The Kraken’s Quest: Karl in Wonderland

(Part four of the continuing saga. If you are not caught up on Karl’s adventures, here are links to part one, part two, and part three.)

Good day, my dear readers!

If you have been waiting as anxiously and as eagerly as I have for Karl’s latest letter, you need stretch your patience no longer! Here it is in full.

My dearest dragon,

To begin with, Cecilia, my messenger pigeon, has described to me at length how much care you lavished on her while she was recuperating from her ordeal with the amateur naturalists. As an expression of my gratitude, please find enclosed two slices of treacle tart, provided they have not been damaged in transit or eaten by Cecilia herself.

I am, as you may have gathered from my previous letter, at Oxford. What a remarkable place, as perfectly suited to my inner temperament as saltwater is to my outer membranes. I am staying at the house of the professor I encountered in the pond at the end of my last letter. What a comfortable and delightful place it is! I have been granted full use of the professor’s private library of classical literature, which is one of the most extensive I have ever seen. I am tempted to bring some of the volumes back to Bookmarks to fill our already burgeoning history and philosophy shelves. 

Yet I must not allow myself to become too comfortable, lest I fall into complacency. I shall, as soon as I have rested my tentacles and determined the best next course of action, resume my quest to find the dangerous and mysterious Waldo.

In the meantime, I have taken up a new employment as the minder to the professor’s children. He has several, though I cannot recall their names or number, for they all rather blend together in my mind. I have been reading to them, for they are woefully behind in their literary knowledge. Not a single one of them has even heard of Harry Potter! This is not their fault, to be clear, for I could find no trace of any of the classics of children’s literature on the shelves of this house. I was forced to read to them some of the books that were readily available, mostly selections from Thucydides and Diogenes Laertius. 

We were all seated on the college lawn, the children and I, when one of the girls spoke protested that the chapter of Aristotle I was reading had neither pictures nor conversations. 

“My dear young minnow,” said I, breaking off my reading, “though both illustrations and dialogue do greatly enhance the experience of a book, they are by no means necessary to the enjoyment of reading. There are a great many books that have attained the status of classics, and justly so, though they are lacking color plates and quotation marks.”

“But I don’t see the use of having a book without pictures or conversation!” she replied.

“The use? The use of a book? Why, one ought not to ask a book to be useful! Books are not screwdrivers or pasta makers or parachutes! They are not meant to be useful, merely to – ” 

But here I broke off my passionate explanation of the benefits of literature, for I had just spotted a strange figure running past, across the lawn. It appeared to be a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and a pocket watch – which was nothing out of the ordinary, of course, for most rabbits I know are very attentive to fashion. But this particular rabbit appeared to be in a great hurry. Indeed, he showed every sign of being under great stress of arriving late (where to I could not say).

As I had been on the lookout for curious and suspicious behavior since my run-in with the enigmatic Waldo, I knew that I must pursue this rabbit and attempt to learn what had spurred him to such haste. Abandoning both Aristotle and the children, I ran after him across the meadow.

“Stop, my good latecoming lagomorph!” I called to him, but he suddenly disappeared below the grass. I found that he had leapt headfirst into a deep hole whose bottom was enveloped in darkness.

Being the sensible and safety-conscious kraken that I am, I was reluctant to follow him down there, so I turned and with a sigh trudged back toward the children. Though it was by every measure the most sensible decision, I cannot help thinking that not pursuing that rabbit further might have kept from me some adventure or revelation that could further my quest. But it is too late now – I cannot find the hole again in the endless lawn.

I have had one further adventure worthy of note during my stay here, yet it is one that pains me greatly to describe, for it involves a threat to the life of our dear Cecilia the pigeon. You see, the professor and his children insist on keeping a cat in their house, who they inform me is called Dinah, and who has recently become the mother of two kittens. I am sad to say that one of the kittens is a great menace to society and insists on getting caught up in all sorts of trouble, and Dinah refuses to raise a paw to discipline him. 

I put up with the kitten’s constant belligerence for several days without remark, for I am above all a tolerant and patient kraken. But after Cecilia returned from her latest voyage, Kitty (for such is the only name I have heard this creature called) began to look at her with a most malicious expression and would not let her land anywhere in the house. When I heard that the kitten had made a leap at poor Cecilia while the latter was pecking at her afternoon tea, and that the young feline’s claws came so close as to dislodge several feathers from her wing. 

Here I drew the line. I strode up to the mother one day to demand that she intervene in her offspring’s misbehavior. She gave me a look of annoyance, then suggested that we resolve our disagreements over a game of chess. I know I should not have assented to such a ridiculous request, but at the time I was so indignant at this mother’s inattentiveness that I could think of nothing more satisfying than to best her in a game of chess (a game at which we krakens excel).

I had underestimated her skill. She did not beat me, but we ended in a stalemate. I suggested that we settle our score with a contest of poetical composition. Her tale was quite tangled and rather fuzzy, and I will not repeat it here, but I do believe my own had an interesting formal complexity. I have transcribed a portion of it below:

Said I to the dragon,      Said the dragon to me,     Said I once again,
I fear that your talons,     my dear beast of          my dear purple-winged
when opening                        the sea, you                      friend, I am sorry
    pages of                                  should know                           to make such
        books, will                                that my claws                         assumptions.
           tear and will                               are quite blunt.                    Indeed, to my
        rend, and                                I polish and file,                       mind the 
   whenever we                        it’s not worth                                words are  
send in new                     my while to                                           hard to find
        orders we’ll                         keep them                                         to express my
   get funny                                        so sharp                                                    sincerest
looks                                                 for the                                                       compunc-
!                                                    hunt!                                                                    tion!

I went on in this style for five more stanzas, at which point I decided that the poem had reached its logical conclusion. I had, I believed, won a stunning triumph over the old housecat, yet she refused to concede to me. She is still allowing her pesky progeny to terrorize my poor pigeon. 

I suppose this may be the incentive I need to throw off the comforts of this domestic interlude and recommence my quest for that striped-shirted man of mystery. I have had a very pleasant time here, but I cannot justify staying if it means risking the safety of dear, faithful Cecilia.

Until next I write,

Yours truly,

Karl the Kraken

I wrote back almost immediately:

 Karl–

I am surprised at you! Though your knowledge of the human literary canon is recently acquired, surely you are familiar with one of the greatest classics of children’s literature? I am tempted to send you an edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland along with this letter, but I fear poor Cecilia is not up to carrying such a weight on a trans-Atlantic flight. What’s more, the Bookmarks store seem to be straight out of Alice at the moment – a testament, I suppose, to the book’s enduring popularity. Perhaps I might be able to find someone else involved with Bookmarks who has a copy or two at their house.

Yours sincerely,

Daisy the Dragon