by Mary Norton
Pod looked up at the boy. “Hey,” he called, trying to attract his attention. The boy looked down. “Put the roof back now,” Pod begged him, trying to sound matter of fact and reasonable; “we’re getting cold.”
“All right,” agreed the boy, but he seemed to hesitate: he reached across them for the piece of board which formed their roof. “Shall I nail you down?” he asked, and they saw him pick up the hammer; it swayed above them, very dangerous looking.
“Of course nail us down,” said Pod irritably.
“I mean,” said the boy, “I’ve got some more things upstairs—”
Pod looked uncertain and Homily nudged him. “Ask him,” she whispered, “what kind of things?”
“What kind of things?” asked Pod.
“Things from an old doll’s house there is on the top shelf of the cupboard by the fireplace in the schoolroom.”
“I’ve never seen no doll’s house,” said Pod.
“Well, it’s in the cupboard,” said the boy, “right up by the ceiling; you can’t see it—you’ve got to climb on the lower shelves to get to it.”
“What sort of things are there in the doll’s house?” asked Arrietty from the sitting room.
“Oh, everything,” the boy told her; “carpets and rugs and beds with mattresses, and there’s a bird in a cage—not a real one—of course, and cooking pans and tables and five gilt chairs and a pot with a palm in it—a dish of plaster tarts and an imitation leg of mutton—”
Homily leaned across to Pod. “Tell him to nail us down lightly,” she whispered. Pod stared at her and she nodded vigorously, clasping her hands.
Pod turned to the boy. “All right,” he said, “you nail us down. But lightly, if you see what I mean. Just a tap or two here and there. . . .”
Chapter Sixteen
THEN began a curious phase in their lives: borrowings beyond all dreams of borrowing—a golden age. Every night the floor was opened and treasures would appear: a real carpet for the sitting room, a tiny coal-scuttle, a stiff little sofa with damask cushions, a double bed with a round bolster, a single ditto with a striped mattress, framed pictures instead of stamps, a kitchen stove which didn’t work but which looked “lovely” in the kitchen; there were oval tables and square tables and a little desk with one drawer; there were two maple wardrobes (one with a looking-glass) and a bureau with curved legs. Homily grew not only accustomed to the roof coming off but even went so far as to suggest to Pod that he put the board on hinges. “It’s just the hammering I don’t care for,” she explained—“it brings down the dirt.”
When the boy brought them a grand piano Homily begged Pod to build a drawing room. “Next to the sitting room,” she said, “and we could move the storerooms farther down. Then we could have those gilt chairs he talks about and the palm in a pot. . . .” Pod, however, was a little tired of furniture removing; he was looking forward to the quiet evenings when he could doze at last beside the fire in his new red velvet chair. No sooner had he put a chest of drawers in one place when Homily, coming in and out at the door—“to get the effect”—made him “try” it somewhere else. And every evening, at about his usual bedtime, the roof would fly up and more stuff would arrive. But Homily was tireless; bright-eyed and pink-cheeked, after a long day’s pushing and pulling, she still would leave nothing until morning. “Let’s just try it,” she would beg, lifting up one end of a large doll’s sideboard, so that Pod would have to lift the other; “it won’t take a minute!” But as Pod well knew, in actual fact it would be several hours before, disheveled and aching, they finally dropped into bed. Even then Homily would sometimes hop out “to have one last look.”
In the meantime, in payment for these riches, Arrietty would read to the boy—every afternoon in the long grass beyond the cherry tree. He would lie on his back and she would stand beside his shoulder and tell him when to turn the page. They were happy days to look back on afterwards, with the blue sky beyond the cherry boughs, the grasses softly stirring, and the boy’s great ear listening beside her. She grew to know that ear quite well, with its curves and shadows and sunlit pinks and golds. Sometimes, as she grew bolder, she would lean against his shoulder. He was very still while she read to him and always grateful. What worlds they would explore together—strange worlds to Arrietty. She learned a lot and some of the things she learned were hard to accept. She was made to realize once and for all that this earth on which they lived turning about in space did not revolve, as she had believed, for the sake of little people. “Nor for big people either,” she reminded the boy when she saw his secret smile.
In the cool of the evening Pod would come for her—a rather weary Pod, disheveled and dusty—to take her back for tea. And at home there would be an excited Homily and fresh delights to discover. “Shut your eyes!” Homily would cry. “Now open them!” and Arrietty, in a dream of joy, would see her home transformed. All kinds of surprises there were—even, one day, lace curtains at the grating, looped up with pink string.
Their only sadness was that there was no one there to see: no visitors, no casual droppers-in, no admiring cries and envious glances! What would Homily have not given for an Overmantel or a Harpsichord? Even a Rain-Barrel would have been better than no one at all. “You write to your Uncle Hendreary,” Homily suggested, “and tell him. A nice long letter, mind, and don’t leave anything out!” Arrietty began the letter on the back of one of the discarded pieces of blotting-paper, but it became as she wrote it just a dull list, far too long, like a sale catalogue or the inventory of a house to let; she would have to keep jumping up to count spoons or to look up words in the dictionary, and after a while she laid it aside: there was so much else to do, so many new books to read, and so much, now, that she could talk of with the boy.
“He’s been ill,” she told her mother and father; “he’s been here for the quiet and the country air. But soon he’ll go back to India. Did you know,” she asked the amazed Homily, “that the Arctic night lasts six months, and that the distance between the two poles is less than that between the two extremities of a diameter drawn through the equator?”
Yes, they were happy days and all would have been well, as Pod said afterwards, if they had stuck to borrowing from the doll’s house. No one in the human household seemed to remember it was there and consequently nothing was missed. The drawing room, however, could not help but be a temptation: it was so seldom used nowadays; there were so many knick-knack tables which had been out of Pod’s reach, and the boy, of course, could turn the key in the glass doors of the cabinet.
The silver violin he brought them first and then the silver harp; it stood no higher than Pod’s shoulder and Pod restrung it with horse-hair from the sofa in the morning room. “A musical conversazione, that’s what we could have!” cried the exulting Homily as Arrietty struck a tiny, tuneless note on a horse-hair string. “If only,” she went on fervently, clasping her hands, “your father would start on the drawing room!” (She curled her hair nearly every evening nowadays and, since the house was more or less straight, she would occasionally change for dinner into a satin dress; it hung like a sack, but Homily called it “Grecian.”) “We could use your painted ceiling,” she explained to Arrietty, “and there are quite enough of those toy builders’ bricks to make a parquet floor.” (“Parkay,” she would say. “Par-r-r-kay . . . ,” just like a Harpsichord.)
Even Great-Aunt Sophy, right away upstairs in the littered grandeur of her bedroom, seemed distantly affected by a spirit of endeavor which seemed to flow, in gleeful whorls and eddies, about the staid old house. Several times lately Pod, when he went to her room, had found her out of bed. He went there nowadays not to borrow, but to rest: the room, one might almost say, had become his, club; a place to which he could go “to get away from things.” Pod was a little irked by his riches; he had never visualized, not in his wildest dreams, borrowing such as this. Homily, he felt, should call a halt; surely, now, then—home was grand enough; these jeweled snuffboxes and diamond-encrusted
miniatures, these filigree vanity cases and Dresden figurines—all, as he knew, from the drawing-room cabinet—were not really necessary: what was the good of a shepherdess nearly as tall as Arrietty or an outsize candle-snuffer? Sitting just inside the fender, where he could warm his hands at the fire, he watched Aunt Sophy hobble slowly round the room on her two sticks. “She’ll be downstairs soon, I shouldn’t wonder,” he thought glumly, hardly listening to her oft-told tale about a royal luncheon aboard a Russian yacht, “then she’ll miss these things. . . .”
It was not Aunt Sophy, however, who missed them first. It was Mrs. Driver. Mrs. Driver had never forgotten the trouble over Rosa Pickhatchet. It had not been, at the time, easy to pin-point the guilt. Even Crampfurl had felt under suspicion. “From now on,” Mrs. Driver had said, “I’ll manage on me own. No more strange maids in this house—not if I’m to stay on meself!” A drop of Madeira here, a pair of old stockings there, a handkerchief or so, an odd vest, or an occasional pair of gloves—these, Mrs. Driver felt, were different; these were within her rights. But trinkets out of the drawing-room cabinet—that, she told herself grimly, staring at the depleted shelves, was a different story altogether!
She felt tricked. Standing there, on that fateful day, in the spring sunshine, feather duster in hand, her little black eyes had become slits of anger and cunning. It was, she calculated, as though someone, suspecting her dishonesty, were trying to catch her out. But who could it be? Crampfurl? That boy? The man who came to wind the clocks? These things had disappeared gradually, one by one: it was someone, of that she felt sure, who knew the house—and someone who wished her ill. Could it, she wondered suddenly, be the old lady herself? The old girl had been out of bed lately and walking about her room. Might she not have come downstairs in the night, poking about with her stick, snooping and spying. (Mrs. Driver remembered suddenly the empty Madeira bottle and the two glasses which, so often, were left on the kitchen table.) Ah, thought Mrs. Driver, was not this just the sort of thing she might do—the sort of thing she would cackle over, back upstairs again among her pillows, watching and waiting for Mrs. Driver to report the loss? “Everything all right downstairs, Driver? “—that’s what she’d always say and she would look at Mrs. Driver sideways out of those wicked old eyes of hers. “I wouldn’t put it past her!” Mrs. Driver exclaimed aloud, gripping her feather duster as though it were a club. “And a nice merry-andrew she’d look if I caught her at it—creeping about the downstairs rooms in the middle of the night. All right, my lady,” muttered Mrs. Driver grimly, “pry and potter all you want—two can play at that game!”
Chapter Seventeen
MRS. DRIVER was short with Crampfurl that evening; she would not sit down and drink with him as usual, but stumped about the kitchen, looking at him sideways every now and again out of the corners of her eyes. He seemed uneasy—as indeed he was: there was a kind of menace in her silence, a hidden something which no one could ignore. Even Aunt Sophy had felt it when Mrs. Driver brought up her wine; she heard it in the clink of the decanter against the glass as Mrs. Driver set down the tray and in the rattle of the wooden rings as Mrs. Driver drew the curtains; it was in the tremble of the floorboards as Mrs. Driver crossed the room and in the click of the latch as Mrs. Driver closed the door. “What’s the matter with her now?” Aunt Sophy wondered vaguely as delicately ungreedily she poured the first glass.
The boy had felt it too. From the way Mrs. Driver had stared at him as he sat hunched in the bath; from the way she soaped the sponge and the way she said: “And now!” She had scrubbed him slowly, with a careful, angry steadiness, and all through the bathing time she did not say a word. When he was in bed she had gone through all his things, peering into cupboards and opening his drawers. She had pulled his suitcase out from under the wardrobe and found his dear dead mole and his hoard of sugar lumps and her best potato knife. But even then she had not spoken. She had thrown the mole into the waste-paper basket and had made angry noises with her tongue; she pocketed the potato knife and all the sugar lumps. She had stared at him a moment before she turned the gas low—a strange stare it had been, more puzzled than accusing.
Mrs. Driver slept above the scullery. She had her own backstairs. That night she did not undress. She set the alarm clock for midnight and put it, where the tick would not disturb her, outside her door; she unbuttoned her tight shoes and crawled, grunting a little, under the eiderdown. She had “barely closed her eyes” (as she told Crampfurl afterwards) when the clock shrilled off—chattering and rattling on its four thin legs on the bare boards of the passageway. Mrs. Driver tumbled herself out of bed and fumbled her way to the door. “Shush!” she said to the clock as she felt for the catch, “Shush!” and clasped it to her bosom. She stood there, in her stockinged feet, at the head of the scullery stairs: something, it seemed, had flickered below—a hint of light. Mrs. Driver peered down the dark curve of the narrow stairway. Yes, there it was again—a moth-wing flutter! Candlelight—that’s what it was! A moving candle—beyond the stairs, beyond the scullery, somewhere within the kitchen.
Clock in hand, Mrs. Driver creaked down the stairs in her stockinged feet, panting a little in her eagerness. There seemed a sigh in the darkness, an echo of movement. And it seemed to Mrs. Driver, standing there on the cold stone flags of the scullery, that this sound that was barely a sound could only mean one thing: the soft swing-to of the green baize door—that door which led out of the kitchen into the main hall beyond. Hurriedly Mrs. Driver felt her way into the kitchen and fumbled for matches along the ledge above the stove; she knocked off a pepper-pot and a paper bag of cloves, and glancing quickly downwards saw a filament of light; she saw it in the second before she struck a match—a thread of light, it looked like, on the floor beside her feet; it ran in an oblong shape, outlining a rough square. Mrs. Driver gasped and lit the gas and the room leapt up around her: she glanced quickly at the baize door; there seemed to her startled eye a quiver of movement in it, as though it had just swung to; she ran to it and pushed it open, but the passage beyond was still and dark—no flicker of shadow nor sound of distant footfall. She let the door fall to again and watched it as it swung back, slowly, regretfully, held by its heavy spring. Yes, that was the sound she had heard from the scullery—that sighing whisper—like an indrawn breath.
Cautiously, clutching back her skirts, Mrs. Driver moved toward the stove. An object lay there, something pinkish, on the floor beside the jutting board. Ah, she realized, that board—that was where the light had come from! She hesitated and glanced about the kitchen: everything else looked normal and just as she had left it—the plates on the dresser, the saucepans on the wall, and the row of tea-towels hanging symmetrically on their string above the stove. The pinkish object, she saw now was a heart-shaped cachou-box—one that she knew well—from the glassed-in tray-table beside the fireplace in the drawing room. She picked it up; it was enamel and gold and set with tiny brilliants. “Well, I’m—” she began, and stooping swiftly with a sudden angry movement she wrenched back the piece of floor.
And then she shrieked, loud and long. She saw movement: a running, a scrambling, a fluttering! She heard a squeaking, a jabbering, and a gasping. Little people, they looked like, with hands and feet . . . and mouths opening. That’s what they looked like . . . but they couldn’t be that, of course! Running here, there, and everywhere. “Oh! oh! oh!” she shrieked and felt behind her for a chair. She clambered on to it and it wobbled beneath her and she climbed, still shrieking, from the chair to the table. . . .
And there she stood, marooned, crying and gasping, and calling out for help, until, after hours it seemed, there was a rattling at the scullery door. Crampfurl it was, roused at last by the light and the noise. “What is it?” he called. “Let me in!” But Mrs. Driver would not leave the table. “A nest! A nest!” she shouted. “Alive and squeaking!”
Crampfurl threw his weight against the door and burst open the lock. He staggered, slightly dazed, into the kitchen, his corduroy
trousers pulled on over his nightshirt. “Where?” he cried, his eyes wide beneath his tousled hair. “What sort of a nest?”
Mrs. Driver, sobbing still with fright, pointed at the floor. Crampfurl walked over in his slow, deliberate way and stared down. He saw a hole in the floor, lined and cluttered with small objects—children’s toys, they looked like, bits of rubbish—that was all. “It’s nothing,” he said after a moment; “it’s that boy, that’s what it is.” He stirred the contents with his foot and all the partitions fell down. “There ain’t nothing alive in there.”
“But I saw them, I tell you,” gasped Mrs. Driver, “little people like with hands—or mice dressed up. . . .”
Crampfurl stared into the hole. “Mice dressed up?” he repeated uncertainly.
“Hundreds of them,” went on Mrs. Driver, “running and squeaking. I saw them, I tell you!”
“Well, there ain’t nothing there now,” said Crampfurl, and he gave a final stir round with his boot.
“Then they’ve run away,” she cried, “under the floor . . . up inside the walls . . . the place is alive with them.”
“Well,” said Crampfurl stolidly, “maybe. But if you ask me, I think it’s that boy—where he hides things.” His eye brightened and he went down on one knee. “Where he’s got the ferret, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Listen,” cried Mrs. Driver, and there was a despairing note in her voice, “you’ve got to listen. This wasn’t no boy and it wasn’t no ferret.” She reached for the back of the chair and lowered herself clumsily on to the floor; she came beside him to the edge of the hole. “They had hands and faces, I tell you. Look,” she said, pointing, “see that? It’s a bed. And now I come to think of it one of ’em was in it.”
