Kitabı oku: «The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats. Volume 5 of 8. The Celtic Twilight and Stories of Red Hanrahan», sayfa 9
Then he went on till he came to the king’s house, and when he was at the door the princess came running down the stairs, and said, ‘Welcome to you back again.’ And all the people said, ‘It is a wonder you have gone hunting three days after your marriage, and to stop so long away.’ So he stopped that night with the princess, and she thought it was her own husband all the time.
And in the morning the deer came, and bells ringing on her, under the windows, and called out, ‘The hunt is here, where are the huntsmen and the hounds?’ Then Bill got up and got his horse and his hound, and followed her over hills and hollows till they came to the wood, and there he saw nothing but the mud-wall cabin and the old woman sitting by the fire, and she bade him stop the night there, and gave him two ribs of hair to tie his horse and his hound with. But Bill was wittier than Jack was, and before he went out, he threw the ribs of hair into the fire secretly. When he came in the old woman said, ‘Your brother killed my three sons, and I killed him, and I’ll kill you along with him.’ And she put her gloves on, and they began the fight, and then Bill called out, ‘Help, horse.’ ‘Squeeze, hair,’ called the old woman; ‘I can’t squeeze, I’m in the fire,’ said the hair. And the horse came in and gave her a blow of his hoof. ‘Help, hound,’ said Bill then. ‘Squeeze, hair,’ said the old woman; ‘I can’t, I’m in the fire,’ said the second hair. Then the hound put his teeth in her, and Bill brought her down, and she cried for mercy. ‘Give me my life,’ she said, ‘and I’ll tell you where you’ll get your brother again, and his hound and horse.’ ‘Where’s that?’ said Bill. ‘Do you see that rod over the fire?’ said she; ‘take it down and go outside the door where you’ll see three green stones, and strike them with the rod, for they are your brother, and his horse and hound, and they’ll come to life again.’ ‘I will, but I’ll make a green stone of you first,’ said Bill, and he cut off her head with his sword.
Then he went out and struck the stones, and sure enough there were Jack, and his horse and hound, alive and well. And they began striking other stones around, and men came from them, that had been turned to stones, hundreds and thousands of them.
Then they set out for home, but on the way they had some dispute or some argument together, for Jack was not well pleased to hear he had spent the night with his wife, and Bill got angry, and he struck Jack with the rod, and turned him to a green stone. And he went home, but the princess saw he had something on his mind, and he said then, ‘I have killed my brother.’ And he went back then and brought him to life, and they lived happy ever after, and they had children by the basketful, and threw them out by the shovelful. I was passing one time myself, and they called me in and gave me a cup of tea.
1902.
BY THE ROADSIDE
Last night I went to a wide place on the Kiltartan road to listen to some Irish songs. While I waited for the singers an old man sang about that country beauty who died so many years ago, and spoke of a singer he had known who sang so beautifully that no horse would pass him, but must turn its head and cock its ears to listen. Presently a score of men and boys and girls, with shawls over their heads, gathered under the trees to listen. Somebody sang Sa Muirnín Díles, and then somebody else Jimmy Mo Mílestór, mournful songs of separation, of death, and of exile. Then some of the men stood up and began to dance, while another lilted the measure they danced to, and then somebody sang Eiblín a Rúin, that glad song of meeting which has always moved me more than other songs, because the lover who made it sang it to his sweetheart under the shadow of a mountain I looked at every day through my childhood. The voices melted into the twilight, and were mixed into the trees, and when I thought of the words they too melted away, and were mixed with the generations of men. Now it was a phrase, now it was an attitude of mind, an emotional form, that had carried my memory to older verses, or even to forgotten mythologies. I was carried so far that it was as though I came to one of the four rivers, and followed it under the wall of Paradise to the roots of the trees of knowledge and of life. There is no song or story handed down among the cottages that has not words and thoughts to carry one as far, for though one can know but a little of their ascent, one knows that they ascend like mediæval genealogies through unbroken dignities to the beginning of the world. Folk art is, indeed, the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all great art is rooted. Wherever it is spoken by the fireside, or sung by the roadside, or carved upon the lintel, appreciation of the arts that a single mind gives unity and design to, spreads quickly when its hour is come.
In a society that has cast out imaginative tradition, only a few people – three or four thousand out of millions – favoured by their own characters and by happy circumstance, and only then after much labour, have understanding of imaginative things, and yet ‘the imagination is the man himself.’ The churches in the Middle Age won all the arts into their service because men understood that when imagination is impoverished, a principal voice – some would say the only voice – for the awakening of wise hope and durable faith, and understanding charity, can speak but in broken words, if it does not fall silent. And so it has always seemed to me that we, who would reawaken imaginative tradition by making old songs live again, or by gathering old stories into books, take part in the quarrel of Galilee. Those who are Irish and would spread foreign ways, which, for all but a few, are ways of spiritual poverty, take part also. Their part is with who those who were of Jewry, and yet cried out, ‘If thou let this man go thou art not Cæsar’s friend.’
1901.
INTO THE TWILIGHT
Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight;
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
Thy mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight gray;
Though hope fall from thee or love decay
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill,
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of hollow wood and the hilly wood
And the changing moon work out their will.
And God stands winding his lonely horn;
And Time and the World are ever in flight,
And love is less kind than the gray twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN
RED HANRAHAN
Hanrahan, the hedge schoolmaster, a tall, strong, red-haired young man, came into the barn where some of the men of the village were sitting on Samhain Eve. It had been a dwelling-house, and when the man that owned it had built a better one, he had put the two rooms together, and kept it for a place to store one thing or another. There was a fire on the old hearth, and there were dip candles stuck in bottles, and there was a black quart bottle upon some boards that had been put across two barrels to make a table. Most of the men were sitting beside the fire, and one of them was singing a long wandering song, about a Munster man and a Connaught man that were quarrelling about their two provinces.
Hanrahan went to the man of the house and said, ‘I got your message’; but when he had said that, he stopped, for an old mountainy man that had a shirt and trousers of unbleached flannel, and that was sitting by himself near the door, was looking at him, and moving an old pack of cards about in his hands and muttering. ‘Don’t mind him,’ said the man of the house; ‘he is only some stranger came in awhile ago, and we bade him welcome, it being Samhain night, but I think he is not in his right wits. Listen to him now and you will hear what he is saying.’
They listened then, and they could hear the old man muttering to himself as he turned the cards, ‘Spades and Diamonds, Courage and Power; Clubs and Hearts, Knowledge and Pleasure.’
‘That is the kind of talk he has been going on with for the last hour,’ said the man of the house, and Hanrahan turned his eyes from the old man as if he did not like to be looking at him.
‘I got your message,’ Hanrahan said then; ‘“he is in the barn with his three first cousins from Kilchriest,” the messenger said, “and there are some of the neighbours with them.”’
‘It is my cousin over there is wanting to see you,’ said the man of the house, and he called over a young frieze-coated man, who was listening to the song, and said, ‘This is Red Hanrahan you have the message for.’
‘It is a kind message, indeed,’ said the young man, ‘for it comes from your sweetheart, Mary Lavelle.’
‘How would you get a message from her, and what do you know of her?’
‘I don’t know her, indeed, but I was in Loughrea yesterday, and a neighbour of hers that had some dealings with me was saying that she bade him send you word, if he met any one from this side in the market, that her mother has died from her, and if you have a mind yet to join with herself, she is willing to keep her word to you.’
‘I will go to her indeed,’ said Hanrahan.
‘And she bade you make no delay, for if she has not a man in the house before the month is out, it is likely the little bit of land will be given to another.’
When Hanrahan heard that, he rose up from the bench he had sat down on. ‘I will make no delay indeed,’ he said, ‘there is a full moon, and if I get as far as Kilchriest to-night, I will reach to her before the setting of the sun to-morrow.’
When the others heard that, they began to laugh at him for being in such haste to go to his sweetheart, and one asked him if he would leave his school in the old lime-kiln, where he was giving the children such good learning. But he said the children would be glad enough in the morning to find the place empty, and no one to keep them at their task; and as for his school he could set it up again in any place, having as he had his little inkpot hanging from his neck by a chain, and his big Virgil and his primer in the skirt of his coat.
Some of them asked him to drink a glass before he went, and a young man caught hold of his coat, and said he must not leave them without singing the song he had made in praise of Venus and of Mary Lavelle. He drank a glass of whiskey, but he said he would not stop but would set out on his journey.
‘There’s time enough, Red Hanrahan,’ said the man of the house. ‘It will be time enough for you to give up sport when you are after your marriage, and it might be a long time before we will see you again.’
‘I will not stop,’ said Hanrahan; ‘my mind would be on the roads all the time, bringing me to the woman that sent for me, and she lonesome and watching till I come.’
Some of the others came about him, pressing him that had been such a pleasant comrade, so full of songs and every kind of trick and fun, not to leave them till the night would be over, but he refused them all, and shook them off, and went to the door. But as he put his foot over the threshold, the strange old man stood up and put his hand that was thin and withered like a bird’s claw on Hanrahan’s hand, and said: ‘It is not Hanrahan, the learned man and the great songmaker, that should go out from a gathering like this, on a Samhain night. And stop here, now,’ he said, ‘and play a hand with me; and here is an old pack of cards has done its work many a night before this, and old as it is, there has been much of the riches of the world lost and won over it.’
One of the young men said, ‘It isn’t much of the riches of the world has stopped with yourself, old man,’ and he looked at the old man’s bare feet, and they all laughed. But Hanrahan did not laugh, but he sat down very quietly, without a word. Then one of them said, ‘So you will stop with us after all, Hanrahan’; and the old man said: ‘He will stop indeed, did you not hear me asking him?’
They all looked at the old man then as if wondering where he came from. ‘It is far I am come,’ he said, ‘through France I have come, and through Spain, and by Lough Greine of the hidden mouth, and none has refused me anything.’ And then he was silent and nobody liked to question him, and they began to play. There were six men at the boards playing, and the others were looking on behind. They played two or three games for nothing, and then the old man took a four-penny bit, worn very thin and smooth, out from his pocket, and he called to the rest to put something on the game. Then they all put down something on the boards, and little as it was it looked much, from the way it was shoved from one to another, first one man winning it and then his neighbour. And sometimes the luck would go against a man and he would have nothing left, and then one or another would lend him something, and he would pay it again out of his winnings, for neither good nor bad luck stopped long with anyone.
And once Hanrahan said as a man would say in a dream, ‘It is time for me to be going the road’; but just then a good card came to him, and he played it out, and all the money began to come to him. And once he thought of Mary Lavelle, and he sighed; and that time his luck went from him, and he forgot her again.
But at last the luck went to the old man and it stayed with him, and all they had flowed into him, and he began to laugh little laughs to himself, and to sing over and over to himself, ‘Spades and Diamonds, Courage and Pleasure,’ and so on, as if it was a verse of a song.
And after a while anyone looking at the men, and seeing the way their bodies were rocking to and fro, and the way they kept their eyes on the old man’s hands, would think they had drink taken, or that the whole store they had in the world was put on the cards; but that was not so, for the quart bottle had not been disturbed since the game began, and was nearly full yet, and all that was on the game was a few sixpenny bits and shillings, and maybe a handful of coppers.
‘You are good men to win and good men to lose,’ said the old man, ‘you have play in your hearts.’ He began then to shuffle the cards and to mix them, very quick and fast, till at last they could not see them to be cards at all, but you would think him to be making rings of fire in the air, as little lads would make them with whirling a lighted stick; and after that it seemed to them that all the room was dark, and they could see nothing but his hands and the cards.
And all in a minute a hare made a leap out from between his hands, and whether it was one of the cards that took that shape, or whether it was made out of nothing in the palms of his hands, nobody knew, but there it was running on the floor of the barn, as quick as any hare that ever lived.
Some looked at the hare, but more kept their eyes on the old man, and while they were looking at him a hound made a leap out between his hands, the same way as the hare did, and after that another hound and another, till there was a whole pack of them following the hare round and round the barn.
The players were all standing up now, with their backs to the boards, shrinking from the hounds, and nearly deafened with the noise of their yelping, but as quick as the hounds were they could not overtake the hare, but it went round, till at the last it seemed as if a blast of wind burst open the barn door, and the hare doubled and made a leap over the boards where the men had been playing, and went out of the door and away through the night, and the hounds over the boards and through the door after it.
Then the old man called out, ‘Follow the hounds, follow the hounds, and it is a great hunt you will see to-night,’ and he went out after them. But used as the men were to go hunting after hares, and ready as they were for any sport, they were in dread to go out into the night, and it was only Hanrahan that rose up and that said, ‘I will follow, I will follow on.’
‘You had best stop here, Hanrahan,’ the young man that was nearest him said, ‘for you might be going into some great danger.’ But Hanrahan said, ‘I will see fair play, I will see fair play,’ and he went stumbling out of the door like a man in a dream, and the door shut after him as he went.
He thought he saw the old man in front of him, but it was only his own shadow that the full moon cast on the road before him, but he could hear the hounds crying after the hare over the wide green fields of Granagh, and he followed them very fast for there was nothing to stop him; and after a while he came to smaller fields that had little walls of loose stones around them, and he threw the stones down as he crossed them, and did not wait to put them up again; and he passed by the place where the river goes under ground at Ballylee, and he could hear the hounds going before him up towards the head of the river. Soon he found it harder to run, for it was uphill he was going, and clouds came over the moon, and it was hard for him to see his way, and once he left the path to take a short cut, but his foot slipped into a boghole and he had to come back to it. And how long he was going he did not know, or what way he went, but at last he was up on the bare mountain, with nothing but the rough heather about him, and he could neither hear the hounds nor any other thing. But their cry began to come to him again, at first far off and then very near, and when it came quite close to him, it went up all of a sudden into the air, and there was the sound of hunting over his head; then it went away northward till he could hear nothing more at all. ‘That’s not fair,’ he said, ‘that’s not fair.’ And he could walk no longer, but sat down on the heather where he was, in the heart of Slieve Echtge, for all the strength had gone from him, with the dint of the long journey he had made.
And after a while he took notice that there was a door close to him, and a light coming from it, and he wondered that being so close to him he had not seen it before. And he rose up, and tired as he was he went in at the door, and although it was night time outside, it was daylight he found within. And presently he met with an old man that had been gathering summer thyme and yellow flag-flowers, and it seemed as if all the sweet smells of the summer were with them. And the old man said: ‘It is a long time you have been coming to us, Hanrahan the learned man and the great songmaker.’
And with that he brought him into a very big shining house, and every grand thing Hanrahan had ever heard of, and every colour he had ever seen, were in it. There was a high place at the end of the house, and on it there was sitting in a high chair a woman, the most beautiful the world ever saw, having a long pale face and flowers about it, but she had the tired look of one that had been long waiting. And there was sitting on the step below her chair four grey old women, and the one of them was holding a great cauldron in her lap; and another a great stone on her knees, and heavy as it was it seemed light to her; and another of them had a very long spear that was made of pointed wood; and the last of them had a sword that was without a scabbard.
Hanrahan stood looking at them for a long time, but none of them spoke any word to him or looked at him at all. And he had it in his mind to ask who that woman in the chair was, that was like a queen, and what she was waiting for; but ready as he was with his tongue and afraid of no person, he was in dread now to speak to so beautiful a woman, and in so grand a place. And then he thought to ask what were the four things the four grey old women were holding like great treasures, but he could not think of the right words to bring out.
Then the first of the old women rose up, holding the cauldron between her two hands, and she said ‘Pleasure,’ and Hanrahan said no word. Then the second old woman rose up with the stone in her hands, and she said ‘Power’; and the third old woman rose up with the spear in her hand, and she said ‘Courage’; and the last of the old women rose up having the sword in her hands, and she said ‘Knowledge.’ And everyone, after she had spoken, waited as if for Hanrahan to question her, but he said nothing at all. And then the four old women went out of the door, bringing their four treasures with them, and as they went out one of them said, ‘He has no wish for us’; and another said, ‘He is weak, he is weak’; and another said, ‘He is afraid’; and the last said, ‘His wits are gone from him.’ And then they all said ‘Echtge, daughter of the Silver Hand, must stay in her sleep. It is a pity, it is a great pity.’
And then the woman that was like a queen gave a very sad sigh, and it seemed to Hanrahan as if the sigh had the sound in it of hidden streams; and if the place he was in had been ten times grander and more shining than it was, he could not have hindered sleep from coming on him; and he staggered like a drunken man and lay down there and then.
When Hanrahan awoke, the sun was shining on his face, but there was white frost on the grass around him, and there was ice on the edge of the stream he was lying by, and that goes running on through Daire-caol and Druim-da-rod. He knew by the shape of the hills and by the shining of Lough Greine in the distance that he was upon one of the hills of Slieve Echtge, but he was not sure how he came there; for all that had happened in the barn had gone from him, and all of his journey but the soreness of his feet and the stiffness in his bones.
It was a year after that, there were men of the village of Cappaghtagle sitting by the fire in a house on the roadside, and Red Hanrahan that was now very thin and worn and his hair very long and wild, came to the half-door and asked leave to come in and rest himself; and they bid him welcome because it was Samhain night. He sat down with them, and they gave him a glass of whiskey out of a quart bottle; and they saw the little inkpot hanging about his neck, and knew he was a scholar, and asked for stories about the Greeks.
He took the Virgil out of the big pocket of his coat, but the cover was very black and swollen with the wet, and the page when he opened it was very yellow, but that was no great matter, for he looked at it like a man that had never learned to read. Some young man that was there began to laugh at him then, and to ask why did he carry so heavy a book with him when he was not able to read it.
It vexed Hanrahan to hear that, and he put the Virgil back in his pocket and asked if they had a pack of cards among them, for cards were better than books. When they brought out the cards he took them and began to shuffle them, and while he was shuffling them something seemed to come into his mind, and he put his hand to his face like one that is trying to remember, and he said: ‘Was I ever here before, or where was I on a night like this?’ and then of a sudden he stood up and let the cards fall to the floor, and he said, ‘Who was it brought me a message from Mary Lavelle?’
‘We never saw you before now, and we never heard of Mary Lavelle,’ said the man of the house. ‘And who is she,’ he said, ‘and what is it you are talking about?’
‘It was this night a year ago, I was in a barn, and there were men playing cards, and there was money on the table, they were pushing it from one to another here and there – and I got a message, and I was going out of the door to look for my sweetheart that wanted me, Mary Lavelle.’ And then Hanrahan called out very loud: ‘Where have I been since then? Where was I for the whole year?’
‘It is hard to say where you might have been in that time,’ said the oldest of the men, ‘or what part of the world you may have travelled; and it is like enough you have the dust of many roads on your feet; for there are many go wandering and forgetting like that,’ he said, ‘when once they have been given the touch.’
‘That is true,’ said another of the men. ‘I knew a woman went wandering like that through the length of seven years; she came back after, and she told her friends she had often been glad enough to eat the food that was put in the pig’s trough. And it is best for you to go to the priest now,’ he said, ‘and let him take off you whatever may have been put upon you.’
‘It is to my sweetheart I will go, to Mary Lavelle,’ said Hanrahan; ‘it is too long I have delayed, how do I know what might have happened her in the length of a year?’
He was going out of the door then, but they all told him it was best for him to stop the night, and to get strength for the journey; and indeed he wanted that, for he was very weak, and when they gave him food he eat it like a man that had never seen food before, and one of them said, ‘He is eating as if he had trodden on the hungry grass.’ It was in the white light of the morning he set out, and the time seemed long to him till he could get to Mary Lavelle’s house. But when he came to it, he found the door broken, and the thatch dropping from the roof, and no living person to be seen. And when he asked the neighbours what had happened her, all they could say was that she had been put out of the house, and had married some labouring man, and they had gone looking for work to London or Liverpool or some big place. And whether she found a worse place or a better he never knew, but anyway he never met with her or with news of her again.
