Tom's Midnight Garden

by Philippa Pearce

  ‘So sad about Abel,’ said Hatty, mysteriously.

  ‘Sad?’

  ‘The whole family is a sad one. But you must promise not to tell, if I tell you.’

  Tom said nothing, and Hatty went straight on.

  ‘He had just one brother, and they were together in the fields one day—it was just before Abel became gardener here. His brother was very jealous of him, and one day, in the fields, they fought. Well, really, his brother just attacked Abel—with a weapon—murderously.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He killed Abel—that is, of course, he very nearly killed him. There was a great deal of blood. It lay smoking on the ground of the field.’

  There was a horrified silence; and then Tom said suddenly, ‘What was Abel’s brother’s name?’

  ‘Really, I don’t remember,’ said Hatty, looking away from Tom at a bird in the sky.

  ‘Was his brother’s name Cain?’ asked Tom. Hatty pretended not to have heard him. This was particularly irritating to Tom, as it was what he had to suffer from all the other people in the garden. ‘Because the story of Cain and Abel is in the Bible, and Cain really killed Abel. I don’t believe this Abel who gardens here has anything to do with the Bible Abel—except that he was called after him. I don’t believe this Abel ever had a brother who tried to murder him.’

  ‘Suppose I told you that Susan had told me—and Susan is Abel’s sweetheart? Or suppose I told you that Abel himself told me, as a secret?’

  ‘I’m not sure you don’t tell fibs,’ said Tom; and even then he knew that he was choosing a mild word, to be kind to Hatty. ‘I dare you to go to Abel now, and ask him whether he has a brother who tried to murder him!’

  ‘I shan’t ever—ever—tell you any more secrets—ever!’ Hatty cried passionately; but Tom knew how much to fear that. Meanwhile, she did not take up his challenge to have the matter out with Abel, and Tom took this as permission to disbelieve her story. It was only a step from that to disbelieving that Hatty herself was the Princess she claimed to be.

  Yet it was true that she had made this garden a kind of kingdom.

  XI

  The River to the Sea

  ‘I meant to ask Hatty questions about the garden,’ Tom wrote to Peter, ‘but somehow I forgot.’ He always forgot. In the daytime, in the Kitsons’ flat, he thought only of the garden, and sometimes he wondered about it: where it came from, what it all meant. Then he planned cunning questions to put to Hatty, that she would have to answer fully and without fancy; but each night, when he walked into the garden, he forgot to be a detective, and instead remembered only that he was a boy and this was the garden for a boy and that Hatty was his playmate.

  There was always so much to do in the garden. They were to build a tree-house in one of the yew-trees, as soon as Hatty could spy out some floor boarding for them; in the meantime, there were bows and arrows.

  Hatty had said wistfully that Hubert and James and Edgar used to play at forest outlaws, with bows and arrows made in the garden.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’ asked Tom.

  ‘They said I was too young; and, then, when I was old enough, they said they were too old.’

  ‘Well, why didn’t you play by yourself? You could make your own bow and arrows.’

  ‘I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. At least, I think I know how to make arrows, because James once showed me—they’re easy; but not a bow.’

  Then Tom told Hatty to get a sharp knife. She went indoors and came back with a kitchen-knife hidden under her pinafore. Directed by Tom, she hacked free a suitable stave of yew; it was unseasoned wood, but they could not help that. Then Hatty trimmed it roughly, and notched it round at either end for the bow string. She was clumsy with the knife at first, and Tom had even to explain to her about cutting always away from herself for safety.

  When the yew stave was ready at last, Hatty found that she had not the strength to bend it and string it. Tom could not help her; and in the end she went to Abel.

  Before stringing her bow for her, Abel examined its knifework.

  ‘You did this, Miss Hatty?’

  ‘Yes, indeed I did.’

  ‘Aye, but who taught you to do it?’

  ‘Someone.’

  ‘Well, whoever it was taught you—take care he don’t teach you trouble with it.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Trouble for yourself, Miss Hatty.’ Abel gave her a long stare, which Tom, watching from a distance, could not understand. Then Abel strung the bow, as Hatty had asked.

  Arrows were easy to make, and Hatty—as she had said—knew how. She sought out the straight, unknotted wands from among the old wood of the nut stubs. One end of each hazel-wand she trimmed and then notched, to fit on to the bow-string. The other end she capped and weighted with a short piece of elder. The cousins had always used elder, it seemed: you pushed the tip of the arrow into the elder pith until it held fast.

  Tom wanted to have the arrows feathered; but Hatty was impatient to use them as they were, and Tom gave way. His only grief was that he could never shoot the arrows for himself. However, he gave advice.

  He wanted Hatty to shoot at birds, but she refused, although—as he pointed out with truth—there was not the slightest danger of her ever hitting them. Instead, Hatty shot up into the air: she liked to shoot, and then screw up her eyes and watch the thin line of the arrow against the dazzling blue of the perpetual summer sky.

  They lost four arrows in the tree-tops, from Hatty’s shooting upwards at random; and then the fifth arrow fell through the greenhouse roof.

  The only witness of the accident, fortunately, was Abel; and he seemed to be on their side. In silence, he fetched a broom, to sweep up the broken glass, and a ladder and a spare pane of glass and some putty. When he had done the repair and had come down the ladder again, fear lifted from Hatty like a cloud—Tom could see that.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to Abel. ‘Aunt won’t even know.’

  ‘No,’ said Abel. Then he said, with deliberation, ‘But do you remember what I told you of.’ It was not a question; it was not an order; rather, it was a warning, heavily foreboding.

  ‘You mean,’ said Hatty, after a moment’s thought, ‘about being taught trouble?’

  Abel simply nodded, and walked away.

  The next trouble they got themselves—or rather Hatty—into, was something from whose consequences Abel was powerless to save. The trouble had its first cause far back in their anxiety not to do more damage in the garden by arrow shooting. To avoid that, Hatty started a practice of shooting over the garden-hedge into the meadow beyond; then she and Tom would worm their way through the hedge tunnel, to retrieve their arrow.

  They did no harm by going over the meadow, for it was already grazed close by cows. The search rather held up the archery; but Tom enjoyed the expeditions. So did Hatty; and, once the arrow was found, the river that bounded the meadow drew her like a charm. She even braved the geese in order to reach the river-bank.

  The geese had goslings with them, now, and always fought a spirited rearguard action in their defence. Tom and Hatty did not want to drive them; but they did want to reach the river. They advanced slowly—Hatty slightly in the rear; the goslings steered far ahead, squeaking and making for the river, and the two geese went with them, and then, last of all, came the gander. He lurched along, his voice calling angrily, the feathers of his long neck rutted with anger, his head turning now to one side, now to the other, so that one eye was always backward-looking on his enemies. Every so often, he would slew round altogether and raise himself high to front them, and then suddenly drop his head and neck forward and down, almost level with the ground, and begin a snake-like run at Tom, hissing. It was always Tom he ran at, because by then Hatty would be well behind Tom and concealed by him as far as was possible.

  The gander’s run stopped short of Tom. He sheered off at the last instant, and went back to his waddling; he caught up with the geese and goslings and followed them, on the look-out,
as before.

  By this progress, the whole gaggle in time reached the river and launched themselves upon it. Then they swam up and down in the water—the elders squawking protests, the goslings rather forgetting the danger they were supposed to have been in. Tom and Hatty sat down on the river-bank, or wandered by it.

  Hatty loved the river, but Tom was not very much impressed by it: he had seen other, bigger rivers; Hatty had not.

  ‘This isn’t big, for a river,’ he said. ‘And it looks shallow, and it has weeds in it.’

  But Hatty, facing downstream, would say: ‘You should see it farther down.’

  ‘Have you?’ asked Tom.

  ‘No, but I’ve heard tell. The boys bathe in it only a little farther downstream, where there are pools; and they fish. It gets bigger as it flows downstream. It flows down to Castleford, and then it flows to Ely, and then it flows down and down into the sea, at last. So they say.’

  ‘All rivers flow into the sea,’ said Tom; but it was this particular river—the only one that she knew—that interested Hatty. She gazed eagerly downstream, as though she envied the waters their endless journeying.

  ‘And sometimes, Tom, the river is big even here. Sometimes, in winter and spring, there are floods, and then the water brims right up the banks, and overflows them and comes flooding over this very meadow.’

  ‘Hatty,’ said Tom, curiously, ‘if you like this river, why don’t you go bathing in it, where the others do? Or why don’t you paddle and wade here? Or you could get a boat and go downstream for yourself, and see where the river goes to.’

  Hatty looked at Tom, startled, and said that she wasn’t allowed in the meadow at all, just because of the river running by it. Her aunt said she might get her clothes muddied, or wet; or—most troublesome of all for everybody—she might even manage to get herself drowned.

  Reminded in this way of her aunt, Hatty would jump up in a frightened flurry, and say she must get back into the garden; and nothing that Tom could say would dissuade her. She made her way quickly back over the meadow to the gap in the hedge. Tom followed. As the two of them left the river-side, all the geese and goslings came to land again, and clambered on to the bank. The three elders, and especially the gander, watched Tom and Hatty sharply. On each occasion they were there to see them take the secret way through the hedge.

  The geese could not exactly be blamed for what followed. No, if anything, the arrow-shooting was to blame. The geese simply used their beady eyes to see the way that Tom and Hatty went with the retrieved arrow, and then, later, went that way themselves. Their motive was almost certainly curiosity and greed—kitchen-garden greed; not malice.

  XII

  The Geese

  The geese must have started their procession through the hedge into the garden soon after sun-up one day, for, when the dew was still thick on the grass of the lawn, there they were. Tom had stolen down from the flat at about midnight as usual; he had opened the hall-door, to find early morning outside in the garden; that had not surprised him, but the sight of the geese had.

  The two geese and the gander raised their necks as usual to stare at him, but the goslings paid no attention: they rambled over the lawn with uncertain interest; they plucked at the grass a little; one lowered his head to sip the dew. Several curved, white breast-feathers lay on the lawn, like little boats; and—far worse—there were one or two dark-green goose-messes.

  ‘What will they say?’ thought Tom, meaning Abel and Hubert and James and Edgar and Susan the housemaid and the severe woman whom he guessed to be Hatty’s aunt—all the people he knew of. Hatty he did not include among the others, because he knew she must be indirectly responsible for this—she and her secret way through the hedge. Of course, Tom was to blame too: he admitted that freely to himself, and would have admitted it as freely to anyone who could have heard his voice.

  There were soon others to see the geese besides Tom. First of all, Abel came along one of the paths to the lawn: he halted; his blue eyes opened very wide, and his mouth too, but he stood speechless.

  Then the sash of one of the bedroom windows went up, and Tom heard a commanding voice that he was sure belonged to Hatty’s aunt. She called to Abel and asked what the geese were doing there—although at that moment it was only too plain to see—and what he was going to do and how they had got there anyway and especially—Tom’s heart sank—who was to blame.

  Abel began methodically to answer at least the first two questions, but, in the middle, the window was slammed down. There was a commotion of voices and footsteps upstairs, then coming down the stairs. It sounded like the whole household coming. Tom took cover behind a tree: in this kind of situation, the instinct to hide over-rode all his certainty of being unseen. He even felt uneasy that, in taking up his position, he had had to cross Abel’s line of vision for an instant.

  Soon enough, they all came hurrying out of the house, on to the doorstep. Hatty was with them, attracted by the excitement, and not realizing its significance for herself. Hubert, James and Edgar hovered in the forefront, ready for action.

  ‘Don’t hurry them,’ Abel was calling from the other side of the lawn. ‘We’ll drive ’em out into the orchard, where they can’t do harm, and then I’ll get ’em round into that old meadow again.’

  Now Pincher the dog had arrived, last of all. He pushed his way through the legs of the group on the doorstep, and stood before them.

  ‘Get the dog away,’ called Abel. As he spoke he was slowly moving forward upon the geese, the three boys began the same movement, herding the geese in the direction of the door into the orchard. Nobody paid attention to Abel’s warning about the dog; after all, he was remaining quietly upon the doorstep. Tom, however, could see that he had begun to shiver with excitement: he would not be able to restrain himself for long.

  The geese were allowing themselves to be moved along, their heads high and ceaselessly turning, the goslings going ahead. The gaggle was suspicious, nervous, on the brink of panic. A sudden rush and barking of Pincher pushed them over that edge into a kind of goose-hell, that was thereupon let loose. At once, instead of two geese and a gander, there seemed to be a dozen, making the noise of a hundred. White and grey wings at the stretch seemed to bar the whole lawn, and flailed the air. Geese, gander and goslings ran in the confusion of anger or terror, trampling over flower-beds, trampling over their own messes, trampling over each other—Tom saw the gander at one moment making a stand in defence of his young, with his enormous flat foot squarely on the back of one of them. Luckily, a large webbed foot is by no means as dangerous as a boot, and the gosling looked hardly flatter—though more flurried—afterwards.

  Altogether, the only damage—but it remained considerable—was to the flower-beds and the lawn. Even the dog had had the sense to run clean through the storm of snapping beaks and round the outskirts and into the house again, its tail between its legs. Abel and the boys drew back a little, too: a frenziedly angry gander, with his wives by his side, and his goslings behind him and even under him, is a daunting sight.

  So they waited until the gaggle had a little calmed itself; then—much more cautiously this time—they began to herd again. Hatty ran ahead to open the orchard door.

  Tom stayed in hiding. There was nothing to be seen now except the devastated lawn, and, on the doorstep, one person remaining—Hatty’s aunt. Tom had thought her stern-looking before; he liked the expression of her face even less now.

  From their different positions, she and Tom heard what was going on. The goose-drivers reached the orchard door, and evidently the geese were safely got through, for there was a cry of triumph from one of the boys, and then the slamming shut of the door.

  Then Tom expected to see them all coming back to the house; but they did not. He realized, in a moment, that they were making their way to the meadow-side of the garden, to find out how the geese had got in at all. As they went, there came occasionally the sound of a lamenting cry from Abel. Then their voices were heard along the mead
ow hedge. Then, at last, they reappeared on the lawn.

  Hatty was not with them. Tom guessed that, now she knew her share of the blame, she had gone into hiding.

  As the others came across the lawn, Abel raised his voice in the same deep, sad cry: he spoke of lettuces ripped to pieces by the geese, and of other plunderings; of seedlings trampled and broken; of goose-messes where they were least desired. And then, in answer to a sharp question from his mistress, he told of the gap and the tunnel in the hedge, through which the geese must have come.

  ‘How they made that way unbeknownst is more than I know, unless the Devil himself taught them!’ said Abel, with a grieving wonder.

  ‘They didn’t make it,’ said Edgar suddenly. ‘Hatty did.’ It was only a guess, Tom was sure, but everyone saw at once the likelihood of the idea.

  Abel stopped speaking abruptly, as though his mind had to go into reverse on the subject. The others were quiet too—so quiet that Tom, even from the distance of his tree, could hear the breathing of Hatty’s aunt: it had become heavy and rasping.

  ‘Harriet!’ she called, so loudly and harshly that the sound was not like a woman’s voice at all.

  Hatty came out from hiding and walked across the lawn to her aunt, not quickly, not slowly. Her face was white, so that her eyes and hair appeared blacker than ever. Her face was quite white—Tom realized afterwards that even her lips had been colourless too.

  She stopped in front of her aunt. Her aunt did not ask whether she had made the gap and the tunnel, and why; she asked none of the questions that Tom had expected; she asked no questions at all. She said: ‘You are to blame.’

  Hatty did not speak: it seemed to Tom that she could not. All the persons that her fancy had ever brought into this garden—Biblical heroes and fairies and the people of legend and hearsay and her own imagination—all her friends fell away from her now. Even Tom could not speak for her or lift a finger to help her.

  He turned his face away, because he expected Hatty’s aunt to strike her; but she did not. She spoke to Hatty instead: she called Hatty a charity-child, a thankless pauper that she had received into her home as a duty to her late husband, whose niece Hatty was; she said that only the claims of blood had induced her to take this mistaken pity upon Hatty; she had expected Hatty to be grateful and dutiful and obedient; and, instead, she was none of these things, but an expense and a shame to her aunt and her cousins—a liar, a criminal, a monster.