by Mary Norton
There was no conversation in the pocket: all four of them felt too dazed. At last Pod, wedged upside down in a corner, freed his mouth from fluff. “You all right, Homily?” he gasped. Homily, tightly interwoven with Spiller and Arrietty, could not quite tell. Pod heard a slight squeak. “Me leg’s gone numb,” said Homily unhappily.
“Not broken, is it?” asked Pod anxiously.
“Can’t feel nothing in it,” said Homily.
“Can you move it?” asked Pod.
There was a sharp exclamation from Spiller as Homily said, “No.”
“If it’s the leg you’re pinching,” remarked Spiller, “stands to reason you can’t move it.”
“How do you know?” asked Homily.
“Because it’s mine,” he said.
The boy’s steps became slower: he seemed to be going uphill; after a while he sat down. The great hand came down amongst them. Homily began to whimper but the fingers slid past her: they were feeling for Spiller. The coat was pulled round and the pocket flap held open, so the boy could peer at them. “You all right, Spiller?” he asked.
Spiller grunted.
“Which is Homily?” asked the boy.
“The noisy one,” said Spiller. “I told you.”
“You all right, Homily?” asked the boy.
Homily, terrified, was silent.
The great fingers came down again, sliding their way into the pocket.
Spiller, standing now with legs apart and back supported against the upright seam called out tersely, “Leave ’em be.”
The fingers stopped moving. “I wanted to see if they were all right,” said the boy.
“They’re all right,” said Spiller.
“I’d like to have ’em out,” the boy went on. “I’d like to have a look at ’em.” He peered downwards at the open pocket. “You’re not dead, are you?” he inquired anxiously. “You b’ain’t none of you dead?”
“How could we say, if we was?” muttered Homily irritably.
“You leave ’em be,” said Spiller again. “It’s warm in here: you don’t want to bring ’em out sudden into the cold. You’ll see ’em often enough,” he consoled the boy, “once we get indoors.”
The fingers withdrew and they were in the dark again: there was a rocking and the boy stood up. Pod, Homily and Arrietty slid the length of the bottom seam of the pocket, fetching up against the opposite corner: it was full of dried bread crumbs, jagged and hard as concrete. “Ouch!” cried Homily unhappily. Spiller, Arrietty noticed, though he swayed on his feet, managed to keep upright: Spiller, she guessed, had traveled by pocket before: the boy was walking again now, and the coat swayed with a more predictable rhythm. “After a while,” Arrietty thought, “I’ll have a go at standing myself.”
Pod experimentally broke off a jagged piece of breadcrumb which, after patient sucking, slowly began to dissolve. “I’ll try a bit of that,” said Homily, holding out her hand; she had revived a little and was feeling peckish.
“Where’s he taking us?” she asked Spiller after a while.
“Round the wood and over the hill.”
“Where he lives with his grandpa?”
“That’s right,” admitted Spiller.
“I ain’t ever heard tell much about gamekeepers,” said Homily, “nor what they’d be apt to do with—a borrower, say. Nor what sort of boy this is neither. I mean,” she went on in a worried voice, “my mother-in-law had an uncle once who was kept in a tin box with four holes in the lid and fed twice a day by an eye-dropper . . .”
“He ain’t that sort of boy,” said Spiller.
“Whatever’s an eye-dropper?” asked Pod: he took it to be some strange sort of craft or profession.
“Then there was Lupy’s cousin, Oggin, you remember,” went on Homily. “They made a regular kind of world for him in the bottom of an old tin bath in the out-house, grass, pond and all. And they gave him a cart to ride in and a lizard for company. But the sides of the bath were good and slippery: they knew he couldn’t get out . . .”
“Lupy?” repeated Spiller wonderingly. “Wouldn’t be two called that?”
“This one married my brother Hendreary,” said Homily. “Why,” she exclaimed with sudden excitement, “you don’t say you know her!”
The pocket had stopped swaying: they heard some metallic sound and the sliding squeak of a latch.
“I know her all right,” whispered Spiller. “She makes my winter clothes.”
“Quiet,” urged Pod, “we’ve arrived.” He had heard the sound of an opening door and could smell an indoor smell.
“You know LUPY?” Homily persisted, unaware that even the pocket had become darker. “But what are they doing? And where are they living—she and Hendreary? We thought they was eaten by foxes, children and all . . .”
“Quiet, Homily,” implored Pod. Strange movements seemed to be going on, doors were opening and shutting; so stealthily the boy was walking the pocket now hung still.
“Tell us, Spiller, quick,” went on Homily; but she dropped her voice to an obedient whisper. “You must know! Where are they living now?”
Spiller hesitated—in the semi-darkness he seemed to smile.
“They’re living here,” he said.
The boy now seemed to be kneeling.
As the fingers came down again feeling amongst them, Homily let out a cry. “It’s all right,” whispered Pod as she burrowed back among the crumbs. “Keep your head—we got to come out sometime.”
Spiller went first; he sailed away from them—nonchalantly astride a finger, without even bothering to glance back. Then it was Arrietty’s turn. “Oh, my goodness me . . .” muttered Homily, “where ever will they put her?”
Pod’s turn next; but Homily went with him. She scrambled aboard at the last moment by creeping under the thumb. There was hardly time to feel sick (it was the swoosh through the empty air which Homily always dreaded) so deftly and gently they found themselves set down.
A gleam of firelight struck the tiny group as they stood beside the hearth, against a high, wooden wall: it was, they discovered later, the side of the log-box. They stood together—close and scared, controlling their longing to run. Spiller, they noticed, had disappeared.
The boy, on one knee, towered above them—a terrifying mountain of flesh. The firelight flickered on his downturned face: they could feel the draught of his breathing.
“It’s all right,” he assured them, “you’ll be all right now.” He was staring with great interest, as a collector would stare at a new-found specimen. His hand hovered above them as though he longed to touch them, to pick one of them up, to examine each more closely.
Nervously Pod cleared his throat. “Where’s Spiller?” he asked.
“He’ll be back,” said the boy. After a moment, he added, “I got six altogether in there.”
“Six what?” asked Homily nervously.
“Six borrowers,” said the boy, “I reckon I got the best collection of borrowers in two counties. And—” he added, “me grand-dad ain’t seen one, though his eyes is sharp enough. Yet he ain’t ever seen a borrower.”
Pod cleared his throat again. “He ain’t supposed to,” he said.
“Some I got in there—” the boy jerked his head toward the log-box, “I never sees neither. Scared. Some folks say you can’t never tame ’em. You can give ’em the earth, ’tis said, but they’ll never come out and be civil.”
“I would,” said Arrietty.
“Now you behave yourself,” snapped Homily, alarmed.
“Spiller would, too,” said Arrietty.
“Spiller’s different,” replied Homily with a nervous glance toward the boy—Spiller, she felt, was the boy’s curator: the go-between of this rare collection. “Gets so much a head, I wouldn’t wonder?”
“Here he is,” said Arrietty, looking toward the corner of the log-box.
Noiselessly, he had come upon them.
“She won’t come out,” said Spiller to the boy.
“Oh,” exclaimed Homily, “does he mean Lupy?”
No one answered: Spiller stood silent, looking up at the boy. The boy frowned thoughtfully; he seemed disappointed. He looked them over once more, examining each of them from head to foot as though loath to see them go; he sighed a little. “Then, take ’em in,” he said.
Chapter Twenty
“Long looked for comes at last.”
Vasco da Gama rounded Cape of Good Hope, 1497
[Extract from Arrietty’s Diary and Proverb Book, November 20th]
THEY FILED IN through the gothic-shaped hole in the wainscot, a little nervous, a little shy. It was shadowy inside, like a cave; disappointingly it felt uninhabited and smelled of dust and mice. “Oh, dear,” muttered Homily incredulously, “is this how they live . . . ?” She stopped suddenly and picked up some object from the floor. “My goodness,” she whispered aside excitedly to Pod. “Do you know what this is?” and she brandished something whiteish under his nose.
“Yes,” said Pod, “it’s a bit of quill pipe-cleaner. Put it down, Homily, and come on, do. Spiller’s waiting.”
“It’s the spout of our old oak-apple teapot,” persisted Homily, “that’s what it is. I’d know it anywhere and it’s no good telling me any different. So they are here . . .” she mused wonderingly as she followed Pod into the shadows to where Spiller with Arrietty stood waiting.
“We go up here,” said Spiller, and Homily saw that he stood with his hand on a ladder. Glancing up to where the rungs soared away above them into dimness, she gave a slight shudder: the ladder was made of match-sticks, neatly glued and spliced to two lengths of split cane, such as florists use to support potted plants.
“I’ll go first,” said Pod. “We better take it one at a time.”
Homily watched fearfully until she heard his voice from above.
“It’s all right,” he whispered from some invisible eyrie. “Come on up.”
Homily followed, her knees trembling, and emerged at last on to the dim-lit platform beside Pod: an aerial landing stage, that was what it seemed like—which creaked a little when she stepped on it and almost seemed to sway. Below lay hollow darkness; ahead an open door. “Oh, my goodness,” she muttered. “I do hope it’s safe . . . Don’t look down,” she advised Arrietty who came up next.
But Arrietty had no temptation to look down: her eyes were on the lighted doorway and the moving shadows within; she heard the faint sound of voices and a sudden high-pitched laugh.
“Come on,” said Spiller, slipping past her, and making toward the door.
Arrietty never forgot her first sight of that upstairs room: the warmth, the sudden cleanliness, the winking candlelight and the smell of home-cooked food.
And so many voices . . . so many people . . .
Gradually, in a dazed way, she began to sort them out. that must be Aunt Lupy embracing her mother—Aunt Lupy so round and glowing, her mother so smudged and lean. Why did they cling and weep, she wondered, and squeeze each other’s hands? They had never liked each other—all the world knew that. Homily had thought Lupy stuck-up because, back in the big house, Lupy had lived in the drawing room and (she had heard it rumored) changed for dinner at night. And Lupy despised Homily for living under the kitchen and for pronouncing parquet—“Parkett.”
And here was Uncle Hendreary, his beard grown thinner, telling her father that this could not be Arrietty and her father, with pride, telling Uncle Hendreary it could. Those must be the three boy cousins—whose names she had not caught—graduated in size but as like as peas in a pod. And this thin, tall, fairylike creature, neither old nor young, who hovered shyly in the background with a faint uneasy smile, who was she?
Homily screamed when she saw her and clapped her hand to her mouth. “It can’t be Eggletina!”
It evidently could. Arrietty stared too, wondering if she had heard aright: Eggletina, that long lost cousin who one fine day escaped from under the floor and was never seen again? A kind of legend she had been to Arrietty and a lifelong cautionary tale. Well, here she was, safe and sound, unless they all were dreaming.
And well they might be.
There was something strangely unreal about this room—furnished with doll’s house furniture of every shape and size, none of it matching or in proportion. There were chairs upholstered in rep or velvet, some of them too small to sit in and some too steep and large; there were chiffoniers which were too tall and occasional tables far too low; and a toy fireplace with color plaster coals and its fire irons stuck down all-of-a-piece with the finder; there were two make-believe windows with curved pelmets and red satin curtains, each hand-painted with an imitation view—one looked out on a Swiss mountain scene, the other a Highland glen (Eggletina did them, Aunt Lupy boasted in her rich society voice. “We’re going to have a third when we get the curtains—a view of Lake Como from Monte S. Primo”); there were table lamps and standard lamps, flounced, festooned and tasseled, but the light in the room, Arrietty noticed, came from the humble, familiar dips like those they had made at home.
Everybody looked extraordinarily clean and Arrietty became even shyer: she threw a quick glance at her father and mother and was not reassured: none of their clothes had been washed for weeks nor, for some days, had their hands and faces. Pod’s trousers had a tear in one knee and Homily’s hair hung down in snakes. And here was Aunt Lupy, plump and polite, begging Homily please to take off her things, in the kind of voice, Arrietty imagined, usually reserved for feather boas, opera cloaks and freshly-cleaned white kid gloves.
But Homily, who back at home had so dreaded being “caught out” in a soiled apron, knew one worth two of that. She had, Pod and Arrietty noticed with pride, adopted her woman-tried-beyond-endurance role backed up by one called yes-I’ve-suffered-but-don’t-let’s-speak-of-it-now; she had invented a new smile, wan but brave, and had—in the same good cause—plucked the two last hairpins out of her dust-filled hair. “Poor dear Lupy,” she was saying, glancing wearily about, “what a lot of furniture! Whoever helps you with the dusting?” And swaying a little, she sank on a chair.
They rushed to support her, as she hoped they might. Water was brought and they bathed her face and hands. Hendreary stood with the tears in his brotherly eyes. “Poor valiant soul,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Your mind kind of reels when you think of what she’s been through. . . .”
Then, after quick wash and brush-up all round and a brisk bit of eye-wiping, they all sat down to supper. This they ate in the kitchen which was rather a come-down except that, in here, the fire was real: a splendid cooking range made of a large, black door-lock; they poked the fire through the key-hole, which glowed handsomely, and the smoke, they were told, went out through a series of pipes to the cottage chimney behind.
The long, white table was richly spread: it was an eighteenth century finger-plate off some old drawing-room door—white-enameled and painted with forget-me-nots, supported firmly on four stout pencil stubs where once the screws had been; the points of the pencils emerged slightly through the top of the table; one was copying ink and they were warned not to touch it in case it stained their hands.
There was every kind of dish and preserve—both real and false; pies, puddings, and bottled fruits out of season—all cooked by Lupy—and an imitation leg of mutton and a desk of plaster tarts borrowed from the dolls’ house. There were three real tumblers as well as acorn cups and a couple of green glass decanters.
Talk, talk, talk . . . Arrietty, listening, felt dazed. She saw, now, why they had been expected. Spiller, she gathered, having found the alcove bootless and its inmates flown, had salvaged their few possessions and had run and told young Tom. Lupy felt a little faint suddenly when they mentioned this person by name and had to leave the table. She sat awhile in the next room on a frail gilt chair placed just inside the doorway—“between drafts” as she put it—fanning her round red face with a lark’s feather.
“Mother’s like this about humans,” explained the eldest cousin
. “It’s no good telling her he’s tame as anything and wouldn’t hurt a fly!”
“You never know,” said Lupy darkly, from her seat in the doorway. “He’s nearly full grown! And that, they say, is when they start to be dangerous. . . .”
“Lupy’s right,” agreed Pod. “I’d never trust ’em meself.”
“Oh, how can you say that?” cried Arrietty. “Look at the way he snatched us up right out of the jaws of death!”
“Snatched you up?” screamed Lupy from the next room. “You mean—WITH HIS HANDS?”
Homily gave her brave little laugh, listlessly chasing a globule of raspberry around her too slippery plate. “Naturally . . .” She shrugged. “It was nothing, really.”
“Oh dear . . .” stammered Lupy faintly. “Oh, you poor thing . . . imagine it! I think,” she went on, “if you’ll excuse me a moment, I’ll just go and lie down . . .” And she heaved her weight off the tiny chair, which rocked as she left it.
“Where did you get all this furniture, Hendreary?” asked Homily, recovering suddenly now that Lupy had gone.
“It was delivered,” her brother told her, “in a plain white pillowcase. Someone from the big house brought it down.”
“From our house?” asked Pod.
“Stands to reason,” said Hendreary. “It’s all stuff from that doll’s house, remember, they had upstairs in the schoolroom. Top shelf of the toy cupboard, on the right hand side of the door.”
“Naturally I remember,” said Homily, “seeing that some of it’s mine. Pity,” she remarked aside to Arrietty, “that we didn’t keep that inventory”—she lowered her voice—“the one you made on blotting paper, remember?”
Arrietty nodded: there were going to be fireworks later—she could see that. She felt very tired suddenly; there seemed too much talk and the crowded room felt hot.
“Who brought it down?” Pod was asking in a surprised voice. “Some kind of human being?”