She walked back to the Beast, who had moved away from her as soon as she began examining his paintings. She touched his arm timidly. “They are all so beautiful,” she said.
He looked down at her. “Not half so beautiful as you are,” he said. “Nor do they speak to me, nor touch me. Even Fourpaws will not touch me. Beauty, will you marry me?”
She shivered as if she had been struck by winter wind, but she left her hand on his arm. “Good night, Beast,” she said, and turned away, to go through the little door, and find her way to her bedroom, and sleep.
“Good night, Beauty,” said the Beast behind her. “Do not forget: Keep your eyes downcast while you are on the stairs.”
“I will not forget,” whispered Beauty.
CHAPTER
10
She was not sure when the dream began. She remembered walking down the long vortex of stairs, keeping her eyes on the next tread, and the next, as her feet stepped down, and down, and she remembered how the darkness seemed to rise towards her as she neared the bottom, till when she stood on the floor again, she could see no more than she had at the top, before the Beast had opened the door that let in the starlight, though it had not been dark at the bottom of the stairs when the Beast had been with her. She stood for a moment, her heart again beating in her ears, and this time the Beast did not stand near her; but then a door opened in front of her, and the twinkle of candlelight beckoned to her from the darkness, although the little light seemed to struggle, as if with some fog or miasma.
She did not remember how long she walked through corridors, familiar and unfamiliar—a little familiar, a little less familiar—till she came again to the chamber of the star, eerily lit by its sky dome, and she walked through her rooms, and rather than at once undressing and climbing into her bed, she went to stand upon the balcony. The spider-web glistened in its corner like hoarfrost.
As she stood, leaning against the railing, her mind and heart still spinning with the images of the Beast’s painting, she looked idly out into the starlit courtyard. And she saw a bent old woman carrying a basket walk slowly round the corner of the glasshouse, as if she came from the carriage-way where the wild wood lay, and she walked slowly down the wing of the palace where the closed gates were hidden. Beauty could not see the gates from where she stood, but the old woman set the basket she carried down, in front of where they might be. And then she turned and walked slowly away again.
And now Beauty knew she dreamt, for she saw the old woman turn the far corner of the glasshouse and walk through the carriage-way into the wild wood, and Beauty watched her till her shadow emerged from the darkness of the tunnel to lie briefly against the starlit ground of the bonfire clearing. Beauty could only just make out what she was now seeing, and she thought she saw silver shapes, like four-legged beasts, come out of the woods round the glade and touch the woman with their long slender noses. But this was very far away, and the trees threw confusing shadows, and it was over very quickly, as the woman disappeared beyond the narrow opening of the archway.
But when Beauty turned to run downstairs and into the courtyard, to see what was in the old woman’s basket, she found herself turning over in bed, with the sunlight streaming onto the glowing carpet, and Fourpaws purring on the pillow, and breakfast on the table, and the deep wild scent of the crimson rose tangled in her hair.
Her first impulse was to rush downstairs in her nightgown and look for the basket even now, knowing it was too late, even knowing that what she remembered must be a dream. At least, she thought, as she threw back the bedclothes, she could look for any sign that those barred and inimical gates had opened recently.
She paused at the top of the bed stairs. There was something very odd about the carpet this morning. She thought back to the morning before last. More hedgehogs? Many more hedgehogs? Positively a lake of hedgehogs? No. This—these were not hedgehogs.
There was a low forlorn croak from one corner of the room and a following gruff murmur that ran all round the floor. “Oh, my lords and ladies,” said Beauty. Frogs? The shore of the lake round the bed stairs rippled and shifted a little. No—toads. Hundreds of toads.
Fourpaws, still purring, went daintily down the stairs, and leapt to the floor. Toads scattered before her, pressing themselves under furniture and into walls. She sat down, looked up at Beauty still paralysed at the edge of the bed, waited for the duration of three tail-lashings, and then stood up again and began to walk towards the opposite wall.
Toads hurtled out of her way, tumbling over one another, making small distressed grunting sounds and a great deal of scrabbling with their small slapping feet. “Oh, stop!” said Beauty. “Please. I’m not really afraid of them—really I’m not—not poor toads—it’s just—it’s just there are so many of them.”
Fourpaws sat down again and began washing a front foot. The toads quieted, and there was the gentle flickering light of many blinking yellow and coppery eyes from ankle level all round the room and in clumps round the legs of furniture.
Beauty came down the stairs and stepped very softly in the toad-free space in the centre of the carpet. Nothing moved, except Fourpaws beginning on the other front foot. “Well,” said Beauty, only a little shakily, “there are too many of you to carry in my skirt, and frankly, my pets, I don’t wish to handle you, for my sake as well as yours; but how am I to convince you that I will lead you to a wonderful garden full of—of—well, you’ll have to ask the hedgehogs what it’s full of, but I’m sure you will like it. That is, you will like it if I can get you there.”
She stood still a moment longer and then sidled towards the chair next to the hearth, where her dressing-gown lay. There was a flurry of toads from that end of the room. She picked up her dressing-gown very softly and eased herself into it. “On the whole, I think I would rather try to shift you first. I don’t fancy breakfast by the light of toad blinks.” She paused and added under her breath, “Thank the kind fates that only one spider was enough.”
She walked towards the doorway, paused, and looked back. “This way,” she said, not knowing what else to do. Several toads hopped out from under her bed and stopped again. Several from the far corner between the bed and the hearth joined them. Toad eddies drifted out from under the wardrobe and the gilt console tables and pooled near the centre of the room, in front of the breakfast table. Fourpaws stopped washing to watch.
Beauty turned and walked to the door that led into the chamber of the star; as the door swung open, she turned round. There was an army of toads following her, ochre-coloured companies, low brown regiments, yellowy-green battalions, and last of all came Fourpaws, tail high, the tip just switching back and forth, eyes huge and fascinated.
She led them all into the chamber of the star; but the noise their flapping feet made, and the little tapping echoes that ran up into the dome, obviously upset them, and she went on as quickly as she could through the door that opened onto another corridor. The corridor made itself short for them, and it was not long before she saw the courtyard door opening onto sunlight. She paused again on this threshold and addressed her army: “Now you must be brave, because you won’t like this bit. It is still quite early, and the sunlight will not be too strong for you, but I am sure you will find it unpleasant, and the pebbles will scratch your bellies. But it will be over quickly—I hope—and then there will be lovely grass for you, and dirt, and an orchard, and a garden.”
The toads blinked at her. She turned and walked out into the morning light; and the rustling noise behind her told her that the toads were following, flapping and pattering through the stones. She was so preoccupied with how far they might have to walk that it took her a little while to notice that the rustling noises had increased and somewhat changed their note; and that there was now a humming in the air as well.
She had gone instinctively to her glasshouse and put her hand on it, and as she had done once before, she ran her fingers along it as she walked next to it. And the rustlings increased, and the humming gre
w louder, and as she came to the corner of the glasshouse, she heaved a great sigh of relief, and turned, and saw the tunnel into the orchard only a short distance farther. At that moment it registered with her that she had been hearing a humming noise for some time, and she looked up, and there was a cloud of bumblebees, hovering in the air, as if they were waiting for her and the toads.
“Oh!” she said. Their black and yellow backs gleamed bright as armour in the sunlight. “Oh, how I wish I could let you all into the glasshouse! Perhaps the trouble began because the roses are lonely! But you, you bees, you must have been here all along, or how does the fruit grow in the Beast’s orchard? How does the corn swell in the fields? But why has he not seen you? Why have I never seen nor heard you till now?”
As she said this, the bumblebee swarm rushed upwards, trailing a long tail of single bees behind it, and whizzed along the slope of the glasshouse as if seeking a way in. There were one or two left behind, buzzing disconcertedly and making little zigzag lines in the air as if wondering where the others had gone. One of them very near her bumbled against a pane of the glasshouse, near a strut.
And disappeared.
As it disappeared, Beauty’s hand, which was resting gently against the next strut supporting the next pane of glass, felt a sudden faint draught of air, and her third and little fingers, which had been touching the pane of glass inside the frame, were resting on nothing at all. She snatched her hand away as she saw the bumblebee disappear, looked at what should have been a pane of glass, and was just reaching out to touch it timidly, because the glasshouse panes were always so shining clear that but for their reflective sparkle it was hard to say if they were there or not, when she heard the bee cloud returning.
There were too many things to attend to at once. She looked up at the windstorm sound of the bees, her hand hesitating just before touching the pane of glass that should be there; the bumblebees stopped politely before they flew into her face; and she saw the bumblebee which had disappeared reappear from behind the strut … where it had flown in, and out, of a glasshouse pane.
Beauty touched the glass. It was there, and solid. She touched the pane that the bumblebee had flown through. It was there, and solid.
There was a faint scuttling noise behind her, and her dazed mind flew to the easier recourse of remembering her toads, growing too hot in the sunlight, and worrying about their comfort. She began walking away from the glasshouse, taking the shortest route to the tunnel to the orchard. But her astonishment-heightened senses now reminded her that the susurration of the toad army had changed, and she turned to look, expecting … something. And so she was no more astonished than she already was when she saw the grass-snakes, and the slow-worms, and the red mist of ladybirds, so thick it threw a dappled shadow on the backs of the toads, and which made no sound at all. And as she looked, she saw the crickets creeping out, as it seemed, from among the white pebbles of the courtyard, as if they had been sleeping in hollows beneath. They paused, as if surprised by the sunlight, and then they sprang into the air, as if to hurry to catch up with the toads, and the snakes, and the slow-worms, and the ladybirds, and the bees; and then there was not merely the faint clicking of their legs against the small stones, but the soft tink-tink-tink as the ones with imperfect aim bounced off the wall of the glasshouse as they leapt.
“Perhaps the—the badgers, and foxes, and deer, and rabbits and hares, and mice and voles and weasels and stoats and squirrels, perhaps they are waiting for us. And the birds. I do so hope the birds come back!”
Beauty led her ever-increasing menagerie into the orchard and on towards the walled garden, and the grass stems rattled almost as loudly as spears as it followed her. She did not quite dare to stop again, but she walked sideways for a few steps to look behind her, and she could no longer see her creatures, but the grasses tossed and rippled like a sea cut by a fleet of ships. She turned to face front again just as there was a small streaking explosion like the path of a cannonball to one side of her, and something landed with a heavy thump on her shoulder.
“Oh!” said Beauty, recognizing the bushed-out tail in her eye as belonging to Fourpaws. “I wondered what had become of you.” Even a cat has some difficulty riding on the shoulder of someone wading through tall grass, and Beauty put up a hand to steady her and did not protest the faint prick of several sets of claws through the thick collar of her dressing-gown. “A few too many of them even for you, eh?” said Beauty, and added hastily, mindful of Fourpaws’ dignity, “I am myself very grateful for your company—someone else with warm blood and breath—even if your tail is still in my eye.”
When she came to the walled garden, she threw open the gate and stood aside, and she looked back as well and saw little threads of bobbing grass stems leading off in all directions from the main body of her army, assuring her that everyone was seeking the sort of landscape it liked best. “There’s water at the bottom of the slope,” she called softly. “But you probably knew that already.”
When there was a lull in the flow of creatures over the threshold, she went in and opened the gate on the far side of the garden, into the fields of corn. She paused again to stroke the barley and wheat-awns, and as she paused, she looked round, and her eye was caught by a yellow and white butterfly. It whirled up in a warm draught, and she saw more coloured flickers; there were half a dozen deepest ruddy gold and peacock blue and green butterflies sunning their wings on a narrow mossy ledge in the garden wall.
At that moment she felt a gentle shove against her foot. She looked down, and there was a hedgehog, looking up at her; it was much larger than any of the four she had brought to the garden in her skirt. “The slugs and snails, and borers and beetles, they’re back too, are they? You would not be so shiny and plump else.”
She went back thoughtfully through the garden, and now, when she looked, she could see holes and spots on some of the stems and leaves, and once she saw a snail hastening across the path in front of her, its shining neck stretched its fullest length, its tail streaming behind it; she could only see that it was moving at all by the tangential observation that it was now nearer the side of the path it was aiming at than it had been when she first saw it. She also heard the crickets singing, and swirls of butterflies were gleaming over the heads of the ruby chard, and she had to wave her free hand at a little puff of gnats she walked through.
Surely, if all this were happening, she would find a way to save her Beast’s roses? It is the heart of this place, and it is dying.
Fourpaws leapt down when they reentered the orchard, but she stayed close at Beauty’s heels all the way back to the palace and upstairs to the breakfast table laid in front of Beauty’s balcony. Beauty set a bowl of bread and milk on the floor for Fourpaws and poured herself her first cup of tea. “When the bluebottles are buzzing repellently in all the corners where one can’t get at them, and the mice are chewing holes in the wainscoting and leaving nasty little pellets in the pantry, and the wood borers are eating the furniture and leaving ominous little heaps of dust about, will the tea stew, too, like ordinary tea, instead of tasting fresh-brewed when it has sat half the morning, as this does?” she said; but her eyes were on the pyrotechnics of her glasshouse in the sunlight.
Fourpaws finished her bread and milk and mewed for more. “You’re going to have to start catching mice, you know,” said Beauty, setting down a fresh bowl. “Instead of shadows. I would have thought you might prefer mice.” But when Fourpaws finished the second bowl and mewed for a third, Beauty looked at her in surprise. “Someone your size can’t possibly need a third bowl of bread and milk,” she said. Fourpaws looked at her enigmatically and, holding her gaze, reached out with one imperious forepaw and patted the empty bowl. Beauty laughed. “Very well. But this is your last. Absolutely.”
Beauty was dressing by the time Fourpaws finished her third breakfast, but between the time Beauty dropped her shirt over her head and the time she could see again and was smoothing her hair back, the cat had disappeared. W
hen she had finished brushing and tying up her hair, and lacing her boots, and patting her pockets to check that everything she needed was still there, and had paused to drink a last cup of tea, she realized that through the minor bustle of getting ready for the day (what remained of the day, she thought), she had been hearing furtive noises coming from under her bed. She knelt and lifted the edge of the long curtain. “You aren’t tormenting any lost toads, are you?”
Fourpaws sat up and looked at her indignantly. There was just room for a small cat to sit up to her full height under Beauty’s bed. Then she threw herself down and rolled over on her back, curving her forepaws invitingly; but Beauty looked at her face and her lashing tail and rather thought she had the mien of a cat who was planning on seizing an arm and disembowelling it with her hind feet while she bit its head off. “I think not,” said Beauty.
Fourpaws dropped over onto her side and half lidded her eyes, but the tail was still lashing. “I have no idea what you’re up to,” said Beauty, “but I will leave you to it.” She dropped the curtain hem and rose to her feet.
She knew it was a vain gesture. But once she was out of doors, she could not resist walking down the second side of the palace wall, and looking for the closed gates, and, having found them, looking for any trace of—of anything, any disturbance, any mark of any sort of visitor, but no trace did she find. The pebbles were as flawlessly raked as ever, the grey-white wall as spotless, the doors as perfectly barred.