The Borrowers Aloft by Mary Norton Read Free Book Online Page B

deliberately, he gave her a look, laid down his tools, and went to the drawer in the table.
    "What are you going to do?" asked Miss Menzies, aware that he had a plan.
    "Find my screw driver," said Mr. Pott. "The roof of Vine Cottage comes off in a piece. It was so we could make the two floors ... remember?"
    "But you can't do that. Supposing they are inside, it would be fatal!"
    "We've got to take the risk," said Mr. Pott. "Just get your coat on now and find the umbrella."
    Miss Menzies did as she was told; relieved, she felt suddenly, to surrender the leadership. Her father, she thought, would have acted just like this. And so, of course, would have Aubrey. In times of stress and indecision, it was good, she realized, to have a man about.
    Obediently, she followed him into the rain and held the umbrella while he went to work. Mr. Pott took up a careful position within the High Street, and Miss Men-zies (feet awkwardly placed to avoid damage) teetered slightly beside the back garden. Stooping anxiously, they towered above the house.
    Several deft turns of the screw driver and a good deal of grunting soon loosened the soaking thatch. Lidlike, it came off in a piece. "Bone-dry inside," remarked Mr. Pott as he laid it aside.
    They saw Pod and Homily's bedroom—a little bare it looked, in spite of the three pieces of dollhouse furniture that once Miss Menzies had bought and left about to be borrowed. The bed, with its handkerchief sheets, looked tousled as though they had left it hurriedly. Pod's working coat, carefully folded, lay on a chair, and his best suit hung on a safety-pin coat hanger suspended against the wall; while Homily's day clothes were neatly ranged on two rails at the foot of the bed.
    There was a feeling of deadness and desertion—no sound but the thrum of the rain as it pattered on the soaked umbrella.
    Miss Menzies looked aghast. "But this is dreadful—they've gone in their night clothes! What could have happened? It's like the Marie Celeste..."
    "Nothing's been inside," said Mr. Pott, staring down, screw driver in hand. "No animal marks, no sign of what you'd call a scuffle.... Well, we better see what's below. As far as I remember, this floor comes out all in a piece with the stairs. Better get a box for the furniture."

    The furniture! thought Miss Menzies as she squelched back to the house, picking her way with great Gulliverlike strides over walls and railway lines, streets and alleyways. Just beside the churchyard, her foot slipped on the mud, and to save herself, she caught hold of the steeple. Beautifully built, it held firm, but a bell rang faintly inside: a small sad ghostly protest. No, the furniture, she realized, was too grand an expression for the contents of that little room. If she had known, she would have bought them more things or left more about for them to borrow. She knew how clever they were at contriving, but it takes time, she realized, to furnish a whole house from leftovers. She found a box at last and picked her way back to Mr. Pott.
    He had lifted out the bedroom floor with the ladder stairway attached and was gazing into the parlor. Neat but bare, Miss Menzies saw again: the usual matchbox chest of drawers, a wood block for a table, bottle-lid cooking pots beside the hearth, and Arrietty's truckle bed pushed away in a corner; it was the deeper half of a velvet-lined case, which must once have contained a large cigar holder. She wondered where they had found it—perhaps Spiller had brought it to them. Here, too, the bedclothes had been thrown back hurriedly, and Arrietty's day clothes lay neatly folded on a pillbox at the foot.
    "I can't bear it," said Miss Menzies in a stifled voice, feeling for her handkerchief. "It's all right," she went on hurriedly, wiping her eyes, "I'm not going to break down. But what can we do? It's no good going to the police—they would only laugh at us in a polite kind of way and secretly think we were crazy. I know because of when I saw the fairy