CURDIE'S CLUE
CURDIE was as watchful as ever, but was almost getting tired of his
ill-success. Every other night or so he followed the goblins about, as
they went on digging and boring, and getting as near them as he could,
watched them from behind stones and rocks; but as yet he seemed no
nearer finding out what they had in view. As at first, he always kept
hold of the end of his string, while his pickaxe left just outside the
hole by which he entered the goblins' country from the mine, continued
to serve as an anchor and hold fast the other end. The goblins hearing
no more noise in that quarter, had ceased to apprehend an immediate
invasion, and kept no watch.
One night, after dodging about and listening till he was nearly falling
asleep with weariness, he began to roll up his ball, for he had resolved
to go home to bed. It was not long, however, before he began to feel
bewildered. One after another he passed goblin-houses, caves that is,
occupied by goblin families, and at length was sure they were many more
than he had passed as he came. He had to use great caution to pass
unseen--they lay so close together. Could his string have led him wrong?
He still followed winding it, and still it led him into more thickly
populated quarters, until he became quite uneasy, and indeed
apprehensive; for although he was not afraid of the _cobs_, he was
afraid of not finding his way out. But what could he do? It was of no
use to sit down and wait for the morning--the morning made no difference
here. It was all dark, and always dark; and if his string failed him he
was helpless. He might even arrive within a yard of the mine, and never
know it. Seeing he could do nothing better, he would at least find where
the end of the string was, and if possible how it had come to play him
such a trick. He knew by the size of the ball that he was getting pretty
near the last of it, when he began to feel a tugging and pulling at it.
What could it mean? Turning a sharp corner, he thought he heard strange
sounds. These grew, as he went on, to a scuffling and growling and
squeaking; and the noise increased, until, turning a second sharp
corner, he found himself in the midst of it, and the same moment tumbled
over a wallowing mass, which he knew must be a knot of the cobs'
creatures. Before he could recover his feet, he had caught some great
scratches on his face, and several severe bites on his legs and arms.
But as he scrambled to get up, his hand fell upon his pickaxe, and
before the horrid beasts could do him any serious harm, he was laying
about with it right and left in the dark. The hideous cries which
followed gave him the satisfaction of knowing that he had punished some
of them pretty smartly for their rudeness, and by their scampering and
their retreating howls, he perceived that he had routed them. He stood a
little, weighing his battle-axe in his hand as if it had been the most
precious lump of metal--but indeed no lump of gold itself could have
been so precious at that time as that common tool--then untied the end
of the string from it, put the ball in his pocket, and still stood
thinking. It was clear that the cobs' creatures had found his axe, had
between them carried it off, and had so led him he knew not where. But
for all his thinking he could not tell what he ought to do, until
suddenly he became aware of a glimmer of light in the distance. Without
a moment's hesitation he set out for it, as fast as the unknown and
rugged way would permit. Yet again turning a corner, led by the dim
light, he spied something quite new in his experience of the underground
regions--a small irregular shape of something shining. Going up to it,
he found it was a piece of mica, or Muscovy glass, called sheep-silver
in Scotland, and the light flickering as if from a fire behind it. After
trying in vain for some time to discover an entrance to the place where
it was burning, he came at length to a small chamber in which an opening
high in the wall revealed a glow beyond. To this opening he managed to
scramble up, and then he saw a strange sight.
Below sat a little group of goblins around a fire, the smoke of which
vanished in the darkness far aloft. The sides of the cave were full of
shining minerals like those of the palace-hall; and the company was
evidently of a superior order, for every one wore stones about head, or
arms, or waist, shining, dull, gorgeous colors in the light of the fire.
Nor had Curdie looked long before he recognized the king himself, and
found that he had made his way into the inner apartment of the royal
family. He had never had such a good chance of hearing something! He
crept through the hole as softly as he could, scrambled a good way down
the wall toward them without attracting attention, and then sat down and
listened. The king, evidently the queen, and probably the crown-prince
and the prime minister were talking together. He was sure of the queen
by her shoes, for as she warmed her feet at the fire, he saw them quite
plainly.
"That _will_ be fun!" said the one he took for the crown-prince.
It was the first whole sentence he heard.
"I don't see why you should think it such a grand affair!" said his
stepmother, tossing her head backward.
"You must remember, my spouse," interposed his Majesty, as if making
excuse for his son, "he has got the same blood in him. His mother--"
"Don't talk to me of his mother! You positively encourage his unnatural
fancies. Whatever belongs to _that_ mother, ought to be cut out of him."
"You forget yourself, my dear!" said the king.
"I don't," said the queen, "nor you either. If you expect _me_ to
approve of such coarse tastes, you will find yourself mistaken. _I_
don't wear shoes for nothing."
"You must acknowledge, however," the king said, with a little groan,
"that this at least is no whim of Harelip's, but a matter of
state-policy. You are well aware that his gratification comes purely
from the pleasure of sacrificing himself to the public good. Does it
not, Harelip?"
"Yes, father; of course it does. Only it _will_ be nice to make her cry.
I'll have the skin taken off between her toes, and tie them up till they
grow together. Then her feet will be like other people's, and there will
be no occasion for her to wear shoes."
"Do you mean to insinuate _I've_ got toes, you unnatural wretch?" cried
the queen; and she moved angrily toward Harelip. The councilor, however,
who was betwixt them, leaned forward so as to prevent her touching him,
but only as if to address the prince.
"Your royal Highness," he said, "possibly requires to be reminded that
you have got three toes yourself--one on one foot, two on the other."
"Ha! ha! ha!" shouted the queen triumphantly.
The councilor, encouraged by this mark of favor, went on.
"It seems to me, your royal Highness, it would greatly endear you to
your future people, proving to them that you are not the less one of
themselves that you had the misfortune to be born of a sun-mother, if
you were to command upon yourself the comparatively slight operation
which, in a more extended form, you so wisely meditate with regard to
your future princess."
"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed the queen, louder than before, and the king and
the minister joined in the laugh. It was anything but a laughing matter
to Harelip. He growled, and for a few moments the others continued to
express their enjoyment of his discomfiture.
The queen was the only one Curdie could see with any distinctness. She
sat sideways to him, and the light of the fire shone full upon her face.
He could not consider her handsome. Her nose was certainly broader at
the end than its extreme length, and her eyes, instead of being
horizontal, were set up like two perpendicular eggs, one on the broad,
the other on the small, end. Her mouth was no bigger than a small
buttonhole until she laughed, when it stretched from ear to ear--only
to be sure her ears were very nearly in the middle of her cheeks.
Anxious to hear everything they might say, Curdie ventured to slide down
a smooth part of the rock just under him, to a projection below, upon
which he thought to rest. But whether he was not careful enough, or the
projection gave way, down he came with a rush on the floor of the
cavern, bringing with him a great rumbling shower of stones.
The goblins jumped from their seats in more anger than consternation,
for they had never yet seen anything to be afraid of in the palace. But
when they saw Curdie with his pick in his hand, their rage was mingled
with fear, for they took him for the first of an invasion of miners. The
king notwithstanding drew himself up to his full height of four feet,
spread himself to his full breadth of three and a half, for he was the
handsomest and squarest of all the goblins, and strutting up to Curdie,
planted himself with outspread feet before him, and said with dignity--
"Pray what right have you in my palace?"
"The right of necessity, your majesty," answered Curdie. "I lost my way,
and did not know where I was wandering to."
"How did you get in?"
"By a hole in the mountain."
"But you are a miner! Look at your pickaxe!"
Curdie did look at it, answering,
"I came upon it, lying on the ground, a little way from here. I tumbled
over some wild beasts who were playing with it. Look, your majesty." And
Curdie showed him how he was scratched and bitten.
[Illustration: The goblins fell back a little when he began, and made
horrible grimaces all through the rhyme.]
The king was pleased to find him behave more politely than he had
expected from what his people had told him concerning the miners, for he
attributed it to the power of his own presence; but he did not therefore
feel friendly to the intruder.
"You will oblige me by walking out of my dominions at once," he said,
well knowing what a mockery lay in the words.
"With pleasure, if your majesty will give me a guide," said Curdie.
"I will give you a thousand," said the king, with a scoffing air of
magnificent liberality.
"One will be quite sufficient," said Curdie.
But the king uttered a strange shout, half halloo, half roar, and in
rushed goblins till the cave was swarming. He said something to the
first of them which Curdie could not hear, and it was passed from one to
another till in a moment the farthest in the crowd had evidently heard
and understood it. They began to gather about him in a way he did not
relish, and he retreated toward the wall. They pressed upon him.
"Stand back," said Curdie, grasping his pickaxe tighter by his knee.
They only grinned and pressed closer. Curdie bethought himself, and
began to rhyme.
"Ten, twenty, thirty--
You're all so very dirty!
Twenty, thirty, forty--
You're all so thick and snorty!
"Thirty, forty, fifty--
You're all so puff-and-snifty!
Forty, fifty, sixty--
Beast and man so mixty!
"Fifty, sixty, seventy--
Mixty, maxty, leaventy--
Sixty, seventy, eighty--
All your cheeks so slaty.
"Seventy, eighty, ninety,
All your hands so flinty!
Eighty, ninety, hundred,
Altogether dundred!"
The goblins fell back a little when he began, and made horrible grimaces
all through the rhyme, as if eating something so disagreeable that it
set their teeth on edge and gave them the creeps; but whether it was
that the rhyming words were most of them no words at all, for a new
rhyme being considered more efficacious, Curdie had made it on the spur
of the moment, or whether it was that the presence of the king and queen
gave them courage, I cannot tell; but the moment the rhyme was over,
they crowded on him again, and out shot a hundred long arms, with a
multitude of thick nailless fingers at the end of them, to lay hold upon
him. Then Curdie heaved up his axe. But being as gentle as courageous
and not wishing to kill any of them, he turned the end which was square
and blunt like a hammer, and with that came down a great blow on the
head of the goblin nearest him. Hard as the heads of all goblins are, he
thought he must feel that. And so he did, no doubt; but he only gave a
horrible cry, and sprung at Curdie's throat. Curdie however drew back in
time, and just at that critical moment, remembered the vulnerable part
of the goblin-body. He made a sudden rush at the king, and stamped with
all his might on his Majesty's feet. The king gave a most unkingly howl,
and almost fell into the fire. Curdie then rushed into the crowd,
stamping right and left. The goblins drew back howling on every side as
he approached, but they were so crowded that few of those he attacked
could escape his tread; and the shrieking and roaring that filled the
cave would have appalled Curdie, but for the good hope it gave him. They
were tumbling over each other in heaps in their eagerness to rush from
the cave, when a new assailant suddenly faced him:--the queen, with
flaming eyes and expanded nostrils, her hair standing half up from her
head, rushed at him. She trusted in her shoes; they were of
granite--hollowed like French _sabots_. Curdie would have endured much
rather than hurt a woman, even if she was a goblin; but here was an
affair of life and death: forgetting her shoes, he made a great stamp on
one of her feet. But she instantly returned it with very different
effect, causing him frightful pain and almost disabling him. His only
chance with her would have been to attack the granite shoes with his
pickaxe, but before he could think of that, she had caught him up in her
arms, and was rushing with him across the cave. She dashed him into a
hole in the wall, with a force that almost stunned him. But although he
could not move, he was not too far gone to hear her great cry, and the
rush of multitudes of soft feet, followed by the sounds of something
heaved up against the rock; after which came a multitudinous patter of
stones falling near him. The last had not ceased when he grew very
faint, for his head had been badly cut, and at last insensible.
When he came to himself, there was perfect silence about him, and utter
darkness, but for the merest glimmer in one tiny spot. He crawled to it,
and found that they had heaved a slab against the mouth of the hole,
past the edge of which a poor little gleam found its way from the fire.
He could not move it a hair's breadth, for they had piled a great heap
of stones against it. He crawled back to where he had been lying, in the
faint hope of finding his pickaxe. But after a vain search, he was at
last compelled to acknowledge himself in an evil plight. He sat down and
tried to think, but soon fell fast asleep.