THE FAERY FARM
Sarah Brown, finding herself unfetched by the witch, went home alone
as soon as the 'buses began putting out to sea after the storm. She
expected to find the witch at home, but only the Dog David and Peony
were in the House of Living Alone. David lay on Peony's bed, and Peony
under it. Sarah Brown saw them as she passed their open door.
"Ow Marmaduke!" said Peony, "is it all over? Are you sure? Them 'uns is
so bloody deceitful you never know but what they might go an' blow a
bugle or two to mike believe they'd done, an' then drops bombs on us
just as we was comin' 'appily out from under our beds."
Peony, with a touching faith in the combined protective powers of twelve
inches of mattress and nine inches of dog, had been reading a little
paper book called _Love in Society_ by the light of an electric torch.
"It's all truly over," said Sarah Brown, who had come home through a
roar of rumour. "They say we've brought down at least one Boche. In fact
the ferryman says his aunt telephoned that the special on her corner
says a female Boche was brought down. But that hardly sounds likely.
Hasn't the witch come home yet?"
"Lawd no," replied Peony. "The dear ol' Soup never comes 'ome of a
moonlight night. It's my belief she goes to Maiden'ead among the Jews,
to keep out of the wiy, and 'oo's to blime 'er?"
"Well, that's all right," said Sarah Brown. "For now I shall be able to
buy--without pawning anything for the moment--a little land outfit from
stock. I know she has some."
The night was by then far from young, in fact it was well into its
second childhood. But Sarah Brown and the Dog David sought and tried on
land outfits for several hours.
The shop was divided into three horizontal departments. Nearest the
floor were the foodstuffs; biscuit tins buttressed the counter on every
side; regiments of Grape-nuts, officered by an occasional Quaker Oat,
stood in review order all round the lower shelves. On the counter little
castles of tinned fruit were built, while bins beneath it held the
varied grain, cereal, and magic stock. About on a level with one's head
the hardware department began: frying-pans lolled with tin coffee-pots
over racks, dust-pans divorced from their brushes were platonically
attached to flat-irons or pie-dishes, Stephen's Inks were allied with
penny mugs or tins of boot polish in an invasion of the middle shelves,
and a wreath of sponges crowned the champion of a row of kettles in
shining armour. Against the ceiling the drapery section was found.
Overalls, ready-made breeches, babies' socks, and pink flannelette
mysteries hung doubled up as if in pain over strings nailed to the
rafters. From this department Sarah Brown, balanced upon three large
biscuit tins placed on the counter, chose her outfit with vanity and
care. The general effect was not good, but she did not know this, for
she studied the parts separately in a six-inch mirror. She was filled
with a simple pleasure. For she was always absurdly moved by little
excitements, and by any prospect of a changed to-morrow. She was not
really used to being alive at all, and that is what made her take to
magic so kindly.
"In six hours," she said, "I shall be on my way to something utterly
new."
And in six hours she was on her way, whistling, across the Parish of
Faery. The Dog David ran in front of her among the daisies. The rabbits
can never be caught in this land of happy animals, but they give good
sport and always play fair.
David Blessing Brown, a dog of independent yet loving habit, had spent
about four-fifths of his life in the Brown family. He was three years
old, and though ineligible for military service, made a point of wearing
khaki about his face, and in a symmetrical heart-shaped spot near his
tail. To Sarah Brown he was the Question and the Answer, his presence
was a constant playtime for her mind; so well was he loved that he
seemed to her to move in a little mist and clamour of love. With every
one else she held but lame intercourse, but her Dog David and she
withheld no passing thought from each other. They could often be heard
by unmattering landladies and passers-by exchanging views in the strong
Suffolk accent that was a sort of standing joke between them. I believe
that Sarah Brown had loved the Dog David so much that she had given him
a soul. Certainly other dogs did not care for him. David said that they
had found out that his second name was Blessing, and that they laughed
at him for it. His face was seamed with the scars of their laughing. But
I know that the enmity had a more fundamental reason than that. I know
that when men speak with the tongues of angels they are shunned and
hated by men, and so I think that when dogs approach humanity too nearly
they are banished from the love of their own kind.
Sarah Brown was not altogether unfamiliar with the Parish of Faery, but
she never failed to be surprised by the enchantment of the Enchanted
Forest. The Green Ride runs straight through it, so incredibly straight
that as you walk along it the end of it is at the end of your sight, and
is like a star in a green sky. There is a dream that binds your mind as
you cross the forest; it is like an imitation of eternity, so that, as
you pass into the forest's shade, time passes from before you, and, as
you pass out of it, you seem to have lived a thousand quiet and utterly
forgotten lives. Clocks and calendars have no meaning in the forest; the
seasons and the hours haunt it at their will, and abide by no law. Just
as the sun upon a stormy day makes golden a moving and elusive acre in
our human woods, so the night in the Enchanted Forest comes and goes
like a ghost upon the sight of lovers of the night. For there you may
step, unastonished, from the end of a day into its beginning; there the
summer and the winter may dodge each other round one tree; there you may
see at one glance a spring hoar frost and an autumn trembling of airs, a
wild cherry tree blossoming beside a tawny maple. The forest is so deep
and so thick that it provides its own sky, and can enjoy its own
impulses, and its own quiet anarchy. There you forget that sky of ours
across whose face some tyrant drives our few docile seasons in
conventional order.
I think the Dog David in his own way shared the dream that leads
wayfarers through the Enchanted Forest. When he came out with Sarah
Brown under the tasselled arch of Travellers' Joy that crosses the end
of the Green Ride, he was all shining and dewy with adventure, and his
tail was upright, as though he were pretending that it carried a flag.
On an abrupt hill in the middle of an enormous green meadow a Castle
stood, just as Richard had predicted. It was To Let, and was not looking
its best. Some man of enterprise, taking advantage of its forlorn
condition, had glued an advertisement upon its donjon keep. You could
almost have measured that advertisement in acres; it recommended a face
cream, and represented a lady with a face of horrible size, whose
naturally immaculate complexion was marred by the rivets and loopholes
of the donjon keep itself, which protruded in rather a distressing way.
Oak trees stood round the foot of that pale hill, and the general effect
was rather that of parsley round a ham.
Between two oaks Sarah Brown, following directions, found the beginning
of the Daisified Path. There were not only daisies all over the path but
real violets on either side of it. The daisies looked one in the face,
but the violets did not, because they had morbidly bad manners. Still of
course manners are very small change and count for very little; the
violet, being an artist, is entitled to any manners it likes, while the
daisy has no temperament whatever, and no excuse for eccentricity.
Grasshoppers tatted industriously and impartially among the daisies and
the violets.
Here outside the forest there was weather again, and the weather was
more promising than generous. It continued to promise all day without
exactly explaining what its promise was, and without achieving any
special fulfilment. Fine silver lines of sunlight were ruled at a steep
angle across a grey slate view.
At the gate of Higgins Farm, Sarah Brown was a little disconcerted to
find a small dragon. It was coiled round a tree beside the clipped box
archway. It was not a very fine specimen, being of a brownish-green
colour, and having lost the tip of one wing. Its spine was serrated,
especially deeply between its shoulder blades, where it could raise a
sort of crest if angered or excited. But at present it was asleep, its
saturnine and rather wistful face rested upon one scaly paw.
Sarah Brown was uncertain what to do, but the Dog David took the matter
into his own paws by mistake. He had just met one of the castle dogs,
one of those tremulous-tailed creatures who spend themselves in a rather
pathetic effort to sustain an imaginary reputation for humour. David
retorted to this dog's first facetious onslaught with a kindly quip,
they trod on each other once or twice with extravagant gestures, and
then parted hysterically, each supposing himself to be pursued by the
other. It was then that David tripped over the dragon's barbed tail.
David squeaked, and the dragon awoke. It uncoiled itself suddenly like
a broken spring.
"Gosh," it said. "Asleep again! I was waiting for you, and the sun on my
back always makes me sleepy. I am the foreman. Higgins telephoned that
you were coming."
It preceded her through the little green archway that led to the farm.
The sight reminded Sarah Brown of watching from Golders Green Tube
Station the train one has just missed dive into the tunnel. She
followed.
On the other side of the archway the whole view of the plain called
Higgins Farm met the adventurer. The farm-buildings were heaped
graciously together on a little wave in the sea of ploughed fields.
Except for two pale ricks in their midst, they exactly matched their
surroundings, they were plastered dark red, and thatched with very old
green and brown thatch. Beyond the buildings was a little wood, its
interior lighted up with bluebells, and this wood merged into an
orchard, where a white pony and an auburn pig strove apparently to eat
the same blade of grass. The various sections of the farm land lay
mapped out in different intensities of brown, very young green, and
maturer green, and each section was dotted with people. They seemed
small people even from a distance, and, as Sarah Brown advanced at the
tail of the dragon, she saw that the workers were all indeed under
ordinary human size. The tallest, a man guiding a miniature plough
behind a tall horse, might have reached Sarah Brown's shoulder. None of
them seemed hard at work, they stood talking in little groups. One group
as they passed it was trafficking in cigarette cards. "I want to get my
Gold Scale set of English Kings complete," a voice was saying
tragically. "Has nobody got Edward the Confessor?" None of them took any
notice of the foreman.
"I'm afraid I haven't got the gift of discipline," sighed the dragon.
"And fairies are of course abnormally undisciplined creatures. Still, we
simply can't get any one else, and Higgins will not apply for a few
German prisoners. Get on with your work, you people, do. There, you see,
they defy me to an extent. Ever since the cowmen dipped me in the
horse-pond my authority's gone--gone where the good niggers go."
I find that there are quite a lot of people who cannot say the word
"gone" without adding the clause about the good niggers. These people
have vague minds, sown like an allotment with phrases in grooves.
Directly the dragon said "to an extent" without qualifying the extent,
one saw why it had no gift of discipline.
"I wouldn't attempt this job," it continued, winding breathlessly along
the rutty road, "only I am under a great obligation to Richard Higgins.
I am a _protidgy_ of his, you know, he rescued me from a lot of
mischievous knights who were persecuting me. One of them had tied his
tin hat to my tail, I remember, and the rest were trying to stick their
nasty spears between my scales. Really, you know, it was quite
dangerous. I have known a fellow's eye put out that way. I am not very
good at fighting, though I might have tackled one at a time. Richard
Higgins rode right into the midst of them, knocking them right and
left. Gosh, he gave them a talking to, and they slank away. He took my
case up after that, made enquiries, and gave me this job. We scrape
along somehow, but I'm afraid I'm not really suited for it."
They reached a part of a field in which broad beans were enjoying an
innocent childhood among white butterflies.
"If you wouldn't mind," said the dragon shyly, "I should like you to hoe
between the rows of these beans. You will find a hoe against the big
stack. This is your row, I reserved it for you."
All the other rows were occupied by fairy women with their skirts tucked
up--for only your amateur land-woman wears breeches. They all had hoes,
but were not using them much. They were singing curious old round songs
like summer dreams; you could hear strange fragments of phrases passing
from voice to voice. They took no notice of Sarah Brown, and she began
to work.
"Oh, my One," she said to David. "How happy this is. No wonder they
sing. Any one must sing working like this in great fields. Why, I even
remember that the Shropshire Lad whistled once by mistake, while
ploughing, on his own admission, until a fatalistic blackbird recalled
him to his usual tragic mind."
David sat uncomfortably on a broad bean, protesting against this new
mania. For a moment he had thought that she was seeking for a mouse with
some patent mouse-finding implement. He had even tried to help her, and
turned over a clod with a critical paw, but one sniff had showed him the
empty futility of the thing.
Sarah Brown hoed rather happily for a couple of hours, and then she
began to count the beans still waiting trustfully in the queue, waiting
to be attended to and freed from their embarrassments. There were
ninety-six, she decided, standing up ostensibly to greet an aeroplane.
She became very glad of the occasional aeroplanes that crossed above her
field, and gave her an excuse for standing with a straight back to watch
them. Aeroplanes, crossing singly or in wild-bird formations, are so
common in the sky of Faery that every one in those parts, while turning
his own eyes inevitably upwards, secretly thinks his neighbour
lamentably rustic and unsophisticated for looking at them.
Every aeroplane that crosses Faery feels, I suppose, the reflected magic
from the land below, for there is never one with the barest minute to
spare that does not pause and try to be clever over Higgins Farm. You
may see one industriously climbing the clouds over the Enchanted Forest,
evidently trying hard to be intent on its destination. You may see it
falter, struggling with its sense of duty, and then break weakly into a
mild figure eight. The ragged rooks of Faery at once hurry into the air
to show their laborious imitator how this should be done. The spirit of
frivolous competition enters into the aeroplane, its duty is flung to
the winds. It flaunts itself up and down once or twice, as if to say:
"Now look, everybody, I'm going to be clever." Then it goes mad. It
leaps upon imaginary Boches, it stands upon its head and falls downward
until the very butterflies begin to take cover, it stands upon its tail
and falls upward, it writes messages in a flowing hand across the sky
and returns to cross the t's. It circles impertinently round your head,
fixing its bold tricolour eye upon you until you begin to think there
must be something wrong with your appearance. It bounds upon a field of
onions and rebounds in the same breath from the topmost cloud of heaven.
The rooks return disconsolately to their nests.
Then you may see the erring machine suddenly remember itself, and check
itself in the act of some new paroxysm. It remembers the European War
that gave it birth; it thinks of its mates scanning the sky for its
coming; its frivolity ebbs suddenly. The eastern sky becomes once more
its highway instead of its trapeze. It collects its wits, emits a few
contrite bubbles of smoke, and leaps beyond sight.
Whenever this happened, the female fairies behaved in a very plebeian
and forward manner, waving their hoes at each machine, encouraging it by
brazen gestures to further extravagances, and striving to reach its
hearing with loud shrill cries. There was very little difference
between these fairies and other lady war-workers. In fact they were only
distinguishable by their stature and by the empty and innocent
expression of their faces. Also perhaps by their tuneful singing, and by
a habit of breaking out suddenly into country dances between the
bean-rows.
Sarah Brown, who worked a great deal more industriously than any one
else in sight, soon overtook them, and while conscious of that touch of
interested scorn always felt by the One towards the Herd, found relief
in watching their vagaries, and presently in speaking to them.
For she needed relief, poor Sarah Brown, her disabilities were catching
her up; a hoarse contralto cough was reminding her of many doctors'
warnings against manual work. She could feel, so to speak, the distant
approaching tramp of that pain in her side under whose threat she had
lived all her life. But there were seventy-five beans yet.
The note of her hoe, a high note not quite true pitched, clamoured
monotonously upon her brain. Three blisters and a half were persecuting
her hands.
"Let them blist," she said defiantly. "This row of beans was given me to
hoe, and Death itself shall not take it from me."
She could almost imagine she saw Death, waiting for her tactfully beyond
the last bean. She had no sense of proportion. She was so very weary of
having her life interrupted by her weakness that anything that she had
begun to do always seemed to her worth finishing, even under torture. To
finish every task, in spite of all hindrance, was her only ambition, but
it was almost always frustrated.
Seventy more beans. "Three score and ten," thought Sarah Brown. "What's
that? Only a lifetime." She bent to her work.
A great clump of buttercups bestrode her bean row, and as after a
struggle she dragged its protesting roots from the earth, something fell
from it.
"Oh, a nest," she gasped. "Look, I have hoed up a nest."
"Good gracious," exclaimed a fairy. "Look what she's done. It's
Clement's nest, poor chap, he only married in February. Say, girls,
here's Clement's semi-detached gone up."
Cries of consternation were heard from every bean-row.
Clement's nest was really almost more than semi-detached. It had been
but lightly wedged between two buttercup stalks. The two eggs in it were
at once unseated, and one was broken. Sarah Brown was deeply distressed.
"What a blind fool I am," she said, trying helplessly to replace the
nest. "Won't Clement ever come back?"
"Mrs. Clement won't," said the nearest fairy. "She is almost hysterical
about the sanctity of the home, and all that. She'll probably get a
divorce now."
"Oh, poor Clement, poor Clement," said Sarah Brown. "Will he be terribly
cut up?"
"There he is," replied the fairy, pointing upward. "He's watching you.
That's Clement's voice you hear."
"Clement's voice," exclaimed Sarah Brown. "Singing like that? Why, he
sounds perfectly happy."
"Perfectly happy," mocked the fairy. "His family only sings like that
when it's upset. Perfectly happy indeed! Can't you understand tragedy
when you hear it?"
Sarah Brown with despairing care tucked the nest up under a bean, and
replaced the unbroken egg.
"Do you mean to tell me, then," she said, after a busy painful pause,
"that Shelley probably misunderstood that lark he wrote a poem about? He
called it a blithe spirit, you know, because it sang. Do you suppose it
wasn't one?"
"Certainly not," said the fairy. "I don't know the actual facts of the
case, but without a doubt your friend Shelley was standing on the
unfortunate bird's nest all the time he was writing his poem."
Sarah Brown, with a deep sigh, began hoeing again.
Fifty beans yet.
She had altogether ceased to find pleasure in the day. Pain is an
extinguisher that can put out the sun. She had ceased to find pleasure
in the singing of the birds, the voice of the pigeon sounded to her no
more than an unbeautiful falsetto growl. She was irritated by the fact
that the cuckoo had only one song to sing. She tried not to hoe in time
to that song, but the monotony of it possessed her. Her row of beans
stretched in front of her right across the world; every time she looked
along it the end seemed farther away. Every time she raised her hoe the
sword of pain slipped under her guard.
The Dog David, impatient of her unnatural taste in occupations, had
forsaken her. She could trace his course by a moving ripple across the
potato patch, just as a shark's movement seams the sea.
Forty beans.
Time wears a strangely different guise out of doors. Under the sun time
stands almost still. Only when every minute is a physical effort do you
discover that there really are sixty minutes in an hour, and that one
hour is very little nearer to the evening than another. People who work
indoors under the government of clocks never meet time face to face.
Their quick seconds are dismissed by the clicking of typewriters, and
when their typewriters fall silent, their day is over. We of Out of
Doors have a daily eternity to contend with during which only our hands
are busy; our minds may grow old and young again between sunrise and
sunset; the future may be remade in an hour, hope killed and reborn
before a blackbird's song is over. We know the length of days. And after
many slow months of stress we come back again, old and bewildered with
much silence and much wondering, to our friends in offices, and find
them unchanged, floating innocently on the surface of time.
Sarah Brown dropped her hoe and fell upon her knees.
"I can't hoe any more," she said. "There are twenty-five more beans, but
I can't hoe them."
"Why should you?" asked the nearest fairy indifferently. "The foreman
never notices if we shirk. We always do."
"I said I would hoe this row," said Sarah Brown. "But I am accursed. It
is a good thing at least to know one's limitations."
Even in affliction she was prosy.
"I would advise you to go and have your dinner," another fairy said.
"Only that I ate your sandwiches as I passed just now. But I left a
little lemonade in your bottle. Go under the trees and drink it."
"I can't move," said Sarah Brown.
"Sit there then," said the fairies, and passed on, tickling but not
uprooting the weeds in their rows. Fairies are never ill. They have
immortal bodies, but no souls. If they see you in pain, they simply
think you are flaunting your superiority and your immortal soul in their
faces.
The dragon undulated up the field. "Very nicely hoed," he said, looking
vaguely at Sarah Brown's row. "Much better than the other rows. Having
your dinner? Quite right too."
He never noticed the twenty-five unhoed beans.
Sarah Brown sat on the edge of a shore of green shadow, and a sea of sun
speckled with buttercups was before her. David Blessing came and leaned
against her. His first intentions were good, he kissed her hurriedly on
the chin, but after that he kissed the sandwich bag.
Sarah Brown wondered whether she could cut her throat with a hoe.
"Suicide while of sound mind," she said. "The said mind being entirely
sick of its unsound body."
If she sat absolutely still and upright the pain was bearable. But even
to think of movement brought tears of pain to her eyes. She detached her
mind from her predicament, and sank into a warm tropical sea of thought.
She was no real thinker, but she thought much about thinking, and was
passionately interested in watching her own mind at work. Thought was
like sleep to her, she sank deeply into it without reaching anything
profound, nothing resulted but useless dreams, and a certain comforting
and defiant intimacy with herself.
She thought of Richard, and wished that she could have hoed a blessing
into every bean of his that she had hoed. She noted half-consciously and
without surprise that the thought of him was beautiful to her. She
could not conjure up his face before her mind, because she always forgot
realities, and only remembered dreams. She could not imagine the sound
of his voice, she could not recall anything that he had said. Yet she
felt again the magic feeling of meeting him, and dreamt of all the
things that might have happened, and that might yet happen, yet never
would happen, between him and her. All the best things that she
remembered had only happened in her dreams, her imagination no sooner
sipped the first sip of an experience than it conjured up for her great
absurd satisfying draughts of nectar, for which the waking Sarah Brown
might thirst in vain. But there was no waking Sarah Brown. Her life was
only a sleep-walking; only very rarely did she awake for a moment and
feel ashamed to see how alert was the world about her.
So she thought of Richard, not of Richard's Richard, but of some pale
private Richard of her own.
The approach of Richard upon a white horse for some time seemed only an
extension of her dream. It was only when she realised that he was riding
up her bean-row, and partially undoing the work of her hoe, that she
awoke suddenly with a start, and caught and tore her breath upon a pin
of pain.
It seemed that the afternoon had now long possessed the fields, it had
wakened into a live and electric blue the Enchanted Forest which she had
last noticed shimmering in its noon green.
All the workers at the approach of Richard were working busily, bent
ostentatiously in the form of hairpins up and down their rows. The
dragon was rippling anxiously along at the heels of the white horse; a
helpless hoping for the best expressed itself in every spike along his
spine.
"I don't really know why she's idling like that," Sarah Brown heard him
say in his breathy pathetic voice. "I left her hard at work. They're all
the same when my back's turned. A fellow needs to have eyes at the tip
of his tail."
"Are you suffering from that Leverhulme six-hour-working-day sort of
feeling?" asked Richard politely of Sarah Brown, in the manner of an
advertisement of a cure for indigestion, as he approached. "I think it's
just splendid how receptive and progressive working people are in these
days."
"I was meditating suicide," replied Sarah Brown candidly, if faintly. "I
am a stricken and useless parasite on the face of your fine earth. But
my hoe is too blunt."
"I have a pocket-knife with three blades I could lend you," said
Richard, slapping himself enquiringly over several pockets. "Or would
you rather try a natty little spell I thought of this morning while I
was shaving. I think any one stricken might find it rather useful."
"Ah, give it to me. Give it to me," said Sarah Brown.
The pain was like a wave breaking upon her, carrying her away from her
safe shore of shadow, to be lost in seething and suffocating seas
without rest. Her eyes felt dried up with fever, and whenever she shut
them, the darkness was filled with a jumble of nauseating squares in
blue upon a mustard-coloured background. The smell of beans was
terrible.
Richard fumbled with something very badly folded up in newspaper. He
also tried ineffectively to light a match by wiping it helplessly
against his riding breeches. He seemed to have none of the small skill
in details that comes to most people before they grow up. He did
everything as if he were doing it for the first time.
"I had nothing but the _Morning Post_ to wrap it in," he murmured. "I'm
afraid that may have spoilt the magic a little."
It was the dragon finally who produced the necessary light. After
watching Richard with the anxious sympathy of one ineffectual for
another, it said: "Let me," and kindly breathed out a little flame,
which set the packet aflare for a moment.
The ashes fluttered down from Richard's hand among the beans, and a thin
violet stalk of smoke went up.
Sarah Brown smelt the unmistakable sour smell of magic, and saw
soundless words moving Richard's little khaki moustache. Then she found
that she had disappeared.
She had never done this before, she had always been present to disturb
and interrupt herself. She had never seen the world before, except
through the little glazed peepholes, called eyes, through which her
everyday self rather wistfully believed that it could see. Now, of
course, she knew what seeing was, and for the first time she was aware
of the real sizes of things. Poor man measures all things by the size of
his own foot. He looks complacently at the print of his boot in the mud,
and notices that the ant which he crushed was not nearly as big as his
foot, therefore the ant does not matter to him. He also notices that
those same feet of his would not be able to walk to the moon within a
reasonable time, therefore the moon does not matter to him.
But Sarah Brown had disappeared, and therefore could not measure
anything. The spider strode from hill to hill, with the wind rushing
through the hair on his back. The blue sky was just a lampshade, clipped
on to the earth to shield it from the glare of the gods, beyond it was a
mere roof of eternity, pricked with a few billion stars to keep it well
ventilated.
Sarah Brown had for a while all the fun of being a god. She was nowhere
and she was everywhere. She could have counted the hairs on David's
head. The world waved like a flower upon a thin purple stalk of
smoke....
Her eyes began to see again. She was aware, of the hollowed tired eyes
of Richard fixed upon her. The dragon dawned once more upon her sight,
it was inquisitively watching developments, while pretending to claw a
weed or two out of a neighbouring bean-row.
The horizon was rusty with a rather heavy sunset. The fields were full
of twilight and empty of fairies.
Sarah Brown came to herself with a start, she was shocked to find that
she had opened her mouth to say something absolutely impossible to
Richard. David's chin was resting on her hand. Her side felt frozen and
dangerous but not painful.
"It didn't altogether answer," said Richard. "I'm afraid the wrapping
was a mistake. A spell of that strength ought to have set you dancing
in three minutes. I'll take you home on my horse. His name is Vivian."
The Horse Vivian, who was so white as to be almost phosphorescent in the
dusk, was now further illuminated by a little red light on his breast,
and a little green light on his tail. Richard was fond of making
elaborate and unnecessary arrangements like this, while neglecting to
acquire skill in the more usual handicrafts.
Sarah Brown, a person of little weight, was placed astride on the back
of the Horse Vivian. Richard walked beside. The dragon nodded good-bye,
and disappeared into its home, a low tunnel-like barn, evidently built
specially for it, with a door at each end, and a conveniently placed
chimney which enabled it to breathe enough fire to cook its meals
without suffocating itself.
Sarah Brown never saw the dragon again, but it stayed always in her
memory as a puzzled soul born tragically out of its time, a shorn lamb,
so to speak, to whom the wind had not been sufficiently tempered.
Now this ride home, through the Enchanted Forest, on a tall horse, with
Richard walking beside her, was the most perfect hour of Sarah Brown's
life.
The Enchanted Forest is only an accumulation of dreams, and from every
traveller through it it exacts toll in the shape of a dream. By way of
receipt, to every traveller it gives a darling memory that neither death
nor hell nor paradise can efface.
Sarah Brown knew that her dream and Richard's could never meet. The fact
that he was thinking of some one else all the way home was not hidden
from her. But she was a person used to living alone, she could enjoy
quite lonely romances, and never even envy real women, whose romances
were always made for two. She was not a real woman, she was morbidly
bodiless. Strange though it may seem, the kind, awkward, absent-minded
touch of Richard as he had lifted her on to the Horse Vivian's back had
been for her the one flaw in that enchanted ride. She could not bear
touch. She had no pleasure in seeing or feeling the skin and homespun
that encloses men and women. She hated to watch people feeding
themselves, or to see her own thin body in the mirror. She ought really
to have been born a poplar tree; a human body was a gift wasted on her.
As they passed along the Green Ride, the red light from the Horse
Vivian's neck made a sort of heralding ghost before them on the grass.
Bats darted above them for a few yards at a time, and were twitched
aside as though by a string or a reminding conscience. The telegraph
wires, bound for the post office of Faery, run through the Enchanted
Forest, and the poles in the faint light were like tall crucifixes. A
long way off, through the opening at the end of the Forest, were the
little lights of Mitten Island.
"Do you know," said Richard--and this is unfortunately the sort of thing
that young men do say at silent and enchanted moments--"that if all the
magic in this Forest were collected together and compressed into a
liquid form, it would be enough to stop the War in one moment?"
"My hat!" said Sarah Brown. "In one moment?"
"In one moment."
"My hat!" said Sarah Brown.
"The powers of magic haven't been anything like thoroughly estimated
even yet," said Richard.
"I suppose the War was made by black magic," suggested Sarah Brown,
trying to talk intelligently and to be faithful to her own thoughts at
the same time.
"Good Lord, no," replied Richard. "The worst of this war is that it has
nothing whatever to do with magic of any sort. It was made and is
supported by men who had forgotten magic, it is the result of the coming
to an end of a spell. Haven't you noticed that a spell came to an end at
the beginning of the last century? Why, doesn't almost every one see
something lacking about the Victorian age?"
"Something certainly died with Keats and Shelley," sighed Sarah Brown.
"Oh well," said Richard, "I don't know about books. I can't read, you
know. But obviously what was wrong with the last century was just that
it didn't believe in fairies."
"Does this century believe in fairies? If the spell came to an end, how
is it that we are so magic now?"
"This century knows that it doesn't know everything," said Richard. "And
as for spells--we have started a new spell. That's the curious part of
this War. So gross and so impossible and so unmagic was its cause, that
magic, which had been virtually dead, rose again to meet it. The worse a
world grows, the greater will magic grow to save it. Magic only dies in
a tepid world. I think there is now more magic in the world than ever
before. The soil of France is alive with it, and as for Belgium--when
Belgium gets back home at last she will find her desecrated house
enchanted.... And the same applies to all the thresholds in the world
which fighting-men have crossed and will never cross again, except in
the dreams of their friends. That sort of austere and secret magic, like
a word known by all and spoken by none, is pretty nearly all that is
left to keep the world alive now...."
Richard seemed to be becoming less and less of a man and more and more
of a wizard the farther he penetrated into the Enchanted Forest. He was
saying things that would have embarrassed him very much had they been
said in the Piccadilly Restaurant, even after three glasses of
champagne. For this reason, although the borders of the Enchanted Forest
are said to be widening, it is to be hoped that they will not encroach
beyond the confines of the Parish of Faery. What would happen if its
trees began to seed themselves in the Strand? Imagine the Stock Exchange
under the shadow of an enchanted oak, and the consequent disastrous
wearing thin of the metal casing in which all good business men keep
their souls.
Sarah Brown thought if rather a curious coincidence that so soon after
they had spoken of the dead Keats they should see him alive. They saw
him framed in a little pale aisle of the Forest, a faintly defined
fragile ghost, crouched against the trunk of a tree, bent awkwardly into
an attitude of pain forgotten and ecstatic attention. It was his dearest
moment that they saw, a moment without death. For he was a prisoner in
a perfect spell; he was utterly entangled in the looped and ensnaring
song of a nightingale. The song was like beaten gold wire. Never again
in her life did Sarah Brown profane with her poor voice the words that a
perfect singer begot in a marriage with a perfect song. But in
unhappiness, and in the horrible nights, the song came to her,
always....
The travellers were approaching the end of the Green Ride, but that did
not matter to Sarah Brown, for there had been nothing lacking all the
way.
"Love----," began Richard in a loud exalted voice, and then suddenly a
searchlight glared diagonally across the end of the Ride, over Mitten
Island, and quenched the magic of the moment.
"Sorry," said Richard. "I thought I was talking to my True Love."
"I'm sorry you weren't," said Sarah Brown, as they emerged from the
Forest. "I mean, I'm sorry it was only me you were talking to."