Lud-in-the-Mist quotes

The social and commercial centre of Dorimare was its capital, Lud-in-the-Mist, which was situated at the confluence of two rivers about ten miles from the sea and fifty from the Elfin Hills.

Lud-in-the-Mist had all the things that make an old town pleasant.

It had an ancient Guild Hall, built of mellow golden bricks and covered with ivy and, when the sun shone on it, it looked like a rotten apricot; it had a harbour in which rode vessels with white and red and tawny sails;

We know better. These are not the normal activities of mortal men. What kind of beings peopled the earth four or five centuries ago, what strange lore they had acquired, and what were their sinister doings, we shall never know.

Our ancestors keep their secret well.

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 …

Besides, the moral of the ephemeral things with which they were decorated was often pointed in an aphorism or riddle. For instance, on a fan painted with windflowers and violets were illuminated these words:

Why is Melancholy like Honey? Because it is very sweet, and it is culled from Flowers.

These trifles clearly belonged to a later period than the masks and costumes. Nevertheless, they, too, seemed very remote from the daily life of the modern Dorimarites.

But after he had heard the Note a more stay-at-home and steady young man could not have been found in Lud-in-the-Mist. For it had generated in him what one can only call a wistful yearning after the prosaic things he already possessed.

It was as if he thought he had already lost what he was actually holding in his hands.

From this there sprang an ever-present sense of insecurity together with a distrust of the homely things he cherished.

Then we cease to note their idiosyncrasies, and they merge, till autumn, into one solid, unobtrusive green curtain for throwing into relief brighter and sharper things.

There is nothing so dumb as a tree in full leaf.

It was in the spring of his fiftieth year that Master Nathaniel Chanticleer had his first real anxiety. It concerned his only son Ranulph, a little boy of twelve years old.

“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 endeavoured to make jocular. “I don’t think anything very much happens in Lud, does it?”

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 civilised 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, they considered him apt to be disrespectful, and his humour 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.

“What was I doing to him? Why, I was giving him medicine.

Songs were medicines long before herbs.

”

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.”

But 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.

but, at the bottom of his heart he was relieved. He had a lurking fear that Hempie was right and Endymion Leer was wrong, and that it had really been fairy fruit after all that Ranulph had eaten.

But it is best to let sleeping facts lie.

And he feared that if confronted with Willy Wisp the facts might wake up and begin to bite. But what was this that Mumchance was telling him?

It was “Columbine,” but with a difference.

For, since they had last heard it, the tune might have died, and wandered in strange places, to come back to earth, an angry ghost.

“Now, then, dance!” cried Professor Wisp, in harsh, peremptory tones.

Mumchance was holding one of the little shoes, and catching sight of it, she snatched it from him, and tenderly stroked it, as if it had been a wounded dove.

“Dancing, dancing, dancing!” she muttered, “dancing day and night! It’s stony dancing on dreams.”

And with an angry snort Mumchance realized, not for the first time in his life, that it was a waste of time trying to get any sense out of Mother Tibbs.

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.

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.

Anyhow, however innocent they might look, they were the repositories of whatever dark secrets Lud might contain. Houses counted among the Silent People. Walls have ears, but no tongue.

Houses, trees, the dead⁠—they tell no tales.

His eye travelled beyond the town to the country that lay beyond, and rested on the fields of poppies and golden stubble, the smoke of distant hamlets, the great blue ribbon of the Dawl, the narrow one of the Dapple—one coming from the north, one …

But when one’s been used all one’s life to seeing him naked, as it were, instead of shut up in a clock, like he is in Lud, one learns that he is as quiet and peaceful as an old ox dragging the plough.

And to watch Time teaches one to sing.

They say the fruit from over the hills makes one sing. I’ve never tasted so much as a sherd of it, but for all that I can sing.”

… Ambrose chose—that he was a hopelessly inefficient Mayor, that his slothfulness during these past months had been criminal—even, if Ambrose insisted, that he was an eater of, and smuggler of, and receiver of, fairy fruit, all rolled into one—if only Ambrose would make friends again.

Pride and resentment are not indigenous to 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.

But Master Nathaniel was a self-indulgent man, and ever ready to sacrifice both dignity and expediency to the pleasure of yielding to a sentimental velleity.

This, perhaps, was natural enough.

Tunes, like fruit, have their seasons, and are, besides, ever forming new species.

But even the voices of the hawkers chanting Yellow Sand! or Knives and Scissors! sounded disconcertingly different.

But it was the criminal trials that, in the past, had given Master Nathaniel the keenest pleasure.

The dry style of the Law was such a magnificent medium for narrative.

And the little details of everyday life, the humble objects of daily use, became so startlingly vivid, when, like scarlet geraniums breaking through a thick autumn mist, they blazed out from that grey style … so vivid, and, often, fraught with such tragic consequences.

And, then, there were his antiquarian tastes. They were generally regarded as a harmless, unprofitable hobby. And yet … the past was dim and evil, a heap of rotting leaves.

The past was silent and belonged to the Silent People⁠ ⁠…

But Dame Marigold was asking another question, a question that had no apparent connection with the previous one: “What was the year of the great drought?”

But would he be able to convince the slow and obstinate mind of Master Ambrose?

Mere suspicions are hard to communicate. They are rather like the wines that will not travel, and have to be drunk on the spot.

At any rate, he could but try.

All round them was darkness, except for the little trickles of light cast before them by their two lanterns.

A house with old furniture has no need of guests to be haunted.

As we have seen, Master Nathaniel was very sensitive to the silent things—stars, houses, trees;

A slight shadow passed across her clear eyes. Then she tossed her head with the noble gesture of a wild creature, and cried,

“No! No! As long as my heart dances my feet will too. And nobody will grow old when the Duke comes back.”

But Master Ambrose could contain himself no longer. He knew only too well Nat’s love of listening to long rambling talk—especially when there happened to be some serious business on hand.

But I don’t think he would have had the wits to invent all that. I expect the story he told was true enough about his daughter selling the osiers, but that it was only for basket-making that she wanted them.

Guilt’s a funny thing⁠—like a smell, and one often doesn’t quite know where it comes from.

I think Diggory’s nose was not mistaken when it smelt out guilt, but it led him to the wrong clue. My father wasn’t poisoned by osiers.”

The cattle crouched round them in soft shadowy clumps, placidly munching, and dreaming with wide-open eyes.

The narrow zone of colour created by the firelight was like the planet Earth⁠—a little freak of brightness in a universe of impenetrable shadows.

Suddenly Luke noticed that each of the three little herdsmen was, like himself, wearing a sprig of fennel.

And Dorian was finally persuaded to repeat the old saying:

“A thousand leagues by the great West Road and ten by the Milky Way.”

Ranulph sprang to his feet, and with rather a wild laugh, he cried, “Let’s have a race to Fairyland. I bet it will be me that gets there first. One, two, three—and away!”

Should she for once assert her position, and, in direct defiance of the widow, report what had happened to the lawman of the district and send a messenger to Master Nathaniel?

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

No, she must wait till she was of age, or married, or … was there any change of condition that could alter her relations with the widow, and destroy the parasite growth of sullen docility which, for as long as she could remember, had rotted …

She and Peter stood watching him, riding along the valley towards the Debatable Hills, till he and his horse were just a speck in the distance.

“Well, well,” said Peter Pease, “I warrant it’ll be the first time in the history of Dorimare that a man has loved his son well enough to follow him yonder.”

“My friends, you are outcasts, though you do not know it, and you have forfeited your place on earth. For there are two races—trees and man; and for each there is a different dispensation.

Trees are silent, motionless, serene. They live and die, but do not know the taste of either life or death; to them a secret has been entrusted but not revealed.

But the other tribe—the passionate, tragic, rootless tree—man? Alas! he is a creature whose highest privileges are a curse. In his mouth is ever the bittersweet taste of life and death, unknown to the trees.

And then the invisible cicerone of dreams, who is one’s other self, whispered in his ear, These are they whom men call dead.

And, like everything else said by that cicerone, these words seemed to throw a flood of light on the situation, to make it immediately normal, even prosaic.

Then the road took a sudden turn, and before them stretched a sort of heath, dotted with the white booths of a fair.

there were cows and sheep and pigs, and refreshment booths and raree-shows. But instead of the cheerful, variegated din that is part of the fun of the everyday fair, over this one there reigned complete silence; for the beasts were as silent as the people.

Dead silence, and blazing sun.

Master Nathaniel started off to investigate the booths. In one of them they were flinging darts at a pasteboard target, on which were painted various of the heavenly bodies, with the moon in the centre.

It was as if he felt that he was doomed by some inexorable fate to whirl round forever and ever with the tarnished horses and chariots, the dingy, patient pony, and the old cracked tunes.

“It is not long,” said the invisible cicerone, “since that little boy was stolen from the mortals. He still can weep.”

Master Nathaniel felt a sudden tightening in his throat. Poor little boy! Poor little lonely boy! What was it he reminded him of? Something painful, and very near his heart.

He could discern nothing but the top of a red head, but the patter was audible: “Now’s your chance, gentlemen!

Beauty doesn’t keep, but rots like apples.

Apple-shies! Four points if you hit her on the breast, six if you hit her on the mouth, and he who first gets twenty points wins the maid. Don’t fight shy of the apple-shies! Apples and beauty do not keep—there’s a worm in both.

“Now’s your chance, gentlemen! Beauty doesn’t keep, but rots like apples. Apple-shies! Four points if you hit her on the breast, six if you hit her on the mouth, and he who first gets twenty points wins the maid. Don’t fight shy of the apple-shies!

Apples and beauty do not keep⁠—there’s a worm in both.

Step up, step up, gentlemen!”

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.

“Poor Chanticleer! Poor John o’ Dreams!” he said gently. “I have often wished my honey were not so bitter to the taste. Believe me, Chanticleer,

I fain would find an antidote to the bitter herb of life, but none grows this side of the hills⁠—or the other.

”

The young man said in a respectful voice, “You must excuse our rough and ready ways when we first saw you, missie; we didn’t know you were one of us.” And then he grinned, showing some very white teeth, and said, “

You see, pretty fresh things don’t often come our way, and sea-dogs are like other dogs and bark at what they’re not used to.

”

but from Hazel they brought forth a little, not unfriendly, smile. Evidently, like her aunt, she was not averse to seafaring men. And, after all, sailors are apt to have a charm of their own.

When on dry land, like ghosts when they walk, there is a tang about them of an alien element.

And Sebastian Thug was a thorough sailor.