George MacDonald

'Hush! scush! scurry!
There you go in a hurry!
Gobble! gobble! goblin!
There you go a wobblin';
Hobble, hobble, hobblin'—
Cobble! cobble! cobblin'!
Hob-bob-goblin!—
Huuuuuh!'

CHAPTER IV.
CURDIE'S FATHER AND MOTHER.
THE eyes of the fathers and mothers are quick to read their children's looks, and when Curdie entered the cottage, his parents saw at once that something unusual had taken place. When he said to his mother, "I beg your pardon for being so late," there was something in the tone beyond the politeness that went to her heart, for it seemed to come from the place where all lovely thin were born before they began to grow in this world. When he set his father's chair to the table, an attention he had not shown him for a long time, Peter thanked him with more gratitude than the boy had ever yet felt in all his life. It was a small thing to do for the man who had been serving him since ever he was born, but I suspect there is nothing a man can be so grateful for as that to which he has the most right. There was a change upon Curdie, and father and mother felt there must be something to account for it, and therefore were pretty sure he had something to tell them. For when a child's heart is all right, it is not likely he will want to keep anything from his parents. But the story of the evening was too solemn for Curdie to come out with all at once.

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 favourite with all; but they knew very little about the upper world, and what might or might not take place there. They knew silver from copper ore; they understood the underground ways of thin, 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 him all the rest of his life for the absurdity of not being absolutely certain that the solemn belief of his father and mother was nothing but ridiculous nonsense.

Avant-propos du traducteur

Sauf erreur, on ignore entièrement en France George MacDOnald (1824-1905). C'est ignorer un poète, un romancier de la vie écossaise et par-dessus tout un merveilleux conteur. Dans une savante étude intitulée "Notes sur la foi en les fées et l'idée d'enfance", Jonathan Cott l'a appelé "le plus grand écrivain visionnaire de la littérature enfantine". C'est vrai, à condition de mettre l'accent sur visionnaire et de sous-entendre une vision profondément cohérente qui obtienne sans cesse l'adhésion du coeur. Si fantastiques que puissent être celles de George MacDonald, elles ne nous dépaysent jamais, elles créent au contraire pour nous un monde spirituel où nous reconnaissons une patrie. Et l'histoire selon laquelle elles s'ordonnent est un message - et même, disons-le, une véritable initiation.
Pierre Leyris.

Puis vient la brume et une triste pluie,
Et la vie n'est plus jamais la même.

"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."

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

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, issuing 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 greatgreat-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—what should he call it?—the behaviour 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.

'Where 'tis all a hole, sir,
Never can be holes:
Why should their shoes have soles, sir,
When they've got no souls?
'But she upon her foot, sir,
Has a granite shoe:
The strongest leather boot, sir,
Six would soon be through.'

'What if I should realreality-really find my beautiful old grandmother up there!' she said to herself as she crept up the steep steps.
When she reached the top she stood a moment listening in the dark, for there was no moon there. Yes! it was! it was the hum of the spinning-wheel!
What a diligent grandmother to work both day and night! She tapped gently at the door.

'What does that matter?' said the boy. 'It must be your fault. It is the princess who will suffer for it. I hope they didn't hear you call her the princess. If they did, they're sure to know her again: they're awfully sharp.'
'Lootie! Lootie!' cried the princess. 'Take me home.'
'Don't go on like that,' said the nurse to the boy, almost fiercely. 'How could I help it? I lost my way.'
'You shouldn't have been out so late. You wouldn't have lost your way if you hadn't been frightened,' said the boy. 'Come along. I'll soon set you right again. Shall I carry your little Highness?'

'Did you expect me to believe you, princess?' asked the nurse coldly. 'I know
princesses are in the habit of telling make-believes, but you are the first I
ever heard of who expected to have them believed,' she added, seeing that
the child was strangely in earnest.
The princess burst into tears.
'Well, I must say,' remarked the nurse, now thoroughly vexed with her for
crying, 'it is not at all becoming in a princess to tell stories and expect to be
believed just because she is a princess.'
'But it's quite true, I tell you.'

That's all nonsense," said Curdie. "I don't know what you mean."
"Then if you don't know what I mean, what right have you to call it nonsense?"

"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 pigeon is. Now that you do know, you are sorry. It is very dangerous to do thin you don't know about."

"Certainly not," returned the voice, which was thin and quavering: "I 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

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 thin. 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 thin. 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 son 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

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: mines 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 perfectly, 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 picture, and yet kept the picture before him all the time—for you can do that kind of thing in your mind,—and look 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.

The mines belonged to the king of the country, and the miners were his
servants, working under his overseers and officers. He was a real king—that is
one who ruled for the good of his people, and not to please himself, and he
wanted the silver not to buy rich thin for himself, but to help him to govern the
country, and pay the armies that defended it from certain troublesome
neighbours, and the judges whom he set to portion out righteousness amont
the people, that so they might learn it themselves, and come to do without
judges at all.

Caverns of awfullest solitude, their walls miles thick, sparkling with
ores of gold or silver, copper or iron, tin or mercury, studded perhaps with
precious stones—perhaps a brook, with eyeless fish in it, running, running
ceaseless, cold and babbling, through banks crusted with carbuncles and
golden topazes, or over a gravel of which some of the stones are rubies and
emeralds, perhaps diamonds and sapphires—who can tell?—and whoever
can't tell is free to think—all waiting to flash, waiting for millions of ages—
ever since the earth flew off from the sun, a great blot of fire, and began to
cool.

I will try to tell you what they are. They are portions of the heart of the earth
that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed up and out. For the heart of the earth is a great wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals, but of glowing hot melted metals and stones. And as our hearts keep us alive, so that great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried sunlight—that is what it is. Now think: out of that caldron, where all the bubbles would be as big as the Alps if it could get room for its boiling, certain bubbles have bubbled out and escaped—up and away, and there they stand in the cool, cold sky—mountains. Think of the change, and you will no more wonder that there should be something awful about the very look of a mountain: from the darkness—for where the light has nothing to shine upon, it is much the same as darkness—from the heat, from the endless tumult of boiling unrest—up, with a sudden heavenward shoot, into the wind, and the cold, and the starshine, and a cloak of snow that lies like ermine above the blue-green mail of the glaciers; and the great sun, their grandfather, up there in the sky; and their little old cold aunt, the moon, that comes wandering about the house at night; and everlasting stillness, except for the wind that turns the rocks and caverns into a roaring organ for the young archangels that are studying how to let out the pent-up praises of their hearts, and the molten music of the streams, rushing ever from the bosoms of the glaciers fresh-born