“The king—the king! I would have given them his message—and I bade them only to get them husks!”
So the poet—who understood—said no word at all, but he shielded Peter with his mantle; and then he took his lute and walked beside the little lad, singing.
They had gone but a short distance when they reached the top of a hill, where the sun shone with exceeding brightness, and the poet noted that the light fell almost like little wings. Peter saw none of this, for his hands were still covering his face. But he heard the poet’s singing interrupted by a voice. The voice was uneven—like a bark or a whine that is turning into words—but yet its words were clear and unmistakable. And they were:—
“Sirs, the world is beginning. You must go and help the king.”
Peter looked up and he saw the man who had spoken, a man twisted and ragged, but who smiled down into the little boy’s face so gently that, for a moment, Peter did not know him; and then he recognized that beggar to whom, on that night long ago, he had given food and the message.
“Ay, friend!” the poet was answering him ringingly, “and we go!”
The beggar hurried on, and the poet touched Peter’s hand.
“Nay, now, little Peter,” he said, “grieve not your heart too much. For you it was who told the beggar the message—from the top of the hill I heard—and I saw you give him food. Can you tell any man without some good coming true of the tidings? Then it may well be that there are those in the town to whom you told the king’s message who will remember, too. Go we forth together to try again!”
Peter looked down the long highway, stretching between the mysterious green, where shrubs changed to animals in so little a space; and then he looked away to the king’s kingdom and saw how it was not finished—because the world had just stopped being nothing and was beginning to be something—and he looked back towards the city where, as at the court, men had not yet done being animals. Everything was changing, as if nothing were meant to be merely what it is. And everything was in savage angles and wild lines. The world was beginning. The people must be told to go and help the king.