_Lurulu Watches the Restlessness of Earth_
As the day wore on and still Orion slept heavily, and even the hounds
lay silent in their kennels a little way off, and the coming and going
of men and carts below had nothing to do with the troll, Lurulu began to
feel lonely. So thick are the brown trolls in the dells they inhabit
that none feels lonely there. They sit there silent, enjoying the beauty
of Elfland or their own impudent thoughts, or at rare moments when
Elfland is stirred from its deep natural calm their laughter floods the
dells. They were no more lonely there than rabbits are. But in all the
fields of Earth there was only one troll; and that troll felt lonely.
The door of the pigeon loft was open some ten feet from the door of the
hayloft, and some six feet higher. A ladder led to the hayloft, clamped
to the wall with iron; but nothing at all communicated with the
pigeon-loft lest cats should go that way. From it came the murmur of
abundant life, which attracted the lonely troll. The jump from door to
door was nothing to him, and he landed in the pigeon-loft in his usual
attitude, with a look of impudent welcome upon his face. But the pigeons
poured away on a roar of wings through their windows, and the troll was
still lonely.
He liked the pigeon-loft as soon as he looked at it. He liked the signs
that he saw of teeming life, the hundred little houses of slate and
plaster, the myriad feathers, and the musty smell. He liked the age-old
ease of the sleepy loft, and the huge spiders-webs that draped the
corners, holding years and years of dust. He did not know what cobwebs
were, never having seen them in Elfland, but he admired their
workmanship.
The age of the pigeon-loft that had filled the corners with cobwebs, and
broken patches of plaster away from the wall, shewing ruddy bricks
beneath, and laid bare the laths in the roof and even the slates beyond,
gave to the dreamy place an air not unlike to the calm of Elfland; but
below it and all around Lurulu noted the restlessness of Earth. Even the
sunlight through the little ventilation-holes that shone on the wall
moved.
Presently there came the roar of the pigeons' returning wings and the
crash of their feet on the slate roof above him, but they did not yet
come in again to their homes. He saw the shadow of this roof cast on
another roof below him, and the restless shadows of the pigeons along
the edge. He observed the grey lichen covering most of the lower roof,
and the neat round patches of newer yellow lichen on the shapeless mass
of the grey. He heard a duck call out slowly six or seven times. He
heard a man come into a stable below him and lead a horse away. A hound
woke and cried out. Some jackdaws, disturbed from some tower, passed
over high in the air with boisterous voices. He saw big clouds go
hurrying along the tops of far hills. He heard a wild pigeon call from a
neighbouring tree. Some men went by talking. And after a while he
perceived to his astonishment what he had had no leisure to notice on
his previous visit to Erl, that even the shadows of houses moved; for he
saw that the shadow of the roof under which he sat had moved a little on
the roof below, over the grey and yellow lichen. Perpetual movement and
perpetual change! He contrasted it, in wonder, with the deep calm of his
home, where the moment moved more slowly than the shadows of houses
here, and did not pass until all the content with which a moment is
stored had been drawn from it by every creature in Elfland.
And then with a whirring and whining of wings the pigeons began to come
back. They came from the tops of the battlements of the highest tower of
Erl, on which they had sheltered awhile, feeling guarded by its great
height and its hoary age from this strange new thing that they feared.
They came back and sat on the sills of their little windows and looked
in with one eye at the troll. Some were all white, but the grey ones had
rainbow-coloured necks that were scarce less lovely than those colours
that made the splendour of Elfland; and Lurulu as they watched him
suspiciously where he sat still in a corner longed for their dainty
companionship. And, when these restless children of a restless air and
Earth still would not enter, he tried to soothe them with the
restlessness to which they were accustomed and in which he believed all
folk that dwelt in our fields delighted. He leaped up suddenly; he
sprang on to a slate-built house for a pigeon high on a wall; he darted
across to the next wall and back to the floor; but there was an outcry
of wings and the pigeons were gone. And gradually he learned that the
pigeons preferred stillness.
Their wings roared back soon to the roof; their feet thumped and clicked
on the slates again; but not for long did they return to their homes.
And the lonely troll looked out of their windows observing the ways of
Earth. He saw a water-wagtail light on the roof below him: he watched it
until it went. And then two sparrows came to some corn that had been
dropped on the ground: he noted them too. Each was an entirely new genus
to the troll, and he showed no more interest as he watched every
movement of the sparrows than should we if we met with an utterly
unknown bird. When the sparrows were gone the duck quacked again, so
deliberately that another ten minutes passed while Lurulu tried to
interpret what it was saying, and although he desisted then because
other interests attracted him he felt sure it was something important.
Then the jackdaws tumbled by again, but their voices sounded frivolous,
and Lurulu did not give them much attention. To the pigeons on the roof
that would not come home he listened long, not trying to interpret what
they were saying, yet satisfied with the case as the pigeons put it;
feeling that they told the story of life, and that all was well. And he
felt as he listened to the low talk of the pigeons that Earth must have
been going on for a long time.
Beyond the roofs the tall trees rose up, leafless except for evergreen
oaks and some laurels and pines and yews, and the ivy that climbed up
trunks, but the buds of the beech were getting ready to burst: and the
sunlight glittered and flashed on the buds and leaves, and the ivy and
laurel shone. A breeze passed by and some smoke drifted from some near
chimney. Far away Lurulu saw a huge grey wall of stone that circled a
garden all asleep in the sun; and clear in the sunlight he saw a
butterfly sail by, and swoop when it came to the garden. And then he saw
two peacocks go slowly past. He saw the shadow of the roofs darkening
the lower part of the shining trees. He heard a cock crow somewhere,
and a hound spoke out again. And then a sudden shower rained on the
roofs, and at once the pigeons wanted to come home. They alighted
outside their little windows again and all looked sideways at the troll;
Lurulu kept very still this time; and after a while the pigeons, though
they saw that he was by no means one of themselves, agreed that he did
not belong to the tribe of cat, and returned at last to the street of
their tiny houses and there continued their curious age-old tale. And
Lurulu longed to repay them with curious tales of the trolls, the
treasured legends of Elfland, but found that he could not make them
understand troll-talk. So he sat and listened to them talking, till it
seemed to him they were trying to lull the restlessness of Earth, and
thought that they might by drowsy incantation be putting some spell
against time, through which it could not come to harm their nests; for
the power of time was not made clear to him yet and he knew not yet that
nothing in our fields has the strength to hold out against time. The
very nests of the pigeons were built on the ruins of old nests, on a
solid layer of crumbled things that time had made in that pigeon-loft,
as outside it the strata are made from the ruins of hills. So vast and
ceaseless a ruin was not yet clear to the troll, for his sharp
understanding had only been meant to guide him through the lull and the
calm of Elfland, and he busied himself with a tinier consideration. For
seeing that the pigeons seemed now amicable he leapt back to his hayloft
and returned with a bundle of hay, which he put down in a corner to make
himself comfortable there. When the pigeons saw all this movement they
looked at him sideways again, jerking their necks queerly, but in the
end decided to accept the troll as a lodger; and he curled up on his hay
and listened to the history of Earth, which he believed the tale of the
pigeons to be, though he did not know their language.
But the day wore on and hunger came on the troll, far sooner than ever
it did in Elfland, where even when he was hungry he had no more to do
than to reach up and take the berries that hung low from the trees, that
grew in the forest that bordered the dells of the trolls. And it is
because the trolls eat them whenever hunger comes on them, which it
rarely does, that these curious fruits are called trollberries. He
leaped now from the pigeon-loft and scampered abroad, looking all round
for trollberries. And there were no berries at all, for there is but one
season for berries, as we know well; it is one of the tricks of time.
But that all the berries on Earth should pass away for a period was to
the troll too astounding to be comprehended at all. He was all among
farm-buildings, and presently he saw a rat humping himself slowly along
through a dark shed. He knew nothing of rat-talk; but it is a curious
thing that when any two folk are after the same thing, each somehow
knows what the other is after, at once, as soon as he sees him. We are
all partially blind to other folks' occupations, but when we meet anyone
engaged in our own pursuit then somehow we soon seem to know without
being told. And the moment that Lurulu saw the rat in the shed he seemed
to know that it was looking for food. So he followed the rat quietly.
And soon the rat came up to a sack of oats, and to open that took him no
longer than it does to shell a row of peas, and soon he was eating the
oats.
"Are they good?" said the troll in troll-talk.
The rat looked at him dubiously, noting his resemblance to man, and on
the other hand his unlikeness to dogs. But on the whole the rat was
dissatisfied, and after a long look turned away in silence and went out
of the shed. Then Lurulu ate the oats and found they were good.
When he had had enough oats the troll returned to the pigeon-loft, and
sat a long while there at one of the little windows looking out across
the roofs at the strange new ways of time. And the shadow upon the trees
went higher, and the glitter was gone from the laurels and all the lower
leaves. And then the light of the ivy-leaves and the holm-oaks turned
from silvery to pale gold. And the shadow went higher still. All the
world full of change.
An old man with a narrow long white beard came slowly to the kennels,
and opened the door and went in and fed the hounds with meat that he
brought from a shed. All the evening rang with the hounds' outcry. And
presently the old man came out again, and his slow departure seemed to
the watchful troll yet more of the restlessness of Earth.
And then a man came slowly leading a horse to the stable below the
pigeon-loft; and went away again and left the horse eating. The shadows
were higher now on walls and roofs and trees. Only the tree-tops and the
tip of a high belfry had the light any longer. The ruddy buds on high
beeches were glowing now like dull rubies. And a great serenity came in
the pale blue sky, and small clouds leisurely floating there turned to a
flaming orange, past which the rooks went homewards to some clump of
trees under the downs. It was a peaceful scene. And yet to the troll, as
he watched in the musty loft amongst generations of feathers, the noise
of the rooks and their multitude thronging the sky, the dull continual
sound of the horse eating, the leisurely sound now and then of homeward
feet, and the slow shutting of gates, seemed to be proof that nothing
ever rested in all the fields we know; and the sleepy lazy village that
dreamed in the Vale of Erl, and that knew no more of other lands than
their folk knew of its story, seemed to that simple troll to be a vortex
of restlessness.
And now the sunlight was gone from the highest places, and a moon a few
days old was shining over the pigeon-loft, out of sight of Lurulu's
window, but filling the air with a strange new tint. And all these
changes bewildered him, so that he thought awhile of returning to
Elfland, but the whim came again to his mind to astonish the other
trolls; and while this whim was on him he slipped down from the loft,
and went to find Orion.