She was sitting in a rowan tree just before dusk, he answered. But I knew that Fanny didn’t really like climbing trees and that he was just trying to impress me. So I didn’t say anything and just let him be. It was nice to have someone’s company. When he noticed that I didn’t feel like talking he played for me a while. It was icy cold in the grotto and I decided to leave as soon as he had finished playing. So after the last verse I said: that was an agreeable visit. But I’m afraid I shall have to leave. How are things at home?
Fine, he answered. My wife has just had quintuplets. All of them girls.
I congratulated him and went on my way.
When the sun rises in the first bay the water is in the shade of the forest but at the entrance to the bay the rocks are red. The seaweed only shines in the evening. You walk and walk and walk and the morning wind begins to get up. The second bay is full of reeds and when the wind blows through them they rustle, and swish and sigh and whisper and whine softly and gently and you go right into the reeds and they brush you on all sides and you go on and on, thinking of nothing at all. The reeds are a jungle that goes on and on right to the end of the earth. The face of the earth is covered by nothing but whispering reeds and all human beings have died and I am the only one left and I just walk on and on through the reeds.
I walk for such a long time that I become tall and thin like a reed and my hair becomes its soft feathery panicle until in the end I take root and begin to swish and rush and sigh like all my reed sisters and time becomes endless.
But in the bay sat a great big pilot who said: ha! ha! ha! ha! The wind is turning westerly I wouldn’t be surprised. He had a red moustache and blue eyes and was wearing pilot’s uniform and had at last noticed me.
I was trembling with joy and answered: force nine I should think, if not more. Would you like a little snorter?
Well, no one likes to see good stuff going begging, he answered, and held out his glass.
I filled it five times.
And what do you think of the pike? he went on.
They’ll rise, I said. If this wind holds …
He nodded thoughtfully and appreciatively. I dare say, he said. They might well.
We drank six quarts of home-brew and two buckets of strong coffee.
Then I said: It’s a bad time for pilots, isn’t it?
Could be, could be, he answered.
Then I couldn’t keep him there any longer.
It’s awful when they go all misty and vanish. You say all the right things but they disappear all the same. It’s not worth going on with it then because it seems silly and you begin to feel lonely.
Now I am in the third bay.
It was here that Daddy and I found our first canisters. It was a day that neither of us will forget as long as we live.
Daddy saw at once what it was. He stood rooted to the spot and craned his neck. He balanced himself out on the stones and began to haul it in. It was an old rotten sack but you could hear the canisters rattling inside it and Daddy said: did you hear that? Did you hear the noise it’s making?
There were four canisters in the sack with two gallons of ninety-six per cent alcohol in each. Oh Daddy, Daddy! And just at that moment the Herberts came round the point. We lay down flat behind the stones very close to one another. I held Daddy’s hand. The Herberts took up their long-lines and didn’t notice a thing. Daddy and I watched them until the danger was over and then we hid the canisters in the seaweed.
I always sit quite still for a long while in the third bay in memory of the time when Daddy and I came across our great secret.
The sun is higher in the sky and everything is beginning to look normal. It’ll be more difficult to find company now – they’re only around early in the morning and at dusk. But it doesn’t matter. I can keep my eyes shut and think about the past instead.
I’m thinking about the time when Daddy and I walked through the forest with the storm-lantern to fetch the baskets of mushrooms.
During the day the family had picked them. Daddy had led us to the right places, his places, where crowds of mushrooms grew. He didn’t pick any himself, he just lit his pipe and made a gesture which seemed to say, carry on everybody. Food!
We picked and picked. Not just any old how. Mushrooms were important – hundreds of lunches during the whole winter. Almost as important as fish. Every mushroom has mysterious mycelia under it and the place where they grow must be preserved for ever and ever for future generations and it is a sign of good citizenship to collect food for one’s family in the summer and to show respect for nature.
At night it’s quite different. Then Daddy and I carry the baskets of mushrooms home that we couldn’t manage during the day. It has to be dark. There was no need to save oil, so we were really extravagant with it. And Daddy always found the place. Sometimes it was windy and the branches made a ghastly sound as they rubbed against each other. Daddy found the right spot. There were the baskets of mushrooms and he said: well I’ll be damned! Look, there they are!
The most beautiful mushrooms were on top. He arranged them according to their colour and shape because they were his bouquets. He did the same with fish.
Once Daddy put his baskets of mushrooms down on the ground and went into the house to find the rest of the family. While he was inside Rosa the cow devoured the lot. She knew she could rely on Daddy and that there wasn’t a single poisonous mushroom in the basket.
Now there’s a steady wind. The fourth bay is a long way away. I am going through a forest drawn by that great artist John Bauer. He knew how to draw forests and since he was drowned nobody has dared to draw them. And Mummy and I think that anybody who does is contemptible.
To draw a forest so that it’s big enough you don’t include the tops of the trees or any sky. Just very thick tree-trunks growing absolutely straight. The ground consists of soft mounds, getting farther and farther away and smaller and smaller until the forest becomes endless. There are stones but you can’t see them. Moss has grown over them for thousands of years and no one has disturbed it. If you step on the moss once you make a big hole which doesn’t straighten out for a week. If you step on it a second time there will be a hole there for ever and ever. The third time you step on the moss it will die.
In a proper painting of a forest everything is roughly the same colour, the moss, the tree-trunks and the branches of the fir trees, everything is soft and solemn, half-way between grey and brown and green, but very little green. If you want you can add a princess, for example. She is always white and very tiny and has long yellow hair. She is placed in the middle or in the golden section. After John Bauer’s death princesses became modern and were just any colour. They were just ordinary children dressed up.
It’s the fourth bay that is the great carcass bay where the pig floated ashore. It was enormous and smelt terrible. Sometimes I think it was an awful-reddish-blue colour and its eyes rolled as it was dashed against the rocks but I’m not sure and I don’t care to think about it too much.
You never meet anybody in the great carcass bay and there’s nothing to remember. It’s a place for awful images that rise up out of the sea.
First come the birds. You can see them on the horizon like a bank of clouds. The cloud gets bigger. Great birds thirty feet long flying so slowly it’s uncanny. Their wings look like tattered palm leaves, straggling and blown to shreds, a thousand enormous birds stretch across the sky casting shadows over the earth. Not one of them says a thing.
And now …
If a morning came when the sun didn’t rise. If we were to wake up as usual and Daddy looked at the clock and said: now it’s gone wrong again. Clocks are inventions of the devil! We tried to go to sleep again, but we couldn’t. Daddy tried to get something on the wireless, but it just whined. Then we went out to see if anything had happened to the earth lead. It looked just as it should. The aerial was still there in the birch tree. It was eight o’clock but still completely dark. As we all felt wide awake we had a cup of tea.
Fanny was sitting on the fence singing the great rain song.
It was nine o’clock, ten, eleven and then twelve, but the sun did not rise and it stayed dark. Then Daddy said, well, dammit, something’s wrong. So he went and talked to Old Charlie for a while. Old Charlie was taking his fishing-nets up and said the weather’s sure to change somehow. This sort of thing hasn’t been seen in living memory.
It was as silent as during an eclipse of the sun. And it was cold, too. Mummy carried in some wood and lit the fire. Then it was two o’clock and three o’clock and four o’clock. It was seventy-five minutes past six. Then Mummy said: we have two packets of candles and half a gallon of oil. But then who knows what will happen to us.
And just then there was a rumbling below the horizon.
That was a good story. Another one.
One evening just before dusk we heard a faint gurgling sound. When we went out to see what it was we saw that the sea had subsided fifteen feet and the beach was green and slimy. The boats were strangling themselves with their painters. The perch in the fish-cage were jumping about like mad. Empty bottles and old tins crept up out of the sea and looked ashamed of themselves. The sea went on falling. There were bubbles round Red Rock as the sea slunk down into the cod-bank. The sea crept further and further out and sank lower and lower revealing hundreds of old skeletons, dead pigs and unmentionable things.
Unmentionable things. It couldn’t be worse than that.
Suddenly I was fed up with everything.
You can jump from one stone to another. That is you must jump very quickly and only touch each stone for a second. You must never step on to the seaweed or the sand, only on the stones, faster and faster. In the end you become a wind, the wind itself, and it whistles in your ears and everything else is wiped out and vanished, there is only the wind and jumping and jumping and jumping. I never make a false jump, I’m confident and strong and I go on jumping until I come to the last bay which is tiny and beautiful and all my own. Here is the climbing tree with branches all the way up like Jacob’s Ladder and at the top the whole pine tree is swaying because the wind is now coming from the south-west. The sun has come up in time for breakfast.
If a thousand little girls walked past under this tree not one of them would have the faintest idea that I am sitting up here. The pine cones are green and very hard. My feet are brown. And the wind is blowing right through my hair.
Flotsam and Jetsam
IF THE WATER RISES THERE’LL BE A STORM. If it falls very quickly and sharply there might be a storm too. A ring around the sun may be dangerous. And a smoky, dark-red sunset bodes no good either. There are many more things like this, but I can’t be bothered with them just now. If it’s not one thing then it’s another.
In the end, Daddy couldn’t put up with being uneasy about the weather and set off. He set the spritsail and said, now remember that one mustn’t have a single unnecessary thing in a boat.
We sat still. We weren’t allowed to read because that shows a lack of respect for the boat. You couldn’t trail anything in the water, such as painters or boats of bark because the pilots might see them. We gave the sandbank a fairly wide berth, but not too narrow because that’s asking for trouble and not too wide because that looks too cautious and the pilots might see it. Then we were on our way.
There are lots of things to attend to in a boat. You have to watch out for the painter otherwise it gets tangled round your feet and can pull you overboard. You might slip when going ashore and hit your head and drown. You can sail too close to the shore and get caught in the undertow. You can stay too far away from the shore and end up in Estonia in the fog. In the end you go aground and then everything really gets into a pickle. Although he thinks all the time about the things that might go wrong, Daddy loves great waves, particularly if they come from the south-west and get bigger and bigger.
Things turn out just as he said and the wind gets stronger and stronger. So now he doesn’t need to be uneasy any longer but can be calm and cheerful while the wind blows.
Alas and alack we’re leaving the shore Oh maiden so fair we’ll see you no more. We’re living under the spritsail on Acre Island and the wind is getting stronger all the time.
The Hermansons and the Seaforths arrived a little later. They have no children. They put up their sail for the night next to ours. And there we all were in the storm. All the females rushed around putting things straight and all the men rolled huge stones and shouted to each other and pulled the boats higher up. When the evening came Mummy wrapped me in a blanket. From under the sail one could see a triangle of heather and surf and the sky that got bigger or smaller as the sail flapped in the wind. All night the men went down to the shore to see that everything was as it should be. They pulled up the boats and measured the height of the water and estimated the strength of the wind out on the point. From time to time Daddy came in to see whether we were still there and stuffed his pockets full of bread. He looked at me and knew that I was enjoying the storm just as much as he was.
Next morning we discovered a motorboat on the far side of the island. It lay there quite abandoned bumping up against the rocks; two planks had split and it was half full of water. And they had had no oars with them. They hadn’t even risked their lives trying to save the boat.
It’s just as I have always said, you can never rely on a motor, it just breaks down. People who go out to sea might well bother themselves to learn something about it first. They have never seen a spritsail in their lives and go and buy boats with high gunnels and then leave them lying on the beach without any tar and so they get leaky and become a disgrace to the whole community.
We stood looking at the boat for a while and then went straight up the shore and looked in the clump of willows behind the rocks on the beach, and there it all was – two-gallon canisters like a silver carpet under the bushes as far as you could see and a little higher up they had tucked the brandy under some spruce trees. Well, Daddy said. Well! It can’t be true!
All the men started to run all over the place and the females followed with Mummy and me last, running as fast as we could.
On the lee-side Daddy and Mr Hermanson were talking to three soaking-wet fellows who were eating our sandwiches. The females and Mr Seaforth were standing a little way away. Then daddy came up to us and said, now this is what we’re going to do. Hermanson and I will take them home because they have been drifting for three days without food and can hardly stand on their feet. If all goes well, each family will get four bottles and three canisters. Seaforth can’t go with us as a matter of principle because he’s a customs man himself.
We sat in a row and watched them sail away. Sometimes you could get a glimpse of the boat but sometimes you couldn’t see them at all.
Mrs Seaforth looked at Mr Seaforth and said: think carefully what you’re doing.
I’m thinking all right! He answered. Do you think this is easy for me? But I’ve made up my mind. I shan’t take any notice of the whole thing, and I shan’t accept a single bottle or a canister either. In any case, I’m on holiday and I’m not the only one who’s taking them home. And they’ve eaten my sandwiches, too. Jansson would understand what I mean.
When daddy and Mr Hermanson came back they were soaked to the skin and very cheerful and immediately they came ashore they went to fetch the canisters. They took one each but Seaforth didn’t take one at all because he was being loyal to the coastguards.
But they promised us four, said Mrs Hermanson. And three bottles of brandy.
That was while they were scared, said Daddy. When we got them home they changed their minds and said one canister for each family.
That’s three then, said Mrs Hermanson. And we can share the Seaforth’s.
That wouldn’t be right, said Daddy. There are principles involved in this. Two canisters, and that’s all. Besides, the journey itself was worth something. Women don’t understand these things.
We hid the canisters in the seaweed.
Tow
ards evening the wind died down and we sailed home, each family going their own way. Then we put the canisters in the fish-cage. We said nothing, we kept quiet.
There are people who sell canisters that they have found and overcharge for them. That’s no way to behave. Others row the canisters to the coastguard. It happened once in Pernby.
To buy a canister is like cheating the government, and anyway is too expensive, and one doesn’t do that sort of thing. The only proper way is to find a canister and preferably save it at the risk of one’s life. Such a canister is a source of satisfaction and does no harm to anybody’s principles.
But a boat that has floated ashore or is just drifting is an entirely different matter. Boats are serious things. One has to search and search until one finds the owner even if it takes years to find him. It’s just the same with fishing-nets that have broken loose and are drifting. They must go back to their owners. Everything else one is allowed to keep, logs, planks and pit-props and net-floats and buoys.
But the worst thing one can do is to take flotsam that has already been salvaged by someone else. That’s unforgivable. If it has been piled up against a stone or collected in a neat pile with two stones on top of it, it is reserved. You can reserve it with two stones, but three are better. One stone is not to be relied on because it might have got there by accident. There are people who take other people’s piles, or even worse just take the best things from each pile. I know! If one has rescued a plank one always recognises it again. And often one knows exactly who has been where one left it. But one says nothing about it afterwards because that would be in bad taste, and in any case who told one to reserve things with stones instead of making two trips to row everything home?
What is right and what is wrong is a very sensitive matter. One could say a lot about it; for example, if you come across a boat floating all by itself with a cabinet in it full of canisters, it goes without saying that one searches for the owner of the boat and keeps the cabinet oneself, if it is a nice one. But how many canisters is one allowed to keep? There’s a lot of difference between a canister in a boat, in the undergrowth, or in the water or in a cabinet that is in a boat.