Part 2

Dawn came creeping up. The moon grew pale with annoyance that daylight was coming to close the revels. The more timid of the stars closed eyes and went to sleep. Only the boldest lights in the greying sky fought against the progress in the east.

Then the song ended--dying out with a note of long-drawn content, the sigh of satisfied victory. There was silence again except for the awakened birds, which, well aware of the rapidly approaching day, chattered and twittered with increasing energy, careless of the history happening beneath them.

June was stirred from her inopportune reverie by the touch of the crown which Oberon, descending from his throne, placed upon her.

A great shout went up.

"June, June, June!"

That was the moment of her triumph. It was the moment of her madness too.

The touch of the mystic rim quickened her indefinite aspirations and sharpened her sadness. She would go! Not Oberon and all his fairies should prevent her. The crown--charged with mighty powers--gave her strange new determination and an influence more potent far than she had ever possessed before. That town-world might be hopeless, but she would not say so till she herself was convinced of it. She would go to London.

Oberon, watching her face, was aware of this fleeting debate in her mind and the disobedient decision. He is the gentlest knight in Fairyland, and for June, who deserved so well of everyone, had an especial reverence and affection. That she should disobey his public command would be almost as hurtful to his pride as allowing a dragon, pent in its subterranean prison, to escape.

"June," he said to her gently, "you will go back to your home in the Land of Wild Roses. A hundred of the fairest knights will guard you and the crown--your precious burden. You will go at once. The revels are ended."

Daylight filled the sky. The moon was a pallid shadow of her former self; the stars had become invisible. The birds, self-centred, were flying hither and thither, bustling about for the wherewithal to live and to help live. One by one the flowers put out their ineffectual lamps.

Ordinarily, the fairies would have decamped forthwith; the gnomes in weary, grumbling, clumsily-clambering pell-mell, every one of them with the fear at his elbow that he might be chosen for some fatigue duty--as our straight-backed friends of the scarlet tunic expressively call it. But on this occasion they stayed. Not an elf stirred. Everyone stared and wondered.

"Was June in disgrace?" they asked of each other, "and if so, why?"

The questions were answered by further questions. There was a jostling of inquiries without any progress made. Rumours rioted. It had been a night indeed!

Again June made appeal.

"Let me go just to see--for only one day and a night!"

"Not for one hour can you go," the king obstinately replied. "Men through their meanness and worldliness have driven the fairies away. We went regretfully, unwillingly; but we went, at last, absolutely. There are innumerable homes of men-folk where the elves are believed in and are welcome. We carry our gifts to them. There the children have smiling eyes and happy faces: but in the narrow world of mean streets and mistaken people, over which that glare is a pall, the children fade, are shrunken, neglected, have some of them forgotten how to smile."

"That is enough!" cried June, and she looked straight at Oberon. "Wherever the children are neglected the fairies ought to go. How can you blame the people for being mean and the places ugly if the elves are forbidden entrance there? Great king, I go!"

In the most daring manner, she raised her wand, made profound obeisance, and was off, like light. Her wings shimmered in the shining of the rising sun.

Fairies started forward to stop her; but she was away before they could do so.

"I told you so!" said Titania, to nobody in particular.

"Stay, all of you," loudly commanded the king. "June has gone wilfully, and must suffer. I would not use the smallest power in Fairyland to bring her back. She has gone disobediently. She can return when she will. I will not send for her. She has gone foolhardily, and must endure alone. We are all of us sorry. There will be no more elfin revels till June has come back again."

"The crown! She has taken that!" said Titania.

Oberon echoed the queen's words. "She has taken that. It cannot perish. June cannot keep it beyond the year. She will have to bring it back then, or earlier. Now, fairies, May-day has come. To your homes and the daytime labours. Away, away! The revels have ended indeed!"

Then there was hurry on the part of the gnomes. Oberon and Titania and their sparkling company flew in a long procession on a winding aerial course, to the palace of the king, which is hidden from eyes of men on an Irish mountain.

They were there in a twinkling. Wink thrice and a fairy's journey is ended, though it be over deserts and beyond seas. It is not so with the gnomes. They must labour and struggle along, like mice and men. But the winged lords and ladies of Elfdom are the happy fortunate. They can put Time in a thimble when they please, and play leap-frog with continents.

In less than three and a half minutes, as measured by a well-behaved clock, the Violet Valley was deserted by all but the birds and Bim. Even the nymph of the lake was invisible. She had sunk to the depths of her pellucid palace the moment June made her bold decision.

Bim waddled to the place where the throne had been. It was rank wild-growth again. No one not a fairy could have dreamed that such a sight had been there but a fragment of time before. He threw himself at full length--such a little full length--on the grass where June had been standing, and thought for a long while with his very best wits.

He made a soliloquy.

"King Oberon said we were not to go. He said that June was to come back alone. He said no one was to follow her. I shall be punished if I go. Pricks and pains and aches and beatings! Ugh! But would that be worse than Fairyland without June? No, it would not. Fairyland will not be Fairyland to me without June. I am going after her; Oberon can beat me till I'm blue." So declaring, he sprang to his feet.

"Brave gnome!" said a voice behind him.

Bim turned about in fright. The courage which had risen during his soliloquy went--pluff!--like an unset jelly.

The nymph of the lake had spoken. She had returned, and stood again on her leaf in the middle of the pool. He was pleased to see she looked at him in the friendliest manner.

"We are behaving very badly indeed in being so disobedient," she said; "but June is from the Land of Wild Roses. So are you and I. Go to her, gnome. She is alone, and even you from Falkland--I beg your pardon for putting it so--are better than nothing. I have no counsel to give you but keep a stout heart. You will need it. You don't know the way!"

Here was the truth. Bim was an expert in ignorance.

"You will find June in the wilderness of stone and evil. In the daytime it is covered by cloud and fog. In the night-time the red glare of lights reflected shines over it. That is what to follow and where to go. When you come back I will find a gift for you. Away with you. Go!"

Bim went.

*CHAPTER III*

*PARADISE COURT*

There are many Paradise Courts in London. The one which comes into this story is identifiable from the fact that a public-house is by its entrance.

Probably this hostelry has given the court its name, for it was the nearest approach to anything of an Eden character which that blotted part of existence held.

The public-house has been known at various times by different names--The Red Lion, The Green Man, The Blue Dragon, The Queen's Head. Possibly it is spoken of by another name now, for its management has always changed pretty frequently, and almost as frequently celebrated the occasion with a new title. It may perhaps be called "The Laughter of June"--who knows?--but digressions are sinful, when they anticipate. These facts are stated to help the reader to find the Paradise Court of the story--if he wants to.

To describe Paradise Court is to tell the picture of one or other of more than a thousand of the mean ways of London. It was narrow and flagged, with cracked slabs of cold stone; was utterly dismal, dingy, dull. Its tenements were brown with years of smoked atmosphere; the windows stained, or stuffed with paper, or empty of glass; the doors, broken gates, giving entrance to inner realms of squalor and nakedness. There is no place on earth more thoroughly hopeless and ugly than was that dismal colony of condemned humanity. The makers of Hell would probably be ashamed to imitate this limbo, where the poorest of the poor crowded and managed to exist.

Hunger and fear were unfading terrors in Paradise Court. Every room was haunted with the tragedy which never dies. No tears were shed there, for the heart which knows despair is dry as a river of sand. In Paradise Court only the babies could have any glimmer of hope, they being utterly ignorant and unable to know. The others were mere mute bodies, too hurt and heavily burdened to feel weary and sore.

There were dangerous brawls sometimes amongst the Paradise Courtiers--they hit their hardest and cunningest to kill; but, fortunately, used fists or sticks--though sometimes the boot found play, and always fought with drink-muddled senses. The men, women and children there knew how to blaspheme: and though the range of language in use was limited, it was violent enough for any ordinary occasion. Sometimes the supply of available adjectives was insufficient for a very special purpose, and then Jim, Bill and 'Arry, Sal, 'Arriett and Liz, repeated themselves unconscionably. The ears of the neighbourhood were not sensitive, which, perhaps, was as well.

Once upon a time a policeman, presuming on his proper faith in a new uniform and the truncheon in his trouser pocket, followed and tried unaided to capture a sneak-thief who had found refuge in its Alsatian sanctuary. When the policeman emerged from the court empty-handed, he was limp and battered; and report--on the lips of the curate, who heard it from someone, who was told by so-and-so, who learned it from somebody else--asserts that his lost truncheon was used thereafter promiscuously to settle private quarrels with. Since that ill-advised adventure, the police only entered the place when they had to, and then went in adequate numbers. Paradise Court had become an independent republic, where the King's authority had ceased to run, and, in effect, was a little farther out of civilization than the forests of Mumbo-Jumbo.

There were fourteen houses in the Court, with five rooms in each, a passage and flight of stairs. On an average four persons slept in every room, and in the summer months the stairs had their occupants, so that the population of the place was as near three hundred as need be.

Paradise Court was, in brief, a piece of Black Country, given back to Chaos and old Night, the haunt of such terrors as are bred of insanitation, rack-rents, thriftlessness, drunkenness, extreme poverty, utter and absolute neglect. It was one of many wens in the metropolitan wilderness.

On every side of it London stretched; immediately about it were clattering thoroughfares, with hurrying streams of life, constant processions of rumbling and jingling vehicles, and buildings, buildings, buildings, streets after streets of them, nearly every one looking jaded, faded, an edifice--fine word!--in despair. Only the public-houses remained clothed in glaring, brave livery, and looked prosperous and vulgarly perky.

June found herself in Paradise Court in the course of that May-day afternoon. How she got there, even she did not know.

Out in the country her journey had been plain flying. She had skimmed over the fields and hills like light in a happy hurry. But gradually the air became heavier, and her wings, which in a joyous atmosphere could have moved unweariedly for almost an eternal time, lagged. She struggled along bravely, and, not for the shred of a moment, wavered in her purposes: but eventually, bewildered by the clamour beneath her, the closeness and thick smoke, which overhung everything--there was the pall which, lighted, was visible from Fairyland--felt her powers vanquished. She tried all her arts--the fairy arts--to make the way easier; but the spoilt air of London oppressed her--it was to her--who more sensitive?--as fiery breath from dragon's nostrils, nauseous.

The crown pressed on her brow with a heavy rim of pain. She clung to remembrance of the children who needed her.

She became as helpless in the hands of circumstance as a snowflake, the sport of winds; was borne hither and thither, buffeted up and down as though mighty mischiefs made her their shuttlecock.

For hours she was hustled along in this condition of blind bewilderment: and then--slap!--felt herself brought sharply against a window-pane, for all the world as if she were a blind wasp or blue-bottle imprisoned in a summer room. She tumbled and clung desperately to the rough stone sill whereon she found herself; and there rested, breathless, draggled, exhausted.

She was the tiredest fairy in and out of Christendom.

So June found Paradise Court.

She rapidly recovered, and looked about her.

"This is very, very ugly," said she to herself. "The fairies can't have been here for ages."

She touched the dingy window-pane with her wand. The glass divided and opened inwards, as if its two parts were separately hinged; but the atmosphere of the room was so old and very evil that June waved the wand and closed the pane in a hurry. Human eyes, examining the glass, ever so carefully, would have been positive it had never been parted. Brothers, how blind we are!

"Can the fairies ever have been there!" murmured June to herself.

She cleared the pane with wishes. It became so clear and burnished that the glass itself seemed invisible; and then, pressing forward eagerly, she looked inside the room, and examined mankind in one of its cages.

"It is a good thing they are shadows, and cannot know or feel very much. If they were as real as we are, that would be bad--bad! Even now I should like to turn them into sparrows; they would be far more fortunate so. Poor people! And there is a child!"

The sight of Sally Wilkins working constantly with ever-weary hands, made June so to tremble and shake with agitation, that she nearly dropped her wand and fell from the sill; but once more she clung with her infinitesimal hands to the narrow column of wooden framework, and, beginning now to feel indignant and angry, looked still more eagerly into the room.

The picture she saw was, alas! not uncommon. Ten thousand interiors of London life down in the grey parts where grinding Poverty is king, were more or less repetitions of the sight June gazed upon.

Two women squatted on the floor, sewing rapidly, with machine-like steadiness. A third suckled as well as her poor means allowed a feeble baby. The mother stared before her with eyes which were very tired. Unlighted--as grey stones in a hollow face--they gazed at a present and a future, too dreary for dreams. All her life was a stain and a grief. One of the women, her companion, was racked with a consumptive cough.

There was by the inside wall of the room, a pile of half-completed clothing--raw material for sweated needles to work upon--and very little else. There were a frameless looking-glass; a few bottles; a battered beer-pot, stolen from the haunt of liquid happiness at the entrance to the Court; one chair, which served as table, cradle and cupboard, when there was something to hoard underneath it; a verminous straw mattress; and some broken wood, cardboard, and rags--the gleanings of rubbish boxes. That is a complete inventory of the furniture, the ornamental as well as the useful.

On the window-ledge were broken crusts, as stale as the phrases of charity, and a black-handled fork, with pieces of string, cotton, needles, several empty reels, which would make firewood some day, and cards of buttons, the capital and essentials of those women's industry.

June, fresh from the revels of Fairyland, was appalled at her picture, and as near to tears as an indignant fairy could be. She felt hot anger against Oberon.

Then again she gazed at Sally Wilkins and studied the hapless child. The fairy's whole being was eager sympathy and love. June knew Sally's history at once through the influence of her powers and the crown.

That was a child who had never seen a green field, or heard any wild birds singing; though very well she knew, as every town-child must do, the twittering of the pert sparrows in the streets. Sally was a lump of solid ignorance. She had heard of God because His name was some necessary part of several favourite swear-phrases; but of the fairies and other sweet realities she had heard just nothing. She lived--poor lass!--in so narrow and limited a world that she might as well have been born in a grave as to the child's destiny in Paradise Court.

She sewed and she sewed, with hardly a pause--"seam and gusset and band"--though in her case it was buttons and buttons and buttons. So constantly was she threading her way through the dark material that life was to her nothing more than a dreary pilgrimage into and out of eternal button-holes. Her fingers were the all-important machines. Her brain was dulled: her soul unquickened. She was twelve years old; and composed of skin, bones, hunger and weariness, wrapped in a modicum of Nothing.

June could not endure the sight any more. Her wings quivered with indignation. She touched the window, flew into the room, and alighted on Sally's shoulder.

The child, without her fingers resting from work for the least part of an instant--time means life to the working poor--looked up wondering. Why did she seem suddenly lighter? Was there sunshine in the room? No, everything appeared precisely as before: though--yes, somebody had certainly, through an obvious misunderstanding, been cleaning the window.

June took off the fairy crown and perched it on Sally's tangle of hair. The consequence was amazing.

Sally began to dream for the first time in her life. A new world was opened to her. She was in a wonder country, and felt she had enjoyed as much food as she wanted--plenty of hot gravy. Her thoughts were always drifting on a river of gravy, towards the promise of pudding.

Under her feet was a kind of green hair--grass--far stretches of it, as cool as the night-wind, but infinitely pleasanter. Flowers, looking for all the world as if they had been picked off stuck-up ladies' bonnets, were pushed into the ground, where they waved, looked and smelt as delicious as--more gravy, Sally's only simile.

The sky was strangely blue, and much broader and higher than the London sky ever was. How did they keep it so clear? She could not see a house, but there were any number of trees shading the grass, trees of all sorts and sizes, some so high that their tops tickled the sky; others with branches so broad and full of leaves that a hundred children like herself could have slept without quarrelling in the shade of any one of them. What a very nice world this was!

There was more still, for look at that very round "spadger" with the red breast that perched on a branch, and went twit, twit perkily, and that very large bird--could that be a spadger too?--with brown speckled breast, and that tiny blue upside-down, eager thing with its sweet chirrup, chirrup; and the other mite of a brown creature, with saucily upturned tail; and this scolding black gentleman with his yellow bill; and more birds too, many more. What a lot there were! Why don't we have fellows who look and pipe like them down our court?--and don't they sing cheerily? My!

There is one going up and up, as if it were climbing a round stairway which couldn't be seen, singing all the while like--like--a tune gone balmy. Sally could hear the soft prevailing sound, and opened her eyes wide--to hear better! There was a brown cliff, and down, tumbling with much splashing and thudding, came water in a shining flood. At first she shivered--water is so cold, and cleansing; but the fright went suddenly when Sally, examining herself, found that though she had no recollection of the horrible process of washing, she was quite clean. So she need not wash, and could, without fear, admire the falling water. Hooray! This was a splendid country. She revelled in its light, warmth, freedom, happiness.

There were loud unsteady footsteps on the stairs. June removed the crown, without removing the sweetness of the dream-world from Sally, and flew to the empty keyhole to reconnoitre.

A man, one of the masters of Paradise Court, was stumbling upstairs, making hob-nail progress. He was mazed; because of the public-house at the corner--the nearest place where the community could discover the correct time. Long experience of similar circumstances safely guided his feet up that rickety rat-haunted staircase, and he lurched into the room, clumsily kicking the door to after he had entered. June hovered over him, flew round and round his head, and still more puzzled his foolish wits.

"'Ave I got 'em?" he asked most seriously, and stared at the revolving wall.

The three women looked at him listlessly. One spoke.

"Shut yer jaw, Bill," she said, and paused to thread her needle. "'Ullo, brought some beer?" she continued, when she saw the tin can he dangled. "Give us a drop, mate!"

June, steadying herself by grabbing his stubbly beard--for fairies are not entirely impervious to the law of gravitation--leaned forward and, just as he had said "Garn! I brought it for----" touched his lips with her wand. He substituted "Sally" for "myself."

Bill put the beer-can on the chair, and rallied himself with an effort.

"I _am_ drunk!" he asserted most seriously, as though a mighty uncertainty had suddenly been put straight.

Sally was still in the green joy-land, whereto June had enchanted her; but she took the can dreamily, and put it to her lips.

That was too much for the man. He stooped forward and grabbed the can.

"Not 'arf!" he said, as he took it from her, spilling some of the contents.

Sally's thoughts were torn from the trance-world. She was snatched from the green dream-country, brought back summarily to the hungry, grey realities of the present. She looked at Bill, and then blasphemed fluently. June, horrified by the child's fierce anger, touched her lips with the wand. Sally was obediently silent, though still her mouth moved with muted imprecations. The two women had, meanwhile, gone on with their work, and the mother stared, her eyes two stones.

Bill sprawled on the boards, and pillowed his head and shoulders on the pile of half-completed clothing. He supped at the beer with long luxurious satisfaction, and slowly tumbled into sleep. The emptied can slipped from his fingers and rolled half-way across the room.

June, who in the presence of this experience had been bewildered and unprepared, flew to where it was lying, and contemplated it thoughtfully.

"There has been magic there," she declared, "worse than the evil of witches."

Sally went on with her sewing.

*CHAPTER IV*

*COCKNEYDOM*

That night June made her nest among the chimney-pots. There was a broad cleft in the mortar which bound the stack, and a black hammock of thick cobweb swinging as the wind-drift blew upon it. June put the crown for safety underneath her; and, clasping the wand with both her guarding hands, reclined on the cobweb and waited for slumber.