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.