by Lord Dunsany
His wife saw some of his perplexities. She knew he would not dream of disobeying the Bishop. So the sooner the start was made the better. She woke him out of his reverie with a question about trains.
“Shall we go by the 3.2 today?”
It was that that awoke him with a shock. But it made him realise that he was really to leave Wolding for a while; and after that it was easy for him to decide, and they settled on the 3.2 the following day.
It only remained to write to the Bishop and pack. “I will tell him what I found out about Tommy Duffin,” he said.
“No,” she said, “he will not want to hear that yet. He expects a long letter from you when we get back.”
All in the bewilderment of the approaching move and the packing, he bowed his head to this though he did not understand it. Those that have travelled in Africa, beyond roads and paths and tracks, and know that whatever trifle they leave behind they will have to live without for weeks or months, will the most easily appreciate Elderick Anwrel’s anxieties when the matter of packing began. Brighton seemed further to him than Africa does to some of us, and the journey more intricate; yet there is a certain parallel.
Briefly he wrote to the Bishop and brieflier still to his chaplain; and soon he was wholly engrossed by the anxieties and fatigues that are inseparable from the manual labour of packing, aggravated by the strain of sending the imagination on ahead to contemplate all the possible needs of a holiday; and holding it there at its trivial task, as weary as the labour of knees and hands.
CHAPTER V
A HINT FROM THE WIND
THE Anwrels had caught the 3.2 at Mereham Station, had changed at Seldham and again further on, and had arrived at Brighton and driven to Hove and found Mrs. Smerdon’s lodgings. And there they had late tea in a small comfortable room amongst bound volumes of forgotten magazines; while in Wolding a westering sun was streaking the slopes of Wold Hill with the shadows of thorn and bramble, wild rose and Tommy Duffin. He sat there motionless amongst that wild company, the green dwellers on Wold Hill, gazing across the valley so fixedly and so long that one might have thought there was something strange to see. But there was nothing to see but the glint of the grasses changing the look of the slopes, and distant windows one by one beginning to flame in the rays, and a shadow going up from amongst dark elms, gradually over the downs, till only the woods at the top saw any sunlight; and then that too was gone and there only remained a glow in the upper air, and a light on the breasts of pigeons passing home.
It was nearly a year since Tommy Duffin had first gone alone to that hill. On one of the last days of August, the first of the days on which, like a prophecy, some hint of the coming of Autumn had gone through the air, he had first felt the lure of the hill all of a sudden at evening. In the foreground of all his thoughts was a weariness at the whole routine of his life, aggravated because it was Sunday; and then there rose up as it were behind this mood the thought of the great dim hill, and the feeling that there all his puzzles might be explained, by the sudden discovery of some purpose that none seemed to know in the village. So he slipped from the house in the valley, and before his father or mother knew he had gone he was away to the hill. As he went through the village it was light enough for him to recognise faces, but darkness began to grow as he climbed the slope. Amongst the wild bushes by which he was sitting now he had sat down and gazed across the valley. And there was the mystery that he had come to find gazing back at him from the opposite side, but silent, hushed, as it were with finger on lip, and not quite to be seen because it was over the top of the hill and just the other side of the shaws of oak. He had gazed long at these trees dark on the crest of the hill on the eastern side of the valley, but could not see the mystery lurking there; which if seen could have told him, as he felt in his heart, not only the purpose of the generations of men that lived their span in Wolding, but the reason even of the ring of old stones that lay in a little valley beyond the ridge behind him, growing moss year after year and casting useless shadows round and round on the plough. They were called The Old Stones of Wolding.
And then he had brought his gaze down the hill, away from the shaws of oak, after wistful and vain searching; and there was the mystery that the darkening trees had hid, lurking now amongst the houses of the village, and almost peering over the ledges of windows where yellow panes were frowning under low eaves. Nor had he found it there, nor on the slope where small wild feet below him were beginning to patter abroad through the whispering grass. And then he had turned to the ridge of Wold Hill above him, where the sky was glowing like a turquoise lantern faintly lit by one candle, where the edge of the wood showed near and ebon black. There, so near that it seemed menacing, the mystery beckoned him from the other side of the hill. He rose and went through the wood; and it was not there.
And all the valley, and the great hills fondling it, and the woods and the wild briars, the silence and the sounds that strayed across it, the huge blue circle of the Evening Star, and the whole dome of the night, all seemed intensely to mean something that had no meaning. But when the vast evening, with all its whispers and silences, from the lurking-places of small wild things of the wood to the paths of the wandering stars, still seeming about to utter some ancient secret, still said to him never a word, he had turned at last and gone all disconsolate home. And amidst all the beauty of that starry night the disconsolate feeling remained with him. He had passed unheeding by the glow-worm’s light, for those tiny travellers still went lit through the fields; and along lanes, roofed over and scented by the wild clematis, he hurried on uncaring. In the valley a smell of wood-fires came through the damp of the mist, mellow windows glowed; sometimes the thunderous mass of an elm rose over him in its blackness; but he had not seemed to notice. Instead, one thought was echoing in his mind. The purpose? The purpose? What was it all for? The huge evening knew, and it had not told him. Reasons he had been given, religious and secular. But there was something the evening knew and had not told him.
Next day that feeling persisted, and all the morning he had brooded silently, doing his work in the fields. Now there was an old woman named Mrs. Tichener, who sometimes did the scrubbing at the farm, and her he had known all his life; one of his very earliest memories being of bringing her a bundle of flowers, and weeping when he found out that the weeds had got thrown away, a trouble that had been soothed away for him at last by Mrs. Tichener, as so many others had been. And he always remembered one day when he had asked her some simple question about life, when it was all new to him; (one of his questions had been “Why do dogs bark?” It may have been that one;) and she had given him some quaint reason; and he had asked her how she knew; and Mrs. Tichener had answered “Because I know everything.”
Whatever the old woman knew, or whatever was hid from her, she at least had the confidence of the child; for he had not only remembered that remark all these years, but it had always coloured his estimate of her, so that she seemed to him a very wise old woman. To her he had gone that day from the stooks of wheat, and had found her in a small garden sitting beside her hollyhocks, and had put his trouble before her, his longing to roam to the hill, his discontent with his home. And at first she gave him for comfort conventional phrases, and old worn moralities. But he needed something more. For if old women gossiping at evening as the ages go by, spin wisdom as the spider in old barns spins gossamer, then Mrs. Tichener had a great store of wisdom, in which little ancient facts were caught up as is dust in the spider’s web. And if these things are all vanity, what are we?
So he questioned her again and again, taking no comfort from anything that she said, when it was such as others might have told him. And then she said, “It was all the fault of that there Reverend Davidson, him that married your father and mother.”
And no more of this would she say; but when he pressed her went rambling away from the point down copybooks-full of old sayings. And for having got this much he was cross at not getting more, and all of a sudden strode petu
lantly away. “Mind my hollyhocks!” she said.
He had gone again to the hill in the dusk, and still got no answer. And then one day when he felt that things were bad at home, and he was still cross with Mrs. Tichener, he went for consolation down to the stream.
And the stream went by in a hurry, perturbed as his own thoughts, yet somehow seeming to care nothing for that. It seemed to have more to show him than downs or wood, for not only had the stream its pebbles and glittering sand, and the light things slipping by on innumerable journeys, but it had also borrowed the sky. He listened long to it, hushed and without moving; when just as it sounded as though it were about to speak to him, it slightly waved one or two bulrushes and went on with its chatter, as a man with the back of his hand might slightly brush documents while speaking of other things. That almost furtive sign, while the babble of water continued as though nothing else had happened, caught the lad’s awed attention. Somehow it seemed that the stream had told him more than Mrs. Tichener would: from such slight hints as this is knowledge at times to be gained. He gazed at the bulrushes, but could not find out what it was that the stream had told him.
And those autumn days went by; and the more that he thought of that mystery that always lurked on the wrong side of the hill or hid in patches of dusk, the mystery to which the stream would only beckon and of which Mrs. Tichener would say no more, the more his father and the young men of the village found him defective in such work as went with other thoughts or with mere industry and punctual habits. The more that the hill called him the more he was scorned by the valley.
He went again to the bulrushes. And then one day, whether on affairs of the autumn or following some quest of its own, a wind sang in the reeds, almost saying to Tommy Duffin what the stream would not say; and ceased, like everything else, before it quite told him anything. And yet its song that was so brief in the reeds remained long in his mind. And there came a day when he went with his knife and cut one of the great rushes, and all the reeds of the stream seemed to be nodding their heads. And guided by some strange lore that seemed older than all the village, he cut it to different lengths and shaped them and bound them together. It was so that he made those pipes that Elderick Anwrel saw.
CHAPTER VI
THE OLD STONES OF WOLDING
WHEN Tommy Duffin had those pipes he used to go down to the stream whenever he felt lonely, or puzzled, or at cross purposes with all the ways of the village; and there he used to croon a few low notes, as though the pipes could say something that the wind would not say, something at which the stream only beckoned, and at which Mrs. Tichener stopped suddenly short; but he crooned the notes softly for fear someone should hear and ask him what he was doing. And the soft notes of the pipes brought him some consolation for knowing nothing of that solemn purpose with which the evening vibrated, and with which Wold Hill seemed to thrill, from the ring of old stones behind it to the foot of the slope that watched Wolding. But the notes that consoled him told him nothing at all of the message that the gloaming had for him, of which to his daily sorrow he could read never a word. And so he had fretted and consoled himself and said nothing about his pipes, and breathed so softly upon them that no one heard. And then one day at sunset the hill called him again clearly.
His father sat smoking by the fire and reading a paper, while his mother talked to Tommy. At first he could not get away unnoticed, but sat waiting his opportunity and thinking of only that, like some wild creature shut into a woodman’s hut. His mother would soon go out to feed the dog, and he watched the minute hand of the clock until he could see it moving. And still she did not go. And he dared say nothing to remind her. At last she went, and Tommy went out with her. In the open air and dim light he soon slipped away, and so was off to the hill.
Doors in the village were open as he went by, showing cheery interiors all bathed in light; but these were not for him, for whatever had called him was something older than lamplight. A window glowed, through which he saw two men at a game of chess; but chess was to Tommy Duffin what it was to his father, no more than material for the jokes of his favourite comic paper about the length of time it took. This was nearly the last house, and then the bulk of the hill rose up all dark before him.
Soon he came to the wild-rose bushes high on the slope, like a company of the things of the wild, halted before the village and coming no nearer. Coming no nearer yet; perhaps one day to pour in, following up the retreat of man. He sat down amongst them and gazed over the valley. The mystery was there, but further and fainter than ever. Yet a certain look that there was in the sky behind him, though the look was almost concealed by the tops of the trees, made him feel that what he sought might be just over the hill. So he rose at once and went upward, and came to the dark of the wood; and a track that he dimly saw guided him on, except when everything was blotted out by the immense blackness of yew trees. So dark it grew that sometimes he struck matches, but against this the night seemed to protest as though her dim ways were profaned by it, and the darkness trebled against him the moment the matches faded; and soon he struck them no more. He came over the top of the hill and saw the track more clearly than when the slope was before him in all its blackness: stars peered down now between branches: and then he went down the far slope through the dark of the pines. And just when it seemed at its blackest their trunks began to detach themselves from the darkness, blackening it one by one; and then he came to the other edge of the wood, and saw in the West the last faint fragment of day, with the enormous shapes of dark clouds riding insolently across it, and heard dogs far away barking in other valleys. Below him in the dark lay the Old Stones of Wolding.
He went down until he could see them, twelve upright forms shaped of blackness, and amongst them a thirteenth, prone; huge and flat in their circle. He stood amongst them all in the hush, under stars and one huge planet. And it was there that the mystery seemed about to speak, and answer the questions that would not let him rest; when a glow appeared on the ground far off: a farmer was going round his byres with a lantern, and the light disturbed his geese. The geese complained and warned for three or four minutes; and the silence on the Old Stones after that seemed to have settled down for the night.
They would tell him nothing now. When Tommy Duffin was sure of this he turned back up the hill. He came to the wood again and went slowly on through the darkness, the feet of little creatures smaller than rabbits pattering away from his path. On the downward slope looking towards Wolding the huge gnarled roots of trees sometimes made steps for him. And suddenly he came to the starlight again, and the grassy slope and wild-rose bushes. And looking across the valley, full of silence and darkness, beyond the winking windows to the far slopes mute as the rest, all roofed over with stars that followed their silent courses as meaningless to him as Space, he felt he never should learn the mystery now. And a melancholy rose up in him and he took his pipes, and put them for solace to his lips, and blew on them clear and loud, as he had not blown before, a tune that all of a sudden ran in his mind.
And the tune was the answer to all things. What those clear notes said to him he could never put into words; perhaps no man could. But while the music thrilled from his pipes, and while the echoes haunted the air, all his longings were gathered in peace before one enormous answer, and nothing seemed strange or perplexed him any more, and all the mysteries over the ridges of hills seemed near and familiar and friendly, and he knew himself one of a fellowship to which the hush of the night, the deep of the woods, or mysteries bold in the moonlight or hidden by mist, reported all their secrets.
When the tune was over old questionings came back to him, and the mystery withdrew itself further away from his guesses, and all was as unfathomable as ever. Yet not a question he could ask of the night, not a secret the darkness hid, not a quest of the little wild feet in the whispering grasses, but had been answered, revealed and made known to him a few moments before. And the knowledge that this had been, and might be again, calmed him with a great calm
.
What had the answer been? He sat there wondering, knowing only that it had come to him. The still night said nothing. A silver streak overhead, a meteorite fell. Glow-worms shone at their posts. A grass-hopper began to call. Then he put the pipes to his lips again, and the tune answered everything; but so far did it transcend any words of man that nothing remained in his reason, when the echoes had floated away, to tell him how it was that for a little while all secrets were open to him, from the purpose of the Old Stones of Wolding to the emotion that sustained the grass-hopper’s call.
Dogs barked in the village, and continued to bark long afterwards. Men looked up from their papers, or games of cards, and wondered, and thought that they had heard wrong. Girls heard it, and trusted their ears, and knew that they had heard it. Heard what? They did not trouble to stay to answer that. They turned to their mothers. And one said “May I go across and see Mary Meriton?” And another “I promised to go and see old Mrs. Skegland.” And another “May I go and see if the calf is all right?”
As many of them as could steal away to the hill went searching to find the piper among wild-rose bushes and bramble. And that night none of them found him. For he slipped away from the hill, fearing he might be discovered, while the wonder of the pipes was all new to him, and he feared that they might be wrong. He did not go down to the village, but went away northwards along, the face of the hill, so that none should find him if they came up from below. And so he came to a lane low under great hedges, and darkened by the towering growth of wild clematis. The white pathway scarcely glimmered in all that blackness. Here he paused and took off his boots, for the noise of them in the still night irked him. Somehow in his bare feet he felt a little closer to that mystery of which the pipes were the clue.