









                         Chapter IX
                              
                 Panic and the Silent People


The following morning Captain Mumchance rode off to search
Miss Primrose Crabapple's Academy for fairy fruit.  And in
his pocket was a warrant for the arrest of that lady should
his search prove successful.
   But when he reached the Academy he found that the birds
had flown.  The old rambling house was empty and silent.  No
light feet tripped down its corridors, no light laughter
wakened its echoes.  Some fierce wind had scattered the
Crabapple Blossoms.  Miss Primrose, too, had disappeared.
   A nameless dread seized Captain Mumchance as he searched
through the empty silent rooms.
   He found the bedrooms in disorder -- drawers half opened,
delicately tinted clothing heaped on the floor -- indicating
that the flitting had been a hurried one.
   Beneath each bed, too, he found a little pair of shoes,
very down at heel, with almost worn-out soles, looking as if
the feet that had worn them must have been very busy.
   He continued his search down to the kitchen premises,
where he found Mother Tibbs sitting smiling to herself, and
crooning.
   "Now, you cracked harlot," he cried roughly, "what have
you been up to, I'd like to know?  I've had my eye on you,
my beauty, for a very long time.  If *I* can't make you
speak, perhaps the judges will.  What's happened to the
young ladies?  Just you tell me *that*!"
   But Mother Tibbs was more crazy than usual that day, and
her only answer was to trip up and down the kitchen floor,
singing snatches of old songs about birds set free, and
celestial flowers, and the white fruits that grow on the
Milky Way.
   Mumchance was holding one of the little shoes, and
catching sight of it, she snatched it from him, and tenderly
stroked it, as if it had been a wounded dove.
   "Dancing, dancing, dancing!" she muttered, "dancing day
and night!  It's stony dancing on dreams."
   And with an angry snort Mumchance realized, not for the
first time in his life, that it was a waste of time trying
to get any sense out of Mother Tibbs.
   So he started again to search the house, this time for
fairy fruit.
   However, not a pip, not a scrap of peel could he find
that looked suspicious.  But, finally, in the loft he
discovered empty sacks with great stains of juice on them,
and it could have been no ordinary juice, for some of the
stains were colours he had never seen before. 
   The terrible news of the Crabapple Blossoms'
disappearance spread like wildfire through Lud-in-the-Mist. 
Business was at a standstill.  Half the Senators, and some
of the richer tradesmen, had daughters in the Academy, and
poor Mumchance was besieged by frantic parents who seemed to
think that he was keeping their daughters concealed
somewhere on his person.  They were all, too, calling down
vengeance on the head of Miss Primrose Crabapple, and
demanding that she should be found and handed over to
justice.
   It was Endymion Leer who got the credit for finding her. 
He brought her, sobbing and screaming, to the guard-room of
the Yeomanry.  He said he had discovered her wandering
about, half frantic, on the wharf, evidently hoping to take
refuge in some outward bound vessel.
   She denied all knowledge of what had happened to her
pupils, and said she had woken up that morning to find the
birds flown.
   She also denied, with passionate protestations, having
given them fairy fruit.  In this, Endymion Leer supported
her.  The smugglers, he said, were men of infinite resource
and cunning, and what more likely than that they should have
inserted the stuff into a consignment of innocent figs and
grapes?
   "And school girls being one quarter boy and three
quarters bird," he added with his dry chuckle, "they cannot
help being orchard thieves... and if there isn't an orchard
to rob, why, they'll rob the loft where the apples are
kept.  And if the apples turn out not to be apples -- why,
then, no one is to blame!"  Nevertheless, Miss Primrose was
locked up in the room in the Guildhall reserved for
prisoners of the better class, pending her trial on a charge
of receiving contraband goods in the form of woven silk --
the only charge, owing to the willful blindness of the law,
on which she could be tried.
   In the meantime a couple of the Yeomen, who had been
scouring the country for Moonlove Honeysuckle, returned with
the news that they had chased her as far as the Debatable
Hills, and had last seen her scrambling like a goat up their
sides.  And no Dorimarite could be expected to follow her
further.
   A couple of days later the Yeomen sent to search for the
other Crabapple Blossoms returned with similar news.  All
along the West Road they had heard rumours of a band of
melancholy maidens flitting past to the sound of sad wild
ditties.  And, finally, they had come upon a goatherd who
had seen them disappearing, like Moonlove, among the folds
of the terrible hills.
   So there was nothing further to be done.  The Crabapple
Blossoms had by now surely perished in the Elfin Marches, or
else vanished for ever into Fairyland.
   These were sad days in Lud-in-the-Mist -- all the big
houses with their shutters down, the dancing halls and other
places of amusement closed, sad, frightened faces in the
streets -- and, as if in sympathy with human things, the
days shortening, the trees yellowing, and beginning to shed
their leaves. 
   Endymion Leer was much in request -- especially in the
houses that had hitherto been closed to him.  Now, he was in
and out of them all day long, exhorting, comforting,
advising.  And wherever he went he managed to leave the
impression that somehow or other Master Nathaniel
Chanticleer was to blame for the whole business.
   There was no doubt about it, Master Nathaniel, these
days, was the most unpopular man in Lud-in-the-Mist.
   In the Senate he got nothing but sour looks from his
colleagues; threats and insults were muttered behind him as
he walked down the High Street; and one day, pausing at a
street corner where a puppet-show was being exhibited, he
found that he himself was the villain of the piece.  For
when the time-honoured climax was reached and the hero was
belabouring the villain's wooden head with his cudgel, the
falsetto voice of the concealed showman punctuated the blows
with such comments as: "There, Nat Cock o' the Roost, is a
black eye to you for small loaves... and there's another for
sour wine.. and there's a bloody nose to you for being too
fond of *papples* and *ares*."
   Here the showman changed his voice and said, "Please,
sir, what are *papples* and *ares*?"  "Ask Nat Cock o' the
Roost," came the falsetto, "and he'll tell you they're
apples and pears that come from across the hills!"
   Most significant of all, for the first time since Master
Nathaniel had been head of the family, Ebeneezor Prim did
not come himself to wind the clocks.  Ebeneezor was a
paragon of dignity and respectability, and it was a joke in
Lud society that you could not really be sure of your social
status till he came to wind your clocks himself, instead of
sending one of his apprentices.
   However, the apprentice he sent to Master Nathaniel was
almost as respectable looking as he was himself.  He wore a
neat black wig, and his expression was sanctimonious in the
extreme, with the corners of his mouth turned down, like one
of his master's clocks that had stopped at 7:25.
   Certainly a very respectable young man, and one who was
evidently fully aware of the unsavoury rumours that were
circulating concerning the house of Chanticleer; for he
looked with such horror at the silly moon-face with its
absurd revolving moustachios of Master Nathaniel's
grandfather clock, and opened its mahogany body so gingerly,
and, when he had adjusted its pendulum, wiped his fingers on
his pocket handkerchief with such an expression of disgust,
that the innocent timepiece might have been the wicked
Mayor's familiar -- a grotesque hobgoblin tabby cat,
purring, and licking her whiskers after an obscene orgy of
garbage.
   But Master Nathaniel was indifferent to these
manifestations of unpopularity.  Let mental suffering be
intense enough, and it becomes a sort of carminative.
   When the news first reached him of the flight of the
Crabapple Blossoms he very nearly went off his head.  Facts
suddenly seemed to be becoming real.
   For the first time in his life his secret shadowy fears
began to solidify -- to find a real focus; and the focus was
Ranulph. 
   His first instinct was to fling municipal obligations to
the winds and ride post-haste to the farm.  But what would
that serve after all?  It would be merely playing into the
hands of his enemies, and by his flight giving the public
reason to think that the things that were said about him
were true.
   It would be madness, too, to bring Ranulph back to Lud. 
Surely there was no place in Dorimare more fraught with
danger for the boy these days than was the fairy
fruit-stained town of Lud.  He felt like a rat in a trap.
   He continued to receive cheerful letters from Ranulph
himself and good accounts of him from Luke Hempen, and
gradually his panic turned into a sort of lethargic
nightmare of fatalism, which seemed to free him from the
necessity of taking action.  It was as if the future were a
treacly adhesive fluid that had been spilt all over the
present, so that everything he touched made his fingers too
sticky to be of the slightest use.
   He found no comfort in his own home.  Dame Marigold, who
had always cared for Prunella much more than for Ranulph,
was in a condition of nervous prostration.
   Each time the realization swept over her that Prunella
had eaten fairy fruit and was either lost in the Elfin
Marches or in Fairyland itself, she would be seized by
nausea and violent attacks of vomiting.
   Indeed, the only moments of relief he knew were in pacing
up and down his own pleached alley, or wandering in the
Fields of Grammary.  For the Fields of Grammary gave him a
foretaste of death -- the state that will turn one into a
sort of object of art (that is to say if one is remembered
by posterity) with all one's deeds and passions simplified,
frozen into beauty; an absolutely silent thing that people
gaze at, and that cannot in its turn gaze back at them.
   And the pleached alley brought him the peace of *still*
life -- life that neither moves nor suffers, but only grows
in silence and slowly matures in secret.
   The Silent People!  How he would have liked to be one of
them!
   But sometimes, as he wandered in the late afternoon about
the streets of the town, human beings themselves seemed to
have found the secret of still life.  For at that hour all
living things seemed to cease from functioning.  The
tradesmen would stand at the doors of their shops staring
with vacant eyes down the street -- as detached from
business as the flowers in the gardens, which looked as if
they too were resting after their day's work and peeping
idly out from between their green shutters.
   And lads who were taking their sweethearts for a row on
the Dapple would look at them with unseeing eyes, while the
maidens gazed into the distance and trailed their hands
absently in the water.
   Even the smithy, with its group of loungers at its open
door, watching the swing and fall of the smith's hammer and
the lurid red light illuminating his face, might have been
no more than a tent at a fair where holiday makers were 
watching a lion tamer or the feats of a professional strong
man; for at that desultory hour the play of muscles, the
bending of resisting things to a human will, the taming of
fire, a creature more beautiful and dangerous than any lion,
seemed merely an entertaining spectacle that served no
useful purpose.
   The very noises of the street -- the rattle of wheels, a
lad whistling, a pedlar crying his wares -- seemed to come
from far away, to be as disembodied and remote from the
activities of man as is the song of the birds.
   And if there was still some bustle in the High Street it
was as soothing as that of a farmyard.  And the whole street
-- houses, cobbles, and all -- might almost have been
fashioned out of growing things cut by man into patterns, as
is a formal garden.  So that Master Nathaniel would wander,
at that hour, between its rows of shops and houses, as if
between the thick green walls of a double hedge of
castellated box, or down the golden tunnel of his own
pleached alley.
   If life in Lud-in-the-Mist could always be like that
there would be no need to die.
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