Chapter 1

It was in the spring when I at last found time from the hospital work
to visit my friend, the old folk-lorist, in his country isolation, and
I rather chuckled to myself, because in my bag I was taking down a book
that utterly refuted all his tiresome pet theories of magic and the
powers of the soul.

These theories were many and various, and had often troubled me. In the
first place, I scorned them for professional reasons, and, in the
second, because I had never been able to argue quite well enough to
convince or to shake his faith, in even the smallest details, and any
scientific knowledge I brought to bear only fed him with confirmatory
data. To find such a book, therefore, and to know that it was safely in
my bag, wrapped up in brown paper and addressed to him, was a deep and
satisfactory joy, and I speculated a good deal during the journey how
he would deal with the overwhelming arguments it contained against the
existence of any important region outside the world of sensory
perceptions.

Speculative, too, I was whether his visionary habits and absorbing
experiments would permit him to remember my arrival at all, and I was
accordingly relieved to hear from the solitary porter that the
"professor" had sent a "veeckle" to meet me, and that I was thus free
to send my bag and walk the four miles to the house across the hills.

It was a calm, windless evening, just after sunset, the air warm and
scented, and delightfully still. The train, already sinking into
distance, carried away with it the noise of crowds and cities and the
last suggestions of the stressful life behind me, and from the little
station on the moorland I stepped at once into the world of silent,
growing things, tinkling sheep-bells, shepherds, and wild, desolate
spaces.

My path lay diagonally across the turfy hills. It slanted a mile or so
to the summit, wandered vaguely another two miles among gorse-bushes
along the crest, passed Tom Bassett's cottage by the pines, and then
dropped sharply down on the other side through rather thin woods to the
ancient house where the old folk-lorist lived and dreamed himself into
his impossible world of theory and fantasy. I fell to thinking busily
about him during the first part of the ascent, and convinced myself, as
usual, that, but for his generosity to the poor, and his benign aspect,
the peasantry must undoubtedly have regarded him as a wizard who
speculated in souls and had dark dealings with the world of faery.

The path I knew tolerably well. I had already walked it once before--a
winter's day some years ago--and from the cottage onward felt sure of
my way; but for the first mile or so there were so many cross
cattle-tracks, and the light had become so dim that I felt it wise to
inquire more particularly. And this I was fortunately able to do of a
man who with astonishing suddenness rose from the grass where he had
been lying behind a clump of bushes, and passed a few yards in front of
me at a high pace downhill toward the darkening valley.

He was in such a state of hurry that I called out loudly to him,
fearing to be too late, but on hearing my voice he turned sharply, and
seemed to arrive almost at once beside me. In a single instant he was
standing there, quite close, looking, with a smile and a certain
expression of curiosity, I thought, into my face. I remember thinking
that his features, pale and wholly untanned, were rather wonderful for
a countryman, and that the eyes were those of a foreigner; his great
swiftness, too, gave me a distinct sensation--something almost of a
start--though I knew my vision was at fault at the best of times, and
of course especially so in the deceptive twilight of the open hillside.

Moreover--as the way often is with such instructions--the words did not
stay in my mind very clearly after he had uttered them, and the rapid,
panther-like movements of the man as he quickly vanished down the hill
again left me with little more than a sweeping gesture indicating the
line I was to follow. No doubt his sudden rising from behind the
gorse-bush, his curious swiftness, and the way he peered into my face,
and even touched me on the shoulder, all combined to distract my
attention somewhat from the actual words he used; and the fact that I
was travelling at a wrong angle, and should have come out a mile too
far to the right, helped to complete my feeling that his gesture,
pointing the way, was sufficient.

On the crest of the ridge, panting a little with the unwonted exertion,
I lay down to rest a moment on the grass beside a flaming yellow
gorse-bush. There was still a good hour before I should be looked for
at the house; the grass was very soft, the peace and silence soothing.
I lingered, and lit a cigarette. And it was just then, I think, that my
subconscious memory gave back the words, the actual words, the man had
spoken, and the heavy significance of the personal pronoun, as he had
emphasised it in his odd foreign voice, touched me with a sense of
vague amusement: "The safest way _for you_ now," he had said, as though
I was so obviously a townsman and might be in danger on the lonely
hills after dark. And the quick way he had reached my side, and then
slipped off again like a shadow down the steep slope, completed a
definite little picture in my mind. Then other thoughts and memories
rose up and formed a series of pictures, following each other in rapid
succession, and forming a chain of reflections undirected by the will
and without purpose or meaning. I fell, that is, into a pleasant
reverie.

Below me, and infinitely far away, it seemed, the valley lay silent
under a veil of blue evening haze, the lower end losing itself among
darkening hills whose peaks rose here and there like giant plumes that
would surely nod their great heads and call to one another once the
final shadows were down. The village lay, a misty patch, in which
lights already twinkled. A sound of rooks faintly cawing, of sea-gulls
crying far up in the sky, and of dogs barking at a great distance rose
up out of the general murmur of evening voices. Odours of farm and
field and open spaces stole to my nostrils, and everything contributed
to the feeling that I lay on the top of the world, nothing between me
and the stars, and that all the huge, free things of the earth--hills,
valleys, woods, and sloping fields--lay breathing deeply about me.

A few sea-gulls--in daytime hereabouts they fill the air--still circled
and wheeled within range of sight, uttering from time to time sharp,
petulant cries; and far in the distance there was just visible a
shadowy line that showed where the sea lay.

Then, as I lay gazing dreamily into this still pool of shadows at my
feet, something rose up, something sheet-like, vast, imponderable, off
the whole surface of the mapped-out country, moved with incredible
swiftness down the valley, and in a single instant climbed the hill
where I lay and swept by me, yet without hurry, and in a sense without
speed. Veils in this way rose one after another, filling the cups
between the hills, shrouding alike fields, village, and hillside as
they passed, and settled down somewhere into the gloom behind me over
the ridge, or slipped off like vapour into the sky.

Whether it was actually mist rising from the surface of the
fast-cooling ground, or merely the earth giving up her heat to the
night, I could not determine. The coming of the darkness is ever a
series of mysteries. I only know that this indescribable vast stirring
of the landscape seemed to me as though the earth were unfolding
immense sable wings from her sides, and lifting them for silent,
gigantic strokes so that she might fly more swiftly from the sun into
the night. The darkness, at any rate, did drop down over everything
very soon afterward, and I rose up hastily to follow my pathway,
realising with a degree of wonder strangely new to me the magic of
twilight, the blue open depths into the valley below, and the pale
yellow heights of the watery sky above.

I walked rapidly, a sense of chilliness about me, and soon lost sight
of the valley altogether as I got upon the ridge proper of these lonely
and desolate hills.

It could not have been more than fifteen minutes that I lay there in
reverie, yet the weather, I at once noticed, had changed very abruptly,
for mist was seething here and there about me, rising somewhere from
smaller valleys in the hills beyond, and obscuring the path, while
overhead there was plainly a sound of wind tearing past, far up, with a
sound of high shouting. A moment before it had been the stillness of a
warm spring night, yet now everything had changed; wet mist coated me,
raindrops smartly stung my face, and a gusty wind, descending out of
cool heights, began to strike and buffet me, so that I buttoned my coat
and pressed my hat more firmly upon my head.

The change was really this--and it came to me for the first time in my
life with the power of a real conviction--that everything about me
seemed to have become suddenly _alive_.

It came oddly upon me--prosaic, matter-of-fact, materialistic doctor
that I was--this realisation that the world about me had somehow
stirred into life; oddly, I say, because Nature to me had always been
merely a more or less definite arrangement of measurement, weight, and
colour, and this new presentation of it was utterly foreign to my
temperament. A valley to me was always a valley; a hill, merely a hill;
a field, so many acres of flat surface, grass or ploughed, drained well
or drained ill; whereas now, with startling vividness, came the
strange, haunting idea that after all they could be something more than
valley, hill, and field; that what I had hitherto perceived by these
names were only the veils of something that lay concealed within,
something alive. In a word, that the poetic sense I had always rather
sneered at, in others, or explained away with some shallow
physiological label, had apparently suddenly opened up in myself
without any obvious cause.

And, the more I puzzled over it, the more I began to realise that its
genesis dated from those few minutes of reverie lying under the
gorse-bush (reverie, a thing I had never before in all my life indulged
in!), or, now that I came to reflect more accurately, from my brief
interview with that wild-eyed, swift-moving, shadowy man of whom I had
first inquired the way.

I recalled my singular fancy that veils were lifting off the surface of
the hills and fields, and a tremor of excitement accompanied the
memory. Such a thing had never before been possible to my practical
intelligence, and it made me feel suspicious--suspicious about myself.
I stood still a moment--I looked about me into the gathering mist,
above me to the vanishing stars, below me to the hidden valley, and
then sent an urgent summons to my individuality, as I had always known
it, to arrest and chase these undesirable fancies.

But I called in vain. No answer came. Anxiously, hurriedly, confusedly,
too, I searched for my normal self, but could not find it; and this
failure to respond induced in me a sense of uneasiness that touched
very nearly upon the borders of alarm.

I pushed on faster and faster along the turfy track among the
gorse-bushes with a dread that I might lose the way altogether, and a
sudden desire to reach home as soon as might be. Then, without warning,
I emerged unexpectedly into clear air again, and the vapour swept past
me in a rushing wall and rose into the sky. Anew I saw the lights of
the village behind me in the depths, here and there a line of smoke
rising against the pale yellow sky, and stars overhead peering down
through thin wispy clouds that stretched their wind-signs across the
night.

After all, it had been nothing but a stray bit of sea-fog driving up
from the coast, for the other side of the hills, I remembered, dipped
their chalk cliffs straight into the sea, and strange lost winds must
often come a-wandering this way with the sharp changes of temperature
about sunset. None the less, it was disconcerting to know that mist and
storm lay hiding within possible reach, and I walked on smartly for a
sight of Tom Bassett's cottage and the lights of the Manor House in the
valley a short mile beyond.

The clearing of the air, however, lasted but a very brief while, and
vapour was soon rising about me as before, hiding the path and making
bushes and stone walls look like running shadows. It came, driven
apparently, by little independent winds up the many side gullies, and
it was very cold, touching my skin like a wet sheet. Curious great
shapes, too, it assumed as the wind worked to and fro through it: forms
of men and animals; grotesque, giant outlines; ever shifting and
running along the ground with silent feet, or leaping into the air with
sharp cries as the gusts twisted them inwardly and lent them voice.
More and more I pushed my pace, and more and more darkness and vapour
obliterated the landscape. The going was not otherwise difficult, and
here and there cowslips glimmered in patches of dancing yellow, while
the springy turf made it easy to keep up speed; yet in the gloom I
frequently tripped and plunged into prickly gorse near the ground, so
that from shin to knee was soon a-tingle with sharp pain. Odd puffs and
spits of rain stung my face, and the periods of utter stillness were
always followed by little shouting gusts of wind, each time from a new
direction. Troubled is perhaps too strong a word, but flustered I
certainly was; and though I recognised that it was due to my being in
an environment so remote from the town life I was accustomed to, I
found it impossible to stifle altogether the feeling of malaise that
had crept into my heart, and I looked about with increasing eagerness
for the lighted windows of Bassett's cottage.

More and more, little pin-pricks of distress and confusion accumulated,
adding to my realisation of being away from streets and shop-windows,
and things I could classify and deal with. The mist, too, distorted as
well as concealed, played tricks with sounds as well as with sights.
And, once or twice, when I stumbled upon some crouching sheep, they got
up without the customary alarm and hurry of sheep, and moved off slowly
into the darkness, but in such a singular way that I could almost have
sworn they were not sheep at all, but human beings crawling on
all-fours, looking back and grimacing at me over their shoulders as
they went. On these occasions--for there were more than one--I never
could get close enough to feel their woolly wet backs, as I should have
liked to do; and the sound of their tinkling bells came faintly through
the mist, sometimes from one direction, sometimes from another,
sometimes all round me as though a whole flock surrounded me; and I
found it impossible to analyse or explain the idea I received that they
were _not_ sheep-bells at all, but something quite different.

But mist and darkness, and a certain confusion of the senses caused by
the excitement of an utterly strange environment, can account for a
great deal. I pushed on quickly. The conviction that I had strayed from
the route grew, nevertheless, for occasionally there was a great
commotion of seagulls about me, as though I had disturbed them in their
sleeping-places. The air filled with their plaintive cries, and I heard
the rushing of multitudinous wings, sometimes very close to my head,
but always invisible owing to the mist. And once, above the swishing of
the wet wind through the gorse-bushes, I was sure I caught the faint
thunder of the sea and the distant crashing of waves rolling up some
steep-throated gully in the cliffs. I went cautiously after this, and
altered my course a little away from the direction of the sound.

Yet, increasingly all the time, it came to me how the cries of the
sea-birds sounded like laughter, and how the everlasting wind blew and
drove about me with a purpose, and how the low bushes persistently took
the shape of stooping people, moving stealthily past me, and how the
mist more and more resembled huge protean figures escorting me across
the desolate hills, silently, with immense footsteps. For the inanimate
world now touched my awakened poetic sense in a manner hitherto
unguided, and became fraught with the pregnant messages of a dimly
concealed life. I readily understood, for the first time, how easily a
superstitious peasantry might people their world, and how even an
educated mind might favour an atmosphere of legend. I stumbled along,
looking anxiously for the lights of the cottage.

Suddenly, as a shape of writhing mist whirled past, I received so
direct a stroke of wind that it was palpably a blow in the face.
Something swept by with a shrill cry into the darkness. It was
impossible to prevent jumping to one side and raising an arm by way of
protection, and I was only just quick enough to catch a glimpse of the
sea-gull as it raced past, with suddenly altered flight, beating its
powerful wings over my head. Its white body looked enormous as the mist
swallowed it. At the same moment a gust tore my hat from my head and
flung the flap of my coat across my eyes. But I was well-trained by
this time, and made a quick dash after the retreating black object,
only to find on overtaking it that I held a prickly branch of gorse.
The wind combed my hair viciously. Then, out of a corner of my eye, I
saw my hat still rolling, and grabbed swiftly at it; but just as I
closed on it, the real hat passed in front of me, turning over in the
wind like a ball, and I instantly released my first capture to chase
it. Before it was within reach, another one shot between my feet so
that I stepped on it. The grass seemed covered with moving hats, yet
each one, when I seized it, turned into a piece of wood, or a tiny
gorse-bush, or a black rabbit hole, till my hands were scored with
prickles and running blood. In the darkness, I reflected, all objects
looked alike, as though by general conspiracy. I straightened up and
took a long breath, mopping the blood with my handkerchief. Then
something tapped at my feet, and on looking down, there was the hat
within easy reach, and I stooped down and put it on my head again. Of
course, there were a dozen ways of explaining my confusion and
stupidity, and I walked along wondering which to select. My eyesight,
for one thing--and under such conditions why seek further? It was
nothing, after all, and the dizziness was a momentary effect caused by
the effort and stooping.

But for all that, I shouted aloud, on the chance that a wandering
shepherd might hear me; and of course no answer came, for it was like
calling in a padded room, and the mist suffocated my voice and killed
its resonance.

It was really very discouraging: I was cold and wet and hungry; my legs
and clothes torn by the gorse, my hands scratched and bleeding; the
wind brought water to my eyes by its constant buffeting, and my skin
was numb from contact with the chill mist. Fortunately I had matches,
and after some difficulty, by crouching under a wall, I caught a swift
glimpse of my watch, and saw that it was but little after eight
o'clock. Supper I knew was at nine, and I was surely over half-way by
this time. But here again was another instance of the way everything
seemed in a conspiracy against me to appear otherwise than ordinary,
for in the gleam of the match my watch-glass showed as the face of a
little old gray man, uncommonly like the folk-lorist himself, peering
up at me with an expression of whimsical laughter. My own reflection it
could not possibly have been, for I am clean-shaven, and this face
looked up at me through a running tangle of gray hair. Yet a second and
third match revealed only the white surface with the thin black hands
moving across it.