The Curse of the Wise Woman

by Lord Dunsany

  It was to these men that I now appealed, calling out to them from the high edge of the bog and telling them that a man was lost out there in the heather. They came at once, and I soon had about thirty of them, some of them English and some the men of Clonrue. “Begob,” said one of the latter to me, “if you set Englishmen walking the bog it’s soon a hundred men that we’ll have to look for, and not only one.” But oddly enough it was the Englishmen that took charge as soon as we started off, though they got very wet over it.

  “We’ll find your son for you, mam,” said one of them. “Don’t you worry.”

  But she looked fiercely at him and only answered: “Do you know the way to World’s End?”

  “I expect we could find it, mam,” was all he said to her.

  Her eyes were blazing, and then she burst into laughter. “And you’ll only be half-way to him then,” she said.

  Then we all spread out to about half a mile and walked in the direction of the deep part of the bog, from which Mrs. Marlin and I had just returned, and heard her laughter still ringing in mockery of the thirty men that were trying to find her son.

  We went back over the grey moss, about twenty-five yards apart, the bog-cotton flowering round us, a bright patch at the tips of the rushes, the skylark high above us singing triumphantly on.

  “It’s got on her mind a bit,” said one of the men, as Mrs. Marlin’s laughter rang out behind us.

  “I’m afraid it has,” I said. For I could not explain Mrs. Marlin to an Englishman.

  “We’ll find him all right, sir,” he said.

  But he only saw that the heather was not high enough to hide anyone lying there from a searcher passing within twelve yards: he did not know the deeps of an Irish bog.

  “Don’t step on the bright mosses,” I said.

  We went on till Mrs. Marlin’s laughter faded from hearing, and the only wild cries we heard were the cries of the curlews.

  When I came again to that waste of water and moss, where trembling waves ran through the bog from every footstep, the line of men drew in from either side to the edges of that morass, each man seeming drawn towards it without anyone saying a word; and we all looked over the water and brilliant mosses in silence. I realised then that in bringing these thirty men over the bog I had done a conventional duty in which there was no meaning whatever.

  We turned round and each man took a different line to the one by which he had come, so as to cover more ground on the way back, but nobody searched any more. I knew that they were not searching, but said no word to them, for my thoughts were in Tir-nan-Og.

  CHAPTER XXV

  When we came back to the land of fields and paths with no more hope of ever finding Marlin, his was not a loss over which I merely mourned for a few days: I feel it still. I feel to this day the zest that went out of my life when I knew that I should no more walk the bog with him, and even thought of laying my gun away and never walking the moss and the heather again, as to-day I could lay down my pen and end this story, were it not for one thing. And that one thing is that the bog itself was threatened; all the wild ways he had shown me, mosses and rushes and heather, the home of the curlew and snipe, and the grazing-grounds of the geese, all those enchanted fields and the magical willows lying under the edge of the bog, all were to be spoiled, hidden, sold and disenchanted by that terrible force named Progress. And Mrs. Marlin had made her compact to protect it, with certain powers that were of the bog itself. No one else promised to save it. Would Mrs. Marlin do so? That was the interest that burned in me now that Marlin was gone. And the less I spoke of it to anyone the more it loomed in my thoughts. The very heart of Ireland appeared to be threatened, for the bog seemed that to me then, as it seems to me still; and it was the only bog I knew. How clear those anxious days are yet in my memory. I might look out of the large window of the room in which I am sitting, and pass my idle hours in jotting down what I see, the motors in the sunlight flashing up the wide street, sometimes a cart with horses, plumed and decked with bright harness, from some farm out in the plains, the different kinds of people, idlers wasting away the passing hour, hurrying men seeking something from some hour yet to come, perhaps equally vainly, statues of famous men of whom I know nothing, great porticoes and façades of the high houses, sometimes even a butterfly lost from the fields, illumining for an instant these sheer cliffs of man, a cat amidst all the clatter and hurry of men attending placidly to her own affairs; the bright clothes of the fashion that passes, and now and then some women, in from the lands beyond, bright with the dress and the ribbons of the fashion that never passes, the age-old fineries of the peasant’s dress; and evening coming on with its outburst of lights; but I could not write an account of the passing moment here as I could of the anxieties that troubled me then, multiplied as all troubles are multiplied always by youth: I foresaw the bog vulgarised by noise and machinery, then cut away altogether, and lastly a litter left of all those bits of iron and old hats, papers, cinders and medicine-bottles, that together make up rubbish-heaps, where once the bog had wandered wild for the curlews, as once for the Irish elk. And the bog was to me what the desert is to the Arab.

  When last I saw Mrs. Marlin on that day, her laughter had ceased and she was standing silent on the high edge of the bog, looking down on the level lands, once the home only of willows, and now as I have described it, and worse. She was looking at the row of new huts, and at the men going back to their work on the dam and laying down narrow rails, and there was a look on her face such as an eagle might wear on a high cliff watching lambs. I turned to go to her and ask her about the compact she said she had made, and to ask if anything could save the bog, but suddenly I despaired and went away.

  I walked back again all under the edge of the bog, where the strata were troubled, as they lay in their sleep, by the violence of old upheavals, and the wavy lines here and there were arched upwards until they cracked. And where the cracks ran deepest, fallen masses of turf lay half-submerged in the square pools of dark water looking like blocks of masonry tumbled down by an earthquake, only that their squared edges and whole bulk were soft. I should never see Marlin again, and the bog I loved was threatened, but the skylark sang on.

  I came to the road and found Ryan, and told him the news about Marlin.

  “Begob, a man must go some time,” he said.

  “Ryan,” I said, “did you ever hear tell of Tir-nan-Og?”

  “I did not,” he answered.

  But I talked of the orchards over the sea in the West, and the twilight caught up in their blossoms for ever and ever, and the queens of old there everlastingly young; till he admitted that he had heard of it.

  “Could Marlin have got to Tir-nan-Og?” I asked.

  “Begob,” he answered, “if a man starts in time, they say among the wise women that Hell can’t get him.”

  And I spoke again of the splendours of Tir-nan-Og, telling, as Marlin had told me, how the glow of the apple-blossom was brighter than any colour seen in the western sky, floating over the sunset, and that the bloom on the face of the immortal maidens was fairer even than that.

  “Hist,” said Ryan, “let us not speak of that land” (he would never name it), “for if a man’s heart turn towards it and he comes to die in bed he dies in mortal sin.”

  “Hell would have him then,” I said.

  “Why wouldn’t it?” Ryan answered.

  Beyond the bog a green dun watched over the waste, built once by men at the edge of the fields that they grazed, and protected on one side by the bog all the way to the horizon, for the bog was there then as now. What kind of men were they, I wondered. What was their heaven? Did they know Tir-nan-Og? And where was Marlin’s spirit? Vain speculations that led my fancy to the mists that surround our knowledge, and through which there is no seeing.

  We drove first to Dr. Rory’s house, and I found him in.

  “Marlin’s gone,” I said.

  “B’Jabers,” said the doctor; “but he should have lasted a bit longer
.”

  “He walked away over the bog,” I told him.

  “Walked away over the bog!” he exclaimed.

  “He was looking for Tir-nan-Og,” said I.

  “Ah,” he said thoughtfully, “he might do that.”

  “What would happen to him?” I asked.

  And Dr. Rory said nothing.

  “Is there such a place as Tir-nan-Og?” I continued.

  And a look came into the doctor’s face as when a man suddenly remembers things that are long gone by.

  “You see, I’ve been studying medical books for fifteen years,” he said.

  “Yes?” I interposed, or something to keep him talking.

  “And there’s nothing about it there,” he said.

  “Nor about Heaven either,” said I.

  It was Father MacGillicud that I should have gone to, but I daren’t, for it is mortal sin to think of Tir-nan-Og as I was thinking of it.

  “Before you studied medicine at all,” I asked, “did you know of Tir-nan-Og?”

  For a moment I thought that he was going to say “No.”

  “When one is young,” he said, “one has a lot of foolish fancies.”

  If I had agreed, or disagreed, that would have been all. But I was silent.

  And after a moment or two he went on. “It’s like this,” he said. “I used to read old histories years ago. And there was surely talk about that country once. About Tir-nan-Og, I mean. And there’s no doubt the priests made a great fight against it, a terrible great fight. And in the end they won. Well, it’s the same in either world, if you’ll take advice from an older man; and it’s this; always to keep away from the beaten side. There’s no good ever comes from going near them; the folks that are beaten, I mean. They’ve nothing left for themselves, and they’re not going to help you. Heaven or earth it’s just the same. And there’s another thing; besides getting no good out of the beaten side, the other side get to hear of it if you go near them, and they’re against you at once.”

  “That’s what Marlin said,” I told him. “He said that he knew that Heaven had turned against him.”

  “And why wouldn’t it?” said the doctor. “Sure it’s right that it should. Wasn’t it Marlin that began it? And there’s another thing, speaking of fights in general: if it’s not much of a fight, and one side’s beaten at once, the winner may forget all about it. But if it’s a close thing, as this was, and against a country of that beauty (for could there be anything lovelier than young girls in the pride of their beauty walking through endless orchards in blossom that never grows old?) why, then the winner’s always afraid he may have to fight again; and it’s little mercy you’d get from either side when they found that you had leanings towards the other. And I don’t presume to blame them: it’s the same everywhere.”

  “I’ll take your advice and keep away from it,” I said.

  “Do,” said the doctor.

  And it was a good deal for me to promise, for in some odd way or other I thought that some nook of those orchards was the arbour of Laura and me; and there’s no saying what fancies may come sometimes to youth. It meant also that I should never see Marlin again.

  “I don’t say,” the doctor continued, “that if you’re over in England, or if you ever travel abroad, you mightn’t be thinking of Tir-nan-Og for a bit. It’s hardly known outside Ireland, and the true faith had no trouble with it: they never had to fight it there, so there’s no bitterness, if you know what I mean. But it’s very different here. It’s not much more than a thousand years since they beat it. And what’s a thousand years to Heaven?”

  If I did not entirely take Dr. Rory’s advice, it kept me at least from coming too much under the influence of Marlin’s heretical faith and his mother’s witcheries, temptations that have little hold on me now, but I write of days when all temptations were strong whenever they came at all. And let me, so that I may tell an honest story, not brush aside influences now, because they were fanciful, false, or contrary to the known truths of religion or science; for none of these disqualifications has the weight of a feather in keeping any doctrine or influence away from youth. It was a perilous influence, and was near me, and I think it was Dr. Rory that saved my soul. I think it is saved: I find all temptations that come to me now so weak that I think it is surely safe. Yet had it not been for the advice of Dr. Rory to turn from Tir-nan-Og, who can say what would have become of it? It was not the doctor’s job to save my soul, but through some queer aptitude of the Irish people they are always doing other men’s jobs as well as their own.

  “Have a drink,” said the doctor.

  And then I remembered that I had had no lunch, and it was well on in the afternoon.

  “May I have some tea?” I said.

  And it leaked out about the missing lunch, or his kindly hospitality drew it out, and he had some eggs boiled for me; and soon we were talking of what weighed most on my mind from the future. Out of the past the loss of Marlin was the trouble that most oppressed me, but the danger that threatened the bog loomed heavily in the future.

  “What will they do to it?” I asked.

  “It will take them a very long time to cut it away,” he said.

  “But they’ll cut right into it,” I complained. “And there’ll never be snipe on it, with all that noise and machinery round the edge, and the geese will never come to it again.”

  “They might not be there very long,” he said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Maybe the curses of Mrs. Marlin might be too much for them after all,” said he.

  “But you said they wouldn’t care about curses,” said I.

  “I said so,” he answered. “But there’s something about a curse that the men might not like, that are doing the work for them. Day after day and Mrs. Marlin still cursing them; they might get tired of it after a while. And she’d do that. And at nights too. Queer things, curses. Even the things we know are queer; bacilli and all that. But they’re nothing to the things that we don’t know.”

  “I suppose they’re not,” I said.

  “B’Jabers, they’re not,” said the doctor.

  “But is there any way of stopping them?” I asked.

  “There’s one way,” he said.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “But it wouldn’t do,” he said.

  “What way were you thinking of?” I persisted.

  “Some of the people about might ask them to go,” he said.

  “They’d never listen to them,” said I.

  “There’s some they’d listen to,” said the doctor. “But it wouldn’t do.”

  I turned to my boiled egg then, for I was very hungry.

  “We searched for Marlin,” I said after a while. For the doctor had asked nothing about that.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he replied. But he said no more.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  Those would have been happy days, but for the loss of Marlin, and but for the rails, the huts, the dam and all the machinery that I had seen preparing against the helpless bog. Spring came to its full glory: the leaves of the chestnut lifted and spread out, and the great blossoms towered up from among them; the birch shone green and the lovely lilac appeared, and the oaks were a mass of gold. In all this splendour I walked at first with a heavy heart, but a boy’s spirit is nearer than mine is now to whatever influences sway the leaves and set the snipe drumming, and I think it was not very long before there was something singing in me with the joy of the birds and with the brilliance of flowers, though I had not thought it could be so, so soon after Marlin’s loss. Yet all the while anxiety for the fate of the bog was weighing on me; anxiety for its silence, for the voices of all its wandering birds, for its wildness, for everything that passes away at the sound of the clank of machinery. Man is the enemy of many an animal, but so they are of each other, and still there is room for all; it is only when he makes an ally of steam and the Pluto-like iron machine that the terrible alliance sweeps all before it: mystery flies awa
y, solitude with it, and quiet is gone with the rest; and all the tribes of the air that love these things, and know them as we shall never know them, are away to the wilder lands. The remoteness, the wildness, the beauty, of the bog were somehow all round my heart-strings: it was as though someone were planning to spoil the Evening Star. I talked to Brophy about this syndicate that had come to trouble Lisronagh, and to Murphy and even young Finn, for I often found that the less men were educated the more they appeared to know of what was going on. But none of them could tell me what was going to happen to the bog, for that depended on the intentions of men in a remote city, and they were men who had double doors to their offices, and double windows, so as to prevent any noise coming in while they were making their plans.

  Fox-hunting was over, and it was of course the close season for game-birds; the only things unprotected now, besides those birds that keepers call vermin, being the rabbits. Even to these I would not take my gun, so much was it associated with memories of Marlin, and I left it where I had put it away on the day that he and I heard the snipe drumming. I took instead a small rifle, which, though it has some features resembling those of a shot-gun, entails such different methods in using it from those of the man with the gun, that they are the implements of as widely separate sports as are a bat and a hockey-stick; and with this I whiled the long evenings away. The rifle I used was called a rook-rifle, named after a rather dull sport, which I very seldom practised; for the young rook is barely able to leave its branch, let alone its tree, so that the only skill required to get him is one accurate shot, a very different thing from the necessity of having the first shot accurate. It was a .250; that is to say its calibre was exactly a quarter of an inch; and it was an ejector, but I had got the blacksmith of Clonrue, who did many odd jobs of other men’s trades, to put the ejector out of work; for the flick of a finger-nail will throw the small cartridge out, and I had noticed again and again that a rabbit will often sit still after one shot, with ears up, wondering what the sound can have been; then comes the click of the ejector, after which I have never known the rabbit to stay. It is the sound of the bullet that he hears, close to his head. But what was it? Where is the danger? The ejector tells him that.