The Death Of Hanrahan
Hanrahan, that was never long in one place, was back again among the
villages that are at the foot of Slieve Echtge, Illeton and Scalp and
Ballylee, stopping sometimes in one house and sometimes in another,
and finding a welcome in every place for the sake of the old times
and of his poetry and his learning. There was some silver and some
copper money in the little leather bag under his coat, but it was
seldom he needed to take anything from it, for it was little he used,
and there was not one of the people that would have taken payment
from him. His hand had grown heavy on the blackthorn he leaned on,
and his cheeks were hollow and worn, but so far as food went,
potatoes and milk and a bit of oaten cake, he had what he wanted of
it; and it is not on the edge of so wild and boggy a place as Echtge
a mug of spirits would be wanting, with the taste of the turf smoke
on it. He would wander about the big wood at Kinadife, or he would
sit through many hours of the day among the rushes about Lake
Belshragh, listening to the streams from the hills, or watching the
shadows in the brown bog pools; sitting so quiet as not to startle
the deer that came down from the heather to the grass and the tilled
fields at the fall of night. As the days went by it seemed as if he
was beginning to belong to some world out of sight and misty, that
has for its mearing the colours that are beyond all other colours and
the silences that are beyond all silences of this world. And
sometimes he would hear coming and going in the wood music that when
it stopped went from his memory like a dream; and once in the
stillness of midday he heard a sound like the clashing of many
swords, that went on for long time without any break. And at the fall
of night and at moonrise the lake would grow to be like a gateway of
silver and shining stones, and there would come from its silence the
faint sound of keening and of frightened laughter broken by the wind,
and many pale beckoning hands.
He was sitting looking into the water one evening in harvest time,
thinking of all the secrets that were shut into the lakes and the
mountains, when he heard a cry coming from the south, very faint at
first, but getting louder and clearer as the shadow of the rushes
grew longer, till he could hear the words, 'I am beautiful, I am
beautiful; the birds in the air, the moths under the leaves, the
flies over the water look at me, for they never saw any one so
beautiful as myself. I am young; I am young: look upon me, mountains;
look upon me, perishing woods, for my body will shine like the white
waters when you have been hurried away. You and the whole race of
men, and the race of the beasts and the race of the fish and the
winged race are dropping like a candle that is nearly burned out, but
I laugh out because I am in my youth.' The voice would break off from
time to time, as if tired, and then it would begin again, calling out
always the same words, 'I am beautiful, I am beautiful.' Presently
the bushes at the edge of the little lake trembled for a moment, and
a very old woman forced her way among them, and passed by Hanrahan,
walking with very slow steps. Her face was of the colour of earth,
and more wrinkled than the face of any old hag that was ever seen,
and her grey hair was hanging in wisps, and the rags she was wearing
did not hide her dark skin that was roughened by all weathers. She
passed by him with her eyes wide open, and her head high, and her
arms hanging straight beside her, and she went into the shadow of the
hills towards the west.
A sort of dread came over Hanrahan when he saw her, for he knew her
to be one Winny Byrne, that went begging from place to place crying
always the same cry, and he had often heard that she had once such
wisdom that all the women of the neighbours used to go looking for
advice from her, and that she had a voice so beautiful that men and
women would come from every part to hear her sing at a wake or a
wedding; and that the Others, the great Sidhe, had stolen her wits
one Samhain night many years ago, when she had fallen asleep on the
edge of a rath, and had seen in her dreams the servants of Echtge of
the hills.
And as she vanished away up the hillside, it seemed as if her cry, 'I
am beautiful, I am beautiful,' was coming from among the stars in the
heavens.
There was a cold wind creeping among the rushes, and Hanrahan began
to shiver, and he rose up to go to some house where there would be a
fire on the hearth. But instead of turning down the hill as he was
used, he went on up the hill, along the little track that was maybe a
road and maybe the dry bed of a stream. It was the same way Winny had
gone, and it led to the little cabin where she stopped when she
stopped in any place at all. He walked very slowly up the hill as if
he had a great load on his back, and at last he saw a light a little
to the left, and he thought it likely it was from Winny's house it
was shining, and he turned from the path to go to it. But clouds had
come over the sky, and he could not well see his way, and after he
had gone a few steps his foot slipped and he fell into a bog drain,
and though he dragged himself out of it, holding on to the roots of
the heather, the fall had given him a great shake, and he felt better
fit to lie down than to go travelling. But he had always great
courage, and he made his way on, step by step, till at last he came
to Winny's cabin, that had no window, but the light was shining from
the door. He thought to go into it and to rest for a while, but when
he came to the door he did not see Winny inside it, but what he saw
was four old grey-haired women playing cards, but Winny herself was
not among them. Hanrahan sat down on a heap of turf beside the door,
for he was tired out and out, and had no wish for talking or for
card-playing, and his bones and his joints aching the way they were.
He could hear the four women talking as they played, and calling out
their hands. And it seemed to him that they were saying, like the
strange man in the barn long ago: 'Spades and Diamonds, Courage and
Power. Clubs and Hearts, Knowledge and Pleasure.' And he went on
saying those words over and over to himself; and whether or not he
was in his dreams, the pain that was in his shoulder never left him.
And after a while the four women in the cabin began to quarrel, and
each one to say the other had not played fair, and their voices grew
from loud to louder, and their screams and their curses, till at last
the whole air was filled with the noise of them around and above the
house, and Hanrahan, hearing it between sleep and waking, said: 'That
is the sound of the fighting between the friends and the ill-wishers
of a man that is near his death. And I wonder,' he said, 'who is the
man in this lonely place that is near his death.'
It seemed as if he had been asleep a long time, and he opened his
eyes, and the face he saw over him was the old wrinkled face of Winny
of the Cross Road. She was looking hard at him, as if to make sure he
was not dead, and she wiped away the blood that had grown dry on his
face with a wet cloth, and after a while she partly helped him and
partly lifted him into the cabin, and laid him down on what served
her for a bed. She gave him a couple of potatoes from a pot on the
fire, and, what served him better, a mug of spring water. He slept a
little now and again, and sometimes he heard her singing to herself
as she moved about the house, and so the night wore away. When the
sky began to brighten with the dawn he felt for the bag; where his
little store of money was, and held it out to her, and she took out a
bit of copper and a bit of silver money, but she let it drop again as
if it was nothing to her, maybe because it was not money she was used
to beg for, but food and rags; or maybe because the rising of the
dawn was filling her with pride and a new belief in her own great
beauty. She went out and cut a few armfuls of heather, and brought it
in and heaped it over Hanrahan, saying something about the cold of
the morning, and while she did that he took notice of the wrinkles in
her face, and the greyness of her hair, and the broken teeth that
were black and full of gaps. And when he was well covered with the
heather she went out of the door and away down the side of the
mountain, and he could hear her cry, 'I am beautiful, I am
beautiful,' getting less and less as she went, till at last it died
away altogether.
Hanrahan lay there through the length of the day, in his pains and
his weakness, and when the shadows of the evening were falling he
heard her voice again coming up the hillside, and she came in and
boiled the potatoes and shared them with him the same way as before.
And one day after another passed like that, and the weight of his
flesh was heavy about him. But little by little as he grew weaker he
knew there were some greater than himself in the room with him, and
that the house began to be filled with them; and it seemed to him
they had all power in their hands, and that they might with one touch
of the hand break down the wall the hardness of pain had built about
him, and take him into their own world. And sometimes he could hear
voices, very faint and joyful, crying from the rafters or out of the
flame on the hearth, and other times the whole house was filled with
music that went through it like a wind. And after a while his
weakness left no place for pain, and there grew up about him a great
silence like the silence in the heart of a lake, and there came
through it like the flame of a rushlight the faint joyful voices ever
and always.
One morning he heard music somewhere outside the door, and as the day
passed it grew louder and louder until it drowned the faint joyful
voices, and even Winny's cry upon the hillside at the fall of
evening. About midnight and in a moment, the walls seemed to melt
away and to leave his bed floating on a pale misty light that shone
on every side as far as the eye could see; and after the first
blinding of his eyes he saw that it was full of great shadowy figures
rushing here and there.
At the same time the music came very clearly to him, and he knew that
it was but the continual clashing of swords.
'I am after my death,' he said, 'and in the very heart of the music
of Heaven. O Cheruhim and Seraphim, receive my soul!'
At his cry the light where it was nearest to him filled with sparks
of yet brighter light, and he saw that these were the points of
swords turned towards his heart; and then a sudden flame, bright and
burning like God's love or God's hate, swept over the light and went
out and he was in darkness. At first he could see nothing, for all
was as dark as if there was black bog earth about him, but all of a
sudden the fire blazed up as if a wisp of straw had been thrown upon
it. And as he looked at it, the light was shining on the big pot that
was hanging from a hook, and on the flat stone where Winny used to
bake a cake now and again, and on the long rusty knife she used to be
cutting the roots of the heather with, and on the long blackthorn
stick he had brought into the house himself. And when he saw those
four things, some memory came into Hanrahan's mind, and strength came
back to him, and he rose sitting up in the bed, and he said very loud
and clear: 'The Cauldron, the Stone, the Sword, the Spear. What are
they? Who do they belong to? And I have asked the question this
time,' he said.
And then he fell back again, weak, and the breath going from him.
Winny Byrne, that had been tending the fire, came over then, having
her eyes fixed on the bed; and the faint laughing voices began crying
out again, and a pale light, grey like a wave, came creeping over the
room, and he did not know from what secret world it came. He saw
Winny's withered face and her withered arms that were grey like
crumbled earth, and weak as he was he shrank back farther towards the
wall. And then there came out of the mud-stiffened rags arms as white
and as shadowy as the foam on a river, and they were put about his
body, and a voice that he could hear well but that seemed to come
from a long way off said to him in a whisper: 'You will go looking
for me no more upon the breasts of women.'
'Who are you?' he said then.
'I am one of the lasting people, of the lasting unwearied Voices,
that make my dwelling in the broken and the dying, and those that
have lost their wits; and I came looking for you, and you are mine
until the whole world is burned out like a candle that is spent. And
look up now,' she said, 'for the wisps that are for our wedding are
lighted.'
He saw then that the house was crowded with pale shadowy hands, and
that every hand was holding what was sometimes like a wisp lighted
for a marriage, and sometimes like a tall white candle for the dead.
When the sun rose on the morning of the morrow Winny of the Cross
Roads rose up from where she was sitting beside the body, and began
her begging from townland to townland, singing the same song as she
walked, 'I am beautiful, I am beautiful. The birds in the air, the
moths under the leaves, the flies over the water look at me. Look at
me, perishing woods, for my body will be shining like the lake water
after you have been hurried away. You and the old race of men, and
the race of the beasts, and the race of the fish, and the winged
race, are wearing away like a candle that has been burned out. But I
laugh out loud, because I am in my youth.'
She did not come back that night or any night to the cabin, and it
was not till the end of two days that the turf cutters going to the
bog found the body of Red Owen Hanrahan, and gathered men to wake him
and women to keen him, and gave him a burying worthy of so great a
poet.
-THE END-
William Butler Yeats' short story: The Death Of Hanrahan
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