_JOHN SHERMAN RETURNS TO BALLAH._
I.
This being the homeward trip, SS. _Lavinia_ carried no cattle, but many
passengers. As the sea was smooth and the voyage near its end, they
lounged about the deck in groups. Two cattle merchants were leaning
over the taffrail smoking. In appearance they were something between
betting men and commercial travellers. For years they had done all
their sleeping in steamers and trains. A short distance from them a
clerk from Liverpool, with a consumptive cough, walked to and fro, a
little child holding his hand. Shortly he would be landed in a boat
putting off from the shore for the purpose. He had come hoping that
his native air of Teeling Head would restore him. The little child
was a strange contrast—her cheeks ruddy with perfect health. Further
forward, talking to one of the crew, was a man with a red face and
slightly unsteady step. In the companion house was a governess, past
her first youth, very much afraid of seasickness. She had brought her
luggage up and heaped it round her to be ready for landing. Sherman
sat on a pile of cable looking out over the sea. It was just noon;
SS. _Lavinia_, having passed by Tory and Rathlin, was approaching the
Donegal cliffs. They were covered by a faint mist, which made them loom
even vaster than they were. To westward the sun shone on a perfectly
blue sea. Seagulls come out of the mist and plunged into the sunlight,
and out of the sunlight and plunged into the mist. To the westward
gannets were striking continually, and a porpoise showed now and then,
his fin and back gleaming in the sun. Sherman was more perfectly happy
than he had been for many a day, and more ardently thinking. All
nature seemed full of a Divine fulfilment. Everything fulfilled its
law—fulfilment that is peace, whether it be for good or for evil, for
evil also has its peace, the peace of the birds of prey. Sherman looked
from the sea to the ship and grew sad. Upon this thing, crawling slowly
along the sea, moved to and fro many mournful and slouching figures.
He looked from the ship to himself and his eyes filled with tears. On
himself, on these moving figures, hope and memory fed like flames.
Again his eyes gladdened, for he knew he had found his present. He
would live in his love and the day as it passed. He would live that his
law might be fulfilled. Now, was he sure of this truth?—the saints
on the one hand, the animals on the other, live in the moment as it
passes. Thitherward had his days brought him. This was the one grain
they had ground. To grind one grain is sufficient for a lifetime.
II.
A few days later Sherman was hurrying through the town of Ballah. It
was Saturday, and he passed down through the marketing country people,
and the old women with baskets of cakes and gooseberries and long
pieces of sugarstick shaped like walking-sticks, and called by children
“Peggie’s leg.”
Now, as two months earlier he was occasionally recognized and greeted,
and, as before, went on without knowing, his eyes full of unintelligent
sadness because the mind was making merry afar. They had the look we
see in the eyes of animals and dreamers. Everything had grown simple,
his problem had taken itself away. He was thinking what he would say
to Mary Carton. Now they would be married, they would live in a small
house with a green door and new thatch, and a row of beehives under
a hedge. He knew where just such a house stood empty. The day before
he and his mother had discussed, with their host of the Imperial
Hotel, this question of houses. They knew the peculiarities of every
house in the neighbourhood, except two or three built while they were
away. All day Sherman and his mother had gone over the merits of the
few they were told were empty. She wondered why her son had grown so
unpractical. Once he was so easily pleased—the row of beehives and the
new thatch did not for her settle the question. She set it all down to
Miss Leland and the plays, and the singing, and the belladonna, and
remembered with pleasure how many miles of uneasy water lay between
the town of Ballah and these things.
She did not know what else beside the row of beehives and the new
thatch her son’s mind ran on as he walked among the marketing country
people, and the gooseberry sellers, and the merchants of “Peggie’s
leg,” and the boys playing marbles in odd corners, and the men in
waistcoats with flannel sleeves driving carts, and the women driving
donkeys with creels of turf or churns of milk. Just now she was trying
to remember whether she used to buy her wool for knitting at Miss
Peters’s or from Mrs. Macallough’s at the bridge. One or other sold
it a halfpenny a skein cheaper. She never knew what went on inside
her son’s mind, she had always her own fish to fry. Blessed are the
unsympathetic. They preserve their characters in an iron safe while the
most of us poor mortals are going about the planet vainly searching
for any kind of a shell to contain us, and evaporating the while.
Sherman began to mount the hill to the vicarage. He was happy. Because
he was happy he began to run. Soon the steepness of the hill made him
walk. He thought about his love for Mary Carton. Seen by the light of
this love everything that had happened to him was plain now. He had
found his centre of unity. His childhood had prepared him for this
love. He had been solitary, fond of favourite corners of fields, fond
of going about alone, unhuman like the birds and the leaves, his heart
empty. How clearly he remembered his first meeting with Mary. They were
both children. At a school treat they watched the fire balloon ascend,
and followed it a little way over the fields together. What friends
they became, growing up together, reading the same books, thinking the
same thoughts.
As he came to the door and pulled at the great hanging iron bell
handle, the fire balloon reascended in his heart, surrounded with
cheers and laughter.
III.
He kept the servant talking for a moment or two before she went for
Miss Carton. The old rector, she told him, was getting less and less
able to do much work. Old age had come almost suddenly upon him.
He seldom moved from the fireside. He was getting more and more
absent-minded. Once lately he had brought his umbrella into the
reading-desk. More and more did he leave all things to his children—to
Mary Carton and her younger sisters.
When the servant had gone Sherman looked round the somewhat gloomy
room. In the window hung a canary in a painted cage. Outside was a
narrow piece of shaded ground between the window and the rectory wall.
The laurel and holly bushes darkened the window a good deal. On a
table in the centre of the room were evangelistic books with gilded
covers. Round the mirror over the mantlepiece were stuck various parish
announcements, thrust between the glass and the gilding. On a small
side table was a copper ear-trumpet.
How familiar everything seemed to Sherman. Only the room seemed smaller
than it did three years before, and close to the table with the
ear-trumpet, at one side of the fireplace before the arm-chair, was a
new threadbare patch in the carpet.
Sherman recalled how in this room he and Mary Carton had sat in winter
by the fire, building castles in the air for each other. So deeply
meditating was he that she came in and stood unnoticed beside him.
“John,” she said at last, “it is a great pleasure to see you so soon
again. Are you doing well in London?”
“I have left London.”
“Are you married, then? You must introduce me to your wife.”
“I shall never be married to Miss Leland.”
“What?”
“She has preferred another—my friend William Howard. I have come here
to tell you something, Mary.” He went and stood close to her and took
her hand tenderly. “I have always been very fond of you. Often in
London, when I was trying to think of another kind of life, I used to
see this fireside and you sitting beside it, where we used to sit and
talk about the future. Mary—Mary,” he held her hand in both his—“you
will be my wife?”
“You do not love me, John,” she answered, drawing herself away. “You
have come to me because you think it your duty. I have had nothing but
duty all my life.”
“Listen,” he said. “I was very miserable; I invited Howard to stay with
us. One morning I found a note on the smoking-room table to say that
Margaret had accepted him, and I have come here to ask you to marry me.
I never cared for any one else.”
He found himself speaking hurriedly, as though anxious to get the
words said and done with. It now seemed to him that he had done ill
in this matter of Miss Leland. He had not before thought of it—his
mind had always been busy with other things. Mary Carton looked at him
wonderingly.
“John,” she said at last, “did you ask Mr. Howard to stay with you on
purpose to get him to fall in love with Miss Leland, or to give you an
excuse for breaking off your engagement, as you knew he flirted with
every one?”
“Margaret seems very fond of him. I think they are made for each
other,” he answered.
“Did you ask him to London on purpose?”
“Well, I will tell you,” he faltered. “I was very miserable. I had
drifted into this engagement I don’t know how. Margaret glitters and
glitters and glitters, but she is not of my kind. I suppose I thought,
like a fool, I should marry some one who was rich. I found out soon
that I loved nobody but you. I got to be always thinking of you and
of this town. Then I heard that Howard had lost his curacy, and asked
him up. I just left them alone and did not go near Margaret much. I
knew they were made for each other. Do not let us talk of them,” he
continued, eagerly. “Let us talk about the future. I will take a farm
and turn farmer. I dare say my uncle will not give me anything when he
dies because I have left his office. He will call me a ne’er-do-weel,
and say I would squander it. But you and I—we will get married, will
we not? We will be very happy,” he went on, pleadingly. “You will still
have your charities, and I shall be busy with my farm. We will surround
ourselves with a wall. The world will be on the outside, and on the
inside we and our peaceful lives.”
“Wait,” she said; “I will give you your answer,” and going into the
next room returned with several bundles of letters. She laid them on
the table; some were white and new, some slightly yellow with time.
“John,” she said, growing very pale, “here are all the letters you
ever wrote me from your earliest boyhood.” She took one of the large
candles from the mantlepiece, and, lighting it, placed it on the
hearth. Sherman wondered what she was going to do with it. “I will tell
you,” she went on, “what I had thought to carry to the grave unspoken.
I have loved you for a long time. When you came and told me you were
going to be married to another I forgave you, for man’s love is like
the wind, and I prayed that God might bless you both.” She leant down
over the candle, her face pale and contorted with emotion. “All these
letters after that grew very sacred. Since we were never to be married
they grew a portion of my life, separated from everything and every
one—a something apart and holy. I re-read them all, and arranged them
in little bundles according to their dates, and tied them with thread.
Now I and you—we have nothing to do with each other any more.”
She held the bundle of letters in the flame. He got up from his
seat. She motioned him away imperiously. He looked at the flame in a
bewildered way. The letters fell in little burning fragments about the
hearth. It was all like a terrible dream. He watched those steady
fingers hold letter after letter in the candle flame, and watched the
candle burning on like a passion in the grey daylight of universal
existence. A draught from under the door began blowing the ash about
the room. The voice said—
“You tried to marry a rich girl. You did not love her, but knew she was
rich. You tired of her as you tire of so many things, and behaved to
her most wrongly, most wickedly and treacherously. When you were jilted
you came again to me and to the idleness of this little town. We had
all hoped great things of you. You seemed good and honest.”
“I loved you all along,” he cried. “If you would marry me we would
be very happy. I loved you all along,” he repeated—this helplessly,
several times over. The bird shook a shower of seed on his shoulder. He
picked one of them from the collar of his coat and turned it over in
his fingers mechanically. “I loved you all along.”
“You have done no duty that came to you. You have tired of everything
you should cling to; and now you have come to this little town because
here is idleness and irresponsibility.”
The last letter lay in ashes on the hearth. She blew out the candle,
and replaced it among the photographs on the mantlepiece, and stood
there as calm as a portion of the marble.
“John, our friendship is over—it has been burnt in the candle.”
He started forward, his mind full of appeals half-stifled with despair,
on his lips gathered incoherent words: “She will be happy with Howard.
They were made for each other. I slipped into it. I always thought I
should marry some one who was rich. I never loved any one but you. I
did not know I loved you at first. I thought about you always. You are
the root of my life.”
Steps were heard outside the door at the end of a passage. Mary Carton
went to the door and called. The steps turned and came nearer. With a
great effort Sherman controlled himself. The door opened, and a tall,
slight girl of twelve came into the room. A strong smell of garden
mould rose from a basket in her hands. Sherman recognized the child who
had given him tea that evening in the schoolhouse three years before.
“Have you finished weeding the carrots?” said Mary Carton.
“Yes, Miss.”
“Then you are to weed the small bed under the pear-tree by the
tool-house. Do not go yet, child. This is Mr. Sherman. Sit down a
little.”
The child sat down on the corner of a chair with a scared look in her
eyes. Suddenly she said—
“Oh, what a lot of burnt paper!”
“Yes; I have been burning some old letters.”
“I think,” said John, “I will go now.” Without a word of farewell he
went out, almost groping his way.
He had lost the best of all the things he held dear. Twice he had gone
through the fire. The first time worldly ambition left him, on the
second love. An hour before the air had been full of singing and peace
that was resonant like joy. Now he saw standing before his Eden the
angel with the flaming sword. All the hope he had ever gathered about
him had taken itself off, and the naked soul shivered.
IV.
The road under his feet felt gritty and barren. He hurried away from
the town. It was late afternoon. Trees cast bands of shadow across the
road. He walked rapidly as if pursued. About a mile to the south of
the town he came on a large wood bordering the road and surrounding
a deserted house. Some local rich man once lived there, now it was
given over to a caretaker who lived in two rooms in the back part. Men
were at work cutting down trees in two or three parts of the wood.
Many places were quite bare. A mass of ruins—a covered well, and
the wreckage of castle wall—that that had been roofed with green
for centuries lifted themselves up, bare as anatomies. The sight
intensified, by some strange sympathy, his sorrow, and he hurried away
as from a thing accursed of God.
The road led to the foot of a mountain, topped by a cairn supposed
in popular belief to be the grave of Maeve, Mab of the fairies, and
considered by antiquarians to mark the place where certain prisoners
were executed in legendary times as sacrifices to the moon.
He began to climb the mountain. The sun was on the rim of the sea. It
stayed there without moving, for as he ascended he saw an ever-widening
circle of water.
He threw himself down upon the cairn. The sun sank under the sea. The
Donegal headlands mixed with the surrounding blue. The stars grew out
of heaven.
Sometimes he got up and walked to and fro. Hours passed. The stars,
the streams down in the valley, the wind moving among the boulders,
the various unknown creatures rustling in the silence—all these were
contained within themselves, fulfilling their law, content to be alone,
content to be with others, having the peace of God or the peace of the
birds of prey. He only did not fulfil his law; something that was not
he, that was not nature, that was not God, had made him and her he
loved its tools. Hope, memory, tradition, conformity, had been laying
waste their lives. As he thought this the night seemed to crush him
with its purple foot. Hour followed hour. At midnight he started up,
hearing a faint murmur of clocks striking the hour in the distant town.
His face and hands were wet with tears, his clothes saturated with dew.
He turned homeward, hurriedly flying from the terrible firmament.
What had this glimmering and silence to do with him—this luxurious
present? He belonged to the past and the future. With pace somewhat
slackened, because of the furze, he came down into the valley. Along
the northern horizon moved a perpetual dawn, travelling eastward as the
night advanced. Once, as he passed a marsh near a lime-kiln, a number
of small birds rose chirruping from where they had been clinging among
the reeds. Once, standing still for a moment where two roads crossed on
a hill-side, he looked out over the dark fields. A white stone rose in
the middle of a field, a score of yards in front of him. He knew the
place well; it was an ancient burying-ground. He looked at the stone,
and suddenly filled by that terror of the darkness children feel, began
again his hurried walk.
He re-entered Ballah by the southern side. In passing he looked at the
rectory. To his surprise a light burned in the drawing-room. He stood
still. The dawn was brightening towards the east, but all round him
was darkness, seeming the more intense to his eyes for their being
fresh from the unshaded fields. In the midst of this darkness shone
the lighted window. He went over to the gate and looked in. The room
was empty. He was about to turn away when he noticed a white figure
standing close to the gate. The latch creaked and the gate moved slowly
on its hinges.
“John,” said a trembling voice, “I have been praying, and a light has
come to me. I wished you to be ambitious—to go away and do something
in the world. You did badly, and my poor pride was wounded. You do not
know how much I had hoped from you; but it was all pride—all pride and
foolishness. You love me. I ask no more. We need each other; the rest
is with God.”
She took his hand in hers, and began caressing it. “We have been
shipwrecked. Our goods have been cast into the sea.” Something in her
voice told of the emotion that divides the love of woman from the love
of man. She looked upon him whom she loved as full of a helplessness
that needed protection, a reverberation of the feeling of the mother
for the child at the breast.
DHOYA.
I.
Long ago, before the earliest stone of the pyramids was laid, before
the Bo tree of Buddha unrolled its first leaf, before a Japanese had
painted on a temple wall the horse that every evening descended and
trampled the rice-fields, before the ravens of Thor had eaten their
first worm together, there lived a man of giant stature and of giant
strength named Dhoya. One evening Fomorian galleys had entered the Bay
of the Red Cataract, now the Bay of Ballah, and there deserted him.
Though he rushed into the water and hurled great stones after them
they were out of reach. From earliest childhood the Fomorians had held
him captive and compelled him to toil at the oar, but when his strength
had come his fits of passion made him a terror to all on board.
Sometimes he would tear the seats of the galley from their places, at
others drive the rowers to some corner where, trembling, they would
watch him pacing to and fro till the passion left him. “The demons,”
they said, “have made him their own.” So they enticed him on shore,
he having on his head a mighty stone pitcher to fill with water, and
deserted him.
When the last sail had dropped over the rim of the world he rose from
where he had flung himself down on the sands and paced through the
forests eastward. After a time he reached that lake among the mountains
where in later times Dermot drove down four stakes and made thereon a
platform with four flags in the centre for a hearth, and placed over
all a roof of wicker and skins, and hid his Grania, islanded thereon.
Still eastward he went, what is now Bulban on one side, Cope’s mountain
on the other, until at last he threw himself at full length in a deep
cavern and slept. Henceforward he made this cavern his lair, issuing
forth to hunt the deer or the bears or the mountain oxen. Slowly the
years went by, his fits of fury growing more and more frequent, though
there was no one but his own shadow to rave against. When his fury was
on him even the bats and owls, and the brown toads that crept out of
the grass at twilight would hide themselves—even the bats and owls and
the brown toads. These he had made his friends, and let them crawl and
perch about him, for at times he would be very gentle, and they too
were sullen and silent—the outcasts from they knew not what. But most
of all, things placid and beautiful feared him. He would watch for
hours, hidden in the leaves, to reach his hand out slowly and carefully
at last, and seize and crush some glittering halcyon.
Slowly the years went by and human face he never saw, but sometimes,
when the gentle mood was on him and it was twilight, a presence seemed
to float invisibly by him and sigh softly, and once or twice he awoke
from sleep with the sensation of a finger having rested for a moment
on his forehead, and would mutter a prayer to the moon before turning
to sleep again—the moon that glimmered through the door of his cave.
“O moon,” he would say, “that wandereth in the blue cave, more white
than the beard of Partholan, whose years were five hundred, sullen and
solitary, sleeping only on the floor of the sea: keep me from the evil
spirits of the islands of the lake southward beyond the mountains, and
the evil spirits of the caves northward beyond the mountains, and the
evil spirits who wave their torches by the mouth of the river eastward
beyond the valley, and the evil spirits of the pools westward beyond
the mountains, and I will offer you a bear and a deer in full horn,
O solitary of the cave divine, and if any have done you wrong I will
avenge you.”
Gradually, however, he began to long for this mysterious touch.
At times he would make journeys into distant parts, and once the
mountain oxen gathered together, proud of their overwhelming numbers
and their white horns, and followed him with great bellowing westward,
he being laden with their tallest, well-nigh to his cave, and would
have gored him, but, pacing into a pool of the sea to his shoulders, he
saw them thunder away, losing him in the darkness. The place where he
stood is called Pooldhoya to this day.
So the years went slowly by, and ever deeper and deeper came his
moodiness, and more often his fits of wrath. Once in his gloom he paced
the forests for miles, now this way now that, until, returning in the
twilight, he found himself standing on a cliff southward of the lake
that was southward of the mountains. The moon was rising. The sound
of the swaying of reeds floated from beneath, and the twittering of
the flocks of reed-wrens who love to cling on the moving stems. It was
the hour of votaries. He turned to the moon, then hurriedly gathered
a pile of leaves and branches, and making a fire cast thereon wild
strawberries and the fruit of the quicken tree. As the smoke floated
upwards a bar of faint purple clouds drifted over the moon’s face—a
refusal of the sacrifice. Hurrying through the surrounding woods he
found an owl sleeping in the hollow of a tree, and returning cast him
on the fire. Still the clouds gathered. Again he searched the woods.
This time a badger was uselessly cast among the flames. Time after
time he came and went, sometimes returning immediately with some live
thing, at others not till the fire had almost burnt itself out. Deer,
wild swine, birds, all to no purpose. Higher and higher he piled the
burning branches, the flames and the smoke waved and circled like
the lash of a giant’s whip. Gradually the nearer islands passed the
rosy colour on to their more distant brethren. The reed-wrens of the
furthest reed beds disturbed amid their sleep must have wondered at
the red gleam reflected in each other’s eyes. Useless his night-long
toil; the clouds covered the moon’s face more and more, until, when the
long fire lash was at its brightest, they drowned her completely in a
surge of unbroken mist. Raging against the fire he scattered with his
staff the burning branches, and trampled in his fury the sacrificial
embers beneath his feet. Suddenly a voice in the surrounding darkness
called him softly by name. He turned. For years no articulate voice had
sounded in his ears. It seemed to rise from the air just beneath the
verge of the precipice. Holding by a hazel bush he leaned out, and for
a moment it seemed to him the form of a beautiful woman floated faintly
before him, but changed as he watched to a little cloud of vapour;
and from the nearest of the haunted islands there came assuredly a
whiff of music. Then behind him in the forest said the voice, “Dhoya,
my beloved.” He rushed in pursuit; something white was moving before
him. He stretched out his hand; it was only a mass of white campion
trembling in the morning breeze, for an ashen morning was just touching
the mists on the eastern mountains. Beginning suddenly to tremble with
supernatural fear Dhoya paced homewards. Everything was changed; dark
shadows seemed to come and go, and elfin chatter to pass upon the
breeze. But when he reached the shelter of the pine woods all was still
as of old. He slackened his speed. Those solemn pine-trees soothed him
with their vast unsociability—many and yet each one alone. Once or
twice, when in some glade further than usual from its kind arose some
pine-tree larger than the rest, he paused with bowed head to mutter an
uncouth prayer to that dark outlaw. But when issuing once more, as he
neared his cave, into the region of mountain ash and hazel the voices
seemed again to come and go, and the shadows to circle round him, and
once a voice said, he imagined, in accents faint and soft as falling
dew, “Dhoya, my beloved.” But a few yards from the cave all grew
suddenly silent.
II.
Slower and slower he went, with his eyes on the ground, bewildered
by all that was happening. A few feet from the cave he stood still,
counting aimlessly the round spots of light made by the beams slanting
through trees that hid with their greenness, as in the centre of the
sea, that hollow rock. As over and over he counted them, he heard,
first with the ear only, then with the mind also, a footstep going
to and fro within the cave. Lifting his eyes he saw the same figure
seen on the cliff—the figure of a woman, beautiful and young. Her
dress was white, save for a border of feathers dyed the fatal red of
the spirits. She had arranged in one corner the spears, and in the
other the brushwood and branches used for the fire, and spread upon
the ground the skins, and now began pulling vainly at the great stone
pitcher of the Fomorians.
Suddenly she saw him, and with a burst of wild laughter flung her arms
around his neck, crying, “Dhoya, I have left my world far off. My
people—on the floor of the lake they are dancing and singing, and on
the islands of the lake; always happy, always young, always without
change. I have left them for thee, Dhoya, for they cannot love. Only
the changing, and moody, and angry, and weary can love. I am beautiful;
love me, Dhoya. Do you hear me? I left the places where they dance,
Dhoya, for thee!” For long she poured out a tide of words, he answering
at first little, then more and more as she melted away the silence of
so many inarticulate years; and all the while she gazed on him with
eyes, no ardour could rob of the mild and mysterious melancholy that
watches us from the eyes of animals—sign of unhuman reveries.
Many days passed over these strangely wedded ones. Sometimes when he
asked her, “Do you love me?” she would answer, “I do not know, but
I long for your love endlessly.” Often at twilight, returning from
hunting, he would find her bending over a stream that flowed near to
the cave, decking her hair with feathers and reddening her lips with
the juice of a wild berry.
He was very happy secluded in that deep forest. Hearing the faint
murmurs of the western sea, they seemed to have outlived change. But
Change is everywhere, with the tides and the stars fastened to her
wheel. Every blood drop in their lips, every cloud in the sky, every
leaf in the world changed a little, while they brushed back their hair
and kissed. All things change save only the fear of change. And yet
for his hour Dhoya was happy and as full of dreams as an old man or an
infant—for dreams wander nearest to the grave and the cradle.
Once, as he was returning home from hunting, by the northern edge of
the lake, at the hour when the owls cry to each other, “It is time to
be abroad,” and the last flutter of the wind has died away, leaving
under every haunted island an image legible to the least hazel branch,
there suddenly stood before him a slight figure, at the edge of the
narrow sand-line, dark against the glowing water. Dhoya drew nearer.
It was a man leaning on his spear-staff, on his head a small red cap.
His spear was slender and tipped with shining metal; the spear of Dhoya
of wood, one end pointed and hardened in the fire. The red-capped
stranger silently raised that slender spear and thrust at Dhoya, who
parried with his pointed staff.
For a long while they fought. The last vestige of sunset passed away
and the stars came out. Underneath them the feet of Dhoya beat up the
ground, but the feet of the other as he rushed hither and thither,
matching his agility with the mortal’s mighty strength, made neither
shadow nor footstep on the sands. Dhoya was wounded, and growing weary
a little, when the other leaped away, and, crouching down by the water,
began—“You have carried away by some spell unknown the most beautiful
of our bands—you who have neither laughter nor singing. Restore her,
Dhoya, and go free.” Dhoya answered him no word, and the other rose
and again thrust at him with the spear. They fought to and fro upon
the sands until the dawn touched with olive the distant sky, and then
his anger fit, long absent, fell on Dhoya, and he closed with his
enemy and threw him, and put his knee on his chest and his hands on his
throat, and would have crushed all life out of him, when lo! he held
beneath his knee no more than a bundle of reeds.
Nearing home in the early morning he heard the voice he loved, singing—
“Full moody is my love and sad,
His moods bow low his sombre crest,
I hold him dearer than the glad,
And he shall slumber on my breast.
“My love hath many an evil mood
Ill words for all things soft and fair,
I hold him dearer than the good,
My fingers feel his amber hair.
“No tender wisdom floods the eyes
That watch me with their suppliant light—
I hold him dearer than the wise,
And for him make me wise and bright.”
And when she saw him she cried, “An old mortal song heard
floating from a tent of skin, as we rode, I and mine, through a
camping-place at night.” From that day she was always either singing
wild and melancholy songs or else watching him with that gaze of animal
reverie.
Once he asked, “How old are you?”
“A thousand years, for I am young.”
“I am so little to you,” he went on, “and you are so much to me—dawn,
and sunset, tranquility, and speech, and solitude.”
“Am I so much?” she said; “say it many times!” and her eyes seemed to
brighten and her breast heaved with joy.
Often he would bring her the beautiful skins of animals, and she would
walk to and fro on them, laughing to feel their softness under her
feet. Sometimes she would pause and ask suddenly, “Will you weep for me
when we have parted?” and he would answer, “I will die then;” and she
would go on rubbing her feet to and fro in the soft skin.
And so Dhoya grew tranquil and gentle, and Change seemed still to
have forgotten them, having so much on her hands. The stars rose and
set watching them smiling together, and the tides ebbed and flowed,
bringing mutability to all save them. But always everything changes,
save only the fear of Change.
III.
One evening as they sat in the inner portion of the cave, watching
through the opening the paling of the sky and the darkening of the
leaves, and counting the budding stars, Dhoya suddenly saw stand before
him the dark outline of him he fought on the lake sand, and heard at
the same instant his companion sigh.
The stranger approached a little, and said, “Dhoya we have fought
heretofore, and now I have come to play chess against thee, for well
thou knowest, dear to the perfect warrior after war is chess.”
“I know it,” answered Dhoya.
“And when we have played, Dhoya, we will name the stake.”
“Do not play,” whispered his companion at his side.
But Dhoya, being filled with his anger fit at the sight of his enemy,
answered, “I will play, and I know well the stake you mean, and I name
this for mine, that I may again have my knee on your chest and my hands
on your throat, and that you will not again change into a bundle of wet
reeds.” His companion lay down on a skin and began to cry a little.
Dhoya felt sure of winning. He had often played in his boyhood, before
the time of his anger fits, with his masters of the galley; and
besides, he could always return to his hands and his weapons once more.
Now the floor of the cave was of smooth, white sand, brought from
the sea-shore in his great Fomorian pitcher, to make it soft for his
beloved to walk upon; before it had been, as it now is, of rough clay.
On this sand the red-capped stranger marked out with his spear-point
a chess-board, and marked with rushes, crossed and recrossed each
alternate square, fixing each end of the rush in the sand, until a
complete board was finished of white and green squares, and then drew
from a bag large chess-men of mingled wood and silver. Two or three
would have made an armful for a child. Standing each at his end they
began to play. The game did not last long. No matter how carefully
Dhoya played, each move went against him. At last, leaping back from
the board he cried, “I have lost!” The two spirits were standing
together at the entrance. Dhoya seized his spear, but slowly the
figures began to fade, first a star and then the leaves showed through
their forms. Soon all had vanished away.
Then, realizing his loss, he threw himself on the ground, and rolling
hither and thither, roared like a wild beast. All night long he lay on
the ground, and all the next day till nightfall. He had crumbled his
staff unconsciously between his fingers into small pieces, and now,
full of dull rage, arose and went forth westward. In a ravine of the
northern mountain he came on the tracks of wild horses. Soon one passed
him fearlessly, knowing nothing of man. The pointed end of his staff
he still carried. He drove it deep in the flank, making a long wound,
sending the horse rushing with short screams down the mountain. Other
horses passed him one by one, driven southward by a cold wind laden
with mist, arisen in the night-time. Towards the end of the ravine
stood one black and huge, the leader of the herd. Dhoya leaped on his
back with a loud cry that sent a raven circling from the neighbouring
cliff, and the horse, after vainly seeking to throw him, rushed off
towards the north-west, over the heights of the mountains where the
mists floated. The moon, clear sometimes of the flying clouds, from low
down in the south-east, cast a pale and mutable light, making their
shadow rise before them on the mists, as though they pursued some
colossal demon, sombre on his black charger. Then leaving the heights
they rushed wildly down that valley where, in far later times, Dermot
hid in a deep cavern his Grania, and passed the stream where Muadhan,
their savage servant, caught fish for them on a hook baited with a
quicken berry. On over the plains, on northward, mile after mile, the
wild gigantic horse leaping cliff and chasm in his terrible race; on
until the mountains of what is now Donegal rose before them—over these
among the clouds, driving rain blowing in their faces from the sea,
Dhoya knowing not whither he went, or why he rode. On—the stones
loosened by the hoofs rumbling down into the valleys—till far in
the distance he saw the sea, a thousand feet below him; then, fixing
his eyes thereon, and using the spear-point as a goad, he roused his
black horse into redoubled speed, and with a wild leap horse and rider
plunged headlong into the Western Sea.
Sometimes the cotters on the mountains of Donegal hear on windy nights
a sudden sound of horses’ hoofs, and say to each other, “There goes
Dhoya.” And at the same hour men say if any be abroad in the valleys
they see a huge shadow rushing along the mountain.
THE END.
The Gresham Press,
UNWIN BROTHERS
CHILWORTH AND LONDON.
Transcriber’s Note:
The table of contents has been added by the transcriber.
End of Project Gutenberg's John Sherman and Dhoya, by William Butler Yeats