The Last Slice of Rainbow, Page 3

  “I—I don’t know,” faltered Christina. “Something came over me. —Why are you so huge?” she added nervously: “Who are you?” she asked, hoping to get the conversation away from whiskers.

  “I’m your fairy godfather,” Crimplesham said angrily. “And I was supposed to look after you, but a fat lot of use I shall be without my whiskers. I shan’t be able to do a thing until they’ve grown again, and that will take nine times nine thousand hours. Meanwhile, I hope your hair will teach you to have a bit more respect for other people’s!”

  And with that, he vanished up the chimney in a cloud of soot.

  Christina was dreadfully dismayed—and more so, when the next minute, all the golden hairs on her head began buzzing and sneering together, in a cloud of tiny voices, like the shrilling of mosquitoes. “Bad girl! Nasty princess, to cut poor pussy’s whiskers,” they screamed. “For shame! Oh what a cruel thing to do!” and so on, and so on.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” poor Christina wept. “I’m very sorry, I’ve said I’m sorry,” but that did not stop the voices at all. She pressed her hands to her ears and ran out into the rain, hoping to escape from them.

  But they came too.

  After that day, Christina heard the terrible little voices almost all the time. If she had not been a princess, they would have driven her mad. Sometimes she thought she was mad; for nobody else could hear them. She told Miss Pagnell about them, she told the prime minister, she told the palace doctor. “Nonsense, Princess!” they said. “You are just imagining things. There aren’t any voices.”

  But Christina could hear them all the time; sometimes muttering, “Come on, you’re not really trying with those sums!” or, “Go on, say something rude to the prime minister, he can’t answer back!”; sometimes fairly screaming at her, “Eat up that piece of liver, pig! Stop pushing it about your plate!” or “Why don’t you give your pony a taste of the stick?” Sometimes the voices gave her bad advice, sometimes they scolded her, sometimes they just teased. “Think you’re pretty? Well you’re not—just fat and plain!” A hundred thousand times she wished for old Crimplesham, even at his crossest and most dignified; a thousand times she wept when she remembered that it would take nine times nine thousand hours for his whiskers to grow again—over nine years that would be! It was no use cutting off her own hair—she did try that, and earned a fearful scolding from Miss Pagnell, who came in and found the princess snipped as bald as an egg. But in two hours all the hair grew back, screaming louder than ever, “Tee hee, thought you’d got rid of us! But you didn’t, you didn’t and you never will!”

  Then a terrible thing happened. News came that the yacht had run into an iceberg. All of its crew, together with the king and queen, were lost. And so poor Christina had to be crowned queen, with a little silver crown made specially, since the coronation crown was far too big for her head. And while the crown was being set on her head by the archbishop of Laurestinia, Christina could hear a hundred little hair voices crying spitefully, “Now that she’s queen she’d better behave herself! Bet she doesn’t! Let’s wait and see!”

  Christina simply hated being queen. She heard the voices louder than ever, nagging at her all day long.

  About a year after she was crowned, however, she discovered a useful thing: The voices would pause in their nagging and teasing if she recited poetry, or if she sang songs or played the piano (which Miss Pagnell was teaching her). So, as you may imagine, Christina learned dozens and dozens of poems and songs; she practiced on her piano for hours on end. And when she was busy doing royal jobs, signing endless documents, or sitting on the throne being polite to foreign ambassadors, inside her head she might be saying a poem to herself, or following the pattern of some lovely tune. And in this way she could from time to time win herself a rest from the pestering voices.

  Since music was such a help in keeping the voices at bay, Christina liked to hear any musicians who came to the island. When she was about thirteen, a young violinist who was famous all over the world came to Laurestinia. It was said that when he played, even the birds stopped chirping to listen. His name was Johann King; Christina sent a message to him, asking if could come and play to her in private. Of course he said yes, but it was soon plain that he had never played to a queen before—he was so nervous that his hands shook, and he broke a string while he was tuning his fiddle.

  “Oh, y-your m-majesty, I am so s-sorry,” he stammered. “I am afraid that now I sh-shan’t be able to play after all.”

  “Haven’t you a spare string?” asked Christina.

  “I make my own; no other strings are strong enough for my music,” he said. “And I just used up my last spare.”

  Bitterly disappointed—for she had been looking forward so much to hearing him play—Christina said shyly, “I don’t suppose one of my hairs would do?”

  The young musician seemed doubtful, and all the hairs on Christina’s head shrieked teasingly, “Hark at her! Thinks she’s so clever!”

  But Christina pulled a long gold strand out of her head—“That’s one less, at all events,” she thought—and Johann King wound it into place on his fiddle. Lo and behold, it sounded as well as the other strings, and he was able to play the most beautiful music, better than any she had ever heard. And—either because of the music or from surprise—the peevish, teasing voices were silent for eight whole hours after. Christina was able to sleep right through the night without their spiteful buzz breaking up her dreams, a thing that had not happened since her parents went away.

  The next day she sent for the musician to say good-bye.

  “Where are you going next?” said she.

  “I am going to travel around the world, Your Majesty,” he replied. “But I hope I shall see you again someday.”

  “I hope so too,” said Christina, and she gave him her hand to kiss. Oddly enough, when he kissed her hand, he too was able to hear the voices of her hair, all shouting louder and shriller and more spitefully because of their night’s silence.

  “Oh, you poor little majesty!” he exclaimed in horror. “Hark at your hair! How can you bear it?”

  “I bear it because I have to,” said Christina, and she pulled out ten more hairs to give him for a keepsake. Then she watched out the window as his ship sailed away.

  After that she went into the garden—for it was still early, before breakfast—while every hair on her head shrieked and yammered and clamored, “You’ll never find anyone else who can hear us, don’t think it! And he’s gone for good!”

  But Christina made up a little song, to one of the tunes that Johann had played, and she sang it as she walked along:

  “Poor Queen Christina with screaming hair,

  Her life is full of grief and pain.

  She’d cut off her hair but she doesn’t dare,

  For she knows it would only grow again.”

  The hairs stopped their buzzing to listen to her song, and began again when she stopped. So then she sang the national anthem.

  “Our country is foggy, our country is free,

  Its people are happy as happy can be—”

  and she walked on through the fog and the laurel trees, singing so hard that, without noticing it, she left the garden and entered a region where she had never been.

  This was called the Backward Area, and the people who lived there were called the Backward People, not because they were stupid but because their feet were turned backward on their ankles. Also their skin was blue, and because of these things, everybody despised them. They lived in the swamp because no one else wanted to, and because they had nowhere else. They were rather bad tempered. Christina was not supposed to enter the area, but she found herself in the middle of the swamp before she realized where she had got to.

  A group of Backward People came clustering around her, and they looked quite frightening, with their blue faces and reversed feet and disagreeable expres
sions.

  “What are you doing here?” they all shouted rudely. “You aren’t supposed to come here. And we ain’t as happy as can be! Queens aren’t wanted in our swamp! Beat it, before we kick you out with our backward feet! Get back to your own quarters!”

  But Christina, looking around, could only feel terribly sorry for them, living in such a damp dismal place, without any pleasures, and she cried, “Oh, I believe that if I were to pull some of my hair out, you could weave it into mats to lay over the swamp. Yes, look, it works! And you could twist hair into ropes to make swings and hammocks and skipping ropes and butterfly nets and kite strings and lots of other useful things, look, look—” While she spoke she was pulling out her long golden hair in handfuls, despite its shrieks of fury—and the Backward People, catching on quick as lightning, wove the hair into thick, strong, buoyant golden mats, which they laid over the swamp, so that what had been a damp dismal bog was transformed into a beautiful pleasure garden, with golden-roped hammocks and swings dangling from the great green laurel trees; and the Backward People were so happy that they knelt all around Christina on the golden mats, with their feet sticking up backward, and cried, “We love you, we love you, dear Queen Christina!”

  She had pulled out every strand of her hair in her wish to help the Backward People, but now it all began to grow again like mustard and cress, and it hissed as it grew, “You think you’re clever, don’t you! But just wait till the prime minister hears where you have been, and then you’ll catch it!”

  The Backward People heard the spiteful angry voices of the hair, and they cried out sorrowfully, “Oh, you poor little queen, how can you bear to have hair like that?”

  “I bear it because I must,” said Christina, and she kissed them all good-bye and returned to the palace. There, as it happened, she did not find herself in trouble, for a wild bull had escaped and was rushing through the streets of the capital city, terrifying everybody. Christina quickly pulled out a handful of hairs, which by this time had grown to waist length again, and she plaited them into a string, and with this the bull was easily lassoed and led back to its shed.

  Due to the fuss about the bull, both Miss Pagnell and the prime minister forgot to scold Christina about her venture into the Backward Area, which, from that time, began to be called the Golden Garden.

  But this made no difference to Christina’s hair, which continued to be as teasing and spiteful as ever, contradicting everything that was told her, shouting bad advice and rude words, interrupting her when she was trying to think, and keeping her awake at night. It was amazing that she managed to rule, but she did manage, and quite well, too.

  Some months later the prime minister came to her with a pale face.

  “Your Majesty, our country is in terrible danger! A huge iceberg is floating toward Laurestinia: It is 44 miles long, 25 miles wide, and 1,000 feet thick, and it is drifting at a speed of thirty knots; it will crush our poor little island like a grain of sugar. We had better all take to the boats and flee.”

  “We had better do no such thing,” said Christina, and she began to tug out her hair by handfuls, ignoring its shouts and screams of rage.

  “Make haste,” she said. “Let everybody in the land come and plait my hair into a rope, and let our two strongest tugboats be ready to steam in opposite directions.”

  Now the iceberg had come into sight on the far horizon, and it was shaped like a double mountain, with two great sharp peaks, all of green ice.

  “We must wind a rope around each peak,” said Christina, tugging away at her hair in spite of its shrieks, “and the tugs must sail off, east and west, so as to pull the iceberg in half.”

  The prime minister shook his head, but as nobody else had a better idea, all the people of the island came to the palace and plaited away at Christina’s hair, while the terrible iceberg drifted closer and closer, giving off deadly cold as a bonfire gives off heat. As it came nearer, all the laurel leaves on the island began to blacken, and the flowers to shrivel, and the fingers of the people as they plaited became numb with cold. At last twenty miles of golden rope were finished, and two brave mountaineers rowed out to the iceberg, climbed its slippery sides by hammering in iron pegs, and wound the golden rope three times around the twin green peaks. Next the two tugs, each taking the end of a rope, rapidly steamed in opposite directions. And then, with a tremendous wrenching creaking crash, the iceberg split in half, and the two halves bobbed away after the tugs, which steamed on, far, far into the southern sea.

  But what was everybody’s astonishment when, out of the middle of the broken iceberg, like a kernel from a nut, appeared the long-lost royal yacht, with the king and queen, and all the crew, yawning and stretching, rubbing their hands together, blinking their eyes and shaking their heads, as they woke from their frozen sleep. For the yacht, in the dark, had sailed straight into a crack in the berg, and had been stuck in there ever since.

  Oh, how happy Christina was to see her parents again, to hug them on the quayside, and to realize that now she was queen no longer.

  “Perhaps my hair will stop screaming,” she thought. “Oh, if only it would!”

  “She thinks we’ll stop!” shouted the hair mockingly. “What a laugh! We shan’t ever stop, we sh—”

  Just at that moment the hair did stop screaming, and why? There was Crimplesham the cat, on the quayside, rubbing his fat striped form against the ankles of the king and queen, with his whiskers grown to full length again.

  “What a good thing we left your fairy godfather to take care of you,” said the old queen, glancing about in a satisfied way. “I can see that our kingdom has been well looked after while we have been away. Even the Backward People look better than they used to.”

  But the Backward People shouted, “Christina did it! She did it! And now she deserves a holiday!”

  “A holiday?” said the king and queen, rather surprised. “Why, where would she go?”

  “I shall go around the world,” said Christina, stepping on board the yacht. And the Backward People jumped on board too, to crew for her, and they all sailed off around, the world, to find Johann King, the young musician, who was the only other person to have heard the terrible sound of Christina’s screaming hair.

  The Tree That Loved a Girl

  ONCE, LONG AGO, WHEN YOU could get four ounces of fruit drops for a penny, and might easily see half a dozen horses between you and the house on the other side of the street, there was a tree that loved a girl.

  This happened in a village so small that there were only nine houses in it. They were grouped in a ring, and the tree, which was a huge oak, stood in the middle, and spread its branches over all of them like an umbrella.

  The girl, whose name was Polly, lived in one of the houses. While she was a baby, her mother used to leave her out in her cradle under the oak tree, and there she would lie, kicking her feet and waving her fists and looking up at the sunshine coming through hundreds of green leaves above her. And the oak tree looked down and thought that Polly was the prettiest baby in the world. She had blue eyes, brown hair, and pink cheeks.

  When Polly grew a little older, she used to bring her skipping rope, or roller skates, and skip or skate under the tree. And she played dolls’ tea parties with the acorn cups, or hide-and-seek with her friends, around the oak tree’s enormous trunk. Even if it was a pouring-wet day, the oak tree took care that no drop of rain should fall on Polly.

  And then, when Polly was a little older, she used to bring her books after school and sit doing her homework under the tree, while it shaded her with its branches from the hot sun.

  And later, when the girls of the village washed their clothes in the fountain, Polly would be there too, and the oak tree looked at her and loved her best. When she had washed all her hair ribbons—red, blue, green, yellow, and pink—she would hang them on a branch to dry. And the oak tree took care that they should not be blown awa
y, or stolen by nest-building birds.

  In autumn, the branches over Polly’s house were always the last to lose their leaves, and in spring they were the first to bud.

  But girls grow faster than trees. After what seemed only a few months to the oak tree, Polly grew up, and she went away to the city to seek her fortune.

  At first the oak tree could not believe that she had left. But there were no ribbons hanging on the branches to dry at night, no books laid out on the grass among its roots, no Polly playing hide-and-seek with her friends around the huge, wrinkled trunk when homework was finished. She was truly gone.

  The tree began to mourn. Although it was no later than midsummer, leaves began falling from its branches. Birds who had built their nests among the twigs became anxious.

  “How can we protect our fledglings from hawks and owls once the leaves have fallen?” they asked.

  A wood dove flew to the top of the tree, and asked it, “Dear Tree, what is the matter? Why do you drop your leaves in the middle of the summer? Is some worm gnawing at your roots? Can we do anything to help you?”

  “I am sad because Polly has gone away. I haven’t the heart to send out sap to keep my leaves green, now that she is no longer here to see them. No, there is nothing you can do for me.”

  And the oak tree sighed deeply, as if a great gust of wind had blown through its branches. A thousand leaves fluttered off and scattered like flakes of snow. All the branches moved, and stretched yearningly in the direction of the city where Polly had gone.

  “Why don’t you send her a message asking her to come back?” asked the practical wood dove.

  “I will send her a thousand messages,” said the oak tree.

  All the leaves that had fallen drifted on the breeze to the city where Polly now lived. Wherever she walked, oak leaves drifted down and touched her softly, as if begging her to return home. But Polly did not understand the oak tree’s message.