The Curse of the Wise Woman

by Lord Dunsany

  And then I turned from the peril that threatened my soul to the sorrow that troubled me here, and told Laura all I had seen at the edge of the bog, and how a factory was to be built by the stream, and the bog cut into and spoiled. What could save it, I asked her? And we spoke of the Hunt Committee, who cared little enough for the bog, as it was the one place they could not ride; and then of politicians, who cared about it no better, as there are fewer votes on the bog than on any equal area. And last of all, I do not know why, but last of all I came to the thing in which I trusted most, the curse of Mrs. Marlin.

  “What do you think of curses?” I asked.

  “I don’t like them,” said Laura.

  “Could Mrs. Marlin’s curse stop them spoiling the bog, do you think?”

  Laura thought for a while: I can see her grey eyes still, in that soft light under the trees, brought down the years by my memory. And then she said: “They’d be carrying a lot of weight if they tried to compete with it.”

  What would Mrs. Marlin do? We talked long about this, and came to no conclusion. But a hope coming dimly from an uncertain power that lurked in the strange woman remained a secret between us, and cheered me during all the anxious days of the summer, during which the Peat Development (Ireland) Syndicate pushed forward hugely its plans for bringing factory and huts to the haunts of willow and curlew.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  It was very soon after this that I went back to Eton, to the calm old buildings, the red may and the chestnuts, and then the willows that with a pang would remind me of those almost enchanted lands lying under the threat of Progress. I do not know what I learned that half; perhaps unconsciously words clung to my memory which I thought had escaped me entirely, but my heart all the while was shadowed by the machines that darkened Lisronagh. “Wilfully dreamy,” said one of my reports; but they were dreams that brought me no pleasure. How would some townsman feel who loved his city, and knew that a band of farmers with their ploughs threatened his very pavements and would tear his high buildings down? As he would feel, fearing that turnips would thrive where his busses ran, so I felt and feared for Lisronagh. I had one hope in this trouble that shadowed me, and that hope was in Mrs. Marlin. I had rejected the help of my friend in the long black coat. Ought I not to have rejected, too, any help from Mrs. Marlin? But I was powerless to gain her help or reject it, where the affairs of the bog were concerned. She loved the bog with a fiercer fury than I did, and if she should defend it I could no more turn her aside from whatever she planned than I could turn the north wind back when it swept the bog in the winter. And yet what could she do? I had no one in whom to confide about it. The priest in Slough, to whom I used to confess, was English and knew nothing of witchcraft; and merely warned me against it, which it was his duty to do. There was more than one master who encouraged one to bring him one’s troubles and difficulties, but how could I tell him that what was wringing my heart was that an Irish bog was going to be developed commercially, incidentally paying me rent, and that my only hope was in the curse of a witch? Then there were boys with whom I sometimes approached this subject, but they seemed to know nothing of witches. Why this was so I never knew, for most of their fathers were magistrates, who must all have taken the oath to suppress witchcraft, which every magistrate takes. Yet beyond these attempted approaches I never got, and never found the understanding I sought for, still less the sympathy.

  And then one day there came a letter from Laura; and it told me of Mrs. Marlin. Laura knew how I should be thinking of the fate of the bog, and the hope that I had in Mrs. Marlin’s curses, a hope slender enough, yet the only one that I had. No one else would save it; not even the Blessed Saints would help me there, knowing well enough that it was along the edges of just such bogs as that, and indeed only there, that the heresy still survived that set men turning westward when they prayed, and thinking of youth and twilight instead of the joys of Heaven, and praying to those of whom we may not think, if we are to hope for salvation. And I am sure that Laura knew I should have found no one to talk to of the thought that was most in my mind, and knew how welcome news of such things would be. Indeed I think Laura knew everything, except how to spell. I have all her letters to-day, and I notice it now when I look them over again, trying to lure from their leaves old moods of mine and old memories: she certainly could not spell. Her letter said: “She is walking along the edge of the bog. She goes along the top of the bank every evening. The men say she looks very black. I’ve seen one of them, and he said she looked ‘terrible black.’ But so she would in that dress of hers in the evening, up against the sky, in that light. Though it may have been her looks that he meant. You know she has pretty dark eyes. I don’t mean pretty, but you know what I mean. And if they got flashing it might look a bit like a thunderstorm to them. The Englishmen laugh at her, but all the Clonrue men have left. I’m afraid that won’t save the poor bog, as they got more men over from England by the next boat, and it did no more than stop half the work for a day. But I thought you’d like to know she’s done something. More power to her, but I’d like to see her save the old bog yet. But I don’t know how. Her curses seem only to work on the Clonrue men. Those English don’t understand them.”

  And there was a lot more, ending up with “I am sure you are in sixth Form now”; just as when writing to a curate one might say: “I am sure that you are a bishop.” I have not exhibited her spelling to eyes that might only mock peculiarities that to me were once almost sacred, and so I have altered it here, though for myself it always seemed better just as it was.

  When I wrote to thank Laura for her letter I asked her to keep an eye on Lisronagh, and to let me know what was happening to it. And she wrote again in a week, telling me about the wheel below the dam in the stream, and the factory and the huts; but I knew from the way that she wrote that things were worse than she said.

  The sorrows of exile seldom last for life, and, when they do, a man still preserves in his heart the image of his home; but I could not keep from the picture my memory made of that part of Ireland that I loved best, the dark smear of machinery that knowledge put vividly into memory’s picture. And one day when this was heavy, as always, upon my mind, there came another letter from Laura. “No one goes to Lisronagh any longer,” she said. “They’re afraid of Mrs. Marlin. The Englishmen are working there, but no one goes near them. They hardly go out from Clonrue on that side at all. I’m afraid it’s all up with the bog.”

  And in spite of the last sad sentence, the letter brought me encouragement, for that told me no more than I knew; while the rest of the letter strengthened the only hope that I had, a dim feeling, too crazy for me ever to speak of it and so to embolden it with the understanding of friends, an uncertain hope that Mrs. Marlin would somehow keep to the compact she said she had made with those that she told me had helped her son to the West, a curious faith that her curses could even yet, so late in the nineteenth century, be able to struggle and win against the might of machinery. At least she still held to her purpose.

  And so the summer half wore softly away, as though three months of sunshine had slipped down the Thames, whose gliding by those fields might have taught me that all things drift away; but nothing ever taught it to me, so that it bursts on me only now like a surprise.

  CHAPTER XXX

  I came again to High Gaut. Bright sunlight on the white-washed walls of the station; welcoming faces, and an outside car; then the long white road by bogs and towers; and so home. Brophy, Murphy, Ryan, young Finn, I saw them all again, and everyone in the house. And then on the very day that I arrived I set off with Ryan in the afternoon to drive to Lisronagh. I had not told Ryan where we were going till I got into the trap at the door, and when I said Lisronagh Ryan said to me: “Is it shooting you are, sir?”

  It was still July, and of course I was not going shooting, as Ryan knew well enough. “No,” I said, “but I want to see what those Englishmen are doing.”

  “Wouldn’t they be able to tell you all about tha
t in Clonrue?” said Ryan. And I saw then that for some reason Ryan did not want to go to Lisronagh.

  “I want to see for myself,” I said.

  “Begob there’s not much to see,” said Ryan.

  I wondered why he wished to avoid Lisronagh, but did not know how to find out.

  “What’s going on there?” I asked.

  “Begob, I don’t know,” Ryan answered.

  “I hear the people of Clonrue have all left it,” I said.

  “Begob, they have,” answered Ryan.

  “Weren’t they giving up a good job?” I asked.

  “There’s jobs,” said Ryan, “that a man might not do if he were starving.”

  “What kind of jobs?” I asked. And Ryan thought for a while.

  “Any job with a curse over it,” he said.

  “I heard Mrs. Marlin was cursing it,” I said straight out; perhaps too straight for Ryan’s tastes.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Shall we go and see?” said I.

  “Maybe the old horse couldn’t get so far and back,” he replied.

  “Didn’t he often do it before?” I asked him.

  “Aye,” said Ryan, “but he was younger then.”

  “Not much,” I said.

  “And the oftener he did it,” said Ryan, “the more it wore him out.”

  “Let’s go and ask the doctor about it,” I said.

  “Begob, we will,” said Ryan.

  There were mysteries that the doctor did not know, but probably none within fifteen miles of Clonrue; and I had no doubt I should get from him what it was that was frightening Ryan.

  But the doctor was not in, and was not expected back for another hour, so we drove on for Lisronagh, Ryan driving slower and slower. We were not gone from Clonrue when I noticed people watching us from the doorways, and children putting their heads up over low walls, to see who it was that took the road to Lisronagh. At the end of the village we met a group of men standing in the road talking. I knew one or two, and they all seemed to know me. They greeted me, and I them. And then one said: “Is it to Lisronagh you’re going, sir?”

  “It is,” I replied.

  And at that they muttered and looked at each other.

  “It’s a fine great bog,” I said.

  “Indeed it is,” said one of them.

  “And I’m wanting to see it again,” I continued.

  This produced scarcely any answer at all, and Ryan was gazing ahead of us down the road as though he heard nothing. A direct question would have brought me no information.

  “Would you care for a drive down to the bog?” I said to one of them that I knew.

  “Begob, sir,” said he, “I’d like it. Only I have my old mother to look after. She’s a long way past sixty now, and if I were away all that time, she’d wonder what had become of me. Begob, she’d be that anxious, she might die of it.”

  I asked another. “Sure I’ve my work to do in Clonrue,” he said.

  All this while an old woman that I hardly noticed at first was coming towards us down the street. Now she arrived beside us and lifted up her voice.

  “Ah, Master Char-les,” she said, “don’t go to Lisronagh. I’m an old woman now, but I never had anything to do with wise sayings, or any of them things at all. But there’s things going on of a nightfall at Lisronagh that it’s best for the likes of us to keep away from, and best for you, Master Char-les.”

  “What things?” said I. And the men were all standing silent, as they heard the topic that they were avoiding thus blurted out.

  “Mrs. Marlin,” she said.

  “Is she putting a curse on the place?” I asked.

  “Begob, she is,” said the old woman; “and worse. For she goes up into the bog and calls on those at night, that it is not for us to name.”

  “That won’t hurt me,” I said.

  “Begob, they’ll hear her,” she answered. “Don’t go near it. For one night they’ll come.”

  “Well, thank you for warning me,” I said.

  “Begob, it’s a good warning,” she said, and looked at me; and then went slowly away.

  There was a strained silence among the men, and Ryan seemed to have heard nothing at all.

  “Then to Lisronagh,” I said to Ryan.

  He gave a slow flick with his whip and the horse moved off at a walk. One man chewed a straw, another searched his pocket for a bit of tobacco to put in his clay pipe, a third turned to find a more comfortable spot in the wall against which he was leaning; none of them spoke; and Ryan and I and the horse went on alone, and saw no one in the fields and no one in the road as we went, nor did anyone in Clonrue seem even to look towards Lisronagh.

  What I saw and heard in Clonrue, and far more what I felt, filled me with sudden hope. For months I had said to myself: What can Mrs. Marlin do? But here was something she had done. There was a fear in Clonrue, and the fear was her doing. Might it not in time extend to the other workmen? Foolish hopes like this in the end add weight to our troubles, and the very first sight I had of them at work as Ryan reluctantly drove down the old bohereen, now a wide road with hard surface, scattered my hope at once, and left me all the forlorner for having clung to it. It was not only the awful progress the work had made, but the whole attitude of the workers, that seemed to show me something solid and real, beside which Mrs. Marlin’s curses were mere shadows.

  “Will you be long, sir?” said Ryan as I stepped down from the trap. And I saw that he feared to wait there long in the evening, lest Mrs. Marlin should soon come out and utter her curses, and lest one of them should reach him from where she walked on the heather.

  I went down to the factory they were building beside the stream, and went up to the foreman.

  “I’m Mr. Peridore,” I told him. “How is the work getting on?”

  “Glad to see you, sir,” he replied. “Getting on nicely.”

  It was indeed, and the wheel in the stream was already in position.

  “You’ll make a big change in the bog, I suppose,” said I.

  “You wouldn’t know it in a year, sir,” he said.

  Some look of sadness I could not conceal in my face he must have noticed, and added: “Well, sir, it’s no use as it is, is it?”

  “No,” I said.

  I had not the heart to say more, and we should have been standing in silence, but that he suddenly said: “She’ll be coming out soon now.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The old woman,” he told me.

  “What does she do?” I asked him.

  “Only a bit o’ cursing, sir,” he said.

  “Does it worry the men at all?” said I.

  “Not a bit, sir,” he said. “She’s only enjoying herself. They know she means no harm by it.”

  No harm by it!

  “But the Clonrue men,” I said, “I heard they’d left.”

  “Oh, them,” he said. “They felt a bit funny about it, and we let ’em go. They weren’t much good.”

  “They tell me no one comes here now from Clonrue,” I said.

  “No, sir,” he said. “They’ve a funny way of looking at things, those people. But we don’t want ’em.”

  And then the door of Mrs. Marlin’s cottage opened and I saw her dark figure come out, and walk through all the shabbiness and untidiness that now littered those lands; and so she came to the high edge of the bog and climbed fiercely up and stood on the heather; and there she raised her arms slowly, with fingers clutching, and stared at the men and the factory, and one saw her against the sky as Laura had said. Then she turned her back to the factory and gazed away over the bog, and seemed to be speaking with people far away; but, if she was, she was only muttering to them, for one heard no sound of her voice. Then she turned round again and began to curse the factory, first in English, then in Irish, and then in what seemed to me some older language, all the while with arms stretched upward threatening the men.

  “Bloody old kipper,” said the foreman.

 
CHAPTER XXXI

  I hurried back to the road of the lost bohereen, for I was anxious about Ryan, not knowing what he would do when the witch appeared; and I found him with the trap turned away from Lisronagh and the reins gathered up in his hand, looking back at the bog with quick glances over his shoulder. The old horse, that seemed so tired coming, trotted fast away from Lisronagh; and half-way to Clonrue, whenever I looked backward I could still see that dark figure prowling above the huts: Ryan too saw her often, although she was the last thing that he wished to see, but he could not help glancing. The Irish evening that I knew so well fell softly round us, making Ryan shiver; but I drew strange hopes from its colour and shadows and gloaming. Not till we reached Clonrue was Ryan himself again.