It was neither cold nor wet below the glass roof of the lake, for, as
David already knew, when you are completely in the water, from your head
to your heels, you never think of saying ‘Oh, how wet it is!’ and it is
only when a piece of you is wet, like when you are washing your hands,
or a snowball goes down your neck, that you think of wetness. Certainly
also it was not cold, because there were so many red-leaf fires burning.
Up overhead the moon shone very brightly through what David knew was ice
to the ordinary world, but which it was much more correct to call
fish-glass, and it made the most lovely lights in it, just as if all the
diamond tiaras and emerald and ruby necklaces had been mashed up in the
fish-glass.
‘That’s something to know,’ he said to himself. ‘When there’s fish-glass
on the lake, I shall make a hole in it and get underneath. What nonsense
grown-up people talk! They all say it’s dangerous to get under the
ice—fish-glass, but it was the only safe thing to do. I suppose I’d
better call on some fish and thank them for rescuing me.’
He began walking towards one of the red fires round which there were a
lot of fish collected, but they all looked so very uninterested and
solemn (‘just as if they were hearing a sermon in church and not
attending,’ thought David), that he decided that he would explore a
little first, and turned quickly off in another direction. At once he
felt he was not walking any more, for his feet had come off the ground,
and he was lying flat a few feet from the floor. This sensation was
rather like losing your balance, and he made a sort of wriggle with his
feet in order to recover it again. But instead of recovering his
footing, he merely darted off at a great speed in a perfectly unexpected
direction.
‘Why, it’s a sort of mad flying in the water,’ he said to himself.
‘O-oh, I see, it’s swimming fish-fashion.’
This was a great discovery; he flicked his feet again, and plunged into
a great thicket of water-trees that waved and swayed round him. Once
more he kicked, but instead of darting forward again, he came to a dead
stop, though he couldn’t understand how he had kicked differently from
before. Another kick made him spin round, and once again he kicked as he
had kicked the first time, and flew out into the open.
‘Take care where you’re going,’ said a thick, bored voice near him, and,
turning round very cautiously lest he should fly off again, he saw an
old brown trout, not looking at him exactly, but not looking anywhere
else. One eye—the only one that David could see, in fact—seemed to be
turned towards him rather than towards anything else, but it merely
stared vacantly at him, as if it was painted there.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said David, ‘but I don’t seem to go where I want.’
The trout opened and shut its mouth once or twice without saying
anything, and then it slewed round and turned its other eye upon him.
Then it turned its back on him altogether, and took no further notice of
him.
This was rather an unpromising beginning, but David was so eager to
learn how to swim, fish-fashion, that he risked being snubbed.
‘Could you spare me the time just to show me the sort of way it goes?’
he asked.
‘You wave yourself,’ said the trout, ‘and then you go. The sooner you
go, the better I shall be pleased.’
David waved himself, and ran into the trout’s tail.
‘Don’t do that,’ said the trout, not the least angrily, but in the same
bored manner. ‘It’s bad manners to hit anybody’s tail. You’re a very
ill-bred sort of creature.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ said David. ‘I didn’t mean to hit you.’
‘Then you did it without meaning,’ said the trout, with its back to him,
‘which is worse, because there’s no sense in it, if it doesn’t mean
anything. I wish you would go away. Right away, I mean: none of your
hanging about here. Get some low, coarse fish to teach you. I’m busy.’
David felt rather discouraged. He didn’t know what adventure might
happen next, or how soon it might happen, and he wanted to learn how to
swim fish-fashion before something else took place. But he felt he could
not face any more dull eyes just yet, which looked at you as if you
didn’t mean anything, and so he moved very cautiously away from this
stupid old thing, for fear of butting it again, and began practising by
himself. He found it was not so difficult as it seemed to be at first
(which is the case with most things). The great point was to make up
your mind first where you wanted to go to, and then look at the place
and wave yourself, and he found that he usually went in that sort of
direction, just as if there was something inside him that knew how to do
it, if he only told it what he wanted. He passed a fish now and then,
which took no notice whatever of him, and presently he found he was
getting on so well that he wished to show off to somebody, so he
returned in the direction of the trout that was so busy. There it was
precisely as David had left it, doing nothing whatever except slowly
opening and shutting its mouth, and staring at nothing at all. So David
gave a tremendous kick in order to dash up to it in a real fish-boy-like
manner, and, miscalculating his direction, ran violently into its nose.
‘Don’t go on doing that,’ said the trout. ‘You butt me here, and you
butt me there, and you’ve got no self-control. It’s very boring of you.
Better go away. You needn’t bother to come back any more, for ever. I
shan’t miss you at all. I only wish you had missed me.’
‘I wish I had too,’ said David. ‘But I was getting on so nicely, and I
wanted to show somebody.’
‘And you’re mudding everything up,’ said the trout. ‘So you’d better
show somebody else, and not me. I don’t care what you do, or where you
go, so long as you don’t do and go it here.’
David felt annoyed at this.
‘Are all trout as rude as you?’ he asked.
The trout opened its mouth two or three times, and each time David
thought it was going to speak.
[Illustration: David and the trout]
‘Yes,’ it said at length. ‘All.’
‘I should think you must get rather tired of each other’s company then,’
said David.
Again it seemed as if the trout was going to speak, and this time David
counted that it opened and shut its mouth eleven times before it
answered.
‘We are,’ it said. ‘We’re each of us tired of everybody else. But I’m
most tired of you. I hate being interrupted when I’m busy, and I hate
people running into my face. I never have liked it, and I don’t mean to
begin now.’
‘Well, I’ve apologised for that,’ said David. ‘I can’t do more.’
This time the trout opened and shut its mouth only nine times before it
answered.
‘Yes, you can,’ it said. ‘You can go away. I can’t think why you don’t.’
David was naturally a polite boy, but when any one was rude to him he
could easily be rude back. He forgot all about his swimming
fish-fashion.
‘I don’t believe you’re a bit busy,’ he said. ‘You haven’t done a thing
since I was here before. You’ve just waved and stared.’
The trout looked at David with one eye, then moved his head and looked
at him with the other.
‘That’s two things then,’ it said.
‘Yes, but that doesn’t make you busy,’ said David. ‘You couldn’t
possibly be idler. That doesn’t count.’
A faint gleam of intelligence came into that foolish face.
‘I can count,’ said the trout. ‘One—two—four—three—nine and a
half—a hundred. There!’
‘You’re quite wrong,’ said David. ‘It goes one—two—six—four. Let me
see what does come after four?’ he added, suddenly forgetting how to
count himself.
‘Nothing: that’s the end,’ said the trout. ‘You needn’t wait any longer.
We’ve both finished. You may get down. Never mind about wiping your
mouth or anything.’
‘One—two—six—fourteen,’ began David again, determined to get it
right, when suddenly he was blown all sideways, as it were, by a
tremendous draught of water, and the trout’s tail whisked by his face.
As for the trout itself, that one swish of its tail had carried it ten
yards away, and it was drifting back again with an enormous worm hanging
out of its mouth. Its cheeks bulged with it, and its eyes stared so that
David thought they would drop out. But in two or three gulps it managed
to swallow the rest of the worm, and to David’s great surprise it looked
almost pleasant and winked at him.
‘There!’ it said. ‘Now you know why I was so busy. I shall have a
holiday for three minutes until I’m hungry again. Who are you, and what
are you doing here, without being drowned? It’s all very irregular.’
‘I was a Field-Marshal last,’ began David, rather proudly.
‘What a stupid thing to be!’ said the trout, ‘especially as there aren’t
any fields here. And who asked you to come to my lake?’
‘Nobody. I chose to come,’ said David.
‘Well, I choose next: I choose that you should go away. I believe you
are a sort of caddis-worm, whom nobody likes.’
‘No, I’m not,’ said David. ‘I’m a boy.’
‘Then you can’t be a Field-Marshal. That’s one to me.’
‘Are we playing a game?’ he asked. ‘Is it a sort of happy families?’
‘No. Two to me. Go away. I’ve got to be busy again.’
‘What you mean by being busy,’ said David, ‘is that you want to eat
something.’
The trout’s eye began to get glazed and vacant.
‘Worms!’ it said.
‘I believe that’s all you ever think about,’ said David.
The stupid mouth began opening and shutting, and David began counting,
rather relieved to find that he could do so again. The seventh time it
opened the trout said:
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘What else do you think about then?’ asked David.
‘Worms,’ said the trout.
‘But that’s the same thing,’ said David.
This time the trout opened and shut its mouth so often without saying
anything at all that David felt that there was no use in waiting any
longer for it to speak. Even when it did speak, too, it was almost
stupider than when it didn’t, and since he had come through the blue
door he had met nobody so completely uninteresting. The groups round the
fires looked just as hopeless, and he felt that he was only wasting his
time. But he could not resist saying what he thought.
‘You’re much the stupidest thing I ever saw,’ he said. ‘I shall go
away.’
‘That’s what I always wanted you to do,’ said the trout. ‘And mind you
don’t come back.’
David wondered whether fish might not be a little brighter at the top
end of the lake where the stream flowed into it, and he waved his way up
there. But even swimming fish-fashion had ceased to amuse him, for he
did not want to do anything that fishes did.
‘If I learned to swim like them,’ he said to himself, ‘I should grow
like them perhaps, and that would be awful. I shall get out of the water
altogether when I come to the end of the roof. They never put it up over
the stream.’
By and by the roof got thinner, and when he came into the stream, he
found, as he had expected, that there was no roof at all. He put his
head up very cautiously for fear he was not far enough away from the
camp, and that he might be pursued again, but found that a mist had come
up, quite covering the lawn, though bugles were still sounding there,
and he felt safe in landing on the far side of the stream, underneath
the shelter of the bridge. The moonlight felt very warm and comfortable
after the water, and the moment he stepped on to land he was quite dry
again, if he had ever really been wet at all.
He had hardly taken his second foot out of the water when there was a
great swirl in the stream behind him, and the head of a huge wicked pike
snapped at his heel.
‘You little wretch,’ it said. ‘How dare you come into my lake? If I had
only known about you a minute sooner, I’d have eaten you up.’
David bounded up the bank. He had never seen anything so ugly and cruel.
‘You beastly fish,’ he said. ‘If I had teeth like you, I should go to
the dentist. I’m not frightened of you.’
He was terrified really, but when you are frightened, it is always
comforting to say you’re not.
‘Yes, you are,’ said the pike, snapping his jaws, and shouldering his
way up through the shallow water. ‘You daren’t come down into the stream
again.’
‘I don’t want to come into your muddy stream,’ said David. ‘I should if
I wanted to. And for that matter you daren’t come up here.’
‘Yes, I dare,’ said the pike, pushing farther up, till half his horrid
body was out of the stream. ‘And I’m coming too.’
David really didn’t feel sure that he wasn’t, for since he had got
through the blue door, he had found that animals and soldiers and
flowers could do all sorts of things that you wouldn’t expect they were
able to. So he made himself very dignified, and walked away from the
stream, trying very hard not to hurry till he was out of sight of the
pike.
‘Coward, coward,’ yelled the pike. ‘You wait till I catch you.’
David felt pretty safe now, for he knew that he must be able to run on
land as fast as a pike, but he continued to walk away, along by the
hedge, till he had put a considerable distance between himself and the
stream. It was not quite proper for a bird-boy and a Field-Marshal to
run away from a fish, but this was such an awful fish. . . .
There were two signboards, he knew, in this field, one down by the river
about fishing, and the other where there was a path across it, on which
was the notice, ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted with the utmost rigour
of the law.’ He did not mind about that notice since both the field and
the notice belonged to his father, but when he came to the second
signboard and looked up at it, he felt suddenly frozen with terror, and
his teeth chattered like Mr. Funk the bather. For instead of the
ordinary notice this was written up in large capitals:
TRESPASSERS WILL BE MARRIED
WITH THE UTMOST RIGOUR OF
THE LAW
‘Oh, what am I to do?’ thought poor David. ‘There’s a girl coming into
it after all. I know she’ll spoil everything.’
He began running back towards the stream again, for he felt he would
rather fight the pike than be married, but then he thought of those
savage jaws and those dreadful teeth, and his legs simply would not take
him any nearer the stream. They said ‘No!’ just as if they had spoken
aloud. Between his mind that said that he had better face any danger
sooner than be married, and his legs that said that they would go
anywhere except towards the pike, he completely lost his head, and began
running in circles round the field, saying to himself in a most
determined voice:
‘I won’t be married, I won’t be eaten by the pike, I won’t be married to
a pike, I won’t be eaten by anybody.’
[Illustration: Noah pursues David]
So round and round he ran, though all the time there was nothing easier
than to walk out of the gate and get away from the marriage-meadow
altogether, for there was not a soul in sight nor any sound except that
of the pike still calling ‘Coward! Coward!’ But David had quite lost his
head, and such a simple thing as that never occurred to him at all. And
then he saw that he wasn’t alone in the field, for there was a man in a
hard hat and an ulster following him round and round. He was not
running, but was sliding, and all the time he got nearer and nearer to
David. All the time, too, David knew that he knew who it was, but he had
forgotten, just as he had forgotten how to fly, or how to count when he
was talking to that foolish trout. Nearer and nearer he crept, and
David, looking round, saw that he was already extending a stiff wooden
arm to catch him. When he saw that he was on the point of being caught,
he recovered his wits and knew that all he had to do was to get away
from the marriage-meadow at once. So, with redoubled speed, he bolted
towards the side of the field nearest him, just outside which there
stood a house with the door wide open. He didn’t care at all whether he
was prosecuted for going into a house that wasn’t his own; all that
mattered was to escape from this dreadful field where all trespassers
were married.
In he rushed with the sliding figure close behind him, and the door
banged to after them.