Snowflake Read online

  Snowflake now swiftly counted her brood and checked them for injury. But apart from being dirty and blackened like the rest, they were unharmed. Together once more, they dripped down the side of the house and into the stream of water running off into the gutter.

  Down the littered gutter they ran over bits of burned wood, blackened cloth and charred paper, until they reached a large drain like an open mouth at the end of the street.

  Then came a period of falling through darkness, of landing with a splash in a foul stream that flowed sluggishly through ill-smelling underground tunnels of brick, dimly lit by occasional gleams from above. Refuse floated on the brackish surface. Huge rats scurried and scrabbled along the side of the brick walls of the sewer.

  But in the end there was an emerging towards the open air and the sunlight again, a twist, a turn, a gushing from the sewer mouth and there they were back once more in their broad, beloved river, safe and united.

  Yet, it was no longer as it had been before. The hills, the fruitful vineyards and the ancient castles were gone and had been replaced by low pastureland where black and white cows grazed under trees. But Snowflake knew that other changes had taken place as well. They had been through fire. They were all older and wiser, and some of the careless gaiety was gone out of them and their lives.

  But the greatest change, Snowflake was sad to see and which filled her with foreboding, had taken place in Raindrop.

  The strain of the heroic struggle against the fire had left him altered. His pear-shaped figure was no longer as smooth and robust as it had been and he never seemed to recover his former gay and joyous spirit. He looked worn and older and was apt to have long periods when he was moody and silent.

  Yet always he was loving and kind to Snowflake and the children. When his eyes rested upon Snowflake they were filled with such tenderness that her own heart was swelled nearly to bursting. How dear and good he had always been to her.

  One morning, as they drifted slowly on the bosom of the broad, placid river passing through flat meadows where many windmills, stirred by the just-awakened breeze, revolved slowly against the pale sky, Snowflake became aware that Raindrop was no longer with her.

  The night before he had still been at her side. Now he was gone. With a feeling of sadness that was too deep even for tears, Snowflake knew it was forever.

  How could this be? Snowflake asked herself. One moment he had been a part of her, his heartbeat close to hers, the next he had vanished and she was alone.

  Why had he been given to her, if only to be taken?

  Who had called him away in the night so swiftly that he had not had time even to say “Farewell” . . . ?

  The questions that tormented her brought back to her thoughts of the mysteries of her childhood and she asked the One who had made her in the long ago: “Was it You who called him? Shall I ever see him again?”

  There was no reply but the wind rustling the sails of the. windmills. Snowflake cried to herself softly: “How can I bear it without him?”

  The children crowded around her to comfort her. They put their arms about her and said: “Don’t cry. We will never leave you . . .”

  Snowflake looked at them, smiling through her grief, and wondered. For they were no longer children. They had grown up. Snowdrop and Snowcrystal were like herself, but Rainflake and Raindrop-Minor resembled their father, pear-shaped and full of life and vigour. They were always floating off and getting into mischief, exploring swirl and eddy, splashing against every bit of driftwood, leaf or twig they met in the river.

  She comforted herself that they would stay with her as they had promised. Now that Raindrop was gone they were all she had. And to take her mind off grieving for him, she made plans for them.

  Snowdrop, who was the most beautiful, might be destined to water a rose in a garden, there to glisten like a diamond on the velvet petal. Snowcrystal loved the gleaming salmon and trout flashing in the depths. She would spend her life with them.

  Rainflake, who was adventurous, might some day help to drive a great steam engine. Raindrop-Minor liked to dream. He would be happiest in some placid pond where yellow ducklings swam away the long, lazy summer days.

  Thus Snowflake mused as slowly they neared the mouth of the great river.

  Time and the river flowed on. The broad stream grew muddy and sluggish as it came to the end of its course through soft meadow and marshland. Clay stirred up from the shallow bottom turned the clear sparkling blue of the waters to dull brown. It was like a soiled and tired traveller after a long trip and Snowflake and her children took on this new colour as well.

  Yet, as it is, near to the finish of every journey there was all the stir and excitement of impending arrival somewhere, the feeling that everything thereafter would be new and different.

  Snowflake was aware of this anticipation in the children. They were eager, restless and impatient and fretful when the river instead of forging onwards dissolved into swirls and eddies and seemed to move in slow circles instead of forward to its destination.

  And deep in her heart, Snowflake knew that the time was not far distant when, in spite of the promises they had made, the children must go away and, departing, leave behind with her all the beautiful lives she had dreamed for them. Yet she could not keep from hoping that it would not happen.

  At its mouth where it finally entered the sea, the great river divided into five, wandering past the scattered islands of the sunken land.

  The main stream drove directly towards the west, pointing like an arrow at the setting sun.

  The sun was a red ball on the horizon of the limitless ocean when at last they arrived there.

  Pausing only to bid a brief goodbye to Snowflake, each of the children chose a different branch.

  Snowdrop turned to the south; Rainflake entered the one that bent south-west. Snowcrystal chose the one leading north; Raindrop-Minor rushed headlong into the arm curving north by west.

  Each thought that his or her branch would lead most quickly to adventure and success. They had hardly brushed Snowflake’s cheek with the farewell kiss when they were off, quivering with excitement to meet what lay ahead of them. And when each of them reached the bend in the river branch, he or she paused only to turn around and wave a last farewell and then was gone.

  Alone, Snowflake took the path to the blood-red west and the great sea.

  In the sea, all was changed from everything Snowflake had ever known.

  Its waters were deep, mysterious and restless.

  Throughout her life Snowflake had experienced movement, the gay, rapid run of the mountain rill, the frothing charge of the rocky cascade, the airy freedom of the falls, the steady flow of broad rivers and the dance of the wavelets stirred by the summer wind on the surface of the lake.

  But the ocean heaved and surged endlessly this way and that, like someone in torment. It rose and fell, swirled and swept, pulsed and rocked as though it could never come to rest. Always the surface appeared moving and troubled, and Snowflake became a part of its aimless procession.

  And where before the rivulets and brooks, the streams, the runnels, the torrents, the rivers and the lake of which she had been a part were sweet and fresh, the waters of the vast and boundless ocean were salt, and from then on Snowflake always seemed to have in her mouth the bitter taste of tears.

  Everything in the sea was enormous compared with what Snowflake had known in the past, the waves, the currents, the fish and the ships.

  When she was called upon to hold up a liner, it was so huge that one could have packed into it all the boats large and small that Snowflake had ever seen and still have had room for twice as many more.

  Where the little lake steamer had been two decks high, these on the ocean had ten or twelve decks, one on top of the other. Where their friend of the paddles and the gay flag had but one thin smokestack, these that plied the seas to and fro had three and four funnels, each one large enough to conceal a house, and the garden too.

  And where
as the friendly lake vessel had passed lightly over Snowflake and Raindrop without hurting them, the giant cargo and passenger ships weighing many thousands of tons, crushed her with their great bulk. And besides, now that Raindrop was no longer there to share the burden, the entire weight of these ocean giants fell upon her. Snowflake felt that she was growing very tired.

  There seemed to be no place that Snowflake could go to find peace in the vast ocean through which she was now drifting aimlessly, driven by wind and current, or roaring storm.

  When the weather was bad she tried sinking into the green and gloomy depths where it was always calm and still. But she was frightened there by the finny giants that came swimming up to stare with great round eyes as large as dinner plates.

  Some had triple rows of jagged teeth, others huge pointed spikes like spears, and once when she sank far into the black deep she encountered fish lighted up as though by electricity. One looked like a railway coach going by at night and another carried two lanterns in front of its hideous face by means of two long spines that shot out from its head. Deeper still there were the white and sightless worms and other blind monsters that groped through the dark.

  These strange beasts, so unlike the gay, sleek trout and silvery salmon of her beloved rivers and lake, disturbed Snowflake and she soon returned to the surface to bear the full brunt of the storms.

  The storms too were terrifying.

  The raging winds whipped the surface of the sea into living mountains of grey waters, their crests white-capped with salt froth racing before the gale.

  One moment, Snowflake would be lifted dizzyingly to the top of a watery peak and the next instant she would be plunged to the very bottom of the fluid, heaving valleys of these flying hills to gaze upwards and see them, angry and swollen, looming above her, towering walls of water curving inwards as though about to fall upon her with all their weight and crush her.

  At times the wind would snatch her from the topmost mountain crag and send her flying through the air as spray to look down upon the endless marching ranges of the angry sea before she fell back to the surface once more to be buffeted and battered almost beyond endurance.

  Sometimes these violent tempests would last for days, driving Snowflake ahead of them for many hundreds of agonising miles before they blew themselves out and came to an end.

  Yet, the sea could be calm and friendly too, and there were days when the surface was as still as her lovely lake had been, with the sunshine sparkling on blue waters that were hardly more than ruffled by a delicate wind.

  But how vast and lonely it was at those times, and Snowflake thought she almost preferred the menace and excitement of the storm to the empty spaces with not a single thing to see as far as the eye could reach.

  Sometimes there might be the masts of ships and the tips of smokestacks to be glimpsed far away below the horizon, or she might be so fortunate as to encounter a single steamer ploughing its way across the empty desert of water, and then Snowflake would try to throw herself in its way just for company, even though the weight of the giant hurt her. But for the most part she appeared to be the centre of a wide and empty circle made by the line where the sea met the sky all about her.

  And too, now that Raindrop and the children were gone, there was no one to talk to any more, at least no one that Snowflake cared about, and she learned what it was to be lonely.

  One day was just like another in Snowflake’s life now—waves, the huge ships with their threshing screws that turned the water to milk behind them, dolphins, porpoises, sharks and whales and other monsters that lurked in the deep. And the trackless sea.

  And yet it was not quite the same, for while she did not know where she was going, Snowflake had been driven steadily southwards. The water of which she was a part became warmer, the sun hotter, the seas calmer and the storms less frequent.

  Thus she was able to spend more days on the surface under the blue skies, with the burning sun beating down. And gradually Snowflake became aware of a change that was taking place in her. She had felt that for some time she had been growing weaker. The great zest for life and love of living, the pleasure she used to take in all things large and small, was beginning to pass. She was tired much of the time, even when she had been doing nothing but resting and dreaming.

  And Snowflake knew that she must be approaching the end of her days.

  How this end was to take place, what it would be like, or where she would go, Snowflake could not tell. But she was aware that somehow it would have to do with the sun. She did not understand this and it saddened her, for she remembered how happy she had been the first time she had seen it rise and how she had longed for it through the dark days when she had lain buried beneath the snow on the mountainside.

  But the blazing yellow disc had come to be like a furnace glowing in the sky burning with tropical heat and she recalled that other enemy fire, that she had vanquished. She recognised in this blazing star that had once been her friend a force stronger than herself.

  At first she resisted, for even though she had lost those dearest to her, she was filled with love of life. Lonely though she was in this vast emptiness, she was still glad to see the colours in the sky at dusk, or watch the yellow moon rise from the rim of the ocean, to greet a bird winging its solitary way across the wastes of water or to try to count the stars that spangled the heavens at night.

  But more and more she realised her strength and will were ebbing and that she must soon depart.

  Then came the day when the sun beating out of a brazen sky appeared to concentrate its strength and power on her alone. Snowflake knew that she could resist no longer and that her time was come.

  And she was frightened.

  For she felt that she was being drawn upward from the sea, that the liquid life she had so loved was being drained from her, and that soon she would not be any more.

  And in those last moments, her thoughts turned back to the days when she had been young and to the questions that had never been answered. Why? What was the purpose of it all? And above all, Who?

  For what reason had she been born, and sent to earth, to be gay, and sad, to have moments of happiness and others of sorrow? To end as nothing, drawn up into the bosom of the sun from the surface of an endless ocean?

  Truly, the mystery seemed greater than it ever had before, and more futile. Where was the sense, the rightness, or the beauty in being born but to die, to live but to be wasted in the end?

  Who was the One who had decreed that what had happened to her should happen, and why? Was it only to amuse Himself that He had made her a unique and shining crystal and sent her tumbling from the sky? Or had there been some purpose that she could not guess that lay behind it all?

  Had He forgotten her altogether? He had loved her once. She remembered that, and how it felt, warm and sweet, tender and secure as though nothing could ever happen to harm her. Yet how soon He seemed to have tired of her to let her wander and suffer aimlessly through this strange world He had created.

  The sea lay below her now. The glowing sun had her in its grip. Already her form was altering from the lovely crystal drop she had occupied for so long. It was shrivelling and drying. Soon there would be nothing left but a tiny feather of vapour adrift in the sky.

  High overhead floated a soft white cloud. Was that her destination? Snowflake remembered that it was in a cloud she had been born.

  Yet in those last seconds, there were other things that Snowflake remembered too.

  For now her whole life seemed to roll by before her dimming eyes.

  She had fallen upon a mountainside and a little girl with a red cap and mittens had passed over her on her sled.

  She had been made into the nose of a snowman who resembled a teacher in the village and every one who had come to see the snowman had laughed and felt the better for it.

  She had gone tumbling down the hillside in the spring and had awakened a sleeping violet in a wood.

  She had been caught in a mill-rac
e and turned the miller’s wheel to grind wheat so that a woman could bake a loaf of bread for her husband and her children.

  She had merged with a dear and tender raindrop whom she loved and with him entered a lake where she had spent the happiest days of her life.

  As she thought of the lake she remembered all the swimmers she had helped and the bare brown legs of the children she had cooled on hot summer days.

  She heard again the gay hoot of the friendly white paddle steamer with the brave flag of red with a white cross at its stern, and she saw the long barges beflagged with wash and merry with music that she had helped to speed safely on their way.

  She thought of her children and the contentment of Raindrop on the long journey they had made together.

  With a shudder she remembered the awful duel with fire which she had won; she heard again the dying hiss of the vanquished flames and saw once more the figure of the fireman at the window holding the sleeping child in his arms, safe and sound because of her victory.

  She had sent forth her own to go their way and carry on the work of water wherever it was wanted. She herself had entered the lonely sea to go where she was called and give herself where she was needed.

  As she neared the white cloud drifting overhead there came to her in one brief flash of understanding something of the vast and beautiful design woven by Him who had created all.

  Hers had been a humble life. Never at any time had she been or pretended to be anything but a little snowflake.

  But as she looked back she saw that she had been useful, that always when she had been needed she had been there to fulfil her purpose. To have helped a little girl with red cap and red mittens to be in time for school was not to have been born in vain.

  Even to have been a part of the nose of a snowman that made people laugh and forget their troubles was useful.