Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1. - THE SPELL OF THE FOG
Chapter 2. - THE HOUSE AT THE FORK
Chapter 3. - THE VILLAGE OVER THE MOUNTAIN
Chapter 4. - THE SALVAGED EGG CUPS
Chapter 5. - LOST ANN
Chapter 6. - TO HALIFAX FOR JUSTICE
Chapter 7. - ANTHONY
Chapter 8. - THE VESSEL FROM BOMBAY
Chapter 9 - . THE GOVERNMENT HOUSE BALL
Chapter 10. - GRETA’S TWELFTH BIRTHDAY
PUFFIN NEWBERY AWARD WINNERS AND HONOR BOOKS
In every generation of Aldingtons a child was born who understood the fog.
It was just as they turned out of the path to the cove and into the Old Road that Greta happened to look off to the south.
“Rosie, wait,” she called sharply.
She caught her breath and stared. If only stupid old Rosie could see it, too. Surely there was the outline of a building. It was blurred and indistinct, but those straight upright lines, that steep angle—no spruces could look that way. Greta’s heart almost stopped beating, but she had no silly feeling of fear. Fog had always seemed to her like the magic spell in the old fairy tales—a spell that caught you up and kept you as safe, once you were inside it, as you would have been within a sap bubble. But this was stranger than anything she had ever seen before. Here was a house—a house where no house stood! Indistinct though it was, she could follow every line of it. A high sharp roof, a peaked gable, a little lean-to at the side. It was all there. Just such a house as those she saw every day in the village.
“So this,” she said to herself, “this is what can happen to you in a fog. I always knew that there must be something hidden.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TO OUR FRIENDS IN LITTLE RIVER
You have made us welcome to the intimate friendliness of your kitchens. As you kneaded your oat bread or as you baited your trawls for the next day’s work at sea you have dipped far down into your memories for us and the tales you have told are in themselves like an old road into the past. You have been patient with our endless questions. Always you have made us feel that you knew they sprang from genuine interest rather than curiosity. Some of you have listened to the reading of parts of this story in the lamplit cabin while a silent fog kept guard outside, and your help has been boundless. For all this and much more we are grateful.
You will not find yourselves in these pages but you will find your names. Your Christian names and your surnames both seem so peculiarly Nova Scotian that we have borrowed them to help us hold, during these war years, the illusion at least of being less far apart.
PUFFIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc., 1943
Published by Puffin Books, 1986
Reissued simultaneously by Puffin Books and Viking,
divisions of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2005
Copyright © Julia L. Sauer, 1943
Copyright renewed Julia L. Sauer, 1971
All rights reserved
Frontispiece by Lynd Ward
S.A.
Set in Baskerville
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Sauer, Julia L. (Julia L. 1891-1983)
Fog magic.
Reprint. Originally published: New York: Viking Press, 1943.
p. cm.
Summary: A child of Nova Scotia who loves the fog
is transported by it to a secret world of her own.
eISBN : 978-1-101-04341-7
http://us.penguingroup.com
TO ALICE
for whom the old road over the mountain has always led to Blue Cove
1.
THE SPELL OF THE FOG
FROM the time she was a baby in her cradle, Greta had loved the fog.
Every soul in the little fishing village at the foot of the mountain had learned to accept the fog. It was part of their life. They knew that for weeks on end they must live within its circle. But they made no pretense of liking it. Those who tilled their little plots of land hated it when it kept their hay from drying. The men who fished dreaded it for it either kept them on shore altogether and cut down their meager earnings, or it made their hours on the sea more dangerous than ever. Only the lobster poachers who robbed honest men’s lobster pots, or set their own out of season, liked it—the lobster poachers and small Greta. And with Greta it was more than liking. On days when the gray clouds of fog rolled in from the sea and spread over the village, she would watch it drift past the windows with a look on her small face that almost frightened her mother.
“Goodness, child,” Gertrude Addington would say to the mite in the high chair, “you look as if you were seeing things—and pleasant things at that! I believe you like this beastly fog! Don’t you know your father is out there, like as not running on a reef this very minute? And my clean clothes mildewing for want of a bit of proper sun to dry them by?”
But then Greta would gurgle so happily and throw wide her arms with such eagerness to grasp and hold this queer gray smoke that Gertrude’s irritability would vanish like the fog itself when the sun comes suddenly through.
As soon as Greta could walk, Gertrude found that she might as well put her housework aside on foggy days and give herself to minding her child. The first thin wraiths of fog in the high pasture were enough to set her small daughter’s eyes sparkling. By the time it hid the big rock at the top of the pasture, Greta would be working her way cautiously to the door; and when it drew close enough to blur their own out-buildings, she would be scampering down the pasture lane as fast as her uncertain little feet could carry her.
“I’m at my wits’ end minding the child on foggy days,” she said to old Kil. He had stopped on his way home from the smoke house to leave a finnan haddie and he smiled down now at the bedraggled small girl whom Gertrude had just retrieved from beyond the garden. The old man laughed at her.
“Some are moon-struck, they say, and some are sun-struck,” he said. “Maybe this one is fog-struck. Don’t worry about her, Gertrude. It’s good for a young one to want to know the world she lives in in all kinds of weather.” He ran his big hand lightly over her damp curls. “I can’t see that it does this little mess o’ sea weed any harm to be well wetted down. But you might try mooring her to the apple tree and save yourself the minding of her.”
So the small girl came to be moored at the end of the clothes line like an idle dory on every day when the gray wisps of fog came drifting in.
Greta was ten when she began to sense
that she was looking for something within the fog. Until then it had only given her a happy feeling—just as the first snow-flakes delighted some of the other girls and boys, or the first fall winds that set the birch leaves blowing. But from the day when she had gone alone to find old Rosie, the cow, nothing had been quite the same.
The village of Little Valley lay on a narrow neck of land between two great arms of the sea. Like a lazy giant, North Mountain lay sprawled the full length of the peninsula until, at the very end, it sat up in a startled precipice at the sight of the open sea. Years before, a number of villages had dotted the shore on either side. Now, only a few were left and those were dwindling in size as the men despaired of making a living by fishing. At the foot of the mountain and following the line of its base ran the highway. Here the Royal Mail, the grocery truck, the butcher, and the tourist who had lost his way made his daily or weekly or chance trip down the neck to the sea and back again. But there was another road—a road less direct—filled with convenient curves—the old Post Road. This was the road the first settlers had built in the wilderness. They had come by sea, many of them, and made their little clearings near the shore. Gradually they had extended their clearings inland and in time, and with tremendous effort, they had threaded their holdings together on a narrow uncertain road through the spruce forest. With the new highway, generations later, had come new houses, away from the shore and more sheltered. Only cellar holes remained to mark the earlier homes.
This old Post Road was a joy to Greta. A part of it ran through her father’s land. Even though it had fallen so low as to serve as a mere lane to the pastures, there was something grand and romantic about it still. Years of spring freshets had washed away the dirt. The stones were bare that had formed its foundation. To follow it was like walking in the bed of a dry mountain stream. Greta knew every stone, every curve of it for miles, up over the high pastures and then down again toward the sea. This was the road her forefathers had traveled. Surely, she thought, it must lead somewhere worth going.
And then there was the day when old Rosie was particularly stubborn.
“Greta! Greta!” her mother called her from play. “Rosie isn’t at the bars with the other cows. Your father’s had a hard day getting in the hay. You’d best go and look for her before he does. You’ll probably meet her on the way. You’ll not need to go far.”
Greta started willingly enough. She had heard the foghorn blowing at Tollerton, down in the Passage, and she knew there was fog on the way.
“Want me to go along?” one of the boys asked.
“You better not, Hazen. I may be late.” She thanked him hastily and hurried away. To be caught in the fog and with the best excuse in the world was something too precious to share.
She found Rosie far off the Old Road and down at the cove. Rosie looked anything but guilty. Greta laughed.
“You darling,” she said to her. “I think you stayed down here on purpose so I could drive you home in the fog. But that’s not fair, you know, because Father would have had to come if Mother hadn’t noticed.”
She hurried Rosie across the stones of the shore and up through the thick spruce trees to the clearing beyond. The fog was closing in rapidly. You didn’t notice it in the woods, but out in the open it was already thick. Even Rosie began to look soft and furry and indistinct, like an imaginary cow that you tried to see in the clouds.
It was just as they turned out of the path to the cove and into the Old Road that Greta happened to look off to the south.
“Rosie, wait,” she called sharply.
She caught her breath and stared. If only stupid old Rosie could see it, too. Surely there was the outline of a building. It was blurred and indistinct, but those straight upright lines, that steep angle—no spruces could look that way. Greta’s heart almost stopped beating, but she had no silly feeling of fear. Fog had always seemed to her like the magic spell in the old fairy tales—a spell that caught you up and kept you as safe, once you were inside it, as you would have been within a soap bubble. But this was stranger than anything she had ever seen before. Here was a house—a house where no house stood! Indistinct though it was, she could follow every line of it. A high sharp roof, a peaked gable, a little lean-to at the side. It was all there. Just such a house as those she saw every day in the village.
“So this,” she said to herself, “this is what can happen to you in a fog. I always knew that there must be something hidden.”
It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her in her whole life. Rosie, far ahead, was mooing at the pasture bars, and Greta tore herself away to follow. Once inside the barn, she wished that she had stayed and gone closer.
She stood in the barn doorway looking out across the yard. The fog was dense and gray. It blanketed the yard and made the house across the intervening feet as dim as that other one had been. Behind her in the quiet sweet-smelling barn her father sat milking.
“Father,” Greta spoke softly.
“Yes? What is it, Greta?” The milk streamed rhythmically into the pail.
“Father, down where the path to Little Cove turns off the Old Road, is there—is there any old house off in the spruces to the south?”
Her father never stirred on the milking stool, but he dropped his hands quietly on his knees. The barn was very still for a moment.
“There’s an old cellar hole off there, Greta,” he said at last. “There’s been no house upon it in my day.” His voice was as calm and slow as ever. And then he added something very strange. “Every cellar hole should have a house,” he said quietly.
“Yes, Father,” Greta answered. It was almost as if he’d told her that she should build a house and she had almost promised.
Rosie stirred restlessly. Father cleared his throat and went on milking.
“You’d best go in and help your mother with the tea,” he said. “She’ll be fussing. She doesn’t know you’re back.”
Greta stepped out of the warm fragrant barn into the cool fog. It had always seemed to be whispering a secret to her. Now, at last, the words of the secret were coming more clearly.
Greta did not know what Walter Addington and his wife talked about that night. She went up to bed at her usual bedtime. Her little room with its steep sloping ceiling and its single window faced out toward the high pasture and the Old Road. Tonight you couldn’t even see as far as the crooked apple tree by the well. She undressed and slipped into bed. The hushed voices in the room below and the distant rhythmic blowing of the foghorn in the Passage gave her the same warm, safe feeling they had always given her as she drifted off to sleep.
Whatever it was that was said that night, Gertrude was persuaded to let her child wander as she willed in the fog. Father had somehow worked the miracle. Sometimes Gertrude would look so perplexed, so distressed when Greta had finished her stint of housework and was free to go that the girl would come running back to throw her arms around her mother’s neck.
“Why, Mother,” she would say, “can’t you see the fog is lovely? And I know every stone in the Old Road. I can’t get lost. Please, please don’t hate to let me go.”
“Go on, child, go if you must.” Gertrude would even laugh a little at her own vague fears. “It’s just that you’re so different from what I used to be at your age. We always hated this miserable wet fog. We’d scurry for home at the first sign of it.” It was always the same. They never could understand each other about the fog.
One Saturday morning Greta opened her eyes to see a gray blanket filling the window space. A thick fog, and on a Saturday, too, when there was no school! It was the first really foggy day since the night she had seen the strange house back in the spruces—the first chance she had had to see if she had imagined it all. She hurried through her Saturday work. She thought of every little thing her mother could possibly want done—the usual Saturday errands, the washing up. Her own little room was as tidy as a ship’s cabin, her Sunday gloves were washed and hung on the bars over the stove to dry. Th
e collar was pressed on her best dress. Gertrude eyed her sharply.
“I know why you’re so light on your feet this morning,” she said shortly. “You’re wanting to go off again.”
Greta laughed. Not even her mother’s crossness could spoil this day.
“I may go, mayn’t I, Mother?” she coaxed. “It’s only eleven o’clock, and if I take a sandwich and start now, I can be way over the high pasture before noontime. Please, Mother. I may even find some early berries. At least I’ll take a pail.”
Gertrude had been churning. She was pressing the little pats of butter with an acorn stamp. She laid the stamp down and looked at Greta without a word.
“Mother,” the girl said slowly. “Please try just once more to understand.”
Gertrude’s “Well?” wasn’t encouraging and Greta began hesitantly.
“You—you know the way a spider web looks on foggy days. Strings and strings of the tiniest pearls, all in a lovely pattern. Well, everything else is different, too, when—when once you’re inside,” she finished stum blingly.
“Inside?” asked Gertrude sharply. “Inside what, I’d like to know?”
“Oh, just inside the fog,” Greta told her. It was no use. She could never get it into words. No one else could see how the fog always seemed to her like a magic wall. You stepped through and walked until your own familiar house was gone. And then, sometime, something strange and wonderful would happen. She was sure of it.
She made her sandwich quickly, and pulled on her old coat and beret.
“Leave the bread tins and the dinner dishes for me, Mother. I’ll wash them when I get back,” she said as she opened the door.
“Don’t be late,” was her mother’s answer. Then, a little more pleasantly, “I’ll save a plate of chowder for your tea. You’ll like as not be chilled through.”
Greta gave her a loving little squeeze as she slipped out. The day had begun well, and the best part of it lay hidden ahead of her.
Fog Magic Page 1
