are the principal objects that meet the eye of the traveller by that road. And in summer travellers sometimes come that way. Then is the time to see it, with the heather all in bloom and sunlight on the old towers. Yet even in sunlight they wear a mournful air, so vividly do they bear testimony that someone had tried to civilise that waste of bog and heather, and that the waste had won.

  We drove to Gurraghoo. And a little beyond the village a boy of eight or nine slipped over a wall of loose stones and bits of peat and sticks and odd things growing, and stood in the road before us.

  “I have a message for you, Master Char-les,” he shouted.

  “Who is it from?” I asked.

  “They said you’d know,” he answered.

  “But what were their names?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What were they like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “ ‘It wasn’t us,’ ” he said.

  “Was there anything more?” said I.

  “They just said: ‘It wasn’t us,’ ” the boy answered, and was gone over the wall. A few willows standing in a field that wild Nature seemed to have given up to cultivation lately and grudgingly, was all that there was to hide him once he went from the wall, but I saw him no more. I had given him no answer, nor even told him I understood him, or let the driver see that I did; but I understood.

  CHAPTER XXI

  A green mist came out upon thorn trees, a grey mist upon poplars, and clumps of willows seemed welling up in pale flame.

  Two days passed, while through woods and fields, and over the hills and the marshes, went the procession of spring, to the music of wood-pigeons cooing. It came like something new out of strange lands, that had never come before. The thorn trees went brilliant green, and the leaves of the chestnut came like moths from the chrysalis, fresh and intensely bright and with wings not yet unfolded.

  The mist of the buds on the poplar trees grew whiter, and the green of the thorn was now brilliant and deep. Elms were fountains of yellow, beeches pale Indian red, and the trunks of the trees had now a spectre-like look, standing pale amidst so much colour. A glow lingered long after sunset about the oaks and the beeches, a ruddy light in which, yet, there was nothing green. Among them here and there the larch stood in his splendour, perhaps the most brilliant emerald in all the crown of spring. And the cherry was like a cloud, if clouds are there, in heaven. A faintly greenish tinge began to appear on the white mist drifting from poplars. The buds of the rhododendrons began to burst; primroses were at their full, and the daffodils dying.

  And then one night upon all this floral infancy there came the rain. A rainbow shone before sunset, enclosing a cloud-mountain that glowed with a dull red: below it earth shone with that splendour that comes sometimes just before sleet. Chestnut, beech, chestnut, from where I watched at a window, were standing alternately, shining green, red, and green; and further away an elm was flashing the yellow mass of its seed-pods, though as yet it had no leaf. Then fell the sleet like a thin curtain of gauze, and trailed away pale-blue over the grass, leaving an azure sky where the clouds had towered, which rode away on the north wind, still glowing, to the other side of the earth.

  And all that night rain fell, and the wind went round, and in the morning there were yellow flashes against the dark of the beeches, as though a painter had intended to paint the Spring and had recklessly painted a brilliant branch in cadmium and left it forgotten, staring amongst grey trunks in the gloom of the grove. On the bright brown of the oak-buds a dull gold came to appear, and now the laburnum’s buds showed minute tips that were yellow. Cowslips came peering out, as early stars appear; but the dandelions
flashed forth like distant suns at their zenith. And all these splendours of Spring were shining for me with a brightness that was magnified by youth, and by the thought that I should soon see Laura. I somehow thought that in an unheeding world Laura and I understood the glory of leaf and flower, and the rejoicing symphony of blackbirds and thrushes; so that birds sang and leaves shone largely for us. There was justification for this belief at the time, for the mention of any of these things at Eton, or elsewhere, usually met with derision, as though there were something evil about the song of a bird, or contemptible in a flower; but Laura even knew the name of every bird that sang, from hearing its notes alone when the bird was hidden. And, looking back on these things, I find another justification for the belief that birds sang and young leaves flashed chiefly for us. For music is poured out for ears that can hear and sympathise, and beauty is shown to those for whom it has meaning; and, whether birds and leaves knew for themselves, or whether they were guided, Laura and I were a fitting audience then for blackbird and thrush, and our wonder was not unworthy of what the leaves had to show.