The Borrowers Aloft (8 page)

Chapter Sixteen

Under Pod's direction, and with one or two small mistakes on the parts of Homily and Arrietty, the process was reversed and the latch and bolt made fast again. But not before—as Pod had promised—all three had climbed the ladder in solemn file and, rubbing their misted breath from the glass, had stared out over the landscape. They had seen, so far below them, the dazzling slope of Mr. Platter's lawn, the snakelike river, black as a whiplash, curving away into the distance; they had seen the snow-covered roofs of Fordham—and beside a far loop of the stream the three tall poplars that they knew marked the site of Little Fordham. They looked very far away—even, thought Homily, as the crow flies....

They did not talk much after they had seen these things. They felt overawed by the distance, the height, and the whiteness. On Pod's orders they set about storing the tackle below the floor board, where though safely hidden, it would always be ready to hand. "We'll practice that window job again tomorrow," said Pod, "and every other day from now on."

As they worked, the wind rose again, and the underside of the ilex leaves showed gray as the gray sky. Before dusk it began to snow again. When they had set back the board and replaced the nails, they crept up close to the gas fire and sat there thinking as the daylight drained from the room. There still seemed no way of escape. "We're too high," Homily kept saying. "Never does and never has done borrowers any good to be high...."

At last the footsteps of Mrs. Platter on the stairs drove them back to their box. When the match scraped and the gas jet flared, they saw the room again and the blackness of the window with the snow piled high on the outer sill. The line of white rose softly as they watched it with each descending snowflake.

"Terrible weather," muttered Mrs. Platter to herself, as she set down their plate and their saucer. She stared at them anxiously as they lay huddled in the box and turned up the gas fire a little before she went away. And they were left as always to eat by themselves in the dark.

Chapter Seventeen

The snow and frost and leaden cold continued into early February—until one morning they woke to soft rain and the pale clouds running in the sky. The leaves of the ilex branch, enameled and shining, streamed black against the gray, showing no silvery glimpse of underside. "Wind's in the south," announced Pod that morning in the satisfied voice of an experienced weather prophet. "We're likely to have a thaw."

In the past weeks they had employed their time as best they could. Against the weight of snow on the sill, they had practiced the raising of the latch and bolt and had brought the process to a fine art. Mr. and Mrs. Platter, they gathered, had been held up on the building of the cage-house, but the borrowers' clothes had arrived, laid out between layers of tissue paper in a cardboard dress box. It took them no time at all to get the lid off and, with infinite care and cunning, to examine the contents and in secret to try them on. The seamstress had nimbler fingers than those of Mrs. Platter and had worked in far finer materials. There was a gray suit for Pod with—instead of a shirt—a curious kind of dickey with the collar and tie painted on; there was a pleated and ruched dress for Arrietty with two pinafores to keep it clean. Homily, although ready to grumble, took to her green dress with its "hint of a bustle" and would wear it sometimes to a moment of danger—the dread sound of footsteps on the stairs.

To Pod, these goings on seemed frivolous and childish. Had they forgotten, he wondered, their immediate danger and the fate that day by day came closer as the weather cleared and Mr. Platter worked away on the house? He did not reproach them, however. Let them have their little bit of happiness, he decided, in face of misery to come.

But he became very "down." Better they all should be dead, he told them one day, than in lifelong public captivity—and he would sit and stare into space.

He became so "down" that Homily and Arrietty grew frightened. They stopped dressing up and conferred together in corners. They tried to liven him with little jokes and anecdotes; they saved him all the tidbits from the food. But Pod seemed to have lost his appetite. And even when they reminded him that spring was in the air and soon it would be March, "And something always happens to us in March," he evinced no interest. "Something
will
happen to us in March!" was all he said before retreating again into silence.

One day Arrietty came beside him as he sat there, dully thinking, in the corner of the box. She took his hand. "I have an idea," she said.

He made an effort to smile and gently squeezed her hand. "There isn't anything," he said. "We've got to face it, lass."

"But there is something," Arrietty persisted. "Do listen, Papa. I've thought of the very thing!"

"Have you, my girl?" he said gently, and smiling a little, he stroked back the hair from her cheek.

"Yes," said Arrietty. "We could make a balloon."

"A what?" he exclaimed. And Homily, who had been toasting up a sliver of bacon at the gas fire, came across to them, drawn by the sharpness of his tone.

"We needn't even make it!" Arrietty hurried on. "There are heaps of balloons in those boxes, and we have all those strawberry baskets, and there are diagrams and everything..." She pulled his hand. "Come and look at this copy of the
Illustrated London News.
"

There was a three-page spread in the
Illustrated London News
—with diagrams, photographs, and an expert article, set out comprehensively in columns—on the lately revived sport of free ballooning.

Pod could count and add up, but he could not read, so Arrietty, walking about on the page, read the article aloud. He listened attentively, trying to take it in. "Let's have that again, lass," he would say, frowning with his effort to understand.

"Well, move, Mother—please," Arrietty would say because Homily, weak from standing, had suddenly sat down on the page. "You're on the piece about wind velocity..."

Homily kept muttering phrases like, "Oh, my goodness—oh, my goodness gracious me..." as the full implications of their plan began to dawn on her. She looked strained and a little wild but, awake now to their desperate plight, was resigned to a lesser evil.

"I've got that," Pod would say at last, after several repetitions of a paragraph concerning something described as "the canopy or envelope." "Now, let's have that bit about the valve line and the load ring. It's up near the top of the second column." And he and Arrietty would walk up the page again, and patiently, clearly, although stumbling now and again on the big words, Arrietty would read aloud.

In the tool drawer, no longer out of bounds, they had found the stub of a lead pencil. Pod extracted the lead and sharpened it to a fine point for Arrietty to underline key headings and to make lists.

At last, on the third day of concentrated homework, Pod announced, "I'm there!"

He was a changed man suddenly; what had once seemed a ridiculous flight of fancy on the part of Arrietty could now become sober fact, and he was practical enough to see it.

The first job was swiftly to dismantle the shrimping net. On this, in more senses than one, would hang all their hopes of success. Homily, with a cut-down morsel of fret-saw blade taken from a box in the tool drawer, was to cut the knots that secured the net to the frame. Pod would then saw up the frame into several portable lengths and take off the bamboo handle.

"That whole shrimping net's got to disappear," Pod explained, "as though it had never existed. We can't have them seeing the frame with the netting part cut away. Once it's in pieces, like, we can hide it under the floor."

It took less time than they had foreseen, and as they laid back the floor board and dropped the nails into place, Pod—who was not often given to philosophizing—said, "Funny, when you come to think of it, that this old net we were caught in should turn out to be our salvation..."

That night, when they went to bed, they felt tired but a good deal happier. Pod for some time lay awake, thinking another great test lay before them on the morrow. Could the balloon be filled from the gas jet? There was a real danger in meddling with gas, he realized uneasily; even adult human beings had met with accidents, let alone disobedient children. He had warned Arrietty about gas in the days when they lived at Firbank, and she, good girl, had respected his advice and had understood the peril. He would, of course, take every precaution: first the window must be opened wide, the cock of the gas fire shut off, and the fire allowed to cool down until not a spot of red remained. There was plenty of pressure in the gas jet; even this very evening, when Mrs. Platter had first lit it, he remembered how fiercely it had roared; she had always—he had noticed—to turn it a fraction lower. The ascent to the mantelshelf could be made via the dummy. It was no use worrying, he decided at last; they were bound to have this tryout and to. abide by the result. All the same, it was a long time—several hours it seemed—before Pod fell asleep.

Chapter Eighteen

The balloon filled perfectly. Lashed around the nozzle of the gas jet and anchored to the horseshoe on the floor by a separate piece of twine, it first swelled slightly in a limp mass that hung loosely down against the burner and then—to their startled joy—suddenly shot upright and went on swelling. Bigger and bigger it grew—until it became a vast tight globe of a rich translucent purple. Then Pod, firmly perched among the ornate scrollwork of the bracket, leaned sideways and turned off the gas.

As though making a tourniquet, he tied the neck of the balloon above the nozzle and undid the lashing just below. The balloon leaped free almost with a jump but was brought up short by the tethering string that Pod had anchored to the horseshoe.

Homily and Arrietty on the floor beside the horseshoe let out their "Aaahs ... Ohs..." Arrietty ran forward and, seizing the string, tried her weight on it. She swung a little to and fro as the balloon bumped up against the ceiling.

"Gently," cried Pod from the bosom of the dummy. He was climbing down slowly on carefully set footholds of pins. When he reached the caged part below the dummy's hips, he swung down more quickly from one wire rung to another.

"Now, we'll all three take hold," he told them, running to grasp the string. "Pull," he cried, "as hard as you can. Hand over hand!"

Hand over hand they pulled and swung, and slowly the balloon came down. A swift double turn of the twine through a nail hole in the horseshoe and there it was—tethered beside them, gently swaying and twisting.

Pod wiped his brow on his sleeves. "It's too small," he said.

"Too small!" exclaimed Homily. She felt dwarfed and awed by the great bobbing purple mass. But it gave her a feeling of delightful power to push it and make it sway; and a sideways stroke of her fingers would send it into a spin.

"Of course it's too small," explained Pod in a worried voice. "We shouldn't be able to pull it down like that. A balloon like that size might take Arrietty alone, but it would not take the three of us—not with the net and the basket added. And we got to have ballast, too."

"Well," said Homily after a short, dismayed silence, "what are we going to do?"

"I've got to think," said Pod.

"Suppose we all stopped eating and thinned down a bit?" suggested Homily.

"That wouldn't be any good. And you're thin enough already." Pod seemed very worried. "No, I've got to think."

"There is a bigger balloon," said Arrietty. "It's in a box by itself. At least, it looked bigger to me—"

"Well, let's take a look," said Pod, but he did not sound very hopeful.

It did seem bigger and was covered with shriveled white markings. "I think it's some kind of lettering," Arrietty remarked, turning over the box lid. "Yes, it says here, 'Printed to your own specification'—I wonder what it means?"

"I don't care what it means," exclaimed Pod, "so long as there's room for a lot of it. Yes, it's bigger," he went on, "a good deal bigger and it's heavier. Yes, this balloon may just do us nicely. Might as well try it at once, now we've got the fire off and the window open."

"What shall we do with this one?" asked Homily from the floor. She tapped it sharply so that it trembled and spun.

"We better burst it," said Pod on his way down from the table via the raffia ladder, which swung on bent pins from the chair back, "and hide the remains. Nothing much else that we
can
do."

He burst it with a pin. The report seemed deafening, and the balloon, deflating, jumped about like a mad thing; Homily screamed and ran for safety into the wire cage below the dummy. There was a terrible smell of gas.

"Didn't think it would make such a noise," said Pod, pin in hand and looking rather startled. "Never mind; with the window open, the smell will soon wear off..."

The new balloon was more cumbersome to climb with, and Pod had to rest a while on the mantelshelf before he tackled the gas jet.

"Like me to come up and help you, Papa?" Arrietty called out from the floor.

"No," he said, "I'll be all right in a minute. Just let me get my breath..."

The heavier balloon remained limp for longer; until, almost as though groaning under the effort, it raised itself upright and slowly began to fill. "Oh," breathed Arrietty, "it's going to be a lovely color..." It was a deep fuchsia pink, becoming each moment—as the rubber swelled—more delicately pale. As it swayed a little on the gas jet, white lettering began to appear. "STOP" was the first word, with an exclamation mark after it. Arrietty, reading the word aloud, hoped it was not an omen. Below "STOP" came the word "BALLYHOGGIN" and below that again in slightly smaller print, "World Famous Model Village and Riverside Teas."

The balloon was growing larger and larger. Homily looked alarmed. "Careful, Pod," she begged. "Whatever you do, don't burst it!"

"It can go a bit more yet," said Pod. They watched anxiously until at last Pod, in a glow of pink shadow from the swaying monster above him, said, "That's about it," and leaning sideways to the wall, sharply turned off the gas. Climbing back, he took up the tape measure, which still hung from the gas bracket, and measured the height of the letter 'i' in "Riverside Teas." "A good three inches," he said. "That gives us something to check by the next time we inflate." He now spoke more often in current ballooning terms and had acquired quite a fair-sized vocabulary concerning such things as flying ballast, rip lines, trail ropes, or grapnel hooks.

This time the balloon, soaring to the ceiling, half lifted the horseshoe and dragged it along the floor. With great presence of mind, Homily sat down on the horseshoe while Arrietty leaped for the string.

"That looks more like it," said Pod as he climbed once again down the bosom of the dummy. Staring down excitedly, his foot slipped on a pin, but leaning sideways, he pushed the pin back in again almost to the head and made the foothold secure. But for the rest of the climb down he controlled his eagerness and took the stages

more slowly. By the time he reached the floor, in spite of the cold air from the window, he looked very hot and disheveled.

"Any give on the line?" he asked Arrietty as he waited to recover his breath.

"No," gasped Arrietty. Then they all three pulled together, but the balloon merely twisted on the ceiling as though held there by a magnet.

"That's enough," said Pod, after they had all three lifted their feet from the floor and had swung about a while, still with no effect on the balloon. "Let her go. I've got to think again."

They were quiet while he did so but watched anxiously as he paced about, frowning with concentration. Once he untethered the balloon from the horseshoe and, towline in hand, walked it about on the ceiling. It bumped a little but followed him obediently as he sketched out its course from the floor.

"Time's getting on, Pod," Homily said at last.

"I know," he said.

"I mean," Homily went on in a worried voice, "how are we going to get it down? I'm thinking of Mabel and Sidney. We've got to get it down before supper, Pod."

"I know that," he said. He walked the balloon across the room until he stood below the lip of the table. "What we need is some kind of winch—some kind of worm and worm wheel." He stared up at the knob of the tool drawer.

"Worm and worm wheel..." said Homily in a mystified voice. "
Worm?
" she repeated incredulously.

Arrietty, up to date now with almost every aspect of free ballooning, including the use of winches, laughed and said, "It's a thing that takes the weight—supposing, say, you were turning a handle. Like the—" She stopped abruptly, struck by a sudden thought. "Papa!" she called out excitedly. "What about the musical box?"

"The musical box?" he repeated blankly. Then, as Arrietty nodded, a light dawned, and his whole expression changed. "That's it!" he exclaimed. "You've hit it. That's our winch handle, weight, cylinder, worm and wheel and all!"