The Curse of the Wise Woman

by Lord Dunsany

  I had been back two or three days when I got a letter from Mrs. Lanley, asking me to go over to tea in two days’ time to see a new game that had been invented: the rules of it were—but I need not tell them to the reader, for the game was lawn tennis. On the morning of the day on which I was to go to Cloghnacurrer the Spring was shining for me with magnified glory, when a shadow fell, such as often comes in April from clouds full of hail, passing across the sunlight suddenly: Dr. Rory rode over. For a while we spoke of my father. “Who got him?” I asked. For though I had read the man’s name in the Press, it meant nothing to me.

  “No one from these parts,” said the doctor.

  And that bore out what Brophy had told me, and the boy outside Gurraghoo; for the doctor was sure to know.

  And after the doctor’s condolences he came to what he had ridden over to tell me, and this was the shadow that fell on me through the bright leaves of the Spring: “Marlin is dying,” he said.

  “Marlin!” I said. For I had thought his energy inexhaustible. Not only was he ready to walk the bog with me whenever I came and for as long as I liked, but he did it scorning such sustenance as I needed. “Why! He could go all day on only half a glass of whiskey,” I added.

  “That was the trouble,” said Dr. Rory.

  “But Marlin was never drunk in his life,” I said.

  “No,” answered Dr. Rory, “he never took enough to bother his head.”

  “Then what is the matter?” I asked.

  “He took more than his kidneys could manage.”

  I had never thought of that; I had read of men who died of consumption, and had got the idea from my reading that it was a rather romantic death, and I envied those who could take their whack of whiskey without ever showing a sign of it; but I had never thought of the kidneys.

  “I must go and see him,” I said. And then I thought of my visit to Cloghnacurrer. “He’s not dying at once?” I added.

  “Not at all,” said the doctor.

  “A few weeks?” I asked.

  “A week, anyway,” he replied.

  “As bad as that?” said I.

  “It’s bad when your kidneys won’t work,” said Dr. Rory.

  Poor Marlin, the news was as sudden to me as one of the storms of Spring; and I decided to go over and see him the very next day.

  “It will be all right to go to-morrow?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” said Dr. Rory.

  “You are quite certain?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” he said. “He’s still walking about in their bit of a garden.”

  Once more I asked him, and he answered me that Marlin would live at least for another week. And not till then did I decide to see Laura first.

  So I drove over to Cloghnacurrer and they showed me the new game, which had already been going two or three years in England. I remember the line drawn across the court, with the idea, I think, of starting the game gently; and, as the narrow space was considered hard to hit, the server was given two shots at it. The line was drawn, as of course it still is, where the top of the net just obscured it even from a tall man serving, and must have been intended to make an overhead service impossible; but, if so, the inventor had forgotten that the racquet can be held so much higher than the eye that the ball can reach where the aim cannot. But it did not much matter what the rules were, so long as there were rules: it is from these that a game develops. Nor did the rules matter much to me, for I soon went off with Laura to see her rock-garden, and to talk of our land, as two explorers might talk of Africa, but with a sense of ownership such as none can feel for any solid land; for our imaginations not only had travelled there, but had their share, with all who had ever dreamed of that immortal apple-blossom, in building Tir-nan-Og. But there was a sadness in our talk, for I told her of Marlin’s illness, and I was feeling as a traveller of far lands might feel when some old heathen hunter that once has guided him goes home to his gods.

  Then the rock-garden; and all the flowers bowing to the sun, where it came through a gap in some chestnuts from the South. It had passed to the West by now, but the flowers were bowing to the point at which it appeared in its greatest splendour, bent stalks and nodded heads, a bow as graceful as though they had learnt it by moonlight, watching some dainty dance before the Queen of the fairies. Saxifrages, both white and pink, the humble veronica, anemones and oxlips, all bowing the same way; then there were primroses and primulas, cowslips and polyanthi and the tall grape-hyacinths and one or two yellow poppies. The primroses had the same appearance of having strayed there from the woods that squirrels have when they enter a walled garden, though one of the primroses had already flashed to a bright colour, as though in good living it had forgotten the dells of the hazel. All this was at the edge of a grove of Portuguese laurel, whose old trunks twisted like dragons in the dimness under the leaves, a space between Laura’s­ garden and the rest of the grounds, through which foxes went by night and nobody went by day. And beside the rock-garden stood one short tree, of great age, but lopped to within three feet of the ground, a Portuguese laurel strayed from the dark grove, which, as evening wore on, grew more and more like a gnome. The rock-garden itself was a ridge of grey granite which had thrust up through the soil and through other rocks, like a giant that in a restless moment had once heaved a shoulder up, and then had slept again for a million years. And any winds that came from the West, through the gorgeous green of the chestnut, were sweet with the scent of the flowers of common laurel, out of sight, but enchanting the garden. In such a spot we might surely have been content with Earth. Yet it was not so; for we spoke of the orchards just over the rim of the sea, in the land where youth was immortal, as though there were not time enough for the love of Laura and me. Little I thought then of Marlin, I fear, though without him my fancy could never have wandered thither; unless that sadness that seemed so near to our joy came only from the bad news I had had of him and not from the shadow of Earth, which always falls heavily near to any brightness that shines from hope or dream that transcends its mighty bulk.

  CHAPTER XXII

  There was a conference only two days ago in my sitting-room, between Monsieur Alphonse and me, and two gentlemen that Monsieur Alphonse said were members of the government of this State, though I doubt if really they were anything more than the members’ secretaries; and in any case we decided nothing, and I only mention it for the sake of a curious comparison, which is that the memory of the details of that conference is less vivid in my mind to-day than the things that I heard and saw on a morning fifty-two years ago when I drove over to see Marlin, hoping that, after all, Dr. Rory may have been wrong. I went to Clonrue first, to see the doctor, impatient for some better news than what he had given me only the day before, and I even got it, for he had seen Marlin again, later that day. “He’s walking about a good deal,” he said.

  “Then he’ll live longer than you thought?” I asked.

  “Ah, I think he will,” said the doctor.

  And from that I tried to get him to say that perhaps he was wrong after all, and that Marlin would yet recover. What he said I cannot remember. But what does it matter? I was only asking him to echo my hopes. Dr. Rory’s words could not turn Fate back to walk the way that I wished. Yet neither he nor I ever guessed the end of Marlin.

  “What way are you going?” he said to me then.

  “There’s only one way,” I answered.

  “Ah, but you can’t get down the bohereen,” he told me.

  “Can’t get down the bohereen?” said I.

  “No,” said Dr. Rory, “they are making a road along it.”

  “A road?” I exclaimed.

  “Yes,” said the doctor.

  “What ever for?” I asked.

  “The Peat Development (Ireland) Syndicate,” he replied.

  Then it was true. What had almost seemed like ravings, when Mrs. Marlin told me, was mere accurate information. They were going to spoil the bog.

  “But did my father ever give them lea
ve?” I asked, clinging to a last hope, for it was not like him to allow syndicates and such things from towns to make a mess of the countryside.

  “They bought an option for fifty pounds,” said the doctor. “And now they’ve taken it up. You’ll get a rent from them.”

  “I don’t want their rent,” I said. For it seemed like selling Ireland piecemeal, if they were going to cut the bog away. One did not feel like that about the turf-cutters, who all through the spring and summer had their long harvest of peat, that brought the benignant influence of the bog to a hundred hearths, and that filled the air all round the little villages with the odour that hangs in no other air that I know. Indeed the very land on which the Marlins’ house was standing had been once about twenty feet higher, and had been brought to that level by ages of harvests of peat, or turf as we call it. And the land that was left was still Ireland. But now it was to be cumbered with wheels and rails and machinery, and all the unnatural things that the factory was even then giving the world, as the cities began to open that terrible box of Pandora.

  “Why did my father do it?” I asked.

  “He only sold them the option,” said the doctor. “He never thought they’d come here with their nonsense. And fifty pounds is fifty pounds.”

  “What are they going to do?” I enquired.

  “Compress the turf by machinery and sell it as coal,” he answered.

  “What nonsense,” I exclaimed.

  “Of course it is,” he replied. “But there’s a lot of money to be made out of a company. And when it’s got an address beside a bog, and is actually working there, it will look much more real to investors than when it’s only in a prospectus. Not that it doesn’t catch some of them even then.”

  “I wish my father hadn’t done it,” I said. But that was no use.

  “They’ll be broke in a few years,” said the doctor.

  In a few years: that seemed terribly long to a boy.

  “They’ll ruin the bog,” I said. “Can no one stop them?”

  “I’m afraid not,” he answered.

  It seemed so wrong that all that wonderful land, so beautiful and so free, should be brought under the thraldom of business by a city so far away, that my thoughts in their desperation turned strangely to Mrs. Marlin.

  “Could Mrs. Marlin do anything?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” he said.

  “Couldn’t she lay a curse on them?” I continued.

  “She might curse their souls a bit,” said the doctor reflectively, “but they’d think more of business.”

  In despair I left him then, and went on to see Marlin.

  “We’ll go by the other road,” I said to Ryan. “They’re spoiling the bohereen.”

  And Ryan muttered something, as though he were cursing the Peat Development Company, but with an amateur’s ill-trained curses; not like Mrs. Marlin. So down the road we went, the other road from Clonrue. And, if it is not too late, why does not some museum preserve a few yards of an old road, as it used to be before even bicycles came to cover it with their thin tracks? It’s clear enough in my memory, with its wandering wheel-tracks, its pale-grey stone bright in the sunlight, and the cracks that ran through it everywhere from its unstable foundation, as soon as it neared the bog; but when I and my memory are gone and all my generation, who will remember those roads? I suppose it will not matter. They will lie sleeping, deep under tarmac, those old white roads, like the stratum of a lost era for which nobody cares. But who cares aught for the past? That pin-point of light called The Present, dancing through endless night, is all that any man cares for.

  So we drove down the other road, and along the side of the bog; and the little cracks were running among the wheel-tracks as though the bog had often whispered a warning, telling that he was amongst the ancient powers, of which the earthquake was one, and that he suffered roads as all these powers suffer the things of man, which is grudgingly and for a while. And half a mile or so from the Marlins’ cottage, at the nearest point to which this road came to them, I got out of the trap. My walk lay over the level land from which the bog had receded, or rather from which it had been pushed back by man: on my left, all the way as I went, the cliff of the bog’s edge stood like a wave of a threatening tide, dark and long and immanent. Square pools of sombre deep water lay here and there under the cliff, with a green slime floating in most of them, and the green slime teeming with tadpoles. I sat down by the brink of one of these pools and looked at it, for the sheer joy of being home again. I looked and saw little beetles navigating the dark water like bright pellets of lead, and rather seeming to be running than swimming. Then an insect with four legs skipped hurriedly over the surface, going from island to island of scarlet grass, and a skylark came by singing. Above me in the mosses beyond the top of the bog’s sheer edge the curlews were nesting, their spring call ringing over the pools and the heather. Beside me a patch of peat was touched with green as though it had gone mouldy, and up from it went a little forest of buds, each on its slender stalk, for spring had come to the moss as well as the curlews. In amongst the soft moss grew what looked like large leaves, but so fungoid was their appearance that it was hard to say whether they belonged to the moss, or were even vegetable at all: rather they seemed to haunt the boundary of the vegetable kingdom as ghosts haunt the boundary of man’s. Strangely ill-assorted were those gross leaves and the fairy-like slenderness of the stalks. I could have sat there long, watching the activity of the two kinds of insect that scurried over that water, or looking at the history of the ages in the coloured layers of the peat, which is always written wherever an edge of Earth is exposed, if only one can read it; and all the while the skylark sang on. I could have sat there idly all day in deep content, only that an anxiety thrilled through my content, and drove me on, urging me to hasten to hear the worst about Marlin. And so I walked on, under the bog’s edge, with peaty soil underfoot, on which sometimes rushes grew, now all in flower, and sometimes heather, young and very green and sometimes, almost timidly, the grass; for the grass came mostly along the tracks of the turf-carts, and where the earth was most trodden, and by little bridges across tiny streams, as though only in the immediate presence of man could it dare to usurp that land where the bog so recently reigned. And all the way as I went over that quiet land there went beside me a chronicle of the ancient shudders of Earth, old angers that had stirred and troubled the bog; for the long layers, tawny and sable, ochre, umber and orange, that were the ruins of long-decayed heather and bygone moss, went in waves all the way, sometimes heaving up into hills, the mark of some age-old uprising, sometimes cracked by clefts that sundered them twenty feet down, as though they still threatened the levels so lately stolen by man. And even that land that man had won for himself faintly shook as I trod it, making the threat of the bog all the more ominous. I passed innumerable little ditches, dug to run off the water that came down from the bog, so that the things of man might grow there and not the things of the wild. And over all of them were little bridges for the turf-carts to cross with their donkeys, for a man on foot could step over the ditches anywhere; trunks of small trees heaped over with peat and sods; but the trunks were all rotting away, so that only a prophet could tell whether man would hold that land, or whether the damp and the south-west wind and the bog would one day claim their own again.

  Presently I came on turf-cutters at their work, digging out of the brown face of the soft cliff their foot-long sections of peat, four or five inches thick and wide, with an implement that seemed a blend between a spade and a spear. I don’t suppose that has altered since I was living in Ireland, nor for some centuries before that. And another thing that can scarcely ever have altered is the little turf-cart in which the pieces of fresh wet peat are drawn away by donkeys, for it has the air of having been there for ever, and I do not see what it can ever have altered from, for it is so simply primitive that it must have been nearly the first. The superstructure was like that of the wheel-barrow and little larger, but
it was the wheels that had been left behind by receding ages from man’s very earliest effort at drawing loads. These were merely two trunks of trees, hollowed a little where the axles should be and leaving a pair of crude wheels at the ends. An iron bar ran through the core of each trunk, connecting it to the cart, and on these the trunks revolved. Two donkeys dragged the little load away to be stacked and to dry in the spring weather, with a little heather on top to keep off the rain. In those stacks the long, brick-like pieces of chocolate-coloured turf would dry to pale ochre and be carried to the cottages to take their part in the struggle against the next winter. Two men with long black hair were working the face of the bank as I came by, cutting in level lines, as though they were taking bricks layer by layer off a wall; so that when they had come to the blacker layers underneath, and had gone as low as they could and met the water, the edge of the bog would have receded along the width of their working a distance of four inches. We greeted each other as I passed, and I went on over grass and bare peat and rushes, and over the little bridges, till I saw far off the willows that grew near the Marlins’ house, shining like sunlight coming through greenish smoke. I saw the willows that I knew so well, now glorying in the spring, but I saw with a pang light flashing on roofs that were strange to me: mean buildings had come already, with the swiftness of an encampment, to that land that had always seemed to me as enchanted as any land can be. And what would come of that enchantment now? So elusive a thing, among that cluster of huts, could never survive the noise, the ugliness, the ridicule and the greed. I felt sick at heart at the sight of them; and in my despair I knew nothing that could protect the ancient wildness that was such a rest and a solace to any cares that one brought to it from the world; and, feeling helpless myself, I placed no confidence in any help that could come from Mrs. Marlin.