The Borrowers Afield (7 page)

Chapter Nine

"As ye sow, so shall ye reap."
Valparaiso surrenders to the Congressionalists, 1891

[Extract from Arrietty's Diary and
Proverb Book, August 28th]

"N
OW, TODAY
," said Pod, at breakfast next morning, "we'd better go gleaning. There's a harvested cornfield yonder. Nuts and fruit is all right," he went on, "but for winter we're going to need bread."

"Winter?" moaned Homily. "Aren't we supposed to be looking for the badger's set? And," she went on, "who's going to grind the corn?"

"You and Arrietty, couldn't you?" said Pod. "Between two stones."

"You'll be asking us to make fire with two sticks next," grumbled Homily, "and how do you think I can make bread without an oven? And what about yeast? Now, if you ask me," she went on, "we don't want to go gleaning and trying to make bread and all that nonsense: what we want to do is to put a couple of nuts in our pockets, pick what fruit we see on the way, and have a real good look for the badger's set."

"As you say," agreed Pod, after a moment, and heaved a sigh.

They tidied away breakfast, put the more precious of their belongings inside the boot and carefully laced it up, and struck out uphill, beyond that water, along the hedge which lay at right angles to the bank in which they had passed the night.

It was a weary traipse. Their only adventure was at mid-day, when they rested after a frugal luncheon of rain-sodden, over-ripe blackberries. Homily, lying back against the bank, her drowsy eyes fixed on the space between a stone and a log, saw the ground begin to move: it streamed past the gap, in a limited but constant flow.

"Oh, my goodness, Pod," she breathed, after watching a moment to make sure it was not an optical illusion, "do you see what I see? There, by that log..." Pod, following the direction of her eyes, did not speak straight away and when he did, it was hardly above a whisper.

"Yes," he said, seeming to hesitate. "It's a snake."

"Oh, my goodness..." breathed Homily again in a trembling voice, and Arrietty's heart began to beat wildly.

"Don't move," whispered Pod, his eyes on the steady ripple: there seemed to be no end—the snake went on and on and on (unless it was, as Arrietty thought afterwards, that Time itself, in a moment of danger, has often been said to slow down) but just when they felt they could bear the sight not a moment longer, they saw the flick of its tail.

They all breathed again. "What was it, Pod?" asked Homily weakly, "an adder?"

"A grass snake, I think," said Pod.

"Oh," exclaimed Arrietty, with a relieved little laugh, "they're harmless."

Pod looked at her gravely; his currant-bunnish face seemed more doughy than usual. "To humans," he said slowly. "And what's more," he added, "you can't talk to snakes."

"Pity," remarked Homily, "that we did not bring one of the hat pins."

"What good would that have done?" asked Pod.

By about tea time (rose hips, this time: they were sick of sodden blackberries) they found, to their surprise, that they were more than halfway along the third side of the field. There had been more walking than searching: none of the ground they had covered so far could have housed the Hendrearies let alone a badger colony. The bank, as they made their way uphill beside the hedge, had become lower in proportion until, here where they sat drearily munching rose hips, there was no bank at all.

"It's almost as far now," said Pod, "to go back the same way as we came as to keep on round. What do you say, Homily?"

"We better keep on round, then," said Homily hoarsely, a hairy seed of a rose hip being stuck in her throat. She began to cough. "I thought you said you cleaned them?" she complained to Arrietty, when she could get back her breath.

"I must have missed one," said Arrietty. "Sorry," and she passed her mother a new half hip, freshly scoured; she had rather enjoyed opening the pale scarlet globes and scooping out the golden nest of close-packed seeds, and she liked the flavor of the hips themselves—they tasted, she thought, of apple skins honeyed over with a dash of rose petal.

"Well, then," said Pod, standing up, "we better start moving."

The sun was setting when they reached the fourth and last side of the field; but the hedge threw out a ragged carpet of shadow. Through a gap in the dark branches they could see a blaze of golden light on a sea of harvested stubble.

"As we're here," suggested Pod, standing still and staring through the gap, "and it's pretty well downhill most the way back now, what's the harm in an ear or two of corn?"

"None," said Homily wearily, "if it would walk out and follow us."

"Corn ain't heavy," said Pod. "Wouldn't take us no time to pick up a few ears...."

Homily sighed. It was she who had suggested this trip, after all. In for a penny, she decided wanly, in for a pound.

"Have it your own way," she said resignedly.

So they clambered through the hedge and into the cornfield.

And
into a strange world (as it seemed to Arrietty) not like the Earth at all: the golden stubble, lit by the evening sun, stood up in rows like a blasted colorless forest; each separate bole threw its own long shadow and all die shadows, combed by the sun in direction, lay parallel—a bizarre criss-cross of light and dark which flicked and fleckered with every footstep. Between the boles, on the dry straw-strewn earth, grew scarlet pimpernel in plenty, with here and there a ripened ear of wheat.

"Take a bit of stalk, too," Pod advised them. "Makes it easier to carry."

The light was so strange in this broken, beetle-haunted forest that, every now and again, Arrietty seemed to lose sight of her parents but, turning panic-stricken, would find them again quite close, zebra-striped with black and gold.

At last they could carry no more and Pod had mercy; they foregathered on their own side of the hedge, each with two hunches of wheat ears, carried head downwards by a short length of stalks. Arrietty was reminded of Crampfurl, back home in the big house, going past the grating with onions for the kitchen; they had been strung on strings and looked like these corn grains and in about the same proportion.

"Can you manage all that?" asked Pod anxiously of Homily as she started off ahead down the hill.

"I'd sooner carry it than grind it," remarked Homily tartly, without looking back.

"There wouldn't be no badgers' sets along this side," panted Pod (he was carrying the heaviest load), coming abreast of Arrietty. "Not with all the plowing, sowing, dogs, men, horses, tractors and what-not—as there must have been—"

"Where could one be, then?" asked Arrietty, setting down her corn for a moment to rest her hands. "We've been all round."

"There's only one place to look, now," said Pod. "Them trees in the middle," and standing still in the deep shadow, he gazed across the stretch of pastureland. The field looked in this light much as it had on that first day (could that only be the day before yesterday?). But from this angle, they could not see the trail of dusky shadow thrown by the island of trees.

"Open ground," said Pod, staring. "Your mother would never make it."

"I'd go," said Arrietty. "I'd like to go...."

Pod was silent. "I got to think," he said, after a moment. "Come on, lass. Take up your corn, else we won't get back before dark."

They didn't. Or, rather, it was deep dusk along the ditch of their home stretch and almost dark when they came abreast of their cave. But even in the half-light there seemed something suddenly homelike and welcoming about the laced-up boot.

Homily sank down at the foot of the bank, between her bunches of corn. "Just a breather—" she explained weakly, "before that next pull up."

"Take your time," said Pod. "I'll go ahead and unlace the boot." Panting a little, half-dragging his ears of corn, he started up the bank. Arrietty followed.

"Pod," called Homily from the darkness below, without turning, "you know what?"

"What?" asked Pod.

"It's been a long day," said Homily. "Suppose, tonight, we made a nice cup of tea."

"Please yourself," said Pod, unlacing the neck of the boot and feeling cautiously inside. He raised his voice, shouting down at her: "What you have now, you can't have later. Bring the half scissor, Arrietty, will you? It's on a nail in the storeroom." After a moment, he added impatiently, "Hurry up. No need to take all day, it's just there to your hand."

"It isn't," came Arrietty's voice, after a moment.

"What do you mean—it isn't?"

"It isn't here. Everything else is, though."

"Isn't there!" exclaimed Pod unbelievingly. "Wait a minute, let
me
look." Their voices sounded muffled to Homily, listening below; she wondered what the fuss was about.

"Something or someone's been mucking about in here," she heard Pod say, after what seemed a distressed pause; and picking up her ears of wheat Homily scrambled up the bank.

"Get a match, will you," Pod was saying in a worried voice, "and light the candle," and Homily foraged in the boot to find the wax-matches.

As the wick guttered, wavered, then rose to a steady flame, the little hollow, halfway up the bank, became illumined like a scene on a stage: strange shadows were cast on the sandy walls of the annex. Pod and Homily and little Arrietty seemed, as they passed back and forth, curiously unreal, like characters in a play. There were the borrowing-bags, stacked neatly together as Pod had left them, their mouths tied up with twine; there hung the tools from their beam-like root, and, leaning beside them—as Pod had left it this morning—the purple thistle-head with which he had swept the floor. He stood there now, white-faced in the candlelight, his hand on a bare nail. "It was here," he said, tapping the nail, "that's where I left it."

"Oh, goodness," exclaimed Homily, setting down her wheat ears. "Let's just look again." She pulled aside the borrowing-bags and felt behind them. "And you, Arrietty," she ordered, "could you get round to the back of the boot?"

But it was not there nor, they discovered suddenly, was the larger hat pin. "Anything but them two things," Pod kept saying in a worried voice as Homily, for the third or fourth time, went through the contents of the boot. "The smaller hat pin's here all right," she kept repeating. "We still got one. You see no animal could unlace a boot...

"But what kind of animal," asked Pod wearily, "would take a half nail scissor?"

"A magpie might," suggested Arrietty, "if it looked kind of shiny."

"Maybe," said Pod. "But what about the hat pin? I don't see a magpie carrying the two. No," he went on thoughtfully, "it doesn't look to me like no magpie, nor like any other race of bird. Nor no animal neither, if it comes to that. Nor I wouldn't say it was any kind of human being: a human being, like as not, finding a hole like this smashes the whole place up. Kind of kick with their feet, human beings do out walking, 'fore they touch a thing with their hands. Looks to me," said Pod, "like something in the style of a borrower."

"Oh," cried Arrietty joyfully, "then we've found them!"

"Found what?" asked Pod.

"The cousins ... the Hendrearies..."

Pod was silent a moment. "Maybe," he said uneasily again.

"Maybe!" mimicked Homily, irritated. "Who else could it be? They live in this field, don't they? Arrietty, put some water on to boil, there's a good girl. We don't want to waste the candle."

"Now see here—" began Pod.

"But we can't fix the tin lid," interrupted Arrietty, "without something to hold it."

"Oh, goodness me," complained Homily, "use your head and think of something! Suppose we'd never had a nail scissor! Tie a piece of twine round an aspirin lid and hang it over the flame from a nail or bit of root or something. What were you saying, Pod?"

"I said we got to go careful on the tea, that's all. We was only going to make tea to celebrate like, or in what you might call a case of grave emergency."

"Well, we are, aren't we?"

"Are what?" asked Pod.

"Celebrating. Looks like we've found what we come for."

Pod glanced uneasily toward Arrietty who, in the farther corner of the annex, was busily knotting twine round a ridged edge of a screw-on lid. "You don't want to go so fast, Homily," he warned her, lowering his voice, "nor you don't want to jump to no conclusions. Say it was one of the Hendrearies. All right, then, why didn't they leave a word or sign or stay awhile and wait for us? Hendreary knows our gear all right—that Proverb book of Arrietty's, say, many's the time he's seen it back home under the kitchen."

"I don't see what you're getting at," said Homily in a puzzled voice, watching Arrietty anxiously as gingerly she suspended the water-filled aspirin lid from a root above the candle. "Careful," she called out. "You don't want to burn the twine."

"What I'm getting at is this," explained Pod. "Say you look at the nail scissor as a blade, a sword—as you might say—and the hat pin as a spear, say, or a dagger. Well, whoever took them things has armed himself, see what I mean? And left us weaponless."

"We got the other hat pin," said Homily in a troubled voice.

"Maybe," said Pod. "But he doesn't know that, see what I mean?"

"Yes," whispered Homily, very scared.

"Make tea, if you like," Pod went on, "but I wouldn't call it a celebration. Not yet, at any rate."

Homily glanced unhappily toward the candle: above the aspirin lid, she noticed longingly, already there rose a welcome haze of steam. "Well," she began and hesitated. Then suddenly she seemed to brighten. "It comes to the same thing."

"How do you mean?" asked Pod.

"About the tea," explained Homily, perking up. "Going by what you said, stealing our weapons and such—this looks to be something you might call serious. Depends how it strikes you. I mean," she went on hurriedly, "there's some I know as might even name it a state of grave emergency."

"There's some as might," agreed Pod wanly. Then, suddenly, he sprang aside, beating the air with his hands. Arrietty screamed and Homily, for a second, thought they had both gone mad. Then she saw.