During tea the children were quiet, saving up their energy and excitement for the night. Dr Biggin was deep in thought, studying her tea-leaves or pushing the crumbs round on her plate as if she expected to find bits of the Ogru there. Miss Sybilla Bun was cooing to her food, turning the cake dishes round to look at them from all sides, bowing to congratulate the cakes for having risen perfectly. When she was icing them in the kitchen, patting and putting the last touches, the silver sweets or the borders of up-ended almonds, you would have thought she was dressing a child for a party, she talked so lovingly to them. When she came to cut them it was the same again. Her knife hesitated in the air, and always as she was going to cut she widened the slice a little and laughed merrily. So now, if biscuits and rock buns slipped into pockets in provision for the night hours, it was not noticed except that Miss Bun would say with pleased surprise: ‘Oh! the plates are emptying fast! Are you ready for the Praline and Coffee Sponge?’
After tea the children began their map. Ida said they were not to paint any part till they were sure it was right. Then they would put in pictures to show what each island was famous for. They had marked Green Knowe in the middle and continued to extend the river on each side as far as they had gone, marking the boat-houses, the weirs, water-gates and locks. They were able to name Swan Nest Island, Tangle Island, Owl Palace Island, Hermit Island and mark out others that they knew but had not been on. One of these was the large island opposite Green Knowe, where they were going to spend the night, which as yet had no name.
*
AT MIDNIGHT, WHEN Ida woke the two boys, a dusty curtained blackness filled the house, and the cold windowpanes were all that separated them from the void outside. They put on their warmest clothes and crept silently downstairs. Although nobody had told them they were not to go out at midnight, they knew enough of grown-ups to expect to be sent back to bed if they were caught. Creaking floors and old obstinate doors and steep uncarpeted stairs had to be passed, the flashlight travelling from banister to banister till they were down on the brick floor of the hall, where all the scents of the day before were settling as mud settles in still water.
Outside it was less dark, though there was no moon nor any star showing. After a moment or two the earth could just be distinguished from the unbroken cloud of the sky. It was recognizable as a huge dim mass. As the children moved uncertainly along – for Ida would not allow the flashlight because it was cheating – they could not even see the avenue of shaped bushes along the path, though they knew when they were near one because of a looming feeling in the darkness, and a yew smell. The river, however, had a just perceptible glimmer of its own, though where it was reflected from was a mystery. In the boathouse the dark was absolute and the smell of water and rotting wood as powerful as in a forest. The familiar fidgeting of the canoe came to their ears, but they had to feel for its rim with their hands.
It seemed a long way as they paddled across the river in darkness towards a bank they could not see. The sound of the water-gate was magnified to an ominous fall, much too near. It was a relief when the prow of the canoe grounded on the bank. Ida had brought her groundsheet.
‘We’ll sit beside the water-gate,’ she said, ‘and then if we want to talk it will drown our voices. We shan’t be heard.’
Their eyes were getting used to the darkness. They could see the line of foam below the fall, and the bars of the water-gate showed hard and black against the soft sooty ceiling of cloud. They could not see each other except as densities. As they sat and waited they gradually acquired a feeling of the position in space of open ground or trees, and the different kind of openness that was the course of the river.
They huddled together, overcome by the immense solitude. Or perhaps it was not solitude, thought Ida, but rather that the three of them were the only ones who ought not to be there.
‘I am glad we are on this side of the water-gate,’ she said. ‘If Ping’s water snake comes, the gate will keep it on the other side.’
‘You don’t know my water snake,’ said Ping. ‘It will rear up and look over the top bar, and slide its body over length after length, slippery like a water spout, and –’
‘Shut up about your water snake,’ said Oskar. ‘You’ll make it come real.’
‘All right,’ said Ping. ‘Would you rather have a spider as big as a haymaking machine, with curved springy legs coming up one after another, crossing the island now?’
‘Don’t!’ said Ida. ‘That’s worse. Can’t you think of something nice, like your singing fishes?’
‘If it weren’t so cloudy,’ said Oskar, ‘we might see two stars come from outer space and have a collision and make a blaze and falling sparks like a Roman Candle. I don’t know what we expect in this darkness. Even if there were a parliament of badgers we shouldn’t see it. We’d only hear the barks and squeaks. The thing is to listen. We might hear a Litany of worms. Their noses would be as thin as blades of grass and they would sway from side to side in supplication. We shouldn’t see them, of course.’
‘What do you imagine worms would sound like?’
‘Like wind through a keyhole.’
‘Thou knowest that we are but dust,’ said Ida. ‘I wouldn’t like to miss the worms. If we stay here we can’t hear anything but the waterfall. Let’s move to the quietest place, so that if anything comes we shall hear it.’
They walked along the grass till they came to a quiet reach on the far side of the island with a gently sloping bank. There they sat down.
‘What a lovely smell there is everywhere. What can it be? I have smelled it all the time, since we landed here. And when I strain my eyes there is a sort of whitish look in the air.’ Ida put up her hand to brush something away from her hair, then caught it and drew it down to her nose. ‘It’s meadowsweet. This side of the island must be covered with it. How comforting! I am sure only nice things live in meadowsweet.’
They sat and listened. Quiet water sighing; now and then a rustle in the reeds; in the near distance the known weirs and faster currents of the encircling water, in the far distance the screech of young owls among the trees in the churchyard.
Presently Ping said: ‘I can hear something coming.’
They all held their breath. They heard, from a little way off, very slow footfalls, one step at a time with long pauses in between. Ping breathed: ‘This is it.’ Then they saw above the gleam of meadowsweet a crowd of white blurs that moved dreamily up and down.
‘Can it be will-o’-the-wisps?’
‘With footsteps?’
For a while there was nothing but their heart-beats banging in their ears, then suddenly, close at hand, crisp short tugs, here, there and everywhere.
‘Horses!’ said Ida laughing. ‘Hundreds of them! The will-o’-the-wisps are the stars on their foreheads. I never saw them here in the day-time; did you, Ping? This island’s always empty.’
The sky was very slowly growing less dark, as if the cloud ceiling was going up higher leaving less shadow and more space over the featureless earth. Against this space could vaguely be seen the outline of horses’ backs and necks, a big herd moving along together, cropping clover and meadowsweet as they went.
‘Let’s try them with our apples.’ The three children went out to meet the horses, but the herd, without hurrying, without even seeming to notice them, turned aside and could not be met face to face. Running, stalking, cajoling were all in vain. The indifferent creatures kept just out of reach.
Tired, Ping and Oskar threw themselves down on the river bank. ‘Perhaps they’ll come down to drink,’ Oskar said. ‘What we want now is a Word of Power.’
‘Shut up!’ said Ping. ‘I’m listening to the river and doing magic.’
Ida remained standing, her eyes straining after the horses. She caught her breath and seemed to herself to become nothing but a wire for a current of electric attention. Above the line of a horse’s back something had flapped up and blocked out the sky for a minute. And another. And again. And there was a sound to match
it.
‘Ping!’ she cried. ‘What have you done? They are winged.’
And now in the glimmer of the night the horses as if all moved by the same inclination, one after another put up their wings, pointed like yacht sails, and still browsing moved majestically on.
‘Oskar! Ping! Oh, Ping!’
Ping answered, scrambling up from the position where he had been leaning over the river. ‘I asked the river to give me a Word of Power, and it answered over and over again, my own name, HSU.’ As he said it, the leading horse lifted its head in his direction and gave a docile whinny – taken up by all the herd as they too raised their heads and drew forward. Ida remembered the sound for months, trying to describe what it was like. The nearest she could get was the excitement of an orchestra tuning up, with flutes and oboes running up and down above the buzz.
The horses all holding their wings in the same ceremonial position, advanced, the quickened pace of their walking hooves thudding on the grass. They put out their noses with wide flaring nostrils to Ping, who murmured his name to each in turn, and received a reply very like it.
After this they accepted all the children. They let themselves be handled. They nibbled themselves under their wings. They had immensely long manes and tails and their ears twitched like mouse whiskers. As the darkness shifted into less than dark, the children saw each other’s faces and hardly recognized them. Ping stood leaning his head against the leading horse’s neck and its black mane fell round his face so that he looked like a witch girl, his teeth showing white as he smiled with great joy. Oskar looked like a lean prophet absolutely believing the impossible. He was nearly crying. Ida’s grey eyes were black because they were all pupil. She was curled up between the legs of a winged foal that lay on the ground. She looked like a cat that was its stable companion. The musky smell of horse was all round them. The foal smelled young, like a puppy.
At this happy moment the wail of a distant fire siren tore the long silence of the night. Up and down, far and wide, vibrating like panic, it ripped up the space of dreams.
The horses wheeled away from the children and were off, galloping to a flying start, their wings clapping till the air was bruised. When they were airborne, the sound had the pulse and drumming of an express train fading far away – a sound the children had often heard from their beds.
Ida wanted to say that the foal had flown with its long legs hanging down like a mosquito. But none of them dared to speak at all.
It was not until they were back in their own beds and Ida, waking up at normal breakfast time, had stretched her arms and legs and relaxed again into comfort and laziness, that she dared to say:
‘Ping! What did you do with your apple last night?’
‘The horse ate it,’ he replied sitting up in bed golden and slit-eyed. Ida smiled. ‘Mine too,’ she said.
‘Mine too,’ said Oskar into his pillow. So nothing more needed to be said. But when they were dressed, Ping knelt on the floor by the map, and in beautiful strokes with a paint brush he wrote the Chinese for Flying Horse Island.
At breakfast Sybilla Bun remarked: ‘I don’t suppose you children heard the Fire Alarm last night. It gave me quite a fright. I got out of bed to look.’
The children’s eyes all turned to fix her with a questioning gaze.
‘Did you see anything?’ Ping ventured.
‘No. Anyway, the milkman told me it was only a haystack somewhere.’
Dr Biggin had received a letter from somebody called Old Harry, who, as the children already knew, was her chief partner in the excavations they had done in Abyssinia, where tools that seemed to have been made for giants had been found, and a queer bone. Old Harry wanted her to hold a meeting for their Committee at Green Knowe, at which he and she would both read papers. He was also pleased to be able to tell her that, as requested, a bag containing a sample of the much discussed grass, Paradurra megalocephala abyssiniensis Var. Andrewsii would be delivered separately. ‘And here it is,’ said Dr Biggin, picking up and shaking a parcel. ‘My dear,’ she went on, speaking to Sybilla Bun, ‘this is the seed that Old Harry considers the main cereal food of the giants. We think they ate it as a sort of porridge. In quantities, of course. I often wonder if Scotland might not yield some surprises if we dug there. I think if you make a little porridge every day and give it to Ida, we can measure her before and after and see if it adds anything to her stature.’
‘Would it not be better,’ Sybilla said tactlessly, ‘if we gave it to Oskar, as he is growing so much anyway. You would get much more interesting results.’
Dr Biggin was deeply affronted.
‘You have no idea of scientific investigation at all, Sybilla. I specially chose Ida because she is not growing. For one thing, if she does grow it will be as near proof as we could get. For another thing she is much too small so we can afford to experiment with her. It would be an improvement. Whereas the effect on Oskar might be disastrous. He might shoot into a giant before the end of the holidays.’
The children were not sure if this was one of Dr Biggin’s jokes or not, but they could not help laughing. Ping put his hand above his eyes as if gazing up into the sky expecting Oskar’s face to appear there.
Miss Bun was a little hurt too. She lifted the lid off the coffee-pot and inhaled the aroma with closed eyes to restore herself. Then she said: ‘Well, that means that dear Oskar can have some nice real porridge. I don’t imagine,’ she added, twitching her shoulders so that her beads rattled, ‘that the Ogru were good cooks.’
‘The latest theory is that they lived like gods. But I admit we are a long way from having access to any of their recipes. We can guess at some. But where can you get meat on the spit now except in the most expensive restaurants? And then it is only over gas. No flavour of burnt cedar in it. Gas! Pooh! But of course you have never eaten kid cooked under the stars.’
‘Do the stars make it taste?’ asked Ping gravely.
‘Eh? And why not, I should like to know! Now don’t get upset, Sybilla. Nobody in England does better with our wretched modern substitutes. After all, Old Harry has suggested bringing the Committee here for your cooking as much as for anything else.’
Miss Bun was mollified. Smoked salmon, chicken Maryland with dry Hock, crêpes Suzette, melon and ginger ice …
‘It would be nice,’ said Maud Biggin openly winking at the children, ‘if you could make us a kidney risotto with Paradurra megalocephala abyssiniensis. They would be interested.’
Miss Bun grew crimson.
‘I shall do no such thing, Maud. The most I shall do with your miserable grass seeds is a gruel for Ida. It is the domain of medicine, not of good eating. Good eating is an Art.’
After breakfast Ida was solemnly measured, lying on the wooden floor so that she could not cheat by stretching. After that the children were free.
*
THEY STILL FELT that after meeting the winged horses they had had enough excitement for some time. Also, in order to cherish this secret memory and keep it from being rubbed out or discredited by the presence of hum-drum holiday crowds, they decided not to go on the river at all, but simply to cross over the moat into the orchard belonging to Green Knowe, and to spend the day there. Sybilla Bun had even excused them from lunch, giving them a picnic basket, because she wanted to go shopping in preparation for the Committee’s luncheon party.
The orchard itself was an island, connected with the garden by a rickety willow-pattern bridge. It was derelict, the trees were old and leaning. Under them the uncut grass was bulgy and soft like an eiderdown. It was bordered by a thick hedge of hazel and hawthorn and was quite hidden from the river.
The sky was cloudless and the sun beat down with a heat that hushed both birds and humans. Oars squeaked going up the river but the people in the boats were silent, flopping back and saving their energy. The three children lay in the grass and watched the activity taking place there. In this shady world of criss-crossed stalks the heat brought everybody out. Ants, beetles, spi
ders, grasshoppers, butterflies, bees, caterpillars and the rest were all as busy in the crowded space as city dwellers. Some of the caterpillars were so stupid it was maddening to watch them, but the spiders and bees knew exactly what they were doing and wasted no time about it. The butterflies and big sealskin-coated bumble bees were bent on pleasure only and showed that they knew it. Over all, the birds swung and peered and picked off the fattest. The grass grew high round the children’s flattened bed.
‘There’s a little road here,’ said Oskar, gazing into the stalks near his face. ‘It looks as though it might be a mouse road. Yes, it is. There’s one running along it now. It’s his garden path leading to the nest. He’s climbed up the stalks and gone in.’
The children all watched. The harvest mouse took as little notice of them as if they had been calves or foals. The nest was woven round three strong stalks of wild barley. It was hardly as big as a tennis ball and the mouse itself not much bigger than the sealskin-coated bumble bee. He looked all head, tail and hands, and was adorably pretty. He seemed to be collecting stores of grain to take to his mate, who now and again put her head out at the door to wait for him. Inside they could be heard talking in squeaks no louder than you could make with a pair of scissors.
‘Let’s see who can make the best mouse nest,’ said Ida, after they had watched for some time.
They all set to work. Ida had done basket work at school, but all the same she found it difficult and fiddling and very slow. It was not beyond any of them to make the initial platform that bound the three tall stalks together, or to continue as far as an egg-cup shape, but when it came to leaving a hole half-way up for the door and then closing in the roof, they were all beaten. No harvest mouse would have recognized their clumsy efforts as intended nests. Ping’s was made from strong broad green grasses and looked like something a cow had dropped out of its mouth. Ida’s was of straw, hard and spiky like a doll’s linen basket. It was also big enough for a rook.
The Children of Green Knowe Collection Page 16
