Moominpappa at Sea

by Tove Jansson

  ‘What did you say?’ exclaimed Moominmamma. ‘What curious taste he has!’

  ‘He looks as if he didn’t eat anything else,’ added Little My. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me in the least. But he knows his own mind, and never asks questions,’ she said appreciatively.

  ‘Doesn’t he tell you anything either?’ asked Moominpappa.

  ‘Not a thing,’ said Little My. So saying, she climbed up the chimney-piece and curled up against the warm wall to sleep off the rain.

  ‘Anyway, he’s our neighbour after all,’ said Moominmamma vaguely. ‘One has to have neighbours, I mean.’ She sighed, and added: ‘I think the rain’s coming in.’

  ‘I’ll put that right,’ said Moominpappa. ‘By and by, when I’ve got a moment.’ But he thought: ‘Perhaps it’ll clear up. I don’t want to go up there. There’s too much there that reminds me of the lighthouse-keeper.’

  *

  The long, rainy day drew to a close, and towards evening the wind had dropped so much that Moominpappa decided to take up the nets.

  ‘Now you can see I know something about the sea,’ he said, very pleased with himself. ‘We shall be back in good time for evening tea, and we shall bring the biggest fish with us. The rest we’ll throw back into the sea.’

  The island was wet everywhere. It seemed to be drooping, and had quite lost its colour in the rain. The water had risen so much that little could be seen of the beach, and the boat was rolling from side to side with its stern in the sea.

  ‘We must pull her right up the beach to the alder bushes,’ said Moominpappa. ‘Now you can see what the water can do when autumn comes. If I’d waited till tomorrow morning to take the nets up we shouldn’t have had any boat left. You can’t be too careful with the sea, you know! I wonder,’ Moominpappa added, ‘I wonder why the sea rises and falls like this. There must be an explanation…’

  Moomintroll looked around. The beach had changed completely. The sea looked swollen, it heaved wearily and sulkily and had flung up a heap of seaweed all over the beach. ‘It’s no beach for sea-horses any longer. Imagine if they only like sandy beaches and don’t bother to come back again! What if the Groke has scared them away…’ thought Moomintroll. He threw a timid glance in the direction of the tiny islands offshore, but they had disappeared in the drizzle.

  ‘Watch where you’re rowing!’ Moominpappa shouted. ‘Look for the float and mind out for the waves or we’ll be driven ashore!’

  Moomintroll pulled on his left oar as hard as he could. The Adventure swung round to leeward all the time and stuck in the troughs of the waves.

  ‘Row out! Row out!’ shouted Moominpappa from the stern. ‘Turn her round! Backwards! Backwards!’ He lay on his stomach over the stern of the boat and tried to reach the float. ‘No, no, no, no! This way! No, the other way, I mean. That’s it. I’ve got it. Now row straight out!’

  Moominpappa caught the net and began to haul it in. The rain was driving in his face and the net felt very heavy.

  ‘We shall never be able to eat all this fish,’ he thought, a little disconcerted by the thought of such a large catch. ‘What a job!’ he reflected. ‘But if one has a family, one has a family…’

  Pulling on the oars like one possessed, Moomintroll saw something dark coming up with the net – it was seaweed! The net was full of seaweed, yards and yards of it!

  Moominpappa said nothing. He had stopped trying to take in the net neatly and was lying across the bow of the boat, pulling the net in any old way with his arms. Armful after armful of thick yellowish-brown seaweed came over the side, but not a single fish. All three nets were the same – nothing but seaweed. Moomintroll turned round and let the boat drift towards the beach while he held the right oar without rowing, and in a few moments the Adventure had her nose ashore. The next wave struck her side and she capsized. Moominpappa was suddenly full of life.

  ‘Jump in and pull the prow out,’ he shouted. ‘Pull it out and hold on tight!’

  Moomintroll stood up to his waist in the water, holding on to the Adventure and wave after wave broke over his head. The water was so cold that it was painful. Moominpappa tried to haul the nets ashore, heaving and straining, his hat down over his eyes, and the oars had rolled on to the sand and got tied up with the net and his legs – everything was about as bad as it could be. When they finally got the Adventure safely up, another sheet of rain drifted in over the sea, and darkness concealed everything. Night was falling.

  ‘Well, we managed that all right,’ said Moomintroll, looking cautiously at his father.

  ‘Do you think so?’ said Moominpappa doubtfully. He stared at the enormous heap of net and seaweed and decided that Moomintroll was right. ‘Yes, we did,’ he said. ‘A battle with the ocean! That’s what happens out here, you know.’

  *

  When Little My heard the story of their adventures, she put the sandwich she was eating on the table in front of her and said: ‘Well! You two are going to have fun. It’ll take three or four days to sort those nets out. That seaweed clings like the very devil. Comes of leaving the net in all day.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Moominpappa began.

  ‘We’ve got plenty of time,’ said Moominmamma quickly. ‘It might be quite a nice job if the weather’s good…’

  ‘The fisherman can eat them clean,’ suggested Little My. ‘He likes seaweed.’

  Moominpappa felt quite deflated. This seaweed had come right after that wretched business of the lamp, it wasn’t fair. One toiled and toiled and nothing worked. Things just seemed to slip through one’s fingers. Moominpappa’s thoughts started to wander, and he stirred and stirred with his spoon in his cup although the sugar had melted long ago. In the centre of the table stood the smallest saucepan. At intervals a drop fell from the ceiling with a plop. Moomintroll sat staring at the calendar, listlessly making knots in his tail.

  ‘Let’s light the lamp!’ said Moominmamma cheerfully. ‘It’s stormy tonight, so we can hang it in the window!’

  ‘No, no! Not in the window,’ shouted Moomintroll, jumping up.

  Moominmamma sighed. It was exactly what she was afraid of. The rainy weather was making them behave just as strangely as if they were kept in by the rain on a trip. And there would be lots of rainy days here. There back home there had always been plenty to do indoors, but here… Moominmamma got up and went over to the desk and opened the top drawer.

  ‘I went through this today,’ she said. ‘It was almost empty. And you can’t imagine what I found! A puzzle. There are at least a thousand small pieces here, and no one can tell what it’s supposed to be until you put it together. What fun it will be, don’t you think?’

  She poured the bits on to the table among the tea-cups in an enormous heap. The family stared at it with disapproval.

  Moomintroll turned one of the pieces over. It was quite black. As black as the Groke. Or the shadows in the thicket – or the pupils of the sea-horses’ eyes. Or a million other things. It might be just anything. You wouldn’t know where it fitted in until the whole puzzle was almost finished.

  *

  That night the Groke was singing out on the sea. No one had come down to the beach with a lamp. She had waited and waited and no one had come.

  She started softly, but gradually her song of loneliness had got louder and louder. It was no longer just sad, it was defiant too. ‘There’s no other Groke, I’m the only one. I’m the coldest thing that ever was. I am never, never warm.’

  ‘It’s seals,’ murmured Moominpappa into his pillow.

  Moomintroll pulled the blanket over his head. He knew that the Groke was sitting waiting for the lantern. But he wasn’t going to let it give him a bad conscience. She could howl as much as she wanted, he didn’t care. He didn’t care a scrap. And besides, Moominmamma had said that they were using too much paraffin. So that was that.

  *

  The days passed, and the water rose as the stubborn east wind continued. The waves swept round the island in a continuous, hypnotic roar. T
he fisherman’s little house was completely cut off, but, according to Little My, he was jolly glad to be left in peace. It had stopped raining, and the family had gone down to the beach to look around.

  ‘What masses of seaweed!’ exclaimed Moominmamma, delighted to see it. ‘Now I can make a much larger garden!’ She went over the rock and stopped suddenly. The garden had disappeared, completely and utterly vanished. The sea had washed it away.

  ‘Well, it was too near the sea, of course,’ Moominmamma thought. She was quite crestfallen. ‘I must carry the seaweed much higher up and start a new one…’

  She gazed over the flooded beach where the waves were breaking in a hissing white semicircle. They came right up to the boat, lying pressed against the alder bushes, striking her in the stern so that she leapt up in indignation. Moominpappa was standing right out in the water, looking for his breakwater. He went this way and that, and waded in up to his waist. He turned round and shouted something.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Moominmamma asked.

  ‘It’s gone,’ said Moomintroll. ‘All the stones have rolled away.’

  This was serious. Moominmamma hurried over the wet sand and out into the water to show that she was sympathetic. It was better than saying anything at a moment like this.

  Moominmamma and Moominpappa stood side by side in the water getting cold. She thought: ‘This sea of his is unkind…’

  ‘Come, let’s go ashore,’ said Moominpappa absent-mindedly. ‘Perhaps those stones weren’t as big as I thought they were.’

  They left the whole lot behind, and went past the boat into the aspens, where Moominpappa stopped and said: ‘It’s no good trying to make a path here. I’ve tried. These wretched stones are much too big. The lighthouse-keeper would have made one long ago if it had been possible, and a jetty too.’

  ‘Perhaps one shouldn’t try to change things so much on this island,’ said Moominmamma. ‘Just leave it as it is. Back home it was easier somehow… But I’m going to try and make a new garden, higher up.’

  Moominpappa said nothing.

  ‘And there’s so much to do in the lighthouse,’ Moominmamma went on. ‘One could make lots of little shelves, and nice furniture! Couldn’t one? And mend that awful staircase… and the roof…’

  ‘I don’t want to mend anything,’ thought Moominpappa. ‘I don’t want to pick seaweed… I want to build big things, strong things, I want to so terribly much… But I don’t know… It’s so very difficult being a father!’

  They went towards the lighthouse, and Moomintroll saw them disappearing up the slope with their tails drooping.

  Above the lighthouse-rock he could see a broken rainbow with all its transparent colours. While he was looking at it, Moomintroll noticed that the colours were getting fainter, and he knew at once that it was very important for him to get to his glade before it disappeared altogether. He rushed to the thicket, threw himself on his tummy and crawled in.

  The glade was his very own, and it was just as beautiful in cloudy weather. He could see a spider’s web between the branches, all silver with drops of water. Although the wind was blowing outside, it was quite calm in here. And no ants. Not a single one.

  But perhaps they were just hiding from the rain. Moomintroll started to dig up the turf impatiently with both paws. There it was again – the smell of paraffin. And there they were, masses of them, but all dead every one. They were all shrivelled up. Horror of horrors! A terrible massacre had taken place, and not a single ant had survived! They were drenched in paraffin.

  Moomintroll got up, and all of a sudden it hit him: ‘It’s all my fault. I should have known. Little My isn’t the sort of person who talks to people and tries to persuade them. She acts on the spur of the moment, or nothing at all. What shall I do? What shall I do?’

  Moomintroll sat in his very own glade – his for ever and ever – swaying backwards and forwards with the smell of paraffin creeping all over him. It stuck to him all the way home, and he was sure he would never get rid of it.

  *

  ‘But ants are like mosquitoes,’ said Little My. ‘It’s a good thing to get rid of them! Anyway, you knew exactly what I was going to do to them! All you hoped was that I shouldn’t tell you about it. You’re awfully good at deceiving yourself!’

  There was no answer to that.

  That evening Little My caught sight of Moomintroll creeping through the heather in an obvious attempt to make himself invisible. Naturally, she followed him, and saw him spreading sugar round the edge of the spruce forest. Then he disappeared again into the thicket with a tin.

  ‘Huh!’ thought Little My. ‘Now he’s trying to ease his conscience. I could tell him that ants don’t eat sugar, and that it’ll melt anyway because the ground’s wet. And that any ant that I didn’t catch is completely indifferent to the whole thing, and is in no need of consolation. But I can’t be bothered.’

  *

  Then there were two days when Moominmamma and Moomintroll did nothing but pick seaweed out of the nets.

  *

  Then it started to rain again. The wet patch on the ceiling got bigger and bigger. The drops fell ‘plip, plip, plip’ into the little saucepan, and ‘plop, plop, plop’ into the big one. Up in the lamp-room Moominpappa sat contemplating the broken window with great aversion. The more he looked at the wretched window and the more he thought about it, the emptier his mind became. It should be nailed up from the outside, or tightened from the inside with sacking and glue. That’s what Moominmamma had suggested.

  Moominpappa felt more and more tired, and finally lay on the floor. The green window-pane became a beautiful emerald. He began to feel better, and after a while he was struck by an idea, all his own. ‘If I was to cut a good wide strip of sacking, and then spread the glue on it, and then break the green glass into lots and lots of emeralds and then press them into the glue…’ Moominpappa sat up. ‘What an interesting idea!’ he thought.

  ‘In between the emeralds I could throw fine white sand before the glue is too dry. No, perhaps rice instead. That’s it – I could work in tiny white grains of rice, like pearls, thousands and thousands of them.’

  Moominpappa got up and took a hammer to the broken window. He started to prise it away very carefully. A large piece crashed to the floor and splintered. He selected a pawful of little pieces and with endless patience began to hammer the fragments into beautiful even pieces.

  *

  Moominpappa came down through the trap-door in the afternoon when the belt was ready.

  ‘I tried it on,’ he said. ‘And then I took quite a bit off. It should be just right for you.’

  Moominmamma put it over her head and it slipped down to her waist, just where it should be.

  ‘It can’t be true!’ said Moominmamma. ‘It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever been given!’

  She was so happy that she suddenly felt very serious.

  ‘We couldn’t understand why you wanted rice!’ exclaimed Moomintroll. ‘It swells when it’s wet… so we thought you were using it to tighten the window in some way…’

  ‘It’s fantastic,’ said Little My with reluctant admiration. ‘I can hardly believe it.’ She put the wash-basin in a different place so that the drops falling from the ceiling didn’t say plip or plop but plup, and added: ‘Well, that’s good-bye to the rice pudding!’

  ‘I have got rather a large waist,’ said Moominmamma reproachfully. ‘We can eat gruel just as well.’

  This suggestion was met by complete silence. Moominpappa could hear the drops falling from the ceiling, making a sort of melody with three notes instead of two, specially written for him. He didn’t like it.

  ‘Dearest, if I had to choose between a jewel and rice pudding,’ Moominmamma began, but Moominpappa interrupted her saying, ‘How much of the food is eaten?’

  ‘Rather a lot,’ said Moominmamma anxiously. ‘You know what sea air is like…’

  ‘Is there anything left?’ Moominpappa went on.

  Moomi
nmamma made a vague gesture which seemed to suggest that there wasn’t much left except porridge, but that it wasn’t so important after all.

  Then Moominpappa did the only possible thing that he could do in such a situation – he took his fishing-rod, put on the lighthouse-keeper’s hat, and in proud silence selected his most beautiful trolling spoon.

  ‘I’m going fishing for a while,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s just the right weather for pike.’

  *

  The north-easter had blown itself out, but the water was still very high. It was drizzling, and the rock and the water were the same colour, a grey nothingness and very lonely.

  Moominpappa fished for an hour in the black pool. He didn’t get a single bite. ‘One shouldn’t talk about pike till one’s got a catch,’ he thought.

  Like most fathers of a certain kind Moominpappa liked fishing. He had got his fishing-rod on his birthday a couple of years before and it was a very fine one. But sometimes it stood in its corner in a slightly unpleasant way, as though reminding him that it was for catching fish.

  Moominpappa stood looking down into the black water of the pool, and the pool stared back at him with its great eye. He drew in his line and put his pipe in his hat. Then he walked over to the leeward side of the island.

  There might be some pike there, little ones perhaps, but something to take home with him anyway.

  Just off-shore sat the fisherman fishing in his boat.

  ‘Is this a good place to fish?’ Moominpappa asked.

  ‘No,’ said the fisherman.

  Pappa sat on the rock and tried to think of something to say. He had never met anyone so difficult to talk to. It all seemed so clumsy and awkward.

  ‘I expect it’s a little lonely here in winter,’ he ventured, but of course he got no answer. He tried once more.