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.

he had been an exquisite poet, and such of his songs as had come down were as fresh as flowers and as lonely as the cuckoo’s cry.

The men of the revolution, he said, had substituted law for fairy fruit. But whereas only the reigning Duke and his priests had been allowed to partake of the fruit, the law was given freely to rich and poor alike. Again, fairy was delusion, so was the law. At any rate, it was a sort of magic, molding reality into any shape it chose. But, whereas fairy magic and delusion were for the cozening and robbing of man, the magic of the law was to his intention and for his welfare.

But they were as different as possible from the toys of that older civilization that littered the attics of the Chanticleers. About these there had been something tragic and a little sinister; while all the manifestations of the modern civilization were like fire-light — fantastic, but homely.

There is nothing so dumb as a tree in full leaf.

Master Nathaniel’s heart suddenly contracted; but he tried not to understand.

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

And the man who remains calm inevitably takes command of a situation.

Though we laugh at old songs and old yarns, nevertheless, they are the yarn with which we weave our picture of the world.”

“Well, it was you dragged the words from my lips, and though you are the Mayor and the Lord High Seneschal, you can’t come lording it over my thoughts … I’ve a right to them!” cried Hempie, indignantly.

But Mother Tibbs, the half-crazy old washerwoman, who, in spite of her forty summers danced more lightly than any maiden,

“Thrice blessed little herb!” he began in a whimsical voice. “Herb o’ grease, with thy waxen stem and blossom of flame! Thou art more potent against spells and terrors and the invisible menace than fennel or dittany or rue. Hail! antidote to the deadly nightshade! Blossoming in the darkness, thy virtues are heartease and quiet sleep. Sick people bless thee, and women in travail, and people with haunted minds, and all children.”

And there’s no love lost between her and her granddaughter, her step-granddaughter I should say, her who’s called Miss Hazel,

Each generation had its own jokes and its own secrets; but they were always on the same pattern; just as when one of the china cups got broken, it was replaced by another exactly like it, with the same painted border of squills and ivy.

“Professor Wisp is going to teach you very old and aristocratic dances, my dear,” said Miss Primrose reprovingly. “Dances such as were danced at the court of Duke Aubrey — were they not, Professor Wisp?”

Nasty things have a way of not always staying at the bottom, you know — stir the pond and they rise to the top.

Then Endymion Leer started applying his famous balm — a balm that varied with each patient that required it.

girls will be girls.

So much did he dislike it that he even avoided the words that resembled it in sound, and had made Dame Marigold dismiss a scullery-maid, merely because her name happened to be Kirstie.

For the Fields of Grammary gave him a foretaste of death — the state that will turn one into a sort of object of art (that is to say if one is remembered by posterity) with all one’s deeds and passions simplified, frozen into beauty; an absolutely silent thing that people gaze at, and that cannot in its turn gaze back at them.

“Here lies Hyacinth Quirkscuttle, weaver, who stretched his life as he was wont to do the list of his cloth far beyond its natural limits, and, to the great regret of his family, died at the age of xcix.”

“Aye, and why not?” cried Hempie, undaunted. “I was country-bred, Master Nat, and I learned not to mind the smell of a fox or of a civet cat … or of a Fairy. They’re mischievous creatures, I daresay, and best left alone. But though we can’t always pick and choose our neighbors, neighborliness is a virtue all the same. For my part, I’d never have chosen the Fairies for my neighbors — but they were chosen for me. And we must just make the best of them.”

It’s just because we’re all so scared of our neighbors that we get bamboozled by them.

‘There’s no clock like the sun and no calendar like the stars.’ And why? Because it gets one used to the look of Time.

Master Ambrose hummed and hawed, and talked about women’s reasoning, and rash conclusions. But perhaps he was more impressed, really, than he chose to let Master Nathaniel see.

“It’s the Law, Ambrose — the homoeopathic antidote that our forefathers discovered to delusion.

“You seem to consider that in what you call the world-in-law one does as one likes with facts — launch a new legal fiction, then, according to which, for your own particular convenience, Endymion Leer is for the future Christopher Pugwalker.”