"Our savings!" he exclaimed scornfully. "Our savings! What are our puny little savings compared with the kind of fortune we had here in our hands?" He opened his hands wide and then dropped them again. Mrs. Platter looked more and more alarmed: their savings, to her certain knowledge, amounted to several thousand pounds. "You get this into your head, Mabel," he went on. "No one in the whole world believes such creatures exist—not until they see them, with their own eyes, walking and talking and eating . .."
"Not going to the lavatory, Sidney: you made them a little bathroom. But—" she repeated the word, "but you must remember that they may huddle in that back place all day and never come out, like some of those animals in the zoo."
"Oh, I'd think of something to make them come out—at least in front of the public. Something electric, perhaps. After midnight, I don't care much what they do so long as they're on show in the morning."
"But how can we hope to find them, Sidney dear?" She still found his mood rather frightening. "Say they're not in the model village? Five or six inches high, they could slip into any corner."
"We shall find them in the end," he said slowly, stressing every word, "however long it takes, because we are the only living people who know of their existence!"
"Miss Menzies knows of their existence."
"And who is Miss Menzies? A foolish spinster lady who could not say boo to a goose!" He laughed. "And even if she did, the goose wouldn't take any notice. No, I'm not frightened of Miss Menzies, Mabel, or any of her ilk." He rose from the table, and she was glad to see him calmer. "Well, we'd better get going. It's a mild night..."
He put the wire cutters and chisel into the cat basket. Mrs. Platter added the sandwiches, the eggs, and a bottle of cold tea. "Would you like a piece of cake?" she asked him. But he did not seem to hear her, so picking up her coat, she followed him quietly out through the front door.
In spite of the mild weather, the tranquil moonlight, and the uneventful run downstream, the Platters' evening did not turn out to be a particularly pleasant one. First, they had to wait for Abel Pott to put his lamp out. "Staying up late tonight," muttered Mr. Platter. "Hope he hasn't got visitors .. ." Then, on the upper road behind Mr. Pott's thatched cottage, they saw a figure on a bicycle. As it passed by, too slowly for Mr. Platter's comfort, he recognized the tall head gear of a policeman. What was Mr. Pomfret doing out so late? Mr. Platter wondered.
"Perhaps," said Mrs. Platter, perched uncomfortably on her narrow seat, "he takes a look round like this every evening."
"Well, anyway," said Mr. Platter, as the bicycle passed out of sight, "we can get on quietly with the wire cutting."
Their boat was moored to an iron upright, against which the wire fencing had been stretched and secured to a formidable tightness. At the first cut, the wire flew back with a loud ping. In the utter quietness of that peaceful night and to the ears of the Platters, it sounded as loud as a pistol shot. "Better we wait until his light's out..." whispered Mrs. Platter.
Mr. Platter sat down again, nervously tapping the wire cutters against his knee, his eyes on that unwelcome light in Mr. Pott's window. "Say we had our little bit of supper now?" suggested Mrs. Platter in a whisper. "It would leave us a bit more room in the cat basket."
Mr. Platter nodded impatiently. But even the unwrapping of the sandwiches (cold fried bacon tonight) created a rustle and a stir in the uncanny moonlit silence. Mrs. Platter had forgotten to bring a cup, so they drank their cold tea from the bottle. They would have preferred something hot, but Thermos bottles, only just invented, were expensive items in those days—bound in leather, with silver-plated tops. Mr. and Mrs. Platter had not yet heard of them.
Still the light glowed on. "What can he be doing at this time of night?" Mr. Platter muttered. "He's usually in bed by eight-thirty at the latest. He must have visitors..."
But Mr. Pott did not have visitors. Had they but known it, he was seated quietly at his worktable, his wooden leg stretched out before him, peering down in his short-sighted way at the delicate work in hand. This was the repainting of the tiny wicket gates, all of different shapes and sizes, which led into the miniature front gardens of his beloved model village. At Easter, he would reopen the village to the public, and by that time every detail needed to be perfect.
At last, after what seemed hours to the Platters, the gentle lamplight was extinguished, and after another cautious wait, they both felt free to move. Mr. Platter, fast and expert, soon freed the wire from the post. As it loosened, it did not ping so loudly, and he was able very soon to fold a section back.
"Now!" he said to Mrs. Platter. And taking the cat basket from her, he helped her up the bank. It was slightly slippery from last night's rain, but at last she was through the wire, and they could survey the miniature village by the light of the brilliant moon.
Mr. Pott had set it on a slight slope, and the whole layout was spread on the rise before them. The lines of the model railway glistened in the moonlight, and so did the slated roofs. The thatched roofs were a little dimmer, but the tiny, winding roads and lanes were snakelike chasms of blackest darkness. However, from where they stood, they could plainly see Vine Cottage, the house Miss Menzies had once fitted out for the borrowers. The question was, How best to get to it? "Follow me," said Mr. Platter.
He chose roads wide enough to take the width of one foot if each foot was placed carefully before the other. It was a finicky business, but at last they stood beside the tiny house from where, six months ago, they had so heartlessly stolen the "little people." History was repeating itself, thought Mr. Platter complacently as he carefully inserted his chisel under the eaves of the roof. It came off surprisingly easily. Somebody must have "been at it," Mr. Platter decided as he stared down inside. He produced a torch from his pocket to see better.
The house was empty, abandoned. On the night they had captured the borrowers, it had been fully furnished: chairs, dressers, tables, cooking utensils, clothes in tiny dollhouse wardrobes. Now there was nothing except the fixtures—a cooking stove and a tiny porcelain sink. Mrs. Platter, peering down beside him, saw a scrap of white beside the closed front door. She picked it out gingerly. It was a tiny apron, one that Homily had discarded in their rush to get away. She put it in her pocket.
Mr. Platter swore. He swore quite loudly and rather rudely, which was quite unusual for him. He straightened up and stepped back angrily. There was a tinkle of breaking glass: he had put a careless heel through one of Mr. Pott's miniature shop fronts.
"Hush, Sidney," pleaded Mrs. Platter in a hoarse whisper. She looked about her in a frightened way, and then she gave a gasp. "Look! Abel Pott's put his light on again! Let's get out of here ... Come, Sidney! Come quickly!"
Mr. Platter turned sharply. Yes, there was the light—growing brighter every minute as Mr. Pott turned up the wick. Mr. Platter swore again and turned towards the river. In his disappointment and anger, all the houses between him and his boat seemed just a jumble to him now. He no longer bothered to seek out the roads. And Mrs. Platter, feeling about for the cat basket (it might, one day, be evidence
against them), heard tinkles of breaking glass and sudden falls of masonry as Mr. Platter made his clumsy way down the hill. She followed him, panting and crying and sometimes stumbling.
At last they reached the opened wire. "Oh, Sidney," sobbed Mrs. Platter, "he'll be out in a minute. I heard him unbolting the front door!"
Mr. Platter, already in the boat, put out a hand—less to help her than to drag her in. She slipped on the mud and fell into the water. It was very shallow by the bank, and she soon climbed out again. But she had not been able to repress a slight scream. Mr. Platter was fumbling for oars and took no more notice of her as she sat dripping in the stern. "Oh, Sidney, he's coming after us! I know he is . .."
"Let him come!" exclaimed Mr. Platter fiercely. "What do I care for old Abel Pott with his wooden leg? People have been found floating in the river before now."
And with that he began to row upstream.
/> Once safely back in her own house, Mrs. Platter went straight through to the kitchen and pushed the large teakettle onto the hotter part of the stove. She raked up the embers beneath it until they began to glow red. Her cold felt much worse, and she wondered if she had a temperature. She drove a hand into her coat pocket to find her handkerchief but pulled out Homily's rather grubby little apron instead. She tossed it on the table and felt in her other pocket. She found her handkerchief, but it, too, was soaking wet.
"Would you like tea or cocoa?" she asked Mr. Platter, who had followed her in. "I'm going upstairs now to get into something dry."
"Cocoa," he said, and picked up the little apron. He eyed it curiously. "Oh, Mabel," he called out just as she was reaching the door.
She turned back unwillingly. "Yes?"
"What did you do with that other stuff they left behind upstairs?" He had the apron in his hand.
"Threw it away, of course, when I cleaned out the attic: there was nothing worth keeping." And before he could speak again, she had made her way towards the front hall.
Mr. Platter sat down slowly. He was looking very thoughtful. He spread the small apron before him on the table and stared at it musingly.
"Lady Mullings...?" he murmured to himself, and slowly, almost triumphantly, he began to smile.
Chapter Sixteen
Arrietty was to look back to that spring as one of the happiest periods of her life. Life seemed full of excitement and interest from that first night in their new home under the window seat when, worn out with carrying, they had slept at last in their own little beds among the cluttered piles of stacked furniture, to the week-by-week improvements instigated by Pod.
His inventiveness knew no bounds. He had his old tools and he constructed others, and as Arrietty had foreseen, the jumble in the old game larder provided him with an almost endless supply of wonderful odds and ends, more than even he could make use of or need.
The first priority was the construction of a kitchen within a kitchen for Homily. She hated cooking in that shadowy vastness, where, she said, she felt as though she never knew what might be coming up behind her. First, he and Spiller and Arrietty moved the distant shelves nearer to the grill and replaced the pronged fork with a brass wheel (from the discarded grandfather clock in the game larder) set on a pivot so that Homily could turn it, varying the degree of heat from the embers below. On the outer rim, she could simmer; towards the spokes near the middle, she could grill. A battered old tobacco tin, once he had loosened the hinges and supplied it with a handle, scoured out and hammered straight by Pod, provided a Dutch oven. He found two white tiles and constructed a small table to fit them. Homily was delighted with this: it was so easy to wipe down.
But how to wall it, this kitchen? How to enclose it? This was Pod's great puzzle. There were plenty of strong old cardboard boxes in the game larder: tea chests, lengths of plywood, and similar bits and pieces. But there seemed no way of introducing any large flat object through the very small openings that led into the chimney. The passage under the floorboards (now scrubbed and fresh-smelling) was far too narrow for any object large enough to serve as sides of a wall. The hard covers of two large atlases, such as Pod had seen on one of the library shelves, would have been ideal. But how to get them in? Except, perhaps, by climbing on the roof and dropping them down the chimney. But the getting of them up the side of the house onto the roof seemed too much labor to contemplate at this juncture. Besides, the chimneys themselves, where they emerged on the roof, might turn out to be too tall.
It was Peagreen who solved the problem in the end. "Supposing," he said to Pod, "you constructed a little cardboard shelter in some dark corner of the game larder? Then took it to pieces again, and I soaked the pieces in the birdbath, and when they had softened, we could roll them up, tie them with twine into ... well ... cylinders, you might say. We could then take those cylinders in through the grating and push them along the passage under the floor. Then build your little kitchen again round the fire in the old hearth. Keep a good cooking fire up for a day or two, and your walls would soon be stiff again."
Pod was delighted and very impressed. "We'd have to flatten them out first, though," he said.
"That'll be easy," Peagreen told him. "They'll be soaking wet. They'll almost flatten themselves out under their own weight of water. We can lay down that bookend—the one that covers the hole to the steps—and walk about on it, say any of the cardboard started to curl up..."
Arrietty and Homily had been given the job of cleaning up the ancient hearthstones of the old chimney, chopping and stacking the untidy piles of wood, sorting the tin lids and screw bottle tops in which, it seemed, the Wainscots had done their cooking. It was just a happy chance that Peagreen happened to be beside Arrietty when she was about to throw away a large charred tin lid containing something that looked like stiffened treacle. "Don't throw that away!" he almost shouted. "Let me see it first." Distastefully, Arrietty handed it over and was surprised to see a slow smile spread over Peagreen's face as he stooped to smell the horrid-looking contents.
"It's some of Wainscot's resin mixture," he told her. "It can be melted down again..." Triumphantly he carried the precious burden to a safe corner. "Your father will be pleased with this!"
The second brainwave came after the kitchen partitions had been erected and the sides glued firmly together with the help of strong strips of material cut by Pod from a dry—but grubby—floorcloth discarded by the caretakers. The little room had no ceiling, so that any smoke from Homily's fire would escape into the vast chimney above. But Pod had made her a little door from a small book called Essays of Emerson. He had removed all the inside pages, glued the back of the book to the cardboard wall, and had left the front cover to swing to and fro against a small opening cut to the right size.
All the same, for all Pod's cleverness and Peagreen's bright ideas, it did not look like a particularly cheerful kitchen. The cardboard walls, now that they were erected, did not appear any too clean. There were footmarks on them here and there, and in spite of Homily's efforts, they had collected grimy smears when laid out to dry on the floor. One could not wash so large an expanse of hearthstone with drops of water collected, drip by drip, into an eyecup. One could only brush it, as thoroughly as one could, with the heads of dried-up teasels.
It was then that Peagreen had his second brilliant idea. He remembered the roll of canvas on the top shelf of the library. It too formed a kind of cylinder. Tied and rolled, he could knock it to the floor. Pod could remove the loose tile in the fire surround, and between them, they could push the canvas through the gap.
No sooner thought of than achieved: Homily's kitchen became lined and shining white and its enclosing walls even stronger. They pasted the canvas over the bookend, hiding it altogether, and now the little leather door looked like what it was—a little leather door. "And if ever the canvas should get a bit dingy with smoke," Peagreen told them, "there's plenty of whitewash in the game larder."
"Maybe..." mused Pod, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully, "later on, I'll fix some sort of a hood over the fire. But she'll be pleased enough with it as it is for the time being."
He smiled at Peagreen. Poets and painters might not be so good with their hands (whatever that meant), but they certainly were good with ideas. "Sure you won't need some of this canvas for yourself?" he asked.
"There's plenty left over," Peagreen told him, looking down in a satisfied way at the odds and ends on the floor.
Homily was unwilling to visit the Hendrearys until her kitchen was finished. "The kitchen is the heart of the home," she told Pod. "I don't mind, for the moment, leaving all that stacked-up stuff in our living quarters. We can see to all that later at our leisure..."
And then, of course, there were the ghosts, but as Peagreen had prophesied, Arrietty soon got used to them. All the same, her attitude towards them differed a little from that of her parents and Peagreen: she never quite lost a sense of curiosity and wonder. Why shou
ld they suddenly appear and then, for no apparent reason, disappear and not be seen again for weeks? There seemed no logic in it.
She soon got used to The Footsteps. The first time she heard them was after the telephone had shrilled three times. Ready for flight into the conservatory in case she heard the warning scamper of feet along the tiles of the front hall, after a short silence she heard instead a slow and ponderous tread, which seemed, as she stood beside Peagreen in the library, to be coming down the main staircase. Who could it be? Not Mrs. Whitlace's light, running steps, nor Mr. Whitlace's slightly slower ones, unless, of course, he might be carrying something inordinately heavy. The Footsteps grew louder as they seemed to cross the hall. She waited tensely for the lifting of the receiver and for some kind of human voice. But nothing happened beyond the sound of a dull kind of stumble, followed by a sudden silence.
She turned an alarmed face to Peagreen and saw that he was laughing. "Nobody's answered the telephone," she whispered uneasily.
"Ghosts don't," said Peagreen.
"Oh," exclaimed Arrietty, "was that...? Do you mean...?" She looked very scared.
"Those were The Footsteps. I told you about them." He still seemed amused.
"But I don't understand. I mean, could they hear the telephone?"
"No, of course not," said Peagreen. He was really laughing now. "The telephone has nothing to do with it: it was just a coincidence." He laid a hand on her arm. "It's all right, Arrietty. There's nothing to be frightened about: the Whitlaces are out."
Yes, Peagreen was quite right: the real danger lay with human beings—not with harmless noises, however unearthly they might seem. Feeling rather a fool, she walked off into the conservatory, which was filled with sunlight. But she never showed (or even felt) fear of The Footsteps again.
The second ghost was The Little Girl on the Stairs. Actually, during those first weeks, Arrietty did not see her. For one reason because she appeared, slightly luminous, only at night. And, for another, because Arrietty very seldom went into the front hall. On her rare visits to the larder, she preferred Peagreen's route along the ivy to the partly opened window. She really disliked that open, coverless trek across the vast kitchen floor and avoided it whenever she could. Pod had seen this vision regularly, on his nightly visits to collect old junk from the game larder. It was a little girl, dressed in her night clothes, crouched halfway up the curve of the main staircase. She seemed to be crying bitterly, although there was no sound. Pod had described her little nightcap, shaped like a baby's bonnet, tied neatly below her chin. She was there most nights, he thought, weeping for a favorite brother "who had somehow got himself shot," Peagreen had told them. The faint, pale light she gave out helped him to find his bearings as he made his way through the darkness of the hall. He found her very useful.