








                         Chapter II
                              
          The Duke Who Laughed Himself Off a Throne
              and Other Traditions of Dorimare


Before we start on our story, it will be necessary, for its
proper understanding, to give a short sketch of the history
of Dorimare and the beliefs and customs of its inhabitants.
   Lud-in-the-Mist was scattered about the banks of two
rivers, the Dapple and the Dawl, which met on its outskirts
at an acute angle, the apex of which was the harbour.  Then
there were more houses up the side of a hill, on the top of
which stood the Fields of Grammary.
   The Dawl was the biggest river of Dorimare, and it became
so broad at Lud-in-the-Mist as to give that town, twenty
miles inland though it was, all the advantages of a port;
while the actual seaport town itself was little more than a
fishing village.  The Dapple, however, which had its source
in Fairyland (from a salt inland sea, the geographers held)
and flowed subterraneously under the Debatable Hills, was a
humble little stream, and played no part in the commercial
life of the town.  But an old maxim of Dorimare bade one
never forget that `The Dapple flows into the Dawl.'  It had
come to be employed when one wanted to show the
inadvisability of despising the services of humble agents;
but, possibly, it had originally another application.
   The wealth and importance of the country was mainly due
to the Dawl.  It was thanks to the Dawl that girls in remote
villages of Dorimare wore brooches made out of walrus tusks,
and applied bits of unicorns' horns to their toothache, that
the chimney-piece in the parlour of almost every farm-house
was adorned with an ostrich egg, and that when the ladies of
Lud-in-the-Mist went out shopping or to play cards with
their friends, their market-basket or ivory markers were
carried by little indigo pages in crimson turbans from the
Cinnamon Isles, and that pigmy pedlars from the far North
hawked amber through the streets.  For the Dawl had turned
Lud-in-the-Mist into a town of merchants, and all the power
and nearly all the wealth of the country was in their hands.
   But this had not always been the case.  In the old days
Dorimare had been a duchy, and the population had consisted
of nobles and peasants.  But gradually there had arisen a
middle-class.  And this class had discovered -- as it always
does -- that trade was seriously hampered by a ruler
unchecked by a constitution, and by a ruthless, privileged
class.  Figuratively, these things were damming the Dawl. 
   Indeed, with each generation the Dukes had been growing
more capricious and more selfish, till finally these
failings had culminated in Duke Aubrey, a hunchback with a
face of angelic beauty, who seemed to be possessed by a
laughing demon of destructiveness.  He had been known, out
of sheer wantonness, to gallop with his hunt straight
through a field of standing corn, and to set fire to a fine
ship for the mere pleasure of watching it burn.  And he
dealt with the virtue of his subjects' wives and daughters
in the same high-handed way.
   As a rule, his pranks were seasoned by a slightly
sinister humour.  For instance, when on the eve of marriage
a maid, according to immemorial custom, was ritually
offering her virginity to the spirit of the farm, symbolised
by the most ancient tree on the freehold, Duke Aubrey would
leap out from behind it, and, pretending to be the spirit,
take her at her word.  And tradition said that he and one of
his boon companions wagered that they would succeed in
making the court jester commit suicide of his own free
will.  So they began to work on his imagination with
plaintive songs, the burden of which was the frailty of all
lovely things, and with grim fables comparing man to a
shepherd, doomed to stand by impotent, while his sheep are
torn, one by one, by a ravenous wolf.
   They won their wager; for coming into the jester's room
one morning they found him hanging from the ceiling, dead. 
And it was believed that echoes of the laughter with which
Duke Aubrey greeted this spectacle were, from time to time,
still to be heard proceeding from that room.
   But there had been pleasanter aspects to him.  For one
thing, he had been an exquisite poet, and such of his songs
as had come down were as fresh as flowers and as lonely as
the cuckoo's cry.  While in the country stories were still
told of his geniality and tenderness -- how he would appear
at a village wedding with a cart-load of wine and cakes and
fruit, or of how he would stand at the bedside of the dying,
grave and compassionate as a priest.
   Nevertheless, the grim merchants, obsessed by a will to
wealth, raised up the people against him.  For three days a
bloody battle raged in the streets of Lud-in-the-Mist, in
which fell all the nobles of Dorimare.  As for Duke Aubrey,
he vanished -- some said to Fairyland, where he was living
to this day.
   During those three days of bloodshed all the priests had
vanished also.  So Dorimare lost simultaneously its Duke and
its cult.
   In the days of the Dukes, fairy things had been looked on
with reverence, and the most solemn event of the religious
year had been the annual arrival from Fairyland of
mysterious, hooded strangers with milk-white mares, laden
with offerings of fairy fruit for the Duke and the
high-priest.
   But after the revolution, when the merchants had seized
all the legislative and administrative power, a taboo was
placed on all things fairy. 
   This was not to be wondered at.  For one thing, the new
rulers considered that the eating of fairy fruit had been
the chief cause of the degeneracy of the Dukes.  It had,
indeed, always been connected with poetry and visions,
which, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of
mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdy common
sense of a burgher-class in the making.  There was certainly
nothing morbid about the men of the revolution, and under
their regime what one can only call the tragic sense of life
vanished from poetry and art.
   Besides, to the minds of the Dorimarites, fairy things
had always spelled delusion.  The songs and legends
described Fairyland as a country where the villages appeared
to be made of gold and cinnamon wood, and where priests, who
lived on opobalsum and frankincense, hourly offered
holocausts of peacocks and golden bulls to the sun and the
moon.  But if an honest, clear-eyed mortal gazed on these
things long enough, the glittering castles would turn into
old, gnarled trees, the lamps into glow-worms, the precious
stones into potsherds, and the magnificently-robed priests
and their gorgeous sacrifices into aged crones muttering
over a fire of twigs.
   The fairies themselves, tradition taught, were eternally
jealous of the solid blessings of mortals, and, clothed in
invisibility, would crowd to weddings and wakes and fairs --
wherever good victuals, in fact, were to be found -- and
suck the juices from fruits and meats -- in vain, for
nothing could make them substantial.
   Nor was it only food that they stole.  In out-of-the-way
country places it was still believed that corpses were but
fairy cheats, made to resemble flesh and bone, but without
any real substance -- otherwise, why should they turn so
quickly to dust?  But the real person, for which the corpse
was but a flimsy substitute, had been carried away by the
Fairies, to tend their blue kine and reap their fields of
gillyflowers.  The country people, indeed, did not always
clearly distinguish between the Fairies and the dead.  They
called them both the "Silent People"; and the Milky Way they
thought was the path along which the dead were carried to
Fairyland.
   Another tradition said that their only means of
communication was poetry and music; and in the country
poetry and music were still called "the language of the
Silent People."
   Naturally enough, men who were teaching the Dawl to run
gold, who were digging canals and building bridges, and
seeing that the tradesmen gave good measure and used
standard weights, and who liked both virtues and commodities
to be solid, had little patience for flimsy cheats. 
Nevertheless, the new rulers were creating their own form of
delusion, for it was they who founded in Dorimare the
science of jurisprudence, taking as their basis the
primitive code used under the Dukes and adapting it to
modern conditions by the use of legal fictions. 
   Master Josiah Chanticleer (the father of Master
Nathaniel), who had been a very ingenious and learned
jurist, had drawn in one of his treatises a curious parallel
between fairy things and the law.  The men of the
revolution, he said, had substituted law for fairy fruit. 
But whereas only the reigning Duke and his priests had been
allowed to partake of the fruit, the law was given freely to
rich and poor alike.  Again, fairy was delusion, so was the
law.  At any rate, it was a sort of magic, moulding reality
into any shape it chose.  But, whereas fairy magic and
delusion were for the cozening and robbing of man, the magic
of the law was to his intention and for his welfare.
   In the eye of the law, neither Fairyland nor fairy things
existed.  But then, as Master Josiah had pointed out, the
law plays fast and loose with reality -- and no one really
believes it.
   Gradually, an almost physical horror came to be felt for
anything connected with the Fairies and Fairyland, and
society followed the law in completely ignoring their
existence.  Indeed, the very word "fairy" became taboo, and
was never heard on polite lips, while the greatest insult
one Dorimarite could hurl at another was to call him "Son of
a Fairy."
   But, on the painted ceilings of ancient houses, in the
peeling frescoes of old barns, in the fragments of
bas-reliefs built into modern structures, and, above all, in
the tragic funereal statues of the Fields of Grammary, a
Winckelmann, had he visited Dorimare, would have found, as
he did in the rococo Rome of the eighteenth century, traces
of an old and solemn art, the designs of which served as
poncifs to the modern artists.  For instance, a well-known
advertisement of a certain cheese, which depicted a comic,
fat little man menacing with knife and fork an enormous
cheese hanging in the sky like the moon, was really a sort
of unconscious comic reprisal made against the action
depicted in a very ancient Dorimarite design, wherein the
moon itself pursued a frieze of tragic fugitives.
   Well, a few years before the opening of this story, a
Winckelmann, though an anonymous one, actually did appear in
Lud-in-the-Mist; although the field of his enquiries was not
limited to the plastic arts.  He published a book, entitled
_Traces of Fairy in the Inhabitants, Customs, Art,
Vegetation and Language of Dorimare_.
   His thesis was this: that there was an unmistakable fairy
strain running through the race of Dorimarites, which could
only be explained by the hypothesis that, in the olden days,
there had been frequent intermarriage between them and the
Fairies.  For instance, the red hair, so frequent in
Dorimare, pointed, he maintained, to such a strain.  It was
also to be found, he asserted, in the cattle of Dorimare. 
For this assertion he had some foundation, for it was
undeniable that from time to time a dun or dapple cow would
bring forth a calf of a bluish tinge, whose dung was of a
ruddy gold.  And tradition taught that all the cattle of
Fairyland were blue, and that fairy gold turned into dung 
when it had crossed the border.  Tradition also taught that
all the flowers of Fairyland were red, and it was
indisputable that the cornflowers of Dorimare sprang up from
time to time as red as poppies, and the lilies as red as
damask roses.  Moreover, he discovered traces of the
Fairies' language in the oaths of the Dorimarites and in
some of their names.  And, to a stranger, it certainly
produced an odd impression to hear such high-flown oaths as;
by the Sun, Moon and Stars; by the Golden Apples of the
West; by the Harvest of Souls; by the White Ladies of the
Fields; by the Milky Way, come tumbling out in the same
breath with such homely expletives as Busty Bridget; Toasted
Cheese; Suffering Cats; by my Great-Aunt's Rump; or to find
names like Dreamsweet, Ambrose, Moonlove, wedded to such
grotesque surnames as Baldbreech, Fliperarde, or Pyepowders.
   With regard to the designs of old tapestries and old
bas-reliefs, he maintained that they were illustrations of
the flora, fauna, and history of Fairyland, and scouted the
orthodox theory which explained the strange birds and
flowers as being due either to the artists' unbridled fancy
or to their imperfect control of their medium, and
considered that the fantastic scenes were taken from the
rituals of the old religion.  For, he insisted, all artistic
types, all ritual acts, must be modelled on realities; and
Fairyland is the place where what we look upon as symbols
and figures actually exist and occur.
   If the antiquary, then, was correct, the Dorimarite, like
a Dutchman of the seventeenth century, smoking his
churchwarden among his tulips, and eating his dinner off
Delft plates, had trivialised to his own taste the solemn
spiritual art of a remote, forbidden land, which he believed
to be inhabited by grotesque and evil creatures given over
to strange vices and to dark cults... nevertheless in the
veins of the Dutchman of Dorimare there flowed without his
knowing it the blood of these same evil creatures.
   It is easy to imagine the fury caused in Lud-in-the-Mist
by the appearance of this book.  The printer was, of course,
heavily fined, but he was unable to throw any light on its
authorship.  The manuscript, he said, had been brought to
him by a rough, red-haired lad, whom he had never seen
before.  All the copies were burned by the common hangman,
and there the matter had to rest.
   In spite of the law's maintaining that Fairyland and
everything to do with it was non-existent, it was an open
secret that, though fairy fruit was no longer brought into
the country with all the pomp of established ritual, anyone
who wanted it could always procure it in Lud-in-the-Mist. 
No great effort had ever been made to discover the means and
agents by which it was smuggled into the town; for to eat
fairy fruit was regarded as a loathsome and filthy vice,
practised in low taverns by disreputable and insignificant
people, such as indigo sailors and pigmy Norsemen.  True,
there had been cases known from time to time, during the
couple of centuries that had elapsed since the expulsion of
Duke Aubrey, of youths of good family taking to this vice. 
But to be suspected of such a thing spelled complete social
ostracism, and this, combined with the innate horror felt
for the stuff by every Dorimarite, caused such cases to be
very rare. 
   But some twenty years before the opening of this story,
Dorimare had been inflicted with a terrible drought.  People
were reduced to making bread out of vetches and beans and
fern-roots; and marsh and tarn were rifled of their reeds to
provide the cattle with food, while the Dawl was diminished
to the size of an ordinary rill, as were the other rivers of
Dorimare -- with the exception of the Dapple.  All through
the drought the waters of the Dapple remained unimpaired;
but this was not to be wondered at, as a river whose sources
are in Fairyland has probably mysterious sources of
moisture.  But, as the drought burned relentlessly on, in
the country districts an ever-increasing number of people
succumbed to the vice of fairy fruit-eating... with tragic
results to themselves, for though the fruit was very
grateful to their parched throats, its spiritual effects
were most alarming, and every day fresh rumours reached
Lud-in-the-Mist (it was in the country districts that this
epidemic, for so we must call it, raged) of madness,
suicide, orgiastic dances, and wild doings under the moon. 
But the more they ate the more they wanted, and though they
admitted that the fruit produced an agony of mind, they
maintained that for one who had experienced this agony life
would cease to be life without it.
   How the fruit got across the border remained a mystery,
and all the efforts of the magistrates to stop it were
useless.  In vain they invented a legal fiction (as we have
seen, the law took no cognisance of fairy things) that
turned fairy fruit into a form of woven silk and, hence,
contraband in Dorimare; in vain they fulminated in the
Senate against all smugglers and all men of depraved minds
and filthy habits -- silently, surely, the supply of fairy
fruit continued to meet the demand.  Then, with the first
rain, both began to decrease.  But the inefficiency of the
magistrates in this national crisis was never forgotten, and
"feckless as a magistrate in the great drought" became a
proverb in Dorimare.
   As a matter of fact, the ruling class of Dorimare had
become incapable of handling any serious business.  The
wealthy merchants of Lud-in-the-Mist, the descendants of the
men of the revolution and the hereditary rulers of Dorimare
had, by this time, turned into a set of indolent,
self-indulgent, humorous gentlemen, with hearts as little
touched to tragic issues as those of their forefathers, but
with none of their forefathers' sterling qualities.
   A class struggling to assert itself, to discover its true
shape, which lies hidden, as does the statue in the marble,
in the hard, resisting material of life itself, must, in the
nature of things, be different from that same class when
chisel and mallet have been laid aside, and it has actually
become what it had so long been struggling to be.  For one
thing, wealth had ceased to be a delicate, exotic blossom. 
It had become naturalised in Dorimare, and was now a hardy
perennial, docilely renewing itself year after year, and
needing no tending from the gardeners. 
   Hence sprang leisure, that fissure in the solid masonry
of works and days in which take seed a myriad curious little
flowers -- good cookery, and shining mahogany, and a fashion
in dress, that, like a baroque bust, is fantastic through
sheer wittiness, and porcelain shepherdesses, and the
humours, and endless jokes -- in fact, the toys, material
and spiritual, of civilisation.  But they were as different
as possible from the toys of that older civilisation that
littered the attics of the Chanticleers.  About these there
had been something tragic and a little sinister; while all
the manifestations of the modern civilisation were like
fire-light -- fantastic, but homely.
   Such, then, were the men in whose hands lay the welfare
of the country.  And, it must be confessed, they knew but
little and cared still less about the common people for whom
they legislated.
   For instance, they were unaware that in the country Duke
Aubrey's memory was still green.  It was not only that
natural children still went by the name of "Duke Aubrey's
brats"; that when they saw a falling star old women would
say, "Duke Aubrey has shot a roe"; and that on the
anniversary of his expulsion, maidens would fling into the
Dapple, for luck, garlands woven out of the two plants that
had formed the badge of the Dukes -- ivy and squills.  He
was a living reality to the country people; so much so that,
when leakages were found in the vats, or when a horse was
discovered in the morning with his coat stained and furrowed
with sweat, some rogue of a farm-hand could often escape
punishment by swearing that Duke Aubrey had been the
culprit.  And there was not a farm or village that had not
at least one inhabitant who swore that he had seen him, on
some midsummer's eve, or some night of the winter solstice,
galloping past at the head of his fairy hunt, with harlequin
ribbands streaming in the wind, to the sound of innumerable
bells.
   But of Fairyland and its inhabitants the country people
knew no more than did the merchants of Lud-in-the-Mist. 
Between the two countries stood the barrier of the Debatable
Hills, the foothills of which were called the Elfin Marches,
and were fraught, tradition said, with every kind of danger,
both physical and moral.  No one in the memory of man had
crossed these hills, and to do so was considered tantamount
to death.
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