by Mary Norton
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.
“As a matter of fact,” said Crampfurl, “there did used to be one, but when I showed him where it was like, he didn’t take no notice of it. Just stood there, waiting for me to go.” Crampfurl laughed. “Two can play at that game, I thought, so I just sits m’self down. And there we were the two of us.”
“And what happened?”
“Well, he had to go off in the end. Leaving his ferret. I waited a bit, but it never came out. I poked around a bit and whistled. Pity I never heard properly what he called it. Uncle something it sounded like—” Arrietty heard the sudden scrape of a chair. “Well,” said Crampfurl, “I’d better get on now and shut up the chickens—”
The scullery door banged and there was a sudden clatter overhead as Mrs. Driver began to rake the stove. Arrietty replaced the stool and stole softly into the sitting room, where she found her mother alone.
Chapter Thirteen
HOMILY was ironing, bending and banging and pushing the hair back out of her eyes. All round
the room underclothes hung airing on safety pins which Homily used like coathangers.
“What happened?” asked Homily. “Did you fall over?”
“Yes,” said Arrietty, moving quietly into her place beside the fire.
“How’s the feeling coming?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Arrietty. She clasped her knees and laid her chin on them.
“Where’s your knitting?” asked Homily. “I don’t know what’s come over you lately. Always idle. You don’t feel seedy, do you?”
“Oh,” exclaimed Arrietty, “let me be!” And Homily for once was silent. “It’s the spring,” she told herself. “Used to take me like that sometimes at her age.”
“I must see that boy,” Arrietty was thinking—staring blindly into the fire. “I must hear what happened. I must hear if they’re all right. I don’t want us to die out. I don’t want to be the last Borrower. I don’t want”—and here Arrietty dropped her face on to her knees—“to live for ever and ever like this . . . in the dark . . . under the floor. . . .”
“No good getting supper,” said Homily, breaking the silence; “your father’s gone borrowing. To Her room. And you know what that means!”
Arrietty raised her head. “No,” she said, hardly listening; “what does it mean?”
“That he won’t be back,” said Homily sharply, “for a good hour and a half. He likes it up there, gossiping with Her and poking about on the dressing table. And it’s safe enough once that boy’s in bed. Not that there’s anything we want special,” she went on. “It’s just these new shelves he’s made. They look kind of bare, he says, and he might, he says, just pick up a little something . . .”
Arrietty suddenly was sitting bolt upright: a thought had struck her, leaving her breathless and a little shaky at the knees. “A good hour and a half,” her mother had said and the gates would be open!
“Where are you going?” asked Homily as Arrietty moved toward the door.
“Just along to the storerooms,” said Arrietty, shading with one hand her candle-dip from the draught. “I won’t be long.”
“Now don’t you untidy anything!” Homily called out after her. “And be careful of that light!”
As Arrietty went down the passage she thought: “It is true. I am going to the storerooms—to find another hat pin. And if I do find a hat pin (and a piece of string—there won’t be any name-tape) I still ‘won’t be long’ because I’ll have to get back before Papa. And I’m doing it for their sakes,” she told herself doggedly, “and one day they’ll thank me.” All the same she felt a little guilty. “Artful”—that’s what Mrs. Driver would say she was.
There was a hat pin—one with a bar for a top—and she tied on a piece of string, very firmly, twisting it back and forth like a figure of eight and, as a crowning inspiration, she sealed it with sealing wax.
The gates were open and she left the candle in the middle of the passage where it could come to no harm, just below the hole by the clock.
The great hall when she had climbed out into it was dim with shadows. A single gas jet, turned low, made a pool of light beside the locked front door and another faintly flickered on the landing halfway up the stairs. The ceiling sprang away into height and darkness and all around was space. The night-nursery, she knew, was at the end of the upstairs passage and the boy would be in bed—her mother had just said so.
Arrietty had watched her father use his pin on the chair, and single stairs, in comparison, were easier. There was a kind of rhythm to it after a while: a throw, a pull, a scramble, and an upward swing. The stair rods glinted coldly, but the pile of the carpet seemed soft and warm and delicious to fall back on. On the half-landing she paused to get her breath. She did not mind the semi-darkness; she lived in darkness; she was at home in it and, at a time like this, it made her feel safe.
On the upper landing she saw an open door and a great square of golden light which like a barrier lay across the passage. “I’ve got to pass through that,” Arrietty told herself, trying to be brave. Inside the lighted room a voice was talking, droning on. “. . . And this mare,” the voice said, “was a five-year-old which really belonged to my brother in Ireland, not my elder brother but my younger brother, the one who owned Stale Mate and Oh My Darling. He had entered her for several point-to-points . . . but when I say ‘several’ I mean three or at least two. . . . Have you ever seen an Irish point-to-point?”
“No,” said another voice, rather absent-mindedly. “That’s my father,” Arrietty realized with a start, “my father talking to Great-Aunt Sophy or rather Great-Aunt Sophy talking to my father.” She gripped her pin with its loops of string, and ran into the light and through it to the passage beyond. As she passed the open door she had a glimpse of firelight and lamplight and gleaming furniture and dark-red silk brocade.
Beyond the square of light the passage was dark again and she could see, at the far end, a half-open door. “That’s the day-nursery,” she thought, “and beyond that is the night-nursery.”
“There are certain differences,” Aunt Sophy’s voice went on, “which would strike you at once. For instance . . .” Arrietty liked the voice. It was comforting and steady, like the sound of the clock in the hall, and as she moved off the carpet on to the strip of polished floor beside the skirting-board, she was interested to hear there were walls in Ireland instead of hedges. Here by the skirting she could run and she loved running. Carpets were heavy going—thick and clinging, they held you up. The boards were smooth and smelled of beeswax. She liked the smell.
The schoolroom, when she reached it, was shrouded in dust sheets and full of junk. Here too a gas jet burned, turned low to a bluish flame. The floor was linoleum, rather worn, and the rugs were shabby. Under the table was a great cavern of darkness. She moved into it, feeling about, and bumped into a dusty hassock higher than her head. Coming out again, into the half light, she looked up and saw the corner cupboard with the doll’s tea service, the painting above the fireplace, and the plush curtain where her father had been “seen.” Chair legs were everywhere and chair seats obscured her view. She found her way among them to the door of the night-nursery and there she saw, suddenly, on a shadowed plateau in the far corner, the boy in bed. She saw his great face, turned toward her on the edge of the pillow; she saw the gaslight reflected in his open eyes; she saw his hand gripping the bedclothes, holding them tightly pressed against his mouth.
She stopped moving and stood still. After a while, when she saw his fingers relax, she said softly: “Don’t be frightened. . . . It’s me, Arrietty.”
He let the bedclothes slide away from his mouth and said: “Arri-what-y?” He seemed annoyed.
“Etty,” she repeated gently. “Did you take the letter?”
He stared at her for a moment without speaking, then he said: “Why did you come creeping, creeping, into my room?”
“I didn’t come creeping, creeping,” said Arrietty. “I even ran. Didn’t you see?”
He was silent, staring at her with his great, wide-open eyes.
“When I brought the book,” he said at last, “you’d gone.”
“I had to go. Tea was ready. My father fetched me.”
He understood this. “Oh,” he said matter-of-factly, and did not reproach her.
“Did you take the letter?” she asked again.
“Yes,” he said, “I had to go back twice. I shoved it down the badger’s hole. . . .” Suddenly he threw back the bedclothes and stood up in bed, enormous in his pale flannel night-shirt. It was Arrietty’s turn to be afraid. She half turned, her eyes on his face, and began backing slowly toward the door. But he did not look at her; he was feeling behind a picture on the wall. “Here it is,” he said, sitting down again, and the bed creaked loudly.
“But I don’t want it back!” exclaimed Arrietty, coming forward again. “You should have left it there! Why did you bring it back?”
He turned it over in his fingers. “He’s written on it,” he said.
“
Oh, please,” cried Arrietty excitedly, “show me!” She ran right up to the bed and tugged at the trailing sheet. “Then they are alive! Did you see him?”
“No,” he said, “the letter was there, just down the hole where I’d put it.” He leaned toward her. “But he’s written on it. Look!”
She made a quick dart and almost snatched the letter out of his great fingers, but was careful to keep out of range of his hand. She ran with it to the door of the schoolroom where the light, though dim, was a little brighter. “It’s very faint,” she said, holding it close to her eyes. “What’s he written it with? I wonder. It’s all in capitals—” She turned suddenly. “Are you sure you didn’t write it?” she asked.
“Of course not,” he began. “I write small—” But she had seen by his face that he spoke the truth and began to spell out the letters. “T—e—double l,” she said. “Tell y—o—r—e.” She looked up. “Yore?” she said.
“Yes,” said the boy, “your.”
“Tell your a—n—t, ant?” said Arrietty. “Ant? My ant?” The boy was silent, waiting. “Ant L—u—Oh, Aunt Lupy!” she exclaimed; “He says—listen, this is what he says: ‘Tell your Aunt Lupy to come home’!”
There was silence. “Then tell her,” said the boy after a moment.
“But she isn’t here!” exclaimed Arrietty. “She’s never been here! I don’t even remember what she looked like!”
“Look,” said the boy, staring through the door, “someone’s coming!”
Arrietty whipped round. There was no time to hide: it was Pod, borrowing-bag in one hand and pin in the other. He stood in the doorway of the schoolroom. Quite still he stood, outlined against the light in the passage, his little shadow falling dimly in front of him. He had seen her.
