“Now the days and the weeks went on again, and I
dreamed that John had little peace either by day or night for thinking of the
rules and the black hole full of snakes.
At first he tried very hard to keep them all, but when it came to
bed-time he always found that he had broken far more than he had kept: and the
thought of the horrible tortures to which the good, king Landlord would put him
became such a burden that the next day he would become quite reckless and break
as many as he possibly could; for oddly enough this eased his mind for the
moment. But then after a few days the
fear would return and this time it would be worse than before because of the
dreadful number of rules that he had broken during the interval. But what puzzled him most at this time was a
discovery which he made after the rules had been hanging in his bedroom for two
or three nights: namely, that on the other side of the card, on the back, there
was quite a different set of rules.
There were so many that he never read them all through and he was always
finding new ones. Some of them were very
like the rules on the front of the card, but most of them were just the
opposite. Thus whereas the front of the
card said that you must be always examining yourself to see how many rules you
had broken, the back of the card began like this:
Rule I: --Put the whole thing out of your head
The
moment you get into bed.
Or again, whereas the front said that you must
always go and ask you elders what the rule about a certain thing was, if you
were in the least doubt, the back said:
Rule 2: --Unless they saw you do it,
Keep
quiet or else you’ll rue it.
And so on.
And now I dreamed that John went out one morning and tried to play in
the road and to forget his troubles; but the rules kept coming back into his
head so that he did not make much of it.
However, he went on always a few yards further till suddenly he looked
up and saw that he was so far away from home that he was in a part of the road
he had never seen before. Then came the
sound of a musical instrument, from behind it seemed, very sweet and very
short, as if it were one plucking of a string or one note of a bell, and after
it a full, clear voice—and it sounded so high and strange that he thought it
was very far away, further than a star. The
voice said, Come. Then John saw that
there was a stone wall beside the road in that part: but it had (what he had
never seen in a garden wall before) a window.
There was no glass in the window and no bars; it was just a square hole
in the wall. Through it he saw a green
wood full of primroses: and he remembered suddenly how he had gone into another
wood to pull primroses, as a child, very long ago—so long that even in the
moment of remembering the memory seemed still out of reach. While he strained to grasp it, there came to
him from beyond the wood a sweetness and a pang so piercing that instantly he
forgot his father’s house, and his mother, and the fear of the Landlord, and
the burden of the rules.”
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