Bab Bab 1 · Chapter I

. Chapter I

“A spirit . . .

. . . . . .

The undulating woods, and silent well,

And rippling rivulet, and evening gloom,

Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming,

Held commune with him; as if he and it

Were all that was.”

SHELLEY’S _Alastor_.

I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies

the return of consciousness. As I lay and looked through the eastern

window of my room, a faint streak of peach-colour, dividing a cloud

that just rose above the low swell of the horizon, announced the

approach of the sun. As my thoughts, which a deep and apparently

dreamless sleep had dissolved, began again to assume crystalline forms,

the strange events of the foregoing night presented themselves anew to

my wondering consciousness. The day before had been my

one-and-twentieth birthday. Among other ceremonies investing me with my

legal rights, the keys of an old secretary, in which my father had kept

his private papers, had been delivered up to me. As soon as I was left

alone, I ordered lights in the chamber where the secretary stood, the

first lights that had been there for many a year; for, since my

father’s death, the room had been left undisturbed. But, as if the

darkness had been too long an inmate to be easily expelled, and had

dyed with blackness the walls to which, bat-like, it had clung, these

tapers served but ill to light up the gloomy hangings, and seemed to

throw yet darker shadows into the hollows of the deep-wrought cornice.

All the further portions of the room lay shrouded in a mystery whose

deepest folds were gathered around the dark oak cabinet which I now

approached with a strange mingling of reverence and curiosity. Perhaps,

like a geologist, I was about to turn up to the light some of the

buried strata of the human world, with its fossil remains charred by

passion and petrified by tears. Perhaps I was to learn how my father,

whose personal history was unknown to me, had woven his web of story;

how he had found the world, and how the world had left him. Perhaps I

was to find only the records of lands and moneys, how gotten and how

secured; coming down from strange men, and through troublous times, to

me, who knew little or nothing of them all. To solve my speculations,

and to dispel the awe which was fast gathering around me as if the dead

were drawing near, I approached the secretary; and having found the key

that fitted the upper portion, I opened it with some difficulty, drew

near it a heavy high-backed chair, and sat down before a multitude of

little drawers and slides and pigeon-holes. But the door of a little

cupboard in the centre especially attracted my interest, as if there

lay the secret of this long-hidden world. Its key I found.

One of the rusty hinges cracked and broke as I opened the door: it

revealed a number of small pigeon-holes. These, however, being but

shallow compared with the depth of those around the little cupboard,

the outer ones reaching to the back of the desk, I concluded that there

must be some accessible space behind; and found, indeed, that they were

formed in a separate framework, which admitted of the whole being

pulled out in one piece. Behind, I found a sort of flexible portcullis

of small bars of wood laid close together horizontally. After long

search, and trying many ways to move it, I discovered at last a

scarcely projecting point of steel on one side. I pressed this

repeatedly and hard with the point of an old tool that was lying near,

till at length it yielded inwards; and the little slide, flying up

suddenly, disclosed a chamber—empty, except that in one corner lay a

little heap of withered rose-leaves, whose long-lived scent had long

since departed; and, in another, a small packet of papers, tied with a

bit of ribbon, whose colour had gone with the rose-scent. Almost

fearing to touch them, they witnessed so mutely to the law of oblivion,

I leaned back in my chair, and regarded them for a moment; when

suddenly there stood on the threshold of the little chamber, as though

she had just emerged from its depth, a tiny woman-form, as perfect in

shape as if she had been a small Greek statuette roused to life and

motion. Her dress was of a kind that could never grow old-fashioned,

because it was simply natural: a robe plaited in a band around the

neck, and confined by a belt about the waist, descended to her feet. It

was only afterwards, however, that I took notice of her dress, although

my surprise was by no means of so overpowering a degree as such an

apparition might naturally be expected to excite. Seeing, however, as I

suppose, some astonishment in my countenance, she came forward within a

yard of me, and said, in a voice that strangely recalled a sensation of

twilight, and reedy river banks, and a low wind, even in this deathly

room:—

“Anodos, you never saw such a little creature before, did you?”

“No,” said I; “and indeed I hardly believe I do now.”

“Ah! that is always the way with you men; you believe nothing the first

time; and it is foolish enough to let mere repetition convince you of

what you consider in itself unbelievable. I am not going to argue with

you, however, but to grant you a wish.”

Here I could not help interrupting her with the foolish speech, of

which, however, I had no cause to repent—

“How can such a very little creature as you grant or refuse anything?”

“Is that all the philosophy you have gained in one-and-twenty years?”

said she. “Form is much, but size is nothing. It is a mere matter of

relation. I suppose your six-foot lordship does not feel altogether

insignificant, though to others you do look small beside your old Uncle

Ralph, who rises above you a great half-foot at least. But size is of

so little consequence with old me, that I may as well accommodate

myself to your foolish prejudices.”

So saying, she leapt from the desk upon the floor, where she stood a

tall, gracious lady, with pale face and large blue eyes. Her dark hair

flowed behind, wavy but uncurled, down to her waist, and against it her

form stood clear in its robe of white.

“Now,” said she, “you will believe me.”

Overcome with the presence of a beauty which I could now perceive, and

drawn towards her by an attraction irresistible as incomprehensible, I

suppose I stretched out my arms towards her, for she drew back a step

or two, and said—

“Foolish boy, if you could touch me, I should hurt you. Besides, I was

two hundred and thirty-seven years old, last Midsummer eve; and a man

must not fall in love with his grandmother, you know.”

“But you are not my grandmother,” said I.

“How do you know that?” she retorted. “I dare say you know something of

your great-grandfathers a good deal further back than that; but you

know very little about your great-grandmothers on either side. Now, to

the point. Your little sister was reading a fairy-tale to you last

night.”

“She was.”

“When she had finished, she said, as she closed the book, ‘Is there a

fairy-country, brother?’ You replied with a sigh, ‘I suppose there is,

if one could find the way into it.’”

“I did; but I meant something quite different from what you seem to

think.”

“Never mind what I seem to think. You shall find the way into Fairy

Land to-morrow. Now look in my eyes.”

Eagerly I did so. They filled me with an unknown longing. I remembered

somehow that my mother died when I was a baby. I looked deeper and

deeper, till they spread around me like seas, and I sank in their

waters. I forgot all the rest, till I found myself at the window, whose

gloomy curtains were withdrawn, and where I stood gazing on a whole

heaven of stars, small and sparkling in the moonlight. Below lay a sea,

still as death and hoary in the moon, sweeping into bays and around

capes and islands, away, away, I knew not whither. Alas! it was no sea,

but a low fog burnished by the moon. “Surely there is such a sea

somewhere!” said I to myself. A low sweet voice beside me replied—

“In Fairy Land, Anodos.”

I turned, but saw no one. I closed the secretary, and went to my own

room, and to bed.

All this I recalled as I lay with half-closed eyes. I was soon to find

the truth of the lady’s promise, that this day I should discover the

road into Fairy Land.