Fifty One Tales by Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
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Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett] >> Fifty One Tales
Produced by Anne Reshnyk, Suzanne L. Shell, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
FIFTY-ONE TALES
by Lord Dunsany
1915
CONTENTS
The Assignation
Charon
The Death of Pan
The Sphinx at Giza
The Hen
Wind and Fog
The Raft-Builders
The Workman
The Guest
Death and Odysseus
Death and the Orange
The Prayer of the Flower
Time and the Tradesman
The Little City
The Unpasturable Fields
The Worm and the Angel
The Songless Country
The Latest Thing
The Demagogue and the Demi-monde
The Giant Poppy
Roses
The Man With the Golden Ear-rings
The Dream of King Karna-Vootra
The Storm
A Mistaken Identity
The True History of the Hare and the Tortoise
Alone the Immortals
A Moral Little Tale
The Return of Song
Spring In Town
How the Enemy Came to Thlunrana
A Losing Game
Taking Up Picadilly
After the Fire
The City
The Food of Death
The Lonely Idol
The Sphinx in Thebes (Massachusetts)
The Reward
The Trouble in Leafy Green Street
The Mist
Furrow-Maker
Lobster Salad
The Return of the Exiles
Nature and Time
The Song of the Blackbird
The Messengers
The Three Tall Sons
Compromise
What We Have Come To
The Tomb of Pan
THE ASSIGNATION
Fame singing in the highways, and trifling as she sang, with sordid
adventurers, passed the poet by.
And still the poet made for her little chaplets of song, to deck her
forehead in the courts of Time: and still she wore instead the worthless
garlands, that boisterous citizens flung to her in the ways, made out of
perishable things.
And after a while whenever these garlands died the poet came to her
with his chaplets of song; and still she laughed at him and wore the
worthless wreaths, though they always died at evening.
And one day in his bitterness the poet rebuked her, and said to her:
"Lovely Fame, even in the highways and the byways you have not
foreborne to laugh and shout and jest with worthless men, and I have
toiled for you and dreamed of you and you mock me and pass me by."
And Fame turned her back on him and walked away, but in departing
she looked over her shoulder and smiled at him as she had not smiled
before, and, almost speaking in a whisper, said:
"I will meet you in the graveyard at the back of the Workhouse in a
hundred years."
CHARON
Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his
weariness.
It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide
floods of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms that had
become for him part of the scheme that the gods had made and was
of a piece with Eternity.
If the gods had even sent him a contrary wind it would have divided
all time in his memory into two equal slabs.
So grey were all things always where he was that if any radiance
lingered a moment among the dead, on the face of such a queen
perhaps as Cleopatra, his eyes could not have perceived it.
It was strange that the dead nowadays were coming in such numbers.
They were coming in thousands where they used to come in fifties. It
was neither Charon's duty nor his wont to ponder in his grey soul why
these things might be. Charon leaned forward and rowed.
Then no one came for a while. It was not usual for the gods to send
no one down from Earth for such a space. But the gods knew best.
Then one man came alone. And the little shade sat shivering on a
lonely bench and the great boat pushed off. Only one passenger:
the gods knew best. And great and weary Charon rowed on and on
beside the little, silent, shivering ghost.
And the sound of the river was like a mighty sigh that Grief in the
beginning had sighed among her sisters, and that could not die like
the echoes of human sorrow failing on earthly hills, but was as old
as time and the pain in Charon's arms.
Then the boat from the slow, grey river loomed up to the coast of
Dis and the little, silent shade still shivering stepped ashore, and
Charon turned the boat to go wearily back to the world. Then the
little shadow spoke, that had been a man.
"I am the last," he said.
No one had ever made Charon smile before, no one before had ever
made him weep.
THE DEATH OF PAN
When travellers from London entered Arcady they lamented one to
another the death of Pan.
And anon they saw him lying stiff and still.
Horned Pan was still and the dew was on his fur; he had not the look
of a live animal. And then they said, "It is true that Pan is dead."
And, standing melancholy by that huge prone body, they looked for
long at memorable Pan.
And evening came and a small star appeared.
And presently from a hamlet of some Arcadian valley, with a sound
of idle song, Arcadian maidens came.
And, when they saw there, suddenly in the twilight, that old recumbent
god, they stopped in their running and whispered among themselves.
"How silly he looks," they said, and thereat they laughed a little.
And at the sound of their laughter Pan leaped up and the gravel flew
from his hooves.
And, for as long as the travellers stood and listened, the crags and
the hill-tops of Arcady rang with the sounds of pursuit.
THE SPHINX AT GIZEH
I saw the other day the Sphinx's painted face.
She had painted her face in order to ogle Time.
And he has spared no other painted face in all the world but hers.
Delilah was younger than she, and Delilah is dust. Time hath loved
nothing but this worthless painted face.
I do not care that she is ugly, nor that she has painted her face, so
that she only lure his secret from Time.
Time dallies like a fool at her feet when he should be smiting cities.
Time never wearies of her silly smile.
There are temples all about her that he has forgotten to spoil.
I saw an old man go by, and Time never touched him.
Time that has carried away the seven gates of Thebes!
She has tried to bind him with ropes of eternal sand, she had hoped
to oppress him with the Pyramids.
He lies there in the sand with his foolish hair all spread about her paws.
If she ever finds his secret we will put out his eyes, so that he shall
find no more our beautiful things--there are lovely gates in Florence
that I fear he will carry away.
We have tried to bind him with song and with old customs, but they
only held him for a little while, and he has always smitten us and
mocked us.
When he is blind he shall dance to us and make sport.
Great clumsy time shall stumble and dance, who liked to kill little
children, and can hurt even the daisies no longer.
Then shall our children laugh at him who slew Babylon's winged bulls,
and smote great numbers of the gods and fairies--when he is shorn
of his hours and his years.
We will shut him up in the Pyramid of Cheops, in the great chamber
where the sarcophagus is. Thence we will lead him out when we
give our feasts. He shall ripen our corn for us and do menial work.
We will kiss they painted face, O Sphinx, if thou wilt betray to us Time.
And yet I fear that in his ultimate anguish he may take hold blindly
of the world and the moon, and slowly pull down upon him the
House of Man.
THE HEN
All along the farmyard gables the swallows sat a-row, twittering
uneasily to one another, telling of many things, but thinking only of
Summer and the South, for Autumn was afoot and the North wind
waiting.
And suddenly one day they were all quite gone. And everyone
spoke of the swallows and the South.
"I think I shall go South myself next year," said a hen.
And the year wore on and the swallows came again, and the year
wore on and they sat again on the gables, and all the poultry discussed
the departure of the hen.
And very early one morning, the wind being from the North, the
swallows all soared suddenly and felt the wind in their wings; and a
strength came upon them and a strange old knowledge and a more
than human faith, and flying high they left the smoke of our cities and
small remembered eaves, and saw at last the huge and homeless sea,
and steering by grey sea-currents went southward with the wind. And
going South they went by glittering fog-banks and saw old islands lifting
their heads above them; they saw the slow quests of the wandering
ships, and divers seeking pearls, and lands at war, till there came in
view the mountains that they sought and the sight of the peaks they
knew; and they descended into an austral valley, and saw Summer
sometimes sleeping and sometimes singing song.
"I think the wind is about right," said the hen; and she spread her
wings and ran out of the poultry-yard. And she ran fluttering out on
to the road and some way down it until she came to a garden.
At evening she came back panting.
And in the poultry-yard she told the poultry how she had gone South
as far as the high road, and saw the great world's traffic going by,
and came to lands where the potato grew, and saw the stubble upon
which men live, and at the end of the road had found a garden, and
there were roses in it--beautiful roses!--and the gardener himself was
there with his braces on.
"How extremely interesting," the poultry said, "and what a really
beautiful description!"
And the Winter wore away, and the bitter months went by, and the
Spring of the year appeared, and the swallows came again.
"We have been to the South," they said, "and the valleys beyond
the sea."
But the poultry would not agree that there was a sea in the South:
"You should hear our hen," they said.
WIND AND FOG
"Way for us," said the North Wind as he came down the sea on an
errand of old Winter.
And he saw before him the grey silent fog that lay along the tides.
"Way for us," said the North Wind, "O ineffectual fog, for I am
Winter's leader in his age-old war with the ships. I overwhelm
them suddenly in my strength, or drive upon them the huge seafaring
bergs. I cross an ocean while you move a mile. There is mourning in
inland places when I have met the ships. I drive them upon the rocks
and feed the sea. Wherever I appear they bow to our lord the Winter."
And to his arrogant boasting nothing said the fog. Only he rose up
slowly and trailed away from the sea and, crawling up long valleys,
took refuge among the hills; and night came down and everything was
still, and the fog began to mumble in the stillness. And I hear him telling
infamously to himself the tale of his horrible spoils. "A hundred and
fifteen galleons of old Spain, a certain argosy that went from Tyre,
eight fisher-fleets and ninety ships of the line, twelve warships under
sail, with their carronades, three hundred and eighty-seven river-craft,
forty-two merchantmen that carried spice, thirty yachts, twenty-one
battleships of the modern time, nine thousand admirals...." he mumbled
and chuckled on, till I suddenly rose and fled from his fearful
contamination.
THE RAFT-BUILDERS
All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon
doomed ships.
When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity
with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile
upon Oblivion's sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our
names and a phrase or two and little else.
They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like
sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract
their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces
before the ship breaks up.
See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier
than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps
swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest
things--small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden
evenings--and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.
See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there
that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the
deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden
bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis.
For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor
strewn with crowns.
Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.
There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.
THE WORKMAN
I saw a workman fall with his scaffolding right from the summit of
some vast hotel. And as he came down I saw him holding a knife
and trying to cut his name on the scaffolding. He had time to try and
do this for he must have had nearly three hundred feet to fall. And I
could think of nothing but his folly in doing this futile thing, for not
only would the man be unrecognizably dead in three seconds, but the
very pole on which he tried to scratch whatever of his name he had
time for was certain to be burnt in a few weeks for firewood.
Then I went home for I had work to do. And all that evening I thought
of the man's folly, till the thought hindered me from serious work.
And late that night while I was still at work, the ghost of the workman
floated through my wall and stood before me laughing.
I heard no sound until after I spoke to it; but I could see the grey
diaphanous form standing before me shuddering with laughter.
I spoke at last and asked what it was laughing at, and then the ghost
spoke. It said: "I'm a laughin' at you sittin' and workin' there."
"And why," I asked, "do you laugh at serious work?"
"Why, yer bloomin' life 'ull go by like a wind," he said, "and yer 'ole
silly civilization 'ull be tidied up in a few centuries."
Then he fell to laughing again and this time audibly; and, laughing
still, faded back through the wall again and into the eternity from
which he had come.
THE GUEST
A young man came into an ornate restaurant at eight o'clock in
London.
He was alone, but two places had been laid at the table which was
reserved for him. He had chosen the dinner very carefully, by letter
a week before.
A waiter asked him about the other guest.
"You probably won't see him till the coffee comes," the young man
told him; so he was served alone.
Those at adjacent tables might have noticed the young man continually
addressing the empty chair and carrying on a monologue with it
throughout his elaborate dinner.
"I think you knew my father," he said to it over the soup.
"I sent for you this evening," he continued, "because I want you to
do me a good turn; in fact I must insist on it."
There was nothing eccentric about the man except for this habit of
addressing an empty chair, certainly he was eating as good a dinner
as any sane man could wish for.
After the Burgundy had been served he became more voluble in his
monologue, not that he spoiled his wine by drinking excessively.
"We have several acquaintances in common," he said. "I met King Seti
a year ago in Thebes. I think he has altered very little since you knew
him. I thought his forehead a little low for a king's. Cheops has left the
house that he built for your reception, he must have prepared for you
for years and years. I suppose you have seldom been entertained like
that. I ordered this dinner over a week ago. I thought then that a lady
might have come with me, but as she wouldn't I've asked you. She may
not after all be as lovely as Helen of Troy. Was Helen very lovely? Not
when you knew her, perhaps. You were lucky in Cleopatra, you must
have known her when she was in her prime.
"You never knew the mermaids nor the fairies nor the lovely goddesses
of long ago, that's where we have the best of you."
He was silent when the waiters came to his table, but rambled merrily
on as soon as they left, still turned to the empty chair.
"You know I saw you here in London only the other day. You were
on a motor bus going down Ludgate Hill. It was going much too fast.
London is a good place. But I shall be glad enough to leave it. It was
in London that I met the lady I that was speaking about. If it hadn't
been for London I probably shouldn't have met her, and if it hadn't
been for London she probably wouldn't have had so much besides
me to amuse her. It cuts both ways."
He paused once to order coffee, gazing earnestly at the waiter and
putting a sovereign in his hand. "Don't let it be chicory," said he.
The waiter brought the coffee, and the young man dropped a tabloid
of some sort into his cup.
"I don't suppose you come here very often," he went on. "Well, you
probably want to be going. I haven't taken you much out of your way,
there is plenty for you to do in London."
Then having drunk his coffee he fell on the floor by a foot of the
empty chair, and a doctor who was dining in the room bent over
him and announced to the anxious manager the visible presence of
the young man's guest.
DEATH AND ODYSSEUS
In the Olympian courts Love laughed at Death, because he was
unsightly, and because She couldn't help it, and because he never
did anything worth doing, and because She would.
And Death hated being laughed at, and used to brood apart thinking
only of his wrongs and of what he could do to end this intolerable
treatment.
But one day Death appeared in the courts with an air and They all
noticed it. "What are you up to now?" said Love. And Death with
some solemnity said to Her: "I am going to frighten Odysseus"; and
drawing about him his grey traveller's cloak went out through the
windy door with his jowl turned earthwards.
And he came soon to Ithaca and the hall that Athene knew, and
opened the door and saw there famous Odysseus, with his white
locks bending close over the fire, trying to warm his hands.
And the wind through the open door blew bitterly on Odysseus.
And Death came up behind him, and suddenly shouted.
And Odysseus went on warming his pale hands.
Then Death came close and began to mouth at him. And after a
while Odysseus turned and spoke. And "Well, old servant," he said,
"have your masters been kind to you since I made you work for me
round Ilion?"
And Death for some while stood mute, for the thought of the laughter
of Love.
Then "Come now," said Odysseus, "lend me your shoulder," and he
leaning heavily on that bony joint, they went together through the open
door.
DEATH AND THE ORANGE
Two dark young men in a foreign southern land sat at a restaurant
table with one woman.
And on the woman's plate was a small orange which had an evil
laughter in its heart.
And both of the men would be looking at the woman all the time, and
they ate little and they drank much.
And the woman was smiling equally at each.
Then the small orange that had the laughter in its heart rolled
slowly off the plate on to the floor. And the dark young men both
sought for it at once, and they met suddenly beneath the table, and
soon they were speaking swift words to one another, and a horror
and an impotence came over the Reason of each as she sat helpless
at the back of the mind, and the heart of the orange laughed and the
woman went on smiling; and Death, who was sitting at another table,
tête-à-tête with an old man, rose and came over to listen to the quarrel.
THE PRAYER OF THE FLOWERS
It was the voice of the flowers on the West wind, the lovable, the
old, the lazy West wind, blowing ceaselessly, blowing sleepily, going
Greecewards.
"The woods have gone away, they have fallen and left us; men love
us no longer, we are lonely by moonlight. Great engines rush over
the beautiful fields, their ways lie hard and terrible up and down the
land.
"The cancrous cities spread over the grass, they clatter in their lairs
continually, they glitter about us blemishing the night.
"The woods are gone, O Pan, the woods, the woods. And thou art
far, O Pan, and far away."
I was standing by night between two railway embankments on the
edge of a Midland city. On one of them I saw the trains go by, once
in every two minutes, and on the other, the trains went by twice in
every five.
Quite close were the glaring factories, and the sky above them wore
the fearful look that it wears in dreams of fever.
The flowers were right in the stride of that advancing city, and
thence I heard them sending up their cry. And then I heard, beating
musically up wind, the voice of Pan reproving them from Arcady--
"Be patient a little, these things are not for long."
TIME AND THE TRADESMAN
Once Time as he prowled the world, his hair grey not with weakness
but with dust of the ruin of cities, came to a furniture shop and entered
the Antique department. And there he saw a man darkening the wood
of a chair with dye and beating it with chains and making imitation
wormholes in it.
And when Time saw another doing his work he stood by him awhile
and looked on critically.
And at last he said: "That is not how I work," and he turned the man's
hair white and bent his back and put some furrows in his little cunning
face; then turned and strode away, for a mighty city that was weary
and sick and too long had troubled the fields was sore in need of him.
THE LITTLE CITY
I was in the pre-destined 11.8 from Goraghwood to Drogheda, when
I suddenly saw the city. It was a little city in a valley, and only seemed
to have a little smoke, and the sun caught the smoke and turned it
golden, so that it looked like an old Italian picture where angels walk
in the foreground and the rest is a blaze of gold. And beyond, as one
could tell by the lie of land although one could not see through the
golden smoke, I knew that there lay the paths of the roving ships.
All round there lay a patchwork of small fields all over the slopes of
the hills, and the snow had come upon them tentatively, but already
the birds of the waste had moved to the sheltered places for every
omen boded more to fall. Far away some little hills blazed like an
aureate bulwark broken off by age and fallen from the earthward
rampart of Paradise. And aloof and dark the mountains stared
unconcernedly seawards.
And when I saw those grey and watchful mountains sitting where
they sat while the cities of the civilization of Araby and Asia arose
like crocuses, and like crocuses fell, I wondered for how long there
would be smoke in the valley and little fields on the hills.
THE UNPASTURABLE FIELDS
Thus spake the mountains: "Behold us, even us; the old ones, the
grey ones, that wear the feet of Time. Time on our rocks shall break
his staff and stumble: and still we shall sit majestic, even as now,
hearing the sound of the sea, our old coeval sister, who nurses the
bones of her children and weeps for the things she has done.
"Far, far, we stand above all things; befriending the little cities until
they grow old and leave us to go among the myths.
"We are the most imperishable mountains."
And softly the clouds foregathered from far places, and crag on
crag and mountain upon mountain in the likeness of Caucasus upon
Himalaya came riding past the sunlight upon the backs of storms and
looked down idly from their golden heights upon the crests of the
mountains.
"Ye pass away," said the mountains.
And the clouds answered, as I dreamed or fancied,
"We pass away, indeed we pass away, but upon our unpasturable
fields Pegasus prances. Here Pegasus gallops and browses upon
song which the larks bring to him every morning from far terrestrial
fields. His hoof-beats ring upon our slopes at sunrise as though our
fields were of silver. And breathing the dawn-wind in dilated nostrils,
with head tossed upwards and with quivering wings, he stands and
stares from our tremendous heights, and snorts and sees far-future
wonderful wars rage in the creases and the folds of the togas that
cover the knees of the gods."
THE WORM AND THE ANGEL
As he crawled from the tombs of the fallen a worm met with an angel.
And together they looked upon the kings and kingdoms, and youths
and maidens and the cities of men. They saw the old men heavy in
their chairs and heard the children singing in the fields. They saw far
wars and warriors and walled towns, wisdom and wickedness, and
the pomp of kings, and the people of all the lands that the sunlight knew.
And the worm spake to the angel saying: "Behold my food."
"Be dakeon para Thina poluphloisboio Thalassaes," murmured the
angel, for they walked by the sea, "and can you destroy that too?"
And the worm paled in his anger to a greyness ill to behold, for for
three thousand years he had tried to destroy that line and still its
melody was ringing in _his head_.
THE SONGLESS COUNTRY
The poet came unto a great country in which there were no songs.
And he lamented gently for the nation that had not any little foolish
songs to sing to itself at evening.
And at last he said: "I will make for them myself some little foolish
songs so that they may be merry in the lanes and happy by the
fireside." And for some days he made for them aimless songs such
as maidens sing on the hills in the older happier countries.
Then he went to some of that nation as they sat weary with the
work of the day and said to them: "I have made you some aimless
songs out of the small unreasonable legends, that are somewhat akin
to the wind in the vales of my childhood; and you may care to sing
them in your disconsolate evenings."