All things discarded and shed on Middle Earth find their way here sooner or later. As I walked by I could watch the heaps swelling slowly, the hopes and loves effacing one another as the incoming tide effaces a baby’s rampart of sand. For a little while the older hopes would be still visible beneath the new ones, then they would be smoothed away and done with. And now I could remember many of the hopes and dreams I had myself cherished in that earlier time, and I could have lain down by the roadside and wept for them, but that I had to hurry on without pause. Only, the memory of what I had wanted for myself and my world as I saw it, made a kind of rough ache in my mind, corresponding to the ache which was now beginning in my feet and ankles, and which I had never known in all the days of my fleet-foot hunting and hour-long dancing in Fairy Land. Thus I remembered kindred pains on Middle Earth, cheap shoes that bit my toes and instep, chilblains, cracked lips, back-ache coming home from the office dog-tired on Spring evenings, my head still full of figures and always at the back the anxiety as to whether one would keep the job, whether the boss had been just snappy or whether he’d meant it, whether perhaps next Saturday—and what would Mother say when I came back, or rather what would we both do?
Cogitating upon this it came to me that the thing which I at least had done was, clearly, to go to Fairy Land—or to have been taken there. Yet I could not at present determine any backward limit to my seven years in that country, for right at the beginning it had still appeared as though I had always been there. Or so I thought now.
I looked round constantly over my shoulder, listening intently at the same time, but I could only hear the tinkling and rustling and sighing of the dump-heaps. The road had mounted a slight brow and was now dropping, and I could see that, some distance ahead of me, the lights were reflected in a peculiar way. I was wondering about this when the arc-lamp immediately ahead of me gave a ping and dropped through the centre of its light-cone a flaming question mark which turned to black on the road and shrivelled out, but was enough to sharpen my walk into something near running. Down and down I went as the road dipped and dropped and the lamps dimmed in a rising fog or steam. Then behind me I heard the fairy horns, the long rising scream of the siren, the wild tooting, the speed unchecked on that cornerless road. Looking back from my now breathless running on the bruising concrete, I could see their headlights beginning to lap over the rise in the road, rapidly rising suns. Now I could see ahead of me patches of steam and patches of reflection apparently across the road. Now a plain flood limit lay unescapable but a chance. I could not tell what it was, only it looked dark. Half in, on the edge, lay a piece of machinery with little wheels and a blunt muzzle and a ribbon of cartridges dripping out of its guts. I was in over my shoes as the headlights tipped the crest, but already wreaths of steam were hiding me, rising from the warm blood into the cold night air.
I recognised this for what it was, but where it had been knee-deep in the time of Thomas the Rhymer, it was now almost shoulder-high in the middle, with a slow current that dragged at one’s knees and feet. I did not care to swim; I could not face all that blood against my neck and chin. There was no sound now from the horns, no glare from the headlights, the pursuit was checked. Gradually we climbed out of it again, waist-deep, thigh-deep, ankle-deep. In mid-stream I had found a companion. She said: “I was shot while attempting to escape. So I had to wait till someone else came by. Hold me until we are out.”
Our clasped hands dripped blood together, strangely from no wounds of our own. I said: “Was it they who shot you?”
“I think so,” she said, “but now it is over.” I said: “Where can we wash this off us?”
She said: “There is a deep spring near here, of eye-water, tears for the blood. I think that will wash us.”
We went down from the road over rocks that were strewn with torn treaties and crumpled telegrams, and washed in the spring. When we came out I found that we were covered with a kind of flexible armour and that it was near dawn. When I asked my companion why, she asked me in turn what else I thought could happen when opposite meets opposite on the same body. And as to the dawn, night had been piling up and piling up in the further side of the Debateable Land which I had just left, and after a time something was bound to alter. I admitted that this was so and asked her for her name. She shook her head and said she didn’t know any longer and added that we were now in that part of the Debateable Land where come all that have lived in vain, and this was why we were armoured. We went on together; it was still too dark to see her face at all clearly, and she kept it turned away, partly perhaps because there was a bullet hole in her forehead.
For a time we were walking along the road in silence, very white in our armour of opposites, and then far off I heard the roaring of the sea. As we came nearer I saw a little below the road a bay between black cliffs, and heard the grinding and shrieking of pulled gravel as the great waves pounded and swept forward and back and sideways. And there, fighting the waves with sword and axe and shield were three heroes, each desperate, wearing himself out, each unaware of the others. I asked: “Who are they?” but even as I did so I could see in the dawn light reflecting up from the slithering foam how their faces changed, so that sometimes there was one man and sometimes another. And after a little I observed that one of them was a man whom I had seen more than once on Middle Earth speaking about those things which had seemed to me then to matter more than anything, from a platform in the hall where I was used to go on a Sunday evening when my mother shook her head at me regretfully and went to church; and this man’s face now was like his face had been then, and now too his lips were tight and his eyes hard and agonised as he slashed and tore at the leaping water.
And now we were walking through a lovely forest, murmuring in the dawn, where great tree trunks held up uncounted fingers of twig and living leaf. But all at once there was terror in the forest. I saw coming towards us a monstrous flapping thing, white and crumpled, and as it passed it was eating the forest with its formless jaws. “Keep well to the middle of the road,” said my companion, and we watched the destruction of the trees by the newspaper and saw the headlines that striped its hideous body dissolve and melt into one another. When it was near us it paused and flapped itself and grinned at us, momently shooting out and withdrawing notebooks, press cameras, fountain pens, cheques and paper laurel wreaths. But we in our armour shook our heads at its antics and walked on quickly. I remembered my boy-cousin who was a reporter on our local paper at eighteen, and how later on his face had changed and gone bright and bitter.
Beyond the forest there was a great concourse of ghosts, old and young, and a great many babies and very young children. They were all round us in the early morning under the now unlighted lamp standards, and I felt a vile misery creeping through me between my skin and the armour, although I did not believe that the ghosts themselves were unhappy, for they seemed to be talking and playing and doing ordinary things. But I was afraid of seeing my mother among them, or anyone else I had known and loved on Middle Earth, and I stopped on the road with my right hand over my eyes. I still held the hazel stick in my left. It seemed to me now that I could remember the whole of my life on Middle Earth from my shrilly-complaining obscure childhood on to the fright and uncertainty of my adolescence, and the growing dull pressure of working days. And it was all a ghost life. And it was to get back to this that I had left Fairy Land. And as I thought of that I knew also that the pursuit was again near, coming swiftly on me. But I did not care. I was gone soft with misery. I only hoped they might take me back with them so that if only once again I might see and feel the delight I had cast away.
But my companion was crying at me: “Go on! Go on! Very soon I shall be remembering my name!” And she looked up with the oozing bullet hole in her forehead and I thought if I stayed I must recognise her and hear her name, and I was afraid of what it might be, and suddenly I turned away and plunged through the hosts down the road, which narrowed ahead of me to a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel w
as light, and an immediate chasm. At the far side of the chasm the road began again, apparently the same. At the bottom of the chasm, but not so far down that one could not see clearly, there was an outcrop of extremely jagged rocks and I thought I could also perceive across one of them some pieces of torn cloth and the occasional white of bones. Over the chasm was a rope and plank bridge, just wide enough to walk along, dipping in a curve and without hand-rails. Behind me in the tunnel I could hear the first laughter of the fairies, unpleasantly prolonged by echo, and after all it was impossible for me to surrender to it. My knees were beginning to tremble, but I ran across that bridge, looking steadily at the far side, my head almost bursting with the effort of control, and using my hazel stick for balance. It was very difficult where it sloped up at the far side; I was almost hopeless of being able to make it; when I did reach the road again I lay down flat, shaking, and only just in time unlooped the ropes from the staples and set the chasm between myself and pursuit.
It was now full daylight, although cloudy, and with a rippling wind. The road was very much pleasanter, grass edges and a gravel surface instead of concrete; the lamp standards were gone, and here it wound about through low hills with pasture and woodland and sometimes orchards. There would be farm-houses and barns and byres, and occasionally I saw people working in the fields. Looking through the gate of one barnyard that opened onto the road, I noticed that a chained dragon, elderly, its scales moulting, was being used to blow leisured fire under the boiler of a steam threshing machine, and I saw by the notice attached to the animal’s spikes that this was a farmers’ co-operative effort.
I was beginning to be hungry and thirsty, so, after crossing a brook, I went down to the edge, knelt on a mossy stone and drank. As I lifted my wet face, the brook said in a grumbling, gabbling voice: “What right have you to drink my water?”
“Please, brook,” I said, “I was thirsty.”
“All right,” said the brook. “But don’t make me turn any of your mills.”
“Please, brook, I haven’t got any mills,” I said, and put back the piece of moss which my foot had scraped off the stone. But as I was doing this, suddenly again I heard the sounds of pursuit, the fairies whooping merrily to one another as I had heard it often enough when I was hunter not quarry. I fell on my knees, whispering, my lips against the water:
“Brook, brook, hide me,
So the fairies won’t find me.
By power of thirst and hunger and pain,
So the fairies won’t find me again.”
I am not sure how that spell came into my head, but I suspect that it had been left lying in the air of the Debateable Land for more years than even the brook could tell. At least it worked, for the brook said: “Very well, my girl, you jump in and be one of my trout.”
So in I jumped and was a trout. This was very pleasant and slippery and I saw all kinds of things which I liked, such as bright pebbles and roundnesses, and delicious nosing places under roots, and I blew bubbles out of my mouth and I ate three worms and a wriggling fly cleverly lipped from the dazzling brink of air. But when the fairies came rushing and hulloing over the bridge I was frightened and darted about, though I did not know why, and when one of them threw a pebble down into the brook I darted into the comfort of my deepest nosing place.
And then I was myself again, and I thanked the brook and went on. But I was still hungry and when I saw a bramble covered with big ripe blackberries, I began to eat them. The bramble said, in a scratchy, snarly voice: “What right have you to eat my blackberries?”
“Please, bramble,” I said, “I was hungry.”
“All right,” said the bramble, “but don’t cut me back to make any of your tidy hedges.”
“Please, bramble, I haven’t got a farm,” I said, and carefully unhooked the trailer that had caught in my skirt. But as I was doing this, I heard the sound of a second pursuit and knew by the singing that those who came now were the very best of my fairy friends in the old days: the one who had broken the necklace, the one who had been master of birds, and the one into whose eyes I had looked too deep. So I pressed my lips down on the thorns and whispered:
“Bramble, bramble, hide me,
So the fairies won’t find me.
By power of thirst and hunger and pain,
So the fairies won’t know me again.”
“Very well, my girl,” said the bramble, “you jump in and be one of my beetles.” So I jumped into the bramble bush and before the thorns had pricked me much I was a very small beetle with six black legs and a double pair of red and purple wings. I was walking up the stem of a bramble because I had started walking up the stem of the bramble, and I went on walking with all my six legs until the fairies rushing and singing by twitched at the branch and I fell through immense hollows and lights and darknesses, bouncing lightly from stem to stem until I fell flat on my back on a great leaf. And there I lay, kicking my six legs in the air because when I was on my back my six legs naturally kicked. In time one of these legs might have met with a grass-blade onto which it might have clung, or indeed a puff of wind might have blown the whole upset beetle right side up. In time any of the limited number of things which can happen to beetles might have happened to the beetle I was, but while I was still kicking I became myself again, lying under a bramble bush wild with rage and self-pity because my fairy friends had passed me by. In this frenzy I would have leapt up to run after them, but the bramble bush had me by the hair, hooked me by the wrist and ankles. By the time I had loosed myself the frenzy had faded, I thanked the bramble and went on.
It was, of course, possible that the pursuit might turn and come racing back on me again, so I went warily through the pleasant country where Spring and Autumn mingled from one bend of the road to the next. Yet the look of things was getting more ordinary; I noticed fewer unicorns and hippogriffs grazing among the dairy herds or the solid plough-horses; earlier on I had seen a witch at her cottage door beating a recalcitrant broom-stick, but now the old ladies I passed were doing nothing more strenuous than knitting or shelling peas. However, when I saw someone coming towards me down the road I stepped back behind a wall, gripping my hazel staff, and watched. He was a middle-aged man in ordinary working clothes, with a cap and blue woollen muffler knotted round his neck, and thick boots; his face was heavily lined, especially round the eyes and mouth, and looked worried, and his hair was going a bit grey, especially where it was clipped short at the back of his neck—though I did not notice that until later. It was clear that he was not one of the fairies, so I stepped out from behind the wall, and he said: “Well, you’ve been long enough coming!”
“Were you looking for me?” I asked.
“All day,” he answered, “and most of this last year as well. Come on now, or we shall be late.” And he turned round again in the direction he had been going, plainly expecting me to follow him.
“Are you my deliverer?” I asked, and I think my voice must have shaken a little, for I had been informed by Serpent of the necessary relationship between deliverer and delivered.
“Aye,” he said and nodded, grinning at me a little from gapped teeth. “Did you think you’d get a better one?” And he stretched out his hand at me. It was quite clearly the hand I had grasped out of the funnel in the forest, and it was a strong hand; but it was not the questing, beautiful hand of the fairy men, the harp players, the cunning strokers of young leopards. He took my hazel stick out of my hands then, and hit me lightly over the shoulders with it. “Get on!” he said. “We’re bound to be out of the Debateable Land by nightfall.”
“And then?” I said.
“Why then,” said he, “we’re man and wife as we’re bound to be now the rest of our days on Middle Earth, and what have you to put in to the housekeeping?”
“Well,” said I, “if that is so, so it is, and I shall bring my mother’s pink and blue teapot and the rest of the crockery, and as many sheets and table-cloths as we’re likely to need, the two of us (though it’s the
truth that most of them are darned here and there), and some bits and pieces of furnishing, the like of a horse-hair sofa (though I have always wanted a good sofa in plush), a flap-table and four cane chairs, an arm-chair that was my Granny’s and a hearth rug not much worn. There’s upstairs furniture as well—”
“I’ll be getting the bed,” said he, and put an arm through mine. He was limping a little, and I asked him why. “That’s just my leg,” he said, “it was plugged by a machine gun at Givenchy. I was thinking the Jerrys had got me that time. I was there bleeding in a shell-hole—ach, hours I was. I can’t go running races with you now.”
“Never heed,” I said, and stroked his arm, “you’ve got all the blood in you that you need. What’s gone’s gone. Well then, I’ve got some kitchen things, saucepans and that, and a good girdle, and I’ve a nice sewing machine, and what’s more, if you lose your job I might still go back to mine, for I used to get four pounds a week in my best time.”
“But that was the good years,” he said, “you’d never get that now. Not near. But mine’s steady. Seems so, anyway, not that there’s telling, these days.”
We walked along in silence then for a little time, I fitting in my step to his slower one. And I remembered fitting my steps once before to a man’s whose arm was round mine. Whit Sunday it was, and a clear day, and we’d walked out miles beyond the bus stop, and he wore a pink tie, the colour of pink hawthorn almost, at least I thought so, and he was a checker at the warehouse up behind my office, and we were going to get a ring and all and he was saving up. And that was seven years ago, before Fairy Land. And I’d been in love with him like the girls in the pictures, and Mother’d have hot supper ready for us, with scones and jam and a good pot of tea, against the time we got back, for a girl can only be young once. And that was seven years ago.
My deliverer looked round, a bit awkward, and began speaking and stopped, and then said: “One thing. I do like a quiet evening. Not gadding off. You know. Once a week, well, that’s all right, but there’s a fine lot of books I’ve got. More than a hundred books, and serious. Would you ever be doing any serious reading, now?”
The Fourth Pig Page 19
