by Sally Gardens
Chapter Ten: Despair's Dark Load
Dark and empty.
Wandering the streets.
Dark and empty.
Windows shuttered.
Dark and empty.
Listening, listening...
Only the wind.
Only...
Never again.
Dark and empty.
With a sharp gasp Frodo bolted up from where he lay.
Dark and empty.
Blinking, he gradually grew cognizant of where and when he was: Bed. Night. Bag End. Shire.
Home?
His hand flew to his chest, as if to still the pounding within.
Limbs trembling, he fumbled his way out of the blankets and into clothes. There would be no more sleep for him.
Creeping down the hall, he slipped into the study, pulling the door not quite closed. He waited until his hands stopped shaking, then with extreme care lit the lamp by the desk. It did not take much rummaging to find a piece of paper. He sat at the desk, uncapped the ink well, dipped the pen, and set the pen to the paper; it began in the style of a simple journal entry—I dreamt again, last night, of dark waves and a distant shore—but soon the words began to shape themselves into verse.
I walked by the sea, and there came to me,
as a star-beam on the wet sand,
a white shell like a sea-bell...
He scribbled frenetically, changing a word here, crossing out a word there, until a poem took form. He set down the pen, lifted the paper, blew gently to dry the ink.
Then I saw a boat silently float
on the night-tide, empty and grey.
"It is later than late! Why do we wait?"
I leapt in and cried: "Bear me away!"
Bear me away. Silently he mouthed the words, sinking back in the chair with a sigh.
The opening and closing of a door down the hall startled him back upright. Quickly, Frodo looked about; his glance settled on the Red Book, and hastily he slipped the paper between the last page and the back cover and set the book back in place.
"You're up early, this morning," came Sam's voice from the study door.
Frodo stood and stretched. "Couldn't sleep," he said with a yawn. "I thought perhaps spending a bit of time amongst your mayoral papers would remedy the matter."
"Hm." Sam snorted, a glint of mirth in his eyes. "A wonder it didn't work. Come along and have some breakfast."
It bore me away, wetted with spray,
wrapped in a mist, wound in a sleep,
to a forgotten strand in a strange land.
Frodo took to solitary wandering around town and country, wrapped in somber silence. If he noticed that someone had greeted him, he would smile and return the greeting politely enough, but with "that drifty look in his eyes," as his neighbors called it. He seemed not to notice the whisperings, the sudden hushes as he passed, the murmurs that began anew when he was thought to be out of earshot.
On this particular day in early winter, Frodo meandered eastward along the Water, avoiding the village, and let his thoughts drift until a strident male voice drifted into them.
"...Mayor's always saying what a hero he was. Hero!" The speaker snorted. "Stands around like a fool—or a coward, like as not—while the rest of us lays our lives on the line to rid the Shire of them ruff—oh! Ah—good day, Mr. Baggins."
Frodo drew a deep breath. "Good day, Mr. Cooper, Mr. Goodchild," he replied, nodding to each in turn. The two Hobbit men nodded back and hurried past Frodo as quickly as good manners would allow.
Halting, Frodo stared dully into the burbling stream. A fine misty drizzle began to seep into his uncovered hair. Rivulets of water trickled down his face from the stray curls plastered against his skin.
In the twilight beyond the deep
I heard a sea-bell swing in the swell,
dinging, dinging, and the breakers roar
on the hidden teeth of a perilous reef;
and at last I came to a long shore.
He recalled the Field of Cormallen: Praise the Ring-bearers! Praise them with great praise! And he remembered the great honor the Elves had bestowed upon him and upon Sam as they rode through the Shire to the Grey Havens, whence Frodo would sail with the same Elves to a place where the Ring-bearer's sacrifices would without a doubt be held in the highest esteem.
The water rippled, churned, swelled into roaring surf...
Glittering sand slid through my hand,
dust of pearl and jewel-grist...
"Good day, Frodo."
Just in time he prevented himself from sighing; even in his melancholy, he could not allow himself to hurt his kind-hearted neighbor. "Good day, Molly." He felt a tugging at the nape of his neck, and then his hood was sliding up to cover his rain-drenched curls.
"If you'll pardon me for being forward," she said wryly. "That hood was put there for good reason."
She must have noticed that she had failed to elicit so much as a hint of a smile. "What is it, has you so preoccupied this day?" she softly inquired.
Frodo kept his eyes on the stream. "The Sea," he quietly responded.
"Ah." There was a space of silence, then: "Is it the Sea itself, or that which lies beyond the Sea?"
That which lies...
But under cliff-eaves there were glooming caves,
weed-curtained, dark and grey;
a cold air stirred in my hair,
and the light waned, as I hurried away.
"Tol Eressëa. The Lonely Isle. Where the Elves find rest when they grow weary of this world."
Gently came the response: "We are not Elves."
The sky was gray. The land was gray. The rain, the waves, the water that joined land and sky; all was gray.
I have lost myself, and I know not the way...
He turned sharply. Her eyes were brown, deep brown, as the tilled Earth in spring. "And where, then, do we find rest?"
Her gaze never wavered. "The same place we find unrest."
There still afloat waited the boat,
in the tide lifting, its prow tossing.
Weary I lay, as it bore me away...
coming to haven, dark as a raven,
silent as snow, deep in the night.
"But I can see I am disturbing you. Good day, Frodo."
By the time Frodo collected his wits, Molly was already walking on, up and over the rise, toward home.
...where drizzling rain poured down a drain
I cast away all that I bore:
in my clutching hand some grains of sand,
and a sea-shell silent and dead.
Frodo drifted onward, following the Water toward Bywater. He endured the usual stares and whispers as he passed through the town. On the other side of town he veered away from the river, slowly ascending a low hill until he reached a strip of tilled earth surrounding a boulder. Upon the boulder were engraved the names of the Hobbits who had fallen in the Battle of Bywater, back in 1419. It had been in that battle that the Hobbits of the Shire, led by Merry and Pippin and aided by Sam, had successfully driven away the ruffian Men who had taken the Shire by force while Frodo and his companions had been away on the Quest. It had been at that battle that Frodo stood by, horrified, as the people, his people, all too readily shed their peaceable ways for a lust for blood and revenge. Sadly Frodo pondered the grave and its empty garden.
Never will my ear that bell hear,
never my feet that shore tread;
Never again...
A tug at his cloak brought him back.
"Why you sad?"
Turning, Frodo looked down into an earnest childish face. In spite of his dark mood, he was deeply touched by the concern of the tiny lass. Smiling wanly, he searched for a suitable answer. "Oh—"
"Petty!" A stout matron huffed her way up the hillside, half-stumbling in her frantic scramble. "Petunia Smallburrow," she sharply rebuked, grasping the child's hand. "You ought not to go about bothering folks. Begging your pardon, Mr. Baggins." She looked up at him with a smile that failed to conceal the fear in her eyes. "She'll not trouble you any further."
"It was no troub—" But Mrs. Smallburrow had already fled down the path with Petunia. Frodo watched them go, and the shadows within him grew darker.
To myself I talk;
for still they speak not, men that I meet.