No More Learning

Now that he could
go no further because of the sea, he found that he was very tired and
the night very cold, and went into a shebeen close to the shore and
threw himself down upon a bench. The room was full of Spanish and Irish
sailors who had just smuggled a cargo of wine and ale, and were waiting
a favourable wind to set out again. A Spaniard offered him a drink in
bad Gaelic. He drank it greedily and began talking wildly and rapidly.

For some three weeks the wind blew inshore or with too great violence,
and the sailors stayed drinking and talking and playing cards, and
Costello stayed with them, sleeping upon a bench in the shebeen, and
drinking and talking and playing more than any. He soon lost what
little money he had, and then his horse, which some one had brought
from the mountain boreen, to a Spaniard, who sold it to a farmer from
the mountains, and then his long cloak and his spurs and his boots of
soft leather. At last a gentle wind blew towards Spain, and the crew
rowed out to their schooner, singing Gaelic and Spanish songs, and
lifted the anchor, and in a little while the white sails had dropped
under the horizon. Then Costello turned homeward, his life gaping
before him, and walked all day, coming in the early evening to the road
that went from near Lough Gara to the southern edge of Lough Cay. Here
he overtook a great crowd of peasants and farmers, who were walking
very slowly after two priests and a group of well-dressed persons,
certain of whom were carrying a coffin. He stopped an old man and
asked whose burying it was and whose people they were, and the old man
answered: 'It is the burying of Oona, Dermott's daughter, and we are
the Namaras and the Dermotts and their following, and you are Tumaus
Costello who murdered her. '

Costello went on towards the head of the procession, passing men who
looked at him with fierce eyes, and only vaguely understanding what
he had heard, for now that he had lost the understanding that belongs
to good health, it seemed impossible that a gentleness and a beauty
which had been so long the world's heart could pass away. Presently he
stopped and asked again whose burying it was, and a man answered: 'We
are carrying Dermott's daughter Winny whom you murdered, to be buried
in the island of the Holy Trinity,' and the man stooped and picked up
a stone and cast it at Costello, striking him on the cheek and making
the blood flow out over his face. Costello went on scarcely feeling the
blow, and coming to those about the coffin, shouldered his way into the
midst of them, and laying his hand upon the coffin, asked in a loud
voice: 'Who is in this coffin? '

The three old Dermotts from the Ox Mountains caught up stones and bid
those about them do the same; and he was driven from the road, covered
with wounds, and but for the priests would surely have been killed.

When the procession had passed on, Costello began to follow again, and
saw from a distance the coffin laid upon a large boat, and those about
it get into other boats, and the boats move slowly over the water to
Insula Trinitatis; and after a time he saw the boats return and their
passengers mingle with the crowd upon the bank, and all disperse by
many roads and boreens.
It seemed to him that Winny was somewhere on
the island smiling gently as of old, and when all had gone he swam
in the way the boats had been rowed and found the new-made grave
beside the ruined Abbey of the Holy Trinity, and threw himself upon
it, calling to Oona to come to him. Above him the square ivy leaves
trembled, and all about him white moths moved over white flowers, and
sweet odours drifted through the dim air.

He lay there all that night and through the day after, from time to
time calling her to come to him, but when the third night came he had
forgotten, worn out with hunger and sorrow, that her body lay in the
earth beneath; but only knew she was somewhere near and would not come
to him.

Just before dawn, the hour when the peasants hear his ghostly voice
crying out, his pride awoke and he called loudly: 'Winny, daughter of
Dermott of the Sheep, if you do not come to me I will go and never
return to the island of the Holy Trinity,' and before his voice had
died away a cold and whirling wind had swept over the island and he saw
many figures rushing past, women of the Sidhe with crowns of silver and
dim floating drapery; and then Oona, but no longer smiling gently, for
she passed him swiftly and angrily, and as she passed struck him upon
the face crying: 'Then go and never return. '

He would have followed, and was calling out her name, when the whole
glimmering company rose up into the air, and, rushing together in the
shape of a great silvery rose, faded into the ashen dawn.

Costello got up from the grave, understanding nothing but that he had
made his beloved angry and that she wished him to go, and wading out
into the lake, began to swim. He swam on and on, but his limbs were too
weary to keep him afloat, and her anger was heavy about him, and when
he had gone a little way he sank without a struggle, like a man passing
into sleep and dreams.

The next day a poor fisherman found him among the reeds upon the lake
shore, lying upon the white lake sand with his arms flung out as
though he lay upon a rood, and carried him to his own house. And the
very poor lamented over him and sang the keen, and when the time had
come, laid him in the Abbey on Insula Trinitatis with only the ruined
altar between him and Dermott's daughter, and planted above them two
ash-trees that in after days wove their branches together and mingled
their trembling leaves.




ROSA ALCHEMICA


O blessed and happy he, who knowing the mysteries
of the gods, sanctifies his life, and purifies his
soul, celebrating orgies in the mountains with holy
purifications. --_Euripides. _




ROSA ALCHEMICA


I

IT is now more than ten years since I met, for the last time, Michael
Robartes, and for the first time and the last time his friends
and fellow students; and witnessed his and their tragic end, and
endured those strange experiences, which have changed me so that my
writings have grown less popular and less intelligible, and driven
me almost to the verge of taking the habit of St. Dominic. I had
just published _Rosa Alchemica_, a little work on the Alchemists,
somewhat in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, and had received many
letters from believers in the arcane sciences, upbraiding what they
called my timidity, for they could not believe so evident sympathy
but the sympathy of the artist, which is half pity, for everything
which has moved men's hearts in any age. I had discovered, early in
my researches, that their doctrine was no merely chemical phantasy,
but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements and to
man himself; and that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals
merely as part of an universal transmutation of all things into some
divine and imperishable substance; and this enabled me to make my
little book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life into art,
and a cry of measureless desire for a world made wholly of essences.

I was sitting dreaming of what I had written, in my house in one of
the old parts of Dublin; a house my ancestors had made almost famous
through their part in the politics of the city and their friendships
with the famous men of their generations; and was feeling an unwonted
happiness at having at last accomplished a long-cherished design, and
made my rooms an expression of this favourite doctrine.