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BLAGDAROSS
On a waste place strewn with bricks in the outskirts of a town twilight
was falling. A star or two appeared over the smoke, and distant windows
lit mysterious lights. The stillness deepened and the loneliness. Then all
the outcast things that are silent by day found voices.
An old cork spoke first. He said: "I grew in Andalusian woods, but never
listened to the idle songs of Spain. I only grew strong in the sunlight
waiting for my destiny. One day the merchants came and took us all away
and carried us all along the shore of the sea, piled high on the backs of
donkeys, and in a town by the sea they made me into the shape that I am
now. One day they sent me northward to Provence, and there I fulfilled my
destiny. For they set me as a guard over the bubbling wine, and I
faithfully stood sentinel for twenty years. For the first few years in the
bottle that I guarded the wine slept, dreaming of Provence; but as the
years went on he grew stronger and stronger, until at last whenever a man
went by the wind would put out all his might against me, saying, 'Let me
go free; let me go free!' And every year his strength increased, and he
grew more clamourous when men went by, but never availed to hurl me from
my post. But when I had powerfully held him for twenty years they brought
him to the banquet and took me from my post, and the wine arose rejoicing
and leapt through the veins of men and exalted their souls within them
till they stood up in their places and sang Provençal songs. But me they
cast away--me that had been sentinel for twenty years, and was still as
strong and staunch as when first I went on guard. Now I am an outcast in a
cold northern city, who once have known the Andalusian skies and guarded
long ago Provençal suns that swam in the heart of the rejoicing wine."
An unstruck match that somebody had dropped spoke next. "I am a child of
the sun," he said, "and an enemy of cities; there is more in my heart than
you know of. I am a brother of Etna and Stromboli; I have fires lurking in
me that will one day rise up beautiful and strong. We will not go into
servitude on any hearth nor work machines for our food, but we will take
out own food where we find it on that day when we are strong. There are
wonderful children in my heart whose faces shall be more lively than the
rainbow; they shall make a compact with the North wind, and he shall lead
them forth; all shall be black behind them and black above them, and there
shall be nothing beautiful in the world but them; they shall seize upon
the earth and it shall be theirs, and nothing shall stop them but our old
enemy the sea."
Then an old broken kettle spoke, and said: "I am the friend of cities. I
sit among the slaves upon the hearth, the little flames that have been fed
with coal. When the slaves dance behind the iron bars I sit in the middle
of the dance and sing and make our masters glad. And I make songs about
the comfort of the cat, and about the malice that is towards her in the
heart of the dog, and about the crawling of the baby, and about the ease
that is in the lord of the house when we brew the good brown tea; and
sometimes when the house is very warm and slaves and masters are glad, I
rebuke the hostile winds that prowl about the world."
And then there spoke the piece of an old cord. "I was made in a place of
doom, and doomed men made my fibres, working without hope. Therefore there
came a grimness into my heart, so that I never let anything go free when
once I was set to bind it. Many a thing have I bound relentlessly for
months and years; for I used to come coiling into warehouses where the
great boxes lay all open to the air, and one of them would be suddenly
closed up, and my fearful strength would be set on him like accurse, and
if his timbers groaned when first I seized them, or if they creaked aloud
in the lonely night, thinking of woodlands out of which they came, then I
only gripped them tighter still, for the poor useless hate is in my soul
of those that made me in the place of doom. Yet, for all the things that
my prison-clutch has held, the last work that I did was to set something
free. I lay idle one night in the gloom on the warehouse floor. Nothing
stirred there, and even the spider slept. Towards midnight a great flock
of echoes suddenly leapt up from the wooden planks and circled round the
roof. A man was coming towards me all alone. And as he came his soul was
reproaching him, and I saw that there was a great trouble between the man
and his soul, for his soul would not let him be, but went on reproaching
him.
"Then the man saw me and said, 'This at least will not fail me.' When I
heard him say this about me, I determined that whatever he might require
of me it should be done to the uttermost. And as I made this determination
in my unfaltering heart, he picked me up and stood on an empty box that I
should have bound on the morrow, and tied one end of me to a dark rafter;
and the knot was carelessly tied, because his soul was reproaching him all
the while continually and giving him no ease. Then he made the other end
of me into a noose, but when the man's soul saw this it stopped
reproaching the man, and cried out to him hurriedly, and besought him to
be at peace with it and to do nothing sudden; but the man went on with his
work, and put the noose down over his face and underneath his chin, and
the soul screamed horribly.
"Then the man kicked the box away with his foot, and the moment he did
this I knew that my strength was not great enough to hold him; but I
remembered that he had said I would not fail him, and I put all my grim
vigour into my fibres and held by sheer will. Then the soul shouted to me
to give way, but I said:
"'No; you vexed the man.'
"Then it screamed for me to leave go of the rafter, and already I was
slipping, for I only held on to it by a careless knot, but I gripped with
my prison grip and said:
"'You vexed the man.'
"And very swiftly it said other things to me, but I answered not; and at
last the soul that vexed the man that had trusted me flew away and left
him at peace. I was never able to bind things any more, for every one of
my fibres was worn and wrenched, and even my relentless heart was weakened
by the struggle. Very soon afterwards I was thrown out here. I have done
my work."
So they spoke among themselves, but all the while there loomed above them
the form of an old rocking-horse complaining bitterly. He said: "I am
Blagdaross. Woe is me that I should lie now an outcast among these worthy
but little people. Alas! for the days that are gathered, and alas for the
Great One that was a master and a soul to me, whose spirit is now shrunken
and can never know me again, and no more ride abroad on knightly quests. I
was Bucephalus when he was Alexander, and carried him victorious as far as
Ind. I encountered dragons with him when he was St. George, I was the
horse of Roland fighting for Christendom, and was often Rosinante. I
fought in tournays and went errant upon quests, and met Ulysses and the
heroes and the fairies. Or late in the evening, just before the lamps in
the nursery were put out, he would suddenly mount me, and we would gallop
through Africa. There we would pass by night through tropic forests, and
come upon dark rivers sweeping by, all gleaming with the eyes of
crocodiles, where the hippopotamus floated down with the stream, and
mysterious craft loomed suddenly out of the dark and furtively passed
away. And when we had passed through the forest lit by the fireflies we
would come to the open plains, and gallop onwards with scarlet flamingoes
flying along beside us through the lands of dusky kings, with golden
crowns upon their heads and scepters in their hands, who came running out
of their palaces to see us pass. Then I would wheel suddenly, and the dust
flew up from my four hooves as I turned and we galloped home again, and my
master was put to bed. And again he would ride abroad on another day till
we came to magical fortresses guarded by wizardry and overthrew the
dragons at the gate, and ever came back with a princess fairer than the
sea.
"But my master began to grow larger in his body and smaller in his soul,
and then he rode more seldom upon quests. At last he saw gold and never
came again, and I was cast out here among these little people."
But while the rocking-horse was speaking two boys stole away, unnoticed by
their parents, from a house on the edge of the waste place, and were
coming across it looking for adventures. One of them carried a broom, and
when he saw the rocking-horse he said nothing, but broke off the handle
from the broom and thrust it between his braces and his shirt on the left
side. Then he mounted the rocking-horse, and drawing forth the broomstick,
which was sharp and spiky at the end, said, "Saladin is in this desert
with all his pyjamas, and I am Coeur de Lion." After a while the other boy
said: "Now let me kill Saladin too." But Blagdaross in his wooden heart,
that exulted with thoughts of battle, said: "I am Blagdaross yet!"
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