No More Learning

He started back, crying: 'Wizard, I will let no
wicked thing touch my blessed beads'; and the sense of a great danger
just escaped made him tremble.

'If you listen to me,' replied a voice so faint that it was like a
sigh, 'you will know that I am not a wizard, and you will let me kiss
the cross before I die. '

'I will listen to you,' he answered, 'but I will not let you touch my
blessed beads,' and sitting on the grass a little way from the dying
man, he reloaded his gun and laid it across his knees and composed
himself to listen.

'I know not how many generations ago we, who are now herons, were the
men of learning of the King Leaghaire; we neither hunted, nor went to
battle, nor listened to the Druids preaching, and even love, if it
came to us at all, was but a passing fire. The Druids and the poets
told us, many and many a time, of a new Druid Patrick; and most among
them were fierce against him, while a few thought his doctrine merely
the doctrine of the gods set out in new symbols, and were for giving
him welcome; but we yawned in the midst of their tale. At last they
came crying that he was coming to the king's house, and fell to their
dispute, but we would listen to neither party, for we were busy with
a dispute about the merits of the Great and of the Little Metre; nor
were we disturbed when they passed our door with sticks of enchantment
under their arms, travelling towards the forest to contend against his
coming, nor when they returned after nightfall with torn robes and
despairing cries; for the click of our knives writing our thoughts in
Ogham filled us with peace and our dispute filled us with joy; nor
even when in the morning crowds passed us to hear the strange Druid
preaching the commandments of his god. The crowds passed, and one, who
had laid down his knife to yawn and stretch himself, heard a voice
speaking far off, and knew that the Druid Patrick was preaching within
the king's house; but our hearts were deaf, and we carved and disputed
and read, and laughed a thin laughter together. In a little we heard
many feet coming towards the house, and presently two tall figures
stood in the door, the one in white, the other in a crimson robe; like
a great lily and a heavy poppy; and we knew the Druid Patrick and our
King Leaghaire. We laid down the slender knives and bowed before the
king, but when the black and green robes had ceased to rustle, it was
not the loud rough voice of King Leaghaire that spoke to us, but a
strange voice in which there was a rapture as of one speaking from
behind a battlement of Druid flame: "I preached the commandments of the
Maker of the world," it said; "within the king's house and from the
centre of the earth to the windows of Heaven there was a great silence,
so that the eagle floated with unmoving wings in the white air, and
the fish with unmoving fins in the dim water, while the linnets and
the wrens and the sparrows stilled their ever-trembling tongues in
the heavy boughs, and the clouds were like white marble, and the
rivers became their motionless mirrors, and the shrimps in the far-off
sea-pools were still, enduring eternity in patience, although it was
hard. " And as he named these things, it was like a king numbering his
people. "But your slender knives went click, click! upon the oaken
staves, and, all else being silent, the sound shook the angels with
anger. O, little roots, nipped by the winter, who do not awake although
the summer pass above you with innumerable feet. O, men who have no
part in love, who have no part in song, who have no part in wisdom,
but dwell with the shadows of memory where the feet of angels cannot
touch you as they pass over your heads, where the hair of demons cannot
sweep about you as they pass under your feet, I lay upon you a curse,
and change you to an example for ever and ever; you shall become grey
herons and stand pondering in grey pools and flit over the world in
that hour when it is most full of sighs, having forgotten the flame of
the stars and not yet found the flame of the sun; and you shall preach
to the other herons until they also are like you, and are an example
for ever and ever; and your deaths shall come to you by chance and
unforeseen, that no fire of certainty may visit your hearts. "'

The voice of the old man of learning became still, but the voteen
bent over his gun with his eyes upon the ground, trying in vain to
understand something of this tale; and he had so bent, it may be for a
long time, had not a tug at his rosary made him start out of his dream.
The old man of learning had crawled along the grass, and was now trying
to draw the cross down low enough for his lips to reach it.

'You must not touch my blessed beads,' cried the voteen, and struck
the long withered fingers with the barrel of his gun. He need not have
trembled, for the old man fell back upon the grass with a sigh and was
still. He bent down and began to consider the black and green clothes,
for his fear had begun to pass away when he came to understand that
he had something the man of learning wanted and pleaded for, and now
that the blessed beads were safe, his fear had nearly all gone; and
surely, he thought, if that big cloak, and that little tight-fitting
cloak under it, were warm and without holes, Saint Patrick would take
the enchantment out of them and leave them fit for human use. But the
black and green clothes fell away wherever his fingers touched them,
and while this was a new wonder, a slight wind blew over the pool and
crumbled the old man of learning and all his ancient gear into a little
heap of dust, and then made the little heap less and less until there
was nothing but the smooth green grass.


WHERE THERE IS NOTHING, THERE IS GOD.

THE little wicker houses at Tullagh, where the Brothers were accustomed
to pray, or bend over many handicrafts, when twilight had driven them
from the fields, were empty, for the hardness of the winter had brought
the brotherhood together in the little wooden house under the shadow
of the wooden chapel; and Abbot Malathgeneus, Brother Dove, Brother
Bald Fox, Brother Peter, Brother Patrick, Brother Bittern, Brother
Fair-brows, and many too young to have won names in the great battle,
sat about the fire with ruddy faces, one mending lines to lay in the
river for eels, one fashioning a snare for birds, one mending the
broken handle of a spade, one writing in a large book, and one shaping
a jewelled box to hold the book; and among the rushes at their feet lay
the scholars, who would one day be Brothers, and whose school-house
it was, and for the succour of whose tender years the great fire was
supposed to leap and flicker. One of these, a child of eight or nine
years, called Olioll, lay upon his back looking up through the hole
in the roof, through which the smoke went, and watching the stars
appearing and disappearing in the smoke with mild eyes, like the eyes
of a beast of the field. He turned presently to the Brother who wrote
in the big book, and whose duty was to teach the children, and said,
'Brother Dove, to what are the stars fastened? ' The Brother, rejoicing
to see so much curiosity in the stupidest of his scholars, laid down
the pen and said, 'There are nine crystalline spheres, and on the first
the Moon is fastened, on the second the planet Mercury, on the third
the planet Venus, on the fourth the Sun, on the fifth the planet Mars,
on the sixth the planet Jupiter, on the seventh the planet Saturn;
these are the wandering stars; and on the eighth are fastened the fixed
stars; but the ninth sphere is a sphere of the substance on which the
breath of God moved in the beginning. '

'What is beyond that? ' said the child.

'There is nothing beyond that; there is God. '

And then the child's eyes strayed to the jewelled box, where one great
ruby was gleaming in the light of the fire, and he said, 'Why has
Brother Peter put a great ruby on the side of the box? '

'The ruby is a symbol of the love of God. '

'Why is the ruby a symbol of the love of God?