Lud-In-The-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

it is never safe to classify the souls of one’s neighbours; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a fool. You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait – a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished.

Among the Chanticleers’ lumber there was also no lack of those delicate, sophisticated toys – fans, porcelain cups, engraved seals – that, when the civilisation that played with them is dead, become pathetic and appealing, just as tunes once gay inevitably become plaintive when the generation that first sang them has turned to dust.

In the eye of the law, neither Fairyland nor fairy things existed. But then, as Master Josiah had pointed out, the law plays fast and loose with reality – and no one really believes it.

Moreover, he discovered traces of the Fairies’ language in the oaths of the Dorimarites and in some of their names. And, to a stranger, it certainly produced an odd impression to hear such high-flown oaths as; by the Sun, Moon and Stars; by the Golden Apples of the West; by the Harvest of Souls; by the White Ladies of the Fields; by the Milky Way, come tumbling out in the same breath with such homely expletives as Busty Bridget; Toasted Cheese; Suffering Cats; by my Great-Aunt’s Rump; or to find names like Dreamsweet, Ambrose, Moonlove, wedded to such grotesque surnames as Baldbreech, Fliperarde, or Pyepowders.

When finally the baffled Dame Marigold got up to go, the old woman cried shrilly: ‘Now, ma’am, remember, not a word of this to the master! He was never one that could stand being worried. He’s like his father in that. My old mistress used often to say to me, “Now, Polly, we won’t tell the master. He can’t stand worry.” Aye, all the Chanticleers are wonderful sensitive.’ And the unexpressed converse of this last statement was, ‘All the Vigils, on the other hand, have the hides of buffaloes.’

Then, Master Ambrose Honeysuckle was asked whether the Honeysuckles considered a Moongrass cheese to be a cheese; the point being that Master Ambrose had an exaggerated sense of the importance of his own family, and once in the law-courts, when the question arose as to whether a dragon (there were still a few harmless, effete dragons lurking in caves in out-of-the-way parts of Dorimare) were a bird or a reptile, he had said, with an air of finality, ‘The Honeysuckles have always considered them to be reptiles’.

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

Then, the trees, after their long silence, began to talk again, in yellow and red.

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

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.

He had inherited from his father a fine legal library; and the book-shelves in his pipe-room were packed with volumes bound in vellum and old calf of edicts, codes, and trials, Some of them belonged to the days before printing had been introduced into Dorimare, and were written in the crabbed hand of old town-clerks. 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.

‘By the Sun, Moon and Stars!’ exclaimed Master Nathaniel excitedly, ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if you were right, Marigold. You’ve got a head on your shoulders with something in it more useful than porridge!’

As he read, the colours of his mental landscape were gradually modified, as the colours of a real landscape are modified according to the position of the sun.

Once there, he had no difficulty in finding Mistress Ivy’s little shop, and she herself was sitting behind the counter. She was a comely, apple-cheeked woman of middle age, who looked as if she would be more in her element among cows and meadows than in a stony little shop, redolent of the various necessities and luxuries of a village community. She seemed of a cheerful, chatty disposition, and Master Nathaniel punctuated his various purchases with quips and cranks and friendly questions. By the time she had weighed him out two ounces of snuff and done them up into a neat little paper poke she had told him that her maiden name had been Gibberty, and that her husband had been a ship’s captain, and she had lived till his death in the seaport town. By the time she had provided him with a quarter of lollipops, he knew that she much preferred a country life to trade. And by the time a woollen muffler had been admired, purchased and done up in a parcel, she had informed him that she would have liked to have settled in the neighbourhood of her old home, but – there were reasons.

Could you swear to him in court?’ cried Master Nathaniel eagerly. Mistress Ivy looked puzzled. ‘What good would it do to swear at him?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘I must say I never held with foul language in a woman’s mouth, nor did my poor Peppercorn – for all that he was a sailor.’

Suddenly Ranulph broke the silence with the startling question, ‘How far is it from here to Fairyland?’ The little boys nudged one another and again began to snigger behind their hands. ‘For shame, Master Ranulph!’ cried Luke indignantly, ‘talking like that before youngsters!’ ‘But I want to know!’ said Ranulph petulantly. ‘Tell what your old granny used to say, Dorian,’ giggled Toby. And Dorian was finally persuaded to repeat the old saying: ‘A thousand leagues by the great West Road and ten by the Milky Way.’

Again they lapsed into silence. And all round them, subject to blind taciturn laws, and heedless of man, myriads of things were happening, in the grass, in the trees, in the sky.

It was the hour when night-watchers begin to idealize their bed,

But, as everybody knows, legal rights can be but weaklings – puny little child princes, cowed by their bastard uncles, Precedent and Seniority.

he struck off the high road into the valley – and very lovely it was looking in its autumn colouring. The vintage was over, and the vines were now golden and red. Some of the narrow oblong leaves of the wild cherry had kept their bottle-green, while others, growing on the same twig, had turned to salmon-pink, and the mulberries alternated between canary-yellow and grass-green. The mountain ash had turned a fiery rose (more lovely, even, than had been its scarlet berries) and often an olive grew beside it, as if ready, lovingly, to quench its fire in its own tender grey.

Yes, 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.

The moon was on the wane, but still sufficiently full to give a good light. She was, indeed, an orchard thief, for no fruit being left to rob, she had robbed the leaves of all their colour. ‘Poor old moon!’ chuckled Master Nathaniel, who was now in the highest of spirits, ‘always filching colours with which to paint her own pale face, and all in vain!

‘You . . . you didn’t mean what you said to the widow, sir, about . . . about going . . . yonder?’ asked Peter Pease in an awed voice. Suddenly the fire was rekindled in Master Nathaniel’s eyes, and he cried fiercely, ‘Aye, yonder, and beyond yonder, if need be . . . till I find my son.’

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 humour, sans vulgarity, where they had sounded as pure and silvery as a shepherd’s pipe.

‘All of us, that’s to say those of us who had parts to play, seemed to be living each others’ dreams or dreaming each others’ lives, whichever way you choose to put it, and the most incongruous things began to rhyme – apples and bleeding corpses and trees and ghosts. Yes, all our dreams got entangled.

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! And with this final exhortation this book shall close.