KNOONIE IN THE SLEEPING PALACE

Just when the palace fell into its deep sleep, the porter’s son had run out to follow a swarm of bees which had flown over the fish-ponds into the woods lying outside the royal demesne. In the very minute after he had climbed the wood-pales, to the time when the shifty swarm came swinging its long bright tangle for home, calling on him to retrace his pursuit, sleep had clapped down like a great eyelid over the whole palace.

Knoonie made a clear leap over the palings into the royal clover; and then felt something hurting his heart, he could not know what or why, very strange, very frightening; it was like waking up all alone in the middle of a dark night, and feeling that something was standing quite still in the silence before him—quite still, because he himself had moved. He took one step forward, and at that sprang aside as if a snake were under him: his foot had made no sound in the clover! Then, thinking his ears must have deceived him, he tried once more. Ah! now it was so frightful that his courage went utterly: “Help, help!” he cried with all the force of his lungs: but his voice gave no sound. The dead silence that weighed on his struggles to cry, drove him wild with terror.

He set off running as if Death were after him: running like a blind thing; and knew nothing more till he fell half-stunned and bleeding into the gateway of the palace-courtyard.

He sprang, and tapped with his hand on the porter’s wicket. “Father, dear father, open quick!” he cried. But the words fell mute, and the wicket did not open. Then he began beating with his fists on the bronze panels, and, seizing hold of the knocker, battered for dear life. For dear life! But dear reason almost died in the attempt. The great bronze knocker beat without making a sound. He stopped his ears with his fingers to get rid of the stillness which was so terrible: and then at last he began to think that while in the wood he must have gone stone-deaf. But he was frightened; though he was deaf, others surely should hear him: again he beat and beat upon the knocker, throwing his whole weight upon it, and cried with the tears running down his face for his father to come to him.

Surely somebody must come. No, all was quite still as well as silent: nothing moved: everywhere it was the same. There was a sentry on guard over the gate: Knoonie could see his helmet and the top of his halbert shining in the sun. He cried to him to come down and let him in; but the man stood so still that he began to think he must truly have lost the power of speech as well as of hearing. He stooped down, and taking up a stone, threw it at the soldier to make him turn round; moving away from the wall so as to get a better aim, he was able to see more of him. The sentry stood very strangely; he must be asleep or sun-struck, for a small green paroquet had come and perched on his shoulder.

The fifth stone Knoonie threw (for fear had made his hand tremble) hit the soldier on the head; and yet he did not wake up, and the strange little paroquet remained as if stuffed and glued to its perch.

Then Knoonie, casting his eyes all round for anything to help, saw a new sight. All down the broad avenues of the park a movement was taking place from the earth upwards: it came nearer and nearer: it was like a green army on the march: it waved long prickly spears and many-pointed crests, and sent green things like lizards swarming into the high trees that stood in its way. Up and up, closer and higher to the very gates of the palace it came—a wall of thistles, magic in strength and stature, over-ranked by beetling heads of hemlock, and under-run by long snakey loops of bramble, that writhed in and out of the earth like huge worms.

“I must be dreaming!” thought Knoonie for a way out of his distress. “It’s all one horrid dream which will come to an end just as the worst thing happens.” But the giant thistles came crowding close, reaching hungry hands at him. He caught hold of the knocker, and dragging himself up was able in his terror to force open the wicket, and work his small body through, just as the first thistle caught him by the leg. He escaped shoeless and with all his hose torn into ribands from the knee. Inside he came upon his father, sitting in his accustomed niche, keys in hand, sitting quite still with head bent and closed eyes.

The child began to tremble and cry; he forgot any longer to think it was a dream; a remembrance like the touch of dead lips chilled his heart: the remembrance that while his father had been sitting there almost within reach of his hand, he, Knoonie, had cried and beaten with all his force upon the door, and had not been heard. He threw his arms round his father’s neck, and clinging close to the deaf face he loved: “Father, father,” he cried, “wake!” But his words had no sound, and the porter made no sound or stir.

Dead, dead! Knoonie threw up his hands, and trying vainly to utter one call for help, darted into the palace.

After a long time, he came out again with a white face, looking dazed into the sunlight: what was it he had seen in there? Beautiful lords and ladies, still as death, smiling and bending over golden plates and half-tasted wine; serving men who stood upright and still as death, carrying dishes and tilting out the wine into great tankards; and, over all, the yellow sunlight streaming in licked the dead faces as a beast licks carrion.

He ran tottering over the marble pavement, as fast as fear would send him; to get away out of the palace and fetch help for all these dead or dying people: for there must still be somebody left somewhere. But when he came to the porter’s lodge, there was a sight in the wicket that stopped him: the small square aperture was bulged through by thistle and bramble, in the midst of which his little shoe hung trussed and skewered; the hard grasp of the thistles had bent it out of shape, and the thorns of the bramble had cut into the leather like the steel teeth of a trap. Looking through, he could see nothing but one dense forest of thistles, made the more impassable by a thick mesh of creepers that clung about their stems. He climbed up on to the walls: everywhere was the same; those death’s heads of hemlock had grown higher than the trees of the park, and threw their shadows over the whole palace.

Slowly, the meaning of the horror which had first been so impossible for his mind to take in grew clear to his imagination. The sleeping palace, that whispered tale of his childhood, was embodied before him; and of all those who had heard it told, and laughed it lightly away because every day brought sameness of life to each sense, he alone was left awake to drink the full cup of this sleep of doom, he alone, amid others unconscious of their arrested life, with all the ways of knowledge closed from him by an overwhelming silence, he and he only must live and move, and endure this living tomb, till the Prince Rescuer should come, of whom the same tale gave promise. The great palace where he had been such a little thing at everybody’s beck and call, one for the grooms to tease, and for maids and serving-men to harry, was his own possession now, to do in what he would; but no joy came to him with this growing sense of a strange liberty. He went from place to place, tiptoeing at first, hardly daring to enter those grand chambers where the king and his great lords were sitting in state; but the lords-in-waiting stood making way for him with closed eyes; and he might see and touch and taste whatever he chose.

He went and stood behind great ladies, and stroked their shining hair, and touched their white wondrous throats, and the strong hands of the knights, the King’s even, with its gold signet ring; but there was no joy in any of these things. And when hunger came on him he put out his hand and helped himself from the King’s plate: yet though he had tasted no such delicacies in his life before, they gave him no pleasure now. He looked at all the beautiful ladies with their sweet-smiling lips, and remembered how he had thought that to be kissed by them would be almost death, so great must be the delight. Now he climbed up to the sweetest of them all, and tried to imagine her as the mother he had never known; yet when he kissed, and saw how the lips went smiling on, it was such bitterness that the tears burst from his eyes, and fell into the velvet lap of her dress. He caught up a napkin, “For when she wakes up she will see what a mess I have made and be angry,” he thought: then he remembered the hundred years, and cried still more.

At last, when it began to get dark, weary with sorrow, and drawn thither by a growing fear of his loneliness, he went back to the gate, and there, kissing him, lay down with his head on his father’s knee, and clinging to the hand that had hold of the keys of his prison, wept himself to sleep. Ah! how happy would he be if sleep would join his lot to theirs, and his eyes never open again till the whole day of deliverance was come. Alas! that the bees should have led him beyond reach of the charm which would have brought sleep, and only back to be enclosed in the impenetrable embrace of that thorny fastness.

The next day’s sun shone down and opened Knoonie’s eyes; and he rose up into the life-long silence that encompassed him; and, kissing his father’s face, went forth into the joyless splendours of his prison-house.

This day he climbed all the towers, and strained his eyes for a glimpse of the great unsleeping world beyond. But high and far the forest of thorns had stretched itself; and he could only see here and there the blue of the most distant hills through gaps of thicket.

Then he went down, and sought out all his old acquaintances, the stable-boys who played with him, the grooms who bullied, and the maids who teased. He came face to face with the terrible head-cook, who had so many times threatened to beat him to a jelly; now Knoonie could have boxed the tyrant’s head off, and no hand would be there to stay him; but he only stood and looked at the big grim face and the closed eyes, and longed hungrily for a blow from that coarse red fist.

He went on to the stables; and now who was there to forbid him his heart’s desire to climb on to the back of the King’s great charger, who stood sleeping with beautifully arched neck: yet when he had clambered his way up by the manger, it was no pride to him to be there: he only bowed his face down into the black mane and wept.

That same day he found the Princess sleeping in her chamber; oh! so beautiful she was with her little white hand laid on the spinning-wheel, a small prick of scarlet showing on the delicate skin. So beautiful she was, he dared not kiss her yet, for he did not know that anyone who could win entrance into the sleeping palace, could by kissing the Princess break the charm and gain her for his bride. Already more than one brave knight had entered that vast forest of thorns and thrown away his life in striving to get to those lips which were Knoonie’s for a little stooping. But he was a child and he did not understand.

The days went by, the weeks went by, and the child fell in with ever deepening sadness to the loneliness of his environment. His wistful face grew beautiful and pure in that still air, and the picture of courtly life that encircled his lent him an unconscious grace. Yet he stayed humble and sad, and every night, leaving beds of down and pillows of lace untouched, went back to kiss his father’s face and lie with his head on his knee. As for food, that great palace held stores which would suffice him through many lives; and during the magic sleep nothing changed or decayed: even the milk stayed fresh through the many years to come; a hundred shining pails of it standing in the king’s dairy.

The weeks, the months, even the years went by; but the child forgot the passing of time; and the less and less of a child, retained the child’s heart still, lonely and sad; with a child’s will and brain, with the memory of its childish prattle dying away, and no words or thoughts of a growing man to take its place; and amid that sleep of dreamless men, where even the thought of evil did not enter, his heart was left to him, gentle, simple, and pure.

Every night at his father’s knee Knoonie knelt and said his evening prayer, and slept well, with the porter’s hand in his. Years made his body fair and of a slender strength, and through the deep silence he grew tall. And he would go and look at the sweet-faced women, and wonder why he sighed, and why it was so sad to kiss their lips that smiled and yet cared nothing—so sad that as years went on he left off from that which seemed to put a double silence on his life, the pain being too keen for his heart. And then he would go and look at the Princess whose lips he had never kissed: and that seemed the saddest thing of all.

Still years went on, and his mild mute life bore him very slowly on to age: and still night by night, a young man once, and then a man in his full prime, and then a man with grey hair showing on his head, and then a man beginning to bend down with age, went and said his childish prayer, and kissed his father’s face, and slept with his head against his father’s knee.

Very gently had life cradled him to age when a hundred years came round: he had lost all knowledge or thought of speech, save that one form of daily use, and his silver-grey face was a reflection of the spirit that brooded over the sleeping palace.

The great day came when all the palace clocks, and the sounds of speech and laughter woke back to life. The thorns and thistles had disappeared, dropping a child’s shoe for luck over the palace threshold: the Prince had come and broken the spell. The cook was screaming that a hundred cats had been at the cream.

In a far-off corner of the palace Knoonie heard, and knew what these sounds meant, and his heart trembled for joy: but it was so very terrible! To him the pain, the bewilderment, the multitude of sights and sounds made this renewed life an agony past knowing; he was so giddy he could only creep hand over hand along the wall towards the gate where his father sat. Now his one thought was to see his father.

As he came under the archway, the porter took him by the shoulder roughly, and turned him out of doors. “We want no naked old mendicants here.”

Knoonie found no words to say; he just walked on and on, a beautiful bowed down old man, bespoken of none, until one night he knocked at a doorway in fairyland, and there with me found contentment and a home.

Printed in Great Britain by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.