There was a salt marsh under an enormous sky. It was a bare, wild place of creeks and mud flats, sea lavender and reedbeds. It was the home of wading birds and seals and gulls. For years, a small creature had lived there too. Root dark, reed thin, perhaps half the height of a man, perhaps less. Not an imp, nor a boggart, nor an elf. Something of that kind, but without their charm or mystery. Without their easy magic too. He was a hob. A plain, scuttling hob, with a husky, piping voice.
Before the hob came to the marsh, he had lived inland, where there were barley fields and windmills and fat meadow sheep. Among the meadows was a village, with cottages and farms and apple orchards. In one of those orchards had been a low brick building where, long before, a farmer had kept turkeys. The old turkey house, overgrown to the roof with a thorny, pale pink rose, made a home for the hob.
The hob had no name; or if he had, he had never heard it told. The village people had no name for him either. They called him “Eh up!” “Yon fella,” “Now then!” and “Li’l chap.” He worked for them, and they paid him in barley loaves, bowls of milk, fallen apples, hot broth in wintertime, a three-legged stool and a woolen patchwork blanket. In return he picked stones from the fields, cleaned the stables and sheds, swept the yards, sat up at night beside sick beasts, brewed cures from herbs, and spun the wool from the fleeces of the fat sheep into great, smooth hanks of yarn.
The hob was good at spinning. He had a little wooden spinning wheel, cut down to suit his size. When he wasn’t at his farmwork, he sat in the doorway of the old turkey house with his wheel, and he sang sometimes; thin, reedy songs of his own thoughts:
Fair days such fair days never seen such fair days
With light on the barley
When the wind blows.
One day the hob was singing a song such as this, when a woman went past with a child. The hob watched them. He always watched children, especially very small ones. They seemed less remote to him than grown people did. This child, a girl in a blue dress, was of the age when children learn to speak. She was pointing to things and naming them.
When the hob realized this, he put his hand on the wheel to stop the spinning and listened.
“Sky,” said the child, gazing upward.
And the woman said, “Yes. Sky.”
“Stick,” said the child, stooping to pick up a fallen birch twig, and again the woman agreed.
“ ’Onkey!” The child pointed in glee at a nodding gray head at a gate.
“Donkey,” said the woman, smiling.
“Donkey, donkey!” said the child, nodding so much like the donkey that the hob’s beechnut pointy face twisted into a smile. The girl saw the smile and laughed back and spoke again.
A name.
The hob’s eyes grew wide. His mouth fell open. His heart pounded so hard he felt faint and fearful. He was fearful in case the child was mistaken. He fixed his eyes on the woman. She nodded tranquilly to the child and added, “Spinning! Straw into gold!”
That was a saying they had in those parts: “Straw into gold,” a sort of joke. A sort of impossible wish or hope.
The woman and the little girl passed on, but just as they turned the corner out of sight, the girl looked back over her shoulder, straight into the face of the hob, and she said his name again.
Now the hob’s days were different. He had a name. In the night he murmured it, and hugged it to himself like a great treasure. In the day his steps were bolder. When his work was done he walked up and down the village street looking about himself.
This was all because of knowing his name.
The hob’s spinning now became supreme. He worked with a new, wild energy. There came a day when he turned his wheel so fast that there was no combed fleece left in the village to be spun. Yet the hob still burned with his bold new eagerness. What could he spin? He looked around his little turkey-house home. Then he remembered, for the first time since he had heard them, the words of the woman with the child.
Straw into gold.
The hob turned to his bed and gathered a bunch of barley straw.
Then in secret, and with great difficulty and some pain in his hands, the hob spun a new thread. He spun the barley straw into a thick solid thread of pure bright gold. When it was finished he wound the new thread into a shining acorn-sized ball and held it in his hand. It glowed like a miniature sun on the hob’s dark palm.
Gold was no part of the hob’s life. He had his milk and his barley bread, his blanket and his rose. He had his name to murmur at night. He had no use for this little piece of gold, and yet he knew it was a wonder. So he took it into the village and walked up and down the street with it until he stumbled over a cart-rut in front of the village inn. He dropped the gold then, and it rolled away, and he crawled in the gutter, searching for it.
It was not often that people spoke to the hob, but now and then they did. As he scrabbled, a kindly voice asked, “What you doing, li’l chap?”
“I dropped my gold,” said the hob.
“Your gold?”
“My piece of gold,” said the hob.
“Ha!” called the man to the group in front of the inn. “They’re paying the hob in gold now! What about that?”
Laughter broke over the hob and buffeted him.
“What you been up to in that orchard, then,” someone called to him, “to be worth so much?”
“Spinnin’,” said the hob.
“That must have been rare fleece!”
“Barley straw,” said the hob.
“You been spinning barley straw?”
“Spun it into gold,” said the hob proudly.
This time the laughter was a gale, and the men slapped their knees, and those that had heard called to those that had not, “Come, listen to this!” and they said to the hob, “Tell it again!”
“Spun straw to gold,” repeated the hob, looking from one huge laughing face to another. “Barley straw.”
The landlord was among them now, with a great jug of barley beer and a fistful of mugs. “That’s a joke well worth a drink!” he said, squatting down to speak to the hob. “There you go, li’l fella!”
The hob took his mug in two hands, and it was like a barrel to him and smelled like all the good things he had ever smelled, earth and barley and honey and new bread, all of them in one. It tasted like them too, and he drank it down, gulp by gulp, and wagged his head with the strong, good, dizzy feel of it, and wiped the foam on his fingers.
“And what would you have bought with your barley-straw gold?” asked a grinning face. “What was it to be, my fine spinner?”
The hob shook his swimming head.
“Barley beer?” they asked him. “A fine new hat? A riding mare? What do you lack, fella? What’s your desire? What would you buy?”
The hob looked from one to the other. More questions than he had ever been asked in his life. His head buzzing with barley beer. What did he lack? A companion. A soul to work for. A voice to say his name.
“One thing?” asked a man, laughing.
“A child,” said the baffled, beer-swarmed, lonely hob.
“A child?” said the man, and all the laughter stopped.
The world stopped.
“A child?” they repeated. And they asked each other, “What would a creature like a hob want with a child? What have we kept among us?”
That was the end of the hob’s days in the village, and the turkey house and the rose, and the barley bread and the bowls of milk. The hob’s world was pulled apart by great men’s hands, the rose torn up, the stool smashed, the walls demolished and the roof destroyed, and the hob himself sent running, scurrying, hobbling from the village, with hard words and stones following after him, and his spinning wheel strapped to his back.
He was outcast, and he had not the smallest understanding of why.
It was dark now all the time in the hob’s world. Daylight made no difference to his darkness. He groped blindly forward into an empty nothingness. He felt no hunger, nor thirst, nor tiredness. He felt nothing but the road beneath his feet, until he came to the wall.
The wall barred his way. He could not pass it and so he dropped against it. For a long time he lay crumpled there, neither awake nor asleep.
Rain fell on him . . .
The hob did not die, and so he had to go on living.
He opened his eyes, and the sky was still there. Towering above him was a great, creaking windmill, red brick and white sails and long green grass at the foot. The spinning wheel lay tangled among the grasses.
Since the hob had to live, he had to eat. To eat, he had to work. Very slowly, with the wall to help him, he pulled himself to his feet, staggered round to the dark open door of the mill, found a broom, and began to sweep the floor.
The miller’s daughter was named Petal, and it suited her. She was a round, soft blossom of a girl, golden-haired, pink-skinned, and as lazy as she was pretty. Petal drifted through her days, dreamily combing her long, smooth curls, smiling when the sunlight moved round to her chair, sleepily humming on the garden swing. She had a nice singing voice, but she never did anything useful except, now and then, a little spinning.
“You can spin sitting down,” said Petal.
The miller said, “I never knew anyone do so little for so long!”
“Well, now you do,” said Petal.
“Big lass like you should be busy with all sorts!” said the miller. “What’s going to happen when you marry, my fine lady? Then who will keep the house?”
“Housemaids!” said Petal.
“And cook the food?”
“Kitchen maids!” said Petal.
“And mind the babies?”
“Nursemaids!” said Petal. “Of course!”
“Then mind you marry a very rich man, our Petal!”
“I’ll marry the King,” said Petal. “He’s rich enough!”
“Marry the King!” scoffed the miller. “I’d like to see the King marry a girl like you!”
“Watch, then,” said Petal, “and you will.”
The miller grunted with temper. He always lost his arguments with Petal; he had done all her life.
“There’s a hob about,” he told her, changing the subject.
“I’ve not seen it, but it’s there. Sweeps the mill and does the stable. Brews cures from herbs. Cured the bay horse. I been leaving it porridge, and a coin now and then.”
“When the King comes,” said Petal, who had been smiling into her little looking glass and not listening to a word, “tell him I’m here.”
“The King!” growled the miller. “That’ll be the day, when the King leaves his great palace in the middle of town to come out here by the marsh and knock on the mill-house door! You do have some ideas!”
“I do,” said Petal.
“You’ll wait forever and a day!”
“A day will be enough,” said Petal. And as usual she was right and the miller was wrong, and the next day the King left his great palace in the town and came knocking on the mill-house door, his carriage having lost a wheel in the road outside, and he himself not wanting to stand around in the rain till it was mended.
So the King was shown into the mill-house parlor and handed a glass of the miller’s best wine (which he ungratefully poured out of the window) while the miller ran upstairs to ask Petal how she knew.
“Knew what?” asked Petal, rolling dozily over in bed.
“Don’t you notice nothing?” demanded the miller. “We’ve got the King down there, sitting in the parlor!”
“Well then,” said Petal, “tell him you’ve got a daughter as beautiful as the day, and she’ll marry him soon as he’s ready!”
“I don’t know how he’ll take that,” said the miller doubtfully.
“He’ll be enchanted,” said Petal, but this time she was wrong. The King did not seem at all enchanted.
“Thoughtful of her,” he said, sounding completely uninterested, and he looked out of the window to see if his carriage was mended yet.
Petal, who had been listening over the banisters, now called, “Father! Father!”
“What now?” asked the miller, hurrying back up the stairs.
“Tell the King,” said Petal, “you’ve got a daughter as beautiful as the day, who can sing sweet as a bird, and she’ll marry him any day he likes!”
“Astonishing,” said the King, when he heard this good news, and his eyes rolled with boredom to the ceiling.
“Father!” called Petal over the banister, once again. “Father, come here!”
The miller groaned, but came.
“Tell the King,” said Petal, “you’ve got a daughter as beautiful as the day and can sing sweet as a bird . . .”
“Yes, yes,” said the miller. “I did.”
“. . . and can spin straw into gold!” said Petal.
“Straw into gold?” asked the miller, staring.
Petal nodded, bright-eyed and lovely in her pink dressing gown and fluffy slippers. “And who will marry him,” she continued, “whenever he asks!”
“Don’t be daft, our Petal!” said the miller, coming to his senses. “He’d have my head off for impertinence! I’m not telling him that!”
“Not telling him what?” demanded the King, appearing suddenly in the parlor doorway.
“Ooh, Your Majesty!” squeaked Petal, blushing behind her silky gold curls as she retreated modestly back to her bedroom, clutching her dressing gown.
“Not telling him WHAT?” demanded the King of the unhappy miller.
“Only her nonsense,” said the miller.
“What nonsense?” snapped the King, icily regal.
“That she is as b-b-b-beautiful as the day and can s-s-s-sing sweet as a bird and can spin straw into g-g-g-g-g—”
“Spit it out, man!” roared the King.
“Gold!”
“Gold?”
“Yes,” agreed the miller, wishing he had never spoken, nor opened the door to the King, nor had a daughter either. “And she’ll m-m-m-marry you whenever you ask.”
“Will she now?” said the King thoughtfully. “Hmm, I’d have to see the proof.”
Petal. The hob heard her weeping, out in the barn.
The carriage was mended. The King was gone. The miller, sick of the whole awful business, had taken himself off into town. Petal was alone with her spinning wheel and a bundle of straw and tears running down her cheeks.
“It’s not fair!” she sobbed.
The hob had never seen her before, although he had heard her singing around the mill now and then. He crept up to the window and stared at her, speechless.
“I never thought he’d want it done!” said Petal. “I just said it to make him look at me! I thought once he saw I was beautiful as the”—sniff—“day, he’d marry me with no more fuss!”
She was beautiful. The hob sighed at such sadness from someone so lovely, and Petal heard him and looked up.
“Who are you?” she asked. “The hob?”
The hob nodded.
“Did my father send you?”
The hob shook his head.
“I can’t spin straw into gold. No one could.”
Something in the hob’s stillness caught her attention. “Could you?” she asked. “You’re clever, I hear. You cured the horse’s cough.”
“That was flaxseed.”
“And my father’s stiff back.”
“That was meadowsweet.”
“I think you could spin straw into gold!”
“No,” said the hob huskily.
“Then I could marry the King!”
“You don’t want to,” said the hob.
“I do! Spin it for me, hob!”
The hob backed away.
“I’ll give you my beads. My green glass beads.”
“I don’t want your beads,” muttered the hob.
But she had already taken them off and looped them around his neck. “Spin it!” she said. “He’s coming back in the morning!”
And because she was so lovely and her eyes so blue and her tears so silver, the hob went reluctantly to the spinning wheel and sat down. Then, with pain in his hands, he spun the bundle of straw into a length of golden thread.
“Is that all it made?” asked Petal when she saw.
“It weren’t that much straw,” said the hob, and he scuttled away to nurse his aching hands before any more was asked of him.