THE WORLD-IN-LAW
"Well," said Master Ambrose, as he laid down the volume, "the woman was
clearly as innocent as you are. And I should very much like to know
what bearing the case has upon the present crisis."
Master Nathaniel drew up his chair close to his friend's and said in
a low voice, as if he feared an invisible listener, "Ambrose, do you
remember how you startled Leer with your question as to whether the
dead could bleed?"
"I'm not likely to forget it," said Master Ambrose, with an angry
laugh. "That was all explained the night before last in the Fields of
Grammary."
"Yes, but supposing he had been thinking of something else--not of
fairy fruit. What if Endymion Leer and Christopher Pugwalker were one
and the same?"
"Well, I don't see the slightest reason for thinking so. But even if
they were--what good would it do us?"
"Because I have an instinct that hidden in that old case is a good
honest hempen rope, too strong for all the gossamer threads of Fairie."
"You mean that we can get the rascal hanged? By the Harvest of Souls,
you're an optimist, Nat. If ever a fellow died quietly in his bed
from natural causes, it was that fellow Gibberty. But, for all that,
there's no reason to lie down under the outrageous practical joke that
was played off on you yesterday. By my Great-aunt's Rump, I thought
Polydore and the rest of them had more sense than to be taken in by
such tomfoolery. But the truth of it is that that villain Leer can make
them believe what he chooses."
"Exactly!" cried Master Nathaniel eagerly. "The original meaning of
Fairie is supposed to be delusion. They can juggle with appearances--we
have seen them at it in that tapestry-room. How are we to make any
stand against an enemy with such powers behind him?"
"You don't mean that you are going to lie down under it, Nat?" cried
Master Ambrose indignantly.
"Not ultimately--but for a time I must be like the mole and work in
secret. And now I want you to listen to me, Ambrose, and not scold me
for what you call wandering from the point and being prosy. Will you
listen to me?"
"Well, yes, if you've got anything sensible to say," said Master
Ambrose grudgingly.
"Here goes, then! What do you suppose the Law was invented for,
Ambrose?"
"What was the Law invented for? What are you driving at, Nat? I suppose
it was invented to prevent rapine, and robbery, and murder, and all
that sort of thing."
"But you remember what my father said about the Law being man's
substitute for fairy fruit? Fairy things are all of them supposed to be
shadowy cheats--delusion. But man can't live without delusion, so he
creates for himself another form of delusion--the world-in-law, subject
to no other law but the will of man, where man juggles with facts to
his heart's content, and says, 'If I choose I shall make a man old
enough to be my father my son, and if I choose I shall turn fruit into
silk and black into white, for this is the world I have made myself,
and here I am master.' And he creates a monster to inhabit it--the
man-in-law, who is like a mechanical toy and always behaves exactly as
he is expected to behave, and is no more like you and me than are the
fairies."
For the life of him, Master Ambrose could not suppress a grunt of
impatience. But he was a man of his word, so he refrained from further
interruption.
"Beyond the borders of the world-in-law," continued Master Nathaniel,
"that is to say, the world as we choose for our convenience that it
should appear, there is delusion--or reality. And the people who live
there are as safe from our clutches as if they lived on another planet.
No, Ambrose, you needn't purse up your lips like that ... everything
I've been saying is to be found more or less in my father's writings,
and nobody ever thought him fantastic--probably because they never took
the trouble to read his books. I must confess I never did myself till
just the other day."
As he spoke he glanced up at the portrait of the late Master Josiah,
taken in the very arm-chair he, Nathaniel, was at that very moment
sitting in, and following his son's every movement with a sly, legal
smile. No, there had certainly been nothing fantastic about Master
Josiah.
And yet ... there was something not altogether human about these bright
bird-like eyes and that very pointed chin. Had Master Josiah also heard
the Note ... and fled from it to the world-in-law?
Then he went on: "But what I'm going to say now is my own idea.
Supposing that everything that happens on the one planet, the planet
that we call Delusion, reacts on the other planet; that is to say, the
world as we choose to see it, the world-in-law? No, no, Ambrose! You
promised to hear me out!" (For it was clear that Master Ambrose was
getting restive.) "Supposing then, that one planet reacts on the other,
but that these reactions are translated, as it were, into the terms of
the other? To take an example, supposing that what on one planet is a
spiritual sin should turn on the other into a felony? That what in the
world of delusion are hands stained with fairy fruit should, in the
world-in-law, turn into hands stained with human blood? In short, that
Endymion Leer should turn into Christopher Pugwalker?"
Master Ambrose's impatience had changed to real alarm. He greatly
feared that Nathaniel's brain had been unhinged by his recent
misfortunes. Master Nathaniel burst out laughing: "I believe you think
I've gone off my head, Brosie--but I've not, I promise you. In plain
language, unless we can find that this fellow Leer has been guilty of
something in the eye of the Law he'll go on triumphing over us and
laughing at us in his sleeve and ruining our country for our children
till, finally, all the Senate, except you and me, follows his funeral
procession, with weeping and wailing, to the Fields of Grammary. It's
our one hope of getting even with him, Brosie. Otherwise, we might as
soon hope to catch a dream and put it in a cage."
"Well, according to your ideas of the Law, Nat, it shouldn't be too
difficult," said Master Ambrose drily. "You seem to consider that in
what you call the world-in-law one does as one likes with facts--launch
a new legal fiction, then, according to which, for your own particular
convenience, Endymion Leer is for the future Christopher Pugwalker."
Master Nathaniel laughed: "I'm in hopes we can prove it without legal
fiction," he said. "The widow Gibberty's trial took place thirty-six
years ago, four years after the great drought, when, as Marigold has
discovered, Leer was in Dorimare, though he has always given us to
understand that he did not arrive till considerably later ... and the
reason would be obvious if he left as Pugwalker, and returned as Leer.
Also, we know that he is intimate with the widow Gibberty. Pugwalker
was a herbalist; so is Leer. And then there is the fright you gave him
with your question, 'Do the dead bleed?' Nothing will make me believe
that that question immediately suggested to him the mock funeral and
the coffin with fairy fruit ... he might think of that on second
thoughts, not right away. No, no, I hope to be able to convince you,
and before very long, that I am right in this matter, as I was in the
other--it's our one hope, Ambrose."
"Well, Nat," said Master Ambrose, "though you talk more nonsense in
half an hour than most people do in a lifetime, I've been coming to the
conclusion that you're not such a fool as you look--and, after all,
in Hempie's old story it was the village idiot who put salt on the
dragon's tail."
Master Nathaniel laughed, quite pleased by this equivocal
compliment--it was so rarely that Ambrose paid one a compliment at all.
"Well," continued Master Ambrose, "and how are you going to set about
launching your legal fiction, eh?"
"Oh, I'll try and get in touch with some of the witnesses in the
trial--Diggory Carp himself may turn out to be still alive. At any
rate, it will give me something to do, and Lud's no place for me just
now."
Master Ambrose groaned: "Has it really come to this, Nat, that you have
to leave Lud, and that we can do nothing against this ... this ... this
cobweb of lies and buffoonery and ... well, delusion, if you like? I
can tell you, I haven't spared Polydore and the rest of them the rough
side of my tongue--but it's as if that fellow Leer had cast a spell on
them."
"But we'll break the spell, by the Golden Apples of the West, we'll
break it, Ambrose!" cried Master Nathaniel buoyantly; "we'll dredge the
shadows with the net of the Law, and Leer shall end on the gallows, or
my name's not Chanticleer!"
"Well," said Master Ambrose, "seeing you've got this bee in your
bonnet about Leer you might like a little souvenir of him; it's the
embroidered slipper I took from that gibbering criminal old woman's
parlour, and now that her affair is settled there's no more use for
it." (The variety of "silk" found in the Academy had finally been
decided to be part "barratine tuftaffity" and part "figured mohair,"
and Miss Primrose had been heavily fined and set at liberty.) "I told
you how the sight of it made him jump, and though the reason is obvious
enough--he thought it was fairy fruit--it seems to take so little to
set your brain romancing there's no telling what you mayn't discover
from it! I'll have it sent over to you tonight."
"You're very kind, Ambrose. I'm sure it will be most valuable," said
Master Nathaniel ironically.
During Miss Primrose's trial the slipper had from time to time been
handed round among the judges, without its helping them in the
slightest in the delicate distinctions they were drawing between
tuftaffity and mohair. In Master Nathaniel it had aroused a vague
sense of boredom and embarrassment, for it suggested a long series of
birthday presents from Prunella that had put him to the inconvenience
of pumping up adequate expressions of gratitude and admiration. He had
little hope of being able to extricate any useful information from that
slipper--still, Ambrose must have his joke.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Master Nathaniel rose
to his feet and said, "This may be a long business, Ambrose, and we may
not have an opportunity for another talk. Shall we pledge each other in
wild thyme gin?"
"I'm not the man to refuse your wild-thyme gin, Nat. And you don't
often give one a chance of tasting it, you old miser," said Master
Ambrose, trying to mask his emotion with facetiousness. When he had
been given a glass filled with the perfumed grass-green syrup, he
raised it, and smiling at Master Nathaniel, began, "Well, Nat...."
"Stop a minute, Ambrose!" interrupted Master Nathaniel. "I've got a
sudden silly whim that we must should take an oath I must have read
when I was a youngster in some old book ... the words have suddenly
come back to me. They go like this: 'We' (and then we say our own
names), 'Nathaniel Chanticleer and Ambrose Honeysuckle, swear by the
Living and the Dead, by the Past and the Future, by Memories and Hopes,
that if a Vision comes begging at our door we will take it in and warm
it at our hearth, and that we will not be wiser than the foolish nor
more cunning than the simple, and that we will remember that he who
rides the Wind needs must go where his Steed carries him.' Say it after
me, Ambrose."
"By the White Ladies of the Fields, never in my life have I heard such
fustian!" grumbled Master Ambrose.
But Nat seemed to have set his heart on this absurd ceremony, and
Master Ambrose felt that the least he could do was to humour him, for
who could say what the future held in store and when they might meet
again. So, in a protesting and excessively matter-of-fact voice, he
repeated after him the words of the oath.
When, and in what book had Master Nathaniel found it? For it was the
vow taken by the candidates for initiation into the first degree of the
ancient Mysteries of Dorimare.
Do not forget that, in the eye of the Law, Master Nathaniel was a dead
man.