









                          Chapter I
                              
                Master Nathaniel Chanticleer
                              

The Free State of Dorimare was a very small country, but,
seeing that it was bounded on the south by the sea and on
the north and east by mountains, while its centre consisted
of a rich plain, watered by two rivers, a considerable
variety of scenery and vegetation was to be found within its
borders.  Indeed, towards the west, in striking contrast
with the pastoral sobriety of the central plain, the aspect
of the country became, if not tropical, at any rate
distinctly exotic.  Nor was this to be wondered at, perhaps;
for beyond the Debatable Hills (the boundary of Dorimare in
the west) lay Fairyland.  There had, however, been no
intercourse between the two countries for many centuries.

   The social and commercial centre of Dorimare was its
capital, Lud-in-the-Mist, which was situated at the
confluence of two rivers about ten miles from the sea and
fifty from the Elfin Hills.
   Lud-in-the-Mist had all the things that make an old town
pleasant.  It had an ancient Guild Hall, built of mellow
golden bricks and covered with ivy and, when the sun shone
on it, it looked like a rotten apricot; it had a harbour in
which rode vessels with white and red and tawny sails; it
had flat brick houses -- not the mere carapace of human
beings, but ancient living creatures, renewing and modifying
themselves with each generation under their changeless
antique roofs.  It had old arches, framing delicate
landscapes that one could walk into, and a picturesque old
graveyard on the top of a hill, and little open squares
where comic baroque statues of dead citizens held levees
attended by birds and lovers and insects and children.
   It had, indeed, more than its share of pleasant things;
for, as we have seen, it had two rivers.
   Also, it was plentifully planted with trees.
   
   One of the handsomest houses of Lud-in-the-Mist had
belonged for generations to the family of Chanticleer.  It
was of red brick, and the front, which looked on to a quiet
lane leading into the High Street, was covered with stucco,
on which flowers and fruit and shells were delicately
modelled, while over the door was emblazoned a fine, 
stylized cock -- the badge of the family.  Behind, it had a
spacious garden, which stretched down to the river Dapple. 
Though it had no lack of flowers, they did not immediately
meet the eye, but were imprisoned in a walled
kitchen-garden, where they were planted in neat ribands,
edging the plots of vegetables.  Here, too, in spring was to
be found the pleasantest of all garden conjunctions -- thick
yew hedges and fruit trees in blossom.  Outside this
kitchen-garden there was no need of flowers, for they had
many substitutes.  Let a thing be but a sort of punctual
surprise, like the first cache of violets in March, let it
be delicate, painted and gratuitous, hinting that the
Creator is solely preoccupied with *aesthetic*
considerations, and combines disparate objects simply
because they *look* so well together, and that thing will
admirably fill the role of a flower.
   In early summer it was the doves, with the bloom of plums
on their breasts, waddling on their coral legs over the wide
expanse of lawn, to which their propinquity gave an almost
startling greenness, that were the flowers in the
Chanticleers' garden.  And the trunks of birches are as
good, any day, as white blossom, even if there had not been
the acacias in flower.  And there was a white peacock which,
in spite of its restlessness and harsh shrieks, had
something about it, too, of a flower.  And the Dapple
itself, stained like a palette, with great daubs of colour
reflected from sky and earth, and carrying on its surface,
in autumn, red and yellow leaves which may have fallen on it
from the trees of Fairyland, where it had its source -- even
the Dapple might be considered as a flower growing in the
garden of the Chanticleers.
   There was also a pleached alley of hornbeams.
   To the imaginative, it is always something of an
adventure to walk down a pleached alley.  You enter boldly
enough, but soon you find yourself wishing you had stayed
outside -- it is not air that you are breathing, but
silence, the almost palpable silence of trees.  And is the
only exit that small round hole in the distance?  Why, you
will never be able to squeeze through *that*!  You must turn
back... too late!  The spacious portal by which you entered
has in its turn shrunk to a small round hole.
   
   Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, the actual head of the
family, was a typical Dorimarite in appearance; rotund,
rubicund, red-haired, with hazel eyes in which the jokes,
before he uttered them, twinkled like a trout in a burn.
   Spiritually, too, he passed for a typical Dorimarite;
though, indeed, it is never safe to classify the souls of
one's neighbors; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a
fool.  You should regard each meeting with a friend as a
sitting he is unwittingly giving you for a portrait -- a
portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be
unfinished.  And, though this is an absorbing pursuit,
nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists.  For
however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may
be the background, in the first rough sketch of each 
portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with
every tiny readjustment of the "values," with every
modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you
grow more disquieting.  And, finally, it is your *own* face
that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by
candle-light, when all the house is still.
   All who knew Master Nathaniel would have been not only
surprised, but incredulous, had they been told he was not a
happy man.  Yet such was the case.  His life was poisoned at
its springs by a small, nameless fear; a fear not always
active, for during considerable periods it would lie almost
dormant -- *almost*, but never entirely.
   He knew the exact date of its genesis.  One evening, many
years ago, when he was still but a lad, he and some friends
decided as a frolic to dress up as the ghosts of their
ancestors and frighten the servants.  There was no lack of
properties; for the attics of the Chanticleers were filled
with the lumber of the past: grotesque wooden masks, old
weapons and musical instruments, and old costumes -- tragic,
hierophantic robes that looked little suited to the uses of
daily life.  There were whole chests, too, filled with
pieces of silk, embroidered or painted with curious scenes. 
Who has not wondered in what mysterious forests our
ancestors discovered the models for the beasts and birds
upon their tapestries; and on what planet were enacted the
scenes they have portrayed?  It is in vain that the dead
fingers have stitched beneath them -- and we can picture the
mocking smile with which these crafty cozeners of posterity
accompanied the action -- the words "February," or
"Hawking," or "Harvest," having us believe that they are but
illustrations of the activities proper to the different
months.  We know better.  These are not the normal
activities of mortal men.  What kind of beings peopled the
earth four or five centuries ago, what strange lore they had
acquired, and what were their sinister doings, we shall
never know.  Our ancestors keep their secret well.
   Among the Chanticleers' lumber there was also no lack of
those delicate, sophisticated toys -- fans, porcelain cups,
engraved seals -- that, when the civilisation that played
with them is dead, become pathetic and appealing, just as
tunes once gay inevitably become plaintive when the
generation that first sang them has turned to dust.  But
those particular toys, one felt, could never have been
really frivolous -- there was a curious gravity about their
colouring and lines.  Besides, the moral of the ephemeral
things with which they were decorated was often pointed in
an aphorism or riddle.  For instance, on a fan painted with
wind-flowers and violets were illuminated these words: "Why
is Melancholy like Honey?  Because it is very sweet, and it
is culled from Flowers."
   These trifles clearly belonged to a later period than the
masks and costumes.  Nevertheless, they, too, seemed very
remote from the daily life of the modern Dorimarites.
   Well, when they had whitened their faces with flour and
decked themselves out to look as fantastic as possible, 
Master Nathaniel seized one of the old instruments, a sort
of lute ending in the carving of a cock's head, its strings
rotted by damp and antiquity, and, crying out, "Let's see if
this old fellow has a croak left in him!" plucked roughly at
its strings.
   They gave out one note, so plangent, blood-freezing and
alluring, that for a few seconds the company stood as if
petrified.
   Then one of the girls saved the situation with a
humourous squawk, and, putting her hands to her ears, cried,
"Thank you, Nat, for your cat's concert!  It was worse than
a squeaking slate."  And one of the young men cried
laughingly, "It must be the ghost of one of your ancestors,
who wants to be let out and given a glass of his own
claret."  And the incident faded from their memories -- but
not from the memory of Master Nathaniel.
   He was never again the same man.  For years that note was
the apex of his nightly dreams; the point towards which, by
their circuitous and seemingly senseless windings, they had
all the time been converging.  It was as if the note were a
living substance, and subject to the law of chemical changes
-- that is to say, as that law works in dreams.  For
instance, he might dream that his old nurse was baking an
apple on the fire in her own cosy room, and as he watched it
simmer and sizzle she would look at him with a strange
smile, a smile such as he had never seen on her face in his
waking hours, and say, "But, of course, you know it isn't
really the apple.  *It's the Note.*"
   The influence that this experience had had upon his
attitude to daily life was a curious one.  Before he had
heard the note he had caused his father some uneasiness by
his impatience of routine and his hankering after travel and
adventure.  He had, indeed, been heard to vow that he would
rather be the captain of one of his father's ships than the
sedentary owner of the whole fleet.
   But after he had heard the Note a more stay-at-home and
steady young man could not have been found in
Lud-in-the-Mist.  For it had generated in him what one can
only call a wistful yearning after the prosaic things he
already possessed.  It was as if he thought he had already
lost what he was actually holding in his hands.
   From this there sprang an ever-present sense of
insecurity together with a distrust of the homely things he
cherished.  With what familiar object -- quill, pipe, pack
of cards -- would he be occupied, in which regular recurrent
action -- the pulling on or off of his nightcap, the weekly
auditing of his accounts -- would he be engaged when IT, the
hidden menace, sprang out at him?  And he would gaze in
terror at his furniture, his walls, his pictures -- what
strange scene might they one day witness, what awful
experience might he one day have in their presence?
   Hence, at times, he would gaze on the present with the
agonizing tenderness of one who gazes on the past: his wife,
sitting under the lamp embroidering, and retailing to him
the gossip she had culled during the day; or his little son,
playing with the great mastiff on the floor. 
   This nostalgia for what was still there seemed to find a
voice in the cry of the cock, which tells of the plough
going through the land, the smell of the country, the placid
bustle of the farm, as happening *now,* all round one; and
which, simultaneously, mourns them as things vanished
centuries ago.
   From his secret poison there was, however, some sweetness
to be distilled.  For the unknown thing that he dreaded
could at times be envisaged as a dangerous cape that he had
already doubled.  And to lie awake at night in his warm
feather bed, listening to the breathing of his wife and the
soughing of the trees, would become, from this attitude, an
exquisite pleasure.
   He would say to himself, "How pleasant this is!  How
safe!  How warm!  What a difference from that lonely heath
when I had no cloak and the wind found the fissures in my
doublet, and my feet were aching, and there was not moon
enough to prevent my stumbling, and IT was lurking in the
darkness!" enhancing thus his present well-being by
imagining some unpleasant adventure now safe behind him.
   This also was the cause of his taking a pride in knowing
his way about his native town.  For instance, when returning
from the Guildhall to his own house he would say to himself,
"Straight across the market-place, down Appleimp Lane, and
round by the Duke Aubrey Arms into the High Street... I know
every step of the way, every step of the way!"
   And he would get a sense of security, a thrill of pride,
from every acquaintance who passed the time of day with him,
from every dog to whom he could put a name.  "That's
Wagtail, Goceline Flack's dog.  That's Mab, the bitch of
Rackabite the butcher, *I* know them!"
   Though he did not realise it, he was masquerading to
himself as a stranger in Lud-in-the-Mist -- a stranger whom
nobody knew, and who was thus almost as safe as if he were
invisible.  And one always takes a pride in knowing one's
way about a strange town.  But it was only this pride that
emerged completely into his consciousness.
   The only outward expression of this secret fear was a
sudden, unaccountable irascibility, when some harmless word
or remark happened to sting the fear into activity.  He
could not stand people saying, "Who knows what we shall be
doing this time next year?" and he loathed such expressions
as "for the last time," "never again," however trivial the
context in which they appeared.  For instance, he would snap
his wife's head off -- why, she could not think -- if she
said, "*Never again* shall I go to that butcher," or "That
starch is a disgrace.  *It's the last time* I shall use it
for my ruffs."
   This fear, too, had awakened in him a wistful craving for
other men's shoes that caused him to take a passionate
interest in the lives of his neighbors; that is to say if
these lives moved in a different sphere from his own.  From
this he had gained the reputation -- not quite deserved --
of being a very warmhearted, sympathetic man, and he had won
the heart of many a sea-captain, of many a farmer, of many
an old working-woman by the unfeigned interest he showed in
their conversation.  Their long, meandering tales of humble
normal lives were like the proverbial glimpse of a snug,
lamp-lit parlour to a traveller belated after nightfall. 
   He even coveted *dead* men's shoes, and he would loiter
by the hour in the ancient burying-ground of
Lud-in-the-Mist, known from time immemorial as the Fields of
Grammary.  He could justify this habit by pointing out the
charming view that one got thence of both Lud and the
surrounding country.  But though he sincerely loved the
view, what really brought him there were such epitaphs as
this:
                           HERE LIES
                        EBENEEZOR SPIKE
                             BAKER
              WHO HAVING PROVIDED THE CITIZENS OF
                        LUD-IN-THE-MIST
            FOR SIXTY YEARS WITH FRESH SWEET LOAVES
                       DIED AT THE AGE OF
                          EIGHTY-EIGHT
             SURROUNDED BY HIS SONS AND GRANDSONS.
   
   How willingly would he have changed places with that old
baker!  And then the disquieting thought would come to him
that perhaps after all epitaphs are not altogether to be
trusted.
