No More Learning

And after a while his weakness left no place for
pain, and there grew up about him a great silence like the silence in
the heart of a lake, and there came through it like the flame of a
rushlight the faint joyful voices ever and always.

One morning he heard music somewhere outside the door, and as the day
passed it grew louder and louder until it drowned the faint joyful
voices, and even Winny's cry upon the hillside at the fall of evening.
About midnight and in a moment, the walls seemed to melt away and to
leave his bed floating on a pale misty light that shone on every side
as far as the eye could see; and after the first blinding of his eyes
he saw that it was full of great shadowy figures rushing here and there.

At the same time the music came very clearly to him, and he knew that
it was but the continual clashing of swords.

'I am after my death,' he said, 'and in the very heart of the music of
Heaven. O Cherubim and Seraphim, receive my soul! '

At his cry the light where it was nearest to him filled with sparks of
yet brighter light, and he saw that these were the points of swords
turned towards his heart; and then a sudden flame, bright and burning
like God's love or God's hate, swept over the light and went out and
he was in darkness. At first he could see nothing, for all was as dark
as if there was black bog earth about him, but all of a sudden the
fire blazed up as if a wisp of straw had been thrown upon it. And as
he looked at it, the light was shining on the big pot that was hanging
from a hook, and on the flat stone where Winny used to bake a cake now
and again, and on the long rusty knife she used to be cutting the roots
of the heather with, and on the long blackthorn stick he had brought
into the house himself. And when he saw those four things, some memory
came into Hanrahan's mind, and strength came back to him, and he rose
sitting up in the bed, and he said very loud and clear: 'The Cauldron,
the Stone, the Sword, the Spear. What are they? Who do they belong to?
And I have asked the question this time,' he said.

And then he fell back again, weak, and the breath going from him.

Winny Byrne, that had been tending the fire, came over then, having her
eyes fixed on the bed; and the faint laughing voices began crying out
again, and a pale light, grey like a wave, came creeping over the room,
and he did not know from what secret world it came.
He saw Winny's
withered face and her withered arms that were grey like crumbled earth,
and weak as he was he shrank back farther towards the wall. And then
there came out of the mud-stiffened rags arms as white and as shadowy
as the foam on a river, and they were put about his body, and a voice
that he could hear well but that seemed to come from a long way off
said to him in a whisper: 'You will go looking for me no more upon the
breasts of women. '

'Who are you? ' he said then.

'I am one of the lasting people, of the lasting unwearied Voices, that
make my dwelling in the broken and the dying, and those that have lost
their wits; and I came looking for you, and you are mine until the
whole world is burned out like a candle that is spent. And look up
now,' she said, 'for the wisps that are for our wedding are lighted. '

He saw then that the house was crowded with pale shadowy hands, and
that every hand was holding what was sometimes like a wisp lighted for
a marriage, and sometimes like a tall white candle for the dead.

When the sun rose on the morning of the morrow Winny of the Cross Roads
rose up from where she was sitting beside the body, and began her
begging from townland to townland, singing the same song as she walked,
'I am beautiful, I am beautiful. The birds in the air, the moths under
the leaves, the flies over the water look at me. Look at me, perishing
woods, for my body will be shining like the lake water after you have
been hurried away. You and the old race of men, and the race of the
beasts, and the race of the fish, and the winged race, are wearing away
like a candle that has been burned out. But I laugh out loud, because I
am in my youth. '

She did not come back that night or any night to the cabin, and it was
not till the end of two days that the turf cutters going to the bog
found the body of Red Owen Hanrahan, and gathered men to wake him and
women to keen him, and gave him a burying worthy of so great a poet.




_Printed by_ A. H. BULLEN, _at The Shakespeare Head Press,
Stratford-on-Avon.