A Dreamers Tales | Page 8

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