Lud-in-the-Mist (5 page)

Master Nathaniel began to pace up and down the room, his fists clenched, muttering imprecations against inefficient women and the overwhelming worries of a family man — in his need for a victim on whom to vent his rage, actually feeling angry with Dame Marigold for having married him and let him in for all this fuss and to-do. And his shadowy fears were more than usually clamorous.

Dame Marigold, as she sat watching him, felt that he was rather like a cockchafer that had just flounced in through the open window, and, with a small, smacking sound, was bouncing itself backwards and forwards against its own shadow on the ceiling — a shadow that looked like a big, black velvety moth. But it was its clumsiness, and blundering ineffectualness that reminded her of Master Nathaniel; not the fact that it was banging itself against the shadow.

Up and down marched Master Nathaniel, backwards and forwards bounced the cockchafer, hither and thither flitted its soft, dainty shadow. Then, suddenly, straight as a die, the cockchafer came tumbling down from the ceiling and, at the same time, Master Nathaniel — calling over his shoulder, “I must go up and see that boy” — dashed from the room.

He found Ranulph in bed, sobbing his heart out, and as he looked at the piteous little figure he felt his anger evaporating. He laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder and said not unkindly: “Come, my son; crying won’t mend matters. You’ll write an apology to Cousin Ambrose, and Uncle Polydore, and all the rest of them, tomorrow; and then — well, we’ll try to forget about it. We’re none of us quite responsible for what we say when we’re out of sorts … and I gather from your mother you’ve not been feeling quite the thing these past weeks.”

“It was something
made
me say it!” sobbed Ranulph.

“Well, that’s a nice, easy way of getting out of it,” said Master Nathaniel more sternly. “No, no, Ranulph, there’s no excuse for behavior like that, none whatever. By the Harvest of Souls!” and his voice became indignant, “Where did you pick up such ideas and such expressions?”

“But they’re true! They’re true!” screamed Ranulph.

“I’m not going into the question of whether they’re
true
or not. All I know is that they’re not the things talked about by ladies and gentlemen. Such language has never before been heard under my roof, and I trust it never will be again … you understand?”

Ranulph groaned, and Master Nathaniel added in a kinder voice, “Well, we’ll say no more about it. And now what’s all this I hear from your mother about your being out of sorts, eh?”

But Ranulph’s sobs redoubled. “I want to get
away!
to get
away!”
he moaned.

“Away? Away from where?” and there was a touch of impatience in Master Nathaniel’s voice.

“From … from things
happening
,” sobbed Ranulph.

Master Nathaniel’s heart suddenly contracted; but he tried not to understand. “Things happening?” he said in a voice that he endeavored to make jocular. “I don’t think anything very much happens in Lud, does it?”

“All
the things,” moaned Ranulph, “summer and winter, and days and nights.
All
the things!”

Master Nathaniel had a sudden vision of Lud and the surrounding country, motionless and soundless, as it appeared from the Fields of Grammary.

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.

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.

Master Nathaniel looked at him. The fixed stare, the slightly-open mouth, the rigid motionless body, fettered by a misery too profound for restlessness — how well he knew the state of mind these things expressed! But there must surely be relief in thus allowing the mood to mould the body’s attitude to its own shape.

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 antennae 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!

It was in a slightly husky voice that, laying his hand on Ranulph’s, he said, “Come, my son, this won’t do.” And then, with a twinkle, he added, “Chivvy the black rooks away from the corn.”

Ranulph gave a little shrill laugh. “There are no black rooks — all the birds are golden,” he cried.

Master Nathaniel frowned — with
that
sort of thing he had no patience. But he determined to ignore it, and to keep to the aspect of the case for which he had real sympathy. “Come, my son!” he said, in a tenderly rallying voice. “Tell yourself that tomorrow it will all be gone. Why, you don’t think you’re the only one, do you? We all feel like that at times, but we don’t let ourselves be beaten by it, and mope and pine and hang our heads. We stick a smile on our faces and go about our business.”

Master Nathaniel, as he spoke, swelled with complacency. He had never realized it before, but really it was rather fine the way he had suffered in silence, all these years!

But Ranulph had sat up in bed, and was looking at him with a strange little smile.

“I’m not the same as you, father,” he said quietly. And then once more he was shaken by great sobs, and screamed out in a voice of anguish, “I have eaten fairy fruit!”

At these terrible words Master Nathaniel stood for a moment dizzy with horror; then he lost his head. He rushed out on to the landing, calling for Dame Marigold at the top of his voice.

“Marigold! Marigold!
Marigold!”

Dame Marigold came hurrying up the stairs, calling out in a frightened voice, “What is it, Nat? Oh, dear! What
is
it?”

“By the Harvest of Souls, hurry!
Hurry!
Here’s the boy saying he’s been eating … the stuff we don’t mention. Suffering cats! I’ll go mad!”

Dame Marigold fluttered down on Ranulph like a plump dove.

But her voice had none of the husky tenderness of a dove as she cried, “Oh, Ranulph! You naughty boy! Oh, dear, this is
frightful!
Nat! Nat! What are we to do?”

Ranulph shrank away from her, and cast an imploring look towards his father. Whereupon Master Nathaniel took her roughly by the shoulders and pushed her out of the room, saying, “If
that
is all you can say, you’d better leave the boy to me.”

And Dame Marigold, as she went down the stairs, terrified, contemptuous, sick at heart, was feeling every inch a Vigil, and muttering angrily to herself, “Oh, these
Chanticleers!”

We are not yet civilized enough for exogamy; and, when anything seriously goes wrong, married couples are apt to lay all the blame at its door.

Well, it would seem that the worst disgrace that could befall a family of Dorimare had come to the Chanticleers. But Master Nathaniel was no longer angry with Ranulph. What would it serve to be angry? Besides, there was this new tenderness flooding his heart, and he could not but yield to it.

Bit by bit he got the whole story from the boy. It would seem that some months ago a wild, mischievous lad called Willy Wisp who, for a short time, had worked in Master Nathaniel’s stables, had given Ranulph one sherd of a fruit he had never seen before. When Ranulph had eaten it, Willy Wisp had gone off into peal upon peal of mocking laughter, crying out, “Ah, little master, what you’ve just eaten is FAIRY FRUIT, and you’ll never be the same again … ho, ho, hoh!”

At these words Ranulph had been overwhelmed with horror and shame: “But now I nearly always forget to be ashamed,” he said. “All that seems to matter now is to get away … where there are shadows and quiet … and where I can get … more
fruit.”

Master Nathaniel sighed heavily. But he said nothing; he only stroked the small, hot hand he was holding in his own.

“And once,” went on Ranulph, sitting up in bed, his cheeks flushed, his eyes bright and feverish, “in the garden in full daylight I saw them dancing — the Silent People, I mean — and their leader was a man in green, and he called out to me, ‘Hail, young Chanticleer! Some day I’ll send my piper for you, and you will up and follow him!’ And I often see his shadow in the garden, but it’s not like our shadows, it’s a bright light that flickers over the lawn. And I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll
go
, I’ll
go
, some day, I know I shall!” and his voice was frightened and, at the same time, triumphant.

“Hush, hush, my son!” said Master Nathaniel soothingly, “I don’t think we’ll let you go.” But his heart felt like lead.

“And ever since … since I ate … the
fruit,”
went on Ranulph, “everything has frightened me … at least, not only since then, because it did before too, but it’s much worse now. Like that cheese tonight … anything can suddenly seem queer or terrible. But since … since I ate that fruit I sometimes seem to see the reason why they’re terrible. Just as I did tonight over the cheese, and I was so frightened that I simply couldn’t keep quiet another minute.”

Master Nathaniel groaned. He too had felt frightened of homely things.

“Father,” said Ranulph suddenly, “What does the cock say to
you?”

Master Nathaniel gave a start. It was as if his own soul were speaking to him.

“What does he say to me?”

He hesitated. Never before had he spoken to anyone about his inner life. In a voice that trembled a little, for it was a great effort to him to speak, he went on, “He says to me, Ranulph, he says … that the past will never come again, but that we must remember that the past is made of the present, and that the present is always here. And he says that the dead long to be back again on the earth, and that …”

“No! No!” cried Ranulph fretfully, “he doesn’t say that to
me
. He tells me to come away … away from real things … that bite one. That’s what he says to
me.”

“No, my son.
No,”
said Master Nathaniel firmly. “He
doesn’t
say that. You have misunderstood.”

Then Ranulph again began to sob. “Oh, father! father!” he moaned, “they hunt me so — the days and nights. Hold me! Hold me!”

Master Nathaniel, with a passion of tenderness such as he had never thought himself capable of, lay down beside him, and took the little, trembling body into his arms, and murmured loving, reassuring words.

Gradually Ranulph stopped sobbing, and before long he fell into a peaceful sleep.

M
aster Nathaniel awoke the following morning with a less leaden heart than the circumstances would seem to warrant. In the person of Ranulph an appalling disgrace had come upon him, and there could be no doubt but that Ranulph’s life and reason were both in danger. But mingling with his anxiety was the pleasant sense of a new possession — this love for his son that he had suddenly discovered in his heart, and it aroused in him all the pride and the pleasure that a new pony would have done when he was a boy.

Besides, there was that foolish feeling of his that reality was not solid, and that facts were only plastic toys; or, rather, that they were poisonous plants, which you need not pluck unless you choose. And, even if you do pluck them, you can always fling them from you and leave them to wither on the ground.

He would have liked to vent his rage on Willy Wisp. But during the previous winter Willy had mysteriously disappeared. And though a whole month’s wages had been owing to him, he had never been seen or heard of since.

However, in spite of his attitude to facts, the sense of responsibility that had been born with this new love for Ranulph forced him to take some action in the matter, and he decided to call in Endymion Leer.

Endymion Leer had arrived in Lud-in-the-Mist some thirty years ago, no one knew from where.

He was a physician, and his practice soon became one of the biggest in the town, but was mainly confined to the tradespeople and the poorer part of the population, for the leading families were conservative, and always a little suspicious of strangers. Besides, they considered him apt to be disrespectful, and his humor had a quality that made them vaguely uncomfortable. For instance, he would sometimes startle a polite company by exclaiming half to himself, “Life and death! Life and death! They are the dyes in which I work. Are my hands stained?” And, with his curious dry chuckle, he would hold them out for inspection.

However, so great was his skill and learning that even the people who disliked him most were forced to consult him in really serous cases.

Among the humbler classes his was a name to conjure with, for he was always ready to adapt his fees to the purses of his patients, and where the purses were empty he gave his services free. For he took a genuine pleasure in the exercise of his craft for its own sake. One of the stories told about him was that one night he had been summoned from his bed to a farmhouse that lay several miles beyond the walls of the town, to find when he got there that his patient was only a little black pig, the sole survivor of a valuable litter. But he took the discovery in good part, and settled down for the night to tend the little animal; and by morning he was able to declare it out of danger. When, on his return to Lud-in-the-Mist, he had been twitted for having wasted so much time on such an unworthy object, he had answered that a pig was thrall to the same master as a Mayor, and that it needed as much skill to cure the one as the other; adding that a good fiddler enjoys fiddling for its own sake, and that it is all the same to him whether he plays at a yokel’s wedding or a merchant’s funeral.