The scene you want me to write isn't at all in character with the Irish people.

So you've said, Edward. We talked the matter out at Rothenburg, but men's instincts are the same all over the world. If you don't feel the scene, perhaps it would be as well if you allowed me to sketch it out for you. It is all quite clear.... Just as you like.

Edward said he didn't mind, and I went up to my bedroom, and came down about tea-time to look for him, anxious to read the pages I had written. He consented to hear the scene, but it seemed to me that he listened to it resentfully; and when I had finished, it did not surprise me to hear that he didn't like it at all; and then he begged of me, almost hysterically, not to press my alteration upon him, crying aloud, Leave me my play! Then, turning suddenly, he thanked me effusively for the trouble I had taken, and besought me to try to understand that he couldn't act otherwise, assigning as a reason that I was giving the play a different colour from what he intended.

I'm sorry. But what is to be done? You admit the play requires alteration?

Yes, but I can make the alterations myself. And away he went up the slippery staircase of the old castle to his study.

For it is in the old castle that he prefers to live; the modern house, which he built some five-and-twenty years ago, remaining always outside his natural sympathies, especially its drawing-room. But one cannot have a modern house without a drawing-room, or a drawing-room without upholstered furniture, and the comfort of a stuffed armchair does not compensate Edward for its lack of design; and he prefers that his hinder parts should suffer rather than his spirit. Every drawing-room is, in the first glance, a woman's room—the original harem thrown open to visitors—and his instinct is to get away from women, and all things which evoke intimacy with women. He was always the same, even in his hunting days, avoiding a display of horsemanship in front of a big wall, if women were about. It was in these early days, when the stables were filled with hunters, that I first went to Tillyra; and walking on the lawn, I remember trying to persuade him that the eighteenth-century house, which one of his ancestors had built alongside of the old castle, on the decline of brigandage, would be sufficient for his wants.

For you don't intend to become a country gentleman, do you?

That he might escape from Tillyra had clearly never occurred to him, and he was startled by the idea suggested by me that he should follow his instinct. But the sea sucks back the wave, and he murmured that the old house had decayed and a new one was required.

If you spend a few hundred pounds upon the old house it will last your lifetime, my dear friend; and it is in much better taste than any house you will build. You think that modern domestic Gothic will be in keeping with the old fortress!

He must have suspected I was right, for his next argument was that the contract had been signed, and to break it would cost several hundred pounds. Better pay several hundred than several thousand, and your Gothic house will cost you twenty, and never will it please you.

For a moment it seemed as if he were going to reconsider the matter, and then he adduced a last argument in favour of the building: his mother wished it.

But, my dear friend, unless you're going to marry, so large a house will be a burden.

Going to marry!

Well, everybody will look upon you as an engaged man.

A shadow crossed his face, and I said: I've touched the vital spot, and rebellion against all authority being my instinct, I incited him to rebel.

After all, your mother has no right to ask you to spend so much money, and she wouldn't do so unless she thought you were going to marry.

I suppose she wouldn't.

But not on that occasion, nor any other, could I induce him to throw the architect's plans into the fire, and why blame him for his lack of courage? For it is natural to man to yield something of himself in order that there may be peace in his home. (Edward yields completely to authority once he has accepted it.) His mother's clear and resolute mind was perhaps more sympathetic to me than to him, and turning to her, in my officiousness, I said, thinking to frighten her: Will that house be finished for fifteen thousand?

The painting and the papering aren't included in the estimate; but a few thousands more will finish it, and I have promised to finish it for him.

That the spending of so much money should cost her no scruple whatever surprised me, and to explain her to myself I remembered that she belonged to a time when property was secured to its owner by laws. The Land Acts, which were then coming into operation, could not change her point of view. Edward must build a large and substantial house of family importance, and when this house was finished he could not do otherwise than marry. She would ask all the young ladies of her acquaintance to come to see them, and among the many Edward might find one to his liking. This hope often transpired in her talks about Edward, and she continued to cherish it during the building of the house, in spite of her suspicions that Edward's celibacy was something more than the whim of a young man who thinks that a woman might rob him of his ideals. She could not admit to herself any more than you can, reader, or myself, that we come into the world made as it were to order, contrived so that we shall run down certain lines of conduct. We are not determinists, except in casual moments of no importance, and we like to attribute at least our misfortunes to circumstance, never looking beyond the years of childhood, just as if the greater part of man's making was not done before he came into the world. Edward was a bachelor before he left his mother's womb. But how was his mother to know such a thing—or to sympathise with such an idea? All the instruction we get from the beginning of our lives is to the effect that man is free, and our every action seems so voluntary that we cannot understand that our lives are determined for us. Another illusion is that nothing is permanent in us, that all is subject to change. Edward's mother shared this illusion, but for a much shorter time than many another woman would have done, partly because her intelligence allowed her to perceive much, and to understand much that would have escaped an inferior woman, and partly because Edward never tried to hide his real self, wearing always his aversion on his sleeve. So it could not have been later than two years after the building of the house that the first thought crossed her mind, that, though she had ruled Edward in every detail of his daily life since he was a little boy, she might still fail to reach the end which she regarded as the legitimate end of life—a wife for her son, and grandchildren for herself.

He has built a modern house, but before it is quite finished he has decided to live in the old tower, she said to me, and the furniture which had been made for his sitting-room filled her, I could see, with dread. A less intelligent woman would have drawn no conclusions from the fact that a table taken from a design by Albert Dürer, and six oaken stools with terrifying edges, were to be the furniture of the turret chamber, reached by cold, moist, winding stairs, and that his bedroom, too, was to be among the ancient walls. Look at his bed, she said, as narrow as a monk's; and the walls whitewashed like a cell, and nothing upon them but a crucifix. He speaks of his aversion from upholstery, and he can't abide a cushion.

She has begun to understand that there are certain natures which cannot be changed, I said to myself. She understands in her subconscious nature already, soon she will understand with her intellect, that he, who lies in that bed by choice, will never leave it for a bridal chamber.

Life affords no more arresting drama than the fatality of temperament which irrevocably separates two people bound together by the closest natural ties, and the poignancy is heightened when each is sensitive to the duty which each bears the other, when each is anxious to perform his or her part of the contract; and the drama is still further heightened when both become aware that they must go through life together without any hope that they will ever understand each other better. This drama is curious and interesting to the looker-on, who is able to appreciate the qualities of the mother and the son; the son's imaginative temperament always in excess of, and overruling, his reason, and his mother's clear, practical intelligence, always unable to understand that her son must live the life that his nature ordained him to live. Again and again, in the course of our long friendship, he has said: If you had been brought up as severely as I was.... A sudden scruple of conscience, or shyness of soul, stays the end of the phrase on his large loose mouth. But by brooding on his words I understand them to mean that his mother imposed obedience upon him by appealing to his fear of God, and aggravating this fear by a severe training in religious dogma. It is easy to do this; a little child's mind is so sensitive and so unprotected by reason that a stern mother is one of the great perils of birth. If the boy is a natural boy with healthy love of sex in his body, the wife or mistress will redeem him from his mother, but if there be no such love in him he stands in great danger; for from woman's influence the son of man may not escape; and it would seem that whoever avoids the wife falls into the arms of the mistress, and he who avoids the wife and the mistress becomes his mother's bond-slave.

Edward was in his tower, and, wandering about the park, I thought how he had gone back to his original self since his mother death. The schoolboy was a Republican, but the Church is not friendly to free-thought, and the prestige of his mother's authority had prevented him from taking any active part in Nationalist politics during her lifetime. The wild heather, I said, is breaking out again; and I stopped in my walk, so that I might think how wonderful all this was—the craving for independence, of a somewhat timid nature always held back, never being able to cast out of the mouth the bit that had been placed in it. These weak, ambiguous natures lend themselves so much more to literature, and, indeed, to friendship, than the stronger, who follow their own instincts, thinking always with their own brains. They get what they want, the others get nothing; but the weak men are the more interesting: they excite our sentiments, our pity, and without pity man may not live.

Then, a little weary of thinking of Edward, my thoughts turned to Yeats. He had come over to Tillyra from Coole a few days before, and had read us The Shadowy Waters, a poem that he had been working on for more than seven years, using it as a receptacle or storehouse for all the fancies that had crossed his mind during that time, and these were so numerous that the pirate-ship ranging the Shadowy Waters came to us laden to the gunnel with Fomorians, beaked and unbeaked, spirits of Good and Evil of various repute, and, so far as we could understand the poem, these accompanied a metaphysical pirate of ancient Ireland cruising in the unknown waters of the North Sea in search of some ultimate kingdom. We admitted to Yeats, Edward and I, that no audience would be able to discover the story of the play, and we confessed ourselves among the baffled that would sit bewildered and go out raging against the poet. Our criticism did not appear to surprise Yeats; he seemed to realise that he had knotted and entangled his skein till no remedy short of breaking some of the threads would avail, and he eagerly accepted my proposal to go over to Coole to talk out the poem with him, and to redeem it, if possible from the Fomorians. He would regret their picturesque appearance; but could I get rid of them, without losing the poetical passages? He would not like the words poetical passages—I should have written beautiful verses.

Looking up at the ivied embrasure of the tower where Edward was undergoing the degradation of fancying himself a lover so that he might write the big scene between Jasper and Millicent at the end of the third act, I said: He will not come out of that tower until dinner-time, so I may as well ride over to Coole and try what can be done. But the job Yeats has set me is a difficult one.

Away I went on my bicycle, up and down along the switch-back road, trying to arrive at some definite idea regarding Fomorians, and thinking, as I rode up the long drive, that perhaps Yeats might not be at home, and that to return to Tillyra without meeting the Fomorians would be like riding home from hunting after a blank day.

The servant told me that he had gone for one of his constitutionals, and would be found about the lake. The fabled woods of Coole are thick hazel coverts, with tall trees here and there, but the paths are easy to follow, and turning out of one of these into the open, I came upon a tall black figure standing at the edge of the lake, wearing a cloak which fell in straight folds to his knees, looking like a great umbrella forgotten by some picnic-party.

I've come to relieve you of Fomorians, and when they've been flung into the waters we must find some simple and suggestive anecdote. Now, Yeats, I'm listening.

As he proceeded to unfold his dreams to me I perceived that we were inside a prison-house with all the doors locked and windows barred.

The chimney is stopped, I said, but a brick seems loose in that corner. Perhaps by scraping—

And we scraped a little while; but very soon a poetical passage turned the edge of my chisel like a lump of granite, and Yeats said:

I can't sacrifice that.

Well, let us try the left-hand corner.

And after scraping for some time we met another poetical passage.

Well, let us try one of the tiles under the bed; we might scrape our way into some drain which will lead us out.



But Yeat's mind was whirling with Fomorians, and he strove to engage my attention with a new scheme of reconstruction. He had already proposed, and I had rejected so many that this last one was undistinguishable in my brain from those which had preceded it, and his febrile and somewhat hysterical imagination, excited as if by a drug, set him talking, and so volubly, that I could not help thinking of the old gentleman that Yeats had frightened when he was staying last at Tillyra. The old gentleman had come down in the morning, pale and tired, after a sleepless night, complaining that he had been dreaming of Neptune and surging waves.

Last night, said Yeats, looking up gloomily from his breakfast, I felt a great deal of aridness in my nature, and need of moisture, and was making most tremendous invocations with water, and am not surprised that they should have affected the adjoining room.

The old gentleman leaned back in his chair, terror-stricken, and taking Edward aside after breakfast he said to him: A Finnish sorcerer; he has Finnish blood in him; some Finnish ancestor about a thousand years ago. And with the old gentleman's words in my head, I scrutinised my friend's hands and face, thinking them strangely dark for Ireland. But there are Celts with hair of Oriental blackness, and skins dyed with Oriental yellow. All the same, the old gentleman's reading of Yeats's prehistoric ancestry seemed to me like an intuition. His black hair and yellow skin were perhaps accidents, or they might be atavisms. It was not the recurrence of any Finnish strain of a thousand years ago that tempted me to believe in a strain of Oriental blood; it was his subtle, metaphysical mind, so unlike anything I had ever met in a European, but which I had once met in an Oriental years ago in West Kensington, in a back drawing-room, lecturing to groups of women—an Indian of slender body and refined face, a being whose ancestry were weaving metaphysical arguments when painted savages prowled in the forests of Britain and Ireland. He seemed to be speaking out of a long metaphysical ancestry; unpremeditated speech flowed like silk from a spool, leading me through the labyrinth of the subconscious, higher and higher, seemingly towards some daylight finer than had ever appeared in the valleys out of which I was clambering hurriedly, lest I should lose the thread that led me. On and on we went, until at last it seemed to me that I stood among the clouds; clouds filled the valleys beneath me, and about me were wide spaces, and no horizon anywhere, only space, and in the midst of this space light breaking through the clouds above me, waxing every moment to an intenser day; and every moment the Indian's voice seemed to lead me higher, and every moment it seemed that I could follow it no longer. The homely earth that I knew had faded, and I waited expectant among the peaks, until at last, taken with a sudden fear that if I lingered any longer I might never see again a cottage at the end of an embowered lane, I started to my feet and fled.

But the five minutes I had spent in that drawing-room in West Kensington were not forgotten; and now by the side of the lake, hearing Yeats explain the meaning of his metaphysical pirate afloat on Northern waters, it seemed to me that I was listening again to my Indian. Again I found myself raised above the earth into the clouds; once more the light was playing round me, lambent light like rays, crossing and recrossing, waxing and waning, until I cried out, I'm breathing too fine air for my lungs. Let me go back. And, sitting down on a rock, I began to talk of the fish in the lake, asking Yeats if the autumn weather were not beautiful, saying anything that came into my head, for his thoughts were whirling too rapidly and a moment was required for me to recover from a mental dizziness.

In this moment of respite, without warning, I discovered myself thinking of a coachman washing his carriage in the mews, for when the coachman washes his carriage a wheel is lifted from the ground, and it spins at the least touch of the mop, turning as fast as Yeats's mind, and for the same reason, that neither is turning anything. I am alluding now to the last half-hour spent with Yeats, talking about his poem; and thinking of Yeats's mind like a wheel lifted from the ground, it was impossible for my thoughts not to veer round to Edward's slow mind, and to compare it to the creaking wheel of an ox-waggon.

If one could only combine these two—one is an intellect without a temperament to sustain it, the other is a temperament without an intellect to guide it; and I reflected how provokingly Nature separates qualities which are essential, one to the other; and there being food for reflection in this thought, I began to regret Yeats's presence. Very soon his mind would begin to whirl again. The slightest touch, I said, of the coachman's mop will set it going, so I had better remain silent.

It was then that I forgot Yeats and Edward and everything else in the delight caused by a great clamour of wings, and the snowy plumage of thirty-six great birds rushing down the lake, striving to rise from its surface. At last their wings caught the air, and after floating about the lake they settled in a distant corner where they thought they could rest undisturbed. Thirty-six swans rising out of a lake, and floating round it, and settling down in it, is an unusual sight; it conveys a suggestion of fairyland, perhaps because thirty-six wild swans are so different from the silly china swan which sometimes floats and hisses in melancholy whiteness up and down a stone basin. That is all we know of swans—all I knew until the thirty-six rose out of the hushed lake at our feet, and prompted me to turn to Yeats, saying, You're writing your poem in its natural atmosphere. To avoid talking about the poem again, and because I am always interested in natural things, I begged him to tell me whence this flock had come, and if they were really wild swans; and he told me that they were descended originally from a pair of tame swans who had re-acquired their power of flight, and that the thirty-six flew backwards and forwards from Coole to Lough Couter, venturing farther, visiting many of the lakes of Galway and Mayo, but always returning in the autumn to Coole.

We struck across the meadows to avoid the corner of the lake where the swans had settled, and Yeats proposed another scheme for the reconstruction of his poem, and it absorbed him so utterly that he could feel no interest in the smell of burning weeds, redolent of autumn, coming from an adjoining field. Yet it trailed along the damp meadows, rising into the dry air till it seemed a pity to trouble about a poem when Nature provided one so beautiful for our entertainment—incense of woods and faint colours, and every colour and every odour in accordance with my mood.

How pathetic the long willow leaves seemed to me as they floated on the lake! and I wondered, for there was not a wind in the branches. So why had they fallen?... Yeats said he would row me across, thereby saving a long walk, enabling us to get to Tillyra an hour sooner than if we followed the lake's edge. Remember, it was still day, though the moon shed a light down the vague water, but when we reached the other side the sky had darkened, and it was neither day-time nor night-time. The fields stretched out, dim and solitary and grey, and seeing cattle moving mysteriously in the shadows, I thought of the extraordinary oneness of things—the cattle being a little nearer to the earth than we, a little farther than the rocks—and I begged of Yeats to admire the mystery. But he could not meditate; he was still among his Fomorians; and we scrambled through some hawthorns over a ruined wall, I thinking of the time when masons were building that wall, and how quaint the little leaves of the hawthorns were, yellow as gold, fluttering from their stems.



Yeats knew the paths through the hazel woods, and talking of the pirate, we struck through the open spaces, decorated with here and there a thorn tree and much drooping bracken, penetrating into the silence of the blood-red beeches, startled a little when a squirrel cracked a nut in the branch above us, and the broken shells fell at our feet.

I thought there were no squirrels in Ireland?

Twenty years ago there was none, but somebody introduced a pair into Wexford, and gradually they have spread all over Ireland.

This and no more would he tell me, and as we fell into another broad path, where hazels grew on either side, it seemed to me that I should have walked through those woods that evening with some quiet woman, talking of a time long ago, some love-time which had grown distinct in the mirror of the years, like the landscape in the quiet waters of the lake. But in life nothing is perfect; there are no perfect moments, or very few, and it seemed to me that I could no longer speak about Fomorians or pirates. Every combination had been tried, and my tired brain was fit for nothing but to muse on the beauty that was about me, the drift of clouds seen through the branches when I raised my head. But Yeats would not raise his eyes; he walked, his eyes fixed on the ground, still intent upon discovering some scheme of recomposition which would allow him to write his poem without much loss of the original text, and before we reached the end of the alley he delivered himself of many new arrangements, none of which it was possible for me to advise him to adopt, it differing nowise from the half a dozen which had preceded it, and in despair I ran over the story again, just as one might run one's fingers down the keys of a piano, with this result—that in a hollow of the sloppy road which we were following he agreed to abandon the Fomorians; and discussing the harp of apple-wood, which could not be abandoned, we trudged on, myself held at gaze by the stern line of the Burran Mountains showing on our left, and the moon high above the woods of Tillyra. How much more interesting all this is than his pirate! I thought. A shadowy form passed us now and then; a peasant returning from his work, his coat slung over his shoulder; a cow wandering in front of a girl, who curtsied and drew her shawl over her head as she passed us.

Yes, that will do, Yeats answered. I shall lose a good many beautiful verses, but I suppose it can't be helped. Only, I don't like your ending.

The poem has since those days been reconstructed many times by Yeats, but he has always retained the original ending, which is, that after the massacre of the crew of the merchant galley, the Queen, who lies under the canopy when the vessel is boarded, is forced by spells, shed from the strings of a harp made of apple-wood, into a love so overwhelming for the pirate, that she consents to follow him in his quest of the ultimate kingdom in the realms of the Pole. My ending was that her fancy for the pirate should cool before his determination to go northward, and that he should bid her step over the bulwarks into the merchant galley, where the pirates were drinking yellow ale; and then, cutting the ropes which lashed the vessels together, he should hoist a sail and go away northward. But Yeats said it would be a disgraceful act to send a beautiful woman to drink yellow ale with a drunken crew in the hold of a vessel.

So did we argue as we went towards Tillyra, the huge castle now showing aloft among the trees, a light still burning in the ivied embrasure where Edward sat struggling with the love-story of Jasper and Millicent.

He, too, is an inferior artist; he will not yield himself to the love-story. Both of these men in different ways put their personal feelings in front of their work. They are both subaltern souls. And my thoughts turned from them to contemplate the huge pile which Edward's Norman ancestor had built in a hollow. Why in a hollow? I asked myself, for these Norman castles are generally built from hillside to hillside, and were evidently intended to overawe the country, the castles lending each other aid when wild hordes of Celts descended from the Burran Mountains; and when these raids ceased, probably in the seventeenth century, the castle's keep was turned into stables, and a modern house run up alongside of the central tower. Ireland is covered with ruins from the fifth to the eighteenth century.

A land of ruin and weed, I said, and began to dream again a novel that I had relinquished years ago in the Temple, till rooks rising in thousands from the beech-trees interrupted my thoughts.

We'd better go into this wood, I said. Our shadows will seem to Edward from his casement window—

Somewhat critical, Yeats answered; and we turned aside to talk of The Tale of a Town, Yeats anxious to know from me if there was any chance of Edward's being able to complete it by himself, and if he would accept any of the modifications I had suggested.