The Curse of the Wise Woman

by Lord Dunsany

  “Well done, Master Char-les,” said Marlin. “B’ the Tarrawar, but that’s great.”

  I never heard anyone else swear by the Tarrawar, and I do not know what it is. Marlin lying flat with even his face hidden had not seen the bird drop, but he had heard the thump of it in the still night.

  I waited, wondering if more would come. But Marlin said to me: “Pick it up, Master Char-les, before it gets too dark.”

  It is curious how I had failed to foresee the blackness with which night would soon cover everything. It seemed so easy to pick up a goose twenty yards away. But I waited a little longer, and in that short while the last of the light went suddenly out of the rushes, and I was searching soon amongst scores of black lumps, one of which must be the goose. When Marlin found the goose and gave it me, and I held it in my hand by the neck, it was one of those moments of achievement that I suppose all men hope for, and that sometimes come, bringing with them very often disillusion, when they come at all. And I suppose that if you examine all the achievements of man, one by one under the microscope of philosophy, you will find what Solomon found; you will find in every one the same taint of disillusion. Therefore let no man grudge me my goose or scorn it; it was one of those things I have known, which like some rare metal purified perhaps by the flames of a meteorite, was without any trace of disillusion.

  “It’s late to get out of the bog, Master Char-les,” said Marlin, “but sure we’ll do it.”

  And I realised then that the day’s work was not over, and that the short and easy journey we had made to get to the place at which I had watched for the geese was now something to be undertaken in the spirit of pioneers travelling in unknown lands.

  Marlin went in front, relying on some kind of instinct he must have had, for we could not see. And I followed him step by step, and he turned round once in every ten yards or so to see how I was getting on. The night was very still and menacing. It was not till I was clear of that uncertain land, led all the way by Marlin, that I gave another thought to poor Marlin’s soul. And then I wondered once more how it was that merely living all his life by the side of the bog could have so utterly turned him from Heaven, and whether it was really too late. “Marlin,” I said, “how could just looking at the bog make you think so much of Tir-nan-Og.”

  “Begob,” said Marlin, “you should see it in spring.” Which is of course just the time I never went there, as it was only shooting that took me. “And when the heather is first blooming,” went on Marlin, “and at dawn, and when the sun’s setting over it, and in storm. And the further it goes, the grander it gets. And over there where it goes out of sight men have tried to hem it in with roads and railways, but they could not spoil the glory of it, and it goes on, in spite of them all, till it comes to the sea, and a little way over the sea is the land of the young. And isn’t the bog lovelier than the sky?”

  And somehow I knew that he was going to argue from that that his heathen land was lovelier than Heaven. And it was to prevent him saying such a thing that I repeated something I had been told about Heaven which teaches us that it is fairer than any land that there is, or any that could be imagined.

  “God help me,” said Marlin, “I have chosen Tir-nan-Og.”

  CHAPTER VII

  We walked on in silence then, I saddened a little as I hope and do believe I was, by the knowledge, now, that Marlin’s soul must be lost, and yet with elations in me that no boy could have kept under, that came from the very feel of the goose in my hand; and so we came to the cottage. And in the bright candle-light I looked at the rows of feathers, wide and deep on the goose’s breast. I had never seen one before. And Marlin’s mother looked at the bird, whose coming she had prophesied to me, and all she said was: “Aye, they had written his name to die to-day. And had they written your father’s name, he too. It’s all in the writing.”

  Who They were she did not say. And, when I asked her how they wrote it, she only said: “With the north wind on ice.”

  With a boy’s persistence I asked where it was written. And she flung up a warning hand, saying: “Never read that!” And I asked her no more.

  I was glad of the tea that she gave me again, dark and strong now, for it was the same tea that she had made for me nearly two hours ago, kept warm by her great fire. Again, at that table, bright amongst cavernous shadows, I felt that but the lifting of a curtain, but a glance through a door ajar, but a flicker of mist, might have shown me the bog as Marlin’s mother saw it, and the path of water and moss across the horizon as it was known to Marlin. I seemed for a while to be hovering between two worlds, that both claimed the same area of Ireland. I see, now, that I was wrong, I see now that Tir-nan-Og is contrary to everything we have been taught, and I know that there are no spirits haunting the bog for any other purpose than to mislead us. But in that cottage then, there was something in Mrs. Marlin’s eyes alone, and in Marlin’s thoughtful face, that showed me there were beliefs of the land all round us, held as strongly as any creed, though they were heathen. And the influence of those beliefs, arising from glances, dim lights, and the mere wonder of night, and confirmed, as they seemed to be, by every whisper the north wind said to the thatch, so gripped me in that cottage by the bog that the influence abides in my memory to this day, not strong enough, I trust, to imperil my soul. And yet when I look at the bog shining there in my memories I find it hard to remember the map and to say exactly where its boundaries go; rather I seem to see it crossing the sky-line and narrowing where roads and railways confine it, but a strip of it running on, till it comes to the very sand and shells of the ocean, and across that a little way westward, God help me, Tir-nan-Og.

  I am afraid as I read what I have written that I have not shown any reason why my heart should have leaned even for a moment towards that heathen land; but it will be known, I trust, in Heaven what power there was in the shadows that stalked from the firelight, and the clear words of the wind, clear though in no known language, and in that strong tea, and in the mystery all round us, made by the night and the bog, a mystery hushed with the silence of one about to whisper, and in old Irish legends that gathered these things together, and in the attitude of the only two that were with me, which clearly accepted more than all I have hinted. They will estimate all these influences and know their weight, and will know that in the end I have turned my back to the West.

  The wind was rising, but, above the voice of it, I heard the sound of the horse and trap that Ryan was to bring for me down the bohereen. So I said good-bye to the dark woman, and, as I shook her by the hand she peered into my face, and then said: “You will come again.” She did not say it as though asking a question, or uttering a polite phrase, but as though stating something that she had just seen. And I said something polite that sounded foolish against the deeper certainty of her words; and she added: “Aye, and the day will come when we three shall be here again, two of us looking as we seem, and one of us drifting over the bog in the night.”

  I did not understand her, but I remembered her words. Glancing at Marlin I saw no surprise in his face at either of her remarks: he merely accepted both as though she had said that tea would be ready at five. As I left he said to me: “Then you’ll come again, Master Char-les.”

  He too said it as though it were something that had now been ascertained. Which left me little to say.

  The lights of the trap at the end of the bohereen glared suddenly, as something out of a different land, as the lights of a ship from some great city might gleam by uncharted coasts.

  The things that most stand out in my memory after that are showing my treasure to the different people I met, to Ryan, to the lodge-keeper by the light of one of the lamps, to our cook, and next morning to Murphy. And one other thing stands out very clear from that day; there came a telegram from my father. It had been handed in at Euston just before eight o’clock, and said: “Forward all letters to the club.” From that I knew he was safe. As for the letters, my father belonged to no club, having taken his name off t
he list of members even at the Kildare Street Club, for the sake of economy years ago: in London he had never belonged to a club. But it told me all that was intended, and if the postmistress talked about the telegram till others were sent to look for my father around the London clubs, no harm was done by that. I saw that he must have ridden a long way that night, and come to some other line than our familiar one and caught some early train of which I knew nothing, and so boarded the Irish mail only ten hours after leaving High Gaut. He may have even taken a special, so as to catch that boat. I never enquired who were after him, well advised by Marlin; but whoever they were, my father must have relied on them not to waste a night in sleep. I showed the telegram to the butler without a word, and he said nothing to me; nor did either of us talk to the other at any time about forwarding letters. It was better not.

  The north wind that had blown all day had been increasing in power all the while that I was driving home; it had flapped the wings of the dead goose as I brought it into the house with me, and it had slammed the door behind me. And now it was rising still. All night it boomed and wailed, trying shut doors in anger, and mourning in aged walls. For a while after going to bed my imagination kept pace with the wind’s anger, wondering what men were breaking into the house, or tiptoeing along corridors, and then in the midst of its furious tumult I slept. I woke in as deep a calm as I have ever known, the hush of an utter silence, and in the silence the snow. It lay bright over everything. The north wind had brought it and fallen.

  What a change snow brings to any land that it visits: rather enchantment than change. It is as though the mountains came down to speak to the fields, almost as though overnight another planet had called for us and taken us over from Earth. Even the inside of the house was changed, a bright light dwelt in the pictures, making the work of men long dead more vivid and merrier; and on the north side of the house all the rooms seemed as though they were still curtained, and all their blinds drawn down, for the snow was clinging to the window-panes where the wind had so violently hurled it; and yet even in those dim rooms, through the grey snow, there seemed to shine gleams from the light of a strangely triumphant morning. And the first thing I thought as I saw all that snow was that my snipe would be gone; they would have risen from beside their countless pools, from their feeding-grounds of marsh and their shelters of heather, and would have gone by those bright levels along the horizon where the bog went wide through the hills, and would have taken the way of Marlin’s dreams until they came to the sea. From the rushy lands they would be gone too. And even the geese, with snow on their grazing grounds, would feed tonight upon beaches beyond my knowledge. But perhaps the most essential quality of a sportsman is an aptitude to adapt his pursuits to the weather: he is not the enemy of the elements, having far more friendship for the north wind and the snowstorm than he has for the railway and pavement. It is the weather that brings him everything; and, if sometimes he try to outwit it, keeping himself warm or dry with the alliance of some stout willow, when the air is full of hail, it is a contest no more unfriendly than that between two teams of athletes. He has no more enmity for the weather than a business man has for his banks. Indeed, I think we sportsmen are somewhat nearer to the tides and the growth of trees and the night and the morning, and to whatever we call the plan that orders the planets, than many a man that does more useful things. And so I immediately thought of what the weather would bring me in place of the geese and the snipe. It would put the woodcock in. The woods should be full of them.

  So after breakfast I went to find Murphy, to ask him what chance there would be of getting beaters. I found him standing outside the door of his house at the edge of one of the woods, looking out over the snow with the air of one estimating the qualities of some new neighbour. At my question of beaters a thoughtful expression came over his weather-beaten face. He said little or nothing, and I knew that the thought in his face was not concerned with how to get the beaters, but the subtler problem of how to speak to me without offending or even disappointing me; and I realised that the difficulty about the beaters was that I had no authority to take the men from such work as they might be doing. He would gladly have done it for me, and would have found it easier to go round collecting the beaters, working only his legs, than to work his brains to find for me appeasing temporising answers. But he could not get the men without asking the steward, and the steward ran the place for my father. Things were like that till my father’s letter arrived. And this was not for another two days, two days that I spent in walking about with my gun by streams and wherever water was not frozen, to find snipe that the weather had driven out of their marshes. Two or three I found, and a teal, and the larder profited by my lonely walks.

  And then one morning my father’s letter arrived. It had been posted in Paris, posted on the day on which I had woken to see the snow, arriving two days later. It showed me that my father had not stopped even three or four hours in London, but had gone straight on. I wondered at this haste, thinking he would have been safe enough there, but I was young and knew nothing of the extent of the ramifications of politics. This was the letter.

  My dear Charles,

  Run the place as well as you can till I return. I’ve told the bank to let Brophy have funds to pay the men. There are things that I want to tell you about the Dutch picture, and about other things in the library, for pictures and books are roads that may lead you far. Best of all, keep out of politics. I will write to you at greater length, but first I must be sure that my letters are not being tampered with. I have put a number 8 shot in this letter, the kind you use for shooting snipe. Write and tell me if one fell out when you opened the envelope. I know you will open it at breakfast and will easily find the shot on the tablecloth if it rolled out, but if none was there my letters are being opened.

  Your affectionate father,

  James Charles Peridore.

  I should explain perhaps that our family have always been called James Charles, or Charles James, father and eldest son alternately, ever since our disastrous loyalty to James II. But, poor Stuarts, our loyalty to them was no more disastrous to us than our loyalty to-day. When we are called James Charles, the first name is after James II, and the second after the prince that they called the Young Pretender; when we are called Charles James, the first name is after Charles I and the next after James II. They gave us a medal and that nebulous dukedom, and that is all we got for it.

  To return to the letter, the shot was there all right and I wrote at once to say so, but from that day the correspondence ceased. I got no more letters from my father.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The thing that at first most concerned me about my father’s letter was his permission to run the place. This meant that I could have beaters. I interfered in no other way with the routine, that Brophy ran as well as he could, but I went at once to him and asked him to let Murphy have the men. Seven or eight were all he could let me have, in fact it was pretty well all that there were. So young Finn was sent for, and soon he was going round the place calling the men loudly by name. It occurred to me then, as it never had done before, that young Finn was oddly described. He was tall and greatly wrinkled, and his long beard that once I remembered to have had faint tints of yellow about the edges was now pure white. When my father called him young Finn, as he always did, I never thought of questioning the designation, which was no doubt given him to distinguish him from some Finn that I never knew; but now for the first time I questioned the appropriateness of it, though I still called him young Finn.

  Young Finn, then, went shouting round the place and soon had seven men, and the morning was not too far on its way when Murphy had them all lined up at the beginning of a long narrow wood that hid the wall that shut us off from the road, a wall built too high for any man to climb, but time had given a hold between rows of stone, first to moss, then to men’s feet, and fingers had done the rest, so that tracks led into the wood here and there from the wall; no one knew whose; probably the men that c
ame to look for my father had come in by one of these ways. There were brambles here, roving a little further every year about the feet of old beech trees; and here were box bushes and patches of privet. The men went through the wood shouting: “Hi, cock; hi, cock,” as they went. But the snow had so beaten down the usual homes of the woodcock that in this wood we got none at all.

  “They’ll all be in the fir woods,” said Murphy.

  So we all set off towards them, wilder woods at the far end of the demesne, with the tidy land lying park-like in front of them, and the wild hill behind. Wide rides had been cut for shooting, and I took my place at the junction of two of them. It was while standing there waiting for a woodcock, that I began to think of my father’s letter. I had fully understood his reference to books and pictures in the library. Obviously he intended to tell me, as soon as he was sure that his letters came safely, about that exit from the library that was somewhere behind my back while I watched the Dutch picture. At the time it had been far better for me not to know, but who knew what the future would bring forth? And he wanted to tell me now of that secret path to safety that might one day be needed again. But one thing I had not understood when first I read the letter, and that was why he had explained to me that number 8 shot was the kind one used to shoot snipe. At the time it had rather annoyed me; now it puzzled me. It was rather I that used to tell him what shot one used for different birds, for shooting was the chief glory of the Christmas holidays, and I could not help talking of all its details; it was so new to me then; so was life. But why had my father wasted ink on telling me what shot I used for snipe? And from thinking of this I came to other things in the letter. Why was he so sure that I would open the letter over the dining-room tablecloth? As a matter of fact, I hadn’t. Not that it mattered, for the two sides of the folded sheet of paper had been turned over for a quarter of an inch, the open end being towards me, so that it could not easily have fallen out at all. What then of the people that he seemed to suppose might open the letter and lose the shot? Why should they lose it? Did he suppose that they would open the letter hurriedly where there was no level surface to receive the shot if it fell out, whereas I would have the tablecloth to receive it? Perhaps. But in any case the envelope showed no sign of having been tampered with, and with a boy’s arrogance I was a little contemptuous of these elder fancies, that I regarded as too complicated for reality. Another thought I had about that pellet of shot, which came again later, but just now a woodcock gliding by me put it out of my mind. I had not seen the woodcock soon enough, but there is always some excuse for missing a woodcock, if not seeing the bird in time can be regarded as any excuse: rather it is an aggravation. Anyhow, I missed it. And more came by and I missed them too, till it began to look like a morning wasted. And yet every woodcock I missed was teaching me something, and any skill in defeating this difficult bird, that I later came to share with most Irish gentlemen, I was learning then. The snow helped me. I began to see by marks of my shot on the snow how far I had shot behind a bird. And then the knack came to me: it came merely by aiming far in front of the apparently slow flight, and I began to hit them then, except when they were flying straight away from me, when an unforeseeable twist would take them out of my aim, usually just as I fired, or when they were flying straight towards me; that was the most difficult of all.