The Little Girls (14 page)

“Old aunt asked, and, wondrous to say, was told! Her father’s my brother, and
he’s
a doctor, as I expect you know. Careers do frequently run in families.—What’s your father?”

“He’s dead.”

The aunt was nonplussed, again.

The child stole a very cautious look at the hat, out of the corner of her eye—the magpie at any rate had subsided. Steeling herself, she again searched under the brim; this time, more outright calculating than formerly. “Did Romans leave anything about—did they leave anything behind? Would that be there, if anyone hunted?”

“There are interesting, fine Roman things in museums. There should be many in the museum here.—It a little surprises me,” said the aunt, glittering a disparaging glance downhill at the comatose backview of St. Agatha’s, “that all you girls shouldn’t have been shown them!”

“Oh, we’ve been shown them; but all those things
have
been found. Would there still be anything there, anywhere?”

“You could always go with your little spade and see!”

The child, at the sound of the laugh, frowned, haughtily turning her head away.

“You never know, you know—one can never tell!” the woman continued.

“Did Romans live underground?”

“No, dear—my goodness, what
do
they teach you here? But the Romans, I’m sorry to say, have been long gone, and as time goes on things bury themselves.”

“Oh. Doesn’t anyone bury them?”

The aunt wore, pinned to her chest, a watch beneath an enamel bow—now she dipped her beak to take a peck at the time. “I don’t know,” she was forced to confess, with chagrin, “what can have become of that girl Elfreda! I think, Diana, perhaps I’ll just potter down.—Are those all the girls, I see, coming in from games?”

She did see the girls coming in from games. In a drawn-out straggle, in flopping white linen hats, they proceeded along the winding coast road from St. Swithin’s and turned in at the gates of St. Agatha’s. Tea-time. Dicey gummed herself to the aunt as the aunt rose. “Have you found anything, ever?” she by now deeply wanted to know. But the fell aunt did all she could to cast Dicey off. “Your history mistress will tell you about the Romans.” She readjusted her hat, with a fearful whiff. Lolloping down the slope after the aunt, she child mourned: She tells us about the Greeks.”

“Well, that’s nice.”—The aunt waved in a gratified, slavish way down at Elfreda, who glared up at them from the foot of the path.

“No. The Greeks never came here.”

“There you are,” Elfreda severely said. “I’ve arranged about tea for you, in Miss Ardingfay’s drawing-room—that will be all right, because she’s out.” The ignored Dicey slid past the family group, to fling herself in at a back door, happily open. Before, or almost before, she had drawn breath, she was at the tea table—one of those long, long trestles—safe in between one tomato-hot and one cucumber-cool friend. She panted: “I’ve had Elfreda’s aunt.”

“What, the Suffragette?”

“
Oo
?”

“That’s,” Clare said, “what Elfreda says.”

Sheikie blew lightly over the tea in her cup. Then: “Oh yes,” she said. “She’s been chained to railings.”

The box possibility—though it had taken form at St. Agatha’s and would involve use of the school terrain—was discussed, in the interests of greater secrecy, elsewhere, in a series of meetings outside school hours. One, at an early stage, was held or meant to be held at Feverel Cottage.

It was Saturday. Mrs. Piggott sat playing Debussy in the drawing-room; other parts of the house were disturbed by being made ready for Cousin Roland. Two of the three girls sat, not patiently, on the lower stairs, waiting for Dicey to come down to them. When she did, it was with an armful of squirming kittens. That the kittens were orphans, much to be felt for, did not make them less of a complication—hastily they’d been garnered up by her from the spare-room bed, on which, in ignorance or defiance of peacock counterpane over snowiest blankets and freshest linen, ready for Cousin Roland, they had all been sleeping, some of them making messes. Clambering over her friends in a worried way, she went on downward to the door of the dining-room, which in spite of kittens she managed to fling open. She then pelted the kittens, one by one, at the old cook and very odd other maid, who were in there polishing brass and silver. (Why in there, why at this hour?)

The stir preceding a visit from Cousin Roland had origin chiefly in the cook, who saw it as owed not to him only but to herself. Mrs. Piggott suffered it, on condition that it cease—and
have
ceased, leaving no ripple—before he possibly could arrive. Cousin Roland was known to like calmness only. Distaste for fuss, of any kind and at any time, was one of his silent characteristics. He did not so much “arrive” at Feverel Cottage as return thither: each time, he resumed a life, plummeting back again into depths which he thereby deepened.

Dicey had to break to her friends that, as things were, the one place likely to be inviolate seemed the bathroom. The garden, they could see for themselves, was being raked over fervently by the jobbing gardener, egged on by the cook. Dicey’s room opened off her mother’s; and who knowing Mrs. Piggott could be certain when she might not close the piano and sweep upstairs, to go over her winter furs, or some-such, or settle down on her end-of-the-bed sofa, to go on with a book she had left there? Safer the bathroom. Having locked themselves in, they seated themselves in a row along the edge of the bath, formally. Fresh from bossing kittens, Dicey showed her true colours. “Not
chickens
’
bones,” she laid down.

“Who said chickens
’
?”

“You said if we took humans’ we’d go to prison, Mumbo.”

“I know,” put forward the local girl, “where there’s wood with a dead sheep in it. Some boys showed me.”

“You never said.”

“Well, I’ve been saving it up. But that sheep won’t be a skull for a bit yet; we should have to wait.”

“No, we can’t. Oh!—Our Unknown Language?”

“Either of
you
started inventing that?”

“You said you’d know how to. You did, Mumbo!”

“I
could,
like billy-o. Only I can’t if you two insist on sticking your noses in—last time, both of you said you meant to.”

“Let her, Dicey! Who cares?”

“One head’s better than three, any day,” said the head’s owner.

“All right, Mumbo—go on. Don’t invent it so’s it’s unknown to
us,
though: you swear and promise? We must know what what we have said is.”

“Writing
that
out’s going to take so long, we might as well wait for the sheep, I should have thought.—What about the rich jewels?”

“And the pistol: how are we getting those? Hasn’t your mother, or someone, got any, Sheikie?”

“Not a
pistol,
she hasn’t,” the daughter said, thoughtfully…

“We can’t burgle,” laid down the Burkin-Jones child, adding: “You mean revolver.”

“
I
mean pistol. And I didn’t,” asserted the leading spirit,
“mean
burgle! I mean, why can’t we get hold of things?— Let’s, though, not have the rich jewels and not bother. About having any rich jewels, we only said. A pistol, I know we can.”

“Seen one, somewhere? Or was,” inquired the expert, nastily, “what you really saw a revolver?”

“Well, I—
Sheikh,
where are you going?”

“I’m going away.” The lovely dancer, off the bath, already was at the door, unlocking it. “I,” she declared, with a backward toss of the plaits, “call this silly! I don’t want to go on playing this: it’s babyish. Babyish, with your old chickens’ bones and no jewels. You two ‘say,’ then you’re frightened! I’m going home.” She reflected. “I’m not going
home
either; I’m going Somewhere Else.” Thumb on the key, she paused, for an instant, to let the instant sink in—whereupon, something beyond the door caught, and held, her scornful attention. She turned to the two on the bath, with utter finality! “Well, there you are.—And there
you
are, anyway, Dicey: here comes your mother!”

Yes, it was Mrs. Piggott, calling “Dicey?” as though some pleasing idea had struck her, from halfway upstairs. A scuffle resulted: Dicey, having got control of the door, answered: “Yes, Mother?” opening it an inch. However, once she let go the handle the door, in a manner known to Feverel Cottage, swung open, behind her, as wide as a door can. “You poor creatures in there!” exclaimed Mrs. Piggott contritely. “Nowhere else for you? (Good afternoon, Clare; good afternoon, Sheila!) Listen,” she went on, “don’t think
it’s not delightful having you here, but I wondered how it would be if you all went out?—How would you like to? How would it be to go into Southstone and all have tea—with ices too, I should think?—at the Geisha Cafe?”

They looked at each other.

“If I gave you five shillings … ?”

At that answer to prayer they again looked at each other, sharply and sternly.

“Or are you tired of the Geisha?”

“We go to the Blue Bird, now. We like that better.”

“That sounds lovely. Because,” went on Mrs. Piggott, taking them into her confidence, as her way was, “I think possibly Cousin Roland after his journey might like a quiet tea. So now, I expect you will want to go? Wait a minute, then.” She disappeared, to devote the next five minutes to hunting for five shillings, upstairs and down.

Money to lay out altered the picture. It re-engaged Sheikie. The three being again in concert, decisions went on to make themselves, as ever. Tea to be gone without, light refreshments possible. Shelving the jewellery question, go straight for fetters…. Not wearing St. Agatha’s hats cut both ways: they had to pay on the bus, but could be licentious once into town. Dropping off the bus into crowded Southstone, they shoved their way through to the Old High Street. Halfway down that was Fagg’s goldfish shop: this not only dealt in but provided for dogs and all but all kinds of pets. More than sunless, Fagg’s inside was dark as a cellar: clicks, fumblings, and rustlings, from cages stacked to the grubby ceiling and barricading the small-paned window, animated the awesomely smelly gloom, in which how many hundreds of pairs of captive eyes watched? The only form of life missing, when the girls walked in, was Mr. Fagg: in a minute, however, he put that right, coming through the arch from the rabbit vaults to behind his counter like an old he-owl. “Well, ladies, what can I do for you?”

“A chain for a large bloodhound,” panted Dicey, again well to the fore. Mr. Fagg looked sceptical. “Or Great Dane —any kind of mastiff,” Mumbo put in, in her at once more slighting yet man-to-mannish way. Sheikie confined herself to pointing out: “Any ordinary chain would be no good.”

“Haven’t got your dog yet, then?” asked Mr. Fagg. “I wouldn’t touch a dog that size if I was any of you. Not at your ages. You wouldn’t have the muscle to pull against it. What any of you want is a nice terrier. Now I have a litter of
nice
terriers, it so happens.”

“We don’t want a dog; we want a chain.”

“Life’s nothing without a dog.”

“A large chain. We can see some, there, hanging up.”

Mr. Fagg, shown his way round his own shop, merely plucked at a wart, turning over resentful thoughts. Well was it that he did nothing more—for Mumbo, now, whistled a piercing warning. Not merely was somebody coming in, but the somebody was a St. Agatha’s bigger girl, Hermione Bollet. Fifteen if a day, Hermione picked her way to the counter—her escort, a very much smaller brother, made for a corner where he tormented mice. By the look of her, Hermione had been making Saturday afternoon experiments with her person: she had tied back her hair in a wide black bow which something or other had since knocked sideways, and reefed in her anatomy, halfway down, by tightening the belt of her nice pink dress. She carried (probably because it would not go on without further damaging the bow?) a straw hat wreathed with maidenly rosebuds. Every inch a lady—and as at present so many inches went to the making of this girl, she was lady to a tremendous extent.

St. Agatha’s out-of-school etiquette ordained that not more than the briefest glare be exchanged between encountering parties. The juniors slithered away along the counter into a bunch at its far end, to watch and listen. “Don’t mind about
us!
”
Dicey, at her most gracious, told Mr. Fagg—who was not intending to. “And what can I do for
you
, miss?” he asked Hermione, though in a by now not optimistic tone.

“I wanted some ants’ eggs. But, Mr. Fagg—” “Then what’s your trouble? I have them.” “One of my goldfish died.” “Well, we’re all but mortal.” “But another’s begun to come out in blotches: are you
sure
your ants’ eggs are quite all right?” “Those fish of yours, were they ever healthy?” “Beautifully healthy, always. They came,” said Hermione, colouring with social consciousness, “from Harrods.” “Thought
I
never supplied them! Well, if they continue to play you up, miss, I should tip the whole lot out and begin anew.” “But I’m very, very
fond
of them, Mr. Fagg,” expostulated the almost mother.

“Take it from me,” he said, “all fish are the same.” He got out ants’ eggs, two packets, and planked them down. “Here’s what you asked for. Want them? That’s your decision—I can help you no further. Now dogs do show difference in character. It so happens, I have a nice litter…”

“No, we have dogs, thank you.” Hermione bit her lip, then finally drew off a white cotton glove, the better to poke about in her purse. Mr. Fagg slid the packets, grudgingly, into a paper bag. She was nearly safely out of the den when Clare bawled: “Hi, you’ve forgotten your brother!” Disengaging the child from the mice took time.