The Abominables, Page 3

  “Well, I did leave a note,” said Con, “so he won’t be too worried until tomorrow evening. Anyway,” he went on contentedly, “I can’t leave tonight, can I?”

  All around him sat the yetis, as close to him as they could get, but trying very hard not to stare because they knew it was rude.

  “I don’t mind him having no hair on his face,” whispered Ambrose to his sister. “I just know we are going to be friends.”

  “He’s very thin,” murmured Lucy worriedly. “Shall I go and say sorry to some grass for him?”

  “Now run along, all of you,” said Lady Agatha, when Con had finished drinking. “I want to talk to this boy alone before bedtime.”

  “But he hasn’t told me a story,” wailed Ambrose. “He knows a new one, about a chicken called Donald!”

  “Not a chicken, Ambrose,” said Con. “A duck.”

  “Later, dear,” said Lady Agatha, and Ambrose ambled off after the others to investigate Hubert’s hole, which had turned out to be a tunnel to the world outside.

  When they had gone, Lady Agatha looked at Con’s serious, thoughtful face and sighed.

  “If you’d been grown up,” she said, “not still a child, I’d have thought you’d been sent in answer to my prayers.”

  Con was sitting on the grass at her feet, his hands round his knees.

  “Why?” he said.

  For a moment she didn’t answer. Then she said: “For some time now, I have thought that my yetis ought to leave the valley. That they ought to be taken to a place where they will be absolutely safe. I am an extremely old woman, you see. How old, you might not believe. And if anyone found them here in the wilds after my death … well, anything could happen.”

  Con was silent. He knew only too well how right she was. Those dreadful people in the hotel …

  “Father would always be safe,” Lady Agatha went on. “He knows every rock, every crevasse; he’s wise and he can be cunning. But the children … they’re so trusting. And Grandma is old, and Uncle Otto … well, he’s a scholar, and they’re never very good at looking after themselves.”

  “But where would they go, Lady Agatha? Where would you take them?”

  A dreamy look came into her face. “To my old home. To Farley Towers, in Hampshire.”

  “All the way to Britain!” Con was amazed. It was a journey halfway across the world, through the burning plains of India, the stony wastes of Afghanistan, across Iran and Turkey and almost the whole length of Europe. How could the yetis ever manage that?

  “It’s such a beautiful place, Farley. Soft, mellow brick terraces with peacocks, a deer park, a lake … My Little Ones would be safe there, I know, and it’s just the life for them. Drawing Room Tea, Church on Sundays, Croquet …”

  “But, Lady Agatha, it’s years since you left. Anything could have happened to Farley Towers.”

  But Lady Agatha said she was certain that her old home was just as she had left it and still in the charge of some dear member of her family who would welcome and care for the yetis just as she had done. “After all,” she said, “An Englishman’s Home Is Still His Castle.”

  Con was beginning to understand. “Was that why you wanted me to be grown up? So that I could help you to take your yetis to England?”

  “So that you could take them for me. I’m far too old to travel. I shall die here in this valley where I have lived so happily.”

  Con’s mind was racing ahead, thinking out the yetis’ journey.

  “It would have to be a secret, I suppose?”

  “Indeed, yes,” said Lady Agatha. “The strictest secret. It would be most dangerous if anyone came upon them before they were safe at Farley Towers.”

  Con was silent, his forehead furrowed. “Do yetis hibernate?” he said at last. “Go to sleep through the winter, I mean, like bears?”

  “Not hibernate, exactly,” said Lady Agatha, “but in severe weather conditions with extreme cold they can go into a sort of coma. Their heartbeat slows down, and they don’t need food or drink. They can survive almost anything. No yeti has ever died of exposure.”

  “Well, in that case,” said Con, “I think I can see how to get them to England without anyone knowing.”

  And he told her his plan. Once a week, said Con, huge, refrigerated lorries came all the way from Britain to the Hotel Himalaya, trucking in frozen meat for the visitors who were too picky to try the local delicacies—sour cheese smoked in yak dung, or tea with rancid butter floating in it. Usually these lorries returned with a load of spices, or cloth, or goatskins that the Bukhimese wanted to sell in Britain. “But just once,” said Con, “if I can square it with the driver, I reckon it could return with yetis.”

  Lady Agatha stared at him. Then: “I have something that might help persuade the driver,” she said.

  She disappeared into her stone hut and came back with a little bag made out of the hem of her flannel nightdress. “Open it!” she commanded.

  Con took the bag, which was surprisingly heavy, and undid the string. The metal inside, catching the sunlight, was unmistakable.

  “Gold,” he said wonderingly.

  “I dredged it up from the river,” said Lady Agatha. “It’s silly stuff but I thought it might come in useful. I need hardly tell you that no one must ever know where it came from.” She closed the bag and sat down again on her tussock. “There’s one thing you’ve forgotten,” she said. “Where would you hide the yetis till the lorry came?”

  Con grinned. “In the last place that anyone would look for them. In the bridal suite of the hotel. It’s a terribly grand set of rooms on the top floor, quite cut off from the rest of the hotel, with its own lift and everything. The Prince of Pettelsdorf booked it this week for his honeymoon, but he’s canceled. My sister knows where the keys are; she’d help me smuggle them in.”

  Lady Agatha was silent. “It’s quite impossible, of course. Quite out of the question that I could let a child as young as you take on the responsibility of such a journey.”

  But Con wasn’t so easily beaten. “How old were you when you came to the valley?” he asked innocently.

  Lady Agatha blushed. “Older than you.” There was a pause. “Well, not much older … Oh, dear, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Then say yes,” begged Con.

  This time the pause seemed endless. “All right,” said Lady Agatha at last. “You can take my yetis for me. I’ll say it. Yes.”

  Over breakfast the next day Lady Agatha broke the news to the yetis, and they spent the rest of the morning crying.

  When yetis cry, just as when they smile, they do not hold back. They do not sniffle or hiccup or gulp. They weep rivers.

  Now they cried so hard that their fur became all dark and wet, so that they looked more like huge walruses or seals than Abominable Snowmen.

  They cried because they were leaving Lady Agatha, whom they loved so dearly, and the beautiful valley of Nanvi Dar, where they had lived all their lives. They cried because they were leaving the trees and the birds and the flowers, and they cried because the yaks would be sad without them.

  “I will be able to take Hubert?” Ambrose asked anxiously.

  “Now, Ambrose,” said Lady Agatha gently, “I’ve told you time and time again that this is going to be a difficult and dangerous journey. How do you think Con can take a yak? Especially a yak that doesn’t even know its own mother.”

  So that of course started Ambrose off again. But when they had cried so much that there was hardly a tear left in any of them, the yetis secretly began to get rather excited about their journey.

  “Tell us again about Farley Towers,” Ambrose begged. And Lady Agatha closed her eyes, and in a dreamy voice she told them about the great vine that grew on the south wall, about the yew trees clipped into the most beautiful shapes, about the big peaceful library with over five thousand books bound in rich, dark leather and the carved four-poster bed in which Queen Elizabeth had slept and in which Ambrose might be allowed to sleep, too, if only he
was a good yeti and stopped crying.

  While the yetis went up and down the valley saying, “Good-bye, juniper bush,” “Good-bye, bird’s nest,” “Good-bye, beetles,” Lady Agatha told Con some of the things she thought he ought to know, like what to do when Grandma’s knees went under her and about Clarence not having a brain and about Lucy’s sleepwalking. She told him that Uncle Otto liked having something rubbed into his bald patch once a day (“Anything will do,” she said. “It’s just to show you care.”) and that Ambrose, although he looked abominable, definitely was not—quite the opposite.

  Above all she warned Con to be very careful, because the yetis, though the gentlest of creatures, did not always know their own strength and could easily break someone’s arm while just shaking hands with them. And she showed him some scars she had got in the early days before the yetis had understood that people were so frail and breakable.

  Then she called all the yetis together and made a speech. She said how painful it was for her to part with them, but that she knew Con would be like a father to them and that they would be happy at Farley Towers. She reminded them how wrong it was to use Bad Language, or Forget to Do to Others as They Would Be Done By, and that they were to be sure to chew everything they ate thirty-two times so as not to get Lumps in the Stomach. “And now,” she said, “I’m going to give each of you a present to take away.”

  “’Esent,” said Clarence excitedly. “’Esent, ’esent!” He always seemed to understand things like that.

  Lady Agatha turned and went into the little stone hut that had been her home since she first came to the valley. There she kept some of the things she had been wearing when Father carried her away, which were the only treasures she had.

  “Grandma first,” said Lady Agatha when she came out. And she gave Grandma the delicate, fleecy white shawl that had been round her shoulders when she slept.

  Grandma really loved it. It was far too small to wrap around her shoulders, but she could use it as a headscarf and tie it under her chin. It was a crochet shawl with big openwork holes so that little tufts of gray and ginger hair sprouted out of the center of each rosette, giving her a most distinguished look. To Uncle Otto Lady Agatha gave the woolly nightcap she had been wearing when she was carried away. With a couple of hairpins, she fastened it with her own hands over Otto’s bald patch—a most tactful present, because even if the bald patch did grow bigger, no one, now, would ever know.

  For Lucy, Lady Agatha had kept a golden locket with a picture of Queen Victoria and all her nine children in it. She had made an extra-long cord of braided yak’s hair for it, and when Lucy put it on, everybody agreed that nothing more beautiful than Queen Victoria and all her children nestling against the furry dome of Lucy’s stomach had ever been seen in Nanvi Dar.

  Clarence got the brass compass that had been in the pocket of the Earl’s jacket. He wandered about with a blissful look on his face, saying, “’Ick-’ock, ’ick-’ock,” because he thought it was a watch. And from then on, whenever someone wanted to know the time, he always studied his compass with an important look on his face.

  For Father, Lady Agatha had kept the Earl’s cigar case. It was very valuable—pure gold studded with rubies—and there was a moment of silence as the yetis took in this costly present.

  Father took it in his huge, gentle hands. He turned it over, admired the workmanship and the glitter of the rubies. Then he handed it back to Lady Agatha.

  “I don’t need a farewell present,” he said in his deep, serious voice.

  “But—”

  “I don’t need it,” Father went on, “because I’m not going away.”

  Everyone looked at him, thunderstruck.

  “Aren’t you going with us, Father?” asked Ambrose in a trembly voice.

  Father shook his head. “A hundred years ago I brought the Lady Farlingham to this valley. She cared for my children, she gave us speech, she taught us everything she knew. If I left her now to die alone, I should bring shame forever to the name of yeti.”

  When he had finished, there was a long and solemn silence. Then all the yetis slowly nodded their enormous heads. What Father had said was almost unbearably sad, but it was right.

  “I’m not in the least afraid of dying,” said Lady Agatha briskly. “After all, everyone enjoys going to sleep. So why not going to sleep for good?”

  But nothing could shift Father. He said he was staying with her, and anyone who wanted to move him from the valley was welcome to try. Since Father was far and away the strongest of all the yetis, that was the end of that.

  But of course after that everybody began to cry again because Father was behaving so beautifully and because they would have to go without him and because Lady Agatha wasn’t going to live forever and ever, which was what Ambrose wanted her to do.

  “Come, come,” said Lady Agatha, though she was secretly very moved by Father’s words, “this won’t do. Ambrose hasn’t had his present yet.”

  Ambrose’s present was the most special one of all. It was one of the blue bedsocks that Lady Agatha had worn when she was carried away, and it still had a name tag inside saying: Agatha Emily Farlingham, Farley Towers, Hants.

  “So when you arrive, Ambrose, and show them this sock, my family will know that you really come from me.”

  “It’s like a sort of password,” said Con.

  Ambrose was incredibly pleased. He tried the sock on his foot, but it would only cover three of his eight enormous toes. Then he tried it on his left ear, but it kept slipping off. So Lady Agatha braided a cord for him, like Lucy’s, and he wore the bedsock across his chest like a medal.

  And then the dreaded moment could be postponed no longer. The yetis kissed Lady Agatha over and over again, they hugged Father, and they cried and cried till Con thought they would never get away. But at last they were ready, and with a stout stick to help Grandma, they made their way to the head of the valley.

  Con could have sworn that Ambrose simply didn’t have any tears left. But just as he started the steep ascent up the scree, a last wail broke from him. “My yak! I never said good-bye to my yak!”

  But Con knew that he had to be firm. “Look, Ambrose,” he said, “you don’t want to upset Hubert, do you? You know how sensitive he is.”

  “He’ll think I don’t love him,” said Ambrose, and his brown eye, which felt things more than his blue one, began to fill up again.

  But here the other yetis came to Con’s rescue. “Now, Ambrose,” said Grandma firmly, “you know that that animal hasn’t had a thought in his head since the day he was born.”

  “And maybe when you’re safe at Farley Towers, you can send for him,” said Con.

  “Really?” said Ambrose.

  “Really,” said Con.

  There was no more to say. They had come to the foot of the towering cliff wall that had protected the secret valley for thousands of years. Otto picked up Con, tucked him under his arm, and began swarming up the unclimbable rock face like an enormous hairy spider.

  And then one by one the yetis filed in behind him and left forever the lovely valley of Nanvi Dar.

  OR CON THE JOURNEY ACROSS THE HIGH PEAKS was a dreadful one. As darkness fell, they came across the western shoulder of Nanvi Dar, and though Con rode on Uncle Otto’s shoulders, the thin air and biting wind were almost more than he could bear. For the yetis, of course, it was not much worse than an evening stroll, even though they were at times wading through waist-high snow, leaping over crevasses, or scrambling down hair-raising icefalls. Con burrowed as deep as he could into Uncle Otto’s thick coat and gritted his teeth.

  Ambrose, on the other hand, had recovered from his sorrow about Hubert and was in high spirits.

  “Will there be proper beds, like in ‘The Princess and the Pea’? What’s a suite? Is it sweet like fruit, or sweet like baby squirrels?”

  Con was too stiff and frozen to answer.

  But at last they were below the snow line and walking down a broad river valley, s
heltered from the wind. Scrub and grassland gave way to majestic cedars and pines, and the lights of the hotel appeared, shining through the trees.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” said Ambrose, “it’s like in a story!”

  Otto lifted Con from his shoulders and placed him carefully on the ground.

  “We will have to be very quiet,” said Con. “You must wait outside and stay out of sight until I have been in and talked to my sister.” Then he went on alone.

  Ellen wasn’t really asleep. She had been a bit worried the night before, in spite of Con’s note. Now it was the middle of the second night, and she knew that in the morning she must raise the alarm and start expecting the worst.

  So when her door opened silently and Con crept in, she was up in an instant.

  “Thank goodness you’re back. I was getting really scared.”

  “I’m fine. Just be quiet and listen to me.”

  Con explained.

  Some people, if they were told in the middle of the night that there were five Abominable Snowmen outside who needed to be smuggled into the bridal suite of a luxury hotel, might have asked a lot of questions or made a fuss. But Ellen was not some people.

  “I’ll get the keys and wait for you up there,” said Ellen. “Are yetis very big?”

  Con said yes, he could honestly say that they were on the large side.

  “Then they’ll have to come up one by one. It’s going to take a while. I’ll wait for you up there.” And Ellen pulled on a dressing gown and went to get the keys. Con went back outside.

  Yetis are absolute experts at being quiet. In the moonlight, five great shadows flitted across the perfectly mown lawn toward the hotel. The only sound was an almost inaudible “Sorry” from Lucy, who was feeling peckish after her walk and happened to pass a bed of Himalayan poppies.