Moominpappa at Sea (13 page)

‘Did you hear that? Did you hear that?’ they shouted to each other. ‘He’s given it to his mother! To his mother! To his mother!’

They galloped towards him, brushing up against him. Their manes brushed his face like soft silky grass.

‘I can ask for it back! I can go and fetch it!’ he called into the darkness.

The moon came out again. He saw the sea-horses go into the sea side by side, their hair floating behind them. They were exactly alike. One of them turned her head and called distantly: ‘Another night…’

Moomintroll sat down on the sand. She had spoken to him. She had promised to come back. There would be moonlight for many nights to come if only it wasn’t cloudy. And he would make sure not to light the hurricane lamp.

He suddenly realized that his tail was freezing. He was sitting on the very spot where the Groke had sat.

The following night he went down to the beach without taking the hurricane lamp with him. The moon was on the wane now, the time when the sea-horses would soon go and play somewhere else. This he knew, and felt it instinctively.

Moomintroll had the silver horseshoe with him. It
hadn’t been an easy matter getting it back. He had blushed and behaved terribly awkwardly. Moominmamma had taken the horseshoe off its nail without asking why he wanted it.

‘I’ve rubbed it with silver-polish,’ she had said. ‘Look how nicely it’s come up!’

No more than that, and in quite an ordinary voice, too.

Moomintroll had muttered something about giving her something to replace it and taken himself off with his tail between his legs. He
couldn’t
explain about the sea-horse, he just couldn’t. If only he could find some shells. She would certainly like to have shells rather than a horseshoe. It would be a simple matter for the sea-horse to bring up a few of the largest and most beautiful from the bottom of the sea. That is, of course, if sea-horses cared about other people’s mothers. Perhaps it would be better not to ask.

She didn’t come.

The moon went down and no sea-horses came at all. Of course she had said ‘another night’ and not ‘tomorrow night’. Another night could be any night. Moomintroll sat and played with the sand and he was very sleepy.

And of course the Groke came. She came over the water in her cloud of cold like somebody’s bad conscience, and crept up the beach.

Moomintroll suddenly became incredibly angry.

He backed up to the alder bushes and shouted: ‘I’ve
no lamp for you! I’m not going to light it for you any more! You shouldn’t come here, this island belongs to my father!’ He walked away from her backwards, turned and started to run away. The aspens round him trembled and rustled as if there was going to be a storm. They knew that the Groke was on the island.

When he was back in his bed, he heard her howling, and it seemed much closer than before. ‘I hope she doesn’t come in here,’ he thought. ‘As long as the others don’t know she’s there. She carries on like a fog-horn… I know somebody who’ll say I’m being stupid, and that’s the worst thing of all.’

At the edge of the thicket Little My lay listening under a low-lying branch. She pulled the moss tightly round her and whistled thoughtfully. ‘Now he’s got himself into a nice mess. That’s what happens if you start making a fuss of the Groke and imagine you can be friends with a sea-horse.’

Then she suddenly remembered the ants and laughed heartily and loudly to herself.

ACTUALLY, Moominmamma hadn’t said anything terrible and certainly nothing that should have made Moominpappa feel annoyed. Nevertheless Moominpappa couldn’t for the life of him remember what she had said. It was something about the family having quite enough fish.

It had started by her not admiring the pike enough. They hadn’t got any scales, but anyone could see that it was a pike of over six pounds, well – five anyway. When one catches one perch after the other just because one wants to provide for one’s family, it’s quite an event to catch a pike. And then she had made that remark about having too much fish.

She had been sitting as usual by the window, drawing flowers on the window-sill. It was quite full of flowers all over. Suddenly Moominmamma had said, not
looking at anyone in particular, that she just didn’t know what to do with all the fish he caught. Or was it that they hadn’t any more jars to put them in? Or perhaps it was something about it being nice to have porridge for a change. Something like that anyway.

Moominpappa had put his fishing-rod in the corner and gone out for a walk along the edge of the water, but not near the fisherman’s point.

It was a cloudy and completely calm day. You could hardly see the surface of the water heaving in a slow swell after the east wind, and it was as grey as the sky and looked like silk. Some ducks were flying close to the water, very quickly and obviously going about their own business. Moominpappa walked with one paw on the rock and the other in the water, dragging his tail in the sea. The lighthouse-keeper’s hat was pulled down over his nose and he was wondering whether there would be a storm or not. A real storm. One would have to rush round saving things and making sure that the family wasn’t swept away. Then climb the lighthouse tower and see how strong the wind was… come down again and say: ‘The wind’s force thirteen. We must keep quite calm. There’s nothing to get worked up about…’

Little My was catching sticklebacks.

‘Why aren’t you fishing?’ she asked.

‘I’ve given up fishing,’ Moominpappa answered.

‘That must be a relief for you,’ Little My remarked. ‘You must have found it an awful bore after a while.’

‘You’re quite right!’ said Moominpappa, surprised. ‘It did become terribly boring. Why didn’t I notice it myself ?’

He went and sat on the lighthouse-keeper’s little ledge and thought: ‘I must do something different, something new. Something tremendous.’

But he didn’t know what it was he wanted to do. He was quite bewildered and confused. It reminded him of the time long ago when the Gafsan’s daughter had pulled the mat from under his feet. Or like sitting in the air next to a chair but not on it. No it wasn’t like that either. It was as if he had been taken in by something.

As he sat there looking at the silky-grey surface of the sea that seemed to refuse to work itself up into a storm, the feeling of being taken in by somebody or something got stronger and stronger. ‘Just you wait,’ he muttered to himself, ‘I’ll find out, I’ll get to the bottom of this…’ He didn’t know whether he meant the sea, the island or the black pool. Perhaps he meant the lighthouse or the lighthouse-keeper. In any case it sounded very menacing. He shook his perplexed head and went and sat by the black pool. There he continued to think, his nose in his paws. From time to time the breakers washed in over the threshold and disappeared in the black, mirror-like water.

‘This is where storms have washed in for hundreds of years,’ he thought. ‘Cork floats and pieces of bark and small sticks have been carried in by the waves and then carried out again, it must have happened like that many, many times… Until one day…’ Moominpappa lifted his nose and an extraordinary idea suddenly occurred to him.

‘Imagine if suddenly one day something really big
and heavy, something from a wreck, was swept in and sank there and stayed at the bottom for ever and ever!’

Moominpappa got up. Treasure trove, perhaps. A case of contraband whisky. The skeleton of a pirate. Anything! The whole pool might be full of the most incredible things!

He felt tremendously happy. He immediately became full of life. Something seemed to wake up inside him as if a steel spring had suddenly been released like a jack-in-the-box, setting him in motion. He rushed home, flew up the stairs two at a time, pushed open the door and shouted: ‘I’ve got an idea!’

‘You haven’t!’ exclaimed Moominmamma, who was standing by the stove. ‘Is it a good one?’

‘Of course it is,’ Moominpappa answered. ‘It’s a grand idea. Come and sit down and I’ll tell you all about it.’

Moominmamma sat down on one of the empty boxes and Moominpappa began to tell her all about his idea. When he had finished Moominmamma said: ‘Why, it’s incredible! Only you could have thought of something like that. There might be just anything down there!’

‘Exactly,’ said Moominpappa. ‘Just anything.’ They looked at each other and laughed. ‘When are you going to start looking?’ Moominmamma asked.

‘Immediately, of course,’ said Moominpappa. ‘I shall drag the pool thoroughly. But first I must find out how deep it is. We must try and get the boat into the pool. You see, if I try to haul everything up the cliff
face it might fall down again. And it’s very important to reach the middle of the pool. Obviously the best things are there.’

‘Don’t you want any help?’ Moominmamma asked.

‘Oh no,’ said Moominpappa. ‘This is a job that I must do. I must find a plumb-line…’ He went up the ladder, through the trap-door and into the lamp-room without giving the lamp a single thought and higher up to the loft above. After a while he came down again with a rope and asked: ‘Have you got anything I can use as a weight?’ Moominmamma rushed to the stove and gave him the iron.

‘Thanks,’ Moominpappa said, disappearing through the door. She heard him running down the stairs two at a time. Then all was quiet again.

Moominmamma sat down at the table and laughed. ‘How wonderful,’ she said. ‘What a relief!’

Moomintroll lay in his glade watching the birch leaves waving above him. They were turning yellow and looked more beautiful than ever.

He had made three separate entrances to his house: the front door, the kitchen door and an emergency door if he had to escape suddenly. He had patiently filled in the green walls of the house with plaited branches and he had made the glade his very own by doing it up for himself.

Moomintroll didn’t think about the ants any more. They had become a part of the ground beneath him. The smell of paraffin had disappeared, and new
flowers would grow where the old ones had died. He supposed that round the thicket there were thousands of happy little red ants enjoying the sugar. Everything was just right.

No, he was thinking about the sea-horses. Something had happened to him. He had become quite a different troll, with quite different thoughts. He liked being all by himself. It was much more exciting to play games in his imagination, to have thoughts about himself and the sea-horses, of the moonlight, and the Groke’s shadow was always in his thoughts, too. He knew she was sitting somewhere out there all the time. She howled at night, but it didn’t matter. Or so he thought.

He had collected all sorts of presents for the sea-horses. Beautiful pebbles and bits of glass, rubbed smooth by the sea until they looked like jewels. And some smooth copper weights which he had taken from the lighthouse-keeper’s drawer. He imagined what the sea-horse would say when he gave them to her, he had worked out all sorts of clever and poetic things to say to her.

He was waiting for the moon to come back.

Moominmamma had put everything they had brought with them from home in order long ago. There was no need for her to do much cleaning. Out here there was hardly any dust at all, and in any case one shouldn’t make too much fuss about cleaning. Preparing meals was easy, too, provided one did it in the most light-hearted
way possible. And so the days came to seem long in quite the wrong way.