The Borrowers (9 page)

B
UT
it was one thing to write a letter and quite another to find some means of getting it under the mat. Pod, for several days, could not be persuaded to go borrowing: he was well away on his yearly turn-out of the storerooms, mending partitions, and putting up new shelves. Arrietty usually enjoyed this spring sorting, when half-forgotten treasures came to light and new uses were discovered for old borrowings. She used to love turning over the scraps of silk or lace; the odd kid gloves; the pencil stubs; the rusty razor blades; the hairpins and the needles; the dried figs, the hazel nuts, the powdery bits of chocolate, and the scarlet stubs of sealing wax. Pod, one year, had made her a hairbrush from a toothbrush and Homily had made her a small pair of Turkish bloomers from two glove fingers for "knocking about in the mornings." There were spools and spools of colored silks and cottons and small variegated balls of odd wool penpoints which Homily used as flour scoops, and bottle tops galore.

But this year Arrietty banged about impatiently and stole away whenever she dared, to stare through the grating, hoping to see the boy. She now kept the letter always with her, stuffed inside her jersey, and the edges became rubbed. Once he did run past the grating and she saw his woolen stockings; he was making a chugging noise in his throat like some kind of engine, and as he turned the corner he let out a piercing "Ooooo—oo" (it was a train whistle, he told her afterwards) so he did not hear her call. One evening, after dark, she crept away and tried to open the first gate, but swing and tug as she might she could not budge the pin.

Homily, every time she swept the sitting room, would grumble about the carpet. "It may be a curtain-and-chair job," she would say to Pod, "but it wouldn't take you not a quarter of an hour, with your pin and name-tape, to fetch me a bit of blotting paper from the desk in the morning room ... anyone would think, looking at this floor, that we lived in a toad hole. No one could call me house-proud," said Homily. "You couldn't be, not with my kind of family, but I do like," she said, "to keep 'nice things nice.'" And at last, on the fourth day, Pod gave in. He laid down his hammer (a small electric-bell clapper) and said to Arrietty: "Come along...."

Arrietty was glad to see the morning room; the door luckily had been left ajar and it was fascinating to stand at last in the thick pile of the carpet gazing upward at the shelves and pillars and towering gables of the famous overmantel. So that's where they had lived, she thought, those pleasure-loving creatures, remote and gay and self-sufficient. She imagined the Overmantel women—a little "tweedy," Homily had described them, with wasp waists and piled Edwardian hair—swinging carelessly outwards on the pilasters, lissom and laughing; gazing at themselves in the inset looking-glass which reflected back the tobacco jars, the cut-glass decanters, the bookshelves, and the plush-covered table. She imagined the Overmantel men—fair, they were said to be, with long mustaches and nervous slender hands—smoking and drinking and telling their witty tales. So they had never asked Homily up there! Poor Homily with her bony nose and never tidy hair ... They would have looked at her strangely, Arrietty thought, with their long, half-laughing eyes, and smiled a little and, humming, turned away. And they had lived only on breakfast food—on toast and egg and tiny snips of mushroom; sausage they'd have had and crispy bacon and little sips of tea and coffee. Where were they now? Arrietty wondered. Where could such creatures go?

Pod had flung his pin so it stuck into the seat of the chair and was up the leg in a trice, leaning outwards on his tape; then, pulling out the pin, he flung it like a javelin, above his head, into a fold of curtain. This is the moment, Arrietty thought, and felt for her precious letter. She slipped into the hall. It was darker, this time, with the front door closed, and she ran across it with a beating heart. The mat was heavy, but she lifted up the corner and slid the letter under by pushing with her foot. "There!" she said and looked about her shadows shadows and the ticking clock. She looked across the great plain of floor to where, in the distance, the stairs mounted. "Another world above," she thought, "world on world..." and shivered slightly.

"Arrietty," called Pod softly from the morning room, and she ran back in time to see him swing clear of the chair seat and pull himself upward on the name-tape, level with the desk. Lightly he came down feet apart and she saw him, for safety's sake, twist the name-tape lightly round his wrist. "I wanted you to see that," he said, a little breathless. The blotting paper, when he pushed it, floated down quite softly, riding lightly on the air, and lay at last some feet beyond the desk, pink and fresh, on the carpet's dingy pile.

"You start rolling," whispered Pod. "I'll be down," and Arrietty went on her knees and began to roll the blotting paper until it grew too stiff for her to hold. Pod soon finished it off and lashed it with his name-tape, through which he ran his hat pin, and together they carried the long cylinder, as two house painters would carry a ladder, under the clock and down the hole.

Homily hardly thanked them when, panting a little, they dropped the bundle in the passage outside the sitting room door. She looked alarmed. "Oh, there you are," she said. "Thank goodness! That boy's about again. I've just heard Mrs. Driver talking to Crampfurl."

"Oh!" cried Arrietty. "What did she say?" and Homily glanced sharply at her and saw that she looked pale. Arrietty realized she should have said: "What boy?" It was too late now.

"Nothing real bad," Homily went on, as though to reassure her. "It's just a boy they have upstairs. It's nothing at all, but I heard Mrs. Driver say that she'd take a slipper to him, see if she wouldn't, if he had the mats up once again in the hall."

"The mats up in the hall!" echoed Arrietty.

"Yes. Three days running, she said to Crampfurl, he'd had the mats up in the hall. She could tell, she said, by the dust and the way he'd put them back. It was the hall part that worried me, seeing as you and your father—What's the matter, Arrietty? There's no call for that sort of face! Come on now, help me move the furniture and we'll get down the carpet."

"Oh dear, oh dear," thought Arrietty miserably, as she helped her mother empty the match-box chest of drawers. "Three days running he's looked and nothing there. He'll give up hope now ... he'll never look again."

That evening she stood for hours on a stool under the chute in their kitchen, pretending she was practicing to get "a feeling" when really she was listening to Mrs. Driver's conversations with Crampfurl. All she learned was that Mrs. Driver's feet were killing her, and that it was a pity that she hadn't given in her notice last May, and would Crampfurl have another drop, considering there was more in the cellar than anyone would drink in Her lifetime, and if they thought she was going to clean the first-floor windows singlehanded they had better think again. But on the third night, just as Arrietty had climbed down off the stool before she overbalanced with weariness, she heard Crampfurl say: "If you ask me, I'd say he had a ferret." And quickly Arrietty climbed back again, holding her breath.

"A ferret!" she heard Mrs. Driver exclaim shrilly. "Whatever next? Where would he keep it?"

"That I wouldn't like to say," said Crampfurl in his rumbling earthy voice; "all I know is he was up beyond
Parkin's Beck, going round all the banks and calling-like down all the rabbit holes."

"Well, I never," said Mrs. Driver. "Where's your glass?"

"Just a drop," said Crampfurl. "That's enough. Goes to your liver, this sweet stuff—not like beer, it isn't. Yes," he went on, "when he saw me coming with a gun he pretended to be cutting a stick like from the hedge. But I'd see'd him all right and heard him. Calling away, his nose down a rabbit hole. It's my belief he's got a ferret." There was a gulp, as though Crampfurl was drinking. "Yes," he said at last, and Arrietty heard him set down the glass, "a ferret called Uncle something."

Arrietty made a sharp movement, balanced for one moment with arms waving, and fell off the stool. There was a clatter as the stool slid sideways, banged against a chest of drawers and rolled over.

"What was that?" asked Crampfurl.

There was silence upstairs and Arrietty held her breath.

"I didn't hear nothing," said Mrs. Driver.

"Yes," said Crampfurl, "it was under the floor like, there by the stove."

"That's nothing," said Mrs. Driver. "It's the coals falling. Often sounds like that. Scares you sometimes when you're sitting here alone.... Here, pass your glass, there's only a drop left—might as well finish the bottle...."

They're drinking Fine Old Madeira, thought Arrietty, and very carefully she set the stool upright and stood quietly beside it, looking up. She could see light through the crack, occasionally nicked with shadow as one person or another moved a hand or arm.

"Yes," went on Crampfurl, returning to his story, "and when I come up with m'gun he says, all innocent like—to put me off, I shouldn't wonder: 'Any old badgers' sets round here?'"

"Artful," said Mrs. Driver; "the things they think of ... badgers' sets..." and she gave her creaking laugh.

"As a matter of fact," said Crampfurl, "there did used to be one, but when I showed him where it was like, he didn't take no notice of it. Just stood there, waiting for me to go." Crampfurl laughed. "Two can play at that game, I thought, so I just sits m'self down. And there we were the two of us."

"And what happened?"

"Well, he had to go off in the end. Leaving his ferret. I waited a bit, but it never came out. I poked around a bit and whistled. Pity I never heard properly what he called it. Uncle something it sounded like—" Arrietty heard the sudden scrape of a chair. "Well," said Crampfurl, "I'd better get on now and shut up the chickens—"

The scullery door banged and there was a sudden clatter overhead as Mrs. Driver began to rake the stove. Arrietty replaced the stool and stole softly into the sitting room, where she found her mother alone.

H
OMILY
was ironing, bending and banging and pushing the hair back out of her eyes. All round the room underclothes hung airing on safety pins which Homily used like coathangers.

"What happened?" asked Homily. "Did you fall over?"

"Yes," said Arrietty, moving quietly into her place beside the fire.

"How's the feeling coming?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Arrietty. She clasped her knees and laid her chin on them.

"Where's your knitting?" asked Homily. "I don't know what's come over you lately. Always idle. You don't feel seedy, do you?"

"Oh," exclaimed Arrietty, "let me be!" And Homily for once was silent. "It's the spring," she told herself. "Used to take me like that sometimes at her age."

"I must see that boy," Arrietty was thinking—staring blindly into the fire. "I must hear what happened. I must hear if they're all right. I don't want us to die out. I don't want to be the last Borrower. I don't want"—and here Arrietty dropped her face on to her knees—"to live for ever and ever like this ... in the dark ... under the floor...."