Fifty-One Tales by Lord Dunsany 1915

The Return of the Exiles

The old man with a hammer and the one-eyed man with a spear

were seated by the roadside talking as I came up the hill.

   "It isn't as though they hadn't asked us," the one with

the hammer said.

   "There ain't no more than twenty as knows about it," said

the other.

   "Twenty's twenty," said the first.

   "After all these years," said the one-eyed man with the

spear.  "After all these years.  We might go back just

once."

   "O' course we might," said the other.

   Their clothes were old even for laborers, the one with

the hammer had a leather apron full of holes and blackened,

and their hands looked like leather.  But whatever they were

they were English, and this was pleasant to see after all

the motors that had passed me that day with their burden of

mixed and doubtful nationalities.

   When they saw me the one with the hammer touched his

greasy cap.

   "Might we make so bold, sir," he said, "as the ask the

way to Stonehenge?"

   "We never ought to go," mumbled the other plaintively.

"There's not more than twenty as knows, but..."

   I was bicycling there myself to see the place so I

pointed out the way and rode on at once, for there was

something so utterly servile about them both that I did not

care for their company.  They seemed by their wretched mien

to have been persecuted or utterly neglected for many years,

I thought that very likely they had done long terms of penal

servitude.

   When I came to Stonehenge I saw a group of about a score

of men standing among the stones.  They asked me with some

solemnity if I was expecting anyone, and when I said No they

spoke to me no more.  It was three miles back where I left

those strange old men, but I had not been in the stone

circle long when they appeared, coming with great strides

along the road.  When they saw them all the people took off

their hats and acted very strangely, and I saw that they had

a goat which they led up then to the old altar stone.  And

the two old men came up with their hammer and spear and

began apologizing plaintively for the liberty they had taken

in coming back to that place, and all the people knelt on

the grass before them.  And then still kneeling they killed

the goat by the altar, and when the two old men saw this

they came up with many excuses and eagerly sniffed the

blood.  And at first this made them happy.  But soon the one

with the spear began to whimper.  "It used to be men," he

lamented.  "It used to be men."

   And the twenty men began looking uneasily at each other,

and the plaint of the one-eyed man went on in that tearful

voice, and all of a sudden they all looked at me.  I do not

know who the two old men were or what any of them were

doing, but there are moments when it is clearly time to go,

and I left them there and then.  And just as I got up on to

my bicycle I heard the plaintive voice of the one with the

hammer apologizing for the liberty he had taken in coming

back to Stonehenge.

   "But after all these years," I heard him crying, "After

all these years..."

   And the one with the spear said: "Yes, after three

thousand years..."