"A nice piece of what?" asked Arrietty in a dazed voice, not believing her ears.
"Meat," said Homily firmly, without looking at her.
Arrietty jumped up and came across to the table; she stared blankly down at the neat brown slices. "But I thought we were vegetarians...." After a moment she raised her eyes to Spiller: there was a question in them. "Is it—?" she began, unhappily.
Spiller shook his head quickly; it was a firm negative and settled her misgivings. "We never ask," put in Homily sharply, tightening her lips and creating a precedent. "Let's just call it a bit of what the gypsies caught and leave it at that."
"Not leave it..." murmured Arrietty dreamily: quite recovered she seemed suddenly: and arranging her skirts she joined them at the low table round which they sat picnic-wise on the floor. Tentatively she took up a slice in two fingers, took a cautious bite, then closed her eyes and almost shuddered, so welcome and downright was the flavor. "Did the gypsies catch it?" she asked incredulously.
"No," said Pod. "Spiller did."
"I thought so," Arrietty said. "Thank you, Spiller," she added. And this time, her voice sounded heartfelt—alive and ringing with proper gratitude.
Chapter Fourteen
"Pull gently on a weak rope."
First Balloon Ascent in England, 1784
[Extract from Arrietty's Diary and
Proverb Book, September 15th]
MEALS BECAME different after that—different and better—and this had something to do, Arrietty decided, with their stolen half nail scissor. Stolen? An unpleasant-sounding word, seldom applied to a borrower. "But what else can you call it?" Homily wailed as she sat one morning on the edge of the alcove while Pod sewed a patch on her shoe, "or expect, even, of a poor, homeless, ignorant boy dragged up, as they say, in the gutter...."
"Ditch, you mean," put in Arrietty drowsily, who was lying below on the bank.
"I mean gutter," repeated Homily, but she looked a little startled: she had not known Arrietty was near. "It's a manner of speaking. No," she went on primly, adjusting the hem of her skirt to hide her stockinged foot (there was a slight hole, she had noticed, in the toe), "you can't blame the lad. I mean, with that sort of background, what could he learn about ethics?"
"About whatticks?" asked Pod. Homily, poor ignorant soul, occasionally hit on a word which surprised him and, what surprised him still more, sometimes she hit on its meaning.
"Ethics," repeated Homily coolly and with perfect confidence. "You know what ethics are, don't you?"
"No, I don't," Pod admitted simply, sewing away on his patch. "Sounds to me like something you pick up in the long grass."
"Them's ticks," said Homily.
"Or," Pod went on, smoothing the neat join with a licked thumb, "that thing that horses get from drinking too quick."
"It's funny..." mused Arrietty, "that you can't have just one."
"One what?" asked Homily sharply.
"One ethic," said Arrietty.
"That's where you're wrong," snapped Homily. "As a matter of fact there is only one. And Spiller's never learned it. One day," she went on, "I'm going to have a nice, quiet, friendly talk with that poor lad...."
"What about?" asked Arrietty.
Homily ignored the question: she had composed her face to a certain kind of expression and was not going to change it. "'Spiller,' I'll say, 'you never had a mother—' "
"How do you know he never had a mother?" asked Pod. "He must have had," he added reasonably after a moment's reflection.
"Yes," put in Arrietty, "he did have a mother. That's how he knows his name."
"How?" asked Homily, suddenly curious.
"Because his mother told him, of course! Spiller's his surname. His first name's Dreadful."
There was a pause.
"What is it?" asked Homily then, in an awed voice.
"Dreadful!"
"Never mind," snapped Homily. "Tell us: we're not children."
"That's his name: Dreadful Spiller. He remembers his mother saying it one day, at table: 'A Dreadful Spiller, that's what you are,' she said, 'aren't you?' It's about all he does remember about his mother."
"All right," said Homily, after a moment, composing her features back to gentle tolerance. "Then I'll say to him (she smiled her sad smile), 'Dreadful,' I'll say, 'dear boy, my poor orphan lad—'"
"How do you know he's orphaned?" interrupted Pod. "Have you ever asked him if he's orphaned?"
"You can't ask Spiller things," put in Arrietty quickly. "Someones he tells you, but you can't ask him. Remember when you tried to find out how he did the cooking? He didn't come back for two days."
"That's right," agreed Pod glumly. "Couple o' days without meat. We don't want that again in a hurry. Look here, Homily," he went on, turning suddenly toward her, "better leave Spiller alone."
"It's for his own good," protested Homily angrily, "and it's telling, not asking! I was only going to say—(again she smiled her smile) 'Spiller, my poor lad...' or 'Dreadful' or whatever his name is—"
"You can't call him Dreadful, Mother," put in Arrietty, "not unless he asks you—"
"Well, 'Spiller' then"—Homily threw up her eyes—"but I got to tell him."
"Tell him what?" asked Pod, irritated.
"This ethic!" Homily almost shouted. "This what we all been brought up on! That you don't never borrow from a borrower!"
Impatiently Pod snapped off his thread. "He knows that," he said. He handed the shoe to Homily. "Here, you, put it on."
"Then what about the hat pin?" persisted Homily.
"He give it back," Pod said.
"He didn't give back the nail scissor!"
"He skins the game with it," said Arrietty quickly. "And we get the meat."
"Skins the game?" pondered Homily. "Well, I never...."
"That's right," agreed Pod, "and cuts is up. See what I mean, Homily?" He rose to his feet. "Better leave well alone."
Homily was struggling absent-mindedly with the laces of her shoe. "Wonder how he does cook?" she mused aloud after a moment.
"Wonder away," said Pod: he crossed to the shelf to replace his tools. "No harm in that, so long as you don't ask."
"Poor orphaned lad..." said Homily again: she spoke quite lightly but her eye was thoughtful.
Chapter Fifteen
"No joy without alloy."
Columbus discovered New World, 1492
[Extract from Arrietty's Diary and
Proverb Book, October 12th]
THE NEXT six weeks, according to Tom Goodenough, were the happiest Arrietty ever spent out-of-doors. Not that they could be called halcyon exactly: they ran, of course, the usual gamut of English summer weather—days when the fields were drowned in opal mist and spiders' webs hung jeweled in the hedges: days of breathless heat and stifling closeness; thundery days with once a searing strike of lightning across the woods when Homily, terrified, had buried the razor-blade saying that "steel attracts"; and one whole week of dismal, steady rain with scarcely a let-up, when the ditch below their bank became a roaring cataract on which Spiller, guiding his tin soap case with uncanny speed and skill, intrepidly shot the rapids; during this week, Homily and Arrietty were kept house-bound in case, Pod told them, they should slip on the mud and fall in: it would be no joke, he explained, to be swept along down the ditch to the swollen stream at the corner and on and on through the lower fields until they met the river and eventually, he concluded, be carried out to sea.
"Why not say 'across to America' and have done with it?" Homily had remarked tartly, remembering Arrietty's Gazetteer of the World. But she got ahead with her winter knitting, saw the men had hot drinks and dried out poor Spiller's clothes over the candle while he huddled naked, but clean for once, in the boot. The rain never actually beat into the alcove but there was an unpleasant dampness all over everything, white mildew on the leather of the boot, and, once, a sudden crop of yellow toadstools where none had been before. Another morning, when Homily crept forth shivering t
o get breakfast, a silvery track of slime wound ribbon-like across the floor and, putting her hand in the tool shelf for the matches, she gave a startled scream—stuffed, the shelf was, and flowing over with a heaving mass of slug. A slug that size cannot be easily tackled by a borrower, but luckily this one shrunk up and feigned dead: once they had prized it out of its close-fitting retreat, they could bowl it over across the sandy floor and roll it away down to the bank.
After this, toward the end of October, there did come some halcyon days—about ten of them: sun and butterflies and drowsy heat; and a second burst of wild flowers. There was no end to Arrietty's amusements out-of-doors. She would climb down the bank, across the ditch and into the long grass and, stretched between the stems, would lie there watching. Once she became used to the habits of the insects, she no longer feared them: her world, she realized, was not their world and for them hers had little interest; except, perhaps for that bug-like horror (an ethic to Pod) which, crawling sluggishly across bare skin would bury its head and cling.
Grasshoppers would alight like prehistoric birds on the grasses above her head; strange, armor-plated creatures, but utterly harmless to such as she. The grass stems would sway wildly beneath their sudden weight and Arrietty, lying watchful below, would note the machine-like slicing of the mandibles as the grasshopper munched its fill.
Bees, to Arrietty, were as big as birds are to humans; and if honey bees were pigeon-sized, a bumble bee in weight and girth could be compared to a turkey. These, too, she found, if unprovoked, were harmless. A quivering bumble bee, feeding greedily on clover, became strangely still all at once when, with gentle fingers, she stroked his fur. Benignity met with benignity: and anger, she found, was only roused through fear. Once she was nearly stung when, to tease it, she imprisoned a bee in that bloom called wild snapdragon by closing the lip with her hands. The trapped bee buzzed like a dynamo and stung, not Arrietty this time, but the enclosing calyx of the flower.
A good deal of time she would spend by the water-paddling, watching, learning to float. The frogs fought shy of her: at Arrietty's approach, they would plop away with bored bleats of distaste, their bulging eyes resigned but nervous; "Look where it comes again..." * they seemed to croak.
After bathing, before putting on her clothes, sometimes, she would dress up: a skirt of violet leaves, stalks uppermost, secured about the waist with a twist of faded columbine and, aping the fairies, a foxglove bell for a hat. This, Arrietty thought as she stared at her bright reflection in the stagnant water of a hoof crater, might look all right on gnomes, elves, brownies, pixies and what-not, but she had to admit that it looked pretty silly on a common-or-garden borrower: for one tiling, if the lip fitted the circumference of her head, the whole thing stood up too high like some kind of pinkish sausage or a very drawn-out chef's cap. Yet if, on the other hand, the lip of the bell flowed out generously in a gentle, more hat-like curve, the whole contraption slid down past her face to rest on her shoulders in a ku-klux-klan effect.
And to get hold of these bells at all was not easy: fox-glove plants were high. Fairies, Arrietty supposed, just flew up to them with raised chins and neatly pointed toes, trailing a wisp of gauze. Fairies did everything so gracefully: Arrietty, poor girl, had to hook down the plant with a forked stick and sit on it as heavily as she could while she plucked any bells within reach. Sometimes the plant would escape her and fly up again. But usually, by shifting her
weight along the stalk, she would manage to get five or six bells—sufficient anyway to try some out for size.
Spiller, gliding by in his cleverly loaded boat, would stare with some surprise: he was not altogether approving of Arrietty's games. Having spent all his life out-of-doors, fending for himself against nature, he had no picture of what such freedom could mean to one who had spent her childhood under a kitchen floor. Frogs were just meat to Spiller; grass was "cover"; and insects a nuisance, especially gnats; water was there to drink, not to splash in; and streams were highways which held fish. Spiller, poor harried creature, had never had time to play.
But he was a fearless borrower; that even Pod conceded; as skillful in his own way as ever Pod had been. The two gentlemen would have long discussions of an evening after supper, on the finer points of a multiplex art. Pod belonged to a more moderate school: the daily sortie and modest loot—a little here, a little there—nothing to rouse suspicion. Spiller preferred a make-hay-while-the-sun-shines technique: a swift whip-round of whatever he could lay hands on and a quick getaway. This difference in approach was understandable, Arrietty thought as, listening, she helped her mother with the dishes. Pod was a house-borrower, long established in traditional routine; whereas Spiller dealt exclusively with gypsies—here today and gone tomorrow—and must match his quickness with theirs.
Sometimes a whole week would elapse without their seeing Spiller, but he would leave them well-stocked with cooked food: a haunch of this or that, or a little stew flavored with wild garlic which Homily would heat over the candle. Flour, sugar, tea, butter—even bread—they had now in plenty. Spiller, in his nonchalant way, would sooner or later provide almost anything they asked for—a piece of plum-colored velvet out of which Homily made a new skirt for Arrietty, two whole candles to augment their stub; four empty cotton reels on which they raised their table and, to Homily's joy, six mussel shells for plates.
Once he brought them a small glass medicine bottle, circular in shape. As he uncorked it, Spiller said: "Know what this is?"
Homily, wry-faced, sniffed at the amber liquid. "Some kind of hair-wash?" she asked, grimacing.
"Elder-flower wine," Spiller told her, watching her expression. "Good, that is."
Homily, about to taste, suddenly changed her mind. "'When wine is in,'" she told Spiller—quoting from Arrietty's Diary and Proverb Book, "'Wit is out.' Besides, I was brought up teetotal."
"He makes it in a watering can," explained Spiller, "and pours it out of the spout."
"Who does?" asked Homily.
"Mild Eye," said Spiller.
There was a short silence, tense with curiosity. "And who might Mild Eye be?" asked Homily at last. Airily pinning up her back hair, she moved slightly away from Spiller and began softly to hum below her breath.
"He that had the boot," said Spiller carelessly.
"Oh?" remarked Homily. She took up the thistle-head and began to sweep the floor—without seeming to be rude she managed to convey a gentle dismissal of the now-I-must-get-on-with-the-housework kind. "What boot?"
"This boot," said Spiller, and kicked the toe.
Homily stopped sweeping; she stared at Spiller. "But this was a gentleman's boot," she pointed out evenly.
"'Was' is right," said Spiller.
Homily was silent a moment. "I don't understand you," she said at last.
"Afore Mild Eye pinched 'em," explained Spiller.
Homily laughed. "Mild Eye ... Mild Eye ... who is this Mild Eye?" she asked airily, determined not to be rattled.
"I told you," said Spiller. "The gypsy as took up the boots."
"Boots?" repeated Homily, raising her eyebrows and stressing the plural.
"They was a pair. Mild Eye picked 'em up outside the scullery door—" Spiller jerked his head—"that big house down yonder. Went there selling clothes pegs and there they was, set out on the cobbles, pairs of 'em—all shapes and sizes, shined up nice, set out in the sunshine ... brushes and all."
"Oh," said Homily thoughtfully—this sounded a good "borrow," "and he took the lot?"
Spiller laughed. "Not Mild Eye. Took up the pair and closed up the gap."
"I see," said Homily. After a moment she asked, "And who borrowed this one? You?"
"In a manner of speaking," said Spiller, and added, as though in part explanation, "He's got this piebald cat."
"What's the cat got to do with it?" asked Homily.
"A great Tom comes yowling round the place one night and Mild Eye ups and heaves a boot at it—this boot." Again Spiller kicked at th
e leather. "Good and water-tight this boot was afore a weasel bit into the toe. So I gets hold of her, drags her through the hedge by the laces, heaves her into the water, jumps aboard, sails downstream to the corner, brings her aground on the mud and dries her out after, up in the long grass."
Spiller laughed. "You should have heard old Mild Eye in the morning. Knew just where he'd heaved the boot, cussin' and swearin'. Couldn't make it out." Spiller laughed again. "Never passes the way," he went on, "but he has another look."
Homily turned pale. "Another look?" she repeated nervously.
Spiller shrugged. "What's the difference? Wouldn't think to look this side of the water. Knows where he heaved the boot, Mild Eye does: that's what he can't fathom.
"Oh, my," faltered Homily unhappily.
"You've no call to worry," said Spiller. "Anything you'm wanting?"
"A bit of something woolen, I wouldn't mind," said Homily. "We was cold last night in the boot."
"Like a bit of sheep's fleece?" asked Spiller. "There's plenty down to the lane along them brambles."
"Anything," agreed Homily, "providing it's warm. And providing"—she added, suddenly struck by a horrid thought—"it ain't a sock." Her eyes widened. "I don't want no sock belonging to that Mild Eye."
Spiller dined with them that night on cold boiled minnow with sorrel salad. He had brought them a splendid wad of cleanish fleece and a strip of red rag off the end of a blanket. Pod, less teetotal than Homily, poured him out a half hazel shell of elderberry wine. But Spiller would not touch it. "I've things to do," he told them soberly, and they guessed he was off on a trip.
"Be away long?" asked Pod casually as, just to sample it, he took a sip of wine.
"A week," said Spiller, "ten days, maybe...."
"Well," said Pod, "take care of yourself." He took another sip of wine. "It's nice," he told Homily, proffering the hazel shell. "You try it."
Homily shook her head and tightened her lips. "We'll miss you, Spiller," she said, batting her eyelids and ignoring Pod, "and that's a fact...."