Mistress Masham's Repose

by T. H. White

  Poor little forlorn hope! They lacked the wise counsels of their kidnaped dominie, who would certainly have shown them that the odds against them were too great, but it was brave of them to come to save him all the same.

  After the Governess had described all this from her spy hole, the Vicar said: “M-m-m-m.”

  “I will trouble you,” said he later, “to extinguish the electric light.

  “And now that we are in the dark,” he added, “you will kindly shut and latch the window.”

  When this was done, they sat down on either side of Maria, each gripping a pigtail, and Mr. Hater hummed.

  “This time,” said he, “there must be no mistake.”

  “No confusion.”

  “Our object, I presume, is to impound as many of these minnikins as possible, for future profit. How shall we set about it?”

  “Might I offer a suggestion?”

  “What?”

  “The minnikins, as you so ably dubbed them, are, as I know from sad experience, armed with such minnified weapons as, though fragile, can make a painful puncture.”

  “The fact had not escaped me.”

  “Grabbing by handfuls, if we leave aside the fact that hands when full would hold but few at best, might seem an occupation comparable to catching porcupines?”

  “M-m-m-m-m.”

  “But with a broom, rapidly brushing all before us, they tumbling upside down and separated from us by a lengthy handle, we might roll up a regiment or two without mishap, and clap a bucket on them?”

  “Bravo, Miss Brown! We find these brooms and buckets, creep out by different routes, you west, I east. We take the line in flank, one at each end, and sweep toward the middle. Their limbs, though bruised, will not be permanently harmed by bristles. They, in confusion, tumbled up and over, will prove unable to deploy their weapons....”

  “We with our brooms and buckets....”

  “Saucepans....”

  “Anything with lids....”

  “Collect our spoils! And sell ’em! But first, the child must be disposed of.”

  They winked at each other for some time over Maria’s head, which she had to keep down because they were pulling her hair so, and made wide mouths or big eyes or complicated gestures, in their efforts to discuss the plan. Finally they nodded agreement.

  “Our cherub,” said the Vicar sarcastically, summing up the winks, “must be conducted to her chamber, there locked in. I will assume this pleasant duty. You, Miss Brown, shall look for suitable receptacles, me being absent. Come, dear child, your arm.”

  He was dragging her out in the dark, still by the pigtails, when Maria opened her mouth to yell. It was her last chance to warn the people about the brooms.

  But the Vicar could see in the dark, like a cat. Before she could make a sound, his puffy hand was clapped across her mouth. They went in silence.

  In the bedroom, her captor proved to be a thoughtful scoundrel. He threw her on the bed with a wheeze, and stood in the middle of the linoleum, tapping his teeth with one blunt fingernail.

  “Our pet,” said he, “is not without intelligence, indeed resource. Merely to lock the door would be to leave her practically at liberty. Now, let me see. Firstly, the troops are camped before the window, although some stories down. We therefore shut the window, so, and to secure the catch, m-m-m-m, we bend the metal with this poker, thus, using a grown-up’s strength, and still remembering to remove the poker when we leave. Just so. No child will shift it now, especially without the poker. Next we pause, consider. For instance, a resourceful maiden, m-m-m-m, standing well lighted at a window, though unopened, might by some sign or gesture warn our quarry. We therefore draw the electric bulb from out its socket, thus—the merest twist removes it—and we find: why, that the room’s in darkness! No amount of clicks upon the switch, manipulated by those childish fingers, will now illumine Lilliput. What more? Locked in, unlighted, windowless, high up.... I think we may withdraw. Sleep well, Maria.”

  She listened to the key being turned in the lock, and waited tensely while the Vicar chuckled out of hearing. Then she leaped off the bed like an arrow, took the water jug from the washstand, and threw it through the window. So far as bending catches went, she was not the fool he thought her.

  The glass went outward with a jangling crash, followed, long after, by a thump as the enameled ewer hit the terrace. This thump was in the middle of a tinkling shower of musical meteors, made by the falling glass. There was a thin high shout from all the army down below.

  She leaned out from the hole and yelled,

  “Go away! They are coming from different doors, with brooms, to sweep you up. Don’t go together. Scatter. Everybody go his own way, till you meet at home. Go quick! They are coming now!”

  She could hear them shouting back, so narrow a sound, but she could not hear the words.

  “Yes, I am safe. Quite safe. I am free. But go! Go at once! Spread! Run! If anybody is followed, don’t lead them to you-know-where. Stand still, as if they were owls. They will miss you. But go, run, every way, not all together! I am safe. They won’t hurt me. They want to track me till I lead them to you. The Schoolmaster is not here.

  “And, by the way,” screamed Maria, for they seemed to be fading already, “don’t bring me food! They feed me now! And don’t expect me in the evenings!”

  She ended on a positive shriek, for fear that she would not be heard, just as Miss Brown and her Führer came charging up the terrace.

  Too late.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  THEY came upstairs with livid faces. The Vicar’s was plum-colored with rage and with the climb; Miss Brown’s was pallid, with scarlet nostrils. They were almost too furious to speak. They had heard what she was shouting through the window. They replaced the electric light bulb and sat down.

  “Maria,” said Miss Brown, “listen to Mr. Hater.”

  The Vicar said: “These dwarfs are worth a fortune in cold money. Do you understand? They are worth enough money to make you a rich girl, and to give an old age of peaceful security to poor Miss Brown here, who is always doing her best for you. I do not mention myself. Where do they live?”

  Maria looked at him.

  “Do you understand that if they could be sold, the shameful debts of your ancestors would be paid off to many a ruined tradesman, and Malplaquet rescued from disgrace?”

  “I thought they were being paid from your allowance.”

  “You are a wicked girl. Where do they live?”

  She folded her hands.

  “Maria, you are to tell the Vicar where they live.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Do you understand that it is evil to look God’s mercies in the face? You are throwing the gift horse in His mouth. God has sent these creatures to help us in our difficulties, and by your thankless stubbornness you are giving an insult to God. Where do they live?”

  She shut her lips.

  Miss Brown stood up and came waddling to stand over her.

  “You are a naughty girl. You are impertinent. You had better tell the Vicar, or you will regret it. You know what I mean.”

  When there was no answer to this, or to anything else, Mr. Hater lost patience. He did not even want to hurt Maria, he was so hot with avarice. He wanted the People.

  “If you will not tell, you will be locked up. Do you hear? Locked up without your dinner. And punished. Punished till you do tell. Such obstinacy is sinful, monstrous. It is selfish. You are a naughty, wicked, stubborn, selfish girl!

  “Very well,” he said, when there was no reply. “She can stay in this room till she speaks, and you, Miss Brown ...”

  The Governess said: “Cook comes to this room, Mr. Hater, and there might be talk.”

  “Then she must be locked in some other room, where Cook won’t come, and we must say that she has gone away.”

  “To stay with an aunt.”

  “That will do very well. What room do you suggest?”

  “There is always,” said Miss B
rown most sweetly, “the dungeon.”

  Everybody ought to know the dungeon at Malplaquet, the one which historians have mentioned in so many works. It was an excavation extending backward in time, far beyond the First Duke, far into the misty past which saw the Tower of London rise.

  The Duke’s ancestors had been some Nova Scotia baronets, who had dwelt since the days of James I in an ancient Norman castle, which had once stood on some of the ground that was now covered by the ballroom floor. They had fallen out with Cromwell, who had blown the castle up, and the Duke had used the stones when he started to erect his palace, pulling down the rest. The only parts which he had been unable to pull down had been the dungeons, for they had been down already. So he had left them for wine cellars, keeping the main one in its original state. He had thought it a curio, owing to its being Gothick.

  It was lit by red light, through a small window which had crimson glass, in a wall about twenty feet thick. The window was barred, and the effect of the color on the stone arches of the Norman roof was better than anything in the Chamber of Horrors.

  The furniture, where it was not red, was coal black. It consisted of instruments of torture, which had not been sold at the sale, because there had been no demand for them. The floor was covered with rushes, except where sand or sawdust were needed, to soak up blood.

  In one corner stood the Rack: the improved pattern, perfected by the villain Topcliffe. Written on the side of it, in vermilion letters, were the awful words of the warrant to torture poor Guido Fawkes:

  PER GRADUS AD IMA.

  The opposite corner held a German instrument called the Virgin of Nuremberg, which consisted of an upright coffin, shaped like a woman. Its lid opened like a door, and was covered with six-inch spikes, arranged so that they would run into people at various places when they stood inside the coffin and the door was shut.

  A third corner held the machine known as the Manacles, which happened to be the one on which Peacham had been tormented in 1614, in the presence of Francis Bacon—when he had been examined “before torture, in torture, between tortures, and after torture.” Its inscription said:

  PAINE IS GAINE.

  The fourth corner held the Block. It was black like the others, but covered with a pall of scarlet velvet. When this was lifted, the scars in the wood could be seen, where the ax had bitten deep. The ax itself lay across the pall, a ruby flash of steel, and this was the very one which had been used to decapitate King Charles I. It had been wielded by Richard Brandon—or “Young Gregory,” as he had been called, to distinguish him from his father, “Old Gregory,” who had also been an executioner. The same sure hand had used the same ax on Strafford, Laud, Holland, Hamilton, and Capel, all lords, and little can these martyrs have paused to reflect how lucky they were, to get the job done by an artist who took himself seriously. For Young Gregory had trained from earliest childhood, by chopping off the heads of stray cats. It was not so with that scoundrel Ketch, who took five whacks to decapitate the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth, and even then he had to finish him off with a penknife.

  Next to the ax, in a small crystal casket, there was half the fourth cervical vertebra of King Charles, the other half having been stolen from the King’s coffin in 1813, by a doctor called Sir Henry Halford.

  Across the casket, somebody had engraved the famous quotation:

  In the middle of the main wall, opposite the massy door, there was an enormous fireplace, for heating branding irons. Opposite the window, in the darkest recess, there was a pile of thighbones, skulls, and so forth.

  Prisoners had scratched their last remarks upon the walls. The Little Princes, who were finished off at Malplaquet and not in the Tower, had written “Adiew,” “Adeiw.” A witch had inscribed, before they burned her, “I come, Graymalkin,” and some homesick Scot, tired by too much thumbscrew, had suggested: “East, Quhest, Hame Ys Best.” An anonymous villein had written: “yis hurte me mo than it hurtës yow.”

  They dragged Maria struggling to the gloomy chamber, a secure hold which Cook would never dream of searching, and they actually chained her with one of the handcuffs, when they remembered her resourcefulness with the water jug. Of course they did not intend to use the instruments of torture on her, but they did intend to find out where the People lived.

  “If,” said the Vicar finally, looking at her with a thoughtful hum, “the child insists on being sullen, she must be punished till she speaks. Naughty children should be whipped.”

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE Professor was sitting at the end of his vegetable garden, under a marble monument to the Tragic Muse. He was chopping wood. The other side of the monument was to the Comic Muse, so that he had two wide mouths above his head, one laughing and the other howling. It was to Congreve, or to somebody of that sort. The Professor was chopping with a sixpenny hatchet from Woolworth’s, where he did his shopping, and he had a one-and-threepenny metal hacksaw beside him, counting the cost of blades, with which he had managed to fell a small blackthorn for firing. His head was buzzing with schemes.

  The first scheme was to work his passage to London as a bus conductor, where, perhaps, they might be likely to have a set of Du Cange in the British Museum Reading Room. In connection with this scheme, he was certain that Tripharium meant either “trefoliated” or else “tripartite”; but the trouble was that the manuscript could bear either construction, with different results.

  The second scheme was, to save up until he could afford a penny fishhook, and then to ask permission from Maria to fish in the lakes at Malplaquet. His mouth watered at the thought of the fishes he might catch—perch perhaps—and of how he would eat them grilled, on slices of bread and butter. He could not afford to buy a rod or line, but he was planning to use a sapling of ash, with some string from a parcel which he had once received, tied to the end, and the only difficulty was to save up a penny for the hook. He felt so greedy when he thought of the hot perch that he almost decided to sell one of his first-folio Shakespeares, to get the money.

  The third scheme was about making some parsnip wine in the kitchen copper.

  The fourth was about touching the Vicar for a testimonial, so that he could go to Buckingham Palace and ask to be made Prime Minister. He felt sure that a person who ruled the whole nation would be expected to be an educated man, and, as he had been educating himself for the last sixty years, he thought that there would probably be a chance of getting the job. He argued that people who had spent their lives leading revolutions, or killing other humans, or howling out lies on election platforms, could have had very little time for education, and thus that his own weary life of study might have put him ahead of them in this respect.

  Perhaps the maddest of his schemes was that, when he had been made the Premier, he would choose educated people to be his ministers, just as one chooses a trained dentist to pull one’s teeth out, instead of going to the nearest quack at a street corner who likes to scream from the top of a tub that he “opposes toothache.” The Professor was silly enough to think that if doctors had to pass examinations before they could cut out his appendix, then members of parliament ought to pass examinations before they could rule his life.

  He was well mixed up with all these schemes when the garden gate was pushed open, and Cook appeared. She was dressed in a brownish-gray alpaca dress, with a serviceable hat pinned on, and she carried a Rexine shopping bag which bulged. She was on her best behavior, but determined to do her duty. She had sadly left her beloved Captain at home, with tears on both sides, because she knew that the Professor did not get on with dogs.

  He stopped his chopping and hurried along the path between the currant bushes, looking hungrily at the Rexine bag. As he came, he cried out joyfully: “Ah, Mrs. Noakes, good day, good day! You are welcome to the Ridings! Pray do not ring the bell! It does not ring! We are enjoying very seasonable weather! Yes, yes! Some small fault in the mechanism, I believe! I must buy a gong! It is due to the sun being in Aries!”

  Cook said: “There
now.”

  “I assure you that I am correct. The Zodiac ... But I am leaving you to stand upon the doorstep without a welcome. We must enter the cottage before embarking on abstruser themes. Let me see. Just so. The door is locked, we notice.”

  “I only come, Sir, if you please, on account of what I was desirous ...”

  “But love laughs, Mrs. Noakes, ha! ha! at locksmiths. I have my own methods, Watson, that is, er, Mrs. Noakes. The pot of geraniums! Whenever I lock myself out of my cottage, I am careful to conceal the means of ingress in a place known only to myself. Now, Mrs. Noakes, if you will kindly look the other way for just one moment, I will extract the key from under this pot of geraniums, where I keep it for secrecy, you see, and we shall be inside the edifice before we can say Tom Robinson. Tom? Perhaps I am thinking of Crusoe. But even then we ought to call him Kreutznaer. The idiom I am attempting is that we are likely to be there in half a Nippy.”

  Cook said that she was sure she did not wish to intrude upon a gentleman, knowing, as she hoped, what was due to such, and being able from a girl to observe her station....

  The Professor said that it was no intrusion at all, none, in fact a pleasure, an unexpected pleasure, and that, if she could just wait for a moment or so while he tried the key the other way up, as it was, he feared, inclined to be recalcitrant, there was no doubt but what, with a little humoring—which he pronounced without the “H”—a favorable entry would be effected....