by Mary Norton
“We reckon so,” agreed Hendreary. “It was lying there t’other side of the bank—soon after we got turned out of the badger’s set and had set up house in the stove. . . .”
“What stove was that?” asked Pod. “Not the one by the camping site?”
“That’s right,” Hendreary told him. “Two years we lived there, off and on.”
“A bit too close to the gypsies for my liking,” said Pod! He cut himself a generous slice of hot boiled chestnut and spread it thickly with butter.
“You got to be close,” Hendreary explained, “like it or not, when you got to borrow.”
Pod, about to bite, withdrew the chestnut: he seemed amazed. “You borrowed from caravans?” he exclaimed. “At your age!”
Hendreary shrugged slightly and was modestly silent.
“Well, I never,” said Homily admiringly. “There’s a brother for you! You think what that means, Pod—”
“I am thinking,” said Pod. He raised his head. “What did you do about smoke?”
“You don’t have none,” Hendreary told him, “not when you cook on gas.”
“On gas!” exclaimed Homily.
“That’s right. We borrowed a bit o’ gas from the gas company: they got a pipe laid all along that bank. The stove was resting on its back, like, you remember? We dug down behind through a flue—a good six weeks we spent in that tunnel. Worth it in the end, though: three pin-hole burners we had down there.”
“How did you turn ’em on and off?” asked Pod.
“We didn’t—once lit, we never let them out. Still burning they are to this day.”
“You mean that you still go back there?”
Hendreary, yawning slightly, shook his head (they had eaten well and the room felt very close). “Spiller lives there,” he said.
“Oh,” exclaimed Homily, “so that’s how Spiller cooked! So that’s what those bones were! He might have told us,” she went on, looking about in a hurt way, “or, at any rate, asked us in—”
“He wouldn’t do that,” said Hendreary, “once bitten, twice shy, as you might say.”
“How do you mean?” asked Homily.
“After we left the badger’s set—” began Hendreary and broke off—slightly shamefaced, he seemed, in spite of his smile. “Well, that stove was one of his places: he asked us in for a bite and a sup and we stayed a couple o’ years. . . .”
“Once you’d struck gas, you mean,” said Pod.
“That’s right,” said Hendreary. “We cooked and Spiller borrowed.”
“Ah—” said Pod. “Spiller borrowed? Now I understand. . . . You and me, Hendreary, we got to face up to it—we’re not as young as we was. Not by a long chalk.”
“Where is Spiller now?” asked Arrietty suddenly.
“Oh, he’s gone off,” said Hendreary vaguely; he seemed a little embarrassed and sat there frowning and tapping the table with a pewter spoon (one of a set of six, Homily remembered angrily: she wondered how many were left).
“Gone off where?” asked Arrietty.
“Home, I reckon,” Hendreary told her.
“But we haven’t thanked him,” cried Arrietty. “Spiller saved our lives!”
Hendreary threw off his gloom. “Have a drop of blackberry cordial,” he suggested suddenly to Pod. “Lupy’s own make. Cheer us all up. . . .”
“Not for me,” said Homily firmly, before Pod could speak. “No good never comes of it as we’ve found out to our cost.”
“But what will Spiller think,” persisted Arrietty, and there were tears in her eyes. “We haven’t even thanked him?”
Hendreary looked at her, surprised. “Spiller? He don’t hold with thanks. He’s all right . . .” and he patted Arrietty’s arm.
“Why didn’t he stay for supper?”
“He don’t ever,” Hendreary told her. “Doesn’t like company. He’ll cook something on his own.”
“Where?”
“In his stove.”
“But that’s miles away!”
“Not for Spiller—he’s used to it. Goes part way by water.”
“And it must be getting dark,” Arrietty went on unhappily.
“Now don’t you fret about Spiller,” her uncle told her. “You eat up your pie. . . .”
Arrietty looked down at her plate (pink celluloid, it was, part of a tea-service which she seemed to remember): somehow she had no appetite. She raised her eyes. “And when will he be back?” she asked anxiously.
“He don’t come back much. Once a year for his new clothes. Or if young Tom sends ’im special.”
Arrietty looked thoughtful. “He must be lonely,” she ventured at last.
“Spiller? No . . . I wouldn’t say he was lonely. Some borrowers is made like that. Solitary. You get ’em now and again.” He glanced across the room to where his daughter, having left the table, was sitting alone by the fire. “Eggletina’s a bit like that . . . Pity, but you can’t do nothing about it. Them’s the ones as gets this craze for humans—kind of man-eaters, they turns out to be . . .”
When Lupy returned, refreshed from her rest, it all began again: talk, talk, talk . . . and Arrietty slipped unnoticed from the table. But, as she wandered away toward the other room, she heard it going on: talk about living arrangements, about the construction of a suite of rooms upstairs; about what pitfalls there were in this new way of life and the rules they had made to avoid such pitfalls-how you always drew the ladder up last thing at night but that it should never be moved while the men were out borrowing; that the young boys went out as learners, each in turn, but that, true to borrowing tradition, the women would stay at home. She heard her mother declining the use of the kitchen. “Thank you, Lupy,” Homily was saying, “it’s very kind of you but we’d better begin as we mean to go on, don’t you think, quite separate.”
And so it starts again, thought Arrietty, as entering the next room she seated herself in a stiff armchair. But no longer quite under the floor—up a little, they would be now, among the lath and plaster: there would be ladders instead of dusty passages and that platform, she hoped, might do instead of her grating.
She glanced about her at the over-furnished room: the doll’s house leftovers suddenly looked silly—everything for show and nothing much for use; the false coals in the fireplace looked worn as though scrubbed too often by Lupy and the painted views in the windows had finger-marks round the edge.
She wandered out to the dim-lit platform; this, with its dust and shadows—had she known of such things—was something like going backstage. The ladder was in place, she noticed—a sign that someone was out—but in this case, not so much “out” as “gone.” Poor Spiller . . . solitary, they had called him. Perhaps, thought Arrietty self-pityingly, that’s what’s the matter with me. . . .
There was a faint light, she saw now, in the chasm below her; what at first had seemed a lessening of darkness seemed now a welcoming glow. Arrietty, her heart beating, took hold of the ladder and set her foot on the first rung. If I don’t do it now, she thought desperately, this first evening—perhaps, in the future, I should never dare again; there seemed too many rules in Aunt Lupy’s house, too many people, and the rooms seemed too dark and too hot. There may be compensations, she thought—her knees trembling a little as rung after rung she started to climb down—but I’ll have to discover them myself.
Soon she stood once again in the dusty entrance hall; she glanced about her and then nervously she looked up; she saw the top of the ladder outlined against the light and the jagged edge of the high platform. It made her feel suddenly dizzy and more than a little afraid: suppose someone, not realizing she was below, decided to pull it up?
The faint light, she realized, came from the hole in the wainscot: the log-box, for some reason, was not laid flush against it—there might well be room to squeeze through. She would like to have one more peep at the room in which, some hours before, young Tom had set them down—to have some little knowledge, however fleeting, of this human dwelling whic
h from now on would compose her world.
All was quiet as she stole toward the gothic-shaped opening. The log-box, she found, was a good inch and a half away. It was easy enough to slip out and ease her tiny body along the narrow passage left between the side of the box and the wall. Again a little frightening: suppose some human being decided suddenly to shove the log-box into place; she would be squashed, she thought, and found long afterwards glued to the wainscot, like some strange, pressed flower. For this reason, she moved fast, and reaching the box’s corner, she stepped out on the hearth.
She glanced about the room. She could see the rafters of the ceiling, the legs of a Windsor chair and the underside of its seat. She saw a lighted candle on a wooden table, and, by its leg, a pile of skins on the floor—ah, this, she realized, was the secret of Spiller’s wardrobe.
Another kind of fur lay on the table, just beyond the candle, above a piece of cloth—tawny yellow and somehow rougher. As she stared it seemed to stir. A cat? A fox? Arrietty froze to stillness but she bravely stood her ground. Now the movement became unmistakable: a roll over and a sudden lifting up.
Arrietty gasped—a tiny sound but it was heard.
A face looked back at her, candle-lit and drowsed with sleep, below its thatch of hair. There was a long silence. At last, the boy’s lips curved softly into a smile—and very young, he looked, after sleeping, very harmless. The arm on which he had rested his head lay loosely on the table and Arrietty, from where she stood, had seen his fingers relax. A clock was ticking somewhere above her head; the candle flame rose, still and steady, lighting the peaceful room; the coals gave a gentle shudder and settled in the grate.
“Hallo,” said Arietty.
“Hallo,” replied young Tom.
For Peter and Caroline
Chapter One
“But what do they talk about?” asked Mr. Beguid, the lawyer. He spoke almost irritably, as of foolish goings-on.
“They talk about the borrowers,” said Mrs. May.
They stood beneath the shelter of the hedge among wet, treelike cabbages, which tumbled in the wind. Below them on this dark, dank afternoon, a lamp glowed warmly through the cottage window. “We could have an orchard here,” she added lightly, as though to change the subject.
“At our time of life,” remarked Mr. Beguid, gazing still at the lighted window below them in the hollow, “yours and mine—it’s wiser to plant flowers than fruit . . .”
“You think so?” said Mrs. May. She drew her ulster cape about her against the eddying wind. “But I’ll leave her the cottage, you see, in my will.”
“Leave whom the cottage?”
“Kate, my niece.”
“I see,” said Mr. Beguid, and he glanced again toward the lighted window behind which he knew Kate was sitting: a strange child, he thought; disconcerting—the way she gazed through one with wide unseeing eyes and yet would chatter by the hour with old Tom Goodenough, a rascally one-time gamekeeper. What could they have in common, he asked himself, this sly old man and eager, listening child? There they had been now (he glanced at his watch) for a good hour and a quarter, hunched by the window, talking, talking . . .
“Borrowers . . .” he repeated, as though troubled by the word. “What kind of borrowers?”
“Oh, it’s just a story,” said Mrs. May lightly, picking her way amongst the rain-drenched cabbages toward the raised brick path, “something we used to tell each other, my brother and I, when we stayed down here as children.”
“At Firbank Hall, you mean?”
“Yes, with Great-Aunt Sophy. Kate loves this story.”
“But why,” asked Mr. Beguid, “should she want to tell it to him?”
“To old Tom? Why not? As a matter of fact, I believe it’s the other way round: I believe he tells it to her.”
As he followed Mrs. May along the worn brick path, Mr. Beguid became silent. He had known this family most of his life, and a strange lot (he had begun to think lately) they were.
“But a story made up by you?”
“Not by me, no—” Mrs. May laughed as though embarrassed. “It was my brother, I think, who made it up. If it was made up,” she added suddenly, just above her breath.
Mr. Beguid pounced on the words. “I don’t quite follow you. This story you speak of, is it something that actually happened?”
Mrs. May laughed. “Oh no, it couldn’t have actually happened. Not possibly.” She began to walk on again, adding over her shoulder, “It’s just that this old man, this old Tom Goodenough, seems to know about these people.”
“What people? These cadgers?”
“Not cadgers—borrowers . . .”
“I see,” said Mr. Beguid, who didn’t see at all.
“We called them that,” and turning on the path, she waited for him to catch up with her. “Or rather they called themselves that—because they had nothing of their own at all. Even their names were borrowed. The family we knew—father, mother, and child—were called Pod, Homily and little Arrietty.” As he came beside her, she smiled. “I think their names are rather charming.”
“Very,” he said, a little too drily. And then, in spite of himself, he smiled back at her. Always, he remembered, there had been in her manner this air of gentle mockery; even as a young man, though attracted by her prettiness, he had found her disconcerting. “You haven’t changed,” he said.
She at once became more serious. “But you can’t deny that it was a strange old house?”
“Old, yes. But no more strange than”—he looked down the slope—“than this cottage, say.”
Mrs. May laughed. “Ah, there Kate would agree with you! She finds this cottage quite as strange as we found Firbank, neither more nor less. You know, at Firbank, my brother and I—right from the very first—had this feeling that there were other people living in the house besides the human beings.”
“But—” exclaimed Mr. Beguid, exasperated, “there can be no such thing as ‘people’ other than human beings. The terms are synonymous.”
“Other personalities, then. Something far smaller than a human being but like them in essentials—a little larger-seeming in the head, perhaps, a little longer in the hands and feet. But very small and hidden. We imagined that they lived like mice—in the wainscots, or behind the skirtings, or under the floorboards—and were entirely dependent on what they could filch from the great house above. Yet you couldn’t call it stealing: it was more a kind of garnering. On the whole, they only took things that could well be spared.”
“What sort of things?” asked Mr. Beguid. Suddenly feeling foolish, he sprang ahead of her to clear a trail of bramble from her path.
“Oh, all sorts of things. Any kind of food, of course, and any other small movable objects which might be useful—matchboxes, pencil ends, needles, bits of stuff—anything they could turn into tools or clothes or furniture. It was rather sad for them, we thought, because they had a sort of longing for beauty and for making their dark little holes as charming and comfortable as the homes of human beings. My brother used to help them”—Mrs. May hesitated suddenly as though embarrassed—“or so he said,” she concluded lamely, and she gave a little laugh.
“I see,” said Mr. Beguid again. He became silent as they skirted the side of the cottage to avoid the dripping thatch. “And where does Tom Goodenough come in?” he asked at last as she paused beside the water butt.
She turned to face him. “Well, it’s extraordinary, isn’t it? At my age—nearly seventy—to inherit this cottage and find him still here in possession?”
“Not in possession, exactly—he’s the outgoing tenant.”
“I mean,” said Mrs. May, “to find him here at all. In the old days, when they were boys, he and my brother used to go rabbiting—in a way they were great companions. But that all ended—after the rumpus.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Beguid, “so there was a rumpus?” They stood together by the weatherworn front door, and intrigued against his wish, he withdrew his hand from the latch
.
“There most certainly was,” exclaimed Mrs. May. “I should have thought you might have heard about it. Even the policeman was implicated—you remember Ernie Runacre? It must have gone all over the village. The cook and the gardener got wind of these creatures and determined to smoke them out. They got in the local ratcatcher and sent up here for Tom to bring his ferret. He was a boy then, the gamekeeper’s grandson—a little older than we were, but still quite young. But”—Mrs. May turned suddenly toward him—“you must have heard something of this?”
Mr. Beguid frowned. Past rumors stirred vaguely in his memory . . . some nonsense or other at Firbank Hall; a cook with a name like Diver or Driver; things missing from the cabinet in the drawing room . . .
“Wasn’t there”—he said at last—“some trouble about an emerald watch?”
“Yes, that’s why they sent for the police.”
“But”—Mr. Beguid’s frown deepened—“this woman, Diver or—”
“Driver! Yes, that was the name.”
“And this gardener—you mean to say they believed in these creatures?”
“Obviously,” said Mrs. May, “or they would not have made all this fuss.”
“What happened?” asked Mr. Beguid. “Did they catch them? No, no—I don’t mean that! What I meant to say is—what did they turn out to be? Mice, I suppose?”
“I wasn’t there myself at the time—so I can’t say ‘what they turned out to be.’ But according to my brother, they escaped out of doors through a grating just in the nick of time: one of those ventilator things set low down in the brickwork outside. They ran away across the orchard and”—she looked around her in the half light—“up into these fields.”
“Were they seen to go?”
“No,” said Mrs. May.
Mr. Beguid glanced swiftly down the mist-enshrouded slopes. Against the pallid fields the woods beyond looked dark—already wrapped in twilight.
“Squirrels,” he said, “that’s what they were, most likely.”
“Possibly,” said Mrs. May. She moved away from him to where, beside the washhouse, the workmen that morning had opened up a drain. “Wouldn’t this be wide enough to take sewage?”