Sweethearts at Home

by S. R. Crockett

However, he did manage to get them off, and was just getting ready to plunge into the nice cool water, when the stranded log, on which he had been sitting taking off his stockings, sat up in its turn and stretched out a kind of wizened claw that caught Little Rooty by the middle and held him in the air, kicking and screaming. Then two horny warty lids winked up, and two eyes like cold gravy looked at him—oh, so coldly and hatefully! It was the Ugly Gray Dwarf, and he had been lying waiting for Little Rooty all the afternoon. Then Rooty thought of everything his father had told him, and wished it had never felt so hot and stuffy and bumble-bee-y inside the house, and he resolved that if he got off this time, nothing would ever induce him to disobey his parents again. He even wished he was back in the wood-cellar, with his father getting the little green switch down off the shelf. Positively he thought he could have enjoyed it. Of course Rooty was the first little boy who ever felt like that, but he did not have a very long time in which to repent, and, indeed, it mattered very little to the Gray Dwarf whether he did or not. That hideous brute just pinched him all over to see how fat he was, gurgling approbation all the time of Little Rooty's "ribs" and "chines" and "cuts off the joint"—all of which Rooty had always liked very much, but had never before thought of in so intimate a connection with himself.

Meanwhile, in the little house of the Bogle Thorn, its walls wainscoted with green silk from a fairy Liberty's, its ceilings done in Grass of Parnassus with sprigs and tassels of larch, the afternoon world slept on. But the Little Green Woman paused in her long drowsy tale-telling to the children in the shady corner of the Roof Garden. She thought she heard a cry, so faint and far away that it might have been the squeak of a field-mouse scuttling away from a weasel among the grass roots.

Then a sudden thought struck her like a knife.

"Where is Rooty? Who saw Rooty last? Toppy, you run and look over the pricklements and see if you see Rooty. I thought I heard him cry."

Toppy ran to the green wall of thorn, and was just in time to see the Gray Dwarf toss poor Little Rooty over his shoulder (or at least the knotted crotch of a tree which served him as a shoulder), and away with him to his Grisly Den on the face of the moorland. Toppy just managed to scream, and then his mother ran and caught him, or it might very well have been all over with Little Toppy. By the time the Little Green Man was wakened off the green sofa, and had understood what they were saying (for the entire family talked at once, as is mostly the case with united families), he ran hastily up to the Roof Garden, and saw the Gray Dwarf, very little and flat on the face of the heath, just like a splotch of mildew. And on his shoulder there was a spot of green, hardly visible, which the father knew at once for his Little Rooty. But he did not scold—at least not then. He went for his fairy bow, made tiny like a catapult—not hurrying, you know, but going so fast that it felt as if the wind was rising all over the house of the Bogle Thorn. The Little Green Man dipped each arrow-point—that is, the flint part of it—into a kind of green stuff like porridge, made from hemlock and the berries of deadly nightshade, with other pleasant and effective things only known to the Little Green People. He took great care not to let any drip about, and looked closely to see if there were any scratches on his hands. For it was quite unusual stuff, and precious. So he did not want to waste any of it. He needed it all for that mildewy spot crawling over the moorland towards the Grisly Cave with the green dot on its shoulder which was his own Rooty.

Perhaps, being exceptionally good children, you are not sorry for naughty Rooty. ("Oh, yes, we are! We are!") But, anyway, his father was sorry for him, though all the time he was promising him the best "hiding" he had ever had in his life when he got him safe back again. ("Bet he never got a whack!" said Sir Toady, who is an authority on the subject.) So, locking the children in and putting the key in his pocket, the Little Green Man and his wife went away over the moorland to look for the Ugly Gray Dwarf. The man did not want the woman to come. But she begged of him, weeping, saying that she would go "human" if she were left (and among the Green People that is a terrible word, and a yet more terrible thing[1]). So in the end the Little Green Man let her come.

Then she wanted to go direct to the cave, but her husband, who had had a lot of experience, showed her how impossible and foolish that was. For the Gray Dwarf would just lie down behind a big bowlder and wait for them. Then he would stun them with a log or strangle them with his long twisty fingers as they went by.

So instead they went all the way round by John Knox's Pulpit and the Folds Firs, that they might turn the flank of the enemy, and so come at his cave by a way he would never expect. It was a narrow cleft between two rocks up which they had to come—the Little Green Man and his woman. They crawled and crawled, noiseless as earth-worms on a plowed field. All the while the eyes of the Little Green Man shot out small sparkles of fire, though the lids of them were closed so that they showed like slits in a drying plaster wall.

After a long climb they looked over a ridge of many bowlders and much heather—the Little Green Man and his woman close behind him. And at the sight they saw there the wife would have screamed out and run forward. For she was a real woman, you see, though little and green. Only her husband was prepared for her, knowing, after so many years, exactly what she would do. So he first put the palm of his hand across her mouth to keep in the scream, and next gave her the pouch of arrow-heads to hold. Then with a pair of tweezers made of bent wood he lifted the little poisoned flakelets of flint and dropped each into a split in the arrow-head. Then his wife deftly bound each of them about with green cord—for that was her part of the business. She forgot about screaming when she had anything to do.

Then the Little Green Man peered cautiously from behind a rock, first giving his wife a good push with his foot as a warning—but, of course, you know, kindly.