Chapter 2: Penmanship

Sam knew that in all the world, no door was as wonderful as the green door of Bag End. No door was as wonderfully round, as wonderfully green, or had such a wonderful bright brass knob, and no other door opened onto such a wonderful place.

Oh, to be sure, Sam's own hobbit-hole on Bagshot Row was fine and comfortable, but it was nothing like Bag End. At #3 Bagshot Row, Sam would not find an Elvish sword casually propped in the corner of the front parlour, or a map of the Misty Mountains spread out over the kitchen table, or books piled in every corner. No books at all, as a matter of fact.

But most of all, Bag End was wonderful because Bilbo Baggins lived here, and Bilbo had journeyed throughout the wide world and had many adventures, and told astonishing stories, and was teaching Sam his letters this summer. And now Bag End was more wonderful than ever, for Bilbo's cousin Frodo had at last come to stay, just three months shy of his twenty-first birthday.

Sam first met Frodo on a fresh June morning, the sort of brilliant day when it seems possible that winter winds will never blow again. Sam had come up to Bag End with his father, as he often did, and while his father had started work in the garden, Sam wandered off to see if Bilbo was in his study.

Bilbo was not at his desk and, after peeking over his shoulder, Sam tiptoed into the study to say good morning to Frodo's portrait. Since he had first laid eyes on the portrait in December, Sam had become quite familiar with it. He always greeted it, and would sometimes even talk to it, as if he and Frodo had been old friends. Frodo's portrait never answered, of course, but Sam often answered for it, imagining the sorts of things that Frodo would say and the thoughts that would spring from behind that Elvish forehead.

Leaning against the desk, Sam looked up and said, "Good morning, Mr. Frodo."

"Good morning yourself."

Sam jumped so violently that he had to steady himself against the edge of the desk. Goodness me! he thought wildly. My mind's playin' tricks on me! Yet he knew he had heard the voice with his own two ears, plain as he could hear the birds singing outside the window or his father whistling in the garden.

"Mr.…Mr. Frodo?" he asked hesitantly.

"That's right, but I think you'll get a better response if you talk to me instead of my picture," answered the bemused voice behind him.

Sam turned his head slowly to look over his shoulder. His heart pounded from the sudden shock, and he began to feel hot from a great dawning embarrassment.

Sam gaped. He was astounded to behold the face he had grown so accustomed to seeing in black and white pencil strokes suddenly rendered in vibrant colour. Sam saw the same unusual blending of youthful softness with fine-boned angularity, the same full mouth and clear, bright eyes. But Sam now saw the almost cream-coloured fairness of Frodo's complexion and the rosy tint of his mouth. And although Sam had guessed that Frodo's eyes were light, no simple portrait could ever have prepared him for the colour of those eyes. Blue, as blue as the morning glories in his mother's garden when the morning sun shone through them; as blue as the June sky outside the study's round window. And they sparkled; they shimmered as sunlight will when it skips over the surface of a deep blue lake. Sam had never seen eyes so bright in all his life. He leaned against Bilbo's desk and goggled in amazement.

Frodo was sitting in the stuffed chair by the fireplace. A book was turned facedown on his lap, and he leaned forward with his elbows upon his knees. Frodo's sleeves were rolled up, and Sam noticed that his wrists were slender and fair, as were his slim, white hands.

"Mr. Frodo." Sam said, and gulped.

Frodo smiled. "Well, you know my name, at least. But I don't think we've been introduced."

Sam cleared his throat. "I'm Sam. Gamgee. Samwise Gamgee. My dad works for Mr. Bilbo. They call him the Gaffer. My dad, I mean. Not Mr. Bilbo. Of course. No one ever calls Mr. Bilbo anything except Mr. Bilbo. Or Master Bilbo. Or Master Baggins." He clamped his lips together to make himself stop talking.

Frodo stood up and walked over to Sam. He was quite a bit taller, and Sam found himself gawking upwards. Frodo lowered himself until he was at Sam's eye level, and put out his hand.

Sam stared dumbly at Frodo's outstretched hand, then finally came to his senses and put his own into it. He had never realized that his own hands were so small, and so brown. Frodo shook his hand enthusiastically.

"Well, Samwise Gamgee, son of the Gaffer who works for Master Baggins. I'm pleased to meet you. I expect we'll be seeing a bit of each other from now on."

Sam held Frodo's hand and looked into his startling eyes. Suddenly, Sam realized that something from Bilbo's portrait of Frodo was missing in the flesh. Sam did not see any trace of the sad expression that had so struck him, and had seemed to whisper to him of unknown sorrows to come. In Frodo's face, Sam saw only warmth, and life, and merriment. Perhaps Bilbo had drawn his cousin on an unhappy day.

"I hope you'll be able to show me where everything is. It's all rather new to me," Frodo said.

Sam returned Frodo's handshake with great zest. "Of course, Mr. Frodo! Of course!" He felt himself grinning from ear to ear. "Welcome to Bag End! It's a wonderful place!"

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That had been just two weeks ago, and Bag End was still as wonderful as ever. But now, as Sam stood with his hand on the brass knob of Bag End's green door (the most wonderful door in all the world), he could not bring himself to go inside. He felt quite sick, actually, and he also felt as if he was going to cry. In fact, he knew that he was going to cry.

Sam put his books under his arm and scurried to the woodshed. He sat down on a little pile of logs, drew his knees up to his chest and let tears fill his eyes.

He had been sobbing for quite a while, occasionally sniffling and wiping his nose on his sleeve, when he heard footsteps behind him. It was too late to hide. In a panic, Sam could only think, Oh dear, oh dear!

"Sam, what are you doing out here? What's the matter?"

"Nothing, Mr. Frodo," he said, and wiped his hand over his face.

Frodo crouched down so that he could look Sam in the eye. "Sam, I could hear you crying all the way from the kitchen. It doesn't seem like nothing to me. What is it?"

Sam gripped his copybook so hard that his knuckles turned white. He couldn't bear to look at Frodo when he told him, so he squeezed his eyes shut and then blurted out, "I haven't done my lessons!"

"What?" Frodo asked.

Sam looked at Frodo, his face a portrait of misery. "I haven't done my lessons. The lessons that Mr. Bilbo gave me to do at home. I was supposed to copy a story from this book. I tried but…the words didn't make no sense once I got home and I was by myself. And I tried just copying the shapes of the letters but then they all started to look alike. And I couldn't hold my pencil right. And then I pressed too hard on the paper…and then…and then…"

"And then?"

"And then my pencil broke!" Sam put his copybook over his head and sobbed.

"Oh, Sam!" Frodo said, and Sam looked up to see him laughing.

He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. "'Tain't funny, Mr. Frodo."

"No, Sam, I'm sorry. It isn't funny. But it isn't quite the end of the world, either."

"Mr. Bilbo will be angry. He'll think I've been wasting his time. And after he took all that trouble to ask my dad if he could learn me my letters."

Bilbo would never be angry over something like this."

"I don't know what I'm going to tell him."

"Well, Sam, you're in luck. Bilbo had to go away unexpectedly this morning, and won't be back until this afternoon. So you have plenty of time to finish your lessons before he returns."

Sam looked down at his useless copybook. "It won't do no good," he muttered. "I could have a hundred years and I still wouldn't be able to finish."

"Come on, Sam," Frodo said, taking Sam by the hand. "I'll help you finish."

"Oh, I couldn't ask you to do that, sir. It wouldn't be right. Them being my lessons and all."

Frodo turned around and smiled at Sam. "Sam, I didn't say I would do them for you. Now don't be silly. Come on."

Frodo took Sam to Bilbo's study and sat him down at the desk. Sam's feet dangled over the edge of Bilbo's wooden chair. Frodo pulled up a stool and sat down next to him.

Sam stared at the stool for a moment. It was one of Bilbo's curiosities, and Sam found it grotesquely fascinating. Bilbo had told Sam that it was made from the petrified leg of a great beast, called an oliphaunt, just like in his mother's nursery rhymes. Bilbo had said oliphaunts were real, and lived far in the South, where tall men rode them like ponies. The idea of anyone, even the tallest of men, riding a creature with a leg like that had seemed so preposterous to Sam that he had laughed out loud, and petrified leg or not, he had doubted whether such a beast even existed. Wistfully, he had realized that even if it did, he had little chance of ever seeing one with his own eyes.

Taking Sam's copybook, Frodo said, "Now let's see how far you got. Where's this story you were supposed to copy?"

Sam handed Frodo the little leather-bound book that Bilbo had given him. "In there. I didn't get very far at all."

Frodo looked from Sam's copybook to the story and back again. A smile played around the corners of his mouth. He looked up at Sam. "Sam, this isn't nearly as bad as you thought."

"It isn't?"

"No, but…perhaps we should just make a fresh start on a new sheet. What do you think?"

"All right, Mr. Frodo. That sounds like a good idea."

"Fine," Frodo said. He folded back Sam's page to reveal a clean, white one. He opened one of the little drawers in Bilbo's desk and pulled out a pencil. "And look here! A brand new pencil! Guaranteed not to break!"

"Don't be so sure," Sam said in a dejected voice.

"Why don't you get started, and let me know if you get stuck on something."

Sam swallowed hard. "All right, Mr. Frodo."

Sam held the pencil tightly in his chubby brown hand. He bit his lip and squinted and started copying from the book. After a few words, the letters began to swim before his eyes. His hand ached. His own writing on the paper looked clumsy and senseless. He suffered for another moment, then put the pencil down and looked at Frodo in despair.

"I'm stuck."

"All right, what stopped you?"

"Everything. It's useless."

Frodo smiled. "Don't give up so easily, Sam! You've already begun. If something is worth beginning, it's worth seeing through to the end. Now for one thing," he said, "You're holding your pencil much too tightly. You don't have to hold on for dear life. Here, it's like this."

Frodo put the pencil back into Sam's hand. He arranged Sam's fingers around the pencil and then wrapped his hand around Sam's and wrote a few letters on the paper. Sam was astonished to see himself creating words, not in his own awkward lettering, but in Frodo's flowing script. He laughed in delight.

"You see," Frodo said. "It's much easier to do this when your knuckles aren't creaking."

Sam found that with Frodo's hand around his own, the words in the book were much clearer to him. No longer upset over his clumsy hand, or in fear of breaking another pencil, he was able to relax and recognize the letters that he was copying, and he read the words out loud to Frodo while he wrote.

After doing a paragraph and a half, Frodo said, "How much of this did Bilbo tell you to copy?"

"Just a page, sir."

"Well, you're halfway there. I think you've earned a bit of a rest."

Frodo picked up the book they had been copying. "What's this that Bilbo has given you, anyway?"

"I don't know the whole thing, Mr. Frodo. It's too much for me to read right now."

"Hmmm," Frodo said, and leafed through the book. "It looks like a history of the city of Dale."

"Dale!" Sam said with excitement. "I know Dale! Dale is where the dragon lived!"

Frodo smiled. "Well, the dragon really lived under the mountain. But Dale was right next door. I see Bilbo's been telling you about his adventures."

"Oh, Mr. Frodo, I love Mr. Bilbo's stories! The things he's done! When I hear folks saying that he just made all that up I…" Sam clapped a hand over his mouth, aghast at having possibly insulted Bilbo right in front of his cousin.

Instead of looking offended, Frodo laughed out loud. "Yes, I'm sure people do think he made those stories up. But I'm certain that all of his stories true—well, mostly true. I loved listening to them, too, when I was a lad. I still do, in fact." Frodo absently flipped through the book's pages. "Bilbo was very lucky, I think, to have led such an exciting life," he said softly.

Sam looked at Frodo and blinked in surprise. For the first time, Sam saw what he had missed from Bilbo's portrait: that soft sadness around Frodo's eyes and mouth, the curious expression that somehow made Sam's heart ache. A question suddenly came to his mind. "If Mr. Bilbo were to go off again," Sam asked, "Off adventuring, would you go with him, Mr. Frodo?"

Frodo looked out the window. His eyes sparkled like clear water in the morning light. He looked back at Sam and answered, "Yes, I believe I would."

"Even if there were dragons, Mr. Frodo?"

Frodo leaned towards Sam as if about to confide a great secret, and his eyes danced. "Especially if there were dragons!"

A terrific elation swept over Sam. He had a sudden vision of Frodo as a great adventurer, slaying dragons and performing feats so daring that stories and songs and poems would be written about them. Yet as Sam looked at Frodo, it seemed that slaying dragons and other, merely legendary deeds would be far too commonplace for such an extraordinary hobbit. Sam was certain that only the greatest and most heroic of adventures awaited Frodo, although what that could possibly be, Sam could not imagine.

"Would you take me with you, Mr. Frodo?" Sam asked urgently. "I mean, you can't go off into the wild on your own! I could make myself very useful, I could!"

Frodo laughed brightly. "But Sam, no one is going anywhere!"

"But if you ever were…oh, Mr. Frodo, please take me with you! I want to see Elves, and mountains, and do all sorts of grand things, and…" Sam's words faltered in his enthusiasm.

"All right Sam," Frodo laughed. "I promise. If I ever go off in search of dragons, or buried treasure or anything else that remotely qualifies as an adventure, I will be certain that Master Samwise Gamgee accompanies me."

"Oh, thank you! Thank you, Mr. Frodo!" Sam cried, and again Frodo laughed.

"You know what they say. You should be careful what you wish for…you might just get it!" Frodo again looked out the window, at the peaceful, summertime view down the hill and over the fields of the Shire. A butterfly fluttered past the window, the sunlight golden on its wings, but otherwise the morning was completely still. "But I don't think you'll ever have to worry about this one coming true."

"That's all right, sir," Sam said. "I'm not worried!" He looked out the window, then at Frodo, and swung his feet cheerfully.

"Well, I think we should get back to business, Sam."

"Yes, Mr. Frodo."

"Would you like to try writing a little on your own?"

"Not just yet, Mr. Frodo, if you don't mind. I don't think I quite have the hang of it yet. The next paragraph, maybe."

"All right, Sam," Frodo said and again took Sam's hand within his own.

Sam looked at Frodo's slender hand around his sturdy one. He glanced up at Frodo's face for a moment, then back at their joined hands, and was very happy.