Moominpappa at Sea

by Tove Jansson

  ‘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.

  And she didn’t want to do the puzzle because it reminded her that she was so much alone.

  One day she started to collect wood. She picked up every little stick she found, until the beach was clean of everything the sea had washed up. Gradually she had gathered together a large pile of logs and bits of plank. The nice thing about it was that she had tidied up the island at the same time; it made her feel as though the island was like a garden that could be cleaned up and made to look beautiful.

  She carried everything herself to a place she had chosen to the leeward of the lighthouse-rock. There she had nailed together a horse for sawing the wood on. It was a little crooked, but it worked all right if she held the right side with her paw.

  Moominmamma sawed and sawed in the mild, overcast weather. She measured every bit so that they were all exactly the same size and arranged them neatly in a half-circle round her. The wall of wood round her grew higher and higher, until she stood there sawing in an enclosed space all her own that gave her a lovely feeling of security. She stacked the dry sticks by the stove, but she didn’t have the heart to tackle the really big logs. But she had never been particularly good at wielding an axe.

  Close by the place where she piled the wood there was growing a little mountain-ash, to which she became very attached. It was covered with red berries, lots and lots of them for such a little tree. She collected the best bits of wood under this tree. Moominmamma knew a lot about trees; she knew what oak was and jacaranda; she recognized balsam and Oregon pine and mahogany. They all had a different smell, felt different to the touch. They had all reached her after a long, long journey.

  ‘Jacaranda and palisanda,’ murmured Moominmamma to herself, deeply satisfied, and went on sawing.

  The others had got used to Moominmamma sawing, and they could see less and less of her behind her wall of wood. In the beginning Moominpappa had been very upset and had wanted to collect the wood himself. But Moominmamma had got angry and said: ‘This job’s mine. I want to play too!’ And she went on sawing and sawing, going round the island every morning, looking for fresh pieces of wood.

  One grey, absolutely calm, morning Moominmamma found a shell on the beach. It was a big conch shell, pink inside and pale brown with dark spots outside.

  Moominmamma was both pleased and surprised. It was lying high up on the beach although the water hadn’t come so far for a week. A little farther off she found a white one, the kind one puts round borders in a garden. As a matter of fact, there were shells all over the beach, large ones and small ones, and the most remarkable thing was that on one of them she read ‘A present from the seaside’, written on it in tiny red letters.

  Moominmamma was even more surprised, and began to collect them all in her apron. Then she went to show them to Moominpappa, who was busy dragging the black pool.

  He lay with his nose over the side of the boat, looking very small from the top of the cliff. The boat was drifting, with the oars trailing in the water.

  ‘Come and look!’ Moominmamma called.

  Moominpappa rowed over to the side of the pool.

  ‘Look! Real shells!’ Moominmamma said. ‘I found them high up on the beach, and there were none there yesterday at all!’

  ‘That’s very strange,’ said Moominpappa, knocking his pipe out on the rock. ‘One of the mysteries of the sea. Sometimes I’m quite fascinated when I think of the way the sea behaves in such a mysterious way. You say they were lying high up on the beach and weren’t there yesterday? Well, that must mean that the sea can rise a whole yard in a few hours and then fall again, although we don’t have the tides here that they do further south. Very interesting, very interesting indeed! And the inscription on this one – well, it opens up limitless possibilities.’ He looked at Moominmamma very seriously. ‘You know, it’s things like this I must get really worked out and perhaps write a book about. Everything to do with the sea, and I mean the real sea. I must find out all I can about the sea. Jetties and paths and fishing are for small-minded people who don’t care about the really big things.’ He repeated very solemnly, ‘the really big things’, it sounded most impressive. ‘It’s this black pool which has made me think of all this.’

  ‘Is it deep?’ Moominmamma asked, opening her eyes wide.

  ‘Very deep,’ Moominpappa said. ‘The plumb-line hardly reaches to the bottom. Yesterday I hauled up this metal canister, which proves my theories are right.’

  Moominmamma nodded. After a while she said: ‘Well, perhaps I’ll go and put these shells in the garden.’

  Moominpappa didn’t answer. He was lost in profound thoughts and speculation.

  *

  At about the same time, Moomintroll was burning a box, which had been stripped of all its shells, in Moominmamma’s stove. It wasn’t worth keeping now that he had taken all the shells off. He had found it in the bottom drawer of the desk, the one Moominmamma hadn’t wanted to touch because it obviously contained the lighthouse-keeper’s most personal belongings.

  *

  The metal canister was rusty and broken, and had probably never had anything more interesting than turpentine or oil in it. But it was a proof. The black pool was the place where the sea hid things, things it wanted to keep secret. Moominpappa was convinced with a desperate certainty that at the bottom of all these secrets were waiting for him. And there might be just anything down there. He thought that if he could only get everything up he would understand the sea, everything would fall into place. He felt he would fit in, too.

  So Moominpappa went on dragging with dogged determination in the middle of the pool and lowering the plumb-line again and again. He had called the centre of the pool ‘the unfathomable depths’. ‘The Unfathomable Depths,’ he whispered to himself, and felt his spine tingle with the magic o
f the phrase.

  Most of the time, the line stopped at different depths. But it could also go down and down without touching the bottom however hard he tried to make it reach. The whole boat was full of tangled lines: the washing line, fishing lines, the anchor rope, and every little bit of rope he had been able to lay his paws on, and all really meant to be used for an entirely different purpose, but then that’s what always happens with rope.

  Moominpappa had worked out a theory that the pool was really a hole leading down to the centre of the earth, it was the crater of an extinct volcano. Finally, he started to write his speculations in an old exercise-book he had found in the loft. Some of the pages of this exercise-book were full of the lighthouse-keeper’s notes, small words with long spaces in between them, looking as if a spider had crawled over the paper.

  ‘Libra is in the ascendant, the moon has entered the seventh house,’ Moominpappa read, ‘Saturn is in conjunction with Mars.’ Perhaps the lighthouse-keeper had had visitors on the island after all. That had certainly cheered him up. The rest of it was mostly figures which he didn’t understand at all. He turned the book round and started writing at the other end. Most of the time he drew plans of the black pool, some in section and some bird’s-eye view, and became completely absorbed in complicated calculations and explanations of perspective.

  Moominpappa didn’t talk so much about his investigations any more. By and by he stopped dragging. Instead, he sat on the lighthouse-keeper’s ledge just thinking. Sometimes he made some notes about the pool or the sea in the exercise-book.

  He might write: ‘sea-currents are strange and wonderful things to which no one has devoted proper attention’, or ‘the movement of waves is something that will always amaze us’… and then he would drop the exercise-book and lose himself in an endless perspective of profound thoughts.

  Fog was stealing over the island. It had crept in over the sea without anybody realizing it was coming. All of a sudden everything was wrapped in pale-grey mist, and the lighthouse-keeper’s ledge seemed to be floating, lonely and deserted, in a woolly void.

  Moominpappa liked hiding himself in the fog. He slept a little – until a gull screamed and he woke up with a start. He got up and went on strolling round the island, brooding helplessly over currents and winds, the origin of the rain and of storms, and deep holes in the bottom of the sea that no one could fathom.

  Moominmamma saw him emerging from the fog and disappearing again, his nose resting on his stomach, and lost in thought. ‘He’s collecting material,’ she thought. ‘Or so he said. Perhaps his exercise-book is full of material. It will be a relief when he’s finished!’

  She counted out five sweets and put them on a saucer. Then she went and put them on the ledge in the cliff to cheer him up.

  *

  Moomintroll lay in the undergrowth looking intently down into a little pool. He dipped the horseshoe in the clear, brown water and watched it turn gold. He could see branches and blades of grass reflected in the water; a very small, upside-down landscape. The twigs stood out very clearly against the fog, and even the tiniest little creature running up and down could be seen.

  Moomintroll felt a desperate need to talk to someone about the sea-horse. Just to describe what she looked like. Or just to talk about sea-horses in general.

  Now there were two creepy-crawlies on the same twig. He touched the surface of the water and the miniature landscape vanished. He got up and strolled towards the thicket. Right on the edge of it there was a small beaten track in the moss. ‘This is probably where Little My lives,’ he thought. He could hear a rustling sound. She was at home.

  Moomintroll took a step forward. The dangerous desire to confide in someone was like a lump sticking in his throat. He bent down and crept in under the branches. There she sat, rolled up like a tiny ball.

  ‘You’re in, I see,’ he said rather stupidly. He sat down in the moss and stared at her.

  ‘What are you holding in your paw?’ Little My asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ answered Moomintroll, and so ruined his opening gambit. ‘I just happened to be passing.’

  ‘Huh!’ said Little My.

  He looked first this way and then that in order to avoid her critical gaze. There was her raincoat hanging on a twig. And a cup with prunes and raisins in it. A bottle of fruit juice…

  Moomintroll jumped up and leant forward. Further in under the branches the ground was flat with smooth pine-needles, and as far as his eyes could reach in the fog he saw rows of tiny little crosses. They were made of broken sticks and bound together with twine. ‘What have you done?’ he cried.

  ‘Do you think this is where I bury all my enemies?’ said Little My, much amused. ‘Those are birds’ graves. Someone’s buried dozens of them in there.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Moomintroll asked.

  ‘I’ve looked,’ said Little My. ‘Small white skeletons, just like the one we found by the lighthouse the first day we were here. You remember, “The Revenge of the Forgotten Bones”.’

  ‘It must have been the lighthouse-keeper,’ said Moomintroll.

  Little My nodded, and her tight little knot of hair shook.

  ‘They must have flown into the light,’ Moomintroll said slowly. ‘It’s what birds do… And killed themselves. Perhaps the lighthouse-keeper picked them up every morning. And then one day he got fed up with it, put the light out and went away. How frightful!’ he cried.

  ‘It’s a long time ago,’ said Little My, yawning. ‘The light’s out now anyway.’

  Moomintroll looked at her and wrinkled his nose.

  ‘You shouldn’t feel so sorry for everything,’ she said. ‘Now run away. I’m going to take a nap.’

  When Moomintroll emerged from the thicket he opened his paw and looked at the horseshoe. He had said nothing about the little sea-horse. She was still his own.

  *

  There was no moon and the hurricane lamp wasn’t lit, but all the same Moomintroll went down to the beach. He couldn’t stop himself somehow. He had the horseshoe and the presents with him.

  His eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and he saw the sea-horse as she came out of the fog like an unreal creature in a story. He put the horseshoe down on the beach, hardly daring to breathe.

  The shadowy form came nearer with small prancing steps. She stepped into her shoe in the absent-minded sort of way that ladies do, and stood there waiting for the shoe to fix itself firmly and start growing to her again with her head turned away from him.

  ‘I like your fringe,’ said Moomintroll softly. ‘A friend of mine has got one too. Perhaps she’ll come and stay some day… I think you’d like lots of my friends.’

  The little sea-horse’s silence showed she wasn’t interested.

  Moomintroll tried again. ‘Islands at night are so beautiful. This is Pappa’s island, but I don’t know if we shall live here all our lives. Sometimes I think that the island doesn’t like us. The most important thing is that it should like Pappa…’

  She wasn’t listening. She didn’t want to know about his family.

  Then Moomintroll spread out his presents for her on the sand. The sea-horse came a little closer and sniffed them, but still she said nothing.

  At last he found something to say. ‘You dance beautifully.’

  ‘Do you think so? Do you?’ she said. ‘Have you been waiting for me? Have you really? You didn’t expect me, did you?’

  ‘Have I waited for you!’ exclaimed Moomintroll. ‘I waited and waited and was so worried when it was so rough out there… I want to protect you from all danger! I have my own little nest and I have hung up your picture there. It’s the only thing that I shall hang there…’

  The sea-horse listened attentively.

  ‘You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,’ Moomintroll went on, and just then the Groke began to howl.

  There she was, sitting out there in the fog, howling for the lamp.

  The little horse reared, and was gone, leaving beh
ind her little pearls of laughter. A whole string of pearls followed her as she capered into the sea again.

  The Groke came shuffling out of the fog towards where Moomintroll was standing. He turned and ran. But tonight the Groke didn’t stop on the beach. She followed Moomintroll over the island, through the heather and right up to the lighthouse-rock. He could see her moving like a great grey shadow and then stop and crouch under the rock to wait.

  Moomintroll slammed the door behind him and ran up the winding staircase with his heart in his stomach – it had happened: the Groke had come right on to the island!

  Moominmamma and Moominpappa hadn’t woken up and the room was quite quiet. But he could feel an uneasy feeling coming through the window as the island murmured in its sleep and turned over. He heard the poplar leaves rustle with fright and the gulls started to screech.

  ‘Can’t you sleep?’ Moominmamma asked.

  Moomintroll closed the window.

  ‘I woke up,’ he said, and crept into bed. His nose was stiff with cold.

  ‘It’s getting colder,’ said Moominmamma. ‘It’s a good thing I sawed up all those logs. Are you cold?’

  ‘No,’ said Moomintroll.

  She was sitting there freezing just below the lighthouse. She was so cold that the ground under her turned to ice… There it was again. It crept up and he couldn’t shake it off. It was so easy to imagine somebody who could never get warm, somebody nobody liked, who destroyed everything wherever she went. It wasn’t fair. Why should he have the Groke round his neck all the time, no one else had? You just couldn’t help her to get warm!

  ‘Are you unhappy about something?’ Moominmamma asked.

  ‘No,’ answered Moomintroll.

  ‘Well, it’ll be another nice long day tomorrow,’ said Moominmamma. ‘And it’s all yours from beginning to end. Now isn’t that a lovely thought!’