No More Learning

There are moments even now when I seem to hear those voices of
exultation and lamentation, and when the indefinite world, which has
but half lost its mastery over my heart and my intellect, seems about
to claim a perfect mastery; but I carry the rosary about my neck, and
when I hear, or seem to hear them, I press it to my heart and say: 'He
whose name is Legion is at our doors deceiving our intellects with
subtlety and flattering our hearts with beauty, and we have no trust
but in Thee'; and then the war that rages within me at other times is
still, and I am at peace.




THE TABLES OF THE LAW


I

'WILL you permit me, Aherne,' I said, 'to ask you a question, which I
have wanted to ask you for years, and have not asked because we have
grown nearly strangers? Why did you refuse the berretta, and almost
at the last moment? When you and I lived together, you cared neither
for wine, women, nor money, and had thoughts for nothing but theology
and mysticism. ' I had watched through dinner for a moment to put my
question, and ventured now, because he had thrown off a little of
the reserve and indifference which, ever since his last return from
Italy, had taken the place of our once close friendship. He had just
questioned me, too, about certain private and almost sacred things, and
my frankness had earned, I thought, a like frankness from him.

When I began to speak he was lifting to his lips a glass of that old
wine which he could choose so well and valued so little; and while
I spoke, he set it slowly and meditatively upon the table and held
it there, its deep red light dyeing his long delicate fingers. The
impression of his face and form, as they were then, is still vivid
with me, and is inseparable from another and fanciful impression:
the impression of a man holding a flame in his naked hand. He was to
me, at that moment, the supreme type of our race, which, when it has
risen above, or is sunken below, the formalisms of half-education and
the rationalisms of conventional affirmation and denial, turns away,
unless my hopes for the world and for the Church have made me blind,
from practicable desires and intuitions towards desires so unbounded
that no human vessel can contain them, intuitions so immaterial that
their sudden and far-off fire leaves heavy darkness about hand and
foot. He had the nature, which is half monk, half soldier of fortune,
and must needs turn action into dreaming, and dreaming into action;
and for such there is no order, no finality, no contentment in this
world. When he and I had been students in Paris, we had belonged to a
little group which devoted itself to speculations about alchemy and
mysticism. More orthodox in most of his beliefs than Michael Robartes,
he had surpassed him in a fanciful hatred of all life, and this hatred
had found expression in the curious paradox--half borrowed from some
fanatical monk, half invented by himself--that the beautiful arts were
sent into the world to overthrow nations, and finally life herself, by
sowing everywhere unlimited desires, like torches thrown into a burning
city. This idea was not at the time, I believe, more than a paradox,
a plume of the pride of youth; and it was only after his return to
Ireland that he endured the fermentation of belief which is coming upon
our people with the reawakening of their imaginative life.

Presently he stood up, saying: 'Come, and I will show you, for you at
any rate will understand,' and taking candles from the table, he lit
the way into the long paved passage that led to his private chapel. We
passed between the portraits of the Jesuits and priests--some of no
little fame--his family had given to the Church; and engravings and
photographs of pictures that had especially moved him; and the few
paintings his small fortune, eked out by an almost penurious abstinence
from the things most men desire, had enabled him to buy in his travels.
The pictures that I knew best, for they had hung there longest,
whether reproductions or originals, were of the Sienese School, which
he had studied for a long time, claiming that it alone of the schools
of the world pictured not the world but what is revealed to saints in
their dreams and visions. The Sienese alone among Italians, he would
say, could not or would not represent the pride of life, the pleasure
in swift movement or sustaining strength, or voluptuous flesh. They
were so little interested in these things that there often seemed to
be no human body at all under the robe of the saint, but they could
represent by a bowed head, or uplifted face, man's reverence before
Eternity as no others could, and they were at their happiest when
mankind had dwindled to a little group silhouetted upon a golden abyss,
as if they saw the world habitually from far off. When I had praised
some school that had dipped deeper into life, he would profess to
discover a more intense emotion than life knew in those dark outlines.
'Put, even Francesca, who felt the supernatural as deeply,' he would
say, 'beside the work of Siena, and one finds a faint impurity in his
awe, a touch of ghostly terror, where love and humbleness had best
been all. ' He had often told me of his hope that by filling his mind
with those holy pictures he would help himself to attain at last to
vision and ecstasy, and of his disappointment at never getting more
than dreams of a curious and broken beauty. But of late he had added
pictures of a different kind, French symbolistic pictures which he had
bought for a few pounds from little-known painters, English and French
pictures of the School of the English Pre-Raphaelites; and now he stood
for a moment and said, 'I have changed my taste. I am fascinated a
little against my will by these faces, where I find the pallor of souls
trembling between the excitement of the flesh and the excitement of the
spirit, and by landscapes that are created by heightening the obscurity
and disorder of nature. These landscapes do not stir the imagination
to the energies of sanctity but as to orgaic dancing and prophetic
frenzy. ' I saw with some resentment new images where the old ones had
often made that long gray, dim, empty, echoing passage become to my
eyes a vestibule of Eternity.

Almost every detail of the chapel, which we entered by a narrow Gothic
door, whose threshold had been worn smooth by the secret worshippers of
the penal times, was vivid in my memory; for it was in this chapel that
I had first, and when but a boy, been moved by the mediaevalism which
is now, I think, the governing influence in my life. The only thing
that seemed new was a square bronze box which stood upon the altar
before the six unlighted candles and the ebony crucifix, and was like
those made in ancient times of more precious substances to hold the
sacred books. Aherne made me sit down on an oak bench, and having bowed
very low before the crucifix, took the bronze box from the altar, and
sat down beside me with the box upon his knees.

'You will perhaps have forgotten,' he said, 'most of what you have
read about Joachim of Flora, for he is little more than a name to even
the well read. He was an abbot in Cortale in the twelfth century,
and is best known for his prophecy, in a book called _Expositio in
Apocalypsin_, that the Kingdom of the Father was passed, the Kingdom
of the Son passing, the Kingdom of the Spirit yet to come. The
Kingdom of the Spirit was to be a complete triumph of the Spirit, the
_spiritualis intelligentia_ he called it, over the dead letter. He
had many followers among the more extreme Franciscans, and these were
accused of possessing a secret book of his called the _Liber Inducens
in Evangelium AEternum_. Again and again groups of visionaries were
accused of possessing this terrible book, in which the freedom of the
Renaissance lay hidden, until at last Pope Alexander IV. had it found
and cast into the flames. I have here the greatest treasure the world
contains. I have a copy of that book; and see what great artists have
made the robes in which it is wrapped. The greater portion of the book
itself is illuminated in the Byzantine style, which so few care for
to-day, but which moves me because these tall, emaciated angels and
saints seem to have less relation to the world about us than to an
abstract pattern of flowing lines, that suggest an imagination absorbed
in the contemplation of Eternity. Even if you do not care for so formal
an art, you cannot help seeing that work where there is so much gold,
and of that purple colour which has gold dissolved in it, was valued at
a great price in its day. But it was only at the Renaissance the labour
was spent upon it which has made it the priceless thing it is. The
wooden boards of the cover show by the astrological allegories painted
upon them, as by the style of painting itself, some craftsman of the
school of Francesco Cossi of Ferrara, but the gold clasps and hinges
are known to be the work of Benvenuto Cellini, who made likewise the
bronze box and covered it with gods and demons, whose eyes are closed,
to signify an absorption in the inner light.

I took the book in my hands and began turning over the gilded,
many-coloured pages, holding it close to the candle to discover the
texture of the paper.

'Where did you get this amazing book? ' I said. 'If genuine, and I
cannot judge by this light, you have discovered one of the most
precious things in the world. '

'It is certainly genuine,' he replied. 'When the original was
destroyed, one copy alone remained, and was in the hands of a
lute-player of Florence, and from him it passed to his son, and so
from generation to generation until it came to the lute-player who
was father to Benvenuto Cellini, and from Benvenuto Cellini to that
Cardinal of Ferrara who released him from prison, and from him to
a natural son, so from generation to generation, the story of its
wandering passing on with it, until it came into the possession of
the family of Aretino, and to Giulio Aretino, an artist and worker in
metals, and student of the kabalistic heresies of Pico della Mirandola.
He spent many nights with me at Rome, discussing philosophy; and at
last I won his confidence so perfectly that he showed me this, his
greatest treasure; and, finding how much I valued it, and feeling that
he himself was growing old and beyond the help of its teaching, he sold
it to me for no great sum, considering its great preciousness. '

'What is the doctrine? ' I said. 'Some mediaeval straw-splitting about
the nature of the Trinity, which is only useful to-day to show how many
things are unimportant to us, which once shook the world? '

'I could never make you understand,' he said, with a sigh, 'that
nothing is unimportant in belief, but even you will admit that this
book goes to the heart. Do you see the tables on which the commandments
were written in Latin? ' I looked to the end of the room, opposite to
the altar, and saw that the two marble tablets were gone, and that
two large empty tablets of ivory, like large copies of the little
tablets we set over our desks, had taken their place. 'It has swept
the commandments of the Father away,' he went on, 'and displaced the
commandments of the Son by the commandments of the Holy Spirit. The
first book is called _Fractura Tabularum_. In the first chapter it
mentions the names of the great artists who made them graven things
and the likeness of many things, and adored them and served them; and
the second the names of the great wits who took the name of the Lord
their God in vain; and that long third chapter, set with the emblems
of sanctified faces, and having wings upon its borders, is the praise
of breakers of the seventh day and wasters of the six days, who yet
lived comely and pleasant days. Those two chapters tell of men and
women who railed upon their parents, remembering that their god was
older than the god of their parents; and that which has the sword of
Michael for an emblem commends the kings that wrought secret murder and
so won for their people a peace that was _amore somnoque gravata et
vestibus versicoloribus_, heavy with love and sleep and many-coloured
raiment; and that with the pale star at the closing has the lives of
the noble youths who loved the wives of others and were transformed
into memories, which have transformed many poorer hearts into sweet
flames; and that with the winged head is the history of the robbers who
lived upon the sea or in the desert, lives which it compares to the
twittering of the string of a bow, _nervi stridentis instar_; and those
two last, that are fire and gold, are devoted to the satirists who bore
false witness against their neighbours and yet illustrated eternal
wrath, and to those that have coveted more than other men the house of
God, and all things that are His, which no man has seen and handled,
except in madness and in dreams.

'The second book is called _Lex Secreta_, and describes the true
inspiration of action, the only Eternal Evangel; and ends with a
vision, which he saw among the mountains of La Sila, of his disciples
sitting throned in the blue deep of the air, and laughing aloud, with
a laughter that was like the rustling of the wings of Time: _Coelis in
coeruleis ridentes sedebant discipuli mei super thronos: talis erat
risus, qualis temporis pennati susurrus. _'

'I know little of Joachim of Flora,' I said, 'except that Dante set him
in Paradise among the great doctors. If he held a heresy so singular, I
cannot understand how no rumours of it came to the ears of Dante; and
Dante made no peace with the enemies of the Church. '

'Joachim of Flora acknowledged openly the authority of the Church, and
even asked that all his published writings, and those to be published
by his desire after his death, should be submitted to the censorship of
the Pope. He considered that those whose work was to live and not to
reveal were children and that the Pope was their Father; but he taught
in secret that certain others, and in always increasing numbers, were
elected, not to live, but to reveal that hidden substance of God which
is colour and music and softness and a sweet odour; and that these
have no father but the Holy Spirit. Just as poets and painters and
musicians labour at their works, building them with lawless and lawful
things alike, so long as they embody the beauty that is beyond the
grave, these children of the Holy Spirit labour at their moments with
eyes upon the shining substance on which Time has heaped the refuse of
creation; for the world only exists to be a tale in the ears of coming
generations; and terror and content, birth and death, love and hatred,
and the fruit of the Tree, are but instruments for that supreme art
which is to win us from life and gather us into eternity like doves
into their dove-cots.

'I shall go away in a little while and travel into many lands, that I
may know all accidents and destinies, and when I return, will write
my secret law upon those ivory tablets, just as poets and romance
writers have written the principles of their art in prefaces; and when
I know what principle of life, discoverable at first by imagination
and instinct, I am to express, I will gather my pupils that they may
discover their law in the study of my law, as poets and painters
discover their own art of expression by the study of some Master. I
know nothing certain as yet but this--I am to become completely alive,
that is, completely passionate, for beauty is only another name for
perfect passion. I shall create a world where the whole lives of men
shall be articulated and simplified as if seventy years were but one
moment, or as they were the leaping of a fish or the opening of a
flower. '

He was pacing up and down, and I listened to the fervour of his words
and watched the excitement of his gestures with not a little concern.
I had been accustomed to welcome the most singular speculations, and
had always found them as harmless as the Persian cat who half closes
her meditative eyes and stretches out her long claws before my fire.
But now I would battle in the interests of orthodoxy, even of the
commonplace: and yet could find nothing better to say than: 'It is
not necessary to judge everyone by the law, for we have also Christ's
commandment of love. '

He turned and said, looking at me with shining eyes: 'Jonathan Swift
made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbour as
himself. '

'At any rate, you cannot deny that to teach so dangerous a doctrine is
to accept a terrible responsibility. '

'Leonardo da Vinci,' he replied, 'has this noble sentence: "The hope
and desire of returning home to one's former state is like the moth's
desire for the light; and the man who with constant longing awaits
each new month and new year, deeming that the things he longs for are
ever too late in coming, does not perceive that he is longing for his
own destruction. " How, then, can the pathway which will lead us into
the heart of God be other than dangerous? Why should you, who are no
materialist, cherish the continuity and order of the world as those do
who have only the world? You do not value the writers who will express
nothing unless their reason understands how it will make what is called
the right more easy; why, then, will you deny a like freedom to the
supreme art, the art which is the foundation of all arts? Yes, I shall
send out of this chapel saints, lovers, rebels and prophets: souls who
will surround themselves with peace, as with a nest made with grass;
and others over whom I shall weep. The dust shall fall for many years
over this little box; and then I shall open it; and the tumults, which
are, perhaps, the flames of the last day, shall come from under the
lid. '

I did not reason with him that night, because his excitement was great
and I feared to make him angry; and when I called at his house a few
days later, he was gone and his house was locked up and empty. I have
deeply regretted my failure both to combat his heresy and to test the
genuineness of his strange book. Since my conversion I have indeed done
penance for an error which I was only able to measure after some years.


II

I was walking along one of the Dublin quays, on the side nearest the
river, about ten years after our conversation, stopping from time
to time to turn over the books upon an old bookstall, and thinking,
curiously enough, of the terrible destiny of Michael Robartes, and his
brotherhood; when I saw a tall and bent man walking slowly along the
other side of the quay. I recognized, with a start, in a lifeless mask
with dim eyes, the once resolute and delicate face of Owen Aherne. I
crossed the quay quickly, but had not gone many yards before he turned
away, as though he had seen me, and hurried down a side street; I
followed, but only to lose him among the intricate streets on the north
side of the river. During the next few weeks I inquired of everybody
who had once known him, but he had made himself known to nobody; and I
knocked, without result, at the door of his old house; and had nearly
persuaded myself that I was mistaken, when I saw him again in a narrow
street behind the Four Courts, and followed him to the door of his
house.

I laid my hand on his arm; he turned quite without surprise; and indeed
it is possible that to him, whose inner life had soaked up the outer
life, a parting of years was a parting from forenoon to afternoon.
He stood holding the door half open, as though he would keep me from
entering; and would perhaps have parted from me without further words
had I not said: 'Owen Aherne, you trusted me once, will you not trust
me again, and tell me what has come of the ideas we discussed in this
house ten years ago? --but perhaps you have already forgotten them. '

'You have a right to hear,' he said, 'for since I have told you the
ideas, I should tell you the extreme danger they contain, or rather the
boundless wickedness they contain; but when you have heard this we must
part, and part for ever, because I am lost, and must be hidden! '

I followed him through the paved passage, and saw that its corners were
choked, and the pictures gray, with dust and cobwebs; and that the
dust and cobwebs which covered the ruby and sapphire of the saints on
the window had made it very dim. He pointed to where the ivory tablets
glimmered faintly in the dimness, and I saw that they were covered with
small writing, and went up to them and began to read the writing. It
was in Latin, and was an elaborate casuistry, illustrated with many
examples, but whether from his own life or from the lives of others
I do not know. I had read but a few sentences when I imagined that a
faint perfume had begun to fill the room, and turning round asked Owen
Aherne if he were lighting the incense.

'No,' he replied, and pointed where the thurible lay rusty and empty on
one of the benches; as he spoke the faint perfume seemed to vanish, and
I was persuaded I had imagined it.

'Has the philosophy of the _Liber Inducens in Evangelium AEternum_ made
you very unhappy? ' I said.

'At first I was full of happiness,' he replied, 'for I felt a divine
ecstasy, an immortal fire in every passion, in every hope, in every
desire, in every dream; and I saw, in the shadows under leaves, in the
hollow waters, in the eyes of men and women, its image, as in a mirror;
and it was as though I was about to touch the Heart of God. Then all
changed and I was full of misery, and I said to myself that I was
caught in the glittering folds of an enormous serpent, and was falling
with him through a fathomless abyss, and that henceforth the glittering
folds were my world; and in my misery it was revealed to me that man
can only come to that Heart through the sense of separation from it
which we call sin, and I understood that I could not sin, because I
had discovered the law of my being, and could only express or fail to
express my being, and I understood that God has made a simple and an
arbitrary law that we may sin and repent! '

He had sat down on one of the wooden benches and now became silent, his
bowed head and hanging arms and listless body having more of dejection
than any image I have met with in life or in any art. I went and stood
leaning against the altar, and watched him, not knowing what I should
say; and I noticed his black closely-buttoned coat, his short hair,
and shaven head, which preserved a memory of his priestly ambition,
and understood how Catholicism had seized him in the midst of the
vertigo he called philosophy; and I noticed his lightless eyes and his
earth-coloured complexion, and understood how she had failed to do more
than hold him on the margin: and I was full of an anguish of pity.

'It may be,' he went on, 'that the angels whose hearts are shadows of
the Divine Heart, and whose bodies are made of the Divine Intellect,
may come to where their longing is always by a thirst for the divine
ecstasy, the immortal fire, that is in passion, in hope, in desire, in
dreams; but we whose hearts perish every moment, and whose bodies melt
away like a sigh, must bow and obey! '

I went nearer to him and said: 'Prayer and repentance will make you
like other men. '

'No, no,' he said, 'I am not among those for whom Christ died, and this
is why I must be hidden. I have a leprosy that even eternity cannot
cure. I have seen the whole, and how can I come again to believe that a
part is the whole? I have lost my soul because I have looked out of the
eyes of the angels. '

Suddenly I saw, or imagined that I saw, the room darken, and faint
figures robed in purple, and lifting faint torches with arms that
gleamed like silver, bending, above Owen Aherne; and I saw, or
imagined that I saw, drops, as of burning gum, fall from the torches,
and a heavy purple smoke, as of incense, come pouring from the flames
and sweeping about us. Owen Aherne, more happy than I who have been
half initiated into the Order of the Alchemical Rose, and protected
perhaps by his great piety, had sunk again into dejection and
listlessness, and saw none of these things; but my knees shook under
me, for the purple-robed figures were less faint every moment, and now
I could hear the hissing of the gum in the torches. They did not appear
to see me, for their eyes were upon Owen Aherne; now and again I could
hear them sigh as though with sorrow for his sorrow, and presently I
heard words which I could not understand except that they were words of
sorrow, and sweet as though immortal was talking to immortal. Then one
of them waved her torch, and all the torches waved, and for a moment it
was as though some great bird made of flames had fluttered its plumage,
and a voice cried as from far up in the air: 'He has charged even his
angels with folly, and they also bow and obey; but let your heart
mingle with our hearts, which are wrought of divine ecstasy, and your
body with our bodies, which are wrought of divine intellect. ' And at
that cry I understood that the Order of the Alchemical Rose was not of
this earth, and that it was still seeking over this earth for whatever
souls it could gather within its glittering net; and when all the faces
turned towards me, and I saw the mild eyes and the unshaken eyelids, I
was full of terror, and thought they were about to fling their torches
upon me, so that all I held dear, all that bound me to spiritual and
social order, would be burnt up, and my soul left naked and shivering
among the winds that blow from beyond this world and from beyond the
stars; and then a faint voice cried, 'Why do you fly from our torches
that were made out of the trees under which Christ wept in the Garden
of Gethsemane? Why do you fly from our torches that were made out of
sweet wood, after it had perished from the world and come to us who
made it of old times with our breath? '

It was not until the door of the house had closed behind my flight, and
the noise of the street was breaking on my ears, that I came back to
myself and to a little of my courage; and I have never dared to pass
the house of Owen Aherne from that day, even though I believe him to
have been driven into some distant country by the spirits whose name is
legion, and whose throne is in the indefinite abyss, and whom he obeys
and cannot see.




THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI


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. Mallarme 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 Phaeacians--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-paidreacha fo 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.




JOHN SHERMAN

AND

DHOYA:

TWO EARLY STORIES


_Republished by kind permission of Mr. T. Fisher Unwin. _


Having been persuaded somewhat against my judgment to include these
early stories, I have read them for the first time these many years.
They have come to interest me very deeply; for I am something of an
astrologer, and can see in them a young man--was I twenty-three? and
we Irish ripen slowly--born when the Water-Carrier was on the horizon,
at pains to overcome Saturn in Saturn's hour, just as I can see in
much that follows his struggle with the still all-too-unconquered
Moon, and at last, as I think, the summons of the prouder Sun. Sligo,
where I had lived as a child and spent some months or weeks of every
year till long after, is Ballah, and Pool Dhoya is at the river mouth
there, and he who gave me all of Sherman that was not born at the
rising of the Water-Carrier has still the bronze upon his face, and is
at this moment, it may be, in his walled garden, wondering, as he did
twenty years ago, whether he will ever mend the broken glass of the
conservatory, where I am not too young to recollect the vine-trees and
grapes that did not ripen.

W. B. YEATS.

_November 14th, 1907. _




JOHN SHERMAN


FIRST PART

JOHN SHERMAN LEAVES BALLAH


I

IN the west of Ireland, on the 9th of December, in the town of Ballah,
in the Imperial Hotel there was a single guest, clerical and youthful.
With the exception of a stray commercial traveller, who stopped once
for a night, there had been nobody for a whole month but this guest,
and now he was thinking of going away. The town, full enough in summer
of trout and salmon fishers, slept all winter like the bears.

On the evening of the 9th of December, in the coffee-room of the
Imperial Hotel, there was nobody but this guest. The guest was
irritated. It had rained all day, and now that it was clearing up night
had almost fallen. He had packed his portmanteau; his stockings, his
clothes-brush, his razor, his dress shoes were each in their corner,
and now he had nothing to do. He had tried the paper that was lying on
the table. He did not agree with its politics.

The waiter was playing an accordion in a little room over the stairs.
The guest's irritation increased, for the more he thought about it
the more he perceived that the accordion was badly played. There was
a piano in the coffee-room; he sat down at it and played the tune
correctly, as loudly as possible. The waiter took no notice. He did not
know that he was being played for.
He was wholly absorbed in his own
playing, and besides he was old, obstinate, and deaf. The guest could
stand it no longer. He rang for the waiter, and then, remembering that
he did not need anything, went out before he came.

He went through Martin's Street and Peter's Lane, and turned down by
the burnt house at the corner of the fish-market, picking his way
towards the bridge. The town was dripping, but the rain was almost
over. The large drops fell seldomer and seldomer into the puddles. It
was the hour of ducks. Three or four had squeezed themselves under a
gate, and were now splashing about in the gutter of the main street.
There was scarcely anyone abroad. Once or twice a countryman went by
in yellow gaiters covered with mud and looked at the guest. Once an
old woman with a basket of clothes, recognizing the Protestant curate's
_locum tenens_, made a low curtsey.

The clouds gradually drifted away, the twilight deepened and the stars
came out. The guest, having bought some cigarettes, had spread his
waterproof on the parapet of the bridge and was now leaning his elbows
upon it, looking at the river and feeling at last quite tranquil.
His meditations, he repeated, to himself, were plated with silver by
the stars. The water slid noiselessly, and one or two of the larger
stars made little roadways of fire into the darkness. The light from a
distant casement made also its roadway. Once or twice a fish leaped.
Along the banks were the vague shadows of houses, seeming like phantoms
gathering to drink.

Yes; he felt now quite contented with the world. Amidst his enjoyment
of the shadows and the river--a veritable festival of silence--was
mixed pleasantly the knowledge that, as he leant there with the light
of a neighbouring gas-jet flickering faintly on his refined form and
nervous face and glancing from the little medal of some Anglican order
that hung upon his watch-guard, he must have seemed--if there had been
any to witness--a being of a different kind to the inhabitants--at once
rough and conventional--of this half-deserted town. Between these two
feelings the unworldly and the worldly tossed a leaping wave of perfect
enjoyment. How pleasantly conscious of his own identity it made him
when he thought how he and not those whose birthright it was, felt most
the beauty of these shadows and this river! For him who had read much,
seen operas and plays, known religious experiences, and written verse
to a waterfall in Switzerland, and not for those who dwelt upon its
borders for their whole lives, did this river raise a tumult of images
and wonders. What meaning it had for them he could not imagine. Some
meaning surely it must have!

As he gazed out into the darkness, spinning a web of thoughts from
himself to the river, from the river to himself, he saw, with a corner
of his eye, a spot of red light moving in the air at the other end of
the bridge. He turned towards it. It came closer and closer, there
appearing behind it the while a man and a cigar. The man carried in one
hand a mass of fishing-line covered with hooks, and in the other a tin
porringer full of bait.

'Good evening, Howard. '

'Good evening,' answered the guest, taking his elbows off the parapet
and looking in a preoccupied way at the man with the hooks. It was only
gradually he remembered that he was in Ballah among the barbarians, for
his mind had strayed from the last evening flies, making circles on
the water beneath, to the devil's song against 'the little spirits' in
_Mefistofele_. Looking down at the stone parapet he considered a moment
and then burst out--

'Sherman, how do you stand this place--you who have thoughts above mere
eating and sleeping and are not always grinding at the stubble mill?
Here everybody lives in the eighteenth century--the squalid century.
Well, I am going to-morrow, you know. Thank Heaven, I am done with your
grey streets and grey minds! The curate must come home, sick or well.
I have a religious essay to write, and besides I should die. Think of
that old fellow at the corner there, our most important parishioner.
There are no more hairs on his head than thoughts in his skull. To
merely look at him is to rob life of its dignity. Then there is nothing
in the shops but school-books and Sunday-school prizes. Excellent, no
doubt, for anyone who has not had to read as many as I have. Such a
choir! such rain! '

'You need some occupation peculiar to the place,' said the other,
baiting his hooks with worms out of the little porringer. 'I catch
eels. You should set some night-lines too. You bait them with worms in
this way, and put them among the weeds at the edge of the river. In the
morning you find an eel or two, if you have good fortune, turning round
and round and making the weeds sway. I shall catch a great many after
this rain. '

'What a suggestion! Do you mean to stay here,' said Howard, 'till your
mind rots like our most important parishioner's? '

'No, no! To be quite frank with you,' replied the other, 'I have some
good looks and shall try to turn them to account by going away from
here pretty soon and trying to persuade some girl with money to fall in
love with me. I shall not be altogether a bad match, you see, because
after she has made me a little prosperous my uncle will die and make
me much more so. I wish to be able always to remain a lounger. Yes, I
shall marry money. My mother has set her heart on it, and I am not,
you see, the kind of person who falls in love inconveniently. For the
present--'

'You are vegetating,' interrupted the other.

'No, I am seeing the world. In your big towns a man finds his minority
and knows nothing outside its border. He knows only the people like
himself. But here one chats with the whole world in a day's walk, for
every man one meets is a class. The knowledge I am picking up may be
useful to me when I enter the great cities and their ignorance. But I
have lines to set. Come with me. I would ask you home, but you and my
mother, you know, do not get on well. '

'I could not live with anyone I did not believe in,' said Howard; 'you
are so different from me. You can live with mere facts, and that is
why, I suppose, your schemes are so mercenary. Before this beautiful
river, these stars, these great purple shadows, do you not feel like
an insect in a flower? As for me, I also have planned my future. Not
too near or too far from a great city, I see myself in a cottage
with diamond panes, sitting by the fire. There are books everywhere
and etchings on the wall; on the table is a manuscript essay on some
religious matter. Perhaps I shall marry some day. Probably not, for I
shall ask so much. Certainly I shall not marry for money, for I hold
that when we have lost the directness and sincerity of our nature we
have no compass. If we once break it the world grows trackless. '

'Good-bye,' said Sherman, briskly; 'I have baited the last hook. Your
schemes suit you, but a sluggish fellow like me, poor devil, who wishes
to lounge through the world, would find them expensive. '

They parted; Sherman to set his lines and Howard to his hotel in high
spirits, for it seemed to him he had been eloquent. The billiard-room,
which opened on the street, was lighted up. A few young men came round
to play sometimes. He went in, for among these provincial youths he
felt distinguished; besides, he was a really good player. As he came
in one of the players missed and swore. Howard reproved him with a
look. He joined the play for a time, and then catching sight through a
distant door of the hotel-keeper's wife putting a kettle on the hob he
hurried off, and, drawing a chair to the fire, began one of those long
gossips about everybody's affairs peculiar to the cloth.

As Sherman, having set his lines, returned home, he passed a
tobacconist's--a sweet-shop and tobacconist's in one--the only shop
in town, except public-houses, that remained open. The tobacconist
was standing in his door, and, recognizing one who dealt consistently
with a rival at the other end of the town, muttered: 'There goes that
Jack o' Dreams; been fishing most likely. Ugh! ' Sherman paused for a
moment as he repassed the bridge and looked at the water, on which now
a new-risen and crescent moon was shining dimly. How full of memories
it was to him! what playmates and boyish adventures did it not bring to
mind! To him it seemed to say, 'Stay near to me,' as to Howard it had
said, 'Go yonder, to those other joys and other sceneries I have told
you of. ' It bade him who loved stay still and dream, and gave flying
feet to him who imagined.


II

The house where Sherman and his mother lived was one of those bare
houses so common in country towns. Their dashed fronts mounting above
empty pavements have a kind of dignity in their utilitarianism. They
seem to say, 'Fashion has not made us, nor ever do its caprices pass
our sand-cleaned doorsteps. ' On every basement window is the same dingy
wire blind; on every door the same brass knocker. Custom everywhere!
'So much the longer,' the blinds seem to say, 'have eyes glanced
through us'; and the knockers to murmur, 'And fingers lifted us. '

No. 15, Stephens' Row, was in no manner peculiar among its twenty
fellows. The chairs in the drawing-room facing the street were of heavy
mahogany with horsehair cushions worn at the corners. On the round
table was somebody's commentary on the New Testament laid like the
spokes of a wheel on a table-cover of American oilcloth with stamped
Japanese figures half worn away. The room was seldom used, for Mrs.
Sherman was solitary because silent. In this room the dressmaker sat
twice a year, and here the rector's wife used every month or so to
drink a cup of tea. It was quite clean. There was not a fly-mark on the
mirror, and all summer the fern in the grate was constantly changed.
Behind this room and overlooking the garden was the parlour, where
cane-bottomed chairs took the place of mahogany. Sherman had lived here
with his mother all his life, and their old servant hardly remembered
having lived anywhere else; and soon she would absolutely cease to
remember the world she knew before she saw the four walls of this
house, for every day she forgot something fresh. The son was almost
thirty, the mother fifty, and the servant near seventy. Every year they
had two hundred pounds among them, and once a year the son got a new
suit of clothes and went into the drawing-room to look at himself in
the mirror.

On the morning of the 10th of December Mrs. Sherman was down before her
son. A spare, delicate-featured woman, with somewhat thin lips tightly
closed as with silent people, and eyes at once gentle and distrustful,
tempering the hardness of the lips. She helped the servant to set the
table, and then, for her old-fashioned ideas would not allow her to
rest, began to knit, often interrupting her knitting to go into the
kitchen or to listen at the foot of the stairs. At last, hearing a
sound upstairs, she put the eggs down to boil, muttering the while,
and began again to knit. When her son appeared she received him with a
smile.

'Late again, mother,' he said.

'The young should sleep,' she answered, for to her he seemed still a
boy.

She had finished her breakfast some time before the young man, and
because it would have appeared very wrong to her to leave the table,
she sat on knitting behind the tea-urn: an industry the benefit of
which was felt by many poor children--almost the only neighbours she
had a good word for.

'Mother,' said the young man, presently, 'your friend the _locum
tenens_ is off to-day. '

'A good riddance. '

'Why are you so hard on him? He talked intelligently when here, I
thought,' answered her son.

'I do not like his theology,' she replied, 'nor his way of running
about and flirting with this body and that body, nor his way of
chattering while he buttons and unbuttons his gloves. '

'You forget he is a man of the great world, and has about him a manner
that must seem strange to us. '

'Oh, he might do very well,' she answered, 'for one of those Carton
girls at the rectory. '

'That eldest girl is a good girl,' replied her son.

'She looks down on us all, and thinks herself intellectual,' she
went on. 'I remember when girls were content with their catechism
and their Bibles and a little practice at the piano, maybe, for an
accomplishment. What does any one want more? It is all pride. '

'You used to like her as a child,' said the young man.

'I like all children. '

Sherman having finished his breakfast, took a book of travels in one
hand and a trowel in the other and went out into the garden. Having
looked under the parlour window for the first tulip shoots, he went
down to the further end and began covering some sea-kale for forcing.
He had not been long at work when the servant brought him a letter.
There was a stone roller at one side of the grass plot. He sat down
upon it, and taking the letter between his finger and thumb began
looking at it with an air that said: 'Well! I know what you mean. ' He
remained long thus without opening it, the book lying beside him on the
roller.

The garden--the letter--the book! You have there the three symbols of
his life. Every morning he worked in that garden among the sights and
sounds of nature. Month by month he planted and hoed and dug there. In
the middle he had set a hedge that divided the garden in two. Above
the hedge were flowers; below it, vegetables. At the furthest end from
the house, lapping broken masonry full of wallflowers, the river said,
month after month to all upon its banks, 'Hush! ' He dined at two with
perfect regularity, and in the afternoon went out to shoot or walk.
At twilight he set night-lines. Later on he read. He had not many
books--a Shakespeare, Mungo Park's travels, a few two-shilling novels,
_Percy's Reliques_, and a volume on etiquette. He seldom varied his
occupations. He had no profession. The town talked of it. They said:
'He lives upon his mother,' and were very angry. They never let him
see this, however, for it was generally understood he would be a
dangerous fellow to rouse; but there was an uncle from whom Sherman had
expectations who sometimes wrote remonstrating. Mrs. Sherman resented
these letters, for she was afraid of her son going away to seek his
fortune--perhaps even in America. Now this matter preyed somewhat on
Sherman. For three years or so he had been trying to make his mind up
and come to some decision. Sometimes when reading he would start and
press his lips together and knit his brows for a moment.

It will now be seen why the garden, the book, and the letter were
the three symbols of his life, summing up as they did his love of
out-of-door doings, his meditations, his anxieties. His life in the
garden had granted serenity to his forehead, the reading of his few
books had filled his eyes with reverie, and the feeling that he was not
quite a good citizen had given a slight and occasional trembling to his
lips.

He opened the letter. Its contents were what he had long expected.
His uncle offered to take him into his office. He laid it spread
out before him--a foot on each margin, right and left--and looked at
it, turning the matter over and over in his mind. Would he go? would
he stay? He did not like the idea much. The lounger in him did not
enjoy the thought of London. Gradually his mind wandered away into
scheming--infinite scheming--what would he do if he went, what would he
do if he did not go?

A beetle, attracted by the faint sunlight, had crawled out of its hole.
It saw the paper and crept on to it, the better to catch the sunlight.
Sherman saw the beetle but his mind was not occupied with it. 'Shall I
tell Mary Carton? ' he was thinking. Mary had long been his adviser and
friend. She was, indeed, everybody's adviser. Yes, he would ask her
what to do. Then again he thought--no, he would decide for himself. The
beetle began to move. 'If it goes off the paper by the top I will ask
her--if by the bottom I will not. '

The beetle went off by the top. He got up with an air of decision and
went into the tool-house and began sorting seeds and picking out the
light ones, sometimes stopping to watch a spider; for he knew he must
wait till the afternoon to see Mary Carton. The tool-house was a
favourite place with him. He often read there and watched the spiders
in the corners.

At dinner he was preoccupied.

'Mother,' he said, 'would you much mind if we went away from this? '

'I have often told you,' she answered, 'I do not like one place better
than another. I like them all equally little. '

After dinner he went again into the tool-house. This time he did not
sort seeds--only watched the spiders.


III

Towards evening he went out. The pale sunshine of winter flickered
on his path. The wind blew the straws about. He grew more and more
melancholy.