Chapter IV

Tom’s return created a good deal of interest in the village for a day or two; people whose grandfathers had been babies when Tom was stolen would stop him on the road to ask how he was after all this time, what he had been doing all these years, and what he proposed to do now. To these questions he answered, “Very well, thank you,” and “All sorts of things,” and “I haven’t made up my mind.” Then one night Prince Carlo’s Circus came along and pitched its tent in Half-Moon Meadow, and everybody’s thoughts were full of lovely spangled ladies, and black-and-white ponies, and red-and-white clowns, and strong men who could carry worlds on their shoulders, and slim youths who could leap through the air like birds from one bar to another; and their ears were full of the sound of brass music, and their eyes of the sight of flaring torches, and their noses of the smell of grass and sawdust. Tom went with the rest of the village to the twopenny seats, and liked it immensely, and after the Circus had departed the people talked of its wonders for a week and thought about Tom no more. And nobody but Sally Drake, his grim old niece, bothered to ask him what he proposed to do for a living.

“For it’s high time, uncle,” said she, “that a handy young lad of seventy-seven like you should be put to some trade.”

“There’s no hurry,” said Tom. “I think when I’m older I’d like to be one of the Duke’s keepers, and perhaps Jack would take me round with him so as I can get the hang of things.”

Jack was agreeable, and they spent long days together in the wild Park; and Tom was taught how to handle a gun, and all the other ways of a keeper, with which I am not very well acquainted, so I cannot tell _you_. All I know is that one morning, as Jack and Tom were going through the Park, the Duke himself came up to them and said to Jack, “Good-morning, Drake. Something very funny’s going on in this Park.”

“Is it, your Grace?” said Jack Drake. “I hadn’t noticed particular.”

“Come along with me, then,” said the Duke, “and I’ll show you.”

So they went along all three to one of the rabbit-warrens, and there were hundreds of rabbits racing along the runs they had scratched on the hillside; and big and little, brown and white, old and young, they all had horns on their heads.

“That’s queer now,” said Jack Drake, rubbing his eyes.

“And that’s not all,” said the Duke, and went a bit further on to a glade much favoured by his deer. And one and all, dun and dappled, doe, buck, and fawn, they had wings on their backs.

“That’s queerer still,” said Jack Drake, scratching his head.

“Then what do you think of _this_?” said the Duke, and led the way to the biggest tumulus on his estate; and there, on the very top, stood a handsome mahogany table-leg with a claw foot, and planted atop of it was the body of a splendid lion, roaring in a friendly way and wagging its tail with pleasure.

Jack Drake rubbed his chin and said, “That’s the queerest yet.”

“It is,” said the Duke, “and I don’t like it at all; and as my Head Keeper I’ll thank you to keep it from occurring again.”

“I’ll do my best, your Grace,” said Jack Drake; and then he stared so hard at the Duke’s feet that the Duke looked down too, and saw, to his great annoyance, that he had golden boots on. They looked very grand, to be sure, but they were hard and heavy, and most uncomfortable to walk in. He hurried home and changed them for his bedroom slippers, and sent to the bootmaker for another pair of leather boots; but after this, so sure as he walked in the Park he walked in gold. Before long he had a whole cupboardful of golden boots and shoes.

And this wasn’t the end of the queer doings in Shortways that summer. When the fish began to leap, the fishermen came as usual with their reels and creels and lanterns to fish in the river outside the Lodge gates. No doubt they were the grandsons of the men Tom Cobble used to see there, but they looked just exactly the same. There they sat in the dark among the reeds, as deaf and as dumb as of old. Tom Cobble came and watched them, but he did not ask them questions any more. While _they_ fished in silence, _he_ lay on the bank and read in his brown book. And one night a fisherman, attending to his bait which had just been carried away by a saucy perch, discovered to his vexation that his bait-box, instead of worms and gentles, was full of parsley sauce, and the other fishermen were in just the same case. So there was no more fishing that night.

The next night the fishermen came again, and cast their lines in the river, and Tom Cobble came too with his book, and sprawled in the reeds beside them. It was a lovely rainy night, and the fish were jumping a treat. But all of a sudden the rain stopped and the moon appeared as big as a silver plate, and no sooner did they see it than the jumping fish jumped clean out of the water and went leaping through the air till they were safe in the dark blue sky; and there, as though they had been in their own sweet river, they swam round and round the moon all night, some swift, some slow, perch and bass and dace and little minnows, making the prettiest patterns with their supple slippery bodies and wavy fins. Several of the villagers turned out to see the sight when they heard what was happening; but those who preferred to keep their beds asked what it was like in the morning; and the fishermen went home, for there was no more fishing _that_ night.

However, it is the hardest thing in the world to discourage a fisherman, and on the following night they were there again, and there, too, was Tom Cobble with his book. And this night the fishermen did not go away, but fished in peace with their usual sort of luck. But when the morning came and they thought they would make a move, they found they couldn’t, for every man had taken root in the reeds where he sat, and there he was whether he liked it or not.

The village children were very nice to the fishermen in the reeds, and bought them licorice shoe-strings from the shop to cheer them up, and whenever the fish jumped they cast their lines contentedly and hadn’t such a bad time of it after all. Except one, who had the misfortune to be mowed down with a bundle of reeds, where he was overlooked by Jem Turner the thatcher, who thatched him into the gable-end of an old cowshed that wanted patching up. However, his arms were left free, so the children put a bucket of rainwater on the ground below, and gave him his fishing-line to drop into it, and then he was as happy as the day was long.

_Harry Blossom and his queer left shoe._
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I relate these events just so that you can know the sort of thing that now began to happen in Shortways, and went on for the next seven years, but these were mere nothings. If I told you even a fiftieth part of Tom Cobble’s lop-sided magic, you wouldn’t be in bed before breakfast-time. Sally Drake suspected him and his book from the first, and pretty soon told her son Jack to be quit of the boy as a keeper, and apprentice him to the village Cobbler.

The Cobbler took Tom on for a year, during which time Tom made boots and shoes very deftly, but something was always wrong. The right-hand shoe was perfect, but the left-hand shoe was queer. The first pair he ever made was for Harry Blossom, the Potman of the Garland Inn. He pulled them on behind the bar, and made one step forward with his right to serve Jem Turner with a draught of porter—and the next step he took he was over the counter and standing on Doctor Daly’s onion-bed, a quarter of a mile down the road. He started back with his right, and then his left plunged forward and landed him breathless in the school-house, where the children were chanting,

“Twice one is two!”

“That depends,” said Harry Blossom, sitting down quick on the floor before he was betrayed into another step; and he pulled off his boots and walked the half-mile back to the Garland Inn in his socks.

The next pair Tom Cobble made was for the Parson, who wore them one Sunday to church. The right boot was a sober boot enough, but the left boot was given to dancing. So sure as it touched the ground, up it flew like a columbine. The Parson was late as it was and couldn’t turn back; he managed to get to the church unseen, but he created some surprise when he pirouetted into the pulpit, where for safety he stood the whole morning on one leg to deliver his sermon. Or perhaps Tom’s left shoe had the power of flying, or the knack of pinching you whenever you told the least little fib—Tom Cobble himself was a strictly truthful boy—or perhaps his left slipper might be made of pure glass.

Well, the Cobbler passed him on to the Blacksmith, where he made horseshoes that galloped off the anvil and up the hill without waiting so much as to make the acquaintance of the horse standing to be shod; it was an alarming thing to meet one of Tom’s red-hot horseshoes racing through the fields, taking the gates and ditches, and fetching up at last in the stable, where it stood waiting for the horse to come while it cooled off. So the Blacksmith passed him on to the Farmer, where the clover and the corn, and the poppies in among them, came up that year made of silk and calico, like the flowers in the Squire’s Lady’s Sunday bonnet, and in little Daisy Martin’s market-hat. And when one day the speckled hen, who was such a fine layer, stopped her proud cackling in the yard, and marching into the kitchen said to the Farmer’s Wife, “I’m come to inform you, ma’am, that I’ve just laid a beautiful egg,” the Farmer paid Tom Cobble his wages, and told him to go.

So back he went to Sally Drake, and spent the time in reading his book, and doing whatever he fancied: such as making the river run backward; and the snow turn to white sugar icing when it fell; and the school-house settle itself in the top of an oak-tree, where the children had to climb through the leaves to their lessons; and Farmer Jolly’s sheep on the Downs transform themselves into a flock of white clouds, when the Butcher came to fetch them away, that rose bleating softly into the blue summer sky, and after a short while disappeared. But after that, every now and again, when the white clouds came sailing over Shortways, one of them might be heard to bleat as it passed, and the villagers would tell each other, “There’s one of Jolly’s sheep going by.”

In due course Tom completed the seventh year of his return from Fairyland, and to all intents and purposes was twenty-one years old.