The Rule of Names

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Mr Underhill came out from under his hill, smiling and breathing hard. Each breath shot out of his nostrils as a double puff of steam, snow-white in the morning sunshine. Mr Underhill looked up at the bright December sky and smiled wider than ever, showing snow-white teeth. Then he went down to the village.

‘Morning, Mr Underhill,’ said the villagers as he passed them in the narrow street between houses with conical, overhanging roofs like the fat red caps of toadstools. ‘Morning, morning!’ he replied to each. (It was of course bad luck to wish anyone a good morning; a simple statement of the time of day was quite enough, in a place so permeated with Influences as Sattins Island, where a careless adjec­tive might change the weather for a week.) All of them spoke to him, some with affection, some with affectionate disdain. He was all the little island had in the way of a wizard, and so deserved respect—but how could you respect a little fat man of fifty who waddled along with his toes turned in, breathing steam and smiling? He was no great shakes as a workman either. His fireworks were fairly elaborate but his elixirs were weak. Warts he charmed off frequently reappeared after three days; tomatoes he enchanted grew no bigger than canta­loupes; and those rare times when a strange ship stopped at Sattins harbour, Mr Underhill always stayed under his hill—for fear, he explained, of the evil eye. He was, in other words, a wizard the way wall-eyed Gan was a carpenter: by default. The villagers made do with badly hung doors and inefficient spells, for this generation, and relieved their annoyance by treating Mr Underhill quite familiarly, as a mere fellow-villager. They even asked him to dinner.

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