No More Learning

Deer,
wild swine, birds, all to no purpose. Higher and higher he piled the
burning branches, the flames and the smoke waved and circled like
the lash of a giant's whip. Gradually the nearer islands passed the
rosy colour on to their more distant brethren. The reed-wrens of the
furthest reed beds disturbed amid their sleep must have wondered at the
red gleam reflected in each other's eyes. Useless his night-long toil;
the clouds covered the moon's face more and more, until, when the long
fire-lash was at its brightest, they drowned her completely in a surge
of unbroken mist. Raging against the fire he scattered with his staff
the burning branches, and trampled in his fury the sacrificial embers
beneath his feet. Suddenly a voice in the surrounding darkness called
him softly by name. He turned. For years no articulate voice had
sounded in his ears. It seemed to rise from the air just beneath the
verge of the precipice. Holding by a hazel bush he leaned out, and for
a moment it seemed to him the form of a beautiful woman floated faintly
before him, but changed as he watched to a little cloud of vapour;
and from the nearest of the haunted islands there came assuredly a
whiff of music. Then behind him in the forest said the voice, 'Dhoya,
my beloved. ' He rushed in pursuit; something white was moving before
him. He stretched out his hand; it was only a mass of white campion
trembling in the morning breeze, for an ashen morning was just touching
the mists on the eastern mountains. Beginning suddenly to tremble with
supernatural fear Dhoya turned homewards.
Everything was changed; dark
shadows seemed to come and go, and elfin chatter to pass upon the
breeze. But when he reached the shelter of the pine woods all was still
as of old. He slackened his speed. Those solemn pine-trees soothed
him with their vast unsociability--many and yet each one alone. Once
or twice, when in some glade further than usual from its kind arose a
pine-tree larger than the rest, he paused with bowed head to mutter an
uncouth prayer to that dark outlaw. As he neared his cave and came from
the deep shade into the region of mountain-ash and hazel, the voices
seemed again to come and go, and the shadows to circle round him, and
once a voice said, he imagined, in accents faint and soft as falling
dew, 'Dhoya, my beloved. ' But a few yards from the cave all grew
suddenly silent.


II

Slower and slower he went, with his eyes on the ground, bewildered
by all that was happening. A few feet from the cave he stood still,
counting aimlessly the round spots of light made by the beams slanting
through trees that hid with their greenness, as in the centre of the
sea, that hollow rock. As over and over he counted them, he heard,
first with the ear only, then with the mind also, a footstep going to
and fro within the cave. Lifting his eyes he saw the same figure seen
on the cliff--the figure of a woman, beautiful and young. Her dress was
white, save for a border of feathers dyed the fatal red of the spirits.
She had arranged in one corner the spears, and in the other the
brushwood and branches used for the fire, and spread upon the ground
the skins, and now began pulling vainly at the great stone pitcher of
the Fomorians.

Suddenly she saw him and with a burst of laughter flung her arms round
his neck, crying, 'Dhoya, I have left my world far off. My people--on
the floor of the lake they are dancing and singing, and on the islands
of the lake; always happy, always young, always without change. I have
left them for thee, Dhoya, for they cannot love.