罗弗兰庄园 英文名著｜第8章

The first thing he did, after a trial swim round the ballroom, was to bite at the other dog’s tail. In fun, of course; but fun or not, there was nearly a fight on the spot, for the mer-dog was a bit touchy-tempered. Rover only saved himself by making off as fast as possible; nimble and quick he had to be, too. My word! there was a chase, in and out of windows, and along dark passages, and round pillars, and out and up and round the domes; till at last the merdog himself was exhausted, and his bad temper too, and they sat down together on the top of the highest cupola next to the flag-pole. The mer-king’s banner, a seaweed streamer of scarlet and green, spangled with pearls, was floating from it.

‘What’s your name?’ said the mer-dog after a breathless pause. ‘Rover?’ he said. ‘That’s my name, so you can’t have it. I had it first!’

‘How do you know?’

‘Of course I know! I can see you are only a puppy, and you have not been down here hardly five minutes. I was enchanted ages and ages ago, hundreds of years. I expect I’m the first of all the dog Rovers.

‘My first master was a Rover, a real one, a sea-rover who sailed his ship in the northern waters; it was a long ship with red sails, and it was carved like a dragon at the prow, and he called it the Red Worm and loved it. I loved him, though I was only a puppy, and he did not notice me much; for I wasn’t big enough to go hunting, and he didn’t take dogs to sail with him. One day I went sailing without being asked. He was saying farewell to his wife; the wind was blowing, and the men were thrusting the Red Worm out over the rollers into the sea. The foam was white about the dragon’s neck; and I suddenly felt that I should not see him again after that day, if I didn’t go too. I sneaked on board somehow, and hid behind a waterbarrel; and we were far at sea and the landmarks low in the water before they found me.

‘That’s when they called me Rover, when they dragged me out by my tail. “Here’s a fine sea-rover!” said one. “And a strange fate is on him, that turns never home,” said another with queer eyes. And indeed I never did go back home; and I have never grown any bigger, though I have grown much older—and wiser, of course.

‘There was a sea-fight on that voyage, and I ran up on the fore-deck while the arrows fell and sword clashed upon shield. But the men of the Black Swan boarded us, and drove my master’s men all over the side. He was the last to go. He stood beside the dragon’s head, and then he dived into the sea in all his mail; and I dived after him.

‘He went to the bottom quicker than I did, and the mermaids caught him; but I told them to carry him swift to land, for many would weep, if he did not come home. They smiled at me, and lifted him up, and bore him away; and now some say they carried him to the shore, and some shake their heads at me. You can’t depend on mermaids, except for keeping their own secrets; they’re better than oysters at that.

‘I often think they really buried him in the white sand. Far away from here there lies still a part of the Red Worm that the men of the Black Swan sank; or it was there when last I passed. A forest of weed was growing round it and over it, all except the dragon’s head; somehow not even barnacles were growing on that, and under it there was a mound of white sand.

‘I left those parts long ago. I turned slowly into a seadog—the older sea-women used to do a good deal of witchcraft in those days, and one of them was kind to me. It was she that gave me as a present to the mer-king, the reigning one’s grandfather, and I have been in and about the palace ever since. That’s all about me. It happened hundreds of years ago, and I have seen a good deal of the high seas and the low seas since then, but I have never been back home. Now tell me about you! I suppose you don’t come from the North Sea by any chance, do you?—we used to call it England’s Sea in those days—or know any of the old places in and about the Orkneys?’

Our Rover had to confess that he had never heard before of anything but just ‘the sea’, and not much of that. ‘But I have been to the moon,’ he said, and he told his new friend as much about it as he could make him understand.

The mer-dog enjoyed Rover’s tale immensely, and believed at least half of it. ‘A jolly good yarn,’ he said, ‘and the best I have heard for a long time. I have seen the moon. I go on top occasionally, you know, but I never imagined it was like that. But my word! that sky-pup has got a cheek. Three Rovers! Two’s bad enough, but three’s impossible! And I don’t believe for a moment he is older than I am; if he is a hundred yet, I should be mighty surprised.’

He was probably quite right too. The moon-dog, as you noticed, exaggerated a lot. ‘And anyway,’ went on the merdog, ‘he only gave himself the name. Mine was given me.’

‘And so was mine,’ said our little dog.

‘And for no reason at all, and before you had begun to earn it any way. I like the Man-in-the-Moon’s idea. I shall call you Roverandom, too; and if I were you I should stick to it—you never do seem to know where you are going next! Let’s go down to supper!’

It was a fishy supper, but Roverandom soon got used to that; it seemed to suit his webby feet. After supper he suddenly remembered why he had come all the way to the bottom of the sea; and off he went to look for Artaxerxes. He found him blowing bubbles, and turning them into real balls to please the little mer-children.

‘Please, Mr Artaxerxes, could you be bothered to turn me—’ began Roverandom.

‘O! go away!’ said the wizard. ‘Can’t you see I can’t be bothered? Not now, I’m busy.’ This is what Artaxerxes said all too often to people he did not think were important. He knew well enough what Rover wanted; but he was not in a hurry himself.

So Roverandom swam off and went to bed, or rather roosted in a bunch of seaweed growing on a high rock in the garden. There was the old whale resting just underneath; and if anyone tells you that whales don’t go down to the bottom or stop there dozing for hours, you need not let that bother you. Old Uin was in every way exceptional.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘How have you got on? I see you are still toy-size. What’s the matter with Artaxerxes? Can’t he do anything, or won’t he?’

‘I think he can,’ said Roverandom. ‘Look at my new shape! But if ever I try to get onto the matter of size, he keeps on saying how busy he is, and he hasn’t time for long explanations.’

‘Umph!’ said the whale, and knocked a tree sideways with his tail—the swish of it nearly washed Roverandom off his rock. ‘I don’t think that PAM will be a success in these parts; but I shouldn’t worry. You’ll be all right sooner or later. In the meanwhile there are lots of new things to see tomorrow. Go to sleep! Good-bye!’ And he swam off into the dark. The report that he took back to the cove made old Psamathos very angry all the same.

The lights of the palace were all turned off. No moon or star came down through that deep dark water. The green got gloomier and gloomier, until it was all black, and there was not a glimmer, except when big luminous fish went by slowly through the weeds. Yet Roverandom slept soundly that night, and the next night, and several nights after. And the next day, and the day after, he looked for the wizard and couldn’t find him anywhere.

One morning when he was beginning already to feel quite a sea-dog and to wonder if he had come to stay there for ever, the mer-dog said to him: ‘Bother that wizard! Or rather, don’t bother him! Give him a miss today. Let’s go off for a really long swim!’

Off they went, and the long swim turned into an excursion lasting for days. They covered a terrific distance in the time; they were enchanted creatures, you must remember, and there were few ordinary things in the seas that could keep up with them. When they got tired of the cliffs and mountains at the bottom, and of the racing runs in the middle heights, they rose up and up and up, right through the water for a mile and a bit; and when they got to the top, no land was to be seen.

The sea all round them was smooth and calm and grey. Then it suddenly ruffled and went dark in patches under a little cold wind, the wind at dawn. Swiftly the sun looked up with a shout over the rim of the sea, red as if he had been drinking hot wine; and swiftly he leaped into the air and went off for his daily journey, turning all the edges of the waves golden and the shadows between them dark green. A ship was sailing on the margin of the sea and the sky, and it sailed right into the sun, so that its masts were black against the fire.

‘Where’s that going to?’ asked Roverandom.

‘O! Japan or Honolulu or Manila or Easter Island or Thursday or Vladivostok, or somewhere or other, I suppose,’ said the mer-dog, whose geography was a bit vague, in spite of his hundreds of years of boasted prowlings. ‘This is the Pacific, I believe; but I don’t know which part—a warm part, by the feel of it. It’s rather a large piece of water. Let’s go and look for something to eat!’

When they got back, some days later, Roverandom at once went to look for the wizard again; he felt he had given him a good long rest.

‘Please, Mr Artaxerxes, could you bother—‘ he began as usual.

‘No! I could not!’ said Artaxerxes, even more definitely than usual. This time he really was busy, though. The Complaints had come in by post. Of course, as you can imagine, all kinds of things go wrong in the sea, that not even the best PAM in the ocean could prevent, and some of which he is not even supposed to have anything to do with. Wrecks come down plump now and again on the roof of somebody’s sea-house; explosions occur in the sea-bed (O yes! they have volcanoes and all that kind of nuisance quite as badly as we have) and blow up somebody’s prize flock of goldfish, or prize bed of anemones, or one and only pearl-oyster, or famous rock and coral garden; or savage fish have a fight in the highway and knock mer-children over; or absent-minded sharks swim in at the dining-room window and spoil the dinner; or the deep, dark, unmentionable monsters of the black abysses do horrible and wicked things.

The mer-folk have always put up with all this, but not without complaining. They liked complaining. They used of course to write letters to The Weekly Weed, The Mermail, and Ocean Notions; but they had a PAM now, and they wrote to him as well, and blamed him for everything, even if they got their tails nipped by their own pet lobsters. They said his magic was inadequate (as it sometimes was) and that his salary ought to be reduced (which was true but rude); and that he was too big for his boots (which was also near the mark: they should have said slippers, he was too lazy to wear boots often); and they said lots besides to worry Artaxerxes every morning, and especially on Mondays. It was always worst (by several hundred envelopes) on Mondays; and this was a Monday, so Artaxerxes threw a lump of rock at Roverandom, and he slipped off like a shrimp from a net.

He was jolly glad when he got out into the garden to find that he was still unchanged in shape; and I dare say if he had not removed himself quick the wizard would have changed him into a sea-slug, or sent him to the Back of Beyond (wherever that is), or even to Pot (which is at the bottom of the deepest sea). He was very annoyed, and he went and grumbled to the sea-Rover.

‘You’d better give him a rest till Monday is over, at any rate,’ advised the mer-dog; ‘and I should miss out Mondays altogether, in future, if I were you. Come and have another swim!’

After that Roverandom gave the wizard such a long rest that they almost forgot about one another—not quite: dogs don’t forget lumps of rock very quickly. But to all appearances Roverandom had settled down to become a permanent pet of the palace. He was always off somewhere with the mer-dog, and often the mer-children came along as well. They were not as jolly as real, two-legged children in Roverandom’s opinion (but then of course Roverandom did not really belong to the sea, and was not a perfect judge), but they kept him happy; and they might have kept him there for ever and have made him forget little boy Two in the end, if it had not been for things that happened later. You can make up your mind whether Psamathos had anything to do with these events, when we come to them.

There were plenty of these children to choose from, at any rate. The old mer-king had hundreds of daughters and thousands of grandchildren, and all in the same palace; and they were all fond of the two Rovers, and so was Mrs Artaxerxes. It was a pity that Roverandom never thought of telling her his story; she knew how to manage the PAM in any mood. But in that case, of course, Roverandom would have gone back sooner and missed many of the sights. It was with Mrs Artaxerxes, and some of the merchildren that he visited the Great White Caves, where all the jewels that are lost in the sea, and many that have always been in the sea, and of course pearls upon pearls, are hoarded and hidden.

They went too, another time, to visit the smaller seafairies in their little glass houses at the bottom of the sea. The sea-fairies seldom swim, but wander singing over the bed of the sea in smooth places, or drive in shellcarriages harnessed to the tiniest fishes; or else they ride astride little green crabs with bridles of fine threads (which of course don’t prevent the crabs from going sideways, as they always will); and they have troubles with the sea-goblins that are larger, and ugly and rowdy, and do nothing except fight and hunt fish and gallop about on sea-horses. Those goblins can live out of the water for a long while, and play in the surf at the water’s edge in a storm. So can some of the sea-fairies, but they prefer the calm warm nights of summer evenings on lonely shores (and naturally are very seldom seen in consequence).

Another day old Uin turned up again and gave the two dogs a ride for a change; it was like riding on a moving mountain. They were away for days and days; and they only turned back from the eastern edge of the world just in time. There the whale rose to the top and blew out a fountain of water so high that a lot of it was thrown right off the world and over the edge.

Another time he took them to the other side (or as near as he dared), and that was a still longer and more exciting journey, the most marvellous of all Roverandom’s travels, as he realised later, when he was grown to be an older and a wiser dog. It would take the whole of another story, at least, to tell you of all their adventures in Uncharted Waters and of their glimpses of lands unknown to geography, before they passed the Shadowy Seas and reached the great Bay of Fairyland (as we call it) beyond the Magic Isles; and saw far off in the last West the Mountains of Elvenhome and the light of Faery upon the waves. Roverandom thought he caught a glimpse of the city of the Elves on the green hill beneath the Mountains, a glint of white far away; but Uin dived again so suddenly that he could not be sure. If he was right, he is one of the very few creatures, on two legs or four, who can walk about our own lands and say they have glimpsed that other land, however far away.

‘I should catch it, if this was found out!’ said Uin. ‘No one from the Outer Lands is supposed ever to come here; and few ever do now. Mum’s the word!’