THERE are some doubters even in the western villages. One woman told
me last Christmas that she did not believe either in hell or in
ghosts. Hell she thought was merely an invention got up by the priest
to keep people good; and ghosts would not be permitted, she held, to
go ‘trapsin about the earth’ at their own free will; ‘but there are
faeries,’ she added, ‘and little leprechauns, and water-horses and
fallen angels.’ I have met also a man with a Mohawk Indian tattooed
upon his arm, who held exactly similar beliefs and unbeliefs. No matter
what one doubts one never doubts the faeries, for, as the man with the
Mohawk Indian on his arm said to me, ‘they stand to reason.’ Even the
official mind does not escape this faith.
A little girl who was at service in the village of Grange, close
under the seaward slopes of Ben Bulben, suddenly disappeared one
night about three years ago. There was at once great excitement in
the neighbourhood, because it was rumoured that the faeries had taken
her. A villager was said to have long struggled to hold her from
them, but at last they prevailed, and he found nothing in his hands
but a broomstick. The local constable was applied to, and he at once
instituted a house-to-house search, and at the same time advised the
people to burn all the _bucalauns_ (ragweed) on the field she vanished
from, because _bucalauns_ are sacred to the faeries. They spent the
whole night burning them, the constable repeating spells the while. In
the morning the little girl was found, the story goes, wandering in the
field. She said the faeries had taken her away a great distance, riding
on a faery horse. At last she saw a big river, and the man who had
tried to keep her from being carried off was drifting down it—such are
the topsy-turvydoms of faery glamour—in a cockle-shell. On the way her
companions had mentioned the names of several people who were about to
die shortly in the village.
Perhaps the constable was right. It is better doubtless to believe much
unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial’s sake truth and
unreason alike, for when we do this we have not even a rush candle
to guide our steps, not even a poor sowlth to dance before us on the
marsh, and must needs fumble our way into the great emptiness where
dwell the misshapen dhouls. And after all, can we come to so great evil
if we keep a little fire on our hearths and in our souls, and welcome
with open hand whatever of excellent come to warm itself, whether it
be man or phantom, and do not say too fiercely, even to the dhouls
themselves, ‘Be ye gone’? When all is said and done, how do we not know
but that our own unreason may be better than another’s truth? for it
has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the
wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey. Come into
the world again, wild bees, wild bees!