The Fox in the Attic by Richard Hughes Read Free Book Online Page A

mouth—shrivelling its sensitive wet membranes with a squirt of hot wind, plastering a dry cloth onto her wet tongue, poking wads of dry cotton wool into her cheek, hooking over her bottom teeth a bubbling sucking thing which plucked at the roots of her tongue ... by the end she had felt as if her dried-up mouth had died of drought and would never be able to wet itself again. Nor could she quite breathe through her nose because of her cold ... almost she had wished he would hurt, to take her mind off that horrible dryness and off the thought that any moment her nose might run and she not able to get at it.
    But most of all Polly was sad because she was lonely—and that happened only when she came to London! She never felt lonely at home in Dorset; for at Mellton Chase there were animals to play with, but in London there were only children.
    Kensington Gardens, you would have thought, were full of “suitable” playmates for Polly. But all those children were Londoners—or virtually Londoners. Already they had formed their own packs, and nothing their nannies could say—Polly’s Nanny was high in their hierarchy, so the nannies tried their best—would make them treat the little country child as one of themselves. Under orders, they would take her kindly by the hand and lead her away; but once out of sight they turned her upside down, or stood round her in a ring jeering her ignorance of their private shibboleths.
    They would call her derisively “Little Polly-wolly-doodle,” or even worse names such as “Baby-dolly-lulu.” Any name with “baby” in it was hard to bear, for Polly’s age was just five and her struggle out of the slough of babyhood so recent a memory that the very word “baby” seemed still to have power to drag her back into it.
    Of all these groups in the Gardens, the most exclusive and the most desirable was “Janey’s Gang.” This gang had a rule: no one could join it who had not “Knocked down a Man.” This was not impossible even for quite small children, for nothing in the rule required that he should be looking; and if you had made him fall into water you were an Officer straight away.
    Janey herself was huge: she was turned seven. Janey claimed three Men to her credit, two of them in water and the third in a garden frame. She had done it so skillfully (or her curls were so golden, her blue eyes so wide) that not one of the three had suspected the push was intentional. No wonder the gang was titularly “Janey’s Gang”!
    Grown-ups were ex officio Enemy to all these children, to be out-smarted on every occasion: so, their scores rose. But even if Polly had been old enough and clever enough properly to understand the Rule (she was not, in fact, particularly intelligent), she could never even have made a beginning. For Polly’s own grown-ups were not “Enemy,” that was the rub: they were infinitely kind, they made little pretense of not adoring Polly and it never occurred to Polly to make any pretense at all of not loving them back. Loving, indeed, was the one thing she was really good at: how then could she ever bring herself to “knock a Man down”?
    Mr. Corbett, for example: the head gardener at Mellton Chase, and indeed the greatest potentate on earth: the massive sloping buttress of his front—his gold watch-chain marked the halfway line of the ascent—held him upright like a tower, and nowadays his hands never deigned to touch fork or spade except to weed Miss Polly’s little garden for her; or to pick fruit, except when he saw Miss Polly coming ...
    It was unthinkable to inflict on Mr. Corbett the indignity of falling!
    Or even on dear Gusting (her uncle Augustine, that was). Of course he was a lesser dignitary in the world’s eyes than Mr. Corbett; but she loved him even more. Admired and loved him with every burning cockle of her heart!
    There was magic in