No More Learning

And they knew then that they had looked upon a king of the
poets of the Gael, and a maker of the dreams of men.

Of a sudden his singing stopped, and his eyes grew misty as if he was
looking at some far thing.

Mary Gillis was pouring whiskey into a mug that stood on a table beside
him, and she left off pouring and said, 'Is it of leaving us you are
thinking? '

Margaret Rooney heard what she said, and did not know why she said it,
and she took the words too much in earnest and came over to him, and
there was dread in her heart that she was going to lose so wonderful a
poet and so good a comrade, and a man that was thought so much of, and
that brought so many to her house.

'You would not go away from us, my heart? ' she said, catching him by
the hand.

'It is not of that I am thinking,' he said, 'but of Ireland and the
weight of grief that is on her. ' And he leaned his head against his
hand, and began to sing these words, and the sound of his voice was
like the wind in a lonely place.

The old brown thorn trees break in two high over Cummen Strand
Under a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand;
Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies,
But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes
Of Cathleen the daughter of Hoolihan.

The wind has bundled up the clouds high over Knocknarea
And thrown the thunder on the stones for all that Maeve can say;
Angers that are like noisy clouds have set our hearts abeat,
But we have all bent low and low and kissed the quiet feet
Of Cathleen the daughter of Hoolihan.

The yellow pool has overflowed high upon Clooth-na-Bare,
For the wet winds are blowing out of the clinging air;
Like heavy flooded waters our bodies and our blood,
But purer than a tall candle before the Holy Rood
Is Cathleen the daughter of Hoolihan.

While he was singing, his voice began to break, and tears came rolling
down his cheeks, and Margaret Rooney put down her face into her hands
and began to cry along with him. Then a blind beggar by the fire shook
his rags with a sob, and after that there was no one of them all but
cried tears down.




RED HANRAHAN'S CURSE


ONE fine May morning a long time after Hanrahan had left Margaret
Rooney's house, he was walking the road near Collooney, and the sound
of the birds singing in the bushes that were white with blossom set
him singing as he went. It was to his own little place he was going,
that was no more than a cabin, but that pleased him well.
For he was
tired of so many years of wandering from shelter to shelter at all
times of the year, and although he was seldom refused a welcome and a
share of what was in the house, it seemed to him sometimes that his
mind was getting stiff like his joints, and it was not so easy to him
as it used to be to make fun and sport through the night, and to set
all the boys laughing with his pleasant talk, and to coax the women
with his songs. And a while ago, he had turned into a cabin that some
poor man had left to go harvesting and had never come to again. And
when he had mended the thatch and made a bed in the corner with a few
sacks and bushes, and had swept out the floor, he was well content to
have a little place for himself, where he could go in and out as he
liked, and put his head in his hands through the length of an evening
if the fret was on him, and loneliness after the old times. One by one
the neighbours began to send their children in to get some learning
from him, and with what they brought, a few eggs or an oaten cake or a
couple of sods of turf, he made out a way of living. And if he went for
a wild day and night now and again to the Burrough, no one would say a
word, knowing him to be a poet, with wandering in his heart.

It was from the Burrough he was coming that May morning, light-hearted
enough, and singing some new song that had come to him. But it was not
long till a hare ran across his path, and made away into the fields,
through the loose stones of the wall. And he knew it was no good sign a
hare to have crossed his path, and he remembered the hare that had led
him away to Slieve Echtge the time Mary Lavelle was waiting for him,
and how he had never known content for any length of time since then.
'And it is likely enough they are putting some bad thing before me
now,' he said.

And after he said that, he heard the sound of crying in the field
beside him, and he looked over the wall. And there he saw a young girl
sitting under a bush of white hawthorn, and crying as if her heart
would break. Her face was hidden in her hands, but her soft hair and
her white neck and the young look of her, put him in mind of Bridget
Purcell and Margaret Gillane and Maeve Connelan and Oona Curry and
Celia Driscoll, and the rest of the girls he had made songs for and had
coaxed the heart from with his flattering tongue.

She looked up, and he saw her to be a girl of the neighbours, a
farmer's daughter. 'What is on you, Nora? ' he said. 'Nothing you could
take from me, Red Hanrahan.