Part 3

It was pitch black there. He groped and stumbled. His knee grazed against a step. He climbed ... then another, and another and another, until he was at the head of a steep flight of stairs. Then another hallway, and another flight of stairs. His hands hit upon something straight and sharp. It was a ladder. Up this he went, too, a rung at a time, through a narrow hole in the ceiling.

A gust of wind caught him full in the face. Above him were the stars—and he knew that he had reached the roof. He crossed it on tiptoe, for fear of the crackle of the tiles under foot. A broken down, tumbled chimney stopped him at the edge. Clinging to its loosened bricks, he could peer down into the street and over the roofs of the houses of the neighborhood. On the other side, the lights had died away in the palace windows—and all was dark and still. Even the startled soldier had disappeared.

He lay down at the bottom of the chimney. Slowly he drifted off to sleep, shivering in his dampened clothes, and mumbling strange words between his gums.

All the next day he lay there, dozing in the heat of the sun upon the open roof. Every little while he raised himself on his elbow to look down into the street. He saw the soldiers marching back and forth there, so tiny in size, and heard their faint shouts as they halted and searched each passerby.

So they were hunting for him, eh? Well, let them hunt! He would rest here against the chimney pots until the sun had set and the wisp of a new moon had risen ... and then! Ah, then for mischief!

XIV

PETERKIN’S RESCUE

AND meanwhile Peterkin, in the dungeon deep, was lying face down upon the cold stone floor, trying his brave best to shut out from his head a thousand wild fears and torments which did not belong there. What if he should stay here in this dark cell for all his days? What if he should never again see the sunlight or hear the rustle of the trees? What should he do for food? And for drink?

He rose and walked up and down, up and down, across the little floor. He scanned each wall closely. No, there was no escape possible. The door was fast shut, and its iron bars firm. And the little window, through which the day was fading quickly, was higher, by far, than he could reach a-tiptoe. No, no escape!

The sky, through the window, was a little square of red now. Slowly it faded and grew dark. In the center of it a single star winked into view. Evening had come. And Peterkin must spend the night here, where the dew was gathering in gray, cobwebby streaks upon the chilly walls.

Then softly—as softly as the coming of the dew—there was a pitter-patter of light footsteps at the end of the hall. Someone was stealing down the mossy steps. Someone was approaching. He seized the bars with tightening fingers. His breath came fast. Yes, yes, it was——

The princess!

He could hardly see her in the darkness of the hall. He could scarcely recognize the blue of her gown and the glint of her golden hair. But he heard the jingle of many keys in her hand and the creak of the lock, as she tried each key ... and failed!

“Oh, this one will open it,” she whispered, each time. “Oh, this one must!”

Then, at last, she came to the last key in her hand. She thrust it into the hole: it fitted perfectly. She turned it—snap! The lock flew open. Peterkin hunched his back and pushed against the bars. He was in the hall now—and free!

Neither he nor the little princess said a word for a long moment. Then she took his hand and placed into it a little vial of purple liquid.

“Guard this well,” she warned him. “It is the Water of Bounceability. Whenever you wish to leap over great heights, you have only to sip a little of it and then to bounce high up and away. And, alas, you have many heights to leap ere you are back in my royal father’s favor. He is so angry at you for having brought his arch-enemy into the city that he has ordered your death at midnight. The hangman is already plaiting his rope and the carpenters hammering at a high scaffold. So follow me quickly to the city’s edge, where none will find you.”

Peterkin was close at her heels, all the dark way. Through pitchy tunnels she led him, far under the cellars of the city; through narrow cave-like passages, heavy with reeking gases, until at last they came up into an open space, where the woods came down from the slopes of black hills to meet the streets and houses. It was the furthermost edge of the city.

“I must leave you here,” sighed the princess. “I must return and take the spanking which awaits me. But as for you, brave Peterkin, you have your choice: either you may escape safely into exile and never return to see me again—or else you may perform four mighty deeds. Aye, deeds so great that even the King, my father, cannot do them. But if you succeed in them, you may return here, so high in the King’s favor that he will grant your dearest wish. Tell me, stranger, which will you choose?” Ah, little princess—I wonder if she blushed when she said it!

But Peterkin never wavered. “Need you ask, my Princess Clem?” he whispered.

“Then you must know,” she continued, “that there is a misery in each of the Four Kingdoms o’er which my father rules. Misery, sorrow and tears. Go, now, to each of these Four Kingdoms and make its people happy. Give joy instead of sorrow and smiles instead of tears. More than this I cannot tell you, but go! You shall see strange things and do brave deeds, and I shall be sitting at my palace window, under the gilded dome, awaiting your return”——

Then, all in a twinkling, the little princess had fled back into the tunnel and was gone. Peterkin was alone.

XV

THE WATER OF BOUNCEABILITY

PETERKIN turned his face at once towards the hazy line of hills which loomed through the darkness. He must escape over their crests while night was still here. He must take a sip—as the Princess Clem had taught him—of that purple liquid from the little vial in his hand.

Carefully he uncorked the bottle—and sniffed. What a sweet, fragrant odor! He touched his tongue to the rim. It was like melted candy—yet the taste of it stung like fire. His limbs seemed to twitch and throb at the touch.

He drew a long breath—and gulped down a gurgling mouthful of the Water of Bounceability.

Immediately he knew that he might jump—_must_ jump—jump anywhere, up into the sky, where the stars were, and over the distant hills. He made a little run, a hop, and then—up he went sailing far across the hilltops, down into the valley on the other side. The whole leap took but a moment: no more time than it takes the fluff of a withered dandelion to fly across a lawn.

Yet here he was thirty leagues or more from his starting place, in a strange, new valley! He wondered what the name of it could be.... It was such a wild and woody-looking place. He could not see very much, of course, for the stars gave little light, and the moon was but a thin, pale crescent. But he saw that all was tangled forests here and that wild, thorny heather and tall weeds had spread across what should have been clean meadows. An old road went across the heath, but it was overgrown with ferns and brambles and ditched with great muddy pools as if no one mended or repaired it—and no one traveled it. It was all a vast desert of waste and decay, hid by the dark of the night.

Peterkin knew how useless it would be to try to make his way forward before morning. So he lay down under the branches of the trees and slept.

But early the next day, before the sun was up, Peterkin had started on his way. A difficult journey it was, too, along the deserted road. There were puddles to wade and vines to skip and rocky barriers to climb. There were ruts where the leaves of the past autumn had buried themselves in a soggy mass or where the summer dust had sifted into foolish heaps. There were trunks of fallen trees across the road, and lizards, frogs and hedge-hogs crawled or hopped or ran beside them. All was desolate and wild. It was a valley of mysterious decay.

Then, at last, where the road slanted down to meet another long stretch of brown heathered fields, Peterkin spied a house. A huge, tall house, too, which must have been a splendid mansion once upon a time. But now it was shabby and needed paint. The bricks of its walls were losing their mortar; the slates of the roof were falling to the ground; none of the windows had curtains and few of them glass. There was moss upon the steps and in the eaves. The chimney pots were crumbled, and the lawn was high with choking weeds.

Peterkin wondered, Could anyone live here?

As if in answer to his question, a little boy came around the corner of the house. He came slowly, though he never stopped or hesitated a moment when he was within sight of Peterkin. He stumbled unsteadily through the weeds, with his hands held out before him. His face was handsome, truly—but his hair was in a fearful tousle over his eyes and his clothes were all in rags.

“No wonder you can’t see a thing,” laughed Peterkin. “Take your hair out of your eyes!”

The little boy stopped short at the sound of a voice. He nodded his head sadly.

“What are eyes?” he asked. “I know I have two of them—but what use are they? Won’t you tell me, stranger?”

“Why, silly!” roared Peterkin. “Eyes are to see with!”

The little boy smiled more sadly than before. “No,” he sighed. “If you can see with your eyes, you are not of this valley. For I am blind. And so are my father and my mother, and all our neighbors, too. And so is everybody in this valley. All of us are blind!”

XVI

THE VALE OF THE BLIND

THE little boy led Peterkin into the house to meet his father and mother. But they, like the boy, were in rags and tatters—and blind!

“You can _see_?” asked the father in wonder, when Peterkin had explained whence he came. “What does it mean to _see_? Isn’t all the world a thing of blackness? Is there anything more to it than the dark nothing of the blind?”

“Oh, yes, indeed!” cried Peterkin, his own eyes filling with tears of pity. “There’s the sunshine and the trees, and all the bright flowers of the garden. There are birds of bright plumage, and moonbeams on the surface of the water, and the smiles on people’s faces. Oh, the world is so full of things to see.... I could not tell you all of them.”

The mother nodded. “Yes, that is just the way my father’s father used to speak,” she said slowly. “It was in his youth that this became the Vale of the Blind. Before that, it was known in all the Four Kingdoms as the Vale of Bright Eyes. But now——” Her voice sank away and she sighed.

“Tell me the story,” begged Peterkin. “Tell me how this great misfortune came upon your grandfathers.”

It was the father who answered him. “Our valley,” he began, “was the happiest-hearted of all hereabouts fifty years ago. These things you speak of—these colors and sunshine which we do not know—were here in smiling plenty. The fields were neat and trim with golden grain. The pastures were like new-swept velvet, clean and green. The roads were smooth and bright. The houses were all handsome, with pretty lawns and gardens. Men wore fine clothes and took pride in themselves and in one another.

“But one day, there came into our Valley of Bright Eyes a haggard stranger. He was the saddest being that e’er trudged down over the boundary hills, my grandfather used to tell me. He wept, the whole day long, because he had no teeth. Think of it! he could not be happy for want of a set of teeth!

“Now, all their happiness had made my grandparents and their neighbors a kind, soft-hearted lot. No sooner did they see this man—who said he was a farmer—than they took pity on him. They fed him with porridge and honey—for they knew he could not eat what must be chewed—and they gave him a bed of fragrant blossoms to lie on when the night came.

“But he would not sleep, at once. He got up every little while to ask them: ‘And are you sure this Valley of Bright Eyes is one of the Four Kingdoms, hey? Are you sure that the King of the Four Kingdoms is its ruler, hey?’

“Every time they told him ‘Yes’ he would chuckle and mumble strange words through his toothless gums. In the middle of the night, he arose and looked out across the moonlit fields, where the grain was rich, and down the gleaming road, where the handsome houses stood in sleeping order. He laughed aloud, this time, the story goes. Then he strode out into the road and ran and ran—faster than ever a man had run before.

“‘I seek a set of teeth!’ he screamed as he ran. Up flew the windows, all the good folk roused from bed, rushing to see who could possibly be making such a racket. All along his way the people stared at him. They saw him take a torch from out of his pocket. They watched him set it aflame. They saw him touch it, hot and sputtering, to the tops of the fields of grain, to the hedges and trees.... _He_ _was setting fire to their valley!_ They rushed down, seized him, and stamped out the fearful blaze in just the nick of time.

“As for the toothless villain, he screamed with merry laughter when they caught him.

“‘Hee, hee, my Bright Eyes!’ he cried. ‘You have been spying on me all this while, eh? Your eyes are too bright. You have been watching my revenge upon my enemy, the King! Too bright, too bright! From now you shall be blind—fast blind—you and your wives and your sons and daughters and your neighbors. From the Vale of Bright Eyes you shall now become the Vale of the Blind. And yours shall henceforth be a valley of ruin and decay. Blind, blind—and never again shall you see the gold of the day or the silver of the moon until I come to give you back your eyes—your bright eyes—hee, hee, hee!’

“And thus he fled from us. For the dark of the blind had come over the valley many years ago ... and there is nothing left for us but tears.”

XVII

PETERKIN PROMISES

“AND so our valley has gone to rack and ruin,” concluded the blind man.

Peterkin was silent for some minutes after he had finished. Then he shook his head wisely, sadly.

“Can you wait four days until I rescue you?” he asked.

“Four days?” The man, his wife and little son all burst into a bitter laughter. “We have waited for half a century already. We can wait a century, if only in the end we gain our eyes again, and win revenge upon our toothless enemy. Four days, ho, ho!”

“You shall have both your eyes and your revenge,” promised the stranger. “It was only three days ago that I sped through the air in the cup of a sea-shell, in company with this toothless farmer. Oh, if I had only known, then!”

“What? In his company? Are you a friend of his?” The blind family rushed in about him, as if to capture him and flay him.

“No, no,” smiled Peterkin. “Not a friend at all. He tried to throw me hundreds of feet down to the ground. But he disappeared—and I do not know where he is. But I shall search the whole world over till I find him. And then—woe to him!”

So saying, he put his hand on the blind man’s shoulder and bade them all good-by. They gave him a few wild herbs to put into his blouse for luncheon—it was all they had for food. And then he went on his way, singing all sorts of promises to them as he went on down the hill.

As he walked along the shabby road, he came to other houses, broken down and unpainted, all tangled in high weeds and matted vines. Each house was poorer than the last; each one more deserted than the other. And from each of them trooped little groups of blind folk, groping in darkness, to question him and to complain to him of their hard fate. All along his way he met the sight of their tears and heard the sound of their weeping. But wherever he went, Peterkin gave the same promise of happiness within four days and left a smile of hope behind him.

At length he came to the last house of the valley. It was high on the slope of one of the boundary mountains, almost at the edge of the gleaming white glacier of the summit. It was fast in the shadow of a huge, bluish ice cave, and long icicles dripped from its eaves and glittered like jewels in the sunshine.

“And are you, too, blind?” he asked of the man who lived in this high house.

“Yes,” replied the old man, sorrowfully. “I am no better than all the others in this valley, no matter how high I live above them. I, like them, am awaiting the rescuer who shall return my sight and bring revenge upon our toothless enemy.”

“That is just what you shall have,” promised Peterkin, “if only you tell me what is in the next valley, on the other side of the white mountains; and how I may reach there the best.”

“Alas,” sighed the old fellow, “those are two riddles which I cannot answer. I only know that in that valley beyond the ridge of the boundary, there is just as much sorrow as there is here. There is something wrong there—though I have never known what it is—and the great barrier of glacier ice has hedged us from each other. So come and rest here for to-day, and to-morrow, bright and early, you may come upon some scheme to cross into that unknown valley over the mountains.”

So Peterkin took shelter there, in the green shadows of the ice cave, and slept a troubled sleep until the morning.

XVIII

THE VALLEY OF SILENCE

AS soon as dawn was over the glacier the next day, Peterkin was on his feet and sipping a good gulp from his flask of the Water of Bounceability. You see, he dreamed about this magic gift of the princess’s as he lay a-sleeping ... and really, what an easy thing it was to cross the boundary mountains, now!

Just one little swallow—and then a hop, skip and jump! Up, up and over! Over the tree-tops, over the glacier itself ... then down into the valley on the other side.

As he floated to the earth there, a strange hush seemed to fall on him. It was the quiet sense of absolute stillness. He walked forward a little way, then stopped in bewilderment. Not a sound—not a whisper of anything. He could not hear even the crunch of his feet upon the greensward. He called out, but somehow his voice sank away into nothing. The trees rustled silently; a great, frothing brook went tumbling down through a bit of woods without a murmur. All was quiet.

A young peasant girl came toward him, leading a horse across the fields—but Peterkin could hear neither the patter of her feet nor the hoof-beats of the horse.

“What ho!” cried he, “I must have gone suddenly deaf! I can’t even hear myself speaking. Here, girl, tell me what’s wrong with my ears?”

The peasant maid halted her horse; she looked at Peterkin with startled wonder. Her gaze settled on his moving mouth—and her eyes grew larger and larger with surprise. Suddenly she snatched a little twig from the branch of a nearby tree, stripped it and commenced to trace queer letters with it in the dust of the road.

“Phew!” thought Peterkin. “She must be deaf herself. It’s a good thing I went to school and learned to read and write!” Then he looked down at what the little girl had traced upon the road—and this is what he read:

“What are you eating?”

Peterkin laughed a noiseless laugh. Then he snatched the twig from her and wrote in reply:

“Nothing.”

“Then what makes you move your mouth so queer?” she asked in writing.

“I’m talking,” he scribbled back.

“What does talking mean? That’s a word we know nothing about in this valley.”

“Then how do you understand one another? And why don’t you make words with your mouth?” he traced.

“We write to each other—like this. There would be no use in talking like you do. We are all deaf.”

“All of you?”

“Yes, everybody in the valley.”

“Oh, then this is a valley of silence,” wrote Peterkin.

“Silence? What is silence?”

“Why, silence is when there is no noise.”

“What is noise?” she scrawled.

Poor Peterkin had to give it up after that. He tried to describe to her what the wind was like when it roared in wintry weather—or how the birds sing at evening in the woods—or how men can understand each other’s smiles and scowls by simple noises which they make with their mouths. But she only shrugged her shoulders and sighed. At any rate, Peterkin thought it was a sigh—but he could not hear it.

So he marched along at her side in strange silence, making no noise and hearing none, until they came into the center of a little village.

XIX

EARS TOO SHARP

THERE, in the silent village, they found a group of old men nodding on a bench in the warm sunlight. Across the brook a big mill wheel was turning; but it made no roar or clatter. A cart went by, but there was no rumble to its wheels. Down the street a blacksmith was hammering at his ruddy forge; but there was no clang or clatter to keep noisy company to the flying sparks. All was silence—dreary, unbroken silence.

The old men stirred when Peterkin approached. They knew him for a stranger. They rose and made a place for him beside them on the bench. Then one of them took a piece of white chalk from his vest pocket, turned to the brick wall behind him and began to write. The words he wrote were so many that, before he was through, he had covered the wall from top to bottom with this sad and mysterious tale:

“Once,” he wrote, “this was the Valley of the Rippling Brooks. All were happy here, then. It was in my youth, I remember, when in our ears there ran the murmur of a hundred gleaming, merry brooks that cross the woods and fields and tumble from the hills in frothy white. The music of our laughter was like the music of these brooks—never slowing, never saddening. We were the happiest of all the Four Kingdoms.

“Then, one spring day, when the brooks were swollen and roaring with gladness, there came into our midst, from I don’t know where, a strange and toothless man. He was a farmer, like ourselves, he told us—and he was forever muttering low words between his empty gums.”

“The toothless villain again!” thought Peterkin.

“We gave him shelter for the night,” continued the old man with his writing. “But long before the moon was up, he had stolen off to the fields where the brooks were white in the darkness—up the steeps to where the waterfalls were splashing into quiet pools with a cheery murmur. He reached over the low banks, listening greedily to the music of the water. He knelt, bent his face close to the gurgling eddies—and began to drink!

“We were all in bed by now and most of us asleep. It was so easy to fall asleep in those good days, with the murmur of the softly playing brooklets in our ears—not at all like to-day, when night is a black stretch of silent terror.

“Suddenly, in every household, someone sat up straight in bed. In every household, someone had noticed that the sound of the water was growing fainter and fainter. First one brook and then another seemed to die down—as if it were suddenly drying up!

“We rushed out into the village square, across the fields, up the hills. The moon came out and showed us, gleaming bare, the dry and empty beds of many of our beloved brooks. Yes, nothing but dry, pebbled ruts, where no stream trickled and no water sang. Where was the villain who had worked this trick of tricks?