But Master Nathaniel was indifferent to these manifestations of unpopularity. Let mental suffering be intense enough, and it becomes a sort of carminative.
When the news first reached him of the flight of the Crabapple Blossoms he very nearly went off his head. Facts suddenly seemed to be becoming real.
For the first time in his life his secret shadowy fears began to solidify—to find a real focus; and the focus was Ranulph.
His first instinct was to fling municipal obligations to the winds and ride post-haste to the farm. But what would that serve after all? It would be merely playing into the hands of his enemies, and by his flight giving the public reason to think that the things that were said about him were true.
It would be madness, too, to bring Ranulph back to Lud. Surely there was no place in Dorimare more fraught with danger for the boy these days than was the fairy fruit-stained town of Lud. He felt like a rat in a trap.
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.
He found no comfort in his own home. Dame Marigold, who had always cared for Prunella much more than for Ranulph, was in a condition of nervous prostration.
Each time the realization swept over her that Prunella had eaten fairy fruit and was either lost in the Elfin Marches or in Fairyland itself, she would be seized by nausea and violent attacks of vomiting.
Indeed, the only moments of relief he knew were in pacing up and down his own pleached alley, or wandering in the Fields of Grammary. 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.
And the pleached alley brought him the peace of still life—life that neither moves nor suffers, but only grows in silence and slowly matures in secret.
The Silent People! How he would have liked to be one of them!
But sometimes, as he wandered in the late afternoon about the streets of the town, human beings themselves seemed to have found the secret of still life. For at that hour all living things seemed to cease from functioning. The tradesmen would stand at the doors of their shops staring with vacant eyes down the street—as detached from business as the flowers in the gardens, which looked as if they too were resting after their day’s work and peeping idly out from between their green shutters.
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.
The very noises of the street—the rattle of wheels, a lad whistling, a pedlar crying his wares—seemed to come from far away, to be as disembodied and remote from the activities of man as is the song of the birds.
And if there was still some bustle in the High Street it was as soothing as that of a farmyard. And the whole street—houses, cobbles, and all—might almost have been fashioned out of growing things cut by man into patterns, as is a formal garden. So that Master Nathaniel would wander, at that hour, between its rows of shops and houses, as if between the thick green walls of a double hedge of castellated box, or down the golden tunnel of his own pleached alley.
If life in Lud-in-the-Mist could always be like that there would be no need to die.
X
Hempie’s Song
There were days, however, when even the silent things did not soothe Master Nathaniel; when the condition described by Ranulph as the imprisoning of all one’s being into a space as narrow as a tooth, whence it irradiates waves of agony, became so overwhelming, that he was unconscious of the external world.
One late afternoon, a prey to this mood, he was mooning about the Fields of Grammary.
In the epitaphs on the tombstone one could read the history of Dorimarite sensibility from the quiet poignancy of those dating from the days of the Dukes—Eglantine mourns for Endymion, who was Alive and now is Dead; or During her Life Ambrose often dreamed that Forget-Me-Not was Dead. This Time he woke up and found that it was True—followed by the peaceful records of industry and prosperity of the early days of the Republic, down to the cheap cynicism of recent times—for instance, 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
