THE DUKE WHO LAUGHED HIMSELF OFF A THRONE
AND OTHER TRADITIONS OF DORIMARE
Before we start on our story, it will be necessary, for its proper
understanding, to give a short sketch of the history of Dorimare and
the beliefs and customs of its inhabitants.
Lud-in-the-Mist was scattered about the banks of two rivers, the Dapple
and the Dawl, which met on its outskirts at an acute angle, the apex
of which was the harbour. Then there were more houses up the side of a
hill, on the top of which stood the Fields of Grammary.
The Dawl was the biggest river of Dorimare, and it became so broad at
Lud-in-the-Mist as to give that town, twenty miles inland though it
was, all the advantages of a port; while the actual seaport town itself
was little more than a fishing village. The Dapple, however, which had
its source in Fairyland (from a salt inland sea, the geographers held)
and flowed subterraneously under the Debatable Hills, was a humble
little stream, and played no part in the commercial life of the town.
But an old maxim of Dorimare bade one never forget that 'The Dapple
flows into the Dawl.' It had come to be employed when one wanted to
show the inadvisability of despising the services of humble agents;
but, possibly, it had originally another application.
The wealth and importance of the country was mainly due to the Dawl. It
was thanks to the Dawl that girls in remote villages of Dorimare wore
brooches made out of walrus tusks, and applied bits of unicorns' horns
to their toothache, that the chimney-piece in the parlour of almost
every farm-house was adorned with an ostrich egg, and that when the
ladies of Lud-in-the-Mist went out shopping or to play cards with their
friends, their market-basket or ivory markers were carried by little
indigo pages in crimson turbans from the Cinnamon Isles, and that pigmy
peddlers from the far North hawked amber through the streets. For the
Dawl had turned Lud-in-the-Mist into a town of merchants, and all the
power and nearly all the wealth of the country was in their hands.
But this had not always been the case. In the old days Dorimare had
been a duchy, and the population had consisted of nobles and peasants.
But gradually there had arisen a middle-class. And this class had
discovered--as it always does--that trade was seriously hampered by a
ruler unchecked by a constitution, and by a ruthless, privileged class.
Figuratively, these things were damming the Dawl.
Indeed, with each generation the Dukes had been growing more capricious
and more selfish, till finally these failings had culminated in Duke
Aubrey, a hunchback with a face of angelic beauty, who seemed to be
possessed by a laughing demon of destructiveness. He had been known,
out of sheer wantonness, to gallop with his hunt straight through a
field of standing corn, and to set fire to a fine ship for the mere
pleasure of watching it burn. And he dealt with the virtue of his
subjects' wives and daughters in the same high-handed way.
As a rule, his pranks were seasoned by a slightly sinister humour. For
instance, when on the eve of marriage a maid, according to immemorial
custom, was ritually offering her virginity to the spirit of the farm,
symbolised by the most ancient tree on the freehold, Duke Aubrey would
leap out from behind it, and, pretending to be the spirit, take her at
her word. And tradition said that he and one of his boon companions
wagered that they would succeed in making the court jester commit
suicide of his own free will. So they began to work on his imagination
with plaintive songs, the burden of which was the frailty of all lovely
things, and with grim fables comparing man to a shepherd, doomed to
stand by impotent, while his sheep are torn, one by one, by a ravenous
wolf.
They won their wager; for coming into the jester's room one morning
they found him hanging from the ceiling, dead. And it was believed that
echoes of the laughter with which Duke Aubrey greeted this spectacle
were, from time to time, still to be heard proceeding from that room.
But there had been pleasanter aspects to him. For one thing, he had
been an exquisite poet, and such of his songs as had come down were
as fresh as flowers and as lonely as the cuckoo's cry. While in the
country stories were still told of his geniality and tenderness--how he
would appear at a village wedding with a cart-load of wine and cakes
and fruit, or of how he would stand at the bedside of the dying, grave
and compassionate as a priest.
Nevertheless, the grim merchants, obsessed by a will to wealth, raised
up the people against him. For three days a bloody battle raged in the
streets of Lud-in-the-Mist, in which fell all the nobles of Dorimare.
As for Duke Aubrey, he vanished--some said to Fairyland, where he
was living to this day. During those three days of bloodshed all the
priests had vanished also. So Dorimare lost simultaneously its Duke and
its cult.
In the days of the Dukes, fairy things had been looked on with
reverence, and the most solemn event of the religious year had been
the annual arrival from Fairyland of mysterious, hooded strangers with
milk-white mares, laden with offerings of fairy fruit for the Duke and
the high-priest.
But after the revolution, when the merchants had seized all the
legislative and administrative power, a taboo was placed on all things
fairy.
This was not to be wondered at. For one thing, the new rulers
considered that the eating of fairy fruit had been the chief cause of
the degeneracy of the Dukes. It had, indeed, always been connected with
poetry and visions, which, springing as they do from an ever-present
sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdy common
sense of a burgher-class in the making. There was certainly nothing
morbid about the men of the revolution, and under their regime what one
can only call the tragic sense of life vanished from poetry and art.
Besides, to the minds of the Dorimarites, fairy things had always
spelled delusion. The songs and legends described Fairyland as a
country where the villages appeared to be made of gold and cinnamon
wood, and where priests, who lived on opobalsum and frankincense,
hourly offered holocausts of peacocks and golden bulls to the sun and
the moon. But if an honest, clear-eyed mortal gazed on these things
long enough, the glittering castles would turn into old, gnarled trees,
the lamps into glow-worms, the precious stones into potsherds, and the
magnificently-robed priests and their gorgeous sacrifices into aged
crones muttering over a fire of twigs.
The fairies themselves, tradition taught, were eternally jealous of the
solid blessings of mortals, and, clothed in invisibility, would crowd
to weddings and wakes and fairs--wherever good victuals, in fact, were
to be found--and suck the juices from fruits and meats--in vain, for
nothing could make them substantial.
Nor was it only food that they stole. In out-of-the-way country places
it was still believed that corpses were but fairy cheats, made to
resemble flesh and bone, but without any real substance--otherwise, why
should they turn so quickly to dust? But the real person, for which
the corpse was but a flimsy substitute, had been carried away by the
Fairies, to tend their blue kine and reap their fields of gillyflowers.
The country people, indeed, did not always clearly distinguish between
the Fairies and the dead. They called them both the "Silent People";
and the Milky Way they thought was the path along which the dead were
carried to Fairyland.
Another tradition said that their only means of communication was
poetry and music; and in the country poetry and music were still called
"the language of the Silent People."
Naturally enough, men who were teaching the Dawl to run gold, who were
digging canals and building bridges, and seeing that the tradesmen gave
good measure and used standard weights, and who liked both virtues
and commodities to be solid, had little patience for flimsy cheats.
Nevertheless, the new rulers were creating their own form of delusion,
for it was they who founded in Dorimare the science of jurisprudence,
taking as their basis the primitive code used under the Dukes and
adapting it to modern conditions by the use of legal fictions.
Master Josiah Chanticleer (the father of Master Nathaniel), who had
been a very ingenious and learned jurist, had drawn in one of his
treatises a curious parallel between fairy things and the law. The men
of the revolution, he said, had substituted law for fairy fruit. But
whereas only the reigning Duke and his priests had been allowed to
partake of the fruit, the law was given freely to rich and poor alike.
Again, fairy was delusion, so was the law. At any rate, it was a sort
of magic, moulding reality into any shape it chose. But, whereas fairy
magic and delusion were for the cozening and robbing of man, the magic
of the law was to his intention and for his welfare.
In the eye of the law, neither Fairyland nor fairy things existed. But
then, as Master Josiah had pointed out, the law plays fast and loose
with reality--and no one really believes it.
Gradually, an almost physical horror came to be felt for anything
connected with the Fairies and Fairyland, and society followed the law
in completely ignoring their existence. Indeed, the very word "fairy"
became taboo, and was never heard on polite lips, while the greatest
insult one Dorimarite could hurl at another was to call him "Son of a
Fairy."
But, on the painted ceilings of ancient houses, in the peeling frescoes
of old barns, in the fragments of bas-reliefs built into modern
structures, and, above all, in the tragic funereal statues of the
Fields of Grammary, a Winckelmann, had he visited Dorimare, would have
found, as he did in the rococo Rome of the eighteenth century, traces
of an old and solemn art, the designs of which served as poncifs to the
modern artists. For instance, a well-known advertisement of a certain
cheese, which depicted a comic, fat little man menacing with knife and
fork an enormous cheese hanging in the sky like the moon, was really
a sort of unconscious comic reprisal made against the action depicted
in a very ancient Dorimarite design, wherein the moon itself pursued a
frieze of tragic fugitives.
Well, a few years before the opening of this story, a Winckelmann,
though an anonymous one, actually did appear in Lud-in-the-Mist;
although the field of his enquiries was not limited to the plastic
arts. He published a book, entitled _Traces of Fairy in the
Inhabitants, Customs, Art, Vegetation and Language of Dorimare_.
His thesis was this: that there was an unmistakable fairy strain
running through the race of Dorimarites, which could only be explained
by the hypothesis that, in the olden days, there had been frequent
intermarriage between them and the Fairies. For instance, the red hair,
so frequent in Dorimare, pointed, he maintained, to such a strain.
It was also to be found, he asserted, in the cattle of Dorimare. For
this assertion he had some foundation, for it was undeniable that
from time to time a dun or dapple cow would bring forth a calf of a
bluish tinge, whose dung was of a ruddy gold. And tradition taught
that all the cattle of Fairyland were blue, and that fairy gold turned
into dung when it had crossed the border. Tradition also taught that
all the flowers of Fairyland were red, and it was indisputable that
the cornflowers of Dorimare sprang up from time to time as red as
poppies, and the lilies as red as damask roses. Moreover, he discovered
traces of the Fairies' language in the oaths of the Dorimarites and
in some of their names. And, to a stranger, it certainly produced an
odd impression to hear such high-flown oaths as; by the Sun, Moon and
Stars; by the Golden Apples of the West; by the Harvest of Souls; by
the White Ladies of the Fields; by the Milky Way, come tumbling out in
the same breath with such homely expletives as Busty Bridget; Toasted
Cheese; Suffering Cats; by my Great-Aunt's Rump; or to find names like
Dreamsweet, Ambrose, Moonlove, wedded to such grotesque surnames as
Baldbreech, Fliperarde, or Pyepowders.
With regard to the designs of old tapestries and old bas-reliefs,
he maintained that they were illustrations of the flora, fauna, and
history of Fairyland, and scouted the orthodox theory which explained
the strange birds and flowers as being due either to the artists'
unbridled fancy or to their imperfect control of their medium, and
considered that the fantastic scenes were taken from the rituals of the
old religion. For, he insisted, all artistic types, all ritual acts,
must be modelled on realities; and Fairyland is the place where what we
look upon as symbols and figures actually exist and occur.
If the antiquary, then, was correct, the Dorimarite, like a Dutchman of
the seventeenth century, smoking his churchwarden among his tulips, and
eating his dinner off Delft plates, had trivialised to his own taste
the solemn spiritual art of a remote, forbidden land, which he believed
to be inhabited by grotesque and evil creatures given over to strange
vices and to dark cults ... nevertheless in the veins of the Dutchman
of Dorimare there flowed without his knowing it the blood of these same
evil creatures.
It is easy to imagine the fury caused in Lud-in-the-Mist by the
appearance of this book. The printer was, of course, heavily fined, but
he was unable to throw any light on its authorship. The manuscript, he
said, had been brought to him by a rough, red-haired lad, whom he had
never seen before. All the copies were burned by the common hangman,
and there the matter had to rest.
In spite of the law's maintaining that Fairyland and everything to do
with it was non-existent, it was an open secret that, though fairy
fruit was no longer brought into the country with all the pomp of
established ritual, anyone who wanted it could always procure it in
Lud-in-the-Mist. No great effort had ever been made to discover the
means and agents by which it was smuggled into the town; for to eat
fairy fruit was regarded as a loathsome and filthy vice, practised in
low taverns by disreputable and insignificant people, such as indigo
sailors and pigmy Norsemen. True, there had been cases known from time
to time, during the couple of centuries that had elapsed since the
expulsion of Duke Aubrey, of youths of good family taking to this vice.
But to be suspected of such a thing spelled complete social ostracism,
and this, combined with the innate horror felt for the stuff by every
Dorimarite, caused such cases to be very rare.
But some twenty years before the opening of this story, Dorimare had
been inflicted with a terrible drought. People were reduced to making
bread out of vetches and beans and fern-roots; and marsh and tarn were
rifled of their reeds to provide the cattle with food, while the Dawl
was diminished to the size of an ordinary rill, as were the other
rivers of Dorimare--with the exception of the Dapple. All through
the drought the waters of the Dapple remained unimpaired; but this
was not to be wondered at, as a river whose sources are in Fairyland
has probably mysterious sources of moisture. But, as the drought
burned relentlessly on, in the country districts an ever-increasing
number of people succumbed to the vice of fairy fruit-eating ... with
tragic results to themselves, for though the fruit was very grateful
to their parched throats, its spiritual effects were most alarming,
and every day fresh rumours reached Lud-in-the-Mist (it was in the
country districts that this epidemic, for so we must call it, raged) of
madness, suicide, orgiastic dances, and wild doings under the moon. But
the more they ate the more they wanted, and though they admitted that
the fruit produced an agony of mind, they maintained that for one who
had experienced this agony life would cease to be life without it.
How the fruit got across the border remained a mystery, and all the
efforts of the magistrates to stop it were useless. In vain they
invented a legal fiction (as we have seen, the law took no cognisance
of fairy things) that turned fairy fruit into a form of woven silk
and, hence, contraband in Dorimare; in vain they fulminated in the
Senate against all smugglers and all men of depraved minds and filthy
habits--silently, surely, the supply of fairy fruit continued to meet
the demand. Then, with the first rain, both began to decrease. But
the inefficiency of the magistrates in this national crisis was never
forgotten, and "feckless as a magistrate in the great drought" became a
proverb in Dorimare.
As a matter of fact, the ruling class of Dorimare had become
incapable of handling any serious business. The wealthy merchants of
Lud-in-the-Mist, the descendants of the men of the revolution and the
hereditary rulers of Dorimare had, by this time, turned into a set of
indolent, self-indulgent, humorous gentlemen, with hearts as little
touched to tragic issues as those of their forefathers, but with none
of their forefathers' sterling qualities.
A class struggling to assert itself, to discover its true shape, which
lies hidden, as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting
material of life itself, must, in the nature of things, be different
from that same class when chisel and mallet have been laid aside, and
it has actually become what it had so long been struggling to be. For
one thing, wealth had ceased to be a delicate, exotic blossom. It had
become naturalised in Dorimare, and was now a hardy perennial, docilely
renewing itself year after year, and needing no tending from the
gardeners.
Hence sprang leisure, that fissure in the solid masonry of works
and days in which take seed a myriad curious little flowers--good
cookery, and shining mahogany, and a fashion in dress, that, like a
baroque bust, is fantastic through sheer wittiness, and porcelain
shepherdesses, and the humours, and endless jokes--in fact, the toys,
material and spiritual, of civilisation. But they were as different as
possible from the toys of that older civilisation that littered the
attics of the Chanticleers. About these there had been something tragic
and a little sinister; while all the manifestations of the modern
civilisation were like fire-light--fantastic, but homely.
Such, then, were the men in whose hands lay the welfare of the country.
And, it must be confessed, they knew but little and cared still less
about the common people for whom they legislated.
For instance, they were unaware that in the country Duke Aubrey's
memory was still green. It was not only that natural children still
went by the name of "Duke Aubrey's brats"; that when they saw a falling
star old women would say, "Duke Aubrey has shot a roe"; and that on
the anniversary of his expulsion, maidens would fling into the Dapple,
for luck, garlands woven out of the two plants that had formed the
badge of the Dukes--ivy and squills. He was a living reality to the
country people; so much so that, when leakages were found in the vats,
or when a horse was discovered in the morning with his coat stained
and furrowed with sweat, some rogue of a farm-hand could often escape
punishment by swearing that Duke Aubrey had been the culprit. And there
was not a farm or village that had not at least one inhabitant who
swore that he had seen him, on some midsummer's eve, or some night of
the winter solstice, galloping past at the head of his fairy hunt, with
harlequin ribbands streaming in the wind, to the sound of innumerable
bells.
But of Fairyland and its inhabitants the country people knew no more
than did the merchants of Lud-in-the-Mist. Between the two countries
stood the barrier of the Debatable Hills, the foothills of which were
called the Elfin Marches, and were fraught, tradition said, with every
kind of danger, both physical and moral. No one in the memory of man
had crossed these hills, and to do so was considered tantamount to
death.