Lud-in-the-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

And this incorrigible optimist about facts was the same man who walked in daily terror of the unknown. But perhaps the one state of mind was the outcome of the other.

“But I’ll ask you to listen to the tune before you begin to dance it,” he went on. “Now then, Portunus!” “Why! It’s just ‘Columbine’ over again …” began Prunella scornfully. But the words froze on her lips, and she stood spellbound and frightened. It was ‘Columbine,’ but with a difference. For, since they had last heard it, the tune might have died, and wandered in strange places, to come back to earth, an angry ghost.

But her only answer was to look at him in agonized terror, and then to moan, “The horror of midday!” Dame Jessamine sat up with a start and rubbing her eyes exclaimed, “Dear me, I believe I was napping. But … Moonlove! Ambrose! What’s happening?” But before Master Ambrose could answer, Moonlove gave three blood-curdling screams, and shrieked out, “Horror! Horror! The tune that never stops! Break the fiddle! Break the fiddle! Oh, Father, quietly, on tiptoe behind him, cut the strings. Cut the strings and let me out, I want the dark.”

And lads who were taking their sweethearts for a row on the Dapple would look at them with unseeing eyes, while the maidens gazed into the distance and trailed their hands absently in the water. Even the smithy, with its group of loungers at its open door, watching the swing and fall of the smith’s hammer and the lurid red light illuminating his face, might have been no more than a tent at a fair where holiday makers were watching a lion tamer or the feats of a professional strong man; for at that desultory hour the play of muscles, the bending of resisting things to a human will, the taming of fire, a creature more beautiful and dangerous than any lion, seemed merely an entertaining spectacle that served no useful purpose.

It was as if he had suddenly seen something white and straight — a road or a river — cutting through a somber, moonlit landscape. And the straight, white thing was his own will to action.

Dame Marigold was one of those women who, though they walk blindfold through the fields and woods, if you place them between four walls have eyes as sharp as a naturalist’s for the objects that surround them.

They do say as what those old Dukes were a wild crew, and it might have suited their book very well to have a secret way out of their place!”

It made the past very real, and threw a friendly, humorous light upon the dead, to come upon, when turning those yellow parchment pages, some personal touch of the old scribe’s, such as a sententious or facetious insertion of his own — for instance, “The Law bides her Time, but my Dinner doesn’t!” or the caricature in the margin of some forgotten judge. It was just as if one of the grotesque plaster heads on the old houses were to give you, suddenly, a sly wink.

A house with old furniture has no need of guests to be haunted. As we have seen, Master Nathaniel was very sensitive to the silent things — stars, houses, trees; and often in his pipe-room, after the candles had been lit, he would sit staring at the bookshelves, the chairs, his father’s portrait — even at his red umbrella standing up in the corner, with as great a sense of awe as if he had been a star-gazer. But that night, the brooding invisible presences of the carved panels, the storied tapestries, affected even the hardheaded Master Ambrose.

If only they would speak, or begin to move about — those silent rooted things! It was like walking through a wood by moonlight.

But, depicted in these brilliant hues, they were like the ashes of the past, suddenly, under one’s very eyes, breaking into flame. Heigh-presto! The men and women of a vanished age, noisy, gaudy, dominant, are flooding the streets, and driving the living before them like dead leaves.

A slight shadow passed across her clear eyes. Then she tossed her head with the noble gesture of a wild creature, and cried, “No! No! As long as my heart dances my feet will too. And nobody will grow old when the Duke comes back.”

“If you’ll promise not to cut the fiddle strings I’ll show you the prettiest sight in the world — the sturdy dead lads in the Fields of Grammary hoisting their own coffins on their shoulders, and tripping it over the daisies. Come!”

The dew, like lunar daisies, lay thickly on the grassy graves. The marble statues of the departed seemed to flicker into smiles under the rays of the full moon; and, not far from the sycamore, two men were digging up a newly-made grave.

But Master Nathaniel merely gave an absent smile; there was something vaguely reminiscent in that idea of the dead bleeding — something he had recently read or heard; but, for the moment, he could not remember where.

Once the Senators had donned their robes of office and taken their places in the magnificent room reserved for their councils, their whole personality was wont suddenly to alter, and they would cease to be genial, easy-going merchants who had known each other all their lives and become grave, formal — even hierophantic, in manner; while abandoning the careless colloquial diction of every day, they would adopt the language of their forefathers, forged in more strenuous and poetic days than the present.

It is for us, then, as fathers as well as citizens, once and for all to uproot this menace, the roots of which are in the past, the branches of which cast their shadow on the future.

Master Nathaniel sat watching the scene with an eye so cold and aloof that the Eye of the Law itself could surely not have been colder. What power had delusion or legal fictions against the mysterious impetus propelling him along the straight white road that led he knew not whither?

There was a certain solemnity in Master Nathaniel’s voice as he replied, “It’s the Law, Ambrose — the homoeopathic antidote that our forefathers discovered to delusion.

Fairy things are all of them supposed to be shadowy cheats — delusion. But man can’t live without delusion, so he creates for himself another form of delusion — the world-in-law, subject to no other law but the will of man, where man juggles with facts to his heart’s content, and says, ‘If I choose I shall make a man old enough to be my father my son, and if I choose I shall turn fruit into silk and black into white, for this is the world I have made myself, and here I am master.’ And he creates a monster to inhabit it — the man-in-law, who is like a mechanical toy and always behaves exactly as he is expected to behave, and is no more like you and me than are the fairies.”

“There’s no more foolish proverb than the one which says that dead men tell no tales. To help dead men to find their tongues is one of the chief uses of the Law.”

And then, when he had finished his supper, he would get out his collection of patibulary treasures, and over a bowl of negus finger lovingly the various bits of gallows rope, the blood-stained glove of a murdered strumpet, the piece of amber worn as a charm by a notorious brigand chief, and gloat over the stealthy steps of his pet tiger, the Law.

There was something sinister in the silent language in which dead men told their tales — with sly malice embroidering them on old maids’ canvas work, hiding them away in ancient books, written long before they were born;

It was the hour when night-watchers begin to idealize their bed, and, with Sancho Panza, to bless the man who invented it.

It was not so much a modification of the darkness, as a sigh of relief, a slight relaxing of tension, so that one felt, rather than saw, that the night had suddenly lost a shade of its density … ah! yes; there! between these two shoulders of the hills she is bleeding to death.

Then the greyness became filtered with a delicate sea-green; and next, one realized that the grey-green belonged to the foliage, against which the petals were beginning to show white — and then pink, or yellow, or blue; but a yellow like that of primroses, a blue like that of certain wild periwinkles, colors so elusive that one suspects them to be due to some passing accident of light, and that, were one to pick the flower, it would prove to be pure white.

But had we kept one eye on the sky we should have noticed that a star was quenched with every flower that reappeared on earth.

Then a cock crowed, and another answered it, and then another — a ghostly sound, which, surely, did not belong to the smiling, triumphant earth, but rather to one of those distant dying stars.

It was one of those mysterious autumn days that are intensely bright though the sun is hidden; and when one looked at these lambent trees one could almost fancy them the source of the light flooding the valley.

For he realized at last that the spiritual balm he had always found in silent things was simply the assurance that the passions and agonies of man were without meaning, roots, or duration — no more part of the permanent background of the world than the curls of blue smoke that from time to time were wafted through the valley from the autumn bonfires of weeds and rubbish, and that he could see winding like blue wraiths in and out of the foliage of the trees.

But she crept up to the attic and aroused one of the unmarried laborers — who, according to the old custom, slept in their master’s house — and bade him ride into Swan and bring the blacksmith back with him on important business concerning the law.

Her face turned as pale as death, and in a low voice of horror she cried, “Long ago I guessed who he was, and feared that he might prove my undoing.” Then her voice grew shrill with terror and her eyes became fixed, as if seeing some hideous vision, “The Silent People!” she screamed. “The dumb who speak! The bound who strike! I cherished and fed old Portunus like a tame bird. But what do the dead know of kindness?”

The words acted like a spell. It was as if Endymion Leer’s previous sly, ironical, bird-like personality slipped from him like a mask, revealing another soul, at once more formidable and more tragic. For a few seconds he stood white and silent, and then he cried out in a terrible voice: “Treachery! Treachery! The Silent People have betrayed me! It is ill serving a perfidious master!”

And he swept the hall with his usual impudent appraising glance, as if to say, “Linsey-woolsey, linsey-woolsey! But one must make the best of a poor material.”

As for the widow, her handsome passionate face was deadly pale and emptied of all expression; this gave her a sort of tragic sinister beauty, reminiscent of the faces of the funereal statues in the Fields of Grammary.

He had never before seen them at their work, and he was always a death-fancier — tasting, and smelling, and fingering death, like a farmer does samples of grain at market.

For every tree can be a gallows, and every man has a neck to hang.”

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

First came the sounds of wild sweet music, then the tramp of a myriad feet, and then, like hosts of leaves blown on the wind, the invading army came pouring into the town. As he watched, Master Ambrose remembered the transfigured tapestry in the Guildhall, and the sense they had had of noisy, gaudy, dominant dreams flooding the streets and scattering reality in their wake.