by Mary Norton
“To start with,” muttered Homily that first morning as, foot after hand, she followed Pod up the laths. Unlike most borrowers, she was not very fond of climbing. “What are we meant to do after?”
She dared not look down. Beneath her, she knew, was the rickety platform below which again were further depths and the matchstick ladder gleaming like a fishbone. “Anyway,” she comforted herself, feeling clumsily for footholds, “steep it may be, but at least it’s a separate entrance. . . . What’s it like, Pod?” she asked as her head emerged suddenly at floor level through the circular trap door—very startling it looked, as though decapitated.
“It’s dry,” said Pod, noncommittally; he stamped about a bit on the floor as though to test it.
“Don’t stamp so, Pod,” Homily complained, seeking a foothold on the quivering surface. “It’s only cardboard.”
“I know,” said Pod. “Mustn’t grumble,” he added as Homily came toward him.
“At least,” said Homily, looking about her, “back home under the kitchen, we was on solid ground. . . .”
“You’ve lived in a boot since,” Pod reminded her, “and you’ve lived in a hole in a bank. And nearly starved. And nearly frozen. And nearly been captured by the gypsies. Mustn’t grumble,” he said again.
Homily looked about her. Two rooms? They were barely that: a sheet of cardboard between two sets of laths, divided by a cloth-covered book cover, on which the words “Pig Breeders’ Annual, 1896” were stamped in tarnished gold. In this dark purple wall, Hendreary had cut a door. Ceilings there were none, and an eerie light came down from somewhere far above—a crack, Homily supposed, between the floorboards and the whitewashed walls of the gamekeeper’s bedroom.
“Who sleeps up there,” she asked Pod. “That boy’s father?”
“Grandfather,” said Pod.
“He’ll be after us, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Homily, “with traps and what-not.”
“Yes, you’ve got to be quiet,” said Pod, “especially with gamekeepers. Out most of the day, though, and the young boy with him. Yes, it’s dry,” he repeated, looking about him, “and warm.”
“Not very,” said Homily. As she followed him through the doorway, she saw that the door was hung by the canvas binding that Hendreary had not cut through. “Soon fray, that will,” she remarked, swinging the panel to and fro, “and then what?”
“I can stitch it,” said Pod, “with me cobbler’s thread. Easy.” He laid his hands on the great stones of the farther wall. “’Tis the chimney casing,” he explained. “Warm, eh?”
“Um,” said Homily, “if you lean against it.”
“What about if we sleep here—right against the chimney?”
“What in?” asked Homily.
“They’re going to lend us beds.”
“No, better keep the chimney for cooking.” Homily ran her hands across the stones and from a vertical crevice began to pick out the plaster. “Soon get through here to the main flue. . . .”
“But we’re going to eat downstairs with them,” Pod explained. “That’s what’s been arranged—so that it’s all one cooking.”
“All one cooking and all one borrowing,” said Homily. “There won’t be no borrowing for you, Pod.”
“Rubbish,” said Pod. “Whatever makes you say a thing like that?”
“Because,” explained Homily, “in a cottage like this with only two human beings, a man and a boy, there aren’t the pickings there were back at Firbank. You mark my words: I been talking to Lupy. Hendreary and the two elder boys can manage the lot. They won’t be wanting competition.”
“Then what’ll I do?” said Pod. A borrower deprived of borrowing—especially a borrower of Pod’s standing? His eyes became round and blank.
“Get on with the furniture, I suppose.”
“But they’re going to lend us that.”
“Lend us!” hissed Homily. “Everything they’ve got was ours!”
“Now, Homily—” began Pod.
Homily dropped her voice, speaking in a breathless whisper. “Every single blessed thing. That red velvet chair, the dresser with the painted plates, all that stuff the boy brought us from the dollhouse . . .”
“Not the keyhole stove,” put in Pod, “not that dining table they’ve made from a doorplate. Not the—”
“The imitation leg of mutton, that was ours,” interrupted Homily, “and the dish of plaster tarts. All the beds were ours, and the sofa. And the palm in a pot. . . . And they got your hatpin, over behind the stove. Been poking the fire with it most likely. I wouldn’t put it past them. . . .”
“Now listen, Homily,” pleaded Pod, “we’ve been into all that, remember. I’ll take back the hatpin—that I will take—but findings keepings, as they say. Far as they knew we was dead and gone—like as we might be lost at sea. The things all came to them in a plain white pillowcase delivered to the door. See what I mean? It’s like as if they was left them in a will.”
“I would never have left anything to Lupy,” remarked Homily.
“Now, Homily, you’ve got to say they’ve been kind.”
“Yes,” agreed Homily, “you’ve got to say it.”
Unhappily she gazed about her. The cardboard floor was scattered with lumps of fallen plaster. Absent-mindedly she began to push these toward the gaps where the floor, being straight-edged, did not fit against the rough plaster. They clattered hollowly down the hidden shaft into Lupy’s kitchen.
“Now you’ve done it,” said Pod. “And that’s the kind of noise we mustn’t make, not if we value our lives. To human beings,” he went on, “droppings and rollings means rats or squirrels. You know that as well as I do.”
“Sorry,” said Homily.
“Wait a minute,” said Pod. He had been gazing upwards toward the crack of light, and now in a flash he was on the laths and climbing up toward it.
“Careful, Pod,” whispered Homily. He seemed to be pulling at some object that was hidden from Homily by the line of his body. She heard him grunting with the effort.
“It’s all right,” said Pod in his normal voice, beginning to climb down again. “There isn’t no one up there. Here you are,” he went on as he landed on the floor and handed her an old bone toothbrush, slightly taller than herself. “The first borrowing,” he announced modestly, and she saw that he was pleased. “Someone must have dropped it up there in the bedroom, and it wedged itself in this crack between the floorboards and the wall. We can borrow from up there,” he went on, “easy; the wall’s fallen away like or the floorboards have shrunk. Farther along it gets even wider. . . . And here you are again,” he said and handed her a fair-sized cockleshell he had pulled out from the rough plaster. “You go on sweeping,” he told her, “and I’ll pop up again, might as well, while it’s free of human beings. . . .”
“Now, Pod, go careful . . .” Homily urged him, with a mixture of pride and anxiety. She watched him climb the laths and watched him disappear before, using the cockleshell as a dustpan, she began to sweep the floor. When Arrietty arrived to tell them a meal was ready, a fair-sized haul was laid out on the floor; the bottom of a china soap dish for baths, a crocheted table mat in red and yellow that would do as a carpet, a worn sliver of pale green soap with gray veins in it, a large darning needle—slightly rusted—three aspirin tablets, a packet of pipe cleaners, and a fair length of tarred string.
“I’m kind of hungry,” said Pod.
Chapter Three
They climbed down the laths onto the platform, keeping well away from the edge, through Lupy’s drawing room, into the kitchen.
“Ah, here you are,” cried Lupy, in her loud, rich, aunt-like voice—very plump she looked in her dress of purple silk, and flushed from the heat of the stove. Homily, beside her, looked as thin and angular as a clothes peg. “We were just going to start without you.”
The doorplate table was lit by a single lamp; it was made from a silver salt shaker with a hole in the top, out of which protruded a wick. The flame burned
stilly in that airless room, and the porcelain table top, icily white, swam in a sea of shadow.
Eggletina, by the stove, was ladling out soup, which Timmus, the younger boy, unsteadily carried round in yellow snail shells—very pretty they looked, scoured and polished. They were rather alike—Eggletina and Timmus—Arrietty thought, quiet and pale and watchful-seeming. Hendreary and the two elder boys were already seated, tucking into their food.
“Get up, get up,” cried Lupy archly, “when your aunt comes in,” and her two elder sons rose reluctantly and quickly sat down again. “Harpsichord manners . . .” their expressions seemed to say. They were too young to remember those gracious days in the drawing room of the big house—the Madeira cake, little sips of China tea, and music of an evening. Churlish and shy, they hardly ever spoke. “They don’t much like us,” Arrietty decided as she took her place at the table. Little Timmus, his hands in a cloth, brought her a shell of soup. The thin shell was piping hot, and she found it hard to hold.
It was a plain meal, but wholesome: soup, and boiled butter beans with a trace of dripping—one bean each. There was none of that first evening’s lavishness when Lupy had raided her store cupboards. It was as though she and Hendreary had talked things over, setting more modest standards. “We must begin,” she had imagined Lupy saying to Hendreary in a firm, self-righteous voice, “as we mean to go on.”
There was, however, a sparrow’s egg omelette, fried in a tin lid, for Hendreary and the two boys. Lupy saw to it herself. Seasoned with thyme and a trace of wild garlic, it smelled very savory and sizzled on the plate. “They’ve been borrowing, you see,” Lupy explained, “out of doors all morning. They can only get out when the front door’s open, and on some days they can’t get back. Three nights Hendreary spent once in the woodshed before he got his chance.”
Homily glanced at Pod, who had finished his bean and whose eyes had become strangely round. “Pod’s done a bit, too, this morning,” she remarked carelessly, “more high than far; but it does give you an appetite. . . .”
“Borrowing?” asked Uncle Hendreary. He seemed amazed, and his thin beard had ceased the up-and-down movement that went with his eating.
“One or two things,” said Pod modestly.
“From where?” asked Hendreary, staring.
“The old man’s bedroom. It’s just above us . . .
Hendreary was silent a moment and then he said, “That’s all right, Pod,” but as though it wasn’t all right at all. “But we’ve got to go steady. There isn’t much in this house, not to spare like. We can’t all go at it like bulls at gates.” He took another mouthful of omelette and consumed it slowly while Arrietty, fascinated, watched his beard and the shadow it threw on the wall. When he had swallowed, he said, “I’d take it as a favor, Pod, if you’d just leave borrowing for a while. We know the territory, as you might say, and we work to our own methods. Better we lend you things, for the time being. And there’s food for all, if you don’t mind it plain.”
There was a long silence. The two elder boys, Arrietty noticed, shoveling up their food, kept their eyes on their plates. Lupy clattered about at the stove. Eggletina sat looking at her hands, and little Timmus stared wonderingly from one to another, eyes wide in his small pale face.
“As you wish,” said Pod slowly, as Lupy bustled back to the table.
“Homily,” said Lupy brightly, breaking the awkward silence, “this afternoon, if you’ve got a moment to spare, I’d be much obliged if you’d give me a hand with Spiller’s summer clothes. . . .”
Homily thought of the comfortless rooms upstairs and of all she longed to do to them. “But of course,” she told Lupy, trying to smile.
“I always get them finished,” Lupy explained, “by early spring. Time’s getting on now: the hawthorn’s out—or so they tell me.” And she began to clear the table; they all jumped up to help her.
“Where is Spiller?” asked Homily, trying to stack the snail shells.
“Goodness knows,” said Lupy, “off on some wild goose chase. No one knows where Spiller is. Nor what he does for that matter. All I know is,” she went on, taking the plug out of the pipe (as they used to do at home Arrietty remembered) to release a trickle of water, “that I make his moleskin suits each autumn and his white kid ones each spring and that he always comes to fetch them.”
“It’s very kind of you to make his suits,” said Arrietty, watching Lupy rinse the snail shells in a small crystal salt cellar and standing by to dry them.
“It’s only human,” said Lupy.
“Human!” exclaimed Homily, startled by the choice of word.
“Human—just short like that—means kind,” explained Lupy, remembering that Homily, poor dear, had had no education, being dragged up as you might say under a kitchen floor. “It’s got nothing at all to do with human beings. How could it have?”
“That’s what I was wondering . . .” said Homily.
“Besides,” Lupy went on, “he brings us things in exchange.”
“Oh, I see,” said Homily.
“He goes hunting, you see, and I smoke his meat for him—there in the chimney. Some we keep and some he takes away. What’s over I make into paste with butter on the top—keeps for months that way. Birds’ eggs, he brings, and berries and nuts . . . fish from the stream. I smoke the fish, too, or pickle it. Some things I put down in salt. . . . And if you want anything special, you tell Spiller—ahead of time, of course—and he borrows it from the gypsies. That old stove he lives in is just by their camping site. Give him time and he can get almost anything you want from the gypsies. We have a whole arm of a waterproof raincoat, got by Spiller, and very useful it was when the bees swarmed one summer—we all crawled inside it.”
“What bees?” asked Homily.
“Haven’t I told you about the bees in the thatch? They’ve gone now. But that’s how we got the honey, all we’d ever want, and a good, lasting wax for the candles. . . .”
Homily was silent a moment—enviously silent, dazzled by Lupy’s riches. Then she said, as she stacked up the last snail shell, “Where do these go, Lupy?”
“Into that wickerwork hair-tidy in the corner. They won’t break—just take them on the tin lid and drop them in. . . .”
“I must say, Lupy,” Homily remarked wonderingly as she dropped the shells one by one into the hair-tidy (it was horn-shaped with a loop to hang it on and a faded blue bow on the top), “that you’ve become what I’d call a very good manager. . . .”
“For one,” agreed Lupy, laughing, “who was brought up in a drawing room and never raised a hand.”
“You weren’t brought up in a drawing room,” Homily reminded her.
“Oh, I don’t remember those Rain-pipe days,” said Lupy blithely. “I married so young. Just a child . . .” and she turned suddenly to Arrietty. “Now, what are you dreaming about, Miss-butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth?”
“I was thinking of Spiller,” said Arrietty.
“A-ha!” cried Aunt Lupy. “She was thinking of Spiller!” And she laughed again. “You don’t want to waste precious thoughts on a ragamuffin like Spiller. You’ll meet lots of nice borrowers, all in good time. Maybe, one day, you’ll meet one brought up in a library: they’re the best, so they say, gentlemen all, and a good cultural background.”
“I was thinking,” continued Arrietty evenly, trying to keep her temper, “that I couldn’t imagine Spiller dressed up in white kid.”
“It doesn’t stay white long,” cried Lupy. “Of that I can assure you! It has to be white to start with because it’s made from an evening glove. A ball glove, shoulder length—it’s one of the few things I salvaged from the drawing room. But he will have kid, says it’s hard-wearing. It stiffens up, of course, directly he gets it wet, but he soon wears it soft again. And by that time,” she added, “it’s all colors of the rainbow.”
Arrietty could imagine the colors; they would not be “all colors of the rainbow”; they would be colors without real color, the shade
s that made Spiller invisible—soft fawns, pale browns, dull greens, and a kind of shadowy gun-metal. Spiller took care about “seasoning” his clothes: he brought them to a stage where he could melt into the landscape, where one could stand beside him, almost within touching distance, and yet not see him. Spiller deceived animals as well as gypsies. Spiller deceived hawks, and stoats, and foxes. . . . Spiller might not wash but he had no Spiller scent: he smelled of hedgerows, and bark, and grasses, and of wet sun-warmed earth; he smelled of buttercups, dried cow dung, and early morning dew. . . .
“When will he come?” Arrietty asked, but ran away upstairs before anyone could tell her. She wept a little in the upstairs room, crouched beside the soap dish.
To talk of Spiller reminded her of out-of-doors and of a wild, free life she might never know again. This new-found haven among the lath and plaster had all too soon become another prison. . . .
Chapter Four
It was Hendreary and the boys who carried the furniture up the laths with Pod standing by to receive it. In this way, Lupy lent them just what she wished to lend and nothing they would have chosen. Homily did not grumble, however. She had become very quiet lately as slowly she realized their position.
Sometimes they stayed downstairs after meals, helping generally or talking to Lupy. But they gauged the length of these visits according to Lupy’s mood: when she became flustered, blaming them for some small mishap brought on by herself, they knew it was time to go. “We couldn’t do right today,” they would say, sitting empty-handed upstairs on Homily’s old champagne corks that Lupy had unearthed for stools. They would sit by the chimney casing in the inner room to get the heat from the stones. Here Pod and Homily had a double bed, one of those from the dollhouse. Arrietty slept in the outer room, close beside the entrance hole. She slept on a thickish piece of wadding, borrowed in the old days from a box of artist’s pastels, and they had given her most of the bedclothes.