As the apple-woman left off singing the Queen moved away, still murmuring the words of her story, and Jack said:
"Does the Queen tell stories of what has happened, or of what is going to happen?"
"Why, of what is going to happen, of course," replied the woman. "Anybody could tell the other sort."
"Because I heard a little of it," observed Jack. "I thought she was talking of me. She said: 'So he took the measure, and Mopsa stood still for once, and he found she was only one foot high, and she grew a great deal after that. Yes, she can grow.' "
"That's a fine hearing, and a strange hearing," said the apple-woman; "and what did she mutter next?"
"Of how she heard me sobbing," replied Jack; "and while you went on about stepping on board the ship, she said: 'He was very good to me, dear little fellow! But Fate is the name of my old mother, and she reigns here[14]. Oh, she reigns! The fatal F is in her name, and I cannot take it out!' "
"Ah!" replied the apple-woman, "they all say that, and that they are fays, and that mortals call their history fable; they are always crying out for an alphabet without the fatal F."
"And then she told how she heard Mopsa sobbing too," said Jack; "sobbing among the reeds and rushes by the river side."
"There are no reeds and no rushes either here," said the apple-woman, "and I have walked the river from end to end. I don't think much of that part of the story. But you are sure she said that Mopsa was short of her proper height?"
"Yes, and that she would grow; but that's nothing. In my country we always grow."
"Hold your tongue about your country!" said the apple-woman sharply. "Do you want to make enemies of them all?"
Mopsa had been listening to this, and now she said: "I don't love the Queen. She slapped my arm as she went by, and it hurts."
Mopsa showed her little fat arm as she spoke, and there was a red place on it.
"That's odd too," said the apple-woman; "there's nothing red in a common fairy's veins. They have sap in them: that's why they can't blush."
Just then the sun went down, and Mopsa got up on the apple-woman's lap and went to sleep; and Jack, being tired, went to his boat and lay down under the purple canopy, his old hound lying at his feet to keep guard over him.
The next morning, when he woke, a pretty voice called to him: "Jack! Jack!" and he opened his eyes and saw Mopsa. The apple-woman had dressed her in a clean frock and blue shoes, and her hair was so long! She was standing on the landing-place, close to him. "Oh, Jack! I'm so big," she said. "I grew in the night; look at me."
Jack looked. Yes, Mopsa had grown indeed; she had only just reached to his knee the day before, and now her little bright head, when he measured her, came as high as the second button on his waistcoat.
"But I hope you will not go on growing so fast as this," said Jack, "or you will be as tall as my mamma is in a week or two much too big for me to play with."
CHAPTER TEN
Mopsa Learns her Letters
A apple-pie.
B bit it.
"How ashamed I am," Jack said, "to think that you don't know even your letters!"
Mopsa replied that she thought that did not signify, and then she and Jack began to play at jumping from the boat on to the bank and back again; and afterwards, as not a single fairy could be seen, they had breakfast with the apple-woman.
"Where is the Queen?" asked Jack.
The apple-woman answered: "It's not the fashion to ask questions in Fairyland."
"That's a pity," said Jack, "for there are several things that I particularly want to know about this country. Mayn't I even ask how big it is?"
"How big?" said Mopsa little Mopsa looking as wise as possible. "Why, the same size as your world, of course."
Jack laughed. "It's the same world that you call yours," continued Mopsa; "and when I'm a little older I'll explain it all to you."
"If it's our world," said Jack, "why are none of us in it, excepting me and the apple-woman?"
"That's because you've got something in your world that you call TIME," said Mopsa; "so you talk about NOW, and you talk about THEN."
And don't you?" asked Jack.
"I do if I want to make you understand," said Mopsa.
The apple-woman laughed, and said: "To think of the pretty thing talking so queen-like already! Yes, that's right, and just what the grown-up fairies say. Go on, and explain it to him if you can."
"You know," said Mopsa, "that your people say there was a time when there were none of them in the world a time before they were made. Well, THIS is that time. This is long ago."
"Nonsense!" said Jack. "Then how do I happen to be here?"
"Because," said Mopsa, "when the albatross brought you she did not fly with you a long way off, but a long way back hundreds and hundreds of years. This is your world, as you can see; but none of your people are here, because they are not made yet. I don't think any of them will be made for a thousand years."
"But I saw the old ships," answered Jack, "in the enchanted bay."
"That was a border country," said Mopsa. "I was asleep while you went through those countries; but these are the real Fairylands."
Jack was very much surprised when he heard Mopsa say these strange things; and as he looked at her he felt that a sleep was coming over him, and he could not hold up his head. He felt how delightful it was to go to sleep; and though the apple-woman sprang to him when she observed that he was shutting his eyes, and though he heard her begging and entreating him to keep awake, he did not want to do so; but he let his head sink down on the mossy grass, which was as soft as a pillow, and there under the shade of a Guelder rose tree[15], that kept dropping its white flowerets all over him, he had this dream.
He thought that Mopsa came running up to him, as he stood by the river, and that he said to her: "Oh, Mopsa, how old we are! We have lived back to the times before Adam and Eve!"
"Yes," said Mopsa; "but I don't feel old. Let us go down the river, and see what we can find."
So they got into the boat, and it floated into the middle of the river, and then made for the opposite bank, where the water was warm and very muddy, and the river became so very wide that it seemed to be afternoon when they got near enough to see it clearly; and what they saw was a boggy country, green, and full of little rills, but the water which, as I told you, was thick and muddy the water was full of small holes! You never saw water with eyelet-holes in it; but Jack did. On all sides of the boat he saw holes moving about in pairs, and some were so close that he looked and saw their lining; they were lined with pink, and they snorted! Jack was afraid, but he considered that this was such a long time ago that the holes, whatever they were, could not hurt him; but it made him start, notwithstanding, when a huge flat head reared itself up close to the boat, and he found that the holes were the nostrils of creatures who kept all the rest of themselves under water.
In a minute or two, hundreds of ugly flat-heads popped up, and the boat danced among them as they floundered about in the water.
14
But Fate
reigns here. The words "fay" and "fairy" actually do derive from the Latin