I WAS sitting reading late into the night a little after my last
meeting with Aherne, when I heard a light knocking on my front door. I
found upon the doorstep three very old men with stout sticks in their
hands, who said they had been told I should be up and about, and that
they were to tell me important things. I brought them into my study,
and when the peacock curtains had closed behind us, I set their chairs
for them close to the fire, for I saw that the frost was on their
great-coats of frieze and upon the long beards that flowed almost to
their waists. They took off their great-coats, and leaned over the
fire warming their hands, and I saw that their clothes had much of the
country of our time, but a little also, as it seemed to me, of the town
life of a more courtly time. When they had warmed themselves--and they
warmed themselves, I thought, less because of the cold of the night
than because of a pleasure in warmth for the sake of warmth--they
turned towards me, so that the light of the lamp fell full upon their
weather-beaten faces, and told the story I am about to tell. Now one
talked and now another, and they often interrupted one another, with
a desire, like that of countrymen, when they tell a story, to leave
no detail untold. When they had finished they made me take notes of
whatever conversation they had quoted, so that I might have the exact
words, and got up to go. When I asked them where they were going, and
what they were doing, and by what names I should call them, they would
tell me nothing, except that they had been commanded to travel over
Ireland continually, and upon foot and at night, that they might live
close to the stones and the trees and at the hours when the immortals
are awake.
I have let some years go by before writing out this story, for I am
always in dread of the illusions which come of that inquietude of the
veil of the Temple, which M. Mallarmé considers a characteristic of our
times; and only write it now because I have grown to believe that there
is no dangerous idea which does not become less dangerous when written
out in sincere and careful English.
The three old men were three brothers, who had lived in one of the
western islands from their early manhood, and had cared all their lives
for nothing except for those classical writers and old Gaelic writers
who expounded an heroic and simple life; night after night in winter,
Gaelic story-tellers would chant old poems to them over the poteen; and
night after night in summer, when the Gaelic story-tellers were at work
in the fields or away at the fishing, they would read to one another
Virgil and Homer, for they would not enjoy in solitude, but as the
ancients enjoyed. At last a man, who told them he was Michael Robartes,
came to them in a fishing-boat, like St. Brandan drawn by some vision
and called by some voice; and spoke of the coming again of the gods
and the ancient things; and their hearts, which had never endured the
body and pressure of our time, but only of distant times, found nothing
unlikely in anything he told them, but accepted all simply and were
happy. Years passed, and one day, when the oldest of the old men, who
travelled in his youth and thought sometimes of other lands, looked
out on the grey waters, on which the people see the dim outline of the
Islands of the Young--the Happy Islands where the Gaelic heroes live
the lives of Homer’s Phæacians--a voice came out of the air over the
waters and told him of the death of Michael Robartes. They were still
mourning when the next oldest of the old men fell asleep while reading
out the Fifth Eclogue of Virgil, and a strange voice spoke through him,
and bid them set out for Paris, where a woman lay dying, who would
reveal to them the secret names of the gods, which can be perfectly
spoken only when the mind is steeped in certain colours and certain
sounds and certain odours; but at whose perfect speaking the immortals
cease to be cries and shadows, and walk and talk with one like men and
women.
They left their island, at first much troubled at all they saw in the
world, and came to Paris, and there the youngest met a person in a
dream, who told him they were to wander about at hazard until those who
had been guiding their footsteps had brought them to a street and a
house, whose likeness was shown him in the dream. They wandered hither
and thither for many days, but one morning they came into some narrow
and shabby streets, on the south of the Seine, where women with pale
faces and untidy hair looked at them out of the windows; and just as
they were about to turn back because Wisdom could not have alighted in
so foolish a neighbourhood, they came to the street and the house of
the dream. The oldest of the old men, who still remembered some of the
modern languages he had known in his youth, went up to the door and
knocked, but when he had knocked, the next in age to him said it was
not a good house, and could not be the house they were looking for, and
urged him to ask for some one that they knew was not there and go away.
The door was opened by an old over-dressed woman, who said, ‘O, you are
her three kinsmen from Ireland. She has been expecting you all day.’
The old men looked at one another and followed her upstairs, passing
doors from which pale and untidy women thrust out their heads, and into
a room where a beautiful woman lay asleep in a bed, with another woman
sitting by her.
The old woman said: ‘Yes, they have come at last; now she will be able
to die in peace,’ and went out.
‘We have been deceived by devils,’ said one of the old men, ‘for the
immortals would not speak through a woman like this.’
‘Yes,’ said another, ‘we have been deceived by devils, and we must go
away quickly.’
‘Yes,’ said the third, ‘we have been deceived by devils, but let us
kneel down for a little, for we are by the deathbed of one that has
been beautiful.’ They knelt down, and the woman who sat by the bed, and
seemed to be overcome with fear and awe, lowered her head. They watched
for a little the face upon the pillow and wondered at its look, as of
unquenchable desire, and at the porcelain-like refinement of the vessel
in which so malevolent a flame had burned.
Suddenly the second oldest of them crowed like a cock, and until the
room seemed to shake with the crowing. The woman in the bed still
slept on in her death-like sleep, but the woman who sat by her head
crossed herself and grew pale, and the youngest of the old men cried
out: ‘A devil has gone into him, and we must begone or it will go into
us also.’ Before they could rise from their knees, a resonant chanting
voice came from the lips that had crowed and said: ‘I am not a devil,
but I am Hermes the Shepherd of the Dead, and I run upon the errands of
the gods, and you have heard my sign, that has been my sign from the
old days. Bow down before her from whose lips the secret names of the
immortals, and of the things near their hearts, are about to come, that
the immortals may come again into the world. Bow down, and understand
that when they are about to overthrow the things that are to-day and
bring the things that were yesterday, they have no one to help them,
but one whom the things that are to-day have cast out. Bow down and
very low, for they have chosen for their priestess this woman in whose
heart all follies have gathered, and in whose body all desires have
awaked; this woman who has been driven out of Time and has lain upon
the bosom of Eternity. After you have bowed down the old things shall
be again, and another Argo shall carry heroes over sea, and another
Achilles beleaguer another Troy.’
The voice ended with a sigh, and immediately the old man awoke out of
sleep, and said: ‘Has a voice spoken through me, as it did when I fell
asleep over my Virgil, or have I only been asleep?’
The oldest of them said: ‘A voice has spoken through you. Where has
your soul been while the voice was speaking through you?’
‘I do not know where my soul has been, but I dreamed I was under the
roof of a manger, and I looked down and I saw an ox and an ass; and I
saw a red cock perching on the hay-rack; and a woman hugging a child;
and three old men, in armour studded with rubies, kneeling with their
heads bowed very low in front of the woman and the child. While I was
looking the cock crowed and a man with wings on his heels swept up
through the air, and as he passed me, cried out: “Foolish old men, you
had once all the wisdom of the stars.” I do not understand my dream or
what it would have us do, but you who have heard the voice out of the
wisdom of my sleep know what we have to do.’
Then the oldest of the old men told him they were to take the
parchments they had brought with them out of their pockets and spread
them on the ground. When they had spread them on the ground, they took
out of their pockets their pens, made of three feathers, which had
fallen from the wing of the old eagle that is believed to have talked
of wisdom with St. Patrick.
‘He meant, I think,’ said the youngest, as he put their ink-bottles
by the side of the rolls of parchment, ‘that when people are good the
world likes them and takes possession of them, and so eternity comes
through people who are not good or who have been forgotten. Perhaps
Christianity was good and the world liked it, so now it is going away
and the immortals are beginning to awake.’
‘What you say has no wisdom,’ said the oldest, ‘because if there are
many immortals, there cannot be only one immortal.’
Then the woman in the bed sat up and looked about her with wild eyes;
and the oldest of the old men said: ‘Lady, we have come to write down
the secret names,’ and at his words a look of great joy came into her
face. Presently she began to speak slowly, and yet eagerly, as though
she knew she had but a little while to live, and in the Gaelic of their
own country; and she spoke to them many secret powerful names, and of
the colours, and odours, and weapons, and instruments of music and
instruments of handicraft belonging to the owners of those names; but
most about the Sidhe of Ireland and of their love for the Cauldron, and
the Whetstone, and the Sword, and the Spear. Then she tossed feebly
for a while and moaned, and when she spoke again it was in so faint a
murmur that the woman who sat by the bed leaned down to listen, and
while she was listening the spirit went out of the body.
Then the oldest of the old men said in French to the woman who was
still bending over the bed: ‘There must have been yet one name which
she had not given us, for she murmured a name while the spirit was
going out of the body,’ and the woman said, ‘She was but murmuring
over the name of a symbolist painter she was fond of. He used to go to
something he called the Black Mass, and it was he who taught her to see
visions and to hear voices. She met him for the first time a few months
ago, and we have had no peace from that day because of her talk about
visions and about voices. Why! It was only last night that I dreamed I
saw a man with a red beard and red hair, and dressed in red, standing
by my bedside. He held a rose in one hand, and tore it in pieces with
the other hand, and the petals drifted about the room, and became
beautiful people who began to dance slowly. When I woke up I was all in
a heat with terror.’
This is all the old men told me, and when I think of their speech and
of their silence, of their coming and of their going, I am almost
persuaded that had I gone out of the house after they had gone out of
it, I should have found no footsteps on the snow. They may, for all I
or any man can say, have been themselves immortals: immortal demons,
come to put an untrue story into my mind for some purpose I do not
understand. Whatever they were, I have turned into a pathway which
will lead me from them and from the Order of the Alchemical Rose. I
no longer live an elaborate and haughty life, but seek to lose myself
among the prayers and the sorrows of the multitude. I pray best in poor
chapels, where the frieze coats brush by me as I kneel, and when I pray
against the demons I repeat a prayer which was made I know not how many
centuries ago to help some poor Gaelic man or woman who had suffered
with a suffering like mine.
_Seacht b-pàidreacha fó seacht
Chuir Muire faoi n-a Mac,
Chuir Brighid faoi n-a brat,
Chuir Dia faoi n-a neart,
Eidir sinn ‘san Sluagh Sidhe,
Eidir sinn ‘san Sluagh Gaoith._
Seven paters seven times,
Send Mary by her Son,
Send Bridget by her mantle,
Send God by His strength,
Between us and the faery host,
Between us and the demons of the air.