Mistress Masham's Repose Page 20

  A party of musicians had been sent to the Clockroom in the pediment, where they had disconnected the machinery which played “When the Heart of a Man,” so that they could use the bells for a Christmas peal.

  Most extraordinary of all, there was a blaze of light from the Grand Ballroom. They hurried in, to discover the cause of this, and there was an enormous Christmas tree, a whole spruce in a barrel, with hundreds of rush lights all over it and the Lord Lieutenant lighting them with a cigarette lighter in the shape of a filly, while Dumbledum held the ladder. The People had voluntarily disclosed their secret to these two, so that they could get help in moving the tree, and to have them at the celebration. On the tree there were presents for everybody, made by the craftsmen of the island in their spare time. There was a pair of spider-silk stockings for Maria, for which any film star would have given a king’s ransom. For Cook there was a moleskin comforter to be worn round her bad leg. Dumbledum got some snake-fat ointment for his lumbago, which was better. Captain, who followed the Schoolmaster about all the evening, got a new collar made of the softest frogskin beautifully tanned. And the Lord Lieutenant got a carved hound, no longer than his fingernail, which played “Bobby Bingo” almost inaudibly, and threw out a shower of snuff, which made everybody sneeze. The Professor’s present was a masterpiece. It was a Medieval Latin Word List (Baxter and Johnson, 10/6), which they had obtained by getting Cook to pawn their sprugs in Northampton. They had then written a letter on a piece of graph paper out of an exercise book of Maria’s, enlarged it ten times by means of the squares, traced it on a piece of notepaper, and painted the words with a rat-hair brush. The letter and the money from the sacrificed sprugs had brought back the dictionary, in which the Professor instantly found TRIFARIE, trefoil, and he thereupon danced a coranto with Cook.

  Maria dashed out for her parcel as soon as she could, which gave the final glory to the tree. During the trial the Professor had managed to touch the Lord Lieutenant for a fiver, and the whole of this had been expended on presents for the People. There were Woolworth silks galore; the finest threads and tinsels sold by the firms who tie trout flies, together with some Greenwell’s Glories (size ooo) for the ladies to wear in their hats; hack-saw blades for felling timber, and also fret-saw blades; wire traces for the fishermen; ant eggs for bait, but of course these were really pupae; plenty of pins and needles; plain horn buttons without holes for plates; silver thimbles for drinking toasts on state occasions; a packet of mixed seeds of the smallest rock plants; for the children such things as the charms from plum puddings and some preserved currants, one each; for the grownups edibles such as whitebait, caviar, small beer, and snipe; medicines such as Carter’s Little Liver Pills; a toy yacht for taking pleasure cruises; a toy telescope for looking at Maria through the wrong end of, in case anybody developed an inferiority complex; a Penguin book called Elizabethan Miniatures; some white mice and a pair of guinea pigs for farm stock; and a little crystal set with earphones, which would do for loud-speakers. No sooner had the presents been distributed and hugged, than the ringers in the Clockroom pealed out “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” and the doors of Miss Brown’s dining room were thrown open, suddenly to reveal the Banquet.

  There were hors d’oeuvres of small sheep, a fish course of the twenty-pound pike, done by Cook so that it tasted like salmon, entrée of deviled bullocks, pheasants trapped in the grounds, plum pudding provided by Mrs. Dumbledum, and a savory of sticklebacks on horseback for the Lord Lieutenant. Dumbledum had carried down the Professor’s barrels in the wheelbarrow, and the Lord Lieutenant had brought some bottles of port.

  Afterward they had healths. The Lord Lieutenant proposed Mrs. Noakes, Mrs. Noakes proposed Dumbledum, Dumbledum proposed the Professor, the Professor proposed Maria, and Maria proposed the People. The People remembered to propose Captain, who wagged his tail. All these were drank with three times three. Then the Lord Lieutenant gave Fox Huntin’, and produced a wineglass in the shape of a huntsman’s cap which played “The Horn, the Horn, the Noble Horn,” and suddenly exploded, drenching everybody with port. The Professor gave The Supposed Continuator of Ingulf of Croyland. Dumbledum gave Absent Friends, which Cook refused to drink—but the others had already forgiven the Vicar and poor Miss Brown, in prison, for whom they turned down an empty glass.

  Finally the carol singers arrived, little boys about three inches high whose mothers had carefully brushed their hair with a drop of water to keep it down, and these sang “Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful” in trebly treble voices, until Maria cried.

  What with the bells and the presents and the banners and the banquet and the trouble they had taken to meet her with welcome so far away in the snow, it was more than she could bear.

  She made a speech which was mostly sobs, until she remembered to be tough, and then everybody broke into small groups, to drain a final thimble and to discuss the glorious campaign which they had fought and won together.

  At this point Cook remembered that an important-looking letter had arrived the day before, with seven red seals upon it, and she delivered the same to Maria at once, in case it might contain a present.

  It would take too long to explain the whole thing. To put it briefly, the letter was from Maria’s solicitors. It seems that they had enjoyed a long talk with the Professor during the trial of the miscreants, and, by his advice, they had sued out a suit of mort d’ancestre in trailbaston, with collateral praemunire and just a pinch of oyer and terminer, in partibus, based on the document which he had discovered in the dungeon. The result was that the whole of Maria’s great inheritance had been restored.

  The cheers when this was understood were deafening! At least, they were nearly loud. Everybody shook hands with everybody else; “Auld Lang Syne” and “She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” were sung simultaneously; the Schoolmaster actually patted Captain; the Professor kissed Mrs. Noakes; the Lord Lieutenant promoted Dumbledum to Sergeant on the spot, and all looked forward, with hopeful hearts, as they made their way home through the snowdrifts of Christmas night, to the time when the ancient glories of Malplaquet would flourish as they had in days of yore.

  So that is the end of our simple story, Amaryllis, and now it is time for you to go to bed. But, before you go, it might be best to tell you one more thing. If you take the road from Northampton nowadays, to Monks-Unmentionable-Cum-Mumble, you will pass the stone gates of a gigantic avenue. All the hinges are oiled, all the trees are pruned, and, if you walk up it for five or six miles, you will come to a Triumphal Arch. Out of a side door in this, there will come a seven-foot beadle in a gold-laced hat, bearing a golden staff and a brass dinner bell, to whom you should present your gilt-edged visiting card. The Beadle will rap three times with his staff, at which two under-beadles will throw the gates wide open, and he himself will ring his dinner bell like thunder, to give notice of your approach. As you wind your way up one of the five remaining avenues, a hundred contented-looking gardeners will look up from the spick tulip beds or from the span salvias, to touch their hats with stately courtesy. Take a peep as you pass at the one-time Wilderness, and you will see that it has once more been laid out as a wonderful Japanese garden, shown to visitors each Friday on payment of I/- for the Red Cross, with stunted trees and little houses and Hornby trains which really run. In front of you, you will see the golden façade of Malplaquet, at the head of its shaven lawns, with every tile in place and every stone repointed. A dozen footmen in scarlet and powder will rush down the steps, when you reach the North Front at last, and will deprive you of your umbrella. A dozen underfootmen, in mere striped waistcoats, will pass it up the steps, hand over hand. That will be the time to say that you have come to see Maria.

  Unfortunately, however, you are quite likely to hear that she is out. Everybody will be kind to you. Everybody will give you claret cup in tumblers or champagne in buckets, whichever you prefer, but, when you ask them where Maria is, they will just seem rather stupid. The fact is that every man on that estate, and there are 365.2564
of them, is, on one subject, sworn to deadly secrecy. If Maria is you-know-where, they will not say a word.

  But go you down past the Quincunx, Amaryllis, as you wind your long way home, and you might see a newly varnished punt, looking bright upon the water of the lake. You might even catch the flash of a skirt, or the twinkle of a long white beard, among the slender columns of Mistress Masham’s Repose.

  T[ERENCE] H[ANBURY] WHITE (1906–1964) was born in Bombay, India, and educated at Cambridge University. His childhood was unhappy—“my parents loathed each other,” he later wrote—and he became a solitary person with a deep fund of strange lore and unusual enthusiasms. Fascinated by medieval life and legend, White taught himself Latin shorthand and translated a Latin bestiary. He taught himself the ancient art of falconry, which he wrote about in his book The Goshawk. Indeed, it was as a writer that he became famous, most of all for The Once and Future King, his wonderful retelling of the stories of King Arthur. An exceptional fisherman, an airplane pilot, and a deep-sea diver, T. H. White seemed to follow the same advice he has Merlin give in The Once and Future King: “The best thing for being sad is to learn something.”

  FRITZ EICHENBERG (1901–1990) was born and raised in Germany, where he became a successful political cartoonist. The rise of Hitler made him worry about his family’s safety, and in 1933 he left Germany for the United States, where he illustrated classics such as Crime and Punishment and Wuthering Heights, along with the pages of Dorothy Day’s radical news-sheet The Catholic Worker. Eichenberg also founded the Pratt Graphic Arts Center in Manhattan. He considered his teaching work “a debt I have paid off to this country.... I’m very fond of America as a country that has welcomed so many people from different parts of the world without asking questions.”

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1946 by T. H. White. Copyright renewed 1973 by Lloyds Bank Executor and Trustee Co. (Channel Islands) Ltd.

  Illustrations copyright © Fritz Eichenberg.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Louise Fili Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  White, T. H. (Terence Hanbury), 1906–1964.

  Mistress Masham’s repose/written by T. H. White;

  illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg.

  p. cm. — (The New York Review children’s collection)

  Summary: Ten-year-old Maria, an orphan living on a crumbling

  English estate and mistreated by her guardians, meets the descendants of the

  Lilliputians on an overgrown island and they discover ways to help each other.

  ISBN 1-59017-103-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  [1. Orphans—Fiction. 2. Characters in literature—Fiction. 3. England—Fiction.]

  I. Eichenberg, Fritz, 1901—ill. II. Title. III. Series.

  PZ7.W58463Mi 2004

  [Fic] — dc22

  2004004559

  eISBN 978-1-59017-547-7

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014