Yes, he had heard that voice before. He began to shoulder his way through the crowd. It proved curiously yielding, and he had no difficulty in reaching the centre of attraction, a wooden platform on which gesticulated, grimaced and pirouetted who but his rascally groom Willy Wisp, dressed as a harlequin. But Willy Wisp was not the strangest part of the spectacle. Out of the platform grew an apple tree, and tied to it was his own daughter, Prunella, while grouped around her in various attitudes of woe were the other Crabapple Blossoms.
Suddenly Master Nathaniel felt convinced that this was not merely a story he was inventing himself, but, as well, it was a dream - a grotesque, illogical, synthesis of scraps of reality, to which he could add what elements he chose.
"What's happening?" he asked his neighbour.
But he knew the answer - Willy Wisp was selling the girls to the highest bidder, to labour in the fields of gillyflowers.
"But you have no right to do this!" he cried out in a loud angry voice, "no right whatever. This is not Fairyland - it is only the Elfin Marches. They cannot be sold until they have crossed over into Fairyland - I say they cannot be sold."
All round him he heard awed whispers, "It is Chanticleer - Chanticleer the dreamer, who has never tasted fruit." Then he found himself giving a learned dissertation on the law of property, as observed in the Elfin Marches. The crowd listened to him in respectful silence. Even Willy Wisp was listening, and the Crabapple Blossoms gazed at him with inexpressible gratitude.
With what seemed to him a superbly eloquent peroration he brought his discourse to an end. Prunella stretched out her arms to him, crying, "Father, your have saved us! You and the Law."
"You and the Law! You and the Law!" echoed the other Crabapple Blossoms.
"Chanticleer and the Law! Chanticleer and the Law!" shouted the crowd.
_ _ _ _
The fair had vanished. He was in a strange town, and was one of a great crowd of people all hurrying in the same direction.
"They are looking for the bleeding corpse," whispered the invisible cicerone, and the words filled Master Nathaniel with an unspeakable horror.
Then the crowd vanished, leaving him alone in a street as silent as the grave. He pressed forward, for he knew that he was looking for something; but what it was he had forgotten. At every street corner he came on a dead man, guarded by a stone beggar with a face like the herm in the Gibberty's orchard. He was almost choked by the horror of it. The terror became articulate: "Supposing one of the corpses should turn out to be that little lonely boy on the merry-go-round!"
This possibility filled him with an indescribable anguish.
Suddenly he remembered about Ranulph. Ranulph had gone to the country from which there is no return.
But he was going to follow him there and fetch him back. Nothing would stop him - he would push, if necessary, through fold after fold of dreams until he reached their heart.
He bent down and touched one of the corpses. It was warm, and it moved. As he touched it he realized that he had incurred the danger of contamination from some mysterious disease.
"But it isn't real, it isn't real," he muttered. "I'm inventing it all myself. And so, whatever happens, I shan't mind, because it isn't real."
It was growing dark. He knew that he was being followed by one of the stone beggars, who had turned into a four-footed animal called Portunus. In one sense the animal was a protection, in another a menace, and he knew that in summoning him he must be very careful to use the correct ritual formulary.
He had reached a square, on one side of which was a huge building with a domed roof. Light streamed from it through a great window of stained glass, on which was depicted a blue warrior fighting with a red dragon no, it was not a stained glass window but merely the reflection on the white walls of the building from a house in complete darkness in the opposite side of the square, inhabited by creatures made of red lacquer. He knew that they were expecting him to call, because they believed that he was courting one of them.
"What else could bring him here save all this lovely spawn?" said a voice at his elbow.
He looked round - suddenly the streets were pullulating with strange semi-human fauna: tiny green men, the wax figures of his parents from Hempie's chimney-piece, grimacing greybeards with lovely children gamboling round them dressed in beetles' shards.
Now they were dancing, some slow old-fashioned dance in and out, in and out. Why, they were only figures on a piece of tapestry flapping in the wind!
Once more he felt his horse beneath him. But what were these little pattering footsteps behind him? He turned uneasily in his saddle, to discover that it was nothing but a gust of wind rustling a little eddy of dead leaves.
The town and its strange fauna had vanished, and once more he was riding up the bridle-path; but now it was night.
Chapter XXVIII
"By the Sun, Moon and Stars and the Golden Apples of the West"
Though it was a relief to have returned to the fresh air of reality, Master Nathaniel was frightened. He realized that he was alone at dead of night in the Elfin Marches. And the moon kept playing tricks on him, turning trees and boulders into goblins and wild beasts; cracking her jokes, true humourist that she was, with a solemn impassive face. But, how was this? She was a waxing moon, and almost full, while the night before - or what he supposed was the night before - she had been a half moon on the wane.
Had he left time behind him in Dorimare?
Then suddenly, like some winged monster rushing from its lair, there sprang up a mighty wind. The pines creaked and rustled and bent beneath its onslaught, the grasses whistled, the clouds flocked together and covered the face of the moon.
Several times he was nearly lifted from his saddle. He drew his cloak closely round him, and longed, with an unspeakable longing, for his warm bed in Lud; and it flashed into his mind that what he had so often imagined in that bed, to enhance his sense of well-being, was now actually occurring - he was tired, he was cold, and the wind was finding the fissures in his doublet.
Suddenly, as if some hero had slain the monster, the wind died down, the moon sailed clear of the clouds, and the pines straightened themselves and once more stood at attention, silent and motionless. In spite of this, his horse grew strangely restive, rearing and jibbing, as if something was standing before it in the path that frightened it; and in vain Master Nathaniel tried to quiet and sooth it.
Then it shuddered all over and fell heavily to the ground.
Fortunately, Master Nathaniel was thrown clear, and was not hurt, beyond the inevitable bruises entailed by the fall of a man of his weight. He struggled to his feet and hurried to his horse. It was stone dead.
For some time he sat beside it his last link with Lud and familiar things; as yet too depressed in mind and aching in body to continue his journey on foot.
But what were those sudden strains of piercingly sweet music, and from what strange instrument did they proceed? They were too impersonal for a fiddle, too passionate for a flute, and much too sweet for any pipes or timbrels. It must be a human - or superhuman - voice, for now he was beginning to distinguish the words.
"There are windfalls of dreams, there's a wolf in the stars,
And Life is a nymph who will never be thine,
With lily, germander, and sops in wine.
With sweet-brier,
And bon-fire,
And strawberry-wire,
And columbine."
The voice stopped, and Master Nathaniel buried his face in his hands and sobbed as if his heart would break.
In this magically sweet music once more he had heard the Note. It held, this time, no menace as to things to come; but it aroused in his breast an agonizing tumult of remorse for having allowed something to escape that he would never, never recapture. It was as if he had left his beloved with harsh words, and had returned to find her dead.