Moominsummer Madness (5 page)

'A villain!' whispered Little My. 'Only waiting to knock us all over the head!'

'Now, take it easy,' said Whomper with a slight catch in his throat.

He approached a little door that stood ajar and sniffed carefully.

It led to a narrow passage mysteriously winding on into darkness.

'I suppose the pantry would be somewhere in these parts,' said Whomper.

They entered the passage and discovered that it was lined with small doors. The Mymble's daughter peered at the nearest doorplate and spelled out the faded letters. 'P, r, o, p, e, r, t, i, u, s,' she read 'Propertius. What a villainous name!'

Whomper braced himself and knocked. They waited, but evidently Mr Propertius wasn't in.

The Mymble's daughter pushed the door open.

Never before had they seen so many things at one time and in one place. The walls were all shelves up to the ceiling and down to the floor, and the shelves contained all the things that can be placed on shelves. Large bowls filled with fruit, playthings, table-lamps and china, tin helmets and flowers, tools and stuffed birds, books and telephones, fans and buckets, globes and guns, hatboxes and mantel clocks and letter-scales and...

Little My took a flying jump from her sister's shoulder and landed on one of the shelves. She stared in a mirror and cried: 'Look! I'm growing smaller all the time! I can't even see myself any more!'

'It's not a real looking-glass,' explained the Mymble's daughter. 'You're here all right, life-size.'

Whomper hunted for marmalade. 'Perhaps jam will do just as well,' he said and tried to take the lid off a jampot.

'Painted plaster,' stated the Mymble's daughter. She took an apple and chewed at it. 'Wood,' she said.

Little My laughed.

But Whomper felt worried. All the things around him were false. Their pretty colours were a sham, and everything he touched was made of paper or wood or plaster. The golden crowns weren't nice and heavy, and the flowers were paper flowers. The fiddles had no strings and the boxes no bottoms, and the books couldn't even be opened.

Troubled in his honest heart, Whomper pondered over the meaning of it all, but he couldn't find any solution. 'I wish I were just a tiny bit more clever,' he thought. 'Or a few weeks older.'

'I like it here,' said the Mymble's daughter. 'It's just as if nothing really mattered here.'

'Does anything matter anywhere?' asked Little My.

'No,' her sister replied happily. 'Don't ask such silly questions.'

At that moment somebody gave a snort. Loudly and contemptuously.

They looked frightenedly at one other.

'I'm going back,' Whomper mumbled. 'All these things make me sad.'

A loud thump resounded from the drawing-room, and a light cloud of dust rose from the shelves. Whomper snatched a sword and rushed out in the passage. They could hear Misabel squeaking.

The drawing-room was completely dark. Something large and yielding struck Whomper in the face. He closed his eyes and thrust his sword straight through the invisible enemy. There was a sharp, rending sound, as if the enemy was made of cloth, and when Whomper dared to open his eyes again he could see daylight through the hole he had made.

'What are you doing?' asked the Mymble's daughter behind him.

'I've killed Propertius,' replied Whomper in a trembling voice.

The Mymble's daughter laughed and climbed through the hole into the drawing-room. 'And what are
you
up to here?' she asked.

'Mother just pulled a rope!' cried Moomintroll.

'And then something terribly big fell down from the ceiling,' cried Misabel.

'And all of a sudden we had a landscape in the room,' said the Snork Maiden. 'At first we thought it was real. Until you came in through the lawn.'

The Mymble's daughter turned for a look.

She saw a wood of very green birches by a highly-coloured blue lake. Whomper's face was peering out of the grass with a relieved expression.

'Great goodness,' Moominmamma said. 'I thought it was some kind of curtain string. And then all this comes sailing down. What luck nobody was hurt. Did you find any marmalade?'

'No,' answered Whomper.

'Well, we must have some tea in any case,' said Moominmamma. 'We can look at this picture meanwhile. It's wonderful. I hope it's going to stay where it is now.'

She began pouring out tea.

And at that moment somebody laughed.

It was a spiteful laugh that sounded immensely old, and it emerged from the dark corner behind the paper palm.

'What are you laughing at?' asked Moominpappa after a long silence.

The silence only lengthened.

'Won't you take a cup of tea?' asked Moominmamma uncertainly.

The corner remained silent.

'It must be someone who has lived here before us,' she said. 'Why won't he step out and introduce himself?'

They waited a long time, but as nothing happened, Moominmamma said: 'Your tea's getting cold, children,' and began to share out the cheese in equal pieces. Then while she spread butter on the toast a sudden shower of rain drummed on the roof.

Just as suddenly a gale started to whine and whistle outside.

They looked out and saw the sun sinking peacefully in a summer sea, smooth as a mirror.

'Something rotten here,' remarked Whomper. He seemed rather upset.

The gale heightened. They distinctly heard the sound of a surf breaking on a distant shore, and the rain evidently continued to pour down over their heads - but outside the weather looked just as lovely as before. And then the thunder started. At first a quiet rumbling in the distance. Then it drew closer, white lightning flashed through the drawing-room, and soon peal after peal rolled over the unhappy Moomins.

The sun was still setting, quietly and nicely.

Then the floor began to turn around. It started off on a slow pace, but soon it went faster and faster, until the tea splashed to and fro in the cups and spilled over the rims. The drawing-room behaved like a merry-go-round, and the table and chairs and all the Moomins, and the mirror-cabinet and the linen cupboard could do nothing but hang on.

In a little while everything stopped as suddenly as it had started. Thunder, lightning, rain, and wind, all were gone.

'What a very strange world the world is,' exclaimed Moominmamma.

'That wasn't real!' cried Whomper. 'There were no clouds. And the lightning struck thrice and nothing broke! And the rain and wind and...'

'Somebody was
laughing
at me all the time!' said Misabel.

'It's all over now,' said Moomintroll.

'We'll have to be very careful,' said his father. 'This is a dangerous, haunted house, and anything may happen.' He looked around him with shining eyes.

'Thanks for the tea,' said Whomper.
^*
He walked to the edge of the drawing-room and stared out in the dusk. 'They're all so very unlike me,' he thought. 'They have feelings and they see colours and hear sounds and whirl around, but
what
they feel and see and hear, and
why
they whirl doesn't concern them in the least.'

The uppermost rim of the sun-disc disappeared in the water. And at the same moment the whole drawing-room was splendidly lit.

In astonishment the Moomins looked up from their cups of tea. An arch of burning lamps, red and blue, stretched above them. It framed the evening sea like a wreath of stars, beautiful and friendly-looking. A similar row of lamps glowed along the floor.

'That's to prevent people from falling in the water,' said Moominmamma. 'How orderly life can be. But all these exciting and wonderful events have made me just a little tired. I think I'll retire now.'

But before Moominmamma pulled her counterpane over her snout she remembered to say: 'Still, please wake me up if anything new happens!'

*

Later in the evening Misabel went for a solitary stroll by the sea. She saw the moon rise and start his lonesome journey through the night.

'He's exactly like me,' Misabel thought sadly. 'So plump and lonely.'

At this thought she felt so forsaken and mild that she had to cry a little.

'What are you crying for?' asked Whomper nearby.

'I don't know, but it feels nice,' replied Misabel.

'But people cry because they feel sorry, don't they?' objected Whomper.

'Well, yes - the moon,' Misabel replied vaguely and blew her nose. 'The moon and the night and all the sadness there is...'

'Oh, yes,' said Whomper.

CHAPTER 4
About vanity and the dangers of sleeping in trees

A
FEW
days passed.

The Moomins were beginning to get used to their strange home. Every evening, exactly at sundown, the beautiful lamps were lighted. Moominpappa found out that the red velvet curtains could be pulled to against rain, and that there was a small pantry under the floor. It had a round little roof and was quite cool as there was water around it on three sides. But the nicest discovery was that the ceiling was filled with pictures, still more beautiful than the one with the birches. You could pull them down and back up again, just as you liked. There was one picture of a veranda with a fretwork railing, and it became their favourite, because it reminded them of the Moomin Valley.