_The Ebbing of Elfland_
Next morning Alveric came up the tower to the witch Ziroonderel, weary
and frantic from searching all night long in strange places for Lirazel.
All night he had tried to guess what fancy had beckoned her out and
whither it might have led her; he had searched by the stream by which
she had prayed to the stones, and the pool where she prayed to the
stars; he had called her name up every tower, and had called it wide in
the dark, and had had no answer but echo; and so he had come at last to
the witch Ziroonderel.
"Whither?" he said, saying no more than that, that the boy might not
know his fears. Yet Orion knew.
And Ziroonderel all mournfully shook her head. "The way of the leaves,"
she said. "The way of all beauty."
But Alveric did not stay to hear her say more than her first five words;
for he went with the restlessness with which he had come, straight from
the room and hastily down the stair, and out at once into the windy
morning, to see which way those glorious leaves were gone.
And a few leaves that had clung to cold branches longer, when the gay
company of their comrades had gone, were now too on the air, going
lonely and last: and Alveric saw they were going south-east towards
Elfland.
Hurriedly then he donned his magical sword in its wide scabbard of
leather; and with scanty provisions hastened over the fields, after the
last of the leaves, whose autumnal glory led him, as many a cause in its
latter days, all splendid and fallen, leads all manner of men.
And so he came to the upland fields with their grass all grey with dew;
and the air was all sparkling with sunlight, and gay with the last of
the leaves, but a melancholy seemed to dwell with the sound of the
lowing of cattle.
In the calm bright morning with the north-west wind roaming through it
Alveric came by no calm, and never gave up the haste of one who has lost
something suddenly: he had the swift movements of such, and the frantic
air. He watched all day over clear wide horizons, south-east where the
leaves were leading; and at evening he looked to see the Elfin
Mountains, severe and changeless, unlit by any light we know, the colour
of pale forget-me-nots. He held on restlessly to see their summits, but
never they came to view.
And then he saw the house of the old leather-worker who had made the
scabbard for his sword; and the sight of it brought back to him the
years that were gone since the evening when first he had seen it,
although he never knew how many they were, and could not know, for no
one has ever devised any exact calculation whereby to estimate the
action of time in Elfland. Then he looked once more for the pale-blue
Elfin Mountains, remembering well where they lay, in their long grave
row past a point of one of the leather-worker's gables, but he saw never
a line of them. Then he entered the house and the old man still was
there.
The leather-worker was wonderfully aged; even the table on which he
worked was much older. He greeted Alveric, remembering who he was, and
Alveric enquired for the old man's wife. "She died long ago," he said.
And again Alveric felt the baffling flight of those years, which added a
fear to Elfland whither he went, yet he neither thought to turn back nor
reined for a moment his impatient haste. He said a few formal things of
the old man's loss that had happened so long ago. Then "Where are the
Elfin Mountains," he asked, "the pale-blue peaks?"
A look came slowly over the old man's face as though he had never seen
them, as though Alveric being learned spoke of something that the old
leather-worker could not know. No, he did not know, he said. And Alveric
found that to-day as all those years ago, this old man still refused to
speak of Elfland. Well, the boundary was only a few yards away; he would
cross it and ask the way of elfin creatures, if he could not see the
mountains to guide him then. The old man offered him food, and he had
not eaten all day; but Alveric in his haste only asked him once more of
Elfland, and the old man humbly said that of such things he knew
nothing. Then Alveric strode away and came to the field he knew, which
he remembered to be divided by the nebulous border of twilight. And
indeed he had no sooner come to the field than he saw all the toadstools
leaning over one way, and that the way he was going; for just as thorn
trees all lean away from the sea, so toadstools and every plant that has
any touch of mystery, such as foxgloves, mulleins and certain kinds of
orchis, when growing anywhere near it, all lean towards Elfland. By this
one may know before one has heard a murmur of waves, or before one has
guessed an influence of magical things, that one comes, as the case may
be, to the sea or the border of Elfland. And in the air above him
Alveric saw golden birds, and guessed that there had been a storm in
Elfland blowing them over the border from the south-east, though a
north-west wind blew over the fields we know. And he went on but the
boundary was not there, and he crossed the field as any field we know,
and still he had not come to the fells of Elfland.
Then Alveric pressed on with a new impatience, with the north-west wind
behind him. And the Earth began to grow bare and shingly and dull,
without flowers, without shade, without colour, with none of those
things that there are in remembered lands, by which we build pictures of
them when we are there no more; it was all disenchanted now. Alveric saw
a golden bird high up, rushing away to the south-east; and he followed
his flight hoping soon to see the mountains of Elfland, which he
supposed to be merely concealed by some magical mist.
But still the autumnal sky was bright and clear, and all the horizon
plain, and still there came never a gleam of the Elfin Mountains. And
not from this did he learn that Elfland had ebbed. But when he saw on
that desolate shingly plain, untorn by the north-west wind but blooming
fair in the Autumn, a may tree that he remembered a long while since,
all white with blossom that once rejoiced a Spring day far in his
childhood, then he knew that Elfland had been there and must have
receded, although he knew not how far. For it is true, and Alveric
knew, that just as the glamour that brightens much of our lives,
especially in early years, comes from rumours that reach us from Elfland
by various messengers (on whom be blessings and peace), so there returns
from our fields to Elfland again, to become a part of its mystery, all
manner of little memories that we have lost and little devoted toys that
were treasured once. And this is part of the law of ebb and flow that
science may trace in all things; thus light grew the forest of coal, and
the coal gives back light; thus rivers fill the sea, and the sea sends
back to the rivers; thus all things give that receive; even Death.
Next Alveric saw lying there on the flat dry ground a toy that he yet
remembered, which years and years ago (how could he say how many?) had
been a childish joy to him, crudely carved out of wood; and one unlucky
day it had been broken, and one unhappy day it had been thrown away. And
now he saw it lying there not merely new and unbroken, but with a wonder
about it, a splendour and a romance, the radiant transfigured thing that
his young fancy had known. It lay there forsaken of Elfland as wonderful
things of the sea lie sometimes desolate on wastes of sand, when the sea
is a far blue bulk with a border of foam.
Dreary with lost romance was the plain from which Elfland had gone,
though here and there Alveric saw again and again those little forsaken
things that had been lost from his childhood, dropping through time to
the ageless and hourless region of Elfland to be a part of its glory,
and now left forlorn by this immense withdrawal. Old tunes, old songs,
old voices, hummed there too, growing fainter and fainter, as though
they could not live long in the fields we know.
And, when the sun set, a mauve-rose glow in the East, that Alveric
fancied a little too gorgeous for Earth, led him onward still; for he
deemed it to be the reflection cast on the sky by the glow of the
splendour of Elfland. So he went on hoping to find it, horizon after
horizon; and night came on with all Earth's comrade stars. And only then
Alveric put aside at last that frantic restlessness that had driven him
since the morning; and, wrapping himself in a loose cloak that he wore,
ate such food as he had in a satchel, and slept a troubled sleep alone
with other forsaken things.
At the earliest moment of dawn his impatience awoke him, although one of
October's mists hid all glimpses of light. He ate the last of his food
and then pushed on through the greyness.
No sound from the things of our fields came to him now; for men never
went that way when Elfland was there, and none but Alveric went now to
that desolate plain. He had travelled beyond the sound of cock-crow from
the comfortable houses of men and was now marching through a curious
silence, broken only now and then by the small dim cries of the lost
songs that had been left by the ebb of Elfland and were fainter now than
they had been the day before. And when dawn shone Alveric saw again so
great a splendour in the sky, glowing all green low down in the
south-east, that he thought once more he saw a reflection from Elfland,
and pressed on hoping to find it over the next horizon. And he passed
the next horizon; and still that shingly plain, and never a peak of the
pale-blue Elfin Mountains.
Whether Elfland always lay over the next horizon, brightening the clouds
with its glow, and moved away just as he came, or whether it had gone
days or years before, he did not know but still kept on and on. And he
came at last to a dry and grassless ridge on which his eyes and his
hopes had been set for long, and from it he looked far over the desolate
flatness that stretched to the rim of the sky, and saw never a sign of
Elfland, never a slope of the mountains: even the little treasures of
memory that had been left behind by the ebb were withering into things
of our every day. Then Alveric drew his magical sword from its sheath.
But though that sword had power against enchantment it had not been
given the power to bring again an enchantment that was gone; and the
desolate land remained the same, for all that he waved his sword, stony,
deserted, unromantic and wide.
For a little while he went on; but in that flat land the horizon moved
imperceptibly with him, and never a peak appeared of the Elfin
Mountains; and on that dreary plain he soon discovered, as sooner or
later many a man must, that he had lost Elfland.