The Snergs are a race of people only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and of great strength. Probably they are some offshoot of the pixies who once inhabited the hills and forests of England, and who finally disappeared about the reign of Henry VIII. Their language is not very difficult and the children especially learn to speak it in a few weeks, which helps to strengthen my theory of their origin. The ladies, however, never learn to speak the language with fluency, and the little slang expressions are quite beyond them; but owing to the untiring energy of Miss Watkyns, that brainy woman, they now have a little Snerg grammar, with a vocabulary and some easy exercises.
The Snergs took a great interest in the Society’s development and offered their services at an early date. It soon came to pass that they did all the heavy work, such as building (at which they are expert), gardening, painting and decorating, and the more troublesome part of the housework, such as swabbing floors. They come in batches and spend some weeks at work; then they say they are homesick, which means they have got tired of it, and they go home as soon as another batch can take their place. In return for these services they receive instruction in up-to-date methods from Miss Watkyns’ Encyclopædia, little presents from London or some other large town when one of the ladies has gone there on business, and those little general advantages, difficult to specify in words, which come from intercourse with refined females.
If the children go to the woods to collect berries or mushrooms or whatever else happens to be in season, or to play at outlaws or a little scalping party, a Snerg or two goes with them to shoo away obtrusive bears. When they are bathing a Snerg or two sits on a rock ready to dive in and pick out any child that has got into trouble. It is interesting to see how they reach such a one with a few vigorous strokes, take it to land, up-end it by the heels to let the water run out, and lay it on the grass to dry.
The Snergs dress in tight-fitting woollen hose, with a jerkin of the same material and a leather belt, and little round leather caps rather like the deeper kinds of saucers. When at home most of them live in the town; some few have their mills and farms a little distance away, but they come in pretty often for they are gregarious people, loving company. The town has one main street which goes rambling round corners, with one or two little alleys branching off from it through archways and so forth, and the houses are three or four or more stories in height, built in an irregular way of timber and clay and plaster, top-heavy in appearance though sound in reality even if a bit elastic. If a house leans over more than it should they prop it up by timbers reaching across to the house opposite, this generally giving them an excuse for making a little covered-in passage way on the timbers so that they can visit one another without all the fuss of going downstairs and up again, they being great on visits. You never know when a Snerg will finish with his house because he is always making additions to it, such as throwing out bay windows, or carrying a balcony on stilts to one of the big trees near by and then building a spare bedroom in the tree itself, and the like fool tricks.
They are long-lived people; roughly speaking they live as long as oaks. For instance those Snergs who remember the excitement caused by the landing of William the Conqueror (1066) are old, old gaffers, opinionated, sitting in arm-chairs. The men who remember the Wars of the Roses are middle-aged and of ripe judgment (in so far as a Snerg ever has judgment), while those born about the time of the Gunpowder Plot have still something of the gay insouciance of youth. The babies date from Trafalgar and upwards.
They are great on feasts, which they have in the open air at long tables joined end on and following the turns of the street. This is necessary because nearly everybody is invited—that is to say, commanded to come, because the King gives the feasts, though each person has to bring his share of food and drink and put it in the general stock. Of late years the procedure has changed owing to the enormous number of invitations that had to be sent; the commands are now understood and only invitations to stay away are sent to the people who are not wanted on the particular occasion. They are sometimes hard up for a reason for a feast, and then the Master of the Household, whose job it is, has to hunt for a reason, such as its being somebody’s birthday. Once they had a feast because it was nobody’s birthday that day.
The King presides at the head of the table, with the best people on either hand, and there they sit in the mellow evening light and tell tales of the brave days of old and listen to the sound of harps. But at the other end of the table, round the corner and out of sight, there is often a good deal of reckless behaviour and talk, since there is no one to check the number of cups of mead they drink; and the truth is they get slightly tiddleums, and laugh far too much and grab off each other’s caps and throw them in other fellow’s faces, and so on. Queer people.
The tale is going to start very soon but it will be necessary to give some account of the two children, Sylvia and Joe, who got mixed up with the strange doings I have mentioned, and also of Vanderdecken and his men, because if it had not been for them I really don’t know how things would have come out as well as they did. Let us begin with Sylvia.