by Mary Norton
Timmus stood up, clasping the rope with his hands. “Now, if you like, we could go and climb the rood screen,” he suggested.
Arrietty hesitated. “I can’t climb as well as you,” she said at last, but then she added quickly, “yet.”
“It’s easy. You can get about all over that rood screen. I go up there to watch the human beans . . .”
“What human beans?”
“The human beans who come to church. They can’t see you. Not if you stay quite still. They think you’re part of the carving. That’s why I brown my face.”
“What with?” asked Arrietty.
“Walnut juice, of course.” He swung the rope a little. “Could you give me a bit of a push?”
Arrietty was bewildered. How quickly he went from one subject to another! “What sort of a push?” she said.
“On me. Just give a push on me.”
Hand over hand, he was climbing up the “tail,” and once he had gripped it firmly between his feet and knees, Arrietty pushed him gently. This first bell rope, she saw, hung lower than the others. Perhaps through constant use? The sausage-shaped pad looked frayed and shabby and had been cleverly reinforced by a piece of old carpet, neatly bound round with string. This, she supposed, was the bell they heard on Sundays.
“Harder!” cried Timmus. “Much harder!” So she gave him a massive shove. He leaned outwards from the rope and, by pushing with his feet and pulling with his hands, began to gain momentum. Backwards and forwards swung the bell rope, farther and farther, higher and higher. Once he brushed the curtains, which opened slightly. She became afraid he might hit the walls!
“Careful . . . !” she called in rising panic: the bell rope was too long to be checked by its radius—it could go any distance within sight. “Careful, Timmus!” she implored. “Please be careful . . . !”
He only laughed, lithe and confident. With a twist of his body, he made a circular swerve, brushing the other bell ropes, so they too swung and trembled. The whole bell chamber became alive with movement. Supposing somebody came! Supposing the bells began to ring! Arrietty felt a sudden sense of guilt: this wild display was all for her benefit. “Stop it, Timmus,” she begged him, almost in tears. She threw out her arms, as though to check him—a fruitless gesture at the speed he was going—and she had to dodge back swiftly as the bell rope flew wildly past her through the gap in the curtains. She heard the sliding crash and the scrape of wood on stone. He had hit the bench. “Oh, please don’t let him be dead,” she cried out to herself as she rushed through the curtains.
He wasn’t dead at all: he was standing on the bench, surrounded by scattered pamphlets—the rope still held in his hand. He looked down on it in a bewildered way, then gently let it go. In her distress, Arrietty hardly noticed it as it sailed softly past her through the gaping curtains and back to its usual place, curving and trembling as though it were alive.
There were pamphlets on the floor, the collecting box was pushed sideways, and the bench was out of place. Not very much out of place, she noticed with relief. “Oh, Timmus . . . !” she exclaimed, and there was a world of reproach in her voice.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and moved towards the edge of the bench, as if about to descend. It would have been a big drop. “Stay where you are,” Arrietty ordered him. “I’ll get you down later. We’ve got to tidy this up . . . Have you hurt yourself?”
He still looked bewildered. “Not much,” he said.
“Then collect all those papers together and put them back into piles. I’ll pass you these ones on the floor.”
He did as he was told. He was moving rather stiffly, but Arrietty, stooping to collect the scattered pamphlets on the flagstones, had no time to notice or look up. At least, he could walk and bend.
On tiptoe, she passed her small collection of post cards and pamphlets up to him while he, perilously leaning over the edge of the polished bench, stretched down to receive them. At last, all the papers were in place. The bench itself, alas, would have to remain crooked.
“Now, you’d better try to straighten up the collecting box—if it’s not too heavy . . .”
It was heavy, but he managed it after a struggle. Then Arrietty passed him up the card that said THANK YOU. And that, at last, was that.
They walked back up the aisle very soberly. Neither of them felt much like talking, but as they reached the rood screen, Arrietty said, “I don’t think we’ll climb that today.” Although he did not answer, Timmus appeared to agree with her.
Chapter Eighteen
After that, Arrietty went down to the church quite often: it was because of the “new arrangements”—arrangements that made Arrietty very happy and became a turning point in her life: she was to be allowed to borrow, and not only that but, joy of joys, to borrow out of doors!
It came about like this: her uncle Hendreary had been finding the long walk to the kitchen garden increasingly tiring, and Timmus was too young to be sent out alone. He would go with his father sometimes to help to carry, but he would dash about and “run like a mouse,” and this exercise, too, Hendreary found tiresome, being prone to odd twinges of gout. It had been different when the two elder boys had been at home: they had always undertaken to do what Aunt Lupy called the donkey work, but now that they had returned to their old home in the badgers’ set with Eggletina to keep house for them, seeking what they called their independence, the daily chores fell heavily on their father. “I am not as young as I was,” he would say, and he would say it very often.
Pod could not help much: he had worked out a wonderful scheme for their living quarters under the window seat, and the work this entailed took up all of his time. He was determined to divide up this fairly large space into three separate rooms: a little one for Arrietty, another for himself and Homily, and a bright, sun-filled sitting room, which would look out on to the grating. He would construct the partitions from the backs of the many odd books Peagreen had left behind. Montaigne’s Essays, in two volumes, were the largest, and these he had set up first; the smaller books he would use for doors. He kept back a good supply of the inside pages. With these he planned to paper the walls in vertical lines of news type. Homily thought the even lettering a little dull and uninteresting for the sitting room: She would have preferred a touch of color. “You don’t want a big room like this all gray. And that’s what it’ll look like if you don’t look closely. Just gray: the print’s so small, like . . .” But Arrietty and Pod persuaded her that this neutral shade would increase the feeling of space and make a splendid background for the pictures Peagreen had promised to paint for them.
“You see, Mother,” Arrietty tried to explain, “this room won’t be furnished with bits and bobs—like the room under the floor at Firbank. I mean, now we’ve got all Miss Menzies’s beautiful dollhouse furniture.”
“Bits and bobs!” Homily had muttered crossly: she had been fond of their cozy room at Firbank, and especially fond of that beautiful knight from a chess set. She wondered where it was now.
But she would cook them splendid meals in her snow-white kitchen (well supplied with borrowings from the vegetable garden, and Spiller brought them an occasional minnow or fresh-water crayfish from the stream and—every now and again—a haunch of this or that, rich and gamy, but he would never say of what).
Pod hammered and sawed (and whistled under his breath) among the stacked furniture and general chaos under the window seat in the library. Peagreen would occasionally look in to inspect the work and bring them some rare dainty or other from the larder, but he found it hard to tear himself away from his painting (which he was doing in secret so that each picture would be a surprise).
Everybody seemed happy, each with his own particular job, but perhaps the happiest of all were Arrietty and Timmus.
He would never “run like a mouse” with Arrietty (except when danger threatened: they had once had a very nasty encounter with a weasel). And, on their way to the kitchen garden, she would often tell him a story, and this would keep him enthralled
. In those first, early days of spring, there was little to borrow except Brussels sprouts, parsley, and winter kale, but as the weather grew warmer, there were crowded rows of seedling lettuces that badly needed thinning: the borrowers thinned them. They also “thinned” the tiny seedling onions and gathered sprigs of thyme. Then came the glorious day when Whitlace dug the first of the new potatoes and left in the soft earth a myriad of tiny tubers—some no larger than a hazelnut—with which he “would not bother.” But Homily “bothered,” and so did Lupy. What a treat it was to serve up a whole dish of miniature new potatoes, flavored with tender sprigs of early mint! And if Peagreen could produce a knob of butter from the larder! What a change from cutting off slices from tired old potatoes, potatoes so large that they had to be rolled along dusty floorboards into Homily’s kitchen, as had been the case at Firbank.
Then came the promise of the first broad beans, the scarlet runners, the strawberry beds and raspberry canes breaking into leaf. And those mysterious fruit trees trained along the southern wall. Peaches? Nectarines? Victoria Plums? They would have to wait and see. Oh, the bottlings and the dryings and the storings! Pod was hard put to find enough utensils. And yet the old disused game larder never seemed to fail him. With patient and persistent searchings, he could usually supply most needs.
Spiller would sometimes join them in the vegetable garden: with the aid of his bow and arrow, he kept down the larger pests. Pigeons were the greatest menace: they could strip a planting of early cabbage in less than a couple of hours. But they grew to detest the sting of his tiny arrows.
Borrowing for two families could sometimes be heavyish work. One Brussels sprout was as big as a cabbage to Arrietty and Timmus, and besides all the other borrowings, they had always to return with four, two for each household. All the same, in that warm and sheltered garden, there were quite long hours of fun and leisure: hide-and-seek among the parsley, and if it rained, they could shelter under the spreading leaves of rhubarb and play guessing games and such. They had, of course, to keep a sharp lookout for Whitlace. And there were rats among the compost. But Spiller saw to those. They, too, grew to know the ping of that tiny bow.
On the way home, they would leave Arrietty’s borrowings below the grating (where Pod would take them in), and then go on to the church. Sometimes Aunt Lupy would ask Arrietty to stay to tea, and Arrietty nearly always accepted: she was longing to catch a glimpse of Miss Menzies. Although she had solemnly promised her father never again to speak to a human bean, there might be some way of letting Miss Menzies know that they were safe. But though the other ladies appeared on Wednesdays and Saturdays to do the flowers, Miss Menzies was never among them.
Aunt Lupy, Arrietty noticed, was getting quite fond of her ladies. She was very used to genteel, human conversation, having become a Harpsichord by marriage and living so long with her first husband inside that instrument in the drawing room at Firbank. It was there, Homily maintained, that she had picked up grander manners than those rougher ways current below the kitchen—“Although,” Homily would always add, “Lupy was only a Rainpipe from the stables before she married Harpsichord.” The harpsichord was never opened because so many of the strings were missing. All the same, superior though it might seem, it had not been an easy life: they had had to subsist entirely on what was left over from afternoon tea. And their borrowing had to be done at lightning speed, between the time the ladies left to change for dinner and the butler appeared to clear away the tea things. And there was many a day (as she once confessed to Homily) when there had been nothing to drink except water from the flower vases and nothing to eat at all. With a few exceptional interludes, Aunt Lupy seemed doomed, Arrietty thought, to make a home inside some kind of musical instrument.
Arrietty liked to hear Aunt Lupy’s stories about the human beans and picked up many bits of interesting information with which she would regale her mother and father on her return to supper. For instance, why the old rector no longer lived in the rectory, but in a neat, compact villa across the lane. She learned that Mrs. Whitlace came down to the church every evening to lock away the offertory box in the press in the vestry, and how that solid old press (set deep into the stones of the original church) housed “priceless treasures” (Lady Mullings’s description): gold and silver altar plates, a jeweled chalice, exquisite candlesticks, far more ancient than those that had been stolen from the altar, and many other historic objects, described in an awed voice by Lupy but of which Arrietty had forgotten the names.
“Fancy!” Homily would exclaim as Arrietty reeled off as many as she could remember. “Who ever would have guessed it!”
And Pod would remark, “Sounds like the display cabinet at Firbank.”
“Should all be under lock and key,” Homily had said sternly.
“They are under lock and key,” Pod had explained patiently. “I’ve examined those doors: the oak is that hard with age that no one could drive so much as a nail into it. Not even a human bean could.”
“Lady Mullings,” Arrietty told them, “thinks all those things should be put in a bank.”
“In a bank!” exclaimed Homily, thinking of a grassy slope.
“Yes, it sounded funny to me, too,” admitted Arrietty.
“Is that the Lady Mullings who’s a ‘finder’?” asked Homily, after a moment.
“Yes. Well, she is for other people. But Aunt Lupy says she can never find anything she mislays herself. Aunt Lupy says she heard her telling Mrs. Crabtree that she’s lost the key of her attic and now she can’t get at the things she laid aside for the jumble sale. And she’s always leaving things in the church—umbrellas and handkerchiefs, gloves, things like that . . .”
“I could do with a nice leather glove,” said Pod.
One afternoon, a short time later, Arrietty picked up courage to ask quite openly about Miss Menzies: why did she no longer come?
“Oh, poor thing!” exclaimed Aunt Lupy. “She did come once to make her excuses. But she’s been in dreadful trouble.”
Arrietty’s heart sank. “What . . . what kind of trouble?”
“Some vandals broke into the model village and knocked down all the houses!”
“All the houses?” gasped Arrietty, although she knew that Aunt Lupy was apt to exaggerate.
“Well, that’s what it sounded like to me. Upset! I never heard a poor thing more upset. And it was nearly the end of Mr. Pott. The brutes must have got in across the stream. They’d cut the wire and all. And there they both are—Miss Menzies and Mr. Pott—working night and day, to try to repair the damage. Poor things! They had wanted so much to get the place open for Easter. That’s when the season starts.”
“When . . .” stammered Arrietty, “I mean—how long ago did this happen?”
“Let me see . . .” Aunt Lupy looked thoughtful. “About a week ago? No, it was more than that—more like two . . .” She wrinkled her brow, trying to remember. “How long ago is it since you all first arrived here?”
“About two weeks . . .” said Arrietty.
“Well, it must have been about then. I seem to recall it was the night of a very full moon—”
“Yes.” Arrietty was leaning forwards, her hands clasped so tightly in her lap that the nails dug into her palms. “That was the night after we first arrived.” Her voice had trembled.
“What’s the matter, child?”
“Oh, Aunt Lupy! Can’t you see? If we’d delayed one night, just one night—and my mother wanted to—they’d have got us!”
“Who’d have got you?” Aunt Lupy looked alarmed.
“The Platters! They’d have taken the roof off, as they did before. And we’d have been in the house. Like rats in a trap, Aunt Lupy!”
“Goodness gracious me . . .” exclaimed Lupy.
“It wasn’t vandals, Aunt Lupy, it was the Platters!”
“You mean those people who shut you up in the attic and were going to put you in a showcase?”
“Yes, yes.” Arrietty was standing up now.
/> “But how do you know it was them?”
“I just know. My father was expecting them. I must go home now, Aunt Lupy.” She was searching round frantically for her empty borrowing bag. “I must tell all this to my parents . . .”
“But you’re safe now, dear. Those people don’t know that you’re here.”
“I hope not,” said Arrietty. She found her bag and stooped hurriedly to kiss her aunt.
“The Lord takes care of his own,” said Lupy. “Thank you for the lettuce. Go carefully, child.”
But Arrietty did not go very carefully. She was in such a hurry that she nearly ran in to Kitty Whitlace, who was approaching the wicket gate from the far side. Luckily Arrietty heard her singing, recognized the singer by the song, and had time to slip under the edge of a flat gravestone.
“In a dear little town in the old County Down,” sang Kitty, as she approached the gate, “You must linger way down in my heart. / Though it never was grand, / It is my fairyland . . .” She paused to unlatch the gate, and carefully relatch it behind her, before she went on: “In a wonderful world apart.” Arrietty, peering out from under the lip of the gravestone, saw that Kitty, as she strolled along, was swinging a very large key on the forefinger of her right hand. Ah, yes! She suddenly remembered that this was the hour that Kitty Whitlace always went down to the church for a last look round and to lock up the collecting box in the solid old press for the night. Swiftly, she slid out from under the gravestone and between the palings of the gate.
Her mother and father looked grave when they had heard her story. They seemed shaken and appalled at the narrowness of their escape. There was no crowing by Pod about his unheeded warnings to Homily. Nor did she concede, as she half longed to, how right those warnings had proved. This was no time for cheap triumphs or recriminations. They were safe now, and that was all that mattered. But what a near thing it had been!
“How desperate they must have been, those Platters!” Pod said at last.
