Tales From Moominvalley (6 page)

At this the fillyjonk became angry, which was a most unusual thing. She felt that she had to challenge Gaffsie in some way or other, and she chose the first thing that came to her mind. She pointed a shaking finger at the horrid little shrub in the table vase and cried:

'Look! Isn't it nice? The perfect thing to match my tea-set!'

And Gaffsie was feeling just as tired and cross, so she jumped to her feet and replied:

'Not a bit! It's all too large and prickly and gaudy, it has a brazen look and doesn't belong on a tea-table at all!'

Then the two ladies took leave of each other, and the fillyjonk shut her door and went back to her drawing-room.

She felt miserable and disappointed with her tea party. The small shrub stood on the table, grey and thorny and covered with little dark red flowers. Suddenly it seemed to the fillyjonk that it wasn't the flowers that did not match her tea-set. It was the tea-set that didn't match anything.

She put the vase on the window-sill.

The sea had changed. It was grey all over, but the waves had bared their white teeth and were snapping at the beach. The sky had a ruddy glow, and looked heavy.

The fillyjonk stood in her window for a long time, listening to the rising wind.

Then there was a ring on the telephone.

'Is that Mrs Fillyjonk?' Gaffsie's voice asked cautiously.

'Of course,' said the fillyjonk. 'No one else lives here. Did you arrive home all right?'

'Yes, all right,' said Gaffsie. 'There's quite a wind.' She was silent for a while, and then she said in a friendly voice: 'Mrs Fillyjonk? Those terrible things you spoke of. Have they happened often to you?'

'No,' said the fillyjonk.

'Just a few times, then?'

'Well, never, really,' said the fillyjonk. 'It's just how I feel.'

'Oh,' said Gaffsie. 'Well, thank you for inviting me. It was so nice. So nothing has ever happened to you?'

'No,' said the fillyjonk. 'So kind of you to call me. I hope we'll see more of each other.'

'So do I,' said Gaffsie and hung up.

The fillyjonk sat looking at the telephone for a while. She suddenly felt cold.

My windows are going dark again, she thought. I could hang some blankets against them. I could turn the mirrors face to wall. But she didn't do anything, she sat listening to the wind that had started to howl in the chimney. Not unlike a small homeless animal.

On the south side the hemulen's fishing net had started whacking against the wall, but the fillyjonk didn't dare go out to lift it down.

The house was shivering, very slightly. The wind was coming on in rushes; one could hear a gale getting an extra push on its way in from the sea.

A roof-tile went coasting down the roof and crashed to the ground. The fillyjonk rose and hurried into her bedroom. But it was too large, it didn't feel safe. The pantry. It would be small enough. The fillyjonk took her quilt from the bed and ran down the kitchen passage, kicked open the pantry door and shut it behind her. She panted a bit. Here you heard less of the gale. And here was no window, only a small ventilator grating.

She felt her way in the dark past the sack of potatoes and rolled herself into her quilt, on the floor below the jam shelf.

Slowly her imagination started to picture a gale of its own, very much blacker and wilder than the one that was shaking her house. The breakers grew to great white dragons, a roaring tornado sucked up the sea like a black pillar on the horizon, a gleaming pillar that came rushing towards her, nearer and nearer...

Those storms of her own were the worst ones. And deep down in her heart the fillyjonk was just a little proud of her disasters that belonged to no one else.

Gaffsie is a jackass, she thought. A silly woman with cakes and pillow-slips all over her mind. And she doesn't know a thing about flowers. And least of all about me. Now she's sitting at home thinking that I haven't ever experienced anything. I, who see the end of the world every day, and still I'm going on putting on my clothes, and taking them off again, and eating and washing-up the dishes and receiving visits, just as if nothing ever happened!

The fillyjonk thrust out her nose from the quilt, stared severely out in the dark and said: 'I'll show you.'

Whatever that meant. Then she snuggled down under her quilt and pressed her paws against her ears.

*

But outside the gale was steadily rising towards midnight, and by one o'clock it had reached 47 yards per second (or however they measure the big storms).

About two o'clock in the morning the chimney blew down. Half of it fell outside the house and the other half smashed down into the kitchen fireplace. Through the hole in the ceiling one could see the dark night sky and great rushing clouds. And then the gale found its way inside and nothing at all was to be seen except flying

ashes, wildly fluttering curtains and tablecloths and photographs of aunts and uncles whirling through the air. All the fillyjonk's sacred things came to life, rustling, tinkling and clashing everywhere, doors were banging and pictures crashing to the floor.

In the middle of the drawing-room stood the fillyjonk herself, dazed and wild in her fluttering skirt, thinking confusedly: this is it. Now comes the end. At last. Now I don't have to wait any more.

She lifted the telephone receiver to call Gaffsie and tell her... well, tell her a few really crushing things. Coolly and triumphantly.

But the telephone wires had blown down.

The fillyjonk could hear nothing but the gale and the rattle of loosening roof-tiles. If I were to go up to the attic the roof would blow off, she thought. And if I go down in the cellar the whole house comes down over me. It's going to do it anyway.

She got hold of a china kitten and pressed it hard in her paw. Then a window blew open and shattered its pane in small fragments over the floor. A gust of rain spattered the mahogany furniture, and the stately plaster

hemulen threw himself from his pedestal and went to pieces.

With a sickening crash her great chandelier fell to the floor. It had belonged to her maternal uncle. All around her the fillyjonk heard her belongings cry and creak. Then she caught a flash of her own pale snout in a fragment of a mirror, and without any further thought she rushed up to the window and jumped out.

She found herself sitting in the sand. She felt warm raindrops on her face, and her dress was fluttering and flapping around her like a sail.

She shut her eyes very tight and knew that she was in the midst of danger, totally helpless.

The gale was blowing, steady and undisturbed. But all the alarming noises had vanished, all the howling and crashing, the thumping, splintering and tearing. The danger had been inside the house, not outside.

The fillyjonk drew a wary breath, smelt the bitter tang of the sea-weed, and opened her eyes.

The darkness was no longer as dark as it had been in her drawing-room.

She could see the breakers and the light-house's outstretched arm of light that slowly moved through the night, passing her, wandering off over the sand dunes, losing itself towards the horizon and returning again. Round and round circled the calm light, keeping an eye on the gale.

I've never been out alone at night before, the fillyjonk thought. If Mother knew...

She started to crawl against the wind, down to the beach, to get as far away as possible from the hemulen's house. She still held the china kitten in her left paw, it calmed her to have something to protect. Now she could see that the sea looked almost all blue-white. The wave crests were blown straight off and drifted like smoke over the beach. The smoke tasted of salt.

Behind her something or other was still crashing to pieces, inside the house. But the fillyjonk didn't even turn her head. She had curled up behind a large boulder and was looking wide-eyed into the dark. She wasn't cold any longer. And the strange thing was that she suddenly felt quite safe. It was a very strange feeling, and she found it indescribably nice. But what was there to worry about? The disaster had come at last.

*

Towards morning the gale was blowing itself out. The fillyjonk hardly noticed it. She was sitting in deep thought about herself and her disasters, and her furniture, and wondering how it all fitted together. As a matter of fact nothing of consequence had happened, except that the chimney had come down.

But she had a feeling that nothing more important had ever happened to her in her life. It had given her quite a shaking-up and turned everything topsy-turvy. The fillyjonk didn't know what she should do to right herself again.

The old kind of fillyjonk was lost, and she wasn't sure that she wanted her back. And what about all the belongings of this old fillyjonk?

All the things that were broken and sooty and cracked and wet? To sit and mend it all, week after week, glueing and patching and looking for lost pieces and fragments...

To wash and iron and paint over and to feel sorry about all the irreparable things, and to know that there would still be cracks everywhere, and that all the things had been in much better shape before... No, no! And to put them all back into place in the dark and bleak rooms and try to find them cosy once more...

No, I won't! cried the fillyjonk and rose on cramped legs. If I try to make everything the same as before, then I'll be the same myself as before. I'll be afraid once more... I can feel that. And the tornadoes will come back to lurk around me, and the typhoons too...

For the first time she looked back at the hemulen's house. It was standing as before. It was filled with broken things. It waited for her to come and take care of them.

No genuine fillyjonk had ever left her old inherited belongings adrift... Mother would have reminded me about duty, the fillyjonk mumbled. It was morning.

The eastern horizon was waiting for sunrise. Small frightened squalls of rain were flying off, and the sky was strewn with clouds that the gale had forgotten to take along with it. A few weak thunderclaps went rolling by.

The weather was uneasy and didn't know its own mind. The fillyjonk hesitated also.

At this moment she caught sight of the tornado.

It didn't look like her own special tornado, which was a gleaming black pillar of water. This was the real thing. It was luminous. It was a whirl of white clouds churning downwards in a large spiral, and it turned to chalk white where it met the water lifting itself upwards out of the sea.

It didn't roar, it didn't rush. It was quite silent and slowly came nearer the shore, slightly swaying on its way. The sun rose, and the tornado turned rose-petal red.

It looked infinitely tall, rotating silently and powerfully around itself, and it drew slowly nearer and nearer...

The fillyjonk was unable to move. She was standing still, quite still, crushing the china kitten in her paw and thinking: Oh, my beautiful, wonderful disaster...

The tornado wandered over the beach, not far from the fillyjonk. The white, majestic pillar passed her, became a pillar of sand, and very quietly lifted the roof off the hemulen's house. The fillyjonk saw it rise in the air and disappear. She saw her furniture go whirling up and disappear. She saw all her knick-knacks fly straight to heaven, tray-cloths and photo-frames and tea-cosies and grandma's silver cream jug, and the sentences in silk and silver, every single thing! and she thought ecstatically: How very, very wonderful! What can I do, a poor little fillyjonk, against the great powers of nature? What is there to mend and repair now? Nothing! All is washed clean and swept away!