It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any
unmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like,
and something in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this
entanglement of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows and
deepens the furrows about our eyes. If we could love and hate with as
good heart as the faeries do, we might grow to be long-lived like them.
But until that day their untiring joys and sorrows must ever be one-
half of their fascination. Love with them never grows weary, nor can
the circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet. The Donegal
peasants remember this when they bend over the spade, or sit full of
the heaviness of the fields beside the griddle at nightfall, and they
tell stories about it that it may not be forgotten. A short while ago,
they say, two faeries, little creatures, one like a young man, one like
a young woman, came to a farmer’s house, and spent the night sweeping
the hearth and setting all tidy. The next night they came again, and
while the farmer was away, brought all the furniture up-stairs into one
room, and having arranged it round the walls, for the greater grandeur
it seems, they began to dance. They danced on and on, and days and days
went by, and all the country-side came to look at them, but still their
feet never tired. The farmer did not dare to live at home the while;
and after three months he made up his mind to stand it no more, and
went and told them that the priest was coming. The little creatures
when they heard this went back to their own country, and there their
joy shall last as long as the points of the rushes are brown, the
people say, and that is until God shall burn up the world with a kiss.
But it is not merely faeries who know untiring days, for there have
been men and women who, falling under their enchantment, have attained,
perhaps by the right of their God-given spirits, an even more than
faery abundance of life and feeling. It seems that when mortals have
gone amid those poor happy leaves of the Imperishable Rose of Beauty,
blown hither and thither by the winds that awakened the stars, the dim
kingdom has acknowledged their birthright, perhaps a little sadly, and
given them of its best. Such a mortal was born long ago at a village in
the south of Ireland. She lay asleep in a cradle, and her mother sat by
rocking her, when a woman of the Sidhe (the faeries) came in, and said
that the child was chosen to be the bride of the prince of the dim
kingdom, but that as it would never do for his wife to grow old and die
while he was still in the first ardour of his love, she would be gifted
with a faery life. The mother was to take the glowing log out of the
fire and bury it in the garden, and her child would live as long as it
remained unconsumed. The mother buried the log, and the child grew up,
became a beauty, and married the prince of the faeries, who came to her
at nightfall. After seven hundred years the prince died, and another
prince ruled in his stead and married the beautiful peasant girl in his
turn; and after another seven hundred years he died also, and another
prince and another husband came in his stead, and so on until she had
had seven husbands. At last one day the priest of the parish called
upon her, and told her that she was a scandal to the whole
neighbourhood with her seven husbands and her long life. She was very
sorry, she said, but she was not to blame, and then she told him about
the log, and he went straight out and dug until he found it, and then
they burned it, and she died, and was buried like a Christian, and
everybody was pleased. Such a mortal too was Clooth-na-bare,[FN#9] who
went all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery
life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake
to hill, and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted,
until at last she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough
Ia, on the top of the Birds’ Mountain at Sligo.
[FN#9] Doubtless Clooth-na-bare should be Cailleac Bare, which would
mean the old Woman Bare. Bare or Bere or Verah or Dera or Dhera was a
very famous person, perhaps the mother of the Gods herself. A friend of
mine found her, as he thinks frequenting Lough Leath, or the Grey Lake
on a mountain of the Fews. Perhaps Lough Ia is my mishearing, or the
storyteller’s mispronunciation of Lough Leath, for there are many Lough
Leaths.
The two little creatures may well dance on, and the woman of the log
and Clooth-na-bare sleep in peace, for they have known untrammelled
hate and unmixed love, and have never wearied themselves with “yes” and
“no,” or entangled their feet with the sorry net of “maybe” and
“perhaps.” The great winds came and took them up into themselves.