Lud-in-the-Mist (27 page)

“Your Worship! Your Worship!” she cried, shrilly, “Hang me instead of him! My life for his! Was it not I who gave your daughters fairy fruit, with my eyes open! And I glory in the knowledge that I was made a humble instrument of the same master whom he has served so well. Dear Master Polydore, have mercy on your country, spare your country’s benefactor, and if the law must have a victim let it be me — a foolish useless woman, whose only merit was that she believed in loveliness though she had never seen it.”

Weeping and struggling, her face twisted into a grotesque tragic mask, they dragged her from the hall, amid the laughter and ironical cheers of the public.

That afternoon Mumchance came to Master Polydore to inform him that a young maid-servant from the Academy had just been to the guard-room to say that Miss Primrose Crabapple had killed herself.

Master Polydore at once hurried off to the scene of the tragedy, and there in the pleasant old garden where so many generations of Crabapple Blossoms had romped, and giggled, and exchanged their naughty little secrets, he found Miss Primrose, hanging stone-dead from one of her own apple trees.

“Well, as the old song has it, Mumchance” said Master Polydore — “‘Here hangs a maid who died for love.’”

Master Polydore was noted for his dry humor.

A
gibbet had been set up in the great court of the Guildhall, and the next day, at dawn, Endymion Leer and the widow Gibberty were hanged by the neck till they died.

Rumor said that as the Doctor’s face was contorted in its last grimace strange silvery peals of laughter were heard proceeding from the room where long ago Duke Aubrey’s jester had killed himself.

A
bout two hours after he had set out from the farm, Master Nathaniel reached a snug little hollow at the foot of the hills, chosen for their camp by the consignment of the Lud Yeomanry stationed, by his own orders, at the foot of the Debatable Hills.

“Halt!” cried the sentry. And then he dropped his musket in amazement. “Well, I’m blessed if it ain’t his Worship!” he cried. Some six or seven of his mates, who were lounging about the camp, some playing cards, some lying on their backs and staring up at the sky, came hurrying up at the sound of the challenge, and, speechless with astonishment, they stared at Master Nathaniel.

“I have come to look for my son,” he said. “I have been told that … er … he came this way some two or three nights ago. If so, you must have seen him.”

The Yeomen shook their heads. “No, your Worship, we’ve seen no little boy. In fact, all the weeks we’ve been here we’ve not seen a living soul. And if there
are
any folks about they must be as swift as swallows and as silent-footed as cats, and as hard to see — well, as the dead themselves. No, your Worship, little Master Chanticleer has not passed this way.”

Master Nathaniel sighed wearily. “I had a feeling that you would not have seen him,” he said; adding dreamily more to himself than to them: “Who knows? He may have gone by the Milky Way.”

And then it struck him that this was probably the last normal encounter he would ever have with ordinary human beings, and he smiled at them wistfully.

“Well, well,” he said, “you’re having a pleasant holiday, I expect … nothing to do and plenty to eat and drink, eh? Here’s a couple of crowns for you. Send to one of the farms for a pigskin of red wine and drink my health … and my son’s. I’m off on what may prove a very long journey; I suppose this bridle-path will be as good a route as any?”

They stared at him in amazement.

“Please, your Worship, if you’ll excuse me mentioning it, you must be making a mistake,” said the sentry, in a shocked voice. “All the bridle-paths about here lead to nowhere but the Elfin Marches … and beyond.”

“It is for beyond that I am bound,” answered Master Nathaniel curtly. And digging his spurs into his horse’s flanks, he dashed past the horrified Yeomen, and up one of the bridle-paths, as if he would take the Debatable Hills by storm.

For a few seconds they stood staring at one another, with scared, astonished eyes. Then the sentry gave a low whistle.

“He must be powerful fond of that little chap,” he said.

“If the little chap really slipped past without our seeing him, that will be the third Chanticleer to cross the hills. First there was the little missy at the Academy, then the young chap, then the Mayor.”

“Aye, but
they
didn’t do it on an empty stomach — leastways, we know the Crabapple Blossoms didn’t, and if the talk in Lud be true, the little chap had had a taste too of what he oughtn’t,” said another. “But it’s another story to go when you’re in your right mind. Doctor Leer can’t have been in the right when he said all them Magistrates were played out, for it’s the bravest thing has ever been done in Dorimare.”

M
aster Nathaniel, for how long he could not have said, went riding up and up the bridle-path that wound in and out among the foothills, which gradually grew higher and higher. Not a living creature did he meet with — not a goat, not so much as a bird. He began to feel curiously drowsy, as if he were riding in a dream.

Suddenly his consciousness seemed to have gone out of gear, to have missed one of the notches in time or space, for he found himself riding along a high-road, in the midst of a crowd of peasants in holiday attire. Nor did this surprise him — his passive uncritical mood was impervious to surprise.

And yet … what were these people with whom he had mingled? And ordinary troop of holiday-making peasants? At first sight, so they seemed. There were pretty girls, with sunny hair escaping from under red and blue handkerchiefs, and rustic dandies cross-gartered with gay ribands, and old women with quiet, nobly-lined faces — a village community bound for some fair or merry-making.

But why were their eyes so fixed and strange, and why did they walk in
absolute silence?

And then the invisible cicerone of dreams, who is one’s other self, whispered in his ear,
These are they whom men call dead
.

And, like everything else said by that cicerone, these words seemed to throw a flood of light on the situation, to make it immediately normal, even prosaic.

Then the road took a sudden turn, and before them stretched a sort of heath, dotted with the white booths of a fair.

“That is the market of souls,” whispered the invisible cicerone. “Of course, of course,” muttered Master Nathaniel, as if all his life he had known of its existence. And, indeed, he had forgotten all about Ranulph, and thought that to visit this fair had been the one object of his journey.

They crossed the heath, and then they paid their gate-money to a silent old man. And though Master Nathaniel paid with a coin of a metal and design he had never seen before, it was with no sense of a link missing in the chain of cause and effect that he produced it from his pocket.

Outwardly, there was nothing different in this fair from those in Dorimare. Pewterers, shoemakers, silversmiths were displaying their wares; there were cows and sheep and pigs, and refreshment booths and raree-shows. But instead of the cheerful, variegated din that is part of the fun of the every-day fair, over this one there reigned complete silence; for the beasts were as silent as the people. Dead silence, and blazing sun.

Master Nathaniel started off to investigate the booths. In one of them they were flinging darts at a pasteboard target, on which were painted various of the heavenly bodies, with the moon in the center. Anyone whose dart struck the moon was allowed to choose a prize from a heap of glittering miscellaneous objects — golden feathers, shells painted with curious designs, brilliantly-colored pots, fans, silver sheep-bells.

“They’re like Hempie’s new ornaments,” thought Master Nathaniel.

In another booth there was a merry-go-round of silver horses and gilded chariots — both sadly tarnished. It was a primitive affair that moved not by machinery, but by the ceaseless trudging of a live pony — a patient, dingy little beast — tied to it with a rope. And the motion generated a thin, cracked music — tunes that had been popular in Lud-in-the-Mist when Master Nathaniel had been a little boy.

There was “Oh, you Little Charmer with your pretty Puce Bow,” there was “Old Daddy Popinjay fell down upon his Rump,” there was “Why did she cock her Pretty Blue Eye at the Lad with the Silver Buckles?”

But, except for one solitary little boy, the tarnished horses and chariots whirled round without riders; and the pert tunes sounded so thin and wan as to accentuate rather than destroy the silence and atmosphere of melancholy.

In a hopeless, resigned sort of way, the little boy was sobbing. It was as if he felt that he was doomed by some inexorable fate to whirl round forever and ever with the tarnished horses and chariots, the dingy, patient pony, and the old cracked tunes.

“It is not long,” said the invisible cicerone, “since that little boy was stolen from the mortals. He still can weep.”

Master Nathaniel felt a sudden tightening in his throat. Poor little boy! Poor little lonely boy! What was it he reminded him of? Something painful, and very near his heart.

Round and round trudged the pony, round and round went the hidden musical-box, grinding out its thin, blurred tunes.

These vulgar songs, though faded, were not really old. Nevertheless, to Master Nathaniel, they were the oldest songs in existence — sung by the Morning Stars when all the world was young. For they were freighted with his childhood, and brought the memory, or, rather, the tang, the scent, of the solemn innocent world of children, a world sans archness, sans humor, sans vulgarity, where they had sounded as pure and silvery as a shepherd’s pipe. Where the little charmer with her puce bow, and the scheming hussy who had cocked her blue eye had been own sisters to the pretty fantastic ladies of the nursery rhymes, like them walking always to the accompaniment of tinkling bells and living on frangipane and sillabubs of peaches and cream; and whose gestures were stylized and actions preposterous — nonsense actions that needed no explanation. While mothers-in-law, shrewish wives, falling in love — they were just pretty words like brightly-colored beads, strung together without meaning.

As Master Nathaniel listened, he knew that other people would have heard other tunes — whatever tunes through the milkman’s whistle, or the cracked fiddle of a street musician, or the voices of young sparks returning from the tavern at midnight, the Morning Stars may have happened to sing in their own particular infancy.

Round and round whirled the tarnished horses and chariots with their one pathetic little rider; round and round trudged the pony — the little dusty, prosaic pony.

Master Nathaniel rubbed his eyes and looked round; he felt as if after a dive he were slowly rising to the surface of the water. The fair seemed to be coming alive — the silence had changed into a low murmur. And now it was swelling into the mingled din of chattering voices, lowing cows, grunting pigs, blasts from tin trumpets, hoarse voices of cheapjacks praising their wares — all the noises, in short, that one connects with an ordinary fair.

He sauntered away from the merry-go-round and mingled with the crowd. All the stall-keepers were doing a brisk trade, but, above all, the market gardeners —
their
stalls were simply thronged.

But, lo and behold! the fruit that they were selling was of the kind he had seen in the mysterious room of the Guildhall, and concealed inside the case of his grandfather’s clock — it was fairy fruit; but the knowledge brought no sense of moral condemnation.

Suddenly he realized that his throat was parched with thirst and that nothing would slake it but one of these translucent globes.

The wizened old woman who was selling them cried out to him coaxingly, “Three for a penny, sir! Or, for you, I’ll make it four for a penny — for the sake of your hazel eyes, lovey! You’ll find them as grateful as dew to the flowers — four for a penny, pretty master. Don’t say no!”

But he had the curious feeling that one sometimes has in dreams, namely, that he himself was inventing what was happening to him, and could make it end as he chose.

“Yes,” he said to himself, “I am telling myself one of Hempie’s old stories, about a youngest son who has been warned against eating anything offered to him by strangers, so, of course, I shall not touch it.”

So with a curt “No thank’ee, nothing doing today,” he contemptuously turned his back on the old woman and her fruit.

But whose was that shrill voice? Probably that of some cheapjack whose patter or whose wares, to judge from the closely-packed throng hiding him from view, had some particularly attractive quality. The voice sounded vaguely familiar, and, his curiosity aroused, Master Nathaniel joined the crowd of spectators.

He could discern nothing but the top of a red head, but the patter was audible: “Now’s your chance, gentlemen! Beauty doesn’t keep, but rots like apples. Apple-shies! Four points if you hit her on the breast, six if you hit her on the mouth, and he who first gets twenty points wins the maid. Don’t fight shy of the apple-shies! Apples and beauty do not keep — there’s a worm in both. Step up, step up, gentlemen!”

Yes, he had heard that voice before. He began to shoulder his way through the crowd. It proved curiously yielding, and he had no difficulty in reaching the center of attraction, a wooden platform on which gesticulated, grimaced and pirouetted … who but his rascally groom Willy Wisp, dressed as a harlequin. But Willy Wisp was not the strangest part of the spectacle. Out of the platform grew an apple tree, and tied to it was his own daughter, Prunella, while grouped around her in various attitudes of woe were the other Crabapple Blossoms.

Suddenly Master Nathaniel felt convinced that this was not merely a story he was inventing himself, but, as well, it was a dream — a grotesque, illogical, synthesis of scraps of reality, to which he could add what elements he chose.

“What’s happening?” he asked his neighbor.

But he knew the answer — Willy Wisp was selling the girls to the highest bidder, to labor in the fields of gillyflowers.

“But you have no right to do this!” he cried out in a loud angry voice, “no right whatever. This is not Fairyland — it is only the Elfin Marches. They cannot be sold until they have crossed over into Fairyland — I say they
cannot be sold.”

All round him he heard awed whispers, “It is Chanticleer — Chanticleer the dreamer, who has never tasted fruit.”

Then he found himself giving a learned dissertation on the law of property, as observed in the Elfin Marches. The crowd listened to him in respectful silence. Even Willy Wisp was listening, and the Crabapple Blossoms gazed at him with inexpressible gratitude.

With what seemed to him a superbly eloquent peroration he brought his discourse to an end. Prunella stretched out her arms to him, crying, “Father, your have saved us! You and the Law.”

“You and the Law! You and the Law!” echoed the other Crabapple Blossoms.

“Chanticleer and the Law! Chanticleer and the Law!” shouted the crowd.

T
he fair had vanished. He was in a strange town, and was one of a great crowd of people all hurrying in the same direction.

“They are looking for the bleeding corpse,” whispered the invisible cicerone, and the words filled Master Nathaniel with an unspeakable horror.

Then the crowd vanished, leaving him alone in a street as silent as the grave. He pressed forward, for he knew that he was looking for something; but what it was he had forgotten. At every street corner he came on a dead man, guarded by a stone beggar with a face like the herm in the Gibberty’s orchard. He was almost choked by the horror of it. The terror became articulate: “Supposing one of the corpses should turn out to be that little lonely boy on the merry-go-round!”