by Lord Dunsany
CHAPTER XXIII
When I saw the willows shining I hurried on, for anxiety drove me on over the little bridges to hear the news of Marlin. The curlews uttered their curious cry on my left, beyond the wavy strata, while above me a skylark sang on and on and on; and, amongst all the cries of the birds and the gleam of the willows, my melancholy deepened, standing out all the blacker against the splendour of spring.
And then I saw Mrs. Marlin, far off, in her garden. She was not hurrying, she was not wailing; and I knew how grief would have racked that dark woman, giving a wild movement to her strides and a certain terror to every line of her. Or if I did not know to what fury grief would have urged her spirit, I saw at least, and even at that distance, that no great passion was driving her; although later, when I came nearer, I saw often a quick uneasy turn of her head towards the new huts and the dam that was building across the stream, as though a malevolence smouldered in her, or she rested from recently cursing; but at least Marlin was not dying; and, suddenly relieved of that fear, I walked towards her with all my anxieties gone.
“How is Marlin?” I asked, when I got within call of her.
“He’s all right, sir,” she said.
I came a few paces nearer.
“I am delighted to hear that,” I said to her. “The doctor gave a very bad account of him.”
And she laughed at that, with rather a sly look.
“Ah, what does he know?” she said.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Ah, he’s gone,” she replied.
“But Marlin, I mean,” said I.
“Aye. Sure, he’s gone,” she answered.
“Gone?” I said. “Where?”
“Over the bog,” she said.
“But what way?” I asked.
“A rainbow showed him,” she said.
“A rainbow?” I muttered.
And she went to the door and opened it for me, and we went in. And she offered me a chair before her great fireplace and sat down on a chair herself and gazed into the red embers of the turf, which never break into flame. And then she said: “He was very ill. Ill as the doctor said. But, sure, what does he know of anything, only of the affairs of that world?” And she pointed away from the bog.
“He was lying there in his bed yesterday evening, ill as the doctor said, and I was trying to get him to take some medicine, when he turned to me and says: ‘Mother, I must go. For if I stop any longer I’ll be dying. And I’ll not die in this earth.’ And I says to him: ‘Ireland’s a good enough land for any man to die in.’ And he says: ‘Not when it’s Hell you’d have to go to; and it’s where I’d go from here.’ And at that he rises up from his bed and puts on his boots, and gives one look round at the cottage. Then he gives me a kiss and sets off, and there was a rainbow shining. And no sooner had he climbed up by the bank of turf and set his foot on the bog, but the rainbow begins to go further and further off. And he follows it all the way to the everlasting morning.”
I don’t exactly know what she meant by that, but she pointed through a window as she spoke, in the direction in which the sun usually brightened far patches of water, away by the bog’s horizon, all the morning; the direction in which so often I had seen Marlin’s eyes stray.
“But how far did he go?” I asked.
“To Tir-nan-Og,” she said.
“But how did he know the way?” said I.
“The rainbow showed him,” she answered.
What had happened to Marlin? I wondered. Where had he gone?
“How far did you see him?” I asked.
“Away and away,” she said. “And the rainbow before him.”
“But he couldn’t walk out of your sight,” I said. “A sick man couldn’t have done it.”
But still she pointed away to the far horizon, where the water shone and no hills bounded the bog.
“The night came on,” she said, “after the rainbow left him.”
Her words frightened me. You can’t walk the bog out there in the night; or it is very nearly impossible.
“You should have called him back,” I said.
“Call back a rainbow!” she exclaimed, with a gust of laughter.
“No, Marlin,” I explained.
“Nor him, either,” she said. “They were both of them going away to the glory of Tir-nan-Og, the rainbow from the dark world and the coming of night, and my son from damnation. Little they know the rainbow from his few visits to these fields, little they know it that have not seen it glorying in its home, entwined with the apple-blossom of the Land of the Young; and little they know of a man till they have seen him in the splendour of his youth among the everlastingly youthful in the orchards of Tir-nan-Og.”
For a moment I feared she would try to go after him, and drown herself, thinking she could not go very far in safety, at her age, over the bog. “You’re not going, too?” I asked.
“I’ll never see him there,” she said. “God knows I’ll never see him there, having stayed on Earth too long, till my feet are slow with its weeds and my soul with its cares. Though I’ll say nothing harsh against Earth, for the sake of Ireland. And I have one thing more to do upon Earth yet. For I have to speak with the powers of bog and storm and night, and to learn their will with the men that are harming the heather.”
“Show me the way he went,” I said, and got up from the chair; for I felt sure that a man as sick as he was could never have walked far over the bog. And she rose and came with me out of the door and we walked to the bog’s edge, I impatient to find Marlin and trying to hurry her, she without any anxieties and only concerned with her reflections, which she uttered as we went.
“It’s by the blessing of God,” she said, “that mothers never see their sons grow old; bent and wrinkled and haggard. It’s the blessing of God. And they should not see them die. A few days more and Tommy would have died, there in his bed beside me; and no art of mine could have hindered it; for I have no power against the splendour of death. But he rose and walked away out of the world, where age cannot overtake him, and where death is only known from idle stories told in the orchards by those that are young for ever, for the sake of the touch of sadness that gives a savour to their immortal joy. Weakness and wrinkles and dying, they are the way of this world, and the shadow of damnation creeping nearer. But he has walked away from the world and away from the shadow.”
All the while I was trying to hurry her, picturing Marlin lying a mile away out in the bog, for I feared he could scarce have got further; and how would a sick man fare, out there all night?
“Was there any frost?” I asked her; for we still had a touch of frost sometimes at night, and she was nearer to these things than I in our large house.
But she only answered: “Aye, the world’s cold,” and gazed away before her with happy eyes as though she went to her son’s wedding.
“Hurry,” I said, for she would not quicken her pace. “Or we’ll find him dead.”
“Ah, no,” she said. “He would not wait for death. And why would he, with damnation prepared for him by those that are jealous of the land of the morning?”
I don’t know whom she meant; and, God knows, these are no words of mine, but only hers still haunting my memory, where I fear they should not be, and would not be if I could banish them.
And so we came to the steep edge of the bog and she climbed agilely up, and I after her; and for a while we walked in silence over the rushes. The moss lay grey all round us, crisp as a dry sponge, while we stepped on the heather and rushes, the heather all covered with dead grey buds, the rushes a pale sandy colour. I had never walked the bog in the spring before, and was surprised at the greyness of it. But some bright mosses remained, scarlet and brilliant green; and along the edge of the bog under the hills lay a slender ribbon of gorse, and the fields flashed bright above it, so that the bog lay like a dull stone set in gold, with a row of emeralds round the golden ring. A snipe got up brown, and turned, and flashed white in turning. A curlew rose and sped away
down the sky with swift beats of his long wings and loud outcry, giving the news, “Man, Man,” to all whose peace was endangered by our approach, and a skylark shot up and sang, and stayed above us, singing. The pools that in the winter lay between the islands of heather, and that Marlin used to tell me were bottomless, were most of them grey slime now, topped with a crust that looked as if it might almost bear one. We knew the way to go; the way that I had so often seen Marlin’s eyes gazing, the way that Mrs. Marlin said straight out was the way to Tir-nan-Og: I could see the water flashing over there, though the grey moss was dry about us. The fear that I had had that Mrs. Marlin would come to harm in the bog I had now entirely forgotten, for she stepped from tussock to tussock surely and firmly, with a stride that seemed to know the bog too well to falter even with age. We came, with the skylark still singing, to pools that were partly water and partly luxuriant moss: strange grasses leaned along them and burst into flower. More and more pools we met, and less grey moss, and presently the wide lakes lay before us, to which Marlin had looked so often. I stood on a hummock of heather and stared ahead, then looked at Mrs. Marlin. There was nothing but water and rushes and moss before us. We were as far as a sick man could have walked, apart from the danger and difficulty of all that lay ahead. If Marlin had come this way there was no hope for him.
“You are sure he went this way?” I asked, and knew that the question was hopeless even as I asked it.
Her face all lighted up, looking glad and young, and with shining eyes she gazed over the desolate water, and said: “Aye, he went this way, this way; away from the world and the shadow cast by damnation, black as tar on the cities. Aye, he went this way.”
And then I knew that Marlin shared with the Pharaohs that strange eternity of the body that only Egypt and the Irish bog can give. Centuries hence, when we are all mouldered away, some turf-cutter will find Marlin there and will look on a face and a figure untouched by all those years, even as though the body had obeyed the dream after all.
CHAPTER XXIV
Then I brought Mrs. Marlin back from the bog, thinking she had gone far enough, and knowing that the part of it to which we had come was dangerous walking even for a young man. For these were the waters that Marlin called “the sumach,” or some such word that I do not know how to spell, a mass of stored rains that grew heavier every year, till it flooded in under the roots of whatever growth gave a foothold, and floated the light surface of mosses and peat, till everything trembled round one as one walked: one called it the shaky bog, the most dangerous of all the kinds of bog that one walks. These waters were the source of the stream that ran past the Marlins’ house; but, as more rain came with the storms than left with the stream, the whole weight of the bog was increasing.
“We must get all the men we can find, and search the bog for him,” I said, when I got her back to the safe grey moss and the heather. And at that she laughed with peals of her strange wild laughter.
“Aye, search the world for him,” she said. “But he will not be there. And it’s not the world that wants him, but Hell. And Hell will not have him either. It’s the orchards of Tir-nan-Og that have him now, with the morning dripping from their branches in everlasting light, golden and slow, like honey. Aye, and the evening too, and both together; for Time that troubles us here comes not to those gleaming shores. Age, desolation and dying; that’s the way of these fields; and not one wrinkle, nor sigh, nor one white hair, ever came to Tir-nan-Og.”
“We must look for him,” I said. For it was a duty to do all that one could, even if the search seemed hopeless; and I did not wish her words to turn me away from it, as I feared that they soon would.
“Aye, search for ever,” she said, “and you’ll never see him. But I shall see him often.”
“Where?” I said.
“Where would it be,” she answered, “but about his mother’s house and over the heather that he knew as a child, and on mosses by pools where he played? Where else would he go when he comes from Tir-nan-Og, and the jack-o’-lanterns come riding the storm through the darkness, and go dancing over the bog?”
“How will he come?” I asked.
“On the west wind,” she answered.
“We must search for him,” I said, sticking to my point, which it seemed harder and harder to do.
“Aye, search,” she said, and went off again into peals of her wild laughter, which rang far over the bog and frightened the curlews.
“How could he get to Tir-nan-Og?” I asked. For if there was any chance of finding him, it would have to be done quickly, and she would not see that it was serious at all. I spoke to her all the more impatiently for the fear that I soon should believe her, and do nothing at all. And one ought to do something.
“He’d go by the way of the bog till he came to the sea,” she said. “Didn’t he know the way well?”
“And then?” I asked.
“There’ll be a boat there, lifting and dropping with the lap of the tide,” she said; “and eight queens to row it; queens that have turned from Heaven, and yet slipped away from damnation. Hell has not their souls, nor the earth their dust.”
“How could he know they’d be there?” I asked her.
“How could he know?” she said. “I told him.”
But that made things no clearer. Then she gazed away over the bog and went on talking: “ ‘Hell would have me, mother,’ he said, ‘if I stay here.’ And when I saw he was bent on leaving the world, I said I’d help him; for he knew the way over the bog to the shore, but he’d never been on the sea. And I went one stormy night to the bog, when the wind was in the West and all the people of Tir-nan-Og were riding upon the storm, and by the edge of the water where they were flashing and admiring their heathen beauty, I called out to them: ‘Ancient People, there’s a man that would share your everlasting glory; and Hell wants him, because he has turned his face to the West. How shall he go to find you?’
“And with tiny voices they answered me through the storm, voices shriller than the cry of the snipe and small as the song of the robin, they whose voices rang once from hill to hill over Ireland; and they said: ‘To the sea, to the sea.’
“ ‘And then?’ I said, ‘Oh ancient and glorious people?’
“ ‘What would you have of us?’ they asked.
“And I lured them nearer, by a power I have, and said to them: ‘By that power, I need your help over the sea.’
“And they said to me: ‘When will he come?’
“And I answered: ‘One of these days,’ which is the only time we know with the future, and all we ever will know, till it is dated and mapped as is should be.
“And they repeated one to another, with their small voices, ‘One of these days,’ till the message passed out of hearing. And I made my compact with them out there on the bog, swearing by turf and heather, as they swore by blossom and twilight. For a danger threatened the bog and I swore to guard it, and they swore to carry Tommy over the water and bring him to Tir-nan-Og. Eight fair girls, they said, that were queens of old in Ireland, would bring him over the water, waiting for him where the bog ran down to the shore, upon the day that I said. And Tommy would know them, apart from their beauty and apart from their crowns of gold, by the light that would be gleaming along the sides of the boat; for the boat would be made from the bark of birches growing in Tir-nan-Og, and the twilight that shone on them in the Land of the Young would be shining upon them still. And whether it was night in the world, or whether noon or morning, the twilight of Tir-nan-Og would be shining upon that birch-bark.”
I tried to picture a boat glowing gently in twilight while it was noon all round, with the sun bright on the water; or, more wonderful still, the birch-bark iridescent in the soft light of the gloaming, while all around was night. But thinking of this only drifted me from my purpose, which was to find a number of men and search the heather for Marlin. I was in two minds; one was the mind that listened to Mrs. Marlin telling of Tir-nan-Og, of which I had already learned so much from
her son; the other, a more disciplined mind, told me that the bog must be searched for Marlin whether there seemed any hope of finding him there or not. The more useless this appeared the more I clung to it, lest Mrs. Marlin should lure me to forget it altogether, and a duty remain undone.
“We must search for him,” I repeated.
“Aye, search,” she said indulgently, as though the search were some trivial rite that custom idly bound me to. And I think she knew from the tone of my voice that I somehow had not my heart in it. “Would they fail me?” she went on. “Never.”
And I saw from her far gaze westwards, and the light in her eyes, that she was thinking of those eight queens.
We came to the bog’s edge, where deep fissures ran down out of sight, as though the vast weight of the bog were too much for the banks that bounded it; and from that high edge I looked over the land lying round Marlin’s cottage that had always seemed so magical to me, the land over which the old willows brooded in winter and were like an enchantment in spring, and I could have wept at what I saw. And what I saw is well enough known: I need hardly describe it: a large number of small houses meanly built, and all exactly the same, denying any difference between the tastes of one man and another, nor caring anything for any man’s taste, nor expressing any feeling or preference of builder or owner. It was as though men without any passions had built them all for the dead.
They were barely finished, but men were already living in some of them, and work had already started on building the dam and putting in the wheel that was to be turned by the water and which would set the machinery clanking in the ugly house they were building. The world is full of such things, little need to describe them; the only concern that this story has with them is to tell that they came down dark upon that spot to which first my memories went whenever I was far from Ireland, racing there quicker than homing pigeons, or bees going back to the hive. And not only had they spoiled the magic that lay over all that land, deep as mists in the autumn, but they were there for the purpose of cutting the bog away; not as the turf-cutters take it, with imperceptible harvests, slowly, as years go by, a few yards in each generation, but working it out as miners work out a stratum of coal.