The Works of "Fiona Macleod", Volume IV
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Title: The Works of "Fiona Macleod", Volume IV
Editor: William Sharp
Elizabeth A. Sharp
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Language: English
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The Works of
"FIONA MACLEOD"
_UNIFORM EDITION_
ARRANGED BY
MRS. WILLIAM SHARP
VOLUME IV
_The Gods approve the depth and not the tumult of
the soul._
_It is loveliness I seek, not lovely things._
[Illustration: From the original by L. Y. Cameron
Iona Cathedral]
THE DIVINE ADVENTURE
IONA
STUDIES IN SPIRITUAL HISTORY
BY
"FIONA MACLEOD"
(WILLIAM SHARP)
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1912
_UNIFORM EDITION_
_First published 1910. New Edition 1912_
_Copyright 1895, 1910._
THE WIND, SILENCE, AND LOVE
FRIENDS WHO HAVE TAUGHT ME MOST:
BUT SINCE, LONG AGO, TWO WHO ARE NOT FORGOTTEN
WENT AWAY UPON THE ONE, AND DWELL, THEMSELVES
REMEMBERING, IN THE OTHER, I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
TO
EALASAIDH
WHOSE LOVE AND SPIRIT LIVE HERE ALSO
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE DIVINE ADVENTURE 1
IONA 91
BY SUNDOWN SHORES:
BY SUNDOWN SHORES 253
THE WIND, SILENCE, AND LOVE 263
BARABAL: A MEMORY 268
THE WHITE HERON 276
THE SMOOTHING OF THE HAND 292
THE WHITE FEVER 298
THE SEA-MADNESS 303
EARTH, FIRE, AND WATER 308
FROM "GREEN FIRE":
THE HERDSMAN 319
FRAGMENTS 383
A DREAM 405
NOTES 411
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 433
By Mrs. William Sharp.
THE DIVINE ADVENTURE
"_Let the beginning, I say, of this little book, as if it were some
lamp, make it clear that a divine miracle was manifested._"
_St. Adamnan_, Book II. c. I.
The Divine Adventure
I
"We were three: the Body, the Will, and the Soul.... The Will, the
Soul, which for the first time had gone along outside of our common
home, had to take upon themselves bodily presences likewise."--_The
Divine Adventure._
I remember that it was on St. John's Eve we said we would go away
together for a time, but each independently, as three good friends. We
had never been at one, though we had shared the same home, and had
enjoyed so much in common; but to each, at the same time, had come the
great desire of truth, than which there is none greater save that of
beauty.
We had long been somewhat weary. No burden of years, no serious ills, no
grief grown old in its own shadow, distressed us. We were young. But we
had known the two great ends of life--to love and to suffer. In deep
love there is always an inmost dark flame, as in the flame lit by a
taper: I think it is the obscure suffering upon which the Dancer lives.
The Dancer!--Love, who is Joy, is a leaping flame: he it is who is the
son of that fabled planet, the Dancing Star.
On that St. John's Eve we had talked with friends on the old mysteries
of this day of pagan festival. At last we withdrew, not tired or in
disagreement, but because the hidden things of the spirit are the only
realities, and it seemed to us a little idle and foolish to discuss in
the legend that which was not fortuitous or imaginary, since what then
held up white hands in the moonlight, even now, in the moonlight of the
dreaming mind, beckons to the Divine Forges.
We left the low-roofed cottage room, where, though the window was open,
two candles burned with steadfast flame. The night was listeningly
still. Beyond the fuchsia bushes a sighing rose, where a continuous
foamless wave felt the silences of the shore. The moonpath, far out upon
the bronze sea, was like a shadowless white road. In the dusk of the
haven glimmered two or three red and green lights, where the
fishing-cobles trailed motionless at anchor. Inland were shadowy hills.
One of the St. John's Eve fires burned on the nearest of these, its cone
blotting out a thousand eastern stars. The flame rose and sank as
though it were a pulse: perhaps at that great height the sea-wind or a
mountain air played upon it. Out of a vast darkness in the south swung
blacker abysses, where thunders breathed with a prolonged and terrible
sighing; upon their flanks sheet-lightnings roamed.
There was no sound in the little bay. Beyond, a fathom of
phosphorescence showed that mackerel were playing in the moonshine. Near
the trap-ledges, which ran into deep water sheer from the goat-pastures,
were many luminous moving phantoms: the medusae, green, purple, pale
blue, wandering shapes filled with ghostly fire.
We stood a while in silence, then one of us spoke:
"Shall we put aside, for a brief while, this close fellowship of ours;
and, since we cannot journey apart, go together to find if there be any
light upon those matters which trouble us, and perhaps discern things
better separately than when trying, as we ever vainly do, to see the
same thing with the same eyes?"
The others agreed. "It may be I shall know," said one? "It may be I
shall remember," said the other.
"Then let us go back into the house and rest to-night, and to-morrow,
after we have slept and eaten well, we can set out with a light heart."
The others did not answer, for though to one food meant nothing, and to
the other sleep was both a remembering and a forgetting, each
unwittingly felt the keen needs of him whom they despised overmuch, and
feared somewhat, and yet loved greatly.
II
Thus it was that on a midsummer morning we set out alone and afoot, not
bent for any one place, though we said we would go towards the dim blue
hills in the west, the Hills of Dream, as we called them; but, rather,
idly troubled by the very uncertainties which beset our going. We began
that long stepping westward as pilgrims of old who had the Holy City for
their goal, but knew that midway were perilous lands.
We were three, as I have said: the Body, the Will, and the Soul. It was
strange for us to be walking there side by side, each familiar with and
yet so ignorant of the other. We had so much in common, and yet were so
incommunicably alien to one another. I think that occurred to each of
us, as, with brave steps but sidelong eyes, we passed the fuchsia
bushes, where the wild bees hummed, and round by the sea pastures, where
white goats nibbled among the yellow flags, and shaggy kine with their
wild hill-eyes browsed the thyme-sweet salted grass. A fisherman met us.
It was old Ian Macrae, whom I had known for many years. Somehow, till
then, the thought had not come to me that it might seem unusual to those
who knew my solitary ways, that I should be going to and fro with
strangers. Then, again for the first time, it flashed across me that
they were so like me--or save in the eyes I could myself discern no
difference--the likeness would be as startling as it would be
unaccountable.
I stood for a moment, uncertain. "Of course," I muttered below my
breath, "of course, the others are invisible; I had not thought of
that." I watched them slowly advance, for they had not halted when I
did. I saw them incline the head with a grave smile as they passed Ian.
The old man had taken off his bonnet to them, and had stood aside.
Strangely disquieted, I moved towards Macrae.
"Ian," I whispered rather than spoke.
"Ay," he answered simply, looking at me with his grave, far-seeing eyes.
"Ian, have you seen my friends before?"
"No, I have never seen them before."
"They have been here for--for--many days."
"I have not seen them."
"Tell me; do you recognise them?"
"I have not seen them before."
"I mean, do you--do you see any likeness in them to any you know?"
"No, I see no likeness."
"You are sure, Ian?"
"Ay, for sure. And why not?" The old fisherman looked at me with
questioning eyes.
"Tell me, Ian, do you see any difference in me?"
"No, for sure, no."
Bewildered, I pondered this new mystery. Were we really three
personalities, without as well as within?
At that moment the Will turned. I heard his voice fall clearly along the
heather-fragrant air-ledges.
"We, too, are bewildered by this mystery," he said.
So he knew my thought. It was _our_ thought. Yes, for now the Soul
turned also; and I heard his sunwarm breath come across the
honeysuckles by the roadside.
"I, too, am bewildered by this mystery," he said.
"Ian," I exclaimed to the old man, who stared wonderingly at us; "Ian
tell me this: what like are my companions; how do they seem to you?"
The old man glanced at me, startled, then rubbed his eyes as though he
were half-awakened from a dream.
"Why are you asking that thing?"
"Because, Ian, you do not see any likeness in them to myself. I had
thought--I had thought they were so like."
Macrae put his wavering, wrinkled hand to his withered mouth. He gave a
chuckling laugh.
"Ah, I understand now. It is a joke you are playing on old Ian."
"Maybe ay, and maybe no, Ian; but I do want to know how they seem to
you, those two yonder."
"Well, well, now, for sure, that friend of yours there, that spoke
first, he is just a weary, tired old man, like I am myself, and so like
me, now that I look at him, that he might be my wraith. And the other,
he is a fine lad, a fisher-lad for sure, though I fear God's gripped
his heart, for I see the old ancient sorrow in his eyes."
I stared: then suddenly I understood.
"Good-day, Ian," I added hurriedly, "and the blessing of Himself be upon
you and yours, and upon the nets and the boats."
Then I moved slowly towards my companions, who awaited me. I understood
now. The old fisherman had seen after his own kind. The Will, the Soul,
which for the first time had journeyed outside our common home, had to
take upon themselves bodily presences likewise. But these wavering
images were to others only the reflection of whoso looked upon them. Old
Ian had seen his own tired self and his lost youth. With a new fear the
Body called to us, and we to him; and we were one, yet three; and so we
went onward together.
III
We were silent. It is not easy for three, so closely knit, so intimate,
as we had been for so many years, suddenly to enter upon a new
comradeship, wherein three that had been as one were now several. A new
reticence had come to each of us. We walked in silence--conscious of
the beauty of the day, in sea and sky and already purpling moors; of the
white gulls flecking the azure, and the yellowhammers and stonechats
flitting among the gorse and fragrant bog-myrtle--we knew that none was
inclined to speak. Each had his own thoughts.
The three dreamers--for so we were in that lovely hour of dream--walked
steadfastly onward. It was not more than an hour after noon that we came
to an inlet of the sea, so narrow that it looked like a stream, only
that a salt air arose between the irises which thickly bordered it, and
that the sunken rock-ledges were fragrant with sea-pink and the
stone-convolvulus. The moving tidal water was grass-green, save where
dusked with long, mauve shadows.
"Let us rest here," said the Body. "It is so sweet in the sunlight, here
by this cool water."
The Will smiled as he threw himself down upon a mossy slope that reached
from an oak's base to the pebbly margins.
"It is ever so with you," he said, still smiling. "You love rest, as the
wandering clouds love the waving hand of the sun."
"What made you think of that?" asked the Soul abruptly, who till that
moment had been rapt in silent commune with his inmost thoughts.
"Why do you ask?"
"Because I, too, was thinking that just as the waving hand of the sun
beckons the white wandering clouds, as a shepherd calls to his scattered
sheep, so there is a hand waving to us to press forward. Far away,
yonder, a rainbow is being woven of sun and mist. Perhaps, there, we may
come upon that which we have come out to see."
"But the Body wishes to rest. And, truly, it is sweet here in the
sunflood, and by this moving green water, which whispers in the reeds
and flags, and sings its own sea-song the while."
"Let us rest, then."
And, as we lay there, a great peace came upon us. There were hushed
tears in the eyes of the Soul, and a dreaming smile upon the face of the
Will, and, in the serene gaze of the Body, a content that was exceeding
sweet. It was so welcome to lie there and dream. We knew a rare
happiness in that exquisite quietude.
After a time, the Body rose, and moved to the water-edge.
"It is so lovely," he said, "I must bathe"--and with that he threw
aside his clothes, and stood naked among the reeds and yellow flags
which bordered the inlet.
The sun shone upon his white body, the colour of pale ivory. A delicate
shadow lightly touched him, now here, now there, from the sunlit green
sheaths and stems among which he stood. He laughed out of sheer joy and
raised his arms, and made a splashing with his trampling feet.
Looking backward with a blithe glance, he cried:
"After all, it is good to be alive: neither to think nor to dream, but
just content _to be_."
Receiving no answer, he laughed merrily, and, plunging forward, swam
seaward against the sun-dazzle.
His two companions watched him with shining eyes.
"Truly, he is very fair to look upon," said the Soul.
"Yes," added the Will, "and perhaps he has chosen the better part
elsewhere as here."
"Can it be the better part to prefer the things of the moment of those
of Eternity?"
"What is Eternity?"
For a few seconds the Soul was silent. It was not easy for him to
understand that what was a near horizon to him was a vague vista,
possibly a mirage, to another. He was ever, in himself, moving just the
hither side of the narrow mortal horizon which Eternity swims in upon
from behind and beyond. The Will looked at him questioningly, then spoke
again:
"You speak of the things of Eternity. What is Eternity?"
"Eternity is the Breath of God."
"That tells me nothing."
"It is Time, freed from his Mortality."
"Again, that tells me little. Or, rather, I am no wiser. What is
Eternity to _us_?"
"It is our perpetuity."
"Then is it only a warrant against Death?"
"No, it is more. Time is our sphere: Eternity is our home."
"There is no other lesson for you in the worm, and in the dust?"
"What do you mean, brother?"
"Does dissolution mean nothing to you?"
"What is dissolution?"
It was now the Will who stared with wondering eyes. To him that question
was as disquieting as that which he had asked the Soul. It was a minute
before he spoke again.
"You ask me what is dissolution? Do you not understand what death means
to _me_?"
"Why to you more than to me, or to the Body?"
"What is it to you?"
"A change from a dream of Beauty, to Beauty."
"And at the worst?"
"Freedom: escape from narrow walls--often dark and foul."
"In any case nothing but a change, a swift and absolute change, from
what was to what is?"
"Even so."
"And you have no fear?"
"None. Why should I?"
"Why should you not?"
Again there was a sudden silence between the two. At last the Soul
spoke:
"Why should I not? I cannot tell you. But I have no fear. I am a Son of
God."
"And we?"
"Ah, yes, dear brother: you, too, and the Body."
"But we perish!"
"There is the resurrection of the Body."
"Where--when?"
"As it is written. In God's hour."
"Is the worm also the Son of God?"
The soul stared downward into the green water, but did not answer. A
look of strange trouble was in his eyes.
"Is not the Grave on the hither side of Eternity?"
Still no answer.
"Does God whisper beneath the Tomb?"
At this the Soul rose, and moved restlessly to and fro.
"Tell me," resumed the Will, "what is Dissolution?"
"It is the returning into dust of that which was dust."
"And what is dust?"
"The formless: the inchoate: the mass out of which the Potter makes new
vessels, or moulds new shapes."
"But _you_ do not go into dust?"
"I came from afar: afar I go again."
"But we--we shall be formless: inchoate?"
"You shall be upbuilded."
"How?"
The Soul turned, and again sat by his comrade.
"I know not," he said simply.
"But if the Body go back to the dust, and the life that is in him be
blown out like a wavering flame; and if you who came from afar, again
return afar; what, then, for me, who am neither an immortal spirit nor
yet of this frail human clan?"
"God has need of you."
"When--where?"
"How can I tell what I cannot even surmise?"
"Tell me, tell me this: if I am so wedded to the Body that, if he
perish, I perish also, what resurrection can there be for me?"
"I do not know."
"Is it a resurrection for the Body if, after weeks, or years, or scores
of years, his decaying dust is absorbed into the earth, and passes in a
chemic change into the living world?"
"No: that is not a resurrection: that is a transmutation."
"Yet that is all. There is nothing else possible. Dust unto dust. As
with the Body, so with the mind, the spirit of life, that which I am,
the Will. In the Grave there is no fretfulness any more: neither any
sorrow, or joy, or any thought, or dream, or fear, or hope whatsoever.
Hath not God Himself said it, through the mouth of His prophet?"
"I do not understand," murmured the Soul, troubled.
"Because the Grave is not your portion."
"But I, too, must know Death!"
"Yes, truly--a change what was it?--a change from a dream of Beauty, to
Beauty!"
"God knows I would that we could go together--you, and he yonder, and I;
or, if that cannot be, he being wholly mortal, then at the least you and
I."
"But we cannot. At least, so it seems to us. But I--I too am alive, I
too have dreams and visions, I too have joys and hopes, I too have
despairs. And for me--_nothing_. I am, at the end, as a blown flame."
"It may not be so. Something has whispered to me at times that you and I
are to be made one."
"Tell me: can the immortal wed the mortal?"
"No."
"Then how can we two wed, for I am mortal. My very life depends on the
Body. A falling branch, a whelming wave, a sudden ill, and in a moment
that which was is not. He, the Body, is suddenly become inert,
motionless, cold, the perquisite of the Grave, the sport of the maggot
and the worm: and I--I am a subsided wave, a vanished spiral of smoke, a
little fugitive wind-eddy abruptly ended."
"You know not what is the end any more than I do. In a moment we are
translated."
"Ah, is it so with you? O Soul, I thought that you had a profound
surety!"
"I know nothing: I believe."
"Then it may be with you as with us?"
"I know little: I believe."
"When I am well I believe in new, full, rich, wonderful life--in life in
the spiritual as well as the mortal sphere. And the Body, when he is
ill, he, too, thinks of that which is your heritage. But if _you_ are
not sure--if _you_ know nothing--may it not be that you, too, have fed
upon dreams, and have dallied with Will-o'-the-wisp, and are an
idle-blown flame even as I am, and have only a vaster spiritual outlook?
May it not be that you, O Soul, are but a spiritual nerve in the dark,
confused, brooding mind of Humanity? May it not be that you and I and
the Body go down unto one end?"
"Not so. There is the word of God."
"We read it differently."
"Yet the Word remains."
"You believe in the immortal life?--You believe in Eternity?"
"Yes."
"Then what is Eternity?"
"Already you have asked me that!"
"You believe in Eternity. What is Eternity?"
"Continuity."
"And what are the things of Eternity?"
"Immortal desires."
"Then what need for us who are mortal to occupy ourselves with what must
be for ever beyond us?"
Thereat, with a harsh laugh, the Will arose, and throwing his garments
from him, plunged into the sunlit green water, with sudden cries of joy
calling to the Body, who was still rejoicefully swimming in the
sun-dazzle as he breasted the tide.
An hour later we rose, and, silent again, once more resumed our way.
IV
It was about the middle of the afternoon that we moved inland, because
of a difficult tract of cliff and bouldered shore. We followed the
course of a brown torrent, and were soon under the shadow of the
mountain. The ewes and lambs made incessantly that mournful crying,
which in mountain solitudes falls from ledge to ledge as though it were
no other than the ancient sorrow of the hills.
Thence we emerged, walking among boulders green with moss and grey with
lichen, often isled among bracken and shadowed by the wind-wavering
birches, or the finger-leafed rowans already heavy with clusters of
ruddy fruit. Sometimes we spoke of things which interested us: of the
play of light and shadow in the swirling brown torrent along whose banks
we walked, and by whose grayling-haunted pools we lingered often, to
look at the beautiful shadowy unrealities of the perhaps not less
shadowy reality which they mirrored: of the solemn dusk of the pines; of
the mauve shadows which slanted across the scanty corn that lay in green
patches beyond lonely crofts; of the travelling purple phantoms of
phantom clouds, to us invisible, over against the mountain-breasts; of a
solitary seamew, echoing the wave in that inland stillness.
All these things gave us keen pleasure. The Body often laughed joyously,
and talked of chasing the shadow till it should turn and leap into him,
and he be a wild creature of the woods again, and be happy, knowing
nothing but the incalculable hour. It is an old belief of the Gaelic
hill-people.
"If one yet older be true," said the Will, speaking to the Soul, "you
and Shadow are one and the same. Nay, the mystery of the Trinity is
symbolised here again--as in us three; for there is an ancient forgotten
word of an ancient forgotten people, which means alike the Breath, the
Shadow, and the Soul."[1]
As we walked onward we became more silent. It was about the sixth hour
from noon that we saw a little coast-town lying amid green pastures,
overhung, as it seemed, by the tremulous blue band of the sea-line. The
Body was glad, for here were friends, and he wearied for his kind. The
Will and the Soul, too, were pleased, for now they shared the common lot
of mortality, and knew weariness as well as hunger and thirst. So we
moved towards the blue smoke of the homes.
"The home of a wild dove, a branch swaying in the wind, is sweet to it;
and the green bracken under a granite rock is home to a tired hind; and
so we, who are wayfarers idler than these, which blindly obey the law,
may well look to yonder village as our home for to-night."
So spoke the Soul.
The Body laughed blithely. "Yes," he added, "it is a cheerier home than
the green bracken. Tell me, have you ever heard of The Three Companions
of Night?"
"The Three Companions of Night? I would take them to be Prayer, and
Hope, and Peace."
"So says the Soul--but what do _you_ say, O Will?"
"I would take them to be Dream, and Rest, and Longing."
"We are ever different," replied the Body, with a sigh, "for the Three
Companions of whom I speak are Laughter, and Wine, and Love."
"Perhaps we mean the same thing," muttered the Will, with a smile of
bitter irony.
We thought much of these words as we passed down a sandy lane hung with
honeysuckles, which were full of little birds who made a sweet
chittering.
Prayer, and Hope, and Peace; Dream, and Rest, and Longing; Laughter, and
Wine, and Love: were these analogues of the Heart's Desire?
When we left the lane, where we saw a glow-worm emitting a pale fire as
he moved through the green dusk in the shadow of the hedge, we came upon
a white devious road. A young man stood by a pile of stones. He stopped
his labour and looked at us. One of us spoke to him.
"Why is it that a man like yourself, young and strong, should be doing
this work, which is for broken men?"
"Why are you breathing?" he asked abruptly.
"We breathe to live," answered the Body, smiling blithely.
"Well, I break stones to live."
"Is it worth it?"
"It's better than death."
"Yes," said the Body slowly, "it is better than death."
"Tell me," asked the Soul, "why is it better than death?"
"Who wants not to want?"
"Ah--it is the need to want, then, that is strongest!"
The stone-breaker looked sullenly at the speaker.
"If you're not anxious to live," he said, "will you give me what money
you have? It is a pity good money should be wasted. I know well where I
would be spending it this night of the nights," he added abruptly in
Gaelic.
The Body looked at him with curious eyes.
"And where would you be spending it?" he asked, in the same language.
"This is the night of the marriage of John Macdonald, the rich man from
America, who has come back to his own town, and is giving a big night of
it to all his friends, and his friends' friends."
"Is that the John Macdonald who is marrying Elsie Cameron?" demanded the
Body eagerly.
"Ay, the same; though it may be the other daughter of Alastair Rua, the
girl Morag."
A flush rose to the face of the Body. His eyes sparkled.
"It is Elsie," he said to the man.
"Belike," the stone-breaker muttered indifferently.
"Do you know where Alastair Rua and his daughters are?"
"Yes, at Beann Marsanta Macdonald's big house of the One-Ash Farm."
"Can you show me the way?"
"I'm going that way."
Thereat the Body turned to his comrades:
"I love her," he said simply; "I love Morag Cameron."
"She is not for your loving," answered the Will sharply; "for she has
given troth to old Archibald Sinclair."
The Body laughed.
"Love is love," he said lightly.
"Come," interrupted the Soul wearily; "we have loitered long enough. Let
us go."
We stood looking at the stone-breaker, who was gazing curiously at us.
Suddenly he laughed.
"Why do you laugh?" asked the Soul.
"Well, I'm not for knowing that. But I'll tell you this: if you two wish
to go into the town, you have only to follow this road. And if _you_
want to come to One-Ash Farm, then you must come this other way with
me."
"Do not go," whispered the Soul.
But the Body, with an impatient gesture, drew aside. "Leave me," he
added: "I wish to go with this man. I will meet you to-morrow morning at
the first bridge to the westward of the little town yonder, just where
the stream slackens over the pebbles."
With reluctant eyes the two companions saw their comrade leave. For a
long time the Will watched him with a bitter smile. Redeeming love was
in the longing eyes of the Soul.
When the Body and the stone-breaker were alone, as they walked towards
the distant farm-steading, where already were lights, and whence came a
lowing of kye in the byres, for it was the milking hour, they spoke at
intervals.
"Who were those with you?" asked the man.
"Friends. We have come away together."
"What for?"
"Well, as you would say, to see the world."
"To see the world?" The man laughed. "To see the world! Have you money?"
"Enough for our needs."
"Then you will see nothing. The world gives to them that already have,
an' more than have."
"What do you hope for to-night?"
"To be drunk."
"That is a poor thing to hope for. Better to think of the laugh and the
joke by the fireside; and of food and drink, too, if you will: of the
pipes, and dancing, and pretty girls."
"Do as you like. As for me, I hope to be drunk."
"Why?"
"Why? Because I'll be another man then. I'll have forgotten all that I
now remember from sunrise to sundown. Can you think what it is to break
a hope in your heart each time you crack a stone on the roadside?
That's what I am, a stone-breaker, an' I crack stones inside as well as
outside. It's a stony place my heart, God knows."
"You are young to speak like that, and you speak like a man who has
known better days."
"Oh, I'm ancient enough," said the man, with a short laugh.
"What meaning does that have?"
"What meaning? Well, it just means this, that I'm as old as the Bible.
For there's mention o' me there. Only there I'm herding swine, an' here
I'm breaking stones."
"And is _your_ father living?"
"Ay, he curses me o' Sabbaths."
"Then it's not the same as the old story that is in the Bible?"
"Oh, nothing's the same an' everything's the same--except when you're
drunk, an' then it's only the same turned outside in. But see, yonder's
the farm. Take my advice, an' drink. It's better than the fireside, it's
better than food, it's better than kisses, ay it's better than love,
it's as good as hate, an' it's the only thing you can drown in except
despair."
Soon after this the Body entered the house of the Beann Marsanta
Macdonald, and with laughter and delight met Morag Cameron, and others
whom his heart leaped to see.
At midnight, the Will sat in a room in a little inn, and read out of two
books, now out of one, now out of the other. The one was the Gaelic
Bible, the other was in English and was called _The One Hope_.
He rose, as the village clock struck twelve, and went to the window. A
salt breath, pungent with tide-stranded seaweed, reached him. In the
little harbour, thin shadowy masts ascended like smoke and melted. A
green lantern swung from one. The howling of a dog rose and fell. A
faint lapping of water was audible. On a big fishing-coble some men were
laughing and cursing.
Overhead was an oppressive solemnity. The myriad stars were as the
incalculable notes of a stilled music, become visible in silence. It was
a relief to look into unlighted deeps.
"These idle lances of God pierce the mind, slay the spirit," the Will
murmured, staring with dull anger at the white multitude.
"If the Soul were here," he added bitterly, "he would look at these
glittering mockeries as though they were harbingers of eternal hope. To
me they are whited sepulchres. They say _we live_, to those who die;
they say _God endures,_ to Man that perisheth; they whisper the Immortal
Hope to Mortality." Turning, he went back to where he had left the
books. He lifted one, and read:--
"_Have we not the word of God Himself that Time and Chance happeneth to
all: that soon or late we shall all be caught in a net, we whom Chance
hath for his idle sport, and upon whom Time trampleth with impatient
feet? Verily, the rainbow is not more frail, more fleeting, than this
drear audacity._"
With a sigh he put the book down, and lifted the other. Having found the
page he sought, he read slowly aloud:--
"_... but Time and Chance happeneth to them all. For man also knoweth
not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the
birds that are caught in the snare, even so are the sons of men snared
in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them._"
He went to the window again, brooding darkly. A slight sound caught his
ear. He saw a yellow light run out, leap across the pavement and pass
like a fan of outblown flame. Then the door closed, and we heard a step
on the stone flags. He looked down. The Soul was there.
"Are you restless? Can you not sleep?" he asked.
"No, dear friend. But my heart is weary because of the Body. Yet before
I go, let me bid you read that which follows upon what you have just
read. It is not only Time and Chance upon which to dwell; but upon this,
that God knows that which He does, and the hour and the way, and sees
the end in the beginning."
And while the Soul moved softly down the little windy street, the Will
opened the Book again, and read as the Soul had bidden.
"It may be so," he muttered, "it may be that the dreamer may yet wake to
behold his dream--As thou knowest not what is the way of the wind, even
so thou knowest not the work of God Who doeth all?"
With that he sighed wearily, and then, afraid to look again at the
bitter eloquence of the stars, lit a candle as he lay down on his bed,
and watched the warm companionable flame till sleep came upon him, and
he dreamed no more of the rue and cypress, but plucked amaranths in the
moonshine.
Meanwhile the Soul walked swiftly to the outskirts of the little town,
and out by the grassy links where clusters of white geese huddled in
sleep, and across the windy common where a tethered ass stood, with
drooping head, his long, twitching ears now motionless. In the
moonlight, the shadow of the weary animal stretched to fantastic
lengths, and at one point, when the startled Soul looked at it, he
beheld the shadow of the Cross.
When he neared One-Ash Farm he heard a loud uproar from within. Many
couples were still dancing, and the pipes and a shrill flute added to
the tumult. Others sang and laughed, or laughed and shouted, or cursed
hoarsely. Through the fumes of smoke and drink rippled women's laughter.
He looked in at a window, with sad eyes. The first glance revealed to
him the Body, his blue eyes aflame, his face flushed with wine, his left
arm holding close to his heart a bright winsome lass, with hair
dishevelled, and wild eyes, but with a wonderful laughing eagerness of
joy.
In vain he called. His voice was suddenly grown faint. But what the ear
could not hear, the heart heard. The Body rose abruptly.
"I will drink no more," he said.
A loud insensate laugh resounded near him. The stone-breaker lounged
heavily from a bench, upon the servant's table.
"I am drunk now, my friend," the man cried with flaming eyes. "I am
drunk, an' now I am as reckless as a king, an' as serene as the Pope,
an' as heedless as God."
The Soul turned his gaze and looked at him. He saw a red flame rising
from grey ashes. The ashes were his heart. The flame was his impotent,
perishing life.
Stricken with sorrow, the Soul went to the door, and entered. He went
straight to the stone-breaker, who was now lying with head and arms
prone on the deal table.
He whispered in the drunkard's ear. The man lifted his head, and stared
with red, brutish eyes.
"What is that?" he cried.
"Your mother was pure and holy. She died to give you her life. What will
it be like on the day she asks for it again?"
The man raised an averting arm. There was a stare of horror in his eyes.
"I know you, you devil. Your name is Conscience."
The Soul looked at the Speaker. "I do not know," he answered simply;
"but I believe in God."
"In the love of God?"
"In the love of God."
"He dwells everywhere?"
"Everywhere."
"Then I will find Him, I will find His love, _here_"--and with that the
man raised the deathly spirit to his lips again, and again drank. Then,
laughing and cursing, he threw the remainder at the feet of his unknown
friend.
"Farewell!" he shouted hoarsely, so that those about him stared at him
and at the new-comer.
The Soul turned sadly, and looked for his strayed comrade, but he was
nowhere to be seen. In a room upstairs that friend whom he loved was
whispering eager vows of sand and wind; and the girl Morag, clinging
close to him, tempted him as she herself was tempted, so that both stood
in that sand, and in the intertangled hair of each that wind blew.
The Soul saw, and understood. None spoke to him, a stranger, as he went
slowly from the house, though all were relieved when that silent,
sad-eyed foreigner withdrew.
Outside, the cool sea-wind fell freshly upon him. He heard a corncrake
calling harshly to his mate, where the corn was yellowing in a little
stone-dyked field; and a night-jar creeping forward on a juniper,
uttering his whirring love-note; and he blessed their sweet, innocent
lust. Then, looking upward, he watched for a while the white procession
of the stars. They were to him the symbolic signs of the mystery of God.
He bowed his head. "Dust of the world," he muttered humbly, "dust of
the world."
Moving slowly by the house--so doubly noisy, so harshly discordant,
against the large, serene, nocturnal life--he came against the gable of
an open window. On the ledge lay a violin, doubtless discarded by some
reveller. The Soul lifted it, and held it up to the night-wind. When it
was purified, and the vibrant wood was as a nerve in that fragrant
darkness, he laid it on his shoulder and played softly.
What was it that he played? Many heard it, but none knew what the strain
was, or whence it came. The Soul remembered, and played. It is enough.
The soft playing stole into the house as though it were the cool
sea-wind, as though it were the flowing dusk. Beautiful, unfamiliar
sounds, and sudden silences passing sweet, filled the rooms. The last
guests left hurriedly, hushed, strangely disquieted. The dwellers in the
farmstead furtively bade good-night, and slipt away.
For an hour, till the sinking of the moon, the Soul played. He played
the Song of Dreams, the Song of Peace, the three Songs of Mystery. The
evil that was in the house ebbed. Everywhere, at his playing, the
secret obscure life awoke. Nimble aerial creatures swung, invisibly
passive, in the quiet dark. From the brown earth, from hidden
sanctuaries in rocks and trees, green and grey lives slid, and stood
intent. Out of the hillside came those of old. There were many eager
voices, like leaves lapping in a wind. The wild-fox lay down, with red
tongue lolling idly: the stag rose from the fern, with dilated nostrils;
the night-jar ceased, the corncrake ceased, the moon-wakeful thrushes
made no single thrilling note. The silence deepened. Sleep came stealing
softly out of the obscure, swimming dusk. There was not a swaying reed,
a moving leaf. The strange company of shadows stood breathless. Among
the tree-tops the loosened stars shone terribly--lonely fires of
silence.
The Soul played. Once he thought of the stone-breaker. He played into
his heart. The man stirred, and tears oozed between his heavy lids. It
was his mother's voice that he heard, singing-low a cradle-sweet song,
and putting back her white hair that she might look earthward to her
love. "Grey sweetheart, grey sweetheart," he moaned. Then his heart
lightened, and a moonlight of peace hallowed that solitary waste place.
Again, at the last, the Soul thought of his comrade, heavy with wine in
the room overhead, drunken with desire. And to him he played the
imperishable beauty of Beauty, the Immortal Love, so that, afterwards,
he should remember the glory rather than the shame of his poor frailty.
What he played to the girl's heart only those women know who hear the
whispering words of Mary the Mother in sleep, when a second life
breathes beneath each breath.
When he ceased, deep slumber was a balm upon all. He fell upon his knees
and prayed.
"Beauty of all Beauty," he prayed, "let none perish without thee."
It was thus that we three, who were one, realised how Prayer and Hope
and Peace, how Dream and Rest and Longing, how Laughter and Wine and
Love, are in truth but shadowy analogues of the Heart's Desire.
V
At dawn we woke. A movement of gladness was in the lovely tides of
morning--delicate green, and blue, and gold. The spires of the grasses
were washed in dew; the innumerous was as one green flower that had lain
all night in the moonshine.
We had agreed to meet at the bridge over the stream where it lapsed
through gravelly beaches just beyond the little town.
There the Soul and the Will long awaited the Body. The sun was an hour
risen, and had guided a moving multitude of gold and azure waters
against the long reaches of yellow-poppied sand, and to the bases of the
great cliffs, whose schist shone like chrysolite, and whose dreadful
bastions of black basalt loomed in purple shadow, like suspended
thunder-clouds on a windless afternoon.
The air was filled with the poignant sweetness of the loneroid or
bog-myrtle, meadow-sweet, and white wild-roses. The green smell of the
bracken, the delicate woodland odour of the mountain-ash, floated
hitherward and thitherward on the idle breath of the wind, sunwarm when
it came across the sea-pinks and thyme-set grass, cool and fresh when it
eddied from the fern-coverts, or from the heather above the
hillside-boulders where the sheep lay, or from under the pines at the
bend of the sea-road where already the cooing of grey doves made an
indolent sweetness.
The Soul was silent. He had not slept, but, after his playing in the
dark, peace had come to him.
Before dawn he had gone into the room where the Will lay, and had
looked long at his comrade. In sleep the Will more resembled him, as
when awake he the more resembled the Body. A deep pity had come upon the
Soul for him whom he loved so well, but knew so little.
Why was it, he wondered, that he felt less alien from the Body? Why was
it that this strange, potent, inscrutable being, whom both loved, should
be so foreign to each? The Body feared him. As for himself, he, too,
feared him at times. There were moments when all his marvellous
background of the immortal life shrank before the keen gaze of his
friend. Was it possible that Mind could have a life apart from mortal
substances? Was it possible? If so----
It was here that the Will awoke, and smiled at his friend.
He gave no greeting, but answered his thought.
"Yes," he said gravely, and as though continuing an argument, "it is
impossible, if you mean the mortal substance of our brother, the Body.
But yet not without material substance. May it not be that the Mind may
have an undreamed-of shaping power, whereby it can instantly create?"
"Create what?"
"A new environment for its need? Drown it in the deepest gulfs of the
sea, and it will, at the moment it is freed from the body, sheathe
itself in a like shape, and habit itself with free spaces of air, so
that it may breathe, and live, and emerge into the atmosphere, there to
take on a new shape, to involve itself in new circumstances, to live
anew?"
"It is possible. But would that sea-change leave the mind the same or
another?"
"The Mind would come forth one and incorruptible."
"If in truth, the Mind be an indivisible essence?"
"Yes, if the mind be one and indivisible."
"You believe it so?"
"Tell me, are you insubstantial? You, yourself, below this accident of
mortality?"
"I know not what you mean."
"You were wondering if, after all, it were possible for me to have a
life, a conscious, individual continuity, apart from this mortal
substance in which you and I now share--counterparts of that human home
we both love and hate, that moving tent of the Illimitable, which at
birth appears a speck on sands of the Illimitable, and at death again
abruptly disappears. You were wondering this. But, tell me: have you
yourself never wondered how you can exist, as yourself, apart from
something of this very actuality, this form, this materialism to which
you find yourself so alien in the Body?"
"I am spirit. I am a breath."
"But you are you?"
"Yes, I am I."
"The surpassing egotism is the same, whether in you, the Soul, who are
but a breath; or in me, the Will, who am but a condition; or in our
brother, the Body, a claimant to Eternal Life while perishing in his
mortality!"
"I live in God. Whence I came, thither shall I return."
"A breath?"
"It may be."
"Yet you shall be you?"
"Yes; I."
"Then that breath which will be you must have form, even as the Body
must have form."
"Form is but the human formula for the informulate."
"Nay, Form _is_ life."
"You have ever one wish, it seems to me, O Will: to put upon me the
heavy yoke of mortality."
"Not so: but to lift it from myself."
"And the Body?"
"Where did you leave him last night?"
"You remember what he said about the Three Companions of Night:
Laughter, and Wine, and Love? I left him with these."
"They are also called Tears, and Weariness, and the Grave. He has his
portion. Perhaps he does well. Death intercepts many retributions."
"He, too, has his dream within a dream."
"Yes, you played to it, in the silence and the darkness."
"You heard my playing--you here, I there?"
"I heard."
"And did you sleep or wake, comforted?"
"I heard a Wind. I have heard it often. I heard, too, my own voice
singing in the dark."
"What was the song?"
"This:--
In the silences of the woods
I have heard all day and all night
The moving multitudes
Of the Wind in flight.
He is named Myriad:
And I am sad
Often, and often I am glad;
But oftener I am white
With fear of the dim broods
That are his multitudes."
"And then, when you had heard that song?"
"There was a rush of wings. My hair streamed behind me. Then a sudden
stillness, out of which came moonlight; and a star fell slowly through
the dark, and as it passed my face I felt lips pressed against mine, and
it seemed to me that you kissed me."
"And when I kissed you, did I whisper any word?"
"You whispered: '_I am the Following Love._'"
"And you knew then that it was the Breath of God, and you had deep
peace, and slept?"
"I knew that it was the Following Love,--that is the Breath of God, and
I had deep peace, and I slept."
The Soul crossed from the window to the bed, and stooped, and kissed the
Will.
"Beloved," he whispered, "the star was but a dewdrop of the Peace that
passeth understanding. And can it be that to you, to whom the healing
dew was vouchsafed, shall be denied the water-springs?"
"Ah, beautiful dreamer of dreams, bewilder me no more with your lovely
sophistries. See, it is already late, and we have to meet the Body at
the shore-bridge over the little stream!"
It was then that the two, having had a spare meal of milk and new bread,
left the inn, and went, each communing with his own thoughts, to the
appointed place.
They heard the Body before they saw him, for he was singing as he came.
It was a strange, idle fragment of a song--"The Little Children of the
Wind"--a song that some one had made, complete in its incompleteness, as
a wind-blown blossom, and, as a blossom discarded by a flying bird,
thrown heedlessly on the wayside by its unknown wandering singer:--
I hear the little children of the wind
Crying solitary in lonely places:
I have not seen their faces,
But I have seen the leaves eddying behind,
The little tremulous leaves of the wind.
The Soul looked at the Will.
"So he, too, has heard the Wind," he said softly.
VI
All that day we journeyed westward. Sometimes we saw, far off, the pale
blue films of the Hills of Dream, those elusive mountains towards which
our way was set. Sometimes they were so startlingly near that, from
gorse upland or inland valley, we thought we saw the shadow-grass shake
in the wind's passage, or smelled the thyme still wet with dew where it
lay under the walls of mountain-boulders. But at noon we were no nearer
than when, at sunrise, we had left the little sea-town behind us: and
when the throng of bracken-shadows filled the green levels between the
fern and the pines--like flocks of sheep following fantastic
herdsmen--the Hills of the West were still as near, and as far, as the
bright raiment of the rainbow which the shepherd sees lying upon his
lonely pastures.
But long before noon we were glad because of what happened to one of us.
The dawn had flushed into a wilderness of rose as we left the bridge by
the stream. Long shafts of light, plumed with pale gold, were flung up
out of the east: everywhere was the tremulous awakening of the new day.
A score of yards from the highway a cottage stood, sparrows stirring in
the thatch, swift fairy-spiders running across the rude white-washed
walls, a redbreast singing in the dew-drenched fuchsia-bush. The blue
peat-smoke which rose above it was so faint as to be invisible beyond
the rowan which stood sunways. The westward part of the cottage was a
byre: we could hear the lowing of a cow, the clucking of fowls.
In every glen, on each hillside, are crofts such as this. There was
nothing unusual in what we saw, save that a collie crouched whimpering
beyond a dyke on the farther side of the rowan.
"All is not well here," said the Will.
"No," murmured the Soul, "I see the shadowy footsteps of those who serve
the Evil One. Await me here."
With that the Soul walked swiftly towards the cottage, and looked in at
the little window. His thought was straightway ours, and we knew that a
woman lay within and was about to give birth to a child. We knew, also,
that those who had dark, cruel eyes, and wore each the feather of a
hawk, had no power within, but were baffled, and roamed restlessly
outside the cottage on the side of shadow. The _Fuath_ himself was not
there, but when his call came the evil spirits rose like a flock of
crows and passed away. Then we saw our comrade stand back, and bow down,
and fall upon his knees.
When he rejoined us we were for a moment as one, and saw seven tall and
beautiful spirits, starred and flame-crested, hand-clasped and standing
circlewise round the cottage. They were Sons of Joy, who sang because in
that mortal hour was born an immortal soul who in the white flame and
the red of mortal life was to be a spirit of gladness and beauty. For
there is no joy in the domain of the Spirit like that of the birth of a
new joy.
A long while we walked in silence. In the eyes of the Soul we saw a
divine and beautiful light: in the eyes of the Will we saw
rainbow-spanned depths: in the eyes of the Body we saw gladness.
"We are one!"
None knew who spoke. For a moment I heard my own voice, saw my own
shadow in the grass; then, in the twinkling of an eye, three stood,
looking at each other with startled gaze.
"Let us go," said the Soul; "we have a long way yet to travel."
Each dreaming his own dream, we walked onward. Suddenly the Soul turned
and looked in the eyes of the Body.
"You are thinking of your loneliness," he said gravely.
"Yes," answered the Body.
"And I too," said the Will.
For a time no word more was said.
"I am indeed alone." This I murmured to myself after a long while, and
in a moment the old supreme wisdom sank, and we were not one but three.
"But you, O Soul," said the Will, "how can you be alone when in every
hour you have the company of the invisible, and see the passage of
powers and influence, of demons and angels, creatures of the triple
universe, souls, and the pale flight of the unembodied?"
"I do not know loneliness because of what I see or do not see, but
because of what I feel. When I walk here with you side by side it is as
though I walked along a narrow shore between a fathomless sea and
fathomless night."
The thought of one was the thought of three. I shivered with that great
loneliness. The Body glanced sidelong at the Will, the Will at the Soul.
"It is not good to dwell upon that loneliness," said the last.
"To you, O Body, and to you, O Will, as to me, it is the signal of Him
whom we have lost. Listen, and in the deepest hollow of loneliness we
can hear the voice of the Shepherd."
"I hear nothing," said the Body.
"I hear an echo," said the Will: "I hear an echo; but so, too, I can
hear the authentic voice of the sea in a hollow shell. Authentic! ...
when I know well that the murmur is no eternal voice, no whisper of the
wave made one with pearly silence, but only the sound of my flowing
blood heard idly in the curves of ear and shell?"
"Ah!" ... cried the Body, "it is a lie, that cruel word of science. The
shell must ever murmur of the sea; if not, at least let us dream that it
does. Soon, soon we shall have no dream left. How am I to know that
_all_, that everything, is not but an idle noise in my ears? How am I to
know that the Hope of the Will, and the Voice of the Soul, and the
message of the Word, and the Whisper of the Eternal Spirit, are not one
and all but a mocking echo in that shell which for me is the Shell of
Life, but may be only the cold inhabitation of my dreams?"
"Yet were it not for these echoes," the Soul answered, "life would be
intolerable for you, as for you too, my friend."
The Will smiled scornfully.
"Dreams are no comfort, no solace, no relief from weariness even, if one
knows them to be no more than the spray above the froth of a distempered
mind."
Suddenly one of us began in a low voice a melancholy little song:--
I hear the sea-song of the blood in my heart,
I hear the sea-song of the blood in my ears;
And I am far apart,
And lost in the years.
But when I lie and dream of that which was
Before the first man's shadow flitted on the grass--
I am stricken dumb
With sense of that to come.
Is then this wildering sea-song but a part
Of the old song of the mystery of the years--
Or only the echo of the tired Heart
And of Tears?
But none answered, and so again we walked onward, silent. The wind had
fallen, and in the noon-heat we began to grow weary. It was with relief
that we saw the gleam of water between the branches of a little wood of
birches, which waded towards it through a tide of bracken. Beyond the
birks shimmered a rainbow; a stray cloud had trailed from glen to glen,
and suddenly broken among the tree-tops.
"There goes Yesterday!" cried the Body laughingly--alluding to the
saying that the morning rainbow is the ghost of the day that passed at
dawn. The next moment he broke into a fragment of song:--
Brother and Sister, wanderers they
Out of the Golden Yesterday--
Thro' the dusty Now and the dim To-morrow
Hand-in-hand go Joy and Sorrow.
"Yes, joy and sorrow, O glad Body," exclaimed the Will--"but it is the
joy only that is vain as the rainbow, which has no other message. It
should be called the Bow of Sorrow."
"Not so," said the Soul gently, "or, if so, not as you mean, dear
friend:--
It is not Love that gives the clearest sight:
For out of bitter tears, and tears unshed,
Riseth the Rainbow of Sorrow overhead,
And 'neath the Rainbow is the clearest light.
The Will smiled:--
"I too must have my say, dear poets:--
Where rainbows rise through sunset rains
By shores forlorn of isles forgot,
A solitary Voice complains
'The World is here, the World is not.'
The Voice may be the wind, or sea,
Or spirit of the sundown West:
Or, mayhap, some sweet air set free
From off the Islands of the Blest:
It may be; but I turn my face
To that which still I hold so dear;
And lo, the voices of the days--
'The World is not, the World is here.'
'Tis the same end whichever way
And either way is soon forgot:
The World is all in all, To-day:
'To-morrow all the World is not.'
VII
In the noon-heat we lay, for rest and coolness, by the pool, and on the
shadow-side of a hazel. The water was of so dark a brown that we knew it
was of a great depth, and, indeed, even at the far verge, a heron,
standing motionless, wetted her breast-feathers.
In the mid-pool, where the brown lawns sloped into depths of
purple-blue, we could see a single cloud, invisible otherwise where we
lay. Nearer us, the water mirrored a mountain-ash heavy with ruddy
clusters. That long, feathery foliage, that reddening fruit, hung in a
strange, unfamiliar air; the stranger, that amid the silence of those
phantom branches ever and again flitted furtive shadow-birds.
We had walked for hours, and were now glad to rest. With us we had
brought oaten bread and milk, and were well content.
"It was by a pool such as this," said one of us, after a long interval,
"that dreamers of old called to Connla, and Connla heard. That was the
mortal name of one whose name we know not."
"Call him now," whispered the Body eagerly.
The Soul leaned forward, and stared into the fathomless brown dusk.
"Speak, Connla! Who art thou?"
Clear as a Sabbath-bell across windless pastures we heard a voice:
"I am of those who wait yet a while. I am older than all age, for my
youth is Wisdom; and I am younger than all youth, for I am named
To-morrow."
We heard no more. In vain, together, separately, we sought to break that
silence which divides the mortal moment from hourless time. The Soul
himself could not hear, or see, or even remember, because of that mortal
raiment of the flesh which for a time he had voluntarily taken upon
himself.
"I will tell you a dream that is not all a dream," he said at last,
after we had lain a long while pondering what that voice had uttered,
that voice which showed that the grave held a deeper mystery than
silence.
The Will looked curiously at him.
"Is it a dream wherein we have shared?" he asked slowly.
"That I know not: yet it may well be so. I call my dream 'The Sons of
Joy.' If you or the Body have also dreamed, let each relate the dream."
"Yes," said the Body, "I have dreamed it. But I would call it rather
'The Sons of Delight.'"
"And I," said the Will, "The Sons of Silence."
"Tell it," said the Soul, looking towards the Body.
"It was night," answered the Body at once: "and I was alone in a waste
place. My feet were entangled among briars and thorns, and beside me was
a quagmire. On the briar grew a great staff, and beside it a circlet of
woven thorn. I could see them, in a soft, white light. It must have been
moonlight, for on the other side of the briar I saw, in the moonshine, a
maze of wild roses. They were lovely and fragrant. I would have liked to
take the staff, but it was circled with the thorn-wreath; so I turned to
the moonshine and the wild roses. It was then that I saw a multitude of
tall and lovely figures, men and women, all rose-crowned, and the pale,
beautiful faces of the women with lips like rose-leaves. They were
singing. It was the Song of Delight. I, too, sang. And as I sang, I
wondered, for I thought that the eyes of those about me were heavy with
love and dreams, as though each had been pierced with a shadowy thorn.
But still the song rose, and I knew that the flowers in the grass
breathed to it, and that the vast slow cadence of the stars was its
majestic measure. Then the dawn broke, and I saw all the company, winged
and crested with the seven colours, press together, so that a rainbow
was upbuilded. In the middle space below the rainbow, a bird sang. Then
I knew I was that bird; and as the rainbow vanished, and the dawn grew
grey and chill, I sank to the ground. But it was all bog and swamp. I
knew I should sing no more. But I heard voices saying: 'O happy,
wonderful bird, who has seen all delight, whose song was so rapt, sing,
sing, sing!' But when I could sing no more I was stoned, and lay dead.
"That was my dream."
The Soul sighed.
"It was not thus I dreamed," he murmured; "but thus:--
"I stood, at night, on the verge of the sea, and looked at the maze of
stars. And while looking and dreaming, I heard voices, and, turning,
beheld a multitude of human beings. All were sorrowful; many were heavy
with weariness and despair; all suffered from some grievous ill. Among
them were many who cried continually that they had no thought, or dream,
no wish, but to forget all, and be at rest:
"I called to them, asking whither they were bound?
"'We are journeying to the Grave,' came the sighing answer.
"Then suddenly I saw the Grave. An angel stood at the portals. He was so
beautiful that the radiance of the light upon his brow lit that
shoreless multitude; in every heart a little flame arose. The name of
that divine one was Hope.
"As shadow by shadow slipt silently into the dark road behind the Grave,
I saw the Angel touch for a moment every pale brow.
"I knew at last that I saw beyond the Grave. Infinite ways traversed the
universe, wherein suns and moons and stars hung like fruit. Multitude
within multitude was there.
"Then, again, suddenly I stood where I had been, and saw the Grave
reopen, and from it troop back a myriad of bright and beautiful beings.
I could see that some were souls re-born, some were lovely thoughts,
dreams, hopes, aspirations, influences, powers and mighty spirits too.
And all sang:
"'We are the Sons of Joy.'
"That was my dream."
We were still for a few moments. Then the Will spoke.
"This dream of ours is one thing as the Body's, and another as the
Soul's. It is yet another, as I remember it:--
"On a night of a cold silence, when the breath of the equinox sprayed
the stars into a continuous dazzle, I heard the honk of the wild geese
as they cleft their way wedgewise through the gulfs overhead.
"In the twinkling of an eye I was beyond the last shadow of the last
wing.
"Before me lay a land solemn with auroral light. For a thousand years,
that were as a moment, I wandered therein. Then, far before me, I saw an
immense semi-circle of divine figures, tall, wonderful, clothed with
moonfire, each with uplifted head, as a forest before a wind. To the
right they held the East, and to the left the West.
"'Who are you?' I cried, as I drifted through them like a mist of pale
smoke.
"'We are the Laughing Gods,' they answered.
"Then after I had drifted on beyond the reach of sea or land, to a
frozen solitude of ice, I saw again a vast concourse stretching
crescent-wise from east to west: taller, more wonderful, crowned with
stars, and standing upon dead moons white with perished time.
"'Who are you?' I cried, as I went past them like a drift of pale smoke.
"'We are the Gods who laugh not,' they answered.
"Then when I had drifted beyond the silence of the Pole, and there was
nothing but unhabitable air, and the dancing fires were a flicker in the
pale sheen far behind, I saw again a vast concourse stretching
crescent-wise from east to west. They were taller still; they were more
wonderful still. They were crowned with flaming suns, and their feet
were white with the dust of ancient constellations.
"'Who are you!' I cried, as I went past them like a mist of pale smoke.
"'We are the Gods,' they answered.
"And while I waned into nothingness I felt in my nostrils the salt
smell of the sea, and, listening, I heard the honk of the wild geese
wedging southward.
"That was my dream."
When the Will ceased, nothing was said. We were too deeply moved by
strange thoughts, one and all. Was it always to be thus ... that we
might dream one dream, confusedly real, confusedly unreal, when we three
were one; but that when each dreamed alone, the dream, the vision, was
ever to be distinct in form and significance?
We lay resting for long. After a time we slept. I cannot remember what
then we dreamed, but I know that these three dreams were become one, and
that what the Soul saw and what the Will saw and what the Body saw was a
more near and searching revelation in this new and one dream than in any
of the three separately. I pondered this, trying to remember: but the
deepest dreams are always unrememberable, and leave only a fragrance, a
sound as of a quiet footfall passing into silence, or a cry, or a sense
of something wonderful, unimagined, or of light intolerable: but I could
recall only the memory of a moment ... a moment wherein, in a flash of
lightning, I had seen all, understood all.
I rose ... there was a dazzle on the water, a shimmer on every leaf, a
falling away as of walls of air into the great river of the wind ... and
there were three, not one, each staring dazed at the other, in the ears
of each the bewilderment of the already faint echo of that lost "I."
VIII
Towards sundown we came upon a hamlet, set among the hills. Our hearts
had beat quicker as we drew near, for with the glory of light gathered
above the west the mountains had taken upon them a bloom soft and
wonderful, and we thought that at last we were upon the gates of the
hills towards which we had journeyed so eagerly. But when we reached the
last pines on the ridge we saw the wild doves flying far westward.
Beyond us, under a pale star, dimly visible in a waste of rose, were the
Hills of Dream.
The Soul wished to go to them at once, for now they seemed so near to us
that we might well reach them with the rising of the moon. But the
others were tired, nor did the Hills seem so near to them. So we sat
down by the peat-fire in a shepherd's cottage, and ate of milk and
porridge, and talked with the man about the ways of that district, and
the hills, and how best to reach them. "If you want work," he said,
"you should go away south, where the towns are, an' not to these lonely
hills. They are so barren, that even the goatherds no longer wander
their beasts there."
"It's said they're haunted," added the Body, seeing that the others did
not speak.
"Ay, sure enough. That's well known, master. An' for the matter o' that,
there's a wood down there to the right where for three nights past I
have seen figures and the gleaming of fire. But there isn't a soul in
that wood--no, not a wandering tinker. I took my dogs through it to-day,
an' there wasn't the sign even of a last-year's gypsy. As for the low
bare hill beyond it, not a man, let alone a woman or child, would go
near it in the dark. In the Gaelic it's called Maol De, that is to say,
the Hill of God."
For a long time we sat talking with the shepherd, for he told us of many
things that were strange, and some that were beautiful, and some that
were wild and terrible. One of his own brothers, after an evil life, had
become mad, and even now lived in caves among the higher hills, going
ever on hands and feet, and cursing by day and night because he was made
as one of the wild swine, that know only hunger and rage and savage
sleep. He himself tended lovingly his old father, who was too frail to
work, and often could not sleep at nights because of the pleasant but
wearying noise the fairies made as they met on the dancing-lawns among
the bracken. Our friend had not himself heard the simple people, and in
a whisper confided to us that he thought the old man was a bit mazed,
and that what he heard was only the solitary playing of the Amadan-Dhu,
who, it was known to all, roamed the shadows between the two dusks.
"Keep away from the river in the hollow," he said at another moment,
"for it's there, on a night like this, just before the full moon got up,
that, when I was a boy, I saw the Aonaran. An' to this day, if I saw you
or any one standing by the water, it 'ud be all I could do not to thrust
you into it and drown you: ay, I'd have to throw myself on my face, an'
bite the grass, an' pray till my soul shook the murder out at my throat.
For that's the Aonaran's doing."
Later, he showed us, when we noticed it, a bit of smooth coral that hung
by a coarse leathern thong from his neck.
"Is that an amulet?" one of us asked.
"No: it's my lassie's."
We looked at the man inquiringly.
"The bairn's dead thirty years agone."
In the silence that followed, one of us rose, and went with the shepherd
into the little room behind. When the man came back it was with a
wonderful light in his face. Our comrade did not return ... but when we
glanced sidelong, lo, the Soul was there, as though he had not moved.
Then, of a sudden, we knew what he had done, what he had said, and were
glad.
When we left (the shepherd wanted us to stay the night, but we would
not), the stars had come. The night was full of solemn beauty.
We went down by the wood of which the shepherd had spoken, and came upon
it as the moon rose. But as a path bordered it, we followed that little
winding white gleam, somewhat impatient now to reach those far hills
where each of us believed he would find his heart's desire, or, at the
least, have that vision of absolute Truth, of absolute Beauty, which we
had set out to find.
We had not gone a third of the way when the Body abruptly turned, waving
to us a warning hand. When we stood together silent, motionless, we saw
that we were upon a secret garden. We were among ilex, and beyond were
tall cypresses, like dark flames rising out of the earth, their hither
sides lit with wavering moonfire. Far away the hill-foxes barked.
Somewhere near us in the dusk an owl hooted. The nested wild doves were
silent. Once, the faint churr of a distant fern-owl sent a vibrant
dissonance, that was yet strangely soothing, through the darkness and
the silence.
"Look!" whispered the Body.
We saw, on a mossy slope under seven great cypresses, a man lying on the
ground, asleep. The moonshine reached him as we looked, and revealed a
face of so much beauty and of so great a sorrow that the heart ached.
Nevertheless, there was so infinite a peace there, that, merely gazing
upon it, our lives stood still. The moonbeam slowly passed from that
divine face. I felt my breath rising and falling, like a feather before
the mystery of the wind is come. Then, the further surprised, we saw
that the sleeper was not alone. About him were eleven others, who also
slept; but of these one sat upright, as though the watchman of the dark
hour, slumbering at his post.
While the Body stooped, whispering, we caught sight of the white face of
yet another, behind the great bole of a tree. This man, the twelfth of
that company which was gathered about the sleeper in its midst, stared,
with uplifted hand. In his other hand, and lowered to the ground, was a
torch. He stared upon the Sleeper.
Slowly I moved forward. But whether in so doing, or by so doing, we
broke some subtle spell, which had again made us as one, I know not.
Suddenly three stood in that solitary place, with none beside us,
neither sleeping nor watching, neither quick nor dead. Far off the
hill-foxes barked. Among the cypress boughs an owl hooted, and was
still.
"Have we dreamed?" each asked the other. Then the Body told what he had
seen, and what heard; and it was much as is written here, only that the
sleepers seemed to him worn and poor men, ill-clad, weary, and that
behind the white face of the twelfth, who hid behind a tree, was a
company of evil men with savage faces, and fierce eyes, and drawn
swords.
"I have seen nothing of all this," said the Will harshly, "but only a
fire drowning in its own ashes, round which a maze of leaves circled
this way and that, blown by idle winds."
The Soul looked at the speaker. He sighed. "Though God were to sow
living fires about you, O Will," he said, "you would not believe."
The Will answered dully: "I have but one dream, one hope, and that is to
believe. Do not mock me." The Soul leaned and kissed him lovingly on the
brow.
"Look," he said; "what I saw was this: I beheld, asleep, the Divine
Love; not sleeping, as mortals sleep, but in a holy quiet, brooding upon
infinite peace, and in commune with the Eternal Joy. Around him were the
Nine Angels, the _Crois nan Aingeal_ of our prayers, and two
Seraphs--the Eleven Powers and Dominions of the World. And One stared
upon them, and upon Him, out of the dark wood, with a face white with
despair, that great and terrible Lord of Shadow whom some call Death,
and some Evil, and some Fear, and some the Unknown God. Behind him was a
throng of demons and demoniac creatures: and all died continually. And
the wood itself--it was an infinite forest; a forest of human souls
awaiting God."
The Will listened, with eyes strangely ashine. Suddenly he fell upon his
knees, and prayed. We saw tears falling from his eyes.
"I am blind and deaf," he whispered in the ear of the Body, as he rose;
"but, lest I forget, tell me where I am, in what place we are."
"It is a garden called Gethsemane," answered the other--though I know
not how he knew--I--we--as we walked onward in silence through the dusk
of moon and star, and saw the gossamer-webs whiten as they became
myriad, and hang heavy with the pale glister of the dews of dawn.
IX
The morning twilight wavered, and it was as though an incalculable host
of grey doves fled upward and spread earthward before a wind with
pinions of rose: then the dappled dove-grey vapour faded, and the rose
hung like the reflection of crimson fire, and dark isles of ruby and
straits of amethyst and pale gold and saffron and April-green came into
being: and the new day was come.
We stood silent. There is a beauty too great. We moved slowly round by
the low bare hill beyond the wood. No one was there, but on the summit
stood three crosses; one, midway, so great that it threw a shadow from
the brow of the East to the feet of the West.
The Soul stopped. He seemed as one rapt. We looked upon him with awe,
for his face shone as though from a light within. "Listen," he
whispered, "I hear the singing of the Sons of Joy. Farewell: I shall
come again."
We were alone, we two. Silently we walked onward. The sunrays slid
through the grass, birds sang, the young world that is so old smiled:
but we had no heed for this. In that new solitude each almost hated the
other. At noon a new grief, a new terror, came to us. We were upon a
ridge, looking westward. There were no hills anywhere.
Doubtless the Soul had gone that way which led to them. For us ... they
were no longer there.
"Let us turn and go home," said the Body wearily.
The Will stood and thought.
"Let us go home," he said.
With that he turned, and walked hour after hour. It was by a road
unknown to us, for, not noting where we went, we had traversed a path
that led us wide of that by which we had come. At least we saw nothing
of it. Nor, at dusk, would the Will go further, nor agree even to seek
for a path that might lead to the garden called Gethsemane.
"We are far from it," he said, "if indeed there be any such place. It
was a dream, and I am weary of all dreams. When we are home again, O
Body, we will dream no more."
The Body was silent, then abruptly laughed. His comrade looked at him
curiously.
"Why do you laugh?"
"Did you not say there would be no more tears? And of that I am glad."
"You did not laugh gladly. But what I said was that there shall be no
more dreams for us, that we will dream no more."
"It is the same thing. We have tears because we dream. If we hope no
more, we dream no more: if we dream no more, we weep no more. And I
laughed because of this: that if we weep no more we can live as we like,
without thought of an impossible to-morrow, and with little thought even
for to-day."
For a time we walked in brooding thought, but slowly, because of the
gathering dark. Neither spoke, until the Body suddenly stood still,
throwing up his arms.
"Oh, what a fool I have been! What a fool I have been!"
The Will made no reply. He stared before him into the darkness.
We had meant to rest in the haven of the great oaks, but a thin rain had
begun, and we shivered with the chill. The thought came to us to turn
and find our way back to the house of the shepherd, hopeless as the
quest might prove, for we were more and more bewildered as to where we
were, or even as to the direction in which we moved, being without pilot
of moon or star, and having already followed devious ways. But while we
were hesitating, we saw a light. The red flame shone steadily through
the rainy gloom, so we knew that it was no lantern borne by a
fellow-wayfarer. In a brief while we came upon it, and saw that it was
from a red lamp burning midway in a forest chapel.
We lifted the latch and entered. There was no one visible. Nor was any
one in the sacristy. We went to the door again, and looked vainly in all
directions for light which might reveal a neighbouring village, or
hamlet, or even a woodlander's cottage.
Glad as we were of the shelter, and of the glow from the lamp, a
thought, a dream, a desire, divided us. We looked at each other
sidelong, each both seeking and avoiding the other's eyes.
"I cannot stay here," said the Body at last; "the place stifles me. I am
frightened to stay. The path outside is clear and well trodden; it must
lead somewhere, and as this chapel is here, and as the lamp is lit, a
village, or at least a house, cannot be far off."
The Will looked at him.
"Do not go," he said earnestly.
"Why?"
"I do not know. But do not let us part. I dare not leave here. I feel as
though this were our one safe haven to-night."
The Body moved to the door and opened it.
"I am going. And--and--I am going, too, because I am tired both of you
and the Soul. There is only one way for me, I see, and I go that way.
Farewell."
The door closed. The Will was alone. For a few moments he stood, smiling
scornfully. With a sudden despairing gesture he ran to the door, flung
it open, and peered into the darkness.
He could see no one; could hear no steps. His long beseeching cry was
drowned among these solitudes. Slowly he re-closed the door; slowly
walked across the stone flags; and with folded arms stood looking upon
the altar, dyed crimson with the glow from the great lamp which hung
midway in the nave.
There was a choir-stall to the right. Here he sat, for a time glad
merely to be at rest.
Soon all desire of sleep went from him, and he began to dream. At this
he smiled: it was so brief a while ago since he had said he would dream
no more.
Away now from his two lifelong comrades, and yet subtly connected with
them, and living by and through each, he felt a new loneliness. Life
could be very terrible. Life ... the word startled him. What life could
there be for him if the Body perished? That was why he had cried out in
anguish after his comrade had left, with that ominous word "farewell."
True, now he lived, breathed, thought, as before: but this, he knew, was
by some inexplicable miracle of personality, by which the three who had
been one were each enabled to go forth, fulfilling, and in all ways
ruled and abiding by, the natural law. If the Body should die, would he
not then become as a breath in frost? If the Soul ... ah! he wondered
what then would happen.
"When I was with the Body," he muttered, "I was weary of dreams, or
longed only for those dreams which could be fulfilled in action. But now
... now it is different. I am alone. I must follow my own law. But what
... how ... where ... am I to choose? All the world is a wilderness with
a heart of living light. The side we see is Life: the side we do not see
we call Hope. All ways--a thousand myriad ways--lead to it. Which shall
I choose? How shall I go?"
Then I began to dream ... I ... we ... then the Will began to dream.
Slowly the Forest Chapel filled with a vast throng, ever growing more
dense as it became more multitudinous, till it seemed as though the
walls fell away and that the aisles reached interminably into the world
of shadow, through the present into the past, and to dim ages.
Behind the altar stood a living Spirit, most wonderful, clothed with
Beauty and Terror.
Then the Will saw, understood, that this was not the Christ, nor yet the
Holy Spirit, but a Dominion. It was the Spirit of this world, one of the
Powers and Dominions whom of old men called the gods. But all in that
incalculable throng worshipped this Spirit as the Supreme God. He saw,
too, or realised, that, to those who worshipped, this Spirit appeared
differently, now as a calm and august dreamer, now as an inspired
warrior, now as a man wearing a crown of thorns against the shadow of a
gigantic cross: as the Son of God, or the Prophet of God, or in manifold
ways the Supreme One, from Jehovah to the savage Fetich.
Turning from that ocean of drowned life, he looked again at the
rainbow-plumed and opal-hued Spirit: but now he could see no one,
nothing, but a faint smoke that rose as from a torch held by an
invisible hand. The altar stood unserved.
Nor was the multitude present. The myriad had become a wavering shadow,
and was no more.
A child had entered the church. The little boy came slowly along the
nave till he stood beneath the red lamp, so that his white robe was warm
with its glow. He sang, and the Will thought it was a strange song to
hear in that place, and wondered if the child were not an image of what
was in his own heart.
When the day darkens,
When dusk grows light,
When the dew is falling,
When Silence dreams...
I hear a wind
Calling, calling
By day and by night.
What is the wind
That I hear calling
By day and by night,
The crying of wind?
When the day darkens,
When dusk grows light,
When the dew is falling?
The Will rose and moved towards the child. No one was there, but he saw
that a wind-eddy blew about the altar, for a little cloud of rose-leaves
swirled above it. As in a dream he heard a voice, faint and sweet:--
Out of the Palace
Of Silence and Dreams
My voice is falling
From height to height:
I am the Wind
Calling, calling
By day and by night.
The red flame waned and was no more. Above the altar a white flame, pure
as an opal burning in moonfire, rose for a moment, and in a moment was
mysteriously gathered into the darkness.
Startled, the Will stood moveless in the obscurity. Were these symbols
of the end--the red flame and the white ... the Body and the Soul?
Then he remembered the ancient wisdom of the Gael, and went out of the
Forest Chapel and passed into the woods. He put his lips to the earth,
and lifted a green leaf to his brow, and held a branch to his ear: and
because he was no longer heavy with the sweet clay of mortality, though
yet of the human clan, he heard that which we do not hear, and saw that
which we do not see, and knew that which we do not know. All the green
life was his. In that new world he saw the lives of trees, now pale
green, now of woodsmoke blue, now of amethyst: the grey lives of stone:
breaths of the grass and reed: creatures of the air, delicate and wild
as fawns, or swift and fierce and terrible, tigers of that undiscovered
wilderness, with birds almost invisible but for their luminous wings,
their opalescent crests.
With these and the familiar natural life, with every bird and beast
kindred and knowing him kin, he lived till the dawn, and from the dawn
till sunrise, and from sunrise till noon. At noon he slept. When he woke
he saw that he had wandered far, and was glad when he came to a
woodlander's cottage. Here a woman gave him milk and bread, but she was
dumb, and he could learn nothing from her. She showed him a way which he
followed; and by that high upland path, before sundown, he came again
upon the Forest Chapel, and saw that it stood on a spur of blue hills.
Were it not for a great and startling weakness that had suddenly come
upon him, he would have gone in search of his lost comrade. While he lay
with his back against a tree, vaguely wondering what ill had come upon
him, he heard a sound of wheels. Soon after a rough cart was driven
rapidly towards the Forest Chapel, but when the countryman saw him he
reined in abruptly, as though at once recognising one whom he had set
out to seek. "Your friend is dying," he said; "come at once if you want
to see him again. He sent me to look for you."
In a moment all lassitude and pain went from the Will, and he sprang
into the cart, asking (while his mind throbbed with a dreadful anxiety)
many questions. But all he could learn from his taciturn companion was
that yester eve his comrade had fallen in with a company of roystering
and loose folk, with whom he had drunk heavily over-night and gamed and
lived evilly; that all this day he had lain as in a stupor, till the
afternoon, when he awoke and straightway fell into a quarrel about a
woman, and, after fierce words and blows, had been mortally wounded
with a knife. He was now lying, almost in the grasp of death, at the Inn
of the Crossways.
In the whirl of anxiety, dread, and a new and terrible confusion, the
Will could not think clearly as to what he was to say or do, what was to
be or could be done for his friend. And while he was still swayed
helplessly, this way and that, as a herring in a net drifted to and fro
by wind and wave, the Inn was reached.
With stumbling eagerness he mounted the rough stairs, and entered a
small room, clean, though almost sordid in its bareness, yet through its
western window filled with the solemn light of sunset.
On a white bed lay the Body, and the Will saw at a glance that his
comrade had not long to live. The handkerchief the sufferer held on his
breast was stained with the bright crimson of the riven lungs; his white
face was whiter than the pillow, the more so, as a red splatch lay on
each cheek.
The dying man opened his eyes as the door opened. He smiled gladly when
he saw who had come.
"I am glad indeed of this," he whispered. "I feared I was to die alone,
and in delirium or unconsciousness. Now I shall not be alone till the
end. And then----"
But here the Will sank upon his knees by the bedside. For a few minutes
his tears fell upon the hand he clasped. The sobs shook in his throat.
He had never fully realised what love he bore his comrade, his second
self; how interwrought with him were all his joys and sorrows, his
interests, his hopes and fears.
Suddenly, with supplicating arms, he cried, "Do not die! Oh, do not die!
Save me, save me, save me!"
"How can I save you, how can I help you, dear friend?" asked the Body in
a broken voice; "my sand is all but run out; my hour is come."
"But do you not know, do you not see, that I cannot live without
you!--that I must _die_--that if you perish so must I also pass with
your passing breath!"
"No--no--no!--for, see, we are no longer one, but three. The Soul is far
from us now, and soon you too will be gone on your own way. It is only I
who can go no more into the beautiful dear world. O Will, if I could, I
would give all your knowledge and endless quest of wisdom and all your
hopes, and all the dreams and the white faith of the Soul, for one
little year of sweet human life--for one month even--ah, what do I say,
for a few days even, for a day, for a few hours! It is so terrible thus
to be stamped out. Yesterday I saw a dog leaping and barking in delight
as it raced about a wagon, and then in a moment a foot caught and it was
entangled, and the wagon-wheel crushed it into a lifeless mass. There
was no dog; for that poor beast it was the same as though it had never
been, as though the world had never been, as though nothing more was to
be. He was a breath blown unremembering out of nothing into nothing.
That is what death is. That is what death is, O Will!"
"No, no, it is too horrible--too cruel--too unjust."
"Yes, for you. But not for me. Your way is not the way of death, but of
life. For me, I am as the beasts are, their sorry lord, but akin--oh
yes, akin, akin. I follow the natural law in all things. And I know this
now, dear comrade: that without you and the Soul I should have been no
other than the brutes that know nothing save their innocent lusts and
live and die without thought."
The Will slowly rose.
"It was madness for us to separate and come upon this quest," he said,
looking longingly at the Body.
"Not so, dear friend. We should have had to separate soon or late,
whatsoever we had done. If I have feared you at times, and turned from
you often, I have loved you well, and still more the Soul. I think you
have both lied to me overmuch, and you mostly. But I forgive what I know
was done in love and hope. And you, O Will, forgive me for all I have
brought, what I now bring, upon you; forgive the many thwartings and
dull indifference and heavy drag I have so often, oh, so often been to
you. For now death is at hand. But I have one thing I wish to ask you."
"Speak."
"Before my life was broken, there was one whom I loved. Every hope,
every dream, every joy, every sorrow that I had came from this love. It
was her death which broke my life--not only for the piteous loss and all
it meant to me, but because death came with tragic heedlessness--for she
was young, and strong, and beautiful. And before she died, she said we
should meet again. I was never, and now am far the less worthy of her;
and yet--and yet--oh, if only that great, beautiful love were all I had
to doubt or fear, I should have no doubt or fear! But no--no--we shall
never meet. How can we? Before to-morrow I shall be like that crushed
dog, and not be: just as if I had never been!"
The blood rose, and sobs and tears made further words inaudible. But
after a little the Body spoke again.
"But you, O Will, you and the Soul both resemble me. We are as flowers
of the same colour, as clay of the same mould. It may be you shall meet
her. Tell her that my last thought was of her: take her all my dreams
and hopes--and say--and say--say----"
But here the Body sat up in the bed, ash-white, with parted lips and
straining eyes.
"What? Quick, quick, dear Body--say?----"
"Say that I loved best that in her which I loved best in myself--the
Soul. Tell her I have never wholly despaired. Ah, if only the Soul were
here, I would not even now despair! Tell her I leave all to the
Soul--and--and--love shall triumph----"
There was a rush of blood, a gurgling cry, and the Body sank back
lifeless. In the very moment of death the eyes lightened with a
wonderful radiance--it was as though the evening stars suddenly came
through the dark.
The Will looked to see whence it came. The Soul stood beside him, white,
wonderful, radiant.
"I have come," he said.
"For me?" said the Will, shaking as with an ague, yet in bitter irony.
"Yes, for you, and for the Body too."
"For the Body?--see, he is already clay. What word have you to say to
_that_, to _me_ who likewise am already perishing?
"This--do you remember what so brief a while ago we three as one
wrote--wrote with my spirit, through your mind, and the Body's
hand--these words: _Love is more great than we conceive, and Death is
the keeper of unknown redemptions?_"
"Yes--yes--O Soul! I remember, I remember."
"It was true there: it is true here. Have I not ever told you that Love
would save?"
With that the Soul moved over to the bedside, and kissed the Body.
"Farewell, fallen leaf. But the tree lives--and beyond the tree is the
wind, the breath of the eternal."
"Look," he added, "our comrade is still asleep, though now no mortal
skill could nourish the hidden spark"; and with that he stooped and
kissed again the silent lips and the still brow and the pulseless
heart, and suddenly a breath, an essence, came from the body, in form
like itself, a phantom, yet endued with a motion of life.
As the faintest murmur in a shell we heard him whisper, _Life! Life!
Life!_ Then, as a blown vapour, he was one with us. A singular change
came upon the clay which had once been so near and dear to us: a frozen
whiteness that had not been there before, a stillness as of ancient
marble.
The Will stood, appalled, with wild eyes. Some dreadful invisible power
was upon him.
"Lost!" he cried; and now his voice, too, was faint as a murmur in a
shell. But the Soul smiled.
Then the Will grew grey as a willow-leaf aslant in the wind; and as the
shadow of a reed wavered in the wind; and as a reed's shadow is and is
not, so was he suddenly no more.
But, in the miracle of a moment, the Soul appeared in the triple mystery
of substance, and mind, and spirit. In full and joyous life the Will
stood re-born, and now we three were one again.
I looked for the last time on that which had been our home. The lifeless
thing lay, most terribly still and strange; yet with a dignity that
came as a benediction, for this dead temple of life had yielded to a
divine law, allied not to shadow and decay, but to the recurrent spring,
to the eternal ebb and flow, to the infinite processional. It is we of
the human clan only who are troubled by the vast waste and refuse of
life. There is not any such waste, neither in the myriad spawn nor the
myriad seed: a Spirit sows by the law we do not see, and reaps by a law
we do not know.
Then I turned and went to the western window. I saw that the Inn stood
upon the Hills of Dream, yet, when I looked within, I knew that I was
again in my familiar home. Once more, beyond the fuchsia bushes, the sea
sighed, as it felt the long shore with a continuous foamless wave. In
the little room below, the lamp was lit; for the glow fell warmly upon
the gravel path, shell-bordered, and upon the tufted mignonette,
sea-pinks, and feathery southernwood. The sound of hushed voices rose.
And now the dawn is come, and I have written this record of what we, who
are now indeed one, but far more truly and intimately than before, went
out to seek. In another hour I shall go hence, a wayfarer again. I have
a long road to travel, but am sustained by joy, and uplifted by a great
hope. When, tired, I lay down the pen, and with it the last of mortal
uses, it will be to face the glory of a new day. I have no fear. I shall
not leave all I have loved, for I have that in me which binds me to this
beautiful world, for another life at least, it may be for many lives.
And that within me which dreamed and hoped shall now more gladly and
wonderfully dream, and hope, and seek, and know, and see ever deeper and
further into the mystery of beauty and truth. And that within me which
_knew_, now _knows_. In the deepest sense there is no spiritual dream
that is not true, no hope that shall for ever go famished, no tears that
shall not be gathered into the brooding skies of compassion, to fall
again in healing dews.
What the Body could not, nor ever could see, and what to the Will was a
darkness, or at best a bewildering mist, is now clear. There are
mysteries of which I cannot write; not from any occult secret, but
because they are so simple and inevitable, that, like the mystery of day
and night, or the change of the seasons, or life and death, they must be
learned by each, in his own way, in his own hour. It is not out of their
light that I see; it is by these stars that I set forth, where else I
should be as a shadow upon a trackless waste.
But Love, I am come to realise, is the supreme deflecting force. Love
"unloosens sins," unites failure, disintegrates the act; not by an
inconceivable conflict with the immutable law of consequence, but by
deflection. For the divine love follows the life, and turns and meets it
at last, and in that meeting deflects: so that that which is mortal,
evil, and what is of the mortal law, the act, sinks; and on the forehead
of the divine law that which is alone inevitable survives and moves
onward in the rhythm that is life. When we understand the mystery of
Redemption, we shall understand what Love is. The expiatory is an
unknown attribute in the Divine. Expiation is but the earthly
burnt-offering of that in us that is mortal: Redemption, which is the
spiritual absorption of the expiation due to others, and the measureless
restitution in love of wrong humbly brought to the soul and consumed
there--so that it issues a living force to meet and deflect--is the
living witness in that of us which is immortal. Those who wrong us do
indeed become our saviours. It is _their_ expiation that we make _ours_:
they must go free of us; and when they come again and discrown us, then
in love we shall be at one and equal. So far, words may clothe thought;
but, beyond, the soul knows there is no expiation. Except you redeem
yourself, there is no God. Forgiveness is the dream of little children:
beautiful because thus far we see and know, but no farther.
I see now what madness it was, as so often happened, to despise the
body. But one mystery has become clear to me through this strange quest
of ours--though when I say "I," or "our," I know not whether it is the
Body or the Will or the Soul that speaks, till I remember that triune
marriage at the deathbed, and know that while each is consciously
each--the one with memory, the other with knowledge and hope, the third
with wisdom and faith--we are yet one, as are the yellow and the white
and the violet in the single flame in this candle beside me. And this
mystery is, that the body was not built of life-warmed clay merely to be
the house of the soul. Were it so, were the soul unwed to its mortal
comrades, it would be no more than a moment's uplifted wave on an
infinite sea. Without memory, without hope, it would be no more than a
breath of the Spirit. But before the Divine Power moulded us into
substance, we were shaped by it in form. And form is, in the spiritual
law, what the crystal is in the chemic law.
For now I see clearly that the chief end of the body is to enable the
soul to come into intimate union with the natural law, so that it may
fulfil the divine law of Form, and be at one with all created life and
yet be for ever itself and individual. By itself the soul would only
vainly aspire; it has to learn to remember, to become at one with the
wind and the grass and with all that lives and moves; to take its life
from the root of the body, and its green life from the mind, and its
flower and fragrance from what it may of itself obtain, not only from
this world, but from its own dews, its own rainbows, dawn stars and
evening stars, and vast incalculable fans of time and death. And this I
have learned: that there is no absolute Truth, no absolute Beauty, even
for the Soul. It may be that in the Divine Forges we shall be so moulded
as to have perfect vision. Meanwhile only that Truth is deepest, that
Beauty highest which is seen, not by the Soul only, or by the Mind, or
by the Body, but all three as one. Let each be perfect in kind and
perfect in unity. This is the signal meaning of the mystery. It is so
inevitable that it has its blind descent to fetich as well as its divine
ascension. But the ignoble use does not annul the noble purport, any
more than the blindness of many obscures the dream of one.
There could be no life hereafter for the soul were it not for the body,
and what were that life without the mind, the child of both, whom the
ancient seers knew and named Mnemosyne? Without memory life would be a
void breath, immortality a vacuum.
Ah, the glory of the lifting light! The new day is come. Farewell.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] The Aztec word _Ehecatl_, which signifies alike the Wind (or
Breath), Shadow, and Soul.
IONA
"_There are moments when the soul takes wings: what it has to
remember, it remembers: what it loves, it loves still more: what it
longs for, to that it flies._"
Iona
A few places in the world are to be held holy, because of the love which
consecrates them and the faith which enshrines them. Their names are
themselves talismans of spiritual beauty. Of these is Iona.
The Arabs speak of Mecca as a holy place before the time of the prophet,
saying that Adam himself lies buried here: and, before Adam, that the
Sons of Allah, who are called Angels, worshipped; and that when Allah
Himself stood upon perfected Earth it was on this spot. And here, they
add, when there is no man left upon earth, an angel shall gather up the
dust of this world, and say to Allah, "There is nothing left of the
whole earth but Mecca: and now Mecca is but the few grains of sand that
I hold in the hollow of my palm, O Allah."
In spiritual geography Iona is the Mecca of the Gael.
It is but a small isle, fashioned of a little sand, a few grasses salt
with the spray of an ever-restless wave, a few rocks that wade in
heather and upon whose brows the sea-wind weaves the yellow lichen. But
since the remotest days sacrosanct men have bowed here in worship. In
this little island a lamp was lit whose flame lighted pagan Europe, from
the Saxon in his fens to the swarthy folk who came by Greek waters to
trade the Orient. Here Learning and Faith had their tranquil home, when
the shadow of the sword lay upon all lands, from Syracuse by the
Tyrrhene Sea to the rainy isles of Orcc. From age to age, lowly hearts
have never ceased to bring their burthen here. Iona herself has given us
for remembrance a fount of youth more wonderful than that which lies
under her own boulders of Dun-I. And here Hope waits.
To tell the story of Iona is to go back to God, and to end in God.
But to write of Iona, there are many ways of approach. No place that has
a spiritual history can be revealed to those who know nothing of it by
facts and descriptions. The approach may be through the obscure glens of
another's mind and so out by the moonlit way, as well as by the track
that thousands travel. I have nothing to say of Iona's acreage, or
fisheries, or pastures: nothing of how the islanders live. These things
are the accidental. There is small difference in simple life anywhere.
Moreover, there are many to tell all that need be known.
There is one Iona, a little island of the west. There is another Iona,
of which I would speak. I do not say that it lies open to all. It is as
we come that we find. If we come, bringing nothing with us, we go away
ill-content, having seen and heard nothing of what we had vaguely
expected to see or hear. It is another Iona than the Iona of sacred
memories and prophecies: Iona the metropolis of dreams. None can
understand it who does not see it through its pagan light, its Christian
light, its singular blending of paganism and romance and spiritual
beauty. There is, too, an Iona that is more than Gaelic, that is more
than a place rainbow-lit with the seven desires of the world, the Iona
that, if we will it so, is a mirror of your heart and of mine.
History may be written in many ways, but I think that in days to come
the method of spiritual history will be found more suggestive than the
method of statistical history. The one will, in its own way, reveal
inward life, and hidden significance, and palpable destiny: as the
other, in the good but narrow way of convention, does with exactitude
delineate features, narrate facts, and relate events. The true
interpreter will as little despise the one as he will claim all for the
other.
And that is why I would speak here of Iona as befalls my pen, rather
than as perhaps my pen should go: and choose legend and remembrance, and
my own and other memories and associations, and knowledge of my own and
others, and hidden meanings, and beauty and strangeness surviving in
dreams and imaginations, rather than facts and figures, that others
could adduce more deftly and with more will.
In the _Felire na Naomh Nerennach_ is a strangely beautiful if fantastic
legend of one Mochaoi, Abbot of n'-Aondruim in Uladh. With some
companions he was at the edge of a wood, and while busy in cutting
wattles wherewith to build a church, "he heard a bright bird singing on
the blackthorn near him. It was more beautiful than the birds of the
world." Mochaoi listened entranced. There was more in that voice than in
the throat of any bird he had ever heard, so he stopped his
wattle-cutting, and, looking at the bird, courteously asked who was
thus delighting him. The bird at once answered, "A man of the people of
my Lord" (that is, an angel). "Hail," said Mochaoi, "and for why that, O
bird that is an angel?" "I am come here by command to encourage you in
your good work, but also, because of the love in your heart, to amuse
you for a time with my sweet singing." "I am glad of that," said the
saint. Thereupon the bird sang a single surpassing sweet air, and then
fixed his beak in the feathers of his wing, and slept. But Mochaoi heard
the beauty and sweetness and infinite range of that song for three
hundred years. Three hundred years were in that angelic song, but to
Mochaoi it was less than an hour. For three hundred years he remained
listening, in the spell of beauty: nor in that enchanted hour did any
age come upon him, or any withering upon the wattles he had gathered;
nor in the wood itself did a single leaf turn to a red or yellow flame
before his eyes. Where the spider spun her web, she spun no more: where
the dove leaned her grey breast from the fir, she leaned still.
Then suddenly the bird took its beak from its wing-feathers, and said
farewell. When it was gone, Mochaoi lifted his wattles, and went
homeward as one in a dream. He stared, when he looked for the little
wattled cells of the Sons of Patrick. A great church built of stone
stood before his wondering eyes. A man passed him, and told the stranger
that it was the church of St. Mochaoi. When he spoke to the assembled
brothers, none knew him: some thought he had been taken away by the
people of the Shee, and come back at fairy-nightfall, which is the last
hour of the last day of three hundred years. "Tell us your name and
lineage," they cried. "I am Mochaoi, Abbot of n'-Aondruim," he said, and
then he told his tale, and they knew him, and made him abbot again. In
the enchanted wood a shrine was built, and about it a church grew, "and
surpassingly white angels often alighted there, or sang hymns to it from
the branches of the forest trees, or leaned with their foot on tiptoe,
their eyes on the horizon, their ear on the ground, their wings
flapping, their bodies trembling, waiting to send tidings of prayer and
repentance with a beat of their wings to the King of the Everlasting."
There are many who thought that Mochaoi was dead, when he was seen no
more of his fellow-monks at the forest monastery of n'Aondruim in Uladh.
But his chronicler knew: "a sleep without decay of the body Mochaoi of
Antrim slept."
I am reminded of the story of Mochaoi when I think of Iona. I think she
too, beautiful isle, while gathering the help of human longing and tears
and hopes, strewn upon her beaches by wild waves of the world, stood,
enchanted, to listen to a Song of Beauty. "That is a new voice I hear in
the wave," we can dream of her saying, and of the answer: "we are the
angelic flocks of the Shepherd: we are the Voices of the Eternal: listen
a while!"
It has been a long sleep, that enchanted swoon. But Mochaoi awoke, after
three hundred years, and there was neither time upon his head, nor age
in his body, nor a single withered leaf of the forest at his feet. And
shall not that be possible for the Isle of Dreams, whose sands are the
dust of martyrs and noble and beautiful lives, which was granted to one
man by "one of the people of my Lord?"
When I think of Iona I think often, too, of a prophecy once connected
with Iona; though perhaps current no more in a day when prophetical
hopes are fallen dumb and blind.
It is commonly said that, if he would be heard, none should write in
advance of his times. That I do not believe. Only, it does not matter
how few listen. I believe that we are close upon a great and deep
spiritual change. I believe a new redemption is even now conceived of
the Divine Spirit in the human heart, that is itself as a woman, broken
in dreams, and yet sustained in faith, patient, long-suffering, looking
towards home. I believe that though the Reign of Peace may be yet a long
way off, it is drawing near: and that Who shall save us anew shall come
divinely as a Woman, to save as Christ saved, but not, as He did, to
bring with Her a sword. But whether this Divine Woman, this Mary of so
many passionate hopes and dreams, is to come through mortal birth, or as
an immortal Breathing upon our souls, none can yet know.
Sometimes I dream of the old prophecy that Christ shall come again upon
Iona, and of that later and obscure prophecy which foretells, now as the
Bride of Christ, now as the Daughter of God, now as the Divine Spirit
embodied through mortal birth in a Woman, as once through mortal birth
in a Man, the coming of a new Presence and Power: and dream that this
may be upon Iona, so that the little Gaelic island may become as the
little Syrian Bethlehem. But more wise it is to dream, not of hallowed
ground, but of the hallowed gardens of the soul wherein She shall appear
white and radiant. Or, that upon the hills, where we are wandered, the
Shepherdess shall call us home.
From one man only, on Iona itself, I have heard any allusion to the
prophecy as to the Saviour who shall yet come: and he in part was
obscure, and confused the advent of Mary into the spiritual world with
the possible coming again to earth of Mary, as another Redeemer, or with
a descending of the Divine Womanhood upon the human heart as a universal
spirit descending upon awaiting souls. But in intimate remembrance I
recall the words and faith of one or two whom I loved well. Nor must I
forget that my old nurse, Barabal, used to sing a strange "oran," to the
effect that when St. Bride came again to Iona it would be to bind the
hair and wash the feet of the Bride of Christ.
One of those to whom I allude was a young Hebridean priest, who died in
Venice, after troubled years, whose bitterest vicissitude was the
clouding of his soul's hope by the wings of a strange multitude of
dreams--one of whom and whose end I have elsewhere written: and he told
me once how, "as our forefathers and elders believed and still believe,
that Holy Spirit shall come again which once was mortally born among us
as the Son of God, but, then, shall be the Daughter of God. The Divine
Spirit shall come again as a Woman. Then for the first time the world
will know peace." And when I asked him if it were not prophesied that
the Woman is to be born in Iona, he said that if this prophecy had been
made it was doubtless of an Iona that was symbolic, but that this was a
matter of no moment, for She would rise suddenly in many hearts, and
have her habitation among dreams and hopes. The other who spoke to me of
this Woman who is to save was an old fisherman of a remote island of the
Hebrides, and one to whom I owe more than to any other spiritual
influence in my childhood, for it was he who opened to me the three
gates of Beauty. Once this old man, Seumas Macleod, took me with him to
a lonely haven in the rocks, and held me on his knee as we sat watching
the sun sink and the moon climb out of the eastern wave. I saw no one,
but abruptly he rose and put me from him, and bowed his grey head as he
knelt before one who suddenly was standing in that place. I asked
eagerly who it was. He told me that it was an Angel. Later, I learned (I
remember my disappointment that the beautiful vision was not winged with
great white wings) that the Angel was one soft flame of pure white, and
that below the soles of his feet were curling scarlet flames. He had
come in answer to the old man's prayer. He had come to say that we could
not see the Divine One whom we awaited. "But you will yet see that Holy
Beauty," said the Angel, and Seumas believed, and I too believed, and
believe. He took my hand, and I knelt beside him, and he bade me repeat
the words he said. And that was how I first prayed to Her who shall yet
be the Balm of the World.
And since then I have learned, and do see, that not only prophecies and
hopes, and desires unclothed yet in word or thought, foretell her
coming, but already a multitude of spirits are in the gardens of the
soul, and are sowing seed and calling upon the wind of the south; and
that everywhere are watching eyes and uplifted hands, and signs which
cannot be mistaken, in many lands, in many peoples, in many minds; and,
in the heaven itself that the soul sees, the surpassing signature.
I recall one whom I knew, a fisherman of the little green island: and I
tell this story of Coll here, for it is to me more than the story of a
dreaming islander. One night, lying upon the hillock that is called
Cnoc-nan-Aingeal, because it is here that St. Colum was wont to hold
converse with an angel out of heaven, he watched the moonlight move like
a slow fin through the sea: and in his heart were desires as infinite as
the waves of the sea, the moving homes of the dead.
And while he lay and dreamed, his thoughts idly adrift as a net in deep
waters, he closed his eyes, muttering the Gaelic words of an old line,
_In the Isle of Dreams God shall yet fulfil Himself anew_.
Hearing a footfall, he stirred. A man stood beside him. He did not know
the man, who was young, and had eyes dark as hill-tarns, with hair light
and soft as thistledown; and moved light as a shadow, delicately
treading the grass as the wind treads it. In his hair he had twined the
fantastic leaf of the horn-poppy.
The islander did not move or speak: it was as though a spell were upon
him.
"God be with you," he said at last, uttering the common salutation.
"And with you, Coll mac Coll," answered the stranger. Coll looked at
him. Who was this man, with the sea-poppy in his hair, who, unknown,
knew him by name? He had heard of one whom he did not wish to meet, the
Green Harper: also of a grey man of the sea whom islesmen seldom alluded
to by name: again, there was the Amadan Dhu ... but at that name Coll
made the sign of the cross, and remembering what Father Allan had told
him in South Uist, muttered a holy exorcism of the Trinity.
The man smiled.
"You need have no fear, Coll mac Coll," he said quietly.
"You that know my name so well are welcome, but if you in turn would
tell me your name I should be glad."
"I have no name that I can tell you," answered the stranger gravely;
"but I am not of those who are unfriendly. And because you can see me
and speak to me, I will help you to whatsoever you may wish."
Coll laughed.
"Neither you nor any man can do that. For now that I have neither father
nor mother, nor brother nor sister, and my lass too is dead, I wish
neither for sheep nor cattle, nor for new nets and a fine boat, nor a
big house, nor as much money as MacCailein Mor has in the bank at
Inveraora."
"What then do you wish for, Coll mac Coll?"
"I do not wish for what cannot be, or I would wish to see again the dear
face of Morag, my lass. But I wish for all the glory and wonder and
power there is in the world, and to have it all at my feet, and to know
everything that the Holy Father himself knows, and have kings coming to
me as the crofters come to MacCailein Mor's factor."
"You can have that, Coll mac Coll," said the Green Harper, and he waved
a withe of hazel he had in his hand.
"What is that for?" said Coll.
"It is to open a door that is in the air. And now, Coll, if that is your
wish of all wishes, and you will give up all other wishes for that wish,
you can have the sovereignty of the world. Ay, and more than that: you
shall have the sun like a golden jewel in the hollow of your right hand,
and all the stars as pearls in your left, and have the moon as a white
shining opal above your brows, with all knowledge behind the sun, within
the moon, and beyond the stars."
Coll's face shone. He stood, waiting. Just then he heard a familiar
sound in the dusk. The tears came into his eyes.
"Give me instead," he cried, "give me a warm breast-feather from that
grey dove of the woods that is winging home to her young." He looked as
one moon-dazed. None stood beside him. He was alone. Was it a dream, he
wondered? But a weight was lifted from his heart. Peace fell upon him as
dew upon grey pastures. Slowly he walked homeward. Once, glancing back,
he saw a white figure upon the knoll, with a face noble and beautiful.
Was it Colum himself come again? he mused: or that white angel with whom
the Saint was wont to discourse, and who brought him intimacies of God?
or was it but the wave-fire of his dreaming mind, as lonely and cold and
unreal as that which the wind of the south makes upon the wandering
hearths of the sea?
I tell this story of Coll here, for, as I have said, it is to me more
than the story of a dreaming islander. He stands for the soul of a race.
It is because, to me, he stands for the sorrowful genius of our race,
that I have spoken of him here. Below all the strife of lesser desires,
below all that he has in common with other men, he has the livelong
unquenchable thirst for the things of the spirit. This is the thirst
that makes him turn so often from the near securities and prosperities,
and indeed all beside, setting his heart aflame with vain, because
illimitable, desires. For him, the wisdom before which knowledge is a
frosty breath: the beauty that is beyond what is beautiful. For, like
Coll, the world itself has not enough to give him. And at the last, and
above all, he is like Coll in this, that the sun and moon and stars
themselves may become as trampled dust, for only a breast-feather of
that Dove of the Eternal, which may have its birth in mortal love, but
has its evening home where are the dews of immortality.
"The Dove of the Eternal." It was from the lips of an old priest of the
Hebrides that I first heard these words. I was a child, and asked him if
it was a white dove, such as I had seen fanning the sunglow in
Icolmkill.
"Yes," he told me, "the Dove is white, and it was beloved of Colum, and
is of you, little one, and of me."
"Then it is not dead?"
"It is not dead."
I was in a more wild and rocky isle than Iona then, and when I went
into a solitary place close by my home it was to a stony wilderness so
desolate that in many moods I could not bear it. But that day, though
there were no sheep lying beside boulders as grey and still, nor
whinnying goats (creatures that have always seemed to me strangely
homeless, so that, as a child, it was often my noon-fancy on hot days to
play to them on a little reed-flute I was skilled in making, thwarting
the hill-wind at the small holes to the fashioning of a rude furtive
music, which I believed comforted the goats, though why I did not know,
and probably did not try to know): and though I could hear nothing but
the soft, swift, slipping feet of the wind among the rocks and grass and
a noise of the tide crawling up from a shore hidden behind crags
(beloved of swallows for the small honey-flies which fed upon the
thyme): still, on that day, I was not ill at ease, nor in any way
disquieted. But before me I saw a white rock-dove, and followed it
gladly. It flew circling among the crags, and once I thought it had
passed seaward; but it came again, and alit on a boulder.
I went upon my knees, and prayed to it, and, as nearly as I can
remember, in these words:--
"O Dove of the Eternal, I want to love you, and you to love me: and if
you live on Iona, I want you to show me, when I go there again, the
place where Colum the Holy talked with an angel. And I want to live as
long as you, Dove" (I remember thinking this might seem disrespectful,
and that I added hurriedly and apologetically), "Dove of the Eternal."
That evening I told Father Ivor what I had done. He did not laugh at me.
He took me on his knee, and stroked my hair, and for a long time was so
silent that I thought he was dreaming. He put me gently from him, and
kneeled at the chair, and made this simple prayer which I have never
forgotten: "O Dove of the Eternal, grant the little one's prayer."
That is a long while ago now, and I have sojourned since in Iona, and
there and elsewhere known the wild doves of thought and dream. But I
have not, though I have longed, seen again the White Dove that Colum so
loved. For long I thought it must have left Iona and Barra too, when
Father Ivor died.
Yet I have not forgotten that it is not dead. "I want to live as long as
you," was my child's plea: and the words of the old priest, knowing and
believing were, "O Dove of the Eternal, grant the little one's prayer."
It was not in Barra, but in Iona, that, while yet a child, I set out one
evening to find the Divine Forges. A Gaelic sermon, preached on the
shoreside by an earnest man, who, going poor and homeless through the
west, had tramped the long roads of Mull over against us, and there fed
to flame a smouldering fire, had been my ministrant in these words. The
"revivalist" had spoken of God as one who would hammer the evil out of
the soul and weld it to good, as a blacksmith at his anvil: and
suddenly, with a dramatic gesture, he cried: "This little island of Iona
is this anvil; God is your blacksmith: but oh, poor people, who among
you knows the narrow way to the Divine Forges?"
There is a spot on Iona that has always had a strange enchantment for
me. Behind the ruined walls of the Columban church, the slopes rise, and
the one isolated hill of Iona is, there, a steep and sudden wilderness.
It is commonly called Dun-I (_Doon-ee_), for at the summit in old days
was an island fortress; but the Gaelic name of the whole of this
uplifted shoulder of the isle is Slibh Meanach. Hidden under a wave of
heath and boulder, near the broken rocks, is a little pool. From
generation to generation this has been known, and frequented, as the
Fountain of Youth.
There, through boggy pastures, where the huge-horned shaggy cattle
stared at me, and up through the ling and roitch, I climbed: for, if
anywhere, I thought that from there I might see the Divine Forges, or at
least might discover a hidden way, because of the power of that water,
touched on the eyelids at sunlift, at sunset, or at the rising of the
moon.
From where I stood I could see the people still gathered upon the dunes
by the shore, and the tall, ungainly figure of the preacher. In the
narrow strait were two boats, one being rowed across to Fionnaphort, and
the other, with a dun sail burning flame-brown, hanging like a bird's
wing against Glas Eilean, on the tideway to the promontory of Earraid.
Was the preacher still talking of the Divine Forges? I wondered; or were
the men and women in the ferry hurrying across to the Ross of Mull to
look for them among the inland hills? And the Earraid men in the
fishing-smack: were they sailing to see if they lay hidden in the
wilderness of rocks, where the muffled barking of the seals made the
loneliness more wild and remote?
I wetted my eyelids, as I had so often done before (and not always
vainly, though whether vision came from the water, or from a more
quenchless spring within, I know not), and looked into the little pool.
Alas! I could see nothing but the reflection of a star, too obscured by
light as yet for me to see in the sky, and, for a moment, the shadow of
a gull's wing as the bird flew by far overhead. I was too young then to
be content with the symbols of coincidence, or I might have thought that
the shadow of a wing from Heaven, and the light of a star out of the
East, were enough indication. But, as it was, I turned, and walked idly
northward, down the rough side of Dun Bhuirg (at Cul Bhuirg, a furlong
westward, I had once seen a phantom, which I believed to be that of the
Culdee, Oran, and so never went that way again after sundown) to a
thyme-covered mound that had for me a most singular fascination.
It is a place to this day called Dun Mananain. Here, a friend who told
me many things, a Gaelic farmer named Macarthur, had related once a
fantastic legend about a god of the sea. Manaun was his name, and he
lived in the times when Iona was part of the kingdom of the Suderoeer.
Whenever he willed he was like the sea, and that is not wonderful, for
he was born of the sea. Thus his body was made of a green wave. His hair
was of wrack and tangle, glistening with spray; his robe was of windy
foam; his feet, of white sand. That is, when he was with his own, or
when he willed; otherwise, he was as men are. He loved a woman of the
south so beautiful that she was named Dear-sadh-na-Ghrene (Sunshine). He
captured her and brought her to Iona in September, when it is the month
of peace. For one month she was happy: when the wet gales from the west
set in, she pined for her own land: yet in the dream-days of November,
she smiled so often that Manaun hoped; but when Winter was come, her
lover saw that she could not live. So he changed her into a seal. "You
shall be a sleeping woman by day," he said, "and sleep in my dun here on
Iona: and by night, when the dews fall, you shall be a seal, and shall
hear me calling to you from a wave, and shall come out and meet me."
They have mortal offspring also, it is said.
There is a story of a man who went to the mainland, but could not see to
plough, because the brown fallows became waves that splashed noisily
about him. The same man went to Canada, and got work in a great
warehouse; but among the bales of merchandise he heard the singular note
of the sandpiper, and every hour the sea-fowl confused him with their
crying.
Probably some thought was in my mind that there, by Dun Mananain, I
might find a hidden way. That summer I had been thrilled to the inmost
life by coming suddenly, by moonlight, on a seal moving across the last
sand-dune between this place and the bay called Port Ban. A strange
voice, too, I heard upon the sea. True, I saw no white arms upthrown, as
the seal plunged into the long wave that swept the shore; and it was a
grey skua that wailed above me, winging inland; yet had I not had a
vision of the miracle?
But alas! that evening there was not even a barking seal. Some sheep fed
upon the green slope of Manaun's mound.
So, still seeking a way to the Divine Forges, I skirted the shore and
crossed the sandy plain of the Machar, and mounted the upland district
known as Sliav Starr (the Hill of Noises), and walked to a place, to me
sacred. This was a deserted green airidh between great rocks. From here
I could look across the extreme western part of Iona, to where it
shelved precipitously around the little Port-na-Churaich, the Haven of
the Coracle, the spot where St. Columba landed when he came to the
island.
I knew every foot of ground here, as every cave along the wave-worn
shore. How often I had wandered in these solitudes, to see the great
spout of water rise through the grass from the caverns beneath, forced
upward when tide and wind harried the sea-flocks from the north; or to
look across the ocean to the cliffs of Antrim, from the Carn cul Ri
Eirinn, the Cairn of the Hermit King of Ireland, about whom I had woven
many a romance.
I was tired, and fell asleep. Perhaps the Druid of a neighbouring mound,
or the lonely Irish King, or Colum himself (whose own Mound of the
Outlook was near), or one of his angels who ministered to him, watched,
and shepherded my dreams to the desired fold. At least I dreamed, and
thus:--
The skies to the west beyond the seas were not built of flushed clouds,
but of transparent flame. These flames rose in solemn stillness above a
vast forge, whose anvil was the shining breast of the sea. Three great
Spirits stood by it, and one lifted a soul out of the deep shadow that
was below; and one with his hands forged the soul of its dross and
welded it anew; and the third breathed upon it, so that it was winged
and beautiful. Suddenly the glory-cloud waned, and I saw the multitude
of the stars. Each star was the gate of a long, shining road. Many--a
countless number--travelled these roads. Far off I saw white walls,
built of the pale gold and ivory of sunrise. There again I saw the three
Spirits, standing and waiting. So these, I thought, were not the walls
of Heaven, but the Divine Forges.
That was my dream. When I awaked, the curlews were crying under the
stars.
When I reached the shadowy glebe, behind the manse by the sea, I saw the
preacher walking there by himself, and doubtless praying. I told him I
had seen the Divine Forges, and twice; and in crude, childish words told
how I had seen them.
"It is not a dream," he said.
I know now what he meant.
It would seem to be difficult for most of us to believe that what has
perished can be reborn. It is the same whether we look upon the dust of
ancient cities, broken peoples, nations that stand and wait, old
faiths, defeated dreams. It is so hard to believe that what has fallen
may arise. Yet we have perpetual symbols; the tree, that the winds of
Autumn ravage and the Spring restores; the trodden weed, that in April
awakes white and fragrant; the swallow, that in the south remembers the
north. We forget the ebbing wave that from the sea-depths comes again:
the Day, shod with sunrise while his head is crowned with stars.
Far-seeing was the vision of the old Gael, who prophesied that Iona
would never wholly cease to be "the lamp of faith," but would in the end
shine forth as gloriously as of yore, and that, after dark days, a new
hope would go hence into the world. But before that (and he prophesied
when the island was in its greatness)--
"Man tig so gu crich
Bithidh I mar a bha,
Gun a ghuth mannaich
Findh shalchar ba ..."
quaint old-world Erse words, which mean--
"Before this happens,
Iona will be as it was,
Without the voice of a monk,
Under the dung of cows."[2]
And truly enough the little island was for long given over to the
sea-wind, whose mournful chant even now fills the ruins where once the
monks sang matins and evensong; for generations, sheep and long-horned
shaggy kine found their silent pastures in the wilderness that of old
was "this our little seabounded Garden of Eden."
But now that Iona has been "as it was," the other and greater change may
yet be, may well have already come.
Strange, that to this day none knows with surety the derivation or
original significance of the name Iona. Many ingenious guesses have been
made, but of these some are obviously far-fetched, others are impossible
in Gaelic, and all but impossible to the mind of any Gael speaking his
ancient tongue. Nearly all these guesses concern the Iona of Columba:
few attempt the name of the sacred island of the Druids. Another people
once lived here with a forgotten faith; possibly before the Picts there
was yet another, who worshipped at strange altars and bowed down before
Shadow and Fear, the earliest of the gods.
The most improbable derivation is one that finds much acceptance. When
Columba and his few followers were sailing northward from the isle of
Oronsay, in quest, it is said, of this sacred island of the Druids,
suddenly one of the monks cried _sud i_ (_? siod e!_) "yonder it!" With
sudden exultation Columba exclaimed, _Mar sud bithe I, goir thear II_,
"Be it so, and let it be called I" (I or EE). We are not the wiser for
this obviously monkish invention. It accounts for a syllable only, and
seems like an effort to explain the use of _I_ (II, Y, Hy, Hee) for
"island" in place of the vernacular Innis, Inch, Eilean, etc. Except in
connection with Iona I doubt if _I_ for island is ever now used in
modern Gaelic. Icolmkill is familiar: the anglicised Gaelic of the Isle
of Colum of the Church. But it is doubtful if any now living has ever
heard a Gael speak of an island as _I_; I doubt if an instance could be
adduced. On the other hand, _I_ might well have been, and doubtless is,
used in written speech as a sign for Innis, as _'s_ is the common
writing of _agus_, and. As for the ancient word _Idh_ or _Iy_ I do not
know that its derivation has been ascertained, though certain Gaelic
linguists claim that _Idh_ and Innis are of the same root.
I do not know on what authority, but an anonymous Gaelic writer, in an
account of Iona in 1771, alludes to the probability that Christianity
was introduced there before St. Columba's advent, and that the island
was already dedicated to the Apostle St. John, "for it was originally
called _I'Eoin_, i.e. the Isle of John, whence Iona." _I'eoin_ certainly
is very close in sound, as a Gael would pronounce it, to Iona, and there
can be little doubt that the island had druids (whether Christian monks
also with or without) when Columba landed. Before Conall, King of Alba
(as he was called, though only Dalriadic King of Argyll), invited Colum
to Iona, to make that island his home and sanctuary, there were
certainly Christian monks on the island. Among them was the
half-mythical Odran or Oran, who is chronicled in the _Annals of the
Four Masters_ as having been a missionary priest, and as having died in
Iona fifteen years before Colum landed. Equally certainly there were
druids at this late date, though discredited of the Pictish king and his
people, for a Cymric priest of the old faith was at that time Ard-Druid.
This man Gwendollen, through his bard or second-druid Myrddin (Merlin),
deplored the persecution to which he was subject, in that now he and his
no longer dared to practise the sacred druidical rites "in raised
circles"--adding bitterly, "the grey stones themselves, even, they have
removed."
Again, Davies in his _Celtic Researches_ speaks of Colum as having on
his settlement in Iona burnt a heap of druidical books. It is at any
rate certain that druidical believers (helots perhaps) remained to
Colum's time, even if the last druidic priest had left. In the explicit
accounts which survive there is no word of any dispossession of the
druidic priests. It is more than likely that the Pictish king, who had
been converted to Christianity, and gave the island to Columba by
special grant, had either already seen Irish monks inhabit it, or at
least had withdrawn the lingering priests of the ancient faith of his
people. Neither Columba nor Adamnan nor any other early chronicler
speaks of Iona as held by the Druids when the little coracle with the
cross came into Port-na-Churaich.
Others have derived the name from _Aon_, an isthmus, but the objections
to this are that it is not applicable to the island, and perhaps never
was; and, again, the Gaelic pronunciation. Some have thought that the
word, when given as _I-Eoin_, was intended, not for the Isle of John,
but the Isle of Birds. Here, again, the objection is that there is no
reason why Iona should be called by a designation equally applicable to
every one of the numberless isles of the west. To the mountaineers of
Mull, however, the little low-lying seaward isle must have appeared the
haunt of the myriad sea-fowl of the Moyle; and if the name thus derives,
doubtless a Mull man gave it.
Again, it is said that Iona is a miswriting of _Ioua_, "the avowed
ancient name of the island." It is easy to see how the scribes who
copied older manuscripts might have made the mistake; and easy to
understand how, the mistake once become the habit, fanciful
interpretations were adduced to explain "Iona."
There is little reasonable doubt that _Ioua_ was the ancient Gaelic or
Pictish name of the island. I have frequently seen allusions to its
having been called Innis nan Dhruidnechean, or Dhruidhnean, the Isle of
the Druids: but that is not ancient Gaelic, and I do not think there is
any record of Iona being so called in any of the early manuscripts.
Doubtless it was a name given by the Shenachies or bardic story-tellers
of a later date, though of course it is quite possible that Iona was of
old commonly called the Isle of the Druids. In this connection I may put
on record that a few years ago I heard an old man of the western part of
the Long Island (Lewis), speak of the priests and ministers of to-day as
"druids"; and once, in either Coll or Tiree, I heard a man say, in
English, alluding to the Established minister, "Yes, yes, that will be
the way of it, for sure, for Mr. ---- is a wise druid." It might well
be, therefore, that in modern use the Isle of Druids signified only the
Isle of Priests. There is a little island of the Outer Hebrides called
Innis Chailleachan Dhubh--the isle of the black old women; and a legend
has grown up that witches once dwelt here and brewed storms and evil
spells. But the name is not an ancient name, and was given not so long
ago, because of a small sisterhood of black-cowled nuns who settled
there.
St. Adamnan, ninth Abbot of Iona, writing at the end of the seventh
century, invariably calls the island _Ioua_ or the _Iouan Island_.
Unless the hypothesis of the careless scribes be accepted, this should
be conclusive.
For myself I do not believe that there has been any slip of _n_ for _u_.
And I am confirmed in this opinion by the following circumstance. Three
years ago I was sailing on one of the sea-lochs of Argyll. My only
companion was the boatman, and incidentally I happened to speak of some
skerries (a group of sea-set rocks) off the Ross of Mull, similarly
named to rocks in the narrow kyle we were then passing; and learned with
surprise that my companion knew them well, and was not only an Iona man,
but had lived on the island till he was twenty. I asked him about his
people, and when he found that I knew them he became more confidential.
But he professed a strange ignorance of all concerning Iona. There was
an old Iona iorram, or boat-song, I was anxious to have: he had never
heard of it. Still more did I desire some rendering or even some lines
of an ancient chant of whose existence I knew, but had never heard
recited, even fragmentarily. He did not know of it: he "did not know
Gaelic," that is, he remembered only a little of it. Well, no, he
added, perhaps he did remember some, "but only just to talk to fishermen
an' the like."
Suddenly a squall came down out of the hills. The loch blackened. In a
moment a froth of angry foam drove in upon us, but the boat righted, and
we flew before the blast, as though an arrow shot by the wind. I noticed
a startling change in my companion. His blue eyes were wide and
luminous; his lips twitched; his hands trembled. Suddenly he stooped
slightly, laughed, cried some words I did not catch, and abruptly broke
into a fierce and strange sea-chant. It was no other than the old Iona
rann I had so vainly sought!
Some memory had awakened in the man, perhaps in part from what I had
said--with the old spell of the sea, the old cry of the wind.
Then he ceased abruptly, he relapsed, and with a sheepish exclamation
and awkward movement shrank beside me. Alas, I could recall only a few
lines; and I failed in every effort to persuade him to repeat the rann.
But I had heard enough to excite me, for again and again he had called
or alluded to Iona by its ancient pre-Columban name of Ioua, and once at
least I was sure, from the words, that the chant was also to Ioua the
Moon.
That night, however, he promised to tell me on the morrow all he could
remember of the old Ioua chant. On the morrow, alas, he had to leave
upon an unexpected business that could not be postponed, and before his
return, three days later, I was gone. I have not seen him again, but it
is to him I am indebted for the loan of an ancient manuscript map of
Iona, a copy of which I made and have by me still. It was an heirloom:
by his own account had been in his family, in Iona, for seven
generations, "an it's Himself knows how much more." He had been to the
island the summer before, because of his father's death, and had brought
this coarsely painted and rudely framed map away with him. He told me
too, that night, how the oldest folk on the island--"some three or four
o' them, anyway; them as has the Gaelic"--had the old Ioua chant in
their minds. As a boy he had heard it at many a winter _ceilidh_. "Ay,
ay, for sure, Iona was called Ioua in them old ancient days."
My friend also had a little book of his mother's which contained, in a
neat hand, copies of Gaelic songs, among them some of the old Islay and
Skye oar-chants of the _iorram_ kind. I recall an iorram that had
hardly a word in it, but was only a series of barbaric cries, sometimes
full of lament (_ho-ro-aroo-arone_, _ho-ro_, _ah-hone_, _ah-hone_!),
which was the Iona fisherman's song to entice seals to come near. I
remember, too, the opening of a "maighdean-mhara" or mermaid song, by a
little-known namesake of my own, a sister of Mary Macleod, "the sweet
singer of the Hebrides," because it had as a heading (perhaps put there
by the Iona scribe) some lines of Mary's that I liked well.
I quote from memory, but these were to the effect that, in his home,
what the Macleod loved, was playing at chess
_Agus fuaim air a chlarsaich
Gus e h'eachdraidh na dheigh sin
Greis air ursgeul na Feine_
[_and the music of the harp, and the telling of tales of the feats of
the Feinn_ (the Fingalians).] There are not many now, I fear, who could
find entertainment thus, or care to sit before the peat-fires.
On one other occasion I have heard the name Ioua used by a fisherman. I
was at Strachnr, on Loch Fyne, and was speaking to the skipper of a
boat's crew of Macleods from the Lews, when I was attracted by an old
man. He knew my Uist friend, then at Strachur, who told me more than one
strange legend of the Sliochd-nan-Ron, the seal-men. I met the old man
that night before the peat-glow, and while he was narrating a story of a
Princess of Spain who married the King of Ireland's son, he spoke
incidentally of their being wrecked on Iona, "that was then called Ioua,
ay, an' that for one hundred and two hundred and three hundred years and
thrice a hundred on the top o' that before it was Icolmkill."
I did not know him, but a friend told me that the late Mr. Cameron, the
minister of Brodick, in Arran, had the M.S. of an old Iona (or
Hebridean) iorram, in the refrain of which _Ioua_ was used throughout.
Neither do I think the name the island now bears has anything in common
with _Ioua_. In a word, I am sure that the derivations of Iona are
commonly fanciful, and that the word is simply Gaelic for the Isle of
Saints, and was so given it because of Columba and the abbots and monks
who succeeded him and his. In Gaelic, the letters _sh_ at the beginning
of a word are invariably mute; so that _I-shona_, the Isle of Saints,
would be pronounced _Iona_. I think that any lingering doubt I had
about the meaning of the name went when I got the old map of which I
have spoken, and found that in the left corner was written in large rude
letters _II-SHONA_.
How great a man was the Irish monk Crimthan, called Colum, the Dove:
Columcille, the Dove of the Church. One may read all that has been
written of him since the sixth century, and not reach the depths of his
nature. I doubt if any other than a Gael can understand him aright. More
than any Celt of whom history tells, he is the epitome of the Celt. In
war, Cuchullin himself was not more brave and resourceful. Finn, calling
his champions to the pursuit of Grania, or Oisin boasting of the Fianna
before Patrick, was not more arrogant, yet his tenderness could be as
his Master's was, and he could be as gentle as a young mother with her
child, and had a child's simplicity. He knew the continual restlessness
of his race. He was forty-two when he settled in Iona, and had led a
life of frequent and severe vicissitude, often a wanderer, sometimes
with blood against him and upon his head, once in extremity of danger,
an outlaw, excommunicated. But even in his haven of Iona he was not
content. He journeyed northward through the Pictish realms, a more
dangerous and obscure adventure then than to cross Africa to-day. He
sailed to "the Ethican island" as St. Adamnan calls Tiree, and made of
it a sanctuary, where prayer might rise as a continual smoke from quiet
homes. No fear of the savage clans of Skye--where a woman had once
reigned with so great a fame in war that even the foremost champion of
Ireland went to her in his youth to learn arms and
battle-wisdom--restrained him from facing the island Picts. Long before
Hakon the Dane fought the great seafight off Largs on the mainland,
Colum had built a church there. In the far Perthshire wilds, before
Macbeth slew Duncan the king, the strong abbot of Iona had founded a
monastery in that thanedom. At remote Inbhir Nis, the Inverness of
to-day, he overcame the King of the Picts and his sullen Druids, by his
daring, the fierce magnetism of his will, his dauntless resource. Once,
in a savage region, far north-eastward, towards the Scandinavian sea, he
was told that there his Cross would not long protect either wattled
church or monk's cell: on that spot he built the monastery of Deir, that
stood for a thousand years, and whose priceless manuscript is now one of
the treasures of Northumbria.
Columba was at once a saint, a warrior, a soldier of Christ, a great
abbot, a dauntless explorer, and militant Prince of the Church; and a
student, a man of great learning, a poet, an artist, a visionary, an
architect, administrator, law-maker, judge, arbiter. As a youth this
prince, for he was of royal blood, was so beautiful that he was likened
to an angel. In mature manhood, there was none to equal him in stature,
manly beauty, strength, and with a voice so deep and powerful that it
was like a bell and could be heard on occasion a mile away, and once,
indeed, at the court of King Bruidh, literally overbore and drowned a
concerted chorus of sullen druids. These had tried to outvoice him and
his monks, little knowing what a mighty force the sixty-fourth Psalm
could be in the throat of this terrible Culdee, who to them must have
seemed much more befitting his house-name, Crimthan (Wolf), than "the
Dove"!
This vocal duel was a characteristic device of the Druids. I recall one
notable instance long before Colum's time, though the _Leabhar na
H'Uidhre_ in which it is to be found was not compiled till A.D. 1000. In
the story of the love of Connla, son of Conn of the Hundred Battles, for
a woman of the other world, a druid asks her whence she has come, and
when she answers that it is from the lands of those who live a beautiful
and deathless life, he knows that she is a woman of the _Sidhe_. So he
chants against the fair woman till the spell of her voice is overcome,
and she goes away as a mist that falls on the shore, as a Hebridean poet
would say.[3]
Later, she comes again, and now invisible to all save Connla. Conn the
king hears her chanting to Connla that it is no such lofty place he
holds "amid short-lived mortals awaiting fearful death" that he need
dread to leave it, "the more as the ever-living ones invite thee to be
the ruler over Tethra (a Kingdom of Joy)." So once more the king calls
upon the Ard-Druid to dispel the woman by his incantations. For a moment
Connla wavers, but the Fairy Woman, with a music of mockery, sings to
him that Druidism is in ill-favour "over yonder," little loved and
little honoured "there," for, in effect, the nations of the Shee do not
need that idle dream. Connla's longing is more great to him than his
kingdom or the fires of home, and he goes with his leannanshee in a
boat, till those on the strand see him dimly and then no more in that
sundown glow, nor ever again. Columba, a poet and scholar familiar with
the old tables of his beloved Eire, probably did not forget on occasion
to turn this druidic tale against Druidism itself, repeating how, in its
own time, before the little bell of the tonsured folk was heard in
Ireland (so little a bell to be the tocsin of fallen gods and broken
nations), "Druidism is not loved, for little has it progressed to honour
on the great Righteous Strand."
For one thing of great Gaelic import, Columba has been given a singular
pre-eminence--not for his love of country, pride of race, passionate
loyalty to his clan, to every blood-claim and foster-claim, and
friendship-claim, though in all this he was the very archetype of the
clannish Gael--but because (so it is averred) he was the first of our
race of whom is recorded the systematic use of the strange gift of
spiritual foresight, "second-sight." It has been stated authoritatively
that he is the first of whom there is record as having possessed this
faculty; but that could only be averred by one ignorant of ancient
Gaelic literature. Even in Adamnan's chronicle, within some seventy
years after the death of Columba, there is record of others having this
faculty, apart from the perhaps more purely spiritual vision of his
mother Aithne, when an angel raimented her with the beauty of her unborn
son, or of his foster-father, the priest Cruithnechan, who saw the
singular light of the soul about his sleeping pupil, or of the abbot
Brendan who redeemed the saint from excommunication and perhaps death by
his vision of him advancing with a pillar of fire before him and an
angel on either side. (When, long years afterwards, Brendan died in
Ireland, Colum in Iona startled his monks by calling for an immediate
celebration of the Eucharist, because it had been revealed to him that
St. Brendan had gone to the heavenly fatherland yesternight: "Angels
came to meet his soul: I saw the whole earth illumined with their
glory.") Among others there is the story of Abbot Kenneth, who, sitting
at supper, rose so suddenly as to leave without his sandals, and at the
altar of his church prayed for Colum, at that moment in dire peril upon
the sea: the story of Ernan, who, fishing in the river Fenda, saw the
death of Colum in a symbol of flame: the story of Lugh mac Tailchan,
who, at Cloinfinchoil, beheld Iona (which he had never visited), and
above it a blaze of angels' wings, and Colum's soul. In the most ancient
tales there is frequent allusion to what we call second-sight. The
writers alluded to could not have heard of the warning of the dread
Mor-Rigan to Cuchullin before the fatal strife of the Tain-Bo-Cuailgne;
or Cuchullin's own pre-vision (among a score as striking) of the
hostings and gatherings on the fatal plain of Muirthemne; or the
Amazonian queen, Scathach's, fore-knowledge of the career and early
death of the champion of the Gaels:
"(At the last) great peril awaits thee ...
Alone against a vast herd:
Thirty years I reckon the length of thy years
(literally, the strength of thy valour);
Further than this I do not add;"
or of Deirdre's second-sight, when by the white cairn on Sliav Fuad she
saw the sons of Usna headless, and Illann the Fair headless too, but
Buimne the Ruthless Red with his head upon his shoulders, smiling a grim
smile--when she saw over Naois, her beloved, a cloud of blood--or that,
alas, too bitter-true a foreseeing, when in the Craebh Derg, the House
of the Red Branch, she cried to her lover and his two brothers that
death was at the door and "grievous to me is the deed O darling
friends--and till the world's end Emain will not be better for a single
night than it is to-night." Or, again, of that pathetic, simultaneous
death-vision of Baile the Sweet-Spoken and Aillinn, he in the north, she
in the south, so that each out of a grief unbearable straightway died,
as told in one of the oldest as well as loveliest of ancient Gaelic
tales, the _Scel Baili Binnberlaig_.
There is something strangely beautiful in most of these "second-sight"
stories of Columba. The faculty itself is so apt to the spiritual law
that one wonders why it is so set apart in doubt. It would, I think, be
far stranger if there were no such faculty.
That I believe, it were needless to say, were it not that these words
may be read by many to whom this quickened inward vision is a
superstition, or a fantastic glorification of insight. I believe; not
only because there is nothing too strange for the soul, whose vision
surely I will not deny, while I accept what is lesser, the mind's
prescience, and, what is least, the testimony of the eyes. That I have
cause to believe is perhaps too personal a statement, and is of little
account; but in that interior wisdom, which is no longer the flicker of
one little green leaf but the light and sound of a forest, of which the
leaf is a part, I know that to be true, which I should as soon doubt as
that the tide returns or that the sap rises or that dawn is a ceaseless
flashing light beneath the circuit of the stars. Spiritual logic demands
it.
It would ill become me to do otherwise. I would as little, however, deny
that this inward vision is sometimes imperfect and untrustworthy, as I
would assert that it is infallible. There is no common face of good or
evil; and in like fashion the aspect of this so-called mystery is
variable as the lives of those in whom it dwells. With some it is a
prescience, more akin to instinct than to reason, and obtains only among
the lesser possibilities, as when one beholds another where in the body
none is; or a scene not possible, there, in that place; or a face, a
meeting of shadows, a disclosure of hazard or accident, a coming into
view of happenings not yet fulfilled. With some it is simply a larger
sight, more wide, more deep; not habitual, because there is none of us
who is not subject to the law of the body; and sudden, because all tense
vision is a passion of the moment. It is as the lightning, whose
sustenance is sure for all that it has a second's life. With a few it is
a more constant companion, a dweller by the morning thought, by the
noon reverie, by the evening dream. It lies upon the pillow for some:
to some it as though the wind disclosed pathways of the air; a swaying
branch, a dazzle on the wave, the quick recognition in unfamiliar eyes,
is, for others, sufficient signal. Not that these accidents of the
manner need concern us much. We have the faculty, or we do not have it.
Nor must we forget that it can be the portion of the ignoble as well as
of those whose souls are clear. When it is in truth a spiritual vision,
then we are in company of what is the essential life, that which we call
divine.
It was this that Columba had, this serene perspicuity. That it was a
conscious possession we know from his own words, for he gave this answer
to one who marvelled: "Heaven has granted to some to see on occasion in
their mind, clearly and surely, the whole of earth and sea and sky."
It is not unlikely that in the seventy years which elapsed between
Colum's death and the writing of that lovely classic of the Church,
Adamnan's _Vita St. Columbae_, some stories grew around the saint's
memory which were rather the tribute of childlike reverence and love
than the actual experiences of the holy man himself. What then? A field
in May is not the less a daughter of Spring, because the
cowslip-wreaths found there may have been brought from little wayward
garths by children who wove them lovingly as they came.
Many of these strange records are mere coincidences; others reveal so
happy a surety in the simple faith of the teller that we need only
smile, and with no more resentment than at a child who runs to say he
has found stars in a wayside pool. Others are rather the keen insight of
a ceaseless observation than the seeing of an inward sense. But, and
perhaps oftener, they are not inherently incredible. I do not think our
forebears did ill to give haven to these little ones of faith, rather
than to despise, or to drive them away.
I have already spoken of Columba as another St. Francis, because of his
tenderness for creatures. I recall now the lovely legend (for I do not
think Colum himself attributed "second-sight" to an animal) which tells
how the old white pony which daily brought the milk from the cow-shed to
the monastery came and put its head in the lap of the aged and feeble
abbot, thus mutely to bid farewell. Let Adamnan tell it: "This creature
then coming up to the saint, and knowing that his master would soon
depart from him, and that he would see his face no more, began to utter
plaintive moans, and, as if a man, to shed tears in abundance into the
saint's lap, and so to weep, frothing greatly. Which when the attendant
saw, he began to drive away that weeping mourner. But the saint forbade
him, saying, 'Let him alone? As he loves me so, let him alone, that into
this my bosom he may pour out the tears of his most bitter lamentation.
Behold, thou, a man, that hast a soul, yet in no way hast knowledge of
my end save what I have myself shown thee; but to this brute animal the
Master Himself hath revealed that his master is about to go away from
him.' And so saying, he blessed his sorrowing servant the horse."
If there be any to whom the aged Colum comforting the grief of his old
white pony is a matter of disdain or derision, I would not have his soul
in exchange for the dumb sorrow of that creature. One would fare further
with that sorrow, though soulless, than with the soul that could not
understand that sorrow.
If one were to quote from Adamnan's three Books of the Prophecies,
Miracles, and Visions of Columba, there would be another book. Amid much
that is childlike, and a little that is childish, what store of
spiritual beauty and living symbol in these three books--the Book of
Prophetic Revelations, the Book of Miracles of Power, the Book of
Angelic Visitations. But there, as elsewhere, one must bear in
remembrance that, in spiritual sight, there is symbolic vision as well
as actual vision. When Colum saw his friend Columbanus (who, unknown to
any on Iona, had set out in his frail coracle from the Isle of Rathlin)
tossed in the surges of Corryvrechan; or when, nigh Glen Urquhart, he
hurried forward to minister to an old dying Pict "who had lived well by
the light of nature," and whose house, condition, and end had been
suddenly revealed to him: then we have actual vision. When Aithne, his
mother, dreamed that an angel showed her a garment of so surpassing a
loveliness that it was as though woven of flowers and rainbows, and then
threw it on high, till its folds expanded and covered every mountain-top
from the brows of Connaught to the feet of the Danish sea, and so
revealed to her what manner of son she bore within her womb; or when, in
the hour of Colum's death, the aged son of Tailchan beheld the whole
expanse of air flooded with the blaze of angels' wings, which trembled
with their songs: then we have symbolic vision. And sometimes we have
that which partakes of each, as when (as Adamnan tells us in his third
book) Colum saw angels standing upon the rocks on the opposite side of
the Sound which divides Iona from the Ross of Mull, calling to his soul
to cross to them, yet, as they assembled and beckoned, mysteriously and
suddenly restrained, for his hour was not come.
And in all actual vision there is gradation; from what is so common,
premonition, to what is not common, prescience, and to what is rare,
revelation. Thus when the labourers on Iona looked up from the fields
and saw the aged abbot whom they so loved, borne in a wagon to give them
benediction at seed-sowing, many among them knew that they would not see
Colum again, and Colum knew it, and so shared that premonition. And
when, many years before, he and the abbot Comgell, returning from a
futile conference of the kings Aedh and Aidan, rested by a spring,
concerning which Colum said that the day would come when it would be
filled with human blood, "because my people, the Hy-Neill, and the
Pictish folk, thy relations according to the flesh, will wage war by
this fortress of Cethirn close by," Comgell learned, through Colum's
foreknowledge, of what did in truth come to pass. Again, when Colum
bade a brother go three days thence to the sea-shore on the west side of
Iona, and lie in readiness to help "a certain guest, a crane to wit,
beaten by the winds during long and circuitous and aerial flights, which
will arrive after the ninth hour of the day, very weary and sore
distressed," and bade him to lift it and tend it lovingly for three days
and three nights till it should have strength to return to "its former
sweet home," and to do this out of love and courtesy because "it comes
from our fatherland"--and when all happens and is done as the saint
foretold and commanded, then we have revelation, the vision that is
absolute, the knowledge that is the atmosphere of the inevitable. It
would take a book indeed to tell all the stories of Columba's visionary
and prophetic powers. That I write at this length concerning him,
indeed, is because he is himself Iona. Columba is Christian Iona, as
much as Iona is Icolmkill. I have often wondered (because of a passage
in Adamnan) if the island be not indeed named after him, the Dove: for
as Adamnan says incidentally, the name Columba is identical with the
Hebrew name Jonah, also signifying a Dove, and by the Hebrews pronounced
Iona.
It is enough now to recall that this man, so often erring but so human
always, in whose life we see the soul of Iona as in a glass, is become
the archetype of his race, as Iona is the microcosm of the Gaelic world.
That he came into this life heralded by dreams and visions, that from
his youth onward to old age he knew every mystery of dream and vision,
and that before and after his death his soul was revealed to others
through dreams and visions, is but an added hieratic grace: yet we do
well to recall often how these dreams before and these visions after
were angelical, and nobly beautiful: how there was left of him, and to
his little company, and to us for remembrance, that last signal vision
of a blaze of angelic wings, more intolerable than the sun at noon, the
tempestuous multitude trembling with the storm of song.
Columba and Oran ... these are the two great names in Iona. Love and
Faith have made one immortal; the other lives also, clothed in legend. I
am afraid there is not much definite basis for the popular Iona legend
of Oran. It is now the wont of guides and others to speak of the Reilig
Odhrain, Oran's burial-place, as that of Columba's friend (and victim),
but it seems likelier that the Oran who lies here is he who is spoken
of in the _Annals of the Four Masters_ as having died in the year 548,
that is fifteen years before Colum came to the island. This, however,
might well be a mistake: what is more convincing is that Adamnan never
mentions the episode, nor even the name of Oran, nor is there mention of
him in that book of Colum's intimate friend and successor, Baithene,
which Adamnan practically incorporated. On the other hand, the Oran
legend is certainly very old. The best modern rendering we have of it is
that of Mr. Whitley Stokes in his _Three Middle-Irish Homilies_, and
readers of Dr. Skene's valuable _Celtic Scotland_ recollect the
translation there redacted. The episode occurs first in an ancient Irish
life of St. Columba. The legend, which has crystallised into a popular
saying, "Uir, uir, air suil Odhrain! mu'n labhair e tuille
comhraidh"--"Earth, earth on Oran's eyes, lest he further blab"--avers
that three days after the monk Oran or Odran was entombed alive (some
say in the earth, some in a cavity), Colum opened the grave, to look
once more on the face of the dead brother, when to the amazed fear of
the monks and the bitter anger of the abbot himself, Oran opened his
eyes and exclaimed, "There is no such great wonder in death, nor is Hell
what it has been described." (Ifrinn, or Ifurin--the word used--is the
Gaelic Hell, the Land of Eternal Cold.) At this, Colum straightway cried
the now famous Gaelic words, and then covered up poor Oran again lest he
should blab further of that uncertain world whither he was supposed to
have gone. In the version given by Mr. Whitley Stokes there is no
mention of Odran's grave having been uncovered after his entombment. But
what is strangely suggestive is that both in the oral legend and in that
early monkish chronicle alluded to, Columba is represented as either
suggesting or accepting immolation of a living victim as a sacrifice to
consecrate the church he intended to build.
One story is that he received a divine intimation to the effect that a
monk of his company must be buried alive, and that Odran offered
himself. In the earliest known rendering "Colum Cille said to his
people: 'It is well for us that our roots should go underground here';
and he said to them, 'It is permitted to you that some one of you go
under the earth of this island to consecrate it.' Odran rose up readily,
and thus he said: 'If thou wouldst accept me,' he said, 'I am ready for
that.' ... Odran then went to heaven. Colum Cille then founded the
Church of Hii."
It would be a dark stain on Columba if this legend were true. But apart
from the fact that Adamnan does not speak of it or of Oran, the
probabilities are against its truth. On the other hand, it is, perhaps,
quite as improbable that there was no basis for the legend. I imagine
the likelier basis to be that a druid suffered death in this fashion
under that earlier Odran of whom there is mention in the _Annals of the
Four Masters_: possibly, that Odran himself was the martyr, and the
Ard-Druid the person who had "the divine intimation." Again, before it
be attributed to Columba, one would have to find if there is record of
such an act having been performed among the Irish of that day. We have
no record of it. It is not improbable that the whole legend is a
symbolical survival, an ancient teaching of some elementary mystery
through some real or apparent sacrificial rite.
Among the people of Iona to-day there is a very confused idea about St.
Oran. To some he is a saint: to others an evil-doer: some think he was a
martyr, some that he was punished for a lapse from virtue. Some swear by
his grave, as though it were almost as sacred as the Black Stone of
Iona: to others, perhaps most, his is now but an idle name.
By the Black Stone of Iona! One may hear that in Icolmkill or anywhere
in the west. It used to be the most binding oath in the Highlands, and
even now is held as an indisputable warrant of truth. In Iona itself,
strangely enough, one would be much more likely to hear a statement
affirmed "by St. Martin's Cross." On this stone--the old Druidic Stone
of Destiny, sacred among the Gael before Christ was born--Columba
crowned Aidan King of Argyll. Later, the stone was taken to
Dunstaffnage, where the Lords of the Isles were made princes: thence to
Scone, where the last of the Celtic Kings of Scotland was crowned on it.
It now lies in Westminster Abbey, a part of the Coronation Chair, and
since Edward I. every British monarch has been crowned upon it. If ever
the Stone of Destiny be moved again, that writing on the wall will be
the signature of a falling dynasty; but perhaps, like Iona in the island
saying, this can be left to the Gaelic equivalent of Nevermas, "gus am
bi MacCailein na' righ," "till Argyll be a king."
In my childhood I well recall meeting in Iona an old man who had come
from the glens of Antrim, to me memorable because he was the last
Gaelic minstrel of the old kind I have seen. "It was a poor land,
Antrim," he said, "with no Gaelic, a bitter lot o' protestantry, an'
little music."
I remember, too, his adding in effect:
"It is in the west you should be if you want music, an' men and women
without coldness or the hard mouth. In Donegal an' Mayo an' all down
Connemara-way to the cliffs of Moher you'll hear the wind an' the voices
o' the Shee with never a man to curse the one or the other." I asked him
why he had come to Iona. It was to see the isle of Colum, he said, "St.
Bridget's brother, God bless the pair av' thim." He was on his way to
Oban, thence to go to a far place in the Athole country, where his
daughter had married a factor who had returned to his own land from the
Irish west, and was the more dear to the old man because his only living
blood-kin, and because she had called her little girl by the name of the
old harper's long-lost love, "my love an' my wife."
The last harper, though he had not his harp with him. He had come from
Drogheda in a cattle-boat to Islay (whence he had sailed in a
fishing-smack to Iona), and his friend the mate had promised to leave
the harp and his other belongings at Oban in safe keeping. He had with
him, however, a small instrument that he called his little clar. It was
something between a guitar and a cithern, suggestive of a primitive
violin, and he played on it sometimes with his fingers, sometimes with a
short bit of wood like a child's tipcat; and, he said, could make good
music with a hazel-wand or "the dry straight rod of a quicken when
that's to be had." He said this quaint instrument had come down to him
through fifty-one generations: literally, "eleven and twice twenty
_sheanairean_ (grandfathers, or elders or forebears)," of whom he could
at any moment give the pedigree of _ceithir deug air 'fhichead_, "four
and ten upon twenty"--that is, to translate the Gaelic method of
enumeration, "thirty-four."
This was at the house of a minister then lodging in the island, and it
was he who hosted the old harper. He told me, later, that he had no
doubt this was the old-world cruit, the Welsh _crwth_ of to-day, and the
once colloquial Lowland "crowther," akin to the Roman _canora cythara_,
the "forebear" of the modern Spanish guitar. To this day, I may add,
Highlanders (at least in the west) call the guitar the
_Cruit-Spanteach_. There seems to have been four kinds of "harp" in the
old days: the clar or clarsach, the kairneen (ceirnine), the
kreemtheencrooth (cream-thine-cruit), and the cionar cruit. The clarsach
was the harp proper; that is, the small Celtic harp. The ceirnine was
the smaller hand-harp. The "creamthine cruit" had six strings, and was
probably used chiefly at festivals, possibly for a strong sonance to
accentuate chants; while the cionar cruit had ten strings, and was
played either by a bow or with a wooden or other instrument. It must
have been a cionar-cruit, ancient or a rude later-day imitation, that
the old harper had.
Poor old man, I fear he never played on his harp again; for I learned
later that he had found his Athole haven broken up, and his daughter and
her husband about to emigrate to Canada, so that he went with them, and
died on the way--perhaps as much from the mountain-longing and
home-sickness as from any more tangible ill.
I have a double memento of him that I value. In Islay he had bought or
been given a little book of Gaelic songs (the Scoto-Gaelic must have
puzzled him sorely, poor old _eirionnach_), and this he left behind him,
and my minister friend gave it to me, with much of the above noted down
on its end-pages. The little book had been printed early in the century,
and was called _Ceilleirean Binn nan Creagan Aosda_, literally
"Melodious Little Warblings from the Aged Rocks"; and it has always been
dear to me because of one lovely phrase in it about birds, where the
unknown Gaelic singer calls them "clann bheag' nam preas," the small
clan of the bushes, equivalent in English to "the children of the
bushes." This occurs in a lovely verse--
"Mu'n cuairt do bhruachaibh ard mo glinn,
Biodh luba gheuga 's orra blath,
's clann bheag' nam preas a' tabhairst seinn
Do chreagaibh aosd oran graidh."
("Along the lofty sides of my glen let there be bending boughs clad in
blossom, and the children of the bushes making the aged rocks re-echo
their songs of love")--truly a characteristic Gaelic wish,
characteristically expressed.
And though this that I am about to say did not happen on Iona, I may
tell it here, for it was there and from an islander I heard it, an old
man herding among the troubled rocky pastures of Sguir Mor and Cnoc na
Fhiona, in the south of that western part called Sliav Starr--one
translation of which might be Wuthering Heights, for the word can be
rendered wind-blustery or wind-noisy; though I fancy that _starr_ is, on
Iona, commonly taken to mean a strong coarse grass. (Fhiona here I take
to be not the genitive of a name, nor that of "wine," but a mis-spelling
of _fionna_, grain.)
When he was a boy he was in the island of Barra, he said, and he had a
foster-brother called Iain Macneil. Iain was born with music in his
mind, for though he was ever a poor creature as a man, having as a child
eaten of the bird's heart, he could hear a power o' wonder in the
wind.[4] He had never come to any good in a worldly sense, my old
herdsman Micheil said; but it was not from want of cleverness only, but
because "he had enough with his music." "Poor man, he failed in
everything he did but that--and, sure, that was not against him, for _is
ann air an traghadh a rugadh e_--wasn't he born when the tide was
ebbing?" Besides, there was a mystery. Iain's father was said to be an
Iona man, but that was only a politeness and a play upon words ("_The
Holy Isle of the Western Sea_" could mean either Iona or the mystic
Hy-Brasil, or Tir-na-thonn of the underworld); for he had no mortal
father, but a man of the Smiling Distant People was his father. Iain's
mother had loved her Leannan-shee, her fairy sweetheart, but that love
is too strong for a woman to bear, and she died. Before Iain was born
she lay under a bush of whitethorn, and her Leannan appeared to her. "I
can't give you life," he said, "unless you'll come away with me." But
she would not; for she wished the child to have Christian baptism.
"Well, good-bye," he said, "but you are a weak love. A woman should care
more for her lover than her child. But I'll do this: I'll give the child
the dew, an' he won't die, an' we'll take him away when we want him. An'
for a gift to him, you can have either beauty or music." "I don't want
the dew," she said, "for I'd rather he lay below the grass beside me
when his time comes: an' as for beauty, it's been my sorrow. But because
I love the songs you have sung to me an' wooed me with, an' made me
forget to hide my soul from you--an' it fallen as helpless as a broken
wave on damp sand--let the child have the _binn-beul_ an' the _lamh
clarsaireachd_ (the melodious mouth an' the harping hand)."
And truly enough Iain Macneil "went away." He went back to his own
people. It must have been a grief to him not to lie under the grass
beside his mother, but it was not for his helping. For days before he
mysteriously disappeared he went about making a _ciucharan_ like a
November wind, a singular plaintive moaning. When asked by his
foster-brother Micheil why he was not content, he answered only "_Far am
bi mo ghaol, bidh mo thathaich_" (Where my Love is, there must my
returning be). He had for days, said Micheil, the mournful crying in the
ear that is so often a presage of death or sorrow; and himself had said
once "Tha 'n eabh a' m' chenais"--the cry is in my ear. When he went
away, that going was the way of the snow.
It is no wonder that legends of Finn and Oisein, of Oscur and Gaul and
Diarmid, of Cuchullin, and many of the old stories of the Gaelic
chivalry survive in the isles. There, more than in Ireland, Gaelic has
survived as the living speech, and though now in the Inner Hebrides it
is dying before "an a' Beurla," the English tongue, and still more
before the degraded "Bheurla leathan" or Glasgow-English of the lowland
west, the old vernacular still holds an ancient treasure.
The last time I sailed to Staffa from Ulva, a dead calm set in, and we
took a man from Gometra to help with an oar--his recommendation being
that he was "cho laidir ri Cuchullin," as strong as Coohoolin. But
neither in Iona nor in the northward isles nor in Skye itself, have I
found or heard of much concerning the great Gaelic hero. Fionn and Oisin
and Diarmid are the names oftenest heard, both in legend and proverbial
allusion. An habitual mistake is made by writers who speak of the famous
Cuchullin or Cuthullin mountains in Skye as having been named after
Cuchullin; and though sometimes the local guides to summer tourists may
speak of the Gaelic hero in connection with the mountains north of
Coruisk, that is only because of hearsay. The Gaelic name should never
be rendered as the Cuthullin or Cohoolin mountains, but as the Coolins.
The most obvious meaning of the name _Cuilfhion_ (Kyoolyun or Coolun),
is "the fine corner," but, as has been suggested, the hills may have got
their name because of the "cuillionn mara" or sea-holly, which is
pronounced _Ku' l'-unn_ or _coolin_. This is most probably the origin
of the name.
In fine weather one may see from Iona the Coolins standing out in lovely
blue against the northern sky-line, their contours the most beautiful
feature in a view of surpassing beauty. How often I have watched them,
have often dreamed of what they have seen, since Oisin passed that way
with Malvina: since Cuchullin learned the feats of war at Dun Scaaiah,
from that great queen whose name, it is said, the island bears in
remembrance of her; since Connlaoch, his son, set sail to meet so tragic
a death in Ireland. There are two women of Gaelic antiquity who above
all others have always held my imagination as with a spell: Scathach or
Sgathaith (_sky-ah_), the sombre Amazonian queen of the mountain-island
(then perhaps, as now, known also as the Isle of Mist), and Meave, the
great queen of Connaught, whose name has its mountain bases in gigantic
wars, and its summits among the wild poetry and romance of the Shee.
My earliest knowledge of the heroic cycle of Celtic mythology and
history came to me, as a child, when I spent my first summer in Iona.
How well I remember a fantastic legend I was told: how that these far
blue mountains, so freaked into a savage beauty, were due to the
sword-play of Cuchullin. And this happened because the Queen o' Skye had
put a spear through the two breasts of his love, so that he went in
among her warrior women and slew every one, and severed the head of
Sgayah herself, and threw it into Coruisk, where to this day it floats
as Eilean Dubh, the dark isle. Thereafter, Cuchullin hewed the
mountain-tops into great clefts, and trampled the hills into a craggy
wilderness, and then rushed into the waves and fought with the
sea-hordes till far away the bewildered and terrified stallions of the
ocean dashed upon the rocks of Man and uttermost shores of Erin.
This magnificent mountain range can be seen better still from Lunga near
Iona, whence it is a short sail with a southerly wind. In Lunga there is
a hill called Cnoc Cruit or Dun Cruit, and thence one may see, as in a
vast illuminated missal whose pages are of deep blue with bindings of
azure and pale gold, innumerable green isles and peaks and hills of the
hue of the wild plum. When last I was there it was a day of cloudless
June. There was not a sound but the hum of the wild bee foraging in the
long garths of white clover, and the continual sighing of a wave.
Listening, I thought I heard a harper playing in the hollow of the hill.
It may have been the bees heavy with the wine of honey, but I was
content with my fancy and fell asleep, and dreamed that a harper came
out of the hill, at first so small that he seemed like the green stalk
of a lily and had hands like daisies, and then go great that I saw his
breath darkening the waves far out on the Hebrid sea. He played, till I
saw the stars fall in a ceaseless, dazzling rain upon Iona. A wind blew
that rain away, and out of the wave that had been Iona I saw thousands
upon thousands of white doves rise from the foam and fly down the four
great highways of the wind. When I woke, there was no one near. Iona lay
like an emerald under the wild-plum bloom of the Mull mountains. The
bees stumbled through the clover; a heron stood silver-grey upon the
grey-blue stone; the continual wave was, as before, as one wave, and
with the same hushed sighing.
Two or three years ago I heard a boatman using a singular phrase, to the
effect that a certain deed was as kindly a thought as that of the piper
who played to St. Micheil in his grave. I had never heard of this
before, or anything like it, nor have I since, on lip or in book. He
told me that he spoke of a wandering piper known as Piobaire Raonull
Dall, Blind Piper Ronald, who fifty years or so ago used to wander
through the isles and West Highlands; and how he never failed to play a
spring on his pipes, either to please or to console, or maybe to air a
lament for what's lost now and can't come again, when on any holy day he
stood before a figure of the Virgin (as he might well do in Barra or
South Uist), or by old tombs or habitations of saints. My friend's
father or one of his people, once, in the Kyles of Bute, when sailing
past the little ruinous graveyard of Kilmichael on the Bute shore, had
come upon Raonull-Dall, pacing slowly before the broken stones and the
little cell which legend says is both the hermitage and the grave of St.
Micheil. When asked what he was playing and what for, in that lonely
spot, he said it was an old ancient pibroch, the Gathering of the
Clerics, which he was playing just to cheer the heart of the good man
down below. When told that St. Micheil would be having his fill of good
music where he was, the old man came away in the boat, and for long sat
silent and strangely disheartened. I have more than once since then
sailed to that little lonely ancient grave of Kilmichael in the Kyles of
Bute, from Tignabruaich or further Cantyre, and have wished that I too
could play a spring upon the pipes, for if so I would play to the kind
heart of "Piobaire Raonull Dall."
Of all the saints of the west, from St. Molios or Molossius (Maol-Iosa?
the servant by Jesus?) who has left his name in the chief township in
Arran, to St. Barr, who has given his to the largest of the Bishop's
Isles, as the great Barra island-chain in the South Hebrides used to be
called, there is none so commonly remembered and so frequently invoked
as St. Micheil. There used to be no festival in the Western Isles so
popular as that held on 29th September, "La' Fheill Mhicheil," the Day
of the Festival of Michael; and the Eve of Michael's Day is still in a
few places one of the gayest nights in the year, though no longer is
every barn turned into a dancing place or a place of merry-making or, at
least, a place for lovers to meet and give betrothal gifts. The day
itself, in the Catholic Isles, was begun with a special Mass, and from
hour to hour was filled with traditional duties and pleasures.
The whole of the St. Micheil ceremonies were of a remote origin, and
some, as the ancient and almost inexplicable dances, and their archaic
accompaniment of word and gesture far older than the sacrificial slaying
of the Michaelmas Lamb. It is, however, not improbable that this latter
rite was a survival of a pagan custom long anterior to the substitution
of the Christian for the Druidic faith.
The "Iollach Mhicheil"--the triumphal song of Michael--is quite as much
pagan as Christian. We have here, indeed, one of the most interesting
and convincing instances of the transmutation of a personal symbol. St.
Michael is on the surface a saint of extraordinary powers and the patron
of the shores and the shore-folk: deeper, he is an angel, who is upon
the sea what the angelical saint, St. George, is upon the land: deeper,
he is a blending of the Roman Neptune and the Greek Poseidon: deeper, he
is himself an ancient Celtic god: deeper, he is no other than Manannan,
the god of ocean and all waters, in the Gaelic Pantheon: as, once more,
Manannan himself is dimly revealed to us as still more ancient, more
primitive, and even as supreme in remote godhead, the Father of an
immortal Clan.
To this day Micheil is sometimes alluded to as the god Micheil, and I
have seen some very strange Gaelic lines which run in effect:--
"It was well thou hadst the horse of the god Micheil
Who goes without a bit in his mouth,
So that thou couldst ride him through the fields of the air,
And with him leap over the knowledge of Nature"--
presumably not very ancient as they stand, because of the use of "steud"
for horse, and "naduir" for nature, obvious adaptations from English and
Latin. Certainly St. Michael has left his name in many places, from the
shores of the Hebrides to the famous Mont St. Michel of Brittany, and I
doubt not that everywhere an earlier folk, at the same places, called
him Manannan. In a most unlikely place to find a record of old hymns and
folk-songs, one of the volumes of Reports of the Highlands and Islands
Commission, Mr. Carmichael many years ago contributed some of his
unequalled store of Hebridean reminiscence and knowledge. Among these
old things saved, there is none that is better worth saving than the
beautiful Catholic hymn or invocation sung at the time of the midsummer
migration to the hill-pastures. In this shealing-hymn the three powers
who are invoked are St. Micheil (for he is a patron saint of horses and
travel, as well as of the sea and seafarers), St. Columba, guardian of
Cattle, and the Virgin Mary, "Mathair Uain ghil," "Mother of the White
Lamb," as the tender Gaelic has it, who is so beautifully called the
golden-haired Virgin Shepherdess.
It is pleasant to think of Columba, who loved animals, and whose care
for his shepherd-people was always so great, as having become the patron
saint of cattle. It is thus that the gods are shaped out of a little
mortal clay, the great desire of the heart, and immortal dreams.
I may give the whole hymn in English, as rendered by Mr. Carmichael:
I
"Thou gentle Michael of the white steed,
Who subdued the Dragon of blood,
For love of God and the Son of Mary,
Spread over us thy wing, shield us all!
Spread over us thy wing, shield us all!
II
"Mary beloved! Mother of the White Lamb,
Protect us, thou Virgin of nobleness,
Queen of beauty! Shepherdess of the flocks!
Keep our cattle, surround us together,
Keep our cattle, surround us together.
III
"Thou Columba, the friendly, the kind,
In name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
Through the Three-in-One, through the Three,
Encompass us, guard our procession,
Encompass us, guard our procession.
IV
"Thou Father! Thou Son! Thou Holy Spirit!
Be the Three-One with us day and night,
On the machair plain, on the mountain ridge,
The Three-one is with us, with His arm around our head,
The Three-One is with us, with his arm around our head."
I have heard a paraphrase of this hymn, both in Gaelic and English, on
Iona; and once, off Soa, a little island to the south of Icolmkill, took
down a verse which I thought was local, but which I afterwards found
(with very slight variance) in Mr. Carmichael's Governmental
Uist-Record. It was sung by Barra fishermen, and ran in effect "O
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost! O Holy Trinity, be with us day and night.
On the crested wave as on the mountain-side! Our Mother, Holy Mary
Mother, has her arm under our head; our pillow is the arm of Mary, Mary
the Holy Mother."
It is perhaps the saddest commentary that could be made on what we have
lost that the children of those who were wont to go to rest, or upon any
adventure, or to stand in the shadow of death, with some such words as
"My soul is with the Light on the mountains,
Archangel Micheil shield my soul!"
now go or stand in a scornful or heedless silence, or without
remembrance, as others did who forgot to trim their lamps.
Who now would go up to the hill-pastures singing the Beannachadh
Buachailleag, the Herding Blessing? With the passing of the old language
the old solemnity goes, and the old beauty, and the old patient, loving
wonder. I do not like to think of what songs are likely to replace the
Herding Blessing, whose first verse runs thus:
"I place this flock before me
As ordained by the King of the World,
Mary Virgin to keep them, to wait them, to watch them.
On hill and glen and plain,
On hill, in glen, on plain."
In the maelstrom of the cities the old race perishes, drowns. How common
the foolish utterance of narrow lives, that all these old ways of
thought are superstitious. To have a superstition is, for these, a
worse ill than to have a shrunken soul. I do not believe in spells and
charms and foolish incantations, but I think that ancient wisdom out of
the simple and primitive heart of an older time is not an ill heritage;
and if to believe in the power of the spirit is to be superstitious, I
am well content to be of the company that is now forsaken.
But even in what may more fairly be called superstitious, have we surety
that we have done well in our exchange?
A short while ago I was on the hillside above one of the much-frequented
lochs in eastern Argyll. Something brought to my mind, as I went farther
up into the clean solitudes, one of the verses of the Herding Blessing:
"From rocks, from snow-wreaths, from streams,
From crooked ways, from destructive pits,
From the arrows of the slim fairy women,
From the heart of envy, the eye of evil,
Keep us, Holy St. Bride."
"From the arrows of the slim fairy women." And I--do I believe in that?
At least it will be admitted that it is worth a belief; it is a pleasant
dream; it is a gate into a lovely world; it is a secret garden, where
are old sweet echoes; it has the rainbow-light of poetry. Is it not
poetry? And I--oh yes, I believe it, that superstition: a thousand-fold
more real is it, more believable, than that coarse-tongued,
ill-mannered, boorish people, desperate in slovenly pleasure. For that
will stay, and they will go. And if I am wrong, then I will rather go
with it than stay with them. And yet--surely, surely the day will come
when this sordidness of life as it is so often revealed to us will sink
into deep waters, and the stream become purified, and again by its banks
be seen the slim fairy women of health and beauty and all noble and
dignified things.
This is a far cry from Iona! And I had meant to write only of how I
heard so recently as three or four summers ago a verse of the Uist
Herding Chant. It was recited to me, over against Dun-I, by a friend who
is a crofter in that part of Iona. It was not quite as Mr. Carmichael
translates it, but near enough. The Rann Buachhailleag is, I should add,
addressed to the cattle.
"The protection of God and Columba
Encompass your going and coming,
And about you be the milkmaid of the smooth white palms,
Briget of the clustering hair, golden brown."
On Iona, however, there is, so far as I remember, no special spot sacred
to St. Micheil: but there is a legend that on the night Columba died
Micheil came over the waves on a rippling flood of light, which was a
cloud of angelic wings, and that he sang a hymn to the soul of the saint
before it took flight for its heavenly fatherland. No one heard that
hymn save Colum, but I think that he who first spoke of it remembered a
more ancient legend of how Manannan came to Cuchullin when he was in the
country of the Shee, when Liban laughed.
I spoke of Port-na-Churaich, the Haven of the Coracle, a little ago. How
strange a history is that of Iona since the coming of the Irish priest,
Crimthan, or Crimmon as we call the name, surnamed Colum Cille, the Dove
of the Church. Perhaps its unwritten history is not less strange. God
was revered on Iona by priests of a forgotten faith before the Cross was
raised. The sun-priest and the moon-worshipper had their revelation
here. I do not think their offerings were despised. Colum, who loved the
Trinity so well that on one occasion he subsisted for three days on the
mystery of the mere word, did not forego the luxury of human sacrifice,
though he abhorred the blood-stained altar. For, to him, an obstinate
pagan slain was to the glory of God. The moon-worshipper did no worse
when he led the chosen victim to the dolmen. But the moon-worshipper was
a Pict without the marvel of the written word; so he remained a heathen,
and the Christian named himself saint or martyr.
None knows with surety who dwelled on this mysterious island before the
famous son of Feilim of Clan Domnhuil, great-grandson of Niall of the
Nine Hostages, came with his fellow-monks and raised the Cross among the
wondering Picts. But the furthest record tells of worship. Legend itself
is more ancient here than elsewhere. Once a woman was worshipped. Some
say she was the moon, but this was before the dim day of the
moon-worshippers. (In Gaelic too, as with all the Celtic peoples, it is
not the moon but the sun that is feminine.) She may have been an
ancestral Brighde, or that mysterious Anait whose Scythian name survives
elsewhere in the Gaelic west, and nothing else of all her ancient glory
but that shadowy word. Perhaps, here, the Celts remembered one whom they
had heard of in Asian valleys or by the waters of Nilus, and called upon
Isis under a new name.
The Haven of the Coracle! It was not Colum and his white-robe company
who first made the isle sacred. I have heard that when Mary Macleod (our
best-loved Hebridean poet) was asked what she thought of Iona, she
replied that she thought it was the one bit of Eden that had not been
destroyed, and that it was none other than the central isle in the
Garden untouched of Eve or Adam, where the angels waited.
Many others have dreamed by that lonely cairn of the Irish king, before
Colum, and, doubtless, many since the child who sought the Divine
forges.
Years afterwards I wrote, in the same place, after an absence wherein
Iona had become as a dream to me, the story of St. Briget, in the
Hebrides called Bride, under the love-name commonly given her, Muime
Chriosd--Christ's Foster-Mother. May I quote again, here, as so apposite
to what I have written, to what indirectly I am trying to convey of the
spiritual history of Iona, some portion of it?
In my legendary story I tell of how one called Dughall, of a kingly
line, sailing from Ireland, came to be cast upon the ocean-shore of
Iona, then called Innis-nan-Dhruidhneach, the Isle of the Druids--for
this was before the cry of the Sacred Wolf was heard, as an old-time
island-poet has it, playing upon Colum's house-name, Crimthan,
signifying a wolf. The frail coracle in which he and others had crossed
the Moyle had been driven before a tempest, and cast at sunrise like a
spent fish upon the rocks of the little haven that is now called
Port-na-Churaich. All had found death in the wave except himself and the
little girl-child he had brought with him from Ireland, the child of so
much tragic mystery.
When, warmed by the sun, they rose, they found themselves in a waste
place. Dughall was ill in his mind because of the portents, and now to
his fear and amaze the child Briget knelt on the stones, and, with
claspt hands, frail and pink as the sea-shells round about her, sang a
song of words which were unknown to him. This was the more marvellous,
as she was yet but an infant, and could say few words even of Erse, the
only tongue she had heard.
At this portent, he knew that Aodh the Arch-Druid had spoken seeingly.
Truly this child was not of human parentage. So he, too, kneeled; and,
bowing before her, asked if she were of the race of the Tuatha de
Danann, or of the older gods, and what her will was, that he might be
her servant. Then it was that the kneeling child looked at him, and sang
in a low sweet voice in Erse:
"I am but a little child,
Dughall, son of Hugh, son of Art,
But my garment shall be laid
On the lord of the world,
Yea, surely it shall be that He,
The King of Elements Himself,
Shall lean against my bosom,
And I will give him peace,
And peace will I give to all who ask
Because of this mighty Prince,
And because of his Mother that is the Daughter of Peace."
And while Dughall Donn was still marvelling at this thing, the
Arch-Druid of Iona approached, with his white-robed priests. A grave
welcome was given to the stranger. While the youngest of the servants of
God was entrusted with the child, the Arch-Druid took Dughall aside and
questioned him. It was not till the third day that the old man gave his
decision. Dughall Don was to abide on Iona if he so willed; but the
child was to stay. His life would be spared, nor would he be a bondager
of any kind, and a little land to till would be given him, and all that
he might need. But of his past he was to say no word. His name was to
become as nought, and he was to be known simply as Duvach. The child,
too, was to be named Bride, for that was the way the name Briget is
called in the Erse of the Isles.
To the question of Dughall, that was thenceforth Duvach, as to why he
laid so great stress on the child, who was a girl, and the reputed
offspring of shame at that, Cathal the Arch-Druid replied thus: "My
kinsman Aodh of the golden hair, who sent you here, was wiser than Hugh
the king, and all the Druids of Aoimag. Truly, this child is an
Immortal. There is an ancient prophecy concerning her: surely of her who
is now here, and no other. There shall be, it says, a spotless maid born
of a virgin of the ancient divine race in Innisfail. And when for the
seventh time the sacred year has come, she will hold Eternity in her lap
as a white flower. Her maiden breasts shall swell with milk for the
Prince of the World. She shall give suck to the King of the Elements. So
I say unto you, Duvach, go in peace. Take unto yourself a wife, and live
upon the place I will allot on the east side of Ioua. Treat Bride as
though she were your soul, and leave her much alone, and let her learn
of the sun and the wind. In the fulness of time the prophecy shall be
fulfilled."
So was it, from that day of the days. Duvach took a wife unto himself,
who weaned the little Bride, who grew in beauty and grace, so that all
men marvelled. Year by year for seven years the wife of Duvach bore him
a son, and these grew apace in strength, so that by the beginning of the
third year of the seventh circle of Bride's life there were three
stalwart youths to brother her, and three comely and strong lads, and
one young boy fair to see. Nor did any one, not even Bride herself,
saving Cathal the Arch-Druid, know that Duvach the herdsman was Dughall
Donn, of a princely race in Innisfail.
In the end, too, Duvach came to think that he had dreamed, or at the
least that Cathal had not interpreted the prophecy aright. For though
Bride was of exceeding beauty, and of a holiness that made the young
druids bow before her as though she were a bandia, yet the world went on
as before, and the days brought no change. Often, while she was still a
child, he had questioned her about the words she had said as a babe, but
she had no memory of them. Once, in her ninth year, he came upon her on
the hillside of Dun-I singing these self-same words. Her eyes dreamed
far away. He bowed his head, and, praying to the Giver of Light, hurried
to Cathal. The old man bade him speak no more to the child concerning
the mysteries.
Bride lived the hours of her days upon the slopes of Dun-I, herding the
sheep, or in following the kye upon the green hillocks and grassy dunes
of what then, as now, was called the Machar. The beauty of the world was
her daily food. The spirit within her was like sunlight behind a white
flower. The birdeens in the green bushes sang for joy when they saw her
blue eyes. The tender prayers that were in her heart were often seen
flying above her head in the form of white doves of sunshine.
But when the middle of the year came that was (though Duvach had
forgotten it) the year of the prophecy, his eldest son, Conn, who was
now a man, murmured against the virginity of Bride, because of her
beauty and because a chieftain of the mainland was eager to wed her. "I
shall wed Bride or raid Ioua," was the message he had sent.
So one day, before the Great Fire of the Summer Festival, Conn and his
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