Stories of Red Hanrahan | Page 9

of the world in it. And then it
seemed to him as if the rope had changed in his dream into a great
water-worm that came out of the sea, and that twisted itself about him,
and held him closer and closer, and grew from big to bigger till the
whole of the earth and skies were wound up in it, and the stars
themselves were but the shining of the ridges of its skin. And then he
got free of it, and went on, shaking and unsteady, along the edge of the
strand, and the grey shapes were flying here and there around him. And
this is what they were saying, 'It is a pity for him that refuses the call of
the daughters of the Sidhe, for he will find no comfort in the love of the
women of the earth to the end of life and time, and the cold of the grave
is in his heart for ever. It is death he has chosen; let him die, let him die,
let him die.'

HANRAHAN AND CATHLEEN THE DAUGHTER OF
HOOLIHAN.
It was travelling northward Hanrahan was one time, giving a hand to a
farmer now and again in the hurried time of the year, and telling his
stories and making his share of songs at wakes and at weddings.
He chanced one day to overtake on the road to Collooney one Margaret
Rooney, a woman he used to know in Munster when he was a young
man. She had no good name at that time, and it was the priest routed
her out of the place at last. He knew her by her walk and by the colour
of her eyes, and by a way she had of putting back the hair off her face
with her left hand. She had been wandering about, she said, selling
herrings and the like, and now she was going back to Sligo, to the place
in the Burrough where she was living with another woman, Mary Gillis,
who had much the same story as herself. She would be well pleased,
she said, if he would come and stop in the house with them, and be

singing his songs to the bacachs and blind men and fiddlers of the
Burrough. She remembered him well, she said, and had a wish for him;
and as to Mary Gillis, she had some of his songs off by heart, so he
need not be afraid of not getting good treatment, and all the bacachs
and poor men that heard him would give him a share of their own
earnings for his stories and his songs while he was with them, and
would carry his name into all the parishes of Ireland.
He was glad enough to go with her, and to find a woman to be listening
to the story of his troubles and to be comforting him. It was at the
moment of the fall of day when every man may pass as handsome and
every woman as comely. She put her arm about him when he told her
of the misfortune of the Twisting of the Rope, and in the half light she
looked as well as another.
They kept in talk all the way to the Burrough, and as for Mary Gillis,
when she saw him and heard who he was, she went near crying to think
of having a man with so great a name in the house.
Hanrahan was well pleased to settle down with them for a while, for he
was tired with wandering; and since the day he found the little cabin
fallen in, and Mary Lavelle gone from it, and the thatch scattered, he
had never asked to have any place of his own; and he had never
stopped long enough in any place to see the green leaves come where
he had seen the old leaves wither, or to see the wheat harvested where
he had seen it sown. It was a good change to him to have shelter from
the wet, and a fire in the evening time, and his share of food put on the
table without the asking.
He made a good many of his songs while he was living there, so well
cared for and so quiet, The most of them were love songs, but some
were songs of repentance, and some were songs about Ireland and her
griefs, under one name or another.
Every evening the bacachs and beggars and blind men and fiddlers
would gather into the house and listen to his songs and his poems, and
his stories about the old time of the Fianna, and they kept them in their
memories that were never spoiled with books; and so they brought his

name to every wake and