Chapter XVII

                      The World-in-Law


"Well," said Master Ambrose, as he laid down the volume,
"the woman was clearly as innocent as you are.  And I should
very much like to know what bearing the case has upon the
present crisis."
   Master Nathaniel drew up his chair close to his friend's
and said in a low voice, as if he feared an invisible
listener, "Ambrose, do you remember how you startled Leer
with your question as to whether the dead could bleed?"
   "I'm not likely to forget it," said Master Ambrose, with
an angry laugh.  "That was all explained the night before
last in the Fields of Grammary."
   "Yes, but supposing he had been thinking of something
else -- not of fairy fruit.  What if Endymion Leer and
Christopher Pugwalker were one and the same?"
   "Well, I don't see the slightest reason for thinking so. 
But even if they were -- what good would it do us?"
   "Because I have an instinct that hidden in that old case
is a good honest hempen rope, too strong for all the
gossamer threads of Fairie."
   "You mean that we can get the rascal hanged?  By the
Harvest of Souls, you're an optimist, Nat.  If ever a fellow
died quietly in his bed from natural causes, it was that
fellow Gibberty.  But, for all that, there's no reason to
lie down under the outrageous practical joke that was played
off on you yesterday.  By my Great-aunt's Rump, I thought
Polydore and the rest of them had more sense than to be
taken in by such tomfoolery.  But the truth of it is that
that villain Leer can make them believe what he chooses."
   "Exactly!" cried Master Nathaniel eagerly.  "The original
meaning of Fairie is supposed to be delusion.  They can
juggle with appearances -- we have seen them at it in that
tapestry room.  How are we to make any stand against an
enemy with such powers behind him?"
   "You don't mean that you are going to lie down under it,
Nat?" cried Master Ambrose indignantly.
   "Not ultimately -- but for a time I must be like the mole
and work in secret.  And now I want you to listen to me,
Ambrose, and not scold me for what you call wandering from
the point and being prosy.  Will you listen to me?"
   "Well, yes, if you've got anything sensible to say," said
Master Ambrose grudgingly.
   "Here goes, then!  What do you suppose the Law was
invented for, Ambrose?" 
   "What was the Law invented for?  What *are* you driving
at, Nat?  I suppose it was invented to prevent rapine, and
robbery, and murder, and all that sort of thing."
   "But you remember what my father said about the Law being
man's substitute for fairy fruit?  Fairy things are all of
them supposed to be shadowy cheats -- delusion.  But man
can't live without delusion, so he creates for himself
another form of delusion -- the world-in-law, subject to no
other law but the will of man, where man juggles with facts
to his heart's content, and says, `If I choose I shall make
a man old enough to be my father my son, and if I choose I
shall turn fruit into silk and black into white, for this is
the world I have made myself, and here I am master.'  And he
creates a monster to inhabit it -- the man-in-law, who is
like a mechanical toy and always behaves exactly as he is
expected to behave, and is no more like you and me than are
the fairies."
   For the life of him, Master Ambrose could not suppress a
grunt of impatience.  But he was a man of his word, so he
refrained from further interruption.
   "Beyond the borders of the world-in-law," continued
Master Nathaniel, "that is to say, the world as we choose
for our convenience that it should appear, there is delusion
-- or reality.  And the people who live there are as safe
from our clutches as if they lived on another planet.  No,
Ambrose, you needn't purse up your lips like that...
everything I've been saying is to be found more or less in
my father's writings, and nobody ever thought *him*
fantastic -- probably because they never took the trouble to
read his books.  I must confess I never did myself till just
the other day."
   As he spoke he glanced up at the portrait of the late
Master Josiah, taken in the very arm-chair he, Nathaniel,
was at that very moment sitting in, and following his son's
every movement with a sly, legal smile.  No, there had
certainly been nothing fantastic about Master Josiah.
   And yet... there was something not altogether human about
these bright bird-like eyes and that very pointed chin.  Had
Master Josiah also heard the Note... and fled from it to the
world-in-law?
   Then he went on: "But what I'm going to say now is my own
idea.  Supposing that everything that happens on the one
planet, the planet that we call Delusion, reacts on the
other planet; that is to say, the world as we choose to see
it, the world-in-law?  No, no, Ambrose!  You promised to
hear me out!"  (For it was clear that Master Ambrose was
getting restive.)  "Supposing then, that one planet reacts
on the other, but that these reactions are translated, as it
were, into the terms of the other?  To take an example,
supposing that what on one planet is a spiritual sin should
turn on the other into a felony?  That what in the world of
delusion are hands stained with fairy fruit should, in the
world-in-law, turn into hands stained with human blood?  In
short, that Endymion Leer should turn into Christopher
Pugwalker?" 
   Master Ambrose's impatience had changed to real alarm. 
He greatly feared that Nathaniel's brain had been unhinged
by his recent misfortunes.  Master Nathaniel burst out
laughing: "I believe you think I've gone off my head, Brosie
-- but I've not, I promise you.  In plain language, unless
we can find that this fellow Leer has been guilty of
something in the eye of the Law he'll go on triumphing over
us and laughing at us in his sleeve and ruining our country
for our children till, finally, all the Senate, except you
and me, follows his funeral procession, with weeping and
wailing, to the Fields of Grammary.  It's our one hope of
getting even with him, Brosie.  Otherwise, we might as soon
hope to catch a dream and put it in a cage."
   "Well, according to your ideas of the Law, Nat, it
shouldn't be too difficult," said Master Ambrose drily. 
"You seem to consider that in what you call the world-in-law
one does as one likes with facts -- launch a new legal
fiction, then, according to which, for your own particular
convenience, Endymion Leer is for the future Christopher
Pugwalker."
   Master Nathaniel laughed: "I'm in hopes we can prove it
without legal fiction," he said.  "The widow Gibberty's
trial took place thirty-six years ago, four years after the
great drought, when, as Marigold has discovered, Leer was in
Dorimare, though he has always given us to understand that
he did not arrive till considerably later... and the reason
would be obvious if he left as Pugwalker, and returned as
Leer.  Also, we know that he is intimate with the widow
Gibberty.  Pugwalker was a herbalist; so is Leer.  And then
there is the fright you gave him with your question, `Do the
dead bleed?'  Nothing will make me believe that that
question immediately suggested to him the mock funeral and
the coffin with fairy fruit... he might think of that on
second thoughts, not right away.  No, no, I hope to be able
to convince you, and before very long, that I am right in
this matter, as I was in the other -- it's our one hope,
Ambrose."
   "Well, Nat," said Master Ambrose, "though you talk more
nonsense in half an hour than most people do in a lifetime,
I've been coming to the conclusion that you're not such a
fool as you look -- and, after all, in Hempie's old story it
was the village idiot who put salt on the dragon's tail."
   Master Nathaniel laughed, quite pleased by this equivocal
compliment -- it was so rarely that Ambrose paid one a
compliment at all.
   "Well," continued Master Ambrose, "and how are you going
to set about launching your legal fiction, eh?"
   "Oh, I'll try and get in touch with some of the witnesses
in the trial -- Diggory Carp himself may turn out to be
still alive.  At any rate, it will give me something to do,
and Lud's no place for me just now."
   Master Ambrose groaned: "Has it really come to this, Nat,
that you have to leave Lud, and that we can do nothing
against this... this... this cobweb of lies and buffoonery
and... well, *delusion,* if you like?  I can tell you, I
haven't spared Polydore and the rest of them the rough side
of my tongue -- but it's as if that fellow Leer had cast a
spell on them." 
   "But we'll *break* the spell, by the Golden Apples of the
West, we'll break it, Ambrose!" cried Master Nathaniel
buoyantly; we'll dredge the shadows with the net of the Law,
and Leer shall end on the gallows, or my name's not
Chanticleer!"
   "Well," said Master Ambrose, "seeing you've got this bee
in your bonnet about Leer you might like a little souvenir
of him; it's the embroidered slipper I took from that
gibbering criminal old woman's parlour, and now that her
affair is settled there's no more use for it."  (The variety
of "silk" found in the Academy had finally been decided to
be part "barratine tuftaffity" and part "figured mohair,"
and Miss Primrose had been heavily fined and set at
liberty.)  "I told you how the sight of it made him jump,
and though the reason is obvious enough -- he thought it was
fairy fruit -- it seems to take so little to set your brain
romancing there's no telling what you mayn't discover from
it!  I'll have it sent over to you to-night."
   "You're very kind, Ambrose.  I'm sure it will be most
valuable," said Master Nathaniel ironically.
   During Miss Primrose's trial the slipper had from time to
time been handed round among the judges, without its helping
them in the slightest in the delicate distinctions they were
drawing between tuftaffity and mohair.  In Master Nathaniel
it had aroused a vague sense of boredom and embarrassment,
for it suggested a long series of birthday presents from
Prunella that had put him to the inconvenience of pumping up
adequate expressions of gratitude and admiration.  He had
little hope of being able to extricate any useful
information from that slipper -- still, Ambrose must have
his joke.
   They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Master
Nathaniel rose to his feet and said, "This may be a long
business, Ambrose, and we may not have an opportunity for
another talk.  Shall we pledge each other in wild thyme
gin?"
   "I'm not the man to refuse your wild thyme gin, Nat.  And
you don't often give one a chance of tasting it, you old
miser," said Master Ambrose, trying to mask his emotion with
facetiousness.  When he had been given a glass filled with
the perfumed grass-green syrup, he raised it, and smiling at
Master Nathaniel, began, "Well, Nat..."
   "Stop a minute, Ambrose!" interrupted Master Nathaniel. 
"I've got a sudden silly whim that we must should take an
oath I must have read when I was a youngster in some old
book... the words have suddenly come back to me.  They go
like this: `We' (and then we say our own names), `Nathaniel
Chanticleer and Ambrose Honeysuckle, swear by the Living and
the Dead, by the Past and the Future, by Memories and Hopes,
that if a Vision comes begging at our door we will take it
in and warm it at our hearth, and that we will not be wiser
than the foolish nor more cunning than the simple, and that
we will remember that he who rides the Wind needs must go
where his Steed carries him.'  Say it after me, Ambrose."
   "By the White Ladies of the Fields, never in my life have
I heard such fustian!" grumbled Master Ambrose. 
   But Nat seemed to have set his heart on this absurd
ceremony, and Master Ambrose felt that the least he could do
was to humour him, for who could say what the future held in
store and when they might meet again.  So, in a protesting
and excessively matter-of-fact voice, he repeated after him
the words of the oath.
   When, and in what book had Master Nathaniel found it? 
For it was the vow taken by the candidates for initiation
into the first degree of the ancient Mysteries of Dorimare.
   Do not forget that, in the eye of the Law, Master
Nathaniel was a dead man.