Authors: Hope Mirrlees
So he put down his glass and said briskly, “Now then, Leer, let’s go to business. You’ve removed an enormous load from my mind, but, all the same, the boy’s not himself. What’s the matter with him?”
Endymion Leer gave an odd little smile. And then he said, slowly and deliberately, “Master Nathaniel, what is the matter
with you?”
Master Nathaniel started violently.
“The matter with me?” he said coldly. “I have not asked you in to consult you about my own health. We will, if you please, keep to that of my son.”
But he rather spoiled the dignified effect his words might have had by gobbling like a turkey cock, and muttering under his breath, “Damn the fellow and his impudence!” Endymion Leer chuckled.
“Well, I may have been mistaken,” he said, “but I have sometimes had the impression that our Worship the Mayor was well, a whimsical fellow, given to queer fancies. Do you know my name for your house? I call it the Mayor’s Nest. The Mayor’s Nest!”
And he flung back his head and laughed heartily at his own joke, while Master Nathaniel glared at him, speechless with rage.
“Now, your Worship,” he went on in a more serious voice. “If I have been indiscreet you must forgive me … as I forgave you in the parlor. You see, a doctor is obliged to keep his eyes open … it is not from what his patients tell him that he prescribes for them, but from what he notices himself. To a doctor everything is a symptom … the way a man lights his pipe even. For instance, I once had the honor of having your Worship as my partner at a game of cards. You’ve forgotten probably — it was years ago at the Pyepowders. We lost that game. Why? Because each time that you held the most valuable card in the pack — the Lyre of Bones — you discarded it as if it had burnt your fingers. Things like that set a doctor wondering, Master Nathaniel. You are a man who is frightened about something.”
Master Nathaniel slowly turned crimson. Now that the doctor mentioned it, he remembered quite well that at one time he objected to holding the Lyre of Bones. Its name caused him to connect it with the Note. As we have seen, he was apt to regard innocent things as taboo. But to think that somebody should have noticed it!
“This is a necessary preface to what I have got to say with regard to your son,” went on Endymion Leer. “You see, I want to make it clear that, though one has never come within a mile of fairy fruit, one can have all the symptoms of being an habitual consumer of it. Wait! Wait! Hear me out!”
For Master Nathaniel, with a smothered exclamation, had sprung from his chair.
“I am not saying that
you
have all these symptoms … far from it. But you know that there are spurious imitations of many diseases of the body — conditions that imitate exactly all the symptoms of the disease, and the doctors themselves are often taken in by them. You wish me to confine my remarks to your son … well, I consider that he is suffering from a spurious surfeit of fairy fruit.”
Though still angry, Master Nathaniel was feeling wonderfully relieved. This explanation of his own condition that robbed it of all mystery and, somehow, made it rational, seemed almost as good as a cure. So he let the doctor go on with his disquisition without any further interruption except the purely rhetorical once of an occasional protesting grunt.
“Now, I have studied somewhat closely the effects of fairy fruit,” the doctor was saying. “These effects we regard as a malady. But, in reality, they are more like a melody — a tune that one can’t get out of one’s head,” and he shot a very sly little look at Master Nathaniel, out of his bright bird-like eyes.
“Yes,” he went on in a thoughtful voice, “its effects, I think, can best be described as a changing of the inner rhythm by which we live. Have you ever noticed a little child of three or four walking hand in hand with its father through the streets? It is almost as if the two were walking in time to perfectly different tunes. Indeed, though they hold each other’s hand, they might be walking on different planets … each seeing and hearing entirely different things. And while the father marches steadily on towards some predetermined goal, the child pulls against his hand, laughs without cause, makes little bird-like swoops at invisible objects. Now, anyone who has tasted fairy fruit (your Worship will excuse my calling a spade a spade in this way, but in my profession one can’t be mealy-mouthed) — anyone, then, who has tasted fairy fruit walks through life beside other people to a different tune from theirs … just like the little child beside its father. But one can be
born
to a different tune … and that, I believe, is the case with Master Ranulph. Now, if he is ever to become a useful citizen, though he need not lose his own tune, he must learn to walk in time to other people’s. He will not learn to do that here — at present. Master Nathaniel,
you are not good for your son.”
Master Nathaniel moved uneasily in his chair, and in a stifled voice he said, “What then do you recommend?”
“I should recommend his being taught another tune,” said the doctor briskly. “A different one from any he has heard before … but one to which other people walk as well as he. You must have captains and mates, Master Nathaniel, with little houses down at the seaport town. Is there no honest fellow among them with a sensible wife with whom the lad could lodge for a month or two? Or stay,” he went on, without giving Master Nathaniel time to answer, “life on a farm would do as well — better, perhaps. Sowing and reaping, quiet days, smells and noises that are like old tunes, healing nights … slow-time gin! By the Harvest of Souls, Master Nathaniel, I’d rather any day, be a farmer than a merchant … waving corn is better than the sea, and wagons are better than ships, and freighted with sweeter and more wholesome merchandise than all your silks and spices; for in their cargo are peace and a quiet mind. Yes. Master Ranulph must spend some months on a farm, and I know the very place for him.”
Master Nathaniel was more moved than he cared to show by the doctor’s words. They were like the cry of the cock, without its melancholy. But he tried to make his voice dry and matter of fact, as he asked where this marvelous farm might be.
“Oh, it’s to the west,” the doctor answered vaguely. “It belongs to an old acquaintance of mine — the widow Gibberty. She’s a fine, fresh, bustling woman and knows everything a woman ought to know, and her granddaughter, Hazel, is a nice, sensible, hard-working girl. I’m sure …”
“Gibberty, did you say?” interrupted Master Nathaniel. He seemed to have heard the name before.
“Yes. You may remember having heard her name in the law courts — it isn’t a common one. She had a case many years ago. I think it was a thieving laborer her late husband had thrashed and dismissed who sued her for damages.”
“And where exactly is this farm?”
“Well, it’s about sixty miles away from Lud, just out of a village called Swan-on-the-Dapple.”
“Swan-on-the-Dapple? Then it’s quite close to the Elfin Marches!” cried Master Nathaniel indignantly.
“About ten miles away,” replied Endymion Leer imperturbably. “But what of that? Ten miles on a busy self-supporting farm is as great a distance as a hundred would be at Lud. Still, under the circumstances, I can understand your fighting shy of the west. I must think of some other plan.”
“I should think so indeed!” growled Master Nathaniel.
“However,” continued the doctor, “you have really nothing to fear from that quarter. He would, in reality, be much further moved from temptation there than here. The smugglers, whoever they are, run great risks to get the fruit into Lud, and they’re not going to waste it on rustics and farm-hands.”
“All the same,” said Master Nathaniel doggedly, “I’m not going to have him going so damnably near to … a certain place.”
“The place that does not exist in the eyes of the law, eh?” said Endymion Leer with a smile.
Then he leaned forward in his chair, and gazed steadily at Master Nathaniel. This time, his eyes were kind as well as piercing. “Master Nathaniel, I’d like to reason with you a little,” he said. “Reason I know, is only a drug, and, as such, its effects are never permanent. But, like the juice of the poppy, it often gives a temporary relief.”
He sat silent for a few seconds, as if choosing in advance the words he meant to use. Then he began, “We have the misfortune of living in a country that marches with the unknown; and that is apt to make the fancy sick. Though we laugh at old songs and old yarns, nevertheless, they are the
yarn
with which we weave our picture of the world.”
He paused for a second to chuckle over his own pun, and then went on, “But, for once, let us look things straight in the face, and call them by their proper names. Fairyland, for instance … no one has been there within the memory of man. For generations it has been a forbidden land. In consequence, curiosity, ignorance, and unbridled fancy have put their heads together and concocted a country of golden trees hanging with pearls and rubies, the inhabitants of which are immortal and terrible through unearthly gifts — and so on. But — and in this I am in no way subscribing to a certain antiquary of ill odor — 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.”
Master Nathaniel was drinking in every word as if it was nectar. A sense of safety was tingling in his veins like a generous wine … mounting to his head, even, a little bit, so unused was he to that particular intoxicant.
Endymion Leer eyed him, with a little smile. “And now,” he said, “perhaps your Worship will let me talk a little of your own case. 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. There, beneath you, all round you, there surges and swells, and ebbs and flows, that great, ungovernable, ruthless element that we call life. And its motion gets into your blood, turns your head dizzy. Get your sea legs, Master Nathaniel! By which I do not mean you must cease feeling the motion … go on feeling it, but learn to like it; or if not to like it, at any rate to bear it with firm legs and a steady head.”
There were tears in Master Nathaniel’s eyes and he smiled a little sheepishly. At that moment his feet were certainly on
terra firma
; and so convinced are we that each mood while it lasts will be the permanent temper of our soul that for the moment he felt that he would never feel “life-sickness” again.
“Thank you, Leer, thank you,” he murmured. “I’d do a good deal for you, in return for what you’ve just said.”
“Very well, then,” said the doctor briskly, “give me the pleasure of curing your son. It’s the greatest pleasure I have in life, curing people. Let me arrange for him to go to this farm.”
Master Nathaniel, in his present mood, was incapable of gainsaying him. So it was arranged that Ranulph should shortly leave for Swan-on-the-Dapple.
It was with a curious solemnity that, just before he took his leave, Endymion Leer said, “Master Nathaniel, there is one thing I want you to bear in mind —
I have never in my life made a mistake in a prescription.”
As Endymion Leer trotted away from the Chanticleers he chuckled to himself and softly rubbed his hands. “I can’t help being a physician and giving balm,” he muttered. “But it was monstrous good policy as well. He would never have allowed the boy to go, otherwise.”
Then he started, and stood stock-still, listening. From far away there came a ghostly sound. It might have been the cry of a very distant cock, or else it might have been the sound of faint, mocking laughter.
B
ut Endymion Leer was right. Reason is only a drug, and its effects cannot be permanent. Master Nathaniel was soon suffering from life-sickness as much as ever.
For one thing, there was no denying that in the voice of Endymion Leer singing to Ranulph, he had once again heard the Note; and the fact tormented him, reason with himself as he might.
But it was not sufficient to make him distrust Endymion Leer — one might hear the Note, he was convinced, in the voices of the most innocent; just as the mocking cry of the cuckoo can rise from the nest of the lark or the hedgesparrow. But he was certainly not going to let him take Ranulph away to that western farm.
And yet the boy was longing, nay craving to go, for Endymion Leer, when he had been left alone with him in the parlor that morning, had fired his imagination with its delights.
When Master Nathaniel questioned him as to what other things Endymion Leer had talked about, he said that he had asked him a great many questions about the stranger in green he had seen dancing, and had made him repeat to him several times what exactly he had said to him.
“Then,” said Ranulph, “he said he would sing me well and happy. And I was just beginning to feel so wonderful, when you came bursting in, father.”
“I’m sorry, my boy,” said Master Nathaniel. “But why did you first of all scream so and beg not to be left alone with him?”
Ranulph wriggled and hung his head. “I suppose it was like the cheese,” he said sheepishly. “But, father, I want to go to that farm.
Please
let me go.”
For several weeks Master Nathaniel steadily refused his consent. He kept the boy with him as much as his business and his official duties would permit, trying to find for him occupations and amusements that would teach him a “different tune.” For Endymion Leer’s words, in spite of their having had so little effect on his spiritual condition, had genuinely and permanently impressed him. However, he could not but see that Ranulph was daily wilting and that his talk was steadily becoming more fantastic; and he began to fear that his own objection to letting him go to the farm sprang merely from a selfish desire to keep him with him.