Tales From the Perilous Realm by J. R. R. Tolkien
As soon as Roverandom heard that voice, he sat up and begged.
‘My little begging dog!’ said little boy Two (of course); and he ran up and patted him. ‘Where have you been to?’
But all Roverandom could say at first was: ‘Can you hear what I’m saying?’
‘Of course I can,’ said little boy Two. ‘But when mummy brought you home before, you wouldn’t listen to me at all, although I did my best bark-talk for you. And I don’t believe you tried to say much to me either; you seemed to be thinking of something else.’
Roverandom said how sorry he was, and he told the little boy how he had fallen out of his pocket; and all about Psamathos, and Mew, and many of the adventures he had had since he was lost. That is how the little boy and his brothers got to know about the odd fellow in the sand, and learned a lot of other useful things they might otherwise have missed. Little boy Two thought that ‘Roverandom’ was a splendid name. ‘I shall call you that too,’ he said. ‘And don’t forget that you still belong to me!’
Then they had a game with the ball, and a game of hide-and-seek, and a run and a long walk, and a rabbit-hunt (with no result, of course, except excitement: the rabbits were exceedingly shadowy), and much splashing in the ponds, and all kinds of other things one after another for endless ages; and they got to like one another better and better. The little boy was rolling over and over on the dewy grass, in a very bed-timish light (but no one seems to mind wet grass or bed-time in that place), and the little dog was rolling over and over with him, and standing on his head like no dog on earth ever has done since Mother Hubbard’s dead dog did it; and the little boy was laughing till he—vanished quite suddenly and left Roverandom all alone on the lawn!
‘He’s waked up, that’s all,’ said the Man-in-the-Moon, who suddenly appeared. ‘Gone home, and about time too. Why! it’s only a quarter of an hour before his breakfast time. He’ll miss his walk on the sands this morning. Well, well! I am afraid it’s our time to go, too.’
So, very reluctantly, Roverandom went back to the white side with the old man. They walked all the way, and it took a very long time; and Roverandom did not enjoy it as much as he ought to have done. For they saw all kinds of queer things, and had many adventures—perfectly safe, of course, with the Man-in-the-Moon close at hand. That was just as well, as there were lots of nasty creepy things in the bogs that would otherwise have grabbed the little dog quick. The dark side was as wet as the white side was dry, and full of the most extraordinary plants and creatures, which I would tell you about, if Roverandom had taken any particular notice of them. But he did not; he was thinking of the garden and the little boy.
At last they came to the grey edge, and they looked past the cinder valleys where many of the dragons lived, through a gap in the mountains to the great white plain and the shining cliffs. They saw the world rise, a pale green and gold moon, huge and round above the shoulders of the Lunar Mountains; and Roverandom thought: ‘That is where my little boy lives!’ It seemed a terrible and enormous way away.
‘Do dreams come true?’ he asked.
‘Some of mine do,’ said the old man. ‘Some, but not all; and seldom any of them straight away, or quite like they were in dreaming them. But why do you want to know about dreams?’
‘I was only wondering,’ said Roverandom.
‘About that little boy,’ said the Man. ‘I thought so.’ He then pulled a telescope out of his pocket. It opened out to an enormous length. ‘A little look will do you no harm, I think,’ he said.
Roverandom looked through it—when he had managed at last to shut one eye and keep the other open. He saw the world plainly. First he saw the far end of the moon’s path falling straight onto the sea; and he thought he saw, faint and rather thin, long lines of small people sailing swiftly down it, but he could not be quite sure. The moonlight quickly faded. Sunlight began to grow; and suddenly there was the cove of the sandsorcerer (but no sign of Psamathos—Psamathos did not allow himself to be peeped at); and after a while the two little boys walked into the round picture, going hand in hand along the shore. ‘Looking for shells or for me?’ wondered the dog.
Very soon the picture shifted and he saw the little boys’ father’s white house on the cliff, with its garden running down to the sea; and at the gate he saw—an unpleasant surprise—the old wizard sitting on a stone smoking his pipe, as if he had nothing to do but watch there for ever, with his old green hat on the back of his head and his waistcoat unbuttoned.
‘What’s old Arta-what-d’you-call-him doing at the gate?’ Roverandom asked. ‘I should have thought he had forgotten about me long ago. And aren’t his holidays over yet?’
‘No, he’s waiting for you, my doglet. He hasn’t forgotten. If you turn up there just now, real or toy, he’ll put some new bewitchment on you pretty quick. It isn’t that he minds so much about his trousers—they were soon mended—but he is very annoyed with Samathos for interfering; and Samathos hasn’t finished making his arrangements yet for dealing with him.’
Just then Roverandom saw Artaxerxes’ hat blown off by the wind, and off the wizard ran after it; and plain to see, he had a wonderful patch on his trousers, an orangecoloured patch with black spots.
‘I should have thought that a wizard could have managed to patch his trousers better than that!’ said Roverandom.
‘But he thinks he has managed it beautifully!’ said the old man. ‘He bewitched a piece off somebody’s window-curtains; they got fire insurance, and he got a splash of colour, and both are satisfied. Still, you are right. He is failing, I do believe. Sad after all these centuries to see a man going off his magic; but lucky for you, perhaps.’ Then the Man-in-the-Moon closed the telescope with a snap, and off they went again.
‘Here are your wings again,’ he said when they had reached the tower. ‘Now fly off and amuse yourself! Don’t worry the moonbeams, don’t kill my white rabbits, and come back when you feel hungry!—or have any other sort of pain.’
Roverandom at once flew off to find the moon-dog and tell him about the other side; but the other dog was a bit jealous of a visitor being allowed to see things which he could not, and he pretended not to be interested.
‘Sounds a nasty part altogether,’ he growled. ‘I’m sure I don’t want to see it. I suppose you’ll be bored with the white side now, and only having me to go about with, instead of all your two-legged friends. It’s a pity the Persian wizard is such a sticker, and you can’t go home.’
Roverandom was rather hurt; and he told the moondog over and over again that he was jolly glad to be back at the tower, and would never be bored with the white side. They soon settled down to be good friends again, and did lots and lots of things together; and yet what the moon-dog had said in bad temper turned out to be true. It was not Roverandom’s fault, and he did his best not to show it, but somehow none of the adventures or explorations seemed so exciting to him as they had done before, and he was always thinking of the fun he had in the garden with little boy Two.
They visited the valley of the white moon-gnomes (moonums, for short) that ride about on rabbits, and make pancakes out of snowflakes, and grow little golden appletrees no bigger than buttercups in their neat orchards. They put broken glass and tintacks outside the lairs of some of the lesser dragons (while they were asleep), and lay awake till the middle of the night to hear them roar with rage—dragons often have tender tummies, as I have told you already, and they go out for a drink at twelve midnight every night of their lives, not to speak of between-whiles. Sometimes the dogs even dared to go spider-baiting—biting webs and setting free the moonbeams, and flying off just in time, while the spiders threw lassoes at them from the hill-tops. But all the while Roverandom was looking out for Postman Mew and News of the World (mostly murders and football-matches, as even a little dog knows; but there is sometimes something better in an odd corner).
He missed Mew’s next visit, as he was away on a ramble, but the old man was still reading the letters and news when h
Roverandom felt he could bear it no longer. ‘I’ve got a pain in my inside,’ he said. ‘I want to go back to the little boy, so that his dream can come true.’
The old man put down his letter (it was about Artaxerxes, and very amusing), and took the pipe out of his mouth. ‘Must you go? Can’t you stay? This is so sudden! So pleased to have met you! You must drop in again one day. Deelighted to see you any time!’ he said all in a breath.
‘Very well!’ he went on more sensibly. ‘Artaxerxes is arranged for.’
‘How??’ asked Roverandom, really excited again.
‘He has married a mermaid and gone to live at the bottom of the Deep Blue Sea.’
‘I hope she will patch his trousers better! A green seaweed patch would go well with his green hat.’
‘My dear dog! He was married in a complete new suit of seaweed green with pink coral buttons and epaulettes of sea-anemones; and they burnt his old hat on the beach! Samathos arranged it all. O! Samathos is very deep, as deep as the Deep Blue Sea, and I expect he means to settle lots of things to his liking this way, lots more than just you, my dog.
‘I wonder how it will turn out! Artaxerxes is getting into his twentieth or twenty-first childhood at the moment, it seems to me; and he makes a lot of fuss about very little things. Most obstinate he is, to be sure. He used to be a pretty good magician, but he is becoming badtempered and a thorough nuisance. When he came and dug up old Samathos with a wooden spade in the middle of the afternoon, and pulled him out of his hole by the ears, the Samathist thought things had gone too far, and I don’t wonder. “Such a lot of disturbance, just at my best time for sleeping, and all about a wretched little dog”: that is what he writes to me, and you needn’t blush.
‘So he invited Artaxerxes to a mermaid-party, when both their tempers had cooled down a bit, and that is how it all happened. They took Artaxerxes out for a moonlight swim, and he will never go back to Persia, or even Pershore. He fell in love with the rich mer-king’s elderly but lovely daughter, and they were married the next night.
‘It is probably just as well. There has not been a resident Magician in the Ocean for some time. Proteus, Poseidon, Triton, Neptune, and all that lot, they’ve all turned into minnows or mussels long ago, and in any case they never knew or bothered much about things outside the Mediterranean—they were too fond of sardines. Old Niord retired a long while ago, too. He was of course only able to give half his attention to business after his silly marriage with the giantess—you remember she fell in love with him because he had clean feet (so convenient in the home), and fell out of love with him, when it was too late, because they were wet. He’s on his last legs now, I hear; quite doddery, poor old dear. Oil-fuel has given him a dreadful cough, and he has retired to the coast of Iceland for a little sunshine.
‘There was the Old Man of the Sea, of course. He was my cousin, and I’m not proud of it. He was a bit of a burden—wouldn’t walk, and always wanted to be carried, as I dare say you have heard. That was the death of him. He sat on a floating mine (if you know what I mean) a year or two ago, right on one of the buttons! Not even my magic could do anything with that case. It was worse than the one of Humpty Dumpty.’
‘What about Britannia?’ asked Roverandom, who after all was an English dog; though really he was a bit bored with all this, and wanted to hear more about his own wizard. ‘I thought Britannia ruled the waves.’
‘She never really gets her feet wet. She prefers patting lions on the beach, and sitting on a penny with an eelfork in her hand—and in any case there is more to manage in the sea than waves. Now they have got Artaxerxes, and I hope he will be of use. He’ll spend the first few years trying to grow plums on polyps, I expect, if they let him; and that’ll be easier than keeping the merfolk in order.
‘Well, well, well! Where was I? Of course—you can go back now, if you want to. In fact, not to be too polite, it’s time you went back as soon as possible. Old Samathos is your first call—and don’t follow my bad example and forget your Ps when you meet!’
Mew turned up again the very next day, with an extra post—an immense number of letters for the Man-in-the-Moon, and bundles of newspapers: The Illustrated Weekly Weed, Ocean Notions, The Mer-mail, The Conch, and The Morning Splash. They all had exactly the same (exclusive) pictures of Artaxerxes’ wedding on the beach at full moon, with Mr Psamathos Psamathides, the wellknown financier (a mere title of respect), grinning in the background. But they were nicer than our pictures, for they were at least coloured; and the mermaid really did look beautiful (her tail was in the foam).
The time had come to say good-bye. The Man-in-the-Moon beamed on Roverandom; and the moon-dog tried to look unconcerned. Roverandom himself had rather a drooping tail, but all he said was: ‘Good-bye, pup! Take care of yourself, don’t worry the moonbeams, don’t kill the white rabbits, and don’t eat too much supper!’
‘Pup yourself!’ said the moon-Rover. ‘And stop eating wizards’ trousers!’ That was all; and yet, I believe, he was always worrying the old Man-in-the-Moon to send him on a holiday to visit Roverandom, and that he has been allowed to go several times since then.
After that Roverandom went back with Mew, and the Man went back into his cellars, and the moon-dog sat on the roof and watched them out of sight.
4
There was a cold wind blowing off the North Star when they got near the world’s edge, and the chilly spray of the waterfalls splashed over them. It had been stiffer going on the way back, for old Psamathos’ magic was not in such a hurry just then; and they were glad to rest on the Isle of Dogs. But as Roverandom was still his enchanted size, he did not enjoy himself much there. The other dogs were too large and noisy, and too scornful; and the bones of the bone-trees were too large and bony.
It was dawn of the day after the day after tomorrow when at last they sighted the black cliffs of Mew’s home; and the sun was warm on their backs, and the tips of the sand-hillocks were already pale and dry, by the time they alighted in the cove of Psamathos.
Mew gave a little cry, and tapped with his beak on a bit of wood lying on the ground. The bit of wood immediately grew straight up into the air, and turned into Psamathos’ left ear, and was joined by another ear, and quickly followed by the rest of the sorcerer’s ugly head and neck.
‘What do you two want at this time of day?’ growled Psamathos. ‘It’s my favourite time for sleep.’
‘We’re back!’ said the seagull.
‘And you’ve allowed yourself to be carried back on his back, I see,’ Psamathos said, turning to the little dog.
‘After dragon-hunting I should have thought you would have found a little flight back home quite easy.’
‘But please, sir,’ said Roverandom, ‘I left my wings behind; they didn’t really belong to me. And I should rather like to be an ordinary dog again.’
‘O! all right. Still I hope you have enjoyed yourself as “Roverandom”. You ought to have done. Now you can be just Rover again, if you really want to be; and you can go home and play with your yellow ball, and sleep on armchairs when you get the chance, and sit on laps, and be a respectable little yap-dog again.’
‘What about the little boy?’ said Rover.
‘But you ran away from him, silly, all the way to the moon, I thought!’ said Psamathos, pretending to be annoyed and surprised, but giving a merry twinkle out of one knowing eye. ‘Home I said, and home I meant. Don’t splutter and argue!’
Poor Rover was spluttering because he was trying to get in a very polite ‘Mr P-samathos’. Eventually he did.
‘P-P-Please, Mr P-P-P-samathos,’ he said, most touchingly. ‘P-Please p-pardon me, but I have met him again; and I shouldn’t run away now; and really I belong to him, don’t I? So I ought to go back to him
‘Stuff and nonsense! Of course you don’t and oughtn’t! You belong to the old lady that bought you first, and back you’ll have to go to her. You can’t buy stolen goods, or bewitched ones either, as you would know, if you knew the Law, you silly little dog. Little boy Two’s mother wasted sixpence on you, and that’s an end of it. And what’s in dream-meetings anyway?’ wound up Psamathos with a huge wink.
‘I thought some of the Man-in-the-Moon’s dreams came true,’ said little Rover sadly.
‘O! did you! Well that’s the Man-in-the-Moon’s affair. My business is to change you back at once into your proper size, and send you back where you belong. Artaxerxes has departed to other spheres of usefulness, so we needn’t bother about him any more. Come here!’
He took hold of Rover, and he waved his fat hand over the little dog’s head, and hey presto—there was no change at all! He did it all over again, and still there was no change.
Then Psamathos got right up out of the sand, and Rover saw for the first time that he had legs like a rabbit. He stamped and ramped, and kicked sand into the air, and trampled on the seashells, and snorted like an angry pugdog; and still nothing happened at all!
‘Done by a seaweed wizard, blister and wart him!’ he swore. ‘Done by a Persian plum-picker, pot and jam him!’ he shouted, and kept on shouting till he was tired. Then he sat down.
‘Well, well!’ he said at last when he was cooler. ‘Live and learn! But Artaxerxes is most peculiar. Who could have guessed that he would remember you amidst all the excitement of his wedding, and go and waste his strongest incantation on a dog before going on his honeymoon—as if his first spell wasn’t more than any silly little puppy is worth? If it isn’t enough to split one’s skin.
‘Well! I don’t need to think out what is to be done, at any rate,’ Psamathos continued. ‘There is only one possible thing. You have got to go and find him and beg his pardon. But my word! I’ll remember this against him, till the sea is twice as salt and half as wet. Just you two go for a walk, and be back in half an hour when my temper’s better!’