by Lord Dunsany
And I looked and saw the dark woman climbing the bank, and getting her foothold from the ledges the honest turf-cutters left, who would not have harmed the bog in a hundred years.
“Does it always rain like this here, sir?” he said as he came towards me.
I was hard tempted to say: “Yes, all the year round.” And it was not, I fear, resistance of the temptation that prevented me saying it, but only the knowledge that he had no say in whether they stayed or left, but only some man far away, sitting dry in some office.
I had come to say farewell to the bog. Seeing Mrs. Marlin there, I wondered if there were any one last chance.
“Has she been giving you any trouble?” I said.
“Not a bit, sir,” he answered, crushing my hopes, as a man on a quiet walk crushes insects he never sees. “It’s only her way.”
“The men don’t mind her?” I said, though I knew the hope was vain.
“Not a bit of it, sir,” said he. “She’s just a bit touched in her head, that’s all. A thing that might happen to anyone. They know that, and they just get on with their work. And look at her now, sir. Do you know what she’s doing?”
And I looked at her gaunt dark figure, where he pointed, high on the edge of the bog. She had stopped in her stride and was stooping.
“Digging bits of peat into the stream,” he continued, “to stop the water from coming down to us. That’s the kind of thing she does. Been doing it now for three days.”
And, sure enough, she was making a little dam across the sluggish stream where it left the bog; and I despaired when I saw it, for it seemed the maddest thing she had done yet.
“I’ll go and ask her to stop,” I said.
“It don’t matter to us, sir,” said he.
But still I left him and went over to Mrs. Marlin, for I felt she was bringing the bog and its people into contempt by the childish thing she was doing.
“How are you, Mrs. Marlin?” I said.
She looked at me and then went on with her digging: “I’m well, thank you, sir,” she said, and tumbled another lump into the water that was lying deep against the dam she had made. “And I hope your honour is well.”
“What’s the use of that, Mrs. Marlin?” I said, pointing to the mess she was making.
“And what’s the use, sir,” said she, “of the work they’re making the water do down there?”
“Little enough,” I admitted.
“Then let it stay here,” said she.
“Here?” I repeated.
“Aye, and there’s work for it,” she said.
“But, Mrs. Marlin,” said I, “it will all be gone down by to-morrow.”
“To-morrow,” she said, and with emphasis so strange that I wondered. It was as though to-morrow were far far away, or as though the world would be all quite different to-morrow. And she never denied what I said, but went on digging the turf down into the stream. The rain was pouring down her face as she worked, and her old black dress gave her no protection whatever.
“But you are getting very wet,” I said to the old woman.
She turned to answer me, then suddenly looked away as though she had heard the sound of some other voice, and straightened herself up tall, and stood and listened. Then she smiled with a glad look. And seeing her thus, with that look, in the wild weather, strange fancies came over me. I thought of a queen carried off after some lost battle, a captive, afar, for years, hearing all of a sudden the horns of her own people. So she stood silent, filled with a strange joy.
“It is the north wind,” she said.
And, sure enough, a damp tendril of hair waved from her head southwards. Those were the last words she ever spoke directly to myself, for, though I heard her say much more, she spoke after that neither to me nor to any man, but to spirits and presences of which she was aware, powers of whom I knew nothing.
“Come,” she said, but not to me. “Come as of old.” Then she walked through the heather northwards, with the rising wind in her face, holding out her arms towards it. “As of old,” she said, “with all the strength of the North and the might and splendour of winter. Darling wind, I know you.”
And certainly the wind was rising now, coming full from the North, and the locks of her hair were straying. I had come with her, though she had spoken to me no more. “And old storms,” she said, “come too.” And she stretched out her arms and drew them back towards herself with clutching claw-like fingers, as though beckoning to something wild and fierce as her mood. For my part no such beckoning would ever have brought me, but I could imagine wild and savage things being lured by it. What she wanted with more storms I could not think, for the rain was heavy enough and the wind rising. And the rising wind brought more clouds, and put a slant on the rain that seemed to make it more penetrating. I luckily had my waterproof, but it must have gone right to Mrs. Marlin’s skin. The rain was colder too with that bitter north wind driving it, and the wintry day was already closing in. But Mrs. Marlin’s arms were out as though she hugged the rain, and she was uttering strange endearments to it. I would sooner have kept myself warm, but you cannot see an old woman die of exposure, so I took my waterproof off and offered it to her. I had never known Mrs. Marlin impolite to me, or other than courteous; she merely did not hear me, or see me any more. For the first time I felt ill at ease in her company, for never in her cottage was she without the airs of the perfect hostess that sets all her guests at ease; but now that awkward feeling had overtaken me of being one of a gathering of those that were greater than I, and of being forgotten amongst them. And if it were only a fancy it yet held me strongly, and remained with me all that night, the last thing I had thought to have felt while with that courteous old lady. When she would not take the waterproof I threw it over her and for a while it hung from her shoulders; but she was striding away to the North and still stretching her arms out, and the waterproof did not stay long; and when it had fallen off four or five times I saw it was useless and wore it again myself. All the while she was crooning to that horrible rain, and speaking to that fierce wind as though she were its equal. We came nearer to those pools by which Marlin passed when he went to Tir-nan-Og, those moss-bound lakes to which he always gazed, for they lay rather northwest of the point from which we had started; and I saw as the sun set on that splendour of water how much their mass had increased. For they were the sumach, of which Marlin used to tell me, the great store of the bog’s water that kept all the mosses alive and their roots happy, and sustained and nurtured all that loved the bog, and made the steps of man unsure when he came, and made him come then as a stranger. And these waters always increased, for only one small stream left the bog; but the rain of the last three months had been unparalleled. At sunset a gust rose up that was worse than all the others; you could hear it coming over the tops of the heather; and when it reached us you could lean against it; and the cold as the sun went down increased immediately.
“You must come home, Mrs. Marlin,” I said, and took hold of one of her arms.
But she did not hear me or seem to feel my grip.
“You are come, you are come, great wanderer,” she said. “Your old self. From the ancient ice of the mountains.” And she waved wildly northwards the arm that I was not holding.
Then she looked up to the clouds, that were lower and darker and hurrying. “You too, good shapes,” she said, “kings of the sky, proud riders. You too. And welcome.”
“You must come home,” I said, tightening my grip on her arm.
Perhaps she heard me; perhaps she even spoke to me; but she did not look at me as she spoke.
“Hist. They are come,” she said.
For the rest of that night, while the storm was continually increasing, she made her plans with those, whoever they were, that seemed to be all about her. And her plans were curses.
“Gather against them,” she shouted, waving her arms aloft, even with the weight of my arm upon one of them, a weight she seemed not to feel. “Gather against them, old wind,
and powers of storm.”
Then suddenly she kneeled on the soaked roots of the rushes, and spread out her hands downwards, shaking off my hold with the suddenness with which she turned thus to earth, and began to speak to the bog. “Oh, ancient one,” she said, “oh, beautiful everlasting, rise now out of sleep.”
The rain was now lashing the pools and dripping from everything solid, and night was fast rushing down with it. Once I saw a star, and knew from that that the night was really come, and not only the darkness of the violent rain. The star was hastily curtained away by a cloud, and I saw no more that night. Then nothing but rain and darkness and the triumphant wail of the wind, as though some victorious power mourned over its enemies.
Lovingly she spoke to the bog, bending down to it over the mosses, crooning to it and softly beseeching it, but what she said to it I do not know, for she was talking now that language that seemed older than Irish, which I had once heard her use before, and which certainly was no language that men speak now. Kneeling there I thought I could put my waterproof over her, and tried to do so, but the wind took it out of my hand and into the night and I never saw it again. And she spoke still to the bog, caring neither for rain nor me. “Alarathon ahialee tharnee ekbathaton,” are some words I remember yet, though what they meant I never knew, or in what language they were.
As the storm roared on, the night grew colder and colder, as though worse and worse weather were coming with every gust from the North. By midnight the cold was frightful. I could not leave Mrs. Marlin, and I was unable to drag her away. My voice may have been easily drowned by all that was raging there, but it was strange that she did not feel my hand on her arm, nor pay any heed when I tried to lift her from where she knelt, with her hands spread out to the rushes, as though she were indeed among some august assembly where neither she nor they noticed anything human. And every bitter gust that beat my wet clothes against me and set more cold water running all down my skin, she welcomed joyfully and with outstretched hands. Was she immortal, I wildly thought for a moment, that she still lived on, when by midnight I was wondering if even I, young as I was, would be able to last till morning. At midnight I thought the storm had reached its height, merely because I could not believe that it could be worse. The wind was no longer roaring, but the gusts were banging like guns. Suddenly it seemed to be blowing in every direction at once, and the rain was much heavier. In reality the wind was going round to the West, and thence whatever storms on that night roamed the Atlantic came inland with all their rain. I heard her voice calling out wild welcomes to them, and knew she was still alive, though I could not distinguish words or even what language she spoke in. And then the great lights appeared, the lights I had often read of but never seen, the will-o’-the-wisps over the deeps of the bog; and, strange as they looked out there on that desperate night, it was stranger to hear her crooning to them, welcoming them one by one, so far as I was able to make out from the tones of words that I could not hear. I was now too cold to drag at her arm any more, and no longer wondered that she could not feel my grip, for I no longer felt it myself, either her arm or the ends of my own fingers. And the huge gusts boomed on, and she was nodding and nodding her head to the lights that came with the west wind, and, I think, speaking to them. She seemed to have ceased from her wild appeals to the storm, and her wild welcomes, and seemed as though satisfied with something that she had done, and to be proudly announcing her deed to those to whom she had owed it. But I could only see her profile and her triumphantly nodding head; it was only by these nods, now, that I could tell that the black heap crouched on the rushes beside me was still alive.
The night raged on, and, instead of being crushed by the cold of it, she seemed to draw an energy from its fury which kept her pulses beating.
It seemed the longest night I ever knew. I was looking the way she was looking, which was to the West, crouching and leaning forward against the storm and the slanting sheets of the rain. And at last I saw the western clouds lighten, and knew that the dawn had come raging up behind me. I turned slowly round with limbs that could only move slowly, and barely keeping my balance against the might of the wind, and saw furious splendours of flame and gold wide in the eastern sky. Mrs. Marlin was still crouched there and still seemed to be speaking, as though no more content to abate her curses than the wind to cease from its raging. But, later, she and the wind seemed to end their fury together, for she staggered up from her feet and a great calm fell; and, after the last of the clouds had scurried past the sky was all a glittering Cambridge-blue.
Then at last Mrs. Marlin came with me, but a strange silence was over her; and, though she was walking now, she had the air of resting, while when she was standing or kneeling still for hours she had the air of such an outburst of might as could well have been the stored energies of years. Only her eyes were glittering, as though with a proud memory. She could barely walk, and perhaps she could not speak, and it was with difficulty I got her at last to the edge of the bog, and lifted her down from ledge to ledge of the peat-bank.
Little remains to tell of the day that, of all the days I have lived, remains most clear in my memory. The calm of that day was enormous. Not a breeze moved, not a leaf swayed on the willows, and when Mrs. Marlin’s fire was alight again, the smoke went up and up as straight as a pine, till it was lost in the sparkling blue of the windless sky that at last was done with rain. After leaving Mrs. Marlin at her house, the foreman brought me to one of the huts, and gave me a change of clothing. The huts had survived the storm, and so had the factory, but anything that had been left lying about, even light planks, had been blown away like straws. “Never knew such a night,” said the foreman.
Dr. Rory, after the storm, was out looking for broken limbs, and was prowling round the country like a wolf after a battle. As soon as I saw him coming towards the huts I was able to tell him that no one there had been hurt, and asked him to go and look at Mrs. Marlin, for she had not spoken since dawn and I did not know what the exposure of that night might have done to her. Dr. Rory went, and I finished a cup of tea that I ill deserved, considering how I hated the whole scheme for which those men were working. But after that wonderful cup I decided to bear the destruction of those wild lands that I loved, with a better grace. Then I went back to Mrs. Marlin’s house. There I found that she had not put on dry clothes as I had, but had gone to bed. A thing natural enough and yet it alarmed me at once, for hardy and resolute people like Mrs. Marlin seldom go to bed by day except to die. And a look at the doctor’s face did not reassure me.
“Is she bad?” I asked in a low voice that she seemed not to hear, nor did she seem to see me.
“Wasn’t she out all night on the bog?” asked the doctor.
“Yes,” I said. “I could not get her to come back.”
And the doctor said no more.
He was sitting by her bed, and her eyes were open, but seemed full of things far from us and without interest. She lying there and the doctor sitting beside her, and I standing as still and silent as either; I do not know how much time went by us while none of the three spoke. I seem to remember the sound of the crash of the strides of Time, but it was only her old noisy clock beating out seconds. And then, I remember, she spoke.
“The bog’s coming,” she said.
“Yes, yes,” said the doctor soothingly.
“The bog’s coming,” Mrs. Marlin said again. “Yes, yes,” said the doctor.
And suddenly her voice was young and clear again, as it might have been years ago, out courting with Marlin’s father.
“The bog is coming,” she said.
And a very strange thought indeed came to me then. What, I thought, if it were true! What if that waste of moss and rushes and water were really on the march? What if the old woman spoke sense, and the bog were really coming? For so strange was everything that the Marlins had said, that it was hard to know what might be true. And with this strange thought in my mind I went out of the cottage. “Tommy,” I heard her say m
ost clearly just as I left.
I was in time to see the bank they had undercut arching itself into ridges. I had seen the waves in the strata along the bank, made by old tremors; but those were only ripples. It arched itself into low hills now, and they suddenly came towards us. The whole bog was moving. With the weight of years of rain and those last three months it was coming on over the lower lands, and rising higher and higher as it came. For as far as I could see, left or right, it was rippling and waving. I stood and gazed at it, and then ran into the cottage.
“She’s right,” I shouted.
“She’s dead,” said the doctor.
“We’ve got two minutes to save our own lives,” I said.
Then he understood me. And the roar that the thing made helped him. For it had begun to roar like a tide. We both ran out through the door, and I saw that my two minutes were very much over-estimated, for we had barely one. I had stayed too long looking at it the first time. Dr. Rory gave it one look, then ran to the workmen, who had come out of their huts and were standing gazing at it.
“It’s true,” the doctor shouted. “It can do that.”
For he knew the ways of the bog as well as any man, and knew that a bog can move, though he’d never seen it. And he got the men moving, and stopped all he saw that were running back to their huts to get some possession or other before they left.
“What about Mrs. Marlin?” I called to him. But he was busy saving the men, who had been slow to believe that what they saw was real, and paid little attention to me. “The bog must bury its own witches,” he said.
The roaring was louder than a tide; it was like a waterfall. The bog came grinding on, turning over and over, while Dr. Rory just got the men away in time. It covered the level land, it covered the houses, it rolled the wheel that they had put in the stream to work their machinery for nearly a mile, and still the bog roared on with the weight of all that mass of water behind it, and all the new road that had been a bohereen lay eight foot under the bog when at last it rested. And that was the end of the Peat Development (Ireland) Syndicate.