Puck of Pook\'s Hill
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Rudyard Kipling >> Puck of Pook\'s Hill
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13 PUCK OF POOK'S HILL
RUDYARD KIPLING
CONTENTS
Weland's Sword
Puck's Song
A Tree Song
Young Men at the Manor
Sir Richard's Song
The Knights of the Joyous Venture
Harp Song of the Dane Women
Thorkild's Song
Old Men at Pevensey
The Runes on Weland's Sword
A Centurion of the Thirtieth
'Cities and Thrones and Powers'
A British-Roman Song
On the Great Wall
A Song to Mithras
The Winged Hats
A Pict Song
Hal o' the Draft
'Prophets have honour all over the Earth'
A Smugglers' Song
'Dymchurch Flit'
The Bee Boy's Song
A Three-Part Song
The Treasure and the Law
Song of the Fifth River
The Children's Song
WELAND'S SWORD
Puck's Song
See you the dimpled track that runs,
All hollow through the wheat?
O that was where they hauled the guns
That smote King Philip's fleet!
See you our little mill that clacks,
So busy by the brook?
She has ground her corn and paid her tax
Ever since Domesday Book.
See you our stilly woods of oak,
And the dread ditch beside?
O that was where the Saxons broke,
On the day that Harold died!
See you the windy levels spread
About the gates of Rye?
O that was where the Northmen fled,
When Alfred's ships came by!
See you our pastures wide and lone,
Where the red oxen browse?
O there was a City thronged and known,
Ere London boasted a house!
And see you, after rain, the trace
Of mound and ditch and wall?
O that was a Legion's camping-place,
When Caesar sailed from Gaul!
And see you marks that show and fade,
Like shadows on the Downs?
O they are the lines the Flint Men made,
To guard their wondrous towns!
Trackway and Camp and City lost,
Salt Marsh where now is corn;
Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,
And so was England born!
She is not any common Earth,
Water or Wood or Air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare.
The children were at the Theatre, acting to Three Cows as
much as they could remember of Midsummer Night's
Dream. Their father had made them a small play out of the
big Shakespeare one, and they had rehearsed it with him
and with their mother till they could say it by heart. They
began when Nick Bottom the weaver comes out of the
bushes with a donkey's head on his shoulders, and finds
Titania, Queen of the Fairies, asleep. Then they skipped
to the part where Bottom asks three little fairies to scratch
his head and bring him honey, and they ended where he
falls asleep in Titania's arms. Dan was Puck and Nick
Bottom, as well as all three Fairies. He wore a pointy-
cloth cap for Puck, and a paper donkey's head out
of a Christmas cracker - but it tore if you were not careful
- for Bottom. Una was Titania, with a wreath of
columbines and a foxglove wand.
The Theatre lay in a meadow called the Long Slip. A
little mill-stream, carrying water to a mill two or three
fields away, bent round one corner of it, and in the
middle of the bend lay a large old Fairy Ring of darkened
grass, which was the stage. The millstream banks, overgrown
with willow, hazel, and guelder-rose, made convenient
places to wait in till your turn came; and a
grown-up who had seen it said that Shakespeare himself
could not have imagined a more suitable setting for his
play. They were not, of course, allowed to act on
Midsummer Night itself, but they went down after tea on
Midsummer Eve, when the shadows were growing, and
they took their supper - hard-boiled eggs, Bath Oliver
biscuits, and salt in an envelope - with them. Three Cows
had been milked and were grazing steadily with a tearing
noise that one could hear all down the meadow; and the
noise of the Mill at work sounded like bare feet running
on hard ground. A cuckoo sat on a gate-post singing his
broken June tune, 'cuckoo-cuck', while a busy kingfisher
crossed from the mill-stream, to the brook which ran on
the other side of the meadow. Everything else was a sort
of thick, sleepy stillness smelling of meadow-sweet and
dry grass.
Their play went beautifully. Dan remembered all his
parts - Puck, Bottom, and the three Fairies - and Una
never forgot a word of Titania - not even the difficult
piece where she tells the Fairies how to feed Bottom with
'apricocks, green figs, and dewberries', and all the lines
end in 'ies'. They were both so pleased that they acted it
three times over from beginning to end before they sat
down in the unthistly centre of the Ring to eat eggs and
Bath Olivers. This was when they heard a whistle among
the alders on the bank, and they jumped.
The bushes parted. In the very spot where Dan had
stood as Puck they saw a small, brown, broad-
shouldered, pointy-eared person with a snub nose, slanting
blue eyes, and a grin that ran right across his freckled
face. He shaded his forehead as though he were watching
Quince, Snout, Bottom, and the others rehearsing
Pyramus and Thisbe, and, in a voice as deep as Three Cows
asking to be milked, he began:
'What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here,
So near the cradle of the fairy Queen?'
He stopped, hollowed one hand round his ear, and,
with a wicked twinkle in his eye, went on:
'What, a play toward? I'll be an auditor;
An actor, too, perhaps, if I see cause.'
The children looked and gasped. The small thing - he was
no taller than Dan's shoulder - stepped quietly into the Ring.
'I'm rather out of practice,' said he; 'but that's the way
my part ought to be played.'
Still the children stared at him - from his dark-blue cap, like
a big columbine flower, to his bare, hairy feet. At last he laughed.
'Please don't look like that. It isn't my fault. What else
could you expect?' he said.
'We didn't expect any one,' Dan answered slowly.
'This is our field.'
'Is it?' said their visitor, sitting down. 'Then what on
Human Earth made you act Midsummer Night's Dream
three times over, on Midsummer Eve, in the middle of a
Ring, and under - right under one of my oldest hills in Old
England? Pook's Hill - Puck's Hill - Puck's Hill - Pook's
Hill! It's as plain as the nose on my face.'
He pointed to the bare, fern-covered slope of Pook's
Hill that runs up from the far side of the mill-stream to a
dark wood. Beyond that wood the ground rises and rises
for five hundred feet, till at last you climb out on the bare
top of Beacon Hill, to look over the Pevensey Levels and
the Channel and half the naked South Downs.
'By Oak, Ash, and Thorn!' he cried, still laughing. 'If
this had happened a few hundred years ago you'd have
had all the People of the Hills out like bees in June!'
'We didn't know it was wrong,' said Dan.
'Wrong!' The little fellow shook with laughter. 'Indeed,
it isn't wrong. You've done something that Kings
and Knights and Scholars in old days would have given
their crowns and spurs and books to find out. If Merlin
himself had helped you, you couldn't have managed
better! You've broken the Hills - you've broken the Hills!
It hasn't happened in a thousand years.'
'We - we didn't mean to,' said Una.
'Of course you didn't! That's just why you did it.
Unluckily the Hills are empty now, and all the People of
the Hills are gone. I'm the only one left. I'm Puck, the
oldest Old Thing in England, very much at your service if
- if you care to have anything to do with me. If you don't,
of course you've only to say so, and I'll go.'
He looked at the children, and the children looked at
him for quite half a minute. His eyes did not twinkle any
more. They were very kind, and there was the beginning
of a good smile on his lips.
Una put out her hand. 'Don't go,' she said. 'We like you.'
'Have a Bath Oliver,' said Dan, and he passed over the
squashy envelope with the eggs.
'By Oak, Ash and Thorn,' cried Puck, taking off his
blue cap, 'I like you too. Sprinkle a plenty salt on the
biscuit, Dan, and I'll eat it with you. That'll show you the
sort of person I am. Some of us' - he went on, with his
mouth full - 'couldn't abide Salt, or Horse-shoes over a
door, or Mountain-ash berries, or Running Water, or
Cold Iron, or the sound of Church Bells. But I'm Puck!'
He brushed the crumbs carefully from his doublet and
shook hands.
'We always said, Dan and I,' Una stammered, 'that if it
ever happened we'd know ex-actly what to do; but - but
now it seems all different somehow.'
'She means meeting a fairy,'said Dan. 'I never believed
in 'em - not after I was six, anyhow.'
'I did,' said Una. 'At least, I sort of half believed till we
learned "Farewell, Rewards". Do you know "Farewell,
Rewards and Fairies"?'
'Do you mean this?' said Puck. He threw his big head
back and began at the second line:
'Good housewives now may say,
For now foul sluts in dairies
Do fare as well as they;
And though they sweep their hearths no less
('Join in, Una!')
Than maids were wont to do,
Yet who of late for cleanliness
Finds sixpence in her shoe?'
The echoes flapped all along the flat meadow.
'Of course I know it,' he said.
'And then there's the verse about the rings,' said Dan.
'When I was little it always made me feel unhappy in my
inside.'
"'Witness those rings and roundelays", do you mean?'
boomed Puck, with a voice like a great church organ.
'Of theirs which yet remain,
Were footed in Queen Mary's days
On many a grassy plain,
But since of late Elizabeth,
And, later, James came in,
Are never seen on any heath
As when the time hath been.
'It's some time since I heard that sung, but there's no
good beating about the bush: it's true. The People of the
Hills have all left. I saw them come into Old England and
I saw them go. Giants, trolls, kelpies, brownies, goblins,
imps; wood, tree, mound, and water spirits; heath-
people, hill-watchers, treasure-guards, good people,
little people, pishogues, leprechauns, night-riders,
pixies, nixies, gnomes, and the rest - gone, all gone! I
came into England with Oak, Ash and Thorn, and when
Oak, Ash and Thorn are gone I shall go too.'
Dan looked round the meadow - at Una's Oak by the
lower gate; at the line of ash trees that overhang Otter
Pool where the millstream spills over when the Mill does
not need it, and at the gnarled old white-thorn where
Three Cows scratched their necks.
'It's all right,' he said; and added, 'I'm planting a lot of
acorns this autumn too.'
'Then aren't you most awfully old?' said Una.
'Not old - fairly long-lived, as folk say hereabouts. Let
me see - my friends used to set my dish of cream for me o'
nights when Stonehenge was new. Yes, before the Flint
Men made the Dewpond under Chanctonbury Ring.'
Una clasped her hands, cried 'Oh!' and nodded her head.
'She's thought a plan,' Dan explained. 'She always
does like that when she thinks a plan.'
'I was thinking - suppose we saved some of our
porridge and put it in the attic for you? They'd notice if
we left it in the nursery.'
'Schoolroom,' said Dan quickly, and Una flushed,
because they had made a solemn treaty that summer not
to call the schoolroom the nursery any more.
'Bless your heart o' gold!' said Puck. 'You'll make a fine
considering wench some market-day. I really don't want
you to put out a bowl for me; but if ever I need a bite, be
sure I'll tell you.'
He stretched himself at length on the dry grass, and the
children stretched out beside him, their bare legs waving
happily in the air. They felt they could not be afraid of
him any more than of their particular friend old Hobden
the hedger. He did not bother them with grown-up
questions, or laugh at the donkey's head, but lay and
smiled to himself in the most sensible way.
'Have you a knife on you?' he said at last.
Dan handed over his big one-bladed outdoor knife,
and Puck began to carve out a piece of turf from the centre
of the Ring.
'What's that for - Magic?' said Una, as he pressed up
the square of chocolate loam that cut like so much cheese.
'One of my little magics,' he answered, and cut
another. 'You see, I can't let you into the Hills because the
People of the Hills have gone; but if you care to take seisin
from me, I may be able to show you something out of the
common here on Human Earth. You certainly deserve it.'
'What's taking seisin?' said Dan, cautiously.
'It's an old custom the people had when they bought
and sold land. They used to cut out a clod and hand it
over to the buyer, and you weren't lawfully seised of
your land - it didn't really belong to you - till the other
fellow had actually given you a piece of it -'like this.' He
held out the turves.
'But it's our own meadow,' said Dan, drawing back.
'Are you going to magic it away?'
Puck laughed. 'I know it's your meadow, but there's
a great deal more in it than you or your father ever
guessed. Try!'
He turned his eyes on Una.
'I'll do it,' she said. Dan followed her example at once.
'Now are you two lawfully seised and possessed of all
Old England,' began Puck, in a sing-song voice. 'By right
of Oak, Ash, and Thorn are you free to come and go and
look and know where I shall show or best you please.
You shall see What you shall see and you shall hear What
you shall hear, though It shall have happened three
thousand year; and you shall know neither Doubt nor
Fear. Fast! Hold fast all I give you.'
The children shut their eyes, but nothing happened.
'Well?' said Una, disappointedly opening them. 'I
thought there would be dragons.'
"'Though It shall have happened three thousand
year,"' said Puck, and counted on his fingers. 'No; I'm
afraid there were no dragons three thousand years ago.'
'But there hasn't happened anything at all,' said Dan.
'Wait awhile,' said Puck. 'You don't grow an oak in a
year - and Old England's older than twenty oaks. Let's sit
down again and think. I can do that for a century at a time.'
'Ah, but you're a fairy,' said Dan.
'Have you ever heard me say that word yet?' said Puck quickly.
'No. You talk about "the People of the Hills", but you
never say "fairies",' said Una. 'I was wondering at that.
Don't you like it?'
'How would you like to be called "mortal" or "human
being" all the time?' said Puck; 'or "son of Adam" or
"daughter of Eve"?'
'I shouldn't like it at all,' said Dan. 'That's how the
Djinns and Afrits talk in the Arabian Nights.'
'And that's how I feel about saying - that word that I
don't say. Besides, what you call them are made-up things
the People of the Hills have never heard of - little
buzzflies with butterfly wings and gauze petticoats, and
shiny stars in their hair, and a wand like a schoolteacher's
cane for punishing bad boys and rewarding good ones. I
know 'em!'
'We don't mean that sort,'said Dan. 'We hate 'em too.'
'Exactly,' said Puck. 'Can you wonder that the People
of the Hills don't care to be confused with that painty-
winged, wand-waving, sugar-and-shake-your-head set
of impostors? Butterfly wings, indeed! I've seen Sir Huon
and a troop of his people setting off from Tintagel Castle
for Hy-Brasil in the teeth of a sou'-westerly gale, with the
spray flying all over the Castle, and the Horses of the
Hills wild with fright. Out they'd go in a lull, screaming
like gulls, and back they'd be driven five good miles
inland before they could come head to wind again.
Butterfly-wings! It was Magic - Magic as black as Merlin
could make it, and the whole sea was green fire and white
foam with singing mermaids in it. And the Horses of the
Hills picked their way from one wave to another by the
lightning flashes! That was how it was in the old days!'
'Splendid,' said Dan, but Una shuddered.
'I'm glad they're gone, then; but what made the People
of the Hills go away?' Una asked.
'Different things. I'll tell you one of them some day -
the thing that made the biggest flit of any,' said Puck. 'But
they didn't all flit at once. They dropped off, one by one,
through the centuries. Most of them were foreigners who
couldn't stand our climate. They flitted early.'
'How early?' said Dan.
'A couple of thousand years or more. The fact is they
began as Gods. The Phoenicians brought some over
when they came to buy tin; and the Gauls, and the Jutes,
and the Danes, and the Frisians, and the Angles brought
more when they landed. They were always landing in
those days, or being driven back to their ships, and they
always brought their Gods with them. England is a bad
country for Gods. Now, I began as I mean to go on. A
bowl of porridge, a dish of milk, and a little quiet fun with
the country folk in the lanes was enough for me then, as it
is now. I belong here, you see, and I have been mixed up
with people all my days. But most of the others insisted
on being Gods, and having temples, and altars, and
priests, and sacrifices of their own.'
'People burned in wicker baskets?' said Dan. 'Like
Miss Blake tells us about?'
'All sorts of sacrifices,' said Puck. 'If it wasn't men, it
was horses, or cattle, or pigs, or metheglin - that's a
sticky, sweet sort of beer. I never liked it. They were a
stiff-necked, extravagant set of idols, the Old Things. But
what was the result? Men don't like being sacrificed at the
best of times; they don't even like sacrificing their farm-
horses. After a while, men simply left the Old Things
alone, and the roofs of their temples fell in, and the Old
Things had to scuttle out and pick up a living as they
could. Some of them took to hanging about trees, and
hiding in graves and groaning o' nights. If they groaned
loud enough and long enough they might frighten a poor
countryman into sacrificing a hen, or leaving a pound
of butter for them. I remember one Goddess called
Belisama. She became a common wet water-spirit somewhere
in Lancashire. And there were hundreds of other
friends of mine. First they were Gods. Then they were
People of the Hills, and then they flitted to other
places because they couldn't get on with the English
for one reason or another. There was only one Old
Thing, I remember, who honestly worked for his
living after he came down in the world. He was called
Weland, and he was a smith to some Gods. I've
forgotten their names, but he used to make them swords
and spears. I think he claimed kin with Thor of
the Scandinavians.'
'Heroes of Asgard Thor?' said Una. She had been reading
the book.
'Perhaps,' answered Puck. 'None the less, when bad
times came, he didn't beg or steal. He worked; and I was
lucky enough to be able to do him a good turn.'
'Tell us about it,' said Dan. 'I think I like hearing of Old Things.'
They rearranged themselves comfortably, each chewing
a grass stem. Puck propped himself on one strong
arm and went on:
'Let's think! I met Weland first on a November afternoon
in a sleet storm, on Pevensey Level.'
'Pevensey? Over the hill, you mean?' Dan pointed south.
'Yes; but it was all marsh in those days, right up to
Horsebridge and Hydeneye. I was on Beacon Hill - they
called it Brunanburgh then - when I saw the pale flame
that burning thatch makes, and I went down to look.
Some pirates - I think they must have been Peor's men -
were burning a village on the Levels, and Weland's
image - a big, black wooden thing with amber beads
round his neck - lay in the bows of a black thirty-two-oar
galley that they had just beached. Bitter cold it was! There
were icicles hanging from her deck and the oars were
glazed over with ice, and there was ice on Weland's lips.
When he saw me he began a long chant in his own
tongue, telling me how he was going to rule England,
and how I should smell the smoke of his altars from
Lincolnshire to the Isle of Wight. I didn't care! I'd seen too
many Gods charging into Old England to be upset about
it. I let him sing himself out while his men were burning
the village, and then I said (I don't know what put it into
my head), "Smith of the Gods," I said, "the time comes
when I shall meet you plying your trade for hire
by the wayside."'
'What did Weland say?' said Una. 'Was he angry?'
'He called me names and rolled his eyes, and I went
away to wake up the people inland. But the pirates
conquered the country, and for centuries Weland was a
most important God. He had temples everywhere - from
Lincolnshire to the Isle of Wight, as he said - and his
sacrifices were simply scandalous. To do him justice, he
preferred horses to men; but men or horses, I knew that
presently he'd have to come down in the world - like the
other Old Things. I gave him lots of time - I gave him
about a thousand years - and at the end of 'em I went into
one of his temples near Andover to see how he prospered.
There was his altar, and there was his image, and
there were his priests, and there were the congregation,
and everybody seemed quite happy, except Weland and
the priests. In the old days the congregation were
unhappy until the priests had chosen their sacrifices; and so
would you have been. When the service began a priest
rushed out, dragged a man up to the altar, pretended to
hit him on the head with a little gilt axe, and the man fell
down and pretended to die. Then everybody shouted:
"A sacrifice to Weland! A sacrifice to Weland!"'
'And the man wasn't really dead?' said Una.
'Not a bit. All as much pretence as a dolls' tea-party.
Then they brought out a splendid white horse, and the
priest cut some hair from its mane and tail and burned it
on the altar, shouting, "A sacrifice!" That counted the
same as if a man and a horse had been killed. I saw poor
Weland's face through the smoke, and I couldn't help
laughing. He looked so disgusted and so hungry, and all
he had to satisfy himself was a horrid smell of burning
hair. Just a dolls' tea-party!
'I judged it better not to say anything then ('twouldn't
have been fair), and the next time I came to Andover, a
few hundred years later, Weland and his temple were
gone, and there was a Christian bishop in a church there.
None of the People of the Hills could tell me anything
about him, and I supposed that he had left England.'
Puck turned, lay on his other elbow, and thought for a
long time.
'Let's see,' he said at last. 'It must have been some few
years later - a year or two before the Conquest, I think -
that I came back to Pook's Hill here, and one evening I
heard old Hobden talking about Weland's Ford.'
'If you mean old Hobden the hedger, he's only seventy-two.
He told me so himself,' said Dan. 'He's a intimate
friend of ours.'
'You're quite right,' Puck replied. 'I meant old Hobden's
ninth great-grandfather. He was a free man and
burned charcoal hereabouts. I've known the family,
father and son, so long that I get confused sometimes.
Hob of the Dene was my Hobden's name, and he lived at
the Forge cottage. Of course, I pricked up my ears when I
heard Weland mentioned, and I scuttled through the
woods to the Ford just beyond Bog Wood yonder.' He
jerked his head westward, where the valley narrows
between wooded hills and steep hop-fields.
'Why, that's Willingford Bridge,' said Una. 'We go
there for walks often. There's a kingfisher there.'
'It was Weland's Ford then, dearie. A road led down to
it from the Beacon on the top of the hill - a shocking bad
road it was - and all the hillside was thick, thick oak-
forest, with deer in it. There was no trace of Weland, but
presently I saw a fat old farmer riding down from the
Beacon under the greenwood tree. His horse had cast a
shoe in the clay, and when he came to the Ford he
dismounted, took a penny out of his purse, laid it on a
stone, tied the old horse to an oak, and called out:
"Smith, Smith, here is work for you!" Then he sat down
and went to sleep. You can imagine how I felt when I saw
a white-bearded, bent old blacksmith in a leather apron
creep out from behind the oak and begin to shoe the
horse. It was Weland himself. I was so astonished that I
jumped out and said: "What on Human Earth are you
doing here, Weland?"'
'Poor Weland!' sighed Una.
'He pushed the long hair back from his forehead (he
didn't recognize me at first). Then he said: "You ought to
know. You foretold it, Old Thing. I'm shoeing horses for
hire. I'm not even Weland now," he said. "They call me
Wayland-Smith."'
'Poor chap!' said Dan. 'What did you say?'
'What could I say? He looked up, with the horse's foot
on his lap, and he said, smiling, "I remember the time
when I wouldn't have accepted this old bag of bones as a
sacrifice, and now I'm glad enough to shoe him for a penny."
"'Isn't there any way for you to get back to Valhalla, or
wherever you come from?" I said.
"'I'm afraid not, " he said, rasping away at the hoof. He
had a wonderful touch with horses. The old beast was
whinnying on his shoulder. "You may remember that I
was not a gentle God in my Day and my Time and my
Power. I shall never be released till some human being
truly wishes me well."
"'Surely," said I, "the farmer can't do less than that.
You're shoeing the horse all round for him."
"'Yes," said he, "and my nails will hold a shoe from
one full moon to the next. But farmers and Weald clay,"
said he, "are both uncommon cold and sour."
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