Lord Dunsany - Fifty-One Tales

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Fifty-One Tales

by Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]

#2 in our series by Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]

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**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

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Title: Fifty-One Tales

Author: Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]

Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7838]

[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]

[This file was first posted on May 21, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIFTY-ONE TALES ***

Produced by Anne Reshnyk, Suzanne L. Shell, Charles Franks

and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.”

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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.

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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

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