The Borrowers Afield by Mary Norton Read Free Book Online Page A

grass, into the shallow ditch where, last night, the rain and darkness had combined to scare her.
    There was warm mud here, between the shorter grass blades, fast-drying now in the sun. A bank rose between her and the hedge—a glorious bank, it was, filled with roots, with grasses, with tiny ferns, with small sandy holes, with violet leaves and with pale scarlet pimpernel, and, here and there, a globe of deeper crimson—wild strawberries!
    She climbed the bank—leisurely and happily, feeling the warm sun through her vest, her bare feet picking their way more delicately than clumsy human feet. She gathered three strawberries, heavy with juice, and ate them luxuriously, lying full-length on a sandy terrace before a mouse-hole. From this bank she could see across the field, but today it looked different—as large, as ever; as oddly tilted; but alight and alive with the early sunshine. Now, all the shadows ran a different way-dewy, they seemed, on the gleaming golden grass. She saw in the distance the lonely group of trees: they still seemed to float on a grassy ocean. She thought of her mother's fear of open spaces. "But I could cross this field," she thought. "I could go anywhere..." Was this, perhaps, what Eggletina had thought? Eggletina—Uncle Hendreary's child—who, they said, had been eaten by the cat. Did enterprise, Arrietty wondered, always meet with disaster? Was it really better, as her parents had always taught her, to live in secret darkness underneath the floor?
    The ants were out, she saw, and busy about their business—flurried, eager, weaving their anxious routes among the grass stems. Every now and again, Arrietty noticed, an ant waving its antennae would run up a grass stem and look around. A great contentment filled Arrietty: yes—here they were, for better or worse—there could be no going back!
    Refreshed by the strawberries, she went on up the bank and into the shade of the hedge. Here was sunflecked greenness and a hollowness above her. Up and up as far as she could see—there were layers and stories of green chambers, crossed and recrossed with springing branches. Cathedral-like, the hedge seemed from the inside.
    Arrietty put her foot on a lower branch and swung herself up into the green shadows: quite easy, it was, with branches to her hand on all sides—easier than climbing a ladder. A ladder as high as this would mean a feat of endurance, and a ladder at best was a dull thing, whereas here was variety, a changing of direction, exploration of heights unknown. Some twigs were dry and rigid, shedding curls of dusty bark; others were lissom and alive with sap: on these, she would swing a little (as so often she had dreamed of swinging in that other lifetime under the floor!). "I will come here when it is windy," she told herself, "when the whole hedge is alive and swaying in the wind..."
    Up and up, she went. She found an old bird's nest; the moss inside was straw-dry. She climbed into it and lay for a while and, leaning over the edge, dropped crumbled pieces of dried moss through the tangled branches below her; to watch them plummet between the boughs gave her, she found, an increased sense of height, a delicious giddiness which, safely in the nest, she enjoyed. But having felt this safety, climbing out and on and up seemed far more dangerous. "Suppose I fell," thought Arrietty, "as those bits of moss fell, skimming down through the shadowy hollows and banging and bouncing as they go?" But, as her hands closed round the friendly twigs and her toes spread a little to grip the bark, she was suddenly aware of her absolute safety—the ability (which for so long had been hidden deeply inside her) to climb. "It's heredity," she told herself. "That's why borrowers' hands and feet are longer in pro

    portion than the hands and feet of human beings: that's how my father can come down by a fold in the tablecloth: how he can climb a curtain by the bobbles; how he can swing on his name-tape from a desk