by Lord Dunsany
Observant men and women that know their Bond Street well
will appreciate my astonishment when in a jewellers' shop I
perceived that nobody was furtively watching me. Not only
this but when I even picked up a little carved crystal to
examine it no shop-assistants crowded round me. I walked
the whole length of the shop, still no one politely
followed.
Seeing from this that some extraordinary revolution had
occurred in the jewelry business I went with my curiosity
well aroused to a queer old person half demon and half man
who has an idol-shop in a byway of the City and who keeps me
informed of affairs at the Edge of the World. And briefly
over a pinch of heather incense that he takes by way of
snuff he gave me this tremendous information: that Mr. Neepy
Thang the son of Thangobrind had returned from the Edge of
the World and was even now in London.
The information may not appear tremendous to those
unacquainted with the source of jewelry; but when I say that
the only thief employed by any West-end jeweller since
famous Thangobrind's distressing doom is this same Neepy
Thang, and that for lightness of fingers and swiftness of
stockinged foot they have none better in Paris, it will be
understood why the Bond-street jewellers no longer cared
what became of their old stock.
There were big diamonds in London that summer and a few
considerable sapphires. In certain astounding kingdoms
behind the East strange sovereigns missed from their turbans
the heirlooms of ancient wars, and here and there the
keepers of crown jewels who had not heard the stockinged
feet of Thang, were questioned and died slowly.
And the jewellers gave a little dinner to Thang at the
Hotel Great Magnificent; the windows had not been opened for
five years and there was wine at a guinea a bottle that you
could not tell from champagne and cigars at half a crown
with a Havana label. Altogether it was a splendid evening
for Thang.
But I have to tell of a far sadder thing than a dinner at
a hotel. The public require jewelry and jewelry must be
obtained. I have to tell of Neepy Thang's last journey.
That year the fashion was emeralds. A man named Green
had recently crossed the Channel on a bicycle and the
jewellers said that a green stone would be particularly
appropriate to commemorate the event and recommended
emeralds.
Now a certain money-lender of Cheapside who had just been
made a peer had divided his gains into three equal parts;
one for the purchase of the peerage, country-house and park,
and the twenty thousand pheasants that are absolutely
essential, and one for the upkeep of the position, while the
third he banked abroad, partly to cheat the native
tax-gatherer and partly because it seemed to him that the
days of the Peerage were few and that he might at any moment
be called upon to start afresh elsewhere. In the upkeep of
the position he included jewelry for his wife and so it came
about that Lord Castlenorman placed an order with two
well-known Bond-street jewellers named Messrs. Grosvenor and
Campbell to the extent of 100,000 pounds for a few reliable
emeralds.
But the emeralds in stock were mostly small and
shop-soiled and Neepy Thang had to set out at once before he
had had as much as a week in London. I will briefly sketch
his project. Not many knew it, for where the form of
business is blackmail the fewer creditors you have the
better (which of course in various degrees applies at all
times).
On the shores of the risky seas of Shiroora Shan grows
one tree only so that upon its branches if anywhere in the
world there must build its nest the Bird of the Difficult
Eye. Neepy Thang had come by this information, which was
indeed the truth, that if the bird migrated to Fairyland
before the three eggs hatched out they would undoubtedly all
turn into emeralds, while if they hatched out first it would
be a bad business.
When he had mentioned these eggs to Messrs. Grosvenor and
Campbell they had said, "The very thing": they were men of
few words, in English, for it was not their native tongue.
So Neepy Thang set out. He bought the purple ticket at
Victoria Station. He went by Herne Hill, Bromley and
Bickley and passed St. Mary Cray. At Eynsford he changed
and taking a footpath along a winding valley went wandering
into the hills. And at the top of a hill in a little wood,
where all the anemones long since were over and the perfume
of mint and thyme from outside came drifting in with Thang,
he found once more the familiar path, age-old and fair as
wonder, that leads to the Edge of the World. Little to him
were its sacred memories that are one with the secret of
earth, for he was on business, and little would they be to
me if I ever put them on paper. Let it suffice that he went
down that path going further and further from the fields we
know, and all the way he muttered to himself, "What if the
eggs hatch out and it be a bad business!" The glamour that
is at all times upon those lonely lands that lie at the back
of the chalky hills of Kent intensified as he went upon his
journeys. Queerer and queerer grew the things that he saw
by little World-End Path. Many a twilight descended upon
that journey with all their mysteries, many a blaze of
stars; many a morning came flaming up to a tinkle of silver
horns; till the outpost elves of Fairyland came in sight and
the glittering crests of Fairyland's three mountains
betokened the journey's end. And so with painful steps (for
the shores of the world are covered with huge crystals) he
came to the risky seas of Shiroora Shan and saw them
pounding to gravel the wreckage of fallen stars, saw them
and heard their roar, those shipless seas that between earth
and the fairies' homes heave beneath some huge wind that is
none of our four. And there in the darkness on the grizzly
coast, for darkness was swooping slantwise down the sky as
though with some evil purpose, there stood that lonely,
gnarled and deciduous tree. It was a bad place to be found
in after dark, and night descended with multitudes of stars,
beasts prowling in the blackness gluttered at Neepy Thang.
(See any dictionary, but in vain.) And there on a lower
branch within easy reach he clearly saw the Bird of the
Difficult Eye sitting upon the nest for which she is
famous. Her face was towards those three inscrutable
mountains, far-off on the other side of the risky seas,
whose hidden valleys are Fairyland. Though not yet autumn
in the fields we know, it was close on mid-winter here, the
moment as Thang knew when those eggs hatch out. Had he
miscalculated and arrived a minute too late? Yet the bird
was even now about to migrate, her pinions fluttered and her
gaze was toward Fairyland. Thang hoped and muttered a
prayer to those pagan gods whose spite and vengeance he had
most reason to fear. It seems that it was too late or a
prayer too small to placate them, for there and then the
stroke of mid-winter came and the eggs hatched out in the
roar of Shiroora Shan or ever the bird was gone with her
difficult eye and it was a bad business indeed for Neepy
Thang; I haven't the heart to tell you any more.
"'Ere," said Lord Castlenorman some few weeks later to
Messrs. Grosvenor and Campbell, "you aren't 'arf taking your
time about those emeralds."
