Kitabı oku: «Rewards and Fairies», sayfa 5
‘“Perfectly,” said René. “I drive on the breakers. But before I strike, I shall save hundreds, thousands, millions perhaps, by my little trumpets. Now tell me what sounds the old Gaffer Macklin have made in his chest, and what the young Copper also.”
‘Jerry talked for nearly a quarter of an hour about sick people in the village, while René asked questions. Then he sighed, and said, “You explain very well, Monsieur Gamm, but if only I had your opportunities to listen for myself! Do you think these poor people would let me listen to them through my trumpet – for a little money? No?" – René’s as poor as a church mouse.
‘“They’d kill you, Mosheur. It’s all I can do to coax ’em to abide it, and I’m Jerry Gamm,” said Jerry. He’s very proud of his attainments.
‘“Then these poor people are alarmed – No?” said René.
‘“They’ve had it in for me for some time back because o’ my tryin’ your trumpets on their sick; and I reckon by the talk at the alehouse they won’t stand much more. Tom Dunch an’ some of his kidney was drinkin’ themselves riot-ripe when I passed along after noon. Charms an’ mutterin’s and bits o’ red wool and black hens is in the way o’ nature to these fools, Mosheur; but anything likely to do ’em real service is devil’s work by their estimation. If I was you, I’d go home before they come.” Jerry spoke quite quietly, and René shrugged his shoulders.
‘“I am prisoner on parole, Monsieur Gamm,” he said. “I have no home.”
‘Now that was unkind of René. He’s often told me that he looked on England as his home. I suppose it’s French politeness.
‘“Then we’ll talk o’ something that matters,” said Jerry. “Not to name no names, Mosheur Lanark, what might be your own opinion o’ some one who ain’t old Gaffer Macklin nor young Copper? Is that person better or worse?”
‘“Better – for time that is,” said René. He meant for the time being, but I never could teach him some phrases.
‘“I thought so too,” said Jerry. “But how about time to come?”
‘René shook his head, and then he blew his nose. You don’t know how odd a man looks blowing his nose when you are sitting directly above him.
‘“I’ve thought that too,” said Jerry. He rumbled so deep I could scarcely catch. “It don’t make much odds to me, because I’m old. But you’re young, Mosheur – you’re young," and he put his hand on René’s knee, and René covered it with his hand. I didn’t know they were such friends.
‘“Thank you, mon ami,” said René. “I am much oblige. Let us return to our trumpet-making. But I forget" – he stood up – "it appears that you receive this afternoon!”
‘You can’t see into Gamm’s Lane from the oak, but the gate opened, and fat little Doctor Break stumped in, mopping his head, and half-a-dozen of our people followed him, very drunk.
‘You ought to have seen René bow; he does it beautifully.
‘“A word with you, Laennec,” said Dr. Break. “Jerry has been practising some devilry or other on these poor wretches, and they’ve asked me to be arbiter.”
‘“Whatever that means, I reckon it’s safer than asking you to be doctor,” said Jerry, and Tom Dunch, one of our carters, laughed.
‘“That ain’t right feeling of you, Tom,” Jerry said, “seeing how clever Dr. Break put away your thorn in the flesh last winter.” Tom’s wife had died at Christmas, though Dr. Break bled her twice a week. He danced with rage.
‘“This is all beside the mark,” he said. “These good people are willing to testify that you’ve been impudently prying into God’s secrets by means of some papistical contrivance which this person" – he pointed to poor René – "has furnished you with. Why, here are the things themselves!” René was holding a trumpet in his hand.
‘Then all the men talked at once. They said old Gaffer Macklin was dying from stitches in his side where Jerry had put the trumpet – they called it the devil’s ear-piece; and they said it left round red witchmarks on people’s skins, and dried up their lights, and made ’em spit blood, and threw ’em into sweats. Terrible things they said. You never heard such a noise. I took advantage of it to cough.
‘René and Jerry were standing with their backs to the pigsty. Jerry fumbled in his big flap pockets and fished up a pair of pistols. You ought to have seen the men give back when he cocked his. He passed one to René.
‘“Wait! Wait!” said René. “I will explain to the doctor if he permits." He waved a trumpet at him, and the men at the gate shouted, “Don’t touch it, Doctor! Don’t lay a hand to the thing.”
‘“Come, come!” said René. “You are not so big fool as you pretend, Dr. Break. No?”
‘Dr. Break backed toward the gate, watching Jerry’s pistol, and René followed him with his trumpet, like a nurse trying to amuse a child, and put the ridiculous thing to his ear to show how it was used, and talked of la Gloire, and la Humanité, and la Science, while Dr. Break watched Jerry’s pistol and swore. I nearly laughed aloud.
‘“Now listen! Now listen!” said René. “This will be moneys in your pockets, my dear confrère. You will become rich.”
‘Then Dr. Break said something about adventurers who could not earn an honest living in their own country creeping into decent houses and taking advantage of gentlemen’s confidence to enrich themselves by base intrigues.
‘René dropped his absurd trumpet and made one of his best bows. I knew he was angry from the way he rolled his “r’s.”
‘“Ver-r-ry good,” said he. “For that I shall have much pleasure to kill you now and here. Monsieur Gamm" – another bow to Jerry – "you will please lend him your pistol, or he shall have mine. I give you my word I know not which is best; and if he will choose a second from his friends over there" – another bow to our drunken yokels at the gate – "we will commence.”
‘“That’s fair enough,” said Jerry. “Tom Dunch, you owe it to the doctor to be his second. Place your man.”
‘“No,” said Tom. “No mixin’ in gentry’s quarrels for me.” And he shook his head and went out, and the others followed him.
‘“Hold on,” said Jerry. “You’ve forgot what you set out to do up at the alehouse just now. You was goin’ to search me for witchmarks; you was goin’ to duck me in the pond; you was goin’ to drag all my bits o’ sticks out o’ my little cottage here. What’s the matter with you? Wouldn’t you like to be with your old woman to-night, Tom?”
‘But they didn’t even look back, much less come. They ran to the village alehouse like hares.
‘“No matter for these canaille,” said René, buttoning up his coat so as not to show any linen. All gentlemen do that before a duel, Dad says – and he’s been out five times. “You shall be his second, Monsieur Gamm. Give him the pistol.”
‘Dr. Break took it as if it was red-hot, but he said that if René resigned his pretensions in certain quarters he would pass over the matter. René bowed deeper than ever.
‘“As for that,” he said, “if you were not the ignorant which you are, you would have known long ago that the subject of your remarks is not for any living man.”
‘I don’t know what the subject of his remarks might have been, but he spoke in a simply dreadful voice, my dear, and Dr. Break turned quite white, and said René was a liar; and then René caught him by the throat, and choked him black.
‘Well, my dear, as if this wasn’t deliciously exciting enough, just exactly at that minute I heard a strange voice on the other side of the hedge say, “What’s this? What’s this, Bucksteed?” and there was my father and Sir Arthur Wesley on horseback in the lane; and there was René kneeling on Dr. Break, and there was I up in the oak, listening with all my ears.
‘I must have leaned forward too much, and the voice gave me such a start that I slipped. I had only time to make one jump on to the pigsty roof – another, before the tiles broke, on to the pigsty wall – and then I bounced down into the garden, just behind Jerry, with my hair full of bark. Imagine the situation!’
‘Oh, I can!’ Una laughed till she nearly fell off the stool.
‘Dad said, “Phil – a – del – phia!” and Sir Arthur Wesley said, “Good Ged!" and Jerry put his foot on the pistol René had dropped. But René was splendid. He never even looked at me. He began to untwist Dr. Break’s neckcloth as fast as he’d twisted it, and asked him if he felt better.
‘“What’s happened? What’s happened?” said Dad.
‘“A fit!” said René. “I fear my confrère has had a fit. Do not be alarmed. He recovers himself. Shall I bleed you a little, my dear Doctor?” Dr. Break was very good too. He said, “I am vastly obliged, Monsieur Laennec, but I am restored now.” And as he went out of the gate he told Dad it was a syncope – I think. Then Sir Arthur said, “Quite right, Bucksteed. Not another word! They are both gentlemen.” And he took off his cocked hat to Dr. Break and René.
‘But poor Dad wouldn’t let well alone. He kept saying, “Philadelphia, what does all this mean?”
‘“Well, sir,” I said, “I’ve only just come down. As far as I could see, it looked as though Dr. Break had had a sudden seizure.” That was quite true – if you’d seen René seize him. Sir Arthur laughed. “Not much change there, Bucksteed,” he said. “She’s a lady – a thorough lady.”
‘“Heaven knows she doesn’t look like one,” said poor Dad. “Go home, Philadelphia.”
‘So I went home, my dear – don’t laugh so! – right under Sir Arthur’s nose – a most enormous nose – feeling as though I were twelve years old, going to be whipped. Oh, I beg your pardon, child!’
‘It’s all right,’ said Una. ‘I’m getting on for thirteen. I’ve never been whipped, but I know how you felt. All the same, it must have been funny!’
‘Funny! If you’d heard Sir Arthur jerking out, “Good Ged, Bucksteed!" every minute as they rode behind me; and poor Dad saying, “’Pon my honour, Arthur, I can’t account for it!” Oh, how my cheeks tingled when I reached my room! But Cissie had laid out my very best evening dress, the white satin one, vandyked at the bottom with spots of morone foil, and the pearl knots, you know, catching up the drapery from the left shoulder. I had poor mother’s lace tucker and her coronet comb.’
‘Oh, you lucky!’ Una murmured. ‘And gloves?’
‘French kid, my dear’ – Philadelphia patted her shoulder – ‘and morone satin shoes and a morone and gold crape fan. That restored my calm. Nice things always do. I wore my hair banded on my forehead with a little curl over the left ear. And when I descended the stairs, en grande tenue, old Amoore curtsied to me without my having to stop and look at her, which alas! is too often the case. Sir Arthur highly approved of the dinner, my dear: the mackerel did come in time. We had all the Marklake silver out, and he toasted my health, and he asked me where my little bird’s-nesting sister was. I know he did it to quiz me, so I looked him straight in the face, my dear, and I said, “I always send her to the nursery, Sir Arthur, when I receive guests at Marklake Hall."’
‘Oh, how chee – clever of you. What did he say?’ Una cried.
‘He said, “Not much change there, Bucksteed. Ged, I deserved it,” and he toasted me again. They talked about the French and what a shame it was that Sir Arthur only commanded a brigade at Hastings, and he told Dad of a battle in India at a place called Assaye. Dad said it was a terrible fight, but Sir Arthur described it as though it had been a whist-party – I suppose because a lady was present.’
‘Of course you were the lady; I wish I’d seen you,’ said Una.
‘I wish you had, child. I had such a triumph after dinner. René and Dr. Break came in. They had quite made up their quarrel, and they told me they had the highest esteem for each other, and I laughed and said, "I heard every word of it up in the tree.” You never saw two men so frightened in your life, and when I said, “What was ‘the subject of your remarks,’ René?” neither of them knew where to look. Oh, I quizzed them unmercifully. They’d seen me jump off the pigsty roof, remember.’
‘But what was the subject of their remarks?’ said Una.
‘Oh, Dr. Break said it was a professional matter, so the laugh was turned on me. I was horribly afraid it might have been something unladylike and indelicate. But that wasn’t my triumph. Dad asked me to play on the harp. Between just you and me, child, I had been practising a new song from London – I don’t always live in trees – for weeks; and I gave it them for a surprise.’
‘What was it?’ said Una. ‘Sing it.’
‘“I have given my heart to a flower.” Not very difficult fingering, but r-r-ravishing sentiment.’
Philadelphia coughed and cleared her throat.
‘I’ve a deep voice for my age and size,’ she explained. ‘Contralto, you know, but it ought to be stronger,’ and she began, her face all dark against the last of the soft pink sunset:
‘I have given my heart to a flower,
Though I know it is fading away,
Though I know it will live but an hour
And leave me to mourn its decay!
‘Isn’t that touchingly sweet? Then the last verse – I wish I had my harp, dear – goes as low as my register will reach.’ She drew in her chin, and took a deep breath:
‘Ye desolate whirlwinds that rave,
I charge you be good to my dear!
She is all – she is all that I have,
And the time of our parting is near!’
‘Beautiful!’ said Una. ‘And did they like it?’
‘Like it? They were overwhelmed —accablés, as René says. My dear, if I hadn’t seen it, I shouldn’t have believed that I could have drawn tears, genuine tears, to the eyes of four grown men. But I did! René simply couldn’t endure it! He’s all French sensibility. He hid his face and said, “Assez Mademoiselle! C’est plus fort que moi! Assez!” And Sir Arthur blew his nose and said, “Good Ged! This is worse than Assaye!” While Dad sat with the tears simply running down his cheeks.’
‘And what did Dr. Break do?’
‘He got up and pretended to look out of the window, but I saw his little fat shoulders jerk as if he had the hiccoughs. That was a triumph. I never suspected him of sensibility.’
‘Oh, I wish I’d seen! I wish I’d been you,’ said Una, clasping her hands. Puck rustled and rose from the fern, just as a big blundering cockchafer flew smack against Una’s cheek.
When she had finished rubbing the place, Mrs. Vincey called to her that Pansy had been fractious, or she would have come long before to help her strain and pour off.
‘It didn’t matter,’ said Una; ‘I just waited. Is that old Pansy barging about the lower pasture now?’
‘No,’ said Mrs. Vincey, listening. ‘It sounds more like a horse being galloped middlin’ quick through the woods; but there’s no road there. I reckon it’s one of Gleason’s colts loose. Shall I see you up to the house, Miss Una?’
‘Gracious no! thank you. What’s going to hurt me?’ said Una, and she put her stool away behind the oak, and strolled home through the gaps that old Hobden kept open for her.
BROOKLAND ROAD
I was very well pleased with what I knowed,
I reckoned myself no fool —
Till I met with a maid on the Brookland Road,
That turned me back to school.
Low down – low down!
Where the liddle green lanterns shine —
Oh! maids, I’ve done with ’ee all but one,
And she can never be mine!
’Twas right in the middest of a hot June night,
With thunder duntin’ round,
And I see’d her face by the fairy light
That beats from off the ground.
She only smiled and she never spoke,
She smiled and went away;
But when she’d gone my heart was broke,
And my wits was clean astray.
Oh! Stop your ringing and let me be —
Let be, Oh Brookland bells!
You’ll ring Old Goodman4 out of the sea,
Before I wed one else!
Old Goodman’s farm is rank sea sand,
And was this thousand year;
But it shall turn to rich plough land
Before I change my dear!
Oh! Fairfield Church is water-bound
From Autumn to the Spring;
But it shall turn to high hill ground
Before my bells do ring!
Oh! leave me walk on the Brookland Road,
In the thunder and warm rain —
Oh! leave me look where my love goed
And p’raps I’ll see her again!
Low down – low down!
Where the liddle green lanterns shine —
Oh! maids, I’ve done with ’ee all but one,
And she can never be mine.
The Knife and the Naked Chalk
THE RUN OF THE DOWNS
The Weald is good, the Downs are best —
I’ll give you the run of ’em, East to West.
Beachy Head and Winddoor Hill,
They were once and they are still.
Firle, Mount Caburn and Mount Harry
Go back as far as sums’ll carry.
Ditchling Beacon and Chanctonbury Ring,
They have looked on many a thing;
And what those two have missed between ’em
I reckon Truleigh Hill has seen ’em.
Highden, Bignor and Duncton Down
Knew Old England before the Crown.
Linch Down, Treyford and Sunwood
Knew Old England before the Flood.
And when you end on the Hampshire side —
Butser’s old as Time and Tide.
The Downs are sheep, the Weald is corn,
You be glad you are Sussex born!
The Knife and the Naked Chalk
The children went to the seaside for a month, and lived in a flint village on the bare windy chalk Downs, quite thirty miles away from home. They made friends with an old shepherd, called Mr. Dudeney, who had known their father when their father was little. He did not talk like their own people in the Weald of Sussex, and he used different names for farm things, but he understood how they felt, and let them go with him. He had a tiny cottage about half a mile from the village, where his wife made mead from thyme honey, and nursed sick lambs in front of a coal fire, while Old Jim, who was Mr. Dudeney’s sheep-dog’s father, lay at the door. They brought up beef bones for Old Jim (you must never give a sheep-dog mutton bones), and if Mr. Dudeney happened to be far in the Downs, Mrs. Dudeney would tell the dog to take them to him, and he did.
One August afternoon when the village water-cart had made the street smell specially townified, they went to look for their shepherd as usual, and, as usual, Old Jim crawled over the door-step and took them in charge. The sun was hot, the dry grass was very slippery, and the distances were very distant.
‘It’s just like the sea,’ said Una, when Old Jim halted in the shade of a lonely flint barn on a bare rise. ‘You see where you’re going, and – you go there, and there’s nothing between.’
Dan slipped off his shoes. ‘When we get home I shall sit in the woods all day,’ he said.
‘Whuff!’ said Old Jim, to show he was ready, and struck across a long rolling stretch of turf. Presently he asked for his beef bone.
‘Not yet,’ said Dan. ‘Where’s Mr. Dudeney? Where’s master?’
Old Jim looked as if he thought they were mad, and asked again.
‘Don’t you give it him,’ Una cried. ‘I’m not going to be left howling in a desert.’
‘Show, boy! Show!’ said Dan, for the Downs seemed as bare as the palm of your hand.
Old Jim sighed, and trotted forward. Soon they spied the blob of Mr. Dudeney’s hat against the sky a long way off.
‘Right! All right!’ said Dan. Old Jim wheeled round, took his bone carefully between his blunted teeth, and returned to the shadow of the old barn, looking just like a wolf. The children went on. Two kestrels hung bivvering and squealing above them. A gull flapped lazily along the white edge of the cliffs. The curves of the Downs shook a little in the heat, and so did Mr. Dudeney’s distant head.
They walked toward it very slowly and found themselves staring into a horse-shoe-shaped hollow a hundred feet deep, whose steep sides were laced with tangled sheep-tracks. The flock grazed on the flat at the bottom, under charge of Young Jim. Mr. Dudeney sat comfortably knitting on the edge of the slope, his crook between his knees. They told him what Old Jim had done.
‘Ah, he thought you could see my head as soon as he did. The closeter you be to the turf the more you see things. You look warm-like,’ said Mr. Dudeney.
‘We be,’ said Una, flopping down. ‘And tired.’
‘Set beside o’ me here. The shadow’ll begin to stretch out in a little while, and a heat-shake o’ wind will come up with it that’ll overlay your eyes like so much wool.’
‘We don’t want to sleep,’ said Una indignantly; but she settled herself as she spoke, in the first strip of early afternoon shade.
‘O’ course not. You come to talk with me same as your father used. He didn’t need no dog to guide him to Norton Pit.’
‘Well, he belonged here,’ said Dan, and laid himself down at length on the turf.
‘He did. And what beats me is why he went off to live among them messy trees in the Weald, when he might ha’ stayed here and looked all about him. There’s no profit to trees. They draw the lightning, and sheep shelter under ’em, and so, like as not, you’ll lose a half score ewes struck dead in one storm. Tck! Your father knew that.’
‘Trees aren’t messy.’ Una rose on her elbow. ‘And what about firewood? I don’t like coal.’
‘Eh? You lie a piece more up-hill and you’ll lie more natural,’ said Mr. Dudeney, with his provoking deaf smile. ‘Now press your face down and smell to the turf. That’s Southdown thyme which makes our Southdown mutton beyond compare, and, my mother told me, ’twill cure anything except broken necks, or hearts. I forget which.’
They sniffed, and somehow forgot to lift their cheeks from the soft thymy cushions.
‘You don’t get nothing like that in the Weald. Watercress, maybe?’ said Mr. Dudeney.
‘But we’ve water – brooks full of it – where you paddle in hot weather,’ Una replied, watching a yellow-and-violet-banded snail-shell close to her eye.
‘Brooks flood. Then you must shift your sheep – let alone foot-rot afterward. I put more dependence on a dew-pond any day.’
‘How’s a dew-pond made?’ said Dan, and tilted his hat over his eyes. Mr. Dudeney explained.
The air trembled a little as though it could not make up its mind whether to slide into the Pit or move across the open. But it seemed easiest to go down-hill, and the children felt one soft puff after another slip and sidle down the slope in fragrant breaths that baffed on their eyelids. The little whisper of the sea by the cliffs joined with the whisper of the wind over the grass, the hum of insects in the thyme, the ruffle and rustle of the flock below, and a thickish mutter deep in the very chalk beneath them. Mr. Dudeney stopped explaining, and went on with his knitting.
They were roused by voices. The shadow had crept half-way down the steep side of Norton’s Pit, and on the edge of it, his back to them, Puck sat beside a half-naked man who seemed busy at some work. The wind had dropped, and in that funnel of ground every least noise and movement reached them like whispers up a water-pipe.
‘That is clever,’ said Puck, leaning over. ‘How truly you shape it!’
‘Yes, but what does The Beast care for a brittle flint tip? Bah!’ The man flicked something contemptuously over his shoulder. It fell between Dan and Una – a beautiful dark-blue flint arrow-head still hot from the maker’s hand.
The man reached for another stone, and worked away like a thrush with a snail-shell.
‘Flint work is fool’s work,’ he said at last. ‘One does it because one always did it, but when it comes to dealing with The Beast – no good!’ He shook his shaggy head.
‘The Beast was dealt with long ago. He has gone,’ said Puck.
‘He’ll be back at lambing-time. I know him.’ He chipped very carefully, and the flints squeaked.
‘Not he. Children can lie out on the Chalk now all day through and go home safe.’
‘Can they? Well, call The Beast by his True Name, and I’ll believe it,’ the man replied.
‘Surely!’ Puck leaped to his feet, curved his hands round his mouth and shouted: “Wolf! Wolf!”
Norton’s Pit threw back the echo from its dry sides – ‘Wuff! Wuff!’ like Young Jim’s bark.
‘You see? You hear?’ said Puck. ‘Nobody answers. Grey Shepherd is gone. Feet-in-the-Night has run off. There are no more wolves.’
‘Wonderful!’ The man wiped his forehead as though he were hot. ‘Who drove him away? You?’
‘Many men through many years, each working in his own country. Were you one of them?’ Puck answered.
The man slid his sheepskin cloak to his waist, and without a word pointed to his side, which was all seamed and blotched with scars. His arms too were dimpled from shoulder to elbow with horrible white dimples.
‘I see,’ said Puck. ‘It is The Beast’s mark. What did you use against him?’
‘Hand, hammer, and spear, as our fathers did before us.’
‘So? Then how’ – Puck twitched aside the man’s dark-brown cloak – ‘how did a Flint-worker come by that? Show, man, show!’ He held out his little hand.
The man slipped a long dark iron knife, almost a short sword, from his belt, and after breathing on it, handed it hilt-first to Puck, who took it with his head on one side, as you should when you look at the works of a watch, squinted down the dark blade, and very delicately rubbed his forefinger from the point to the hilt.
‘Good!’ said he, in a surprised tone.
‘It should be. The Children of the Night made it,’ the man answered.
‘So I see by the iron. What might it have cost you?’
‘This!’ The man raised his hand to his cheek. Puck whistled like a Weald starling.
‘By the Great Rings of the Chalk!’ he cried. ‘Was that your price? Turn sunward that I may see better, and shut your eye.’
He slipped his hand beneath the man’s chin and swung him till he faced the children up the slope. They saw that his right eye was gone, and the eyelid lay shrunk. Quickly Puck turned him round again, and the two sat down.
‘It was for the sheep. The sheep are the people,’ said the man, in an ashamed voice. ‘What else could I have done? You know, Old One.’
Puck sighed a little fluttering sigh. ‘Take the knife. I listen.’
The man bowed his head, drove the knife into the turf, and while it still quivered said: ‘This is witness between us that I speak the thing that has been. Before my Knife and the Naked Chalk I speak. Touch!’
Puck laid a hand on the hilt. It stopped shaking. The children wriggled a little nearer.
‘I am of the People of the Worked Flint. I am the one son of the Priestess who sells the Winds to the Men of the Sea. I am the Buyer of the Knife – the Keeper of the People,’ the man began, in a sort of singing shout. ‘These are my names in this country of the Naked Chalk, between the Trees and the Sea.’
‘Yours was a great country. Your names are great too,’ said Puck.
‘One cannot feed some things on names and songs’; the man hit himself on the chest. ‘It is better – always better – to count one’s children safe round the fire, their Mother among them.’
‘Ahai!’ said Puck. ‘I think this will be a very old tale.’
‘I warm myself and eat at any fire that I choose, but there is no one to light me a fire or cook my meat. I sold all that when I bought the Magic Knife for my people. It was not right that The Beast should master man. What else could I have done?’
‘I hear. I know. I listen,’ said Puck.
‘When I was old enough to take my place in the Sheepguard, The Beast gnawed all our country like a bone between his teeth. He came in behind the flocks at watering-time, and watched them round the Dew-ponds; he leaped into the folds between our knees at the shearing; he walked out alongside the grazing flocks, and chose his meat on the hoof while our boys threw flints at him; he crept by night into the huts, and licked the babe from between the mother’s hands; he called his companions and pulled down men in broad daylight on the Naked Chalk. No – not always did he do so! This was his cunning! He would go away for a while to let us forget him. A year – two years perhaps – we neither smelt, nor heard, nor saw him. When our flocks had increased; when our men did not always look behind them; when children strayed from the fenced places; when our women walked alone to draw water – back, back, back came the Curse of the Chalk, Grey Shepherd, Feet-in-the Night – The Beast, The Beast, The Beast!
‘He laughed at our little brittle arrows and our poor blunt spears. He learned to run in under the stroke of the hammer. I think he knew when there was a flaw in the flint. Often it does not show till you bring it down on his snout. Then —Pouf!– the false flint falls all to flinders, and you are left with the hammer-handle in your fist, and his teeth in your flank! I have felt them. At evening, too, in the dew, or when it has misted and rained, your spear-head lashings slack off, though you have kept them beneath your cloak all day. You are alone – but so close to the home ponds that you stop to tighten the sinews with hands, teeth, and a piece of driftwood. You bend over and pull – so! That is the minute for which he has followed you since the stars went out. “Aarh!” he says. "Wurr-aarh!” he says.’ (Norton’s Pit gave back the growl like a pack of real wolves.) ‘Then he is on your right shoulder feeling for the vein in your neck, and – perhaps your sheep run on without you. To fight The Beast is nothing, but to be despised by The Beast when he fights you – that is like his teeth in the heart! Old One, why is it that men desire so greatly, and can do so little?’
‘I do not know. Did you desire so much?’ said Puck.
‘I desired to master The Beast. It is not right that The Beast should master man. But my people were afraid. Even my Mother, the Priestess, was afraid when I told her what I desired. We were accustomed to be afraid of The Beast. When I was made a man, and a maiden – she was a Priestess – waited for me at the Dew-ponds, The Beast flitted from off the Chalk. Perhaps it was a sickness; perhaps he had gone to his Gods to learn how to do us new harm. But he went, and we breathed more freely. The women sang again; the children were not so much guarded; our flocks grazed far out. I took mine yonder’ – he pointed inland to the hazy line of the Weald – ‘where the new grass was best. They grazed north. I followed till we were close to the Trees’ – he lowered his voice – ‘close there where the Children of the Night live,’ He pointed north again.
‘Ah, now I remember a thing,’ said Puck. ‘Tell me, why did your people fear the Trees so extremely?’
‘Because the Gods hate the Trees and strike them with lightning. We can see them burning for days all along the Chalk’s edge. Besides, all the Chalk knows that the Children of the Night, though they worship our Gods, are magicians. When a man goes into their country, they change his spirit; they put words into his mouth; they make him like talking water. But a voice in my heart told me to go toward the north. While I watched my sheep there I saw three Beasts chasing a man, who ran toward the Trees. By this I knew he was a Child of the Night. We Flint-workers fear the Trees more than we fear The Beast. He had no hammer; he carried a knife like this one. A Beast leaped at him. He stretched out his knife. The Beast fell dead. The other Beasts ran away howling, which they would never have done from a Flint-worker. The man went in among the Trees. I looked for the dead Beast. He had been killed in a new way – by a single deep, clean cut, without bruise or tear, which had split his bad heart. Wonderful! So I saw that the man’s knife was magic, and I thought how to get it, – thought strongly how to get it.
