Eochy drew near with his harper, and the earthly harper drowned the
dream of Faery. For a year and a moon and a night Etain lived with
Eochy in the Kingdom of Meath, and theirs were all the boundaries of
all Ireland. Whoever is Lord of Meath kingeth every bound of Ireland.
“The Setting is with the Jewel,” as the Brehons have said. Their
allotted time passed and they chanced to sit in the hall of banquet.
The inner gates were closed. The armed men were withdrawn from the
ramparts, for it was against the chivalry of Ireland to make attack
after nightfall. The porter stood alone in the court. A warrior was
seen passing within the gates. The porter knew not his face nor his
accoutrements and still-stood with fright. His knees kissed and his
heels fled from each other. Eochy heard the clinking of his knees and
cried aloud to the porter: “Who knocks?”
“Midir of the Elf-mounds,” was the reply, “and I am come to play
against the royal harpers for a fee.”
The King of Ireland consented, both for his love of harmony and for
his love of the hazard. Now the best harpers in Ireland are they who
have learnt their tunes from the herdsmen who listen at the holes of
the Elf-mounds, and Midir made sure that no harper of Eochy would
play other than echoes of his own music. Very cunningly he played the
music of challenge, and sang of the youth and beauty of the world that
is ever young, until the old wine in the casks stored under the roof
became fresh wine of the grape and poured down the walls. When he had
finished, the very warriors and poets of Eochy cried: “Victory indeed!”
Then the King called his favourite harper, who had been stolen out of
his cradle by a water-wench, and had heard better music under wave than
ever upon earth. Long he played and all listened, Midir most of all. It
was no music of Elf-land or echo of the elfin tune, but the music of
the cities which have been drowned in the Western sea. The night winds
carried the music into the trees outside the royal rath of the King
and, though it was winter, they burst into bloom. When he had ended,
all present cried: “Victory over victory!” Midir asked the fee he
should pay to the royal harper of Ireland. “Clear the plains of Meath
smooth of stone!” said the harper, who knew whence Midir came. Midir
went as he came.
At dawn the royal steward went out and found the fields as smooth as
the face of the clouds, and a great host with fairy oxen carrying away
every stone except the magic stones of the Druids, and sinking them
into the bogs and waterholes of Ireland.
But Midir was unsatisfied and came to the King the next night, passing
porter and portals into the room of banquet. The King asked his need,
and he said: “A game of royal chess.” The board was set of gold and
silver squares, and the King slew half of Midir’s chessmen. Midir
pretended anger, and bade the King choose whatever stake he would.
“Rid the fields of Meath of every rush,” said the King. At dawn the
royal steward went out and reported that a multitude of small folk were
hewing down the last rushes as men destroy a forest.
The next night Eochy came again and asked another game. The King gladly
consented to show his skill. Midir played with the wisdom of his own
people, and he left no piece but his own standing upon the board, and
the King’s kingpiece. The King inquired his stake. “To hold Etain the
beautiful in my arms for a moment of time,” said Midir. The King was
troubled and bade him return after the month.
At the end of the month Eochy filled his halls with chosen warriors and
trim swordsmen, and sent men riding to and fro upon the ramparts. Midir
passed through them all. “A debt is due to me,” he said. “I have not
considered yet,” said the King. “Etain the beautiful thou hast promised
me.” “But only for a moment of time,” said Eochy. Fear came upon Etain,
for the year of her forgetfulness was passing from her. To the King
she clung, saying: “Until thou resign me I will not go from thee.” “I
will not resign thee,” said Eochy, “but he may take thee in his arms
for a moment of time as thou art, and in the midst of my warriors, and
while my horsemen gallop the battlements.” “Well said,” quoth Midir,
“for a moment of love time is longer than all time.” To Etain then he
whispered her fairy name.
She withdrew not from his arms, but passed away with him as she had
come, through the lattice of the roof. Eochy the King rose and cried
aloud as a sheep shouteth to an eagle bearing away her lamb. When the
warriors in the court heard the cry of the King, they leaped against
each other with their swords in their hands and shame in their eyes.
And the riding men spurred to and fro upon the ramparts. Yet no one was
seen to pass, and though the King of Ireland rode into the night with
his harper and his Druid he never came by Etain the beautiful. But the
fields of Royal Meath to this day are smooth of stone and rid of rush.
KATHLEEN
I cannot prove that animals have souls, but I would go so far as to say
that the apparatus of a soul is there. Instinct is obviously not soul,
and, moreover, is based on hereditary earth-fears and earth desires.
With death, instinct dies like any other quality--like the power of
smell or the colour of the fur. Reasons given to prove that animals
have no souls are that they cannot laugh or they cannot pray, or they
do not leave behind those wisps or waifs of floating personality which
we call ghosts. Only beings with souls to lose or save have the faculty
of impregnating place and time with those unsolved emanations, which we
attribute to some great emotional violence or grief or crime, when we
say that such and such a house is haunted. But then, if the material of
a house can be haunted--that is, possessed by spirits, good or evil,
of the past--why should it not be possible for an animal to become
possessed and, being sentient and animate, to reproduce such effects as
that same spirit would have on a human body?
But of themselves animals have no souls. Otherwise, one might sadly
imagine what a multitude of ghosts would haunt the human race. Would
not the old coach roads be infested with phantom horses once worn
slowly to death in order to keep the system of mails and stages, before
the era of railways, up to time? Would not numberless donkeys haunt the
sea sands? And all the cats and dogs left to starve in deserted houses
should provide the spectral shapes of their anguish and despair, all
manner of feline phantoms and canine come-backs. But, however inhumanly
an animal dies, it is just because it is not human that it leaves no
avenging or haunting emanation on time’s spectroscope.
But an animal is susceptible of lodging a soul or spirit escaped from
some other source. Holy Writ and Mediæval Sorcery combine to reassure
us on that point. The driving of the evil spirits out of their human
host into the Gadarene swine was the greatest experiment in Psychical
Research since the seance of Endor, when the witch raised Samuel from
the dead with the deliberate dare-devilry of a Kensington Pythoness.
The Gadarene swine showed that the bodies of animals could be properly
possessed by spirits, and of course the necromantic Middle Ages
broidered every single Gospel fact to the full, and recorded every kind
of fantastic variant such as familiar spirits occupying owls and men’s
souls entering into wolves; all the horrible legend of lycanthropy, to
give it its right name. The accepted fact that spirits could so easily
make themselves at home in an animal’s body led the theologians to
the theological deduction that an animal could not possibly have had
a soul. It was empty, in fact. A human body, of course, is not easily
occupied by spirits unless the person has been foolish enough to get
out of his body and lose the way back. However, that is another story.
To return to Psychical Research and the animal world, nothing is
better attested than the perception of the unseen to which the
primitive instinct of a dog is liable. Our eyes are often too scaled
or civilised to see what is happening in our own drawing-rooms. Dogs
sometimes follow with their eyes some passing apparition which is held
from their owner’s sight. And they rise and shiver in that numbing
ice-breath, which is so common a concomitant of that which comes from
the unseen. I have known of caged birds dying, well, it was said of a
cold draught, but really of sheer terror....
Of leaving ghosts themselves animals have no specific record though
they frequently figure in ghost stories. But the survivals and
superannuations of human personality do return under animal form.
There was the case of a Scotch recluse, who had a morbid little way
about him, and was always upsetting his prosaic family by threatening
to return to them in the body of one of his many pet sporting dogs.
He was so insistent on this subject that the moment he died his
family had all his dogs destroyed, but he came back all the same and
rather unpleasantly, for visitors used to complain of the whining
and scratching of a dog at their door during the night. Horses have
certainly been known to make their distress known to their owners by
telepathic means, whether they have thrown a foal untimely or stumbled
into wire in the dark.
An old school friend of mine, Edward (and the family name I leave out)
was convinced that a woman’s spirit dwelt in his favourite mare, but
the circumstances he would never allow to be studied scientifically
or published in any way. As he has long left the country, and as I
think that I alone saw the story from start to finish (and can now
evolve some theory) I will tell it as well as I can, always making the
reservation that it is an unpleasant story in the extreme. However,
with the necessary changes in names and places it can do no harm to
present it to the morbid.
We were all at school together, Edward, Lord Petersfield (that was
not his name) and myself, and Eton will make a very good disguise for
the name of the Public School. Edward and Petersfield were prominent
in athletics from the first, though Petersfield was always ahead. He
was a bullnecked fellow with a face and nose of the type the Americans
feelingly describe as “plug-ugly.” He had no brain, and being a peer’s
son would never have been expected to use it if he had one, but he had
tremendous grit and determination to collect all that he wanted in the
shape of silver cups and coloured caps--in glorification of his bodily
prowess. On the whole they prove delusive trophies to English youth,
choking off higher ambitions and satisfying young men with a physical
fitness which cannot last. Petersfield was really supreme of this type,
brave, unscrupulous, thick-skinned and self-centred. He was the finest
kick at football in the school or any school. I can still see the ball
darting more than bouncing from his toe like a billiard ball from the
cue, or describing long parabolas across the playing field like one
of those drawings which illustrate the curve and velocity of cannon
balls. And his pride and self-conceit! Well, it was our fault, for we
worshipped as much as we disliked him. I think we feared him as well.
He had such a relentless way of hurling others out of his path. He
insisted on being first choice always. He had to be captain. He had to
be winner. He had to be the record maker. Being second was poisonous to
him. He could not stand being honourably beaten. He was a fine winner
but a bad loser.
It was the same in later life. He was a fine billiard player, but,
being once defeated in a passing game at the club, he put down his
cue and never played again. Defeat, however honourable, was the only
thing that appeared to hurt him. To the racket and bruises of an
athletic career he was impervious. Besides, he gave as good as he
took. His curiously ugly face was attributed to a streak of foreign
blood. Certainly he had a full-blooded Oriental grandmother. Boys of
foreign descent more often showed a taste at school for pretty clothes
and expensive sweets. It was odd in those days to see one, captain of
an English school Eleven charging and barging, and swearing like any
muscular Christian. Of course there was plenty of English blood on his
father’s side, and it was only while he was a small youth that he was
chaffed about the colour of his Asiatic relations with that considerate
tact which the English schoolboy has made his own. He soon could look
after himself, and played cricket as well as football for the school.
The mixture of blood made him strong as a mongrel and his endless
conceit made him courageous. He was steeled, not unnerved, by the
presence of a large crowd, and could be depended upon to make runs on a
bad pitch. But he was always disliked.
Between Petersfield and Edward there had been a feud as fags when they
first came to school, and it had always rankled. As soon as Petersfield
found his level he had tried to bully Edward, and I remember the day
when Edward decided to stand him no longer. He found himself cornered
in another boy’s room, and seeing Petersfield descending upon him he
snatched a knife from the table, and thrust it with a boy’s frenzy
into his enemy. There was a lot of blood and a serious row. Luckily
Petersfield was tough and no artery was severed. The parents of both
boys were summoned by the Headmaster, and it was wisely decided to
hush everything up. For the rest of their school life they were often
athletic rivals, but they managed to keep out of each other’s way.
They both reached the Eleven eventually, and whatever ill-humour
remained was discharged on the football field. Petersfield left all his
contemporaries behind, and was regarded as the best kick the school had
ever produced, which set his selfishness and self-conceit running into
a settled mould.
The privileges and good things of the English aristocratic life were
abundantly his. The combination of wealth from abroad, title from home,
and athletic prowess at school opened every club and country house to
Petersfield. He went wherever he wished, and nine mothers out of ten
encouraged their daughters to follow and flatter him without thinking
whether he was likely to make an ideal husband, or perhaps because
English mothers seem to believe that the ideal husband is the third
stage of the idolised schoolboy who has become an idle bachelor.
Petersfield and Edward used to meet again in after life during the
hunting season. In face of the solemn realities connected with the
pursuit of foxes they could well afford to forget their disagreements
at school. Edward used to hunt regularly, for in those days hunting was
not out of the reach and pocket of those English country families for
whom the sport had been divinely designed. The time had not yet come
for the sport to become the monied luxury of townsmen rather than the
occupation of squires, when men of wealth would command the hunts their
fortunes supported, and when their lack of horsemanship and speed in
the field would be met by a supply of well-aniseeded foxes and even
three-padded Reynards, amputated for the benefit of sporting stalwarts
who had paid to be in at the death. The King of Sports would have to
be brought within range of the Kings of Commerce and Stock-broking. In
the greater days of fox-hunting, Petersfield and Edward both rode in
the first flight. Hunting was a serious matter in Leicestershire then,
and it was a joy to behold how the hard-riding squires and gentlemen
jockeys kept the after-Christmas crowd at a polite distance by forcing
a tempestuous pace over the oxers and leaving the colliding Cockneys
to drift into the distance. On such occasions there arose a closer
understanding between Edward and Petersfield. They were both well
mounted, and had no quarrel in the open. Indeed, by this time they must
have forgotten the old rivalry at school. But it had left an impression
on my mind, and, remembering how Petersfield had been able to snatch
prize after prize in front of Edward’s nose, I would have been well
satisfied to see him forfeit one of the more substantial gains in life
to my friend.
There came a splendid season with record runs interspersed through the
finest of hunting weather. The Leicestershire colonies settled down to
their Elysian fields with no cloud on the horizon except the prospect
of having to find a new Master for one of the best-known packs.
Fortunately neither Petersfield nor Edward had any ambition that way,
otherwise I would have been really grieved had Petersfield snatched
the Mastership to himself. For any such public and honourable post I
considered that Edward had far higher qualifications. His temper was
more even, and he often thought of others besides himself.
When the time came for the renewal of their rivalry I noticed with
interest and relief that it was over a woman that they were stirred,
first vaguely and hesitatingly, and at last very relentlessly.
Nevertheless the fair sex lead to far less unpleasantness in England
than what are called sporting disputes. An Englishman who is kept out
of some great sporting position or done out of his place in a team of
eleven will harbour vendetta all his life. But for a jilting fiancée or
a forsaking wife he will find a kind of bored consolation elsewhere.
The arrows of love are fortunately blunted by the northern climate.
England is a man’s country not a woman’s. Affairs of honour, if they
arise, rise in the realm of sport, not of gallantry. Cheating at cards,
accusations of foul play, even labelling a man a dangerous shot, will
set men fiercely apart, and will blind accuser and accused to the
consequences. But as a rule men do not fight duels over women or lose
their heads merely because they have lost their hearts. There are
always as many mermaids in the sea as ever emerged from its waves. It
was unfortunate and unnecessary, therefore, that Petersfield and Edward
should have discovered that the one and only girl for them resided in
the same person. Trouble stared them in the face the moment Kathleen
FitzClare arrived to stay at the same hunting lodge where they were
guests. But her charms are no part of my story or at least any detailed
description of them. Their effect certainly is. They seemed to affect
Petersfield and Edward both with the same deadly fascination, for
they both began to court her in the intervals of pursuing the fox.
I was thrown constantly with all three, and found myself something
of a neutral pacemaker for Edward, with an inclination to ride off
Petersfield if I could. But the game was so obviously one where the
third man cannot interfere. The contest was as keen as could be
expected among men whose first thoughts lay with hunting all the time.
The game went to Petersfield.
Though I think on a desert island or on a social level Kathleen would
have chosen Edward for the amiabilities which the other never had,
Petersfield could urge a number of qualities in his cause, which
counted high in the England of those days. A prospective Peerage still
argued nobility and probably gentle blood. His wealth was based on land
reinforced by a fortune abroad. He was unpopular, but his position was
strong, and he could stroll into Parliament or a first-rate club, or
most country houses, with very little preliminaries.
He was still pushing for prizes and generally picking them up whether
he had to make an exertion or not. Perhaps he won them too easily, for
he never had to give that concentration of purpose and pain by which
alone the greatest trophies are won. He had distanced us all at school
without taking the trouble to train himself, and in later life it was
the same. Of him it was said that he could have played cricket for
England and won the Grand National. He had the calibre for both but not
the self-denial. He took his sport for his personal pride and pleasure
and not for its own reward. It was his pleasure to keep his strong body
magnificently fit, but he had no use for asceticism or reducing his
weight or the toils of first class cricket and steeplechasing. And his
pride was sufficiently served by the ease with which he could hold his
own among the amateurs of his time. Nor was he the sort to love a woman
with the bloodless devotion of a Harry Esmond. When he saw an easy
and pleasurable chance to make love he took it. Edward became deeply
in love with Kathleen, but Petersfield forced the pace and in the end
he took her away. The day came when Edward realised that it was all
up. We were coming up the stairs when we caught sight of Petersfield
and Kathleen on the higher landing together. He was leaning backward
and she seemed almost to be dragged forward by the eddy of his lips.
I swore softly, but Edward turned a little pale and said nothing.
Petersfield looked rather like one of those Satyrs that are so often
depicted on classical altars. Well it made me hot and Edward cold, poor
fellow! I do not suppose Petersfield was ever particularly passionate,
but as she turned round I could see the glint of his teeth as he drew
his mouth across her shoulders.... Their engagement was announced soon
after.... At the wedding a curious incident happened. Edward crept into
the church at the last moment, and, as luck would have it, ran into
the bride. Without a word but with a face like marble she broke her
wedding bouquet and handed one half to Edward. Nobody but myself saw
the incident.
Edward seemed quite crushed for a long time after she married
Petersfield, but his early training had prepared him for being
knocked out from the same quarter. He never mentioned it to me then
or afterwards. As for Kathleen--for all that the world knew, it was
a happy marriage. Her relatives were wildly pleased and marriages
are made to please relatives. She kept her end up and always showed
herself well groomed and proud when she appeared in public, and perky
and pleasant in the private houses she visited. Her behaviour showed
the normal attitude with which women equally conceal the most fantastic
tragedies or some secret happiness. You never can know by their conduct
whether women have cancer or a lover. The same intangible veil conceals
the most terrible secrets within. A man will make a hullabulloo over
either, and tell all his friends in the Club sooner or later. Men are
fools. Women will talk about everything that concerns the secrets of
others, but their own they keep more often than people know. Kathleen
kept hers and no one was a penny the wiser. But the marriage did not
last. Neither women nor horses ever lasted Petersfield long. He was
always passing restlessly on his way to try another. But there was no
scandal or divorce in Kathleen’s case. In fact nobody thought anything
was amiss until she was found dead one morning, and the Coroner stated
at somewhat embarrassing length his reasons for supposing that she had
taken an overdose of sleeping draught accidentally!
She had been out hunting the day before, and Edward told me that he had
had a long talk with her. They had always remained close friends and
met more and more gladly. This occasion had been Edward’s last memory
of her, and they had met at the covertside and ridden into a corner
field together. She had talked to Edward with more than her usual gay
manner, with a real tenderness in fact, as though she were going for
a far journey and they were not likely to meet again that season and
for longer. She had shewn herself more interested in Edward than in
the hounds, and had insisted on his wheeling his horse round and round
behind the covert. He could not remember that she had told him anything
important, certainly nothing to illuminate the dark tragedy of the
morning after, but her manner had impressed him deeply. She seemed to
be prescient of a coming disaster and unwilling for him to leave her
side. She had kept him there, he could not tell whether it was ten
minutes or an hour, but the hunt had meantime disappeared. Then with a
handshake and allowing him to kiss her hand she had ridden home leaving
him an imperishable souvenir. Of course he never saw her again, but,
what was so curious, he could not recall a word that she had said.
He was fortunately able to keep the incident from the Coroner whose
interpretation would almost certainly have been wrong.