The Curse of the Wise Woman

by Lord Dunsany

  The beaters’ voices came close; and now the woodcock, that glide as silently as a dream flits through the night, were flying noisily, for they were getting up close, and the woodcock gains that quiet mastery of speed that he has with a rapid flutter of wings as he rises, that is audible for quite fifty yards. One came straight towards me, giving that difficult shot that I mentioned, and I missed with both barrels. I missed with the right barrel because I aimed straight at him, and, if he had really been coming straight at me, bird and shot would have met, but the woodcock never is coming quite straight at one; to begin with he was higher from the ground than my eye, and, as he was not sinking, he cannot have been flying straight towards it; consequently I was a bit behind the bird with my right. Then he saw me, and up he went like a very irregular rocket and whirled away over the trees, while I scarcely got an aim at him at all with my left barrel. I had two or three down, and Murphy eagerly showed me where to find the pin-­feathers, which then were great prizes to me. How much money or toil it takes to come by something we value, later on in life! And all the while we are losing things by the way. Would a diamond bring me now the pleasure that the pin-feather of a woodcock could give me then? I doubt it. And all the while there are people teaching youth to look forward to the solider things wrapped up in the mists of the future, and to scorn as trivial the wealth that lies all around them. What was that fable of the dog with a bone in his mouth, that saw the reflection of a better bone in the water? And can it apply here? Perhaps not.

  No such thoughts as this, that trouble my mind now, came near me then, and I went on to take my stand at the end of the next beat, full of keen expectations encouraged by Murphy. There was a part of the wood there that had been swept by an old storm, and it had been replanted with spruce. This spruce was now just the right age to shelter woodcock, and its layers of greenery held up the snow like the many roofs of a pagoda. Again, as I stood there, I thought of my father’s letter. Why had he turned the edges in so carefully if he had wanted the shot to fall out when the letter was opened? And there came the other thought that a woodcock had previously interrupted: what would anyone tampering with the letter do if he lost the pellet of shot and then read that it ought to be there? I turned over these thoughts, but with far less alertness than that keen fervour with which I waited for the woodcock that Murphy promised under the spruce. And, sure enough, they were there. At first none came at all; and then one came fluttering between two trees, both heavily heaped with snow, and I missed it. But it had shown me the way, for, as often happens with all kinds of birds, others flew the same line as the first: in that dense growth of young spruce there was a kind of white valley down which they came and, one after another, slipped out into the open between the same two trees. I got one, and then another. It was the one place to which they all seemed to have come for the shelter below the dense stiff branches of the spruce that the snow could not beat down. I did not get a right and left, but by the time that the beaters had come up, chanting “Hi, cock,” as they came, I had ten woodcock down. It was some years before I did better than that, and to this hour I can remember the pleasure with which I answered Murphy when he said: “Did you get one, Master Char-les?”

  We picked them all up without much difficulty, which we should not have done but for the snow; for you can stand within a yard of a woodcock, dead or alive, and not see him among brown leaves or bracken. The brown on a woodcock is like the brown of the bracken, and the black bars on him are like the darkness in the spaces between dead leaves; they are more than like; they are identical. Man has to invent the cloak of invisibility in his fairy tales, but all animals that are hunted, or hunt, are born with it.

  Then we went on to an older part of the wood, over that dazzling page on which Nature writes the doings of all her children. Nothing had stirred in the night, since the snow had ended, without leaving clear record of its leaps and travellings, of its escapes or pursuits. In the old wood I got two or three rabbits; then we all had lunch in Murphy’s house, on that excellent dish that Ireland has given to a world that does not always understand it, for I have known cooks beyond our shores to cut all the fat off the cutlets, in order to make them tidy, before putting their sad remnants of lean and bone in the pot. Had I gone to the house for lunch, though it was barely twenty minutes away, I should have lost on the two walks and on the slowness of a more ceremonious meal, little less than an hour of the short winter’s day. We went on, warmed, over the snow, and by the time the sun set huge and round through the wood I had only got one more woodcock. But the bag was good enough, and it was long before I got so many again.

  That evening I went to Brophy’s house to tell him of the day’s sport. I remember him as a tall bent man with a very long brown beard. He had, compared with the rest of the men on the place, some sort of education, and he was a man whom I believed I could trust not to pass on my conversation with him as gossip. So I told him of my father’s letter, and even about the pellet of shot. “That was a good scheme, sir,” he said.

  And yet I wondered about it, and still was a little puzzled.

  CHAPTER IX

  Days passed while the crows and the jackdaws came close to the windows for help from their human neighbour, now that all food was hidden by this sudden change in the world; so I used to share my breakfast with them and to watch the crows walking up, usually sideways, with their deep-blue heads and the purple sheen on their bodies, and their wings a little open to balance their walk, and the grey-headed jackdaws sailing suddenly down from some turret above me. Days passed, and the day came round when my father should have written again. And no letter came; nor the next day. In my growing uneasiness I looked for someone who could tell me all about it; and there was no one. It was then that the temptation came to me one evening to look for help from a source whence aid is rightly forbidden us, and to consult Marlin’s mother. From which temptation I turned in time, but I still drove over to Lis­ronagh next morning, though not to seek help from her; for it occurred to me that among all his heathen fancies there was a streak of shrewdness in Marlin that would be as well able to see through this mystery as the wits of any I knew. We came to the old bohereen and drove only a short way down it, for we were stopped soon by a snowdrift that had found a gap in a hedge and had slanted across our way, its delicate sides smoothed out by the very wings of the wind, barring the road to the bog as though the things of the wild had suddenly come by that mood in which they sometimes weary of man and his wheels. So I got out and walked on to the house of the Marlins, telling Ryan to put up the horse and trap in Clonrue and to wait for me there.

  The land lay still under that great enchantment that a whim of winter had worked with the north wind for a wand; and the bog that had held so many shades and colours was now a glistening plain with shadowy lumps, that went shining away to the sky-line, while grave white hills seemed to watch it on either side. And there was Marlin, motionless, as those slopes, gazing out over it to its furthest point, where it went unbounded by hills to a golden flood of far sunlight. It is right enough that a bog-watcher should watch the bog; and yet I thought from his rapt stillness, and from the look of his face as I came nearer, that it was not of any such work that he was thinking, but of the way over the bog to that flood of sunlight, and thence, keeping still to the bog where it curved to the distant sea, and so to that heathen land a little way over the water, whither none turn even their thoughts who hope for Heaven.

  He was a few yards away from the cottage, and his back was towards me as he watched where the bog beneath its mantle of snow went over the sky-line through the wide gap in the hills. When I was quite close to him and he saw me, he seemed to bring back his gaze from further than the horizon; and so strange for a moment that gaze appeared, coming back to the fields of men, so ill-content to be here, that I wondered if Marlin was ill. And suddenly he was his old self again, my teacher in the only learning I sought. “There’ll be no geese to-night, Master Char-les,” he said. “The bog is frozen and they
can’t get at the briskauns.”

  “I didn’t come for the geese,” I said, though I had my gun.

  “There’ll be no snipe there neither, Master Char-les,” he said, “for the river’s frozen too.”

  For the river, though a running stream after it fell from the bog, was a sluggish line of wide pools among bright mosses before it left the heather.

  “We’ll go the other way,” I said, pointing down the stream.

  “Begob, there might be a teal on it,” said Marlin.

  “What shot should one use for a teal?” I asked; and no young scholar ever studied the aorist, or the tricks of any foreign verb, as I investigated such things as this. But I forget now what shot Marlin recommended.

  “Will you not come into the house and have a sup of something?” said Marlin.

  But I was in search of advice and I feared this house, lest I should be tempted to seek it there; and such things are forbidden. And I answered Marlin out of such store of politeness or evasions (call them what you will) as one is bound to keep for the purpose of refusing drinks.

  We had not gone far when I took from my pocket my father’s letter and showed it to Marlin. “Begob,” said Marlin, ‘‘wouldn’t you read it to me yourself? Sure no one would read it better.”

  This tribute to some special skill in reading for which Marlin was giving me credit failed to conceal from me that he was unable to read himself, and probably all the better able for that to do his own thinking. So I read him the letter and showed him the actual shot and the turning of the two sides of the paper that prevented it falling out sideways. Marlin looked at these things for a moment and thought over the letter. And then he said: “Sure that would be no scheme at all.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “In the first place,” said Marlin, “if the shot fell out in Dublin, wouldn’t they pick it up again as soon as they read it had a right to be there?”

  “But if it rolled away and was lost, before they read about it?” I said.

  “Sure, wouldn’t they put in another?” replied Marlin.

  Yes, that was obvious enough.

  “And isn’t the Duke a shrewd man?” said Marlin.

  “I don’t know,” said I.

  “Don’t I know damned well he is?” answered Marlin. “Sure he wouldn’t be alive this day if he wasn’t.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted.

  “True enough,” said Marlin. “For they were clever men that were after him.”

  I made no answer, and Marlin went on. “Then wouldn’t he make a better scheme than that?”

  And all the questions I had asked in my mind about that letter came all together at once to a single point, kindling a light on the problem that Marlin saw in my face.

  “Begob he did,” said Marlin.

  CHAPTER X

  As we went by a willow I suddenly saw a teal on the far bank of the stream, barely twenty yards away, a male teal standing on a patch of grass that had been sheltered from snow by an aged trunk of an osier. I had never seen a teal so close: I could see the band round his eyes going along his face to the neck, a dark green patch upon his chestnut head; and I had the idea that having got so close I was certain of that teal. All this was in one instant. He seemed so large, standing against the snow that I thought he would rise as duck do, slowly and heavily. But suddenly he was off; and without any flutter, such as the woodcock makes, without any gradual increase of speed like the duck, he seemed to be instantly in the fullness of flight, like a snipe, or like an arrow. I fired at this bird, that but a moment ago seemed taken unawares as we came round the willow, and missed with my right barrel. Then he soared upwards. How far to aim above a teal soaring from the first shot, and how far in front, I think I learned during the next twenty years, but it took me all that time or a little longer; the shot that I fired with my left barrel then went nowhere near him.

  “Missed,” I said to Marlin, which as words go was unnecessary; but I think I must have expressed a great deal more in my voice, for he was at once at hand with his consolation.

  “Sure no man could hit a teal,” he said, “when they get up like that.”

  And I asked him how men did hit teal.

  “Sure I’ll drive them for you one day,” he said, “and you’ll get them coming over.”

  And he began to tell me of pools in the bog where they came, and of rushes in which I could hide while he went round to put forty or fifty of them over me; till the future seemed to be full of compensation for my present disappointment.

  And just as Marlin was telling me of these things there occurred an event; common and unimportant enough (if one has any idea of what is important or not), that dwells with me to this day, a tiny light illuminating the past for me, even in towns: a blue patch brighter than the summer sky, a speck that might have fallen undimmed from some Indian heaven, moved down the centre of the water, curving all the way with every curve of the banks, till that streak of earthly blue exactly divided the stream: it was the kingfisher.

  I was silent with wonder.

  “He’s the one bird that goes from here to there backwards and forwards,” said Marlin.

  And I knew that he was talking again of Tir-nan-Og.

  “He must look lovely over there,” I said.

  “Indeed he does not,” said Marlin. “Over that water, and under that sky, and fluttering about the heads of queens that are young forever, dressed in silks outshining all the silk of the East, and with eyes outshining that, he looks very ordinary.”

  “Does he?” I muttered.

  “He does indeed,” said Marlin.

  And then he told me that the swallows too go to Tir-nan-Og. But only once a year: the kingfisher alone goes backwards and forwards, and perhaps the owl.

  We walked some way along that wandering stream that carried the soft bog-water I knew not where. I got no teal, and all the snipe were gone, probably by that very path along which I had seen Marlin gazing, over the bog to the sunlight, and thence to the sea; a path, I mean, for birds and for the thoughts of men like Marlin, a path through the air and over dreams, for no path led over the bog, but a series of dangerous steps, dead heather and brilliant mosses all the way, the first safe and the second deadly. Again, as we walked back to the cottage, now dream-like in the invisibility that the snow almost gave it, I saw Marlin lift his eyes to that far part of the bog where, unbounded by hills and touching only the sky, it had so clearly the air of going everlastingly on. He lifted his eyes to it as a caged eagle might to the mountains, as though his home were afar. Again that look troubled me. “Are you well, Marlin?” I said.

  “Ah, well enough,” replied Marlin, and once more his eyes were smiling on these fields and hedges of ours.

  We entered the cottage under the thatch whose hollows were hugely filled with snow, and Marlin’s mother looked at me in silence. As a student might look at a book, perhaps a little strange to him, she seemed in those moments of silence to be regarding my life; not the few years that were then past, but those that were coming. And, though I can give no proof that this was so, I seemed to read it as easily in her face as she was probably reading those years in mine.

  “We walked down the river, Mother,” said Marlin.

  “Aye, the river,” said she, “and one of the great rivers of the world, though it’s small here. For it widens out on its way, and there’s cities on it high and ancient and stately, with wide courts shining by the river’s banks, and steps of marble going down to the ships, and folk walking there by the thousand, all proud of their mighty river, but forgetting the wild bog-water.”

  “What cities are they?” I asked, for I felt myself believing in them.

  “Unknown, unknown to the world,” she said. “But when Ireland’s free and their ships go sailing out, they’ll be known the world over.”

  I asked her when that would be.

  “Aye, when?” she said. “And all the cities of the world, waiting to greet their sisters, are asking when. But there’ll
be a day when Ireland’s ships, putting out from all our rivers, will crowd every sea. And they’ll see no grander ships in all their journeys. And they’ll come to all the cities that have ports on any sea, bringing their merchandise, at which the people of all markets will wonder. And the ambassadors from foreign lands, coming to greet us, will pass up our rivers and anchor under the walls of the Irish cities, and see their ships go dark from the shade of our towers and humble from the glow of our cities’ pride. And when they ask of our wealth and the trade that we do with the other great nations of the world, our singers will tell them, coming down to the harbour’s edge with trumpets and gonfalons and telling the men of strange lands of Ireland’s glory. And the ambassadors will go back wistful into their own lands, telling what they have seen in the West, and all the nations will send costly gifts to welcome us, and to win from us treaties with far Indian kings. Aye, kings with crowns of pearl and jade will seek us, travelling from the boundaries of Earth in ships of scented timber.” And suddenly she burst out wildly laughing and threw her arms up high, and dropped them again as though exhausted by that tumult of laughter, and sat down weeping bitterly.