The Curse of the Wise Woman

by Lord Dunsany

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  I have lived fifty years since the bog moved over Lisronagh, leaving only the top of a meaningless ornamentation that they had built on the front of their factory, as a memorial of the syndicate that had worked there once for a while. Birds perched on it: it stood there for years, and is probably whitening there yet. And in those years I have seen many strange things, as who has not in that period that has held man’s greatest wonders and four and a quarter years of his greatest violence? As for the wireless, I am wondering at it yet, and do not think I shall ever cease to do so. I have a set here in this room, and on evenings when Monsieur Alphonse does not drop in, and I am alone, I listen to men speaking in Rome, Toulouse and Madrid, and get to know the announcers by their various intonations and sometimes even by their breathing. Yet, looking back on all the things I have known, many of which, I feel sure, would in other hands be good material for stories, I see only three things that, if I could sketch, I could sit and draw to-day in detail just as exact as any artist with his model before him. And the first of these three things is Laura standing in her rock-garden; and the second is the four men kneeling before me, covering me with their pistols, while I held up the crystal cross; and the third is the dark outline of Mrs. Marlin kneeling in the dark night and stretching out her hands to the bog and beseeching it, but proudly, as though she and it and the North wind and the storm were four equal powers. If I wrote any more of my life I should have to exert a tired memory, and consult old letters, or fragments of diaries that seldom went further than January; I should have to turn the bright-lit pages of youth for pages that grow slowly dimmer and darker.

  I never married Laura. We were engaged for several years. But Laura, who is a Protestant, would not give up what after all is only a heresy. She was never asked to give it up for herself, but only for possible children. God help me, and all the blessed Saints help me, I believed that in spite of all Laura would go to Heaven. And, God help me, I believe it yet.

  I only once spoke to Laura of such things myself. “Do you want to go to Heaven?” I asked her.

  “I do,” said Laura.

  “Will you get there, Laura?” I said.

  “I will,” said Laura.

  “What do you think it will be like?” I asked.

  “Galloping down wind for ever,” she said.

  I could never make Laura serious.

  I lived on for many years at High Gaut, and saw many other lands, in wanderings that form no part of this story. Times changed and moss increased upon steps and gateways, and ate its way into woodwork, and a weed began to cover the paths that workmen once kept tidy. At first I did not notice it; and then one day I saw a small white blossom flowering like a mist down the whole length of a path. It was my uncle that brought the weed. And I cannot write of him for a curious reason. The reason is, he belongs to another writer. He was “the good old man” of Stageland, by Jerome K. Jerome. “When the good old man is a trustee for anyone, he can battle against adversity much longer. While that trust money lasts . . . he fights on boldly. It is not until he has spent the last penny of it that he gives way.”

  Jerome K. Jerome wrote that, not I; and the man is his property for ever, and I cannot write of my guardian and trustee, though he actually existed. Perhaps there was a touch of Pecksniff in him too, but I have no right to tell of Pecksniff either, for he belongs to Dickens. So let him rest.

  The weed had grown very thick by the early nineteen-twenties; and then one day, to my great astonishment, I was invited to be the Minister of the Irish Free State to the country in whose capital I am now sitting over these memories. I had taken no part in politics, and done nothing of any kind to merit the offer. And the reason for it, that I was told soon afterwards, was as strange as the offer itself: I had been recommended for the post by a very prominent member of the Council of the League of Nations. Who the President of the Council was I did not know, nor the name of a single member, so rural was my life at High Gaut, and so out of touch was I there with those who were hoping to order and straighten out the world’s destinies. I accepted at once. And so I sit waiting here for the conference that is to take place one day with the Minister for Extraneous Matters, which Monsieur Alphonse often assures me will be whenever the occasion is ripe. We are to discuss certain action on the part of this State, whether diplomatic or otherwise, with a view to bringing pressure against the continuance of partition in Ireland. They are certainly dilatory, for it is years since the Government first promised the conference; but then they are a dilatory people, and the ministers are often much occupied with the State’s internal affairs. And I don’t see what could come of it even if we did have a conference, for it is an inland power with no navy, and it is hard to see how they could give expression to their wishes in the matter. But those are my instructions.

  My salary, and these fine rooms that I have free, enable me to devote whatever of my income escaped from my uncle to what has always been my hobby or my extravagance, call it what you will, which is giving employment to those families about High Gaut which have looked for it so long to my family, that when we stop I do not know where they will find it. So the place is still kept up by Brophy, who has scarcely altered, except that his long brown beard is now pure white, like the beard of young Finn, who died years ago. And Murphy died too, and Ryan, and Dr. Rory. I think it’s time I was going.

  On my way out here I stopped an hour at Geneva. As the train drew in I looked out over the station full of people with alien faces, their very attitudes strange to me. A gust of loneliness seemed to sweep over the platform. Suddenly the station-master took off his hat, and I saw a man approaching in frock-coat, tall hat and stiff collar, attended by what were obviously secretaries. There was a little stir on the platform. And then he came straight towards me. It was the man who first taught me how to aim at a goose, the man in the long black coat. I recognised him at once, after all those years. I recognised him by his eyes. I do not think I shall ever forget the eyes of those four men that knelt before me, looking along their pistols, when they came to shoot my father. One died as I have told, one was killed in the War, another got remorse for something that he had done, and died like that; they said that a curse was over him. The last of them stood before me.

  Then I knew who he was.

  “You have a fine job,” I said, as we shook hands.

  “Sure, any job is a fine job,” he said, “after twenty years in prison.”

  “Twenty years!” I exclaimed.

  “The best part of it,” said he.

  “What was it about?” I asked.

  “I got to arguing with a man about politics,” he said.

  “It was a damned shame,” said I, because I felt some such remark was called for, and because I was so happy to see an Irish face among all those foreign ones.

  And then I thanked him from my heart for what he had done for me, and for remembering me like that after all this time.

  “And why wouldn’t I?” he said.

  “I’m afraid it must have been a great deal of trouble to you to get this job for me,” said I.

  “Ah, not a bit,” said he. “Haven’t we got the nations by the throat? And we’ll stand no bloody nonsense from any of them, not from the King of Rome himself. And wouldn’t I get any job for you?”

  I explained that the Roman Empire was long since over.

  “Ah well,” said he, “isn’t there others as bad?”

  “There are,” I said.

  We had a great talk, and I came on here.

  I never saw him again. He died not long ago, and I wondered how it went with him. And the more I wondered, the worse and worse it seemed. And then the thought came to me: How does Heaven judge? The newspaper with the column that told of his death lay open before me. I noticed that one or two of its lines were wet, then saw that it was with my own tears. How, I thought then, if Heaven should judge like that?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Ba
ron of Dunsany, was born in 1878 to a wealthy family whose title is the second oldest in the Irish peerage, dating to 1439. Growing up, he split time between London and the family properties in Shoreham, Kent and Dunsany Castle in County Meath and was educated at Cheam, Eton, and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, which he entered in 1896.

  Dunsany was an extremely prolific writer, producing a body of work comprising some eighty volumes in various forms, including short stories, plays, poems, novels, nonfiction, and autobiography. His earliest published works were poems contributed to periodicals in the 1890s, and by 1905 his first volume of short stories, The Gods of Pegana, appeared. In this volume and in several more collections of stories and plays published over the next few years, Dunsany wrote within the fantasy genre, many of his tales focusing on an invented pantheon of deities who dwell in Pegana. These early stories have been cited as influences on J.R.R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Ursula Le Guin, and others.

  Dunsany’s first novel, Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley, appeared in 1922 and was followed by two more well-regarded fantasy novels, both considered classics of the genre, The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) and The Charwoman’s Shadow (1926). Among his later books, notable highlights include The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933), a semi-­autobiographical mixture of realism and fantasy set in late-nineteenth-century Ireland, My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936), adapted for a critically acclaimed 2008 film, and the Jorkens books, collections of short stories in which Joseph Jorkens, a middle-aged raconteur, would recount fantastic stories to anyone who bought him a whiskey and soda.

  Dunsany’s wide-ranging interests included hunting, shooting, chess, and cricket, and, despite his love of hunting, he was an advocate for animal rights. He was also involved in Irish literary circles and numbered Lady Gregory, George William “Æ” Russell, Oliver St. John Gogarty, and W. B. Yeats among his friends. His other contributions to Irish literary life included major donations to the Abbey Theatre and championing the work of the poet Francis Ledwidge.

  Later in life, Dunsany transferred Dunsany Castle to his son and heir and settled with his wife, Beatrice, in Shoreham, Kent, where he continued to write and publish until his death in 1957 from an acute attack of appendicitis.

  Both popular and critically well regarded during his lifetime, Dunsany’s stature has continued to grow after his death, with most of his works still in print and his importance to the fantasy genre increasingly recognized, with Neil Gaiman, Guillermo del Toro, Jorge Luis Borges, Michael Moorcock, and many others, citing him as an influence.