Mistress Masham's Repose Read online

  After two days she had swallowed the lecture successfully—a meal of something nasty like cold porridge, taken with rests between the spoonfuls and finished in the end.

  She sat down to write a straight and manful letter, in her smallest handwriting. It said:

  Dear Sirs,

  I am young but tall. You are old but short. I am sorry and will be better. I hop he is getting better.

  Yours sincerely

  with Tons of love

  from Maria

  Then she persuaded Cook to boil a large snail shell for her—there were some Helix pomatia in the park, which was very rare for Northamptonshire—and bored two small holes with a pin when it was clean, so that she could give it a handle of thread. This made it into a kind of shopping basket. She found a couple of wild strawberries in the Ridings, put them in the basket, and tore one of the middle pages out of Miss Brown’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which was all she could think of for a magazine. She folded her letter as small as she could, stamped it with a patch of paper like confetti, and set off for the lake.

  When she reached the island, she found that the brambles had been woven across her path. She did not beat them down, but left the letter and the comforts for the invalid in one of the canoes.

  For three nights Maria went with an aching heart, carrying her fruit and magazines, but on the third night the brambles rose of their own accord. There was the Schoolmaster waiting to welcome her with a beaming smile, and they flew into each other’s arms.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE People gradually recovered confidence as they saw that their child mountain intended to do her best, and the pilot began to get better, as the Professor had foretold. But Maria was careful from then on not to make favorites, and she never again mentioned the subject of indiarubber airplanes. She blushed to think of queens.

  She used to visit them for an hour or two every midnight, because the days were devoted to Algebra and threatened by telescopes.

  It was true that she felt sleepy in the mornings, and Cook said that she was beginning to look peaked; but Miss Brown did not notice anything, as she was busy puzzling about her plot with the Vicar.

  Maria cast away dull care and enjoyed herself to the top of her bent. She loved stealing out at the dead of night, with the dangerous journey past her tyrant’s door. She loved the wonderful summer moonlight, silver and velvet black. Above all, she loved being with the old-fashioned People, and wondering at their minuscule Oeconomy.

  One thing which she discovered was that it was a mistake for giants to choose small presents for dwarfs. The proper thing for a giant to do was to choose the largest present which a dwarf could possibly use, while the dwarf had to choose the smallest or finest thing which could be of use to the giant. The Professor, with his Hundreds and Thousands, had been astray. For instance, her most successful present—for she tried to take something with her every night—had been the saucepan with no handle. It had been just what they needed, a wonderful farm boiler, which could boil for a week at a time, and, though she had taken it shyly, for fear that they would be offended at the poverty of the gift, she had never been thanked so heartily for anything else. They said it was “compleat.”

  The People found this out as well.

  Instead of using a ship’s sail for the next presentation to Maria, they decided to make her a spider-web scarf. The silk was taken from the webs of the garden spider, the brown one with a white cross on its back, and it was treated with the juice of gorse blooms to get rid of the stickiness, which also made it yellow. Then it was knitted in thin strips by a team of volunteers, for they had no looms, and the strips were finally sewn together. Maria was allowed to watch the process, and she had the satisfaction of seeing, in the course of it, one of the things which had interested Lemuel Gulliver. She saw a little woman threading an invisible needle with invisible thread.

  It made a wonderful scarf, and the curious thing was that it was as strong as good linen, or stronger. It was resilient, like elastic, and she could stick her finger into it without breaking it, although she could see through. Many years later, she wore it as part of her wedding dress; but meanwhile she had to hide it under a floor board in the Duchess’s Powder Closet, for fear of Miss Brown.

  She suddenly realized why, whenever she brought the Lilliputians a present, they tried to give her one. It was because they did not want to be possessed.

  Another thing which she discovered was that the People lived a dangerous life, although they did not complain about it. In spite of the fact that there were no wars, they had other dangers. For instance, there had been a family of magpies some thirty moons before, who had taken a fancy to young Lilliputians, and had carried off a dozen babies before they had been mastered. Magpies were wily, and had good memories; so, when two of them had been wounded with arrows, they had finally given it up.

  The bows and arrows were interesting. The wood of our gigantic trees, when it was in twigs sufficiently thin for a Lilliputian bow, had not enough snap in it. So they used the spines from the pinion feathers of large birds, farm hens if they could get them, strung against the curve. The arrows had metal tips, forged from the nails in the cupola, but these were inclined to be soft.

  By the way, the ancient Lilliputians were accustomed to use poisoned arrows. But in England they could not find the proper poisons—which had perhaps been fortunate for Maria. They did use the formic acid from bees; but they could not get enough strength on the tip of the arrow, although they boiled it down, for any work more formidable than killing insects.

  When they raided hives for the poison, and for honey, which was important to them because they had no sugar, the raiders wore a kind of plate armor made from the wing cases of beetles. The scales were sewn to a mouse-skin foundation, overlapping; but of course they generally raided the nests in frosty weather, and used smoke.

  Another danger was owls, worse than the danger of magpies. There were three main kinds of owl at Malplaquet: the barn, the tawny, and the Lilford, who also hunted by day. Horned owls were rare, though they did come sometimes. These creatures were braver and less wily than the magpies, and they had never learned to keep away. Also, instead of merely pouncing like the crow tribe, they came down vertically like dive bombers, and it was impossible to slay them. There was no time. Consequently the sentry on the cupola had to do night-watching for owls, and, when he spotted one, he rang a bell. Maria, when she found out about it, realized that she had heard the bell often. But there are such a lot of noises in the country, queer noises like donkeys braying and so on, that we neglectful humans do not properly attend to them. The bell made a deepish tonk-tonk-tonk, and Maria had always thought it was a carrion crow. When the bell was rung, the only hope was to stand still without looking up. If they moved, the owl saw them; if they looked up, it noticed their white faces under the moon. If they stood still, looking straight in front of them, it nearly always passed over.

  In the daytime, when they were not so much about, there were kestrels. The procedure was the same for these.

  As for the mainland trappers, their lives were in their hands. A fox was about as big as the National Gallery to them, and, as it could easily pounce across Trafalgar Square, there was nothing to be done. The worst of it was that it could also smell. It was no good shooting at it with their poor arrows. It was no good hiding in the grass, or standing still, because it had a nose. Many ideas had been tried for dealing with foxes, ideas like making a loud noise or a nasty smell, but none of them had been successful. A famous trapper, three hundred moons before, had blinded a fox by shooting an arrow into each eye. Ordinary people could not be expected to have the nerve for that. The common reaction was to stand still and trust to luck, if surprised, but, above all, to keep a weather eye open, and particularly a nose, in case foxes should be about. Even a human, with nostrils as clumsy as two fireplaces, can usually smell a fox. The Lilliputians, with their fine noses, had better warning. Then they had to climb trees.

  It was like li
ving in a world full of dinosaurs and pterodactyls, or even bigger creatures, and they had to keep their wits about them.

  A result of this, which biologists will understand—and if you are not a biologist nobody cares a fig for you—was that the ladies of Lilliput had begun to have twins. They often had triplets, and were delighted when they did.

  Maria wished that she could help them in these dangers. If she had been rich or grown-up or any of the other things which seem so desirable until one gets them, she could have bought a shotgun to shoot the owls, and could have cleared them out like that. Unfortunately, she was not. She did, however, make sensible suggestions. She said that, if they would show her the fox earths all over the Park, she would put tar in them at the next breeding season, or anything else that was unpleasant, whatever the Master of the Malplaquet Hounds might think. She said that with their local knowledge, and her bigness, there were probably several things which could be done. “For instance,” said she, “I can get some petrol from the Primus and put it on the wasps’ nests, if you will show me where they are. I could even smash up the nests of owls, once you had spotted them.”

  The People of the Island were grateful for her kind thoughts, and decided that she was not a bad Mountain after all.

  One pearly night toward the beginning of July, with the owls hooting and the twigs cracking and the paw-feet rustling and the great moon reigning over all, Maria crept up the silver stairs to bed. She passed the door of the square eighteenth-century chapel, where the plaster cherubs with fat cheeks like amoretti looked down from the flaking roof between the Royal Arms and the Ten Commandments; passed the much more than full-length portrait of the Fifth Duke, by Romney, which was unsalable because it covered half an acre of canvas, and also the water color of Naples with Vesuvius by Moonlight, equally unsalable because it was fifteen feet long, the biggest water color in the world; passed the cold busts of the Main Library, not the Third Duke’s, where Sophocles and others looked down with beards like twisted tripe upon the empty shelves which had once housed the Malplaquetian MSS.; passed, with a special tremor, the lofty bedroom in which the Empress Amelia had breathed her last, and also the Duchess’s Chamber, where her own ancestors had been brought into the world, in the presence of twelve doctors and any members of the Privy Council who had happened to be disengaged.

  Maria was an educated person, and for her the Palace was full of ghosts. She knew where the Wicked Marquis had condemned the two young poachers to death; where the Mad Earl had played the violin at midnight, to Lola Montez and the King of Bavaria; where the Impetuous Viscount had blown off his whiskers with a six-shooter, on discovering that he had sold his Honor to the Jews; and where the nasty little Honorable had lighted his Nannie, to see if she would burn.

  She turned up the last corridor and opened the door.

  “Good evening!” said Miss Brown smoothly, sitting on the bed. “So here is our little vagrom, returned from her clandestine tour.”

  “Yes, Miss Brown.”

  “And what has tempted her to brave the inclement airs of night? What horns of elfland, if one may so express oneself, have summoned the tender cheek to leave its downy pillow? Eh, Maria?”

  Miss Brown moved her hand on purpose, and there was the painful ruler which was used at Algebra.

  “I went for a walk.”

  “The midnight ramble. Yes, indeed. The moonlit constitutional, to coin a phrase. And why this promenade among Diana’s minions?”

  “I wanted to go out.”

  “Exactly. So explicit. And yet, to some ideas, the time would scarcely seem conventional?”

  “It was the moon.”

  “The Moon! How true! How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank, et cetera.

  “And these,” added Miss Brown, opening the other hand to show the spider scarf and the handkerchief and the other presents, which she had discovered by tracking her pupil to their hiding place, “and these delicious trifles, fairy fragments as one might designate them if devoted to the Essay Form, are these as well, Maria, nothing but moonshine and Titania’s dreams?”

  There was nothing to be said.

  “Where did you get them?”

  “I got them.”

  “She got them! Lucid explanation! Where?”

  “I won’t say.”

  “Will not say. The elision is so vulgar, is it not? She will not say. And yet, suppose she is made to say, you ask?”

  Maria said distinctly, with some surprise at finding that she was speaking the truth: “The more you hurt me, the less you’ll hear.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Yes.”

  This put the Governess off her stride. One of the best ways to deal with tyrants is to tell them the truth, and to face them, and to let them see how much you hate them plainly, so long as you can make them understand that you will hurt them if you can. It frightens them away.

  Miss Brown gnawed her fingers.

  “The child’s recalcitrant,” she said complainingly. “Ungrateful....”

  And, with a sudden swish like a cobra’s, which made Maria duck, she was out of the door. She slammed the same triumphantly, and turned the key.

  Five minutes afterward, however, she changed her mind; for Maria was surprised to hear the key turned back again quietly, and to know that she was at liberty after all. Why?

  CHAPTER XIII

  NEXT morning was bright and breezy, and there were two expeditions from the ruined palace, in the hours which ought to have been devoted to Irregular Verbs. Miss Brown made an expedition to the Vicarage, while Maria seized the opportunity to visit the Professor.

  She found him searching mournfully for his set of Du Cange—which is a dictionary of Mediaeval Latin, in case you don’t know—but this was an almost hopeless task in the chaos to which he had reduced his cottage. There were books in the shelves, which had been filled some fifty years before. Nearly all the floor, except the part around the tea chest on which he used to sit, was taken up by piles and piles of mildewed volumes. Also, alas, as he had been verifying quotations and things of that sort since the turn of the century, and as he was one of those unfortunate people who leave the book open at the quotation in some accessible place, all the window ledges, oven-shelves, mantelpieces, fenders, and other flat surfaces were stocked with verified quotations, which had long been forgotten. He had left a narrow path to each door. But the steps of the stairs had proved to be tempting flat surfaces, so it was difficult for the poor old fellow to climb to bed, and the bed itself would have been denied to him—except that it was fortunately a double one, and he was able to squeeze in somehow between Gesner and the eleven tomes of Aldrovandus, counting the extra one on Monsters.

  The Professor was crawling about on hands and knees, trying to read the names of the bottom books sideways, without disturbing the piles. He was sick of erudition and only too glad to listen to Maria.

  She told him how Miss Brown had found the artifacts of Lilliput, perhaps by tracking her to the Duchess’s Powder Closet with the magnifying glass, and how she herself had refused to tell where she got them. He was interested.

  “Well, now, my dear child,” said he, sitting down absentmindedly on a stack of books, which happened to be the missing set of Du Cange, “have you ever noticed that when something unusual turns up, you are immediately confronted with a moral problem? For instance, if you were to find yourself in the unusual position of Alice in Wonderland, who was able to make herself large or small at will, nothing would be easier than to rob the Bank of England. You would simply have to go in small, say about the size of a pin, and come out extra large, through the skylight or somewhere, with a few million pounds in your pockets. Moral problem: shall I become a burglar? Or if you found yourself in the unusual position of the Invisible Man, by my young friend Mr. Wells, nothing would be easier than to introduce yourself into the boudoirs of your acquaintances, in order to earn a handsome competence by discovering their secrets. Moral problem: shall I become a blackmailer? Now it is ce
rtainly unusual to discover a colony of people six inches high, and so you were immediately confronted with your moral problem, about being their Queen. Shall I interfere with Lilliput’s proper freedom and become a tyrant? But, dear me, Maria, this is becoming a lecture. I fear I bore?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “It’s quite fun.”

  “So now we have your governess on the track of the unusual, with her own moral problem straight ahead of her. How will she solve it?”

  “Solve what?”

  “About interfering.”

  “If Miss Brown can interfere,” said Maria bitterly, “she will.”

  “How?”

  “I suppose she will just forbid them or something.”

  “Much worse.”

  She looked at him anxiously.

  “She will sell them,” he said.

  “But, oh, she couldn’t! They are real! They are People! She couldn’t sell them like ... like hens!”

  “Nothing is more likely. Don’t you see that they are tremendously valuable? Any big circus would pay thousands and thousands of pounds to get them, perhaps millions. They are the only things of their kind in the world.”

  “But ... But ... She couldn’t. It would be too beastly. It would be ... it would be slaves.”

  “So now you know, Maria, why they did not want to give away their secret.”

  “I’ll never tell her. She can kill me first, but I wouldn’t tell. The beast!”