The Disappearing Dwarf

I infer, an’ please your worship, replied Trim, that the radical moisture is nothing in the world but ditch-water – and that the radical heat, of those who can go to the expense of it, is burnt brandy, – the radical heat and moisture of a private man, an’ please your honour, is nothing but ditch-water – and a dram of geneva – and give us but enough of it, with a pipe of tobacco, to give us spirits, and drive away the vapours – we know not what it is to fear death.

Laurence Sterne
Tristram Shandy

1
The Man of Leisure

It was late May, and the weather was warming up in Twombly Town. The great brass kaleidoscope had been wheeled out from under a shingled awning where, as usual, it had been stored all winter so that it wouldn’t turn color and go to bits in the rain. It sat now amid a sea-green clump of moss that had sprouted late the previous year, covering the little bit of ground where Mr Twickenham’s airship had landed. No one could determine the reason for the sprouting of the strange moss, not even Professor Wurzle, but the stuff was covered with a thousand little flowers in a rainbow of pastel colors and was so altogether beautiful that it really didn’t much matter where it had come from.

Mayor Bastable had hired an assistant town gardener to oversee the plot. But the weather was so unusually fine, and the sight of the flowers so peaceful and idyllic, that the fellow had fallen asleep in the middle of the moss for three days running, and the Mayor was forced to pay a lad to go out and roust him every half hour or so.

It turned out that the moss, which had come up on its own and would probably go on in much the same way, didn’t need a gardener anyway; so Mayor Bastable created a department of agriculture, and the assistant gardener was put to work planting strawberries all up and down the avenues. He’d even planted a big patch behind Jonathan Bing’s cheesehouse.

On the twenty-fourth of May, Jonathan was out poking around in the strawberry patch, trying to find enough ripe ones to smash up over ice cream. Jonathan’s dog, old Ahab, was out there too, sniffing along the rows. He didn’t care much about strawberries. In fact, it’s reasonably certain that he liked his ice cream better without anything smashed over the top. There were certain bugs, though, out in the strawberries, that Ahab liked to chase about. So they were both busy there amid the little creeping vines, or at least were trying to be busy. Actually there weren’t any more bugs out than there were strawberries, and wouldn’t be, likely, for a couple of weeks yet.

Jonathan had done well that past December with his raisin cheeses. He’d made such a good profit selling the things to the dwarfs in Seaside that he was set for a number of months. In fact, the previous January he had considered that he could abandon cheesemaking altogether for nine months out of the year, then make up a big batch of raisin cheeses come fall, sell it downriver, and slide on through spring and summer again. It was an appealing thought –so appealing that he talked himself into giving it a go for a year. He hired a helper, old Beezle’s grandson Talbot, who was given to tramping in the woods making fearful noises on a tuba. He did it, he said, to frighten away bears and goblins. Jonathan asked him if it wouldn’t be just as simple not to tramp in the woods at all and so not have to bother with the tuba, but Talbot said quite simply that that ‘wasn’t his way.’

He had a tremendous aptitude for cheesing, however, and by the first of May was making any number of fine cheeses without any help at all. At that point Jonathan had become a man of leisure, something he had fancied for a long time.

Men of leisure were always appearing in the books of G. Smithers of Brompton Village, Jonathan’s favorite author. Every one of them wore a white suit so as to alert casual passersby to his status as a man of leisure; and in G. Smithers’ books, such passersby, if they had any decency or intelligence about them, were invariably impressed. So Jonathan bought a white suit and a whangee from Beezle’s store and, after about a week, worked up enough courage to go abroad in it. He set out having convinced himself that he cut a moderately fine figure, but halfway to town he ran into his friend Dooly who, quite innocently, remarked that Jonathan, dressed in that suit, was the spitting image of a gibbon ape he’d seen once in a sideshow up in Monmouth. Jonathan decided against going into town. He returned home instead and asked Talbot whether he looked more like a man of leisure or a gibbon ape. Talbot, who had just come in out of the woods with his tuba, said that all things considered it was about a tossup.

The result of all this was that Jonathan had given up both the white suit and the idea of being a man of leisure. He gave the suit to Dooly later that week, and Dooly, having nothing against apes of any nature, wore it when he went off down south to meet old Theophile Escargot, his grandfather. According to Dooly, they were heading down to the tropics – where such a suit would be just the thing –to go off pirating in Escargot’s undersea device.

Since then Jonathan had shingled his roof, built new screens for his windows, and fixed the bank of casements along the east side of his house that leaked when it rained. He was thinking of kicking his front door to bits in order to build a new one, but he wasn’t desperate enough for that yet. He’d worked his way through half of G. Smithers, having long ago come to the conclusion that reading is perhaps the finest thing in the world to do in one’s leisure time. But then it turned out that a man of leisure hadn’t any
leisure
time; he just had suitcases full of the same sort of unidentifiable time, and reading for the sake of filling expanses of that sort of time wasn’t as satisfying as it might be. So he had put down G. Smithers, called Ahab, and wandered out to the strawberry patch. He considered, after that first month of being a man of leisure, that he might do better to go back to being a full-time checser. A man has to have his work, after all – at least that’s what the philosophers said. And he’d just about decided to pack up the whole business when Professor Artemis Wurzle, dressed in a striking sort of suspendered hiking garment, came clumping up the path from town in a determined way.

He seemed altogether too determined. It was easy to see that he wasn’t just out after spring mushrooms or water-weeds and sticklebacks for his aquaria. Ahab went wagging along the path to meet him, suspecting that the Professor had some nature of treat – a dog biscuit or bit of cheese –in his shirt pocket. The Professor hauled out one of the square biscuits from Beezle’s market that had the taste of rye about them and handed it to Ahab, who seemed pleased.

‘Hello, Professor,’ Jonathan said.

‘Hello, Jonathan,’ came the reply. ‘I’ve just been down to town. Talked to Beezle. He tells me you’ve become a man of leisure.’

‘Until about five minutes ago,’ Jonathan replied. ‘But I gave it up. It was too tiring. I couldn’t quit and rest, as Dooly would say.’

‘How about the suit? Beezle says that you bought an amazing suit, and cut a fine figure in it too.’

‘I kept being mistaken for a gibbon ape,’ Jonathan said. ‘White suits don’t do me much good, I’m afraid.’

‘They don’t do anyone any good,’ the Professor explained. ‘Especially at night. They tend to attract the rays of the moon. Something like osmosis. Set a man mad eventually. I did a treatise on it back in my university days. No white-suited man can stay sane long – not if he goes out after dark.’

‘Then it’s just as well I got rid of it,’ Jonathan said. ‘I would have become a mad gibbon ape. A frightening thought. I gave the thing to Dooly, though. He doesn’t know anything about this moon madness business.’

The Professor thought about that for a moment before coming to the conclusion that moon rays probably wouldn’t bother Dooly much anyway. He started to explain something to Jonathan about the scientific principle of saturation points, but it was far too hot there in the sunlight for such lectures. Jonathan suggested they wander over to the house and saturate themselves with iced tea. Ahab bounded off in the wake of young Talbot, who was trudging away in the direction of the forest, carrying his tuba.

All in all, Jonathan’s house was fairly cool. There was such a profusion of windows that breezes blew in from every which way. Oak and tulip wood and liquidambar trees grew on all sides and shaded the roof from the sun. The house and its three little out buildings – a smokehouse, cheesehouse, and shop – sat atop a little rise about a quarter mile from town. Mayor Bastable’s house was two hundred yards east, and in between was a broad expanse of pasture. To the north, beyond the cheesehouse and smokehouse, was a little garden, partly fenced by a tangle of berry vines that piled up right to the edge of the forest. Beyond that, for as many miles as anyone cared about, were the deep woods, rising up out of the valley toward the misty, distant mountains. On a clear day Jonathan could sit in his living room and see the snow-capped peaks of those mountains miles and miles away.

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