The Festival
“Efficiunt daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda hominibus exhibeant.”—Lactantius.
I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me.In the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it layjust over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against theclearing sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathershad called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through theshallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up towhere Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancienttown I had never seen but often dreamed of.
It was the Yuletide, which men call Christmas, though they know intheir hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older thanMemphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last tothe ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival inthe elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they hadcommanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that thememory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine were an oldpeople, old even when this land was settled three hundred yearsbefore. And they were strange, because they had come as dark,furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spokenanother tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyedfishers. And now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals ofmysteries that none living could understand. I was the only one whocame back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, foronly the poor and the lonely remember.
Then beyond the hill’s crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily inthe gloaming; snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples,ridgepoles and chimneypots, wharves and small bridges, willow treesand graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crookedstreets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst nottouch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at allangles and levels like a child’s disordered blocks; antiquityhovering on gray wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrelroofs. And against the rotting wharves the sea pounded; thesecretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in theelder time.
Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak andwindswept, and I saw that it was a burying-ground where blackgravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayedfingernails of a gigantic corpse. The printless road was verylonely, and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible creakingas of a gibbet in the wind. They had hanged four kinsmen of mine forwitchcraft in 1692, but I did not know just where.
As the road wound down the seaward slope I listened for the merrysounds of a village at evening, but did not hear them. Then Ithought of the season, and felt that these old Puritan folk mightwell have Christmas customs strange to me, and full of silenthearthside prayer. So after that I did not listen for merriment orlook for wayfarers, but kept on down past the hushed, lightedfarmhouses and shadowy stone walls to where the signs of ancientshops and sea taverns creaked in the salt breeze, and the grotesqueknockers of pillared doorways glistened along deserted, unpavedlanes in the light of little, curtained windows.
I had seen maps of the town, and knew where to find the home of mypeople. It was told that I should be known and welcomed, for