Half-Past Bedtime Part 17

Doris gripped Cuthbert's arm.

"It's old Mother Hubbard's," she said. "That's her dog. I know it's bark."

"Then we'll never get in," said Cuthbert, but just as he said that they heard footsteps coming down the hall.

"Who's there?" said a voice. It had an odd sort of creak in it, like the creak of a drawer that is seldom opened. Cuthbert told her; and then, after a long pause, the door moved a little on its hinges. An eddy of snow whirled in in front of them, and the door swung back an inch or two more.

"You'd better come inside," said Miss Hubbard, and they went into the hall, her first guests for fifty years. She stood looking at them over a flickering candle. Her eyes were frostier than the wind outside. The air of the house smelt like a tomb. They could hear the ticking of several clocks.

"You'd better come into the scullery," she said, "and shake the snow off," and she led them in silence to the back of the house, where she left them alone for nearly twenty minutes before she came back to ask them in to tea.

"It's in the drawing-room," she said, "and I hope you won't talk. I'm very strong and I have a big dog."

So they followed her into the drawing-room, and then a second, and even more wonderful, thing happened. Cuthbert stopped short, and so did Doris, and old Miss Hubbard switched round and stared at them.

"What's the matter?" she asked. "What are you gaping at?"

"Why, it's the penny room!" said Cuthbert; and so it was. For there was the queer high-backed piano; and there was the picture of people hunting; and there were the old-fashioned heavy ornaments.

"But where's the dog," said Doris, "the blue china dog that used to stand on the mantelpiece?"

Old Miss Hubbard had turned quite white.

"The blue china dog?" she asked. "What do you know about that? It was broken thirty years ago."

"But it's the same room," said Cuthbert, "and there was a girl in it, and she gave a man a penny for his thoughts."

Old Miss Hubbard began to tremble. She sat down heavily, and her eyes looked frightened.

"But how do you know?" she asked. "You're only children; and that was more than fifty years ago."

Cuthbert felt in his pocket and pulled out the penny.

"This is the penny," he said, "that the girl gave him. We've just found it, quite by accident. And he didn't tell her all of his thoughts. He only told her some of them. The rest are in here, and we made them come out."

He began to polish it again with his handkerchief; and then he gave it to her, and they stood watching her. For about five minutes she sat quite still; and then she looked up, and her voice had changed a little.

"If I tell you a story," she said, "will you let me keep it?"

Cuthbert looked at Doris, and Doris nodded her head.

"Why, of course," said Cuthbert. "We should be very pleased."

So while they were having tea she told them that long ago a girl had lived in that house, and that she fell in love with a young man, who was a carpenter by trade. But he was also a naturalist, and especially fond of birds, and he wanted to discover all sorts of things about them; and one day he told the girl that he was just going away to work on a railway in South America. Then he hesitated, as if he wanted to tell her something else, and she gave him a penny for his thoughts; and then he left the house, and was drowned at sea, and the girl never knew whether he had loved her or not.

"It was very silly of him," said Miss Hubbard, "not to have told her.

But perhaps the girl was sillier still. For she was so sad that she wasted her whole life; and now it seems that he loved her after all."

Then she went to the window and pulled up the blind. The storm had died down, and it had stopped snowing. Brighter than eyes at a Christmas party, the stars in their thousands shone in the sky. Cuthbert and Doris said that they must be going; and old Miss Hubbard took them to the front door.

"You must come and see me again," she said. "Come as often as you like; and perhaps next time you'll bring some of your friends."

"But she never told us," said Cuthbert, "who the girl was."

"Why, you silly," said Doris, "it was Miss Hubbard herself."

Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard To fetch her poor dog a bone, But this Mother Hubbard in her heart's cupboard Lives in the dark alone.

Sorrow's grey dust on the chandelier Never a sun-ray sees, Never a finger stirs the blind, Nor the harpsichord's yellow keys.

Dumb is the clock with the china face, The carpet moulds on the floor; Oh, won't you come down to her house with me And open Miss Hubbard's door?

MARIAN'S PARTY

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Little Temple]

XI

MARIAN'S PARTY

For a whole month after Cuthbert and Doris had had tea with old Miss Hubbard the snow lay white upon the ground, and the ice grew thick over the ponds. Day after day during the Christmas holidays the children went skating or tobogganing; and Cuthbert and Doris learnt to waltz on skates, and even Marian learnt to cut threes. And then the frost broke, and it rained all through February, and then came March with its bl.u.s.tering winds. Sometimes it was an east wind, drying the wet fields or powdering them over with tiny snowflakes; and sometimes it was a west wind, shouting in the tree-tops, with its arms full of sunshine and golden clouds; and the week before Marian's birthday, which was on the 27th, was the windiest week of all, chasing people's hats across the tram-lines, and blowing the chimney-smoke down into their sitting-rooms.

Marian always had a party on her birthday, and this year it was going to be a specially nice one. Twelve of her friends were coming, and so was Uncle Joe, and so were Captain Jeremy and Gwendolen's aunt. So was Mr Parker, who lived with Uncle Joe, and so was Lancelot, the bosun's mate; and the most wonderful thing of all, so was old Miss Hubbard.

It had been Cuthbert's idea to ask Miss Hubbard, and she had promised to come on one condition--that she might be allowed to bring the birthday-cake and the nine candles to stick into it. For Marian was going to be nine, and it was nearly two years since she had met Mr Jugg; and she sometimes wondered--it seemed so long ago--if she had ever seen him at all. Cuthbert used to tease her by pretending that she hadn't, and that Mr Jugg was only a dream, just as he used to tease her by telling her that the 27th of March was a silly sort of day on which to have a birthday. That was because his own birthday came in April, so that it was always in the holidays; but Uncle Joe, who knew a lot about birthdays, used to take Marian's side. March was the soldier's month, he said, full of bugles, and one of the best months to be born in; while, as for Cuthbert, anyone could tell by listening to him that he had come in April with all the other cuckoos.

So Marian was naturally rather excited; and then, on the very morning of her birthday, Cuthbert woke up with a strawberry-coloured tongue and a chest as red as a cooked lobster. That was just the sort of thing, Marian thought, that Cuthbert would do, although she knew that she ought to feel sorry for him; and then the doctor came and said that he had scarlet fever, and that was the end of Marian's party. For Mummy had to put on an overall and begin to nurse Cuthbert, and a big sheet was hung across the bedroom door, and Mummy had to sprinkle it with carbolic acid, and of course Marian wasn't allowed to go to school. But she could go for walks, said the doctor, as long as she went by herself and didn't go near anybody, or travel in trams and things; and so she spent the morning in taking notes to her friends, telling them that there wasn't to be a party after all. As for Uncle Joe, Mummy sent him a message by a carrier who pa.s.sed near his house. "And the first thing in the afternoon," she said to Marian, "you must slip across the fields to old Miss Hubbard's."

Now a little girl whose only brother has just been silly enough to get scarlet fever is one of the loneliest people in the world; and that was just how Marian felt. Even her mummy tried to keep away from her, because she was nursing Cuthbert, who was so infectious; and she had had strict orders when she arrived at Mother Hubbard's not to go inside her house.

"Everybody's happy," said Marian, "except me," as she saw the people laughing in the country roads, and the horses biting at each other's manes, and the birds circling together in the soft air. For, as if Somebody had known that it was going to be her birthday and waved a wand during the night, the wind had dropped and the clouds vanished, and the air was full of a thousand scents. There were earth-scents, warm and wet, and hedge-scents of primroses and growing weeds, and the scents of small animals, and cow-scents and lamb-scents, and tree-scents of bark and cracking buds. Invisibly they rose and spread and mingled, like children flocking upstairs in their party frocks; and the sun beamed down on them like some gay old admiral who had just spied summer on the horizon.

But Marian was still unhappy and disappointed, and when she had given her message to old Miss Hubbard she wandered across the fields, not very much caring where she went or what might happen to her. That was how she was feeling when she came at last to a small wood, called the Pirate's Wood because it was shaped rather like a ship, with a lot of masts in it, easy to climb. It was Cuthbert who had christened this wood, because he had climbed higher than the others--almost to the top of the tallest tree. But Doris had climbed nearly as high, and they both laughed at Marian, because she would only climb half-way up. It occurred to her this afternoon, however, that she would climb higher than either of them; and she didn't care, she said, if she fell from the top.

So she swung herself up on to the lowest branch of the big elm-tree near the middle of the wood; and presently she saw above her the fork between two boughs that Cuthbert had christened the crow's-nest. Level with her nose, cut in the bark of the trunk, was a big D, standing for Doris, so that already she had climbed as high as Doris had climbed, and was able to look out over the other trees. But now she had come to the hardest part of the climb, for in order to reach the crow's-nest she would have to swarm up a piece of the elm-trunk from which there were no branches sticking out to help her. There were only roughnesses in the bark, into which she would have to dig her fingers, and first of all she had to pull up her skirt and tuck it down inside her knickers. For a moment or two she began to be frightened. But then she told herself that she didn't care; and soon she had swarmed high enough to reach one of the forking boughs, and had swung herself up into the crow's-nest.