The Borrowers Aloft (4 page)

Chapter Six

"Stillness ... that's the thing," Pod whispered to Arrietty the first time he saw Miss Menzies crouching down behind her thistle. "They don't expect to see you, and if you're still, they somehow don't. And never look at 'em direct—always look at 'em sideways like. Understand?"

"Yes, of course, I understand—you've told me often enough. Stillness, stillness, quiet, quiet, creep, creep, crawl, crawl.... What's the good of being alive?"

"Hush," said Pod and laid a hand on her arm. Arrietty had not been herself lately. It was as though, thought Pod, she had something on her mind. But it wasn't often she was as rude as this. He decided to ignore it; getting to the awkward age—that's what it was, he wouldn't wonder.

They stood in a clump of coarse grass, shoulder high to them, with only their heads emerging. "You see," breathed Pod, speaking with still lips out of the corner of his mouth, "some kind of plant or flowers, that's what we look like to her. Something in bud, maybe."

"Supposing she decided to pick us," suggested Arrietty irritably. Her ankles were aching, and she longed to sit down; ten minutes had become a quarter of an hour, and still neither party had moved. An ant climbed up the grass stem beside her, waved its antennae in the air, and swiftly clambered down again. A slug lay sleeping under the plantain leaf; every now and again there was a slight ripple where the frilled underside of its body appeared to caress the earth.

"It must be dreaming," Arrietty decided, admiring the silver highlights in the lustrous gun-metal skin. If my father were less old-fashioned, she thought guiltily, I would tell him about Miss Menzies, and then we could walk away. But in his view and in that of her mother, it was still a disgrace to be "seen," not only a disgrace but almost a tragedy; to them it meant broken homes, wearisome treks across unexplored country, and the labor of building anew. By her parents' code, to be known to exist at all put their whole way of life into jeopardy, and a borrower once "seen" must immediately move away.

In spite of all this, in her short life of fifteen years, Arrietty herself had been "seen" four times. What was this longing, she wondered, which drew her so strongly to human beings? And on this—her fourth occasion of being "seen"—actually to speak to Miss Men-zies? It was reckless and stupid, no doubt, but also strangely thrilling to address and be answered by a creature of so vast a size, who yet could seem so gentle; to see the giant eyes light up and the great mouth softly smile. Once you had done it and no dreadful disaster had followed, you were tempted to try it again. Arrietty had even gone so far as to lie in wait for Miss Menzies—perhaps because every incident she described to Miss Menzies seemed so to delight and amaze her—and when Spiller was not there, Arrietty was often lonely.

Those few first days had been such wonderful fun! Spiller taking her on the trains—nipping into some half-empty carriage, and when the train moved, sitting so stiff and so still, pretending they too, like the rest of the passengers, were made of barbola wax. Round and round they would go, passing Vine Cottage a dozen times, and back again over the bridge. Other faces besides Mr. Pott's stared down at them, and by Mr. Pott's back door they saw rows of boots and shoes, fat legs, thin legs, stockinged legs, and bare legs. They heard human laughter and human squeals of delight. It was terrifying and wonderful, but somehow, with Spiller, she felt safe. A plume of smoke ran out behind them. The same kind of smoke that was used for the cottage chimneys—parcel string soaked in nitrate and secured in a bundle by a twist of invisible hairpin. ("Have you seen my invisible hairpins?" Miss Menzies had one day asked Mr. Pott, a question that to the puzzled Mr. Pott seemed an odd contradiction in terms.) In Vine Cottage, however, Pod had hooked down the smoldering bundle and had lit a real fire instead, which Homily fed with candle grease, coal slack, and tarry lumps of cinder. On this she cooked their meals.

And it was Spiller, wild Spiller, who had helped Arrietty to make her garden and to search for plants of scarlet pimpernel, small blue-faced bird's-eyes, fernlike mosses, and tiny flowering cedums. With Spiller's help she had graveled the path and laid a lawn of moss.

Miss Menzies, behind her thistle clump, had watched this work with delight. She saw Arrietty; but Spiller, that past master of invisibility, she could never quite discern. Both still and swift, with a wild creature's instinct for cover, he could melt into any background and disappear from sight.

With Spiller, too, Arrietty had explored the other houses, fished for minnows, and bathed in the river, screened by the towering rushes. "Getting too tomboyish, by half," Homily had grumbled. She was nervous of Spiller's influence. "He's not our kind really," she would complain to Pod, in a sudden burst of ingratitude, "even if he did save our lives."

Standing beside her father in the grass and thinking of these things, Arrietty began to feel the burden of her secret. Had her parents searched the world over, she realized uneasily, they could not have found a more perfect place in which to settle—a complete village tailored to their size and, with so much left behind by the visitors, unusually rich in borrowings. It had been a long time since she had heard her mother sing as she sang now at her housework, or her father take up again his breathy, tuneless whistle as he pottered about the village.

There was plenty of "cover," but they hardly needed it. There was little
difference
in size between themselves and the borrowers made of wax, and except during visiting hours Pod could walk about the streets quite freely, providing he was ready to freeze. And there was no end to the borrowing of clothes. Homily had a hat again at last and would never leave the house without it. "Wait," she would say, "while I put on my hat," and took a fussed kind of joy in pronouncing the magic word. No, they could not be moved out now: that would be too cruel. Pod had even put a lock on the front door, complete with key. It was the lock of a pocket jewel case belonging to Miss Menzies. He little knew to whom he owed this find—that she had dropped the case on purpose beside the clump of thistle to make the borrowing easy. And Arrietty could not tell him. Once he knew the truth (she had been through it all before), there would be worry, despair, recriminations, and a pulling up of stakes.

"Oh dear, oh dear," she breathed aloud unhappily, "whatever shall I do...?"

Pod glanced at her sideways. "Sink down," he whispered, nudging her arm. "She's turned her head away. Sink slowly into the grasses ..."

Arrietty was only too grateful to obey. Slowly their heads and shoulders lowered out of sight, and after a moment's pause to wait and listen, they crawled away among the grass stems, and taking swift cover by the churchyard wall, they slid to safety through their own back door.

Chapter Seven

One day Miss Menzies began to talk back to Arrietty. At first, her amazement had kept her silent and confined her share of their conversations to the few leading questions that might draw Arrietty out. This for Miss Menzies was a most unusual state of affairs and could not last for long. As the summer wore on, she had garnered every detail of Arrietty's short life and a good deal of data besides. She had heard about the borrowed library of Victorian miniature books, through which Arrietty had learned to read and to gain some knowledge of the world. Miss Menzies, in her hurried, laughing, breathless way, helped add to this knowledge. She began to tell Arrietty about her own girlhood, her parents, and her family home, which she always described as "dear Gadstone." She spoke of London dances and of how she had hated them; of someone called "Aubrey," her closest and dearest friend—"my cousin, you see. We were almost brought up together. He would come to dear Gadstone for his holidays." He and Miss Menzies would ride and talk and read poetry together. Arrietty, listening and learning about horses, wondered if there was any kind of animal that she could learn to ride. You could tame a mouse (as her cousin Eggletina had done), but a mouse was too small and too scuttley: you couldn't go far on a mouse. A rat? Oh no, a rat was out of the question. She doubted even if Spiller would be brave enough to train a rat. Fight one, yes—armed with Pod's old climbing pin—Spiller was capable of that but not, she thought, of breaking a rat in to harness. But what fun it would have been to go riding with Spiller, as Miss Menzies had gone riding with Aubrey.

"He married a girl called Mary Chumley-Gore," said Miss Menzies. "She had very thick ankles."

"Oh...!" exclaimed Arrietty.

"Why do you say 'Oh' in that voice?"

"I thought he ought to have married you!"

Miss Menzies smiled and looked down at her hands. "So did I," she said quietly. She was silent a moment, and then she sighed. "I suppose he knew me too well. I was almost like a sister." She was quiet again as though thinking this out, and then she added more cheerfully, "They were happy, though, I gather; they had five children and lived in a house outside Bath."

And Miss Menzies, even before Arrietty explained to her, understood about being "seen." "You need never worry about your parents," she assured Arrietty. "I would never—even if you had not spoken—have looked at them directly. As far as we are concerned—and I can speak for Mr. Pott—they are safe here for the rest of their lives. I would never even have looked at you directly, Arrietty, if you had not crept up and spoken to me. But even before I saw any of you, I had begun to wonder—because, you see, Arrietty, your chimney sometimes smoked at quite the wrong sort of times; I only light the string for the visitors, you see, and it very soon burns out."

"And you would never pick us up, any of us? In your hands, I mean?"

Miss Menzies gave an almost scornful laugh. "As though I would dream of such a thing!" She sounded rather hurt.

Miss Menzies also understood about Spiller: that when he came for his brief visits, with his offerings of nuts, corn grains, hard-boiled sparrows' eggs, and other delicacies, she would not see so much of Arrietty. But after Spiller had gone again, she liked to hear of their adventures.

All in all, it was a happy, glorious summer for everyone concerned.

There were scares, of course. Such as the footsteps before dawn, human footsteps but not those of the one-legged Mr. Pott, when something or someone had fumbled at their door. And the moonlight night when the fox came, stalking silently down their village street, casting his great shadow and leaving his scent behind. The owl in the oak tree was, of course, a constant source of danger. But, like most owls, he did his hunting further afield, and once the vast shape had wafted over the river and they had heard his call on the other side of the valley, it was safe to sally forth.

Much of the borrowing was done at night before the mice got at the scraps dropped by the visitors. Homily at first had sniffed fastidiously when presented with—say, the remains of a large ham sandwich. Pod had to persuade her to look at the thing more practically—fresh bread, pure farm butter, and a clean paper bag; what had been good enough for human beings should be good enough for them. What was wrong, he asked her, with the last three grapes of a stripped bunch? You could wash them, couldn't you, in the stream? You could peel them? Or what was wrong with a caramel wrapped up in transparent paper? Half-eaten bath buns, he agreed, were a bit more difficult ... but you could extract the currants, couldn't you, collect and boil down those crusted globules of sugar?

Soon they had evolved a routine of collecting, sorting, cleaning, and conserving. They used Miss Menzies' shop as a storehouse, with—unknown to Pod and Homily—her full cooperation. She had cheated a little on the furnishing, having (some years ago now) gone into the local town and bought a toy grocer's shop, complete with scales, bottles, cans, barrels, and glass containers. With these, she had skillfully furnished the counter and dressed up the windows. This little shop was a great attraction to visitors—it was a general shop and post office modeled on the one in the village—bow windows, thatched roof, and all. A replica of old Mrs. Purbody (slimmed down a little to flatter her) stood behind the counter inside. Miss Menzies had even reproduced the red-knitted shawl that Mrs. Purbody wore on her shoulders, both in summer and winter, and the crisp white apron below. Homily would borrow this apron when she worked on her sortings in the back of the shop but would put it back punctually in time for visitors. Sometimes she washed it out, and every morning—regular as clockwork—she would dust and sweep the shop.

The trains made a good deal of noise. They very soon got used to this, however, and learned, in fact, to welcome it.

When the trains began to clatter and the smoke unfurled from the cottage chimneys, it warned them of Visiting Hours. Homily had time to take off the apron, let herself out of the shop, and cross the road to her home, where she engaged herself in pleasant homely tasks until the trains stopped and all was quiet again and the garden lay dreaming and silent in the peaceful evening light.

Mr. Pott, by this time, would have gone inside to his tea.