by Lord Dunsany
These thoughts that I set down to-day I have shown to Father Svlonenski, who lives at the back of the cathedral here, not far from my house, to ask if they touch the safety of my soul; and he says that there is no danger, but that at the time of which I write my soul was indeed in peril.
CHAPTER XVI
After that walk in the garden I went home with a good sensible horse to take care of me. Had I walked there to-day—Ah, no, it is as I have said; the cold would probably kill me; but were I young to-day, and were Laura young in that garden, I should, I suppose, have driven away in a motor, and I should not have been fit to drive it. Or would it have scattered my dreams, in the way that machines do, and left me changing gears without harming the clutches, and forgetful of Tir-nan-Og? But I think my old horse understood, and he brought me home with my head full of soaring thoughts, and of visions of happiness in this earth, visions whose borders lapped like a rising tide on the shores of the Land of the Young.
The moon was about full and my hunter lame, so that it was time to go to the red bog; and next morning Ryan drove me again to Clonrue. And as we went we talked history, the history of men like me and men like Ryan; not about Kings of France and their favourites, Corn Laws or conquests, but about the fox and the line he took, and of those who followed. Now and then a law comes, and in the course of decades affects the countryside, increasing the narrow-banks round smaller holdings, or filling the hedges with wire, and the close observer may note its effect on gardens and thatches, and, in the case of some great law, even the habits of the people for a little while may be touched by it; but the following of the fox is our history, and all the lesser grades of sport; a tapestry of figures with horses, greyhounds and guns on the eternal background of agriculture.
And I noticed that Ryan had forgiven me for laming the horse, and I saw from this that I must have gone well in the hunt; not that Ryan ever expressed any annoyance with me, or retracted it, nor did I hear a word of what was said of that hunt to Ryan, nor know who said it. Now that so many in Ireland can read, and newspapers are in nearly every cottage, news probably travels a little slower and far less accurately; but in those days men spoke vividly of what they had seen themselves, to those who were keenly interested in it, and a good tale not only outlasted a daily paper, but went right down the generations.
I think, though I do not know, that some enquiries were being made that day in Clonrue about the identity of the man who had waited three hours by the side of the road to see that I was all right after the great hunt. Whether this were so or not I could not say, for I closely followed my father’s advice in his letter, and kept out of politics; but some enquiry must have been afoot, for there was not a man to be seen in the street; the doors of the houses were shut, and any men in sight were working hard in the fields. It is inconvenient never to refer to the man in the long black coat by his name, which by now I knew; but for reasons which I will mention later it would be injudicious, and even tactless, to do so. We passed by Clonrue, its white walls gleaming in silence, and came to the bohereen running down among willows, till it seemed to catch sight of the bog and suddenly stop in terror. Certainly there was a strange, an enchanted, look about that land on which the Marlins lived that might well have awed such an orderly thing as a road, or its little relative a bohereen. It is not that I think that Mrs. Marlin could have enchanted it; rather I think that living there all her life on that wild willowy land beneath the frown of the bog, that in this flat country seemed to rise up almost like a mountain, the queer haunt had given her whatever powers she had. Certainly one would expect some difference in the ways and abilities of the citizens of some town, living amongst their kind, and entirely surrounded by the works of man, from the ways of one who for companionship had chiefly the voices of curlews ringing through miles of emptiness, and whose news of the seasons must have been brought by the varying notes of birds; at whom the moon must have peered through the willows, more of a neighbour than he can ever be to the cities, and to whom the white mist rising up from the marshes at night must have seemed a friendly spirit. Were it otherwise, surroundings would be without their influence upon us, which means that Mother Earth would have no say in the bringing up of her children.
I believe that my father had had some intention once of putting an iron fence across that land, from the bohereen down to the bog, which with the help of the stream would have enclosed a rushy space that two bullocks might have grazed, but the men that came to dig the holes for the fence had seen such fury smouldering in the eyes of Mrs. Marlin that in the end nothing had come of it and the land was left as it was. That land and the stream that ran through it were things so primeval and sacred to her that to alter them at all must have seemed to her the bewildering sacrilege that altering the tides by an hour or so, if we could do it, or rearranging a constellation, would seem to most of us.
Marlin I found, as I so often found him, gazing out over the bog to the distance, where wide pieces of water near the horizon seemed always gathering sunlight.
“Ah, Master Char-les,” he said when he saw me, “I was waiting for you. It’s the full of the moon, and the snipe will be all on the red bog.”
“Will the geese come, Marlin?” I asked.
“God knows that,” he replied. “It’s over three weeks since they were shot at. Begob they might.”
Then he took one look at the wind, which he did by turning his face to it till he could hear the sound of it equally in each of his ears, and we set off at once across a part of the bog, walking straight into the wind, towards the low line of hills that bounded the heather in the direction of Gurraghoo.
“How did you get on in the hunt?” he asked.
“Well enough,” I said.
And snipe got up at the sound of our voices.
“Don’t fire at them,” said Marlin. “There’s no man living could hit them walking up wind.”
It was his old way of worshipping the golden idol of Tact before the goddess Truth, if they got in each other’s way. And I took his good advice, and we spoke again of the hunt, and I told him how his mother had foretold to me the end of that famous run.
“Ah, she would know that,” was all that he said.
“How can she tell?” I asked.
“Begob, she knows,” said Marlin.
And I could pry no further.
To our right lay the bare horizon, and sometimes as we walked I saw Marlin glancing thither, and knew that his thoughts were away by the paths of morass and mosses with the bog’s long wandering to the shore, and the land that lay a little way over the water. But in this world, to which his thoughts came instantly back, his only care was to give me a good day’s sport. Once more I tried to dissuade him from his heresy, but my words fell lame and unpersuasive, since Tir-nan-Og had been the topic of conversation between Laura and me: more than that it had been; almost Tir-nan-Og had been the land to which our spirits had roved and in whose orchards they met; sometimes, to this day, if I dream I am young, it is there that my dreams go, and to this day Laura is there with them. And, if by day I think sometimes of holy things Heaven will not grudge me these straying and frivolous dreams, which come seldom now, and which I fear, Hereafter, may never come any more.
When we came to the dry land under the low hills we turned and set out to walk across the bog, with the open horizon now on our left, and the path to Tir-nan-Og, as I had come to think of it. I took the speck of a white cottage on the other line of hills as my guide and walked t’wards it all the morning. The wind, which was now behind us, came rather from over my left shoulder, so Marlin walked on my right, and most of the snipe he put up flew across me. I did not shoot well; but among all the excuses there are for missing a snipe I had this time a fairly valid reason. I was stiff after that great hunt, as I always am after the first hunt of the year, unless I have been riding about a good deal; and in shooting snipe there is one thing you have to do before you aim at the twisting bird, and that is to get your own balance. Every step on the bog
is chosen; were it left to chance, the chance would be about even on each step finding a safe landing, or taking one down into the quiet slime that Marlin used to say was bottomless. The snipe seldom gets up exactly as both feet are firmly planted, so that sometimes one has to shoot from off one leg, even aiming while stepping forward, and firing before planting one’s leading foot on the tussock; and, if one attends to this last matter first, the snipe is well away over flashing pools and dark heather before one has time to turn to him. The perfect balance that can leave the step to itself and concentrate upon aiming needs supple limbs, and in spite of youth all of my muscles that are the most important for balance were stiff and even aching. Even my arms, though this mattered less, and certainly my left one, were a little slower than usual; so that every snipe had a handicap in his favour of a fifth or a tenth of a second, which was all that most of them needed. On my side I had the consolations of Marlin, always forthcoming, always sufficiently varied; imaginative, and yet never crossing the line at which any inaccuracy would have been obvious. By one o’clock we were still out on the bog with the dry land far before us; I had shot a few snipe, and we chose a suitable one of the bog’s million islands, on the heather of which to lunch. Once more I offered Marlin sandwiches, but the offer was received with the polite indifference with which a well-bred dog would refuse a handful of grass; not that dogs never eat grass, but they eat it rarely and prefer a bone; even so Marlin preferred whiskey. And sitting there with the bog all round me, and with that soft wind blowing, the thought suddenly came to me that in a few days I should be back at Eton, following up the intricacies of some Greek verb.
“I go back to Eton on Thursday,” I said to Marlin.
“That’s a fine school,” said Marlin.
“It is,” I said.
“Don’t all the gentry send their sons there?” he said.
“Some of them,” I replied.
“Sure, there’s no school like it,” he said.
“There is not,” said I.
“But, sure, there’s no use going back to it,” he said.
“I’m afraid I’ve got to,” I answered.
“But if you were too ill to go?” said Marlin.
“I’d have to be very ill,” said I.
“Begob,” said Marlin, “there’s diseases that men know nothing about, that Dr. Rory over at Clonrue knows the same as an old woman would know the name of her cat.”
“I’m afraid they’re rather quick at finding out those sort of diseases,” I said reflectively.
“Begob,” said he, “not when they have Dr. Rory to deal with. And the geese will be coming in of nights to the bog from now on, like chickens into a fowl-run.”
Such temptations do not come to most boys, their parents see to that; and what aggravated the temptation was that Dr. Rory had been in the hunt to Clonnabrann, and I had the feeling he would do anything that I asked.
“No,” I said, “I can’t stay away from Eton just to shoot a goose.” And I looked out over the bog, set in its pale emerald crescents of low hills which did not wholly encircle it, and away and away over brilliant islands of moss in lakes the size of hearth-rugs, and still away and away, till clouds were lifting from the shores of the lakes; and, as I looked, the loneliness of that strange land found a voice, and two notes floated down, as full of magic as any of all the sounds of the sky, and I saw for a moment against a mountain of cloud that musical rover the curlew. “And besides,” I added, “I couldn’t be sure of finding Dr. Rory in time.”
“He’s in Clonrue this minute,” said Marlin.
Honestly, had Marlin not said that, I should have let the difficulty of finding Dr. Rory defeat the temptation. But Marlin’s words drifted me further. Had a good education attracted me more than the cry of the curlew, I should perhaps have some better occupation now; and yet I am very comfortable here in large well-furnished rooms; and wishing that anything in the past had been otherwise is idler than wishing for the moon, to which man may one day attain, but to the past never.
So I got up there and then and set off with Marlin over the bog, back to his mother’s house, only tarrying to make my bag of snipe up to half a dozen in order to send them to Mrs. Lanley.
We climbed by the steep soft precipice with which the bog ended and frowned down on that land in which only the Marlins lived, and we came to their white walls gleaming below the dark of the thatch. Marlin brought me in, and when his mother saw me I perhaps brought back to her mind a mood in which she was when last I had been there, for she stood up from her chair and raised her right hand high, and began to speak of the great cities of Ireland that were further down the stream that ran by the cottage. “The world will know them,” she said, “when Ireland’s free. Our people will look down from their balconies on the navies of distant lands. The great ships of Africa will come into our harbours, and the treasures of Zanzibar. With silks of the furthest East and jewels from the Indies they will come to deck Ireland like a queen, and pearls will drop from their treasuries as they come, and run down the steps of our harbours into the water. All seas will know our ships, and the fame of our land will be in far men’s mouths.”
And she looked into the fire, or the smoke going up from it, for something she wished to see, and was silent a long while. Then she turned to me from the smoke. “Oh, Master Char-les, Master Char-les,” she cried, “forget all I’ve said.”
CHAPTER XVII
I walked over the land between the bog and the bohereen, where the willows leaned their cleft and aged trunks, looking as though they were enchanted by witches, or as though they were the very growth, and in the very place, that passed on the power of witchcraft to human beings from the ancient secrets of Earth. I walked up the bohereen and on to Clonrue, for I had told Ryan to come for me late, and it was not yet four. I found him at the centre of Clonrue, the public-house, in the stables where he had put up the horse and trap.
“I’ve come to see the doctor, Ryan,” I said.
“Are ye not well, sir?” said Ryan.
“I have to go back to Eton on Thursday,” I said.
“Begob,” said Ryan, “you’d not be well enough for that.”
“Do you know is he in?” I asked him.
And, as whatever information Clonrue possessed had passed through that room in which I found Ryan, he was able to tell me all I needed to know.
“He came in half an hour ago,” said Ryan, “and will be there for another hour.”
So I went over to see Dr. Rory, and found him in, as Ryan had said.
“That was a great hunt,” he said as I was shown in by the parlourmaid.
“It was,” I said.
“Are you well?” said he.
“That’s what I wanted to ask you about,” I said.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I have to go back to Eton on Thursday,” I said.
“That’s a serious matter,” said he, “and with hounds hunting the way they have been lately, a good hunt nearly every day, though none of them up to the Clonrue hunt.”
“Could anything be done about it?” I asked.
“You’ve come to the right man,” said he.
I hardly knew what to say next.
And he said: “Have you anything of a cold? There’s a lot of that about, and very dangerous things when neglected.”
“I have not,” I said.
“Well, did you get a fall in the hunt? There’s lots of men think that doesn’t matter, but there’s no part of you that can hit the ground that may not suffer some damage or other.”
“No, I didn’t get a fall,” I said.
Dr. Rory looked grave at that, and waited as though to see if I really meant it. Then he reached for a stethoscope.
“I’d better pound you,” he said.
And this he did, and very uncomfortable such things were in those days; short ear-trumpets whose narrower ends were dug into one’s ribs; and Dr. Rory’s face grew graver and graver.
“Nothing wron
g there,” he said.
“I’m afraid I shall have to go back,” I replied.
“Wait,” he said, rather impatiently, like a thinker interrupted by some frivolity.
“I wouldn’t take a certificate that wasn’t true,” I said, my conscience waking from sleep, though much too late.
“Nor you wouldn’t get one from me that wasn’t true,” he answered.
“I’m afraid I’m quite fit really,” I said.
“Wait,” he said again, and added: “No man can be sure of that.” And after a few moments’ reflection he asked: “Have you been vaccinated lately?”
“No,” I said.
“Then you’d better be,” said Dr. Rory.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because McCluskey,” he said, “is a tenant of your father’s, and you might be going to see him. But it’s my duty to advise you not to go, because if you did, you couldn’t go back to Eton.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because he has small-pox,” he said. “It would be enough if you went in at his door. Only if you neglect my advice not to go, you’d better be vaccinated a day or two before you went in, so as to give whatever devilry there is in the lymph a bit of a start of the devilry that there is in the small-pox.”
“Could you vaccinate me now?” I asked.
“I could that,” he said.
So I was duly vaccinated.
“It’d be a good thing to wear gloves,” said Dr. Rory, “they keep off all kinds of infection, especially the contagious kind, like small-pox.”
“I will,” I said; and he saw me off.
“Well, it’s time you were vaccinated in any case,” he said on his doorstep. “You’ll be seventeen in a short while.”
Next day I drove back to Lisronagh, to try for some snipe again, before they went from the red bog, and to see if the geese were yet coming in, as Marlin had said. As I walked from the bohereen I saw Mrs. Marlin a little way from her cottage gazing over those strange lands upon which she lived, with what looked like an anxious air, almost as though she watched against something that threatened them, an impression I only had for a moment, knowing of nothing that could ever affect those sparse deserted fields. When she saw me she turned her gaze at once from the future, or whatever it was that she watched with that anxious look, saying: “I’ll call Tommy for you.” And she turned and called her son with a high shriek that must have carried as far as the voice of the curlew; and presently Marlin appeared, coming across the bog, and dropped over the steep edge of the raw turf and walked towards me.