Mistress Masham's Repose Page 10

  “Any character of yours, Mum,” said Cook superbly, “is what I’d not besmirch my own possession of which with the application of.”

  The door shut again more gently, the footsteps died away, but the smell of soup remained.

  It was growing dark in the shabby little bedroom. The evening breeze had dropped to nothing and all the summery trees of the park stood silent, without moving a leaf. The twilight hush had impressed the birds and beasts. You could hear a rabbit nibbling twenty yards away. The distant coots on the lake gabbled in undertones.

  Maria spotted patterns in the darkling wallpapers, drummed on the counterpane, practised whistling, pulled feathers out of the bolster, and listened to the sleepy birds outside the window.

  I shall have steamboats, she thought, to ply between the islands: the kind you can buy in toy shops, which are worked by methylated spirits.

  One of the islands is sure to have gulls on it, those black-headed gulls who breed on islands in big lakes and murder each other’s children. It will be unsafe to use that island for the People, at least during the breeding season, for I am sure that no black-headed gull would think twice about snapping up a Lilliputian, considering how they treat their own nephews and nieces.

  On the other hand it might not be a bad idea to play a joke on those same birds.

  At the time of the year when they were not breeding, we would go to Gull Island in force, and set about a bit of engineering. We would dig shallow pans among the pebbles all over the strand, like saucers, or like the depressions which are made by the ant lion, and we should put a trap door at the bottom of each saucer in the earth. Each trap door would lead into a narrow passage, and the passages would communicate with a central chamber underground, in which I would probably bury a large earthenware crock for isinglass. Then, when the next breeding season was due to come round, a picked gang of Lilliputians would set off for the tunnels of Gull Island, with their necessary provisions, and there they would live like puffins, underground, for the whole season. Every time a gull laid an egg, it would of course roll into the bottom of the saucer, and the gull would sit down on top. This would ring a bell—we should have to put in electric batteries, and one of those indicators which the Master of the Malplaquet Hounds has in his kitchen—and two of the People would immediately run down the corridor, open the trap door, and let the egg fall through to the cellarage, where it would be wheeled off to the isinglass for storage. After a bit the ridiculous gull would set up, look between its legs, say, “Goodness me, I thought I was sitting on an egg,” and settle down to lay another. By this means we would not only be able to keep down the number of black-heads, but we would be able to provide egg powder for Lilliput.

  We would need a factory for dehydrating the eggs, or whatever it is called, because one egg would be enough to feed a family for a week, and thus it would not be an economical size to cook. But if we turned the eggs into powder, the stuff could be used in small quantities, about the size of a salt spoon, and this would be a blessing in the kitchens....

  Or else, thought Maria, beginning to yawn, we could hatch them out in incubators and eat them as day-old chicks, or we could ring the parents from underneath for the purposes of Research, or we could train the young ones up for seaplanes....

  Soon she was far away in a sky of dreams, where jet-propelled white seaplanes folded their wings on landing, or stretched them at an angle of incidence of forty-five degrees, when they wanted to take off. It was because she had been short of sleep for the last few weeks. Her hands were together under her cheek; her dark pigtails strayed on the pillow; the mysterious shadows under her eyelashes were quiet gates into a secret world where things went on which nobody could fathom.

  Just before she dozed away, she thought she could hear, half in her dreams, that Miss Brown and the Vicar were talking on the terrace.

  She woke in the dark, feeling wide awake at once. She was healthy and happy and alive, and a most delightful thing was happening.

  Like a spider on the end of its thread, a six-inch man was dangling lower and lower from the gutter outside the window, in the moonlight.

  The fact is that if there are five hundred pairs of bright eyes all round your pleasure ground, fixed steadily on you from under clumps of dock leaves and thistles—if there are five hundred pairs of ears like tiny shells, straining to hear behind the green blackberries and wild parsley—well then, if you will walk about on the terrace telling the Vicar that Maria has been sent to bed without her supper, this development is liable to be discussed in the metropolis of Lilliput before long.

  So it had been, and the little People were not the kind who left their friends to suffer. Arrangements had immediately been started. Ropes from the frigate had been spliced together, transport had been organized, and the other needs of the moment had been put in hand. By ten o’clock they had started the journey, and had come to the South Front an hour before Miss Brown went to bed. They knew which the two inhabited bedrooms were, from seeing the windows lit of an evening.

  A well-known steeple-jack, who generally did the outside repairs of the Temple of Repose, had gone up inside the nearest drainpipe, using it as mountain climbers use a chimney. That is to say, he had put his back against one wall of the pipe and his feet against the other, and had walked up slowly like that, in a sitting position, by pressing his back against the walls. His rope had been too short for the immense length of the pipe—he could not have carried enough—and so he had been followed by a second climber, with a second rope, who had spliced the two together when he was halfway up. Then the top climber, who was by now on the roof gutter, had drawn up certain other tackle that was needed. The second climber had joined him to help.

  They had thrown down the long rope outside the drain-pipe, and willing hands below had been ready to tie it to a stake which they had driven on the edge of the lawn. Now there had been a thread of plaited horsehair stretching from the gutter to the grass. The next thing had been to pass this through a metal loop, forged from a nail, and to tie a second rope to the loop. This had made two long ropes, the fixed one, which was to act like the overhead wire of a rope railway, and the other, which could pull the metal loop up or down on it. It was a bit like a funicular.

  When this had been arranged, and Miss Brown was known to be snoring, the steeple-jack had begun to let himself down on a short cord to Maria’s window sill.

  She opened it stealthily.

  “I am so glad to see you!”

  He said in a low voice: “Tie the End of this to your Table, Ma’am, or somewhere inside the Room. Speak softly, or we shall be smoak’d. We have a Pulley at the Top. Do you desire to see the Schoolmaster?”

  “Yes!”

  “In one Minute, then.”

  And he vanished like a tiny monkey, leaving her to fasten the bottom end.

  The next thing to arrive was the Schoolmaster, in a breeches apparatus.

  He whispered: “Good Evening, Miss.”

  “Good evening, Sir,” she said, in heartfelt tones, “Your Honour, Mister! You are the best thing I have seen today, and don’t I mean it!”

  “Your Servant, Miss. Allow me to present the Victuals.”

  And there they were, coming down slowly on the pulley: three roast oxen, two barrels of elderberry wine, four dozen loaves of grass-seed bread.

  She said: “Oh, dear!”

  She could have squashed him flat.

  It was a regular deputation. Apart from the roast bullocks and other blessings, there was the Schoolmaster and the Admiral and the steeple-jack and an aged town councilor, carrying an illuminated address, all of whom had come to visit her on the principle that invalids and captives needed to be cheered up. They told her that it was past Midnight already. Then, while she consumed the dinner on her face towel, which she spread on the window sill for a table cloth, they watched her gobble it up.

  “I shall eat you out of everything,” she said with a blush.

  “We were sent to convey an Address of Gra
titude, Miss, for your Constancy in shielding the People, which has been subscrib’d by the entire Borough of Lilliput in Exile.”

  “And by the Navy,” said the Admiral firmly.

  “It is me that gets shielded,” she said, overcome with shyness as the address was presented. “At least we are in a horrid muddle. I have such a lot to tell you. I can’t help talking with my mouth full. And please excuse me if I read.”

  While she was reading, they looked about politely—more politely than she had looked about the island. Her room was as strange to them as the island had been to her, but they tried not to stare.

  The Address was written in black-thorn ink on a prepared vole-skin parchment, as thin as Indian paper, and it explained how present and future Generations were to know that the Female Mountain had kept her Word to the People through Famine and Incarceration, etc., etc. It was a splendid testimonial to have, and, as she did not know how to thank them for it, she folded it up and placed it tenderly over her heart (in her pajama pocket). Then she went on eating.

  She said, when she had finished: “Thank Lilliput for my good dinner.”

  “Your Servants, Miss.”

  She noticed that they were no longer calling her “Y’r Honour,” but “Miss,” which was the proper eighteenth-century address for girls, and this made her feel pleased. She did not know why.

  “Don’t go away. Wouldn’t you like to see my things? I have not much to show.”

  They admired the texture of the sheets, because they had no looms of their own, and gazed over the vast expanse of polished oilcloth with respect. Miss Brown was too mean to let her have a carpet, so there was nothing except this wintry oilcloth, and one cheap woolen mat. The furniture, as we know, was cast iron.

  Maria did the honors as well as she could. She found that they were more amused by the looking glass on the dressing table than by anything else. She tilted this backward till it lay level, and they stood on it, admiring themselves upside down. The Admiral did a hornpipe, fascinated by his toes.

  Afterwards it was time to tell them the whole story of how the sprug had been discovered, of the Professor’s views about Law and Slavery, and of Miss Brown’s wild-goose chase after the secret room. The Schoolmaster did not seem so pleased as she expected when he heard of the false trail. He, like the Professor, saw at once that the safety of the People now depended on the endurance of one young girl, and, though he did not like to tell her so, he was beginning to think that his countrymen had better migrate while there was still time to do so, and without revealing their destination even to Maria. All he said, however, was that he would have to think things over.

  When it was time to part, they kissed the tip of her little finger in turn. The town councilor was put in the breeches apparatus to go first, and all were bowing, smiling, or waving good-by—when the thunderbolt fell.

  The key turned in the lock with a sudden click, the door slammed open on its hinges, and there, in the doorway, stood Miss Brown with a candle, in her flannel night dress.

  Everything began to happen so quickly that the scene seemed to go slow. There was Miss Brown, who had heard talking, first ready to be angry; then amazed and not believing what she saw; then, for the briefest moment, half impressed, half wondering whether she ought to be polite to visitors; then guessing, then realizing, then seeing plain the opportunity to catch some of them, to appropriate them to herself, to make her fortune. And at the same time there was Maria crying “Escape!” and there was the deputation tumbling over itself to be gone, the old councilor being bundled into the breeches apparatus and the Admiral drawing his new sword, forged from one of the Woolworth pins, to defend the bridgehead like Horatius.

  Miss Brown ran to grab them. She got a dig with the pin which went right through her finger. (The good sword stood a hair’s-breadth out behind the Tuscan’s hand.) It stopped her for a second. (She reeled and on the mantelpiece she leaned one breathing space, then, like a wild cat mad with wounds, sprang at the Admiral’s face.) She got hold of him by one leg, but Maria charged at the same instant and bit another finger till she felt the flesh turn on the bone. There was a scrimmage free-for-all, with the breeches apparatus going up twice. There was the Admiral climbing hand over hand. There was Maria thrown panting into a corner, like the oak on Mount Avernus. And finally there was Miss Brown left triumphant, with the Schoolmaster in her podgy fist, nearly squeezing the life out of him.

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE most famous of the trappers was called Gradgnag. He was a wiry man with gray hair and a taciturn disposition, who seldom spoke to anybody, but could call birds by note. For many moons he had been planning the longest of his treks. He was a kind of Allan Quatermaine, and now he had reached the hinterland of a continent, which he had been exploring all his life. It was King Solomon’s Mines to him, for the legends of Lilliput in Exile talked of a mysterious house, beyond the vasty borders of the Park itself, from which there could be got a wondrous breed of piebald mice. The skins were of fabulous value, for only one existed on the Island of Repose, and that was used as a part of the communal regalia. It was said that this skin had been taken, three hundred moons before, by the legendary trapper who had blinded the fox and passed into history as the greatest of his trade. Blambran-grill had been his name: a dreamer of strange horizons and of epic deeds; and Gradgnag, although he never talked, had caught the dream.

  The arrangements for the trek had taken many days. He always traveled light and alone, living on the country, but it had seemed wiser to arrange for caches as an emergency store, spaced out at intervals of four hours’ march. He was a methodical man. Then there had been the scouting for direction, which had extended not only over days but over moons, because, although the mouse-house was fabled to lie some way beyond the western boundary wall, the compass bearing was not fixed. On many and many an expedition he had climbed that monstrous wall by cunning footholds, to stare out with his pale blue eyes across the Great Unknown. He had added one fact to another. He had read the archives relating to Blambrangrill, including the bloody parchment with crosses on it which had been found beside his mummified body in a crevice of that very wall, where he had crept to die of his wounds, while the cat waited outside.

  Now Gradgnag himself was there. He had crossed the wall, the ditch, the giant road shining like malachite. He had seen horseless coaches, one hundred and twenty feet high, thundering past with the noise of stampeding elephants; gargantuan men innumerable, like trees walking; dogs thirty feet tall. He had hidden and scouted and pondered over tracks. By day he had sat philosophically at his minute fire, cooking rashers of rat. Now he had found the Eldorado. He was at the House itself. He was tucked up comfortably in his sleeping bag on a branch of Virginia creeper on its wall, beside a pointed window, and six piebald mouse skins were his pillow.

  It was the Vicarage.

  Thirty years before our story, in the time of the previous incumbent, this inconvenient mid-Victorian house had been full of happy people. Then no wheezing disapprover had hummed along its red-tiled corridors, but a merry old hunting parson had bustled to send port wine and jellies to anybody who had the faintest stomach ache in all his parish. Then about a dozen tumbling children, covered with mud from head to foot, had pursued in it the numberless delights of childhood. The eldest son had been a falconer, the second a stamp collector, the third, a tramping botanist, the fourth had owned a puppet show, the fifth had been a carpenter, and the sixth, a very young one, had kept white mice.

  Even now, in the attics which Mr. Hater never visited, there was a jumble of dusty fishing rods and of stage props and of cabinets with well-set butterflies and of falcon’s hoods, and heap on heap of shredded paper, which the mice—the once white mice who had escaped and mated with the gray ones—had used for generation after generation in their nests.

  Gradgnag’s sleeping bag was outside the study window. By craning his head, he could see Mr. Hater, and the room in which he sat.

  The study was a gloomy place with
wallpaper the color of mildew, and one small window, imitation Gothic, in the thick wall. The Vicar’s hood, gown, and surplice hung on the door under his scout’s hat, which he wore when he took the choirboys to their holiday camp in the summer, at a featureless and wind-swept beach on the East Coast. On the wall beside the door there was a group photograph of the Vicar and friends, at Sidney Sussex College, where he had been a high light in the Student Christian Movement. There were also two photographs of Pompeii and of Trajan’s Column. The desk at which he was writing his sermon was of soap-colored wood, and the sermon pen was shaped like an oar, with the arms of Sidney Sussex on the blade. On the mantelpiece there was a china tobacco jar, with the same arms. Over the mantelpiece there was a picture of Sir Galahad, who had conducted a cart horse into a bramble bush, and gone broody there. The seating accommodation included two cane armchairs, which gave a bamboo roar at sitters, and a horsehair sofa which was so slippery that anybody who sat down immediately began to slide off. It was kept for the Confirmation Class, and caused them acute embarrassment.

  Gradgnag was accustomed to all this by now, and would have settled to sleep, so that he might be fresh for the mouse hunting that evening, if he had not seen Miss Brown, on Cook’s bicycle, come floating up the drive. She was an inhabitant of the Park, whose appearance was familiar to him, so he edged round to the window sill, to see what she was after.

  Miss Brown waddled into the study without a word. Mr. Hater looked at her with suppressed hatred, for he disliked being disturbed in the mornings. She put a strong cardboard boot-box in front of him, on the desk. It was tied with several lashings of string and had holes in the lid as if for transporting caterpillars. She undid the string and lifted the lid cautiously, ready to slam it back. Gradgnag was high outside the window and could see into the box. There, pressed against the side in a corner and looking upward, was the rumpled and miserable Schoolmaster, helpless, scared, captive, uncertain whether to risk a smile.