Chapter 1

PUCK OF POOK’S HILL

BOOKS BY RUDYARD KIPLING

PUCK OF POOK’S HILL THEY TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES THE FIVE NATIONS THE JUST SO SONG BOOK JUST SO STORIES KIM STALKY & CO. THE DAY’S WORK THE BRUSHWOOD BOY FROM SEA TO SEA DEPARTMENTAL DITTIES AND BALLADS AND BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS THE LIGHT THAT FAILED LIFE’S HANDICAP: BEING STORIES OF MINE OWN PEOPLE UNDER THE DEODARS, THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW, AND WEE WILLIE WINKIE SOLDIERS THREE, THE STORY OF THE GADSBYS, AND IN BLACK AND WHITE SOLDIER STORIES THE KIPLING BIRTHDAY BOOK (WITH WOLCOTT BALESTIER) THE NAULAHKA

Puck of Pook’s Hill

By Rudyard Kipling

_Illustrated by_ Arthur Rackham, A.R.W.S.

NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1906

Copyright, 1905, 1906, by RUDYARD KIPLING Published, October, 1906

_All rights reserved,_ _including that of translation into foreign languages,_ _including the Scandinavian_

ROBIN GOODFELLOW—HIS FRIENDS

By RUDYARD KIPLING

I. A Centurion of the Thirtieth. II. On the Great Wall. III. The Winged Hats. IV. Hal o’ the Draft. V. Dymchurch Flit. VI. The Treasure and the Law.

Copyright, 1906, by RUDYARD KIPLING.

CONTENTS

PAGE _Puck’s Song_ 1 Weland’s Sword 5 _A Tree Song_ 29 Young Men at the Manor 33 _Sir Richard’s Song_ 55 _Harp Song of the Dane Women_ 59 The Knights of the Joyous Venture 61 _Thorkild’s Song_ 87 Old Men at Pevensey 91 _The Runes on Weland’s Sword_ 119 A Centurion of the Thirtieth 125 _A British-Roman Song_ 145 On the Great Wall 149 _A Song to Mithras_ 173 The Winged Hats 177 _A Pict Song_ 201 Hal o’ the Draft 207 _A Smugglers’ Song_ 227 _The Bee Boy’s Song_ 231 ‘Dymchurch Flit’ 233 _A Three-Part Song_ 251 _Song of the Fifth River_ 255 The Treasure and the Law 257 _The Children’s Song_ 276

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

‘“Go!” she says, “Go with my Leave an’ Goodwill.”’ _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE In the very spot where Dan had stood as Puck they saw a 6 small, brown, broad-shouldered, pointy-eared person with a snub nose, slanting blue eyes, and a grin that ran right across his freckled face. ‘There’s where you meet hunters, and trappers for the 152 Circuses, prodding along chained bears and muzzled wolves.’ ‘Hoity-toity!’ he cried. ‘Here’s Pride in purple 212 feathers! Here’s wrathy contempt and the Pomps of the Flesh!’... And he doffed his cap to the bubbling bird.

PUCK OF POOK’S HILL

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 Cæsar 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._

WELAND’S SWORD

WELAND’S SWORD(1)

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 where Nick Bottom the weaver comes out of the bushes with a donkey’s head on his shoulder, 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-eared 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 their stage. The mill-stream 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 gatepost singing his broken June tune, ‘cuckoo-cuk,’ 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, ripe 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 our 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 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 little 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 Horseshoes 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; For 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 mill-stream 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 seizin 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 seizin?’ 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 seized 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 seized 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 are a fairy,’ said Dan.

‘Have you ever heard me use 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 Hill 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 Hill 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 Phœnicians 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 Peofn’s men—were burning a village on the Levels, and Weland’s image—a big, black wooden thing with amber beads round its 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?’