by Lord Dunsany
The lane was unfamiliar to him, for it was far out of his way. He went without a sound, walking on smooth chalk, along the base of the huge black hedge on his left, feeling all alone and one with the hush and wildness of night. Suddenly, right through the clematis, just over his head, a window glowed from an upper room of a house that seemed to be only a few yards in from the lane. That sudden glow, so near, surprised the lad, and he stood quite still and watched it. It made him feel somehow lonelier. Once more something out of the night seemed to be puzzling him. So he sat down under the bank and put the pipes to his lips, and played the strange notes of that time again very softly. And somehow the mystery of that window alone in the night seemed answered. Then he went on down the lane and out into starlight, and came to a road and followed it, still going northwards, till he met one going down into the valley to a little bridge over the stream, his boots still in his hand and the pipes in his pocket. Soothed, and at ease at last, he was nearing the village now from the opposite end from that by which he had left it. But behind the window that glowed through a space in the clematis a girl who was parlourmaid in the little villa was peering into the night with a new and strange agitation. The little lawn was in a glow of lamp-light flowing out from the drawing-room below her, because no one had drawn its curtains against the evening. So it could not be from the lawn that those soft notes rose to thrill her. Mrs. Airland, the old lady reading in the drawing-room, heard them too, or she is almost as sure she did as one can be of anything. She got up and went to the window and looked out over the lawn, to the left and then to the right. And seeing nothing there she went to the bell and rang it, to ask Lily if she had heard anything. For what she had heard, if she really had heard it, was very strange indeed, and, what was worse, sounded quite close. But before the bell rang Lily was out of the house, and down the drive and through the gate that was near to the end of the lane. And when Tommy came out on the road in his bare feet she followed softly as he, and stole after him down to the stream, and could not tell why she followed, but there was something about those pipes so that it could not be otherwise.
CHAPTER VII
THE CALL OF WOLD HILL
NEXT day there was talk of the pipes. Everyone in the village had heard them. Those clear emphatic notes had pierced into parlours, amongst talk, amongst games of cards, making the talk all of a sudden seem trivial, or the game pointless, till the room felt stuffy and its ornaments mean, and the hill was calling. Men had done no more than pause awhile in a sentence, or hang longer than usual over playing a card, or a tale was checked in a public-house while men wondered for half a minute, then all had gone on as before amongst the men. But next day there was talk amongst them about what the strange notes could have been.
Of the girls only five or six had been able to slip away from the village, and these had found nothing, and had come back late, with burrs and dew on their dresses, and had sat silent till bedtime. But the others heard too, and remained for long after thinking, and telling their thoughts to none. They too were talking next morning about the music: the whole village was talking: but the girls and the men did not talk about it together. When any man spoke of it to a girl she pretended not to have heard the tune or not to be interested, though her mind was glowing with it. And, for all the talk in the village, only one person guessed who made that music and only one person knew. Mrs. Tichener, who eighteen years ago had chanced to see something in the vicarage garden that perhaps no other eye had seen for over a thousand years, guessed it was Tommy Duffin, and Lily from the little villa at the end of the hill knew. Lily knew, and became the first disciple of the strange new heresy; heresy as it certainly was to the vicar, strange, as it was to all, and new, as it seemed in spite of the ages of its antiquity, to all but those who turned back very far the pages of that blend of fable and history that tells the story of Man.
And the talk going through the village soon came to Duffin’s farm, and was a topic awhile for his conversation with Mrs. Duffin at dinner, for both thought they had heard it; while Tommy sat and listened, his opinion not being asked. After that Tommy went to his room to a deep old box, and hid the pipes far down under all his possessions, a varied heap too untidy for anyone to disturb; and there the pipes lay safe all through the autumn. And as the year wore on a haze began to appear in the valley at evening, the thinnest veil through which the grassy slopes shone a pale gold. Tommy, driving the cart full of sheaves to the barn, felt the lure of those pale gold slopes and the glamour of evening, yet he would not go again with his pipes to the hill; for all the talk there had been about that music that suddenly came to him had made him anxious, and he was afraid of being found out doing what as yet was as strange to himself as it was to the folk who had heard those curious notes ring through their parlours.
The thistledown blew by, trusting in light winds, the little speck of life within it probably lit by some tiny hope of soft earth somewhere and splendid growth; a hope, if the little speck of inferior life was able to hope at all, less vain than many of ours. There came up the valley one day from the South the last thunderstorm of the year, with rain at its vortex, where thunder was closest to lightning, that washed gravel down sloping paths and buried it under the sand of hundreds of little estuaries. The stream rose as in dreams at evening and filled the whole valley, four hundred feet deep and nearly two miles across, with the phantasm of a mighty river: it was only its dream, only the white mist. Brown fields were bare of their sheaves. The foliage of potatoes was rotting. Blackberries were ripe. And all was ready for the year’s second wonder, the leaves’ last glory before their farewell to the woods, and their long deep sleep in the forgetting earth. And Tommy Duffin dared not go to the hill, and there came back slowly his old dissatisfied mood, the questioning and the wonder that only his pipes could answer. Only his pipes: the first few trees that turned, like scouts stolen into the valley in front of some golden army, gave him merely hints, not answers. And all the pomp of the departing year told him of some transcendent thing in a language he could not read. Gold and red in the woods, whatever autumn was writing; the mystery of owls’ voices, whatever old tale they were telling; the long grey script of the mist, written on air; were in no language he knew. Only his pipes spoke it.
And winter came, and spoke in a brilliance of stars, and with blazing sunsets prophesied, boding strange things; and geese, foreknowing the storms, forsook distant seas, and came over high, a wandering letter V. And one wild evening Tommy’s disconsolate wonder overcame his shy fear, an evening without a splendour about the sunset, the huge sun dropping enormous below the dark of the hill, unattended by any glory besides his own monstrous magnificence. In the hush of that evening Tommy went to the hill.
He sat on the crisp cold grass and looked at the night. The trees were intensely black and intensely still, each one of their upper twigs stretched rigid against the sky, sombrely prophesying he knew not what. And once more he put his pipes to his lips and blew. And a tune welled up inspired by a magic he knew not, that was older than all those trees, a primaeval thing crooning a tale to the sleeping valley; and it seemed so old in a knowledge of dreams that had troubled men that it almost sounded human; and yet the notes that came out of those pipes of reed were more like those of strange birds with enchanted voices than any notes of men, and called to mind no tune that any knew. They heard it in the village. Suddenly the ornaments in their parlours went tawdry; their walls seemed suddenly narrow, the lamplight garish, their work a weary thing, and again the hill was calling. For some seconds they all stood silent, the lure drawing their hearts; then many of them put the lure away, and turned back to other things, with a new dissatisfaction, scarce felt perhaps, yet lying heavy in the deeps of the heart. But many did not put the lure away, but went to the hill and crept near to Tommy Duffin, and lurked among thorn and bramble to see if he played again; and Lily came up the lane where the clematis hung, and found him and sat beside him. And he played again and the strange tune thrilled through those li
steners, eight girls that had escaped from the tidy village, and Lily from the house at the end of the hill, from the old lady who sat once more wondering as she had not wondered for years. Then doors began to open down in the village; light streamed from them, and there was the sound of a stir; and Tommy Duffin was gone. He went up the hill as wild things go at night, disturbed by wayfaring men. He came to the wood, and putting once more the pipes of reed to his lips as he lightly moved through the blackness, he blew one challenge or taunt on behalf of the thing that inspired him, against all that was orderly in the affairs of men, though knowing nothing of what that inspiration was. That too was heard in the village; and women there, too old to go to the hill, opened windows and gazed at the wood, then swiftly threw out antimacassars or tea-cosies, all in a sudden petulance at their smugness. But Tommy ran on through the wood, and going far round stole home by another way.
Next morning the talk of the pipes, which had only died down a few weeks before, rose in greater volume than ever, sweeping all other topics away, drowning the light gossip of yesterday like dead leaves. And it was more than mere talk; there were conjectures in it; each one that he heard seeming nearer to Tommy Duffin, until one to his great relief, seemed further away. Even the vicar had heard it, right over the valley; Tommy wondered that the notes could have travelled so far. Everywhere the question “What was it?” And Tommy going about in moody silence; till he feared that his silence was in itself suspicious, and he began to ask questions too and make foolish guesses. Nor need he have disguised his guesses much; for what did he know of this strange spell that had hold of him, or whence it came, or what the music was that could answer the riddles of evening and solve the mystery that haunted the hills at night, and leave the human heart soothed and at ease for that solving? Yet he feared they suspected him. What should he say when they asked him why he did it. He that did not even know.
But he need not have feared. They looked for somebody leaner and darker than him, somebody stranger and older; slightly foreign. The picture of the player of those pipes was strangely alike in the minds of all that heard them, olive-brown skin, dark hair and nimble limbs, eyes dark and keen and an almost goatlike profile, strangely unlike Tommy Duffin. He need not have feared, yet he put his pipes away, and played then on the hill no more that winter. But when Spring appeared; at first with a gathering of anemones, like a multitude of the fairy folk, that had marched to the wood from elfland, pale people all just flushed with the wonder of Spring; then with the blue flood of the hyacinths, like pieces of sky lured downward by a witch of the deeps of the wood; and lastly with all the scent and splendour of may; when Spring appeared and all the birds were fluting, and the blackbird chorus woke Tommy Duffin each morning before it was light, and his heart and the hills were alike enchanted with wonder, then he cared no more nor thought what any would say, but took his pipes at sunset and went up to the hill, and played once more the tune that answered the evening. And again he went next day, and many days after, and the maidens of the village gathered at evening in a kind of crescent on the slope just below him; and the village filled with rumours as strange as the tune, so that some of them even came to the ears of the vicar. And travellers from London that chanced that way; probably by a wrong turning from the great Arnley road, for Wolding’s road led nowhere; as the quiet wheels of their bicycles slipped downhill through the village, heard snatches of conversation that would have strangely puzzled them, and would have made a strange tale for the world’s idle ear, and this tale of mine would have been old; but they put it all down to the natural inferiority of country people, and so forgot about it. And Spring went by with all these rumours growing, and the pipes, as it seemed, more insolent every evening, more defiant of all those illusions to which we rightly cling, till the vicar knew it was time to write to the Bishop.
And now Tommy sat on the hill with his pipes in his hand a little while before sunset, afraid no longer of anyone in the village or of what they might ask or say, meditating fiercely and curiously, while the Anwrels sat at a table in Mrs. Smerdon’s parlour in front of a tea-cosy that she had embroidered herself.
CHAPTER VIII
THE REVEREND ARTHUR DAVIDSON
THE novelty of Brighton might long have entertained anyone that came to it as new as the Anwrels did. There were three great things to see that were unfamiliar to Anwrel. There was first of all the sea; and all that expanse untouched by the care of man had an almost soothing effect on a simple mind long accustomed to contemplate in any view a series of humble triumphs, only won from Nature by constant labour and care. And then there was the town, the royal monument to a bygone holiday, with its great modern hotels amongst which the Anwrels were as out of place as a Swiss hall-porter would have been at the hop-picking. And behind all this were the downs, that had once looked straight at the sea, face to face, with nothing between them, and would again; the South downs that the vicar did not know, but they reminded him pathetically of those that he knew to the North, and only a glimpse of them was enough to bring back his thoughts to the trouble from which they seldom wandered far. For he could not forget the face of Tommy Duffin as he had seen it that evening in the parlour at Valley Farm just as the light was fading. There had been something in it that seemed to menace his parish, either the simple people he loved so well, or the old ways he loved even more. It seemed to menace them; a strong word that, but the right word, thought Anwrel: he had not written strongly enough to the Bishop, and had failed to secure his help; he would write again more strongly, saying clearly all that he feared; he would put it so that the Bishop was bound to help him. For without that help what could he hope to do with a trouble so strange that in his humble career nothing like it had ever come within his experience? Such a thing would have to be dealt with by the Bishop.
It was clear that the Bishop intended Anwrel to stay at Hove for about a fortnight. But how could he do his work there? How could he find out just what it was that was sinister in this thing that was puzzling the village? How find out the harm it threatened and how avert it? No doubt the Bishop had sent some able man to Wolding. A double first at least: the Bishop would know many such. But how much would the newcomer know of what had happened already? If he put everything right before Anwrel came back what a relief that would be. But if he did not! If Anwrel had to do it all by himself, the sooner he got to work upon it the better, lest the thing that he feared should happen. And he did not know what he feared. He must have the facts. He must gather all the information he could about what was going on in Wolding. And for this he must be on the spot. What use in staying at Hove? But he stayed the exact week that the Bishop had ordered.
Some solace he got in that week by reading in Mrs. Smerdon’s parlour, for the forgotten magazines were new to him, and some in gazing at the incredible multitude of smooth bright pebbles that the sea had hoarded, useless, as many collections, but shapely and curious and the work of ages. Yet the moment any immediate interest was over, back came again to him that expression on Tommy Duffin’s face, and all the calculations that it gave rise to, beginning with wildest phantasy — for what less had he seen in Tommy Duffin’s eyes? — then checked and kept within bounds, so far as that was possible, by all such facts as he had come by, and everything leading up to help from the Bishop. And here Mrs. Anwrel found it harder to comfort him, for she doubted if help would ever come from that quarter.
Of Anwrel’s weary guesses and calculations I need not tell, for though action is but the shadow cast by thought, yet we follow the shadow more easily than the swift flame that casts it; and the visible result of his anxious wondering was that after seven clear days of exile the Anwrels returned to Wolding, and the vicar brought a pound packet of the best tea he had been able to buy. The return to the vicarage was triumphant: there was the slow and stately welcome of the black cat, a creature brought up with so much kindness that once, on being picked up and carried away from the hearth-rug, it had screamed from surprise; and there was the welcome of the in
animate things, long-familiar knick-knacks that were sparkling now in the sun; and there was Marion hurrying in with the tea, and Mrs. Tweedy the cook coming to ask if they would have cold roast beef for supper, not because there was anything for them to have instead, but because she hoped to hear about Brighton. It was pleasant to be again at their own tea-table; and yet the vicar did not stay for his tea, but hurried down to the village with the packet that he had bought, and ran with it to the house of Mrs. Tichener, where he arrived in time for his purpose, for Mrs. Tichener had not made tea, though the kettle was already singing.
“I’ve brought you a present from Brighton,” he said as he entered.
“Welcome back, sir,” she said all at the same time.
“Thank you, Mrs. Tichener,” said the vicar. “It’s a pound of tea.”
“It’s very kind of you, sir,” she answered.
“I hope you’ll like it,” he said.
“That I’m sure I shall,” said Mrs. Tichener.
And with a little more talk about the tea the point was easily reached at which she asked the vicar if he would stay and taste it himself.
“But I shall be wasting it. I like it so strong, you know,” said the vicar.