Mistress Masham's Repose Page 9

  “Dear me. Yes. But the question is, my dear young lady, whether she would have a right to sell your Lilliputians after all? Just let me think.”

  He tottered off to one of the bookshelves, where he had just noticed some brown volumes which might have been Du Cange, but which were not, then wandered back refreshed.

  “You see, Maria, the whole situation is wrapped in such unusualness that it is difficult to consider it clearly. For instance, are these creatures human or not? What is the legal definition of a human being? Does he cease to be human when he is six inches high? If they are human, presumably it would be illegal for your guardians to sell them, as there are laws in England against slavery. But again, if they are human, what is their nationality? Should they accredit an Ambassador to represent their interests at St. James’s? Will they be regarded as British Subjects By Birth, and as being Domiciled in England for the Purposes of Income Tax? Certainly the latter, if what I hear about the Inland Revenue is true. And then, on the other hand, if they are not human, are we to regard them as ferae naturae, wild animals which become the property of the landlord? If so, you are the landlord, but, as you are a minor, Miss Brown and the Vicar could sell them on your behalf.”

  “I don’t know what they are,” she said sadly.

  “Whatever they are, they only have four hundred sprugs in gold. It seems inevitable that if they are to escape being sold, once your governess has found them, they will have to go to law about themselves, and four hundred sprugs, Maria, is not enough. They could never brief a reliable counsel with such a sum, and, under the due forms of suit and countersuit, I fear that they would be liable to get the thin end of the Law.”

  “We won’t let her find them then.”

  “Last but not least,” said the Professor with a deep sigh, “here we are talking about their future as if it depended on us. But they are reasonable and civilized beings who must decide their future for themselves. I blame myself for this. I am becoming a barbarian. I must not.”

  He patted one of the nearest folios secretly, to cure himself of barbarism, and looked at Maria over the top of his spectacles.

  “Personally, I have found that the best way to deal with a dangerous situation is to face it, and to make it happen, and to go through with it, rather than to keep it hanging over one’s head. If I were a Lilliputian, I believe that I would prefer to be discovered, and to go to law, and to bring the matter into the daylight of some kind of certainty, rather than to creep about in dangerous hiding, under the shadow of discovery.”

  “You said they wouldn’t get fair law.”

  “It is what I fear.”

  “Why,” said Maria, “can’t we just prevent Miss Brown from finding them at all?”

  “The question is, whether you can. Children are under dreadful disadvantages compared with their elders. If your governess made up her mind to discover where you got your sprug and the other things, she could nag for weeks on end, she could send you to bed without any supper, she could keep you on bread and water or tog you out in football boots, and I daresay that a person of her caliber might do worse.”

  Maria’s heart sank at the thought of what Miss Brown might really do. She knew that she was perfectly capable of beating her, and her womanly little heart shrank from the prospect, not only because of the agonizing pain but also because of the humiliation and beastliness. For a few dreadful moments she saw herself as she was, and doubted whether it would be possible to keep even the most important secret under such conditions. However, she said bravely:

  “I don’t mind if she does.”

  “You may think you would not mind, but suppose she kept it up for months?”

  They went on debating the problem for more than an hour, without making it much clearer, until it was time for the Conquistador of Lilliput to go home.

  Incidentally, talking of Conquistadors, the Professor got mixed in a digression toward the end, and insisted that she should take away two books about Conquest by Prescott. He said that they would show her what human beings were liable to do with newly discovered Peoples, when they happened to be valuable.

  Meanwhile, in the Vicarage, a different kind of discussion had been going on.

  The hold which Miss Brown had over Mr. Hater was this. She was a very distant relative of Maria’s, and was the only living one. You remember about the missing parchment concerning the inheritance of Malplaquet. The Vicar believed that if it could be found, and altered slightly, a vast sum of money which ought to have been Maria’s could be gained for Miss Brown, by means of a suit of mort d’ancestre.

  This was why he always wandered so much about the palace, looking for hiding places. Had he been able to find the parchment, and to do the necessary forgery, he would have married Miss Brown for her money, although they hated each other. They would have been bound together by the crime. His knowledge and her name were needed to bring it about.

  You may think that Vicars are not usually forgers, and sometimes indeed they are not; but the heart of man is a strange mechanism, my dear Amaryllis, and it is astonishing what even Vicars can bring themselves to believe, so long as it is in their own interest. Somehow or other, by strange and crooked by-paths of special pleading, Mr. Hater had convinced himself that there would be nothing wrong in altering the ancient title deed, if he could find it. For one thing, he had worked hard, searching about like a sulky old vulture in the British Museum and the Public Record Office, to discover the existence of the deed, and Maria had not worked at all. In any case he was that kind of person. There are people who will just doggedly avert their minds from wrong-doing, and do it.

  The Vicar was like this, and it did not make him preach any the less cruelly, about darksome sins, in his shoddy little church on Sundays.

  So the conversation in the Vicarage that sunny and windy morning was not about Lilliput. Neither of them was cultured enough to associate sprugs with Gulliver, nor to draw any conclusion from the name of Lilliput which was stitched upon the handkerchief. They had not enough imagination to believe in six-inch people. If you had mentioned Gulliver’s Travels to them, they would have said: “Oh, that’s a children’s book, isn’t it?” They had a few instincts about money, and about appearing respectable, but for many and many years they had not had any thoughts on real ideas at all.

  They had decided that Maria’s three treasures, the sprug, the eighteenth-century handkerchief, and the silk scarf of such fineness as to be obviously of value, must have been found in some secret robing-room of the by-gone Dukes. They thought that the sprug was a sequin from a Duchess’s evening dress. Their sagging cheeks were shaking with greed, when they realized that if Maria had really discovered a secret strong room full of valuables, then probably their missing parchment would be in it.

  Usually they were mumchance villains, but the excitement about the discovery made them chatter.

  “Such a difficult child,” deplored Miss Brown, “obstinate and untrustworthy. She refused to say where she had found them, Mr. Hater, in so many words, though I thought it wiser not to make a fuss. Punishment would have only made her still more obstinate.”

  “But why should she refuse?”

  “Out of naughtiness.”

  “This is ridiculous, Miss Brown. We have a right to know of assets at Malplaquet, as a matter of business, as the child’s guardians. How can we administer the estate with the extent of it concealed? You must talk to Maria at once, and bring her to reason. You are her governess. Surely you ought to have her under better control than that? You must talk to her seriously, this very afternoon.”

  “I will indeed.”

  The Vicar looked away and mumbled to the gothic mantelpiece:

  “We must think how much depends upon it.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  COME here.”

  Maria went and stood in front of Miss Brown awkwardly, looking at the hard rings sunk in the fat fingers on the spreading lap.

  “I have decided to overlook your conduct last night.”
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  She said nothing. It was never possible to tell whether her governess was going to be cruel or kind, for her face wore the same quelling look in either case. She waited to see where the catch was.

  “I have been talking to the Vicar about the hidden strong room which you have discovered.”

  This was Greek.

  “You know, of course, for I have told you dozens of times, that you spring from a long line of wasters, who only considered their own pleasures, and who thought nothing of going bankrupt, to the ruin of poor tradesmen who had trusted them.”

  “My great-grandfather,” said Maria proudly, “was the Prime Minister of England.”

  “I’ll thank you not to answer back. You know that Malplaquet has been ruined by your ancestors, and that you yourself are practically supported out of Mr. Hater’s pocket, a charity brat.”

  This was untrue, for the Vicar drew a salary as guardian, and was also stealing most of the money which ought to have been paid into the estate, against Maria’s coming-of-age. That was why he had the Rolls-Royce.

  “I thought the debts were being paid.”

  “So they should be. Would they not be paid the quicker if the ill-gotten gains of your forbears could be brought from this secret chamber which you try to hide from us?

  “There was the Coronation coronet,” pursued Miss Brown cunningly, peeping shrewdly at her victim through slit eyes, to see if there was a reaction, “which went astray in 1797, with the black pearls in it. There was the insignia of the Garter which were never returned to the Sovereign, and the diamond-hilted sword presented to the Second Duke by Catherine the Great. Where are these?”

  Maria began to be filled with unholy joy for Lilliput, as she partly understood how far her governess was going astray.

  “I don’t know anything about a secret chamber.”

  “There would be papers in it too, parchments, deeds, which you are too young to understand. You could be sent to prison for keeping such things back.”

  “Children don’t get sent to prison.”

  “Hold your tongue, Maria. Be careful what you say.”

  “But I tell you I haven’t found a secret chamber.”

  Miss Brown searched out her pupil’s eyes and fixed them with her own. She had a pleasant trick of staring Maria down, which is not so difficult to do when a child expects to be punished.

  “Very well,” she said at last, “you shall go straight to bed this minute, without your supper, and there you can think it over by yourself.”

  It was horrible to be sent to bed on a summer afternoon, when all the park was calling her to be out-of-doors, but she made the best of it. There was the wonder and glory of Lilliput to think about nowadays, and that made up for much.

  If only one were rich enough to own a grouse moor, thought she to distract herself in the dreary bedroom, it would be much more suitable for the People. The stems of heather would be natural trees to them—for heather is more like a gnarled and stunted tree than anything I know, a coniferous, not a deciduous one—and there they could live in their small forest, with proper glades, and bog holes for lakes, and all the tiny mushroom things which you can see, if you lie on your face. There would be millions of insects to hunt in the summer, and they could build themselves real towns, and it would be to scale.

  The trouble would be, she thought, that it would be impossible to protect them. The moment they were found out, on their moor, all the big humans would try to catch them, for circuses and so on, just like Captain Biddel and Miss Brown.

  On a moor, you see, it would be impossible to keep them hidden. Somebody would find them, walking across it, and then the game would be up.

  Even if you put a fence round it, with enormous walls, this would only make people more inquisitive than ever. You would get twice as many trespassers, trying to find out what it was about.

  And if you paid an army of guards to stand round the boundary with tommy guns—well then, the trespassers would get half mad with inquisitiveness, and so would the guards for that matter, and the whole thing would be discovered at once.

  What you want, she thought hungrily, for tea-time was past, is some island off the west coast of Scotland or of Ireland, some uninhabited island with a watchtower, so that if anybody approached in a canoe the People could hide. It would have to be a heather island. It does seem a shame that even on that you could not give them proper houses on the surface. They would still have to live underground, for fear of visitors. I wonder if you could make houses that would sink into the ground when you turned a handle, like a bucket in a well?

  If I were rich, I would buy some island like that, and we would live there safely with ourselves. But what about when I died? I suppose I should have to tell my eldest daughter when she was twenty-one, like the Secret of Glamis. But suppose she turned out to be a pig like Miss Brown? The best thing would be to buy a large model submarine, like the liners which the shipping companies put in their London windows, and then the People could always sail away in search of Lilliput, if they wanted to go. It would be a terrible dangerous voyage....

  No, I would not. If I were really rich I would buy some big, shallow loch in Scotland or in Ireland, so long as it had plenty of tiny islands. I mean tiny. As soon as an island is as big as an acre, the humans take an interest, and try to make some money out of it, with a sheep or something. But there must be millions of islands in lochs and in Clew Bay and in places like that, which are not so big as a tennis court, or even smaller. They would be useless to humans. I daresay there are islands in Lough Con which no human being has set foot on for a hundred years, simply because they are too small to pay. Well then, I would buy this loch with the uninteresting islands in it—they would need to have heather—and, do you know, I would not try to keep it a secret at all? I would buy doll’s houses and toy trains and Japanese plants and all that, quite openly, and I would set them up on my islands. I would even have a public day, Friday, when anybody could visit them on paying a shilling to the Red Cross. I would get people to think: There is that funny old Miss Maria, whose hobby it is to make sort of Japanese gardens in her loch. And all the time the People would be living there safe. It would have to be a big enough loch to give them proper warning, so that, when a boat set out from the banks, they would have time to hide themselves in the man-raid shelter. They would be warned from the watchtowers. And, of course, they would have to keep an extra lookout on Fridays.

  Everything would have to be hidden. They could leave the houses and gardens standing, or anything which I might be supposed to have made myself, but no slops or half-cold cups of tea or telltale details of that sort.

  We should have to hold raid drills.

  When I came out by myself, they would still have to hide, until I blew a certain whistle. We should have to be strict about it. If I ever found a fire burning or a bed rumpled, I should call the magistrate at once, and show him the evidence. Then the culprit would have to be punished, really punished, not to punish him, of course, but to prevent it happening again.

  The trouble about punishments, she thought, is that people enjoy giving them. We should have to stop that sort of thing in our islands. I think we would hurt the culprits on their feet, like in China. Nobody feels shy about their feet. And we would not have executioners at all, but it would be done by a machine. All the punishments for all the mistakes would be invariable, just as fire burns when you put your finger in it, and everybody would know what they were.

  Well then, I would show the rumpled bed to the magistrate (but I must be careful not to be the queen), and he would show it to the lady who had made the mistake, and she would say, “Oh, dear me, I forgot,” and he would look it up in the Retribution Book and say, “It says three turns of the machine on the soles of your feet,” and she would say, “Drat!” I think we would have the machine in a room by itself, so that the criminal could go in without anybody to see, and put her feet into the holes, and press the button for herself. I daresay there would be nervous ladies w
ho would prefer to have an executioner, and there would be a public service to supply one, if asked. I can imagine sympathetic executioners earning quite high fees. “Oh, Mr. Globgruff, I do hope you will be able to see me through my execution tomorrow. I always tell my husband there is no executioner in Lilliput with a machine-side manner like yours.”

  And what about murderers?

  Well, no doubt the People have their own rules about that, and I would not like to interfere with them. But if they did ask me, considered Maria hopefully, I would advise them to keep a special island for murderers. There would be nothing nasty about it: It would be quite as comfortable as any of the others; but everybody on it would just be a murderer. We would tell them: “We don’t want to make you unhappy, but we others cannot trust you any more, so you must live with the dangerous people. If you murder each other, it can’t be helped, there it is; but you must keep away from us.”

  And we would take away any babies they had, to be brought up on the sensible islands. That would be the worst of it for them, poor dears.

  There would be Murder Island and Swindlers Island—what a hard time they would have, swindling each other—and Cruel Island, for people like Miss Brown. All the others would be Happy Islands, and we would only give weapons to the people on them, for fear of wars....

  “But oh,” cried Maria dolefully, out loud, “I do feel hungry, however much I think!”

  CHAPTER XV

  THE reason why Maria felt peckish just then was because honest old Cook had come hobbling up the stairs with Captain, carrying a bowl of soup with which she hoped to relieve the siege; so that the smell of soup came through the door. But Miss Brown had evidently been lying in wait, for there was a sudden scurry in the passage outside. There was the sound of a door banging, and then Maria could hear poor Cook being given notice on the spot.

  “Without a character!” screamed Miss Brown down the corridor.