The Borrowers, Page 5

  Chapter Nine

  IT WAS an eye. Or it looked like an eye. Clear and bright like the color of the sky. An eye like her own but enormous. A glaring eye. Breathless with fear, she sat up. And the eye blinked. A great fringe of lashes came curving down and flew up again out of sight. Cautiously, Arrietty moved her legs: she would slide noiselessly in among the grass stems and slither away down the bank.

  "Don't move!" said a voice, and the voice, like the eye, was enormous but, somehow, hushed—and hoarse like a surge of wind through the grating on a stormy night in March.

  Arrietty froze. "So this is it," she thought, "the worst and most terrible thing of all: I have been 'seen'! Whatever happened to Eggletina will now, almost certainly, happen to me!"

  There was a pause and Arrietty, her heart pounding in her ears, heard the breath again draw swiftly into the vast lungs. "Or," said the voice, whispering still, "I shall hit you with my ash stick."

  Suddenly Arrietty became calm. "Why?" she asked. How strange her own voice sounded! Crystal thin and harebell clear, it tinkled on the air.

  "In case," came the surprised whisper at last, "you ran toward me, quickly, through the grass ... in case," it went on, trembling a little, "you came and scrabbled at me with your nasty little hands."

  Arrietty stared at the eye; she held herself quite still. "Why?" she asked again, and again the word tinkled—icy cold it sounded this time, and needle sharp.

  "Things do," said the voice. "I've seen them. In India."

  Arrietty thought of her Gazetteer of the World. "You're not in India now," she pointed out.

  "Did you come out of the house?"

  "Yes," said Arrietty.

  "From whereabouts in the house?"

  Arrietty stared at the eye. "I'm not going to tell you," she said at last bravely.

  "Then I'll hit you with my ash stick!"

  "All right," said Arrietty, "hit me!"

  "I'll pick you up and break you in half!"

  Arrietty stood up. "All right," she said and took two paces forward.

  There was a sharp gasp and an earthquake in the grass: he spun away from her and sat up, a great mountain in a green jersey. He had fair, straight hair and golden eyelashes. "Stay where you are!" he cried.

  Arrietty stared up at him. So this was "the boy"! Breathless, she felt, and light with fear. "I guessed you were about nine," she gasped after a moment.

  He flushed. "Well, you're wrong, I'm ten." He looked down at her, breathing deeply. "How old are you?"

  "Fourteen," said Arrietty. "Next June," she added, watching him.

  There was silence while Arrietty waited, trembling a little. "Can you read?" the boy said at last.

  "Of course," said Arrietty. "Can't you?"

  "No," he stammered. "I mean—yes. I mean I've just come from India."

  "What's that got to do with it?" asked Arrietty.

  "Well, if you're born in India, you're bilingual. And if you're bilingual, you can't read. Not so well."

  Arrietty stared up at him: what a monster, she thought, dark against the sky.

  "Do you grow out of it?" she asked.

  He moved a little and she felt the cold flick of his shadow.

  "Oh yes," he said, "it wears off. My sisters were bilingual; now they aren't a bit. They could read any of those books upstairs in the schoolroom."

  "So could I," said Arrietty quickly, "if someone could hold them, and turn the pages. I'm not a bit bilingual. I can read anything."

  "Could you read out loud?"

  "Of course," said Arrietty.

  "Would you wait here while I run upstairs and get a book now?"

  "Well," said Arrietty; she was longing to show off; then a startled look came into her eyes. "Oh—" she faltered.

  "What's the matter?" The boy was standing up now. He towered above her.

  "How many doors are there to this house?" She squinted up at him against the bright sunlight. He dropped on one knee.

  "Doors?" he said. "Outside doors?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, there's the front door, the back door, the gun room door, the kitchen door, the scullery door ... and the french windows in the drawing room."

  "Well, you see," said Arrietty, "my father's in the hall, by the front door, working. He ... he wouldn't want to be disturbed."

  "Working?" said the boy. "What at?"

  "Getting material," said Arrietty, "for a scrubbing brush."

  "Then I'll go in the side door"; he began to move away but turned suddenly and came back to her. He stood a moment, as though embarrassed, and then he said: "Can you fly?"

  "No," said Arrietty, surprised; "can you?"

  His face became even redder. "Of course not," he said angrily; "I'm not a fairy!"

  "Well, nor am I," said Arrietty, "nor is anybody. I don't believe in them."

  He looked at her strangely. "You don't believe in them?"

  "No," said Arrietty; "do you?"

  "Of course not!"

  Really, she thought, he is a very angry kind of boy. "My mother believes in them," she said, trying to appease him. "She thinks she saw one once. It was when she was a girl and lived with her parents behind the sand pile in the potting shed."

  He squatted down on his heels and she felt his breath on her face. "What was it like?" he asked.

  "About the size of a glowworm with wings like a butterfly. And it had a tiny little face, she said, all alight and moving like sparks and tiny moving hands. Its face was changing all the time, she said, smiling and sort of shimmering. It seemed to be talking, she said, very quickly—but you couldn't hear a word...."

  "Oh," said the boy, interested. After a moment he asked: "Where did it go?"

  "It just went," said Arrietty. "When my mother saw it, it seemed to be caught in a cobweb. It was dark at the time. About five o'clock on a winter's evening. After tea."

  "Oh," he said again and picked up two petals of cherry blossom which he folded together like a sandwich and ate slowly. "Supposing," he said, staring past her at the wall of the house, "you saw a little man, about as tall as a pencil, with a blue patch in his trousers, halfway up a window curtain, carrying a doll's tea cup—would you say it was a fairy?"

  "No," said Arrietty, "I'd say it was my father."

  "Oh," said the boy, thinking this out, "does your father have a blue patch on his trousers?"

  "Not on his best trousers. He does on his borrowing ones."

  "Oh," said the boy again. He seemed to find it a safe sound, as lawyers do. "Are there many people like you?"

  "No," said Arrietty. "None. We're all different."

  "I mean as small as you?"

  Arrietty laughed. "Oh, don't be silly!" she said. "Surely you don't think there are many people in the world your size?"

  "There are more my size than yours," he retorted.

  "Honestly—" began Arrietty helplessly and laughed again. "Do you really think—I mean, whatever sort of a world would it be? Those great chairs ... I've seen them. Fancy if you had to make chairs that size for everyone? And the stuff for their clothes ... miles and miles of it ... tents of it ... and the sewing! And their great houses, reaching up so you can hardly see the ceilings ... their great beds ... the food they eat ... great, smoking mountains of it, huge bogs of stew and soup and stuff."

  "Don't you eat soup?" asked the boy.

  "Of course we do," laughed Arrietty. "My father had an uncle who had a little boat which he rowed round in the stock-pot picking up flotsam and jetsam. He did bottom-fishing too for bits of marrow until the cook got suspicious through finding bent pins in the soup. Once he was nearly shipwrecked on a chunk of submerged shinbone. He lost his oars and the boat sprang a leak but he flung a line over the pot handle and pulled himself alongside the rim. But all that stock—fathoms of it! And the size of the stock-pot! I mean, there wouldn't be enough stuff in the world to go round after a bit! That's why my father says it's a good thing they're dying out ... just a few, my father says, that's all we need—to ke
ep us. Otherwise, he says, the whole thing gets"—Arrietty hesitated, trying to remember the word—"exaggerated, he says—"

  "What do you mean," asked the boy, "'to keep us'?"

  Chapter Ten

  SO ARRIETTY told him about borrowing—how difficult it was and how dangerous. She told him about the storerooms under the floor; about Pod's early exploits, the skill he had shown and the courage; she described those far-off days, before her birth, when Pod and Homily had been rich; she described the musical snuffbox of gold filigree, and the little bird which flew out of it made of kingfisher feathers, how it flapped its wings and sang its song; she described the doll's wardrobe and the tiny green glasses; the little silver teapot out of the drawing-room case; the satin bedcovers and embroidered sheets..."those we have still," she told him, "they're Her handkerchiefs...." "She," the boy realized gradually, was his Great-Aunt Sophy upstairs, bedridden since a hunting accident some twenty years before; he heard how Pod would borrow from Her room picking his way—in the firelight—among the trinkets on Her dressing table, even climbing Her bed-curtains and walking on Her quilt. And of how She would watch him and sometimes talk to him because, Arrietty explained, every day at six o'clock they brought Her a decanter of Fine Old Pale Madeira, and how before midnight She would drink the lot. Nobody blamed Her, not even Homily, because, as Homily would say, She had so few pleasures, poor soul, but, Arrietty explained, after the first three glasses Great-Aunt Sophy never believed in anything she saw. "She thinks my father comes out of the decanter," said Arrietty, "and one day when I'm older he's going to take me there and She'll think I come out of the decanter too. It'll please Her, my father thinks, as She's used to him now. Once he took my mother, and She perked up like anything and kept asking after her and why didn't she come any more and saying they'd watered the Madeira because once, She says, She saw a little man and a little woman and now she only sees a little man...."

  "I wish she thought I came out of the decanter," said the boy. "She gives me dictation and teaches me to write. I only see her in the mornings when she's cross. She sends for me and looks behind my ears and asks Mrs. D. if I've learned my words."

  "What does Mrs. D. look like?" asked Arrietty. (How delicious it was to say "Mrs. D." like that ... how careless and daring!)

  "She's fat and has a mustache and gives me my bath and hurts my bruise and my sore elbow and says she'll take a slipper to me one of these days...." The boy pulled up a tuft of grass and stared at it angrily and Arrietty saw his lip tremble. "My mother's very nice," he said. "She lives in India. Why did you lose all your worldly riches?"

  "Well," said Arrietty, "the kitchen boiler burst and hot water came pouring through the floor into our house and everything was washed away and piled up in front of the grating. My father worked night and day. First hot, then cold. Trying to salvage things. And there's a dreadful draught in March through that grating. He got ill, you see, and couldn't go borrowing. So my Uncle Hendreary had to do it and one or two others and my mother gave them things, bit by bit, for all their trouble. But the kingfisher bird was spoilt by the water; all its feathers fell off and a great twirly spring came jumping out of its side. My father used the spring to keep the door shut against draughts from the grating and my mother put the feathers in a little moleskin hat. After a while I got born and my father went borrowing again. But he gets tired now and doesn't like curtains, not when any of the bobbles are off...."

  "I helped him a bit," said the boy, "with the tea cup. He was shivering all over. I suppose he was frightened."

  "My father frightened!" exclaimed Arrietty angrily. "Frightened of you!" she added.

  "Perhaps he doesn't like heights," said the boy.

  "He loves heights," said Arrietty. "The thing he doesn't like is curtains. I've told you. Curtains make him tired."

  The boy sat thoughtfully on his haunches, chewing a blade of grass. "Borrowing," he said after a while. "Is that what you call it?"

  "What else could you call it?" asked Arrietty.

  "I'd call it stealing."

  Arrietty laughed. She really laughed. "But we are Borrowers," she explained, "like you're a—a human bean or whatever it's called. We're part of the house. You might as well say that the fire grate steals the coal from the coal scuttle."

  "Then what is stealing?"

  Arrietty looked grave. "Don't you know?" she asked. "Stealing is—well, supposing my Uncle Hendreary borrowed an emerald watch from Her dressing-table and my father took it and hung it up on our wall. That's stealing."

  "An emerald watch!" exclaimed the boy.

  "Well, I just said that because we have one on the wall at home, but my father borrowed it himself. It needn't be a watch. It could be anything. A lump of sugar even. But Borrowers don't steal."

  "Except from human beings," said the boy.

  Arrietty burst out laughing; she laughed so much that she had to hide her face in the primrose. "Oh dear," she gasped with tears in her eyes, "you are funny!" She stared upward at his puzzled face. "Human beans are for Borrowers—like bread's for butter!"

  The boy was silent awhile. A sigh of wind rustled the cherry tree and shivered among the blossoms.

  "Well, I don't believe it," he said at last, watching the falling petals. "I don't believe that's what we're for at all and I don't believe we're dying out!"

  "Oh, goodness!" exclaimed Arrietty impatiently, staring up at his chin. "Just use your common sense: you're the only real human bean I ever saw (although I do just know of three more—Crampfurl, Her, and Mrs. Driver). But I know lots and lots of Borrowers: the Overmantels and the Harpsichords and the Rain-Barrels and the Linen-Presses and the Boot-Racks and the Hon. John Studdingtons and—"

  He looked down. "John Studdington? But he was our grand-uncle—"

  "Well, this family lived behind a picture," went on Arrietty, hardly listening, "and there were the Stove-Pipes and the Bell-Pulls and the—"

  "Yes," he interrupted, "but did you see them?"

  "I saw the Harpsichords. And my mother was a Bell-Pull. The others were before I was born...."

  He leaned closer. "Then where are they now? Tell me that."

  "My Uncle Hendreary has a house in the country," said Arrietty coldly, edging away from his great lowering face; it was misted over, she noticed, with hairs of palest gold. "And four children, Harpsichords and Clocks."

  "But where are the others?"

  "Oh," said Arrietty, "they're somewhere." But where? she wondered. And she shivered slightly in the boy's cold shadow which lay about her, slant-wise, on the grass.

  He drew back again, his fair head blocking out a great piece of sky. "Well," he said deliberately after a moment, and his eyes were cold, "I've only seen two Borrowers but I've seen hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds—"

  "Oh no—" whispered Arrietty.

  "Of human beings." And he sat back.

  Arrietty stood very still. She did not look at him. After a while she said: "I don't believe you."

  "All right," he said, "then I'll tell you—"

  "I still won't believe you," murmured Arrietty.

  "Listen!" he said. And he told her about railway stations and football matches and racecourses and royal processions and Albert Hall concerts. He told her about India and China and North America and the British Commonwealth. He told her about the July sales. "Not hundreds," he said, "but thousands and millions and billions and trillions of great, big, enormous people. Now do you believe me?"

  Arrietty stared up at him with frightened eyes: it gave her a crick in the neck. "I don't know," she whispered.

  "As for you," he went on, leaning closer again, "I don't believe that there are any more Borrowers anywhere in the world. I believe you're the last three," he said.