Free Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson Page B

shook the dust off the gauze around the chandelier, and it fanned the ashes in the porcelain stove. It flapped the transfers that were pasted on the walls. One of them came off and was carried away.
    The room was filled with a smell of night and firs, and Moomintroll thought: 'Good. A family has to be ventilated at times.' He went out on the steps and stared out into the damp darkness.
    'Now I've got everything,' Moomintroll said to himself. 'I've got the whole year. Winter too. I'm the first Moomin to have lived through an entire year.'
    *
    Really, this winter's tale ought to stop exactly at this point. All this about the first spring night, and the wind rushing about in the drawing-room makes a magnificent ending. And then everybody could think what they pleased about what happened afterwards. But that wouldn't be right.
    Because one still couldn't be absolutely sure of what Moominmamma had to say when she awoke. Nor would one know whether the ancestor was allowed to settle down for good in the porcelain stove. Nor whether Snuf-kin was back again before the story ended. Nor how the Mymble had managed without her cardboard box. Nor where Too-ticky would move when the bathing-house became a bathing-house again. Nor a lot of other things.
    I suppose it's better to go on.



Especially as the break-up of the ice is an important event and much too dramatic to be left out.
    *
    Now followed the mysterious month of bright sunny days, of melting icicles, and winds, and rushing skies - and of sharply freezing nights with a snow-crust and a dazzling moon. Moomintroll explored every nook of his valley, dizzy from expectation and pride.

    Now came spring, but not at all as he had imagined its coming. He had thought that it would deliver him from a strange and hostile world, but now it was simply a continuation of his new experiences, of something he had already conquered and made his own.
    He hoped for a long spring, so that he could have his happy, expectant feeling as long as possible. Every morning he almost dreaded for the second-best that could happen: that someone of the family would awaken. He moved cautiously and tried not to bump into things in the drawing-room. And early in the morning he went scuttling out in the valley, to sniff the new smells and to look at the changes since the day before.
    By the south wall of the woodshed an ever-widening spot of earth was becoming bare. The birches were showing a faint shade of red, but it could be seen only at a distance. The sun had burned right through the snowdrifts, and made them honeycombed and brittle. And the ice was darkening, as if the sea was beginning to show through.
    Little My still went skating about far out. She had changed her tin lids for kitchen knives and managed to fasten them edgewise under her boots.
    Now and then Moomintroll came across a figure eight she had made in the ice, but very seldom did he see her. She had always had the gift of having fun on her own, and whatever she might have been thinking about spring she felt no need to talk about it.
    Too-ticky was having a spring cleaning in the bathing-house.
    She rubbed all the green and red panes bright for the first summer fly, she hung out the bath-gowns in the sun and tried to repair the rubber Hemulen.
    'Now the bathing-house'll be a bathing-house again,' she said. 'When the summer's hot and green, and you lie on your tummy on the warm boards of the landing-stage and listen to the waves chuckling and clucking...'
    'Why didn't you talk like that in winter,' said Moomintroll. 'It'd have been such a comfort. Remember, I said once: "There were a lot of apples here." And you just replied: "But now here's a lot of snow." Didn't you understand that I was melancholy?'
    Too-ticky shrugged her shoulders. 'One has to discover

    everything for oneself,' she replied. 'And get over it all alone.'
    The sun was more and more burning every day.
    It bored the ice full of small holes and channels, and one could see that the