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.”
Master 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.
Why did she cock her pretty blue eye
At the lad with the silver buckles,
When the penniless lad who was handsome and spry
Got nought but a rap on his knuckles?
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.
Oh, you little charmer with your pretty puce bow,
I’ll tell mamma if you carry on so!
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 fr
uit 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.
The 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!”
This possibility filled him with an indescribable anguish.
Suddenly he remembered about Ranulph. Ranulph had gone to the country from which there is no return.
But he was going to follow him there and fetch him back. Nothing would stop him — he would push, if necessary, through fold after fold of dreams until he reached their heart.
He bent down and touched one of the corpses. It was warm, and it moved. As he touched it he realized that he had incurred the danger of contamination from some mysterious disease.
“But it isn’t real, it isn’t real,” he muttered. “I’m inventing it all myself. And so, whatever happens, I shan’t mind, because it isn’t real.”
It was growing dark. He knew that he was being followed by one of the stone beggars, who had turned into a four-footed animal called Portunus. In one sense the animal was a protection, in another a menace, and he knew that in summoning him he must be very careful to use the correct ritual formulary.
He had reached a square, on one side of which was a huge building with a domed roof. Light streamed from it through a great window of stained glass, on which was depicted a blue warrior fighting with a red dragon … no, it was not a stained glass window but merely the reflection on the white walls of the building from a house in complete darkness in the opposite side of the square, inhabited by creatures made of red lacquer. He knew that they were expecting him to call, because they believed that he was courting one of them.
“What else could bring him here save all this lovely spawn?” said a voice at his elbow.
He looked round — suddenly the streets were pullulating with strange semi-human fauna: tiny green men, the wax figures of his parents from Hempie’s chimneypiece, grimacing greybeards with lovely children gamboling round them dressed in beetles’ shards.
Now they were dancing, some slow old-fashioned dance … in and out, in and out. Why, they were only figures on a piece of tapestry flapping in the wind!
Once more he felt his horse beneath him. But what were these little pattering footsteps behind him? He turned uneasily in his saddle, to discover that it was nothing but a gust of wind rustling a little eddy of dead leaves.
The town and its strange fauna had vanished, and once more he was riding up the bridle-path; but now it was night.
Chapter XXVIII
“By the Sun, Moon and Stars and the Golden Apples of the West”
Though it was a relief to have returned to the fresh air of reality, Master Nathaniel was frightened. He realized that he was alone at dead of night in the Elfin Marches. And the moon kept playing tricks on him, turning trees and boulders into goblins and wild beasts; cracking her jokes, true humorist that she was, with a solemn impassive face. But, how was this? She was a waxing moon, and almost full, while the night before — or what he supposed was the night before — she had been a half moon on the wane.
Had he left time behind him in Dorimare?
Then suddenly, like some winged monster rushing from its lair, there sprang up a mighty wind. The pines creaked and rustled and bent beneath its onslaught, the grasses whistled, the clouds flocked together and covered the face of the moon.
Several times he was nearly lifted from his saddle. He drew his cloak closely round him, and longed, with an unspeakable longing, for his warm bed in Lud; and it flashed into his mind that what he had so often imagined in that bed, to enhance his sense of well-being, was now actually occurring — he was tired, he was cold, and the wind was finding the fissures in his doublet.
Suddenly, as if some hero had slain the monster, the wi
nd died down, the moon sailed clear of the clouds, and the pines straightened themselves and once more stood at attention, silent and motionless. In spite of this, his horse grew strangely restive, rearing and jibbing, as if something was standing before it in the path that frightened it; and in vain Master Nathaniel tried to quiet and sooth it.
Then it shuddered all over and fell heavily to the ground.
Fortunately, Master Nathaniel was thrown clear, and was not hurt, beyond the inevitable bruises entailed by the fall of a man of his weight. He struggled to his feet and hurried to his horse. It was stone dead.
For some time he sat beside it … his last link with Lud and familiar things; as yet too depressed in mind and aching in body to continue his journey on foot.
But what were those sudden strains of piercingly sweet music, and from what strange instrument did they proceed? They were too impersonal for a fiddle, too passionate for a flute, and much too sweet for any pipes or timbrels. It must be a human — or superhuman — voice, for now he was beginning to distinguish the words.
“There are windfalls of dreams, there’s a wolf in the stars,
And Life is a nymph who will never be thine,
With lily, germander, and sops in wine.
With sweet-brier,
And bonfire,
And strawberry-wire,
And columbine.”
The voice stopped, and Master Nathaniel buried his face in his hands and sobbed as if his heart would break.
In this magically sweet music once more he had heard the Note. It held, this time, no menace as to things to come; but it aroused in his breast an agonizing tumult of remorse for having allowed something to escape that he would never, never recapture. It was as if he had left his beloved with harsh words, and had returned to find her dead.