No More Learning

He sat down on a big stone, and he began swinging his right arm and
singing slowly to himself, the way he did always to hearten himself
when every other thing failed him. And whether it was that time or
another time he made the song that is called to this day 'The Twisting
of the Rope,' and that begins, 'What was the dead cat that put me in
this place,' is not known.

But after he had been singing awhile, mist and shadows seemed to gather
about him, sometimes coming out of the sea, and sometimes moving upon
it. It seemed to him that one of the shadows was the queen-woman he had
seen in her sleep at Slieve Echtge; not in her sleep now, but mocking,
and calling out to them that were behind her: 'He was weak, he was
weak, he had no courage. ' And he felt the strands of the rope in his
hand yet, and went on twisting it, but it seemed to him as he twisted,
that it had all the sorrows of the world in it. And then it seemed to
him as if the rope had changed in his dream into a great water-worm
that came out of the sea, and that twisted itself about him, and held
him closer and closer, and grew from big to bigger till the whole of
the earth and skies were wound up in it, and the stars themselves were
but the shining of the ridges of its skin. And then he got free of it,
and went on, shaking and unsteady, along the edge of the strand, and
the grey shapes were flying here and there around him. And this is what
they were saying, 'It is a pity for him that refuses the call of the
daughters of the Sidhe, for he will find no comfort in the love of the
women of the earth to the end of life and time, and the cold of the
grave is in his heart for ever. It is death he has chosen; let him die,
let him die, let him die. '




HANRAHAN AND CATHLEEN THE DAUGHTER OF HOOLIHAN


IT was travelling northward Hanrahan was one time, giving a hand to a
farmer now and again in the hurried time of the year, and telling his
stories and making his share of songs at wakes and at weddings.

He chanced one day to overtake on the road to Collooney one Margaret
Rooney, a woman he used to know in Munster when he was a young man. She
had no good name at that time, and it was the priest routed her out of
the place at last. He knew her by her walk and by the colour of her
eyes, and by a way she had of putting back the hair off her face with
her left hand. She had been wandering about, she said, selling herrings
and the like, and now she was going back to Sligo, to the place in the
Burrough where she was living with another woman, Mary Gillis, who
had much the same story as herself. She would be well pleased, she
said, if he would come and stop in the house with them, and be singing
his songs to the bacachs and blind men and fiddlers of the Burrough.
She remembered him well, she said, and had a wish for him; and as to
Mary Gillis, she had some of his songs off by heart, so he need not be
afraid of not getting good treatment, and all the bacachs and poor men
that heard him would give him a share of their own earnings for his
stories and his songs while he was with them, and would carry his name
into all the parishes of Ireland.

He was glad enough to go with her, and to find a woman to be listening
to the story of his troubles and to be comforting him. It was at the
moment of the fall of day when every man may pass as handsome and
every woman as comely. She put her arm about him when he told her of
the misfortune of the Twisting of the Rope, and in the half light she
looked as well as another.

They kept in talk all the way to the Burrough, and as for Mary Gillis,
when she saw him and heard who he was, she went near crying to think of
having a man with so great a name in the house.

Hanrahan was well pleased to settle down with them for a while, for he
was tired with wandering; and since the day he found the little cabin
fallen in, and Mary Lavelle gone from it, and the thatch scattered, he
had never asked to have any place of his own; and he had never stopped
long enough in any place to see the green leaves come where he had seen
the old leaves wither, or to see the wheat harvested where he had seen
it sown. It was a good change to him to have shelter from the wet, and
a fire in the evening time, and his share of food put on the table
without the asking.

He made a good many of his songs while he was living there, so well
cared for and so quiet. The most of them were love songs, but some were
songs of repentance, and some were songs about Ireland and her griefs,
under one name or another.

Every evening the bacachs and beggars and blind men and fiddlers would
gather into the house and listen to his songs and his poems, and his
stories about the old time of the Fianna, and they kept them in their
memories that were never spoiled with books; and so they brought his
name to every wake and wedding and pattern in the whole of Connaught.
He was never so well off or made so much of as he was at that time.

One evening of December he was singing a little song that he said he
had heard from the green plover of the mountain, about the fair-haired
boys that had left Limerick, and that were wandering and going astray
in all parts of the world. There were a good many people in the room
that night, and two or three little lads that had crept in, and sat
on the floor near the fire, and were too busy with the roasting of a
potato in the ashes or some such thing to take much notice of him;
but they remembered long afterwards when his name had gone up, the
sound of his voice, and what way he had moved his hand, and the look
of him as he sat on the edge of the bed, with his shadow falling on
the whitewashed wall behind him, and as he moved going up as high as
the thatch. 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?