All through the first weeks of summer the little Company wandered east and northward, acting their plays in inn-yards and at the foot of market crosses as they went. They skirted the bleak slopes of Exmoor and strolled on to Taunton; they followed the coast to Bristol town, where the tall ships lay, and made their way up through the rolling Cotswold country until they came to the grey city of Gloucester and saw the pinnacles of the Cathedral tower reaching up as though to prick the evening sky and make more stars in it, and heard Great Peter among the bells that rang for Evensong.
Hugh had been with the Company for nearly two months now, and it was high summer; the hedgerows were all a-chime with foxglove bells, the beech woods layered with cool green shade where the midges bit you if you lay down for a rest, and the cuckoo’s voice was breaking. Hugh had learned a great deal in those two months, and for quite a while he had been acting in the plays which Jonathan had re-written so as to make room for him. Everybody had a hand in teaching him to act, including Nicky, who said that the three things needful for playing women’s parts were to be able to curtsey, screech, and manage your farthingale so that you did not fall over it. He taught Hugh to do all these things so well that by the time they reached Gloucester he could screech, as Master Pennifeather said, like a pea-hen, drop billowing curtsies that could not have been bettered by the stateliest of the Queen’s Ladies, and sweep across the stage without once getting his farthingale mixed up with his own feet or anybody else’s. Hugh generally played women’s parts, for the women’s parts were always played by boys in those days, so he found Nicky’s lessons very useful indeed, though of course he learned a great many other things about acting too. Also he was learning to blow the long golden trumpet that told people when the play was about to start, because in such a little company, everybody had to be able to do everybody else’s jobs; and he helped Jonathan to copy out parts, and altogether he was very busy. Argos was busy too, because he also was learning to be an actor; he had walked on as a Faithful Hound in several plays, and everybody said he was a very good actor indeed; and the pot of periwinkle was put on the stage to play the part of a garden or a Flowery Pleasance every time one was needed.
The whole Company were nice to Hugh in a rough-and-ready sort of way, and he was very happy with them, even when he was hungry. (They were all hungry between Taunton and Bristol, because the Somerset people did not seem to appreciate good acting.) There were the long marches, trudging beside the tilt-cart, the Company talking to Saffronilia or learning their parts as they went along; the heart-stirring excitement of each performance, with the stage set up in the heart of a crowded inn-yard, and hot supper and warm straw for bedding at the long day’s end, if the audience had been good. And if the audience had been bad, they tightened their belts for supper, and slept in a convenient ditch or under a haystack, and Ben Bunsell said, ‘It’s a long lane that has no turning, that’s what I always say,’ which was cheering, if not really helpful.
One lovely July morning the whole Company were taking their ease on the topmost lift of the Cotswolds. It was a baking hot day, and that was why they had turned off the road for a rest, instead of pushing straight on to Lillingfold Village, where they planned to spend the night and play the Martyrdom of St Edmund next day. The hill-top turf was dry and warm to the touch, smelling of thyme and little white honey-clover, and the coloured counties lay spread below them, green and grey, russet and purple, with here and there a cloud-shadow that seemed to have a bloom on it like the bloom on a sloe, drifting up from the south. A little way off, Saffronilla cropped contentedly at the wayside grass; and the little bronze grasshoppers chirred among the clover stems, and the larks were tossing over the hills, filling all the blue emptiness of the sky with their shimmering song.
Most of the Company were lying flat on their backs; but Jonathan was propped on one elbow to watch those cloud-shadows drifting across England before the warm south wind, and Hugh sprawled on his front beside him. Hugh could not lie on his back comfortably just then, because last evening Master Pennifeather had beaten him for getting too interested in the audience and forgetting about the part he was supposed to be playing. Master Pennifeather had warned him before what would happen if he did it again, and so he had known what to expect, and there was no hard feelings on either side, but Hugh’s shoulders were very sore. So he sprawled on his front beside Jonathan, and watched a small green beetle climbing industriously up and down its own little forest of thyme and clover stems. Argos was being a nuisance, because he was interested in the beetle too, and wanted to blow at it. The beetle did not seem to like being blown at by Argos, so Hugh had to hold his hairy face away with one hand all the time.
‘Leave it alone, Argos!’ said Hugh. ‘It doesn’t like you.’
But Argos liked the beetle, and could not believe that it did not like him; and he went on blowing, so that at last Hugh rolled over and sat up, pulling Argos with him, and the beetle was left in peace.
‘What is over there?’ asked Hugh after a little while. ‘Way over there where everything goes flat and blue and misty and blends into the sky?’
‘Oxfordshire is over there,’ said Jonathan.
Hugh sat quite still, staring away and away into the blueness. Somewhere over there, then, would be the New Learning, and Magdalen Tower with its pinnacles touching the rainbow. It was funny to think that he had come so far on his way, and now he was not going to Oxford, after all – at least, not yet awhile. He still meant to go there one day. He thought about it rather dreamily, as people think of going to Samarkand or Hy-Brazil – or the Foot of the Rainbow; but he still meant to go, one day.
Then he chanced to look at the road, and as he looked, a strange figure appeared over the brow of the hill and came striding along it in their direction. He was a tatterdemalion creature; green and grey and russet rags fluttered about him, and he carried a long staff in his hand, and walked with a strange free lilt that made Hugh think of a wild animal.
‘Look!’ said Hugh. ‘There’s someone queer coming along the road. He’s not a Tom-o’-Bedlam, is he?’
Everybody sat up and looked, and Jonathan said, ‘No. I do believe it’s a pilgrim of some sort. You don’t see many of them nowadays.’
‘And he’s coming to join us,’ said Master Pennifeather. ‘We are honoured, my masters!’
The stranger had turned off the road and was coming across the turf; and as he drew nearer they saw that his skin was brown as a ripe hazelnut, and his long hair as white as the seed-silk of the traveller’s joy – though he did not seem old – and his eyes a strange dancing green. He had a leather scrip tied to his girdle, and a cockleshell in his broad-brimmed hat and a dried palm on his shoulder, and so many little bright pewter figures of saints fastened to his hat and his ragged cloak that he chimed and jingled faintly as he walked.
‘Good-day to you,’ he said, when he reached them. ‘It is a very hot day; even the cloud shadows seem half asleep in the heat. May I join you, here on this hill-top?’
‘Join us and welcome,’ said Master Pennifeather. ‘Plenty of room for us all.’
And Ben Bunsell said comfortably, ‘The more the merrier, I always say.’
The Palmer sat down between Hugh and Jonathan, and held out his hands to Argos; and, to Hugh’s surprise, Argos thrust his muzzle into them, and thumped his tail on the turf and crawled closer until he could lay his head on the man’s ragged knee.
‘He’s never done that before,’ said Hugh, ‘not to a stranger.’
‘All dogs come to me,’ said the Palmer. ‘Creatures of the hearth and creatures of the wild, they all come to me.’
For a little while they sat there, the Players and the Palmer, not talking, just sitting in the sunshine in a companionable sort of way.
Presently Benjamin, by way of making polite conversation, said, ‘You will have travelled a long way, friend, by the palm and cockleshell that you wear.’ (For a cockleshell in a man’s hat meant that he had made the pilgrimage to Compostella, and
a palm at his shoulder meant that he had been to the Holy Land.)
‘Aye,’ said the Palmer. ‘I have walked many roads and seen many lands and sailed many seas. I have seen Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, as I came down the hill road from Bethany – that was in the spring, and all the upland pastures were scarlet with anemones, and the almond trees in flower. I have seen the Golden Gate, and I have sat me down on Mount Gilboa, as I sit now, and watched the cloud-shadows drift across the plain of Esdraelon far below, and all the plain was red; but where the clouds passed the red was changed to wine-purple. I have been to Rome and Compostella, and the golden city of Constantinople; and now I travel the roads of England from shrine to shrine, until the time comes when I go overseas again.’
He talked on for a while, of cities that had been great places of pilgrimage fifty years ago, and pilgrim tracks that were scarcely used nowadays. And Hugh wondered why he went on pilgrimages at all, now that so very few people did, until he noticed that the Palmer didn’t seem to care much about the shrines, only about the roads that led to them. Then he understood that it was for the sake of following strange roads and always seeing over the top of the next hill, that the Palmer went on pilgrimages.
The Palmer said that he was on his way from Glastonbury to visit the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, and that presently, about Christmas time, he would go to Canterbury.
‘Do you know the Palmer’s way to Walsingham?’ he asked. And when they said No, it was farther north than they ever went, he said, ‘They grow saffron up there – whole fields of saffron like shining cloth-of-purple, and the road runs through them all the way.’
Then he picked up his staff and got up, just as suddenly as he had sat down; and one by one the Players got up too.
‘We must take the road again,’ said Master Pennifeather, stretching. ‘Our ways lie together as far as Lillingfold. Will you keep company with us?’
The Palmer shook his head. ‘I am travelling cross-country today. But lend me the boy until evening, and I will bring him back to you at Lillingfold.’
Master Pennifeather said, ‘Should you like that, Brother Dusty?’ (for somehow, Jonathan’s name for him had stuck, though of course it really belonged to all wayfaring folk).
Hugh was surprised, because he didn’t think the Palmer had noticed him particularly, and he was pleased because he wanted to hear more about distant lands; so he said, ‘Yes! Yes, I would! Only I’ll have to take Argos because I don’t think he’ll stay without me.’
So after they had arranged to meet at Lillingfold for supper, the Company split up, Saffronilla and the Players and the tilt-cart went off up the road, and the Palmer, with Hugh and Argos at his heels, went plunging away downhill.
The boy and the dog had to hurry – hurry – hurry, to keep up with the fantastic figure that went loping and lilting on before them, with rags aflutter in the south wind and the sunshine. From time to time he called to them over his shoulder, and from time to time he took a reed pipe from his belt, and, setting it to his lips, played shreds and snatches of country tunes that seemed to draw Hugh after him as though by a silver chain of sound; but always, after a few moments, he would put the pipe back in his belt.
On and on they went, the Palmer in front, the boy and the dog following enchanted at his heels; down from the stone-walled upland fields, and the sheep grazing on the thyme-scented turf, to the lush grass and the woodlands below. By deep meadows and reed-fringed streams and the green shade of beech woods they went, keeping always clear of the lanes and clustering villages where people might see them pass. Presently the Palmer slackened speed for the others to come up; and they went on three abreast, the Palmer in the middle, and Hugh and Argos on either side.
They went more slowly now, and the Palmer began to talk again, sometimes to Argos, but mostly to Hugh. But now, instead of pilgrim-ways and distant countries, he talked about the country they were passing through and the wildlings that lived in it – strange talk, about the airpaths that the woodcock followed down from the north on winter nights, and the ways of the vixen with her cubs. He seemed to know as much about the green plover as though he had been one, and as much of Brock the Badger as though he had lived all his life in an underground sett. Many and many things he told Hugh: about dormice and curlews, wild bees and grass-snakes and otters; and Hugh jogged along at his side, forgetting his sore shoulders, and not even noticing how hot he was nor how tired his legs were getting.
At last, towards evening, they dropped into a wooded hollow with a speckled trout-stream singing through its stillness, and all its slopes shadowy pink with foxgloves under the trees; and the Palmer suddenly grew silent and sat down with his back to an alder tree. Hugh sat down too, and watched him, hoping for more, and Argos settled himself at their feet. Presently the Palmer took out his reed pipe again, and began to finger it, smiling a little secret smile to himself all the while.
‘Come closer,’ he ordered suddenly. ‘Come very close and sit very still, and you shall see what I never yet showed to anyone.’ And he began to play.
It wasn’t a tune exactly, not this time; it was just note after note, with now a pause, and now a run like falling water. And the woods grew very still to listen. Little shivers began to run from Argos’s nose right down his back to the tip of his tail, and he crawled nearer and nearer to the Piper, until once again he dropped his head on to the man’s ragged knee. Then a rabbit popped up from the undergrowth, hesitated, with twitching nose, and scuttled closer to sit on its haunches at the Piper’s feet. Another came, and another; a russet field-mouse crept out from under the foxglove leaves, its eyes black as sloes and bright as stars in its tiny whiskered face. With a flash of living blue out of nowhere-in-particular, a kingfisher landed on a low branch beside the Piper’s head. A robin came, and a hare, a bush-tailed squirrel, and a cock chaffinch with a breast as pink as a rose. The air was full of the flitter of soft wings, and the undergrowth was all a-rustle with bright-eyed furry creatures drawing in to the place where the Piper sat. They thronged round him, cuddling to his feet and perching on his shoulders, quite unafraid of Hugh or Argos. Hugh sat as still as the alder tree, and it seemed to him that the piping that had called Argos and the woodland creatures was calling him too, calling the heart out of his breast, reminding him of things he had forgotten quite soon after he was born, talking about the rainbow above Magdalen Tower, and all the dreams that he had ever dreamed in his eleven years. . . .
Hugh never noticed when the piping stopped; but suddenly he found that everything was quiet, and the long pipe was lying in the Piper’s lap. Then, very slowly, the Piper held out his hands; and the wild things came to him as though by invitation. Soft little noses explored his fingertips, long silky ears were laid back under his caressing hand; a mouse ran up his arm to his ragged shoulder, and sat there among the small birds, cleaning its face. . . .
At last the Piper dismissed them, with a slow, wide gesture of his hands, and once again the air was full of flittering wings, and there were whisperings and rustlings under the foxglove leaves; and when they died away, the little hollow was just as it had been before the Piper began to play.
The Piper looked at Hugh, with a smile glimmering far back in his strange green eyes. ‘A trick of the pipes,’ he said. ‘A fine trick, is it not?’
Hugh nodded. He could not speak just yet. He felt as though he had been somewhere a long way off, and had not yet quite got back. He was still a little dream-bound when he followed the Piper up through the freckled foxgloves to the meadow above.
‘It is growing late,’ said the Piper. ‘See how the shadows reach out their hands towards tomorrow’s dawn. We must be on our way.’
Once again he sped on in front, while Hugh and Argos followed at his heels; on and on, straight across country, as the rooks fly home at sunset, while the shadows lengthened and the evening grew more and more golden. At last they came through a spinney, and saw, farther up the valley, the huddled roofs of a village, with a church tower ri
sing in the midst. The daylight had scarcely begun to fade, but already a candle shone in one of the cottage windows, to welcome someone home.
See,’ said the Piper, halting on the woodshore – and he put his hands on Hugh’s shoulders and looked deep down into his eyes, ‘there is Lillingfold Village, and your friends are waiting for you. But come away with me! Leave the light in the window yonder, and come away with me to the wildwood. I will teach you the magic of my pipes; I will give you your forest heritage; only come away with me now – now, before they come to look for us.’
Just for a moment the pipes seemed to be calling to Hugh again, but he shook his head and said: ‘No, I’m sorry, but I must go back to my friends now.’
‘Perhaps one day, when you only see the stars through a window-pane, and you’ve lost your heritage, you’ll wish you had come away with me tonight.’
‘I don’t see the stars through a window-pane,’ said Hugh firmly. ‘I’m one of the Dusty-Feet, like my friends, and I’m sorry – I shan’t ever forget today – but I won’t come with you.’
The Piper looked deep into his eyes for a moment longer, and then he dropped his hands from Hugh’s shoulders. ‘Aye well, go then,’ he said. ‘Go back to your comrades.’
‘Aren’t you coming too?’ asked Hugh. ‘To supper, you know?’
But the Piper said, ‘No, I have bread of my own. The joy of the wilderness go with you, small brown brother.’ And he turned on his heel and disappeared among the trees.
He had gone so swiftly and so silently that it was as though he had simply melted into the wild that he loved. Argos whimpered in a trouble way, looking up into Hugh’s face. Then they turned back towards the village; and suddenly both of them were very weary.
The shadows were rising knee-deep across the meadows, but the sky was still full of sunshine, a wonderful sky of golden green, barred with clouds of fiery sunset that were like great wings. And beside a little stream that ran between banks of meadowsweet and rose willow-herb, they came upon Jonathan, sitting peacefully with his back to an alder tree.