_Lurulu Speaks of Earth and the Ways of Men_
The troll had found Orion in his castle and had laid his plan before
him. Briefly the plan was to have more whips for the pack. For one alone
could not always guard every hound from straying when they went to the
boundary of twilight, where but a few yards away lay spaces from which
if a hound ever came home, as lost hounds do at evening, it would come
home all worn and bedraggled with age for its half hour of straying.
Each hound, said Lurulu, should have its troll to guide it, and to run
with it when it hunted, and be its servant when it came home hungry and
muddy. And Orion had seen at once the unequalled advantage of having
each hound controlled by an alert if tiny intelligence, and had told
Lurulu to go for the trolls. So now, while the hounds were sleeping on
boards in a doggy mass in each of their kennels, for the dogs and the
bitches dwelt each in a separate house, the troll was scurrying over the
fields we know through twilight trembling on the verge of moonlight,
with his face turned toward Elfland.
He passed a white farm-house with a little window towards him that shone
bright yellow out of a wall pale blue with a tint that it had from the
moon. Two dogs barked at him and rushed out to chase him, and this troll
would have tricked them and mocked them on any other day, but now his
mind was full to the brim with his mission, and he heeded them no more
than a thistledown would have heeded them on a windy day of September,
and went on bouncing over the tips of the grasses till the pursuing dogs
were far behind and panting.
And long before the stars had paled from any touch of the dawn he came
to the barrier that divides our fields from the home of such things as
him, and leaping forward out of the earthly night, and high through the
barrier of twilight, he arrived on all fours on his natal soil in the
ageless day of Elfland. Through the gorgeous beauty of that heavy air
that outshines our lakes at sunrise, and leaves all our colours pale, he
scampered full of the news he had with which to astonish his kith. He
came to the moors of the trolls where they dwell in their queer
habitations, and uttered the squeaks as he went whereby the trolls
summon their folk; and he came to the forest in which the trolls have
made dwellings in boles of enormous trees; for there be trolls of the
forest and trolls of the moor, two tribes that are friendly and kin; and
there he uttered again the squeaks of the trolls' summons. And soon
there was a rustling of flowers throughout the deeps of the forest, as
though all four winds were blowing, and the rustling grew and grew, and
the trolls appeared, and sat down one by one near Lurulu. And still the
rustling grew, troubling the whole wood, and the brown trolls poured on
and sat down round Lurulu. From many a tree-bole, and hollows thick with
fern, they came tumbling in; and from the high thin gomaks afar on the
moors, to name as are named in Elfland those queer habitations for
which there is no earthly name, the odd grey cloth-like material draped
tent-wise about a pole. They gathered about him in the dim but
glittering light that floated amongst the fronds of those magical trees,
whose soaring trunks out-distanced our eldest pines, and shone on the
spikes of cacti of which our world little dreams. And when the brown
mass of the trolls was all gathered there, till the floor of the forest
looked as though an Autumn had come to Elfland, strayed out of the
fields we know, and when all the rustling had ceased and the silence was
heavy again as it had been for ages, Lurulu spoke to them telling them
tales of time.
Never before had such tales been heard in Elfland. Trolls had appeared
before in the fields we know, and had come back wondering: but Lurulu
amongst the houses of Erl had been in the midst of men; and time, as he
told the trolls, moved in the village with more wonderful speed than
ever it did in the grass of the fields of Earth. He told how the light
moved, he told of shadows, he told how the air was white and bright and
pale; he told how for a little while Earth began to grow like Elfland,
with a kinder light and the beginning of colours, and then just as one
thought of home the light would blink away and the colours be gone. He
told of stars. He told of cows and goats and the moon, three horned
creatures that he found curious. He had found more wonder in Earth than
we remember, though we also saw these things once for the first time;
and out of the wonder he felt at the ways of the fields we know, he made
many a tale that held the inquisitive trolls and gripped them silent
upon the floor of the forest, as though they were indeed a fall of brown
leaves in October that a frost had suddenly bound. They heard of
chimneys and carts for the first time: with a thrill they heard of
windmills. They listened spell-bound to the ways of men; and every now
and then, as when he told of hats, there ran through the forest a wave
of little yelps of laughter.
Then he said that they should see hats and spades and dog-kennels, and
look through casements and get to know the windmill; and a curiosity
arose in the forest amongst that brown mass of trolls, for their race is
profoundly inquisitive. And Lurulu stopped not here, relying on
curiosity alone to draw them from Elfland into the fields we know; but
he drew them also with another emotion. For he spoke of the haughty,
reserved, high, glittering unicorns, who tarry to speak to trolls no
more than cattle when they drink in pools of ours trouble to speak to
frogs. They all knew their haunts, they should watch their ways and tell
of these things to man, and the outcome of it would be that they should
hunt the unicorns with nothing less than dogs. Now however slight their
knowledge of dogs, the fear of dogs is--as I have said--universal
amongst all creatures that run; and they laughed gustily to think of the
unicorns being hunted with dogs. Thus Lurulu lured them toward Earth
with spite and curiosity; and knew that he was succeeding; and inwardly
chuckled till he was well warmed within. For amongst the trolls none
goes in higher repute than one that is able to astound the others, or
even to show them any whimsical thing, or to trick or perplex them
humorously. Lurulu had Earth to show, whose ways are considered, amongst
those able to judge, to be fully as quaint and whimsical as the curious
observer could wish.
Then up spake a grizzled troll; one that had crossed too often Earth's
border of twilight to watch the ways of men; and, while watching their
ways too long, time had grizzled him.
"Shall we go," he said, "from the woods that all folk know, and the
pleasant ways of the Land, to see a new thing, and be swept away by
time?" And there was a murmur among the trolls, that hummed away through
the forest and died out, as on Earth the sound of beetles going home.
"Is it not to-day?" he said. "But there they call it to-day, yet none
knows what it is: come back through the border again to look at it and
it is gone. Time is raging there, like the dogs that stray over our
frontier, barking, frightened and angry and wild to be home."
"It is even so," said the trolls, though they did not know; but this was
a troll whose words carried weight in the forest. "Let us keep to-day,"
said that weighty troll, "while we have it, and not be lured where
to-day is too easily lost. For every time men lose it their hair grows
whiter, their limbs grow weaker and their faces sadder, and they are
nearer still to to-morrow."
So gravely he spoke when he uttered that word "to-morrow" that the brown
trolls were frightened.
"What happens to-morrow?" one said.
"They die," said the grizzled troll. "And the others dig in their earth
and put them in, as I have seen them do, and then they go to Heaven, as
I have heard them tell." And a shudder went through the trolls far over
the floor of the forest.
And Lurulu who had sat angry all this while to hear that weighty troll
speak ill of Earth, where he would have them come, to astonish them with
its quaintness, spoke now in defence of Heaven.
"Heaven is a good place," he blurted hotly, though any tales he had
heard of it were few.
"All the blessed are there," the grizzled troll replied, "and it is full
of angels. What chance would a troll have there? The angels would catch
him, for they say on Earth that the angels all have wings; they would
catch a troll and smack him forever and ever."
And all the brown trolls in the forest wept.
"We are not so easily caught," Lurulu said.
"They have wings," said the grizzled troll.
And all were sorrowful and shook their heads, for they knew the speed of
wings.
The birds of Elfland mostly soared on the heavy air and eyed
everlastingly that fabulous beauty which to them was food and nest, and
of which they sometimes sang; but trolls playing along the border,
peering into the fields we know, had seen the dart and the swoop of
earthly birds, wondering at them as we wonder at heavenly things, and
knew that if wings were after him a poor troll would scarcely escape.
"Welladay," said the trolls.
The grizzled troll said no more, and had no need to, for the forest was
full of their sadness as they sat thinking of Heaven and feared that
they soon might come there if they dared to inhabit Earth.
And Lurulu argued no more. It was not a time for argument, for the
trolls were too sad for reason. So he spoke gravely to them of solemn
things, uttering learned words and standing in reverend attitude. Now
nothing rejoices the trolls as learning does and solemnity, and they
will laugh for hours at a reverend attitude or any semblance of gravity.
Thus he won them back again to the levity that is their natural mood.
And when this was accomplished he spoke again of Earth, telling
whimsical stories of the ways of man.
I do not wish to write the things that Lurulu said of man, lest I
should hurt my reader's self-esteem, and thereby injure him or her whom
I seek only to entertain; but all the forest rippled and squealed with
laughter. And the grizzled troll was able to say no more to check the
curiosity which was growing in all that multitude to see who it was that
lived in houses and had a hat immediately above him and a chimney higher
up, and spoke to dogs and would not speak to pigs, and whose gravity was
funnier than anything trolls could do. And the whim was on all those
trolls to go at once to Earth, and see pigs and carts and windmills and
laugh at man. And Lurulu who had told Orion that he would bring a score
of trolls, was hard set to keep the whole brown mass from coming, so
quickly change the moods and whims of the trolls: had he let them all
have their way there were no trolls left in Elfland, for even the
grizzled troll had changed his mind with the rest. Fifty he chose and
led them towards Earth's perilous frontier; and away they scurried out
of the gloom of the forest, as a whirl of brown oak-leaves scurries on
days of November's worst.