The Borrowers Page 6

  Arrietty dropped her face into the primrose. "We're not. There's Aunt Lupy and Uncle Hendreary and all the cousins."

  "I bet they're dead," said the boy. "And what's more," he went on, "no one will ever believe I've seen you. And you'll be the very last because you're the youngest. One day," he told her, smiling triumphantly, "you'll be the only Borrower left in the world!"

  He sat still, waiting, but she did not look up. "Now you're crying," he remarked after a moment.

  "They're not dead," said Arrietty in a muffled voice; she was feeling in her little pocket for a handkerchief. "They live in a badger's set two fields away, beyond the spinney. We don't see them because it's too far. There are weasels and things and cows and foxes ... and crows...."

  "Which spinney?" he asked.

  "I don't KNOW!" Arrietty almost shouted. "It's along by the gas-pipe—a field called Parkin's Beck." She blew her nose. "I'm going home," she said.

  "Don't go," he said, "not yet."

  "Yes, I'm going," said Arrietty.

  His face turned pink. "Let me just get the book," he pleaded.

  "I'm not going to read to you now," said Arrietty.

  "Why not?"

  She looked at him with angry eyes. "Because—"

  "Listen," he said, "I'll go to that field. I'll go and find Uncle Hendreary. And the cousins. And Aunt Whatever-she-is. And, if they're alive, I'll tell you. What about that? You could write them a letter and I'd put it down the hole—"

  Arrietty gazed up at him. "Would you?" she breathed.

  "Yes, I would. Really I would. Now can I go and get the book? I'll go in by the side door."

  "All right," said Arrietty absently. Her eyes were shining. "When can I give you the letter?"

  "Any time," he said, standing above her. "Where in the house do you live?"

  "Well—" began Arrietty and stopped. Why once again did she feel this chill? Could it only be his shadow ... towering above her, blotting out the sun? "I'll put it somewhere," she said hurriedly, "I'll put it under the hall mat."

  "Which one? The one by the front door?"

  "Yes, that one."

  He was gone. And she stood there alone in the sunshine, shoulder deep in grass. What had happened seemed too big for thought; she felt unable to believe it really had happened: not only had she been "seen" but she had been talked to; not only had she been talked to but she had—

  "Arrietty!" said a voice.

  She stood up startled and spun round: there was Pod, moon-faced, on the path looking up at her. "Come on down!" he whispered.

  She stared at him for a moment as though she did not recognize him; how round his face was, how kind, how familiar!

  "Come on!" he said again, more urgently; and obediently because he sounded worried, she slithered quickly toward him off the bank, balancing her primrose. "Put that thing down," he said sharply, when she stood at last beside him on the path. "You can't lug great flowers about—you got to carry a bag. What you want to go up there for?" he grumbled as they moved off across the stones. "I might never have seen you. Hurry up now. Your mother'll have tea waiting!"

  Chapter Eleven

  HOMILY was there, at the last gate, to meet them. She had tidied her hair and smelled of coal-tar soap. She looked younger and somehow excited. "Well—!" she kept saying. "Well!" taking the bag from Arrietty and helping Pod to fasten the gate. "Well, was it nice? Were you a good girl? Was the cherry tree out? Did the clock strike?" She seemed, in the dim light, to be trying to read the expression on Arrietty's face. "Come along now. Tea's all ready. Give me your hand...."

  Tea was indeed ready, laid on the round table in the sitting room with a bright fire burning in the cogwheel. How familiar the room seemed, and homely, but, suddenly, somehow strange: the firelight flickering on the wallpaper—the line which read: "...it would be so charming if—" If what? Arrietty always wondered. If our house were less dark, she thought, that would be charming. She looked at the homemade dips set in upturned drawing pins which Homily had placed as candle-holders among the tea things; the old teapot, a hollow oak-apple, with its quill spout and wired-on handle—burnished it was now and hard with age; there were two roast sliced chestnuts which they would eat like toast with butter and a cold boiled chestnut which Pod would cut like bread; there was a plate of hot dried currants, well plumped before the fire; there were cinnamon breadcrumbs, crispy golden, and lightly dredged with sugar, and in front of each place, oh, delight of delights, a single potted shrimp. Homily had put out the silver plates—the florin ones for herself and Arrietty and the half-crown one for Pod.

  "Come along, Arrietty, if you've washed your hands," exclaimed Homily, taking up the teapot, "don't dream!"

  Arrietty drew up a cotton spool and sat down slowly. She watched her mother pulling on the spout of the teapot; this was always an interesting moment. The thicker end of the quill being inside the teapot, a slight pull just before pouring would draw it tightly into the hole and thus prevent a leak. If, as sometimes happened, a trace of dampness appeared about the join, it only meant a rather harder pull and a sudden gentle twist.

  "Well?" said Homily, gingerly pouring. "Tell us what you saw!"

  "She didn't see so much," said Pod, cutting himself a slice of boiled chestnut to eat with his shrimp.

  "Didn't she see the overmantel?"

  "No," said Pod, "we never went in the morning room."

  "What about my blotting paper?"

  "I never got it," said Pod.

  "Now that's a nice thing—" began Homily.

  "Maybe," said Pod, munching steadily, "but I had me feeling. I had it bad."

  "What's that?" asked Arrietty. "His feeling?"

  "Up the back of his head and in his fingers," said Homily. "It's a feeling your father gets when"—she dropped her voice—"there's someone about."

  "Oh," said Arrietty and seemed to shrink.

  "That's why I brought her along home," said Pod.

  "And was there anyone?" asked Homily anxiously.

  Pod took a mouthful of shrimp. "Must have been," he said, "but I didn't see nothing."

  Homily leaned across the table. "Did you have any feeling, Arrietty?"

  Arrietty started. "Oh," she said, "do we all have it?"

  "Well, not in the same place," said Homily. "Mine starts at the back of me ankles and then me knees go. My mother —hers used to start just under her chin and run right round her neck—"

  "And tied in a bow at the back," said Pod, munching.

  "No, Pod," protested Homily, "it's a fact. No need to be sarcastic. All the Bell-Pulls were like that. Like a collar, she said it was—"

  "Pity it didn't choke her," said Pod.

  "Now, Pod, be fair; she had her points."

  "Points!" said Pod. "She was all points!"

  Arrietty moistened her lips; she glanced nervously from Pod to Homily. "I didn't feel anything," she said.

  "Well," said Homily, "perhaps it was a false alarm."

  "Oh no," began Arrietty, "it wasn't—" and, as Homily glanced at her sharply, she faltered: "I mean if Papa felt something—I mean— Perhaps," she went on, "I don't have it."

  "Well," said Homily, "you're young. It'll come, all in good rime. You go and stand in our kitchen, just under the chute, when Mrs. Driver's raking out the stove upstairs. Stand right up on a stool or something—so's you're fairly near the ceiling. It'll come—with practice."

  After tea, when Pod had gone to his workbench and Homily was washing up, Arrietty rushed to her diary: "I'll just open it," she thought, trembling with haste, "anywhere." It fell open at the 9th and 10th of July: "Talk of Camps but Stay at Home. Old Cameronian Colors in Glasgow Cathedral, 1885"—that's what it said for the 9th. And on the 10th the page was headed: "Make Hay while the Sun Shines. Snowdon Peak sold for £5,750, 1889." Arrietty tore out this last page. Turning it over she read on the reverse side: "July 11th: Make Not a Toil of your Pleasure. Niagara passed by C. D. Graham in a cask, 1886." No, she thought, I'll choose the 10th, "M
ake Hay while the Sun Shines," and, crossing out her last entry ("Mother out of sorts"), she wrote below it:

  Dear Uncle Hendreary,

  I hope you are quite well and the cousins are well and Aunt Lupy. We are very well and I am learning to borrow,

  your loving neice,

  Arrietty Clock

  Write a letter on the back please

  "What are you doing, Arrietty?" called Homily from the kitchen.

  "Writing in my diary."

  "Oh," said Homily shortly.

  "Anything you want?" asked Arrietty.

  "It'll do later," said Homily.

  Arrietty folded the letter and placed it carefully between the pages of Bryce's Tom Thumb Gazetteer of the World and, in the diary, she wrote: "Went borrowing. Wrote to H. Talked to B." After that Arrietty sat for a long time staring into the fire, and thinking and thinking and thinking....

  Chapter Twelve

  BUT it was one thing to write a letter and quite another to find some means of getting it under the mat. Pod, for several days, could not be persuaded to go borrowing: he was well away on his yearly turn-out of the storerooms, mending partitions, and putting up new shelves. Arrietty usually enjoyed this spring sorting, when half-forgotten treasures came to light and new uses were discovered for old borrowings. She used to love turning over the scraps of silk or lace; the odd kid gloves; the pencil stubs; the rusty razor blades; the hairpins and the needles; the dried figs, the hazel nuts, the powdery bits of chocolate, and the scarlet stubs of sealing wax. Pod, one year, had made her a hairbrush from a toothbrush and Homily had made her a small pair of Turkish bloomers from two glove fingers for "knocking about in the mornings." There were spools and spools of colored silks and cottons and small variegated balls of odd wool penpoints which Homily used as flour scoops, and bottle tops galore.

  But this year Arrietty banged about impatiently and stole away whenever she dared, to stare through the grating, hoping to see the boy. She now kept the letter always with her, stuffed inside her jersey, and the edges became rubbed. Once he did run past the grating and she saw his woolen stockings; he was making a chugging noise in his throat like some kind of engine, and as he turned the corner he let out a piercing "Ooooo—oo" (it was a train whistle, he told her afterwards) so he did not hear her call. One evening, after dark, she crept away and tried to open the first gate, but swing and tug as she might she could not budge the pin.

  Homily, every time she swept the sitting room, would grumble about the carpet. "It may be a curtain-and-chair job," she would say to Pod, "but it wouldn't take you not a quarter of an hour, with your pin and name-tape, to fetch me a bit of blotting paper from the desk in the morning room ... anyone would think, looking at this floor, that we lived in a toad hole. No one could call me house-proud," said Homily. "You couldn't be, not with my kind of family, but I do like," she said, "to keep 'nice things nice.'" And at last, on the fourth day, Pod gave in. He laid down his hammer (a small electric-bell clapper) and said to Arrietty: "Come along...."

  Arrietty was glad to see the morning room; the door luckily had been left ajar and it was fascinating to stand at last in the thick pile of the carpet gazing upward at the shelves and pillars and towering gables of the famous overmantel. So that's where they had lived, she thought, those pleasure-loving creatures, remote and gay and self-sufficient. She imagined the Overmantel women—a little "tweedy," Homily had described them, with wasp waists and piled Edwardian hair—swinging carelessly outwards on the pilasters, lissom and laughing; gazing at themselves in the inset looking-glass which reflected back the tobacco jars, the cut-glass decanters, the bookshelves, and the plush-covered table. She imagined the Overmantel men—fair, they were said to be, with long mustaches and nervous slender hands—smoking and drinking and telling their witty tales. So they had never asked Homily up there! Poor Homily with her bony nose and never tidy hair ... They would have looked at her strangely, Arrietty thought, with their long, half-laughing eyes, and smiled a little and, humming, turned away. And they had lived only on breakfast food—on toast and egg and tiny snips of mushroom; sausage they'd have had and crispy bacon and little sips of tea and coffee. Where were they now? Arrietty wondered. Where could such creatures go?

  Pod had flung his pin so it stuck into the seat of the chair and was up the leg in a trice, leaning outwards on his tape; then, pulling out the pin, he flung it like a javelin, above his head, into a fold of curtain. This is the moment, Arrietty thought, and felt for her precious letter. She slipped into the hall. It was darker, this time, with the front door closed, and she ran across it with a beating heart. The mat was heavy, but she lifted up the corner and slid the letter under by pushing with her foot. "There!" she said and looked about her shadows shadows and the ticking clock. She looked across the great plain of floor to where, in the distance, the stairs mounted. "Another world above," she thought, "world on world..." and shivered slightly.

  "Arrietty," called Pod softly from the morning room, and she ran back in time to see him swing clear of the chair seat and pull himself upward on the name-tape, level with the desk. Lightly he came down feet apart and she saw him, for safety's sake, twist the name-tape lightly round his wrist. "I wanted you to see that," he said, a little breathless. The blotting paper, when he pushed it, floated down quite softly, riding lightly on the air, and lay at last some feet beyond the desk, pink and fresh, on the carpet's dingy pile.

  "You start rolling," whispered Pod. "I'll be down," and Arrietty went on her knees and began to roll the blotting paper until it grew too stiff for her to hold. Pod soon finished it off and lashed it with his name-tape, through which he ran his hat pin, and together they carried the long cylinder, as two house painters would carry a ladder, under the clock and down the hole.

  Homily hardly thanked them when, panting a little, they dropped the bundle in the passage outside the sitting room door. She looked alarmed. "Oh, there you are," she said. "Thank goodness! That boy's about again. I've just heard Mrs. Driver talking to Crampfurl."

  "Oh!" cried Arrietty. "What did she say?" and Homily glanced sharply at her and saw that she looked pale. Arrietty realized she should have said: "What boy?" It was too late now.

  "Nothing real bad," Homily went on, as though to reassure her. "It's just a boy they have upstairs. It's nothing at all, but I heard Mrs. Driver say that she'd take a slipper to him, see if she wouldn't, if he had the mats up once again in the hall."

  "The mats up in the hall!" echoed Arrietty.

  "Yes. Three days running, she said to Crampfurl, he'd had the mats up in the hall. She could tell, she said, by the dust and the way he'd put them back. It was the hall part that worried me, seeing as you and your father—What's the matter, Arrietty? There's no call for that sort of face! Come on now, help me move the furniture and we'll get down the carpet."

  "Oh dear, oh dear," thought Arrietty miserably, as she helped her mother empty the match-box chest of drawers. "Three days running he's looked and nothing there. He'll give up hope now ... he'll never look again."

  That evening she stood for hours on a stool under the chute in their kitchen, pretending she was practicing to get "a feeling" when really she was listening to Mrs. Driver's conversations with Crampfurl. All she learned was that Mrs. Driver's feet were killing her, and that it was a pity that she hadn't given in her notice last May, and would Crampfurl have another drop, considering there was more in the cellar than anyone would drink in Her lifetime, and if they thought she was going to clean the first-floor windows singlehanded they had better think again. But on the third night, just as Arrietty had climbed down off the stool before she overbalanced with weariness, she heard Crampfurl say: "If you ask me, I'd say he had a ferret." And quickly Arrietty climbed back again, holding her breath.

  "A ferret!" she heard Mrs. Driver exclaim shrilly. "Whatever next? Where would he keep it?"

  "That I wouldn't like to say," said Crampfurl in his rumbling earthy voice; "all I know is he was up beyond Parkin's Beck, going round
all the banks and calling-like down all the rabbit holes."

  "Well, I never," said Mrs. Driver. "Where's your glass?"

  "Just a drop," said Crampfurl. "That's enough. Goes to your liver, this sweet stuff—not like beer, it isn't. Yes," he went on, "when he saw me coming with a gun he pretended to be cutting a stick like from the hedge. But I'd see'd him all right and heard him. Calling away, his nose down a rabbit hole. It's my belief he's got a ferret." There was a gulp, as though Crampfurl was drinking. "Yes," he said at last, and Arrietty heard him set down the glass, "a ferret called Uncle something."

  Arrietty made a sharp movement, balanced for one moment with arms waving, and fell off the stool. There was a clatter as the stool slid sideways, banged against a chest of drawers and rolled over.

  "What was that?" asked Crampfurl.

  There was silence upstairs and Arrietty held her breath.

  "I didn't hear nothing," said Mrs. Driver.

  "Yes," said Crampfurl, "it was under the floor like, there by the stove."

  "That's nothing," said Mrs. Driver. "It's the coals falling. Often sounds like that. Scares you sometimes when you're sitting here alone.... Here, pass your glass, there's only a drop left—might as well finish the bottle...."

  They're drinking Fine Old Madeira, thought Arrietty, and very carefully she set the stool upright and stood quietly beside it, looking up. She could see light through the crack, occasionally nicked with shadow as one person or another moved a hand or arm.

  "Yes," went on Crampfurl, returning to his story, "and when I come up with m'gun he says, all innocent like—to put me off, I shouldn't wonder: 'Any old badgers' sets round here?'"

  "Artful," said Mrs. Driver; "the things they think of ... badgers' sets..." and she gave her creaking laugh.