The Borrowers Collection

by Mary Norton

  “Wide enough, yes,” said Mr. Beguid, “but the sanitary inspector would never allow it: all these drains flow into the stream. No, you’ll have to have a septic tank, I’m afraid.”

  “Then what was this used for?”

  He nodded toward the washhouse. “The overflow from the sink.” He glanced at his watch. “Could I give you a lift anywhere? It’s getting rather late . . .”

  “That’s very kind of you,” said Mrs. May as they moved toward the front door.

  “An odd story,” remarked Mr. Beguid, putting his hand to the latch.

  “Yes, very odd.”

  “I mean—to go to the lengths of sending for the police. Extraordinary.”

  “Yes,” agreed Mrs. May, and paused to wipe her feet on a piece of torn sacking that lay beside the step.

  Mr. Beguid glanced at his own shoes and followed her example. “Your brother must have been very convincing.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “And very inventive.”

  “Yes, according to my brother there was quite a colony of these people. He talked about another lot, cousins of the ones at Firbank, who were supposed to live in a badger’s set—up here on the edge of these woods. Uncle Hendreary and Aunt Lupy . . .” She looked at him sideways. “This lot had four children.”

  “According to your brother,” remarked Mr. Beguid, as he reached again for the latch.

  “And according to old Tom—” She laughed and lowered her voice. “Old Tom swears that the story is true. But he contends that they did not live in the badger’s set at all; or that, if they did, it could not have been for long. He insists that for years and years they lived up here, in the lath and plaster beside the fireplace.”

  “Which fireplace?” asked Mr. Beguid uneasily.

  “This fireplace,” said Mrs. May. As the door swung open, she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Here in this very cottage.”

  “Here in this very cottage . . .” repeated Mr. Beguid in a startled voice, and standing aside for Mrs. May to pass, he craned his neck forward to peer within, without advancing across the threshold.

  The quiet room seemed empty: all they could see at first was yellow lamplight spilling across the flagstones and dying embers in the grate. By the window stood a stack of hazel wands, split and trimmed for thatching, beyond them a wooden armchair. Then Kate emerged rather suddenly from the shadows beside the fireplace. “Hullo,” she said.

  She seemed about to say more, but her gaze slid past Mrs. May to where Mr. Beguid hovered in the doorway. “I was looking up the chimney,” she explained.

  “So I see—your face is black!”

  “Is it?” said Kate, without interest. Her eyes looked very bright and she seemed to be waiting—either, thought Mrs. May, for Mr. Beguid to shut the door and come in or for Mr. Beguid to shut the door and depart.

  Mrs. May glanced at the empty armchair and then past Kate toward the door of the washhouse. “Where’s Tom?”

  “Gone out to feed the pig,” said Kate. Again she hesitated, then, in a burst, she added, “Need we go yet? It’s only a step across the fields, and there’s something I terribly want to show you—”

  Mr. Beguid glanced at his watch. “Well, in that case—” he began.

  “Yes, please don’t wait for us,” interrupted Mrs. May impulsively. “As Kate says, it’s only a step . . .”

  “I was only going to say,” continued Mr. Beguid stolidly from his neutral position on the threshold, “that as this lane’s so narrow and the ditches so full of mud, I propose to drive on ahead and turn the car at the crossroads.” He began to button up his overcoat. “Perhaps you would listen for the horn?”

  “Yes, yes, indeed. Thank you . . . of course. We’ll be listening . . .”

  When the front door had closed and Mr. Beguid had gone, Kate took Mrs. May by the hand and drew her urgently toward the fireplace. “And I’ve heaps to tell you. Heaps and heaps . . .”

  “We weren’t rude, were we?” asked Mrs. May. “I mean to Mr. Beguid? We didn’t shoo him off?”

  “No, no, of course not. You thanked him beautifully. But look—” Kate went on. “Please look!” Loosing Mrs. May’s hand, she ran forward and—with much tugging and panting—dragged out the log box from where it was jammed against the wall beside the hearth. A rat hole was revealed in the skirting—slightly Gothic in shape. “That’s where they lived—” cried Kate.

  Mrs. May, in spite of herself, felt a curious sense of shock; staring down at it, she said uneasily, “We mustn’t be too credulous, Kate. I mean, we can’t believe quite everything we hear. And you know what they say about old Tom?”

  “In the village? Yes, I know what they say—‘the biggest liar in five counties.’ But all that started because of the borrowers. At first, you see, he used to talk about them. And that was his mistake. He thought people would be interested. But they weren’t interested—not at all: they just didn’t believe him.” Kate knelt down on the hearth, and breathing rather heavily, she peered into the darkness of the hole. “There was only one other human being, I think, who really believed in the borrowers. . . .”

  “Mrs. Driver, you mean, the cook at Firbank?”

  Kate frowned, sitting back on her heels. “No, I don’t really think that Mrs. Driver did believe in them. She saw them, I know, but I don’t think she trusted her eyes. No, the one I was thinking of was Mild Eye, the gypsy. I mean, he actually shook them out of his boot onto the floor of his caravan. And there they were—right under his nose—and no two ways about it. He tried to grab them, Tom says, but they got away. He wanted to put them in a cage and show them for pennies at the fair. It was Tom who rescued them. With the help of Spiller, of course.”

  “Who was Spiller?” asked Mrs. May—she still stared, as though spellbound, at the rat hole. Kate seemed amazed. “You haven’t heard of Spiller?”

  “No,” said Mrs. May.

  “Oh,” cried Kate, throwing her head back and half closing her eyes, “Spiller was wonderful!”

  “I am sure he was,” said Mrs. May. She pulled forward a rush-seated chair and rather stiffly sat down on it. “But you and Tom have been talking for days, remember. . . . I’m a little out of touch. What was Spiller supposed to be—a borrower?”

  “He was a borrower,” corrected Kate, “but rather on the wild side—he lived in the hedgerows, and wore old moleskins, and didn’t really wash. . . .”

  “He doesn’t sound so tremendously wonderful.”

  “Oh, but he was: Spiller ran for Tom and Tom rushed down and rescued them; he snatched them up from under the gypsies’ noses and pushed them into his pockets; he brought them up here—all four of them—Spiller, Pod, Homily, and Arrietty. And he set them down very carefully, one by one”—Kate patted the warm flagstones—“here, on this very spot. And then, poor things, they ran away into the wall through that rat hole in the skirting”—Kate lowered her head again, trying to peer in—“and up a tiny ladder just inside to where the cousins were living. . . .” She scrambled up suddenly and, stretching one arm as far as it would go, she tapped on the plaster beside the chimney. “The cousins’ house was somewhere up here. Quite high. Two floors they had—between the lath and plaster of the washhouse wall and the lath and plaster of this one. They used the chimney, Tom says, and they tapped the washhouse pipes for water. Arrietty didn’t like it up there: she used to creep down in the evenings and talk to young Tom. But our lot did not stay there long. Something happened, you see—”

  “Tell me,” said Mrs. May.

  “Well, there isn’t really time now. Mr. Beguid will start hooting. . . . And old Tom’s the one to tell it: he seems to know everything—even what they said and did when no one else was there. . . .”

  “He’s a born storyteller, that’s why,” said Mrs. May, laughing. “And he knows people. Given a struggle for life, people react very much alike—according to type, of course—whatever their size or station.” Mrs. May leaned forward as though to examine the skirting. “Even I,�
� she said, “can imagine what Homily felt, homeless and destitute, faced with that dusty hole. . . . And strange relations living up above who didn’t know she was coming and whom she hadn’t seen for years . . .”

  Chapter Two

  But Mrs. May was not quite right: she had underestimated their sudden sense of security—the natural joy a borrower feels when safely under cover. It is true that, as they filed in through the Gothic-shaped hole in the skirting, they had felt a little nervous, a little forlorn; this was because, at first glance, the cavelike space about them seemed disappointingly uninhabited: empty, dark and echoing, it smelled of dust and mice. . . .

  “Oh, dear,” Homily had muttered incredulously, “they can’t live here!” But as her eyes became used to the dimness, she had stooped suddenly to pick up some object from the floor. “My goodness,” she whispered excitedly to Pod, “do you know what this is?”

  “Yes,” Pod had told her. “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,” Homily had persisted. “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, “. . . and from somewhere, somehow, they’ve got hold of some of our things.”

  “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 matchsticks, 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 onto 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 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? Could it be Eggletina? Yes, she supposed it could.

  And there was something strangely unreal about the room—furnished with dollhouse 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 that were too tall and occasional tables far too low; and a toy fireplace with colored plaster coals and its fire irons stuck down all-of-a-piece with the fender; 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 on 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 humble dips like those they had made at home.

  Everybody looked extraordinarily clean, and Arrietty became even shier. 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 kid gloves.

  “Poor dear Lupy,” Homily 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 a 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 comedown 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 keyhole, 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 dish of plaster tarts borrowed from the dollhouse. There were three real tumblers as well as acorn cups and a couple of green glass decanters.

  Talk, talk, talk. . . . Arrietty, listening, felt dazed. “Where is Spiller?” she asked 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.”

  “We haven’t even thanked him,” persisted Arrietty, and there were tears in her eyes.

  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 that 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 . . .”

  Very dark it was, this strange new home, almost as dark as under the floorboards at Firbank, and lit by wax dips fixed to upturned drawing pins (how many human dwellings must be burned down, Arrietty realized suddenly, through the carelessness of borrowers running about with lighted candles). In spite of Lupy’s polishings, the compartments smelled of soot and always in the background a pervading odor of cheese.

  The cousins all slept in the kitchen—for warmth, Lupy explained. The ornate drawing room was only rarely used. Outside the drawing room was the shadowed platform with its perilous matchstick ladder leading down below.

  Above this landing, high among the shadows, were the two small rooms allotted them by Lupy. There was no way up to them as yet, except by climbing hand over hand from lath to lath and scrabbling blindly for footholds, to emerge at length on a rough piece of flooring made by Hendreary from the lid of a cardboard shoe box.

  “Do those rooms good to be used,” Lupy had said (she knew Pod was a handyman), “and we’ll lend you furniture to start with.”