The Little White Bird - J. M. Barrie (buy e reader .TXT) 📗

have more time to hide. “Brave, brave!” her doting eyes were crying when she got a dreadful shock; instead of hiding, her hero had run out at the gate! At this bitter sight Maimie stopped blankly, as if all her lapful of darling treasures were suddenly spilled, and then for very disdain she could not sob; in a swell of protest against all puling cowards she ran to St. Govor’s Well and hid in Tony’s stead.

When the ayah reached the gate and saw Tony far in front she thought her other charge was with him and passed out. Twilight came on, and scores and hundreds of people passed out, including the last one, who always has to run for it, but Maimie saw them not. She had shut her eyes tight and glued them with passionate tears. When she opened them something very cold ran up her legs and up her arms and dropped into her heart. It was the stillness of the Gardens. Then she heard clang, then from another part clang, then clang, clang far away. It was the Closing of the Gates.

Immediately the last clang had died away Maimie distinctly heard a voice say, “So that’s all right.” It had a wooden sound and seemed to come from above, and she looked up in time to see an elm tree stretching out its arms and yawning.

She was about to say, “I never knew you could speak!” when a metallic voice that seemed to come from the ladle at the well remarked to the elm, “I suppose it is a bit coldish up there?” and the elm replied, “Not particularly, but you do get numb standing so long on one leg,” and he flapped his arms vigorously just as the cabmen do before they drive off. Maimie was quite surprised to see that a number of other tall trees were doing the same sort of thing, and she stole away to the Baby Walk and crouched observantly under a Minorca Holly which shrugged its shoulders but did not seem to mind her.

She was not in the least cold. She was wearing a russet-coloured pelisse and had the hood over her head, so that nothing of her showed except her dear little face and her curls. The rest of her real self was hidden far away inside so many warm garments that in shape she seemed rather like a ball. She was about forty round the waist.

There was a good deal going on in the Baby Walk, when Maimie arrived in time to see a magnolia and a Persian lilac step over the railing and set off for a smart walk. They moved in a jerky sort of way certainly, but that was because they used crutches. An elderberry hobbled across the walk, and stood chatting with some young quinces, and they all had crutches. The crutches were the sticks that are tied to young trees and shrubs. They were quite familiar objects to Maimie, but she had never known what they were for until tonight.

She peeped up the walk and saw her first fairy. He was a street boy fairy who was running up the walk closing the weeping trees. The way he did it was this, he pressed a spring in the trunk and they shut like umbrellas, deluging the little plants beneath with snow. “Oh, you naughty, naughty child!” Maimie cried indignantly, for she knew what it was to have a dripping umbrella about your ears.

Fortunately the mischievous fellow was out of earshot, but the chrysanthemums heard her, and they all said so pointedly “Hoity-toity, what is this?” that she had to come out and show herself. Then the whole vegetable kingdom was rather puzzled what to do.

“Of course it is no affair of ours,” a spindle tree said after they had whispered together, “but you know quite well you ought not to be here, and perhaps our duty is to report you to the fairies; what do you think yourself?”

“I think you should not,” Maimie replied, which so perplexed them that they said petulantly there was no arguing with her. “I wouldn’t ask it of you,” she assured them, “if I thought it was wrong,” and of course after this they could not well carry tales. They then said, “Well-a-day,” and “Such is life!” for they can be frightfully sarcastic, but she felt sorry for those of them who had no crutches, and she said good-naturedly, “Before I go to the fairies’ ball, I should like to take you for a walk one at a time; you can lean on me, you know.”

At this they clapped their hands, and she escorted them up to the Baby Walk and back again, one at a time, putting an arm or a finger round the very frail, setting their leg right when it got too ridiculous, and treating the foreign ones quite as courteously as the English, though she could not understand a word they said.

They behaved well on the whole, though some whimpered that she had not taken them as far as she took Nancy or Grace or Dorothy, and others jagged her, but it was quite unintentional, and she was too much of a lady to cry out. So much walking tired her and she was anxious to be off to the ball, but she no longer felt afraid. The reason she felt no more fear was that it was now nighttime, and in the dark, you remember, Maimie was always rather strange.

They were now loath to let her go, for, “If the fairies see you,” they warned her, “they will mischief you, stab you to death or compel you to nurse their children or turn you into something tedious, like an evergreen oak.” As they said this they looked with affected pity at an evergreen oak, for in winter they are very envious of the evergreens.

“Oh, la!” replied the oak bitingly, “how deliciously cosy it is to stand here buttoned to the neck and watch