Glindersby stared at the dense fumes that were encircling the great bowl. Half mechanically, almost unwillingly, he gasped out: ‘Oh, Coventry ... go-ahead place, I b’lieve ... eight hundred years hence.’ There was some muttering in a strange tongue, and then a dark hand waved across the rolling, sickly-smelling fumes. ‘Come!’ cried the voice of the Hindoo, who must have trafficked with the devil, whom he resembled at that moment.
Hardly knowing what he was doing, Glindersby found himself in the midst of the fumes, bending over the bowl and staring at the ebony surface of the liquid within. ‘Near Coventry.... Your year, two thousand seven hundred and thirty....’ The voice seemed to come from miles away. Next moment, the fumes, the bowl, everything had vanished, and he seemed to be looking, as from a great height, at a large meadow where a number of sheep with their lambs were browsing. It seemed a bright morning in early summer. There was no shadow of smoke; the air was perfectly clear. In one corner of the meadow a boy was seated under a large elm. He was bare-legged, sandalled and simply clad in a bright blue robe, and, all the time, he appeared to be playing upon a little pipe. Near by was a small shrine garlanded with red roses, and the grass around was strewn with crimson petals scattered by the breeze. Cloud-shadows drifted across the grass; the sheep moved steadily forward, with their lambs capering about them; a few more crimson petals were shaken from the shrine; the boy still fingered his little pipe in the shade of the elm....
‘It is not what you expected to find,’ cried a voice in his ear; and Glindersby looked up and saw the smiling face of Ram Dar Chubb above the bowl over which they had both been bending.
I say that Glindersby is a changed man, and that I, for one, approve the change in him. But I think that this story of his is full of lies; and that as for Ram Dar Chubb, he is an obvious invention, and cheap at that.
ON VULGAR ERRORS
I OFTEN feel sorry that so many quaint and pretty fancies, such as we find gravely weighed by Sir Thomas Brown in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, have fluttered away from our knowing modern world like so many butterflies. After all, there was little harm and often a great deal of poetry or grotesque humour in these ‘vulgar errors,’ as Sir Thomas called them. Now that the ordinary man has flung away these gaily-coloured fancies, I do not know that he is any better off with such dismal scraps of learning as are coming his way at the present time. His ancestors were fanciful fellows with little exact knowledge; his descendants may occupy themselves with a vast accumulated store of learning; meanwhile, he himself, our contemporary, has relinquished his old fancies and quaint dreams, and received little or nothing, as yet, in return. Now, barren of belief, he stands waiting for the meagre crumbs of science.
The Wandering Jew no longer creeps past our doors; we buried him long ago, and there is the end of a grand old tale. No Salamanders live in our fires. No more do ‘swans, a little before their death, sing most sweetly’; another gleam of poetry has faded from the world. We meet with the Unicorn and the Phœnix only in coats-of-arms and commercial advertisements. The Basilisk, or Cockatrice, which came from a cock’s egg, hatched under a toad or serpent, and which could kill at a distance by the power of the eye, no longer haunts the world; perhaps we do not regret him, yet the briefest glance at him, while he was looking some other way, would have been an experience worth remembering. The mermaids and mermen have long since ridden away from our coasts on their water-horses, driving their water-bulls before them. The giants have eaten the pigmies, and have themselves succumbed to indigestion. Our acetylene lights have frightened away Jack-o’-Lanthorn himself, and there is no green cheese in the moon, and very little cheese worth eating on the earth.
Does the Glastonbury thorn still blossom at Christmastide? Certainly the ass still bears the sign of the Cross on its back, and the haddock still shows the black marks left by the finger and thumb of St. Peter. Do our seamen still take cauls with them to guard against drowning? I am afraid that barnacles, when broken off from the sides of a ship, no longer turn into geese. Nor do mandrakes shriek out when they are uprooted, these days. Do our country girls still put the Bible, with sixpence between the pages of Ruth, under their pillows at night, in order to dream of their future husbands? How many of us put bay leaves under our pillows so that we may have true dreams?
Sneezing, in our time, does not call for a blessing. Nor do we bless the moon when it is at the full, nor ask our ladies to drop it a curtsey at the time of its rebirth. Omens trouble us no longer; it does not matter how we put on our stockings and shoes, or, at least, we do not feel that good or ill fortune is bound up with the order of our dressing. We do not attempt to read our destiny in the leaping flames on the hearth, nor look for purses and coffins in the coals that fly out from time to time. On the rare occasions when we see a lighted candle, we do not expect to find it presageful, and we are not likely to try divination from the behaviour of the gas or electric light. A tingling ear, an itching nose, a burning cheek, and other little pranks of the blood and nerves pass as a jest among us. We allow no trafficking with amulets and charms, except as the merest decoration, and we attempt to read the future only through our pass-books. We leave Fate severely alone, not because we think that it is of no importance, but because our lives do not seem of sufficient consequence to be meddled with; wherein we are more modest than our forefathers, but also, I think, more miserable.
All these quaint beliefs have gone in the wind, and it is well, for the world cannot stand still. As I have said before, there was little harm in them, and often a great deal of poetry; they have furnished some good folk, high and low, with many a heartening tale for the chimney-corner; their weft of phantasy has been woven into many a fine ballad or romance. But, shrinking from the fierce light of Truth, these fanciful notions left us long ago.