"You aren"t afraid of a little fog, are you?" I asked. "Let"s go a little bit further and then we"ll turn round."
"I"m not so sure about that," said Albert.
"You"re not scared, are you?" I said, and he paddled on and the raft went out to sea again. It was like moving across a black mirror, like standing on the sea; one could feel the faint swell all through one"s body and one moved with it. The swell came from the south-east and rolled on towards Egg Island.
"We"re turning round now," said Albert firmly. "The fog"s coming."
It got cold very quickly and the fog was there, moving thickly around us, shutting us in on all sides. The smooth swell rolled out of the fog, crawled under the raft with a swallowing movement and rolled back into the fog the other side. I was freezing and was waiting for Albert to say, "What did I say?" or "I told you so ...", but he was silent and just paddled on and looked worried. He turned his head this way and that and listened and looked at the swell and kept in to the sh.o.r.e. After a while he kept more out to sea instead. Now there was a cross-wave in the swell and it started to come from all directions at the same time. Albert stopped paddling and said: "We"d better wait until it lifts."
I was a little scared and said nothing at all.
"If only Rosa would moo, we"d get our direction," said Albert.
We listened in the fog but Rosa didn"t moo. Everything was as silent and deserted as the place where the world ends, and terribly cold.
"Look, there"s something floating," said Albert.
It was greyish-white and straggly and was moving very slowly in a circle towards us in the swell.
Albert said: "It"s a herring gull." He poked it with the paddle and lifted it up onto the raft. It looked very big on the raft and went on shuffling round in a circle.
"It"s not well," I said. "It"s in pain."
Albert picked it up by the neck and looked at it, and it began to screech and flap one wing.
"Let it go!" I shouted. Everything looked so terrifying with the fog and the black water and the bird creeping around and screaming that I was beside myself and said: "Give it to me, I"ll hold it in my lap. We must make it well again."
I sat down on the raft and Albert laid the bird in my lap and said: "It won"t get well. We must kill it."
"You"re always killing and killing," I said. "Look how it"s cuddling up to me; it"s lonely and unhappy!"
But Albert said, "It"s got worms," and lifted up one wing and showed me that it was crawling with them. I screamed and threw the bird down. Then I started to cry and sat down and watched Albert pick up the bird very carefully and examine its wing. "There"s nothing you can do about this," he explained. "It"s rotten. We"ll have to kill it."
"But let it fly away," I whispered. "Perhaps it will get well after all."
"Why should it suffer?" said Albert. He took out his sheath-knife and held the bird by the head, pressing it down onto the raft. I stopped crying and watched, I just couldn"t look away. Albert turned round so that he was between me and the gull. Then he cut right through its neck and let the head and the body of the gull slip into the water. When he turned round again, he was as white as a sheet.
"Look, there"s blood!" I whispered and began to tremble all over. Then he rinsed the blood away.
"Don"t get worked up about it," he said. "You see, it was much the best way."
He was so kind that I began to cry again, and now it was lovely to be able to cry. Everything was over and everything was alright.
Albert always put things right. Whatever happened, and however one behaved, it was always Albert who put things right.
He stood looking at me, worried and not understanding. "Don"t be cross any longer," he said. "Look, the fog"s lifting and the wind is changing."
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 ash.o.r.e and hit your head and drown. You can sail too close to the sh.o.r.e and get caught in the undertow. You can stay too far away from the sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 sh.o.r.e 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 b.u.mping up against the rocks; two planks had split and it was 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 sh.o.r.e 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 alright!" 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 ash.o.r.e 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.
Towards 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 ash.o.r.e 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.
Once I found a boat made of bark that was called Darling. It was very beautifully made with a hold, rudders, a wheelhouse and cloth sails. But Daddy said I didn"t have to find out who owned it.
Maybe nothing is so important, provided that it is small enough. At least, that"s what I think.
High Water.
ONE SUMMER THE BOATHOUSE WAS EMPTY BECAUSE Old Charlie was out fishing all the time. Mummy sat on our veranda and drew ill.u.s.trations and sent them to town with the herring boat. From time to time she took a dip in the sea and then she went on drawing again.
Daddy looked at her and then he went and looked in the boathouse and in the end he went to town and fetched his modelling stand and box of clay, his armatures and his modelling tools. He turned the boathouse into a studio and everybody got interested in it and helped him. They tried to tidy up all Old Charlie"s tools and wanted to clean the floor, but that they weren"t allowed to.
Daddy got cross and then they understood that, for Daddy, the boathouse was a sacred place and not to be disturbed in any way. n.o.body went down the field near the beach and the boats had to tie up at the herring jetty.
It was a very hot summer and the wind never blew.
Mummy drew and drew, and every time a drawing was cleaned up with a rubber she allowed herself to take a dip. I stood next to the table on the veranda and waited till she held up a drawing so that the Indian ink could dry faster and we both laughed because we were thinking what it was like in town when drawing was done at night and made you so tired that you felt sick. Then we ran down to the beach and jumped into the sea. When Old Charlie had people from town staying with him, I had to wear my knickers in the water.
Daddy was working in his new studio. He went there after he"d been fishing and had his breakfast. Daddy loves to go fishing. He gets up at four in the morning and takes his fishing-rod and goes and looks at the bleak fish in the bait box.
It was so hot in the bay that the bleak all died, and we put out the net almost every evening just off Sandy Island. We put a packet of crispbread for Daddy on the veranda every morning. He filled his pockets full and rowed out through the sound.
A mooring-stone is very important. One can look for hours without finding a really good one, as they have to be slightly oval and have a notch in the middle. In the morning Daddy goes fishing by himself. n.o.body interferes with him and n.o.body says he mustn"t. The lighting is wonderful then and the rocks look just as good as if Cavvy had painted them. One just sits and looks at the float, and one knows the fish will bite and when they"ll bite. There"s a rock underneath the water that has been named after Daddy; it"s called Jansson"s Rock and will be called that for ever and ever. Then one makes one"s way home slowly, looking to see if there"s smoke coming out of the chimney.
n.o.body else likes fishing. But Mummy helps with the bag-net and sits at the helm and trails a trolling-spoon. She has no sense of where the right spots are, but that"s something people are born with and it"s seldom found in women.
Daddy went to his new studio after breakfast. It was just as hot every day and there was never any wind.
Daddy got more and more glum. He began to talk politics. n.o.body went near the boathouse and we didn"t bathe near there either, but went to the first bay instead.
The worst thing was the way in which Old Charlie"s visitors behaved. They went out of their way to cut Daddy off and, when they saw him coming, addressed him as "Sculptor" and asked him whether he had had any inspiration or not. I have never heard anything so tactless. They crept past the boathouse in an obvious way, putting their fingers up to their lips, whispering and nodding to one another and giggling, and naturally Daddy could see the whole performance through the window.
And the worst thing was that they suggested motifs to him. Mummy and I felt so terribly embarra.s.sed for them, but what could we do?
Daddy became more and more glum and in the end he didn"t speak to anyone at all. One morning he didn"t even go fishing but stayed in bed staring at the ceiling with his lips pursed.
And it got hotter and hotter.
Then all of a sudden the water began to rise. We didn"t notice it until the wind got up during the night. It all happened in half an hour. A ma.s.s of dry twigs and rubbish from the yard was blown against the window-panes and the storm roared through the forest, and it was so hot that one couldn"t even bear to have a sheet over one in bed. The door was burst open and we ran out onto the steps and saw that there were white horses behind Red Rock, and then we saw the water glistening right up round the well and Daddy cheered up and shouted, "Well, I"ll be d.a.m.ned! What weather!", and put his trousers on and was outside in a jiffy.
Old Charlie"s visitors had been blown out onto the slope in their nightshirts and stood there all huddled together and had no idea at all what to do. But Mummy and Daddy went down to the beach and watched the jetty floating away towards Reed Island with all the boats pushing and nudging each other as though they were alive, and the fish-cage had broken adrift and all the pit-props were floating out through the sound. It was marvellous!
The gra.s.s was under water, the sea was rising all the time, and the storm and the night made the whole landscape look quite different.
Old Charlie ran to fetch the clothesline and f.a.n.n.y stood there shouting and banging a tin can and her white hair was flying in all directions. Daddy rowed out to the jetty with a line and Mummy stood on the sh.o.r.e holding it.
Everything lying on the slope below the house had floated out to sea and the offsh.o.r.e wind was carrying it out towards the sound and the wind was getting stronger and stronger and the water was rising higher and higher. I was shouting with glee, too, as I waded up and down and felt the floating gra.s.s getting tangled round my legs. I was trying to save planks and from time to time Daddy ran past hauling logs and shouting: "What do you think of this! The wind"s getting stronger all the time!"
He flung a rope to the visitors and shouted: "Take hold of this, d.a.m.n you! We must get the jetty up into the field! Do something! Don"t just stand there!" And the visitors hauled on the rope and were soaked to the skin in their nightshirts and had no idea what fun the whole thing was, which served them right.
In the end we saved everything that could be saved and Mummy went into the house to make tea. I pulled off my clothes and was wrapped in a blanket and sat and watched Mummy lighting the fire. The window-panes rattled and were quite dark and it started to rain.
Then Daddy burst in and went into the kitchen and shouted: "d.a.m.n it! Can you imagine what"s happened! The clay looks like porridge. It"s a d.a.m.ned nuisance, but there"s nothing to be done about it!"
"How terrible," said Mummy, looking just as pleased as Daddy.
"I"ve been down to the first bay," Daddy said, "and it"s blowing hard down there and a whole load of logs is floating in. I"ve no time for tea now. I"ll be back later."
"Alright," said Mummy. "I"ll keep it warm."
Then Daddy went out again. Mummy poured out tea for us all. It was the best storm we had ever had.
Jeremiah.
ONE YEAR TOWARDS AUTUMN A GEOLOGIST WAS LIVING in the pilot"s hut. He couldn"t speak either Finnish or Swedish; he just smiled and flashed his black eyes. He would look at people and immediately make them feel how surprised and happy he was to meet them at last and then he just walked on with his hammer and hammered a rock here and there. His name was Jeremiah.
He borrowed a boat to row out to the islands and Old Charlie stood and sn.i.g.g.e.red at Jeremiah because he rowed so miserably. One felt embarra.s.sed for Jeremiah when he took to the water and Daddy wondered what the pilots thought when they saw him rowing.
It was very sensible of me to look after Jeremiah. He couldn"t even tie a proper half-hitch when he tried to, it looked more like some kind of bow. Sometimes he even forgot to tie the boat up. But it was because he didn"t care about anything else in the world except stones. They didn"t have to be pretty and round or odd in any way. He had ideas of his own about stones and they were quite different from anybody else"s.
I never got in his way and I only showed him my collection of stones once. Then he put on such a great show of admiring them that I was embarra.s.sed. He overdid things in the wrong way. But later on he learned better.
We walked along the beach, him in front and me behind. When he stopped, I stopped and stood still and watched while he hammered away, but I never came too close. He hadn"t often got time for me. But sometimes when he turned round and caught sight of me he pretended to be terribly surprised. He bent forward and screwed up his eyes and tried to look at me through his magnifying gla.s.s, then shook his head as though it was impossible that anyone could be as tiny as I was. Then he saw me anyway and stepped backwards in surprise and pretended that he was holding something very, very small in his hands and we both started to laugh.
Sometimes he would draw both of us in the sand, one very tall and one very small, and once I was allowed to borrow his jersey when the wind got up. But otherwise he mostly hammered away at the rocks and forgot all about me. I didn"t mind. I always walked behind him and in the morning I waited outside the pilots" hut until he woke up.
We played a game. I put a present on his doorstep and then hid myself, and when he came out he found the present and was delighted. He puzzled over it and scratched his head and threw his arms in the air and then began to look for me. He looked in a rather stupid way, but that was all part of the game. He had to take a long time to find me and to discover how terribly tiny I was. I tried to make myself smaller and smaller so that he would be delighted. We hammered away at the rocks for many days together. Then it got cloudy and windy and rather cold, and then she came.
She had the same kind of hammer as Jeremiah and walked around hammering in exactly the same way as he did, and she couldn"t speak Swedish or Finnish either. She lived in Old Charlie"s sauna.