Tom’s return created a good deal of interest in the village for a day or
two; people whose grandfathers had been babies when Tom was stolen would
stop him on the road to ask how he was after all this time, what he had
been doing all these years, and what he proposed to do now. To these
questions he answered, “Very well, thank you,” and “All sorts of
things,” and “I haven’t made up my mind.” Then one night Prince Carlo’s
Circus came along and pitched its tent in Half-Moon Meadow, and
everybody’s thoughts were full of lovely spangled ladies, and
black-and-white ponies, and red-and-white clowns, and strong men who
could carry worlds on their shoulders, and slim youths who could leap
through the air like birds from one bar to another; and their ears were
full of the sound of brass music, and their eyes of the sight of flaring
torches, and their noses of the smell of grass and sawdust. Tom went
with the rest of the village to the twopenny seats, and liked it
immensely, and after the Circus had departed the people talked of its
wonders for a week and thought about Tom no more. And nobody but Sally
Drake, his grim old niece, bothered to ask him what he proposed to do
for a living.
“For it’s high time, uncle,” said she, “that a handy young lad of
seventy-seven like you should be put to some trade.”
“There’s no hurry,” said Tom. “I think when I’m older I’d like to be one
of the Duke’s keepers, and perhaps Jack would take me round with him so
as I can get the hang of things.”
Jack was agreeable, and they spent long days together in the wild Park;
and Tom was taught how to handle a gun, and all the other ways of a
keeper, with which I am not very well acquainted, so I cannot tell
_you_. All I know is that one morning, as Jack and Tom were going
through the Park, the Duke himself came up to them and said to Jack,
“Good-morning, Drake. Something very funny’s going on in this Park.”
“Is it, your Grace?” said Jack Drake. “I hadn’t noticed particular.”
“Come along with me, then,” said the Duke, “and I’ll show you.”
So they went along all three to one of the rabbit-warrens, and there
were hundreds of rabbits racing along the runs they had scratched on the
hillside; and big and little, brown and white, old and young, they all
had horns on their heads.
“That’s queer now,” said Jack Drake, rubbing his eyes.
“And that’s not all,” said the Duke, and went a bit further on to a
glade much favoured by his deer. And one and all, dun and dappled, doe,
buck, and fawn, they had wings on their backs.
“That’s queerer still,” said Jack Drake, scratching his head.
“Then what do you think of _this_?” said the Duke, and led the way to
the biggest tumulus on his estate; and there, on the very top, stood a
handsome mahogany table-leg with a claw foot, and planted atop of it was
the body of a splendid lion, roaring in a friendly way and wagging its
tail with pleasure.
Jack Drake rubbed his chin and said, “That’s the queerest yet.”
“It is,” said the Duke, “and I don’t like it at all; and as my Head
Keeper I’ll thank you to keep it from occurring again.”
“I’ll do my best, your Grace,” said Jack Drake; and then he stared so
hard at the Duke’s feet that the Duke looked down too, and saw, to his
great annoyance, that he had golden boots on. They looked very grand, to
be sure, but they were hard and heavy, and most uncomfortable to walk
in. He hurried home and changed them for his bedroom slippers, and sent
to the bootmaker for another pair of leather boots; but after this, so
sure as he walked in the Park he walked in gold. Before long he had a
whole cupboardful of golden boots and shoes.
And this wasn’t the end of the queer doings in Shortways that summer.
When the fish began to leap, the fishermen came as usual with their
reels and creels and lanterns to fish in the river outside the Lodge
gates. No doubt they were the grandsons of the men Tom Cobble used to
see there, but they looked just exactly the same. There they sat in the
dark among the reeds, as deaf and as dumb as of old. Tom Cobble came and
watched them, but he did not ask them questions any more. While _they_
fished in silence, _he_ lay on the bank and read in his brown book. And
one night a fisherman, attending to his bait which had just been carried
away by a saucy perch, discovered to his vexation that his bait-box,
instead of worms and gentles, was full of parsley sauce, and the other
fishermen were in just the same case. So there was no more fishing that
night.
[Illustration: Black and white illustration of several characters in
hats fishing by a reedy riverbank, with a lantern on the left.]
The next night the fishermen came again, and cast their lines in the
river, and Tom Cobble came too with his book, and sprawled in the reeds
beside them. It was a lovely rainy night, and the fish were jumping a
treat. But all of a sudden the rain stopped and the moon appeared as big
as a silver plate, and no sooner did they see it than the jumping fish
jumped clean out of the water and went leaping through the air till they
were safe in the dark blue sky; and there, as though they had been in
their own sweet river, they swam round and round the moon all night,
some swift, some slow, perch and bass and dace and little minnows,
making the prettiest patterns with their supple slippery bodies and wavy
fins. Several of the villagers turned out to see the sight when they
heard what was happening; but those who preferred to keep their beds
asked what it was like in the morning; and the fishermen went home, for
there was no more fishing _that_ night.
However, it is the hardest thing in the world to discourage a fisherman,
and on the following night they were there again, and there, too, was
Tom Cobble with his book. And this night the fishermen did not go away,
but fished in peace with their usual sort of luck. But when the morning
came and they thought they would make a move, they found they couldn’t,
for every man had taken root in the reeds where he sat, and there he was
whether he liked it or not.
The village children were very nice to the fishermen in the reeds, and
bought them licorice shoe-strings from the shop to cheer them up, and
whenever the fish jumped they cast their lines contentedly and hadn’t
such a bad time of it after all. Except one, who had the misfortune to
be mowed down with a bundle of reeds, where he was overlooked by Jem
Turner the thatcher, who thatched him into the gable-end of an old
cowshed that wanted patching up. However, his arms were left free, so
the children put a bucket of rainwater on the ground below, and gave him
his fishing-line to drop into it, and then he was as happy as the day
was long.
[Illustration:
_Harry Blossom and his queer left shoe._
]
I relate these events just so that you can know the sort of thing that
now began to happen in Shortways, and went on for the next seven years,
but these were mere nothings. If I told you even a fiftieth part of Tom
Cobble’s lop-sided magic, you wouldn’t be in bed before breakfast-time.
Sally Drake suspected him and his book from the first, and pretty soon
told her son Jack to be quit of the boy as a keeper, and apprentice him
to the village Cobbler.
The Cobbler took Tom on for a year, during which time Tom made boots and
shoes very deftly, but something was always wrong. The right-hand shoe
was perfect, but the left-hand shoe was queer. The first pair he ever
made was for Harry Blossom, the Potman of the Garland Inn. He pulled
them on behind the bar, and made one step forward with his right to
serve Jem Turner with a draught of porter—and the next step he took he
was over the counter and standing on Doctor Daly’s onion-bed, a quarter
of a mile down the road. He started back with his right, and then his
left plunged forward and landed him breathless in the school-house,
where the children were chanting,
“Twice one is two!”
“That depends,” said Harry Blossom, sitting down quick on the floor
before he was betrayed into another step; and he pulled off his boots
and walked the half-mile back to the Garland Inn in his socks.
The next pair Tom Cobble made was for the Parson, who wore them one
Sunday to church. The right boot was a sober boot enough, but the left
boot was given to dancing. So sure as it touched the ground, up it flew
like a columbine. The Parson was late as it was and couldn’t turn back;
he managed to get to the church unseen, but he created some surprise
when he pirouetted into the pulpit, where for safety he stood the whole
morning on one leg to deliver his sermon. Or perhaps Tom’s left shoe had
the power of flying, or the knack of pinching you whenever you told the
least little fib—Tom Cobble himself was a strictly truthful boy—or
perhaps his left slipper might be made of pure glass.
Well, the Cobbler passed him on to the Blacksmith, where he made
horseshoes that galloped off the anvil and up the hill without waiting
so much as to make the acquaintance of the horse standing to be shod; it
was an alarming thing to meet one of Tom’s red-hot horseshoes racing
through the fields, taking the gates and ditches, and fetching up at
last in the stable, where it stood waiting for the horse to come while
it cooled off. So the Blacksmith passed him on to the Farmer, where the
clover and the corn, and the poppies in among them, came up that year
made of silk and calico, like the flowers in the Squire’s Lady’s Sunday
bonnet, and in little Daisy Martin’s market-hat. And when one day the
speckled hen, who was such a fine layer, stopped her proud cackling in
the yard, and marching into the kitchen said to the Farmer’s Wife, “I’m
come to inform you, ma’am, that I’ve just laid a beautiful egg,” the
Farmer paid Tom Cobble his wages, and told him to go.
So back he went to Sally Drake, and spent the time in reading his book,
and doing whatever he fancied: such as making the river run backward;
and the snow turn to white sugar icing when it fell; and the
school-house settle itself in the top of an oak-tree, where the children
had to climb through the leaves to their lessons; and Farmer Jolly’s
sheep on the Downs transform themselves into a flock of white clouds,
when the Butcher came to fetch them away, that rose bleating softly into
the blue summer sky, and after a short while disappeared. But after
that, every now and again, when the white clouds came sailing over
Shortways, one of them might be heard to bleat as it passed, and the
villagers would tell each other, “There’s one of Jolly’s sheep going
by.”
In due course Tom completed the seventh year of his return from
Fairyland, and to all intents and purposes was twenty-one years old.