Lud-in-the-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

And yet ... there was something not altogether human about these bright bird-like eyes and that very pointed chin. Had Master Josiah also heard the Note ... and fled from it to the world-in-law?

Then he went on: "But what I'm going to say now is my own idea. Supposing that everything that happens on the one planet, the planet that we call Delusion, reacts on the other planet; that is to say, the world as we choose to see it, the world-in-law? No, no, Ambrose! You promised to hear me out!" (For it was clear that Master Ambrose was getting restive.) "Supposing then, that one planet reacts on the other, but that these reactions are translated, as it were, into the terms of the other? To take an example, supposing that what on one planet is a spiritual sin should turn on the other into a felony? That what in the world of delusion are hands stained with fairy fruit should, in the world-in-law, turn into hands stained with human blood? In short, that Endymion Leer should turn into Christopher Pugwalker?"

Master Ambrose's impatience had changed to real alarm. He greatly feared that Nathaniel's brain had been unhinged by his recent misfortunes. Master Nathaniel burst out laughing: "I believe you think I've gone off my head, Brosie—but I've not, I promise you. In plain language, unless we can find that this fellow Leer has been guilty of something in the eye of the Law he'll go on triumphing over us and laughing at us in his sleeve and ruining our country for our children till, finally, all the Senate, except you and me, follows his funeral procession, with weeping and wailing, to the Fields of Grammary. It's our one hope of getting even with him, Brosie. Otherwise, we might as soon hope to catch a dream and put it in a cage."

"Well, according to your ideas of the Law, Nat, it shouldn't be too difficult," said Master Ambrose drily. "You seem to consider that in what you call the world-in-law one does as one likes with facts—launch a new legal fiction, then, according to which, for your own particular convenience, Endymion Leer is for the future Christopher Pugwalker."

Master Nathaniel laughed: "I'm in hopes we can prove it without legal fiction," he said. "The widow Gibberty's trial took place thirty-six years ago, four years after the great drought, when, as Marigold has discovered, Leer was in Dorimare, though he has always given us to understand that he did not arrive till considerably later ... and the reason would be obvious if he left as Pugwalker, and returned as Leer. Also, we know that he is intimate with the widow Gibberty. Pugwalker was a herbalist; so is Leer. And then there is the fright you gave him with your question, 'Do the dead bleed?' Nothing will make me believe that that question immediately suggested to him the mock funeral and the coffin with fairy fruit ... he might think of that on second thoughts, not right away. No, no, I hope to be able to convince you, and before very long, that I am right in this matter, as I was in the other—it's our one hope, Ambrose."

"Well, Nat," said Master Ambrose, "though you talk more nonsense in half an hour than most people do in a lifetime, I've been coming to the conclusion that you're not such a fool as you look—and, after all, in Hempie's old story it was the village idiot who put salt on the dragon's tail."

Master Nathaniel laughed, quite pleased by this equivocal compliment—it was so rarely that Ambrose paid one a compliment at all.

"Well," continued Master Ambrose, "and how are you going to set about launching your legal fiction, eh?"

"Oh, I'll try and get in touch with some of the witnesses in the trial—Diggory Carp himself may turn out to be still alive. At any rate, it will give me something to do, and Lud's no place for me just now."

Master Ambrose groaned: "Has it really come to this, Nat, that you have to leave Lud, and that we can do nothing against this ... this ... this cobweb of lies and buffoonery and ... well, delusion, if you like? I can tell you, I haven't spared Polydore and the rest of them the rough side of my tongue—but it's as if that fellow Leer had cast a spell on them."