The Borrowers (13 page)

Clock in hand, Mrs. Driver creaked down the stairs in her stockinged feet, panting a little in her eagerness. There seemed a sigh in the darkness, an echo of movement. And it seemed to Mrs. Driver, standing there on the cold stone flags of the scullery, that this sound that was barely a sound could only mean one thing: the soft swing-to of the green baize door—that door which led out of the kitchen into the main hall beyond. Hurriedly Mrs. Driver felt her way into the kitchen and fumbled for matches along the ledge above the stove; she knocked off a pepper-pot and a paper bag of cloves, and glancing quickly downwards saw a filament of light; she saw it in the second before she struck a match—a thread of light, it looked like, on the floor beside her feet; it ran in an oblong shape, outlining a rough square. Mrs. Driver gasped and lit the gas and the room leapt up around her: she glanced quickly at the baize door; there seemed to her startled eye a quiver of movement in it, as though it had just swung to; she ran to it and pushed it open, but the passage beyond was still and dark—no flicker of shadow nor sound of distant footfall. She let the door fall to again and watched it as it swung back, slowly, regretfully, held by its heavy spring. Yes, that was the sound she had heard from the scullery—that sighing whisper—like an indrawn breath.

Cautiously, clutching back her skirts, Mrs. Driver moved toward the stove. An object lay there, something pinkish, on the floor beside the jutting board. Ah, she realized, that board—that was where the light had come from! She hesitated and glanced about the kitchen: everything else looked normal and just as she had left it—the plates on the dresser, the saucepans on the wall, and the row of tea-towels hanging symmetrically on their string above the stove. The pinkish object, she saw now was a heart-shaped cachou-box—one that she knew well—from the glassed-in tray-table beside the fireplace in the drawing room. She picked it up; it was enamel and gold and set with tiny brilliants. "Well, I'm—" she began, and stooping swiftly with a sudden angry movement she wrenched back the piece of floor.

And then she shrieked, loud and long. She saw movement: a running, a scrambling, a fluttering! She heard a squeaking, a jabbering, and a gasping. Little people, they looked like, with hands and feet ... and mouths opening. That's what they looked like ... but they couldn't
be
that, of course! Running here, there, and everywhere. "Oh! oh! oh!" she shrieked and felt behind her for a chair. She clambered on to it and it wobbled beneath her and she climbed, still shrieking, from the chair to the table....

And there she stood, marooned, crying and gasping, and calling out for help, until, after hours it seemed, there was a rattling at the scullery door. Crampfurl it was, roused at last by the light and the noise. "What is it?" he called. "Let me in!" But Mrs. Driver would not leave the table. "A nest! A nest!" she shouted. "Alive and squeaking!"

Crampfurl threw his weight against the door and burst open the lock. He staggered, slightly dazed, into the kitchen, his corduroy trousers pulled on over his nightshirt. "Where?" he cried, his eyes wide beneath his tousled hair. "What sort of a nest?"

Mrs. Driver, sobbing still with fright, pointed at the floor. Crampfurl walked over in his slow, deliberate way and stared down. He saw a hole in the floor, lined and cluttered with small objects—children's toys, they looked like, bits of rubbish—that was all. "It's nothing," he said after a moment; "it's that boy, that's what it is." He stirred the contents with his foot and all the partitions fell down. "There ain't nothing alive in there."

"But I saw them, I tell you," gasped Mrs. Driver, "little people like with hands—or mice dressed up...."

Crampfurl stared into the hole. "Mice dressed up?" he repeated uncertainly.

"Hundreds of them," went on Mrs. Driver, "running and squeaking. I saw them, I tell you!"

"Well, there ain't nothing there now," said Crampfurl, and he gave a final stir round with his boot.

"Then they've run away," she cried, "under the floor ... up inside the walls ... the place is alive with them."

"Well," said Crampfurl stolidly, "maybe. But if you ask me, I think it's that boy—where he hides things." His eye brightened and he went down on one knee. "Where he's got the ferret, I shouldn't wonder."

"Listen," cried Mrs. Driver, and there was a despairing note in her voice, "you've got to listen. This wasn't no boy and it wasn't no ferret." She reached for the back of the chair and lowered herself clumsily on to the floor; she came beside him to the edge of the hole. "They had hands and faces, I tell you. Look," she said, pointing, "see that? It's a bed. And now I come to think of it one of 'em was in it."

"Now you come to think of it," said Crampfurl.

"Yes," went on Mrs. Driver firmly, "and there's something else I come to think of. Remember that girl, Rosa Pickhatchet?"

"The one that was simple?"

"Well, simple or not, she saw one—on the drawing-room mantelpiece, with a beard."

"One what?" asked Crampfurl.

Mrs. Driver glared at him. "What I've been telling you about—one of these—these—"

"Mice dressed up?" said Crampfurl.

"Not mice!" Mrs. Driver almost shouted. "Mice don't have beards."

"But you said—" began Crampfurl.

"Yes, I know I said it. Not that these had beards. But what would you call them? What could they be but mice?"

"Not so loud!" whispered Crampfurl. "You'll wake the house up."

"They can't hear," said Mrs. Driver, "not through the baize door." She went to the stove and picked up the fire tongs. "And what if they do? We ain't done nothing. Move over," she went on, "and let me get at the hole."

One by one Mrs. Driver picked things out—with many shocked gasps, cries of amazement, and did-you-evers. She made two piles on the floor—one of valuables and one of what she called "rubbish." Curious objects dangled from the tongs: "Would you believe it—her best lace handkerchiefs! Look, here's another ... and another! And my big mattress needle—I knew I had one—my silver thimble, if you please, and one of hers! And look, oh my, at the wools ... the cottons! No wonder you can never find a spool of white cotton if you want one. Potatoes ... nuts ... look at this, a pot of caviar—
CAVIAR!
No, it's too much, it really is. Doll's chairs ... tables ... and look at all this blotting paper—so that's where it goes! Oh, my goodness gracious!" she cried suddenly, her eyes staring. "What's this?" Mrs. Driver laid down the tongs and leaned over the hole—tentatively and fearfully as though afraid of being stung. "It's a watch—an emerald watch—her watch! And she's never missed it!" Her voice rose. "And it's going! Look, you can see by the kitchen clock! Twenty-five past twelve!" Mrs. Driver sat down suddenly on a hard chair; her eyes were staring and her face looked white and flabby, as though deflated. "You know what this means?" she said to Crampfurl.

"No?" he said.

"The police," said Mrs. Driver, "that's what this means —a case for the police."

T
HE
boy lay, trembling a little, beneath the bed-clothes. The screwdriver was under his mattress. He had heard the alarm clock; he had heard Mrs. Driver exclaim on the stairs and he had run. The candle on the table beside his bed still smelt a little and the wax must still be warm. He lay there waiting, but they did not come upstairs. After hours, it seemed, he heard the hall clock strike one. All seemed quiet below, and at last he slipped out of bed and crept along the passage to the head of the stairway. There he sat for a while, shivering a little, and gazing downwards into the darkened hall. There was no sound but the steady tick of the clock and occasionally that shuffle or whisper which might be wind, but which, as he knew, was the sound of the house itself—the sigh of the tired floors and the ache of knotted wood. So quiet was that at last he found courage to move and to tiptoe down the staircase and along the kitchen passage. He listened awhile outside the baize door arid at length very gently he pushed it open. The kitchen was silent and filled with grayish darkness. He felt, as Mrs. Driver had done, along the shelf for the matches and he struck a light. He saw the gaping hole in the floor and the objects piled beside it and, in the same flash, he saw a candle on the shelf. He lit it clumsily, with trembling hands. Yes, there they lay—the contents of the little home-higgledy-piggledy on the boards and the tongs lay beside them. Mrs. Driver had carried away all she considered valuable and had left the "rubbish." And rubbish it looked thrown down like this—balls of wool, old potatoes, odd pieces of doll's furniture, match boxes, cotton spools, crumpled squares of blotting paper....

He knelt down. The "house" itself was a shambles—partitions fallen, earth floors revealed (where Pod had dug down to give greater height to the rooms), match-sticks, an old cogwheel, onion skins, scattered bottle tops.... The boy stared, blinking his eyelids and tilting the candle so that the grease ran hot on his hand. Then he got up from his knees and, crossing the kitchen on tiptoe, he closed the scullery door. He came back to the hole and, leaning down, he called softly: "Arrietty ... Arrietty!" After a while he called again. Something else fell hot on his hand: it was a tear from his eye. Angrily he brushed it away, and, leaning farther into the hole, he called once more. "Pod," he whispered. "Homily!"

They appeared so quietly that at first, in the wavering light of the candle, he did not see them. Silent they stood, looking up at him with scared white faces from what had been the passage outside the storerooms.

"Where have you been?" asked the boy.

Pod cleared his throat. "Up at the end of the passage. Under the clock."

"I've got to get you out," said the boy.

"Where to?" asked Pod.

"I don't know. What about the attic?"

"That ain't no good," said Pod. "I heard them talking They're going to get the police and a cat and the sanitary inspector and the rat-catcher from the town hall at Leighton Buzzard."

They were all silent. Little eyes stared at big eyes. "There won't be nowhere in the house that's safe," Pod said at last. And no one moved.

"What about the doll's house on the top shelf in the schoolroom?" suggested the boy. "Even a cat can't get there."

Homily gave a little moan of assent. "Yes," she said, "the doll's house...."

"No," said Pod in the same expressionless voice, "you can't live on a shelf. Maybe the cat can't get up, but no more can't you get down. You're stuck. You got to have water."

"I'd bring you water," said the boy. "And there are beds and things here." He touched the pile of "rubbish."

"No," said Pod, "a shelf ain't no good. Besides, you'll be going soon, or so they say."

"Oh, Pod," pleaded Homily in a husky whisper, "there's stairs in the doll's house, and two bedrooms, and a dining room, and a kitchen. And a bathroom," she said.

"But it's up by the ceiling," Pod explained wearily. "You got to eat, haven't you," he asked, "and drink?"

"Yes, Pod, I know. But—"

"There ain't no buts," said Pod. He drew a long breath. "We got to emigrate," he said.

"Oh," moaned Homily softly and Arrietty began to cry.