The Water-Babies

Afterword

The Story Told Straight

Tom is a ten-year-old chimney-sweep in a northern town who cannot read, has never washed and knows no prayers, and he is beaten every day by his master, Mr. Grimes. Sent with Grimes to sweep the chimneys at Harthover Place, the house of the squire Sir John Harthover, Tom meets on the dawn road a tall, barefoot Irishwoman. At a limestone spring Grimes cools his head and then beats Tom for wanting to wash. The woman rebukes Grimes by name, hints at Vendale and at something done in Aldermire Copse, warns them both, and vanishes. Lost in the flues, Tom comes down into a white bedroom where a golden-haired girl lies asleep, and in a great mirror he sees “a little black ape” and knows, with shame, that it is himself. The household chases him as a thief. He escapes over the moor, followed unseen by the Irishwoman, and looks down into a deep valley.

In Vendale an old dame who keeps a school will not have a sweep in her house, yet she feeds him and beds him on hay. Feverish in the dame’s outhouse that morning and longing to be clean, he walks to the stream, strips and goes into the water, where the Irishwoman has already been borne away as Queen of the stream fairies. Then “the fairies took him.” He wakes as a water-baby, under four inches long, with gills like a young newt’s. The searchers find his black husk and take it for his drowned body, so a tombstone is set up in Vendale churchyard, and the old dame dies.

In the stream Tom is clean, but not yet good. He torments its creatures until none will play with him and follows a flood towards the sea, and on the way he watches Grimes, poaching salmon by torchlight, fall into a pool and drown. The fairies carry Grimes off, but not to be a water-baby. At the sea Ellie, the girl of the white bedroom, whose word had cleared Tom of theft, comes to the rocks with Professor Ptthmllnsprts. He is a naturalist who believes nothing his senses cannot vouch for, and he nets Tom and then tells her she has been dreaming. Tom bites him and escapes. Ellie, leaping after him, falls on the rocks, and after a week in bed the fairies bring her wings and she flies away, while a terrible old fairy fills the professor’s head with monsters until he recants his opinions.

Tom frees a lobster from a lobster-pot, in which a vengeful otter drowns, and minutes later he meets his first water-baby, and goes home with the babies to the caves under St. Brandan’s Isle, a sunken land in the western sea. They are the children whom the fairies take in when cruelty, neglect or disease has taken them from the world. On Fridays comes Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, the ugliest fairy in the world, who puts a cold pebble into Tom’s mouth for the pebbles he put into the anemones’, and who punishes cruel adults with what they did to children. Knowing tyrants like Grimes are kept elsewhere. On Sundays her lovely sister, Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, takes the motherless Tom as her own.

In the saddest part of the story Tom steals and eats all the fairy’s sweets while she stands unseen behind him, and grows prickles all over; he confesses and is forgiven, but only he can remove them. His new teacher turns out to be Ellie, and they learn together for seven years. On Sundays she goes “home”, and both fairies tell Tom that to follow her he must go where he does not like and help somebody he does not like, which he comes to see means Grimes. He quarrels with Ellie, and she vanishes, though the fairy brings her back for a moment when he longs for her forgiveness. The fairy then shows them both the history of the Doasyoulikes, who left the land of Hardwork for the land of Readymade and sank into apes, until the explorer Paul Du Chaillu shot the last of them.

Grimes, he learns, is at the Other-end-of-Nowhere, beyond Shiny Wall and Mother Carey. On the way Tom asks the last Gairfowl the way, travels with the storm petrels, and after a gale finds a derelict ship where a widow’s baby sleeps in its cot, guarded by a terrier. A wave sweeps them overboard; the baby becomes a water-baby, and the terrier becomes Tom’s water-dog. Fulmars who were once cruel whaling skippers fly him to the ice, and he dives under Shiny Wall for seven days and nights into the still pool where Mother Carey sits making creatures make themselves. She tells him he has been there already. She shows him the way in her eyes, and sends him walking backward behind the dog.