When all was ready Artaxerxes said good-bye to the mer-king—rather coldly; and not even the mer-children seemed to mind very much, he had so often been busy, and occasions of the bubbles (like the one I told you about) had been rare. Some of his countless sisters-in-law tried to be polite, especially if Mrs Artaxerxes was there; but really everybody was impatient to see him going out of the gate, so that they could send a humble message to the Sea-serpent:
‘The regrettable wizard has departed and will return no more, Your Worship. Pray, go to sleep!’
Of course Mrs Artaxerxes went too. The mer-king had so many daughters that he could afford to lose one without much grief, especially the tenth eldest. He gave her a bag of jewels and a wet kiss on the doorstep and went back to his throne. But everybody else was very sorry, and especially Mrs Artaxerxes’ mass of mer-nieces and mer-nephews; and they were also very sorry to lose Roverandom too.
The sorriest of all and the most downcast was the merdog: ‘Just drop me a line whenever you go to the seaside,’ he said, ‘and I will pop up and have a look at you.’
‘I won’t forget!’ said Roverandom. And then they went.
The oldest whale was waiting. Roverandom sat on Mrs Artaxerxes’ lap, and when they were all settled on the whale’s back, off they started.
And all the people said: ‘Good-bye!’ very loud, and ‘A good riddance of bad rubbish’ quietly, but not too quietly; and that was the end of Artaxerxes in the office of Pacific and Atlantic Magician. Who has done their bewitchments for them since, I don’t know. Old Psamathos and the Man-in-the-Moon, I should think, have managed it between them; they are perfectly capable of it.
5
The whale landed on a quiet shore far, far away from the cove of Psamathos; Artaxerxes was most particular about that. There Mrs Artaxerxes and the whale were left, while the wizard (with Roverandom in his pocket) walked a couple of miles or so to the neighbouring seaside town to get an old suit and a green hat and some tobacco, in exchange for the wonderful suit of velvet (which created a sensation in the streets). He also purchased a bath-chair for Mrs Artaxerxes (you must not forget her tail).
‘Please, Mr Artaxerxes,’ began Roverandom once more, when they were sitting on the beach again in the afternoon. The wizard was smoking a pipe with his back against the whale, looking happier than he had done for a long while, and not at all busy. ‘What about my proper shape, if you don’t mind? And my proper size, too, please!’
‘O very well!’ said Artaxerxes. ‘I thought I might just have had a nap before getting busy; but I don’t mind. Let’s get it over! Where’s my—‘ And then he stopped short. He had suddenly remembered that he had burnt and thrown away all his spells at the bottom of the Deep Blue Sea.
He really was dreadfully upset. He got up and felt in his trouser-pockets, and his waistcoat-pockets, and his coat-pockets, inside and out, and he could not find the least bit of magic anywhere in any of them. (Of course not, the silly old fellow; he was so flustered he had even forgotten that it was only an hour or two since he had bought his suit in a pawnbroker’s shop. As a matter of fact it had belonged to, or at any rate had been sold by, an elderly butler, and he had gone through the pockets pretty thoroughly first.)
The wizard sat down and mopped his forehead with a purple handkerchief, looking thoroughly miserable again. ‘I really am very, very sorry!’ he said. ‘I never meant to leave you like this for ever and ever; but now I don’t see that it can be helped. Let it be a lesson to you not to bite the trousers of nice kind wizards!’
‘Ridiculous nonsense!’ said Mrs Artaxerxes. ‘Nice kind wizard, indeed! There is no nice or kind or wizard about it, if you don’t give the little dog back his shape and size at once—and what’s more I shall go back to the bottom of the Deep Blue Sea, and never come back to you again.’
Poor old Artaxerxes looked almost as worried as he did when the Sea-serpent was giving trouble. ‘My dear!’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry, but I went and put my very strongest anti-removal spell-preserver on the dog—after Psamathos began to interfere (drat him!) and just to show him that he can’t do everything, and that I won’t have sand-rabbit wizards interfering in my private bit of fun—and I quite forgot to save the antidote when I was clearing up down below! I used to keep it in a little black bag hanging on the door in my workshop.
‘Dear, dear me! I am sure you’ll agree that it was only meant to be a bit of fun,’ he said, turning to Roverandom, and his old nose got very large and red with his distress.
He went on saying ‘dear, dear, deary me!’ and shaking his head and beard; and he never noticed that Roverandom was not taking any notice, and the whale was winking. Mrs Artaxerxes had got up and gone to her luggage, and now she was laughing and holding out an old black bag in her hand.
‘Now stop waggling your beard, and get to business!’ she said. But when Artaxerxes saw the bag, he was too surprised for a moment to do anything but look at it with his old mouth wide open.
‘Come along!’ said his wife. ‘It is your bag, isn’t it? I picked it up, and several other little oddments that belonged to me, on the nasty rubbish heap you made in the garden.’ She opened the bag to peep inside, and out jumped the wizard’s magic fountain-pen wand, and also a cloud of funny smoke came out, twisting itself into strange shapes and curious faces.
Then Artaxerxes woke up. ‘Here, give it to me! You’re wasting it!’ he cried; and he grabbed Roverandom by the scruff of his neck, and popped him kicking and yapping into the bag, before you could say ‘knife’. Then he turned the bag round three times, waving the pen in the other hand, and—
‘Thank you! That’ll do nicely!’ he said, and opened the bag.
There was a loud bang, and lo! and behold! there was no bag, only Rover, just as he had always been before he first met the wizard that morning on the lawn. Well, perhaps not just the same; he was a bit bigger, as he was now some months older.
It is no good trying to describe how excited he felt, or how funny and smaller everything seemed, even the oldest whale; nor how strong and ferocious Rover felt. For just one moment he looked longingly at the wizard’s trousers; but he did not want the story to begin all over again, so, after he had run a mile in circles for joy, and nearly barked his head off, he came back and said ‘Thank you!’; and he even added ‘Very pleased to have met you’, which was very polite indeed.
‘That’s all right!’ said Artaxerxes. ‘And that’s the last magic I shall do. I’m going to retire. And you had better be getting home. I have no magic left to send you home with, so you’ll have to walk. But that won’t hurt a strong young dog.’
So Rover said good-bye, and the whale winked, and Mrs Artaxerxes gave him a piece of cake; and that was the last he saw of them for a long while. Long, long afterwards, when he was visiting a seaside place that he had never been to before, he found out what had happened to them; for they were there. Not the whale, of course, but the retired wizard and his wife.
They had settled in that seaside town, and Artaxerxes, taking the name of Mr A. Pam, had set up a cigarette and chocolate shop near the beach—but he was very, very careful never to touch the water (even fresh water, and that he found no hardship). A poor trade for a wizard, but he did at least try to clear up the nasty mess that his customers made on the beach; and he made a good deal of money out of ‘Pam’s Rock’, which was very pink and sticky. There may have been the least bit of magic in it, for children liked it so much they went on eating it even after they had dropped it in the sand.
But Mrs Artaxerxes, I should say Mrs A. Pam, made much more money. She kept bathing-tents and vans, and gave swimming lessons, and drove home in a bath-chair drawn by white ponies, and wore the mer-king’s jewels in the afternoon, and became very famous, so that no one ever alluded to her tail.
In the meanwhile, however, Rover is plodding down the country lanes and highways, going along following his nose, which is bound to lead him home in the end, as dogs’ noses do.
‘All the Man-in-
the-Moon’s dreams don’t come true, then—just as he said himself,’ thought Rover as he padded along. ‘This was evidently one that didn’t. I don’t even know the name of the place where the little boys live, and that’s a pity.’
The dry land, he found, was often as dangerous a place for a dog as the moon or the ocean, though much duller. Motor after motor racketed by, filled (Rover thought) with the same people, all making all speed (and all dust and all smell) to somewhere.
‘I don’t believe half of them know where they are going to, or why they are going there, or would know it if they got there,’ grumbled Rover as he coughed and choked; and his feet got tired on the hard, gloomy, black roads. So he turned into the fields, and had many mild adventures of the bird and rabbit sort in an aimless kind of way, and more than one enjoyable fight with other dogs, and several hurried flights from larger dogs.
And so at last, weeks or months since the tale began (he could not have told you which), he got back to his own garden gate. And there was the little boy playing on the lawn with the yellow ball! And the dream had come true, just as he had never expected!!
‘There’s Roverandom!!!’ cried little boy Two with a shout.
And Rover sat up and begged, and could not find his voice to bark anything, and the little boy kissed his head, and went dashing into the house, crying: ‘Here’s my little begging dog come back large and real!!!’
He told his grandmother all about it. How was Rover to know that he had belonged to the little boys’ grandmother all the while? He had only belonged to her a month or two, when he was bewitched. But I wonder how much Psamathos and Artaxerxes had known about it?
The grandmother (very surprised indeed as she was at her dog’s return looking so well and not motorsmashed or lorry-flattened at all) did not understand what on earth the little boy was talking about; though he told her all he knew about it very exactly, and over and over again. She gathered with a great deal of trouble (she was of course just the wee-est bit deaf) that the dog was to be called Roverandom and not Rover, because the Man-in-the-Moon said so (‘What odd ideas the child has, to be sure’); and that he belonged not to her after all but to little boy Two, because mummy brought him home with the shrimps (‘Very well, my dear, if you like; but I thought I bought him from the gardener’s brother’s son’).
I haven’t told you all their argument, of course; it was long and complicated, as it often is when both sides are right. All that you want to know is that he was called Roverandom after that, and he did belong to the little boy, and went back, when the boys’ visit to their grandmother was over, to the house where he had once sat on the chestof-drawers. He never did that again, of course. He lived sometimes in the country and sometimes, most of the time, in the white house on the cliff by the sea.
He got to know old Psamathos very well, never well enough to leave out the P, but well enough, when he was grown up to a large and dignified dog, to dig him up out of the sand and his sleep and have many and many a chat with him. Indeed Roverandom grew to be very wise, and had an immense local reputation, and had all sorts of other adventures (many of which the little boy shared).
But the ones I have told you about were probably the most unusual and the most exciting. Only Tinker says she does not believe a word of them. Jealous cat!
FARMER GILES OF HAM
Aegidii Ahenobarbi Julii Agricole de Hammo
Domini de Domito
Aule Draconarie Comitis
Regni Minimi Regis et Basilei
mira facinora et mirabilis exortus
or in the vulgar tongue
The Rise and Wonderful Adventures
of Farmer Giles, Lord of Tame
Count of Worminghall and
King of the Little Kingdom
FOREWORD
Of the history of the Little Kingdom few fragments have survived; but by chance an account of its origin has been preserved: a legend, perhaps, rather than an account; for it is evidently a late compilation, full of marvels, derived not from sober annals, but from the popular lays to which its author frequently refers. For him the events that he records lay already in a distant past; but he seems, nonetheless, to have lived himself in the lands of the Little Kingdom. Such geographical knowledge as he shows (it is not his strong point) is of that country, while of regions outside it, north or west, he is plainly ignorant.
An excuse for presenting a translation of this curious tale, out of its very insular Latin into the modern tongue of the United Kingdom, may be found in the glimpse that it affords of life in a dark period of the history of Britain, not to mention the light that it throws on the origin of some difficult place-names. Some may find the character and adventures of its hero attractive in themselves.
The boundaries of the Little Kingdom, either in time or space, are not easy to determine from the scanty evidence. Since Brutus came to Britain many kings and realms have come and gone. The partition under Locrin, Camber, and Albanac, was only the first of many shifting divisions. What with the love of petty independence on the one hand, and on the other the greed of kings for wider realms, the years were filled with swift alternations of war and peace, of mirth and woe, as historians of the reign of Arthur tell us: a time of unsettled frontiers, when men might rise or fall suddenly, and song-writers had abundant material and eager audiences. Somewhere in those long years, after the days of King Coel maybe, but before Arthur or the Seven Kingdoms of the English, we must place the events here related; and their scene is the valley of the Thames, with an excursion north-west to the walls of Wales.
The capital of the Little Kingdom was evidently, as is ours, in its south-east corner, but its confines are vague. It seems never to have reached far up the Thames into the West, nor beyond Otmoor to the North; its eastern borders are dubious. There are indications in a fragmentary legend of Georgius son of Giles and his page Suovetaurilius (Suet) that at one time an outpost against the Middle Kingdom was maintained at Farthingho. But that situation does not concern this story, which is now presented without alteration or further comment, though the original grandiose title has been suitably reduced to Farmer Giles of Ham.
FARMER GILES OF HAM
Ægidius de Hammo was a man who lived in the midmost parts of the Island of Britain. In full his name was Ægidius Ahenobarbus Julius Agricola de Hammo; for people were richly endowed with names in those days, now long ago, when this island was still happily divided into many kingdoms. There was more time then, and folk were fewer, so that most men were distinguished. However, those days are now over, so I will in what follows give the man his name shortly, and in the vulgar form: he was Farmer Giles of Ham, and he had a red beard. Ham was only a village, but villages were proud and independent still in those days.
Farmer Giles had a dog. The dog’s name was Garm. Dogs had to be content with short names in the vernacular: the Book-latin was reserved for their betters. Garm could not talk even dog-latin; but he could use the vulgar tongue (as could most dogs of his day) either to bully or to brag or to wheedle in. Bullying was for beggars and trespassers, bragging for other dogs, and wheedling for his master. Garm was both proud and afraid of Giles, who could bully and brag better than he could.
The time was not one of hurry or bustle. But bustle has very little to do with business. Men did their work without it; and they got through a deal both of work and of talk. There was plenty to talk about, for memorable events occurred very frequently. But at the moment when this tale begins nothing memorable had, in fact, happened in Ham for quite a long time. Which suited Farmer Giles down to the ground: he was a slow sort of fellow, rather set in his ways, and taken up with this own affairs. He had his hands full (he said) keeping the wolf from the door: that is, keeping himself as fat and comfortable as his father before him. The dog was busy helping him. Neither of them gave much thought to the Wide World outside their fields, the village, and the nearest market.
But the Wide World was there. The forest was not far off, and away west and north were the Wild
Hills, and the dubious marches of the mountain-country. And among other things still at large there were giants: rude and uncultured folk, and troublesome at times. There was one giant in particular, larger and more stupid than his fellows. I find no mention of his name in the histories, but it does not matter. He was very large, his walking-stick was like a tree, and his tread was heavy. He brushed elms aside like tall grasses; and he was the ruin of roads and the desolation of gardens, for his great feet made holes in them as deep as wells; if he stumbled into a house, that was the end of it. And all this damage he did wherever he went, for his head was far above the roofs of houses and left his feet to look after themselves. He was near-sighted and also rather deaf. Fortunately he lived far off in the Wild, and seldom visited the lands inhabited by men, at least not on purpose. He had a great tumbledown house away up in the mountains; but he had very few friends, owing to his deafness and his stupidity, and the scarcity of giants. He used to go out walking in the Wild Hills and in the empty regions at the feet of the mountains, all by himself.
One fine summer’s day this giant went out for a walk, and wandered aimlessly along, doing a great deal of damage in the woods. Suddenly he noticed that the sun was setting, and felt that his supper-time was drawing near; but he discovered that he was in a part of the country that he did not know at all and had lost his way. Making a wrong guess at the right direction he walked and he walked until it was dark night. Then he sat down and waited for the moon to rise. Then he walked and walked in the moonlight, striding out with a will, for he was anxious to get home. He had left his best copper pot on the fire, and feared that the bottom would be burned. But his back was to the mountains, and he was already in the lands inhabited by men. He was, indeed, now drawing near to the farm of Ægidius Ahenobarbus Julius Agricola and the village called (in the vulgar tongue) Ham.
Tales From the Perilous Realm Page 9