Did she complain? Not once. She travelled with Mayweed during Beechen’s First Ministry, and did what she had to do to help them both. But that day when Sleekit said that Beechen was tired, Mayweed had seen that Sleekit was tired as well. Seen their whole life together for what it had been for her, which was journeying and travail, in concert it is true, but not in peace.
So when he left them, and Sleekit, loving and knowing him as she did trusted him to be safe, and said not one word of how much she would miss him while he was gone, Mayweed knew in his heart that he was looking for a Bablock for them both. A place where finally, in that little time they had left for one another, he hoped Sleekit might feel secure, and loved, and content to know that he was content as well. A place that would see the culmination of their love, a place to take them to its heart and let them love it as true as they sought always to love one another.
As for Beechen, why, he could take his chance with them! Yes, yes, yes, he could! He was young, he had strength, he had no need of a Bablock! No, no, no!
So in a cheerful spirit, and more partisan to Sleekit’s needs than Beechen’s, Mayweed had set off to find a route that led to a place where a mole might most wish to take his much beloved.
Where, when, how, or why he came to Bablock we do not know nor care. But, one day his route at last took him along the River Thames, and he turned a corner, and watched a cloud, and pondered a coot, and debated a worm, and came upon a mole stanced quiet, and watching the river flow by.
“Plump Sir, you look content!”
“I am.”
“Contented mole, may humbleness ask what you are doing?”
“Nothing much.”
“Ah!”
“There’s nothing much to do in Bablock Hythe but what I’m doing. It’s always been like that and always will I hope.”
“Rotundity, this place sounds good to me,” observed Mayweed, stancing down, “the sort of place I’m looking for.”
“It’s a lot better than the place where you seem to be hurrying to.”
“Where’s that?” asked Mayweed, curious, and grinning.
“What an astonishing grin. It’s almost a leer. I haven’t been leered at for a very long time. No matter. You look as if you’re going somewhere busy.”
“No, no, no, no, mistaken mole, that’s exactly where I’m not going.”
“Well have a worm and stance still because you’re not going the right way about it.”
Mayweed, who delighted in moles who used words as he did, settled down and crunched the proffered worm.
“Mayweed is my name,” said Mayweed eventually.
“Tubney,” said Tubney. Who added after a very long pause during which he stared at the river that flowed past them in a deep dark way, “What sort of place are you looking for?”
“Humble me does not ask for much. He is in love and wishes to find a place which is quiet, peaceful, doesn’t mind a visitor or three, and is not likely to be invaded by grikes, or anymole else come to that.”
“You’ve arrived,” said Tubney, “so have another worm.”
“Forgive humbleness for raising a doubt, but how can Sir be sure? How can Sir not have a fretful talon or a restless tail or twitching fur for thinking that just beyond where he now is is not something better? Is Sir not curious?”
“Um. Curious?” said Tubney slowly, frowning and staring at the slow water, and then at the sky. “Am... I... curious? Well, I suppose I am, sort of.”
““Sort of’!” exclaimed Mayweed. “Sort of Sir, a mole cannot be sort of curious. Curiosity is an absolute where he personally is concerned. If you are curious you fall off your paws satisfying it. If you’re not... you’re dead.”
“Clever but untrue my friend,” said Tubney. “The reason I am contented with where I live is because everymole who ever comes here looks about and tells me that I should be. Now, taken together, they have travelled more than I ever shall so it makes sense and is much easier to believe them. Of course they could be wrong, which is why I’m sort of curious to see if they are right. But not so curious that I can be bothered to find out. Take yourself, Mayweed. Have you travelled much?”
“More than much. Show me a route and I may well have been along it.”
“Just what I thought. Now, go and look around Bablock, say hello to a few moles, pass the time of day with them, and then come back here and give me one good reason why I should leave the place.”
“I shall!” said Mayweed. And he did.
He explored the wormful tunnels, he said hello to the pleasant moles, he wandered the bank of that wide and curved part of the River Thames along which the system lies. He looked at the swirls of slow water, he followed the progress of a feeding coot; he stanced still and listened to the water’s flow, and he scented the meadows and the leafless winter hedgerows beneath which the berries of cuckoo pint shone red and bright.
Nearly a day passed in such wandering before his route took him back to Tubney’s place.
“Well?” said Tubney.
“What did Sir say the system’s name was?”
“Bablock Hythe.”
“Perfection.”
“Almost but not quite, otherwise it would be too dull.”
“Explain, explain, please, please!” said Mayweed, increasingly delighted with Tubney.
“Well, you see, visitors do come. Some have said they are a nuisance and that without them things would be perfect – to use your word. But it is in the very nature of visiting that visitors leave. If they did not they would be residents. And what do I find when visitors leave? Peace, Mayweed. Blissful, delightful, unutterable peace. So my welcome is warm to visitors because being restless they will go and when they go I am reminded of what I had forgotten I have.”
“Philosophical Sir, I shall scribe that down, since it seems to contain a deep truth about happiness.”
“Ah, well, if you can scribe that makes you an interesting visitor, which is, of course, a mixed blessing. Interesting visitors tend to impose themselves a bit, make moles question things, can be disruptive. It can be hard while it lasts, but then when they leave....”
A blissful smile spread across Tubney’s cheerful face.
“Yes, when interesting visitors, especially ones who have been very interesting, finally leave, dear me, it makes me almost glow to think of it! The sheer joy of seeing their rears disappear down that path, the unadulterated pleasure of knowing they are going to be interesting somewhere else for ever more and not here. Mayweed, have you any idea how pleasant that is and what joy it gives me to think of it?”
“Sir is sufficiently eloquent to have given me a very good idea indeed. But one last question: what about moles in love? Are they good moles to have in Bablock?”
“On occasion we have had those. Charming, delightful, brings tears to my eyes. They tend to like the river bank at night, and that sort of thing. They look at the moon and occasionally race about. More mysteriously they stance for hours on end staring at each other, which seems strange when you consider that everything else around here is so much more interesting than mole. But I am thinking of young love, I suppose. Mature love, the kind of love that a mole such as you might indulge in is altogether different. Oh yes. That’s me, you know. A mature love.”
“She is...?” began Mayweed hesitantly.
“... dead? No. Absent with leave, as mature loves should often be. Visiting upslope. Doing what she enjoys doing while I do what I enjoy doing which, as you now know, is nothing much.”
“May humbleness ask the name of your love?”
“Crocus. I’ll tell you the story one day.”
“Pups?”
“Dozens. Hundreds. All gone now, all gone...” A tear slowly coursed down Tubney’s face.
“Why mole, Mayweed, me, he’s sorry, he....”
“Sorry, mole? What for? My tears are tears of joy. I shall never forget the day the last of our pups declared in an earnest voice and not for the first time that he was off and then, to m
y unabated joy, he left! Now that was a day worth waiting for.” The smile returned.
“Marvellous mole, Mayweed has the feeling that Bablock has all that he is looking for.”
For the first time a look of genuine concern came to Tubney’s face.
“You’re not planning to come and stay as a resident are you?”
“No, no, a mere visitor. With Sleekit my consort, and Beechen my, er, well, just a mole I know.”
“But just visiting?”
“Yes, we shall eventually have to leave.”
Tubney relaxed.
“Then, dear Sir, you and your friends shall be very, very welcome here in Bablock Hythe.”
Mayweed could not at that point have known about Beechen’s visit to Cumnor – since the Stone Mole himself had not yet decided to go there – but he might well have guessed the intention and direction of Beechen’s final gathering for his First Ministry.
So Mayweed scurried about and plotted an escape route out of those parts which would avoid all the complications of Cumnor. Rollright, north of Duncton, had been their original objective and soon, Mayweed sensed, it would be wise to go there.
Meanwhile, and despite Tubney’s affectation of not doing much, Mayweed wasted no time in enlisting the aid of the Bablock moles to the Stone Mole’s cause.
“Imagine, new-found chubby chum, how much greater your feelings of relief and delight will be if you leave your system for a time, help others, show your sense of responsibility towards endangered moles of the Stone, and feel you and the moles of Bablock have done something useful.”
“‘Useful’! ‘Responsibility’! ‘Leave’! ‘Help others’!” moaned Tubney. “Why should we? Isn’t it enough that we provide a welcome refuge for those who find us?”
Mayweed stared at him and said nothing.
“I mean to say,” continued Tubney uneasily, “these moles you want us to help you rescue – ‘rescue’, a word redolent of danger and disturbance which makes me shudder – can’t they rescue themselves?”
“Supposing the grike guardmoles descended on you here, selfish Sir, would you not want to be rescued?”
“Ah, yes well... I should have explained. I am a. guardmole, second generation, third order, reserve, retired. You see my father was sent here and, well, he took one look at the place and decided to stay and sort of let it be known that he had died in the course of his duties. Drowned, in fact. Toppled over into the river and drifted off. Enquiries were made, questions asked, guardmoles snouted about a bit, and then they gave up and he emerged from hiding.”
“Does nothing bother Bablock, then?” said Mayweed.
“The eldrene Wort at Cumnor tries. We had been left well alone for years and then she sent a couple of very odd moles down here, ranting and raving about the Word, saying blasphemers should be snouted et cetera and so forth. We gave them plenty of worms and a very enjoyable time and said we completely agreed with them and it was shocking. They went back satisfied but feeling guilty, as sincere moles who overindulge themselves are inclined to. Bablock was put out of bounds to them after that but we get one sneaking down here occasionally and we have a thoroughly enjoyable time pretending to be austere for a few days and agreeing how shockingly lax moledom is becoming.”
“Incorrigible Sir, you impress me. But now I understand that my friends are about to go to Cumnor and may need help....”
“Oh yes, no doubt of it, they will. They are coming tomorrow, or perhaps the next day... in fact some followers have already arrived and the Chawley End moles are most flummoxed about it.”
“You know?” exclaimed Mayweed.
“Of course. One cannot be indolent all the time, just most of it. As for your friends, is it true that one of them is the S —— M ——?”
Tubney mouthed “Stone Mole” but did not speak it aloud.
Mayweed laughed.
“Yes, staggering Sir, yes!”
“That’s what Crocus said. She’s thrilled, of course. Delighted. If only for her I shall bestir myself, just as soon as we have found out what Wort and her henchmoles are doing.”
“But won’t they immediately come down here?”
“No, they won’t, not in force. A mole does not, as Crocus’s cousin rather crudely puts it, poop in his own back burrow. Anyway, you have, I believe, worked out an escape route?”
“You constantly dumbfound me, Tubney,” said Mayweed.
“By Pinkhill?”
“No, Swinford. It’s quicker and less likely.”
“Dear me. Swinford. That’s most daring, most energetic, very vigorous.”
“It may be, Tubney, but just think how you will feel when we finally leave.”
“I do, all the time. Now relax, for your fretting talons and busy leer quite put me in a sweat. All is in paw, when we’ve been told what’s happening we’ll set off towards Hen Wood and be ready to collect your friends. Have a worm or something, tell me a tale, relax, you’re in Bablock now. Things will work out as they should.”
Which, apart from Beechen’s unexpected desire to be alone and leave them on the very threshold of Bablock after their rescue from Hen Wood, they did.
“Relax!” Mayweed said more than once to troubled Buckram as, having looked upslope and seen Beechen gone, the great mole lumbered miserably along feeling that he had failed in his duty.
“No good telling him to relax, Mayweed,” observed Tubney as they continued on. “Nomole relaxes if they’re told to. No, you leave it to Bablock to sort him out. It’ll take a day or two – perhaps three in his particular case – but believe me there’s something about the air in Bablock, and the way the river flows, and, and....”
But he had no need to say more for the moles had turned the corner and crossed the mysterious boundary that took them into the world that was Bablock.
The frosty ground stretched ahead of them, and the pale sunlight slanted down across the tree-lined river banks, and all over the great meander of flowing water whose sound and scents dominate the gravelly terrace on which the Bablock system sits. The last of the autumn colours were dotted here and there, and as Sleekit came to Mayweed’s flank the two paused to stare as Tubney, kind and thoughtful that he was, led Buckram on, talking to him non-stop to take his mind off Beechen.
“Sensuous love, this is the place I found for us,” said Mayweed.
“Mayweed, you always surprise me, from the first time I saw you until this moment.”
“Humbleness thought hard and decided his beloved needed a place to rest and enjoy his company to the full. Bablock and the moles in it will provide it. Indolence and pleasure ooze out of every tunnel, and lie like sweet-scented nesting material on every surface stance. Madam will have noticed that the air here makes her Mayweed wax poetic.”
Sleekit sighed with pleasure, touched him close, stared about, pulled him nearer to the river and closer to herself, peered down into its waters, sighed again, stanced down, stanced up, snouted here and there, sighed a third time, and said, “Will Beechen really be safe?”
“Mayweed does not know, though he fears for him very much. But he thinks the Stone is with Beechen as it is with us. Let the mole be, he needs time alone and thinks he is in love. Let him wander a bit. It does a mole no harm. The Bablock moles are not as idle as they like others to think, and no doubt Tubney will see that moles are watching out for him. When he’s ready he’ll come here and we can show him the pleasures we have found in the place.”
“How long can we stay?”
Mayweed settled down, extended his snout along his paws, stared at the water and then northwards upstream.
“I would like to get you both to Rollright by Longest Night. I....”
“It’s enough, my dear, it’s all I wish to know. When you say we must leave, we shall leave. Until then I’ll pretend we have forever here.”
Which, with much pleasure, she did, as the clear skies that brought frost across moledom continued, and moles enjoyed days of pale sunlight, and shining nights when the bright
stars seemed to conspire with every dream that lovers, young and old, might have.
While in the secret places along the heaths above Bablock, and down to the icy meadows where Whitley lies, two moles began to know their providential love.
Beechen and Mistle, the nervousness of their first meeting soon gone, discovered the joy that complete acceptance by another, both in body and in spirit, brings. Blind such love may sometimes be, irrational as well, yet to those lost in its continuing discoveries time, place and circumstance seem all moulded to suit the lovers’ ends.
Some have said that Beechen, being what he was, should not have fallen so in love. Others that surely Mistle, faced by such a mole as him, could not but feel her love thwarted by the awe she felt, so that it was not love but adoration. And there are those who would pretend that those two young moles had a love so pure, so ideal, that driven snow would have seemed mucky by comparison.
Not so. All untrue. Forget their antecedents and their destiny; think only of two moles driven by that ordinary need young adults always have for a union that gives strength through sharing to the struggle to make sense of the great conflicts and dilemmas that moles and moledom always present. Stone Mole he may have been but, as Tryfan never tired of reminding those in Duncton Wood, he was first but ordinary mole, with an ordinary need to love; and in that sense Mistle was but ordinary as well.
Yet for all that, one thing was extraordinary about their love, which was that from the very first its nature, its context, its very life, was of the Stone. If ever the love of two moles shone with the light of the Stone it was that of Beechen of Duncton Wood and Mistle of Avebury. The meaning and context pairs so often search for in vain, wondering why once passion is spent or why when conversation is done there is a void, those two had discovered from the very first.
Their love was not just of the Stone but was its celebration too, and so once their nervousness was done, wherever they went in those special November days, the Stone was with them, and shone about them.