But he said very little about it.
He let the whole of England go on believing what they pleased. Still, he never misled them. When they put the pointed query at him, he said no. But he took a profound interest in the case. He took what one would call a fatherly interest in it. He got the man’s confidence, and he encouraged him in his attitude before the disaster that approached.
It was incredible, like everything else in this incredible story.
Here was a man, ordinarily a normal man, in youth, in the strength and vigor of youth, encouraged to welcome, impatiently to welcome, a ghastly disaster because by that sacrifice he would win a way into some world of dreams.
Of course his sister, the Countess of Heatherstone, did not give him up. She kept sending him back to the London experts. It was of no use. The man was blind! The optic nerve was ruined. There was no hope for him. There was nothing an expert could do. Letington did not wish to go to London. But he was glad of the insistence that sent him to the experts the last time. An event happened for which he had been hoping.
He got another message!
It was in Regent Street, as he was getting down from the Countess’ motor before the door of one of the experts. Someone spoke to him and passed on. He could not see who it was. He could not see anything now, except the vague presence of light. He knew when it was day and when it was dark, and that was about the extent of it.
It was another Delphic message like the first one:
“Come to me in the land where men grind their wheat in the sky!”
I want to stop here a moment until we can assemble the essentials of the story. Get the whole thing, as one might say it, within a sweep of the eye.
I have said that Sir Godfrey Simon was the deus ex machina in this whole affair. He had not only a grasp on the whole thing but also had the direction of it. I do not mean a direction by accident. I mean a direction by the will—direction like a providence. When one realizes this controlling fact, one is on the way to an accurate conception of the whole thing.
The Earl of Heatherstone has a big country seat on the Teith.
There is a wonderful suite in the east wing of it. Sir Godfrey Simon was there with Letington after the event I have just related, the arrival of that last Delphic message. It’s a wonderful room: a big sitting room, bright with chintz, looking out over a sweep of meadow descending to the dark, rapid river, with a wood beyond.
Letington was profoundly disturbed.
Where was this land—the land where men ground their wheat in the sky? How could he go there? It was like a line out of a fairy story; like a message sent in an Arabian tale.
He began to wonder about it.
Was he, after all, merely the victim of an illusion? That was the only thing that disturbed him. He was not concerned about the night that he had entered. There was a symbolism in that. It comforted and sustained him. When one thinks about it, there is always the dark to be traversed before one comes into any form of life. One arrives at a new day only by passing through the night before it.
The wonderful, incredible fairy life before him lay through this night.
He was not afraid of the night.
If he could be certain that the thing he longed for was to be reached by traversing the night—and he had that assurance—he didn’t care for the world of reality. What was the dark to him if he could win his way to this alluring woman!
But the fear haunted him that the land he was beckoned toward was not, in fact, one of living man. And it was as a living man that he wished to possess this alluring, heavenly creature. He wanted her in life; in this life. He didn’t care about sight and hearing, so long as the living sense of feeling remained.
That was the whole thing.
The consummation of every great emotion, of every ecstasy of emotion, after all, was in nearly every instance accomplished in silence and in the dark. Sight and hearing added nothing to it! It was the sense of feeling that elevated human emotions into an ecstasy. But one had to be alive; to be a living man in the land of the living. There was nothing to be depended on outside of the world he knew.
He wanted this woman now, alive, in this world.
That was the thing that brought Sir Godfrey Simon to sit with him in the great room overlooking the Teith. And it was Sir Godfrey Simon who gave him the key to the mystery, who read the riddle for him:
“Come to me in the land where men grind their wheat in the sky!”
That night Letington disappeared.
He disappeared wholly out of England, as though the earth had opened and received him. No one ever know what became of him. No one ever saw him again. He left a message, on the table, for his sister, written large and crudely, for he couldn’t see:
“I have gone to the land where men grind their wheat in the sky.”
That was all anyone, except Sir Godfrey Simon, ever knew. He gave me a little verbal picture of what happened, as one might look for a moment, through the crack of a door, into fairyland.
Letington crossed a stretch of water in the night, like Arthur on his way to Avalon. He came to a shore beyond it. He was met by an old peasant with a dog harnessed to a cart. He was taken with his luggage on a road he could not see. He could not see! It was all night to him.
They stopped after a while before what seemed to be an immense metal gate.
The old peasant had a good deal of trouble to open it. It seemed to be morning and in a land of sun. The peasant led the blind man through the gate, but remained himself outside. He told Letington to go forward, and he did go forward on what appeared to be a gravel path. And presently beyond him he heard the heavenly voice that he had heard in the Canadian forest; that haunting, alluring, mysterious voice.
He groped his way toward it.
He found the singing woman. He took her in his arms, he passed his fingers gently over her face, her hair, her exquisite, beautiful body. It was clear to his delicate touch that she was young, lovely, and as perfect as a dream!
He had lost the sun, but he had come to what he longed for in the land where men grind their wheat in the sky!
They disappeared among the trees, in the distance, beyond the great metal gate. The man’s arm was around the slender, golden-haired girl, as in the morning of the world the first man and the first woman wandered away in the Garden in Asia!
Go back with me to the opening of this story.
You know where I was; in that inn out of a page of Dumas, conducted by a Walloon to whom I had intrusted a hunter worth a thousand pounds sterling. I was lost, and it was raining outside. The night had descended. I was drying my clothes before a peat fire, and Sir Godfrey Simon was going forward with his story. He shot now a pointed query at me:
“Suppose you had had that oracle to interpret. What would you have done?”
“I would have given it up,” I answered. “Men do not grind their wheat in the sky, and there is no such land, except in the kingdom of the fairies.”
“In the Kingdom of the Belgians!” he said. “What did you pass to-night on your way here?”
I told him what I had passed: meadows, ditches, an abandoned road, and a great spiked iron fence.
“And what else?” he said.
I tried to think about it.
“Some peasant cottages, a village now and then, a sluggish stream.”
“And what else?” he said again.
“And a windmill,” I answered, “now and then in the distance.”
He brought his great hand down on the table.
“There you have it,” he cried. “Grist mills turned by the wind! It is the land where men grind their wheat in the sky!”
He made a great gesture.
“Everywhere else in the world men grind their wheat on the earth. But not so in the Kingdom of the Belgians.”
A thing is a mystery because we do not understand it. It is no mystery when we see it to the end.
Ten minutes of explanation cleared the thing up—cleared up every fabulous thi
ng in it. I thought about it as I rode back in the morning to the château of my host, the Marquis de Brie; as I returned along that abandoned road beside the immense fence.
Sir Godfrey Simon’s brother, dead and buried, and leaving a great estate, had married an Italian operatic star in Vienna. He had one daughter with a golden voice. The girl had prepared to make her début, and on the first night of the opera a piece of scenery caught fire, and her face was burned. She was placed in the care of the greatest experts, who succeeded in restoring the lovely contour of her face and its delicate skin. But they could not remove the horrible red discoloration that underlay the skin. It made the girl, otherwise physically perfect, repulsive to the eye. As a last experiment they turned to Hilderback’s treatment of subjecting the delicate flesh to extreme cold. The girl would not go to Switzerland on account of the crowds of tourists everywhere. The peasant woman who had been her mother’s maid and companion knew of this Italian colony in Canada and persuaded the girl to go there for the winter. And so came this extravaganza in the Canadian forest. All the pretended witchcraft was only clever playacting. For example, the passenger engine was merely cut loose from the train, run through the tunnel and switched into one of the great bark sheds. The hemlock bark was taken down and set up again around it. The fall of snow covered everything. The ends of the tunnel were shot down as a blind.
And Sir Godfrey Simon, with the immense wealth that his brother had bequeathed to the girl, had purchased this estate in Belgium and cut it off from the world with its immense iron-spiked fence.
He had directed events.
He brought the two persons together. He had by that direction of events turned a disaster into a heavenly thing. Like a genie in a tale, he had transported a girl with a horror of aspect and a man with a horror of blindness into the Garden in Asia!
I thought about it in the morning sun on my way to the château of the Marquis de Brie; as I rode southeast over fields and ditches:
In the land where men grind their wheat in the sky!
THE END
A Note on the Author
Melville Davisson Post (1869–1930) was an American author, born in Harrison County, West Virginia. He studied law at West Virginia University, where he graduated in 1892. In 1903 he married Ann Bloomfield Gamble Schofield, with whom he had a son, but the child died in infancy and soon after his son's death Post left law practice and took to writing fiction. He was a prolific and successful writer and is best known for his mystery and crime stories.
Discover books by Gabriel Fielding published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/MelvilleDavissonPost
Monsieur Jonquelle
The Bradmoor Murder
Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © 1922 Melville Davisson Post
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eISBN: 9781448213337
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