No More Learning

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.