The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
When they got to Kanga’s house, they found that Roo was waiting too, being a great friend of Tigger’s, which made it Awkward; but Rabbit whispered “Leave this to me” behind his paw to Pooh, and went up to Kanga.
“I don’t think Roo had better come,” he said. “Not today.”
“Why not?” said Roo, who wasn’t supposed to be listening.
“Nasty cold day,” said Rabbit, shaking his head. “And you were coughing this morning.”
“How do you know?” asked Roo indignantly.
“Oh, Roo, you never told me,” said Kanga reproachfully.
“It was a Biscuit Cough,” said Roo, “not one you tell about.”
“I think not today, dear. Another day.”
“Tomorrow?” said Roo hopefully.
“We’ll see,” said Kanga.
“You’re always seeing, and nothing ever happens,” said Roo sadly.
“Nobody could see on a day like this, Roo,” said Rabbit. “I don’t expect we shall get very far, and then this afternoon we’ll all—we’ll all—we’ll—ah, Tigger, there you are. Come on. Good-bye, Roo! This afternoon we’ll—come on, Pooh! All ready? That’s right. Come on.”
So they went. At first Pooh and Rabbit and Piglet walked together, and Tigger ran round them in circles, and then, when the path got narrower, Rabbit, Piglet and Pooh walked one after another, and Tigger ran round them in oblongs, and by-and-by, when the gorse got very prickly on each side of the path, Tigger ran up and down in front of them, and sometimes he bounced into Rabbit and sometimes he didn’t. And as they got higher, the mist got thicker, so that Tigger kept disappearing, and then when you thought he wasn’t there, there he was again, saying “I say, come on,” and before you could say anything, there he wasn’t.
Rabbit turned round and nudged Piglet.
“The next time,” he said. “Tell Pooh.”
“The next time,” said Piglet to Pooh.
“The next what?” said Pooh to Piglet.
Tigger appeared suddenly, bounced into Rabbit, and disappeared again. “Now!” said Rabbit. He jumped into a hollow by the side of the path, and Pooh and Piglet jumped after him. They crouched in the bracken, listening. The Forest was very silent when you stopped and listened to it. They could see nothing and hear nothing.
“H’sh!” said Rabbit.
“I am,” said Pooh.
There was a pattering noise…then silence again. “Hallo!” said Tigger, and he sounded so close suddenly that Piglet would have jumped if Pooh hadn’t accidentally been sitting on most of him.
“Where are you?” called Tigger.
Rabbit nudged Pooh, and Pooh looked about for Piglet to nudge, but couldn’t find him, and Piglet went on breathing wet bracken as quietly as he could, and felt very brave and excited.
“That’s funny,” said Tigger.
There was a moment’s silence, and then they heard him pattering off again. For a little longer they waited, until the Forest had become so still that it almost frightened them, and then Rabbit got up and stretched himself.
“Well?” he whispered proudly. “There we are! Just as I said.”
“I’ve been thinking,” said Pooh, “and I think——”
“No,” said Rabbit. “Don’t. Run. Come on.” And they all hurried off, Rabbit leading the way.
“Now,” said Rabbit, after they had gone a little way, “we can talk. What were you going to say, Pooh?”
“Nothing much. Why are we going along here?”
“Because it’s the way home.”
“Oh!” said Pooh.
“I think it’s more to the right,” said Piglet nervously. “What do you think, Pooh?”
Pooh looked at his two paws. He knew that one of them was the right, and he knew that when you had decided which one of them was the right, then the other one was the left, but he never could remember how to begin.
“Well,” he said slowly—
“Come on,” said Rabbit. “I know it’s this way.”
They went on. Ten minutes later they stopped again.
“It’s very silly,” said Rabbit, “but just for the moment I—Ah, of course. Come on….”
“Here we are,” said Rabbit ten minutes later. “No, we’re not….”
“Now,” said Rabbit ten minutes later, “I think we ought to be getting—or are we a little bit more to the right than I thought?…”
“It’s a funny thing,” said Rabbit ten minutes later, “how everything looks the same in a mist. Have you noticed it, Pooh?”
Pooh said that he had.
“Lucky we know the Forest so well, or we might get lost,” said Rabbit half an hour later, and he gave the careless laugh which you give when you know the Forest so well that you can’t get lost.
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
“Pooh!” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
When Tigger had finished waiting for the others to catch him up, and they hadn’t, and when he had got tired of having nobody to say, “I say, come on” to, he thought he would go home. So he trotted back; and the first thing Kanga said when she saw him was “There’s a good Tigger. You’re just in time for your Strengthening Medicine,” and she poured it out for him. Roo said proudly, “I’ve had mine,” and Tigger swallowed his and said, “So have I,” and then he and Roo pushed each other about in a friendly way, and Tigger accidentally knocked over one or two chairs by accident, and Roo accidentally knocked over one on purpose, and Kanga said, “Now then, run along.”
“Where shall we run along to?” asked Roo.
“You can go and collect some fir-cones for me,” said Kanga, giving them a basket.
So they went to the Six Pine Trees, and threw fir-cones at each other until they had forgotten what they came for, and they left the basket under the trees and went back to dinner. And it was just as they were finishing dinner that Christopher Robin put his head in at the door.
“Where’s Pooh?” he asked.
“Tigger dear, where’s Pooh?” said Kanga. Tigger explained what had happened at the same time that Roo was explaining about his Biscuit Cough and Kanga was telling them not both to talk at once, so it was some time before Christopher Robin guessed that Pooh and Piglet and Rabbit were all lost in the mist on the top of the Forest.
“It’s a funny thing about Tiggers,” whispered Tigger to Roo, “how Tiggers never get lost.”
“Why don’t they, Tigger?”
“They just don’t,” explained Tigger. “That’s how it is.”
“Well,” said Christopher Robin, “we shall have to go and find them, that’s all. Come on, Tigger.”
“I shall have to go and find them,” explained Tigger to Roo.
“May I find them too?” asked Roo eagerly.
“I think not today, dear,” said Kanga. “Another day.”
“Well, if they’re lost tomorrow, may I find them?”
“We’ll see,” said Kanga, and Roo, who knew what that meant, went into a corner, and practised jumping out at himself, partly because he wanted to practise this, and partly because he didn’t want Christopher Robin and Tigger to think that he minded when they went off without him.
“The fact is,” said Rabbit, “we’ve missed our way somehow.”
They were having a rest in a small sand-pit on the top of the Forest. Pooh was getting rather tired of that sand-pit, and suspected it of following them about, because whichever direction they started in, they always ended up at it, and each time, as it came through the mist at them, Rabbit said triumphantly, “Now I know where we are!” and Pooh said sadly, “So do I,” and Piglet said nothing. He had tried to think of something to say, but the only thing he could think of was, “Help, help!” and it seemed silly to say that, when he had Pooh and Rabbit with him.
“Well,” said Rabbit, after a long silence in which nobody thanked him for the nice walk they were ha
“How would it be,” said Pooh slowly, “if, as soon as we’re out of sight of this Pit, we try to find it again?”
“What’s the good of that?” said Rabbit.
“Well,” said Pooh, “we keep looking for Home and not finding it, so I thought that if we looked for this Pit, we’d be sure not to find it, which would be a Good Thing, because then we might find something that we weren’t looking for, which might be just what we were looking for, really.”
“I don’t see much sense in that,” said Rabbit.
“No,” said Pooh humbly, “there isn’t. But there was going to be when I began it. It’s just that something happened to it on the way.”
“If I walked away from this Pit, and then walked back to it, of course I should find it.”
“Well, I thought perhaps you wouldn’t,” said Pooh. “I just thought.”
“Try,” said Piglet suddenly. “We’ll wait here for you.”
Rabbit gave a laugh to show how silly Piglet was, and walked into the mist. After he had gone a hundred yards, he turned and walked back again…and after Pooh and Piglet had waited twenty minutes for him, Pooh got up.
“I just thought,” said Pooh. “Now then, Piglet, let’s go home.”
“But, Pooh,” cried Piglet, all excited, “do you know the way?”
“No,” said Pooh. “But there are twelve pots of honey in my cupboard, and they’ve been calling to me for hours. I couldn’t hear them properly before, because Rabbit would talk, but if nobody says anything except those twelve pots, I think, Piglet, I shall know where they’re calling from. Come on.”
They walked off together; and for a long time Piglet said nothing, so as not to interrupt the pots; and then suddenly he made a squeaky noise…and an oo-noise…because now he began to know where he was; but he still didn’t dare to say so out loud, in case he wasn’t. And just when he was getting so sure of himself that it didn’t matter whether the pots went on calling or not, there was a shout from in front of them, and out of the mist came Christopher Robin.
“Oh, there you are,” said Christopher Robin carelessly, trying to pretend that he hadn’t been Anxious.
“Here we are,” said Pooh.
“Where’s Rabbit?”
“I don’t know,” said Pooh.
“Oh—well, I expect Tigger will find him. He’s sort of looking for you all.”
“Well,” said Pooh, “I’ve got to go home for something, and so has Piglet, because we haven’t had it yet, and—”
“I’ll come and watch you,” said Christopher Robin.
So he went home with Pooh, and watched him for quite a long time…and all the time he was watching, Tigger was tearing round the Forest making loud yapping noises for Rabbit. And at last a very Small and Sorry Rabbit heard him. And the Small and Sorry Rabbit rushed through the mist at the noise, and it suddenly turned into Tigger; a Friendly Tigger, a Grand Tigger, a Large and Helpful Tigger, a Tigger who bounced, if he bounced at all, in just the beautiful way a Tigger ought to bounce.
“Oh, Tigger, I am glad to see you,” cried Rabbit.
Chapter Eight
IN WHICH
Piglet Does a Very Grand Thing
HALF WAY between Pooh’s house and Piglet’s house was a Thoughtful Spot where they met sometimes when they had decided to go and see each other, and as it was warm and out of the wind they would sit down there for a little and wonder what they would do now that they had seen each other. One day when they had decided not to do anything, Pooh made up a verse about it, so that everybody should know what the place was for.
This warm and sunny Spot
Belongs to Pooh.
And here he wonders what
He’s going to do.
Oh, bother, I forgot—
It’s Piglet’s too.
Now one autumn morning when the wind had blown all the leaves off the trees in the night, and was trying to blow the branches off, Pooh and Piglet were sitting in the Thoughtful Spot and wondering.
“What I think,” said Pooh, “is I think we’ll go to Pooh Corner and see Eeyore, because perhaps his house has been blown down, and perhaps he’d like us to build it again.”
“What I think,” said Piglet, “is I think we’ll go and see Christopher Robin, only he won’t be there, so we can’t.”
“Let’s go and see everybody,” said Pooh. “Because when you’ve been walking in the wind for miles, and you suddenly go into somebody’s house, and he says, ‘Hallo, Pooh, you’re just in time for a little smackerel of something,’ and you are, then it’s what I call a Friendly Day.”
Piglet thought that they ought to have a Reason for going to see everybody, like Looking for Small or Organizing an Expotition, if Pooh could think of something.
Pooh could.
“We’ll go because it’s Thursday,” he said, “and we’ll go to wish everybody a Very Happy Thursday. Come on, Piglet.”
They got up; and when Piglet had sat down again, because he didn’t know the wind was so strong, and had been helped up by Pooh, they started off. They went to Pooh’s house first, and luckily Pooh was at home just as they got there, so he asked them in, and they had some, and then they went on to Kanga’s house, holding on to each other, and shouting “Isn’t it?” and “What?” and “I can’t hear.” By the time they got to Kanga’s house they were so buffeted that they stayed to lunch. Just at first it seemed rather cold outside afterwards, so they pushed on to Rabbit’s as quickly as they could.
“We’ve come to wish you a Very Happy Thursday,” said Pooh, when he had gone in and out once or twice just to make sure that he could get out again.
“Why, what’s going to happen on Thursday?” asked Rabbit, and when Pooh had explained, and Rabbit, whose life was made up of Important Things, said, “Oh, I thought you’d really come about something,” they sat down for a little…and by-and-by Pooh and Piglet went on again. The wind was behind them now, so they didn’t have to shout.
“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully.
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.”
“And he has Brain.”
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.”
There was a long silence.
“I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.”
Christopher Robin was at home by this time, because it was the afternoon, and he was so glad to see them that they stayed there until very nearly tea-time, and then they had a Very Nearly tea, which is one you forget about afterwards, and hurried on to Pooh Corner, so as to see Eeyore before it was too late to have a Proper Tea with Owl.
“Hallo, Eeyore,” they called out cheerfully.
“Ah!” said Eeyore. “Lost your way?”
“We just came to see you,” said Piglet. “And to see how your house was. Look, Pooh, it’s still standing!”
“I know,” said Eeyore. “Very odd. Somebody ought to have come down and pushed it over.”
“We wondered whether the wind would blow it down,” said Pooh.
“Ah, that’s why nobody’s bothered, I suppose. I thought perhaps they’d forgotten.”
“Well, we’re very glad to see you, Eeyore, and now we’re going on to see Owl.”
“That’s right. You’ll like Owl. He flew past a day or two ago and noticed me. He didn’t actually say anything, mind you, but he knew it was me. Very friendly of him, I thought. Encouraging.”
Pooh and Piglet shuffled about a little and said, “Well, good-bye, Eeyore,” as lingeringly as they could, but they had a long way to go, and wanted to be getting on.
“Good-bye,” said Eeyore. “Mind you don’t get blown away, little Piglet. You’d be missed. People would say ‘Where’s little Piglet been blown to?’—really wanting to know. Well, good-bye. And thank you for happening to pass me.”
“Good-bye,” said Pooh and Piglet for the last time, and they pushed on to Owl’s house.<
The wind was against them now, and Piglet’s ears streamed behind him like banners as he fought his way along, and it seemed hours before he got them into the shelter of the Hundred Acre Wood and they stood up straight again, to listen, a little nervously, to the roaring of the gale among the tree-tops.
“Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?”
“Supposing it didn’t,” said Pooh after careful thought.
Piglet was comforted by this, and in a little while they were knocking and ringing very cheerfully at Owl’s door.
“Hallo, Owl,” said Pooh. “I hope we’re not too late for—I mean, how are you, Owl? Piglet and I just came to see how you were, because it’s Thursday.”
“Sit down, Pooh, sit down, Piglet,” said Owl kindly. “Make yourselves comfortable.”
They thanked him, and made themselves as comfortable as they could.
“Because, you see, Owl,” said Pooh, “we’ve been hurrying, so as to be in time for—so as to see you before we went away again.”
Owl nodded solemnly.
“Correct me if I am wrong,” he said, “but am I right in supposing that it is a very Blusterous day outside?”
“Very,” said Piglet, who was quietly thawing his ears, and wishing that he was safely back in his own house.
“I thought so,” said Owl. “It was on just such a blusterous day as this that my Uncle Robert, a portrait of whom you see upon the wall on your right, Piglet, while returning in the late forenoon from a—What’s that?”
There was a loud cracking noise.
“Look out!” cried Pooh. “Mind the clock! Out of the way, Piglet! Piglet, I’m falling on you!”
“Help!” cried Piglet.
Pooh’s side of the room was slowly tilting upwards and his chair began sliding down on Piglet’s. The clock slithered gently along the mantelpiece, collecting vases on the way, until they all crashed together on to what had once been the floor, but was now trying to see what it looked like as a wall. Uncle Robert, who was going to be the new hearthrug, and was bringing the rest of his wall with him as carpet, met Piglet’s chair just as Piglet was expecting to leave it, and for a little while it became very difficult to remember which was really the north. Then there was another loud crack…Owl’s room collected itself feverishly…and there was silence.