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Title: Mistress Masham's Repose
Author: White, T. H. [Terence Hanbury] (1906-1964)
Date of first publication: 1946
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, [1946]
Date first posted: 14 February 2015
Date last updated: 14 February 2015
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1233

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Because of copyright considerations, the illustrations
by Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990) have been omitted from
this ebook.






  MISTRESS
  MASHAM'S
  REPOSE


  By T. H. WHITE



  ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRITZ EICHENBERG



  G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
  NEW YORK




  COPYRIGHT, 1946, BY T. H. WHITE

  _All rights reserved.  This book, or parts thereof, must
  not be reproduced in any form without permission._



  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
  KINGSPORT PRESS, INC., KINGSPORT, TENNESSEE




FOR AMARYLLIS VIRGINIA GARNETT




"I took with me six Cows and two Bulls alive, with as many Yews and
Rams, intending to carry them into my own Country and propagate the
Breed.... I would gladly have taken a Dozen of the Natives...."

--_Gulliver's Travels_




MISTRESS MASHAM'S REPOSE




CHAPTER

I

Maria was ten years old.  She had dark hair in two pigtails, and brown
eyes the color of marmite, but more shiny.  She wore spectacles for the
time being, though she would not have to wear them always, and her
nature was a loving one.  She was one of those tough and friendly
people who do things first and think about them afterward.  When she
met cows, however, she did not like to be alone with them, and there
were other dangers, such as her governess, from which she would have
liked to have had a protector.  Her main accomplishment was that she
enjoyed music, and played the piano well.  Perhaps it was because her
ear was good that she detested loud noises, and dreaded the fifth of
November.  This, however, with the cows, was her only weakness, and she
was said to be good at games.

Unfortunately she was an orphan, which made her difficulties more
complicated than they were with other people.  She lived in an enormous
house in the wilds of Northamptonshire, which was about four times
longer than Buckingham Palace, but was falling down.  It had been built
by one of her ducal ancestors who had been a friend of the poet Pope's,
and it was surrounded by Vistas, Obelisks, Pyramids, Columns, Temples,
Rotundas, and Palladian Bridges, which had been built in honor of
General Wolfe, Admiral Byng, the Princess Amelia, and others of the
same kidney.  Maria's parents had made a desperate attempt to keep the
grounds in order.  They had been killed in an accident, however, and
after that there had been no money left, not even enough to live on
respectably in a boarding-house, somewhere else.  The Rates and so on
had used up all the available income, and nobody could be persuaded to
buy the place for a school nor for a hospital.  Consequently she and
her governess had to sleep in two bedrooms which still had a bit of
roof over them, the governess using one of the smaller drawing rooms to
live in, and they had a cook to look after them, who dwelt in the
kitchen.  It is literally true that this cook had a bicycle in the
basement corridor, which she used to ride along the corridor, when she
had to answer the bell.

The house had 365 windows, all broken but six, 52 state bedrooms, and
12 company rooms.  It was called Malplaquet.

Maria's governess was a Miss Brown.  She had been appointed by the
local vicar, who was Maria's guardian.  Both the Vicar and the
governess were so repulsive that it is difficult to write about them
fairly.

The Vicar was 5 ft. 7 ins. in height, and looked as if he were fifty
years old.  His face was red, with hundreds of little veins of a purple
color, because he suffered either from blood pressure or from a weak
heart or from both.  It was difficult to see his eyes, partly because
they were of the same general color as the rest of his face, and partly
because he wore thick spectacles, behind which they lurked like
oysters.  His hair was parted in the middle and brushed flat.  He had
rather pouting bluish lips, and he walked upright and slow, giving a
faint humming noise from the back of his nose, like a bee.  He had been
a housemaster in a public school before he got the job as Maria's
guardian, and his only pleasure then had been in caning the boys--but
he had not been able to do so much of this as he would have liked to
do, owing to his heart.  His name was Mr. Hater.  He was a bachelor.
It was suspicious that he had a Rolls-Royce, and spent much of his time
in London, while Maria had to live in the ruined house on sago and
other horrors.

Miss Brown had been Mr. Hater's matron at the public school.  She must
have had some mysterious hold over him, for it seems impossible that he
could have chosen her freely, considering what she was.  Her nose was
sharp and pinched, with a high bridge, but the rest of her was podgy.
When she sat down, she spread, as a toad does on one's hand.  Her eyes
were pebble-colored and her hair was yellow.  It was drawn in a tight
bun.  She wore rimless pince-nez.  She was about the same age as the
Vicar, but a good deal shorter.  She was cruel in a complicated way.
For instance, when Maria's last uncle had been alive, he had sometimes
remembered to send the child a box of chocolates for Christmas.  Miss
Brown's arrangements for any such parcel had usually been fixed in
stages.  First, Maria had not been allowed to open it when it came, "in
case it had germs."  It had been sent down to the kitchen to be baked.
Then Maria had been sent for, to the Northwest Drawing Room, in which
Miss Brown resided, and the ruined parcel had been placed before her to
be undone.  The next step had been to claim that Maria had dirty hands,
untruly, and to send her back to the kitchen, a ten minutes' walk, to
wash them.  When she had got back at last, agog with expectation, and
the poor melted chocolates had been unstuck from the brown paper, Miss
Brown used to condemn them as improperly packed and throw them into the
nearest lake with her own fair fingers "for fear they would make the
child ill."

It is difficult but important to believe that this precious pair may
have been trying to do the best they could, considering the kind of
people they were.

Maria had two real friends, the cook and an old professor who lived in
a distant part of the grounds.  She was sometimes very unhappy and
sometimes very happy, because people fly between wider extremes when
they are young.  Her happiest times were when the Vicar was in London
and Miss Brown was in bed with a headache.  Then she would be mad with
pleasure, a sort of wild but earnest puppy rushing about with the
slipper of her imagination, tearing the heart out of it.

It was on a summer day such as this, with her tormentors well out of
the way, that she decided to visit the Quincunx, to try some piracy at
sea.

The Quincunx was one of the lakes at the foot of the lawn on the South
Front.  It was overgrown with trees, huge alders and beeches and wild
cherries and sequoias and cedars, all planted by the numerous
acquaintances of the poet Pope, and its surface was matted with water
lilies, and there was a decayed wooden boathouse with a punt in it,
which leaked.  In the middle of the lake there was a small island
choked with brambles, and, on the island, there was a plastered temple
in the shape of a cupola, or rather, to give it its proper name, of a
monopteron.  It was a dome like the top of an eggshell, raised on five
slender columns, and it was called Mistress Masham's Repose.

But nobody had ever reposed there since the death of Queen Anne.
Nobody had cleared the nettles from the little island, nor swept the
deep leaf mold from the marble steps, nor cut back the laurels and
rhododendrons and blackberries which crowded round the forgotten
temple, even seeming to climb the pillars.  All the dainty elegance
which had once been made so carefully, by hands which had intended it
to stay elegant, had been abandoned in the March of Mind.  The lake
itself was silted with weeds, because there was no money left to cut
them, and the island had become a sort of Atlantis, lost in the seas.
Maria was the only person who knew the weed lanes by which it could be
reached.  She had never landed there, however, because of the tangles.

It was a glorious day in June--for that matter, it was the Glorious
First of June--and the sun was resounding on the great, green sweep of
the lawn.  The farmer who rented the land was chasing his sheep about,
with a hot-buttered face, waving a bottle of lotion for maggots; the
gray squirrels were chattering and cursing in the Chestnut Avenue; the
bullocks in the Jubilee Field, safe on the other side of the Quincunx,
were flicking their tails and occasionally thundering off elsewhere,
because the clegs bit them; cuckoos were changing their tunes; the
insect world was humming in the wilderness of shining evergreens; there
were rabbits, and long grass, and small birds, and Maria was as brown
as a berry.

She lay face downward in the punt, looking over the stern into the deep
water.  Her knees, and most of the front of her, were green with slime;
the water from the bailing scoop had run up her sleeve.  She was happy.
When the boat dawdled to a stop, she gave it a stroke to keep it going.
Under her nose, she watched the mare's-tail and other flora of the
ocean floor, as the prow edged its way between the water lilies.
Dragonflies, like blue needles, and damsel flies like ruby ones--the
husband keeping his wife in order by gripping her tightly round the
neck with a special pair of pincers on the end of his tail--hovered
over the surface.  By going gently, she could sometimes pass above a
flight of perch without disturbing them.  Or rather, they would raise
their spiky fins, blush out the dark anger of their bars, and make
mouths at her.  Once or twice, she passed a pike, only six inches long,
basking under the flat green leaves, and once she came close to the
meeting place of the tench--who made themselves scarce with a loud
plop.  They had been lazily scratching their backs on the lilies, like
a school of elephants.

The lakes of Malplaquet were, in fact, a wonderful place for coarse
fishing.  In the old days, before they were weeded up, the Northampton
Anglers used to go there twice a year for competitions.  The tench ran
big, up to five pounds or more, which was practically the record
weight, and there was sometimes taken a pike of twenty pounds.  The
perch were fair, but not impressive.  There were also some small roach.

When she had come abreast of the little island of Mistress Masham's
Repose, she began to feel piratical.  Swouns and Slids, she said to
herself, but you could stap her vitals if she did not careen there, and
perhaps dig up some buried treasure while about it.  She felt that she
could do with a couple of skellingtons, or with a cross marked in dry
blood on the wrinkled parchment of a map.

The island had lilies all round, mixed with frogbit and water crowfoot,
so dense that it was difficult to push against them.

She paddled round, looking for a place where she could shove through.
She laid her matchlocks handy on the thwart, first blowing on the
priming so that the rum in her breath nearly caught fire.  She loosened
her hanger in the scabbard, and paced the poop.

The only place for landing was a fallen larch--which had dropped there
as a cone since Lady Masham had died ennobled, had grown to its full
stature, rotted, and blown down.  It lay outward from the isle,
bridging the worst part of the lilies.  Some of its branches still
tried to dress themselves in green.

Maria laid her bark alongside the end of the larch, and tied it up so
that it could not drift away--an Inconvenience, as Gulliver tells us,
which all prudent Mariners take special Care to provide against.  Then
she took off her shoes and stockings, thinking that she would climb
more easily in bare feet.  She boarded the tree bole, brandishing her
cutlass, and swarmed ashore with the battle cry of  Maria, her
spectacles twinkling fiercely in the sun.




CHAPTER

II

The island on which she found herself was about the size of a tennis
court.  It had been carried there on boats, when the first duke had
been beautifying his park, and it had risen from the water two hundred
years before, an artificial emerald of green grass, crowned by the
white dome of its cupola.  There, perhaps, the Mistress Hill who was to
become Mistress Masham--or even Mistress Morley herself, had sat in
silks and laces, in the summer weather, drinking tay.  If Mistress
Morley had been there, she probably enjoyed a dash of brandy in the
smoaking Tyde.

But now the island was tangled with every land of briar.  It had a boma
round it, an outer ring of blackberries and nettles, choking the jungle
of the shrubbery which faced the visitor.  There seemed to be no way of
reaching the little temple without pain, for the nettles were ready to
sting and the briars were ready to prick, and what she really needed
was a machete--or any similar instrument used by Indians, in cutting
their trackways through the Bush.

If she had been a gamekeeper with thick clothes and leather leggings,
she might have been able to push her way through; if she had been a
farm laborer, she could have cleared a path with her brish-hook; as she
was neither of these, but a determined person all the same, except for
cows, she bashed her way with the punt scoop.  When she had beaten down
a bramble, she trod on it reluctantly; when they caught in her dress,
she stopped and took them out--sometimes; when they scratched her face,
she swore the appropriate oath; and so, slowly but surely, she burrowed
her way into the forest belt.  She tore her skirt in three places, and
scratched the brown legs horribly, until she had to go back for the
shoes.

The tanglewood stopped suddenly, several yards from the steps of the
temple, and the intruder came to a halt with a blackberry branch in her
hair.

Where the brambles ended, the grass began: the same neat, artificial
grass which Lady Masham must have known.  It was still kept as short,
or even shorter.  It was as smooth as a bowling green.

Indeed, the place was like a bowling green.  It was hedged with the
thicket, as such greens often are with yew.  In the middle, there was
the beautiful, sun-drenched temple, rising airily on its pillars.

But what was strange--and here Maria's heart went Pat, she knew not
why--the strange thing was that everything was neat.

She looked everywhere, but not a soul was to be seen.  Not a leaf
stirred in the little amphitheater, nor was there any trace of a hut to
live in.  There was no shed to hold a lawn mower, nor any mower
standing on the lawn.

Yet somebody had mowed the grass.

Maria took the bramble out of her hair, disentangled herself from the
last branches, and went forward to her doom.

The plaster inside the dome had fallen in some places; but the wooden
slats, which were visible in most of the ruined ceilings of her home,
were not exposed in this one.  It looked as if the roof had been
repaired from inside, with clay or paper, as if it had been done by
wasps.  Also, and this was strange again, there was no plaster on the
floor.  It had been cleared away.

Everything was so clean, so different from the wasteland which she had
come through--so square and round and geometrical, just as it had been
when first erected--that her eye was drawn to details.

She saw: first, a square opening, about eight inches wide, in the
lowest step, which she took to be the ventilator of a damp course--but
there was a path leading to it, trodden in the fine grass, a path for
mice; next, she saw a seven-inch door in the base of each pillar,
possibly also connected with the damp course--but, and this she did not
notice because they were nearly as small as match heads, these doors
had handles; finally, she saw that there was a walnut shell, or half
one, outside the nearest door.  Several walnuts grew in the park,
though none were very close.  She went to look at the shell--but looked
with the greatest astonishment.

There was a baby in it.

She bent down to pick up the cradle, which she took to be some kind of
toy, a toy made more beautifully than any she had ever seen.  When the
shadow of her hand fell across the baby, which was nearly an inch long,
it wagged its head on the minute cushion of moss, put out its fists in
both directions, pulled up its knees as if it were bicycling, and gave
a thin mew, which she could hear.

She did not snatch away her hand when the creature mewed.  On the
contrary, she grabbed the walnut.  If there were one thing now in all
the world which Maria was inclined to snatch, it was the baby.

She held it tenderly in the palm of her hand, not breathing for fear of
spoiling it, and examined its wonderful perfection as well as she
could.  Its eyes, which were as small as a shrimp's, seemed to have the
proper marble-blue for babies; its skin was slightly mauve, so that it
must have been a new one; it was not skinny, but beautifully plump, and
she was just able to distinguish the creases round its fat
wrists--creases which looked as if the thinnest hair had been tied
round in a tight bracelet, or as if the hands had been fitted, on the
ball-and-socket principle, by the most cunning of all the dollmakers
there had ever been.

It was truly alive, and seemed to be fairly pleased at being picked up,
for it held out one hand toward her nose and chuckled.  At least, by
listening to it like a watch, with her head on one side, she was
certain that it made a noise.

While Maria was in a rapture with this windfall, she felt a sharp pain
in her left ankle, as bad as if she had been stung by a bee.

Like most people whose ankles are stung, she stamped her foot and
hopped about on one leg--a useless procedure, so far as bees are
concerned, because it only annoys the others, and the first one cannot
sting again.

She held the cradle with the greatest care while she hopped, clapped
her spare hand to the hurt ankle, and confronted her assailant from a
safe distance, standing on one leg.

There was a fat woman, about five inches high, standing on the marble
pavement of the temple, and brandishing a sort of harpoon.  She was
dressed in rust-colored stuff, like the breast of a robin, and she was
wild with rage or terror.  Her little eyes were flashing, her hair had
come down at the back, her bosom was heaving, and she was shouting in
an unknown language something about Quinba Flestrina.  The harpoon,
which was as sharp as a needle, had a steel head half as long as the
baby.  Some blood was trickling between the fingers of Maria's spare
hand.

Now in spite of the homicides or other torts which she might have
committed as a pirate, who was partial to the Plank, Maria was not the
kind of person who bore malice for injuries, and she was certainly not
the kind of kidnaper who habitually stole babies from their heartbroken
mothers, for the mere cynical pleasure of hearing them scream.  She
guessed immediately that this was the mother of the baby, and, instead
of feeling angry about the harpoon, she began to feel guilty about the
baby.  She began to have an awful suspicion that she would have to give
it back.

Yet the temptation to keep it was severe.  She would never drop on
another find like this, she knew, not if she lived to be a thousand.

Think to yourself, truly, whether you would have returned a live
one-inch baby to its relatives, if caught fairly in the open field?

But Maria did her best.

She said: "I am sorry if this is your baby.  Please, I have not done it
any harm.  Look, you can have it safe.

"And really," she added, almost tearfully, "it is a beauty."

She leaned forward to put the cradle at the mother's feet.

The fierce little woman was either too hysterical to listen, or else
she did not understand English, for she slashed at the huge hand with
her weapon as soon as it came within reach, and cut it across the thumb.

"Oh, you would, would you?" cried Maria.  "You little viper!"

So, instead of giving up the baby, she wrapped it in her handkerchief,
cradle and all, and put the bundle in the pocket of her skirt.  Then
she took a second handkerchief out of the other pocket, waved it in the
face of the mother so that she fell on her back, dropped it over her
head, flicked away the fallen harpoon, and gathered her as well.  She
so seldom had two handkerchiefs, or one for that matter, that she felt
that the hand of the Lord must be upon her.  Then, hearing a kind of
hum in the pillar beside her, like the hum of a hive, she felt also
that it would be wiser not to tempt the Lord's hand further.

Stuffing the larger bundle into the other pocket--it was kicking as
hard as it could--she made for her passage through the brambles.  When
she got there, she turned round for a last look at the temple.  She saw
a group of three men struggling at the pillar door.  Two of them were
holding the third by the arms, to keep him back, and he was fighting
them to follow her.  He was a splendid fellow in a fur tunic, made of
moleskin, and well over six inches high.




CHAPTER

III

When she had pushed off the punt and paddled to a safe distance, she
laid down the scoop and took the larger package from her pocket.  The
woman had been kicking all the time, with fluttering skips and flops,
so that it had felt like a small bird trying to get free.  As soon as
Maria had unwrapped and set her down on the slimy bottom of the boat,
she stood panting, with a hand pressed to her heart.  It was like a
carving in ivory.  Then she ran for the side, as if she were meaning to
leap into the water, but checked herself, and stood glaring at her
captor, the very picture of a wild thing fallen into human hands.
Maria produced the other bundle and laid the baby, still in its cradle,
not far from the mother's feet.  This brought her back from the side.
She ran to the cradle, snatched the baby out of it, and began talking
to it in a foreign language, examining it all over to see if it were
hurt.  It was clear that she was telling the baby that it was Mammy's
Wazzums Oodlums, and did a nasty female mountain try to steal it then,
the precious pet?

Maria licked her wounds, washed them in the cool water of the lake,
dried them with the handkerchiefs, and kept a tight eye on the maternal
scene.

It was getting on for teatime, and she had a lot of things to fix.  She
was determined never to be separated from her treasures--or at least,
not from the baby--but she knew perfectly well, on the other hand, that
Miss Brown would refuse to let her have them.  Either she would
confiscate them, and keep them in a box with Maria's penknife and
sixpenny compass, or else she would take them for her own use, or she
might even arrange to have them drowned, as she used to do with the
favorite kittens.  None of these things was going to happen, if Maria
could help it.

Where could she hide them?  Miss Brown was constantly peeping about for
faults, and there was not a private place in all the palace of
Malplaquet which our heroine could call her own.  There were no longer
any toys in the toy cupboard, so that to keep them there would only
call attention to it.  Her bedroom was ransacked once a week.

"I will put them," she said, "in the little drawer of my dressing table
for tonight at any rate, since Miss Brown's headache will prevent her
from interfering until tomorrow."

This time she made a bag from the wet and gory handkerchief, and, after
cornering her captives, she put them both in this together, loose.  She
tied it round the top with string--for she was a handyman who generally
carried string, having been told by her professor that efficient people
always had a penknife, a shilling, and a bit of this useful article.
She kept the cradle separate, thinking that it would be a bruising
thing to be with, if one were bumping about in a bag with a baby.  Then
she made for the boathouse, put up the punt, and hurried home for tea.

She looked in as she passed the kitchen, which had ovens, spits, and
ranges suitable for serving a twelve-course dinner to one hundred and
fifty persons--but now they cooked on a primus stove--and inquired
about Miss Brown from Cook.

"Lawks, Miss Maria, them stockings!  And, glorious me, them rents all
over the dress!"

"Yes, I know.  I was wondering if Miss Brown...."

"You won't see her tonight, my lamb, and for which we may thank our
tender stars.  You run up to your room now quiet-like, and bring me
back them stockings when you have 'em changed.  You'd best put on the
dressing gown, until I mend the skirt."

"Is there anything for tea?"

"Yes, Miss, there's strawberries.

"Seeing as She," continued Cook, tossing her head, "was took bad-like,
as we might say, I presumed the little liberty for to beg a pound on
'em from your professor, and this, with just a touch of condensated
milk, which we was asaving of for Christmas, should make a dish,
however humble, as might be savored by the Mistress of Malplaquet."

It is needless to explain that Cook was an Old Retainer, who bore with
Miss Brown as well as she could.  She lived her life in the gloomy
kitchen, with nobody to love but Maria, except for a fat collie dog who
had been left to her by her deceased husband, and whose name was
Captain.  He used to fetch the newspaper from the village every
morning, in his mouth, and sometimes he went shopping with a basket.

Maria said: "Cook, if you are ever captured by pirates, or surrounded
by Indians, or if you should fall into the sea and be chased by a
shark, I will see to it that this day's work is not forgotten, if it
costs me the last drop of my blood."

"Thank you, Miss Maria," said Cook, "I'm sure."

She climbed the Grand Staircase and trotted down the Ducal Corridor,
mounted the Second Best Staircase and passed the Corridor for
Distinguished Strangers, plodded up the Privy Stairs in Ordinary and
tiptoed down the Third Best Corridor Once Removed.  At the end of this,
where part of the main roof was still sound, there were the two small
bedrooms in which she and Miss Brown were accustomed to sleep.  It used
to take Cook about three-quarters of an hour to get there from the
kitchen, because she had Bad Legs, and Captain panted dreadfully as he
padded up the stairs behind.  But Miss Brown made them do the bed for
her, all the same.

She peeped in at the open door.

There lay the tyrant on the bed, with her nauseous nose erect.  She was
reading a mauve book with a stuffed back, like a cushion, which was
called _The Daily Light_.  In her other hand she held a handkerchief
soaked with eau de cologne, and with this she occasionally fanned _The
Daily Light_, and occasionally patted her nose tip, which had grown
pink and polished under these attentions.

Miss Brown's personality lay about her.  There, beneath Maria's fearful
eye, stood the thirty pairs of pointed shoes, sharp as builder's
trowels, wrinkled at the toes, dressed in a neat line under the
dressing table.  There, on top of the wardrobe, stood the gray toque
hats with pins in them.  On the bedside table stood the range of books
which Miss Brown considered delightful: the _Journal_ of George Fox,
_Holy Living_ by J. Taylor, and _The Pilgrim's Progress_, about which
Huckleberry Finn once remarked that "the statements were interesting,
but tough."  In a corner of the room there was a cupboard, containing
the fichus and frills with which Miss Brown adorned her bosom; the
dressing table was covered with sharp things or hard things; and the
whole place smelled of unused purses locked away in lavender or
naphthalene.

On the window sill there were some instruments for spying; the
telescope with which she watched from the window, and the magnifying
glass with which she looked for dirt.

Her pupil went down on hands and knees.  She crawled past the bed,
below Miss Brown's line of vision, and reached the window unobserved.
She put the magnifying glass between her teeth, where pirates keep
their cutlasses, except when drinking.  She crawled back to the door,
dropping a drawing pin, which she kept handy for such occasions, into
one of the shoes while passing, and regained the corridor without
mishap.

Then she hurried to her room.

In the bare room, where all the furniture was made of iron, she took
the precious bundle out.  She opened it upon the bed.  The little woman
lay like a suffocating frog, still clutching her baby, and Maria
examined them at leisure, with the glass.

The dress was poor.  It was a simple garment, tied at the waist like a
monk's, and it seemed to have been knitted from silky wool.  It was
raveled in some places and worn, but serviceable.  The woman's face was
red and healthy.  The baby, as she had suspected, had blue eyes.

Maria put them in the small drawer when she had finished, made a bunch
of her own spoiled clothes, and tiptoed down to tea.




CHAPTER

IV

But when the Mistress of Malplaquet got up next morning, she was not
feeling happy.  Not a scrap of the strawberry and cream had been
touched, though she had left a saucer in the drawer, and she could get
nothing from her prisoner but scowls.  It was out of the question to
play with her.

"Cook," she said at breakfast, "do you think Miss Brown's headache will
be better today?"

"No, Miss Maria," said Cook.

"She has left me some mathematics to work out, before dinner--it seems
to be about Algebra."

She twiddled her spoon nonchalantly, and looked from the corner of one
eye.

"I wanted to see the Professor."

"Run along and see him, luv.  If Somebody wakes up, I'll tell her as
how you'm busy with them Algerians, whatsoeverashowsobe as which she
might inquire."

"Cook..." began Maria.

"Yes, luv.  You told un about the sharks."

The Professor was as poor as a church mouse, and he lived by himself in
one of the Ridings, in what had once been a gamekeeper's cottage.

All round the ruined palace there were immense avenues, stretching in
every direction, down which the departed dukes had been accustomed to
drive in state when they had felt like an airing, or when the Comte de
Paris and Queen Victoria had dropped in for the week end.  These
avenues had developed into Ridings which had once been thought the
finest pheasant coverts in Europe, and in them King Edward had often
popped away.  Finally, when the carriage roads had vanished altogether,
they had become green fields between the woods, long and thin, which
were hired to grazing farmers by the solicitors who represented the
Estate.

Such was the Riding in which the Professor lived.

He was a failure, but he did his best to hide it.  One of his failings
was that he could scarcely write, except in a twelfth-century hand, in
Latin, with abbreviations.  Another was that, although his cottage was
crammed with books, he seldom had anything to eat.  He could not tell
from Adam, any more than Maria could, what the latest quotation of
Imperial Chemicals was upon the Stock Exchange.

In the daytime, he used to chop wood and cut some slices of bread and
butter.  In the evenings, having lighted the choppings, he would sit
before the fire and quaff a glass of liquor, pondering the remarks of
Isidore, Physiologus, Pliny, and similar people.  His tipples were
Cowslip, Dandelion, Elderberry, and sometimes Gooseberry Wine, which he
brewed himself.  Inflamed by these, in the kind glow of the green ash,
he would dream of impossible successes: imagining that the Master of
Trinity had referred to him by name in a lecture, or that Dr. Cook had
offered to mention him in a footnote to Zeus, or even that one of the
poorer colleges had given him a sort of supernumerary fellowship of the
lowest class, carrying a stipend of about five pounds a year, so that
he would no longer have to cut his bread and butter.

On the second of June, the Professor had got up early to pick
dandelions.  He was wandering up and down the Ridings with a sack,
nipping off the yellow heads with his fingers, and popping them inside.
He did not notice Maria's figure stumping up the avenue.

"What ho!" she cried.  "Avast!  Belay!"

"Go away," said he promptly.

"Do you know who you are talking to?"

He straightened his aching old back, adjusted the spectacles, and
examined her with care.

"Yes, I believe I do.  It is Black Maria, the Terror of the Tortugas."

"Then you had better keep a civil tongue, and know your station."

"Why?"

"Because."

"Because what?"

"Look here," she said.  "I can't indulge in childish argument.  I came
on business."

"If you mean that you have come for breakfast, I fear that I have
nothing left but half a pound of mustard."

She put her hand on the bottle-green sleeve and made him drop the bag.
The reference to breakfast had touched her, for she knew he seldom had
enough to eat.  She put her arm, a little shyly, round the creaking
waist.

"I have found something."

"What sort of thing?"

"I can't show it here.  I have brought it, but it might escape in
grass.  I want to show you in the cottage."

He said: "Dear me, Maria, well, dear me.  I must say I am glad to see
you.  Come in, come in.  I hardly noticed it was you at first.
Certainly you may come inside my cottage, although I ought to tell you
that I have not done the washing up."

She put the five-inch woman on the kitchen table, in the bread crumbs.
The only tea cup was full of ink.  She told the story and explained her
difficulties--how Miss Brown would be against it, how there was nowhere
safe to hide the mannikins, how they would not eat, and the rest of the
trouble.

"H'm," said he.  "Let me see.  It is one of these modern writers, I
believe.  Martin or Swallow or...  Yes, yes, dear me, it must have been
our Dr. Swift.  He was conscious of the similarity himself.  Indeed,
his nickname with Ld. Treasurer was Martin, if I have my facts.  Yes,
yes.  Now Dr. Swift was at Malplaquet, as we know, in 1712.  He came
here straight from Twit-nam, with the poet Pope.  But that was long
before the _Travels_.  H'm, h'm, h'm."

"I don't..."

"Please hold your tongue, dear girl.  It interrupts the flow.  Now what
more natural than this, that the immortal Dean should finish off the
_Travels_ here for Motte--could he have come again in '25?--and what
place could there be more suited to the toils of literature than the
cool, quiet arbor on the Masham Isle?  No doubt he left some
Lilliputians there behind him, by mistake.  We know that authors suffer
from the absent mind."

"_Gulliver's Travels_?"

"Gulliver!  The very name!  This will be an addition to the annals of
Malplaquet, to know that _Gulliver_ was finished here, and that they
left the people too.  Excuse me while I look it up."

She dangled her legs on a soapbox, keeping a good look-out to see that
the supposed Lilliputian did not run away, and the old gentleman
brought down one first edition after another, with grunts and puffs of
dust, but always with tender fingers.  His findings were a
disappointment.

"It distinctly says that not one single citizen was carried off.
Gulliver brought 'six Cows and two Bulls alive, with as many Yews and
Rams.'  One of the sheep was eaten on the voyage by a rat, and he gave
one cow and one sheep to Captain John Biddel, who brought him home.
H'm, h'm.

"Wait a bit," he added hastily.  "It says that Gulliver left Blefuscu,
in his rowing boat, on the twenty-fourth of September, 1701.  He was
picked up at sea by this Captain Biddel, on the twenty-sixth, in
latitude thirty degrees south.  Mark you, it was only two days later.
He told his story to Biddel--he even gave the pair of animals to prove
it--and, on their return to England, he was able to sell the remaining
cattle for six hundred pound!

"Believe me," continued the Professor, taking off his spectacles and
pointing them at her, "in those days, six hundred were six hundred.
Why, Stella herself contrived to live in genteel comfort, with a
capital of little more than twice that sum.

"If you," said he, "were a captain who had picked up such a castaway,
within two days' rowing of a known latitude, carrying a dozen cattle
worth six hundred pound, old style, what would you do?"

"I should go back to search the latitude."

"Then?"

"I should bring back plenty more.  My goodness, I should bring back
men!"

He shut the book with a bang, which he immediately regretted, wandered
off to return it to its shelf, and began to think of something else.

"All the same," she said, "even if this creature--this, er, little
lady--even if she did come originally from Lilliput or Blefuscu, I
don't see how it helps."

"No?"

"She won't eat."

"No?"

"She won't do anything."

He put his hands behind his back, shuffled on the floor, and scowled.

"She isn't any fun."

He stuffed his beard in his mouth, rolled his eyes, and glared.  Then
he unrolled them, liberated the whiskers, and looked haughtily upon his
visitor.

"Why should she be fun?

"Why should she do anything?

"Why should she eat?

"Is she yours?"

Maria twiddled her fingers nervously, but he sat down on the soapbox
and took her hand.

"My dear neighbor," said he, "there is one thing which I promise, and
that is that I will not say, How would _you_ like to be wrapped up in a
handkerchief?  I am aware that it is not a question of you being
wrapped up in one, but of this person.  I will, however, make a
suggestion.  As we all know, I am a failure in the world.  I do not
rule people, nor deceive them for the sake of power, nor try to swindle
their livelihood into my own possession.  I say to them: Please go
freely on your way, and I will do my best to follow mine.  Well then,
Maria, although this is not a fashionable way of going on, nor even a
successful one, it is a thing which I believe in--that people must not
tyrannize, nor try to be great because they are little.  My dear, you
are a great person yourself, in any case, and you do not need to lord
it over others, in order to prove your greatness."

"I would not do her any harm!  I would not lord it!"

"But would she do the harm to you?  Think what may happen, for a
minute.  Suppose you managed to tame her, suppose you even managed to
tame all the other people from the Island of Repose.  No doubt there
are several more.  You would be a Big Bug then, however kind you were,
and they would be little bugs, without the capitals.  They would come
to depend on you; you would come to boss it over them.  They would get
servile, and you would get lordly.  Do you think that this would be
good for either of you?  I think that it would only make them feeble,
and make you a bully."

"I wouldn't bully them!"

"No?"

"I would try to help."

"But God helps those who help themselves."

She produced her battered handkerchief, and began to twist it into
shreds.

"Then what am I to do?"

He stood up stiffly, went to the cobwebbed window, and stared out.

"It is not for me to say."

"What would you do, Professor?"

"I would put her on the island, free, with love."

"But not have People any more?"

"No more."

"Professor," she said, "I could help them, if I saw them sometimes.  I
could do things for them.  I could dig."

"No good.  They must do their own digging."

"I have nobody to love."

He turned round and put on his spectacles.

"If they love you," he said, "very well.  You may love them.  But do
you think, Maria, that you can make them love you for yourself alone,
by wrapping prisoners up in dirty handkerchiefs?"




CHAPTER

V

She sculled the punt toward the island with a heavy heart.  Once there,
she tied it to the larch and produced her bundle, feeling as if she
would like to drop, as she did so, an unpiratical tear.  She put the
captive on the tree.

The small lady of Lilliput stood for a moment, clutching the baby.  She
was creased and rumpled from her adventures.  Her hair was in disorder
and her mind confused.  However, when she had at last got her bearings,
she did do one thing which made up for much.  She curtsied to Maria.
Immediately afterward she spoiled the effect, by turning round and
running for dear life.

Our heroine paddled round the island despondently, noticing that the
path, which she had broken down, had been blocked up.  The brambles had
been pulled into place again, and woven together, to make a screen.

"After all," she thought, "it is my own island.  I did discover it, and
I have as much right to look about it as anybody else.  Even if I have
to turn them loose, I don't see why I should be warned off from my own
island."

So she tied to the larch again, and sat there meditating.  She wanted
to go ashore, to explore the temple, for she felt certain that there
would be interesting things to find, even, if the people stayed in
hiding.

While she was meditating, she looked at the tree, and, while she
looked, it struck her more and more that there was something queer
about it.  The roots were still on dry land, and the larch lay outward
into the lake until its top was under the surface.  The straight bole
gradually rose from the water at a gentle angle; the branches which
stuck up with their small cones had put on a summer green: and there
was a greenness along one side of the bole also, a misty curtain, like
the bright strands of the larch itself, which hung into the water.  It
was like a camouflage net.

Maria scrambled to the other end of the punt, which brought her close
enough to lift it.  Underneath, in a dock between the net and the tree
trunk, dozens of canoes were moored.  They were the best kind of canoe:
the kind in which, because they have a water-tight deck, the Eskimos
can button themselves and turn somersaults in the water, without
sinking.  The only difference was that these Lilliputian boats, which
were about eight inches long, had collapsible outriggers on both sides.
She examined them closely--they were folded back, for convenience in
mooring--and, by fiddling with the nearest one, which she took from the
water, she discovered that the outriggers ran in a slot.  By pushing
them forward and down, they could be made to fold astern like the wings
of a gull; by pulling them back and up, they were locked into position
outboard, like the legs of a "water boatman."  She did not know this at
the time, but these boats were used for fishing on the lake, and, by
throwing the outriggers into position, it was possible to play fishes
of a pound or more, without being upset.

She put the canoe at its mooring again and dropped the net.

For all I know, she thought, there are things like this all over the
island.  For instance, what about the sheep and cows?  Evidently the
People defend themselves by hiding.  The barrier of brambles is to keep
stray humans off.  I bet the bowling green was full of cows when I
arrived--that was why it was cropped short--and, while I was hacking my
way through the blackberries, everything was driven away.  So far as
that goes, what about the square door in the bottom step, the one with
a path leading to it?  I shouldn't wonder if the cattle were driven
into that.  Perhaps the step is hollowed out, for cowsheds.  Yes, and I
suppose the cradle got left behind in the hurry, and then naturally the
mother came to defend it.  If it hadn't been left, I should never have
noticed anything.

They must have sentries, continued Maria.  If I wanted time to hide
things on the island, I should post a sentry.  Then, if I saw myself
getting out a punt, I should be able to warn myself that I was coming,
with plenty of time to spare.  I bet they were hiding things from the
minute they saw me climb into the boathouse.

The best place for a sentry, she thought, looking at it, would be the
top of the cupola.

There was something on the top.  Very small, not easy to see, perhaps
lying flat on its face, there was something not much bigger than an
acorn.  It might have been the sentry's head.

Maria shook her fist at it cheerfully, for she had suddenly seen her
future plain before her.  She paddled off, feeling happy once again, to
consult the Professor for the second time that day, before Miss Brown's
headache got better.

He was translating some remarks by Solinus, and, when he saw her, he
merely raised his eyebrows thus:

?

She nodded.

"Good."

"I came about the language."

He pointed to the table.

On it, laid open at the title page, was a beautiful octavo volume in
brown calf, which was dated 1735.  It said:


  A GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE EMPIRE OF LILLIPUT,

  from its first Erection,
  through a long Series of Princes,
  with a

  PARTICULAR ACCOUNT

  of their Wars and Politicks, Laws, Learning & Religion
  their Plants and Animals,
  their peculiar Manners and Customs,
  with other Matters very curious and useful,
  to which is added

  A BRIEF VOCABULARY

  of their Language, together with its English
  Correspondencies

  By Lemuel Gulliver, first
  a Surgeon, and then a
  Captain of several
  Ships.


"It's rare," said the Professor, modestly.  "In fact, I don't suppose
there are any other copies in existence.  You will find it mentioned in
the _Travels_."

She turned to the vocabulary:

  QUINBA, s., f., a female
  QUINBUS, s., m., a male.
  RANFU-LO, s., m., no sing., the breeches.
  RELDRESAN, s., n., a secretary...


"It is not very easy to learn a language from a dictionary."

"It is all we have.  There are some idioms at the end."

So she sat down beside him, and, while he muttered about Solinus, she
muttered "the correct Modes of Address."  She was surprised to find
that the idioms were not the usual ones about "Have you (got) some
cheese?", "Is my aunt in the shop of the barber?", "Please give my pen
to the greengrocer," and so on; but were about such matters as "Pray
order me a Dish of Coffee," "Odd-so!  I have broke the Hinge of my
Snuffbox," "Come, Gentlemen, are you for a Party at Quadrille?" and
"Madam, the Chairs are waiting."




CHAPTER

VI

Miss Brown's headache had left her worse than ever.  She questioned
Maria venomously about the Algebra, cross-examined Cook, and even sent
a sharp note to the Professor, on suspicion, requesting him not to
interfere with the education of her Little Charge.  It was because
Maria had looked happy, which made the Governess think that she must
have been doing wrong.  She confided this fear to the Vicar, who agreed
that hers was a truly Christian attitude, but luckily they did not
discover anything which they could punish.

For the remainder of that week, it was nothing but exercise books and
knuckle-rapping, with Miss Brown's quick pounce of the ruler, like a
toad's tongue catching flies.  Several new tortures were invented.  One
was that Maria had to lie down for two hours every afternoon, with the
blinds half drawn and nothing to read, for the sake of her health.
This was called "having a rest."  Another was that whenever Miss Brown
pronounced the grass to be wet, which was always, she had to wear an
enormous pair of football boots, which had been bought in a jumble sale
by the Vicar.  They were too large for her, and made her feel
ridiculous, and on Sunday she had to walk up the aisle in them, wishing
that the earth would swallow her.  Miss Brown knew that children are
conservative about their clothes, and dread to seem outlandish, so she
had invented this ingenious torment in order to take advantage of
Maria's shyness.  While she was clumping up the aisle she felt that all
the choirboys would be thinking that she was too poor to have proper
boots, and Miss Brown knew this also.

There were no more strawberries for tea.

All the same, Maria was far from miserable.  She had a secret life of
her own now, thinking about her plans for the conquest of Lilliput, and
at night she stayed awake for hours, reading under the bedclothes with
Cook's electric torch.  The Professor had kindly lent her a first
edition of _Gulliver's Travels_, as well as the phrase book, and she
was learning the language.  She had a faraway look of private content,
which drove her governess half mad.  On the Monday they had a scene
about Ingratitude, in which Miss Brown stated that it was sharper than
a serpent's tooth to have a thankless child, and this brought on a new
headache, sooner than was expected.

Maria hurried down to the lake next morning.  She went by the
Professor's cottage on the way, to pick up some articles which he had
bought for her, by secret arrangement through Cook.

The passage past the brambles had been plaited up, but she forced her
way for the second time, and stood in the middle of the empty cupola
with a beating heart.

"Glonog," she said, furtively consulting a piece of paper, though she
had been repeating the sentence since the night before, "lumos Kelmin
pesso mes?"

She said this three times, in a loud, uncertain voice, hoping that the
construction would be right.  (It was meant to mean, "Please, will you
swear a peace with me?")

Almost immediately, a small man was pushed from one of the column
doors.  He was dressed in shabby clothes, and had an agitated,
determined look, as if he were sure that he was due to die for his
country.

"Glonog," shouted the man, in a high, clear voice, as you would do if
you had to hail somebody three or four times higher than your house,
"advuntos!"

She hastily produced the Professor's vocabulary, and was already
looking up "glonog" when she realized that she had said it herself.
Come, thought she, we are not getting on so badly if he begins with
"please."  So she began looking up "advuntos" and was not long in
finding it: "ADVUNTIN-TIMMY, v.i., intrans., To go away, Get out,
Remove oneself."

"You horrid little pig," she cried.  "Why should I get out, when it's
my own island?"

The little man grew pale, but stated firmly, in good English: "It has
been our Island, Ma'am, Y'r Honor, Miss, during the Course of nearly
thirty hundred Moons."

"I don't care how long it has been your island.  It was my ancestor,
the first duke, who built it.  It said so in a book in the Library,
before the books were sold."

"Indeed," said the little man, looking interested for half a second--he
was middle-aged and fattish, as if he might have been a lawyer or a
member of parliament, if he had owned some better clothes.  "It has
long been a Topick for Speculation among our Sages, to determine the
Origin or so prodigious a Structure."

"You talk English!"

"It has remain'd our second Language, Ma'am, since the Exile under
Captain John Biddel."

"Then the little woman must have understood----"

At this point their conversation was interrupted by an urchin, about
three inches high, who was pushed from the pillar, and ran to the
spokesman with a message.  There was some brief whispering, and then
the urchin went back with a dignified pace; which failed him, however,
at the end, for he ran the last few inches in a panic.

"In short, Ma'am," said the spokesman coldly--he had evidently been
told not to gossip with giants--"I am instructed by my Countrymen to
desire your Complaisance in leaving these poor Territories forthwith."

"Well," said Maria.  "I see.  Please don't be frightened when I move.
I am sitting down."

She seated herself carefully on the bottom step and leaned her elbow on
the top one, which brought her head fairly close to his, and saved him
the trouble of shouting.  The messenger drew back.

"Now," she said, "I have been talking about this business to my
Professor.  You people are hiding on the island--why?  Evidently
because you are afraid of being captured by human beings, and the
Professor says he doesn't wonder.  He says that you are only protected
by secrecy, for you could never escape us if the secret were to leak
out.  But it has leaked.  What is the good of ordering me off, when I
know it already?  The Professor says that Accident Has Delivered You
Into My Hands, and it is no good Shutting The Stable Door When The
Horse Has Bolted.  He says you may just as well make friends with me
now, so that I won't tell anybody else.  In fact, he says it is your
Only Hope."

"Ma'am..."

"And honestly," said Maria, "I won't tell anybody.  I won't even tell
Cook."

"The Accident, Ma'am..."

"Listen.  Please go and explain what he says, inside the pillar.  Tell
them that I will Defend The Secret With My Life, whether your friends
are kind to me or not.  The Professor says I am not to Threaten With
Discovery.  He says that the secret must be kept in any case, and that
any Decent Person must leave the rest to you."

"The Professor, Ma'am...."

"Your little woman knows about him.  I bet she didn't miss a word.  Now
go and talk it over, please, and the Professor says that I must Walk
About Politely while you do."

The messenger looked as if he were going to say several things at once,
but he pulled himself together, thought it over in a muddled way,
remembered the Topick which he would have liked to discuss, opened his
mouth, shut it, glanced at the pillar door, bowed, and withdrew.  At
the door, he turned, opened his mouth again, shut it, and disappeared.

Maria went round the green, with her eyes skinned, but without making
any discoveries.  She did find that there were four stone walls, about
three inches high, which divided it into fields for the cattle.  On her
other visit she had taken them for drains.  They looked as if they had
been made of rubble from the inside of the temple, which, as she was
beginning to suspect, was probably hollow.  Ants, she knew, would
sometimes eat away the furniture from inside, in tropical countries--or
perhaps it was termites--and it looked as if the People had been doing
the same thing.  At any rate, there were no houses or other buildings
of any sort, which might have given them away.

When she had finished with the green, she went and sat on the steps for
nearly half an hour, but there was no sign of the conference in the
cupola having come to an end.  So she went round the green for the
second time, visited the camouflaged dock for canoes, and took a look
at the shrubbery.  There was little to discover.  It did seem that the
lowest parts of the tangle, what we might call the undergrowth of the
forest, had paths in it, leading in various directions toward the
shore, but only a rabbit would have noticed these.  One thing she
found, and that was a robin caught by a noose of horsehair, on one of
the higher branches.  It was dead.  Maria did not mind this, as she had
no illusions about the habits of robins, and she saw that it had
evidently been caught for somebody's dinner.

After these trips she sat on the steps again, for still another half
hour, and wished very much that the Parliament would rise.

When it did rise at last, the original messenger came out alone,
looking pleased, important, and slightly out of breath.  He bowed
politely, mopped his brow with a small handkerchief, and announced that
the Professor's case was won!  If she would kindly sit here, at a safe
distance from the cowsheds, the People were prepared to show themselves.

She sat where she was told, holding her breath with excitement, and the
messenger stood beside her, as if she were his private discovery.
Wonderful things began to happen.

First the gate in the lowest step was opened, and out of this the
cattle came, each one led by a cowman holding a rope, for fear that
they should bolt on seeing Maria.  They were black cattle, like
Friesians, and, curiously enough, they showed no sign of being afraid.
Probably she was too big for them to notice.  They took her for a tree,
and left it at that.  The sheep came next, all baaing, with their lambs
bleating and frisking.  When the lambs had a drink, their tails went
round like propellers, and this could be distinctly seen.  The cattle
were about four inches high, the sheep about an inch and a half.  There
were some small sheep dogs, like something out of a Noah's Ark, which
ran round the sheep and yapped in squeaky voices, evidently enjoying
the performance very much.

When the farm animals had been promenaded round the green and driven
back for safety in the step, there came a procession of fishermen from
the same entrance.  These marched round, peeping sideways at the
Giantess, carrying paddles for the canoes, harpoons like the one with
which she had been attacked, small gaffs, and minnow rods with
horsehair lines complete.  They had leather thigh boots, tanned from
the skins of mice.

While the fishermen had been making their parade, the population of the
island had been coming from the doors in the five pillars, without
being noticed.  She turned round when the last fisherman had
disappeared, and there they were on the top step of the temple, in
hundreds.  (She found out later that there were more than five hundred.
This was a greater number than could be supported by the green, but
they lived by fishing and hunting and also by using secret pastures on
the mainland at night, as we shall see.)  When she turned round, all
the People said with one voice: "Ooo!"

They were in rags.

It was not exactly rags, when she looked closer, but poor working
clothes made of knitted wool from the sheep, and from moleskins or
mouse skins.  Some of the women had sewn themselves capes, from the
breast feathers of small birds.

They all stood gazing at her with their mouths open, and the mothers
held their children tightly by the hand, and the men stood rather in
front, in case of emergency.

Nobody knew what to do.

Finally she remembered her instructions.  She called out that she was
going to stand up, so they must not be afraid.  When she did stand,
there was another "Ooo!"  She told them to stay where they were, as she
would be back in a minute, and then she rushed to the punt to fetch her
package.  When she got back, she warned the crowd to stand away from
the middle of the pavement--some of the babies began to howl--and laid
the package in the center, only staying to undo the string.

She stood off gently, being careful to look behind her for fear of
treading on somebody, and said: "See what it is."

The lawyer, or whatever he was, was the coolest person, for he had
already passed his own fears, so he called up a team of fishermen, who
pulled back the brown paper under his directions.  Maria was interested
to see that they did not tear the paper off, but treated it with care
and admiration.  Indeed, a piece of thick cardboard covering about half
an acre seemed to them a useful article.  When it was off, the People
began to come forward slowly, hesitating between curiosity and
suspicion, and the lawyer--he was the schoolmaster really--looked at
her, to find out what was going to happen next.  She pointed to him, to
spread the presents out.  It was the silk handkerchiefs which did the
trick.  When the women saw these, they came quickly to finger them, and
to love the bright, smooth colors.  There were six three-penny ones,
from Woolworth's, of artificial silk, the thinnest kind, for ladies,
very gay.

They did not pull them about.  They spread them reverently on the step.
They were the loveliest things they had ever seen, since their
forebears had been carried off from mighty Lilliput, two hundred years
before.

Then there was the packet of needles.  The men fingered these weapons,
trying their temper and their points, with wagging heads and learned
comment.

Twopenny worth of nails were dragged aside by one party, evidently
smiths, and these rang every bar of metal with a hammer, lifting
separate nails and dropping them with the smallest clangs, pointing out
their beauty in thoughtful tones.

A packet of razor blades, the useful kind with only one edge, so that
one does not cut one's fingers when sharpening pencils, proved a puzzle
to undo.  But, when they had been undone, and their greasy paper
stripped, there was a universal cry of admiration.  For those two
hundred years and more, there had been no metal for the People, except
the rusty nails holding the laths inside the plaster dome: only these,
and six cutlasses which had come with them from Lilliput, but which
were now harpoons.

The final glory was in a paper bag.  Maria opened it herself, the
People standing back in wonder, and laid the contents out in rows.  It
was a shilling's worth of chocolate creams.

She had gone through a tussle with the Professor about these.  He, with
his giant's obsession about choosing small things for small people, had
wanted to buy an old-fashioned sweet which was sometimes used on cakes,
called Hundreds and Thousands.  They were tiny pellets of hard sugar,
colored pink or white or blue.  Maria had insisted on full-sized
chocolates.  Which would you have preferred, then: a hard piece of
sugar about the size of a toffee apple, or a chocolate cream the size
of a pram?

There was no doubt about the kind which the people of Lilliput admired.
Half the chocolates were quickly cut into slices with one of the razor
blades, and in a minute everybody was nodding his head, smiling at his
neighbor, rubbing his waistcoat, and taking another bite.

It was a pushover.

But suddenly there was a movement of dismay.  All the eaters stopped
eating the slice in their hands, all the ladies dropped tears on the
silk handkerchiefs, everybody went off into a corner of the pavement
and began to argue with the Schoolmaster.  Maria watched them with a
worried eye.

Presently the Schoolmaster came back.

"The People, Ma'am," he said awkwardly, "have call'd to Mind, that
Transactions of this Complexion were carry'd out for Currency among the
Nations of the civilized Globe.  Four hundred Sprugs, Ma'am, Y'r Honor,
Miss, were all the Treasure ever brought away from our unhappy Country,
and these we have retain'd as old Mementoes of our former Greatness...."

Maria knew about sprugs.  She had been reading the famous Travels
madly, ever since she had found the People, and she knew that these
were the golden coins of ancient Lilliput--each about the size of a
sequin or spangle.

"Goodness me," she said.  "But this is a present.  Nobody has to pay.
I robbed my money box, and the Professor bought them, and when Miss
Brown finds me out she will take my life.  We bought them for you
freely, with our love."

"A Present, Ma'am," said the Schoolmaster with unexpected pathos,
shedding a tear like the smallest dewdrop on a spider's web into his
right sleeve, "a Gift of such Magnificence, Ma'am," he shed three more,
"is, after all these Moons, is, Ma'am, Y'r Honor, Madam, Miss, is..."

And the poor fellow dissolved completely.  It was from having too many
shocks in one day.

Maria, very sensibly, turned round and left them to recover.




CHAPTER

VII

Miss Brown's headaches sometimes lasted three days, one in getting
them, one in treating them, and one in recovering from the treatment.
Consequently our heroine was able to pay the island a third visit.

It was a different affair from the others.

She had scarcely tied at the larch, noticing that the brambles had been
trained across her avenue, when the branches began to lift of their own
accord.  The passage had to be closed when she was away, for fear of
other humans, but the People had secured a number of horsehair ropes to
the trailers, and on these a picked gang of engineers was hauling
lustily.  In a minute, there was a clear road.

She bowed to the engineers and proceeded toward the temple, only to
stop dead as she reached the green.

The People were drawn up on three sides of the pavement, perfectly
silent.  Some horsehair cables had been stretched from pillar to
pillar, fluttering with little wisps of red and green and yellow
bunting.  In the center the Union Flag was flown, which she was able to
recognize as the standard of England, although the red stripes were
missing on the diagonals.  The real Union Jack did not come in until
long after Hogarth's time, although Maria did not know this fact.
Under the old-fashioned flag, a band of music was arranged.  It was a
queer, eighteenth-century band, with flutes, violins, and drums.  When
they saw her, the fat bandmaster waved his arms excitedly, and the
music struck up.  They played "The British Grenadiers!"

She stood still, while the whole tune was played twice--the tiny
horsehairs sawing away at the mouse-gut, the reeds, and they were
really rushes, twinkling gaily under ivory fingers, and the acorn drums
rolling across the square.  Then, at the last note, with an inspiration
from the memory of the female Lilliputian whom she had first captured,
Maria dropped a curtsy, with all the skill at her command.  She
remembered to do it slowly, and, as this was the first one which she
had ever wanted to make, she did a beauty.

When she lifted her head, there was a scene of wonder.  All the little
women had curtsied too, and were still down!  All the little men had
put forward their left feet, placing the other foot behind at right
angles, and were bowing to her, or, rather, as they used to say in the
old days, were "making a Leg."

Then, when they had recovered themselves with a gentle rustle, the
bandmaster whirled his stick in several complicated parabolas, the
drummers gave some terrible bangs, and the whole band countermarched to
the tune of "A Right Little, Tight Little Island," revealing the
Surprise which had been laid out behind.

It was a cask of wine with the top broached, about the size of a
tumbler; a complete bullock roasted whole, or buccaneered, and placed
on three green laurel leaves; six loaves of grass-seed bread, each one
as large as a walnut; and one of her own chocolates kept on purpose,
though they would have dearly loved to eat the rarity themselves.

They had invited her to dinner.

She was so charmed that she did not know what to say.  So she curtsied
again, a smaller one, mounted the steps in a stately manner, and knelt
down to her repast.

The wine was elderberry, better than the Professor's; the bullock had
nearly as much meat on it as a young partridge; the loaves were newly
baked and were delicious.  While she was eating, the People stood round
in tense silence, not missing a thing, but remembering carefully not to
say Ooo, and not to make Personal Remarks about the size of teeth, etc.

She had scarcely finished, and was just wondering whether she ought to
say grace or to stand up, when the Schoolmaster, who had been waiting
officiously to see that everybody behaved, waved to her to keep
kneeling.  A party of ladies was trying to make its way from the back
of the crowd with a heavy bundle, about the size of a ship's sail.  It
was a ship's sail, as we shall see.  Maria remained where she was, and
the bundle was laid before her knees.  A dozen willing hands unrolled
it.

It was a handkerchief.

The People had been as anxious to choose something coarse for her, as
the Professor had been anxious to choose something small for them, so
that this handkerchief was not so fine as an ordinary linen one would
have been.  It had more the texture of cheesecloth.  But the charming
thing about it was that a motto had been worked round the border, in
cross-stitch, like a sampler, with the finest green and yellow wool.

The motto said:

  A Humble PRESENT to Our FEMALE MOUNTAIN +
  From the CITIZENS and BOROUGH of LILLIPUT
  IN EXILE + With Hopes of Continued HEALTH
  AND PROSPERITY + GOD Save The KING +


They must have been working all night to have finished it.

Maria found that she was afflicted with the Schoolmaster's weakness.
She said: "Oh, what a lovely handkerchief!  Is it to blow my nose?"
And, without further ado, for fear that they would notice something
like a tear, she put her nose in the middle of it and blew.

It was a great success.  Everybody clapped respectfully--they had never
heard such a blow--and a little boy who began to howl was promptly
smacked.

"The final Motto," explained the Schoolmaster, "has been preserv'd in
our Archives, since the Days of Captain John Biddel.  He taught our
Ancestors to pronounce it, Ma'am, to entertain your Countrymen, and
this particular Circumstance caused us to feel the Hope that it might
prove acceptable."

"How kind of you," said Maria, wiping her eye, "how kind to think of
something which would prove acceptable to me.

"And, of course," she added, blowing her nose again, "the King will be
delighted too."

When this tender scene was at an end, the Schoolmaster explained that
he had been chosen to be her guide.  He had leave to show her anything
she wanted to see, or to explain anything she wanted to have explained,
and he trusted that their simple Oeconomy would prove to be of
Interest, however Rude.  Maria replied that she would endeavor to merit
their Confidence and Esteem--goodness, she thought, I have begun to
talk in capitals too--and she repeated to the crowd that she would keep
their secret.  They looked hopeful but wistful when they heard this
from her own mouth, not knowing Maria well enough, as yet, to be sure
that her word was her bond.  However, they were willing to make the
best of it.  To tell the truth, the thing which had impressed them most
about her had been her curtsy.  However small they were, they liked to
be treated with respect, even by a Mountain, and the politeness of
their new giant had created a favorable impression.

The first thing was to show her the national treasures.  These were few
and simple, and were housed in the highest room inside the cupola.
(Maria's only regret about the wonders of the island was that she could
never see the actual rooms in which the People lived.  They had feared
to build a town for themselves, because of the danger of discovery, and
were compelled to exist in crowded conditions inside the shell of the
temple.  Her Schoolmaster told her later that she was missing little by
not seeing the interior, for he said that it was like a tenement house,
cold and dark and drafty, but it was the best that they could safely
do.  The three steps were hollowed out, so that they were like a squat,
three-storied house, and there was a staircase leading up the inside of
each pillar.  There were 240 steps in each stair.  Inside the dome
itself, there were other rooms, and a flight of eighty steps led to the
tiny platform on the summit, where the sentry stood.  All these rooms
and staircases were only lit by small air holes through the joints of
the stone, or through the plaster of the dome, and the whole of the
lowest step was kept for cowsheds, granaries, storehouses, and the
communal kitchen.  They used charcoal for cooking, and to warm the
rooms in small pans, so that there would be no smoke to give them away.
The charcoal was got by burning laurel bushes on the mainland, in a
part of the grounds which was known to Maria as the Wilderness.  The
only decent room they had was the highest one of all, directly under
the sentry post.  It was circular, and was used for the Parliament
room, or for dances, though the floor was slightly curved, and it was
in this that the national treasures were preserved.)

Six porters carried them down, one by one, and displayed them in front
of Maria, like the assistants at an auction.  The greatest was the
ancient portrait of the Emperor of Blefuscu, full length, which is
mentioned in _Gulliver's Travels_.  There was also a chest containing
the two hundred sprugs of gold.  Maria would have loved to own just one
of these, but she did not like to ask--so that she was charmed when
they did give her one of their own accord, on her next visit.  To
complete the humble list, there was a collection of the original
clothes worn by the captives of Captain John Biddel, when he had been
exhibiting them round England.  They were threadbare, but not
moth-eaten, any more than your clothes would ever get owl-eaten, and
they consisted of a few skirted coats of blue silk, white pantaloons,
white stockings, buckled shoes, three-cornered hats, and ladies'
dresses.  Most of the musical instruments used by the band were also
national treasures.  They had been made to Captain Biddel's
instructions, and his prisoners had been forced to play upon them, to
amuse the crowds.

When these articles had been shown, the Schoolmaster told Maria the
history of the People, since the days of Gulliver.  The bystanders
listened politely, being pleased to hear their own story, however often
it had been told.

"A Student of your Talents, Ma'am," said the Schoolmaster, "and One who
has become acquainted with the earlier Annals of our Race, besides
mastering the Elements of our mother Tongue, will be aware that the
Empire of Lilliput was visited by a Man Mountain nearabout three
thousand Moons ago.  The Occurrence took Place during a Period of
Hostilities between that Empire and the neighboring Realm of Blefuscu,
from which two Nations our People here is indiscriminately sprung.

"Little may the Man Mountain have suspected, Ma'am, throughout the
Course of his subsequent Travels, and indeed to his dying Day, what
Calamities were brought upon our Ancestors by his Visit!  For no sooner
had he quitted the sister Island in his majestick Vessel, which, you
will call to Mind, had fortunately been discover'd by him in a derelict
Condition, floating with its Bottom up, than the Emperor of Lilliput
was pleas'd to declare a War against his Cousin of Blefuscu, alleging
the hostile Conduct of Blefuscu in allowing the Man Mountain to escape
from those Realms, contrary to an Embassage particularly sent from
Lilliput to restrain him, of which Island the said Mountain was a
Subject, a Nardac, and a discover'd Traytor.

"The Campaign, Ma'am, which follow'd the Declaration, was exasperated
by the old Bitterness of the Big-Endian Heresy--a Topick of Dissension,
which I am happy to say we have since resolved by a Determination to
break such Eggs as we are able to find in the Middle--and, no Quarter
being ask'd or given by either Schism, the War was signalized by
Atrocities and Inhumanities hitherto unexampled in the Legends of our
People.

"Corn Fields were burn'd, Cattle were driven away or slaughter'd, the
Cities were subjected to a Number of Sieges which reduced the
Inhabitants to Starvation, and the Emperors of both Realms died by each
other's Hands, in single Combat outside the Walls of Mendendo.  The
Anarchy which subsequently prevail'd among the Leaders of the rival
Factions, each of whom sought to draw the Power of Direction into his
own Controul, reduced the Hopes of Reconciliation still further; and it
was therefore upon a Civilization already tottering from its
Foundations, Ma'am, that Captain John Biddel descended, after a Lapse
of seventeen Moons, all of which had been devoted to Rapine and
Destruction.

"For such was the secondary Effect of our Visit from the Man Mountain,
whose Name, it was later discover'd, had been Gulliver or Gulliban.
He, Ma'am, Y'r Honour, Miss, unlike Y'r Honour, had made no Efforts to
conceal our Whereabouts from the greater World.  He had committed the
Indiscretion of confiding the Whole of our Oeconomy to the Mariners who
convey'd him Home.  He had presented a Pair of our Cattle to the
Captain of the Ship, the said Captain Biddel; and the Latter, premising
the extreme Value of their Fleeces owing to the Fineness of the Wool,
had return'd to Lilliput for his next Cargo, without finding any
Difficulty in raising the Island, by running down the Latitude.

"Captain Biddel, Ma'am, according to our Annals, was a Seaman of his
ra and Country, neither better nor worse than others of his Rank.  To
him, Ma'am, and, I must beg Leave to add with honest Gratitude that we
have found no Occasion as yet to notice such a Disposition in Yourself,
to him our broken and distrackted People were Creatures not possessed
of human Rights, nor shelter'd by the Laws of Nations.  Our Cattle were
for his Profit, because we could not defend them; our very Persons were
an Object of Cupidity, for he had determined to show us in his native
Land, as Puppet Shews and Mimes.

"Ma'am, Y'r Honour, Miss, we fled, such as could still flee, from the
Pyratts of his monstrous Vessel.  We conceal'd ourselves in Rocks and
Woods, breaking off the internecine, fratricidal Strife too late.  Our
few remaining Herds stampeded, some finding their own Destruction in
the Sea, others falling into the Hands of these unprincipled Mariners,
who joyfully collected them into Enclosures or _Corrales_, made from
the grog-barrels of their ship.  The capital City of Mendendo was
ransack'd for the last Time, in Search of Slaves, but, such had been
the Desperation of the People, even before the Arrival of Biddel, that
only thirteen Refugees were found surviving, and these promptly
empanell'd into the Possession of their future Master.  Lilliput,
Madam, and Blefuscu, ceased at that ill-fated Epocha from their
Existence among the Nations of Antiquity."

There was a sigh from the listeners when the Schoolmaster had got to
this, and he himself looked inquiringly at Maria, as if he were ready
to hear some apology.  After all, Captain Biddel had been a mountain
like her.

"Was nobody left?" she asked.

"That, Ma'am, is a Question, which has agitated the Speculations of
Lilliput in Exile.  Naturally, however, we have no Means by which to
reach a Determination.  Our Philosophers have hoped, Y'r Honour,
perhaps deceived by the delusive Dreams of Hearts which could not wish
to be entirely cut off from the remember'd Home of their admired
Progenitors, that some small Remnant of our Consanguinity survived, and
that perchance, on the old Latitude, there still exists a Lilliput
Redivivus, rebuilt, by them, in Splendour suited to the Genius of our
Kind."

"When I am rich," she said, "we will buy a yacht, and go to find them.
The Professor is making a translation of the _Hexameron_ of Ambrose,
which will make his fortune when it is published, and then we will all
go together."

The People sighed and looked away--they knew nothing about the
commercial demand for St. Ambrose--and the Schoolmaster continued his
story.  ("Fetch the Lock for the Receptacle," he said to the porters.
"We shall have Occasion for it shortly."  Later, when he was talking
about the captivity, it was displayed before her--a cheap, pewter lock
with an expression which said: Well, you won't undo me.)

"The Captives of Mendendo," said he, "included Flimnap the Treasurer
and two Gentlemen of the Rank of Snilpall, beside seven Women and three
men.  These Persons, the Ancestors of all here present, together with
the Flocks and Herds collected by the Pyratts, were taken to the
Vessel.  Captain Biddel weigh'd Anchor with a favorable Wind; and
proceeded for the distant Shores of his own Land, well satisfy'd with
future Hopes of Advancement and Prosperity.

"How miserable, Madam, was the Condition of our Countrymen, cut off
from all Recourse to the Cradle of their Fathers, disillusion'd by the
long Series of Disasters which had attended the War of Eggs, surrounded
by Beings out of all Proportion incompatible with themselves, and
convey'd, in an insanitary Box, to the Servitude of a foreign Clime!

"For Captain Biddel had caused the Ship's Carpenter to construct a
single Receptacle, whose Lock you see, for Man and Beast, in which all
together were assembled promiscuously; and there they were kept on a
Diet of Ship's Biscuit crumbled in Water, which had previously been
found to answer with the Cattle carried off by Surgeon Gulliban in
former Moons.

"Madam and Y'r Honor, I need not distress your tender Susceptibilities,
by describing the Hardships of the Voyage, during which the greater
Number of the Cattle were lost of a Murrain, nor even by dwelling upon
the Indignities to which our Forbears were subjected, after they had
landed on the alien Shore.

"Captain Biddel made Sale of his Command, anticipating a larger
Prosperity from the Exhibition of his Captives among the Fair Grounds
of the Kingdom; and, in this Manner, for more than fifteen Moons, the
High Treasurer of Lilliput, the two Snilpally, and the eight surviving
Commoners, two of whom had died on Passage, were shewn about the Wakes
and Ales of Neptune's Isle.

"Musical Instruments, Ma'am, which you have heard already, were
constructed to the Directions of their Master.  The English Language,
to them excessively difficult owing to the Inequalities of
Pronunciation, was ruthlessly impress'd upon them by the insatiable
Avarice of their Proprietor.  The ancient Skills of Lilliput, such as
Leaping and Creaping, or Dancing upon the Strait Rope, were exploited
for the Entertainment of the Vulgar.  And all the Performance, for
which the miserable Captives were rewarded with no other Guerdon than
the Lash, their Tyrant being by then accustom'd to punish Misdemeanors
by a Flogging with a Sprig of Heather, was attended by no other
Prospect of Amelioration, than the Amelioration of the Grave.  Madam,
it was under these Conditions that the Exhibits were taught to cry: God
save the King!  It was under these Conditions, Madam, that the Banner
of St. George was flown--a Climax, as we learn, to the Spectacle
promoted by the Mariner Biddel.

"These Facts, Y'r Honor," continued the Schoolmaster kindly, "are
mention'd not from any Thought of Bitterness toward yourself, but
merely as a Measure of our own Respect; for we were willing to return
your Kindness with any Exhibition calculated to divert the Species."

Maria bowed.

"Captain Biddel," he went on, "was satisfy'd in his Expectation of
Profit.  Numerous Crouds were collected on every Fair Ground by the
Reputation of his Shew; and the Exertions of the People, constantly
urged forward to greater displays of their gymnastick Abilities, soon
added a handsome Fortune to their Master's Pocket.  Captain Biddel,
Ma'am, insufficiently educated to the Temptations of a comfortable
Station, and passing his Time, as he was forced to do, among the Gin
Shops of the country Fairs, now grew addicted to the Bottle.  Perswaded
as he was that our People fear'd his Race too much to seek Escape among
them--and indeed, beside the Annoyance of their Breath, our Ancestors
were much terrify'd by the vast Faces which crouded about on every
Occasion, by the Stink of their Persons and by the bucolick
Covetousness which they exhibited--Captain Biddel had grown remiss in
locking the Receptacle at Night, particularly on those Nights, now
becoming imperceptibly more frequent, during which he had amus'd
himself with Licquor.

"The People, Ma'am, suffer'd, however, in an even greater Measure from
their Master's Tyranny, the more his Constitution was exasperated by
the Effects of this Debauchery.  The aged Flimnap, forced to perform
his dangerous Acrobaticks on the Rope, dreaded an Accident with more
Reason every Day.  The others, long dejeckted by the Toils of their
Performance and by the Menace of the Heather Whip, were accustom'd to
consider, more and more anxiously, whether Death itself, if attended by
the least Chance of Liberation, might not be preferable to the Miseries
of their Condition.

"It was at this Stage in our History that the Captain was summon'd to
the Palace of Malplaquet, in order to demonstrate his Puppets before
the Household of the reigning Duke.

"Captain Biddel, Ma'am, dined at Northampton on the Night before the
Exhibition, with more than customary Indulgence.  Proposing to himself
a handsome Remuneration from so great a Patron, attended probably by a
valued Recommendation to the World of Fashion, he celebrated his
Fortune in several Bowls of Grog.  Then, calling for his Horse and for
a final Bottle as a _Vade Mecum_, he set out for Malplaquet, where he
was to sleep that Night.

"A Bridge, Ma'am, spans the Torrent, four hundred Blustrugs to our
West, below the Other Sea."

"H'm," said Maria.  "That would be the Oriental Bridge, I suppose.  It
is the one on the Northampton Avenue, at any rate."

"It was at this colossal Structure, Madam, or so our Histories relate,
that Captain Biddel fell Victim to Intoxication, and dismounted from
his Nag to seek the Safety of the _Terra Firma_, on which he instantly
composed himself to Slumber.

"The People, in their horrid Receptacle, which was strapp'd, as usual,
to the Horse's Crupper, and whose Lock he had omitted to turn, came out
upon the Saddle to survey the Night, the Horse meanwhile being content
to graze at Ease beside its Owner.  It was a moonlit Eve.  The Torrent
could be plainly seen, issueing from the Other Sea, and all about the
Land appear'd deserted.  The Resolution to escape was taken on the
Spot, all solemnly asseverating their desperate Intention to perish by
their own Hands, rather than submit to Capture.

"Cables were rapidly made fast, the Strait Ropes of their Exhibition
proving suitable.  The Sheep and Cattle, slung from these, were quickly
lower'd to the Ground.  And the Receptacle itself, being unstrapp'd
with Difficulty, was also taken down.  It was the Plan of Flimnap to
transport his little World by Sea, until some Refuge on the further
Shores could be discover'd.

"I will not, Madam, tire you further with the Tale of our Migration.
Towing the Receptacle against the Stream, the Torrent was surmounted.
The quiet Waters of the Other Sea permitted the driven Cattle to be
embark'd within it, and all together made their Way by Navigation to
the eastern Bank; where, as the Morning dawn'd, the Expedition was
conceal'd beneath the overhanging Branches of a prodigious Tree.  Some
slight Attempts at Search were noticed during the Hours of Daylight
from this Refuge, but without Commotion.  It was conjectured that the
bemus'd Biddel, having been addled since his Setting Out, might not
retain the slightest Recollection of his Actions, and might retrace his
Steps at least toward the Tavern where he dined, still seeking the
Receptacle along his Way.  Next Evening, shelter'd by the Darkness, our
Ark, as we may call it, having been hoisted with incredible Pains along
the Cascade to the Upper Sea, a Scout, who had been sent ahead in Order
to survey the Country, return'd with Informations about the secret
Island where we have ever since continued, and on which, Y'r Honour,
Madam, Miss, you stand today."




CHAPTER

VIII

Maria could not help feeling relieved when the History was over.  Her
head was buzzing with capital letters, and she secretly thought that it
was more fun to ask questions, instead of listening to lectures.  She
was also doubtful about being called "Ma'am, Y'r Honour, Miss," knowing
that her proper name was Maria, and she was determined to keep the
proceedings on a less formal level.  The best thing would be to get
away with the Schoolmaster, so that they could talk to each other
sensibly, instead of being a public meeting.

On the other hand, she saw at once that there would be a difficulty
about exploring with her guide, since even the most versatile human
would find it complicated to go for a walk with a person who did not
reach much further than her ankle.  For one thing, there was the
problem of taking steps.  One step of hers would have covered about
twelve steps of his, so he would have been forced to run very fast to
keep up.  But she did not like to suggest the idea of carrying him.
There was something babyish about being carried, and she did not want
to humiliate him; for she had a certain amount of good taste, in spite
of being only ten.  She was also afraid of holding him, for fear of
squeezing too much, and she guessed that he would be afraid of being
dropped.

Maria had finished her elderberry wine while listening to the History.
She now suggested that, if he were going to show her round, he might
prefer to stand in the barrel, as seamen do in the crow's-nest of a
man-of-war, while she carried it in her hand.  He was delighted with
the scheme, which saved him from being mauled by the big fingers, and
which left him his dignity.  While she washed the barrel in the lake,
and dried it with the remains of her handkerchief--not the new one--he
dispersed the crowds in a short address, advising them not to stare,
and not to get trodden on.  With the Schoolmaster in the barrel, there
was a good deal more to see as they went round the green, and of course
there were a number of questions to be asked.

One of the things which she had not discovered before was the
underground rat stable, hidden by a part of the shrubbery.

No horses had been brought from Lilliput.  Gulliver had not troubled to
do so, and Captain Biddel had not been able to obtain any, because the
final wars had almost destroyed the breed, in cavalry battles.  The
people of Lilliput in Exile had therefore been forced to turn to the
rats of their adopted country, which were used for farm work at harvest
times and for carrying urgent messages on the mainland.  They were
swift, but not stayers, when ridden; for farm work they were strong and
intelligent.  The Schoolmaster said that they were not vicious when
taken young or bred in captivity, that they were cleverer than the
other domestic animals, and that they were not dirty when properly
groomed.  They were fed on the scraps of the community.  Several were
brought for her inspection, and promenaded in a circle on the lead
rein.  They were always ridden on short leathers, as jockeys do for
flat races nowadays, because of the shortness of their legs.

She wanted to know about the food of the People: about the way they
lived, their enemies and dangers, and about all the other things which
her guide insisted on calling Oeconomy.

One thing which interested her was that they ate a good many insects,
and that they kept the green fly, as the ants do, for syrup.  The
difference was that the ants thought of these creatures as cows, while
the Lilliputians thought of them as bees.  She did not like the idea of
eating insects, at first, but when she remembered that the Professor
had told her how a lobster was practically an insect, she began to see
that there was not much difference.  The Schoolmaster told her that his
people used to boil wood lice just as we boil lobsters, and that they
turned red when boiled, and gave people bad dreams.

As for keeping the toy cattle and getting food for five hundred people
on the green, she learned that the colony owned a proper frigate as
well as the canoes--he was taking her to see it--and that, in this,
they carried cows to pasture on the mainland every night.  Indeed, the
whole life of Lilliput was really a night life--he explained that
talking to her in the daytime was like staying up late for them--and
they gathered their harvests of Yorkshire Fog or Rye Grass or Cock's
Foot, for flour, by cutting them in the Jubilee Field, under a harvest
moon, and bringing them back in the frigate.  They also fished at
night.  In the winter the frigate was used as a whaler, to catch pike,
because the winter was the main season for living on fish.  This also
was done at night.

The Lilliputians had trappers.  These brave men would go off on long
treks into the Park, sometimes being away for a moon, and would come
back with stores of furs or salted meats.  They trapped voles, shrews,
mice, and even live rats, but were in constant danger from cats and
weasels.  Every year, one or two of the bravest hunters failed to
return.  Many of them had been able to snare rabbits; but then they
needed to be in bands, to carry back the meat.

One of the foods which they valued most was the leg of a frog, which
was eaten, like turkey, for Christmas.

The grass snakes, which are perfectly harmless and beautiful to us,
were dangerous to the Lilliputians, because, like boa constrictors,
they were inclined to eat any animal the size of a frog, on the rare
occasions when they were hungry.  On the other hand, they were good to
eat themselves.

In the winter, when times were hard, the trappers sometimes caught wild
ducks on the lake, by leaving baited hooks firmly secured, and of these
they often had mallards, tufted duck, pochard, and teal.  The coots and
dabchicks gave bad meat.  Even in the winter, the difficulty of the
season was relieved by the greater length of the nights, which left
more time for hunting.

Maria's Schoolmaster told her that an interesting experiment had been
tried in the lifetime of his father.  It had been nothing less than to
use the birds of our world as airplanes.  A young jackdaw had been
found, too young to fly, and had been kept alive with difficulty, on
insects and sliced worms.  It had grown up tame, though snappish, but
had at first refused to fly at all.  They had been forced to starve it,
and finally to drag it to the top of the cupola, with its wings
brailed, and then the man who usually fed it on a lure, as falconers
do, had waved the lure energetically from the ground.  Finally somebody
had pushed it off, and it had flown to be fed.  When it had grown
accustomed to flight, and had got some power in its wings, a strap had
been fitted round the base of each wing, and under and over the breast,
and the daring aeronaut had sat on its back for some time every day,
gripping the strap, which had loops, like stirrups, for the feet.  Of
course, it had been kept tethered all the time, except for meals.  The
aeronaut had been forced to pad himself, as people do who are teaching
Alsatians to be police dogs, because it was inclined to peck at him,
over its shoulder.  In the end, he had flown on it several times, from
the top of the cupola, but the experiment had collapsed on the question
of navigation.  They had found that it was possible to make the bird
fly in circles, or to left or right, by means of a bridle in its mouth,
if used with a light hand.  But they had never discovered a way to make
it start flying, or stop flying, when wanted.  So all flights on it had
been in the nature of balloon ascents, which might come down anywhere,
and the enterprise had been dropped.

In spite of Maria's efforts to keep him talking about the jackdaw
bomber, which was an idea that interested her, the Schoolmaster seemed
to be ashamed of it, perhaps because it had been a failure, and was
more anxious to lecture about his politics.

There were few laws, he said, but a good deal of public opinion, and
there was no death penalty.  There were no wars, owing to the fortunate
circumstance that there was nobody to have a war against.  Writers and
bards and musicians were rightly regarded as mechanics, like
carpenters, and were valued, like carpenters, for the soundness of
their work.  There was no revealed religion, because it had been
destroyed by the War of Eggs.  The mothers were considered to be the
heads of their families.  They believed that the most important thing
in the world was to find out what one liked doing, and then to do it.
Thus the people who liked being hunters, were hunters; those who liked
fishing, fished; and anybody who did not like doing anything at all was
supported by the others with the greatest care and commiseration, for
they considered him to be the most unfortunate of mortals.

They had three meals a night.  They went to bed at dawn and rose at
sunset.  Their children were never taught a word about Algebra, but
were, on the contrary, educated in the various sciences of life: that
is to say, in Natural History and in their own History and in Oeconomy
and in anything else which dealt with being alive.  They were never
told that their elders were better than themselves.

Maria could not help feeling that these things sounded wonderful, but
she wanted most of all to see the frigate.

The usual way to reach it was along one of the secret paths through the
undergrowth of brambles.  Unfortunately, it was a path which she could
not follow.  So they went down to the punt and sculled round the
island, to reach it from outside.

It was beautifully hidden.

The channel leading to its harbor was covered with the leaves of water
lilies, just like the other lilies round the island, but these leaves
were without stems.  They were merely flat plates floating on the
water, and were renewed once a week.  When the frigate was to sail,
they were dragged aside.

At the end of the channel there was a bluff of land which masked the
dog-legged entrance to the harbor, and the bushes grew above.  She had
been round the island many a time without discovering it.  It was only
after following the channel, under her Schoolmaster's directions, that
she raised the harbor mouth.

There lay the frigate in her quiet pool.  She had gun ports but no
guns, no foundry nor gunpowder being available on the island; her
cordage was of plaited horsehair stolen from the horses in the Jubilee
Field; her canvas was the same as the presentation handkerchief; her
Admiral was the tall young husband who had tried to chase her when she
first secured his wife and baby; and all the sailors, as a compliment,
had gone down by the other path, to man the shrouds.




CHAPTER

IX

It was a week after seeing the frigate for the first time that Maria
was invited to witness a grand whale hunt, at night.  It was not only
safer to go by night, when Miss Brown was in bed, but also it was more
natural to see the Lilliputians at this season, because they slept by
day.

Maria waited in her bedroom, in a fever of impatience to be gone, but
she knew that her governess and the Vicar were sitting in Neptune's
Temple, over an after-dinner cup of coffee.  She could see their
motionless figures in the moonlight through her window, two small dots
squatting under the silver columns, for the Temple had been built to
finish one of the Vistas from the palace itself.  What made it worse
was that the whales of Lilliput were pike, and these fish would only
take the bait at mysterious periods, which they chose for themselves.
One of these periods had been reported to be passing that evening, for
the People had noticed the small roach slapping from the water to save
their lives, which was an infallible sign that pike were feeding.  They
had promised to catch a big one for her, if they could, for there was a
famous monster of twenty pounds, which had been seen in the deepest
hole.  She walked up and down the linoleum of her bedroom, afraid to
lie down for fear that she might go to sleep, and wished her pastor and
mistress at the bottom of the lake.

The Vicar was a constant visitor at Malplaquet, generally for tea.  In
the afternoon she would meet him in the grounds, humming his way from
the Vicarage, his body stiff, his hands behind his back, moving at a
slow and steady pace with his lips pursed up in disapproval.  It was a
mystery to discover why he came, for he seldom spoke to Miss Brown when
he was there, and did not enjoy what he ate.

At tea they would sit on either side of the fireplace in the
North-northwest Drawing Room, with one of those pagoda-like cake stands
between them, and a low table with the silver tea things.  Sometimes
they said nothing.  At most they said eight sentences: "This bread is
cut too thick," "I will speak to Cook," "More tea?", "Thanks," "Cake?",
"Thank you," "The child was late for luncheon again to-day,"
"Inconsiderate."  Miss Brown used to eat three cream buns greedily,
with a fork, but the Vicar used to choose the nastiest cake on the
pagoda, apparently to spite himself.  After tea, he would walk
mysteriously for hours through the palace rooms.

So there they were on the steps of Neptune's Temple, in the lovely
moonlight, while the precious time was slipping away.  It was the
famous Temple in which Dr. Johnson had written the fourth stanza of his
immortal _Pomphoilugoppaphlasmagoria_, the one which begins "Ponder the
aweful Hippopotamos"--but little they cared for this.  It was June and
the nightingales of Malplaquet were in full voice.  They did not hear
them.  Six fluted columns rose on either side, bearing the pediment on
which Neptune, in high relief, was awarding a wreath of seaweed to
Viscount Torrington, after the battle of Cape Passaro, amid the
applause of several dolphins.  They had never looked at it.  Before
them, on the silver sward of the Arcadian Valley, the thousand wild
rabbits of Malplaquet were nibbling and hopping forward and nibbling
again, while the owls hunted food for their babies, gliding with
soundless feather.  The Vicar and Miss Brown stared out with oyster or
pebble eye, to where the towering pillar of the Newton Monument closed
the sweet curve of the valley with its slender finger, glittering like
salt under the moon; but they did not see this either.

They were thinking about Maria, just as she was thinking about them,
and they had reason to do so.  There was something which they did not
want her to find out, but which they wanted to find, or rather to
alter, for themselves.  They did not like the idea of her talks with
the Professor--who was an authority on ancient laws and enjoyed nothing
better than a good bout of _nolle prosequi_--because their mystery was
connected with a missing parchment, concerning the inheritance of
Malplaquet.  The Vicar was humming softly.

"It is a question of _mort d'ancestre_," he said at last.

"No child could understand it."

"She will come of age."

"Not for many years."

"But by talking to the old man, Miss Brown?"

"I shall forbid it."

"M-m-m-m-m."

"More coffee?"

A long time afterward the Vicar said: "You should watch her."  Then he
stood up heavily, and paced off sullenly to bed.

Maria crept down the moonlit corridor, as soon as her governess was
safely asleep.  Down the various staircases she went, creaking on the
bare boards of the less important ones, patting on the bare marble of
the company ones, passing from one bar of moonlight to another.  On the
ground floor she took a short cut through the Grand Ballroom, where her
feet shuffled in the fallen plaster from the Adam ceiling, and the
three-ton chandeliers, too big to sell, gave out a mysterious note of
crystal; through the Third Duke's Library, which had a monstrous
plaster Garter on the ceiling, in gold relief, in celebration of the
Order of the Garter which that duke had at last obtained after twenty
years of chicanery--and which he had subsequently worn round his neck,
even while bathing at Brighton; through the Main Dining Room she went,
which had once housed a mahogany table exactly as long as a cricket
pitch; through the Little Drawing Room, where the two Grinling Gibbons
mantelpieces had been wrenched from the walls to sell, leaving caverns
which looked frightening at night; and through the Absolutely
Insignificant Morning Room, which was a room with only one fireplace,
and that was plain marble.  Maria passed from dark to light, from light
to dark, down the rows of shuttered windows, until she began to look
like a cinema film, flickering badly.  She went too slowly for the
Persistence of Vision.  At last she came to the great double doors
which led to the South Front, hauled them open enough to let herself
through, and appeared in full moonshine between two colossal stone
caryatids, with an antique frieze, stolen by the Fourth Duke from
Herculaneum, thirty feet above her head, and the forty-five marble
steps which led to the Terrace stretched below her feet.

She had been thinking.

Whatever the Professor says, she thought, I don't see why I should not
give presents to the People, since they give presents to me.

She had found out that the silk handkerchiefs had been distributed by
tickets in a lottery, since there had only been enough material to make
dresses for about twenty women.  The rest had been forced to go without.

If I were rich, she thought, and could afford to live in some
respectable little cottage with a bit of money in hand, how I would
like to dress them all!  I would give the men old-fashioned dresses
like the ones their ancestors had: blue coats and canary waistcoats and
white breeches and silk stockings and tiny swords!  And the women
should have flowered gowns of the same century, and I would get coaches
made for them which the rats could draw, or even sedan chairs, and all
would look as bright and beautiful as a bed of flowers....

Alas, Maria only had three shillings and ninepence half-penny left.  It
would not even buy enough handkerchiefs to dress the other women.

One thing, she thought, cheering up, is that I can scrounge things for
them from Cook.  An old saucepan with the handle broken off might be of
value to them, as a boiler for the farm animals.  I must think of all
the broken things which are of no more use to humans, but which might
be treasures to the People: things like used toothbrushes, for brooms,
or jam jars for barrels, or even an ounce or two of salt and pepper,
which would go far and scarcely be missed.  But the three and ninepence
halfpenny must be kept, for a special present, and what is that to be?

Presents can be of two kinds, she decided, flickering once more as she
trotted down the chestnut avenue: Either they can be useful, or else
ornamental.  How I wish I had some real money, say a pound!

She was still considering as she sculled the punt toward the Repose,
and had only got so far as this: A useful present would be to buy them
a pair of guinea-pigs to breed draught horses, or even for meat, while
an ornamental present would be to purchase Christmas cards--so long as
they were not sloppy, but showed pictures of sailing ships, or of
eighteenth-century coaches in the snow, or of anything else which the
People could recognize from their Annals--and to frame these in passe
partout, so that they could be hung round the walls of the council
room.  In the middle, they would hang the ancient portrait of the
Emperor, with his _Austrian_ lip and costume partly _Asiatick_, partly
_European_.  They might look grand by rushlight, hoped Maria.

And then she thought again: Or I could teach them to grow potatoes,
like Sir Walter Raleigh.  You could probably get plenty of potatoes for
three and nine.

The People were relieved when she arrived, for they had almost given
her up.

The frigate was on the lake--how beautiful she looked, too, with her
white sails spread in the silver light--and the sailors were at their
stations, and they were only waiting for their guest to let the
expedition begin.

The sad thing was that she could not go in the ship.  It was hardly
five feet long.  However, they advised her to stand in the punt at the
end of the larch, to watch from there, and the Schoolmaster offered to
be carried in the barrel, so that he could explain the maneuvers.

The Quincunx was so overgrown that it was only in the deepest parts,
near the middle, that it was free from weeds--for most water weeds,
except duckweed, need roots in the bottom, and these cannot grow below
a certain depth.  It was in the largest of these holes that the big
pike lived, and it was consequently to these latitudes that the frigate
sailed.  When she had got there, a live bait with the appropriate hooks
was thrown over from the bows, and the frigate herself sailed to the
nearest lilies, where she anchored in deep water.  The live bait was on
an eight-ply cable of horsehair, which came in through a hawser in the
bows and went over a drum which could be braked.

She had scarcely anchored, and the poor live bait was still wriggling
in a baitly way, when there was a snap and swirl in the water.  The
drum was allowed to run out while Maria's Schoolmaster excitedly
counted ten; then the brake was thrown into gear and the drum crew
rapidly began to wind against it, to drive the hooks home.  After a
dozen of these turns, they put her out of gear and used the brake.

The whole frigate went ahead two or three feet from her moorings--the
Schoolmaster said that it was thirty-five glumgluffs--and began yawing
one way or the other as the monster tugged.  It was given a freedom on
the brake when it struggled too hard, but at any sign of weakening the
brake was increased, while, if it lay motionless for a moment, the crew
began to wind.

The Admiral directed from the poop.

It was a ticklish business in many ways, for the pike was really being
played, not from the frigate, but from her anchor.  There were two
holds which needed attention, instead of one.

After the first minute, the Schoolmaster said sadly that it was not the
big pike.  He had been able to tell from the splashing, to some extent,
for the big one would have been more sullen, and also from the working
of the ship.  He added that he thought she would prove to be of about
four hundred snorrs, or nine pounds, at which weight they were usually
fierce.

The real danger was that the pike's teeth might cut the cable.  They
needed a metal cable at the end, like a fisherman's trace, but there
was no suitable wire to be found in the Park.  The barbed wire used by
the farmer who rented the land was much too thick.

When the monster had been played for about two minutes, it began to
give in.  It was towed slowly to the ship's side, made one more dart to
get away when it saw its captors, was brought in again, and this time
actually rolled right over in the water before it lay on its side,
looking vanquished.  It was far from being so.  Pikes have great
vitality, with which they live for hours even after they are on the
bank, and the real difficulties of whaling were only beginning.

As soon as the gleaming body was stretched beside the frigate, five
picked harpooners set to work.  The harpoons were driven deep into its
back at intervals of six inches or so, and, by means of the ropes
attached to these, it was drawn firmly to the ship's side.  Then the
Admiral came down from the poop--he always took the last hazard
himself--and went over the side on a rope ladder with the sixth
harpoon.  His business was to drive it through the backbone, near the
head.

Now the pike had grown furious as each harpoon drove home, threshing
with a great clap on the water at each thrust.  If the Admiral could
find a joint in the backbone at the first blow, its spinal column would
be cut and the danger would be over.  If not, there was a good chance
of his being thrown into the water by the commotion, where he would run
the risk of being snapped up by the pike itself, for these ferocious
creatures would grab at food even as they were dying, and would
sometimes seize the bait again, if they had escaped from it.

He chose his place and thrust.  The huge body, more than half the
length of the ship, bent like a bow, opening its wide jaws, with row on
row of skinny teeth.  Then it lay slack.

Three of the harpoon cables were drawn up on either side of the vessel,
and the sinking body was secured by these, under her bottom, before she
sailed for home.  The passage of water through its gills made the fish
lively as she sailed, but the severed spine prevented it from making a
flurry.  All it could do was to clash its jaws, which, as the
Schoolmaster told Maria, was often felt through the ship's fabric.

In the meantime, the cables were sent ashore.  A team of rats, and
twenty men on each cable, dragged the still gnashing body through the
shallow water to the bank, where the flensing could begin.  The Admiral
drove his rapier, tempered from one of the cupola nails, into its brain.

Maria paddled round, to see the capture brought in.  She wanted to help
with the victory, and was so excited that she nearly trod on the
haulers, as the rats strained wisely at the seven ropes, under whips
which cracked with a noise she could have made between her finger
nails.  She cried:

"Here, give it to me!  Let me pull!  I can get him out!"  She snatched
several of the cables to tug, and each one broke in her hand.  She was
too big for them.  The many small fists could control the horsehair,
which only snapped in hers.  The dead fish sank heavily beneath the
water-lilies, and was lost.  The precious harpoons would have to be
dived for.  She stopped when she saw what she had done, and the People
tried to be polite.




CHAPTER

X

Maria's misfortunes with the Island of Repose dated from the night on
which she had interfered with the whale hunt.  Although she was decent,
as was shown by her offer to carry the Schoolmaster in the barrel, she
was still young.  The more she adored and wondered at the doings of her
six-inch People, the more she wanted to take control of them.  She
wanted to play with them, like lead soldiers, and even dreamed of being
their queen.  She began to forget what the Professor had said, about
not being an owner.

But the Lilliputians were not toys.  They were grown up, however short
they were, and they were civilized.  Lilliput and Blefuscu had been
countries of high civilization; and so had England been in the
eighteenth century, when they had been brought to it by Captain Biddel.
They had painters, who did wonderful formal pictures of old-fashioned
shepherds and shepherdesses in pannier skirts and ribbons, painted on
stretched puff-ball skins.  They had poets who still wrote the original
meters of their native land.  These latter had found the heroic couplet
too cumbrous for them in English, so they wrote the smaller verses of
the other language: a highly polished form of poetry.  The first words
of the line rhymed as well as the last ones, and, as there were seldom
more than two words in a line, or four lines in a poem, it was not easy
to write.  This was one of their love poems:

  Mo Rog
  Glonog,
  Quinba,
  Hlin varr.

It meant: "Give me a kiss, please, Miss.  I like your nose."  Other
writers produced Tragedies of five scenes, which observed the Unities,
and these were acted by the opera company in the top room of the
monopteron--where there was a miniature harpsichord in the orchestra,
sounding like the ghost of a ghost, which had been made to the order of
Captain Biddel.  Still others were famous for their Essays, which were
seldom more than two lines long, and generally on a moral subject.
"Nothing fails like Success" was one of the Essays; another was
"Narclabb meeting an Ass with a fortunate Name, prophesy'd Success.  I
meet many Asses, but none have fortunate Names."

In short, although, as we shall see later, the People lived hardy and
dangerous lives, they were cultured, and could not possibly be treated
like lead soldiers.  For that matter, they had hidden on the island to
escape this very fate.

However, Maria lost grip of herself, and she now proceeded on the road
to ruin with the speed of a Rake's Progress.

The first mad thing she did was to make a favorite.  This was a
beautiful but silly young fisherman, who was too stupid to mind being
carried about all day, to the detriment of his fishing.  He felt
distinguished when chosen to be the man in the barrel, and did not
dislike being used as a toy, because he was a vain fellow in any case.
(The Schoolmaster, on the other hand, had gone on strike soon after the
incident of the pike flensing.)  Maria devoted herself to the new
favorite, began carrying him in her hands instead of the barrel, and
even carried him in her pocket.  She took him with her everywhere.
Once she took him to sleep in the small drawer of her dressing table,
which was dangerous so far as Miss Brown was concerned, and bad for his
character also, because it made the other Lilliputians look down on
him.  She would sit for hours in the pasture field on the other side of
the Quincunx, inventing exciting stories and making him act them for
her.  Occasionally she kidnaped one or two others, to act with him,
which annoyed them, although it flattered him.  She began to grab and
snatch like a rough baby greedy for toys, which generally get broken in
the process, saying, "No, no.  Do this.  Do that.  You be the conquered
enemy and I will be General Eisenhower.  Give it to me.  I will be the
Queen and you can be my subjects."

There were no more welcomes when she visited the island.  The People
began to have a worried look, and to hide when she came.

The next craze which she got into her head was for toy airplanes.  She
had been so delighted by the story of the jackdaw bomber, in spite of
the Schoolmaster's diffidence about it, that she borrowed twopence from
Cook and persuaded the Professor to buy a model for her in Northampton,
with a propeller worked by elastic.  It was a cheap and nasty one,
having cost only 3/11, but it looked as if it would carry the
fisherman.  She just had sense enough to realize that it would need
ailerons, tail plane, and rudder, but there was an old copy of the
_Illustrated London News_ in Miss Brown's drawing room, which had a
diagram of these controls.  She helped herself to this, and called a
meeting of the reluctant Lilliputians, to plan the conquest of the air.
She flew the model for them several times, with the usual stall and
crash landing on its propellor, and explained how they would have to
make the ailerons according to the diagram, as the work was too fine
for her fingers.

The Schoolmaster refused to help.  He pointed out that an elastic which
lost its power after forty seconds was useless for practical purposes,
as it would scarcely take the machine across the lake; that there would
have to be a gang waiting after each short hop to wind it up again;
that the fisherman did not know how to use the controls in the picture;
and finally that it was a conspicuous object, while their whole mode of
life in the Repose depended on concealment.  Maria said that she was
bigger than they were, and that it had to be done.

They were flatly refusing, when the young fisherman said that he would
do the carpentry himself.  He felt the importance of a favorite, and
the grandeur of flying in an airplane had gone to his head.  The others
had to give in.  But they avoided Maria completely after that, leaving
her and the poor coxcomb to arrange the affair in their own way.  The
Schoolmaster made one awkward attempt to read her a lecture--but she
laughed, and would not listen.

It was only because she was inexperienced and had not thought, not
because she was a bully.  Besides, she was on fire with her dream of a
tiny airplane really flown, and she scarcely noticed the reactions of
other people.

The fisherman made the new controls beautifully, using horsehair for
the wires and sailcloth stretched on twigs of silver birch to make the
various flaps.  When it was finished, it looked like the first flying
machine built by the brothers Wright, except that it was a monoplane.
He had to sit on this plane, as the Wrights did, with his legs
stretched nearly straight in front.

The great day came for flying it, and the pilot was ready to win
immortal fame.  Both of them were too enthusiastic to think.

It would not rise from the ground, because of the long grass in the
Jubilee Field, but ran in circles, buzzing and skidding on its wings,
before it turned upside down.  Fortunately the propeller missed the
pilot as he was thrown clear.

They tried the controls anxiously, wagging them with the control
column, and the horsehair to one of the ailerons had snapped.  This was
replaced.  They chattered as they worked to fix it, agreeing that Maria
was to launch the next flight from her hand, as she had done when
showing how it flew.

"Are you ready?"

"Yes, Y'r Honour."

"Are you sure you will be all right?"

"Yes, yes!"

She let it go, and he was off.

It went straight for the ground at her feet, pulled out of the dive
when within an inch of crashing, skimmed along faster and faster less
than six inches from the grass, with its port wing down, rose with a
great zoom when it was twenty yards away, and, at an altitude of twenty
feet, turned upside down.

The pilot was still falling, a crumpled mass like a shot partridge,
when a gust lifted the starboard wing.  The machine slewed sideways and
down with a sickle swoop, landed on its wing tip, shed the wing, and
lay there thumping feebly as the elastic tried to turn.

He meanwhile had been falling a-sprawl.  Before the airplane struck, he
had hit the ground.

To a man who was six inches high, one of Maria's human feet represented
twelve.  Twenty of her feet would have been two hundred and forty of
his.  That was the fall he had.

Her heart rose to her neck, turned over there, and plunged into her
stomach.  Her blood began to fizz and her fingers to tingle and the
bones vanished from her legs.  She started to run, wishing she could
turn back time, wishing she could unhappen the awfulness of now.

She had not marked him, and could not find him in the grass.

She ran round searching madly, beating the scutch with her hands; then
stood still in agony, realizing that she might have trodden on him.
When she was still, she could hear him groan.  He was stretched beside
a tussock with only one leg!  Or with his other leg twisted under him
horribly!  His face was white, but oh, he must not be dead!

If he had been a human, even from twenty feet, he might have killed
himself; from two hundred and forty, he certainly would have done so.
But bones are made of much the same material, whatever one's size is,
and this is why the small creatures like rats and cats can fall from
greater heights than we can.  They have less weight to fall, and so the
bones are stronger in proportion.

Maria knelt beside him, not knowing what to do, or how to bear the
pathetic noise he was making.  He had certainly broken his leg, even if
nothing else was broken.  She tried to remember what little she knew
about first aid.  People who had broken their backs ought not to be
moved, and fox hunters who had broken their legs, she remembered, were
sometimes carried home on gates.  She felt that she could not dare to
decide.  Suppose his back were broken?  How was she to find out without
moving him?  All the time, in another part of her mind, she was trying
not to let it have happened.

They had told her not to, but she had insisted.  She had let the game
run away with her, not noticing that it was growing rougher; and now
she was awake from the mad dream, with one of the beautiful People
broken, perhaps killed.  It came over her like doom.

The responsibility and the distress were too much.  She began running
back to the lake, to get help.  After a few yards, she feared that she
might not remember exactly where he lay.  She went back to find him,
knelt again, and touched him with her finger.

The touch cleared her head.  Whether I am guilty or not, she thought, I
must get him within reach of aid as quickly as I can.  His leg ought to
be set, but I could not do it daintily enough, nor could I make small
splints, nor even, she added with a sob, make any.  I must not sob, but
I must carry him to the Repose without jerking him.  If I keep my hand
quite flat and steady, it will do for a gate.

The horror of lifting him to the palm of her hand and of straightening
the leg as he groaned unconsciously, for he seemed to have concussion;
the nightmare walk to the lake, like some dreadful egg-and-spoon race;
the paddling of the punt with one hand to the island; all these were
got through somehow.

There was nobody in the Temple.

She called, deathly white, but nobody would answer.  She was sure he
was dying.  She found a large rhododendron leaf for a stretcher, and
edged it under him.  She made a mattress by folding her handkerchief
and laid the stretcher on it, under the middle of the dome.  "He must
be helped," she said.  "You must come."

The Schoolmaster did come, from one of the pillar doors, and pointed
silently for her to go.  She went, and as she disappeared the stretcher
party came to carry off the murdered man.  Halfway across the lake, she
laid her paddle down to howl--then sculled away, looking exactly like a
retrieving puppy which had eaten its pheasant instead of retrieving it.




CHAPTER

XI

Professor was busy with Camb. Univ. Lib. Ii. 4.26, and was stuck on the
first leaf with _Tripharium_.  He had looked it up in Lewis and Short,
to no avail, and had also tried to verify it in a charter-hand
manuscript called Trin. Coll. Camb. R. 14. 9 (884), where he had found
_Triumpharion_, partly scratched out.  This had made confusion worse
confounded.

He motioned the retrieving puppy to his soapbox absently, as it slunk
into the cottage with its tail between its legs, and observed: "It says
_Hujus Genus Tripharium Dicitur_, but the trouble is that a part of the
line seems to have been erased."

"I came about something terrible."

"Murder?"

"It might be," said the puppy, blushing all over.

"Whom have you murdered?  The Vicar, I hope.  The word has evidently
proved a stumbling block to other scribes, who either evade it by
omitting the sentence, or make wild guesses, or, as in this case,
resort to some erasure and to complete obscurity.

"He was an unpleasant man," he added.  "I never liked him much."

"It is a man from Lilliput that I have murdered."

"Indeed!  Just fancy!  _Tripartitum_ is a possibility, of course, but
one hardly cares to divagate so widely from a lucid script."

"The People are arranging never to see me again."

"So long as they will arrange it themselves," he said kindly.  "One has
so many calls on one's time, so many little annoyances like this stupid
_lapsus calami_ I was telling you about.  I suppose I shall have to
write to Sir Sydney Cockerell or to Dr. Basil Atkinson.  Even perhaps
to Mr. G. C. Druce."

"But you must help!"

"No," he said firmly.  "I cannot spare the time.  On any other day, my
dear Maria, but not just now.  What with Ambrose and Ctesias the
Cnydian, one scarcely knows which way to turn."

She pulled herself together, took away his manuscript, and put it in
one of the bookshelves, upside down.  He winced to see this done.

"Do you know what I have been talking about?"

He took off his spectacles and looked at them painfully, with watery
eyes.  He did not know at all.

He said: "I can remember every word.  You were telling me that you had
murdered the Vicar, and a good job too.  How did you dispose of the
body?"

She told her story carefully from the beginning, how she had ruined the
whale hunt and bullied the People and probably killed the fisherman in
her wretched bungee airplane.

"Dear me," he said, when she had finished.  "But this is very
inconvenient."

He considered for some time, then went over to the bookshelf and turned
his manuscript the right way up.

"You know," he said, "it could easily be some monkish mistake for
_Trivialis_, a common species, except that they seem to have attached
particular value to lions--the sentence refers to lions--owing to their
association with the gospels.  The maddening thing is that I have
mislaid Du Cange."

Maria burst into tears.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed when he heard the noise.  "What ever is
the matter?  My own Maria, anything but this!  Allow me to lend you my
handkerchief, a dishcloth, a towel, one of the sheets.  Have a glass of
cowslip wine.  Have a sniff of some burned feathers, if I can find any.
Have anything, Maria, but do not weep!"

"You won't think!"

"Think!" cried the Professor, bashing himself on the head with Lewis
and Short, which looked as if it could weigh about ten pounds.  "Think!
Great Powers of Pedantry assist me now!"

After a bit he sat down calmly beside her on the soapbox and waited for
the sobs to subside.

"Would you object," he asked humbly, "to repeating the subject which we
were just discussing?"

She repeated it with hiccups.

"I think we may depend upon it that the pilot was not killed.  If he
had broken his back or his neck, you would have noticed it when you
moved him, by seeing that he was hinged in the wrong places.  No, no.
He has only broken his leg, and richly he deserved it.  You should take
him some fruit every now and then, with magazines to read in bed.  We
shall find that he recovers in no time."

"I hope he will!"

"Even if he does, you will still be at loggerheads with Lilliput."

"They sent me to Coventry!"

"Yes.  I see.  Now Maria, you must try to look at this from their point
of view.  It is an exceedingly curious situation.  You are a child, but
very big; they are grown-up, but very small.  Just imagine what you
would feel, if you were a grownup whose head was bothered with the
affairs of a family.  Suppose you were off to catch the London train,
with your umbrella well rolled, to see a solicitor about some
mortgages, and just as you were getting near the station a little girl
who was forty-eight feet high stepped over the hedge and carried you
away to a distant field, in the wrong direction, where she put you down
and told you to be a German, while she was being General Eisenhower.
Think how exasperating it would be, as you heard the train puffing off
without you."

"But I only played with a few of them!"

"All the same, they could see the tendency of the position.  If they
had given in to you, they would never have been able to call their
souls their own, and their economic life would have been upset in order
to play at queens and subjects.  However nice you were to them, it
would have been intolerable."

"I used to help them.  I spent all my money buying chocolates and
airplanes!"

"But they did not want the airplanes and they could not live on
chocolates.  They had a living to earn."

"I suppose..."

"You see, Maria, this is a problem which has only once occurred before,
and that was when the small man Gulliver was in the keeping of the huge
girl Glumdalclitch, in the land of the Giants."

"They got on very well."

"Exactly.  But it was because she did not paw him about.  Don't you
remember how disgusted he was with the other young ladies who tried to
make him a plaything?  He hated being mauled and messed, and he was
grateful to Glumdalclitch because she only behaved as a loving
attendant and helper.  This is what you will have to do, if you want to
make it up with Lilliput.  You must never, never force them to do
anything.  You must be as polite to them as you are polite to any other
person of your own size, and then, when they see your magnanimity in
not exerting brute force, they will admire you, and give you love.

"I know it is difficult," he added gently, "because the trouble about
loving things is that one wants to possess them.  But you must keep
hold of your emotions and always be guarding against meanness.  It will
be very difficult indeed."

"The Schoolmaster pointed for me to go away.  He meant I was not to
come back."

"I think you may go back once, if it is to apologize."

"But I don't see why I should apologize!  I was only trying to help
them fly."

"They asked you not to."

An obstinate vanity made her stiffen.

"I have tried to help, and I never struck or forced a single one of
them.  I won't say I'm sorry."

The Professor got up to fetch his manuscript, dismissing her from his
mind.

"Very well, Maria.  Certainly I am not going to force _you_.
Meanwhile, if you will excuse me, there is this little matter of
_Tripharium_, which I must elucidate as best I may."

She could not get another word out of him, and went away in the sulks
herself, feeling twice as guilty as before.

It took her two days to swallow the lecture which she had been given.
Sometimes she protested to herself that she would rather die than
apologize to a set of miserable hop-o'-my-thumbs.  Sometimes she
thought how disgusted the Professor must be feeling with her.
Sometimes she swallowed a small piece of the lecture at a time,
thinking that perhaps it had been a bit annoying for the People, but
all the same they ought to have been more grateful.  I could have
killed the whole lot of them, she thought, if I had wanted to, merely
by stamping my feet, and I could have told Miss Brown their secret.
Yet they order me off my own island, and won't even speak!

After two days she had swallowed the lecture successfully--a meal of
something nasty like cold porridge, taken with rests between the
spoonfuls and finished in the end.

She sat down to write a straight and manful letter, in her smallest
handwriting.  It said:


Dear Sirs,

I am young but tall.  You are old but short.  I am sorry and will be
better.  I hop he is getting better.

Yours sincerely
  with Tons of love
    from Maria


Then she persuaded Cook to boil a large snail shell for her--there were
some _Helix pomatia_ in the park, which was very rare for
Northamptonshire--and bored two small holes with a pin when it was
clean, so that she could give it a handle of thread.  This made it into
a kind of shopping basket.  She found a couple of wild strawberries in
the Ridings, put them in the basket, and tore one of the middle pages
out of Miss Brown's _Pilgrim's Progress_, which was all she could think
of for a magazine.  She folded her letter as small as she could,
stamped it with a patch of paper like confetti, and set off for the
lake.

When she reached the island, she found that the brambles had been woven
across her path.  She did not beat them down, but left the letter and
the comforts for the invalid in one of the canoes.

For three nights Maria went with an aching heart, carrying her fruit
and magazines, but on the third night the brambles rose of their own
accord.  There was the Schoolmaster waiting to welcome her with a
beaming smile, and they flew into each other's arms.




CHAPTER

XII

The People gradually recovered confidence as they saw that their child
mountain intended to do her best, and the pilot began to get better, as
the Professor had foretold.  But Maria was careful from then on not to
make favorites, and she never again mentioned the subject of
indiarubber airplanes.  She blushed to think of queens.  She used to
visit them for an hour or two every midnight, because the days were
devoted to Algebra and threatened by telescopes.

It was true that she felt sleepy in the mornings, and Cook said that
she was beginning to look peaked; but Miss Brown did not notice
anything, as she was busy puzzling about her plot with the Vicar.

Maria cast away dull care and enjoyed herself to the top of her bent.
She loved stealing out at the dead of night, with the dangerous journey
past her tyrant's door.  She loved the wonderful summer moonlight,
silver and velvet black.  Above all, she loved being with the
old-fashioned People, and wondering at their minuscule Oeconomy.

One thing which she discovered was that it was a mistake for giants to
choose small presents for dwarfs.  The proper thing for a giant to do
was to choose the largest present which a dwarf could possibly use,
while the dwarf had to choose the smallest or finest thing which could
be of use to the giant.  The Professor, with his Hundreds and
Thousands, had been astray.  For instance, her most successful
present--for she tried to take something with her every night--had been
the saucepan with no handle.  It had been just what they needed, a
wonderful farm boiler, which could boil for a week at a time, and,
though she had taken it shyly, for fear that they would be offended at
the poverty of the gift, she had never been thanked so heartily for
anything else.  They said it was "compleat."

The People found this out as well.

Instead of using a ship's sail for the next presentation to Maria, they
decided to make her a spider-web scarf.  The silk was taken from the
webs of the garden spider, the brown one with a white cross on its
back, and it was treated with the juice of gorse blooms to get rid of
the stickiness, which also made it yellow.  Then it was knitted in thin
strips by a team of volunteers, for they had no looms, and the strips
were finally sewn together.  Maria was allowed to watch the process,
and she had the satisfaction of seeing, in the course of it, one of the
things which had interested Lemuel Gulliver.  She saw a little woman
threading an invisible needle with invisible thread.

It made a wonderful scarf, and the curious thing was that it was as
strong as good linen, or stronger.  It was resilient, like elastic, and
she could stick her finger into it without breaking it, although she
could see through.  Many years later, she wore it as part of her
wedding dress; but meanwhile she had to hide it under a floor board in
the Duchess's Powder Closet, for fear of Miss Brown.

She suddenly realized why, whenever she brought the Lilliputians a
present, they tried to give her one.  It was because they did not want
to be possessed.

Another thing which she discovered was that the People lived a
dangerous life, although they did not complain about it.  In spite of
the fact that there were no wars, they had other dangers.  For
instance, there had been a family of magpies some thirty moons before,
who had taken a fancy to young Lilliputians, and had carried off a
dozen babies before they had been mastered.  Magpies were wily, and had
good memories; so, when two of them had been wounded with arrows, they
had finally given it up.

The bows and arrows were interesting.  The wood of our gigantic trees,
when it was in twigs sufficiently thin for a Lilliputian bow, had not
enough snap in it.  So they used the spines from the pinion feathers of
large birds, farm hens if they could get them, strung against the
curve.  The arrows had metal tips, forged from the nails in the cupola,
but these were inclined to be soft.

By the way, the ancient Lilliputians were accustomed to use poisoned
arrows.  But in England they could not find the proper poisons--which
had perhaps been fortunate for Maria.  They did use the formic acid
from bees; but they could not get enough strength on the tip of the
arrow, although they boiled it down, for any work more formidable than
killing insects.

When they raided hives for the poison, and for honey, which was
important to them because they had no sugar, the raiders wore a kind of
plate armor made from the wing cases of beetles.  The scales were sewn
to a mouse-skin foundation, overlapping; but of course they generally
raided the nests in frosty weather, and used smoke.

Another danger was owls, worse than the danger of magpies.  There were
three main kinds of owl at Malplaquet: the barn, the tawny, and the
Lilford, who also hunted by day.  Horned owls were rare, though they
did come sometimes.  These creatures were braver and less wily than the
magpies, and they had never learned to keep away.  Also, instead of
merely pouncing like the crow tribe, they came down vertically like
dive bombers, and it was impossible to slay them.  There was no time.
Consequently the sentry on the cupola had to do night-watching for
owls, and, when he spotted one, he rang a bell.  Maria, when she found
out about it, realized that she had heard the bell often.  But there
are such a lot of noises in the country, queer noises like donkeys
braying and so on, that we neglectful humans do not properly attend to
them.  The bell made a deepish tonk-tonk-tonk, and Maria had always
thought it was a carrion crow.  When the bell was rung, the only hope
was to stand still without looking up.  If they moved, the owl saw
them; if they looked up, it noticed their white faces under the moon.
If they stood still, looking straight in front of them, it nearly
always passed over.

In the daytime, when they were not so much about, there were kestrels.
The procedure was the same for these.

As for the mainland trappers, their lives were in their hands.  A fox
was about as big as the National Gallery to them, and, as it could
easily pounce across Trafalgar Square, there was nothing to be done.
The worst of it was that it could also smell.  It was no good shooting
at it with their poor arrows.  It was no good hiding in the grass, or
standing still, because it had a nose.  Many ideas had been tried for
dealing with foxes, ideas like making a loud noise or a nasty smell,
but none of them had been successful.  A famous trapper, three hundred
moons before, had blinded a fox by shooting an arrow into each eye.
Ordinary people could not be expected to have the nerve for that.  The
common reaction was to stand still and trust to luck, if surprised,
but, above all, to keep a weather eye open, and particularly a nose, in
case foxes should be about.  Even a human, with nostrils as clumsy as
two fireplaces, can usually smell a fox.  The Lilliputians, with their
fine noses, had better warning.  Then they had to climb trees.

It was like living in a world full of dinosaurs and pterodactyls, or
even bigger creatures, and they had to keep their wits about them.

A result of this, which biologists will understand--and if you are not
a biologist nobody cares a fig for you--was that the ladies of Lilliput
had begun to have twins.  They often had triplets, and were delighted
when they did.

Maria wished that she could help them in these dangers.  If she had
been rich or grown-up or any of the other things which seem so
desirable until one gets them, she could have bought a shotgun to shoot
the owls, and could have cleared them out like that.  Unfortunately,
she was not.  She did, however, make sensible suggestions.  She said
that, if they would show her the fox earths all over the Park, she
would put tar in them at the next breeding season, or anything else
that was unpleasant, whatever the Master of the Malplaquet Hounds might
think.  She said that with their local knowledge, and her bigness,
there were probably several things which could be done.  "For
instance," said she, "I can get some petrol from the Primus and put it
on the wasps' nests, if you will show me where they are.  I could even
smash up the nests of owls, once you had spotted them."

The People of the Island were grateful for her kind thoughts, and
decided that she was not a bad Mountain after all.

One pearly night toward the beginning of July, with the owls hooting
and the twigs cracking and the paw-feet rustling and the great moon
reigning over all, Maria crept up the silver stairs to bed.  She passed
the door of the square eighteenth-century chapel, where the plaster
cherubs with fat cheeks like amoretti looked down from the flaking roof
between the Royal Arms and the Ten Commandments; passed the much more
than full-length portrait of the Fifth Duke, by Romney, which was
unsalable because it covered half an acre of canvas, and also the water
color of Naples with Vesuvius by Moonlight, equally unsalable because
it was fifteen feet long, the biggest water color in the world; passed
the cold busts of the Main Library, not the Third Duke's, where
Sophocles and others looked down with beards like twisted tripe upon
the empty shelves which had once housed the Malplaquetian MSS.; passed,
with a special tremor, the lofty bedroom in which the Empress Amelia
had breathed her last, and also the Duchess's Chamber, where her own
ancestors had been brought into the world, in the presence of twelve
doctors and any members of the Privy Council who had happened to be
disengaged.

Maria was an educated person, and for her the Palace was full of
ghosts.  She knew where the Wicked Marquis had condemned the two young
poachers to death; where the Mad Earl had played the violin at
midnight, to Lola Montez and the King of Bavaria; where the Impetuous
Viscount had blown off his whiskers with a six-shooter, on discovering
that he had sold his Honor to the Jews; and where the nasty little
Honorable had lighted his Nannie, to see if she would burn.

She turned up the last corridor and opened the door.

"Good evening!" said Miss Brown smoothly, sitting on the bed.  "So here
is our little vagrom, returned from her clandestine tour."

"Yes, Miss Brown."

"And what has tempted her to brave the inclement airs of night?  What
horns of elfland, if one may so express oneself, have summoned the
tender cheek to leave its downy pillow?  Eh, Maria?"

Miss Brown moved her hand on purpose, and there was the painful ruler
which was used at Algebra.

"I went for a walk."

"The midnight ramble.  Yes, indeed.  The moonlit constitutional, to
coin a phrase.  And why this promenade among Diana's minions?"

"I wanted to go out."

"Exactly.  So explicit.  And yet, to some ideas, the time would
scarcely seem conventional?"

"It was the moon."

"The Moon!  How true!  How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,
et cetera.

"And these," added Miss Brown, opening the other hand to show the
spider scarf and the handkerchief and the other presents, which she had
discovered by tracking her pupil to their hiding place, "and these
delicious trifles, fairy fragments as one might designate them if
devoted to the Essay Form, are these as well, Maria, nothing but
moonshine and Titania's dreams?"

There was nothing to be said.

"Where did you get them?"

"I got them."

"She got them!  Lucid explanation!  Where?"

"I won't say."

"Will not say.  The elision is so vulgar, is it not?  She will not say.
And yet, suppose she is made to say, you ask?"

Maria said distinctly, with some surprise at finding that she was
speaking the truth: "The more you hurt me, the less you'll hear."

"Indeed?"

"Yes."

This put the Governess off her stride.  One of the best ways to deal
with tyrants is to tell them the truth, and to face them, and to let
them see how much you hate them plainly, so long as you can make them
understand that you will hurt them if you can.  It frightens them away.

Miss Brown gnawed her fingers.

"The child's recalcitrant," she said complainingly.  "Ungrateful----"

And, with a sudden swish like a cobra's, which made Maria duck, she was
out of the door.  She slammed the same triumphantly, and turned the key.

Five minutes afterward, however, she changed her mind; for Maria was
surprised to hear the key turned back again quietly, and to know that
she was at liberty after all.  Why?




CHAPTER

XIII

Next morning was bright and breezy, and there were two expeditions from
the ruined palace, in the hours which ought to have been devoted to
Irregular Verbs.  Miss Brown made an expedition to the Vicarage, while
Maria seized the opportunity to visit the Professor.

She found him searching mournfully for his set of Du Cange--which is a
dictionary of Mediaeval Latin, in case you don't know--but this was an
almost hopeless task in the chaos to which he had reduced his cottage.
There were books in the shelves, which had been filled some fifty years
before.  Nearly all the floor, except the part around the tea chest on
which he used to sit, was taken up by piles and piles of mildewed
volumes.  Also, alas, as he had been verifying quotations and things of
that sort since the turn of the century, and as he was one of those
unfortunate people who leave the book open at the quotation in some
accessible place, all the window ledges, oven-shelves, mantelpieces,
fenders, and other flat surfaces were stocked with verified quotations,
which had long been forgotten.  He had left a narrow path to each door.
But the steps of the stairs had proved to be tempting flat surfaces, so
it was difficult for the poor old fellow to climb to bed, and the bed
itself would have been denied to him--except that it was fortunately a
double one, and he was able to squeeze in somehow between Gesner and
the eleven tomes of Aldrovandus, counting the extra one on Monsters.

The Professor was crawling about on hands and knees, trying to read the
names of the bottom books sideways, without disturbing the piles.  He
was sick of erudition and only too glad to listen to Maria.

She told him how Miss Brown had found the artifacts of Lilliput,
perhaps by tracking her to the Duchess's Powder Closet with the
magnifying glass, and how she herself had refused to tell where she got
them.  He was interested.

"Well, now, my dear child," said he, sitting down absent-mindedly on a
stack of books, which happened to be the missing set of Du Cange, "have
you ever noticed that when something unusual turns up, you are
immediately confronted with a moral problem?  For instance, if you were
to find yourself in the unusual position of Alice in Wonderland, who
was able to make herself large or small at will, nothing would be
easier than to rob the Bank of England.  You would simply have to go in
small, say about the size of a pin, and come out extra large, through
the skylight or somewhere, with a few million pounds in your pockets.
Moral problem: shall I become a burglar?  Or if you found yourself in
the unusual position of the Invisible Man, by my young friend Mr.
Wells, nothing would be easier than to introduce yourself into the
boudoirs of your acquaintances, in order to earn a handsome competence
by discovering their secrets.  Moral problem: shall I become a
blackmailer?  Now it is certainly unusual to discover a colony of
people six inches high, and so you were immediately confronted with
your moral problem, about being their Queen.  Shall I interfere with
Lilliput's proper freedom and become a tyrant?  But, dear me, Maria,
this is becoming a lecture.  I fear I bore?"

"Not at all," she said.  "It's quite fun."

"So now we have your governess on the track of the unusual, with her
own moral problem straight ahead of her.  How will she solve it?"

"Solve what?"

"About interfering."

"If Miss Brown can interfere," said Maria bitterly, "she will."

"How?"

"I suppose she will just forbid them or something."

"Much worse."

She looked at him anxiously.

"She will sell them," he said.

"But, oh, she couldn't!  They are real!  They are People!  She couldn't
sell them like ... like hens!"

"Nothing is more likely.  Don't you see that they are tremendously
valuable?  Any big circus would pay thousands and thousands of pounds
to get them, perhaps millions.  They are the only things of their kind
in the world."

"But...  But...  She _couldn't_.  It would be _too_ beastly.  It would
be ... it would be _slaves_."

"So now you know, Maria, why they did not want to give away their
secret."

"I'll never tell her.  She can kill me first, but I wouldn't tell.  The
beast!"

"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."

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-hiked 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 who 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.

"Any character of yours, Mum," said Cook superbly, "is what I'd not
besmirch my own possession of which with the application of."

The door shut again more gently, the footsteps died away, but the smell
of soup remained.

It was growing dark in the shabby little bedroom.  The evening breeze
had dropped to nothing and all the summery trees of the park stood
silent, without moving a leaf.  The twilight hush had impressed the
birds and beasts.  You could hear a rabbit nibbling twenty yards away.
The distant coots on the lake gabbled in undertones.

Maria spotted patterns in the darkling wallpapers, drummed on the
counterpane, practised whistling, pulled feathers out of the bolster,
and listened to the sleepy birds outside the window.

I shall have steamboats, she thought, to ply between the islands: the
kind you can buy in toy shops, which are worked by methylated spirits.

One of the islands is sure to have gulls on it, those black-headed
gulls who breed on islands in big lakes and murder each other's
children.  It will be unsafe to use that island for the People, at
least during the breeding season, for I am sure that no black-headed
gull would think twice about snapping up a Lilliputian, considering how
they treat their own nephews and nieces.

On the other hand it might not be a bad idea to play a joke on those
same birds.

At the time of the year when they were not breeding, we would go to
Gull Island in force, and set about a bit of engineering.  We would dig
shallow pans among the pebbles all over the strand, like saucers, or
like the depressions which are made by the ant lion, and we should put
a trap door at the bottom of each saucer in the earth.  Each trap door
would lead into a narrow passage, and the passages would communicate
with a central chamber underground, in which I would probably bury a
large earthenware crock for isinglass.  Then, when the next breeding
season was due to come round, a picked gang of Lilliputians would set
off for the tunnels of Gull Island, with their necessary provisions,
and there they would live like puffins, underground, for the whole
season.  Every time a gull laid an egg, it would of course roll into
the bottom of the saucer, and the gull would sit down on top.  This
would ring a bell--we should have to put in electric batteries, and one
of those indicators which the Master of the Malplaquet Hounds has in
his kitchen--and two of the People would immediately run down the
corridor, open the trap door, and let the egg fall through to the
cellarage, where it would be wheeled off to the isinglass for storage.
After a bit the ridiculous gull would set up, look between its legs,
say, "Goodness me, I thought I was sitting on an egg," and settle down
to lay another.  By this means we would not only be able to keep down
the number of black-heads, but we would be able to provide egg powder
for Lilliput.

We would need a factory for dehydrating the eggs, or whatever it is
called, because one egg would be enough to feed a family for a week,
and thus it would not be an economical size to cook.  But if we turned
the eggs into powder, the stuff could be used in small quantities,
about the size of a salt spoon, and this would be a blessing in the
kitchens....

Or else, thought Maria, beginning to yawn, we could hatch them out in
incubators and eat them as day-old chicks, or we could ring the parents
from underneath for the purposes of Research, or we could train the
young ones up for seaplanes....

Soon she was far away in a sky of dreams, where jet-propelled white
seaplanes folded their wings on landing, or stretched them at an angle
of incidence of forty-five degrees when they wanted to take off.  It
was because she had been short of sleep for the last few weeks.  Her
hands were together under her cheek; her dark pigtails strayed on the
pillow; the mysterious shadows under her eyelashes were quiet gates
into a secret world where things went on which nobody could fathom.

Just before she dozed away, she thought she could hear, half in her
dreams, that Miss Brown and the Vicar were talking on the terrace.

She woke in the dark, feeling wide awake at once.  She was healthy and
happy and alive, and a most delightful thing was happening.

Like a spider on the end of its thread, a six-inch man was dangling
lower and lower from the gutter outside the window, in the moonlight.

The fact is that if there are five hundred pairs of bright eyes all
round your pleasure ground, fixed steadily on you from under clumps of
dock leaves and thistles--if there are five hundred pairs of ears like
tiny shells, straining to hear behind the green blackberries and wild
parsley--well then, if you will walk about on the terrace telling the
Vicar that Maria has been sent to bed without her supper, this
development is liable to be discussed in the metropolis of Lilliput
before long.

So it had been, and the little People were not the kind who left their
friends to suffer.  Arrangements had immediately been started.  Ropes
from the frigate had been spliced together, transport had been
organized, and the other needs of the moment had been put in hand.  By
ten o'clock they had started the journey, and had come to the South
Front an hour before Miss Brown went to bed.  They knew which the two
inhabited bedrooms were, from seeing the windows lit of an evening.

A well-known steeple-jack, who generally did the outside repairs of the
Temple of Repose, had gone up inside the nearest drainpipe, using it as
mountain climbers use a chimney.  That is to say, he had put his back
against one wall of the pipe and his feet against the other, and had
walked up slowly like that, in a sitting position, by pressing his back
against the walls.  His rope had been too short for the immense length
of the pipe--he could not have carried enough--and so he had been
followed by a second climber, with a second rope, who had spliced the
two together when he was halfway up.  Then the top climber, who was by
now on the roof gutter, had drawn up certain other tackle that was
needed.  The second climber had joined him to help.

They had thrown down the long rope outside the drain-pipe, and willing
hands below had been ready to tie it to a stake which they had driven
on the edge of the lawn.  Now there had been a thread of plaited
horsehair stretching from the gutter to the grass.  The next thing had
been to pass this through a metal loop, forged from a nail, and to tie
a second rope to the loop.  This had made two long ropes, the fixed
one, which was to act like the overhead wire of a rope railway, and the
other, which could pull the metal loop up or down on it.  It was a bit
like a funicular.

When this had been arranged, and Miss Brown was known to be snoring,
the steeple-jack had begun to let himself down on a short cord to
Maria's window sill.

She opened it stealthily.

"I am so glad to see you!"

He said in a low voice: "Tie the End of this to your Table, Ma'am, or
somewhere inside the Room.  Speak softly, or we shall be smoak'd.  We
have a Pulley at the Top.  Do you desire to see the Schoolmaster?"

"Yes!"

"In one Minute, then."

And he vanished like a tiny monkey, leaving her to fasten the bottom
end.

The next thing to arrive was the Schoolmaster, in a breeches apparatus.

He whispered: "Good Evening, Miss."

"Good evening, Sir," she said, in heartfelt tones, "Your Honour,
Mister!  You are the best thing I have seen today, and don't I mean it!"

"Your Servant, Miss.  Allow me to present the Victuals."

And there they were, coming down slowly on the pulley: three roast
oxen, two barrels of elderberry wine, four dozen loaves of grass-seed
bread.

She said: "Oh, dear!"

She could have squashed him flat.

It was a regular deputation.  Apart from the roast bullocks and other
blessings, there was the Schoolmaster and the Admiral and the
steeple-jack and an aged town councilor, carrying an illuminated
address, all of whom had come to visit her on the principle that
invalids and captives needed to be cheered up.  They told her that it
was past Midnight already.  Then, while she consumed the dinner on her
face towel, which she spread on the window sill for a table cloth, they
watched her gobble it up.

"I shall eat you out of everything," she said with a blush.

"We were sent to convey an Address of Gratitude, Miss, for your
Constancy in shielding the People, which has been subscrib'd by the
entire Borough of Lilliput in Exile."

"And by the Navy," said the Admiral firmly.

"It is me that gets shielded," she said, overcome with shyness as the
address was presented.  "At least we are in a horrid muddle.  I have
such a lot to tell you.  I can't help talking with my mouth full.  And
please excuse me if I read."

While she was reading, they looked about politely--more politely than
she had looked about the island.  Her room was as strange to them as
the island had been to her, but they tried not to stare.

The Address was written in black-thorn ink on a prepared vole-skin
parchment, as thin as Indian paper, and it explained how present and
future Generations were to know that the Female Mountain had kept her
Word to the People through Famine and Incarceration, etc., etc.  It was
a splendid testimonial to have, and, as she did not know how to thank
them for it, she folded it up and placed it tenderly over her heart (in
her pajama pocket).  Then she went on eating.

She said, when she had finished: "Thank Lilliput for my good dinner."

"Your Servants, Miss."

She noticed that they were no longer calling her "Y'r Honour," but
"Miss," which was the proper eighteenth-century address for girls, and
this made her feel pleased.  She did not know why.

"Don't go away.  Wouldn't you like to see my things?  I have not much
to show."

They admired the texture of the sheets, because they had no looms of
their own, and gazed over the vast expanse of polished oilcloth with
respect.  Miss Brown was too mean to let her have a carpet, so there
was nothing except this wintry oilcloth, and one cheap woolen mat.  The
furniture, as we know, was cast iron.

Maria did the honors as well as she could.  She found that they were
more amused by the looking glass on the dressing table than by anything
else.  She tilted this backward till it lay level, and they stood on
it, admiring themselves upside down.  The Admiral did a hornpipe,
fascinated by his toes.

Afterwards it was time to tell them the whole story of how the sprug
had been discovered, of the Professor's views about Law and Slavery,
and of Miss Brown's wild-goose chase after the secret room.  The
Schoolmaster did not seem so pleased as she expected when he heard of
the false trail.  He, like the Professor, saw at once that the safety
of the People now depended on the endurance of one young girl, and,
though he did not like to tell her so, he was beginning to think that
his countrymen had better migrate while there was still time to do so,
and without revealing their destination even to Maria.  All he said,
however, was that he would have to think things over.

When it was time to part, they kissed the tip of her little finger in
turn.  The town councilor was put in the breeches apparatus to go
first, and all were bowing, smiling, or waving good-by--when the
thunderbolt fell.

The key turned in the lock with a sudden click, the door slammed open
on its hinges, and there, in the doorway, stood Miss Brown with a
candle, in her flannel night dress.  Everything began to happen so
quickly that the scene seemed to go slow.  There was Miss Brown, who
had heard talking, first ready to be angry; then amazed and not
believing what she saw; then, for the briefest moment, half impressed,
half wondering whether she ought to be polite to visitors; then
guessing, then realizing, then seeing plain the opportunity to catch
some of them, to appropriate them to herself, to make her fortune.  And
at the same time there was Maria crying "Escape!" and there was the
deputation tumbling over itself to be gone, the old councilor being
bundled into the breeches apparatus and the Admiral drawing his new
sword, forged from one of the Woolworth pins, to defend the bridgehead
like Horatius.

Miss Brown ran to grab them.  She got a dig with the pin which went
right through her finger.  (The good sword stood a hair's-breadth out
behind the Tuscan's hand.)  It stopped her for a second.  (She reeled
and on the mantelpiece she leaned one breathing space, then, like a
wild cat mad with wounds, sprang at the Admiral's face.)  She got hold
of him by one leg, but Maria charged at the same instant and bit
another finger till she felt the flesh turn on the bone.  There was a
scrimmage free-for-all, with the breeches apparatus going up twice.
There was the Admiral climbing hand over hand.  There was Maria thrown
panting into a corner, like the oak on Mount Avernus.  And finally
there was Miss Brown left triumphant, with the Schoolmaster in her
podgy fist, nearly squeezing the life out of him.




CHAPTER

XVI

The most famous of the trappers was called Gradgnag.  He was a wiry man
with gray hair and a taciturn disposition, who seldom spoke to anybody,
but could call birds by note.  For many moons he had been planning the
longest of his treks.  He was a kind of Allan Quatermaine, and now he
had reached the hinterland of a continent, which he had been exploring
all his life.  It was King Solomon's Mines to him, for the legends of
Lilliput in Exile talked of a mysterious house, beyond the vasty
borders of the Park itself, from which there could be got a wondrous
breed of piebald mice.  The skins were of fabulous value, for only one
existed on the Island of Repose, and that was used as a part of the
communal regalia.  It was said that this skin had been taken, three
hundred moons before, by the legendary trapper who had blinded the fox
and passed into history as the greatest of his trade.  Blambrangrill
had been his name: a dreamer of strange horizons and of epic deeds; and
Gradgnag, although he never talked, had caught the dream.

The arrangements for the trek had taken many days.  He always traveled
light and alone, living on the country, but it had seemed wiser to
arrange for caches as an emergency store, spaced out at intervals of
four hours' march.  He was a methodical man.  Then there had been the
scouting for direction, which had extended not only over days but over
moons, because, although the mouse-house was fabled to lie some way
beyond the western boundary wall, the compass bearing was not fixed.
On many and many an expedition he had climbed that monstrous wall by
cunning footholds, to stare out with his pale blue eyes across the
Great Unknown.  He had added one fact to another.  He had read the
archives relating to Blambrangrill, including the bloody parchment with
crosses on it which had been found beside his mummified body in a
crevice of that very wall, where he had crept to die of his wounds,
while the cat waited outside.

Now Gradgnag himself was there.  He had crossed the wall, the ditch,
the giant road shining like malachite.  He had seen horseless coaches,
one hundred and twenty feet high, thundering past with the noise of
stampeding elephants; gargantuan men innumerable, like trees walking;
dogs thirty feet tall.  He had hidden and scouted and pondered over
tracks.  By day he had sat philosophically at his minute fire, cooking
rashers of rat.  Now he had found the Eldorado.  He was at the House
itself.  He was tucked up comfortably in his sleeping bag on a branch
of Virginia creeper on its wall, beside a pointed window, and six
piebald mouse skins were his pillow.

It was the Vicarage.

Thirty years before our story, in the time of the previous incumbent,
this inconvenient mid-Victorian house had been full of happy people.
Then no wheezing disapprover had hummed along its red-tiled corridors,
but a merry old hunting parson had bustled to send port wine and
jellies to anybody who had the faintest stomach ache in all his parish.
Then about a dozen tumbling children, covered with mud from head to
foot, had pursued in it the numberless delights of childhood.  The
eldest son had been a falconer, the second a stamp collector, the
third, a tramping botanist, the fourth had owned a puppet show, the
fifth had been a carpenter, and the sixth, a very young one, had kept
white mice.

Even now, in the attics which Mr. Hater never visited, there was a
jumble of dusty fishing rods and of stage props and of cabinets with
well-set butterflies and of falcon's hoods, and heap on heap of
shredded paper, which the mice--the once white mice who had escaped and
mated with the gray ones--had used for generation after generation in
their nests.

Gradgnag's sleeping bag was outside the study window.  By craning his
head, he could see Mr. Hater, and the room in which he sat.

The study was a gloomy place with wallpaper the color of mildew, and
one small window, imitation Gothic, in the thick wall.  The Vicar's
hood, gown, and surplice hung on the door under his scout's hat, which
he wore when he took the choirboys to their holiday camp in the summer,
at a featureless and wind-swept beach on the East Coast.  On the wall
beside the door there was a group photograph of the Vicar and friends,
at Sidney Sussex College, where he had been a high light in the Student
Christian Movement.  There were also two photographs of Pompeii and of
Trajan's Column.  The desk at which he was writing his sermon was of
soap-colored wood, and the sermon pen was shaped like an oar, with the
arms of Sidney Sussex on the blade.  On the mantelpiece there was a
china tobacco jar, with the same arms.  Over the mantelpiece there was
a picture of Sir Galahad, who had conducted a cart horse into a bramble
bush, and gone broody there.  The seating accommodation included two
cane armchairs, which gave a bamboo roar at sitters, and a horsehair
sofa which was so slippery that anybody who sat down immediately began
to slide off.  It was kept for the Confirmation Class, and caused them
acute embarrassment.

Gradgnag was accustomed to all this by now, and would have settled to
sleep, so that he might be fresh for the mouse hunting that evening, if
he had not seen Miss Brown, on Cook's bicycle, come floating up the
drive.  She was an inhabitant of the Park, whose appearance was
familiar to him, so he edged round to the window sill, to see what she
was after.


Miss Brown waddled into the study without a word.  Mr. Hater looked at
her with suppressed hatred, for he disliked being disturbed in the
mornings.  She put a strong cardboard boot-box in front of him, on the
desk.  It was tied with several lashings of string and had holes in the
lid as if for transporting caterpillars.  She undid the string and
lifted the lid cautiously, ready to slam it back.  Gradgnag was high
outside the window and could see into the box.  There, pressed against
the side in a corner and looking upward, was the rumpled and miserable
Schoolmaster, helpless, scared, captive, uncertain whether to risk a
smile.

The Vicar sat motionless, looking at the exhibit from behind his
glasses, which reflected the light and hid the eyes, and the wrinkles
on his thick neck gradually went brick red.  He poked the Schoolmaster
with his sermon pen, to make him move.  He put back the lid with
trembling fingers.  He tied it up again.  He produced a bottle of Ruby
Wine which was kept for the Bishop, from a cupboard, and gave Miss
Brown a whole glass.

The window was open at the top, so that the Trapper could hear what
they said.

Miss Brown related how she had surprised the deputation late at night,
when they had gone to relieve Maria, and how she had missed several of
them, and how she suspected that there might be many more.  She
mentioned that these creatures were probably of fabulous value, better
than any treasure chamber, and that in any case the supposed treasures
must have come from them.  She suggested that Barnum and Bailey, Lord
George Sanger, or the Circus at Olympia would offer many thousand
pounds apiece, if they could catch such oddities.

Mr. Hater breathed one word: "Hollywood."

They thought it over slowly, sipping the Ruby Wine.

"The money would have to be held in trust for Maria."

"There would be nothing to prove that the creatures had not been found
at the Vicarage."

"If they are human it may be illegal to sell them."

"They are not human."

"Not one word must be breathed about this discovery, Miss Brown, for
fear of competition.  Nothing must be mentioned until they are safely
trapped."

"The child refuses to say where they live."

"Perhaps we can get the information from the midget you caught."

"He will not answer questions."

"I hope you did not ... punish Maria?"

"Although she bit my finger most savagely, Mr. Hater, positively like a
wild animal, I never raised my hand to her."

"Very wise."

"It crossed my mind that as she knew where they were..."

"M-m-m-m.  You have not locked her up?"

"She is in her room for the time being..."

"But can be set at liberty."

Miss Brown suddenly opened her bun face and let a kind of cackle out of
it.  It might have been the first time she had laughed in her life, and
had a startling effect.  Even the Vicar gave a wintry twinkle with his
glass eyes.

"How fortunate," he said, "that she should visit them at night!  The
cloak of darkness, Miss Brown.  She will never notice that she is being
followed."

So they hurried off to Malplaquet, to arrange about Maria's liberty.
But first Mr. Hater took the Schoolmaster from the boot-box, which did
not look too strong, and locked him in a metal cash-box which was used
to store the offerings for the Society for the Propagation of Christian
Knowledge.

Gradgnag only had to climb the creeper a little higher and to let
himself down by the blind-cord.  The key was beside the cash box.  He
was able to force it round.  Miss Brown and the Vicar had scarcely
reached the bottom of the village before their captive had been
liberated.  They were not at the North Front before the Schoolmaster
and his deliverer had started the long trek home.  Unfortunately, it
would take them a couple of days.

Maria, meanwhile, was surprised to find that she was not to be punished
for biting.  She was more than surprised, she was astonished, when they
gave her the favorite pudding for luncheon (chocolate custard) and said
that Cook need not be sacked.  When they told her at tea-time that she
was a good girl and might visit her "dear little fairy friends"
whenever she pleased, she was more than astonished, she was deeply
suspicious.

When one comes to think of it, Miss Brown and Mr. Hater were pathetic
creatures, not terrible ones.  It was so long since they had forgotten
about being young that they were powerless in Maria's hands.  They were
in the strong position of being able to bully her, of course, but their
weakness was that they had no idea that she was twice as bright as they
were.  "Parents," says the immortal Richard Hughes, who wrote the best
book about children that was ever written, "finding that they see
through their child in so many places the child does not know of,
seldom realize that, if there is some point the child really gives his
mind to hiding, their chances are nil."

"I wonder," said Maria to herself, several times that day.

For dinner they gave her lobster _ l'Americaine_, and a _bombe
glace_, after which she pretended that she was ready for bed.

Miss Brown retired early.

At midnight, Maria rose from her deceptive couch.  She had lain on it
religiously, to save up her energies, and was now in the pink of
training.  She went past Miss Brown's door, with a bit more noise than
usual, and made her lengthy way to the Chestnut Avenue.  At the bottom
of this, she paused and turned round for a look, knowing, like a good
Indian, that she would have a dark background for her own body, while
anybody who followed would be outlined against the moonlit sky.

There they were, sure enough, actually in black cloaks.

Maria grinned and went her way.

The Wilderness had been a Japanese garden, or something of that sort,
two hundred years before.  It was now a labyrinth of rhododendrons,
laurels, and assorted shrubs, with several useful features.  One of
these was that the original paths had become overgrown by the
evergreens, but not entirely squashed out.  There was generally a track
of some sort, often as much as four feet high in clearance, like a
tunnel, however much the leaves and branches met above that height.  A
person of ten could get along them fairly quickly, by shielding her
face, while a person of later years was confronted by a swishy barrier
from the chest up.  Another advantage of the Wilderness was one which
was shared by all jungles, and that was that a single traveler could
get about in it more easily than two.  When two people forced their way
in single file, the branches, swinging back from the first of them,
whacked the second in the face.  There were other attractions.  For
instance, on account of the place having been abandoned to growth and
wildness, it needed an expert to know which way the ghosts of paths
were leading.  It was like the Maze at Hampton Court, but worse: worse
because the top of it was grown across with whipping branches.

Maria waited till she was sure they could not miss her trail, then
plunged into the rustling gloom.

She did not go too far.  After five minutes she sat down, and pricked
her ears.

It was pleasant, listening to Miss Brown and the Vicar, as they fought
each other among the dark and oval leaves.  "Hush!"  "There!"  "This
way!"  "That way!"  "You crackle."  "No, I don't."  "Which turn?"
"M-m-m-m."

Half an hour later, knowing that they were soundly lost, Maria slipped
away to bed.

In the morning she was as fresh as paint.  Miss Brown, who turned up
for breakfast looking pale, with a scratched eye and twigs in her hair,
asked for a bowl of bread and milk.  The Vicar, who called in time to
say their grace, asked hollowly for brandy neat.  Maria, thanking them
for all their kindness, begged for permission to take out her lunch in
sandwiches, and to go exploring.  They rolled their watery eyes,
grinned horribly, and wished her joy.

She went by Malplaquet-in-the-Mould to Maid's Malplaquet, turned left
through the parishes of Gloomleigh, Marshland, and Malplaquet St.
Swithin's, cut across the Northampton road for Bishop's Boozey and
Duke's Doddery, skirted the famous fox covert at
Monk's-Unmentionable-cum-Mumble, doubled back from Bumley-Beausnort to
Biggle, and ate her sandwiches in the gorse patch on the round barrow
at Dunamany Wenches, overlooking the drovers' road to Ort.

Here she saw the sleuths go by.

Staggering with fatigue, quarreling about the route, red-eyed from lack
of sleep, Miss Brown and the Vicar tracked her doggedly on.  Miss Brown
had blisters on both feet, and the long heel from one of her shoes had
become detached, causing her to roll as she walked, like a ship of the
line in the famous gale of 1703.  The Vicar, who had corns, limped
behind her in dejection, humming out at intervals that they ought to
have turned left at Dumbledum-Meanly.  Miss Brown, with her nose in the
air, refused to listen, and Mr. Hater could be seen planning things he
would like to do to her.

Maria finished her sandwiches and enjoyed the summer weather.  All the
farmers of Dunamany Wenches were saving their hay.  All the farm
laborers of Dunamany Wenches were doing the same thing, criticizing the
judgment of the farmers.  All the iron spikes were charging up the
elevators in endless squadrons, carrying the captive grass to the
ricks.  All the swarth turners were crig-a-rig-a-rig-rig-a-rigging
round the edges of the fields, throwing up their bow waves of hay.  All
the horse rakes were threading the swarths, giving a stately clang each
minute, as they delivered the rakeful to its place.  All the headmen,
who did the difficult part, were swishing the great mounds which they
had collected in the arms of a thing like a snowplow, to the right
position.  All the publicans in the Green Man at Muddle, in the
Malplaquet Arms at Pigseaton, and in the Duke's Head at
Biggleswesterleigh were tapping innumerable casks of bitter, which they
knew would be required for the evening.  Everybody everywhere was
keeping a tight eye on His Majesty the Sun, for fear that He might take
it into His head to thunder.

The sun, so far as that went, was in a tyrant's mood.  He was burning
so hard that Maria could almost see him twinkle, could almost see the
javelins of radiation being hurled out in all directions, as he jingled
and hammered away like a Siva with a thousand arms, on the cloudless
anvil of the sky.  She nearly panted as she lay there, on the
sheep-nibbled grass, and her pursuers panted in good earnest, as they
pottered off through Idiot's Utterly, High Hiccough, Malplaquet
Middling, and Mome.

When they had disappeared, Maria dropped her nose into the
thyme-smelling grasses; watched a stinking beetle, with wriggly tail
and aromatic scent and shining armor, as he scuttled his way under some
bird's-foot trefoil; and was shortly fast asleep.

In the afternoon, she woke in time to see them return.  They were fifty
yards apart, no longer on speaking terms, and this time the Vicar was
in the lead.  She hailed them and ran down the hill, to join the march.
Somehow they did not seem too pleased to see her.  They had to do their
best to look delighted.  She rallied their shattered energies with
bright inquiries about their walk, and led them briskly home to dinner.

After dinner, which was of fresh salmon followed by ices, Maria left
them spread out in the drawing room, and rested on her own bed until
dark.  But as soon as Miss Brown had retired, she got up and trotted
past the door.  She could hear the tyrant groan aloud as she went by.
She found the Vicar hiding behind a statue of Psyche in the Assembly
Room, where he had taken his shoes off and gone to sleep on sentry-go,
and she had to cough to wake him up.  Then, while he creaked with
exhaustion at the effort of getting his swollen feet into the shoes
once more, she set her course for the North Front, for a change, and
went by the Beech Avenue instead of the Lime one.

This led her up the Arcadian Valley to the Newton Monument, which was a
thing like Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, except that, instead of
having a statue at the top, it had a small glass observatory with a
broken telescope.  A staircase led up the inside, which, being in
memory of Newton, had exactly the same number of steps as there were
days in the year.

Maria turned the rusty key, entered the darkness of the little hall,
and hid behind the stairs.

Her detectives arrived soon after.

Gasping and hissing from their various corns and blisters, weaving with
exhaustion, leaning against each other to keep upright, the Vicar and
Miss Brown edged the door open feebly and stood whimpering at the
stairs.

"How many steps?"

"Three hundred and sixty-five, point two five six four."

"Civil?"

"Sidereal."

"Come," he said finally.  "Excelsior!  They may be worth a thousand
pounds apiece."

"Excelsior," agreed Miss Brown.  They tottered up the stairs.

When they were well away, Maria let herself out, locked the door behind
her, and went back to bed.

In the morning, after an excellent breakfast of kedgeree, she took a
circumbendibus through the Wilderness, as it was important not to be
visible from above, and reached the Newton Monument before noon.

Miss Brown was at the top of it, waving a petticoat out of the
observatory window on the end of the telescope.  The Vicar was at the
bottom, hammering on the door and whining for help.  As the park lands
of Malplaquet were about twenty-five miles in circumference, and there
was nobody left inside them except Cook, they had little hope of
rescue.  Horace Walpole had once described these grounds as "that
Province which they call a garden."

Maria waited for some time, then carefully wriggled her way to the
door, hidden by arches of rhododendron.  She unlocked it softly, while
the Vicar was still banging, and snaked into the shrubbery, to watch.

The Vicar and Miss Brown continued at their tasks till luncheon.  Then,
suddenly growing maddened beyond endurance, the former seized the door
handle to shake it, as a punishment for its contumacy.  Of course it
opened at once.  His hum of fury brought Miss Brown stumbling down the
stairs.

Both prisoners assumed immediately that the door had been unlocked all
the time.  Each of them accused the other of not having tried to open
it properly.  When they at last dispersed in passion to their beds,
they had determined to sleep it out till Doomsday, if necessary,
whether Maria visited the hidden mannikins or not.

That will teach them, she thought, to let young children out of
bedrooms, so that they can track them to the secret places of their
friends.




CHAPTER

XVII

These matters were fun for Maria, and no doubt they were good for the
characters of Miss Brown and of the Vicar, as well as being good for
their physical training.  But Maria had made the mistake of letting her
amusements run away with her.

She had forgotten her outposts, a thing which no general ought to do.

The People were in a worse muddle than the Vicar was, because she had
failed to explain what she was at.

They did not know where their Schoolmaster was--they thought he was
still a prisoner in the palace--and, from the few glimpses which they
had caught of Maria's wanderings, they had got the idea that she was
trying to escape her persecutors, but that she had been followed and
brought back.

Maria ought to have gone to the island to explain, so soon as she knew
that her pursuers had given in for the sake of rest; but she had been
tired too.  She rested, pleased with the lesson which she had given.

In the evening, when Miss Brown and the Vicar had partly recovered,
they sat before the fire in the North-northeast Drawing Room, with
Maria sitting between them on the sofa.  They were determined to keep
her with them all the time, so that she could not snatch a rest between
times on her own.  The Vicar was showing her his photograph album.

It contained several photographs of the Lake District, together with
picture postcards of Wordsworth, Ruskin, and other worthies, with "A
Present from Skiddaw" printed underneath.  The portrait of Wordsworth
had small views set round in panels, depicting a field of daffodils,
forty cows feeding like one, etc., etc.  There was a view of the Vicar
and Miss Brown halfway up the Old Man of Coniston, and there was a
photograph of some ladies bathing at Ramsgate in 1903 with the horizon
at thirty degrees; but he hid it.  All the pictures which were not of
Wordsworth had their names and dates written under them in white ink:
"Noodles, Pribby, Poo-Poo, me, and Mr. Higgins.  Ambleside '36," or
"Nurse Biggleswade (and dog).  Kendal '38."

On the other side of Maria sat Miss Brown, knitting.  She had long,
sharp, metal needles, which clicked.

The fire was a small one, because it was summer.  It was for ornament,
not use.  The room was comfortably furnished.  The electric light shone
cheerfully on the deep chairs and the coffee things, for it was after
dinner, and the Vicar kept turning his pages with a rustle.  He told
them which was the window of the bedroom in the hotel which he had
slept in, as if he had been Queen Elizabeth.

They were at Keswick when the noise began.

Outside the window, the acorn drums started to roll, the pipes began to
shrill, and hundreds of clear, high voices began to sing together
boldly.

  "And shall the Schoolman die?
  And shall the Schoolman die?
  Five Hundred Men of Lilliput
  Will know the reason why."


They had come to the rescue of their countryman, whatever the odds
against them might be.

The moment the Vicar heard the song strike up, he grabbed Maria by a
pigtail.  Miss Brown grabbed the other one.

The window was behind them.

There she sat, unable to look round, and, from outside, the rescuers
could not see that she was held.  The back of the sofa hid everything
except her head.

The Vicar rose to the situation.

He said, between his teeth, without looking round: "Miss Brown, please
rise to your feet in a nonchalant manner, and saunter to the door.
When you are out of sight of the window, you might peep from behind the
curtains.  Remember that the electric light is behind."

She gave him the other pigtail, and slunk off as instructed, on her
mission.

It was a wonderful scene which she described.

The army was lined up, where the bars of light fell from the window
across the terrace.  There were the infantry in mouseskins standing at
attention, their officers, in beetle breastplates, standing three paces
to the front, with swords unsheathed.  There were the cavalry, with the
Admiral at their head--waving his saber and dressed in one of the
ancient dresses of Captain John Biddel, so that he looked like Nelson.
As with all Admirals, he sat his rat badly.  There also were the
archers, with their left feet forward as if they had been at Agincourt.
Behind these, in orderly ranks, stood the Mother's Union, the Ladies
Loo Club, the Bluestockings, and other female organizations, all
singing lustily and waving banners, which stated: "Votes for Maria,"
"Down with Miss Brown," "No Algebra without Representation," "Lilliput
and Liberty," "No Popery" (this was for the Vicar), or "Schoolmasters
Never Shall Be Slaves."  The A.D.C.'s were cantering up and down with
messages; the bugles were blowing; the drummer boys were beating to
quarters; the regimental standards were uncased; the band had changed
over to "_Malbroock s'en va-t-en guerre_"; the swords and pikes and
harpoons were flashing in the golden light; and, even as Miss Brown
peeped, a flight of arrows was discharged against the window "as it had
been snow."  "Huzza!" cried the infantry.  "Death or Glory," cried the
cavalry.  "The Admiral expects..." cried the Admiral, but when one of
the A.D.C's had whispered to him behind his hand, he quickly changed it
to the better phrasing: "Lilliput Expects That Every Man This Day Will
Do His Duty."

Poor little forlorn hope!  They lacked the wise counsels of their
kidnaped dominie, who would certainly have shown them that the odds
against them were too great, but it was brave of them to come to save
him all the same.

After the Governess had described all this from her spy hole, the Vicar
said: "M-m-m-m."

"I will trouble you," said he later, "to extinguish the electric light.

"And now that we are in the dark," he added, "you will kindly shut and
latch the window."

When this was done, they sat down on either side of Maria, each
gripping a pigtail, and Mr. Hater hummed.

"This time," said he, "there must be no mistake."

"No confusion."

"Our object, I presume, is to impound as many of these minnikins as
possible, for future profit.  How shall we set about it?"

"Might I offer a suggestion?"

"What?"

"The minnikins, as you so ably dubbed them, are, as I know from sad
experience, armed with such minnified weapons as, though fragile, can
make a painful puncture."

"The fact had not escaped me."

"Grabbing by handfuls, if we leave aside the fact that hands when full
would hold but few at best, might seem an occupation comparable to
catching porcupines?"

"M-m-m-m-m."

"But with a broom, rapidly brushing all before us, they tumbling upside
down and separated from us by a lengthy handle, we might roll up a
regiment or two without mishap, and clap a bucket on them?"

"Bravo, Miss Brown!  We find these brooms and buckets, creep out by
different routes, you west, I east.  We take the line in flank, one at
each end, and sweep toward the middle.  Their limbs, though bruised,
will not be permanently harmed by bristles.  They, in confusion,
tumbled up and over, will prove unable to deploy their weapons----

"We with our brooms and buckets----"

"Saucepans...."

"Anything with lids...."

"Collect our spoils!  And sell 'em!  But first, the child must be
disposed of."

They winked at each other for some time over Maria's head, which she
had to keep down because they were pulling her hair so, and made wide
mouths or big eyes or complicated gestures, in their efforts to discuss
the plan.  Finally they nodded agreement.

"Our cherub," said the Vicar sarcastically, summing up the winks, "must
be conducted to her chamber, there locked in.  I will assume this
pleasant duty.  You, Miss Brown, shall look for suitable receptacles,
me being absent.  Come, dear child, your arm."

He was dragging her out in the dark, still by the pigtails, when Maria
opened her mouth to yell.  It was her last chance to warn the people
about the brooms.

But the Vicar could see in the dark, like a cat.  Before she could make
a sound, his puffy hand was clapped across her mouth.  They went in
silence.

In the bedroom, her captor proved to be a thoughtful scoundrel.  He
threw her on the bed with a wheeze, and stood in the middle of the
linoleum, tapping his teeth with one blunt fingernail.

"Our pet," said he, "is not without intelligence, indeed resource.
Merely to lock the door would be to leave her practically at liberty.
Now, let me see.  Firstly, the troops are camped before the window,
although some stories down.  We therefore shut the window, so, and to
secure the catch, m-m-m-m, we bend the metal with this poker, thus,
using a grown-up's strength, and still remembering to remove the poker
when we leave.  Just so.  No child will shift it now, especially
without the poker.  Next we pause, consider.  For instance, a
resourceful maiden, m-m-m-m, standing well lighted at a window, though
unopened, might by some sign or gesture warn our quarry.  We therefore
draw the electric bulb from out its socket, thus--the merest twist
removes it--and we find: why, that the room's in darkness!  No amount
of clicks upon the switch, manipulated by those childish fingers, will
now illumine Lilliput.  What more?  Locked in, unlighted, windowless,
high up....  I think we may withdraw.  Sleep well, Maria."

She listened to the key being turned in the lock, and waited tensely
while the Vicar chuckled out of hearing.  Then she leaped off the bed
like an arrow, took the water jug from the washstand, and threw it
through the window.  So far as bending catches went, she was not the
fool he thought her.

The glass went outward with a jangling crash, followed, long after, by
a thump as the enameled ewer hit the terrace.  This thump was in the
middle of a tinkling shower of musical meteors, made by the falling
glass.  There was a thin high shout from all the army down below.

She leaned out from the hole and yelled,

"Go away!  They are coming from different doors, with brooms, to sweep
you up.  Don't go together.  Scatter.  Everybody go his own way, till
you meet at home.  Go quick!  They are coming now!"

She could hear them shouting back, so narrow a sound, but she could not
hear the words.

"Yes, I am safe.  Quite safe.  I am free.  But go!  Go at once!
Spread!  Run!  If anybody is followed, don't lead them to
you-know-where.  Stand still, as if they were owls.  They will miss
you.  But go, run, every way, not all together.  I am safe.  They won't
hurt me.  They want to track me till I lead them to you.  The
Schoolmaster is not here.

"And, by the way," screamed Maria, for they seemed to be fading
already, "don't bring me food!  They feed me now!  And don't expect me
in the evenings!"

She ended on a positive shriek, for fear that she would not be heard,
just as Miss Brown and her Fhrer came charging up the terrace.

Too late.




CHAPTER

XVIII

They came upstairs with livid faces.  The Vicar's was plum-colored with
rage and with the climb; Miss Brown's was pallid, with scarlet
nostrils.  They were almost too furious to speak.  They had heard what
she was shouting through the window.  They replaced the electric light
bulb and sat down.

"Maria," said Miss Brown, "listen to Mr. Hater."

The Vicar said: "These dwarfs are worth a fortune in cold money.  Do
you understand?  They are worth enough money to make you a rich girl,
and to give an old age of peaceful security to poor Miss Brown here,
who is always doing her best for you.  I do not mention myself.  Where
do they live?"

Maria looked at him.

"Do you understand that if they could be sold, the shameful debts of
your ancestors would be paid off to many a ruined tradesman, and
Malplaquet rescued from disgrace?"

"I thought they were being paid from your allowance."

"You are a wicked girl.  Where do they live?"

She folded her hands.

"Maria, you are to tell the Vicar where they live."

"I won't."

"Do you understand that it is evil to look God's mercies in the face?
You are throwing the gift horse in His mouth.  God has sent these
creatures to help us in our difficulties, and by your thankless
stubbornness you are giving an insult to God.  Where do they live?"

She shut her lips.

Miss Brown stood up and came waddling to stand over her.

"You are a naughty girl.  You are impertinent.  You had better tell the
Vicar, or you will regret it.  You know what I mean."

When there was no answer to this, or to anything else, Mr. Hater lost
patience.  He did not even want to hurt Maria, he was so hot with
avarice.  He wanted the People.

"If you will not tell, you will be locked up.  Do you hear?  Locked up
without your dinner.  And punished.  Punished till you do tell.  Such
obstinacy is sinful, monstrous.  It is selfish.  You are a naughty,
wicked, stubborn, selfish girl!

"Very well," he said, when there was no reply.  "She can stay in this
room till she speaks, and you, Miss Brown..."

The Governess said: "Cook comes to this room, Mr. Hater, and there
might be talk."

"Then she must be locked in some other room, where Cook won't come, and
we must say that she has gone away."

"To stay with an aunt."

"That will do very well.  What room do you suggest?"

"There is always," said Miss Brown most sweetly, "the dungeon."

Everybody ought to know the dungeon at Malplaquet, the one which
historians have mentioned in so many works.  It was an excavation
extending backward in time, far beyond the First Duke, far into the
misty past which saw the Tower of London rise.

The Duke's ancestors had been some Nova Scotia baronets, who had dwelt
since the days of James I in an ancient Norman castle, which had once
stood on some of the ground that was now covered by the ballroom floor.
They had fallen out with Cromwell, who had blown the castle up, and the
Duke had used the stones when he started to erect his palace, pulling
down the rest.  The only parts which he had been unable to pull down
had been the dungeons, for they had been down already.  So he had left
them for wine cellars, keeping the main one in its original state.  He
had thought it a curio, owing to its being Gothick.

It was lit by red light, through a small window which had crimson
glass, in a wall about twenty feet thick.  The window was barred, and
the effect of the color on the stone arches of the Norman roof was
better than anything in the Chamber of Horrors.

The furniture, where it was not red, was coal black.  It consisted of
instruments of torture, which had not been sold at the sale, because
there had been no demand for them.  The floor was covered with rushes,
except where sand or sawdust were needed, to soak up blood.

In one corner stood the Rack: the improved pattern, perfected by the
villain Topcliffe.  Written on the side of it, in vermilion letters,
were the awful words of the warrant to torture poor Guido Fawkes:

  PER GRADUS AD IMA.


The opposite corner held a German instrument called the Virgin of
Nuremberg, which consisted of an upright coffin, shaped like a woman.
Its lid opened like a door, and was covered with six-inch spikes,
arranged so that they would run into people at various places when they
stood inside the coffin and the door was shut.

A third corner held the machine known as the Manacles, which happened
to be the one on which Peacham had been tormented in 1614, in the
presence of Francis Bacon--when he had been examined "before torture,
in torture, between tortures, and after torture."  Its inscription said:

  PAINE IS GAINE.


The fourth corner held the Block.  It was black like the others, but
covered with a pall of scarlet velvet.  When this was lifted, the scars
in the wood could be seen, where the ax had bitten deep.  The ax itself
lay across the pall, a ruby flash of steel, and this was the very one
which had been used to decapitate King Charles I.  It had been wielded
by Richard Brandon--or "Young Gregory," as he had been called, to
distinguish him from his father, "Old Gregory," who had also been an
executioner.  The same sure hand had used the same ax on Strafford,
Laud, Holland, Hamilton, and Capel, all lords, and little can these
martyrs have paused to reflect how lucky they were, to get the job done
by an artist who took himself seriously.  For Young Gregory had trained
from earliest childhood, by chopping off the heads of stray cats.  It
was not so with that scoundrel Ketch, who took five whacks to
decapitate the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth, and even then he had to
finish him off with a penknife.

Next to the ax, in a small crystal casket, there was half the fourth
cervical vertebra of King Charles, the other half having been stolen
from the King's coffin in 1813, by a doctor called Sir Henry Halford.

Across the casket, somebody had engraved the famous quotation:

  DE MORTUIS NIL NISI BONUM


In the middle of the main wall, opposite the massy door, there was an
enormous fireplace, for heating branding irons.  Opposite the window,
in the darkest recess, there was a pile of thighbones, skulls, and so
forth.

Prisoners had scratched their last remarks upon the walls.  The Little
Princes, who were finished off at Malplaquet and not in the Tower, had
written "Adiew," "Adeiw."  A witch had inscribed, before they burned
her, "I come, Graymalkin," and some homesick Scot, tired by too much
thumbscrew, had suggested: "East, Quhest, Hame Ys Best."  An anonymous
villein had written: "yis hurte me mo than it hurts yow."

They dragged Maria struggling to the gloomy chamber, a secure hold
which Cook would never dream of searching, and they actually chained
her with one of the handcuffs, when they remembered her resourcefulness
with the water jug.  Of course they did not intend to use the
instruments of torture on her, but they did intend to find out where
the People lived.

"If," said the Vicar finally, looking at her with a thoughtful hum,
"the child insists on being sullen, she must be punished till she
speaks.  Naughty children should be whipped."




CHAPTER

XIX

The Professor was sitting at the end of his vegetable garden, under a
marble monument to the Tragic Muse.  He was chopping wood.  The other
side of the monument was to the Comic Muse, so that he had two wide
mouths above his head, one laughing and the other howling.  It was to
Congreve, or to somebody of that sort.  The Professor was chopping with
a sixpenny hatchet from Woolworth's, where he did his shopping, and he
had a one-and-threepenny metal hacksaw beside him, counting the cost of
blades, with which he had managed to fell a small blackthorn for
firing.  His head was buzzing with schemes.

The first scheme was to work his passage to London as a bus conductor,
where, perhaps, they might be likely to have a set of Du Cange in the
British Museum Reading Room.  In connection with this scheme, he was
certain that _Tripharium_ meant either "trefoliated" or else
"tripartite"; but the trouble was that the manuscript could bear either
construction, with different results.

The second scheme was, to save up until he could afford a penny
fishhook, and then to ask permission from Maria to fish in the lakes at
Malplaquet.  His mouth watered at the thought of the fishes he might
catch--perch perhaps--and of how he would eat them grilled, on slices
of bread and butter.  He could not afford to buy a rod or line, but he
was planning to use a sapling of ash, with some string from a parcel
which he had once received, tied to the end, and the only difficulty
was to save up a penny for the hook.  He felt so greedy when he thought
of the hot perch that he almost decided to sell one of his first-folio
Shakespeares, to get the money.

The third scheme was about making some parsnip wine in the kitchen
copper.

The fourth was about touching the Vicar for a testimonial, so that he
could go to Buckingham Palace and ask to be made Prime Minister.  He
felt sure that a person who ruled the whole nation would be expected to
be an educated man, and, as he had been educating himself for the last
sixty years, he thought that there would probably be a chance of
getting the job.  He argued that people who had spent their lives
leading revolutions, or killing other humans, or howling out lies on
election platforms, could have had very little time for education, and
thus that his own weary life of study might have put him ahead of them
in this respect.

Perhaps the maddest of his schemes was that, when he had been made the
Premier, he would choose educated people to be his ministers, just as
one chooses a trained dentist to pull one's teeth out, instead of going
to the nearest quack at a street corner who likes to scream from the
top of a tub that he "opposes toothache."  The Professor was silly
enough to think that if doctors had to pass examinations before they
could cut out his appendix, then members of parliament ought to pass
examinations before they could rule his life.

He was well mixed up with all these schemes when the garden gate was
pushed open, and Cook appeared.  She was dressed in a brownish-gray
alpaca dress, with a serviceable hat pinned on, and she carried a
Rexine shopping bag which bulged.  She was on her best behavior, but
determined to do her duty.  She had sadly left her beloved Captain at
home, with tears on both sides, because she knew that the Professor did
not get on with dogs.

He stopped his chopping and hurried along the path between the currant
bushes, looking hungrily at the Rexine bag.  As he came, he cried out
joyfully: "Ah, Mrs. Noakes, good day, good day!  You are welcome to the
Ridings!  Pray do not ring the bell!  It does not ring!  We are
enjoying very seasonable weather!  Yes, yes!  Some small fault in the
mechanism, I believe!  I must buy a gong!  It is due to the sun being
in Aries!"

Cook said: "There now."

"I assure you that I am correct.  The Zodiac ... But I am leaving you
to stand upon the doorstep without a welcome.  We must enter the
cottage before embarking on abstruser themes.  Let me see.  Just so.
The door is locked, we notice."

"I only come, Sir, if you please, on account of what I was desirous..."

"But love laughs, Mrs. Noakes, ha! ha! at locksmiths.  I have my own
methods, Watson, that is, er, Mrs. Noakes.  The pot of geraniums!
Whenever I lock myself out of my cottage, I am careful to conceal the
means of ingress in a place known only to myself.  Now, Mrs. Noakes, if
you will kindly look the other way for just one moment, I will extract
the key from under this pot of geraniums, where I keep it for secrecy,
you see, and we shall be inside the edifice before we can say Tom
Robinson.  Tom?  Perhaps I am thinking of Crusoe.  But even then we
ought to call him Kreutznaer.  The idiom I am attempting is that we are
likely to be there in half a Nippy."

Cook said that she was sure she did not wish to intrude upon a
gentleman, knowing, as she hoped, what was due to such, and being able
from a girl to observe her station....

The Professor said that it was no intrusion at all, none, in fact a
pleasure, an unexpected pleasure, and that, if she could just wait for
a moment or so while he tried the key the other way up, as it was, he
feared, inclined to be recalcitrant, there was no doubt but what, with
a little humoring--which he pronounced without the "H"--a favorable
entry would be effected....

Cook said that she trusted not to make herself an Imposition, being as
how as which it would go just as well outside....

"There!  It requires, as you see, a simple sleight of hand.  The key
has to be inserted _upside down_, and _back to front_, owing to some
anomaly in the formation of the lock, and then it all goes as smoothly
as, as..."

"Smooth."

"Exactly.  And now, Mrs. Noakes, you must step in from the sunlight.
You have walked far and fast.  Let me see...

"I fear," he continued coyly, "that I am unable to offer you a cup of
tea, as I have finished the packet; but there is some excellent boiling
water, which can be procured at a moment's notice, by igniting some of
these pieces of wood that I have been making, and..."

It was true that he could not offer her the tea, for he had finished
the last teaspoon a week before, but it was hardly straight to offer
the hot water.  He would have had to offer it to anybody else, and he
would have done so, but this was not his first visit from Cook.  He
stood on one leg, looking anxiously at the shopping bag, and continued
to say "and..."

"Well, there now, Sir!  If I did not fortunately think to bring..."

He sighed happily.

"... knowing your 'Abits ..."

And Mrs. Noakes vanished into the dirty kitchen with her bag, while the
Professor peeped through the crack of the door in an agony of
anticipation.  The whole thing was whether she had brought bloaters or
sausages.  She always brought one or the other, and today he felt like
bloaters.  He knew that she would make some tea, out of a screw of
paper, and that she would have remembered a bottle of milk and six
lumps of sugar, with two buns baked by herself.  These were delicious.
But, afterward, she always left behind a packet in greased paper, which
was either bloaters or sausages, as if she had forgotten it.  The
Professor never mentioned the packet any more than she did, nor thanked
her for it: either because he was too proud, or too shy, or too
grateful to thank her properly.  He just ate them next day.  Meanwhile,
he wanted badly to know which it was; but he did not like to ask, could
not see through the crack, and was rather ashamed of peeping.  So he
went back to sit on the soapbox and swallowed rhythmically, because his
mouth was watering.

When Cook had made them an excellent cup of tea, and they had eaten
their buns, sitting side by side on the box, she mentioned the reason
for her visit.  It was that here Miss Maria, Sir, on account of which
she was anxious of, being as how there was neither sign nor parable of
her to be seen these two days, as which the one what he knowed of, to
wit, Miss Brown, though not accustomed to name names, the same what she
had referred to notwithstanding, had, though not in the 'Abit of
discussing her employers with the Gentry, as the Professor might be
sure, on account of her having been bred at Malplaquet from a girl
under Mrs. Batterby that was housekeeper to the late Duke, seemingly,
if uncharitable to Nourish Suspicions yet Truth will shame the Devil,
provided some haction against her, the poor mite, as might be
detrementious in a manner of speaking.

The Professor, who had begun to think of other matters while she was
talking, noticed from the silence which followed that it was his turn
to say something.  He observed resourcefully: "Just fancy!"  He had a
secret plan for conversations, which consisted in saying either that or
else "You don't say so!", both of which were foolproof, and could be
used in answer to any statement whatever.

Cook said it was a rare shame, and she had been in such a taking since
Friday morning as how she scarcely knew which way to turn, what with
the goings on and all, and that here Vicar, for you can't make a silken
purse out of a sow's ear, not though the Archbishop of Canterbury were
to lay his hands on, which she doubted, so it had seemed best that
morning, while she was a washing of the dishes, to put the matter
before them as was a gentleman born, which you could see was what the
Professor was of the stock of, as she would say and had said to any
that miscalled him, and to leave the matter in his hands, being as how
as which he would surely know what was rightful for to be done.

A sudden suspicion darted across the Professor's mind.  Cook had been
saying ... Surely he had heard ... Something about...

"Where is Maria?" he demanded.

"That's what I'd give a deal to know.  I hant clapped eye on her this
two days."

"Good gracious!"

"She's gone, Sir," said Cook tearfully.  "My Maria.  And I always tried
to help her little ways."

"My dear Mrs. Noakes, but this is most extraordinary!  A serious
business.  Gone?  Clapped eye?  She cannot have become invisible.
Could she be in bed?  Under the bed?  Up a chimney?  At the seaside?
Lost?  Mislaid somewhere or other?  Can she have gone to London?  To
the British Museum?"

"That Governess of hers give out that she were gone to visit with an
auntie, but no auntie has she got."

"And what do you suspect?"

"She's in the Palace, yet, Sir.  That I'd swear to.  But hid.  Locked
up.  She's in her durance vile."

"Dear me.  You will, of course, have searched?"

"There's rooms, Sir, more than mortal man has counted.  I done me best,
a-bicycling along the corridors and ringing of my bell."

"Well, Mrs. Noakes, you rightly came to me.  I will assume the search
at once.  Some matters are best relegated to the sterner sex.  Dear me,
dear me!  Our poor Maria scotched.  Wait till I fetch my hat."

The old gentleman hurried upstairs, and returned after some time in a
tweed ulster smelling of camphor, with a curious bowler which he had
worn as a dandy in the nineties.  It had a curly brim.  He had to wear
the ulster when visiting, however hot it was, in order to cover the
holes in his clothes.

"We will attack," said he, "this governess in her den.  You, Mrs.
Noakes, had best return in front of me, using some other path.  It
would be wise if I might seem to come by chance, inquiring for Maria.
We must be exceedingly politic."

He bustled her outside the cottage, promising to give her ten minutes'
start, and pushed her off, along the Riding.  Two minutes later, he had
caught her up.

"Oh, Mrs. Noakes, excuse me for a moment.  You would not have, about
you, that is, at your home perhaps, a set of Du Cange?"

"Well, no, Sir.  That I hant.  There's Beeton..."

"You refer to the second archbishop of that name, no doubt.  Certainly
not the Cardinal.  The others were unclerkly, as we know."

"It's cooking, Sir."

"Indeed?  An ancient and a noble art.  A continuator of the Goodman, I
daresay.  But still, you have no volumes of Du Cange?"

"Not that I know of, Sir."

"A pity.  Well, well, well, we can't have everything.  But I am keeping
you.  Good-by, good-by."

After another minute he had caught her up again.

"The word," he said hopefully, "is _Tripharium_.  You have not come
across it in the course of reading, I suppose?"

"Not as I recollect, Sir, no, I haven't."

"No.  Ah, well.  We must possess our souls in patience, Mrs. Noakes.
The _I_, of course, is optional, as scribes would use their vowels more
or less to fancy.  '_Tripharium_,' with a '_D_,' would do as well?"

"There's tripe..."

"Tripe," cried the Professor angrily, "is a Gaelic word.  Nothing to do
with tripe at all.  Good day to you.  Good day."

And he stalked off in a huff, until he remembered the parcel in the
kitchen.  This made his anger melt, and he turned to wave to his kind
friend if he could, but she did not look back.  Then, to give her the
start, he hurried back to investigate the parcel itself.  It was
bloaters, as he had hoped!

He forgot about Maria and began looking up "bloaters" in a dictionary,
to see if they were derived from the Swedish word "blt," which they
were.




CHAPTER

XX

An hour later the Professor tried to scratch his head, found that the
hat was in his way, and wondered why he had put it on.  He made several
attempts to solve this problem, by free suggestion and self-analysis,
finally deciding that he had put it on because he was going out.  He
therefore went out, and looked at the sky.  It did not seem to have any
message for him.  So he went in again, found a piece of paper, and
wrote on it the first word which occurred to him while concentrating on
hats.  This was _Tripharium_.  He tore it up and tried again, getting
RATTO, which he thought was probably something to do with Bishop Hanno
and the rats.  So he tried HANNO and got WINDUP, tried WINDUP and got
CAPE, tried CAPE and got ULSTER.  He discovered that he was wearing his
ulster, and was delighted.  This was followed by a longish tour through
the provinces of Ireland, the Annals of the Four Masters, and so forth,
which brought him back to _Tripharium_.  He tried this, and got
BLOATERS, which he connected by now entirely with Sweden, took a short
circuit through GOTHENBURG, SWEDENBORG, BLAKE, and GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS,
and suddenly remembered that he was pledged to find Maria.  So he
balanced the bottle-green bowler still more carefully upon his head,
and trotted off to do his duty.

It was a basking day.

The trees trapped the heat until the Ridings were long ovens, the
ulster was unbearably hot, the bees droned like aircraft in the sticky
leaves of the lime trees, the swallows who had built nests on south
walls fanned their babies and gasped for breath, the grass snakes were
out in force, making life a misery to the frogs, and the frogs
themselves were committing suicide by dozens, under the wheels of any
passing motor.  The Professor toiled away into the distance, a small
industrious beetle under the copper sky, getting smaller and smaller as
he plodded off toward Malplaquet.

He was not sure what to do.

To search the Palace legally, as he knew from his studies, he would
require several writs of _Habeas Corpus_, together with a _De Heretico
Comburendo_ or so, and perhaps a _Non Compos Mentis_.  On the other
hand, he also knew that it was possible for two or three people to
ramble about in the various corridors for several weeks, without
meeting each other; so that there seemed little reason why he should
not search in an unofficial way, because nobody was likely to notice
whether he was there or not.  The easiest thing would have been to find
Miss Brown, to face her down, and to demand the release of her pupil.
Unfortunately, he had no real proof that Maria was still in the house,
and, besides, he was afraid of the Governess.  She had once been very
rude to him, and he was afraid that the facing down might happen the
other way round.  He felt unhappy, and tried to cool himself as he
went, by waving his hat.

When he had passed the Grecian Amphitheater, and the sixty-foot pyramid
in honor of General Burgoyne, the Valley of Concord opened before him,
as Capability Brown had always intended that it should, and there was
the vast bulk of the mansion at the end of it.  Wren, Vanbrugh,
Hawksmoor, Kent, and the rest of them had erected its dozen colonnades;
Adam, Patrioli, and others had plastered its hundred ceilings;
Sheraton, Heppelwhite, Chippendale, etc., had stuffed it with
furniture, since sold; and there it lay before the Professor in the
evening sunlight, with more rooms than anybody could remember.

He let himself in by a ruined door in the west wing, and began to
search.

He searched the Gothick Billiard Room--which had once held a table as
big as a swimming bath, and which still had the coat armor of all
Maria's ancestors painted on the imitation wooden tracery of the
ceiling.  The central achievement had been kindly provided by Horry
Walpole, and it had 441 quarterings, including the arms of Boadicea and
Herod Antipas.  All the bends were sinister and all the wives were on
the wrong side of their husbands.

He searched the Orangery, where Gibbon had scratched out a semicolon in
the famous last paragraph of _The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_, before presenting the eighth volume to the Duke of
Gloucester--who had observed affably: "Another damned thick book!
Always scribble, scribble, scribble!  Eh, Mr. Gibbon?"

He searched the Menagerie, where the Earl of Chesterfield had once been
locked by mistake for two days as a monkey, and a pity they did not
keep him there for good.

He searched the Chinese Parlor, into which Rousseau had suddenly rushed
in 1768, when he had indignantly read out an interminable and
incomprehensible letter from himself to Diderot, leaving all hearers
completely stunned.

He searched the Rent Room, where the Wicked Earl had once run his
estate agent through the body--the former claimed during his trial by
the Lords that it had been in a duel, but the agent still walked on
Tuesday nights, with the hilt of the sword in the small of his back,
which was a good argument to the contrary.

He searched the Chart Room, where one of the viscounts, an admiral, had
been accustomed to keep his sextant and other instruments, on retiring
from the service after having lost Majorca, Minorca, Bermuda, Goa,
Simla, Hecla, and Alabama, in a series of naval engagements.

He searched the Gun Room, out of whose window the Duke of Orleans had
been accustomed to shoot larks with the corks from champagne bottles.

He searched the Fertilizer Room, where the Master of Malplaquet, who
had invented three separate potato grubbers, had been accustomed to
store enormous quantities of Hypersuperextrainfraphosphates, for the
use of his tenant farmers.

He even searched the State Room, in which Queen Victoria had held the
only Drawing Room ever held outside a royal castle, and in it there was
the very chair in which she had sat, with a glass lid over the seat, to
preserve the royal imprint.

The Professor lifted the lid and sat down himself, for he was beginning
to feel tired.

Then he got up with a sigh and went upstairs to the Clock Room in the
pediment of the North Front, which had a clock made by Christopher
Pinchbeck II, which played "When the Heart of a Man Is Depressed with
Cares," in four parts, one at each quarter--people got over it in time,
and stopped listening.

His quarry was not there.

The Professor began to lose his head, and to hurry from one floor to
another, as the different ideas occurred to him.  He searched the
Butler's Strong Room, which had at various times held the Derby, Grand
National, and Ascot gold cups, as well as an pergne in the shape of a
banyan tree which had been presented to the Sixth Duke by the grateful
inhabitants of Bombay.

He tried the stables for 144 horses, the kennels for 144 hounds, the
attics for 144 abigails or footmen, and the Card Room, where Charles
James Fox had once lost 144,000 in a single night, wearing scarlet
heels to his shoes and blue powder on his wig.

He even tried the Armory, which had once housed the accoutrements of
the Third Duke's Own Northamptonshire Fencibles--and also a party of
visitors who had been mislaid while being shown round the Palace, in
aid of charity, by a forgetful butler, in 1915.

His hostage was nowhere to be seen.

The poor Professor sat down on the bare floor of the Armory for a
second rest.  Then he pulled himself together for a final effort, and
searched afresh.

He searched the Pavilion, where an absent-minded Lord Dudley had once
invited Sydney Smith to dinner with the remark: "Dine with me today,
and I will get Sydney Smith to meet you"--to which Mr. Sydney Smith had
courteously replied that he was engaged to meet him elsewhere.

He searched the Colonnade, where the great Pope himself had walked with
William Broome, on the night when he was persuading the latter to
persuade Tonson to publish a letter from Lintot, signed however by
Cleland, and purporting to have been written by Bolingbroke, in which
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was accused of having suspected a Mr. Green
of persuading Broome to refuse permission to Tonson to publish a letter
by Cleland, purporting to have been signed by Lintot, without the
knowledge of Bolingbroke, about the personal habits of Dr. Arbuthnot,
under the pseudonym of Swift.  (On the other hand, a person named
Worsdale, a mere tool, calling himself R. Smythe, was to tell Curll
that a certain "P.T.," a secret enemy of Temple, possessed a copy of
the correspondence between Lord Hervey and Colley Cibber: with obvious
results.)

He went out of doors at last, and searched the fountain which Boswell
had once fallen into, to amuse the Great Lexicographer.

He even poked about under the equestrian statue of dapper little George
II, seated on a horse with no girths, and for that reason perhaps the
very one which had run away with him at Detringen.

Maria was nowhere to be seen.

In the garden, the Professor observed Miss Brown on her knees, doing
something venomous to a bed of geraniums.  She was wearing a straw hat,
wielding a trowel, kneeling on a carpet mat, and singing bitterly to
herself.  The Schoolmaster's escape had been discovered.

The Professor took off his green bowler, and said politely: "Excuse me,
Miss Brown."

"Oh, it is you, is it.  What do you want now?"

"Well--nothing.  Thank you.  I was just ... walking round."

"You have a fine day for it," said she.  "The gate is there behind."

"The gate?  Oh, yes, I see.  The gate for going away from.  Yes...

"Well," he continued after a bit, "good-by, Miss Brown."

"Good-by."

"Good-by."

"And none of your Nosey-Parkering."

"What?"

"I said: None of your Nosey-Parkering."

"No, certainly not.  No."

He turned his hat round several times, and added bravely: "The
geraniums are red?"

"Do you want me," cried Miss Brown viciously, swinging round on her
knees and pointing the trowel at him, "to set the Vicar on you?  Go
away.  Shut the gate after you.  What are you doing here?"

"I was ... calling on Maria."

"Then you can call elsewhere.  She's gone away."

"To stay with an aunt?"

"Who told you so?"

"I ... I was guessing."

"She's gone away," said Miss Brown brutally, "to stay with her aunt on
Timbuctoo, tee-hee!  I suppose you won't be calling on her there?  Buzz
off, you bluebottle."

The Professor scuttled away while Miss Brown laughed atrociously, and
the last he heard of her, as he closed the gate with trembling fingers,
blushing all over, was when she settled down to sing some private words
once more to her geraniums:

  "Down among the Dungeons,
  Down among the Dungeons,
  Down,
      Down,
          Down,
              Down,
  Down among the Dungeons,
  Let
      her
          lie."


Incidentally, Miss Brown was fond of flowers, and would tell anybody
who chose to listen that the Dear Little Roses were her greatest joy.




CHAPTER

XXI

The Professor walked home with tingling ears, inventing appropriate
retorts which he could have made if he had only thought of them in
time, and worrying about his friend.  He felt certain that she could
not have an aunt in Timbuctoo, not without being darkish, and he was
distressed by the song which the Governess had been singing.  It
sounded suspicious, he thought, as if there had been something going
on.  He began remembering Berkley Castle, and the agonizing king.

All the same, he could not think of anything to do.  He could search
again tomorrow, of course.  There were still plenty of larders,
laundries, cupboards, closets, still rooms, coal cellars, outward rooms
frequented in his early days by Dr. Johnson, servants' halls,
sculleries, harness rooms, pantries, dairies, cloakrooms, storerooms,
and so forth, even in the wing which he had already visited, and then
there were the other wings as well.  Taking cupboards alone, he
calculated that there must be at least two thousand.  But the danger
was that he might arrive too late, however hard he searched.  He wished
that Miss Brown had not been looking so cruel.

When the Professor got home in the rosy twilight, with a wonderful
sunset making the cottage windows flame, and etching one of the
obelisks to Admiral Byng in deepest ebony, he went straight to the
kitchen and sniffed the bloaters.  These cleared his mind, like
smelling salts.  He saw at once what he would have to do.  He would
have to get the help of the People.  Where one old man might take many
weeks in exploration, five hundred searchers working simultaneously,
however small they were, would have the advantage.

It was dark when he started once more, for the moon had waned.  He was
distended with bloaters, at peace with the world, contented with his
plan.  As it was dark, he did not have to wear the curly bowler.  He
was thinking about this and that.

Now if the Professor had a vice at all, apart from his glass of
dandelion wine, it was the fact that he had never cared for dogs.  It
was not that he thought them vulgar or mobbish, but rather that he
disapproved of them for being dependent.  He thought that people and
animals ought to be free and wild, like falcons for instance, and he
disliked dogs because they depended on their masters, in what he
considered to be an undignified way.

It was the same with the People.

He could not see how beings who were only six inches high could hope to
be independent, when they were associated with people who measured as
many feet.  This was why Maria had never been able to persuade him to
visit the island.  The very thought of going made him feel awkward.  He
felt, if you can follow the idea, that the fact of his visiting them
would be an inroad on their proper freedom, because he was so much
bigger than they were.  He agreed with what Gulliver felt among the
giants, that it would be better to die than to undergo "the Disgrace of
leaving a Posterity to be kept in Cages, like tame Canary Birds."  In
his heart of hearts, he disapproved of their association with Maria.
It was, as the same writer has remarked, "upon such a Foot as ill
became the Dignity of human kind."  His idea was that respectable
people ought not to be the masters of others, nor their slaves.

Now if I, thought he, as he pottered down the darkling ride toward the
distant Quincunx, if I had my own choice of capturing one of the
species mentioned by Gulliver, I would prefer to capture a
Brobdingnagian.  Think of the glory and the excitement of catching
somebody who was as high as a church spire!  But I wonder how high they
really were?  It says in the book that Glumdalclitch, who was nine
years old, and little for her age, was only forty feet high.  The
Premier was "near as tall as the Mainmast of the Royal Sovereign."  The
horses were between fifty-four and sixty feet.  Now a horse of sixteen
hands is sixty-four inches high, so, if we do a sum by the unitary
method, comparing sixty feet to sixty-four inches, we get the
comparison that one inch of theirs would be about equal to one foot of
ours.  This would make the average Brobdingnagian some seventy-two feet
high.  Later in the book, it says that a Brobdingnagian on horseback
measured ninety feet.  That would be about four times as high as my
cottage.

But the best comparison, continued the Professor enthusiastically, for
at least he knew everything there was to be known about books, is that
their largest Folio was not above eighteen or twenty feet long.  It
would be a Royal Folio, I suppose, which is twenty inches by twelve and
one-half inches, and so we get the exact scale of one inch to one foot!
They were twelve times as high as we are!

"Now if I were to stand on my own head twelve times," said he aloud, to
the dark form of a beech tree, while the owls of Malplaquet hooted on
every side, "I should be a good deal higher than you are."

The tree rustled.

"Well, then, suppose we wanted to capture one of these Brobdingnagians
that was as tall as you, we should need a ship to reach the country (on
the west coast of North America, somewhat above the Streights of
Annian) and to bring the creature back.  I wonder how deep the well is,
in an oil tanker?  Probably not deep enough to hold a beech tree
without bumping its head.  On the other hand, I do not think we should
need to take the _Normandie_ or the _Empress of Britain_.  A P. and O.
steamer of about twenty thousand tons would be big enough; or, better
still, a middling sort of aircraft carrier.  The advantage of having an
aircraft carrier would be that we could disguise it as a rowing boat
more easily, through its not having too many funnels and things, and
that is what we should finally have to do.

"I would have to publish my Solinus, of course, to get the money, as
they are probably expensive.

"And another splendid advantage of taking an aircraft carrier would be
that we could carry an aircraft."

He resumed his journey, feeling pleased.

"When we got near to the Streights of Annian, we would make the
aircraft fly away on a reconnaissance, and we would hang about
ourselves, out of sight of the country of Brobdingnag, until we heard
from the pilot, by wireless as I think they call it, that he had
spotted one of these giants in a rowing boat by himself, out fishing.

"The Brobdingnagians do not fish much, because our sea fish are smaller
than minnows to them, but sometimes they do go fishing for whales.  The
giant would think our airplane was a large bird, I suppose, if he saw
it.

"Well then, when we had a bearing on this lonely fisherman in his boat,
we would clear our decks for action.  Everybody would have to hide.  We
would steam up quietly from behind him, pretending to be drifting.
When he saw us, he would give us a hail, taking us for a wherry of some
sort, and then, when he got no answer, he would row round us once or
twice, trying to make out what we were.  We should have to leave an
enormous cable hanging over the side, which he would take for a rope.
After a bit, he would climb on board."

The Professor began to snap his fingers.

"Now this is where our previous arrangements would begin to come into
action.  We should have made a big lid in the flight deck, which slid
like the sunshine roof on that motor car I once saw, and inside this
lid there would be our huge cabin, filling the whole of that part of
the ship, fitted up with a chair forty feet high and a table and a bunk
to match!  Of course, the Brobdingnagian would take the whole thing for
the forecastle, or whatever they call it, of the wherry.  And on the
table we would have left a specially made loaf, twelve feet high, and a
bottle of wine to scale!

"So the poor Brobdingnagian would shout out once or twice: 'Is anybody
there?'  And then he would climb down the outsize ladder, to
investigate.  He would be inquisitive.

"The moment he was inside, we would push a button--and snap would go
the lid!"

The Professor pranced with satisfaction when he got to this; but
suddenly he fell into a sober pace.

"We should have to see that this aircraft carrier was solid.  He would
be bound to bang a bit."

He thought it over for some time, considering how the plates would have
to be riveted with bolts that were too small for the giant to move with
his penknife, and then went on with his plan.

"After he had finished bumping and yelling, which might go on for
several hours, he would begin to feel faint or miserable, and he would
sit down at the table, to consider what to do.  That would be the time
when he would notice the food.  So he would suddenly feel thirsty and
decide to take a drink.  Now here is where our cleverness would come in
for the second time, for the wine would be drugged!  Then the poor
giant would lie on the bunk, because his head was going round inside,
and in five minutes he would be asleep.  We should have to use
mandragora.

"The moment we had him under hatches, we should have begun to steam
away from Brobdingnag, after turning his boat adrift, and the moment he
was asleep we should go down with the chains and handcuffs and leg
irons.  We could sling them from a crane or something of that sort,
until he was properly done up.  Then we should have to wait until he
woke."

The Professor grew moody at this, and began to shuffle as he walked.
He did not like the idea of chaining people, even when they were giants.

"Anyway, when he awoke, the captain would have to go down to the bunk,
and he would walk up his chest, and he would tell him not to be afraid.
We should have to have learned the language beforehand.  Perhaps there
is a book on it somewhere in the British Museum, like Du Cange..."

He managed to escape from _Tripharium_ in the nick of time.

"We would tell him that he was a prisoner for the time being, because
we wanted to be safe ourselves, but also that we would not keep him
prisoner forever.  We would only keep him for one year, after which we
would promise to take him home.  And we would explain how we were
carrying him to England in order to make our fortunes by exhibiting
him, but that he would not be made to do anything undignified, and, if
he would be friendly with us, we would be polite to him.  All through
the voyage we would feed him well, and talk things over in a reasonable
way, and then, when we got to Southampton or wherever it was, we would
free him enough to let him stand up, so that he could look out from the
hatch.  Then we would explain to him about antiaircraft guns, as they
call them, and we would have one on the jetty, mounted in a lorry, and
we would shoot down some balloons for him, so that he could see it
work.  We would say: 'We are going to free you altogether now.  You are
in England, thousands of miles away from home.  You cannot get back,
nor do much harm to us--for, after all, you are only as big as a
tree--and we have weapons like this one here, which would do for you in
no time.  This is why we are setting you free.  Now, Giant, if you will
be sensible and walk with us to London without any bonds or indignity,
we will take the Albert Hall for one year, for you to live in, and we
will charge five shillings for a ticket to see you having your dinner
every evening.  We will not ask you to do any tricks, but only to let
the people see you having dinner.  Perhaps you will be kind enough to
talk to them, in the various galleries, if you feel like it.  We will
feed you and house you and treat you with respect, and we will carry
you home after one year.'

He considered this for half a mile, before concluding: "Perhaps it
would be wise to keep the gun pointed at him, from the Gentlemen's
Cloakroom or somewhere like that, just in case.  We would not tell him
about it, of course, for fear of hurting his feelings."

"Also," added the Professor later, still feeling a little
uncomfortable, "we would naturally pay him a commission of ten per
cent."




CHAPTER

XXII

By the time these matters had been settled, the old gentleman had
reached the Quincunx, and had remembered there was work to do.  He
pushed his way through the reeds beside the boathouse and stood in an
oozy place, where the water quickly climbed his ankles, looking across
the glimmering lake.  The more he looked, the more ashamed he felt.  He
was guilty about being bigger.

However, he remembered his young friend's desperate case, and pulled
himself together as well as he could.  He clenched his fists at his
sides and shouted in a gruff, uncertain tone, which was half a squeak
and half a whisper, because he was unsure of it: "News from Maria!"

Try shouting by yourself, out of doors, in the middle of the night, in
the country, without knowing whether anybody is listening, and you will
see how he did it.

He nearly jumped out of his skin when a clear voice near his right
ankle said politely: "_Quid nunc, O vir doctissime, tibi adest_?"

It meant: "What is biting you, learned man?"

The Professor's shyness vanished.  Monkish Latin was the one language
which could have made him forget his unfair size.  It was the
Schoolmaster, safe home from the Vicarage at last, who had spoken, and
the latter, of course, had been brought up in an eighteenth-century
way, to talk Latin with educated foreigners.  He had known that he was
talking to the Professor, from the description given by Maria's captive.

"_Vir eruditissime_," exclaimed the Professor joyfully, "_sed solo voce
mihi cognite..._"

They were sitting side by side on the ledge of the boathouse, jabbering
about Pomponius Mela, when the frigate came upon them from the darkness.

The Admiral wanted to know what was the matter, what was the news from
Maria?  The crew hung over the bulwarks with their mouths open, as if
they were to eat it.  Even the Schoolmaster remembered that Pomponius
could scarcely be the main object of the visit; and the messenger
remembered too.

When the story had been told, there was a council of war.

Considering her captors, it was obvious that the prisoner must be
rescued at the earliest moment.  The Palace was four hundred yards from
the Quincunx.  To cover this distance with a pace of three inches, the
forces of Lilliput would have taken three-quarters of an hour.  But the
Professor could do it in a few minutes.  It was decided, therefore,
that sixty men should be disembarked from the frigate immediately, and
the Professor was to carry them carefully but quickly, rolled in his
ulster like a sack, so that they could begin to search without delay.
Meanwhile, the frigate would return to the Repose for more of the men,
and for the saddle rats, and for as many women as could be spared.  If
the Professor liked to come back for a second cargo in the ulster, they
would be ready for him.  The searchers were to begin in the East Wing
for a change, spreading out in parties from corridor to corridor and
from floor to floor, as quickly as possible, and working inward from
the outside, till all met in the middle.  The second cargo would begin
in the North Wing, the third in the South Wing, and so in order.  Where
the doors were shut, they were to look under them if they could; if
not, they were to call and listen.  Probably their keen ears would be
able to hear Maria, even if she were gagged but breathing.  If and when
she were found, the finder was to go at once to the steps below the
clock on the North Front, where a first-aid party would be waiting.
People were not to make any noise while they were near the
North-northeast Drawing Room.  If anybody sent reports, they were to be
careful to write the time (in hours) and, above all things, reports
were to be copied in triplicate, with capital letters.

One party of desperadoes was willing to wait till midnight, if the
worst came to the worst, so that they could try to tie Miss Brown to
her bed when asleep, as Gulliver had once been tied in the sleep of his
exhaustion.  Then they could prick her with pins, until she confessed
where Maria had been hidden.

The work of search began.

Meanwhile, in the furnished drawing room, Miss Brown and the Vicar were
sitting on either side of the fireplace as usual, two silent images in
their evening clothes.  The People could see them through the windows
and under the door: the Vicar in his black clerical silk, sipping half
a glass of sour sherry because he was too mean to take a whole one, and
Miss Brown in a violet fichu, eating chocolates with a kind of
disdainful greed.  They had nothing to say to each other for the time
being.  They were thinking, perhaps, about the best way to break
Maria's spirit, and dreaming of the vast fortune which they hoped to
enjoy when they had sold the little islanders into slavery, for the
circus at Olympia or the cinemagnates at Hollywood.

When she had finished the chocolates, Miss Brown went to the piano.
She began to play hymns.

Silently and anxiously, while the piano tinkled, the People of Lilliput
pattered up and down the corridors, with footfalls quieter than falling
leaves.

They peeped under doors according to instructions; they whispered
shrilly, "Maria!  Maria!"  They mounted the big stairs laboriously with
scaling ladders which had been brought by the frigate.  For going down,
they slid on the banisters.  In the corridors, they ran, to save time.
Outside, in the inky shadow of a pillar on the North Front, the
Professor waited with the first-aid party in an agony of nerves.  He
was afraid that Miss Brown might catch him and call him a bluebottle,
but he was still more frightened for Maria.

At last there was a flutter of mouselike feet upon the marble pavement,
and the messenger stood gasping.  He had forgotten his forms in
triplicate, but he had not forgotten the news.  He was picked up,
together with the waiting ambulance men, and bundled in the ulster.
The Professor scampered down the servants' stairs.

Down they went, past empty pantries and broom cupboards; down wooden
steps which sounded awfully beneath the Professor's hobnail boots; down
into deeper regions where there were stone walls and cobwebs and the
smell of mouldy corks.  Past wine bins and dusty footsteps, past
looming vaults with sweeping shadows in the light of Cook's torch,
which he had remembered to borrow, past the heavy safe in which the
famous Malplaquet Diamond, 480 carats, stolen by William Malplaquet
("the Great Publican") from the Nawab of Poona, had once been locked in
beamed darkness, past bricked-up arches which might have contained any
number of sherry tasters buried alive by Montresor; they hurried along
past the heavy doorway of the cellars, which had bolts on the outside
but no key, until they reached the last massy door of the dungeon
itself.  It was shut.  A small knot of Lilliputians was standing in
front of it, pointing out Maria's footsteps in the dust.




CHAPTER

XXIII

The door was battle-ax proof.  It was laid together in two plies of
wood, the grain of one ply being horizontal and of the other vertical,
so that no ax could split it.  In its early days, when it had first
been set on its hinges by some feudatory of William the Conqueror's, it
had been secured by an enormous bar of wood, the size of a yule log,
which had run in two wide tunnels left in the masonry of the wall.
When this bar had become worm-eaten, somewhere in the reign of Queen
Elizabeth, the village blacksmith had constructed a wrought-iron lock
to take its place.  This was still there, locked.  Miss Brown had
removed the key, which weighed two pounds three ounces.  There were,
from the same period, some handsome iron bolts.  These offered no
difficulty, because they had only to be drawn, if one happened to be on
the outside.  Since the days of Elizabeth, various other people had
done their best for the security of the hold.  Under the Regency,
somebody had fixed iron bars, like the bars for windows, but these
could be shifted like the bolts.  Under Queen Victoria somebody else
had put on the kind of chain which people have for front doors.  Under
King Edward, an expert had come down from the Bank of England, and had
provided a circular lock which nobody on earth could open, unless he
knew the key word for the combination, which happened to be
"Mnemosyne."  (One of the dukes had won the Derby with a horse of that
name; the bookies had called it "N or M.")  Under King George V, an
American gentleman had sold the reigning duke a ten-shilling lock by
Yale.  Under King George VI, the whole affair had been provided with
strips of antigas and black-out paper, by means of which it could be
stuck together.  The door was shut.

Now the ignorant Amaryllis, who probably knows nothing about anything
except cricket bats, may have come to the conclusion that our Professor
was an inefficient old person.  Because he knew so much about
everything at large, it may have been thought that he would not have
known anything about housebreaking.  Well then, to be absolutely frank,
he did not.  But, and this is where he differed from many well-known
cricket bats, he had a brain.  He had used it before when discovering
the origins of the People.  Now, as he stood outside the dungeon, his
skull could almost be seen to swell and rise like a football being
inflated.  His white hair stood on end like a thunder-stricken cat's,
when stroked; his eyes sank into their sockets with the effort of
concentration; the veins on the side of his temples throbbed like a
frog's heart beating; the temples themselves lifted like a cockchafer's
wing cases, when about to fly.

The door shook on its hinges.

"Exactly," said the Professor.  "Now here we have a door.  Pray stand
in front, most erudite Schoolmaster, to assist my meditations."

The Lilliputians fell back in awe, not of his size but of his mental
powers, and the Schoolmaster stepped forward solemnly to do his best,
feeling proud that he had lived to see that day.

"When," said the Professor, stroking his beard with majesty and glaring
upon the lock, "is a door not a door?  This is the conundrum which we,
among others, and not for the first time, are called upon to determine.
_Hic labor, hoc opus est_."

While he was thinking, the People tried to imagine a way in which they
could take advantage of their size, in opening it.  For instance, if
the Professor had lifted one of them up, the latter could have put his
small arm into the Elizabethan keyhole, and might have been able to
shift the wards, if they had not been too stiff.  But there was no way
in which their smallness could help them in dealing with the
combination lock, which was opened by the secret word, and the Yale
lock was also beyond them, because the box part was inside, so that
there was no hope of unscrewing it.  They were talking these matters
over in whispers, when the Professor lifted his hand for silence.  He
had thought.

"When," he repeated, "is a door not a door?"

"_Tibi ipsi, non mihi_," said the Schoolmaster reverently, meaning "I
will buy it."

"When it is off its hinges."

All were struck by the justice of this.  The old gentleman might have
gone on to point out that most locks and bolts are really a kind of
bluff, that fox hunters who are confronted by a chained gate have only
to lift it from the other end, and that the human race will generally
be fascinated by a padlock as if it were a rattlesnake, instead of
going round another way, or climbing through the window.  He only said:
"Produce a poker."

The hinges were of wrought iron, and had been made by the same
blacksmith who had made the ornamental lock.  They were T hinges, with
hasps like the fleur-de-lis, and they had been put outside the door, so
that the prisoners could not get at them.  The result was that the
rescuers could.  They were old and rust-eaten.

Luckily there was an abandoned poker in one of the outer cellars, and
the Lilliputians brought it between them, carrying it as keepers at the
zoo carry an outsize in boa constrictors.

The Professor set to work with bangs and wrenches; the ancient hinges
gave out showers of powdered rust; the bolts began to fall off one by
one; and the other helpers stood to watch the Titan's effort, with
miniscule anxiety.


In the Drawing Room, the Vicar was thinking private thoughts.  Why, he
wondered, should we only sell the mannikins to Olympia?  Once we have
caught a sufficient number of them, say a barrelful, I will take half a
dozen to London in a cigar box, with holes in the lid.  I will go in
the Rolls, or at any rate I will go first class, for the Clergy are
expected to set an example to the lower orders.  Then I will call, not
only at the Olympia offices, but also on Lord George Sanger, Barnum and
Bailey, and the rest of them.  This will be even better than taking
them to Hollywood.  I will show my specimens and sell the barrel to
each of these in turn, without telling the others.  After all, they are
commercial people, probably of low moral character, and one has to meet
guile with guile.  It is a sad thing, but there it is.  When in Rome
one must do as the Romans do.  And by the way perhaps it would be wiser
not to mention the treble sales to dear Miss Brown?  She is a woman,
and might not understand; besides, if I do not tell her about them, I
shall not need to share.  She will have quite enough by getting a share
in the first sale, indeed she will have more money than any unmarried
woman could possibly want, and I know that her requirements are few.
It would be a pity to spoil her simple nature.  M-m-m-m-m.  Besides, I
daresay I might need to leave the country till the fuss blows over,
after selling the same article to three separate firms, and it would be
useful to leave Miss Brown behind, to handle the business of delivery.
She might desire to leave the country also, if she knew about my
laughable deception.  I understand that women's prisons are extremely
comfortable, and I daresay the climate of Bermuda might not suit her.
M-m-m-m-m.  Palm Beach, Bermuda, Honolulu?  I must order travel
leaflets from the shipping companies.

Miss Brown was also thinking privately.  If, she thought, if--if an
accident were to happen to Maria?  I don't mean any violence, of
course, not premeditated, but if some little accident did happen so
that she--well--was very ill--or even--even if she died?  Quite by
accident, naturally.  We should all regret her.  And if the Vicar were
to be involved in it, so that he felt--well--almost as if he had been
guilty of--of a murder?  If he should attempt to swindle me of what
I've rightly earned?  They say that blackmail is a stronger bond than
matrimony...  But there, murders never happen nowadays.  Such thoughts
are merely day dreams.  And if we found the missing parchment
afterward, and altered it in favor of ourselves?

The Vicar startled her from the reverie.

"Come," said he, finishing his sherry quickly.  "We have been patient
long enough.  Obstinacy is one thing, mere naughtiness is another.  We
must have obedience: it is written in the catechism.  Maria must be
made to speak."

"Now?" asked Miss Brown eagerly.

They rose and went downstairs.


The last bolt fell from the top hinge in a little cataract of
worm-eaten wood.  The Professor took a firm grip of the battered iron
and began to heave the door ajar.  It creaked and grated on the
flagstones, opened an inch or two, then stuck.  The ill-treated flanges
of the locks on the other edge were bending in their sockets,
splintering the old wood of the frame, and shedding screws.  He took
the hinge again and dragged the door half open.  They did not wait to
widen it, but squeezed their way inside.  The Lilliputians ran between
his feet without thinking about being trodden on.  They cried: "Maria!
You are saved!"

There she was in the beam of the torch, handcuffed to the wall, looking
furious.  All the thanks they got was: "Why didn't you come before?"
Then she said defiantly: "I did not tell."  Then she burst into tears.

They found that she was covered with bruises, not because she had been
spanked, for she had escaped that last indignity, but because she had
struggled so hard in being dragged downstairs that the action had
developed into a rough-house.  As a matter of fact, if she had not
struggled, they quite likely might have spanked her then and
there--they were so furious about her feat with the water jug but the
rough-house had put them out of breath.  So you see it is always best
to go down fighting, and if anybody ever tries to beat you, you should
fight them till you die.

She had a splendid black eye.

"Right!" said the Professor.  "That's quite enough of that."

He was so angry that he was almost shaking.

They told her how proud they were of her courage in not telling, and
how much they owed to her.  They found the keys on a nail by the
fireplace, and unlocked her chains.  They asked if she were really
hurt, or hungry, or ill.  They begged her not to cry.

"To begin with," said the Professor, "I shall take her to my cottage.
Not one night shall she stay at Malplaquet, until this matter has been
settled.  I shall revive her with cowslip wine and bread and butter.
Here, have my handkerchief.  And then--"

He raised his fists to the heavens.

"And then I shall get on my tricycle and go to find the Lord Lieutenant
or the Chief Constable, I am not sure which, and I will see to it that
these monsters are made to pay for their outrage, to the last drop of
their inky blood!  What a heaven-sent opportunity!  Do you realize that
with these handcuffs and these bruises we can probably get her
guardians removed and actually sent to prison, which is the only hope
for the people of Lilliput?  Otherwise they would always have had the
legal right to sell you, and Maria could hardly have kept your secret
forever.

"I must say this is an excellent development," added the Professor,
restored to the best of humors by the idea.  "I trust you are seriously
injured, my dear child?  Can you walk?"

"Yes, I am quite safe really.  They didn't hurt me."

"Good.  We shall walk to the cottage at once.  I suppose you wouldn't
like to be carried?  I learned rather a good lift when I was a boy
scout?"

"No."

"Oh, well, you must please yourself.  And let me see.  Is there
anything we ought to arrange with the People?"

The Schoolmaster asked: "Do you intend to call the Constable this
Evening?"

"Yes.  The sooner the better.  The quicker we have these villains under
lock and key, the better it will be for all."

"Should she be guarded while Y'r Honour is away?"

"No.  I will lock the door.  I trust that this will answer.  I always
hide the key under my pot of pink geraniums, a highly secret spot,
known only to myself.  Yes, h'm.  Besides, they will not know that she
is gone, or, should they find she is, will not know where to look for
her.  Forward to safety!  But hark, what noise was that?"

They were in the passage, within reach of freedom.  The Professor
disentangled the torch from his whiskers and pointed it toward the
cellar door--the other one, which blocked the end of the passage.  Even
as he pointed, it was softly closed.  Something suspiciously like a
chuckle, though muffled by the wood, echoed beneath the vaulted ceiling
of the corridor, while on the outward side, the bolts creaked home.




CHAPTER

XXIV

Mr. Hater leaned against the outer door with a long sigh, which
whistled between his pursy lips as if he were letting off steam.  "Got
them!" he said.  "The floor was crawling with the creatures."

Miss Brown lifted the candle to his face and examined it without a word.

"At least fifty.  Say at one thousand pounds apiece.  I think we may at
last allow Maria her supper!"

She held the candle closer.

"And the Professor?"

"We can let him out as soon as the small people are secured."

"Are you deaf?"

"Deaf, Miss Brown?"

"He has found your ward handcuffed to the wall in a dungeon, and he
intends to visit the police.  You heard him tell them.  The Society of
Prevention, Mr. Hater, may have a word to say."

"Well, we cannot keep him locked in there forever.  Besides, when we
have sold the minnikins..."

"Did you observe that he and they appeared to be acquainted?"

"Good heavens!  You mean a prior claim?  But no, they live on our land,
not on his.  They are the property of the landlord.  He has no right,
whatever their acquaintance..."

"The landlord is Maria."

"But, my dear lady, do I understand that you suggest...  It would be
impossible to keep them locked in there perpetually ... The difficulty
of feeding--"

"Why do it?"

"Impossible!  We cannot... It would be ... wicked.  Unfriendly critics
might consider that it was tantamount to murder.  Besides, even if we
did starve them till they died, what of the risk?  It is unthinkable."

"Cook has been told that she is with her aunt, and not one living
person knows the whereabouts of the Professor."

"But the dungeon is a room still visited by antiquarians!"

"We can put off their visits, for a month or two."

"Miss Brown, we could not, no, we must not, dream of such a thing.  We
are Christians.  We must not be selfish.  Besides, if we kept the big
ones locked up, how could we get the little ones out?"

"Sir Isaac Newton bored a hole, to let his kittens through the door."

"Ingenious.  M-m-m-m-m.  You mean, to bore a hole and place some wire
rat trap on the outer side, to catch them.  Yes.  Meanwhile, the
Professor and Maria stay inside...."

"The informer and his evidence."

"It was you who suggested the handcuffs."

"No, it was you."

"It means imprisonment for both, whoever it was, if the Society for
Prevention should be set upon us."

"Yes."

"Miss Brown, we must resist temptation.  The idea is far too dangerous.
Murder will out.  Not, of course, that we should be intending murder,
for it is not our duty to feed the Professor for the rest of his life;
but we must think of the construction which others might put upon it.
No, Miss Brown, we must manage things more carefully.  We will bore the
hole as you suggest, collect the little men, give food and water to the
captives through the aperture, and proceed to make our sale.  Once we
have cashed the checks--that is, the check--we will set off for
Florida, or for some luxury hotel among the Azores, by airplane.  When
there, we can safely cable Cook to let them out.  But murder, no!  I am
amazed that you should mention such a thing."

Miss Brown puddled the hot candle grease with a fat finger while she
thought.  Finally she said: "You must fetch a brace and bit from the
Vicarage, also a rat trap.  Or a bird cage."

It was noticeable that she no longer called him "Mr. Hater," in her
respectful way, but spoke to him as an equal, or as an inferior.


Meanwhile, in the cellarage, the Professor was trying King Charles's ax
on the door.  It proved to be of cross-ply like the other, and would
not split.  The hinges were on the wrong side.  They were trapped.

He went back to the dungeon, where Maria was sitting up and taking
notice.  He had used too much of his brain on the subject of doors and
bruises, and was beginning to feel peevish.  He wanted to go home and
read books.

"Well, here we are."

Maria said cheerfully.  "I must say it is nicer than being alone."

"It may be nicer for you, but it is not nicer for me.  I like to be
alone.  Why did we start this fuss in the first place?  Scampering
about with axes.  I had left a bloater for my supper."

"It will have to keep."

He swung the torch round the walls.

"There must be some way out.  Where is the back door?  Where are the
windows?  What an inconvenient house!"

"There is a small red window there, behind the rack."

"Then we must simply break it, and climb through."

"It is six inches wide, and has some iron bars."

"Why?"

"To prevent us climbing through it, I suppose."

"How very inconsiderate!  They might have known that we should need it.
Nobody thinks of anybody but themselves.  And where am I supposed to
sleep?"

"Y'r Honour and Miss," said the Schoolmaster, "the Dimensions of this
Window, if I may be permitted an Observation, would not preclude the
Passage of my Companions, suppose the Glass to be broken.  Once
liberated, we might make our Way toward the other Aspect of the Cellar
Door, and draw the Bolts."

"Dear me.  Of course!"

"Even if you can't get it open," said Maria, "you could bring us some
food.  I have been feeling rather hungry for the last two days.  Miss
Brown and the Vicar will not want to come in while they know we have an
ax, so I suppose they mean to let us starve, unless you can get us
something."

"Just let them come," said the Professor.

He gave Maria the torch to hold, and broke the glass with the ax in
question, as if the former were the Vicar.

Then the People had to be lifted to the stone ledge, one by one.  They
went silently and seriously, without looking back, so that the
prisoners could see that they had realized the gravity of the
situation, and were determined to do their best.

The dungeon window faced a coal shaft, between the Boilerhouse and the
Armory.  When they had climbed up that, they found themselves in the
open air, under the pared fingernail of a moon, which was almost
slenderer than themselves.

They sent a party to fetch provisions for the prisoners, while others
went to gather the main body, which was still dispersed about the
Palace.  The remainder started for the bolted door.  They collected two
of the ladders which had been brought by the ship, together with ropes
and spikes.  Getting round the Palace was like mountaineering for them,
and this was why they brought the gear.

For Malplaquet was a real mountain to the People of the Island.  It was
a range of mountains.  To imagine their difficulties, we should have to
think how we would get about in a house that was as high as the downs
at Selborne, and more than six miles long.  The countless steps on the
terrace were, for them, each one as tall as a man.  If the doors were
shut, they could not turn the handles.  The pavements of the colonnades
were airdromes.  Even the smaller columns seemed to be two hundred feet
in height; the greater columns, which held up the pediment, were half
as much again.  The basins of the fountains were great lakes.  The
statues were colossi.  Eight of them could have dined at ease inside
King George's head.

The flat cliff of the South Front towered above them, mat-silver in the
moon and starlight, boldly slashed with its deep bars of velvet shade,
but half in ruin.  It was the ruination that made it possible for them
to make their way about.  Beaded and paneled doors, which would have
been impassable if sound, drooped on their parting hinges, or hung
ajar.  Masonry, once too true and square for foothold, gave purchase
now that it was crumbled.  Windows, gap-toothed with broken glass,
opened on the vasty halls.  Spider and swallow, bat and mouse, had long
inherited the coigns of vantage.

The obstacles which we should overlook were tedious to Lilliput.
Gravel paths seemed bouldered beaches, which might turn an ankle in
their desert strips.  The long grass was a jungle of tripping roots.
They moved, climbing and jumping, clambering and toiling, where we
should stroll.

The ladders were in a dump at the foot of the steps on the South Front.
Now they had to carry them round three sides of the Armory, through an
archway, across the Boilerhouse Yard, and down the basement to the
cellar stairs.  By their measurements, it was as if they had to march
three miles; and it was not across easy country.

The first part of it was along what had once been a gravel drive, where
the Fourth Duchess, an invalid, had been accustomed to be promenaded in
her pony carriage, with a powdered footman at each wheel, and another
behind to carry the smelling salts.  Now it was a weedy trackway, whose
weeds were bushes to the People and whose pebbles were smooth rocks.
It was a heartbreaking trail, although it was one degree better than
the scrubland of meadowsweet, scutchgrass, scabious, and sorrel which
lay on its borders.  This part ended at the west corner of the Armory,
where an iron gate, fifty feet high, and a stone step as high as a man,
led to the Menagerie Path and the Orangeries.

They turned right, along another strip of gravel which was dilapidated
like the first, and struggled on.  Here there were toads, who swelled
themselves up, lifted their back ends stiffly, and made strange moonlit
faces at the rescuers as they stumbled past.  There was also a chance
of grass snakes, who used to go to Boswell's Fountain for the frogs.

To reach the Archway, they had to climb six steps.  They had to hold
the ladders firm, because the stones were slippery.  Above them the
great Arch, dedicated to the unfortunate Queen Caroline Matilda and
ornamented with the royal arms of Denmark, blocked out a section of the
sprinkled stars.

The Boilerhouse Yard was an Arabia of stones, between which the nettles
vied with the goose grass, and a nettle sting was like an adder's for
men so small.

The bats creaked above them, sharper than kingfishers, as they wove
their way between the deadly trees.  Outside the yard, beyond the
Temple of the Graces, a corn crake sawed across its comb.  From an
abandoned flower bed the smell of stock was sweet.

The basement door was shut and locked, but its upper panes had once
been glass.  These were now missing.

They had to tie the ladders together, but even then they were a human
foot too short.  The steeple-jack had to go up with spikes, which he
drove into the wood, like the steps on a telegraph pole, until he
reached the open ledge.  From that he lowered a rope inside the door,
and made it fast.  The rest climbed up the ladders, up the spikes, and
down the rope.  The last man had to help the steeple-jack, while he
hauled the ladders up and lowered them inside.

Then they were in the dark in earnest.  The basement corridor, four
furlongs straight and long enough to stage a modest canter even for us,
was gloomy in daylight.  By night, with rats about, it was the valley
of the shadow.  Some of the bats hunted it also, swerving through the
broken panes.  The dim pipes and the drains above them, and the myriad
bellpulls, were no longer lit by the Professor's torch.

However, they were accustomed to working at night.  Their eyes were as
fine as they were small.  After a minute they could partly see.

The flagstones of the basement were as large as tennis courts.  They
clicked across them silently in skirmishing order, whispers forbidden.

Outside, they could disperse.  They could run, hide in the undergrowth,
or stand motionless with a concealing background.  Inside, within four
walls, the case was altered.  Suppose Miss Brown were to spring before
them, were to step from behind a pillar or to pounce with her candle
from a yawning door?  How could they hide on a stone floor, or disperse
with walls round them, or run away even, when they were locked in, and
needed to climb out by ladders?  One stride of the pursuer would cover
twelve of theirs.  Later, when they were down the steps, their retreat
would be cut off by a series of cliffs, which Miss Brown could mount as
easily as the stairs they were.

So they advanced in silence, like red Indians on the war-path, with
their scouts thrown out.  They had to peer round corners, reconnoiter,
listen, even sniff.  Humans have a pungent smell, which is plain as
daylight to the animals.  The People could distinguish with their noses
as clearly.

If a scout were to wind the Vicar, he would squeak like a mouse, three
times.  All would then turn in silence, and would fade back into the
darkness, since silence was their only hope.

But if the Vicar leaped from behind; if he too had managed to lie
concealed without being winded, and had cut off their retreat: in that
case they would have to run in all directions, giving as much trouble
as possible in being caught.  While he was trying to kidnap one of
them, grabbing to seize the nimble figure without injuring it too much
for sale, why then, perhaps, during that time, another would be able to
climb a stair.

The door toward the cellars had left its hinges twenty years before.
The cellar steps were worn by countless feet--the oldest steps in the
Palace, contemporary with the dungeons.  They had to lower the ladders,
climb down two steps, assemble on the third, lower the ladders once
more, and repeat the process.

They passed the strong rooms and the wine bins, under the massive
Norman arches.  They left minuscule footsteps in the dust.  They passed
the moldy corks and cobwebs and the bricked-up vaults.

Dimly, through the bolted door, they could hear the Professor and Maria
talking.  For some reason these two had begun to neigh.

The lower bolt was reached easily from a ladder.  A spike was driven in
the door, six of our inches behind the back end of the bolt.  A rope
was tied to the arm of the bolt and passed over this spike.  Then,
while one of them held the arm up from the ladder, the others heaved
upon the rope.  It came out sweetly.

The upper bolt was too high for the ladders, even when they were tied
together.  The steeple-jack had to go up with spikes, which he drove in
slantwise until he was six inches behind it, as with the other.  Then
he had to reach the bolt arm, by three more spikes, so that he could
tie a longer rope to that.  He had difficulty in raising the arm from
its slot, although it was only just inside it.  Before he could get it
to move, he had to hammer it with a spike.  The rope was passed over
the pulley-spike and thrown down to the haulers.

They heaved with all their strength, climbing the rope in order to put
their weight upon it.

The bolt was immovable.

The door had sagged on its hinges in the course of centuries, and was
leaning on the socket.  It needed human strength to shift the metal.




CHAPTER

XXV

The Professor walked round the walls with his torch, reading the Latin
inscriptions.

"Not a sign of _Tripharium_," he said sadly, "though there is an
interesting use of "questeur" by this Pardoner behind the block, who
dates himself 1389.  I see that Dame Alice Kyteler, the Irish
sorceress, was here for the week end in 1324."

Maria was resting on the rack, with the famous ulster for a pillow.

"A month ago," she said, "the People were thinking how much they would
like to visit Lilliput, to see if there was anybody there.  I said that
when you were rich we would buy a yacht, and go to find them."

"A pleasant holiday.  Yes.  We might pay a visit to all four countries,
kidnap a Brobdingnagian, call on the Balnibarbians and take a distant
look at all the Horses."

"The Balnibarbians?"

"The people with the flying island overhead, the airy island of Laputa."

"What fun!  We could capture it from a Flying Fortress, if we wanted!"

"Why?"

"It might come in useful for something.  We could put it over London in
the next war, for an air-raid shelter."

"Unfortunately it will only work over Balnibarbi.  It says so in the
book."

"Well, we could use it for a health resort.  Or for investigating the
stratosphere, like Professor Picard."

"Its ceiling was not more than four miles.  Airplanes go higher."

"We could..."

"I don't see why you want to capture it in the first place," exclaimed
the Professor petulantly.  "Why couldn't you leave it to the people who
had it?  They were perfectly happy."

"But they were silly people.  All those old philosophers with their
heads on one side, and one eye turned inward, and the servants to flap
them when they got absent-minded."

"What was wrong with that?"

"Well, look at the ridiculous things they invented.  Look at the
projector who wanted to get sunbeams out of cucumbers!"

"Why not?  He was only a little before his time.  What about cod-liver
oil and vitamins and all that?  People will be getting sunbeams out of
cucumbers before we know where we are."

Maria looked surprised.

He stopped wandering and sat on the block.

"Do you know," he said, "I think that Dr. Swift was silly to laugh
about Laputa.  I believe it is a mistake to make a mock of people, just
because they think.  There are ninety thousand people in this world who
do not think, for every one who does, and these people hate the
thinkers like poison.  Even if some thinkers are fanciful, it is wrong
to make fun of them for it.  Better to think about cucumbers even, than
not to think at all."

"But..."

"You see, Maria, this world is run by 'practical' people: that is to
say, by people who do not know how to think, have never had any
education in thinking, and who do not wish to have it.  They get on far
better with lies, tub thumping, swindling, vote catching, murdering,
and the rest of practical politics.  So, when a person who can think
does come along, to tell them what they are doing wrong, or how to put
it right, they have to invent some way of slinging mud at him, for fear
of losing their power and being forced to do the right thing.  So they
always screech out with one accord that the advice of this thinker is
'visionary,' 'unpractical,' or 'all right in theory.'  Then, when they
have discredited his piece of truth by the trick of words, they can
settle down to blacken his character in other ways, at leisure, and
they are safe to carry on with the wars and miseries which are the
results of practical politics.  I do not believe that a thinking man
like Dr. Swift ought to have helped the practical politicians, by
poking fun at thinkers, even if he only meant to poke fun at the silly
ones.  Time is revenging itself upon the Dean.  It is bringing in, as
real inventions, the very ones which he made up for ridicule."

"What would you do," asked Maria suspiciously, "if we called at Laputa?"

"Hire a flapper there, and settle down."

"I thought so."

"In any case, I do not fully believe in Laputa.  I suspect that
Gulliver was drawing the longbow a little.  So many of these travelers
are inclined to be like Sir John Mandeville...."

"Why don't you believe?"

"Do you remember how it was supposed to be kept in the air?"

"It had an enormous magnet inside, and one end attracted the earth and
the other end repelled it.  If they wanted to go up, they put the
repelling end downward."

"Just so.  I do not think it would work.  Sir Thomas Browne discusses
this very question in his _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_, in relation to
Mahomet's Tomb and other articles, like the iron horse of Bellerophon,
which were said to be suspended in the air by magnets.  He says that it
cannot be done."

"Why?"

"If a magnet is pulling hard enough to pull you up, it will also be
pulling hard enough to pull you upper.  The moment you are up, you are
nearer, and consequently you get pulled harder.  That was one reason.
Another one was that, if you hung a thing between two equal magnets,
the balance would be so infinitely delicate that the least breath of
wind would disturb it, and so the object would fly to one or to the
other.  By the way, do you remember the size of the flying island?"

"It was on a plate of adamant two hundred yards thick, covering ten
thousand acres."

"What is adamant?"

"What is it, then?"

"It was one of the old words for diamond.  If you must have a reason
for capturing Laputa, Maria, I think that a diamond five miles long and
two hundred yards thick ought to be sufficient."

"Gee!"

"I wonder why Surgeon Gulliver did not steal a bit."

"Perhaps he could not break it off."

"Perhaps."

They thought about the huge blue fire scintillating in the air, the
light from the waves reflected and refracted from its flashing bottom,
as Gulliver first saw it, till their minds were awed.

"Tell me about the Horses."

"What about them?"

"Tell me," she said guiltily, "how they ought to be pronounced."

The Professor threw his head back firmly and began to neigh.

"What?"

"Can you neigh?"

Maria tried, to see if she could.

"How did you do it?"

"Let me see.  I kept my mouth shut, and I don't think my tongue moved,
and I sort of kept on huffing out a wriggly squeal, through the back of
my nose."

"How would you spell a neigh?"

"You couldn't spell it very well, because you do it with your mouth
shut.  So there can't be any proper letters, really, not real vowels."

"Well, Dr. Swift used a 'hou' for the huffing part, and a Y for the
squealy part, and the N's and M's are the part in the nose, Houyhnhnm.
It is what a horse says."

"It isn't very easy to pronounce it in the book, not when you are
reading aloud."

"It is only a question of practice," said the Professor grandly.
"Practice and self-confidence."

He began neighing merrily, saying that he was quoting a passage at the
end of Chapter Nine.  Maria started also, each thinking his or her own
imitation to be the best, and the Lilliputians wondered outside.

"It is a pity," said he, stopping suddenly, "that we cannot visit them."

"Why not?"

"We are Yahoos."

"But I thought the Yahoos were horrid hairy creatures, who made messes
and thieved and fought."

"That's what we are."

"We?"

"Dr. Swift was thinking of human beings, my dear, when he described the
Yahoos.  He was thinking of the politicians I was telling you about,
and the 'practical' people, and the 'Average Man,' for whom our famous
democracy exists.  Just so.  Do you realize that the Average Man
probably cannot read or write?"

"Oh, surely..."

"If the Average Man means anything, Maria, it means the average human
being in the world.  He lives in Russia and in China and in India, as
well as in England.  Less than half of him can read at all."

"But the Yahoos had claws...."

"We have tommy guns."

"We do not smell!"

"We do not smell ourselves.  They tell me that a European smells quite
horrid to an Asiatic."

"I don't believe it."

"No."

"And anyway, the Horses could not turn us out."

"Why not?  They turned out Gulliver."

"Why did they?"

"Because he was a human, like ourselves."

"What cheek!" exclaimed Maria.  "I'd jolly soon turn out mere animals."

"There," said the old man calmly, "speaks the young Yahoo.  Exactly.
There speaks our budding Homo sapiens."




CHAPTER

XXVI

The Palace kitchen was rather too small for an aircraft hangar, but its
appointments had been praised by Dartiquenave, and the Prince Regent's
chef had there conceived his famous Sauce Chinoise--which had been
composed mainly of red pepper, as the Prince had by then become
incapable of tasting anything else.

In a gloomy corner of the kitchen, with a tallow candle which threw
enormous silhouettes of titanic ovens, of spits for roasting bullocks
whole, and of braziers for deviling small whales, on a broken rocking
chair which she had inherited with Captain from her deceased husband,
with her steel-rimmed spectacles slipping from the end of her nose and
a copy of _Mirabelle's Last Chance_ slipping from her knobbed fingers,
with her head nod, nod, nodding, and jerking up straight again, with a
bundle of Maria's black stockings on the workbasket beside her and
Captain's head upon her knee, old Cook sat snoozing off.  It was long
past midnight, but she was sitting up to make Miss Brown her
nice-hot-water-bottle.

Captain, with his head on the knee, was gazing soulfully at his
mistress with his eyes turned up like lollipops, while he gently
dribble, dribble, dribbled on her apron.  He used to get a sugar
biscuit every night at bedtime, and this was why he was doing so.  He
was also thinking what a charming person Cook was, and wondering how on
earth he could get along without her.

Alas, my poor Miss Maria, thought Cook between her nods; alack, my
dowsabelle.  But Rule Britannia is my motter, and while there is life
there is hope.  Supposing as which her old gentleman was lucky enough
for to lay his hand upon her nest, according to the Scriptures, before
them tryons has her imbrangled, which is what we must imprecate the
Almighty Powers for the accomplishment of before the expiration of
which, I wouldn't be surprised but what there was some of them eternal
hope-springs for the deliverance of whom, not with the aid of them
Glorious Shiners which we wot of.  Dearie me, dearie me.  I'm sure I
didn't hardly have the heart to darn her little stockings....

She jerked her head upright for the fifth time, looked around with an
expression which said: "I wasn't asleep, so there," and laid her
spectacles on the work basket.

These saved, the sixth nod brought the tired head upon her chest, and
she began to snore.

Poor Cook, thought Captain, I must be kinder to her.  She makes a
splendid pet.  How faithful she is!  I always say you can't get the
same love from a dog, not like you can from a human.  So clever, too.
I believe she understands every word I say.  I believe they have souls,
just like dogs, only of course you can't smell them.  It is uncanny how
canine a human can be, if you are kind to them and treat them well.  I
know for a fact that when some dogs in history had died, their humans
lay down on the grave and howled all night and refused food and pined
away.  It was just instinct, of course, not real intelligence, but all
the same it makes you think.  I believe that when a human dies it goes
to a special heaven for humans, with kind dogs to look after it.  It
may be sentimental of me, but there it is.  Poor things, why shouldn't
they?  For that matter, I daresay there are humans in our own heaven
even, for the dogs to make pets of.  It would scarcely be heaven to
some dogs, if they couldn't take their humans with them.  I know I
should want to take Cook....

Captain suddenly lifted his head from the knee and looked at the
distant door.  The hackles rose on the back of his neck, and there must
have been some setter blood among his ancestors, for he froze with his
tail straight out behind him.  His nose went whiffle-whiffle-whiffle.

In the huge arch of the doorway stood the miserable Schoolmaster,
holding out a Lilliputian biscuit about the size of a daisy, and saying
hoarsely: "Poor Fido, a good Fellow then!  A fine Pug, Fido.  A Comfit
for poor Fido...."

The Schoolmaster was always chosen for difficult missions of this sort.
His companions stood in the background, waiting to see how he would
fare.

"Fido!" thought Captain with disgust.  "Good Lord!"

He walked stiffly toward the door, to examine the intruder.

The poor Schoolmaster held the biscuit in front of him like a weapon of
defense, shut his eyes tight, and kept gasping out his store of
pacifications for Fido, while he was sniffed all over.

"It is the same shape as a human," thought Captain, "in spite of the
size, and it smells the same, too, only less.  I think I will keep it
for a pet, like Cook.  I hope she won't be jealous."

So he picked the Schoolmaster up in a velvet mouth, and carried him to
his basket, which stood beside the rocking chair.  The Schoolmaster
said faintly, "A poor Boy, then, a noble Fellow," as he was
transferred.  He dropped the biscuit.

Now Captain was an elderly bachelor, and, like many people of this
sort, he nourished an unconscious hope that one day he might have
puppies.  The size of the Schoolmaster must have suggested the matter
to his mind, for he sat down carefully on the basket and arranged the
Schoolmaster on his stomach.  He prodded him with his nose several
times, to shovel him into the right position, and the Schoolmaster said
indignantly, "Leave me go, you nasty Br..."

But, before he could say "Brute," Captain's tongue was slapped across
his face like an outsize in custard pies, and, before he could say
anything else, he was being given a bath.  Captain knew very well that
the proper thing with puppies was to lick them all over instantly, and
this he proceeded to do, while the exasperated midget kept spluttering
about Br-br-brutes.  He even punched Captain on the nose, he was so
annoyed, but his new mother took all in good part, and held him down
with one paw, since he seemed to be fractious.

"Oh, you Creature!  Down, Sir!  Put me down!  A bad Dog, Fido!  Leave
me down this Instant!"

Long afterward, while Captain snoozed contentedly in a loop, the damp
Schoolmaster crawled cautiously from under his chin.  He stood on
tiptoe by the side of the basket and tugged the great gray curtain of
Cook's skirt.

"Yes, dear," said Cook, without waking up.  "You shall have it in a
minute, my sparrow.  Not before bye-byes."

She thought that Captain was asking for his biscuit.

At the second tug she opened one eye.

She next opened both eyes, rubbed them, put on her spectacles, looked
at the Schoolmaster, shrieked in a determined way, and resourcefully
threw her apron over her head.  Two minutes later, she lifted a corner,
peeped out with the eye which she had used first, found he was still
there, and replaced the apron.

"Madam..."

Cook began drumming on the floor with her heels, to show that she
intended to have hysterics if he did not leave off and go away.

The Schoolmaster stroked his clammy hair.  "The Sex!" he thought
wearily.  "La!  A very little Wit is valued in a Woman, as we are
pleas'd with a few Words spoken plain by a Parrot."

He turned his back, so that she could get accustomed to him in her own
way, without meeting his eye.

Presently his sharp ears heard the apron being lifted for the third
time, but he stood still, without speaking, and waited.

"Lawks!" said Cook.

"Madam, if you will pray compose yourself so soon as may be Convenient,
I have the Honour to present myself upon Business of the most pressing
Urgency."

"A fairy!"

"A Sylph, Sylphid, Fay, Fairy, Genius, Elf, or Daemon, Madam, which you
please, if you would kindly relieve me from the Attentions of Fido here
or Shock, whatever the Animal may be named, and deeply oblige."

Cook took her scissors out of the workbasket and lifted the tallow
candle.

"I bid you begone," said she, "by the Power of Iron and by the Might of
Fire, forever and ever, by Christopher Columbus, and Whatsobe, Amen."

The Schoolmaster turned round cautiously.

"The Effort to convince you of my Reality, Ma'am, would prove a Task
beyond my moderate Powers at present.  You will, however, permit me to
observe that, whatever my substance, I am the Bearer of an urgent
Message from Miss."

"By Snip-Snap-Snorum and High-Cockalorum...."

He stamped his foot with vexation, causing Captain to give a growl.

"The Professor and Miss Maria are bolted in the Cellar!"

"Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home.  Your house is on fire, your
chillun..."

"What the Devil!" screamed the Schoolmaster, who had, after all, been
tried rather high.  "Z--ds!  D--n the Ladybird!  Plague on't, Madam,
can't you understand plain English?  We wish you to unbolt the Door!"

"Maria in the cellar?"

"Don't you hear me, Ma'am (with a Pox), when I tell you that the Bolt
is stiff?  Must I e'en be slobber'd to death with Spittle and stifl'd
by the filthy Carkass of your Monster, to be deafen'd with the Follies
of Domesticks and exorcised under the Appellation of an Insect?  Miss
is in the Cellar, I say, and the Devil fly away with it!"

The Schoolmaster's indignation was more convincing than any explanation
could have been, and, as Cook felt certain that fairies were not
accustomed to swear, she began to pay attention to his news.  When she
realized that it was about unbolting the dungeons for the Professor and
Maria, she gave up trying to understand why the visitor should be six
inches high.  Were he a spirit of grace or goblin damned, she felt
prepared to follow him, if it meant the rescue of her mistress.

She produced the bicycle from one of the smaller ovens, which she used
as a garage, and seemed resigned when more and more of the Lilliputians
began to filter into the kitchen.  They had watched the proceedings of
Captain from a safe distance, and now came forward, seeing that the
embassy had been safely accomplished.  There was a basket on the
handlebars of the bicycle, into which she put several of them, at their
request.

Captain wanted to carry the Schoolmaster in his mouth, and was
dissuaded from this with difficulty.  He ran behind when the expedition
set off, anxiously watching the basket, for fear that his new puppy
might fall out.

Cook pedaled down the Service Corridor at full speed, carefully ringing
her bell at the corners.  She propped the machine against the wall at
the top of the cellar stairs, and hurried down the ancient steps as
fast as her bad leg would permit.  A crowd of the People were grouped
around the bolted door.  They had smoky torches, made from rushes
dipped in mutton fat.

She was able to draw the bolt.

When the door flew open at last, it was to show the Professor and Maria
at the end of the corridor, seated on the rack in the fading light of
the electric torch, eating a hearty meal of small sheep and smaller
loaves, which had been brought for them by the other party, through the
broken window.  The Professor was in high good humor, and had forgotten
about being locked in.

"Ah, Mrs. Noakes," he cried, waving a leg of mutton.  "Come in, come
in!  Just in time to share our miniature repast!  Something quite in
your line, Mrs. Noakes, a piece of cookery which would interest the
Goodman himself.  The mutton positively melts in your mouth.  Take a
chair.  No, there is no chair.  Take a block, Mrs. Noakes.  Allow me to
help you to a couple of these hoggets.  You will remember the
extraordinary miscalculation made by Dr. Swift, when he was estimating
the number of sheep that would be eaten daily by Surgeon Gulliver, on
the island of Lilliput.  I fear that the poor Dean must have confused
himself with his cube roots.  Sufficient, he says, my dear Mrs. Noakes,
for one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight Lilliputians.  Yet, if
a hungry Lilliputian could eat, say, one leg of mutton in a day, one
thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight of them would eat the
equivalent of two hundred and eighty-eight entire sheep.  Do you
suppose that you could eat two hundred and eighty-eight of these
excellent hoggets in one day, Mrs. Noakes, hoggets, you will recollect,
which the Dean himself describes as being of a size with larks, and
eaten, as larks were eaten in his day, bones and all?  Could you eat
two hundred and eighty-eight larks in one day, Mrs. Noakes?  No, no.
Twenty-eight is more like it.  The estimate must be ten times too high."

Cook took no notice of all this nonsense.  She rushed to her long-lost
Maria, and folded her to the ample bosom.

While the hugging was being done, the Professor trotted off to find a
convenient block for his old friend.  He was determined that she should
sample the mutton, and, after trying various makeshift seats, he fixed
on an ancient chest which stood beside the Manacles.  When he began to
pull it across the floor, the lid opened.  It was full of parchments.

"Dear me," he exclaimed.  "What a find!  Somebody hold that torch.
Why, here is a charter-hand script, Maria, which says that your
ancestors were seized of the Castel of Malplace in the thirteenth
century!  And here is Castellum Male Positum, in a late Carolingian
minuscule.  But wait!  What is this?  My goodness, can it be ... I
wonder...  Suppose one were to sue out a suit of _mort d'ancestre_, on
the basis of this charter, with perhaps just a touch of _praemunire_,
but particularly the _mort d'ancestre_, and suppose...  Dear me, this
is extremely interesting!  I think I will just take the liberty of
putting this document in my pocket, Maria, so that I may work it out in
full, at leisure."




CHAPTER

XXVII

It was late at night, and two expeditions were plodding across the
province which Maria's ancestors had called a garden.  The Vicar was
pacing back from the distant Vicarage with his brace and bit, while
Maria and the Professor were making their way in the opposite
direction, along a different path, to the cottage.  What with the rest
which she had enjoyed, and the nourishing meal, she had flatly refused
to be carried in the Boy Scout lift, to the Professor's grief.  He was
consoling himself by telling her the names of stars, as they went.  The
moth wing of the Milky Way was gently glowing above their heads, which
he claimed to be really the Milky Wey, except that people had got it
muddled.

The time was nearly one o'clock in the morning, so that Sagittarius the
Archer was lowly crossing the meridian, and the old gentleman told her
how the hub of the Universe was situated near that constellation.  They
themselves were spinning round the sun, and the sun was spinning round
the hub ten thousand times faster than an express train, and the hub at
that moment was in its right ascension.  Maria felt quite giddy with
all the spinning, particularly as she had to walk with her head craned
backward in order to admire the zenith.  She felt as if she would soon
begin to spin herself, till she whirled away in a powdery blue, to join
the mealy bloom of nebulae.

At the cottage she was given a good dose of dandelion wine, and put to
bed.

The Professor wheeled his tricycle from the coal shed when she was
settled, fetched the curly bowler hat and the faded ulster to cover his
shabby clothes, locked the front door, and hid the key as he had
promised under the geranium.  He looked at the window where Maria was
already sleeping peacefully, and told himself that all was safe.  It
was high time to claim police protection on the score of bruises and
handcuffs, and to lay an information against the villains of our story.
Even if the Lord Lieutenant were in his Garter or his Bath, or in his
bed itself, he would have to be waked without delay.  "Speed!" cried
the Professor, as he pedaled away.  "Expedition!  A stitch while the
iron is hot!  Never put off till tomorrow without a hap'orth of tar."

When the Vicar reached the Palace at last, after his double journey, he
and Miss Brown went down to the cellars at once, to set about the work
of capturing the People.  They stood staring at the open door in the
light of the guttering candle, and the hum died to silence in the back
of his nose.

"Gone!"

First he looked at Miss Brown, convinced that she had double-crossed
him.  But as she was looking at him with the same expression, each with
a face as wicked as the other's, they trusted one another
instinctively.  They went in hastily, and poked among the instruments
of torture.  They searched the other cellars.  They sat down in the
cobwebs on an empty barrel, and were silent for so long that the gray
mice crept out once more to scamper through the dust.

Miss Brown spoke first.

"However they went, they are gone."

"And the midgets."

"He has taken her to the cottage, as he said he would when we were
listening, and has gone for the constable on his tricycle, to lay a
charge against us."

"It was you who suggested the handcuffs."

"Fool," said Miss Brown.

She continued evenly: "The old dolt said that he would lock her in, and
hide the key under his secret pot of pink geraniums."

"What does it matter where he hides it?  If we are to be arrested, and
the dwarfs are lost..."

"No need to be arrested."

"How?"

"Nobody knows that Maria was here.  She was thought to be away on a
visit.  We thought so ourselves."

Her pebble eyes challenged him to contradict.

"We thought so ourselves.  We told Cook.  Yet we find that he has
somehow or other managed to decoy her to his cottage.  If she were
found dead in that cottage, Mr. Hater?"

"I refuse to have anything to do with it!  I will not be mixed up in an
affair like this.  It is too dangerous.  It is impossible."

"He locked her in when he left," pursued Miss Brown, "and hid the key
under the pot of pink geraniums, a secret spot known only to himself.
His finger marks are on the key.  Suppose the key were in its place
when he returned, with the police, and that the cottage were still
locked, the key still finger marked?  We only need to lift it
carefully, in gloves."

"I will not help."

"In the locked house, which he confesses to have locked himself, the
kidnaped child lies dead."

"It is preposterous."

"He will be judged insane, because he fetched the constable."

"But, Miss Brown, this is a nightmare!  There can be no possible reason
for killing Maria, no chance of escape for ourselves if we did."

"It is that or prison.  If he is sane, there is his charge against us,
with her evidence.  If he is mad, and she is dead, we are at liberty."

"But the minnikins!"

"You and your minnikins."

She held the candle close to his face again, and the purple veins and
the blue lips were pale.

"We could not do it."

"We must go at once, or it will be too late."

"I refuse.  It is all too hurried."

"We must get there first, whatever happens.  Perhaps we can think of
something better on the way."

They stood up simultaneously, and left the cellar.


The dauntless Gradgnag--as usual, like Alan Quartermaine, a dependable
Watcher-By-Night--stepped from behind a wine bin when they had gone,
and made all haste to climb the stairs.  Everything depended on speed.
The Schoolmaster and the Admiral would have to be found at once.  Plans
would have to be made for warning Maria, even for guarding her if
possible, since the secret of the geranium pot was out.  It seemed
beyond the bounds of possibility that they could really mean to kill
her, but the Professor would have to be warned also, wherever he was,
and the police protection would have to be hurried.

Fortunately the main body of the searchers were still inside the
Palace, for things had been happening quickly.  The Schoolmaster was in
the kitchen with Cook, where he was trying to explain to her the
difference between himself and a fairy, now that the danger seemed to
be over.

He took the direction of affairs when the crisis had been reported to
him, and did his best to arrange a plan.

Speed was the main object, and speed was a multiple of length.  One
could not go at so many miles an hour unless one covered the miles.  In
the first place, owing to the difference in stride, it would be
impossible to keep up with the assassins on foot, once they had started
for the cottage, and this they had probably done already.  They were
twelve times faster than the People, by stride alone, and that was
leaving out the question of country.  What was walking country to them
was generally climbing country to the Lilliputians, and, where they
could go straight, their pursuers would often have to make a detour.
Fortunately there was a cavalry squadron of guards, mounted on fast
rats, and he sent a message to these that they were to gallop
hell-for-leather to the cottage, where he would join them on one of the
rats which were still about the Palace, once he had arranged the rest
of the campaign.  They were to detail a troop to harry the enemy as
they walked, were to wake Maria up and hide her if they should get
there first, and, if not, they were to take whatever action they could.

This brought up the question of size once more.  Lilliput had none of
the aircraft carriers, antiaircraft guns, and other paraphernalia with
which the Professor had been proposing to capture his Brobdingnagian.
It was a question whether even a squadron of six-inchers could do much
against a towering human.  The Admiral had arrived while the operations
were being arranged, and he and Cook made a kind of defense council
with the Schoolmaster, to discuss the difficulty.  They could skirmish
round the prowlers on rats, charging in like kerns to prod them with
the needle swords, and cantering away again for safety, but this might
not prove to be more than an annoyance.  Their archers could shoot
also, but both the Vicar and Miss Brown, like Gulliver, wore
spectacles.  On the whole, the best hope seemed to lie in stratagem.
What form it might take would have to be dictated by the circumstances
of the field.  By some means or other, taking advantage of whatever
might turn up, they might be able to lead their adversaries astray, or
to trick them, or to defeat them by cunning.  All this would have to be
left to the psychological moment.  If necessary, if no trick presented
itself, they were willing to give them battle, face to face.

The worst problem was how to reach the Professor.  It was evident that
he would have to be recalled as fast as possible, so that he could
bring the police upon whom Maria's safety really depended.  The best
that the People could hope to do against such desperate characters was
to delay them until help arrived.  But all the telephones of Malplaquet
had long ago been disconnected, in the general ruin of the Family;
Cook's bicycle had developed disastrous punctures on the way back from
the cellars; and the People themselves had never been outside the
grounds.  They did not know the way to the Lord Lieutenant's, and could
not have reached his home in the time available on rats--for these
animals were not accustomed to distances.

It seemed an insoluble problem, and there was no time to think about it
properly.

The Schoolmaster seized Cook by the little finger, for he was standing
on the workbasket beside her, and squeezed it hard.

"Madam, we must resign these Circumstances to your Sagacity.  Some
Message, somehow, must be sent.  Pray cogitate, Ma'am.  Pray rattle
your Brains.  'Tis a Matter which concerns her Life and Honour.  We
leave the Message to you.  So, so, a Gallop, a Gallop.  Faith, may we
come in Time!"


Meanwhile, on the dark Riding, Miss Brown suddenly shrieked with
vexation, and clapped her hand to one ankle, as Maria had done before.
She was still hopping when the Vicar put his foot in a trap made by
tying two bunches of grass together, and fell on his nose.

Indeed, it was a strange sight to see them thereafter, as they
blundered up the midnight avenue under the cobalt light of stars,
wrangling about Maria.  The miniature ratmen were charging unseen, and
thrusting with their needles, which the villains mistook for thorns.
The glint of small accoutrements flickered in the long grass.  Every
now and then the giants fell over a grass trap.  Every now and then
they hopped about.  Sometimes they paused to upbraid each other for
their clumsiness, sometimes to hiss agreement or dissent about their
schemes.

And all around them, in the darkness, there were the smaller and
revengeful denizens of the island world.  It was like a rodeo, to see
them gallop in and out.

Shortsighted badgers, at the din, faded their starlit streak of snout
into a deeper darkness.  Foxes, with concave eyelights, peeped at them
and pondered.  Inquisitive rabbits stood on their hind legs, with ears
erect, to see them go, and said: "Good Lord, what's the matter now?"
The owls of Malplaquet, on silent wing, glided about the center of
commotion.

In the doomed cottage, Maria slept in peace.  In the vaulty kitchen of
the Palace, brave Cook sat writing hard.  Her nib was rusty, her ink
was only sediment in a penny bottle, and her pink tongue was sticking
out.  It carefully made the curls that she was turning with her pen.

"Kind sir come back at onct as them as what you knows of sir is up to
triks again..."




CHAPTER

XXVIII

The Professor had found the Lord Lieutenant out of bed.  The latter
happened to be the Master of the Malplaquet Hounds, the one with the
electric bell-indicator which Maria had coveted for Gull Island, and he
had evidently been having a Hunt Ball or a Farmers Dinner, for he was
dressed in a scarlet tail coat with violet facings, and was wearing the
buttons of the Hunt, awarded only For Valor.  He had changed into mauve
carpet slippers with his monogram worked in gold.

He was a tall man with an anxious expression, and he had a walrus
mustache which he had to lift with one finger, when he wanted to eat.

He took the Professor into the Dining Room, and gave him a glass of
port, while the latter told his story.

The Dining Room had a polished mahogany table with a sideboard to
match, and fourteen chairs ranged round the walls, where the servants
had to say their prayers every morning.  The wallpaper was dark red and
there were oil paintings on the walls.  There was a picture of the Lord
Lieutenant on a Borzoi-looking horse, by Lionel Edwards, with a lot of
hounds wandering about among its legs.  There was one of the Lady
Lieutenant, on a roly-poly one, by Munnings, and another of some of the
little Lieutenants, on anatomical ones, by Stewart.  There was a baby
Lieutenant, on a rocking horse, and several generations of Grandpa
Lieutenants, on mounts called Mazeppa, Eclipse, or the Arab Steed.
Some of the pictures were of mares and stallions by themselves, and
these included honest creatures by Romney, fiery creatures by
Delacroix, sagacious creatures by Landseer, and dotty animals with
distended nostrils by anonymous eighteenth-century artists.  The only
person not on a horse was the Hon. Lettuce Lieutenant, the eldest
daughter, who had made the mistake of being done by Augustus John.  He
had left it out on purpose, out of spite.

The Lord Lieutenant said: "But I say, I mean to say, do you mean to
say, old boy, that this vicar of yours and that charmin' Miss
What's-her-name have been maltreatin' the gel in the
what-do-you-may-call-it?"

"I have been trying to tell you..."

"But, good Lord, my dear chap, you can't do that sort of thing in the
nineteenth century, or the twentieth, or whatever it is.  I mean, you
take the first two figures, and add one, or subtract one, I forgot
which, for reasons I never could fathom, possibly owin' to these X's
which those chaps are always writin' on monuments, and then it is
different.  Now, take horses..."

"Whether you can or can't, it has been done.  I tell you..."

"My old Granddad, or his granddad, I can't remember which, used to ride
a hunter in a long point until it foundered, old boy, died, absolutely
_kaput_.  Now you couldn't do that sort of thing nowadays, not in this
century, whichever it is, without getting the Society for Cruelty to
Animals after you.  Absolutely couldn't do it.  Not done.  Out of date.
I heard it was the same with dungeons?"

"It may be out of date, but it happened.  They locked Maria in the old
cellar, because..."

The Lord Lieutenant poured himself a glass of port, inserted it neatly
under his mustache, and eyed the Professor warily across a silver horse
full of walnuts.

"Did they torture you?"

"No, they didn't.  It so happened..."

"There you are, you see.  All hearsay.  Now, take horses.  You are
always meetin' chaps who say they know of a horse that trotted thirty
miles an hour, but when you ask them was it their horse, they say it
was some other chap's horse, and there you are.  Now..."

"Good heavens..."

"Here, have a cigar.  We keep them in this filly here, for parties.
Look, you just press her tail down, like this, and the cigar comes out
of her mouth, like that, oh, I'm sorry, and at the same moment her
nostrils burst into flame, so that you can light it.  Neat, isn't it?"

The cigar shot out of a gold-plated steed, hitting the Professor on the
nose, while a musical box inside the creature's stomach played the last
bars of "A-Huntin' We Will Go."

"I came to ask..."

"My dear old boy, look here, be advised by me.  You drop the whole
thing.  You've got it muddled up.  Perfectly natural, of course; no
criticism intended.  Anybody could get muddled on a thing like that, I
should have done myself.  But when you've been a Lord Lieutenant as
long as I have, or a Chief Constable, or whatever I am, you'll know
that the first thing a Lord Lieutenant has to get hold of is a motive.
Can't have a crime without it.  I assure you, it's an absolute fact.
First thing a criminal must do is get a motive.  It's in a book I read.
Printed.  Now what motive could Miss What-you-may-call-it possibly have
for wanting to handcuff young Thingummy in the what's-it?"

"There was a strong motive, but I am not at liberty to disclose it.  It
concerns the identity of other people."

"Ah, I see.  Very proper, I'm sure.  No names, no pack drill.  H'm, yes.

"It couldn't," whispered the Lord Lieutenant breathlessly, "be dear old
Lottie Catamount gone off again with one of the footmen?"

"Certainly not.  Nothing of the sort.  Maria was aware of the
whereabouts of certain people whom Miss Brown wanted to trace, and she
maltreated the child to make her disclose it."

"Whereabouts, eh?  Gypsies, I daresay.  Wonderful chaps with horses.
Now..."

"Not roundabouts!" shouted the Professor.  "Whereabouts..."

"Here, have some coffee.  We keep it in this copper horse here, with
the methylated lamp under its tummy.  You just twist his near fore,
like this, and it pours out of his ear, like that, oh, I'm sorry, and
the sugar is strewed about in this silver-plated stable here, to
represent bedding.  Pretty, isn't it?"

The Professor mopped the coffee off his knees despairingly, while the
coffeepot played "John Peel."

"I have a right as a citizen of this country to ask for police
protection, and it is your duty, as the Lord Lieutenant, to investigate
the grounds..."

"Good Lord, old boy, you can't have police protection here.  What's the
good of sending old Dumbledum to protect you?  Besides, I happen to
know he has a lumbago.  His wife sent up to borrow a smoothing iron
only this evening.  And who, may I ask, would stop all the motor cars,
and take their licenses and that, if Dumbledum was protecting you all
the time?"

"Dumbledum..."

"Here, have a chocolate.  We keep them in this china hunter here, for
convenience.  You just lift its tail, like this, and the chocolate
comes out there, like that, oh, I'm sorry, and he plays the 'Meynell
Hunt,' only some of the notes are missing.  Useful, isn't it?"

The Professor fished the chocolate out of his coffee with fury.

"And another thing, old boy.  What about witnesses?  That's one of the
first things you have to have in a crime, believe me, as a Lord
Lieutenant--unless you go in for circumstantial evidence, as we call
it, or whatever they call it.  Witnesses!  It's vital.  You can't do
anything, hardly, without them.  Look at that fellow who blew the other
fellow up, unless it was himself, in the garage, or the swimmin' bath,
or whatever it was, only the other day.  He had dozens of witnesses.
Blew them all up as well.  You see?  I mean, you could almost say that
you can't do a crime without 'em.  And where are yours, do you suppose?"

"I have a witness, Mrs. Noakes."

"And who is Mrs. Noakes, when she's at home?"

"Mrs. Noakes is the cook at Malplaquet."

"Good Lord, not Mrs. Noakes!  Mrs. Noakes is Mrs. Noakes?  Why, I know
Mrs. Noakes as well as me own mother.  That's an extraordinary thing, I
must say, I mean that she should be her!  Well, I remember her quails
in aspic, in the old Duke's day, poor fellow, yes, and her oyster
souffl.  An invaluable woman.  Often we tried to get her to come over
to us, but she preferred to stay.  Family feelin'.  Now, take horses..."

"Not horses!"

"Well, hounds then."

"Not hounds!"

"Yes, hounds.  Take hounds.  A hound will eat almost anything.

"In fact," added the Lord Lieutenant blushing, "they often eat horses.
Boiled, you know.  In a sort of soup.  Cruel, really, when you come to
think of it.  But there, it's their nature.  So far as that goes, they
often try to eat me.  Desperate animals.  It comes of living in the
open air, I suppose.  Makes them hungry.  And horses too, they eat all
sorts of things.  Hay and that.  But human beings, they want quails in
aspic.  Makes you think, doesn't it, what, don't you think?"

"I don't think anything at all about horses or hounds, and, once for
all, I insist..."

"Good Lord, I believe you're back again on those dungeons.  You ought
to think about something else, old boy, or it will become a fixed
monomark with you, like when the wind changes.  Here, have a cigarette.
We keep them in this platinum polo pony here, for sentimental reasons.
It's an old pony of my own, poor chap.  Dead, of course.  Must have
been dead about forty years by now.  You just lift up the polo stick,
like this, and he opens his mouth, like that, and out comes a
cigarette, oh, I'm sorry, use a napkin, and, as you see, he plays 'Old
Faithful.'  Sad, isn't it?"

The platinum pony had shot out a stream of about fifty cigarettes,
knocking over the coffee and the port into the Professor's lap.

He leaped to his feet, banged the table, and shouted wildly: "I demand
a hearing!  I refuse to be pelted with these articles!"

Then he folded his arms and sat down on a comic cushion, which began to
play "Boot, Saddle, to Horse, and Away."

"Good Lord, old boy, what are you sitting on that for?  You aren't
supposed to sit on that.  It's supposed to be a sort of trick, to catch
people..."

The Professor hurled the cushion on the floor, which made it play
again, swept several horses out of the way, and shook his fist under
the Lord Lieutenant's nose.

"No good browbeatin' me, old boy.  Everybody always browbeats Lord
Lieutenants.  Doesn't do a bit of good.  To tell you the bitter truth,
I simply don't believe a word you say.  Tryin' to pull me leg.  Won't
work.  Now, if Mrs. Noakes was to tell me all this about dungeons and
things, I'd believe her like a shot.  I'd believe her if she told me
that a mince pie was a ham omelet.  But when a chap like you comes
along, jabberin' about roundabouts..."

"But I tell you that Mrs. Noakes will corroborate what I say..."

"Produce her, then.  Produce your witness.  That's what we say, in the
Law, you know.  Produce your witness."

"How can I produce her when she's an old woman with a bad leg five
miles away in the middle of the night?"

"There you are, you see.  As soon as we get down to brass tacks, you
always say it can't be done.  Like trottin' at thirty miles an hour.  I
say I'll believe Mrs. Noakes, you say you can't produce her.  I say I
don't believe you, you start chuckin' cushions about.  Now, take
horses..."

The Professor clutched his whiskers.

"Take horses.  You can always believe a horse.  I always say to
everybody, Give me a horse, and I'll believe it.  If a horse says there
is wire in that gap, believe me, my boy, there is wire in it.  Or take
hounds.  I always say to everybody, Give me a hound, and I'll believe
it.  If a hound says there is a fox in that gooseberry bush, or in that
hatbox, or wherever it is, believe me, my boy, there is a fox in it.
Always believe a horse or a hound."

The Professor had sunk back in his chair, pulling his hair out in
tufts, when there was a gentle scratching on the door.

"That's one of the hounds," said the Lord Lieutenant happily.  "Let him
in, there's a good fellow.  I suppose I must have fourteen or fifteen
of them round about the house, in various places.  They sit under all
those chairs at dinner and wait for biscuits, like dear old Lord
Lonsdale.  Always believe..."

A footman, however, opened the door, and announced deferentially: "A
strange dog, me Lord."

Captain was standing politely on the mat, with a shopping basket in his
mouth.  When he saw the Professor, he wagged his tail and came in.

The Professor read the letter in the basket and passed it to the Lord
Lieutenant.

"Read for yourself."

"Dear me, a letter from the dog.  Interesting, very."

He produced an eyeglass from his waistcoat pocket, disentangled the
ribbon from his mustache, fixed it in his eye, and began to spell the
letter out.

"'Kind sir come back at onct...'  Bad spelling, that.  Should be an S
in it.  However, you can't expect good spelling from a dog.  It's not
their nature.  '...as them as what you knows of sir is up to triks
again, namely that here Vicar and his fly by nite'--Good Lord, that
will be Miss What's-her-name, just like you said--'and have gorn
off'--good heavens--'gorn off to cut Maria's throat'!  Poor child, poor
child, good gracious, this is shockin'!  'So please to come at onct'--I
should think so, too--'as If not it may be two late and Tell His
Lordship'--that will be me, I expect--'to bring the Army'!  My stars,
thank heaven the hound has come in time!  Always believe a hound!  How
clever of him to write it.  Must have learned it in a circus or
somewhere.  Bring the Army, he says.  Yes, of course.  The Army.  Fancy
cutting a child's throat like that!  Well, we must act.  Action.  Let
me see.  Where's Kingdom?  Somebody fetch me Kingdom.  Oh, there you
are, Kingdom.  Here, Kingdom, get me some people on the telephone.  Get
me the Army and the Navy and the Air Force and the Fire Brigade and the
Home Guard and the Rural District Council and the St. John's Ambulance
Association.  Get me.  Here, get me the telephone.  I'll do it meself."

The butler carried in a telephone in the form of a plastic Derby
winner, and the Lord Lieutenant began to shout commands into its mouth,
occasionally applying its tail to his ear.

"Is that the Exchange?  Where is the Exchange?  Why not?  Well then,
why didn't you say so?  Get me Mr. Winston Churchill.  Certainly I said
Mr. Winston Churchill.  Give him to me at once.  Who the deuce are you,
Sir?  I tell you I'm the Lord Lieutenant.  No, I'm not.  Yes, you are.
An imposter?  So are you.  That settled him.  What?  My good man,
what's the use of Mr. Attlee?  Get me Mr. Churchill, like I said."




CHAPTER

XXIX

Well, they dissuaded him from recalling Mr. Churchill at last.  After
that, he wanted to have General Eisenhower, Field Marshal Montgomery or
Scotland Yard.  The Professor cunningly went aside and wrote a message,
which he persuaded Captain to deliver, saying that though the Far
Eastern Battle Fleet might be very useful, yet they themselves, being
on the spot, would be sure to get there sooner.  The Lord Lieutenant
was delighted by this second example of canine sagacity, and agreed to
send at once for P. C. Dumbledum.  The posse was collected without
further argument.

It set off to the rescue in the early hours of the morning, much
excited.  The Lord Lieutenant was on a horse, the Professor was on his
tricycle, and P. C. Dumbledum was in a wheelbarrow, owing to the
lumbago.  This was propelled by his wife, a woman of strong character,
who was also the village postmistress.

"Faster, Mrs. Dumbledum!  Faster, Professor!  How can I gallop, old boy
and Mrs., when I have to keep up with a wheelbarrow?"

"Faster, me Lord, I cannot go, but ride you on ahead with the
gentleman, and Dumbledum shall not be far behind!"

"Faster, indeed!  How can anybody go fast with that confounded horse
stamping on everything?  Have you brought the warrant, the habeas
corpus, the _de heretico comburendo_?"

"No, no, no.  I tell you it will be sufficient for Dumbledum to produce
his truncheon.  It has the Royal Arms painted on it, dated 1807.  How
are you, Dumbledum?  Can you move at all?  Are you still conscious?"

"Oh, me Lord!"

"There you are, you see.  He can produce his truncheon.  I wish I had a
badge to wear, though, or a lassoo or something.  Never mind, I can
crack my whip.  I say!  Good Lord!  Old boy, I say, can I see something
white?  Look there, ahead of us!  Goodness!  Oh, my, do you believe in
ghosts?"

"No, I don't."

"I don't either, really.  Could we keep closer together?"

"There is something white.  I can see it."

"Good Lord!  I say, shall we go home?  I mean, we could come again in
the mornin'.  Now, don't tinkle your bell so much.  You might frighten
it.

"Take horses," added the Lord Lieutenant faintly.  "Horses believe in
ghosts, you know.  In fact, they frequently are ghosts.  Headless ones,
with hearses and that.  Don't you think it would be best if we ... I
say, do you think it is walkin'?  You know, out for a glide?  Do stop
tinklin' your bell, old boy.  I mean, if we could just sort of pass by
without lookin' at it, it might go on with its walk, mightn't it?"

"There is a hound with it."

"Yes, I see it.  Now, take hounds.  Hounds are frequently ghosts also.
Headless, of course, with the hearse, and generally black.  I say, must
we keep talking about hearses?  Oh, Lord, do you feel all right?"

"It is Mrs. Noakes."

It was, and Captain was with her, as she limped on valiantly through
the long grass, for the second time during that long day.  He had
returned home at once, after delivering the two vital messages so
magnificently.

"Mrs. Noakes!  Hurrah!  Hullo, Mrs. Noakes!  Bless me, you did give us
a turn!  We thought you were a ghost, only, of course, we don't believe
in them.  Well, well, well!  I think we ought to have a biscuit now, to
revive us after the scare.  Fortunately, I have brought my biscuit box,
which I take with me when I am out huntin'.  I keep them in this
chromium steeplechaser here, for safety.  You just turn his tail to the
left, like this, and his saddle swings open, like that, and a kind of
machine inside him gives you a biscuit, like this, oh, I'm sorry, never
mind, we will have some others when we get home, and of course he plays
'Reynard the Fox.'  Convenient, isn't it?"

They left the biscuits where the machine had scattered them, in a wide
circle, and hurried on beside the new recruit.  They passed by peeping
fox and shadowy badger, by inquisitive rabbit and soft-winged owl.  The
stars of the short summer night began to pale as they went and the
small wind that goes before the dawn rustled the treetops with its
single sigh.  They could already see the outline of the cottage
chimney, dark against the dimness, when the second ghost appeared.

It was outside the cottage itself, dancing gravely in the dew.  When it
saw Mrs. Noakes it gave a shout of joy, and rushed to fold her to its
bosom.

"Maria, my lamb!  So they ain't cut your throat arter all!  Oh, dearie
me, I've come all over queer of a sudden, and I can't find me ankercher!

"Who-hoo-hoo," added Cook, weeping happily down Maria's neck, "and you
a-dancing in the dewdrops without any shoes on, my cherubim, and in the
pore Professor's nightie!  Glory hallelujah, is what I say, begging His
Lordship's pardon, I'm sure, but such a day as it's been for old bones
with this and that is more than some could suffer the endurance of with
whatso willingness as they was sustained by whithersoever!  And, oh, my
precious pet, them villyans that was arter you, they may be still about
us notwithstanding!"

"We got 'em," said Maria.  "We..."

The Professor coughed.

"I got 'em," said Maria, catching on.  "I locked them in the cellar.
Come and see."

The Professor used to keep his homemade wine in the wooden coal shed,
so he hurried the party round to the back of the cottages, to see what
damage had been done.  There was profound silence inside.

"Now then, Dumbledum.  Produce your truncheon.  Good Lord, he's left it
behind.  Never mind, produce your armlet.  It has blue stripes on it.
Yes, yes.  It will do splendidly.  Mrs. Dumbledum, tip him out of the
barrow.  Are you alive, Dumbledum?  Good, good.  Try to prop him up,
Professor.  Don't groan so, Dumbledum, or it won't be a surprise.  Now
then, Mrs. Noakes, you open the door.  Unlock it first, of course.
Maria, take horses.  I mean, take my horse.  I mean, hold it.  You hold
it by this thing here.  That's right.  I shall stand behind you, Mrs.
Noakes, with my huntin' crop, in case they turn nasty.  Excellent.  Now
then, when I say One, unlock it, when I saw Two, throw it open.  Then
we shall all rush in and overpower them, or they will all rush out and
overpower us, of course, since it depends how it happens, and Dumbledum
must do his duty.  Don't let him fall down, Professor.  He is sagging
in the middle.  That's better.  Now, are we all ready?  Keep calm,
everybody.  Don't get excited.  I shall begin to count in half a
minute, when I can get my breath.  Desperate characters.  Oh, Lord!  On
the word Two.  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight..."

The door swung open, revealing the silent prisoners seated side by side
on a barrel.  They had so many expressions on their faces, of anxiety,
of outraged dignity, and, yes, of triumph, that their features moved
like water with the wind on it, formless.  The Vicar's mouth was
fluttering at the corner.  He could not stop it.

"Now," said the Lord Lieutenant, taking control of the situation, "I
arrest you in the name of the Lord.  Dumbledum, the handcuffs."

"I protest," said the Vicar.  He was husky, scarlet in the face and
shaky.  "I insist on making a statement.  Before witnesses.  This
barrel contains several hundred people six inches high.  Found by me
and Miss Brown on our own property.  We insist on opening the barrel
before witnesses."

"D.T.'s!"

"I am a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England, wrongfully
detained in this coal shed, and I insist..."

"Now, now," said the Lord Lieutenant, "none of that."

The Vicar pushed him away with a fumbling gesture.

"But you can't push me, sir!  I'm the Lord Lieutenant.  You have
insulted the King's Uniform.  This blue-and-white thing of Dumbledum's.
It's an indictable offense.  Probably High Treason!"

"We insist," cried Miss Brown in a shrill voice, "on opening our
barrel.  Our own barrel.  We call you to witness!"

They trundled it out with painful care, and knocked the lid in.

It was empty.

"D.T.'s," said the Lord Lieutenant.  "Obvious case.  Think they see
little men wanderin' about.  Blue elephants and that.  Well, well, sad
thing really, I mean considerin'.  We shall have to arrest them, of
course.  Can you move Dumbledum, Professor?  That's right.  I give them
in charge for High Treason, drunk and disorderly, obstructing the
police in the discharge of their duties, that's the push they gave me,
and for attempted manslaughter of Maria, though that seems hardly
accurate, as it ought to be girlslaughter, but perhaps we can think of
a better word on the way home.  Yes, and everything they say may be
used in evidence against us, so you can't say I didn't warn them.  Now
then, Dumbledum.  Shove him along, Professor.  Clap 'em in irons.
Hanging too good for them.  I say, what an exciting evening!  Hold up,
Dumbledum.  Here, give me the handcuffs.  I'll do it.  Look, you just
put your hands in this nickel stirrup thing for interest's sake, like
that, and I press this knob, like this, and there must be some sort of
machine in it, I suppose, because a kind of bar comes out to lock you
up, like that, good Lord, it worked, but unfortunately it doesn't play
anything at all.  Ingenious, isn't it?"

"You stole them!" screamed the Vicar and Miss Brown, recovering
simultaneously, and, already handcuffed together, they clutched each
other by the throat.

Mrs. Dumbledum removed them in the wheelbarrow, with the aid of the
Lord Lieutenant.

In case you would like to know what happened to them afterward, perhaps
this is the best place to tell it.  Most of the charges preferred by
their captor were found to be valueless, much to his annoyance, but the
cruel treatment of their ward was proved to the hilt, and it was also
discovered that they had been embezzling the little money she ought to
have had.  They got heavy sentences for these things.  The last that
was seen of them in the Northampton district was when they were taken
to jail in a third-class carriage.  The Vicar crouched in a corner
seat, holding a two-day-old copy of the _Daily Express_ in front of his
face, upside down, with trembling fingers.

It was reported some years later that they had married each other,
which was about the worst fate that could befall them, and one of the
locals who came back from a holiday at Whitby said that he had seen
them in that district, being booed by the small boys, refused drinks by
the publicans, and made to walk by the bus conductors.  The Professor
does not think they would really have murdered our heroine, but it
served them right for all that, say I.

Maria told the others her own story in the gamekeeper's cottage, over a
filling breakfast of boiled water and the remaining bloater.

"The Schoolmaster got here long before they did," she explained, "but
you had locked the door and he couldn't reach the keyhole.  He managed
to scramble up the plum tree to the window sill, but then the glass was
too thick for him to break, so he had to go down again for a stirrup,
and he managed to smash it, in the end, with that.  And luckily the
doors inside were all open, and he told me I had got to hide, and we
went all round looking for a place, and in the end he said it would be
best in the wood.  And we were going out when he looked into the coal
shed, and he said it was a pity I couldn't hide in a barrel like him,
and he went in and knocked the barrels with the stirrup, and one was
hollow, and he had a brilliant idea.  It was simply brilliant.  And we
could hear them quarreling near the Byng Monument, and I unlocked the
front door, and we put your candle so that it would light the steps,
and we opened the cellar door, and I hid behind it.  And in the end the
People arrived, all skirmishing and galloping on rats, and he drew them
up on the step so that they would be seen, and when those two silly
asses opened the gate he made them all shout rude remarks and wave
their swords like anything!  And Miss Brown and the Vicar forgot about
me, and they ran to and fro like mad things making grabs, and the
People kept withdrawing according to plan, without being caught, and in
the end they rushed into the coal shed, and Miss Brown and the Vicar
rushed in after them.  And I slammed the door, and I locked it, and I
danced on the back step.  And I could hear them striking matches and
cursing.  And of course the People had climbed into the barrel, through
the bung hole, where they could not reach!  And that was the plan.
Wasn't it terrific?  But I got it better, you know.  I found a brace
and bit they were carrying, and I went round behind the shed, and I
drilled three holes, and it was a three-quarter-inch bit, and they went
right through the wall and through the barrel, and the People all
scrambled out by the back!  Wasn't it a sell?  Wasn't it clever of us?
As a matter of fact, they are hiding out there in the gooseberry
bushes, this minute...."

She got up hastily at the thought of her friends, and went gladly to
the window, where she waved the bloater.

From outside, in the golden sunrise, there came a tinkling cheer.




CHAPTER

XXX

It was nearly five months later that a tired old gentleman in a curly
bowler hat and a faded ulster was wheeling his tricycle up the Grand
Avenue of Malplaquet, in the snow.  A tired young lady was sitting on
the saddle, clutching an enormous parcel, and the bare trees were thick
with icing.  The sun was setting in a blaze of scarlet, tinting the
white expanse with a saffron tinge between the purple shadows.  Various
robins hopped about in the correct manner.  It was Christmas Day.

They had been long away, staying at a poor hostel in the great
metropolis of Northampton, for the Vicar's trial, and now Maria was
coming home to the palace of her ancestors, a free girl.  She was to
have no more governesses or Algebra.  It had been arranged that the
Professor should teach her instead, at an inclusive fee of sixpence
quarterly, which would be of assistance in his housekeeping.  They were
tired with the excitements of the trial, with the difficult shopping
they had done the day before, and with the long trudge from
Northampton, taken to save the fare.  Also they were hungry from doing
without dinner, for they had saved on that too, in order to keep
everything for the shopping, and the Professor was footsore, and Maria
was cold.

"Dear me," he said.  "Here is the Triumphal Arch at last.  Only another
mile and then I can sit down.  It looks noble with the sun behind it."

The Triumphal Arch was twice as big as the Arc de Triomphe.  It had
been put up to welcome the First Duke, when he came back after
conquering the Nabob of Ooze, at Marzipan, in 1707.

"You scarcely notice it is falling down, not from a distance."

"No."

"I hope the People will be safe."

"I hope so."

"Do your feet ache?"

"Very much."

"Do you know," said the Professor later, "I fear I must be getting old.
I seem to need food nowadays, and a chair to sit on.  It would be nice
to be able to afford them.  Well, well, we cannot have everything.  I
must say it is nice to have a tricycle.  I forget who gave it to me.
It was a thoughtful gift.  Now you mention it, however, I recollect
that I found it in a ditch.  There must be several people who have
neither food nor tricycles, when one comes to think of it, so one is
lucky, really, compared with them.  And this new sixpence a quarter
will go very far, very far.  I shall be able to buy the penny fishhook,
and all sorts of luxuries.  Quite a plutocrat.  Dear me, I believe we
shall shortly be able to go freewheel, downhill."

"There is something in the Arch."

"So there is.  Bless me, it seems to be barred."

"I think it is something lovely!"

They quickened their lagging steps, to find out what it was.

In the enormous archway there was a banner.  It was at least as large
as a pocket handkerchief, high enough for them to pass underneath.

It said:

  WELCOME HOME!
  A LOYAL GREETING FROM LILLIPUT

  TO THEIR MARIA!
  AND TO HER ERUDITE FRIEND!

  VENI, VIDI, VICI!
  SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!


The band was drawn up underneath, dressed in their best
eighteenth-century clothes and three-cornered hats with a lantern on a
pole, so that they looked exactly like the Waits in a Christmas card.
The flautists had red mittens to keep their blue fingers warm, and they
licked their freezing lips so that they would be able to blow.  As soon
as the travelers were within earshot, the whole orchestra burst out as
fortissimo as they could with "See, the Conquering Heroes Come!"

There was the usual illuminated Address, and, while the Schoolmaster
was reading it aloud, a party of sailors under the Admiral swarmed up
the tricycle to attach a harness of horsehair ropes.  If there had been
any horses they would have taken them out, but, as there were none,
they had to do without.  Then, with the Address concluded and the band
marching in front to the strains of "Rule Britannia," the haulage party
set to work, for the rest of the way was fortunately downhill, and
Maria was drawn home in triumph by her devoted tenants!  The Professor
marched behind with quite a springy pace.  He was charmed with the
Latin on the banner, which had been put in specially for him.

When they reached the North Front, the whole of Lilliput was drawn up
on the top step, in their furs and comforters, and Cook stood in the
middle with a second banner of red flannel and cotton wool, which had
been used in the old times when the dukes came home from school.  It
said: HAPPY HOLIDAYS!  As soon as the cortge arrived at the steps, all
the ladies of Lilliput produced handkerchiefs and fluttered them, all
the children removed their hats, as they had been instructed to do, to
give three shrill huzzas for the Squire, and, in the hush that
followed, the bells rang out Noel!

A party of musicians had been sent to the Cloakroom in the pediment,
where they had disconnected the machinery which played "When the Heart
of a Man," so that they could use the bells for a Christmas peal.

Most extraordinary of all, there was a blaze of light from the Grand
Ballroom.  They hurried in, to discover the cause of this, and there
was an enormous Christmas tree, a whole spruce in a barrel, with
hundreds of rush lights all over it and the Lord Lieutenant lighting
them with a cigarette lighter in the shape of a filly, while Dumbledum
held the ladder.  The People had voluntarily disclosed their secret to
these two, so that they could get help in moving the tree, and to have
them at the celebration.  On the tree there were presents for
everybody, made by the craftsmen of the island in their spare time.
There was a pair of spider-silk stockings for Maria, for which any film
star would have given a king's ransom.  For Cook there was a moleskin
comforter to be worn round her bad leg.  Dumbledum got some snake-fat
ointment for his lumbago, which was better.  Captain, who followed the
Schoolmaster about all the evening, got a new collar made of the
softest frogskin beautifully tanned.  And the Lord Lieutenant got a
carved hound, no longer than his fingernail, which played "Bobby Bingo"
almost inaudibly, and threw out a shower of snuff, which made everybody
sneeze.  The Professor's present was a masterpiece.  It was a Medieval
Latin Word List (Baxter and Johnson, 10/6), which they had obtained by
getting Cook to pawn their sprugs in Northampton.  They had then
written a letter on a piece of graph paper out of an exercise book of
Maria's, enlarged it ten times by means of the squares, traced it on a
piece of notepaper, and painted the words with a rat-hair brush.  The
letter and the money from the sacrificed sprugs had brought back the
dictionary, in which the Professor instantly found TRIFARIE, trefoil,
and he thereupon danced a coranto with Cook.

Maria dashed out for her parcel as soon as she could, which gave the
final glory to the tree.  During the trial the Professor had managed to
touch the Lord Lieutenant for a fiver, and the whole of this had been
expended on presents for the People.  There were Woolworth silks
galore; the finest threads and tinsels sold by the firms who tie trout
flies, together with some Greenwell's Glories (size ooo) for the ladies
to wear in their hats; hack-saw blades for felling timber, and also
fret-saw blades; wire traces for the fishermen; ant eggs for bait, but
of course these were really pupae; plenty of pins and needles; plain
horn buttons without holes for plates; silver thimbles for drinking
toasts on state occasions; a packet of mixed seeds of the smallest rock
plants; for the children such things as the charms from plum puddings
and some preserved currants, one each; for the grownups edibles such as
whitebait, caviar, small beer, and snipe; medicines such as Carter's
Little Liver Pills; a toy yacht for taking pleasure cruises; a toy
telescope for looking at Maria through the wrong end of, in case
anybody developed an inferiority complex; a Penguin book called
_Elizabethan Miniatures_; some white mice and a pair of guinea pigs for
farm stock; and a little crystal set with earphones, which would do for
loud-speakers.  No sooner had the presents been distributed and hugged,
than the ringers in the Cloakroom pealed out "God Rest You Merry,
Gentlemen," and the doors of Miss Brown's dining room were thrown open,
suddenly to reveal the Banquet.

There were hors d'oeuvres of small sheep, a fish course of the
twenty-pound pike, done by Cook so that it tasted like salmon, entre
of deviled bullocks, pheasants trapped in the grounds, plum pudding
provided by Mrs. Dumbledum, and a savory of sticklebacks on horseback
for the Lord Lieutenant.  Dumbledum had carried down the Professor's
barrels in the wheelbarrow, and the Lord Lieutenant had brought some
bottles of port.

Afterward they had healths.  The Lord Lieutenant proposed Mrs. Noakes,
Mrs. Noakes proposed Dumbledum, Dumbledum proposed the Professor, the
Professor proposed Maria, and Maria proposed the People.  The People
remembered to propose Captain, who wagged his tail.  All these were
drank with three times three.  Then the Lord Lieutenant gave Fox
Huntin', and produced a wineglass in the shape of a huntsman's cap
which played "The Horn, the Horn, the Noble Horn," and suddenly
exploded, drenching everybody with port.  The Professor gave The
Supposed Continuator of Ingulf of Croyland.  Dumbledum gave Absent
Friends, which Cook refused to drink--but the others had already
forgiven the Vicar and poor Miss Brown, in prison, for whom they turned
down an empty glass.

Finally the carol singers arrived, little boys about three inches high
whose mothers had carefully brushed their hair with a drop of water to
keep it down, and these sang "Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful" in trebly
treble voices, until Maria cried.

What with the bells and the presents and the banners and the banquet
and the trouble they had taken to meet her with welcome so far away in
the snow, it was more than she could bear.

She made a speech which was mostly sobs, until she remembered to be
tough, and then everybody broke into small groups, to drain a final
thimble and to discuss the glorious campaign which they had fought and
won together.

At this point Cook remembered that an important-looking letter had
arrived the day before, with seven red seals upon it, and she delivered
the same to Maria at once, in case it might contain a present.

It would take too long to explain the whole thing.  To put it briefly,
the letter was from Maria's solicitors.  It seems that they had enjoyed
a long talk with the Professor during the trial of the miscreants, and,
by his advice, they had sued out a suit of _mort d'ancestre_ in
_trailbaston_, with collateral _praemunire_ and just a pinch of _oyer
and terminer, in partibus_, based on the document which he had
discovered in the dungeon.  The result was that the whole of Maria's
great inheritance had been restored.

The cheers when this was understood were deafening!  At least, they
were nearly loud.  Everybody shook hands with everybody else; "Auld
Lang Syne" and "She's a Jolly Good Fellow" were sung simultaneously;
the Schoolmaster actually patted Captain; the Professor kissed Mrs.
Noakes; the Lord Lieutenant promoted Dumbledum to Sergeant on the spot,
and all looked forward, with hopeful hearts, as they made their way
home through the snowdrifts of Christmas night, to the time when the
ancient glories of Malplaquet would flourish as they had in days of
yore.

So that is the end of our simple story, Amaryllis, and now it is time
for you to go to bed.  But, before you go, it might be best to tell you
one more thing.  If you take the road from Northampton nowadays, to
Monks-Unmentionable-Cum-Mumble, you will pass the stone gates of a
gigantic avenue.  All the hinges are oiled, all the trees are pruned,
and, if you walk up it for five or six miles, you will come to a
Triumphal Arch.  Out of a side door in this, there will come a
seven-foot beadle in a gold-laced hat, bearing a golden staff and a
brass dinner bell, to whom you should present your gilt-edged visiting
card.  The Beadle will rap three times with his staff, at which two
under-beadles will throw the gates wide open, and he himself will ring
his dinner bell like thunder, to give notice of your approach.  As you
wind your way up one of the five remaining avenues, a hundred
contented-looking gardeners will look up from the spick tulip beds or
from the span salvias, to touch their hats with stately courtesy.  Take
a peep as you pass at the one-time Wilderness, and you will see that it
has once more been laid out as a wonderful Japanese garden, shown to
visitors each Friday on payment of 1/- for the Red Cross, with stunted
trees and little houses and Hornby trains which really run.  In front
of you, you will see the golden facade of Malplaquet, at the head of
its shaven lawns, with every tile in place and every stone repointed.
A dozen footmen in scarlet and powder will rush down the steps, when
you reach the North Front at last, and will deprive you of your
umbrella.  A dozen underfootmen, in mere striped waistcoats, will pass
it up the steps, hand over hand.  That will be the time to say that you
have come to see Maria.

Unfortunately, however, you are quite likely to hear that she is out.
Everybody will be kind to you.  Everybody will give you claret cup in
tumblers or champagne in buckets, whichever you prefer, but, when you
ask them where Maria is, they will just seem rather stupid.  The fact
is that every man on that estate, and there are 365.2564 of them, is,
on one subject, sworn to deadly secrecy.  If Maria is _you-know-where_,
they will not say a word.

But go you down past the Quincunx, Amaryllis, as you wind your long way
home, and you might see a newly varnished punt, looking bright upon the
water of the lake.  You might even catch the flash of a skirt, or the
twinkle of a long white beard, among the slender columns of Mistress
Masham's Repose.






[End of Mistress Masham's Repose, by T. H. White]
