No More Learning

In the midst of this darkness shone
the lighted window. He went over to the gate and looked in. The room
was empty. He was about to turn away when he noticed a white figure
standing close to the gate. The latch creaked and the gate moved slowly
on its hinges.

'John,' said a trembling voice, 'I have been praying, and a light has
come to me. I wished you to be ambitious--to go away and do something
in the world. You did badly, and my poor pride was wounded. You do not
know how much I had hoped from you; but it was all pride--all pride and
foolishness. You love me. I ask no more. We need each other; the rest
is with God. '

She took his hand in hers, and began caressing it. 'We have been
shipwrecked. Our goods have been cast into the sea.
' Something in her
voice told of the emotion that divides the love of woman from the love
of man. She looked upon him whom she loved as full of a helplessness
that needed protection, a reverberation of the feeling of the mother
for the child at the breast.




DHOYA


I

LONG ago, before the earliest stone of the Pyramids was laid, before
the Bo tree of Buddha unrolled its first leaf, before a Japanese had
painted on a temple wall the horse that every evening descended and
trampled the rice-fields, before the ravens of Thor had eaten their
first worm together, there lived a man of giant stature and of giant
strength named Dhoya. One evening Fomorian galleys had entered the Bay
of the Red Cataract, now the Bay of Ballah, and there deserted him.
Though he rushed into the water and hurled great stones after them,
they were out of reach. From earliest childhood the Fomorians had held
him captive and compelled him to toil at the oar, but when his strength
had come his fits of passion made him a terror to all on board.
Sometimes he would tear the seats of the galley from under the rowers,
and drive the rowers up into the shrouds, where they would cling until
the passion left him. 'The demons,' they said, 'have made him their
own. ' So they enticed him on shore, he having on his head a mighty
stone pitcher to fill with water, and deserted him.

When the last sail had dropped over the rim of the world, he rose from
where he had flung himself down on the sands and hurried through the
forest eastward. After a time he reached that lake among the mountains
where in later times Diarmuid drove down four stakes and made thereon
a platform with four flags in the centre for a hearth, and placed over
all a roof of wicker and skins, and hid his Grania, islanded thereon.
Still eastward he went, what is now Bulben on one side, Cope's mountain
on the other, until at last he threw himself at full length in a deep
cavern and slept. Henceforward he made this cavern his lair, issuing
forth to hunt the deer or the bears or the mountain oxen. Slowly the
years went by, his fits of fury growing more and more frequent, though
there was no one but his own shadow to rave against. When his fury was
on him even the bats and owls, and the brown frogs that crept out of
the grass at twilight, would hide themselves--even the bats and owls
and the brown frogs. These he had made his friends, and let them crawl
and perch about him, for at times he would be very gentle, and they
too were sullen and silent--the outcasts from they knew not what.