in token of applause. Then the prophet was conducted back to his place
at the far end of that mighty hall, and for a while musicians played on
marvellous curved horns, while drums throbbed behind them hidden in a
recess. The musicians were sitting cross-legged on the floor, all
blowing their huge horns in the brilliant torchlight, but as the drums
throbbed louder in the dark they arose and moved slowly nearer to the
King. Louder and louder drummed the drums in the dark, and nearer and
nearer moved the men with the horns, so that their music should not be
drowned by the drums before it reached the King.
A marvellous scene it was when the tempestuous horns were halted before
the King, and the drums in the dark were like the thunder of God; and
the queens were nodding their heads in time to the music, with their
diadems flashing like heavens of falling stars; and the warriors lifted
their heads and shook, as they lifted them, the plumes of those golden
birds which hunters wait for by the Liddian lakes, in a whole lifetime
killing scarcely six, to make the crests that the warriors wore when
they feasted in Zaccarath. Then the King shouted and the warriors
sang—almost they remembered then old battle-chants. And, as they sang,
the sound of the drums dwindled, and the musicians walked away
backwards, and the drumming became fainter and fainter as they walked,
and altogether ceased, and they blew no more on their fantastic horns.
Then the assemblage beat on the floor with their palms. And afterwards
the queens besought the King to send for another prophet. And the
heralds brought a singer, and placed him before the King; and the singer
was a young man with a harp. And he swept the strings of it, and when
there was silence he sang of the iniquity of the King. And he foretold
the onrush of the Zeedians, and the fall and the forgetting of
Zaccarath, and the coming again of the desert to its own, and the
playing about of little lion cubs where the courts of the palace had
stood.
“Of what is he singing?” said a queen to a queen.
“He is singing of everlasting Zaccarath.”
As the singer ceased the assemblage beat listlessly on the floor, and
the King nodded to him, and he departed.
When all the prophets had prophesied to them and all the singers sung,
that royal company arose and went to other chambers, leaving the hall of
festival to the pale and lonely dawn. And alone were left the
lion-headed gods that were carven out of the walls; silent they stood,
and their rocky arms were folded. And shadows over their faces moved
like curious thoughts as the torches flickered and the dull dawn crossed
the fields. And the colours began to change in the chandeliers.
When the last lutanist fell asleep the birds began to sing.
Never was greater splendour or a more famous hall. When the queens went
away through the curtained door with all their diadems, it was as though
the stars should arise in their stations and troop together to the West
at sunrise.
And only the other day I found a stone that had undoubtedly been a part
of Zaccarath, it was three inches long and an inch broad; I saw the edge
of it uncovered by the sand. I believe that only three other pieces have
been found like it.
_The Field_
When one has seen Spring’s blossom fall in London, and Summer appear and
ripen and decay, as it does early in cities, and one is in London still,
then, at some moment or another, the country places lift their flowery
heads and call to one with an urgent, masterful clearness, upland behind
upland in the twilight like to some heavenly choir arising rank on rank
to call a drunkard from his gambling-hell. No volume of traffic can
drown the sound of it, no lure of London can weaken its appeal. Having
heard it one’s fancy is gone, and evermore departed, to some coloured
pebble a-gleam in a rural brook, and all that London can offer is swept
from one’s mind like some suddenly smitten metropolitan Goliath.
The call is from afar both in leagues and years, for the hills that call
one are the hills that were, and their voices are the voices of long
ago, when the elf-kings still had horns.
I see them now, those hills of my infancy (for it is they that call),
with their faces upturned to the purple twilight, and the faint
diaphanous figures of the fairies peering out from under the bracken to
see if evening is come. I do not see upon their regal summits those
desirable mansions, and highly desirable residences, which have lately
been built for gentlemen who would exchange customers for tenants.
When the hills called I used to go to them by road, riding a bicycle. If
you go by train you miss the gradual approach, you do not cast off
London like an old forgiven sin, nor pass by little villages on the way
that must have some rumour of the hills; nor, wondering if they are
still the same, come at last upon the edge of their far-spread robes,
and so on to their feet, and see far off their holy, welcoming faces. In
the train you see them suddenly round a curve, and there they all are
sitting in the sun.
I imagine that as one penetrated out from some enormous forest of the
tropics, the wild beasts would become fewer, the gloom would lighten,
and the horror of the place would slowly lift. Yet as one emerges nearer
to the edge of London, and nearer to the beautiful influence of the
hills, the houses become uglier, the streets viler, the gloom deepens,
the errors of civilisation stand bare to the scorn of the fields.
Where ugliness reaches the height of its luxuriance, in the dense misery
of the place, where one imagines the builder saying, “Here I culminate.
Let us give thanks to Satan,” there is a bridge of yellow brick, and
through it, as through some gate of filigree silver opening on
fairyland, one passes into the country.
To left and right, as far as one can see, stretches that monstrous city;
before one are the fields like an old, old song.
There is a field there that is full of king-cups. A stream runs through
it, and along the stream is a little wood of oziers. There I used often
to rest at the stream’s edge before my long journey to the hills.
There I used to forget London, street by street. Sometimes I picked a
bunch of king-cups to show them to the hills.
I often came there. At first I noticed nothing about the field except
its beauty and its peacefulness.
But the second time that I came I thought there was something ominous
about the field.
Down there among the king-cups by the little shallow stream I felt that
something terrible might happen in just such a place.
I did not stay long there, because I thought that too much time spent in
London had brought on these morbid fancies and I went on to the hills as
fast as I could.
I stayed for some days in the country air, and when I came back I went
to the field again to enjoy that peaceful spot before entering London.
But there was still something ominous among the oziers.
A year elapsed before I went there again. I emerged from the shadow of
London into the gleaming sun, the bright green grass and the king-cups
were flaming in the light, and the little stream was singing a happy
song. But the moment I stepped into the field my old uneasiness
returned, and worse than before. It was as though the shadow was
brooding there of some dreadful future thing, and a year had brought it
nearer.
I reasoned that the exertion of bicycling might be bad for one, and that
the moment one rested this uneasiness might result.
A little later I came back past the field by night, and the song of the
stream in the hush attracted me down to it. And there the fancy came to
me that it would be a terribly cold place to be in in the starlight, if
for some reason one was hurt and could not get away.
I knew a man who was minutely acquainted with the past history of that
locality, and him I asked if anything historical had ever happened in
that field. When he pressed me for my reason in asking him this, I said
that the field had seemed to me such a good place to hold a pageant in.
But he said that nothing of any interest had ever occurred there,
nothing at all.
So it was from the future that the field’s trouble came.
For three years off and on I made visits to the field, and every time
more clearly it boded evil things, and my uneasiness grew more acute
every time that I was lured to go and rest among the cool green grass
under the beautiful oziers. Once to distract my thoughts I tried to
gauge how fast the stream was trickling, but I found myself wondering if
it flowed faster than blood.
I felt that it would be a terrible place to go mad in, one would hear
voices.
At last I went to a poet whom I knew, and woke him from huge dreams, and
put before him the whole case of the field. He had not been out of
London all that year, and he promised to come with me and look at the
field, and tell me what was going to happen there. It was late in July
when we went. The pavement, the air, the houses and the dirt had been
all baked dry by the summer, the weary traffic dragged on, and on, and
on, and Sleep spreading her wings soared up and floated from London and
went to walk beautifully in rural places.
When the poet saw the field he was delighted, the flowers were out in
masses all along the stream, he went down to the little wood rejoicing.
By the side of the stream he stood and seemed very sad. Once or twice he
looked up and down it mournfully, then he bent and looked at the
king-cups, first one and then another, very closely, and shaking his
head.
For a long while he stood in silence, and all my old uneasiness
returned, and my bodings for the future.
And then I said, “What manner of field is it?”
And he shook his head sorrowfully.
“It is a battlefield,” he said.
_The Day of the Poll_
In the town by the sea it was the day of the poll, and the poet regarded
it sadly when he woke and saw the light of it coming in at his window
between two small curtains of gauze. And the day of the poll was
beautifully bright; stray bird-songs came to the poet at the window; the
air was crisp and wintry, but it was the blaze of sunlight that had
deceived the birds. He heard the sound of the sea that the moon led up
the shore, dragging the months away over the pebbles and shingles and
piling them up with the years where the worn-out centuries lay; he saw
the majestic downs stand facing mightily southwards; he saw the smoke of
the town float up to their heavenly faces—column after column rose
calmly into the morning as house by house was waked by peering shafts of
the sunlight and lit its fires for the day; column by column went up
toward the serene downs’ faces, and failed before they came there and
hung all white over houses; and every one in the town was raving mad.
It was a strange thing that the poet did, for he hired the largest motor
in the town and covered it with all the flags he could find, and set out
to save an intelligence. And he presently found a man whose face was
hot, who shouted that the time was not far distant when a candidate,
whom he named, would be returned at the head of the poll by a thumping
majority. And by him the poet stopped and offered him a seat in the
motor that was covered with flags. When the man saw the flags that were
on the motor, and that it was the largest in the town, he got in. He
said that his vote should be given for that fiscal system that had made
us what we are, in order that the poor man’s food should not be taxed to
make the rich man richer. Or else it was that he would give his vote for
that system of tariff reform which should unite us closer to our
colonies with ties that should long endure, and give employment to all.
But it was not to the polling-booth that that motor went, it passed it
and left the town and came by a small white winding road to the very top
of the downs. There the poet dismissed the car and led that wondering
voter on to the grass and seated himself on a rug. And for long the
voter talked of those imperial traditions that our forefathers had made
for us and which he should uphold with his vote, or else it was of a
people oppressed by a feudal system that was out of date and effete, and
that should be ended or mended. But the poet pointed out to him small,
distant, wandering ships on the sunlit strip of sea, and the birds far
down below them, and the houses below the birds, with the little columns
of smoke that could not find the downs.
And at first the voter cried for his polling-booth like a child; but
after a while he grew calmer, save when faint bursts of cheering came
twittering up to the downs, when the voter would cry out bitterly
against the misgovernment of the Radical party, or else it was—I forget
what the poet told me—he extolled its splendid record.
“See,” said the poet, “these ancient beautiful things, the downs and the
old-time houses and the morning, and the grey sea in the sunlight going
mumbling round the world. And this is the place they have chosen to go
mad in!”
And standing there with all broad England behind him, rolling northward,
down after down, and before him the glittering sea too far for the sound
of the roar of it, there seemed to the voter to grow less important the
questions that troubled the town. Yet he was still angry.
“Why did you bring me here?” he said again.
“Because I grew lonely,” said the poet, “when all the town went mad.”
Then he pointed out to the voter some old bent thorns, and showed him
the way that a wind had blown for a million years, coming up at dawn
from the sea; and he told him of the storms that visit the ships, and
their names and whence they come, and the currents they drive afield,
and the way that the swallows go. And he spoke of the down where they
sat, when the summer came, and the flowers that were not yet, and the
different butterflies, and about the bats and the swifts, and the
thoughts in the heart of man. He spoke of the aged windmill that stood
on the down, and of how to children it seemed a strange old man who was
only dead by day. And as he spoke, and as the sea-wind blew on that high
and lonely place, there began to slip away from the voter’s mind
meaningless phrases that had crowded it long—thumping majority—victory
in the fight—terminological inexactitudes—and the smell of paraffin
lamps dangling in heated schoolrooms, and quotations taken from ancient
speeches because the words were long. They fell away, though slowly, and
slowly the voter saw a wider world and the wonder of the sea. And the
afternoon wore on, and the winter evening came, and the night fell, and
all black grew the sea; and about the time that the stars come blinking
out to look upon our littleness, the polling-booth closed in the town.
When they got back the turmoil was on the wane in the streets; night hid
the glare of the posters; and the tide, finding the noise abated and
being at the flow, told an old tale that he had learned in his youth
about the deeps of the sea, the same which he had told to coastwise
ships that brought it to Babylon by the way of Euphrates before the doom
of Troy.
I blame my friend the poet, however lonely he was, for preventing this
man from registering his vote (the duty of every citizen); but perhaps
it matters less, as it was a foregone conclusion, because the losing
candidate, either through poverty or sheer madness, had neglected to
subscribe to a single football club.
_The Unhappy Body_
“Why do you not dance with us and rejoice with us?” they said to a
certain body. And then that body made the confession of its trouble. It
said: “I am united with a fierce and violent soul, that is altogether
tyrannous and will not let me rest, and he drags me away from the dances
of my kin to make me toil at his detestable work; and he will not let me
do the little things, that would give pleasure to the folk I love, but
only cares to please posterity when he has done with me and left me to
the worms; and all the while he makes absurd demands of affection from
those that are near to me, and is too proud even to notice any less than
he demands, so that those that should be kind to me all hate me.” And
the unhappy body burst into tears.
And they said: “No sensible body cares for its soul. A soul is a little
thing, and should not rule a body. You should drink and smoke more till
he ceases to trouble you.” But the body only wept, and said, “Mine is a
fearful soul. I have driven him away for a little while with drink. But
he will soon come back. Oh, he will soon come back!”
And the body went to bed hoping to rest, for it was drowsy with drink.
But just as sleep was near it, it looked up, and there was its soul
sitting on the windowsill, a misty blaze of light, and looking into the
street.
“Come,” said that tyrannous soul, “and look into the street.”
“I have need of sleep,” said the body.
“But the street is a beautiful thing,” the soul said vehemently; “a
hundred of the people are dreaming there.”
“I am ill through want of rest,” the body said.
“That does not matter,” the soul said to it. “There are millions like
you in the earth, and millions more to go there. The people’s dreams are
wandering afield; they pass the seas and the mountains of faëry,
threading the intricate passes led by their souls; they come to golden
temples a-ring with a thousand bells; they pass up steep streets lit by
paper lanterns, where the doors are green and small; they know their way
to witches’ chambers and castles of enchantment; they know the spell
that brings them to the causeway along the ivory mountains—on one side
looking downward they behold the fields of their youth and on the other
lie the radiant plains of the future. Arise and write down what the
people dream.”
“What reward is there for me,” said the body, “if I write down what you
bid me?”
“There is no reward,” said the soul.
“Then I shall sleep,” said the body.
And the soul began to hum an idle song sung by a young man in a fabulous
land as he passed a golden city (where fiery sentinels stood), and knew
that his wife was within it, though as yet but a little child, and knew
by prophecy that furious wars, not yet arisen in far and unknown
mountains, should roll above him with their dust and thirst before he
ever came to that city again—the young man sang it as he passed the
gate, and was now dead with his wife a thousand years.
“I cannot sleep for that abominable song,” the body cried to the soul.
“Then do as you are commanded,” the soul replied. And wearily the body
took a pen again. Then the soul spoke merrily as he looked through the
window. “There is a mountain lifting sheer above London, part crystal
and part mist. Thither the dreamers go when the sound of the traffic has
fallen. At first they scarcely dream because of the roar of it, but
before midnight it stops, and turns, and ebbs with all its wrecks. Then
the dreamers arise and scale the shimmering mountain, and at its summit
find the galleons of dream. Thence some sail East, some West, some into
the Past and some into the Future, for the galleons sail over the years
as well as over the spaces, but mostly they head for the Past and the
olden harbours, for thither the sighs of men are mostly turned, and the
dream-ships go before them, as the merchantmen before the continual
trade-winds go down the African coast. I see the galleons even now raise
anchor after anchor; the stars flash by them; they slip out of the
night; their prows go gleaming into the twilight of memory, and night
soon lies far off, a black cloud hanging low, and faintly spangled with
stars, like the harbour and shore of some low-lying land seen afar with
its harbour lights.”
Dream after dream that soul related as he sat there by the window. He
told of tropical forests seen by unhappy men who could not escape from
London, and never would—forests made suddenly wondrous by the song of
some passing bird flying to unknown eeries and singing an unknown song.
He saw the old men lightly dancing to the tune of elfin pipes—beautiful
dances with fantastic maidens—all night on moonlit imaginary mountains;
he heard far off the music of glittering Springs; he saw the fairness of
blossoms of apple and may thirty years fallen; he heard old voices—old
tears came glistening back; Romance sat cloaked and crowned upon
southern hills, and the soul knew him.
One by one he told the dreams of all that slept in that street.
Sometimes he stopped to revile the body because it worked badly and
slowly. Its chill fingers wrote as fast as they could, but the soul
cared not for that. And so the night wore on till the soul heard
tinkling in Oriental skies far footfalls of the morning.
“See now,” said the soul, “the dawn that the dreamers dread. The sails
of light are paling on those unwreckable galleons; the mariners that
steer them slip back into fable and myth; that other sea the traffic is
turning now at its ebb, and is about to hide its pallid wrecks, and to
come swinging back, with its tumult, at the flow. Already the sunlight
flashes in the gulfs behind the east of the world; the gods have seen it
from their palace of twilight that they built above the sunrise; they
warm their hands at its glow as it streams through their gleaming
arches, before it reaches the world; all the gods are there that have
ever been, and all the gods that shall be; they sit there in the
morning, chanting and praising Man.”
“I am numb and very cold for want of sleep,” said the body.
“You shall have centuries of sleep,” said the soul, “but you must not
sleep now, for I have seen deep meadows with purple flowers flaming tall
and strange above the brilliant grass, and herds of pure white unicorns
that gambol there for joy, and a river running by with a glittering
galleon on it, all of gold, that goes from an unknown inland to an
unknown isle of the sea to take a song from the King of Over-the-Hills
to the Queen of Far-Away.
“I will sing that song to you, and you shall write it down.”
“I have toiled for you for years,” the body said. “Give me now but one
night’s rest, for I am exceeding weary.”
“Oh, go and rest. I am tired of you. I am off,” said the soul.
And he arose and went, we know not whither. But the body they laid in
the earth. And the next night at midnight the wraiths of the dead came
drifting from their tombs to felicitate that body.
“You are free here, you know,” they said to their new companion.
“Now I can rest,” said the body.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors.
2. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.