CHAPTER II

The White Pigeon
WHEN in the winter they had had their supper and sat about the fire, or when in the summer they lay on the border of the rock-margined stream that ran through their little meadow close by the door of their cottage, is- suing from the far-up whiteness often folded in clouds, Curdie’s mother would not seldom lead the conversation to one peculiar personage said and believed to have been much concerned in the late issue of events.
That personage was the great-great-grandmother of the princess, of whom the princess had often talked, but whom neither Curdie nor his mother had ever seen. Curdie could indeed remember, although already it looked more like a dream than he could account for if it had really taken place, how the princess had once led him up many stairs to what she called a beautiful room in the top of the tower, where she went through all the
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THE WHITE PIGEON
—what should he call it?—the behavior of presenting him to her grandmother, talking now to her and now to him, while all the time he saw nothing but a bare garret, a heap of musty straw, a sunbeam, and a withered apple. Lady, he would have declared before the king himself, young or old, there was none, except the princess herself, who was certainly vexed that he could not see what she at least believed she saw.
As for his mother, she had once seen, long before Curdie was born, a certain mysterious light of the same description as one Irene spoke of, calling it her grand- mother’s moon; and Curdie himself had seen this same light, shining from above the castle, just as the king and princess were taking their leave. Since that time neither had seen or heard anything that could be supposed con- nected with her. Strangely enough, however, nobody had seen her go away. If she was such an old lady, she could hardly be supposed to have set out alone and on foot when all the house was asleep. Still, away she must have gone, for, of course, if she was so powerful, she would always be about the princess to take care of her.
But as Curdie grew older, he doubted more and more whether Irene had not been talking of some dream she had taken for reality: he had heard it said that children could not always distinguish betwixt dreams and actual events. At the same time there was his mother’s testi- mony: what was he to do with that? His mother, through whom he had learned everything, could hardly be imag-
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ined by her own dutiful son to have mistaken a dream for a fact of the waking world.
So he rather shrank from thinking about it, and the less he thought about it, the less he was inclined to be- lieve it when he did think about it, and therefore, of course, the less inclined to talk about it to his father and mother; for although his father was one of those men who for one word they say think twenty thoughts, Curdie was well assured that he would rather doubt his own eyes than his wife’s testimony.
There were no others to whom he could have talked about it. The miners were a mingled company—some good, some not so good, some rather bad—none of them so bad or so good as they might have been; Curdie liked most of them, and was a favorite with all; but they knew very little about the upper world, and what might or might not take place there. They knew silver from cop- per ore; they understood the underground ways of things, and they could look very wise with their lanterns in their hands searching after this or that sign of ore, or for some mark to guide their way in the hollows of the earth; but as to great-great-grandmothers, they would have mocked Curdie all the rest of his life for the absurd- ity of not being absolutely certain that the solemn belief of his father and mother was nothing but ridiculous non- sense. Why, to them the very word “great-great-grand- mother’ would have been a week’s laughter! I am not sure that they were able quite to believe there were such
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THE WHITE PIGEON
persons as great-great-grandmothers; they had never seen one.
They were not companions to give the best of help to- ward progress, and as Curdie grew, he grew at this time faster in body than in mind—with the usual conse- quence, that he was getting rather stupid—one of the chief signs of which was that he believed less and less in things he had never seen. At the same time I do not think he was ever so stupid as to imagine that this was a sign of superior faculty and strength of mind. Still, he was be- coming more and more a miner, and less and less a man of the upper world where the wind blew. On his way to and from the mine he took less and less notice of bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds. He was gradually changing into a commonplace man.
There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection. One of the latter sort comes at length to know at once whether a thing is true the moment it comes before him; one of the former class grows more and more afraid of be- ing taken in, so afraid of it that he takes himself in alto- gether, and comes at length to believe in nothing but his dinner: to be sure of a thing with him is to have it be- tween his teeth.
Curdie was not in a very good way, then, at that time. His father and mother had, it is true, no fault to find
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THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE
with him—and yet—and yet—neither of them was ready to sing when the thought of him came up. There must be something wrong when a mother catches herself sighing over the time when her boy was in petticoats, or a father looks sad when he thinks how he used to carry him on his shoulder. The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother’s darling, and more, his father’s pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever freshborn.
Curdie had made himself a bow and some arrows, and was teaching himself to shoot with them. One evening in the early summer, as he was walking home from the mine with them in his hand, a light flashed across his eyes. He looked, and there was a snow-white pigeon settling on a rock in front of him, in the red light of the level sun. There it fell at once to work with one of its wings, in which a feather or two had got some sprays twisted, caus- ing a certain roughness unpleasant to the fastidious crea- ture of the air.
It was indeed a lovely being, and Curdie thought how happy it must be flitting through the air with a flash—a live bolt of light. For a moment he became so one with the bird that he seemed to feel both its bill and its feath- ers, as the one adjusted the other to fly again, and his heart swelled with the pleasure of its involuntary sym- pathy. Another moment and it would have been aloft in the waves of rosy light—it was just bending its little legs
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THE WHITE PIGEON
to spring: that moment it fell on the path broken-winged and bleeding from Curdie’s cruel arrow. With a gush of pride at his skill, and pleasure at his
success, he ran to pick up his prey. I must say for him he picked it up gently—perhaps it was the beginning of his repentance. But when he had the white thing in his
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THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE
hands—its whiteness stained with another red than that of the sunset flood in which it had been reveling—ah God! who knows the joy of a bird, the ecstasy of a crea- ture that has neither storehouse nor barn!—when he held it, I say, in his victorious hands, the winged thing looked up in his face—and with such eyes! asking what was the matter, and where the red sun had gone, and the clouds, and the wind of its flight. Then they closed, but to open again presently, with the same questions in them. And as they closed and opened, their look was fixed on his. It did not once flutter or try to get away; it only throbbed and bled and looked at him. Curdie’s heart began to grow very large in his bosom. What could it mean? It was nothing but a pigeon, and why should he not kill a pigeon? But the fact was that not till this very moment had he ever known what a pigeon was. A good many discoveries of a similar kind have to be made by most of us. Once more it opened its eyes—then closed them again, and its throbbing ceased. Curdie gave a sob: its last look reminded him of the princess—he did not know why. He remembered how hard he had labored to set her beyond danger, and yet what dangers she had had to encounter for his sake: they had been saviors to each other—and what had he done now? He had stopped sav- ing, and had begun killing! What had he been sent into the world for? Surely not to be a death to its joy and loveliness. He had done the thing that was contrary to gladness; he was a destroyer! He was not the Curdie he had been meant to be!
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Then the underground waters gushed from the boy’s heart. And with the tears came the remembrance that a - white pigeon, just before the princess went away with her father, came from somewhere—yes, from the grand- mother’s lamp, and flew round the king and Irene and himself, and then flew away: this might be that very pi- geon! Horrible to think! And if it wasn’t, yet it was a white pigeon, the same as this. And if she kept a great many pigeons—and white ones, as Irene had told him, then whose pigeon could he have killed but the grand old princess’s?
Suddenly everything round about him seemed against him. The red sunset stung him; the rocks frowned at him; the sweet wind that had been laving his face as he walked up the hill dropped—as if he wasn’t fit to be kissed any more. Was the whole world going to cast him out? Would he have to stand there forever, not knowing what to do, with the dead pigeon in his hand? Things looked bad indeed. Was the whole world going to make a work about a pigeon—a white pigeon?
The sun went down. Great clouds gathered over the west, and shortened the twilight. The wind gave a howl, and then lay down again. The clouds gathered thicker. Then came a rumbling. He thought it was thunder. It was a rock that fell inside the mountain. A goat ran past him down the hill, followed by a dog sent to fetch him home. He thought they were goblin creatures, and trem- bled. He used to despise them. And still he held the dead pigeon tenderly in his hand.
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It grew darker and darker. An evil something began to move in his heart. “What a fool I am!” he said to himself. Then he grew angry, and was just going to throw the bird from him and whistle, when a brightness shone all round him. He lifted his eyes, and saw a great globe of light—like silver at the hottest heat: he had once seen sil- ver run from the furnace. It shone from somewhere above the roofs of the castle: it must be the great old princess’s moon! How could she be there? Of course she was not there! He had asked the whole household, and nobody knew anything about her or her globe either. It couldn’t be! And yet what did that signify, when there was the white globe shining, and here was the dead white bird in his hand? That moment the pigeon gave a little flutter. “It’s not dead!’ cried Curdie, almost with a shriek. The same instant he was running full speed to- ward the castle, never letting his heels down, lest he should shake the poor, wounded bird.
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CHAPTER, Lit
The Mistress of the Silver Moon
WHEN CurorE reached the castle, and ran into the little garden in front of it, there stood the door wide open. This was as he had hoped, for what could he have said if he had had to knock at it? Those whose business it is to open doors, so often mistake and shut them! But the woman now in charge often puzzled herself greatly to account for the strange fact that however often she shut the door, which, like the rest, she took a great deal of un- necessary trouble to do, she was certain, the next time she went to it, to find it open. I speak now of the great front door, of course: the back door she as persistently kept wide: if people could only go in by that, she said, she would then know what sort they were, and what they wanted. But she would neither have known what sort Curdie was, nor what he wanted, and would assuredly have denied him admittance, for she knew nothing of
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who was in the tower. So the front door was left open for him, and in he walked.
But where to go next he could not tell. It was not quite dark: a dull, shineless twilight filled the place. All he knew was that he must go up, and that proved enough for the present, for there he saw the great staircase rising before him. When he reached the top of it, he knew there must be more stairs yet, for he could not be near the top of the tower. Indeed by the situation of the stairs, he must be a good way from the tower itself. But those who work well in the depths more easily understand the heights, for indeed in their true nature they are one and the same; miners are in mountains; and Curdie, from knowing the ways of the king’s mines, and being able to calculate his whereabouts in them, was now able to find his way about the king’s house. He knew its outside per- fectly, and now his business was to get his notion of the inside right with the outside.
So he shut his eyes and made a picture of the outside of it in his mind. Then he came in at the door of the pic- ture, and yet kept the picture before him all the time— for you can do that kind of thing in your mind—and took every turn of the stair over again, always watching to remember, every time he turned his face, how the tower lay, and then when he came to himself at the top where he stood, he knew exactly where it was, and walked at once in the right direction.
On his way, however, he came to another stair, and up that he went, of course, watching still at every turn how
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THE MISTRESS OF THE SILVER MOON
the tower must lie. At the top of this stair was yet another —they were the stairs up which the princess ran when first, without knowing it, she was on her way to find her great-great-grandmother. At the top of the second stair he could go no farther, and must therefore set out again to find the tower, which, as it rose far above the rest of the house, must have the last of its stairs inside itself.
Having watched every turn to the very last, he still knew quite well in what direction he must go to find it, so he left the stair and went down a passage that led, if not exactly toward it, yet nearer it. This passage was rather dark, for it was very long, with only one window at the end, and although there were doors on both sides of it, they were all shut. At the distant window glim- mered the chill east, with a few feeble stars in it, and its like was dreary and old, growing brown, and looking as if it were thinking about the day that was just gone. Pres- ently he turned into another passage, which also had a window at the end of it; and in at that window shone all that was left of the sunset, just a few ashes, with here and there a little touch of warmth: it was nearly as sad as the east, only there was one difference—it was very plainly thinking of tomorrow.
But at present Curdie had nothing to do with today or tomorrow; his business was with the bird, and the tower where dwelt the grand old princess to whom it belonged. So he kept on his way, still eastward, and came to yet an- other passage, which brought him to a door. He was afraid to open it without first knocking. He knocked, but
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THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE
heard no answer. He was answered nevertheless; for the door gently opened, and there was a narrow stair—and so steep that, big lad as he was, he, too, like the Princess Irene before him, found his hands needful for the climb- ing. And it was a long climb, but he reached the top at last—a little landing, with a door in front and one on each side. Which should he knock at?
As he hesitated, he heard the noise of a spinning wheel. He knew it at once, because his mother’s spinning wheel had been his governess long ago, and still taught him things. It was the spinning wheel that first taught him to make verses, and to sing, and to think whether all was right inside him; or at least it had helped him in all these things. Hence it was no wonder he should know a spinning wheel when he heard it sing—even although as the bird of paradise to other birds was the song of that wheel to the song of his mother’s.
He stood listening, so entranced that he forgot to knock, and the wheel went on and on, spinning in his brain songs and tales and rhymes, till he was almost asleep as well as dreaming, for sleep does not always come first. But suddenly came the thought of the poor bird, which had been lying motionless in his hand all the time, and that woke him up, and at once he knocked.
“Come in, Curdie,” said a voice.
Curdie shook. It was getting rather awful. The heart that had never much heeded an army of goblins trem- bled at the soft word of invitation. But then there was the red-spotted white thing in his hand! He dared not ;
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THE MISTRESS OF THE SILVER MOON
hesitate, though. Gently he opened the door through which the sound came, and what did he see? Nothing at first—except indeed a great sloping shaft of moonlight that came in at a high window, and rested on the floor. He stood and stared at it, forgetting to shut the door.
“Why don’t you come in, Curdie?’” said the voice. “Did you never see moonlight before?”
“Never without a moon,” answered Curdie, in a trem- bling tone, but gathering courage.
“Certainly not,” returned the voice, which was thin and quavering: “J never saw moonlight without a moon.”
“But there’s no moon outside,” said Curdie.
“Ah! but you’re inside now,” said the voice.
The answer did not satisfy Curdie; but the voice went on.
“There are more moons than you know of, Curdie. Where there is one sun there are many moons—and of many sorts. Come in and look out of my window, and you will soon satisfy yourself that there is a moon looking in at it.”
The gentleness of the voice made Curdie remember his manners. He shut the door, and drew a step or two nearer to the moonlight.
All the time the sound of the spinning had been going on and on, and Curdie now caught sight of the wheel. Oh, it was such a thin, delicate thing—reminding him of a spider’s web in a hedge. It stood in the middle of the moonlight, and it seemed as if the moonlight had
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THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE
nearly melted it away. A step nearer, he saw, with a start, two little hands at work with it. And then at last, in the shadow on the other side of the moonlight which came like a river between, he saw the form to which the hands belonged: a small withered creature, so old that no age would have seemed too great to write under her picture, seated on a stool beyond the spinning wheel, which looked very large beside her, but, as I said, very thin, like a long-legged spider holding up its own web, which was the round wheel itself. She sat crumpled together, a filmy thing that it seemed a puff would blow away, more like the body of a fly the big spider had sucked empty and left hanging in his web, than anything else I can think of.
When Curdie saw her, he stood still again, a good deal in wonder, a very little in reverence, a little in doubt, and, I must add, a little in amusement at the odd look of the old marvel. Her gray hair mixed with the moonlight so that he could not tell where the one began and the other ended. Her crooked back bent forward over her chest, her shoulders nearly swallowed up her head be- tween them, and her two little hands were just like the gray claws of a hen, scratching at the thread, which to Curdie was of course invisible across the moonlight. In- deed Curdie laughed within himself, just a little, at the sight; and when he thought of how the princess used to talk about her huge, great, old grandmother, he laughed more. But that moment the little lady leaned forward
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THE MISTRESS OF THE SILVER MOON
into the moonlight, and Curdie caught a glimpse of her eyes, and all the laugh went out of him.
“What do you come here for, Curdie?” she said, as gently as before.
Then Curdie remembered that he stood there as a cul-
prit, and worst of all, as one who had his confession yet to make. There was no time to hesitate over it.
“Oh, ma’am! See here,” he said, and advanced a step or two, holding out the pigeon.
“What have you got there?” she asked.
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THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE
Again Curdie advanced a few steps, and held out his hand with the pigeon, that she might see what it was, into the moonlight. The moment the rays fell upon it the pigeon gave a faint flutter. ‘The old lady put out her old hands and took it, and held it to her bosom, and rocked it, murmuring over it as if it were a sick baby.
When Curdie saw how distressed she was he grew sor- rier still, and said:
“T didn’t mean to do any harm, ma’am. I didn’t think of its being yours.”
“Ah, Curdie! If it weren’t mine, what would become of it now?” she returned. “You say you didn’t mean any harm: did you mean any good, Curdie?”
“No,” answered Curdie.
“Remember, then, that whoever does not mean good is always in danger of harm. But I try to give everybody fair play; and those that are in the wrong are in far more need of it always than those who are in the right: they can afford to do without it. Therefore I say for you that when you shot that arrow you did not know what a pi- geon is. Now that you do know, you are sorry. It is very dangerous to do things you don’t know about.”
“But, please, ma’am—I don’t mean to be rude or to contradict you,” said Curdie, “but if a body was never to do anything but what he knew to be good, he would have to live half his time doing nothing.”
“There you are much mistaken,” said the old quaver- ing voice. “How little you must have thought! Why,
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THE MISTRESS OF THE SILVER MOON
you don’t seem even to know the good of the things you are constantly doing. Now don’t mistake me. I don’t mean you are good for doing them. It is a good thing to eat your breakfast, but you don’t fancy it’s very good of you to do it. The thing is good—not you.”
Curdie laughed.
“There are a great many more good things than bad things to do. Now tell me what bad thing you have done today besides this sore hurt to my little white friend.”
While she talked Curdie had sunk into a sort of rev- erie, in which he hardly knew whether it was the old lady or his own heart that spoke. And when she asked him that question, he was at first much inclined to consider himself a very good fellow on the whole. “I really don’t think I did anything else that was very bad all day,” he said to himself. But at the same time he could not hon- estly feel that he was worth standing up for. All at once a light seemed to break in upon his mind, and he woke up and there was the withered little atomy of the old lady on the other side of the moonlight, and there was the spinning wheel singing on and on in the middle of it!
“I know now, ma’am; I understand now,” he said. “Thank you, ma’am, for spinning it into me with your wheel. I see now that I have been doing wrong the whole day, and such a many days besides! Indeed, I don’t know when I ever did right, and yet it seems as if I had done right some time and had forgotten how. When I killed
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THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE
your bird I did not know I was doing wrong, just because I was always doing wrong, and the wrong had soaked all through me.”
“What wrong were you doing all day, Curdie? It is better to come to the point, you know,” said the old lady, and her voice was gentler even than before.
“I was doing the wrong of never wanting or trying to be better. And now I see that I have been letting things go as they would for a long time. Whatever came into my head I did, and whatever didn’t come into my head I didn’t do. I never sent anything away, and never looked out for anything to come. I haven’t been attending to my mother—or my father either. And now I think of it, I know I have often seen them looking troubled, and I have never asked them what was the matter. And now I see, too, that I did not ask because I suspected it had something to do with me and my behavior, and didn’t want to hear the truth. And I know I have been grum- bling at my work, and doing a hundred other things that are wrong.”
“You have got it, Curdie,” said the old lady, in a voice that sounded almost as if she had been crying. “When people don’t care to be better they must be doing every- thing wrong. I am so glad you shot my bird!”
‘“Ma’am!”’ exclaimed Curdie. “How can you be?”
“Because it has brought you to see what sort you were when you did it, and what sort you will grow to be again, only worse, if you don’t mind. Now that you are sorry, my poor bird will be better. Look up, my dovey.”
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THE MISTRESS OF THE SILVER MOON
The pigeon gave a flutter, and spread out one of its red-spotted wings across the old woman’s bosom.
“I will mend the little angel,” she said, ‘and in a week or two it will be flying again. So you may ease your heart about the pigeon.”
“Oh, thank you! Thank you!” cried Curdie. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Then I will tell you. There is only one way I care for. Do better, and grow better, and be better. And never kill anything without a good reason for it.”
“Ma’am, I will go and fetch my bow and arrows, and you shall burn them yourself.”
“I have no fire that would burn your bow and arrows, Curdie.”’
“Then I promise you to burn them all under my mother’s porridge pot tomorrow morning.”
“No, no, Curdie. Keep them, and practice with them every day, and grow a good shot. There are plenty of bad things that want killing, and a day will come when they will prove useful. But I must see first whether you will do as I tell you.”
“That I will!” said Curdie. “What is it, ma’am?”
“Only something not to do,” answered the old lady; “If you should hear anyone speak about me, never to laugh or make fun of me.”
“Oh, ma’am!” exclaimed Curdie, shocked that she should think such a request needful.
“Stop, stop,” she went on. “People hereabout some- times tell very odd and in fact ridiculous stories of an old
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THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE
woman who watches what is going on, and occasionally interferes. They mean me, though what they say is often great nonsense. Now what I want of you is not to laugh, or side with them in any way; because they will take that to mean that you don’t believe there is any such person a bit more than they do. Now that would not be the case— would it, Curdie?”’
“No, indeed, ma’am. I’ve seen you.”
The old woman smiled very oddly.
“Yes, you’ve seen me,” she said. “But mind,” she con- tinued, “I don’t want you to say anything—only to hold your tongue, and not seem to side with them.”
“That will be easy,” said Curdie, “now that I’ve seen you with my very own eyes, ma’am.”
“Not so easy as you think, perhaps,” said the old lady, with another curious smile. “I want to be your friend,” she added after a little pause, “but I don’t quite know yet whether you will let me.”
“Indeed I will, ma’am,” said Curdie.
“That is for me to find out,” she rejoined, with yet an- other strange smile. “In the meantime all I can say is, come to me again when you find yourself in any trouble, and I will see what I can do for you—only the canning depends on yourself. I am greatly pleased with you for bringing me my pigeon, doing your best to set right what you had set wrong.”
As she spoke she held out her hand to him, and when he took it she made use of his to help herself up from her stool, and—when or how it came about, Curdie could not
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THE MISTRESS OF THE SILVER MOON
tell—the same instant she stood before him a tall, strong woman—plainly very old, but as grand as she was old, and only rather severe-looking. Every trace of the decrep-
itude and witheredness she showed as she hovered like a film about her wheel, had vanished. Her hair was very white, but it hung about her head in great plenty, and
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THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE
shone like silver in the moonlight. Straight as a pillar she stood before the astonished boy, and the wounded bird had now spread out both its wings across her bosom, like some great mystical ornament of frosted silver.
“Oh, now I can never forget you!” cried Curdie. “I see now what you really are!”
“Did I not tell you the truth when I sat at my wheel?” said the old lady. “Yes, ma’am,” answered Curdie.
“I can do no more than tell you the truth now,” she rejoined. “It is a bad thing indeed to forget one who has told us the truth. Now go.”
Curdie obeyed, and took a few steps toward the door.
“Please, ma’am—what am I to call you?” he was going to say; but when he turned to speak, he saw nobody. Whether she was there or not he could not tell, however, for the moonlight had vanished, and the room was ut- terly dark. A great fear, such as he had never before known, came upon him, and almost overwhelmed him. He groped his way to the door, and crawled down the stair—in doubt and anxiety as to how he should find his way out of the house in the dark. And the stair seemed ever so much longer than when he came up. Nor was that any wonder, for down and down he went, until at length his foot struck a door, and when he rose and opened it, he found himself under the starry, moonless sky at the foot of the tower.
He soon discovered the way out of the garden, with which he had some acquaintance already, and in a few
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minutes was climbing the mountain with a solemn and cheerful heart. It was rather dark, but he knew the way well. As he passed the rock from which the poor pigeon fell wounded with his arrow, a great joy filled his heart at the thought that he was delivered from the blood of the little bird, and he ran the next hundred yards at full speed up the hill. Some dark shadows passed him: he did not even care to think what they were, but let them run. When he reached home, he found his father and mother waiting supper for him.
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