Lud-in-the-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

What kind of beings peopled the earth four or five centuries ago, what strange lore they had acquired, and what were their sinister doings, we shall never know. Our ancestors keep their secret well.

But after he had heard the Note a more stay-at-home and steady young man could not have been found in Lud-in-the-Mist. For it had generated in him what one can only call a wistful yearning after the prosaic things he already possessed. It was as if he thought he had already lost what he was actually holding in his hands.

Hence, at times, he would gaze on the present with the agonizing tenderness of one who gazes on the past:

The country people, indeed, did not always clearly distinguish between the Fairies and the dead. They called them both the “Silent People”; and the Milky Way they thought was the path along which the dead were carried to Fairyland.

Was it possible that Ranulph, too, was a real person, a person inside whose mind things happened? He had thought that he himself was the only real person in a field of human flowers. For Master Nathaniel that was a moment of surprise, triumph, tenderness, alarm.

“Life and death! Life and death! They are the dyes in which I work. Are my hands stained?”

Houses counted among the Silent People. Walls have ears, but no tongue. Houses, trees, the dead — they tell no tales.

It was as quiet as trees and pictures and the past, as soothing as the drip of water, as peaceful as the lowing of cows returning to the byre at sunset.

Pride and resentment are not indigenous to the human heart; and perhaps it is due to the gardener’s innate love of the exotic that we take such pains to make them thrive.

Mere suspicions are hard to communicate. They are rather like the wines that will not travel, and have to be drunk on the spot.