by M. R. James
VIII
WAG AT HOME
There was no scrambling up to the window-sill this time. My visitorsshot in like so many arrows, and "brought up" on their hands on thetablecloth, or lit on their feet on the top rail of a chair-back or onmy shoulder, as the fancy took them. It would be tedious to go throughall the congratulations and thanks which I offered, and indeed received,for it was important to them that the Jars should not get into wronghands.
"Father says," said Wag, who was sitting on a book, as usual--"Oh, whatfun it is to be able to fly again!" And he darted straight and level andbutted head first into the back of--Sprat, was it?--who was standingnear the edge of the table. Sprat was merely propelled into the air afoot or two off, and remained standing, but, of course, turned round andtold Wag what he thought of him. Wag returned contentedly to his book."Father says," he resumed, "he hopes you'll come and see us now. He saysyou did all right, and he's very glad the stuff got spilt, becausethey'll take moons and moons to get as much of it together again. Hesays they meant to squirt some of it on you when they got near enough,and while you were trying to get it off they'd have got hold of----" Hepointed to the box of jars; there was a shyness about mentioning it.
"Your father's very kind," I said, "and I hope you'll thank him from me;but I don't quite see how I'm to get into your house."
"Fancy you not knowing that!" said Wag. "I'll tell him you'll come." Andhe was out of the window. As usual, I had recourse to Slim.
"Why, you did put some on your chest, didn't you?" was Slim's question.
"Yes, but nothing came of it."
"Well, I believe you can go pretty well anywhere with that, if you thinkyou can."
"Can I fly, then?"
"No, I should say not; I mean, if you couldn't fly before, you can'tnow."
"How do you fly? I don't see any wings."
"No, we never have wings, and I'm rather glad we don't; the things thathave them are always going wrong somehow. We just work it in the properway with our backs, and there you are; like this." He made a slightmovement of his shoulders, and was standing in the air an inch off thetable. "You never tried that, I suppose?" he went on.
"No," I said, "only in dreams," which evidently meant nothing to him."Well now," I said, "do you tell me that if I went to Wag's house now,I could get inside it? Look at the size I am!"
"It doesn't look as if you could," he agreed, "but my father said justthe same as Wag's father about it."
Here Wag shot on to my shoulder. "Are you coming?"
"Yes, if I knew how."
"Well, come and try, anyhow."
"Very well, as you please; anything to oblige."
I picked up a hat and went downstairs. All the rest followed, if you cancall it following, when there was at least as much flying up steps andin and out of banisters as going down. When we were out on the path, Wagsaid with more seriousness than usual:
"Now you do mean to come into our house, don't you?"
"Certainly I do, if you wish me to."
"Then that's all right. This way. There's Father."
We were on the grass now, and very long it was, and nice and wet Ithought I should be with all the dew. As I looked up to see the elderWag I very nearly fell over a large log which it was very careless ofanyone to have left about. But here was Mr. Wag within a yard of me, andto my extreme surprise he was quite a sizeable man of middle height,with a sensible, good-humoured face, in which I could see a stronglikeness to his son. We both bowed, and then shook hands, and Mr. Wagwas very complimentary and pleasant about the occurrences of theevening.
"We've pretty well got the mess cleared up, you see. Yes, don't bealarmed," he went on, and took hold of my elbow, for he had, no doubt,seen a bewildered look in my eyes. The fact was, as I suppose you havemade out, not that he had grown to my size, but that I had come down tohis. "Things right themselves; you'll have no difficulty about gettingback when the time comes. But come in, won't you?"
You will expect me to describe the house and the furniture. I shall not,further than to say that it seemed to me to be of a piece with thefashion in which the boys were dressed; that is, it was like my idea ofa good citizen's house in Queen Elizabeth's time; and I shall notdescribe Mrs. Wag's costume. She did not wear a ruff, anyhow.
Wag, who had been darting about in the air while we walked to his home,followed us in on foot. He now reached up to my shoulder. Slim, who camein too, was shorter.
"Haven't you got any sisters?" I took occasion to say to Wag.
"Of course," said he; "don't you see 'em? Oh! I forgot. Come out, yousillies!"
Upon which there came forward three nice little girls, each of whom wasputting away something into a kind of locket which she wore round herneck. No, it is no use asking me what _their_ dresses were like; noneat all. All I know is that they curtsied to me very nicely, and thatwhen we all sat down the youngest came and put herself on my knee as ifit was a matter of course.
"Why didn't I see you before?" I asked her.
"I suppose because the flowers were in our hair."
"Show him what you mean, my dear," said her father. "He doesn't know ourways yet."
Accordingly she opened her locket and took out of it a small blueflower, looking as if it was made of enamel, and stuck it in her hairover her forehead. As she did so she vanished, but I could still feelthe weight of her on my knee. When she took it out again (as no doubtshe did) she became visible, put it back in the locket, and smiledagreeably at me. Naturally, I had a good many questions to ask aboutthis, but you will hardly expect me to put them all down. Becominginvisible in this way was a privilege which the girls always had tillthey were grown up, and I suppose I may say "came out." Of course, ifthey presumed on it, the lockets were taken away for the timebeing--just in the same way as the boys were sometimes stopped fromflying, as we have seen. But their own families could always see them,or at any rate the flowers in their hair, and they could always see eachother.
But dear me! how much am I to tell of the conversation of that evening?One part at least: I remembered to ask about the pictures of the thingsthat had happened in former times in places where I chanced to be. Was Iobliged to see them, whether they were pleasant or horrible? "Oh no,"they said; if you shut your eyes from below--that meant pushing up thelower eyelids--you would be rid of them; and you would only beginseeing them, either if you wanted to, or else if you left your mindquite blank, and were thinking of nothing in particular. Then they wouldbegin to come, and there was no knowing how old they might be; thatdepended on how angry or excited or happy or sad the people had been towhom they happened.
And that reminds me of another thing. Wag had got rather fidgety whilewe were talking, and was flying up to the ceiling and down again, andwalking on his hands, and so forth, when his mother said:
"Dear, do be quiet. Why don't you take a glass and amuse yourself withit? Here's the key of the cupboard."
She threw it to him and he caught it and ran to a tall bureau oppositeand unlocked it. After humming and flitting about in front of it for alittle time, he pulled a thing like a slate off a shelf where there werea large number of them.
"What have you got?" said his mother.
"The one I didn't get to the end of yesterday, about the dragon."
"Oh, that's a very good one," said she. "I used to be very fond ofthat."
"I liked it awfully as far as I got," he said, and was betaking himselfto a settle on the other side of the room when I asked if I might seeit, and he brought it to me.
It was just like a small looking-glass in a frame, and the frame had oneor two buttons or little knobs on it. Wag put it into my hand and thengot behind me and put his chin on my shoulder.
"That's where I'd got to," he said; "he's just going out through theforest."
I thought at the first glance that I was looking at a very good copy ofa picture. It was a knight on horseback, in plate-armour, and the armourlooked as if it had really seen service. The horse was a massive whitebeast, ra
ther of the cart-horse type, but not so "hairy in the hoof";the background was a wood, chiefly of oak-trees; but the undergrowthwas wonderfully painted. I felt that if I looked into it I should seeevery blade of grass and every bramble-leaf.
"Ready?" said Wag, and reached over and moved one of the knobs. Theknight shook his rein, and the horse began to move at a foot-pace.
"Well, but he can't _hear_ anything, Wag," said his father.
"I thought you wanted to be quiet," said Wag, "but we'll have it aloudif you like."
He slid aside another knob, and I began to hear the tread of the horseand the creaking of the saddle and the chink of the armour, as well as arising breeze which now came sighing through the wood. Like a cinema,you will say, of course. Well, it was; but there was colour and sound,and you could hold it in your hand, and it wasn't a photograph, but thelive thing which you could stop at pleasure, and look into every detailof it.
Well, I went on reading, as you may say, this glass. In a theatre, youknow, if you saw a knight riding through a forest, the effect would bemanaged by making the scenery slide backwards past him; and in a cinemait could all be shortened up by increasing the pace or leaving out partof the film. Here it was not like that; we seemed to be keeping pace andgoing along with the knight. Presently he began to sing. He had a loudvoice and uttered his words crisply, so that I had no difficulty inmaking out the song. It was about a lady who was very proud and haughtyto him and would have nothing to say to his suit, and it declared thatthe only thing left for him was to lay himself down under a tree. But heseemed quite cheerful about it, and indeed neither his complexion northe glance of his eye gave any sign that he was suffering the pangs ofhopeless love.
Suddenly his horse stopped short and snorted uneasily. The knight leftoff singing in the middle of a verse, looked earnestly into the wood atthe back of the picture, and then out towards us, and then behind him.He patted his horse's neck, and then, humming to himself, put on hisgauntlets, which were hanging at his saddle bow, managed somehow tolatch or bolt the fastenings of them, slipped down his visor, and tookthe hilt of his sword in one hand and the sheath in the other andloosened the blade in the sheath. He had hardly done this when the horseshied violently and reared; and out of the thicket on the near side ofthe road (I suppose) something shot up in front of him on the saddle. Weall drew in our breath.
"Don't be frightened, dear," said Mrs. Wag to the youngest girl, who hadgiven a sort of jump. "He's quite safe this time."
I must say it did not look like it. The beast that had leapt on to thesaddle was tearing with its claws, drawing back its head and driving itforward again with horrid force against the visor, and was at suchclose quarters that the knight could not possibly either draw or use hissword. It was a horrible beast, too; evidently a young dragon. As it saton the saddle-bow, its head was just about on a level with the knight's.It had four short legs with long toes and claws. It clung to the saddlewith the hind feet and tore with the fore feet, as I said. Its head wasrather long, and had two pointed ears and two small sharp horns.Besides, it had bat wings, with which it buffeted the knight, but itstail was short. I don't know whether it had been bitten or cut off insome previous fight. It was all of a mustard-yellow colour. The knightwas for the moment having a bad time of it, for the horse was plungingand the dragon doing its very worst. The crisis was not long, though.The knight took hold of the right wing with both hands and tore themembrane upwards to the root, like parchment. It bled yellow blood, andthe dragon gave a grating scream. Then he clutched it hard by the neckand managed to wrench it away from its hold on the saddle; and when itwas in the air, he whirled its body, heavy as it was, first over hisback and then forwards again, and its neck-bone, I suppose, broke, forit was quite limp when he cast it down. He looked down at it for alittle, and seeing it stir, he got off, with the rein over his arm, drewhis sword, cut the head off, and kicked it away some yards. The nextthing he did was to push up his visor, look upward, mutter something Icould not well hear, and cross himself; after which he said aloud,"Where man finds one of a brood, he may look for more," mounted, turnedhis horse's head and galloped off the way he had come.
We had not followed him far through the wood when--
"Bother!" said Wag, "there's the bell"; and he reached over and slidback the knobs in the frame, and the knight stopped.
I was full of questions, but there was no time to put them. Good-nightshad to be said quickly, and Father Wag saw me out of the front door.
I set out on what seemed a considerable walk across the rough grasstowards the enormous building in which I lived. I suppose I did notreally take many minutes about getting to the path; and as I stepped onto it--rather carefully, for it was a longish way down--why, without anyshock or any odd feeling, I was my own size again. And I went to bedpondering much upon the events of the day.
* * * * *
Well, I began this communication by saying that I was going to explainto you how it was that I "heard something from the owls," and I think Ihave explained how it is that I am able to say that I have done so.Exactly what it was that you and I were talking about when I mentionedthe owls, I dare say neither of us remembers. As you can see, I havehad more exciting experiences than merely conversing withthem--interesting, and, I think, unusual as that is. I have not, ofcourse, told you nearly all there is to tell, but perhaps I have saidenough for the present. More, if you should wish it, another time.
As to present conditions. To-day there is a slight coolness between Wispand the cat. He made his way into a mouse-hole which she was watching,and enticed her close up to it by scratchings and other sounds, andthen, when she came quite near (taking great trouble, of course, to makeno noise whatever), he put his head out and blew in her face, whichaffronted her very much. However, I believe I have persuaded her that hemeant no harm.
The room is rather full of them to-night. Wag and most of the rest arerehearsing a play which they mean to present before I go. Slim, whohappens not to be wanted for a time, is manoeuvring on the table,facing me, and is trying to produce a portrait of me which shall be alittle less libellous than his first effort. He has just now shown methe final production, with which he is greatly pleased. I am not.
Farewell. I am, with the usual expressions of regard,
Yours, M (or N).