Fifty-One Tales by Lord Dunsany 1915

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.