Moominland Midwinter Read online

  Tove Jansson

  Moominland

  Midwinter

  Translated by Thomas Warburton

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  TO MY MOTHER

  INCIDENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  The snowed-up drawing-room

  CHAPTER 2

  The bewitched bathing-house

  CHAPTER 3

  The Great Gold

  CHAPTER 4

  The lonely and the rum

  CHAPTER 5

  The new guests

  CHAPTER 6

  The first of spring

  CHAPTER 1

  The snowed-up drawing-room

  THE sky was almost black, but the snow shone a bright blue in the moonlight.

  The sea lay asleep under the ice, and deep down among the roots of the earth all small beasts were sleeping and dreaming of spring. But spring was quite a bit away because the year had only just got a little past New Year.

  At the point where the valley began its soft slope towards the mountains, stood a snowed-up house. It looked very lonely and rather like a crazy drift of snow. Quite near it ran a bend of the river, coal-black between ice-edges. The current kept the stream open all winter. But there were no tracks leading over the bridge, and no one had touched the snowdrifts around the house.

  Inside, the house was warm and cosy. Heaps of peat were quietly smouldering in the central-heating stove down in the cellar. The moon looked in sometimes at the drawing-room window, lighting on the white winter covers of the chairs and on the cut-glass chandelier in its white gauze bag. And in the drawing-room also, grouped around the biggest porcelain stove of the house, the Moomin family lay sleeping their long winter sleep.

  They always slept from November to April, because such was the custom of their forefathers, and Moomins stick to tradition. Everybody had a good meal of pine-needles in their stomachs, just as their ancestors used to have, and beside their beds they had hopefully laid out everything likely to be needed in early spring. Spades, burning-glasses and films, wind-gauges and the like.

  The silence was deep and expectant.

  Every now and then somebody sighed and curled deeper down under the quilt.

  The streak of moonlight wandered from rocking-chair to drawing-room table, crawled over the brass knobs of the bed end and shone straight in Moomintroll’s face.

  And now something happened that had never happened before, not since the first Moomin took to his hibernating den. Moomintroll awoke and found that he couldn’t go back to sleep again.

  He looked at the moonlight and the ice-ferns on the window. He listened to the humming of the stove in the cellar and felt more and more awake and astonished. Finally he rose and padded over to Moominmamma’s bed.

  He pulled at her ear very cautiously, but she didn’t awake. She just curled into an uninterested ball.

  ‘If not even Mother wakes up it’s no use trying the others,’ Moomintroll thought and went along by himself on a round through the unfamiliar and mysterious house. All the clocks had stopped ages ago, and a fine coat of dust covered everything. On the drawing-room table still stood the soup-tureen with pine-needles left over from November. And inside its gauze dress the cut-glass chandelier was softly jingling to itself.

  All at once Moomintroll felt frightened and stopped short in the warm darkness beside the streak of moonlight. He was so terribly lonely.

  ‘Mother! Wake up!’ Moomintroll shouted. ‘All the world’s got lost!’ He went back and pulled at her quilt.

  But Moominmamma didn’t wake up. For a moment her dreams of summer became uneasy and troubled, but she wasn’t able to open her eyes. Moomintroll curled up on her bed-mat, and the long winter night went on.

  *

  At dawn the snowdrift on the roof began to move. It went slithering down a bit, then it resolutely coasted over the roof edge and sat down with a soft thump.

  Now all the windows were buried, and only a weak, grey light found its way inside. The drawing-room looked more unreal than ever, as if it were deep under the earth.

  Moomintroll pricked his ears and listened long. Then he lit the night-light and padded along to the chest of drawers to read Snufkin’s spring letter. It lay, as usual, under the little meerschaum tram, and it was very much like the other spring letters that Snufkin had left behind when he went off to the South each year in October.

  It began with the word ‘Cheerio’ in his big round hand. The letter itself was short:

  CHEERIO

  Sleep well and keep your pecker up. First warm spring day you’ll have me here again. Don’t start the dam building without me.

  SNUFKIN.

  Moomintroll read the letter several times, and suddenly he felt hungry.

  He went out in the kitchen. It too was miles and miles under the earth as it were and looked dismally tidy and empty. The larder was just as desolate. He found nothing there, except a bottle of loganberry syrup that had fermented, and half a packet of dusty biscuits.

  Moomintroll made himself comfortable under the kitchen table and began to chew. He read Snufkin’s letter once more.

  After that he stretched out on his back and looked at the square wooden clumps under the table corners. The kitchen was silent.

  ‘Cheerio,’ whispered Moomintroll. ‘Sleep well and keep your pecker up. First warm spring day,’ he said, slightly louder. And then he sang at the top of his voice: ‘You’ll have me here again! You’ll have me here, and spring’s in the air, and it’s warm and fair, and we’ll be here, and there we are, and here and there in any year…’

  He stopped short when he caught sight of two small eyes that gleamed out at him from under the sink.

  He stared back, and the kitchen was silent as before. Then the eyes disappeared.

  ‘Wait,’ Moomintroll shouted, anxiously. He crept towards the sink, softly calling all the while:

  ‘Come out, won’t you? Don’t be afraid! I’m good. Come back…’

  But whoever it was that lived under the sink didn’t come back. Moomintroll laid out a string of biscuit crumbs on the floor and poured out a little puddle of loganberry syrup.

  When he came back to the drawing-room the crystals in the ceiling greeted him with a melancholy jingle.

  ‘I’m off,’ Moomintroll said sternly to the chandelier. ‘I’m tired of you all, and I’m going south to meet Snufkin.’ He went to the front door and tried to open it, but it had frozen fast.

  He ran whining from window to window and tried them all, but they also stuck hard. And so the lonely Moomintroll rushed up to the attic, managed to lift the chimney-sweep’s hatch, and clambered out on to the roof.

  A wave of cold air received him.

  He lost his breath, slipped and rolled over the edge.

  And so Moomintroll was helplessly thrown out in a strange and dangerous world and dropped up to his ears in the first snowdrift of his experience. It felt unpleasantly prickly to his velvet skin, but at the same time his snout caught a new smell. It was a more serious smell than any he had felt before, and slightly frightening. But it made him wide awake and greatly interested.

  The valley was enveloped in a kind of grey twilight. It also wasn’t green any longer, it was white. Everything that had once moved had become immobile. There were no living sounds. Everything angular was now rounded.

  ‘This is snow,’ Moomintroll whispered to himself. ‘I’ve heard about it from Mother, and it’s called snow.’

  Without Moomintroll knowing a thing about it, at that moment his velvet skin decided to start growing woollier. It decided to become, by and by, a coat of fur for winter use. That would take some time, but at least the decision was made. And that’s always a good thing.

  Meanwhile Moomintroll was laboriously plod
ding along through the snow. He went down to the river. It was the same river that used to scuttle, transparent and

  jolly, through Moomintroll’s summer garden. Now it looked quite unlike itself. It was black and listless. It also belonged to this new world in which he didn’t feel at home.

  For safety’s sake he looked at the bridge. He looked at the mail box. They tallied with memory. He raised the lid a little, but there was no mail, except a withered leaf without a word on it.

  He was already becoming used to the winter smell. It didn’t make him feel curious any more.

  He looked at the jasmine bush that was an untidy tangle of bare sprigs, and he thought: ‘It’s dead. All the world has died while I slept. This world belongs to somebody else whom I don’t know. Perhaps to the Groke. It isn’t made for Moomins.’

  He hesitated for a moment. Then he decided that he would feel still worse if he were the only one awake among the sleeping.

  And that was why Moomintroll made the first tracks in the snow, over the bridge and up the slope. They were very small tracks, but they were resolute and pointed straight in among the trees, southwards.

  CHAPTER 2

  The bewitched bathing-house

  Down by the sea, farther to the west, a young squirrel was skipping aimlessly about in the snow. He was quite a foolish little squirrel who liked to think of himself as ‘the squirrel with the marvellous tail’.

  As a matter of fact, he never thought at all about anything for very long. Mostly he just had a feeling about things. His latest feeling was that his mattress in the nest was getting knobbly, and so he had gone out to look for a new one.

  Now and again he mumbled: ‘A mattress,’ to keep himself from forgetting what he was looking for. He forgot things very easily.

  The squirrel went skipping this way and that, in among the trees and out on the ice, he stuck his nose in the snow and pondered, looked up at the sky and shook his head and skipped along again.

  He came to the cave on the hill and skipped inside. But when he had got there he wasn’t able to concentrate any longer, and so he forgot all about his mattress. Instead he sat down on his tail and began to think that people could just as well call him ‘the squirrel with the marvellous whiskers’.

  Behind the great snowdrift at the opening of the cave somebody had spread out straw on the floor. And in the straw stood a large cardboard box with the lid partly raised.

  ‘That’s strange,’ said the squirrel aloud, with some surprise. ‘That cardboard box wasn’t here before. Must be something wrong about it. Or else this is the wrong cave. Or I might be the wrong squirrel, but I wouldn’t like to believe that.’

  He poked up a corner of the lid and put his head inside the box.

  It was warm, and it seemed to be filled with something soft and nice. Suddenly the squirrel remembered his mattress. His small, sharp teeth cut into the soft stuffing and pulled out a flock of wool.

  He pulled out one flock after the other; he soon had his arms full of wool and was working hard with all four paws. He felt extremely pleased and happy.

  Then all at once someone was trying to bite the squirrel in the leg. Like a streak of lightning he whizzed out of the box, then hesitated for a moment and decided to feel more curious than scared.

  Presently an angry head with tousled hair appeared in the hole he had bitten in the wool.

  ‘Are you all there, you!?!’ said Little My.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said the squirrel.

  ‘Now you’ve waked me,’ Little My continued severely. ‘And eaten half my sleeping-bag. What’s the great idea?’

  But the squirrel was so beside himself that he had forgotten his mattress again.

  Little My gave a snort and climbed out of the cardboard box. She closed the lid on her sister, who was still asleep, and went over and felt the snow with her paw.

  ‘So this is what it’s like,’ she said. ‘Funny ideas people get.’ She squeezed a snowball and hit the squirrel on the head with her first throw. And then Little My stepped out from the cave to take possession of the winter.

  The first thing she accomplished was to slip on the icy cliff and sit down very hard.

  ‘I see,’ Little My said in a threatening voice. ‘They think they’ll get away with anything.’

  Then she happened to think of what a My looks like with her legs in the air, and she chuckled to herself for quite a while. She inspected the cliff and the hillside and thought a bit. Then she said: ‘Well, now,’ and did a jumpy switchback slide far out on the smooth ice.

  She repeated this six times more and noticed that it made her tummy cold.

  Little My went back into the cave and turned her

  sleeping sister out of the cardboard box. My had never seen a toboggan, but she had a definite feeling that there were many sensible ways of using a cardboard box.

  As to the squirrel, he was sitting in the wood and looking distractedly from one tree to another.

  Not for the tail of him could he remember in which one he lived, nor what he had gone out to look for.

  *

  Moomintroll hadn’t come very far south when darkness was already creeping under the trees.

  At every step his paws sank deep in the snow, and the snow was not in the least as exciting as it had been.

  The silence and the stillness of the wood were complete. Only now and then a large sheaf of snow came thumping down from a tree. The branch from which it had fallen rocked a while, and then all was lifeless again.

  ‘The world’s asleep,’ Moomintroll thought. ‘It’s only I who am awake and sleepless. It’s only I who have to wander and wander, day after day and week upon week, until I too become a snowdrift that no one will even know about.’

  Just then the wood opened out, and before him stretched another valley. On the other side of it he saw the Lonely Mountains. They rolled away southwards in wave upon wave, and never had they looked more lonely.

  Only now Moomintroll began to feel the cold. The evening darkness came crawling out of the clefts and climbed slowly up towards the frozen ridges. Up there the snow was gleaming like bared fangs against the black mountain; white and black, and loneliness everywhere.

  ‘Somewhere on the other side of it all is Snufkin,’ Moomintroll said to himself. ‘He’s sitting somewhere in the sun, peeling an orange. If I only knew that he knew that I’m climbing these mountains for his sake, then I could do it. But all alone I’ll never manage it.’

  And Moomintroll turned around and slowly plodded back in his own tracks.

  ‘I’ll wind all the clocks,’ he thought. ‘Perhaps that makes the spring come a tiny bit earlier. And someone might wake up if I happen to break some big thing.’

  But he knew in his heart that no one would wake up.

  Then something happened. A small track went scuttling across Moomintroll’s own track. He stopped and stood looking at it for a long time. Something alive had padded through the wood, perhaps no more than half an hour ago. It couldn’t have gone far. It had gone towards the valley and must have been smaller than he himself. Its paws had hardly sunk into the snow at all.

  Moomintroll felt all hot inside, from the tip of his tail to the tops of his ears.

  ‘Wait!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t leave me alone!’ He whimpered a little as he went stumbling along again through the snow, and all of a sudden he felt a great terror of the darkness and the loneliness. His fright must have hidden itself somewhere all the time since he awoke in the sleeping house, but this was the first time he dared to feel really afraid.

  Now he didn’t shout any more, because he thought how horrible it would be if nobody answered him. He didn’t even dare to lift his snout from the track that was hardly visible in the dark. He just crawled and stumbled along, and whimpered softly to himself.

  And then he caught sight of the light.

  It was quite small, and yet it filled all the wood with a mild, red glow.

  Moomintroll calmed down. He forgot the track and cont
inued slowly on his way, looking towards the light. Until at last he saw that it was an ordinary candle, thrust steadily upright in the snow. Around it stood a small sugar-loaf of a house, built of round snowballs. They looked transparent and slightly orange-yellow, like the shade of the night-lamp at home.

  On the other side of the lamp someone had dug herself a cosy hole, someone who lay looking up at the serene winter sky and whistling very softly to herself.

  ‘What song is that?’ asked Moomintroll.

  ‘It’s a song of myself,’ someone answered from the pit.

  ‘A song of Too-ticky who built a snow lantern, but the refrain is about wholly other things.’

  ‘I see,’ Moomintroll said and seated himself in the snow.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ replied Too-ticky genially and rose up enough to show her red and white sweater. ‘Because the refrain is about the things one can’t understand. I’m thinking about the aurora borealis. You can’t tell if it really does exist or if it just looks like existing. All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured.’

  She lay down in the snow again and continued looking up at the sky. It was quite black by now.

  Moomintroll also put up his snout and looked at the sparkling northern lights that probably no Moomin had ever seen before him. They were white and blue and a little green, and they draped the sky in long, fluttering curtains.

  ‘I think it exists,’ he said.

  Too-ticky did not reply. She crawled up to the snow lantern and lifted out her candle.

  ‘We’ll take this home,’ she said. ‘Before the Groke comes and sits down on it.’

  Moomintroll nodded gravely. He had seen the Groke once. An August night long ago. Cold and grey like a lump of ice she had squatted in the shadows of the lilac bushes and just looked at him. But what a look! And when she slunk away the ground was frosted white where she had sat.

  For a moment Moomintroll wondered whether winter itself wasn’t something that ten thousand Grokes had made by squatting on the ground. But he decided to take