Suddenly Master Nathaniel felt convinced that this was not merely a story he was inventing himself, but, as well, it was a dream—a grotesque, illogical, synthesis of scraps of reality, to which he could add what elements he chose.
“What’s happening?” he asked his neighbour.
But he knew the answer—Willy Wisp was selling the girls to the highest bidder, to labour in the fields of gillyflowers.
“But you have no right to do this!” he cried out in a loud angry voice, “no right whatever. This is not Fairyland—it is only the Elfin Marches. They cannot be sold until they have crossed over into Fairyland—I say they cannot be sold.”
All round him he heard awed whispers, “It is Chanticleer—Chanticleer the dreamer, who has never tasted fruit.” Then he found himself giving a learned dissertation on the law of property, as observed in the Elfin Marches. The crowd listened to him in respectful silence. Even Willy Wisp was listening, and the Crabapple Blossoms gazed at him with inexpressible gratitude.
With what seemed to him a superbly eloquent peroration he brought his discourse to an end. Prunella stretched out her arms to him, crying, “Father, you have saved us! You and the Law.”
“You and the Law! You and the Law!” echoed the other Crabapple Blossoms.
“Chanticleer and the Law! Chanticleer and the Law!” shouted the crowd.
The fair had vanished. He was in a strange town, and was one of a great crowd of people all hurrying in the same direction.
“They are looking for the bleeding corpse,” whispered the invisible cicerone, and the words filled Master Nathaniel with an unspeakable horror.
Then the crowd vanished, leaving him alone in a street as silent as the grave. He pressed forward, for he knew that he was looking for something; but what it was he had forgotten. At every street corner he came on a dead man, guarded by a stone beggar with a face like the herm in the Gibberty’s orchard. He was almost choked by the horror of it. The terror became articulate: “Supposing one of the corpses should turn out to be that little lonely boy on the merry-go-round!”
This possibility filled him with an indescribable anguish.
Suddenly he remembered about Ranulph. Ranulph had gone to the country from which there is no return.
But he was going to follow him there and fetch him back. Nothing would stop him—he would push, if necessary, through fold after fold of dreams until he reached their heart.
He bent down and touched one of the corpses. It was warm, and it moved. As he touched it he realized that he had incurred the danger of contamination from some mysterious disease.
“But it isn’t real, it isn’t real,” he muttered. “I’m inventing it all myself. And so, whatever happens, I shan’t mind, because it isn’t real.”
It was growing dark. He knew that he was being followed by one of the stone beggars, who had turned into a four-footed animal called Portunus. In one sense the animal was a protection, in another a menace, and he knew that in summoning him he must be very careful to use the correct ritual formulary.
He had reached a square, on one side of which was a huge building with a domed roof. Light streamed from it through a great window of stained glass, on which was depicted a blue warrior fighting with a red dragon … no, it was not a stained glass window but merely the reflection on the white walls of the building from a house in complete darkness in the opposite side of the square, inhabited by creatures made of red lacquer. He knew that they were expecting him to call, because they believed that he was courting one of them.
“What else could bring him here save all this lovely spawn?” said a voice at his elbow.
He looked round—suddenly the streets were pullulating with strange semi-human fauna: tiny green men, the wax figures of his parents from Hempie’s chimneypiece, grimacing greybeards with lovely children gamboling round them dressed in beetles’ shards.
Now they were dancing, some slow old-fashioned dance … in and out, in and out. Why, they were only figures on a piece of tapestry flapping in the wind!
Once more he felt his horse beneath him. But what were these little pattering footsteps behind him? He turned uneasily in his saddle, to discover that it was nothing but a gust of wind rustling a little eddy of dead leaves.
The town and its strange fauna had vanished, and once more he was riding up the bridle-path; but now it was night.
XXVIII
“By the Sun, Moon and Stars and the Golden Apples of the West”
Though it was a relief to have returned to the fresh air of reality, Master Nathaniel was frightened. He realized that he was alone at dead of night in the Elfin Marches. And the moon kept playing tricks on him, turning trees and boulders into goblins and wild beasts; cracking her jokes, true humourist that she was, with a solemn impassive face. But, how was this? She was a waxing moon, and almost full, while the night before—or what he supposed was the night before—she had been a half moon on the wane.
Had he left time behind him in Dorimare?
Then suddenly, like some winged monster rushing from its lair, there sprang up a mighty wind. The pines creaked and rustled and bent beneath its onslaught, the grasses whistled, the clouds flocked together and covered the face of the moon.
Several times he was nearly lifted from his saddle. He drew his cloak closely
