vegetables and herbs. It happened that the only child in the kitchen was Pig, as all the others were at school, or running errands, or playing with friends, or taking naps if they were little. Pig was playing with his marbles and pebbles, by the fender in front of the range. Mother Goose was suspicious because he was so quiet. She knew she ought to be pleased that he was quietly playing, but she was unhappy, and she was right to be unhappy, of course. She sifted the flour and fat through her fingers, and heard a faint clicking sound. She said, without looking round, “What are you doing, little Pig?”
“Playing at marbles,” said Pig. “The marble army is fighting the pebble army. The marbles is quicker and the pebbles is thicker.”
“You mustn’t let them roll around the kitchen floor,” said Mother Goose. “It’s dangerous.”
Pig didn’t reply. She was always saying things were dangerous, and no harm had ever come to him. When she turned back to her flour he sent out an advance party of marbles, the little green and rose ones he called “punies,” and they scattered satisfactorily round the hearth. The pebbles had to go after them. They made a solid formation in a square, and then, click, clack, crunch, they flew into the punies, and there was mayhem. Pig sent out a platoon of brown marbles, in support of the little ones, and the pebbles responded with a furious assault.
Mother Goose turned round. She said “I told you not to let them roll on the floor,” and Pig was startled, and dropped the whole bag of marbles, which went every which way. He started to scramble away to hide behind the coal-scuttle, for he saw he would be smacked, and he ground his knee on a marble, which hurt, and caused him to see that it was a bit dangerous.
Mother Goose came across the kitchen, intending to grab Pig by the ear and spank him. But she slipped on a rolling clutch of marbles and pebbles, and fell with a crash, knocking over the pastry-bowl as she fell. Her hair came unpinned and she hit her head on a table-leg and hurt her cheek and blacked her eye. Her hair was full of flour and her cheek was bloody, and she glared at Pig, she did glare. Pig decided she looked funny. It was better than deciding she looked frightening, though in fact she did look a bit like a wild witch. He laughed.
“That’s enough,” said Mother Goose. She began to gather up the pebbles and marbles and throw them into the waste basket. Pig shouted “Don’t” and Mother Goose said
“I have had enough of you. Go out into the shrubbery and don’t come back.”
Pig felt that the whole kitchen was turning round and round like the coils of smoky glass inside the see-through glass of the big alm-marbles. He snatched at his self-bored stone—he couldn’t save any of the others —and scrambled to his feet, and ran out of the kitchen door. He pulled it shut after him as best he could—he wasn’t tall enough to reach the latch. And he stood for a few minutes in the yard, waiting to be called but he wasn’t. So he trotted round the side of the house, and across the garden into the shrubbery, which was a big shrubbery, and overgrown, with things that shouldn’t be there, the snaking brambles and clumps of nettles and wandering tresses of bryony, for Mother Goose had had to tell the gardener she couldn’t pay him. For a person as small as Pig, the shrubbery was the size of a forest. Or at least, not to exaggerate, of a dense little wood. It had mazy paths, and things were reaching out to infest them, and obscure them, and cover them over, pennywort which runs riot, and periwinkle, plants which are pretty but need a firm hand, and untidy trailing plants with sticky burrs.
Pig didn’t usually go far into the shrubbery. He got his worms and his pebbles from the flowerbeds in front of the house. But he thought he would just show Mother Goose, so he marched in, and went on marching in.
As he got further into the trees and bushes, and further away from the house, he had the feeling that the bushes, and the undergrowth, were getting bigger, and that he was getting smaller. He went a little more slowly—he didn’t really know exactly where he was, by now, for the shrubbery was laid out like a maze, and Pig was far too small to see over the top of anything. He might be going in a circle that would lead to the mouth of the first path he had entered, or he might be pressing further and further to a hidden centre. It was late afternoon, and the shadows of the leaves were long on the other leaves and the gravel path, shadow on shadow, like a grey web over the green. At the same time all the things in the shrubbery appeared to be more solid, and more full of the deep greens and tawny browns of the things that grew there. He stopped to look at a holly. A holly is a living creature in any case but this holly seemed to him to be full of almost too much life, of a different kind. The shiny leaves almost seemed to be giving out a green light, and the few berries seemed to be redder and rounder and glossier than any berry he had ever seen before. And yet at the same time, they were caught in the thick net of almost solid shadows. Pig said to himself, I am not afraid, which meant, of course, that he was. He clutched his white stone tighter, as though it was a talisman. He saw a little clump of toadstools with silky fawn surfaces and the most lovely pleated frill of very pale flesh-colour whorled round above the pearly damp stems. He had the odd idea that he wanted to be the holly-berry, or the toadstool, not only to see. He went slower still—he had all the time in the world, he had been told never to come back—and felt time had stopped all around where he was.
He came to a place where there was a little wooden bench in a diminutive clearing. The bench was covered with a very bright green slime that was growing on it. Pig sat down on it without even thinking of how the slime was going to stain his legs and his socks and trousers. It was suddenly quiet. There had been sounds of things in the undergrowth—a bird chirping like two pebbles rubbed together, and once a rustle of unseen feet in the leaf-mould. Now there was nothing. Pig put his stone to his eye, and looked through it at a tangle of brambles and ferns. Sitting on the ferns was a very small woman, a nut-brown woman with a brown skin, and long brown hair under a brown hat, and sharp brown eyes under bushy eyebrows. She was neither old nor young, and she was wrapped in a brown cloak, veined like a leaf. She had a neat litle basket, and was gathering something—Pig could not see what, it was too small. He sat very still, said nothing, and went on looking through his stone. After a moment or two, the woman closed the basket, climbed down off the fern fronds she had been sitting on, and walked away down the path. He watched her go, until she came to a gnarled root of a thornbush; she ducked under it, and seemed to disappear into the earth.
Pig stood up and trotted after her. He knelt down on the path, on his green-stained, mud-stained knees that would so have upset Mother Goose, and he looked under the root. There were a few fine white bones, from some long-dead fledgling, and a carpet of leaves, rotted to skeletons. No sign of any little woman, though there was a kind of mousehole, going in and down, under the tree. He looked in, and saw spiralling mud, and shadow. He put his self-bored stone to his eye, and put his eye to the hole and peered down.
It was beautiful. It was a hall, with a bright gathering of people, some all earth-brown, like the woman he had followed, but some all gold with bright hair and yellow garments of a very old-fashioned kind, and some all silver, with moony-white hair and dresses with glancing lights in them. They were all very busy—some cooking at a bright hearth, some weaving on tiny elegant looms, some playing with tiny children the size of ants or beetles. The whole room was brown, with brown tables and brown velvet chairs and hangings, but there were gold and silver plates and cups on the tables, and little lamps burned in silver lampholders in crannies and on shelves.
“Oh!” said Pig. “How I wish I could come in.”
