The
Sin-Eater and Other Tales and Episodes
By Fiona Macleod
Contents
PROLOGUE
(FROM
IONA)
I
THE
SIN-EATER
THE NINTH WAVE
THE JUDGMENT O’ GOD
II
THE
HARPING OF CRAVETHEEN
III
TRAGIC
LANDSCAPES
I. THE TEMPEST
II. MIST
III. SUMMER-SLEEP
IV
THE
ANOINTED MAN
THE DÀN-NAN-RÒN
GREEN BRANCHES
V
THE
DAUGHTER OF THE SUN
THE BIRDEEN
SILK O’ THE KINE
The Anointed Man,
Cathal of the Woods, The Daughter of the Sun,
Green Branches, The Harping of Cravetheen,
The Dàn-nan-Ròn, The Judgment of God,
The Last Supper, The Laughter of Scathach the Queen, Mircath,
The Ninth Wave, Silk o’ the Kine,
The Sin-Eater, Tragic Landscapes, Ula and Urla,
The Washer of the Ford
Prologue
FROM
IONA.
To
George Meredith.
Here, where the sound of the falling wave is faintly to be heard,
and rather as in the spiral chamber of a shell than in the windy open, I
write these few dedicatory words. I am alone here, betwixt sea and
sky, for there is no other living thing for the seeing on this bouldered
height of Dûn-I except a single blue shadow that dreams slowly athwart
the hillside. The bleating of lambs and ewes, the lowing of kine, these
come from the Machar that lies between the west slopes and the shoreless sea to the west;
these ascend as the very smoke of sound. All round the island there is a
continuous breathing: deeper and more prolonged on the west, where the
sea-heart is; but audible everywhere. This moment, the seals on Soa
are putting their breasts against the running tide: for I see a flashing
of fins here and there in patches at the north end of the Sound, and
already from the ruddy granite shores of the Ross there is a
congregation of seafowl,—gannets and guillemots, skuas and
herring-gulls, the long-necked northern-diver, the tern, the cormorant.
In this sunflood, the waters of the Sound dance their blue bodies and
swirl their flashing white hair o’ foam; and, as I look, they seem to
me like children of the wind and the sunshine, leaping and running in
these sungold pastures, with a laughter as sweet against the ears as the
voices of children at play.
The joy of life vibrates everywhere. Yet the Weaver doth not
sleep, but only dreams. He loves the sun-drowned shadows. They are
invisible thus, but they are there, in the sunlight itself. Sure, they
may be heard: as, an hour ago, when on my way hither by the Stairway of
the Kings—for so sometimes they call here the ancient stones of the
mouldered princes of long ago—I
heard a mother moaning because of the son that had had to go over-sea
and leave her in her old age; and heard also a child sobbing, because of
the sorrow of childhood,—that sorrow so mysterious, so unfathomable, so for ever incommunicable.
To the little one I spoke. But all she would say, looking up
through dark, tear-wet eye; already filled with the shadow of the burden
of woman, woe: “Ha mee dūvăchŭs.”
“Tha mi Dubhachas!—I have the gloom.”
Ah, that saying! How often I have heard it in the remote Isles!
“The Gloom.” It is not grief, nor any common sorrow, nor that deep
despondency of weariness that comes of accomplished things, too soon,
too literally fulfilled. But it is akin to each of these, and
involves each. It is, rather, the unconscious knowledge of the
lamentation of a race, the unknowing surety of an inheritance of woe.
On the lips of the children of what people, save in the last
despoiled sanctuaries of the Gag?, could be heard these all too
significant sayings: “Tha mi Dubhachas—I
have the gloom;” “Ma tha sin an Dàn—If
that be ordained, If it be Destiny”? Never shall I forget the lisping
of this phrase,—common from
The Seven Hunters, that are the extreme of the Hebrid Isles, to the
Rhinns of Islay, and from the Ord of Sutherland to the Mull of Cantyre,—never
shall I forget the lisping of this phrase in the mouth of a little
birdikin of a lass, not more than three years old,—a
phrase caught, no doubt, as the jay catches the storm-note of the missel-thrush,
but not the less significant, not the less piteous: “Ma tha sin an
Dàn—If it be Destiny!”
This is so. And yet not a stone’s throw from where I lie, half
hidden beneath an overhanging rock, is a Pool of Healing. To this small,
black-brown tarn, pilgrims of every generation, for hundreds upon hundreds
of years, have come. Solitary, these: not only because the pilgrim to
the Fount of Eternal Youth—which,
as all Gaeldom knows, is beneath this tarn on Dûn- I of Iona—must
fare hither alone, and at dawn, so as to touch the healing water the
moment the first sunray quickens it,—but
solitary, also, because those who go in quest of this Fount of Youth are
the dreamers and the Children of Dream, and these are not many, and
few come to this lonely place. Yet, an Isle of Dream, Iona is, indeed.
Here the last sun-worshippers bowed before the Rising of God; here
Columba and his hymning priests laboured and brooded; and here Oran
dreamed beneath the monkish cowl that pagan dream of his. Here, too, the
eyes of Fionn and Oisìn, and of many another of the heroic meet and
women of the Fiànna, lingered often; here the Pict and the Celt bowed
beneath the yoke of the Norse pirate, who, too, left his dreams, or
rather his strangely beautiful soul-rainbows, as a heritage to the
stricken; here, for century after century, the Gael has lived, suffered,
joyed, dreamed his impossible, beautiful dream; as here, now, he still
lives, still suffers patiently, still dreams, and through all and over
all, broods deep against the mystery of things. He is an elemental,
among the elemental forces.
They have the voices of wind and sea; he has
these words of the soul of the Celtic race: “Tha mi Dubhachas—Ma
tha sin an Dàn.” It is because
the Fount of Youth that it upon Dûn-I of Iona is not the only
Wellspring of Peace, that the Gael can front “an Dàn” as
he does, and can endure his “Dubhachas.” Who
knows where its tributaries are? They may be in your heart, or in mine,
and in a myriad others.
I would that the birds of Angus Ogue might, for once, be changed,
not into the kisses of love, but into doves of peace; that they might
fly forth into the green world, and be nested there awhile, crooning
their incommunicable song that would yet bring joy and hope.
Why, you may think, do I write these things? It is because I wish
to say to you, and to all who may read this book, that in what I have
said lies the Secret of the Gael. The beauty of the World, the pathos of
Life, the gloom, the fatalism, the spiritual glamour—it is out of
these, the inheritance of the Gael, that I have wrought these tales.
Well I know that they do not give “a rounded and complete
portrait of the Celt.” It is more than likely that I could not do so
if I tried, but I have not tried; not even to give “a rounded and
complete portrait” of the Gael, who is to the Celtic race what the
Franco-Breton is to the French, a creature not without blitheness and
humour, laughter-loving, indolent, steadfast, gentle, fierce, but above
all attuned to elemental passions, to the poetry of nature, and wrought
in every nerve and fibre by the gloom and mystery of his environment.
Elsewhere I may give such delineation as I can, and is within my
own knowledge, of the manysidedness of the Celt, and even of the insular
Gael. But in this book, as in Pharais and
The Mountain Lovers, I give
the life of the Gael in what is, to me, in accord with my own
observation and experience, its most poignant characteristics,—that
is, of course, in certain circumstances, in a particular environment.
Almost needless to say, I do not present such mere sport of Destiny as
Neil Ross, the Sin-Eater, or Neil MacCodrum (“The
Dàn-nan-Ròn”) as typical Gaels; any more than I would have Gloom Achanna, whose sombre
personality colours the three tales of the fourth section, accepted as
typical of the perverted Celt. They are true in their degree; that is
all. But I do aver that Alasdair Achanna, the Anointed Man; and the
fishermen of Iona of whom I speak; and Ian Mòr of the Hills; and others
akin to these,—are typical.
This, obviously, may be said without affirming that they are “rounded
and complete” types of the Gaelic Celt. Of course they are nothing of
the kind. This, also, may be said: that they are not typical to the
exclusion of other types. Could Ian Mòr be common anywhere? Are there
so many poet-dreamers? Could Ethlenn Stuart or Eilidh Melon be met with
in each strath, on every hillside? Is the beautiful and one inevitable
phrase to be found on any lips? All men speak of love; but only you have
said the supreme thing of the passion of love; namely, that Passion is
noble strength on fire. You only have said this. It is individually
characteristic; it is racially typical; and yet a thousand poets have
come and gone, a million million hearts have beat to this chord; and the
phrase has waited, isolate, for you, is it therefore not indicative?
Whether with phrase, or the lilt of a free music, or with man,—there
should be no saying that he or it does stat exist because invisible
through the dust of the common highway.
It must not be forgotten that “the Celtic Fringe” is of
divers colours. The Armorican, the Cymric, the Gael of Ireland; and the
Scottish Gael are of the same stock, but are not the same people. Even
the crofter of Donegal as the fisherman of Clare is no more than an
older or younger brother of the Hebridean or the Highlander; certainly
they are not twins, of an indistinguishable likeness. Some of my
critics, heedless of the complex conditions which differentiate the
Irish and the Scottish Celt, complain of the Celtic gloom that dusks the
life of the men and women I have tried to draw. That may be just. I wish
merely to say that I have not striven to depict the blither Irish Celt.
I have sought mainly to express something of what I have seen as
paramount, something of “the Celtic Gloom “which, to many Gaels if
not to all, is so distinctive in the remote life of a doomed and
passing race. Possibly, though of course it is unlikely they should
write save out of fulness of knowledge, those of my critics to whom I
allude have dwelt for years among these distant isles, intimate with the
speech and mind and daily life and veiled; secretive inner nature of the
men and women who inhabit them. I cannot judge, for I do not profess to
know every glen in the Highlands, or to have set foot on every one of
the Thousand isles.
A doomed and passing race.
Yes, but not wholly so. The Celt has at last reached his horizon. There
is no shore beyond. He knows it. This has been the burden of his song
since Malvina led the blind Oisìn to his grave by the sea. “Even the
Children of Light must go down into darkness.” But this apparition of
a passing race is no more than the fulfilment of a glorious resurrection
before our very eyes. For the genius of the Celtic race stands out now
with averted torch, and the light of it is a glory before the eyes, and
the flame of it is blown into the hearts of the mightier conquering
people. The Celt falls, but his spirit rises in the heart and the brain
of the Anglo-Celtic peoples, with whom are the destinies of the
generations to come.
Well, this is a far cry, from one small voice on the hill-slope
of Dûn-I of Iona, to the clarion-call of the future! But, sure, even in
this Isle of Joy, as it seems to-day in this dazzle of golden light and
splashing wave, there is all the gloom and all the mystery which lived
in the minds of the old seers and bards. Yonder, where that thin spray
quivers against the thyme-set cliff is the Spouting Cave, where to this
day the Mar-Tarbh, dread creature of the sea, swims at the full of the tide. Beyond, out of
sight behind these heights, is Port-na-Churaich, where, a thousand years
ago, Columbo lauded in his coracle. Here, eastward, is the landing-place
for the dead of old, brought hence, out of Christendom, for sacred
burial in the Isle of the Saints. All the story of Albyn is here. Iona
is the microcosm of Gaeldom.
Last night, about the hour of the sun’s going, I lay upon the
heights near the Cave, overlooking the Ma-char,—the
sandy, rock-frontiered plain of duneland on the west side of Iona,
exposed to the Atlantic. There was neither man nor beast, no living
thing to see, save one solitary human creature. This brown, bent, aged
man toiled at kelp-burning. I watched the smoke till it merged into the
sea-mist that came creeping swift1y out of the north, and down from Dûn-I
eastward. At last nothing was visible. The mist shrouded everything. I
could hear the dull, rhythmic beat of the waves. That was all. No sound,
nothing visible.
It was, or seemed, a long while before a rapid thud-thud trampled
the heavy air. Then I heard the rush, the stamping and neighing, of some
young mares, pasturing there, as they raced to and fro, bewildered or
mayhap only in play. A glimpse I caught of three, with flying manes and
tails; the others were blurred shadows only. A swirl, and the mist
disclosed them: a swirl, and the mist enfolded them again. Then, silence
once mare.
All at once, though not for a long time thereafter, the mist rose
and drifted seaward.
All was as before. The Kelp-Burner still stood, straking the
smouldering seaweed. Above him a column ascended, bluely spiral,
dashed with gloom of shadow.
The Kelp-Burner: who is he but the Gael of the Isles? Who but the
Cell in his sorrow? The mist falls and the mist rises. He is there all
the same, behind it, part of it: and the column of smoke is the incense
out of his longing heart that desires Heaven and Earth, and is dowered
only with poverty and pain, hunger and weariness, a little isle of the
seas, a great hope, and the love of love.
In that mist I had dreamed a dream. When I woke, these strange,
unfamiliar wards were upon my lips: Am Dia beo, an Domhan basacha,’
an Diom-hair Cinne’-Daonna.
Am Dia beo, an Domhan basacha, an Diomhair Cinne’-Daonna: “The
Living God, the dying World, and the mysterious Race of Men.”
I know not what obscure and remote ancestral memory rose,
there, to the surface; but I imagined for a moment that the Spirit of
the race, and not a solitary human being, found utterance in this so
typical saying. It is the sense of an abiding spiritual Presence, of a
waning, a perishing World, and of the mystery and incommunicable destiny
of Man, which distinguishes the ethical life of the Cell.
“The Three Powers,” I murmured, as I rose to leave the place
where I was. “These are the three powers: the Living God, the
evanescent World; and Man. And somewhere in the darkness,—an Dàn,
Destiny.”
Yes, Ma tha sin an Dàn; that
is where we come to again. It is Destiny, then, that is the Protagonist
in the Celtic Drama,—the
most moving, the most poignant of all that make up the too tragic
Tragi-Comedy of human life. And it is Destiny, that sombre Demo-gorgon
of the Gael, whose boding breath, whose menace, whose shadow, glooms so
much of the remote life I know, and hence glooms also this book of
interpretations,—for pages of life must either be interpretative or
merely documentary, and these following pages have for the most part
been written as by one who repeats, with curious insistence, a haunting,
familiar, yet ever wild and remote air, whose obscure meanings he would
fain reiterate, interpret.
You, of all living writers, can best understand this; for in you
the Celtic genius burns a pure fume. True, the Cymric blood that is in
you moves to a more lightsome measure than that of the Scottish Gael,
and the accidents of temperament and life have combined to make you a
writer for great peoples rather than for a people. But though England
appropriate you as her son, and all the Anglo-Celtic peoples are the
heritors of your genius, we claim your brain. Now, we are a scattered
band. The Breton’s eyes are slowly turning from the sea, and slowly
his ears are forgetting the whisper of the wind around Menhir and
Dolmen. The Cornishman has lost his language, and there is now no bond
between him and his ancient kin. The Manxman has ever been the mere
yeoman of the Celtic chivalry; but even his rude dialect perishes year
by year. In Wales, a great tradition survives; in Ireland, a supreme
tradition fades through sunset-hued horizons to the edge o’ dark; its
Celtic Scotland, a passionate regret, a despairing love and longing,
narrows yearly before a bastard utilitarianism which is almost as great
a curse to our despoiled land as Calvinistic theology has been and is.
But with you, and others not less enthusiastic if less brilliant,
we need not despair. “The Englishman may trample down the heather,”
say the shepherds of Argyll, “but he cannot trample down the wind.”
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