Lud-In-The-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

Ranulph had now stopped sobbing, and was lying there quite still. ‘The whole of me seems to have got inside my head, and to hurt . . . just like it all gets inside a tooth when one has toothache,’ he said wearily.

He had no need now to ask his son for explanations. He knew so well both that sense of emptiness, that drawing in of the senses (like the antennæ of some creature when danger is no longer imminent, but there), so that the physical world vanishes, while you yourself at once swell out to fill its place, and at the same time shrink to a millionth part of your former bulk, turning into a mere organ of suffering without thought and without emotions; he knew also that other phase, when one seems to be flying from days and months, like a stag from its hunters – like the fugitives, on the old tapestry, from the moon. But when it is another person who is suffering in this way, in spite of one’s pity, how trivial it all seems! How certain one is of being able to expel the agony with reasoning and persuasion!

But – and in this I am in no way subscribing to a certain antiquary of ill odour – there is not a single homely thing that, looked at from a certain angle, does not become fairy. Think of the Dapple, or the Dawl, when they roll the sunset towards the east. Think of an autumn wood, or a hawthorn in May. A hawthorn in May – there’s a miracle for you! Who would ever have dreamed that that gnarled stumpy old tree had the power to do that? Well, all these things are familiar sights, but what should we think if never having seen them we read a description of them, or saw them for the first time? A golden river! Flaming trees! Trees that suddenly break into flower! For all we know, it may be Dorimare that is Fairyland to the people across the Debatable Hills.’

The malady you suffer from should, I think, be called “life-sickness”. You are, so to speak, a bad sailor, and the motion of life makes you brain-sick.

He continued to receive cheerful letters from Ranulph himself and good accounts of him from Luke Hempen, and gradually his panic turned into a sort of lethargic nightmare of fatalism, which seemed to free him from the necessity of taking action. It was as if the future were a treacly adhesive fluid that had been spilt all over the present, so that everything he touched made his fingers too sticky to be of the slightest use.

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

I was country-bred, and as my old granny used to say, “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. There’s no bogey from over the hills that scares one like Time. But when one’s been used an one’s life to seeing him naked, as it were, instead of shut up in a clock, like he is in Lud, one learns that he is as quiet and peaceful as an old ox dragging the plough. And to watch Time teaches one to sing. They say the fruit from over the hills makes one sing. I’ve never tasted so much as a sherd of it, but for all that I can sing.’

Pride and resentment are not indigenous in 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.

‘But you remember what my father said about the Law being man’s substitute for fairy fruit? 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.’

From time to time a tiny yellow butterfly would flit past, like a little yellow leaf shed by one of the birches; and now and then one of the bleeding, tortured looking liege-oaks would drop an acorn, with a little flop – just to remind you, as it were, that it was leading its own serene, vegetable life, oblivious of the agony ascribed to it by the fevered fancy of man.

their smocks provided the touch of blue that turns a picture into a story;

the farmer Gibberty had once been a real living man, like himself. And so had millions of others, whose names he had never heard. And one day he himself would be a prisoner, confined between the walls of other people’s memory. And then he would cease even to be that, and become nothing but a few words cut in stone. What would these words be, he wondered.

‘But the other tribe – the passionate, tragic, rootless tree – man? Alas! he is a creature whose highest privileges are a curse. In his mouth is ever the bitter-sweet taste of life and death, unknown to the trees. Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses, memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he can never tell. For every man worthy of the name is an initiate; but each one into different Mysteries. And some walk among their fellows with the pitying, slightly scornful smile, of an adept among catechumens. And some are confiding and garrulous, and would so willingly communicate their own unique secret – in vain! For though they shout it in the market-place, or whisper it in music and poetry, what they say is never the same as what they know, and they are like ghosts charged with a message of tremendous import who can only trail their chains and gibber. ‘Such then are the two tribes. Citizens of Lud-in-the-Mist, to which do you belong? To neither; for you are not serene, majestic, and silent, nor are you restless, passionate, and tragic. ‘I could not turn you into trees; but I had hoped to turn you into men.

‘Well, Nat,’ he said, ‘I think I’ve had a lesson in humility. I used to have as good an opinion of myself as most men, I think, but now I’ve learned I’m a very ordinary sort of fellow, made of very inferior clay to you and my Moonlove – all the things that you know at first hand I can only take on faith.’ ‘Suppose, Ambrose, that what we know at first hand is only this – that there is nothing to know?’

And this is but another proof that the Written Word is a Fairy, as mocking and elusive as Willy Wisp, speaking lying words to us in a feigned voice. So let all readers of books take warning!