The Elfin Ship

‘And beyond the Wild Wood again?’ he asked: ‘Where it’s all blue and dim, and one sees what may be hills or perhaps they mayn’t, and something like the smoke of towns, or is it only cloud-drift?’

‘Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,’ said the Rat. ‘And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all.’

Kenneth Grahame
The Wind in the Willows

1
Gilroy Bastable and the Airship

Summer had somehow passed along into autumn, as it will, and with October came a good bit of rain. And rain, isn’t at all bad – as long, that is, as you’re not caught out in it. The blue skies and white bits of clouds had gone south like geese some weeks back and rolling gray masses had taken their place overhead.

A deep rumble, something between the bellow of a giant and the echoing crack of a rock sailing into a canyon, could be heard away up the valley. It appeared from the village as if the green slopes of the mountains merged there where the River Oriel finally fell away into the sea, but that was only because it was so far away. The river, as broad by then as the sky itself, had worked away at the mountains for an age, and although you couldn’t tell it from Twombly Town, the valley opened up beyond the mountains into green rolling hills which continued to roll smack into the sea.

So the leaves were falling slowly in the cool breezes, and of those left on the trees few were green. Most were brown and red and gold, and when they piled up on the ground and were rained on, they smelled awfully good, although it was a sort of lonesome, musty smell.

Great gray clouds and ominous rumbles of thunder usually meant that rain wasn’t a long way off. As Jonathan Bing sat in his old wicker chair which had pretty much gone to bits in the weather, he thought of all of this business about the changing seasons. He could smell the musty odor of the forest which wasn’t more than a stone’s throw off to his left, and he could see three lone boats on the dark river below the village all pulling along toward shore and shelter. The first drops splashed down heavily, as if warning that here was a serious rain; they were followed by a steadily thickening curtain of drops until the shingled roof above his head rattled merrily.

Jonathan nodded in approval, patted his dog, and took a long swallow of the hot punch he’d prepared against this very eventuality. Something about the simple fact that there were people on the river, soaked, no doubt, to their toes, made his punch taste punchier and his woolen coat feel more snug than it might have. High time, he thought, to light his pipe. And so he did, afterward puffing away on the thing as if the rising smoke would form a misty barrier against the wind and rain.

His old dog, Ahab, named after the seventh king of The-Land-Beyond-the-River, was a fat sort of a dog. He didn’t, in fact, look doggish at all. His head seemed much too big for his body and was round as a plate. His eyes, which appeared a trifle piglike, were set off on either side a bit too much – as if Ahab had been caught facing a stiff wind and had had his face pushed about. He was enormously fat and was white with speckles of odd shades of gray and brown all over, and he had short little legs. His legs moved wonderfully fast, and he could have run rings around any rat in the village bakery. He was, however, on moderately good terms with rats and so probably wouldn’t run rings around them anyway. Jonathan used to joke that he had come upon Ahab playing at cards with three or four rats and a crow in the barn once, just to indicate Ahab’s good nature.

He and Ahab had lived in the village for a long time, as had almost everyone else there. Jonathan made cheeses. He was known about town as the Master Cheeser, or simply Cheeser which wasn’t at all strange.

Beyond his house, about halfway up to the dense line of green at the edge of the forest, were the cheesehouses: one was a smokehouse and the other simply a house for curing cheeses. If Jonathan needed a smoked cheese he’d say, ‘I’m going to the smokehouse.’ If he wanted something else, a nice cheddar or a carroway seed cheese, he’d say, ‘I’m going for a cheese,’ and let it go at that.

During the months of October and November Jonathan prepared great circular white cheeses made of goat’s milk and raisins and walnuts and the essences of ripe fruit which he kept secret. The custom was to slice one of these amazing cheeses up on Christmas Eve and eat it with fruitcakes and sherried trifles and roly-poly puddings and, most importantly, honeycakes. In mid November, Jonathan loaded a boat with raisin cheeses and floated down the river to Willowood Station where he sold them to traders who sailed away west to sell them in turn to the field dwarfs along the coast.

These dwarfs, anxiously awaiting their cheeses, prepared honeycakes in huge quantities, some for themselves, some for the elves that lived above in the Elfin Highlands, and some to trade for the round raisin cheeses which had come downriver from Twombly Town. Honeycakes, made with pecans and cinnamon and, of course, honey and a dozen strange grains and spices and good sorts of things that the people upriver in Jonathan’s village knew nothing about, were as much a part of the holiday feast as were raisin cheeses.

Jonathan had contemplated, one afternoon over his pipe, trading the secret of his raisin cheeses for the secret of the honeycakes thereby making the November trading unnecessary. But the good thing about thinking over a pipe is that it takes some time to puff and tamp and light and puff, puff, puff again, giving time to get through a problem from back to front. This idea of trading secret recipes, Jonathan decided, was a bad one. It would no doubt ruin more than it would accomplish. And besides, there was a certain feeling of pride, not a bad pride at all, in being the only person responsible for something as wonderful as raisin cheeses.

But it was getting on into autumn, and it was a gray rainy day for the people of the valley. Jonathan drained his mug of punch and tapped out his pipe against the bottom of his shoe. It was time, decidedly time, to be about cooking supper. As far as he was concerned, all the rain in the sky could fall and he wouldn’t care. He’d rather enjoy it because there was no place he had to go and nothing he had to do but eat a good meal, read a bit, and go to sleep. Nothing is better than having absolutely nothing to do when it’s raining outside. Part of you might say, ‘Weed the garden,’ or ‘Slap a coat of paint on the cheesehouse,’ and another part of you can reply, ‘I can’t. It’s raining outside fit to shout,’ and then all of you can go back to doing nothing.

Jonathan stood up, walked just to the edge of the porch – just to where the raindrops ended – and stood for a moment watching the smoke tumble up out of a dozen chimneys scattered about the hillside and down toward the center of town. Padding along beside him, Ahab straightened up, rolled his eyes, and growled deep in his throat as if he’d heard a suspicious but undefinable noise.

Now Ahab never growled, especially down deep in his throat, unless something was genuinely amiss – such as someone crawling in through the window of the cheesehouse or if a bear had come prowling out of the forest. So Jonathan Bing looked lively. He craned his neck to peer around the corner of the house but saw nothing. To be on the safe side, he whispered, ‘At him, boy!’ to Ahab who simply with his peculiar looks could frighten almost anything save, perhaps, a bear. But Ahab, after sticking his nose out into the storm, lay down and pretended to sleep, opening one eye now and again to see if Jonathan was taken in.

As he stood there listening, a low humming sound gradually became audible from way off in the gray sky. It was a drone like a bee might make who was busy at a flower, and it was a lonely and sad sound. Jonathan had the feeling for a moment that he was a young boy standing alone on just such a rainy afternoon in a grassy clearing in the woods. He didn’t
think
of that – he just felt it all over and it made his heart race and his stomach seem empty. It was then, when he remembered the rain and the woods, that he recognized the sound.

He put one hand over his brow to shade his eyes – (simply out of habit, of course, since there was no sun) – then squinted for a moment before being able to make out the tiny dark blurred shape against the clouds. It was a flying machine, an elfin airship, launched from the mountaintops and whirring along miles above the valley, almost in the clouds themselves if that were possible.

Jonathan watched in wonder, this being the first flying machine he’d seen since that day in the meadow many years before. And even though it was just a tiny dark spot hovering in the sky, it was the most beautiful thing he’d seen – more beautiful than the emerald globe, big as your head, in the village museum or the view through the giant golden kaleidoscope that sat like a great cannon at the gates of the village for anyone in the world to look through. And just as it seemed as if the airship was drawing closer, just when he fancied he could see batlike wings jutting out from either side, the ship sailed silently into a cloud and was gone.

‘To be able to see the inside of a cloud!’ thought Jonathan. ‘Yoicks!’ But he knew immediately that ‘Yoicks’ didn’t quite capture what he felt. He envisioned great lakes of crystal rainwater in there with rainbow-colored fishes swimming through them and elfin airships sailing overhead. Then it occurred to him that such fishes would, as often as not, swim right through the bottom of the clouds like the rain did and find themselves in a predicament. And after all, he’d never seen any rainbow-colored fish sailing out of the sky, so it was all fairly unlikely. But he’d like to see the inside of a cloud anyway, lakes and fishes or no.

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