“Why, so was Syrinx when she fled from Pan,” said the Doctor. “That is the very duality of divinity. The god has always two aspects, one beneficent, one maleficent. Nor are they always distinct: the two aspects may be represented in the same act, or shall I say that every good act is doubled by an evil one, just as every gift of the fairies, who, by−the−by, might well be Pan's representatives on these moors, turns out to have some disastrous condition attached to it. Their gold, in the morning, is a stone, or their invitation to a night's revels holds the unfortunate mortal in a century's slavery.”
“I think I should almost have been glad to meet a fairy this afternoon, for all that,” I said, thinking of Nuaman sitting like a pixie on his stone.
“Well,” said Dr Ravelin, quite gravely, “it would be interesting, but not surprising, if you had. The body of serious testimony to their frequenting this part is considerable. Though it is true, the last recorded encounters were not recent.”
“You speak as if you took them seriously yourself,” I said.
“Seriously? Yes, as seriously as I take any human belief which science tells us is erroneous but which yet has its significant monuments in literature or folklore or in stone. It has been argued, you know, that these little men, elves, pixies and gnomes of our great−grandfathers, are no other than the gods of our remoter ancestors; or, some suggest, an ancient people whom our ancestors displaced: the little metalmen of whom Olaus Magnus and Paracelsus speak; a shy population possessing arts unknown to the invaders, their memory still lingers round the earthworks and the stone circles which were thought to be of their building. Since people have ceased to see them the fairies have degenerated into vapid little wisps of things in books for children written, as it were, at second−hand. They have become the memories of memories. But once they were powerful and feared. So, should you meet one on the moor, Miss Hazel, be circumspect in your dealings with him!”
“All right, I will!” I said. “'Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen'—I'll take Nuaman with me next time. I'm sure he'd be quite at home with little men.”
I was not long in going to bed that night. On the way upstairs I looked into the housekeeper's room to say a word to Mrs. Sarkissian. She was sitting by the window, mending one of the girls' white linen frocks by the failing light. I said something sympathetic about mending and making do.
“Yes,” she said. “Them two don't take no thought for their clothes. Look 'ere what Marvan done this afternoon.” She showed me an impressive rent in the side of the frock.
“Some rip,” I said. “But she couldn't have done that this afternoon. She was wearing her jersey and shorts.” Mrs. Sarkissian shook her head. “They was this morning,” she said, “but they changed into their frocks soon as you'd gone, and Marvan done this on an old nail in the attic after tea. I only seen it when they came
down for supper just afore you come in.”
I suppose I was over−tired and my brain just would not function clearly, but, though I puzzled over what Mrs. Sarkissian said all the time I was undressing and while I snuggled drowsily down in bed, I could not make head or tail of it. But why it mattered whether they had been wearing their white frocks or brown jerseys that afternoon I could not quite decide.
This little problem, my tiredness and my panic of the afternoon all worked hard in my sub−conscious mind, no doubt, to produce the curious dream I had that night.
I dreamed that I woke in the middle of the night, aware of an unusual noise. I sat up and looked round the room. The clouds that had covered the sky all day had cleared away and it was moonlight. My window was open, the night was very still, and quite distinctly I could hear an irregular, metallic sound: ringing blows in quick succession, then a pause and a few isolated taps, then another quick tattoo, then another pause, and so on. The noise was quite inexplicable. I had heard nothing like it before at Ringstones. I got out of bed and listened at the open window. There, it seemed to me that the noise was coming from the back of the house. It was fainter and more distant, I thought, than if it had been anywhere close at hand in the Park. My bedroom door was open, and in the passage was a window that looked out at the back towards the old stables. I went out and listened at that window, and thought I heard the noise much more distinctly from there. It sounded exactly like someone hammering in the old stables. I don't know why in my dream I felt such curiosity to see what was producing the sounds, but as in dreams one sometimes seems to act with more decision than in waking, I went back to my room, put on my dressing−gown and slippers and crept quietly down to the back door which I opened very cautiously to avoid waking anyone else. I remember I did not feel in the least frightened.
Outside, in the black and silver of the night, I listened. The noise had ceased, but I had been so sure of where it came from that I went without hesitation down the path to the stables. I felt distinctly the chill of the night air through my thin dressing−gown, and the cold hardness of the flags through my slippers. I don't know of what my picture of the stable−yard was built up, for I had never been inside it in my waking life. I had seen its two big carriage doors from the outside and that was all. Now, it seemed to me, they were open a little way. I slipped through and found myself in a flagged court with stable and coach−house doors round three sides and a stone horse−trough in the centre. In the middle of the roof−ridge of the block of buildings facing the gates was what I believe is called in architecture a 'lantern', with a weather vane in the shape of a running fox, quite clearly to be seen in the moonlight. That, I suppose, I may have seen from the outside. One other thing I noticed which I could not have seen in reality was that the handle of the iron pump at one end of the horse−trough was finished off with a kind of flourished curl like a heraldic lion's tail, and the lead spout was in the form of a gaping lion's head.
As I stood looking round the clinking, hammering noise began again. At the far right−hand corner of the yard a pair of double doors stood open, the one towards me standing out into the yard so as to prevent my seeing into the place. A dim, smoky red light was coming from there and from there also came the noise. The moon cast an inky black shadow all along the right−hand side of the yard and I slipped up in the shadow and put my eye to the chink between the door and its jamb.
As in dreams one takes the queerest eccentricities of behaviour or dress as a matter of course, so I don't remember that I felt much surprise at what I saw, only an absorbing interest In the middle of the space inside the doors was an anvil; beyond it was a kind of blacksmith's forge from which the red glow came that lit the scene. With his back to me, stripped to the waist, and with his skin shining rosy in that light, stood Sarkissian wielding a hammer. Opposite him, entirely stripped, as far as I could see, was Nuaman, his skin looking a rich gold in the firelight, and he was striking with a smaller hammer. Between them on the anvil was a curiously curved bar of shining metal which was being held in place with a pair of long tongs by an impish−looking little brown−skinned boy, crop−headed, sharp−eared and as bare as Nuaman. At the forge was another couple of naked brown boys, one pumping the bellows and the other stirring something in the coals. I noticed the sweat glistening on their skins. Sarkissian plied his heavy hammer and Nuaman came down rapidly with his light one and between them they were making that ringing, irregular music I had heard from my room. They were working fast and concentrating with a fixity that was truly dreamlike on what they were doing. What really held my interest more than Sarkissian and Nuaman, or the strange boys, however, was something that stood back a little between the anvil and the forge, half in deep shadow, half in the red glow of the fire, though at every stroke of the bellows the glow brightened and leapt out to give me a glimpse of the other half of the strange object. It was a kind of chariot, delicate, elegant and shining with polished metal−work. It was a sort of skeleton thing that looked extremely light and manoeuverable, with the spokes of its wheels flashing and raying in the glow and a red reflection leaping along its curving front rail. Its slender pole sloped up away from me and I saw the end of it only by snatches as the forge fire alternately glowed and dimmed. It seemed to me that one side of the pole was furnished at the tip with just such a curving bar or bow as Sarkissian and Nuaman were forging at the anvil, and from this bar there dangled some complicated kind of leather harness among which I clearly saw, as the leaping brightness momentarily illuminated it, two glinting metal rings, one of which, I was quite firmly convinced, was my watch strap.