The Borrowers Afloat Read Online Free Page A

modestly, and she saw that he was pleased. "Someone must have dropped it up there in the bedroom, and it wedged itself in this crack between the floorboards and the wall. We can borrow from up there," he went on, "easy; the wall's fallen away like or the floorboards have shrunk. Farther along it gets even wider.... And here you are again," he said and handed her a fair-sized cockleshell he had pulled out from the rough plaster. "You go on sweeping," he told her, "and I'll pop up again, might as well, while it's free of human beings...."
    "Now, Pod, go careful..." Homily urged him, with a mixture of pride and anxiety. She watched him climb the laths and watched him disappear before, using the cockleshell as a dustpan, she began to sweep the floor. When Arrietty arrived to tell them a meal was ready, a fair-sized haul was laid out on the floor; the bottom of a china soap dish for baths, a crocheted table mat in red and yellow that would do as a carpet, a worn sliver of pale green soap with gray veins in it, a large darning needle—slightly rusted—three aspirin tablets, a packet of pipe cleaners, and a fair length of tarred string.
    "I'm kind of hungry," said Pod.

Chapter Three
    They climbed down the laths onto the platform, keeping well away from the edge, through Lupy's drawing room, into the kitchen.
    "Ah, here you are," cried Lupy, in her loud, rich, aunt-like voice—very plump she looked in her dress of purple silk, and flushed from the heat of the stove. Homily, beside her, looked as thin and angular as a clothes peg. "We were just going to start without you."
    The doorplate table was lit by a single lamp; it was made from a silver salt shaker with a hole in the top, out of which protruded a wick. The flame burned stilly in that airless room, and the porcelain table top, icily white, swam in a sea of shadow.
    Eggletina, by the stove, was ladling out soup, which Timmus, the younger boy, unsteadily carried round in yellow snail shells—very pretty they looked, scoured and polished. They were rather alike—Eggletina and Timmus—Arrietty thought, quiet and pale and watchful-seeming. Hendreary and the two elder boys were already seated, tucking into their food.
    "Get up, get up," cried Lupy archly, "when your aunt comes in," and her two elder sons rose reluctantly and quickly sat down again. "Harpsichord manners..." their expressions seemed to say. They were too young to remember those gracious days in the drawing room of the big house—the Madeira cake, little sips of China tea, and music of an evening. Churlish and shy, they hardly ever spoke. "They don't much like us," Arrietty decided as she took her place at the table. Little Timmus, his hands in a cloth, brought her a shell of soup. The thin shell was piping hot, and she found it hard to hold.
    It was a plain meal, but wholesome: soup, and boiled butter beans with a trace of dripping—one bean each. There was none of that first evening's lavishness when Lupy had raided her store cupboards. It was as though she and Hendreary had talked things over, setting more modest standards. "We must begin," she had imagined Lupy saying to Hendreary in a firm, self-righteous voice, "as we mean to go on."
    There was, however, a sparrow's egg omelette, fried in a tin lid, for Hendreary and the two boys. Lupy saw to it herself. Seasoned with thyme and a trace of wild garlic, it smelled very savory and sizzled on the plate. "They've been borrowing, you see," Lupy explained, "out of doors all morning. They can only get out when the front door's

    open, and on some days they can't get back. Three nights Hendreary spent once in the woodshed before he got his chance."
    Homily glanced at Pod, who had finished his bean and whose eyes had become strangely round. "Pod's done a bit, too, this morning," she remarked carelessly, "more high than far; but it does give you an appetite...."
    "Borrowing?" asked Uncle Hendreary. He seemed amazed, and his thin beard had ceased the" up-and-down