Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson Page B

it’s incredible! Only you could have thought of something like that. There might be just anything down there!’
    ‘Exactly,’ said Moominpappa. ‘Just anything.’ They looked at each other and laughed. ‘When are you going to start looking?’ Moominmamma asked.
    ‘Immediately, of course,’ said Moominpappa. ‘I shall drag the pool thoroughly. But first I must find out how deep it is. We must try and get the boat into the pool. You see, if I try to haul everything up the cliff
face it might fall down again. And it’s very important to reach the middle of the pool. Obviously the best things are there.’
    ‘Don’t you want any help?’ Moominmamma asked.
    ‘Oh no,’ said Moominpappa. ‘This is a job that I must do. I must find a plumb-line…’ He went up the ladder, through the trap-door and into the lamp-room without giving the lamp a single thought and higher up to the loft above. After a while he came down again with a rope and asked: ‘Have you got anything I can use as a weight?’ Moominmamma rushed to the stove and gave him the iron.
    ‘Thanks,’ Moominpappa said, disappearing through the door. She heard him running down the stairs two at a time. Then all was quiet again.
    Moominmamma sat down at the table and laughed. ‘How wonderful,’ she said. ‘What a relief!’
    *
    Moomintroll lay in his glade watching the birch leaves waving above him. They were turning yellow and looked more beautiful than ever.
    He had made three separate entrances to his house: the front door, the kitchen door and an emergency door if he had to escape suddenly. He had patiently filled in the green walls of the house with plaited branches and he had made the glade his very own by doing it up for himself.
    Moomintroll didn’t think about the ants any more. They had become a part of the ground beneath him. The smell of paraffin had disappeared, and new
flowers would grow where the old ones had died. He supposed that round the thicket there were thousands of happy little red ants enjoying the sugar. Everything was just right.
    No, he was thinking about the sea-horses. Something had happened to him. He had become quite a different troll, with quite different thoughts. He liked being all by himself. It was much more exciting to play games in his imagination, to have thoughts about himself and the sea-horses, of the moonlight, and the Groke’s shadow was always in his thoughts, too. He knew she was sitting somewhere out there all the time. She howled at night, but it didn’t matter. Or so he thought.
    He had collected all sorts of presents for the sea-horses. Beautiful pebbles and bits of glass, rubbed smooth by the sea until they looked like jewels. And some smooth copper weights which he had taken from the lighthouse-keeper’s drawer. He imagined what the sea-horse would say when he gave them to her, he had worked out all sorts of clever and poetic things to say to her.
    He was waiting for the moon to come back.
    *
    Moominmamma had put everything they had brought with them from home in order long ago. There was no need for her to do much cleaning. Out here there was hardly any dust at all, and in any case one shouldn’t make too much fuss about cleaning. Preparing meals was easy, too, provided one did it in the most light-hearted
way possible. And so the days came to seem long in quite the wrong way.
    And she didn’t want to do the puzzle because it reminded her that she was so much alone.
    One day she started to collect wood. She picked up every little stick she found, until the beach was clean of everything the sea had washed up. Gradually she had gathered together a large pile of logs and bits of plank. The nice thing about it was that she had tidied up the island at the same time; it made her feel as though the island was like a garden that could be cleaned up and made to look beautiful.
    She carried everything herself to a place she had chosen to the leeward of the lighthouse-rock. There she had nailed together a