And all
kinds of people would come; there would be gentle folks and village
folks, and some old people and boys and girls, and quite small children,
who sat and watched. And it would all be dark as they came in, except in
one corner where some one was burning something that smelt strong and
sweet, and made them laugh, and there one would see a glaring of coals,
and the smoke mounting up red. So they would all come in, and when the
last had come there was no door any more, so that no one else could get
in, even if they knew there was anything beyond. And once a gentleman
who was a stranger and had ridden a long way, lost his path at night,
and his horse took him into the very middle of the wild country, where
everything was upside down, and there were dreadful marshes and great
stones everywhere, and holes underfoot, and the trees looked like
gibbet-posts, because they had great black arms that stretched out
across the way. And this strange gentleman was very frightened, and his
horse began to shiver all over, and at last it stopped and wouldn't go
any farther, and the gentleman got down and tried to lead the horse, but
it wouldn't move, and it was all covered with a sweat, like death. So
the gentleman went on all alone, going farther and farther into the wild
country, till at last he came to a dark place, where he heard shouting
and singing and crying, like nothing he had ever heard before. It all
sounded quite close to him, but he couldn't get in, and so he began to
call, and while he was calling, something came behind him, and in a
minute his mouth and arms and legs were all bound up, and he fell into a
swoon. And when he came to himself, he was lying by the roadside, just
where he had first lost his way, under a blasted oak with a black trunk,
and his horse was tied beside him. So he rode on to the town and told
the people there what had happened, and some of them were amazed; but
others knew. So when once everybody had come, there was no door at all
for anybody else to pass in by. And when they were all inside, round in
a ring, touching each other, some one began to sing in the darkness, and
some one else would make a noise like thunder with a thing they had on
purpose, and on still nights people would hear the thundering noise far,
far away beyond the wild land, and some of them, who thought they knew
what it was, used to make a sign on their breasts when they woke up in
their beds at dead of night and heard that terrible deep noise, like
thunder on the mountains. And the noise and the singing would go on and
on for a long time, and the people who were in a ring swayed a little to
and fro; and the song was in an old, old language that nobody knows now,
and the tune was queer. Nurse said her great-grandmother had known some
one who remembered a little of it, when she was quite a little girl, and
nurse tried to sing some of it to me, and it was so strange a tune that
I turned all cold and my flesh crept as if I had put my hand on
something dead. Sometimes it was a man that sang and sometimes it was a
woman, and sometimes the one who sang it did it so well that two or
three of the people who were there fell to the ground shrieking and
tearing with their hands. The singing went on, and the people in the
ring kept swaying to and fro for a long time, and at last the moon would
rise over a place they called the Tole Deol, and came up and showed them
swinging and swaying from side to side, with the sweet thick smoke
curling up from the burning coals, and floating in circles all around
them. Then they had their supper. A boy and a girl brought it to them;
the boy carried a great cup of wine, and the girl carried a cake of
bread, and they passed the bread and the wine round and round, but they
tasted quite different from common bread and common wine, and changed
everybody that tasted them. Then they all rose up and danced, and secret
things were brought out of some hiding place, and they played
extraordinary games, and danced round and round and round in the
moonlight, and sometimes people would suddenly disappear and never be
heard of afterwards, and nobody knew what had happened to them. And
they drank more of that curious wine, and they made images and
worshipped them, and nurse showed me how the images were made one day
when we were out for a walk, and we passed by a place where there was a
lot of wet clay. So nurse asked me if I would like to know what those
things were like that they made on the hill, and I said yes. Then she
asked me if I would promise never to tell a living soul a word about it,
and if I did I was to be thrown into the black pit with the dead people,
and I said I wouldn't tell anybody, and she said the same thing again
and again, and I promised. So she took my wooden spade and dug a big
lump of clay and put it in my tin bucket, and told me to say if any one
met us that I was going to make pies when I went home. Then we went on a
little way till we came to a little brake growing right down into the
road, and nurse stopped, and looked up the road and down it, and then
peeped through the hedge into the field on the other side, and then she
said, 'Quick!' and we ran into the brake, and crept in and out among the
bushes till we had gone a good way from the road. Then we sat down under
a bush, and I wanted so much to know what nurse was going to make with
the clay, but before she would begin she made me promise again not to
say a word about it, and she went again and peeped through the bushes on
every side, though the lane was so small and deep that hardly anybody
ever went there. So we sat down, and nurse took the clay out of the
bucket, and began to knead it with her hands, and do queer things with
it, and turn it about. And she hid it under a big dock-leaf for a minute
or two and then she brought it out again, and then she stood up and sat
down, and walked round the clay in a peculiar manner, and all the time
she was softly singing a sort of rhyme, and her face got very red. Then
she sat down again, and took the clay in her hands and began to shape it
into a doll, but not like the dolls I have at home, and she made the
queerest doll I had ever seen, all out of the wet clay, and hid it under
a bush to get dry and hard, and all the time she was making it she was
singing these rhymes to herself, and her face got redder and redder. So
we left the doll there, hidden away in the bushes where nobody would
ever find it. And a few days later we went the same walk, and when we
came to that narrow, dark part of the lane where the brake runs down to
the bank, nurse made me promise all over again, and she looked about,
just as she had done before, and we crept into the bushes till we got to
the green place where the little clay man was hidden.