Chapter IV

In those first fragments of Peterkin’s experiences, all his life was foreshadowed. Wonder, delight, longing, laughter--the four winds of childhood--these blew for him through his first few years, through childhood and boyhood and youth. He is a man now; but though the laughter is rarer and the longing deeper and more constant, there still blow through the dark glens and wide sunlit moors of his mind the four winds of Laughter, Longing, Wonder, and Delight.

As year after year went by, his mind became a storehouse of all that was most beautiful and marvellous in the Celtic wonder-world. It is no wonder this, since he had for story-teller Ian Mor, and Eilidh whom Ian loved; and knew every shepherd on the hillsides of Strachurmore, and every fisherman on the shores of Loch Fyne. The old ballads, the old romances, the strange fragments of the Ossianic tales, the lore of fairydom, fantastic folk-lore, craft of the woodlands, all of the outer and inner life grew into and became interwrought with the fibre of his most intimate being.

I am not here telling the story of Peterkin himself. He stands, indeed, for many children rather than for one, for many lives and not an individual merely.

In a sense, therefore, Peterkin is not merely a little child, a boy, a youth, who went through his years gladly laughing, mysteriously wondering, wrought to pain and joy, to suffering and delight, by all he saw and heard and inwardly learned; but a type of the Wonder-Child, and so a brother to all children, to poets, and dreamers.

Of the many tales of old times which Peterkin loved, none did he dwell upon with so much delight as those three which are familiar throughout Ireland and Gaelic Scotland as “The Three Sorrows of Story-Telling.” In “The Children of Lir,” in “Deirdre and the Sons of Usna,” in “The Children of Turenn,” he found pre-eminently the haunting charm and sad exquisite beauty which are the colour and fragrance of the Celtic genius. And though in his manhood he turned with deeper emotion to tales such as “Dermid and Grainne,” or “The Amadan Mor,” it was of these early favourites that he loved to think, that he loved to re-read, to hear again, to re-tell.

That is why, therefore, I have chosen to make this book essentially a re-telling of the beautiful old tales of “The Three Sorrows,” so familiar once to our Gaelic ancestors, and still, in however crude a form, the most popular of all the tales of the Gael. They are sad, it is true, because all the old beautiful tales are sad; but it is a sadness which is a fragrance about an exquisite bloom, and that bloom wrought of joy and keen delight. They were not sad, they who lived the old, joyous, heroic life; in some poignant vicissitude, some sudden slaying, some passing of a bright flame into a melancholy wane, we see a sad gleam about the end of their days, and, seeing thus the fortuitous coming and going of life and death, read into the old chronicles a melancholy which often is not there.

Of course, a tale such as “The Fate of the Children of Lir”--probably the story known above all others among the children of Western Scotland and Ireland--is sad with another sadness, that of prolonged and unmerited suffering. But to the Gaelic mind, at least, this is redeemed by the sense of heroic endurance, of the deep unselfish devotion of a lovely womanly type such as is represented by Fionula, and perhaps, above all, by the music and beauty which were the sweet doom of Fionula and her brothers.

But to me not one of them is sad, save with beauty. For through all I hear the sound of Peterkin’s laughter. Sometimes it was aroused by an episode; sometimes it leapt like a hound along the trail of vagrant thoughts; sometimes it came and went as an eddying wind, none knowing whence or whither.

This laughter of Peterkin has become for me one of the sweet wonderful voices of nature--the four winds of Childhood: Wonder, Delight, Longing, and Laughter. Ah, children, children, to one and all I wish the golden fortune of Peterkin.