The Disappearing Dwarf (2 page)

‘Quite a view you’ve got from here, Jonathan,’ the Professor commented. He was standing in front of the windows holding a glass of iced tea in his hand.

‘It is that.’

‘Makes a man content.’ The Professor smiled. ‘That garden and your big front porch and the valley all spread out around you – it would be hard to leave.’

‘Impossible.’ Jonathan remembered the look of determination on the Professor’s face and suspected that all of this home and hearth business was leading up to something.

‘But as a man of leisure, doing nothing all day but gazing out of the windows and standing about in the strawberry patch waiting for the green berries to turn, you run a terrible risk, Jonathan.’

Jonathan nodded. Just what I’ve been saying. All this free time takes the wind right out of your sails.’

‘Exactly. What you need is a vacation from it.’

So that was it. That explained the Professor’s look of determination. He wanted to go off traveling and he aimed to talk Jonathan into going along. ‘But I just got home,’ Jonathan stated flatly.

‘We’ve been back six months,’ the Professor said, ‘and you’ve got an air of boredom about you. It hovers around you like a little cloud. They say that once you’ve tasted the highroad you never lose your craving for it. It’s like root beer or brandy or green olives. Traveling is in your blood.’

‘I’m not sure they are correct,’ Jonathan answered. ‘And besides, I’ve my cheeses to see to.’

‘Talbot can see to your cheeses.’

‘Then there’s my garden,’ Jonathan said weakly. ‘It’ll go up in weeds.’

‘Give it to the Mayor,’ the Professor suggested. ‘How many of those zucchinis do you think you can eat anyway? There’s not a man alive who can eat zucchini for three days running with a straight face. And I seem to recall, Jonathan, your having said something about going off this spring to visit the Squire. What happened to that idea?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jonathan swallowed a last gulp of iced tea. He looked at the little patch of sugar at the bottom of the glass. It
would
actually be fun to see the Squire again, not to mention Bufo and Gump and Stick-a-bush. And it would be nice to travel on holiday rather than on business. ‘Why doesn’t this sugar dissolve like it’s supposed to?’ he asked the Professor. ‘You can stir for an hour and there’s still sugar on the bottom of the glass.’

‘It’s a matter of chemistry,’ the Professor replied knowingly. ‘Very complex affair.’

‘Is that it?’ Jonathan seemed satisfied. ‘When do you want to leave on this venture?’

‘That’s the spirit!’ Professor Wurzle shouted, pouring himself more tea out of a green glass pitcher. ‘We leave tomorrow. At sunrise.’

‘Impossible. I’ll need a week,’ Jonathan replied.

‘What for?’

‘I’ve got to square the lad away about the cheeses.’

‘I had one of his cheeses last week. He doesn’t need any squaring away,’ the Professor stated emphatically. ‘Just tell him to keep at it while you’re gone. You trust him, don’t you?’

‘Of course,’ Jonathan said. ‘He’ll do well.’

‘Then we leave tomorrow.’

‘I need time to lock up, to stow things away.’

The Professor pulled out his pocketwatch, gave it a look, strode over and shut one of the casements, then slid the flip-lock into place. He looked at the pocketwatch again. ‘Seven seconds,’ he said. ‘Multiply that by eight, add ten seconds for the door, and this room’s locked up tight. A blind man doesn’t need more than five minutes to lock up a house.’

Jonathan could see that his rationalizations were crumbling in the face of reason. ‘How about supplies, Professor?’

‘They’re loaded. What do you think I’ve been doing all morning, chatting with Beezle about white suits?’

‘Loaded where?’ Jonathan asked, convinced, finally, that fate had raised its peculiar head once again.

‘Why onto your raft, of course. I took the liberty of picking the lock on the hold. We’re ready to push off. In fact, we could leave tonight. There’s a full moon. We could sail by moonlight and troll for river squid.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Jonathan said, ‘will be soon enough.’

The sound of an approaching tuba echoed out of the forest, and away up the path beyond the berry vines Talbot and Ahab could be seen tramping in out of the woods, pursued neither by bears nor goblins. The Professor jumped up and pushed open the screen door. ‘I’ll just inform the lad of our plans, Jonathan. I have all the dates and such written down. Don’t worry.’

I Jonathan sat over another glass of iced tea, looking out the window. G. Smithers lay half finished on the table beside his chair. Just an hour earlier Jonathan had been convinced that he couldn’t read another word. Now it seemed to him as if there were nothing in the world he would rather do. And it struck him that he’d be on the Oriel or somewhere off along the river road when the strawberries finally ripened. Talbot and Mayor Bastable would get the lot of them.

But then it was true that he could always take G. Smithers along with him, since he’d have hours of good, lazy reading time ahead of him on the river. It was true too, that if it was strawberries he wanted, the Squire would be just the man to see. In fact, Squire Myrkle probably ate them by the bushel-basket-full, being as large as he was. Furthermore, when he finally returned home from his trip, he’d feel pretty much as he had when he got home from the k last – doubly glad to see his little house and his wheels of suspended cheese and all the rest of the things that the Professor had pointed out as making a man content. There was nothing like returning home from travels to make a man content – and, of course, you couldn’t return until you’d gone. So there Jonathan was at last – going again. He walked into his bedroom to pack his bag.

There wasn’t any fanfare that next morning on the dock as there had been months before. Jonathan wasn’t setting out as any sort of hero, only as a man off on holiday – travel for the sport of it. Most of the people of Twombly Town, in fact, probably thought the idea fairly foolish. It was a rare villager who traveled beyond the City of the Five Monoliths, where the fair was held at the end of each summer, and none of them would consider going even that far if the fair weren’t there to attract them.

Jonathan, however, had, as the Professor put it, gotten some of the highroad into his blood. It seemed to him, although he might have been mistaken, that travel lent a sort of romantic air to a person – gave one a set of what Theophile Escargot would call
bona fides
. He could imagine himself barefoot, wearing an old cocked hat, and sitting about on the end of a wharf in the Pirate Isles, drinking rum and talking in a worldly and salty way to a one-eyed man with a parrot on his shoulder. He could see himself blowing through Twombly Town with just the right sort of sunburned wrinkles under his eyes and a pocket full of strange gold coins pillaged from the kings of Oceania.

Part of him, however, suspected that if one were to be a gentleman adventurer or a man of the world he’d best be born to it – that it was some sort of natural talent. If he were to
assume
such a role he’d probably develop a mysterious and unfortunate likeness to a gibbon ape. In truth, his adventures of the past fall hadn’t made him feel any different at all; he still woke up in the morning good old Jonathan Bing, the Cheeser. But then, all things considered, he wasn’t altogether dissatisfied with such a fate.

He envied the Professor in a mild way, though, bustling around there on the docks that quiet morning, the sun creeping up over the hills to the east. The Professor didn’t care a bit for adventures or for becoming anything at all. He was content to be off searching for a peculiar species of river clam or calculating the changes of color in the rainbow ice floes in the Mountains of the Moon. Science was enough for the Professor. More than enough in fact. He never ran out of wonders to investigate.

The new day was already warm. A breeze was blowing down the valley and it felt how Jonathan imagined a trade wind should feel. It had the smell of summer blossoms on it and the musty, weedy smell of the river. There was just enough breeze to blow his hair up out of his eyes and to rustle the leaves on the oaks. The wind would be at their backs on the way downriver – an advantage, certainly, if they were concerned with time. But then that was just about the last thing Jonathan was concerned with, so he determined not to hoist the sail anyway. He and Ahab picked their way along the path that ran through the meadow past the Widow’s windmill. It was rough going because through some marvel of nature about a billion little toads had hatched out in the night and were making off across the meadow to determine the lay of the land. Jonathan and Ahab had to look sharp to avoid stepping on any. He paused to scatter a handful over Ahab’s back in order to give the critters a lift down to the river. Also he wanted to see the Professor’s face at the sight of the toad-laden dog; his mind would be a furor of theses and speculations.

The river wound away around a distant bend, its glassy surface broken only by an occasional little eddy or the swirl of a fish. The shore grasses were jeweled with dew that gleamed in the new sun. It was the sort of day that made Jonathan determined to get up with the sun henceforth, just for the sake of the morning. Such ideas, of course, would evaporate as quickly as the dew on the grass, and the idea of sleeping until noon would be every bit as appealing to him by late evening as the idea of rising early was to him there on the meadow.

He poked along after Ahab and finally clomped out onto the wharf. Just for the fun of it, he checked the trout lines that Talbot had tied along one of the wide joists that supported the dock. It was Talbot’s habit to check the lines each morning about seven before settling in to make cheese. There were, invariably, no trout on the lines. Talbot had begun by using lumps of old cheese as bait – not a bad idea at all – but the cheese had fallen so quickly to bits that the hooks went unbaited for about twenty-three hours out of every twenty-four. He had determined, finally, that yellow lumps of rubber would work as well as cheese and found that the rubber could be depended upon to stay on the job and not wander off. The result, however, was pretty much the same. The Professor said that it was likely, at least from the scientific angle, that lumps of yellow rubber affected fish in pretty much the same way that tubas affected bears and goblins, and that Talbot would do well to study the situation a bit more before putting too much faith in rubber cheese.

There were about a half dozen trout, actually, nosing about in the water. They seemed to be gathered around one of the floating rubber cheeses, looking at it as if mystified. As Jonathan watched, one of the trout swam off into the shadows and then came back with two of his friends who, along with the rest of the trout, hovered about, eyeballing the false cheese. The Professor walked over to sec what it was that so captivated Jonathan.

These trout seem to be studying Talbot’s rubber cheese,’ Jonathan said. ‘I wonder if their concern is scientific or philosophic’

‘Almost certainly philosophic,’ the Professor replied. They’re coming to conclusions about the nature of such a beast as would dangle lumps of rubber beneath a dock.’

‘They can only conclude, then,’ Jonathan said, ‘that we’re a race of lunatics. They’ll score our significance in terms of dangling rubber cheese. Perhaps we should drop a book down on a string, or dangle some symbol of technology like a compass or a marble or a bar of soap.’

‘That would just make matters worse. They’d wonder why we worked up such marvels, then dumped them into the water.’

About then, from the green depths of the river, a school of long, rubbery river squid came undulating along, scattering the trout in a half dozen directions. They had great round protruding eyes and a dozen tentacles that trailed along behind. They paused momentarily near the surface, took a look about, then disappeared into the depths, leaving Talbot’s rubber cheese dangling forlornly there in the current.

There must be a whole world of stuff going on down there that we don’t know anything about,’ Jonathan observed. ‘It would be strange to live in that sort of green and shifting light. Too many shadows for my taste.’

‘I’m not sure I agree.’ The Professor walked back across to the raft. ‘I’m at work on a set of plans for a device much like Escargot’s. A subsurface boat. Imagine what you’d see.’

The two of them idled along for another half hour, then cast off and angled out into mid-river. Two men in slouch hats, smoking pipes and trailing fishing lines, spun past in a canoe. They disappeared around a distant swerve of the shore. Jonathan watched Twombly Town grow smaller, and he saw, finally, before he too rounded that bend, young Talbot, tuba and all, coming along down the path toward the wharves in order to check his lines. Talbot waved at them from afar, and as the raft swirled away out of sight of the village, one echoing mournful note from the mouth of Talbot’s tuba reached them, a sad and distant farewell.

Jonathan was immediately homesick in the warm silence of the morning, not as cheerful and full of expectations as he had hoped to be. The Professor broke the silence by banging the coffee pot about and by clattering together pots of butter and jam. When he cut into a loaf of fresh bread, the smell of coffee and bread seemed to Jonathan to be the smell of life itself. Never one to fly in the face of anything as significant as life, he ripped into a big hunk of bread smeared over with apple butter. Then he tossed back a cup of coffee, the combination of coffee and bread effectively scattering the morose mood he seemed to have slipped into. He decided, in fact, to throw out a line of his own and catch a couple of those trout who had been making mock of Talbot’s rubber cheese. By the end of breakfast, Twombly Town might as well have been about a thousand miles behind them, and it seemed to Jonathan as if the future held great undefinable promise.