Mistress Masham's Repose Page 7

  Mo Rog

  Glonog,

  Quinba,

  Hlin varr.

  It meant: “Give me a kiss, please, Miss. I like your nose.” Other writers produced Tragedies of five scenes, which observed the Unities, and these were acted by the opera company in the top room of the monopteron—where there was a miniature harpsichord in the orchestra, sounding like the ghost of a ghost, which had been made to the order of Captain Biddel. Still others were famous for their Essays, which were seldom more than two lines long, and generally on a moral subject. “Nothing fails like Success” was one of the Essays; another was “Narclabb meeting an Ass with a fortunate Name, prophesy’d Success. I meet many Asses, but none have fortunate Names.”

  In short, although, as we shall see later, the People lived hardy and dangerous lives, they were cultured, and could not possibly be treated like lead soldiers. For that matter, they had hidden on the island to escape this very fate.

  However, Maria lost grip of herself, and she now proceeded on the road to ruin with the speed of a Rake’s Progress.

  The first mad thing she did was to make a favorite. This was a beautiful but silly young fisherman, who was too stupid to mind being carried about all day, to the detriment of his fishing. He felt distinguished when chosen to be the man in the barrel, and did not dislike being used as a toy, because he was a vain fellow in any case. (The Schoolmaster, on the other hand, had gone on strike soon after the incident of the pike flensing.) Maria devoted herself to the new favorite, began carrying him in her hands instead of the barrel, and even carried him in her pocket. She took him with her everywhere. Once she took him to sleep in the small drawer of her dressing table, which was dangerous so far as Miss Brown was concerned, and bad for his character also, because it made the other Lilliputians look down on him. She would sit for hours in the pasture field on the other side of the Quincunx, inventing exciting stories and making him act them for her. Occasionally she kidnaped one or two others, to act with him, which annoyed them, although it flattered him. She began to grab and snatch like a rough baby greedy for toys, which generally get broken in the process, saying, “No, no. Do this. Do that. You be the conquered enemy and I will be General Eisenhower. Give it to me. I will be the Queen and you can be my subjects.”

  There were no more welcomes when she visited the island. The People began to have a worried look, and to hide when she came.

  The next craze which she got into her head was for toy airplanes. She had been so delighted by the story of the jackdaw bomber, in spite of the Schoolmaster’s diffidence about it, that she borrowed twopence from Cook and persuaded the Professor to buy a model for her in Northampton, with a propellor worked by elastic. It was a cheap and nasty one, having cost only 3/11½, but it looked as if it would carry the fisherman. She just had sense enough to realize that it would need ailerons, tail plane, and rudder, but there was an old copy of the Illustrated London News in Miss Brown’s drawing room, which had a diagram of these controls. She helped herself to this, and called a meeting of the reluctant Lilliputians, to plan the conquest of the air. She flew the model for them several times, with the usual stall and crash landing on its propellor, and explained how they would have to make the ailerons according to the diagram, as the work was too fine for her fingers.

  The Schoolmaster refused to help. He pointed out that an elastic which lost its power after forty seconds was useless for practical purposes, as it would scarcely take the machine across the lake; that there would have to be a gang waiting after each short hop to wind it up again; that the fisherman did not know how to use the controls in the picture; and finally that it was a conspicuous object, while their whole mode of life in the Repose depended on concealment.

  Maria said that she was bigger than they were, and that it had to be done.

  They were flatly refusing, when the young fisherman said that he would do the carpentry himself. He felt the importance of a favorite, and the grandeur of flying in an airplane had gone to his head. The others had to give in. But they avoided Maria completely after that, leaving her and the poor coxcomb to arrange the affair in their own way. The Schoolmaster made one awkward attempt to read her a lecture—but she laughed, and would not listen.

  It was only because she was inexperienced and had not thought, not because she was a bully. Besides, she was on fire with her dream of a tiny airplane really flown, and she scarcely noticed the reactions of other people.

  The fisherman made the new controls beautifully, using horsehair for the wires and sailcloth stretched on twigs of silver birch to make the various flaps. When it was finished, it looked like the first flying machine built by the brothers Wright, except that it was a monoplane. He had to sit on this plane, as the Wrights did, with his legs stretched nearly straight in front.

  The great day came for flying it, and the pilot was ready to win immortal fame. Both of them were too enthusiastic to think.

  It would not rise from the ground, because of the long grass in the Jubilee Field, but ran in circles, buzzing and skidding on its wings, before it turned upside down. Fortunately the propellor missed the pilot as he was thrown clear.

  They tried the controls anxiously, wagging them with the control column, and the horsehair to one of the ailerons had snapped. This was replaced. They chattered as they worked to fix it, agreeing that Maria was to launch the next flight from her hand, as she had done when showing how it flew.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Yes, Y’r Honour.”

  “Are you sure you will be all right?”

  “Yes, yes!”

  She let it go, and he was off.

  It went straight for the ground at her feet, pulled out of the dive when within an inch of crashing, skimmed along faster and faster less than six inches from the grass, with its port wing down, rose with a great zoom when it was twenty yards away, and, at an altitude of twenty feet, turned upside down.

  The pilot was still falling, a crumpled mass like a shot partridge, when a gust lifted the starboard wing. The machine slewed sideways and down with a sickle swoop, landed on its wing tip, shed the wing, and lay there thumping feebly as the elastic tried to turn.

  He meanwhile had been falling a-sprawl. Before the airplane struck, he had hit the ground.

  To a man who was six inches high, one of Maria’s human feet represented twelve. Twenty of her feet would have been two hundred and forty of his. That was the fall he had.

  Her heart rose to her neck, turned over there, and plunged into her stomach. Her blood began to fizz and her fingers to tingle and the bones vanished from her legs. She started to run, wishing she could turn back time, wishing she could unhappen the awfulness of now.

  She had not marked him, and could not find him in the grass.

  She ran round searching madly, beating the scutch with her hands; then stood still in agony, realizing that she might have trodden on him. When she was still, she could hear him groan. He was stretched beside a tussock with only one leg! Or with his other leg twisted under him horribly! His face was white, but oh, he must not be dead!

  If he had been a human, even from twenty feet, he might have killed himself; from two hundred and forty, he certainly would have done so. But bones are made of much the same material, whatever one’s size is, and this is why the small creatures like rats and cats can fall from greater heights than we can. They have less weight to fall, and so the bones are stronger in proportion.

  Maria knelt beside him, not knowing what to do, or how to bear the pathetic noise he was making. He had certainly broken his leg, even if nothing else was broken. She tried to remember what little she knew about first aid. People who had broken their backs ought not to be moved, and fox hunters who had broken their legs, she remembered, were sometimes carried home on gates. She felt that she could not dare to decide. Suppose his back were broken? How was she to find out without moving him? All the time, in another part of her mind, she was trying not to let it have happened.

  They had to
ld her not to, but she had insisted. She had let the game run away with her, not noticing that it was growing rougher; and now she was awake from the mad dream, with one of the beautiful People broken, perhaps killed. It came over her like doom.

  The responsibility and the distress were too much. She began running back to the lake, to get help. After a few yards, she feared that she might not remember exactly where he lay. She went back to find him, knelt again, and touched him with her finger.

  The touch cleared her head. Whether I am guilty or not, she thought, I must get him within reach of aid as quickly as I can. His leg ought to be set, but I could not do it daintily enough, nor could I make small splints, nor even, she added with a sob, make any. I must not sob, but I must carry him to the Repose without jerking him. If I keep my hand quite flat and steady, it will do for a gate.

  The horror of lifting him to the palm of her hand and of straightening the leg as he groaned unconsciously, for he seemed to have concussion; the nightmare walk to the lake, like some dreadful egg-and-spoon race; the paddling of the punt with one hand to the island; all these were got through somehow.

  There was nobody in the Temple.

  She called, deathly white, but nobody would answer. She was sure he was dying. She found a large rhododendron leaf for a stretcher, and edged it under him. She made a mattress by folding her handkerchief and laid the stretcher on it, under the middle of the dome. “He must be helped,” she said. “You must come.”

  The Schoolmaster did come, from one of the pillar doors, and pointed silently for her to go. She went, and as she disappeared the stretcher party came to carry off the murdered man. Halfway across the lake, she laid her paddle down to howl—then sculled away, looking exactly like a retrieving puppy which had eaten its pheasant instead of retrieving it.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE Professor was busy with Camb. Univ. Lib. Ii. 4.26, and was stuck on the first leaf with Tripharium. He had looked it up in Lewis and Short, to no avail, and had also tried to verify it in a charter-hand manuscript called Trin. Coll. Camb. R. 14. 9 (884), where he had found Triumpharion, partly scratched out. This had made confusion worse confounded.

  He motioned the retrieving puppy to his soapbox absently, as it slunk into the cottage with its tail between its legs, and observed: “It says nujus Genus Tripharium Dicitur, but the trouble is that a part of the line seems to have been erased.”

  “I came about something terrible.”

  “Murder?”

  “It might be,” said the puppy, blushing all over.

  “Whom have you murdered? The Vicar, I hope. The word has evidently proved a stumbling block to other scribes, who either evade it by omitting the sentence, or make wild guesses, or, as in this case, resort to some erasure and to complete obscurity.

  “He was an unpleasant man,” he added. “I never liked him much.”

  “It is a man from Lilliput that I have murdered.”

  “Indeed! Just fancy! Tripartitum is a possibility, of course, but one hardly cares to divagate so widely from a lucid script.”

  “The People are arranging never to see me again.”

  “So long as they will arrange it themselves,” he said kindly. “One has so many calls on one’s time, so many little annoyances like this stupid lapsus calami I was telling you about. I suppose I shall have to write to Sir Sydney Cockerell or to Dr. Basil Atkinson. Even perhaps to Mr. G. C. Druce.”

  “But you must help!”

  “No,” he said firmly. “I cannot spare the time. On any other day, my dear Maria, but not just now. What with Ambrose and Ctesias the Cnydian, one scarcely knows which way to turn.”

  She pulled herself together, took away his manuscript, and put it in one of the bookshelves, upside down. He winced to see this done.

  “Do you know what I have been talking about?”

  He took off his spectacles and looked at them painfully, with watery eyes. He did not know at all.

  He said: “I can remember every word. You were telling me that you had murdered the Vicar, and a good job too. How did you dispose of the body?”

  She told her story carefully from the beginning, how she had ruined the whale hunt and bullied the People and probably killed the fisherman in her wretched bungee airplane.

  “Dear me,” he said, when she had finished. “But this is very inconvenient.”

  He considered for some time, then went over to the bookshelf and turned his manuscript the right way up.

  “You know,” he said, “it could easily be some monkish mistake for Tribialis, a common species, except that they seem to have attached particular value to lions—the sentence refers to lions—owing to their association with the gospels. The maddening thing is that I have mislaid Du Cange.”

  Maria burst into tears.

  “Good heavens!” he exclaimed when he heard the noise. “What ever is the matter? My own Maria, anything but this! Allow me to lend you my handkerchief, a dishcloth, a towel, one of the sheets. Have a glass of cowslip wine. Have a sniff of some burned feathers, if I can find any. Have anything, Maria, but do not weep!”

  “You won’t think!”

  “Think!” cried the Professor, bashing himself on the head with Lewis and Short, which looked as if it could weigh about ten pounds. “Think! Great Powers of Pedantry assist me now!”

  After a bit he sat down calmly beside her on the soapbox and waited for the sobs to subside.

  “Would you object,” he asked humbly, “to repeating the subject which we were just discussing?”

  She repeated it with hiccups.

  “I think we may depend upon it that the pilot was not killed. If he had broken his back or his neck, you would have noticed it when you moved him, by seeing that he was hinged in the wrong places. No, no. He has only broken his leg, and richly he deserved it. You should take him some fruit every now and then, with magazines to read in bed. We shall find that he recovers in no time.”

  “I hope he will!”

  “Even if he does, you will still be at loggerheads with Lilliput.”

  “They sent me to Coventry!”

  “Yes. I see. Now Maria, you must try to look at this from their point of view. It is an exceedingly curious situation. You are a child, but very big; they are grown-up, but very small. Just imagine what you would feel, if you were a grownup whose head was bothered with the affairs of a family. Suppose you were off to catch the London train, with your umbrella well rolled, to see a solicitor about some mortgages, and just as you were getting near the station a little girl who was forty-eight feet high stepped over the hedge and carried you away to a distant field, in the wrong direction, where she put you down and told you to be a German, while she was being General Eisenhower. Think how exasperating it would be, as you heard the train puffing off without you.”

  “But I only played with a few of them!”

  “All the same, they could see the tendency of the position. If they had given in to you, they would never have been able to call their souls their own, and their economic life would have been upset in order to play at queens and subjects. However nice you were to them, it would have been intolerable.”

  “I used to help them. I spent all my money buying chocolates and airplanes!”

  “But they did not want the airplanes and they could not live on chocolates. They had a living to earn.”

  “I suppose ...”

  “You see, Maria, this is a problem which has only once occurred before, and that was when the small man Gulliver was in the keeping of the huge girl Glumdalclitch, in the land of the Giants.”

  “They got on very well.”

  “Exactly. But it was because she did not paw him about. Don’t you remember how disgusted he was with the other young ladies who tried to make him a plaything? He hated being mauled and messed, and he was grateful to Glumdalclitch because she only behaved as a loving attendant and helper. This is what you will have to do, if you want to make it up with Lilliput. You must never, never force them to do anythi
ng. You must be as polite to them as you are polite to any other person of your own size, and then, when they see your magnanimity in not exerting brute force, they will admire you, and give you love.

  “I know it is difficult,” he added gently, “because the trouble about loving things is that one wants to possess them. But you must keep hold of your emotions and always be guarding against meanness. It will be very difficult indeed.”

  “The Schoolmaster pointed for me to go away. He meant I was not to come back.”

  “I think you may go back once, if it is to apologize.”

  “But I don’t see why I should apologize! I was only trying to help them fly.”

  “They asked you not to.”

  An obstinate vanity made her stiffen.

  “I have tried to help, and I never struck or forced a single one of them. I won’t say I’m sorry.”

  The Professor got up to fetch his manuscript, dismissing her from his mind.

  “Very well, Maria. Certainly I am not going to force you. Meanwhile, if you will excuse me, there is this little matter of Tripharium, which I must elucidate as best I may.”

  She could not get another word out of him, and went away in the sulks herself, feeling twice as guilty as before.

  It took her two days to swallow the lecture which she had been given. Sometimes she protested to herself that she would rather die than apologize to a set of miserable hop-o’-my-thumbs. Sometimes she thought how disgusted the Professor must be feeling with her. Sometimes she swallowed a small piece of the lecture at a time, thinking that perhaps it had been a bit annoying for the People, but all the same they ought to have been more grateful. I could have killed the whole lot of them, she thought, if I had wanted to, merely by stamping my feet, and I could have told Miss Brown their secret. Yet they order me off my own island, and won’t even speak!