The Borrowers (14 page)

"Now don't take on," said Pod in a tired voice.

Arrietty had covered her face with her hands and her tears ran through her fingers; the boy, watching, saw them glisten in the candlelight. "I'm not taking on," she gasped, "I'm so happy ... happy."

"You mean," said the boy to Pod, but with one eye on Arrietty, "you'll go to the badger's set?" He too felt a mounting excitement.

"Where else?" asked Pod.

"Oh, my goodness gracious!" moaned Homily, and sat down on the broken match-box chest of drawers.

"But you've got to go somewhere tonight," said the boy. "You've got to go somewhere before tomorrow morning."

"Oh, my goodness gracious!" moaned Homily again.

"He's right at that," said Pod. "Can't cross them fields in the dark. Bad enough getting across them in daylight."

"I know," cried Arrietty. Her wet face glistened in the candlelight; it was alight and tremulous and she raised her arms a little as though about to fly, and she swayed as she balanced on her toe-tips. "Let's go to the doll's house just for tonight and tomorrow—" she closed her eyes against the brightness of the vision—"tomorrow the boy will take us—take us—" and she could not say to where.

"Take us?" cried Homily in a strange hollow voice. "How?"

"In his pockets," chanted Arrietty; "won't you?" Again she swayed, with lighted upturned face.

"Yes," he said, "and bring the luggage up afterwards—in a fish basket."

"Oh, my goodness!" moaned Homily.

"I'll pick all the furniture out of this pile here. Or most of it. They'll hardly notice. And anything else you want."

"Tea," murmured Homily. "Enough for our lifetimes."

"All right," said the boy. "I'll get a pound of tea. And coffee too if you like. And cooking pots. And matches. You'll be all right," he said.

"But what do they eat?" wailed Homily. "Caterpillars?"

"Now, Homily," said Pod, "don't be foolish. Lupy was always a good manager."

"But Lupy isn't there," said Homily. "Berries. Do they eat berries? How do they cook? Out of doors?"

"Now, Homily," said Pod, "we'll see all that when we get there."

"I couldn't light a fire of sticks," said Homily, "not in the wind. What if it rains?" she asked. "How do they cook in the rain?"

"Now, Homily—" began Pod—he was beginning to lose patience—but Homily rushed on.

"Could you get us a couple of tins of sardines to take?" she asked the boy. "And some salt? And some candles? And matches? And could you bring us the carpets from the doll's house?"

"Yes," said the boy, "I could. Of course I could. Anything you want."

"All right," said Homily. She still looked wild, partly because some of her hair had rolled out of the curlers, but she seemed appeased. "How are you going to get us upstairs? Up to the schoolroom?"

The boy looked down at his pocketless night-shirt. "I'll carry you," he said.

"How?" asked Homily. "In your hands?"

"Yes," said the boy.

"I'd rather die," said Homily. "I'd rather stay right here and be eaten by the rat-catcher from the town hall at Leighton Buzzard."

The boy looked round the kitchen; he seemed bewildered. "Shall I carry you in the clothespin bag?" he asked at last, seeing it hanging in its usual place on the handle of the scullery door.

"All right," said Homily. "Take out the clothespins first."

But she walked into it bravely enough when he laid it out on the floor. It was soft and floppy and made of woven raffia. When he picked it up Homily shrieked and clung to Pod and Arrietty. "Oh," she gasped as the bag swayed a little, "oh, I can't! Stop it! Put me out! Oh! Oh!" And, clutching and slipping, they fell into a tangle at the bottom.

"Be quiet, Homily, can't you!" exclaimed Pod angrily, and held her tightly by the ankle. It was not easy to control her as he was lying on his back with his face pushed forward on his chest and one leg, held upright by the side of the bag, somewhere above his head. Arrietty climbed up, away from them, clinging to the knots of raffia, and looked out over the edge.

"Oh, I can't! I can't!" cried Homily. "Stop it, Pod. I'm dying. Tell him to put us down."

"Put us down," said Pod in his patient way, "just for a moment. That's right. On the floor," and, as once again the bag was placed beside the hole, they all ran out.

"Look here," said the boy unhappily to Homily, "you've got to try."

"She'll try all right," said Pod. "Give her a breather, and take it slower, if you see what I mean."

"All right," agreed the boy, "but there isn't much time. Come on," he said nervously, "hop in."

"Listen!" cried Pod sharply, and froze.

The boy, looking down, saw their three upturned faces catching the light—like pebbles they looked, still and stony, against the darkness within the hole. And then in a flash they were gone—the boards were empty and the hole was bare. He leaned into it. "Pod!" he called in a frantic whisper. "Homily! Come back!" And then he too became frozen, stooped and rigid above the hole. The scullery door creaked open behind him.

It was Mrs. Driver. She stood there silent, this time in her nightdress. Turning, the boy stared up at her. "Hallo," he said, uncertainly, after a moment.

She did not smile, but something lightened in her eyes —a malicious gleam, a look of triumph. She carried a candle which shone upwards on her face, streaking it strangely with light and shadow. "What are you doing down here?" she asked.

He stared at her, but he did not speak.

"Answer me," she said. "And what are you doing with the clothespin bag?"

Still he stared at her, almost stupidly. "The clothespin bag?" he repeated and looked down as though surprised to see it in his hand. "Nothing," he said.

"Was it you who put the watch in the hole?"

"No," he said, staring up at her again, "it was there already."

"Ah," she said and smiled, "so you knew it was there?"

"No," he said; "I mean yes."

"Do you know what you are?" asked Mrs. Driver, watching him closely. "You are a sneaking, thieving, noxious little dribbet of no-good!"

His face quivered. "Why?" he said.

"You know why. You're a wicked, black-hearted, fribbling little pickpocket. That's what you are. And so are they. They're nasty little crafty, scampy, scurvy, squeaking little—"

"No, they're not," he put in quickly.

"And you're in league with them!" She came across to him and, taking him by the upper arm, she jerked him to his feet. "You know what they do with thieves?" she asked.

"No," he said.

"They lock them up. That's what they do with thieves. And that's what's going to happen to you!"

"I'm not a thief," cried the boy, his lips trembling, "I'm a borrower."

"A what?" She swung him round by tightening the grip on his arm.

"A borrower," he repeated; there were tears on his eyelids; he hoped they would not fall.

"So that's what you call it!" she exclaimed (as he had done—so long ago, it seemed now—that day with Arrietty).

"That's their name," he said. "The kind of people they are—they're Borrowers."

"Borrowers, eh?" repeated Mrs. Driver wonderingly. She laughed. "Well, they've done all the borrowing they're ever going to do in this house!" She began to drag him toward the door.

The tears spilled over his eyelids and ran down his cheeks. "Don't hurt them," he begged. "I'll move them. I promise. I know how."

Mrs. Driver laughed again and pushed him roughly through the green baize door. "They'll be moved all right," she said. "Don't worry. The rat-catcher will know how. Crampfurl's old cat will know how. So will the sanitary inspector. And the fire brigade, if need be. The police'll know how, I shouldn't wonder. No need to worry about moving them. Once you've found the nest," she went on, dropping her voice to a vicious whisper as they passed Aunt Sophy's door, "the rest is easy!"

She pushed him into the schoolroom and locked the door and he heard the boards of the passage creak beneath her tread as, satisfied, she moved away. He crept into bed then, because he was cold, and cried his heart out under the blankets.

"A
ND
that," said Mrs. May, laying down her crochet hook, "is really the end."

Kate stared at her. "Oh, it can't be," she gasped, "oh, please ...
please....
"

"The last square," said Mrs. May, smoothing it out on her knee, "the hundred and fiftieth. Now we can sew them together—"

"Oh," said Kate, breathing again, "the quilt! I thought you meant the story."

"It's the end of the story too," said Mrs. May absently, "or the beginning. He never saw them again," and she began to sort out the squares.

"But," stammered Kate, "you can't—I mean— It's not fair," she cried, "it's cheating. It's—" Tears sprang to her eyes; she threw her work down on the table and her crochet hook after it, and she kicked the bag of wools which lay beside her on the carpet.

"Why, Kate, why?" Mrs. May looked genuinely surprised.

"Something more must have happened," cried Kate angrily. "What about the rat-catcher? And the policeman? And the—"

"But something more did happen," said Mrs. May, "a lot more happened. I'm going to tell you."

"Then why did you say it was the end?"

"Because," said Mrs. May (she still looked surprised), "he never saw them again."

"Then how can there be more?"

"Because," said Mrs. May, "there is more. A lot more."

Kate glared at her. "All right," she said, "go on."

Mrs. May looked back at her. "Kate," she said after a moment, "stories never really end. They can go on and on and on. It's just that sometimes, at a certain point, one stops telling them."

"But not at this kind of point," said Kate.

"Well, thread your needle," said Mrs. May, "with gray wool, this time. And we'll sew these squares together. I'll start at the top and you can start at the bottom. First a gray square, then an emerald, then a pink, and so on—"

"Then you didn't really mean it," said Kate irritably, trying to push the folded wool through the narrow eye of the needle, "when you said he never saw them again?"

"But I did mean it," said Mrs. May. "I'm telling you just what happened. He had to leave suddenly—at the end of the week—because there was a boat for India and a family who could take him. And for the three days before he left they kept him locked up in those two rooms."

"For three days!" exclaimed Kate.

"Yes. Mrs. Driver, it seemed, told Aunt Sophy that he had a cold. She was determined, you see, to keep him out of the way until she'd got rid of the Borrowers."

"And did she?" asked Kate. "I mean—did they all come? The policeman? And the rat-catcher? And the—"

"The sanitary inspector didn't come. At least, not while my brother was there. And they didn't have the rat-catcher from the town hall, but they had the local man. The policeman came—" Mrs. May laughed. "During those three days Mrs. Driver used to give my brother a running commentary on what was going on below. She loved to grumble, and my brother, rendered harmless and shut away upstairs, became a kind of neutral. She used to bring his meals up, and, on that first morning, she brought all the doll's furniture up on the breakfast tray and made my brother climb the shelves and put it back in the doll's house. It was then she told him about the policeman. Furious he said she was."

"Why?" asked Kate.

"Because the policeman turned out to be Nellie Runacre's son Ernie, a boy Mrs. Driver had chased many a time for stealing russet apples from the tree by the gate—'A nasty, thieving, good-for-nothing dribbet of no-good,' she told my brother. 'Sitting down there he is now, in the kitchen, large as life with his notebook out, laughing fit to bust ... twenty-one, he says he is now, and as cheeky as you make 'em...."'

"And was he," asked Kate, round-eyed, "a dribbet of no-good?"

"Of course not. Any more than my brother was. Ernie Runacre was a fine, upstanding young man and a credit to the police force. And he did not actually laugh at Mrs. Driver when she told him her story, but he gave her what Crampfurl spoke of afterwards as 'an old-fashioned look' when she described Homily in bed—'Take more water with it,' it seemed to say."

"More water with what?" asked Kate.

"The Fine Old Pale Madeira, I suppose," said Mrs. May. "And Great-Aunt Sophy had the same suspicion: she was furious when she heard that Mrs. Driver had seen several little people when she herself on a full decanter had only risen to one or, at most, two. Crampfurl had to bring all the Madeira up from the cellar and stack the cases against the wall in a corner of Aunt Sophy's bedroom where, as she said, she could keep an eye on it."

"Did they get a cat?" asked Kate.

"Yes, they did. But that wasn't much of a success either. It was Crampfurl's cat, a large yellow torn with white streaks in it. According to Mrs. Driver, it had only two ideas in its head—to get out of the house or into the larder. 'Talk of borrowers,' Mrs. Driver would say as she slammed down the fish pie for my brother's luncheon, 'that cat's a borrower, if ever there was one; borrowed the fish, that cat did, and a good half-bowl of egg sauce!' But the cat wasn't there long. The first thing the rat-catcher's terriers did was to chase it out of the house. There was a dreadful set-to, my brother said. They chased it everywhere—upstairs and downstairs, in and out all the rooms, barking their heads off. The last glimpse my brother had of the cat was streaking away through the spinney and across the fields with the terriers after it."

"Did they catch it?"

"No." Mrs. May laughed. "It was still there when I went, a year later. A little morose, but as fit as a fiddle."

"Tell about when
you
went."

"Oh, I wasn't there long," said Mrs. May rather hastily, "and after that the house was sold. My brother never went back."

Kate stared at her suspiciously, pressing her needle against the center of her lower lip. "So they never caught the little people?" she said at last.

Mrs. May's eyes flicked away. "No, they never actually caught them, but"—she hesitated—"as far as my poor brother was concerned, what they did do seemed even worse."