Nothing further happened that night...

(This is a companion chapter to ‘Chapter 96. We consider names and books and things’ from The Tenth Walker)

Our first visit to Bag End since the Ship sailed. Rose greets us with the news that Samwise is off about some business, but ought to be back within the hour, and Elanor is napping, and would we like to wait in the parlour? She has a meat-and-mushroom pie about to come out of the oven, and of course we’re invited to join them.

Pip surprises us both – meaning Rosie and myself – by asking if we might sit in the study instead, but it shouldn’t be a surprise that he would feel closer to Frodo... and Bilbo... there. Just breathing in the smell of the leather bindings and old paper brings them to mind. If I close my eyes, one or both of them might be sitting there, quietly perusing a page together, or even in separate books. At any moment, one of them will speak aloud, to read a particularly pleasing passage to the rest of us in the room.

I swallow down a hard lump in my throat. Though Pip can still surprise me, even after we’ve lived together all these months at Crickhollow, I ought not to have been surprised at his insistence on waiting in the study, even though my memories of him in this room entail mostly protests at being ‘cooped up amongst a lot of old, dusty tomes... on such a glorious day!’ (Rain or sunshine, didn’t matter, the complaint was always more or less along those lines.)

I open my eyes at Pip’s sharply indrawn breath, to see him sitting down in Bilbo’s old chair, drawn up to the desk. Sam and Rosie have kept things in the study exactly the way Frodo left them. It might be awkward, except that Sam is a gardener above all else, even though Freddy keeps urging him to go for Mayor at the next Free Fair, or when old Flourdumpling steps down, whichever should come first.

Pip is sitting at the desk that once belonged to Bilbo, and then was Frodo’s. A big red book with plain red leather covers has pride of place at the centre of the desk – it is Bilbo’s secret book, I realise! The one I got a glimpse of, before the old hobbit went off, years before the world went mad and Frodo set out to right things...

My astonishment is made up of several parts. For one, that Bilbo’s secret book remains at Bag End, and this is the first I’ve heard of it. My ability to sniff out a mystery is slipping, perhaps. Possibly the result of soft living and too many free dinners and splendid parties, I should imagine. But second – to see Pip, reading!

That young cousin of mine... he has never been much of a reader. O he’ll listen to stories told all the day long and well into the wee hours – and has... I’ve been the storyteller all too many times, and Frodo... when a healer said the lad must be kept abed, and storytelling was the only way to keep him there! More times than I want to remember, the worst of which was in the Southlands... when I thought every new story of mine was likely to be his last.

But he has the red book open, his finger on the page, and tears are streaming down his cheeks.

‘What is it, Pip?’ I ask, as gently as I know how.

‘He wrote it... He did! Just as I remember...’

‘Wrote what?’ I ask, but my query goes unanswered as my dear younger cousin covers his face with his hands and begins to sob.

So of course, I must comfort him.

How long we remain so, his head on my shoulder and my arms around him, holding him close, I do not know. Enough time to render my shirt unmistakeably soggy.

Somehow Rosie must have an instinct for such things – upsets from the past, come back to haunt the mind and heart. She speaks softly from the doorway. ‘Mr. Pippin?’

My young cousin has been quiet the last few moments, with only an occasional shudder.

Rosie’s eyes meet mine, and she nods, as if we are engaged in some conspiracy together, and Pip is at the centre of it all. She repeats, ‘Mr. Pippin?’ as if it were any other sunny day, and we were visiting Bag End, and Frodo was dandling little Ellie on his knee in the kitchen whilst Rosie peeled taters and Sam spouted a bit of poetry for our amusement. She adds, ‘I need your help in the kitchen... I’m mixing up seedcake for tea, and I’m not sure I’ve got the spices right.’

Though her eyes are full of pity and sorrow, she manages to inject just the right note of entreaty and uncertainty into her voice. ‘Since they’re your favourite... I would hate to do them wrong and have to throw the batch away...’ She nods at me, but keeps addressing her words to Pip. ‘I’ll just be in the kitchen, Mr. Pippin.’ And she’s gone.

Pip raises his head from my shoulder, and I have a nod and smile for him, along with a clean pocket handkerchief. Without a word, he returns the nod, solemnly, wipes at his face, blows his nose, and – when I refuse the return of the now sodden cloth – shoves the fabric square into his pocket.

Where Rosie will undoubtedly discover it and launder it, along with all else we’ve brought with us, some time during our visit to Bag End. The next time I see it, it will be fresh and smelling of sunshine and gentle breezes.

‘I must go and help Rosie now,’ Pip says, oddly grown-up in his manner.

‘Of course,’ I say in a similar vein.

When he is well gone, I move to the desk and scrutinise the page where I last saw his finger touching a line of text. And there I see it, I read it over again... 

...and I remember.

‘So I was thinking, Frodo.’ Ah, the start of many a string of questions... I’m not so sure, looking back, if we older cousins were humouring Pip by entertaining his questions, or if he was humouring us by asking them!

Frodo answered as he invariably did, his tone practically dripping with patience. ‘What were you thinking, Pip?’ That hobbit always did have an infinite store of patience in dealing with younger cousins. Perhaps Bilbo taught it to him, or perhaps he was born with it. In any event, both Pip and I were beneficiaries. 

On this occasion, at the end of a long night of walking – towards Caradhras, I seem to remember, yes, before its snows nearly buried us, sending us into the darkness that was Moria. ‘I think that – if you happen to write a book, that is – if you should write about us, here, now, I mean...’ 

And of course, Frodo answered in his best encouraging manner. ‘Yes, dearest of cousins?’  

That said, Frodo had never before in his life mentioned thinking about writing a book, except for a brief time in the Prancing Pony, and that was to mislead the Breelanders away from wondering about our business in Bree, near the start of our journeying. How long ago that seems now, how distant and misty, as if it were far away. Before Weathertop. Before Rivendell. Before... but I don’t want to think about that now. 

‘I was thinking, it might be such a good idea to write, Nothing further happened that night.’  Pip’s tone was so earnest as he spoke the words, it caught my attention and turned me away from contemplating the state of my feet and legs, my empty belly, the chill of the air around us, the snowy mountain that reared ahead of us and yet only crept closer by tiny degrees for all the walking we might do over the course of a long winter’s night.

Frodo was as mystified as I was. ‘Nothing further happened that night?’ he said. 

But when Pip is seized by an idea, no matter how nonsensical, he will pursue it to the end, even if his older cousins are dim-witted and slow to take his meaning. ‘Yes,’ he said firmly. ‘Definitely. Nothing further happened that night. I was thinking, you see, that if you planned it so...’ 

I caught my breath as I took his meaning. Pip is a Took, you see, through and through. While that may mean many things to you, including stubborn and clannish (I prefer the term ‘loyal’, myself), it is also salutary to remember the whispers of fairy blood in that family line.

And so, I could not help but answer him along the same line of thought, even though I am some years older, no longer a tween, obliged to live ‘in the real world’ and not indulge in fancy (though I still do, so often as I can, when I can find a few moments to immerse myself in a book). I said, ‘It might happen...’ And somehow in that moment, on that journey of fear and wonder, it even seemed real to me. ‘If you were to plan to write that, it might happen,’ I told Frodo. But just in case I was misunderstanding Pip’s intent, I thought to ask him, ‘Is that what you’re saying, Pip?’

But I had not misunderstood. ‘Exactly,’ he said. 

I remember even today, I swallowed hard. I didn’t have the heart to point out the realities of our situation, so I said instead, ‘I’d say that makes perfect sense...’ 

And Frodo, too, chose in that moment to humour our young cousin. ‘I will plan to write exactly that, Pip,’ he said, though all of us knew of a certainty that up to this point, anyway, he’d never had any intention of writing a book, and he likely still had no intention of doing so. Nevertheless, he said in his firmest tones, ‘Exactly.’ 

I look down at the page and see that, from the account Frodo ended up writing, we were on the road from Hollin to Caradhras, near the end of a long, moonlit night of walking, and something passed over, as of a shadow, passing over the high stars, making them seem to fade and then flash out again.

Old Gandalf tried to pass it off as a wisp of cloud, though I’m sure he knew better, but I heard Strider’s mutter, and I think Pip did, too, though I think Samwise was occupied with soothing Bill, who had also been upset by feeling the chill of what ever had passed high overhead.

On the page, beneath my fingertips, Frodo recounted Strider saying under his breath that the Wizard’s ‘thin cloud’ – the shadow – had been moving against the wind, and fast. And then Frodo’s account breaks off, as if the thought were too much to continue, and he left some blank space before taking up the pen once more.

And immediately following the space, my dearest older cousin wrote these words. Nothing further happened that night.

It is a good thing that Bilbo taught me to always carry a spare pocket handkerchief. I made sure to dry my eyes, wipe my face and blow my nose before I made my way to the kitchen to see if Pip had managed to rescue the seedcake from danger.

***  

Author notes:

Some thoughts here are derived from 'At the Sign of the Prancing Pony', 'The Ring Goes South' and 'The Grey Havens' from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.

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