Tales From Moominvalley Read Online Free PDF Page B

have something to protect. Now she could see that the sea looked almost all blue-white. The wave crests were blown straight off and drifted like smoke over the beach. The smoke tasted of salt.
    Behind her something or other was still crashing to pieces, inside the house. But the fillyjonk didn't even turn her head. She had curled up behind a large boulder and was looking wide-eyed into the dark. She wasn't cold any longer. And the strange thing was that she suddenly felt quite safe. It was a very strange feeling, and she found it indescribably nice. But what was there to worry about? The disaster had come at last.
    *
    Towards morning the gale was blowing itself out. The fillyjonk hardly noticed it. She was sitting in deep thought about herself and her disasters, and her furniture, and wondering how it all fitted together. As a matter of fact nothing of consequence had happened, except that the chimney had come down.
    But she had a feeling that nothing more important had ever happened to her in her life. It had given her quite a shaking-up and turned everything topsy-turvy. The fillyjonk didn't know what she should do to right herself again.
    The old kind of fillyjonk was lost, and she wasn't sure that she wanted her back. And what about all the belongings of this old fillyjonk?
    All the things that were broken and sooty and cracked and wet? To sit and mend it all, week after week, glueing and patching and looking for lost pieces and fragments...
    To wash and iron and paint over and to feel sorry about all the irreparable things, and to know that there would still be cracks everywhere, and that all the things had been in much better shape before... No, no! And to put them all back into place in the dark and bleak rooms and try to find them cosy once more...
    No, I won't! cried the fillyjonk and rose on cramped legs. If I try to make everything the same as before, then I'll be the same myself as before. I'll be afraid once more... I can feel that. And the tornadoes will come back to lurk around me, and the typhoons too...
    For the first time she looked back at the hemulen's house. It was standing as before. It was filled with broken things. It waited for her to come and take care of them.
    No genuine fillyjonk had ever left her old inherited belongings adrift... Mother would have reminded me about duty, the fillyjonk mumbled. It was morning.
    The eastern horizon was waiting for sunrise. Small frightened squalls of rain were flying off, and the sky was strewn with clouds that the gale had forgotten to take along with it. A few weak thunderclaps went rolling by.
    The weather was uneasy and didn't know its own mind. The fillyjonk hesitated also.
    At this moment she caught sight of the tornado.
    It didn't look like her own special tornado, which was a gleaming black pillar of water. This was the real thing. It was luminous. It was a whirl of white clouds churning downwards in a large spiral, and it turned to chalk white where it met the water lifting itself upwards out of the sea.
    It didn't roar, it didn't rush. It was quite silent and slowly came nearer the shore, slightly swaying on its way. The sun rose, and the tornado turned rose-petal red.
    It looked infinitely tall, rotating silently and powerfully around itself, and it drew slowly nearer and nearer...
    The fillyjonk was unable to move. She was standing still, quite still, crushing the china kitten in her paw and thinking: Oh, my beautiful, wonderful disaster...
    The tornado wandered over the beach, not far from the fillyjonk. The white, majestic pillar passed her, became a pillar of sand, and very quietly lifted the roof off the hemulen's house. The fillyjonk saw it rise in the air and disappear. She saw her furniture go whirling up and disappear. She saw all her knick-knacks fly straight to heaven, tray-cloths and photo-frames and tea-cosies and grandma's silver cream jug, and the sentences in silk and silver, every single thing! and she thought ecstatically: How very,