The Little Girls (15 page)

“She makes me sick,” Mr. Fagg said, flicking her money off the counter into the drawer-till. “Sobbing like that.”

“Are fish the same?” little Dicey asked.

“They could be, for all she would ever know. To me, no. No, there are no identical fish—how should there be? What did you say you were after?” he asked, more favourably than he had yet spoken. “A large dog chain?” He unslung the fetters from their hook.

Their cost was shocking. “
And
that one’s rusty!” pointed out Sheikie swiftly. It was not; it was the one they wanted. “You’re a sharp little thing, though,” recognized Mr. Fagg, in tribute to which he knocked off threepence. “This isn’t going to travel far in a paper bag, you understand?” He demonstrated, dropping the chain in, then giving a good hard shake to the bag, which at once burst, dripping chain through. “There, now …”

“You haven’t some
strong
string, and some
strong
paper?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“We can’t, we can’t, we
can’t
carry fetters,” stormed Dicey, “in broad daylight!”

“Well, you are going to look funny without a dog, aren’t you?” said Mr. Fagg, unconcernedly going back to his wart.

Crisis. They tugged each other away into the mouse corner for consultation. Sheikie, unusually excited, declared: “I’ve got it—one of us has to wear it!” “Round their neck?” “Stupid, in broad daylight? Round their middle, under what they’ve got on. Me, it will have to be— Dicey’s too fat, and
you
come apart in the middle.” (Clare was never a frock-wearer, and her scanty blouses were known for coming untucked from her skimpy skirts.) “All I ask,” requested the dedicated one, “is, dust it properly, first!” … The chain was wound around Sheikie, rather a business, in the cramped half-dark of the Fagg earth closet, out at the bottom of the yard beyond the rabbits. He’d been anything but keen on their going there. “What you’ll find won’t be much to your fancy, probably. However, if whichever it is of you can’t wait, go on.” The chain went easily more than once, not completely twice, round the dancer’s average-slender middle: they reefed it out with blue baby ribbon unthreaded from Sheikie’s Saturday frilly knickers. When she had shaken down again into place her nicely starched frock and embroidered petticoat, true enough nothing was to be seen. In the front shop, happily, Mr. Fagg now
was
interesting somebody in his litter. Putting down two shillings, they told him the rest would have to be tick, and, saying “Thank you so very much, Mr. Fagg,” left. By the time he roared they were out of hearing, all but.

While still in funds, now for the coffer… . The more battered the better. From a wreck, or a crack in a rock? Try at the rag-and-bone shop, down near the harbour. Ahead they would have been forging, but for Dicey. “Now what’s up?” she had to be asked.

“I am not too fat. That
would
have gone round me.”

To brighten her up, they had to buy six ounces (two each) of lemon sherbet powder: this not only fizzed de-liciously on the tongue but enabled one to froth at the mouth ad lib, bright yellow. Sheikie, seized by doubt as to whether, as Miss Beaker, she ought to froth at the mouth in the open street, remained on to do so inside the sweetshop: the unrestricted others went on ahead, frothing away in particular at an unknown clergyman whom they hoped might think them possessed by devils. In a rush, before Sheikie could catch up, they made for the picture-shop window—a short way further down, on the Fagg side. This was an Old High Street window not to be missed: it guaranteed a sensation like no other—that of looking at pictures of where one was. The back of the window built itself up with masterpieces, among them “Hope,” still clutching her harp, but the front showed water colours and etchings of the Old High Street—far more queer, as a street, than one had thought. Top parts of buildings stuck out, hatted by too large gables, black beams squeezed doors, windows, and archways out of shape. Nothing high but the crooked chimneys. Toy shopfronts were frowned over by dimmed sign-boards, from under which they looked ready to fall forward. … All this was to be wondered at through two layers of glass—the picture shop’s window’s and the glass in the gilt or ebony frames. But the greater wonder was that, outside the pictures, there the Old High Street actually
was
.
You could verify simply by turning round: there, it indeed remained—a magnified picture. So seeing it, one saw it for the first time….Moreover, a portion of the Old High Street (that exactly across the way from the picture shop) reflected itself not only in the shop window but in the glass of these numerous pictures of itself. The reflection itself looked like a large painting. The gables, etc., were there twice over.

“All right, then, I
am
picturesque!” the street must have said. And soon, sorry it must have been. It came to be overrun by pokers-about, strikers of attitudes, and gazers. Much in the way they were—and would have been more so, but for the hope that their days were numbered: they could be run over, deafened, or given fever. Though the Old High Street, steep and extremely cobbled, was shunned by the traffic of most of Southstone, it had traffic of its own, which did as it liked. The din between the low gables was very lordly. On top of that, bicycles whizzing downhill so bounced and rebounded upon the cobbles that the bells on their handle-bars rang whether rung or not. And the street had deep-seated smells of its own, which, as none could be certified as downright insanitary, the denizens saw no reason to put a stop to. These mingled with smells always travelling up from the Old Harbour’s fish market, oily old engines, and scummy puddles. Southstone’s most (and, to be honest, only) picturesque quarter was seldom visited twice by the same visitor. “It certainly is a place to be seen
once
!” was said of it, with wary enthusiasm. Trophies from it, including water colours and etchings, were usually borne home. Superior paintings of it, by local art groups, hung in most of the drawing-rooms on the plateau.

Clare, sucking the last of the sherbet powder out of the cavity in the lower molar, studied these representations of where she stood, one by one—as she always did—in absolute silence. Dicey again wondered, again aloud, what it would feel like being an artist. Warned by a third reflection, they jumped round from the window in time to stop Sheikie from lobster-nipping them—a form of friendly surprise she favoured. “
I
knew where I should find you!” she said scornfully. She thought nothing of pictures, perhaps rightly. Off again they started, downhill, top speed.

“Look where you’re going, can’t you!” yelled someone, leaping out of their path.

“We are!” They were. Racing drivers of themselves, they matched speed to space. Darting birds in the air could not have been surer. Last-moment swerving, at high velocity, was their forte—to bump into anyone meant enormous loss of prestige for the bumper-in. So, no one had anything to complain of. (Shove they did, but that was another matter.) A clock at the top of the street, then one at the bottom, struck one—two—three—four—five. “
There
you are, you see: it’s practic’ly night!”

“You took ages frothing.”

“I saw jewellery. Pretence, but it flashes—sixpence for ruby rings!”

“Ho, in the
toy
shop?”

“We SAID, next was to be the coffer!”

“You won’t buy a coffer in a jiffy, so you needn’t think! Why can’t a box do?—What
is
a coffer?”

“Oh, tell her, Mumbo!”

“I’ve
told
her—and shut up, shouting! Is this secret, or isn’t it? Go on, do—let the whole
High
Street know, you two silly antelopes!”

Right she was—spies everywhere! They looked fiercely uphill, behind them, downhill, ahead.

“There goes Hermione again, down there!”

“Hoo, look at her! Wobbledy-wobbledy-wobble: she does look silly! She can’t walk straight.—What’s she done with her brother?”

“Sold him as a slave.”

“She’s got three paper bags, now.”

“Gone off her head and think’s she’s in Harrods!”

Pink-linen, Hermione vanished into a doorway, which proved (when they’d hastened down to it) to be that of “Curios.” “Curios” chiefly ran to the second-hand. What was chiefly curious about things in “Curios” was that anyone could ever have wanted them or be hoped to do so ever again. “From auctions,” discerned the Beaker & Artworth child. To make sure what Hermione
was
doing, they took turns at squinting in at the window—under shelves on which fish knives and forks, half dozens of napkin rings, pepper-and-salt sets and so on tarnished away embedded in faded velvet; over trays where assortments of fancy tea spoons, tied up into bunches with rotting ribbons, lay among tangled corals, dishonoured medals and lacquer and other blemished visiting-card cases; and in between verticals such as statuary, domed or naked clocks, decanters with dust in their cut glass, grand jettisoned oil lamps, cruets for ogres. “Choosing a cheap birthday present to give her mother, I expect, or aunt, or something,” opined Dicey. “Now,” she further reported, “she’s starting sobbing—I expect everything’s too expensive?”

Mumbo came elbowing back for a second peer: longer, this time, and closer. Her spine stiffened, her knuckles whacked at her skirt. She used a shout-sized breath for a held-in whisper: “
They’ve
got a
COFFER
in there.”

Three noses flattened against the glass. Sheikie, though, stepped back after a minute. “If that’s all a coffer is, we’ve got two at home!”

“You never said!”

“Well, you never asked. Well, there they
are
—doing no good, either. Nobody uses them ever, or ever wants them. Nobody knows about them, so far as I know… .” Sheikie came, at this point, to a meaning pause. “Nobody’d miss one.” She lightly tilted her eyes at Dicey, then turned coolly away.

“But,
Sheikie …”

But the dancer was elsewhere. This instant, a bronze, a nymph, in “Curios’ ” window had seized her fancy. Fancy, merely?—something more was at work. Inspiration set in. Knowingly, calmly, from every angle, Sheikie studied the pose of the statuette. Poised on a toe on a green alabaster base, the nymph spiralled up to the topmost fingertip of an arm flung upward over her head. Selecting a spot on the pavement outside the shop, Sheikie herself went into the pose. She held it.

Oblivious, Mumbo gnawed at a thumbnail. “
I
don’t know,” she admitted, scowling with indecision. “No harm to at any rate
ask
in there?—if that fat ostrich would buck up and get out.”

“She’s looking at tea spoons now, for her poor mother,” Dicey thought likely, having in view the window from which Mr. Curio’s hand had removed a bunch. “That coffer they’ve got’s exactly just what we SAID.”

“If it had anything wrong with it, like no bottom, we ought to be able to make them knock something off?”

“It wouldn’t be very much good to us with
no
bottom.”

“
I
vote we go on to the rag-and-bone shop!”

“This coffer in
here’s
exactly just what we—”

“Yes!—But they don’t try anything on at the rag-and-bone shop.”

“If we went there, could we probably get some bones?”

Sheikie changed toes, to try the pose in reverse (other arm up). This went, if anything, still better. She now spoke, also—though lacking a marble base, she managed to give her tone a remote altitude. “Do as you like” said she.

“We’re going to. Only we don’t know what, yet.”

“If you like throwing good money after bad, oh do! At home we have two coffers, I merely told you.”

Clare glared no higher up than the lower air. “Ho, yes!
Yours
, are they, by any chance?”

“My own family’s,” mentioned the voice from above. “And Daddy’d give one to
me,
I know.”

“And would he want to know why?—
oh,
no! Or your mother would come along, and she’d start asking.”

“Do as you like,” said Nonchalance, “oh, do!”

Deadlock, unbearable. Dicey screamed: “Bother, oh
botheration
! Oh bother,
be
bothered—oh,
bother
you!”

“That’s right,” Clare told her, “go on, collect a crowd!”

Sheikie already was doing so—in a small way and, be it said, undesignedly. She suffered the increase of starers round her with the indifference of the artist—till one or two of them started chucking pennies. News of a pretty little living waxwork’s being on exhibition somewhere at the bottom of the High Street was, from all signs, spreading like wildfire. Outside where “Curios” was, the Old High Street started not only to flatten down but to widen, being about to debouch on the Old Harbour. This was where good-humoured Saturday people, doing nothing particular, made it their custom to stand and be. By now the sun was off them, but had not left them—from where it was, in hiding behind the High Street’s roofy hill, the sun went on heating the toast-brown shadow, in which the colours, darker than earlier, seemed brighter, brightest being the pink peppermint rock being licked by infants.

No, till the coppers started pelting the pavement round here, she hadn’t turned a hair. She might have been alone in a nymphly glade. “Keep it up, miss!” was shouted: there was otherwise, for that minute or two (nothing lasted more than a minute or two), a hush. Forth into the midst stepped Hermione, out of “Curios.” She had put her hat on. Biting her lip, she looked neither to left nor right. The natives parted before Hermione, who become lost to view till next Monday morning.

Sheikie out of the pose, the three sped on. A minute had to be sacrificed to restraining Dicey from doubling back to pick up the pennies. She mourned: “There were four of them. I counted them. Four of them would have bought—”