Worzel Gummidge, page 5
Before they went, they saw the farmer fling Gummidge into an empty stable, and turn the key in the door.
Chapter 6
Susan and John felt rather muddled the next morning. They were still angry with Gummidge for letting them be scolded for his tiresome adventure, but all the same they could not help feeling sorry for him. The stable where he had spent the night was such a dull, gloomy place.
After breakfast, when they went into the farmyard, a hen was clucking importantly to her family of chickens, whose down was as yellow as the primroses up on Beacon Hill. The tiny birds staggered out from under their mother’s wings, balanced themselves on spindly legs, and peeped up at the children, as though to say, ‘Who are you and what are you doing? Don’t you know that the world began yesterday?’
‘Let’s go and peep through the stable window,’ said Susan after she had finished playing with the chickens. ‘Shall we go and ask Gummidge why he was so horrid yesterday?’
‘No,’ replied John. ‘It’s our turn to sulk now. Next time I see Gummidge, I shall pretend not to know him.’
‘Perhaps we never shall see him again.’ Susan’s freckled face looked quite miserable.
‘Well, I don’t care. He’s not at all a nice person. He’s a beast!’
‘Not exactly a beast,’ said Susan. ‘Not exactly a beast, but he’s dreadfully uncomfortable to be friends with.’
Just then Emily came bustling into the yard, and asked the children to go to the vicarage, and find out what time the jumble sale would begin.
‘What jumble sale?’ asked Susan.
‘What is a jumble sale?’ asked John.
‘Now run along do, there’s good children, and don’t stop to worry me with questions.’
Emily seemed to have forgotten her crossness of the day before, and the children thought they had better not remind her of it by arguing, so they hurried away.
‘Gummidge’s old coat would be a good sort of thing to take to a jumble sale,’ remarked Susan as they turned into the lane. ‘It’s shabby enough for the very best sort of jumble sale.’
‘Let’s get it,’ cried John, and they raced across a field where the corn was beginning to thrust its little green swords through the earth.
When they reached the place where Gummidge’s coat, all silvery with dew, was hanging on a hedge-stake, they remembered that of course it couldn’t be sold, because of the robin’s nest.
‘I’d rather like to wear it myself,’ said John. ‘I’d love to have a robin’s nest in my pocket.’
‘It’s much too dirty,’ objected Susan. ‘Emily would say it’s infectious.’
‘Why? Gummidge isn’t ill.’
‘You might turn into a scarecrow if you wore his coat.’ John made a face, and then turned to follow Susan down the lane that led to the vicarage.
They rang the doorbell as Mrs Parsons was saying to her husband, ‘Do you think the squire’s trousers are worth half a crown?’
Mrs Parsons was as brisk as her husband was dawdlesome, and as plump and perky as he was slow. She looked in a great hurry.
Susan repeated Emily’s message, but Mrs Parsons didn’t seem to be listening. She pointed to some wisps of straw that littered the hall, and said, ‘Such a strange-looking man came here this morning. He was begging for a coat. I told him that he had better come to the jumble sale this afternoon. But he said he hadn’t any money. I said that we would pay him if he could cut the grass for us, but he said he couldn’t do that until this evening. He was very queer. Just look at all those wisps of straw: he shook them out of his shirt-sleeves.’
Susan looked, and at once she was reminded of Worzel Gummidge. Surely nobody else would be so untidy.
‘Do you think he could have been one of Farmer Braithewaite’s men?’ asked Mrs Parsons.
‘No!’ said John, because he didn’t think that any of Farmer Braithewaite’s men kept straw in their shirt-sleeves.
‘Yes,’ said Susan, because she knew that Gummidge belonged in a kind of a way to Farmer Braithewaite.
Mrs Parsons didn’t notice their replies, though, because she had just discovered some bits of mud on a chair, and the children were able to slip away.
As they came home, through a small paddock that opened on to the farmyard, they passed a great pile of rubbish that had been heaped ready for burning. It was very slushy and muddy in that corner of the paddock, and as they picked their way through the thick mud they were startled by a particularly violent sneeze.
‘Gummidge!’ whispered Susan. ‘I’m sure it must be Gummidge.’
‘Don’t take any notice of him,’ begged John, and he hurried on.
Susan simply couldn’t help looking round. She saw Gummidge lying in a most uncomfortable position on the rubbish heap. His head was hanging down and his legs stuck helplessly in the air.
‘Morning!’ he wheezed.
‘Come on!’ said John, and he ran through the farmyard gate.
‘Morning!’ repeated Gummidge pathetically. ‘I can’t take off my hat; it’s tumbled into a puddle.’
He looked so miserable that Susan couldn’t help speaking to him.
‘You were horrid not to tell Mrs Braithewaite that it was your fault about the washing,’ she said reproachfully.
‘I’m not much of a one for talking to strangers,’ explained Gummidge modestly. ‘I generally sulks when I’m spoken to suddenly. It’s a form of shyness. You’d never believe how shy I am.’
He struggled violently, and presently he managed to sit up with his back to Susan.
‘Why are you on this horrid old rubbish heap?’ she asked.
‘I’ve been thrown away!’ said Gummidge sadly. ‘I’m going to be burned this evening, so the farmer says.’
‘How very, very horrid,’ said Susan.
‘Isn’t it?’ replied Gummidge cheerily. ‘But then you see, it’s in the family. They always burns one of my cousins every fifth of November. I remember saying to Guy one evening late in October: I says to him, “I’m glad it’s you and not me.” And he answered, “Well the nights are getting chilly, and anyway the fireworks will be a treat.” That’s what Guy said!’
‘But are the Guy Fawkes alive?’ asked Susan in horror. She had always enjoyed fireworks and bonfires.
‘Well, they’re alive on and off—the same as me. But they are subject to sulks, too, so they don’t feel the fire. Still, I don’t want to be burnt. It seems such a waste of my trousers, and I’d made such nice plans. I’d arranged to have the vicarage grass cut this evening. It does seem a pity. Ooh aye! It does seem a pity.’
‘But why do you stay here?’ asked Susan.
‘I’m used to staying where I’m put,’ replied Gummidge. He looked so forlorn, so tattered and muddled and helpless, that Susan splashed through a puddle and climbed up on to the rubbish heap beside him.
Then she began to talk to him in the way that she talked to dolls and puppies and babies. She wiped his muddy face with her handkerchief. She tried to pull his neck-band straight. She felt rather glad that John had left her alone with Gummidge. Presently she helped him to get up, and hand in hand she and Gummidge went across the fields together. Susan was determined that the scarecrow should not sit still and wait to be burnt.
They went into Ten-acre field, where Susan found his coat in the hedge and helped him into it, though Father Robin was very indignant.
Then, once more putting her hand into his knobbly one, she led him along the little winding lane to the spinney.
‘I think you had better hide here for a bit,’ she said. ‘What are you going to eat for your dinner?’
‘Oh, I dunno,’ said Gummidge. ‘I’ll find something—bits of roots maybe. There’s always some sort of food in the woods for those as takes the trouble to look for it. Maybe the squirrels will help me find a bit of something, and the birds might too.’
A dreadful thought came into Susan’s mind. She hardly liked to mention it, and yet she felt that she must know.
‘You don’t,’ she began, ‘you don’t eat worms, do you?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Gummidge, with dignity. ‘I don’t eat anything that doesn’t keep still.’
Then Susan left him, for she didn’t want to be late for her own dinner.
In the afternoon, John and Susan went to the vicarage jumble sale with Emily Goodenough, who seemed to have forgotten all about their whooping-cough.
Emily wanted to buy a hat that had been sent by Mrs Bloomsbury-Barton and the children wanted to buy anything that they would not, in the ordinary way, be allowed to have, so they took their pig money boxes with them.
When they reached the vicarage, they saw that the lawn was covered with stalls which were heaped with old clothes and the odds and ends from half a dozen attics.
All the old ladies from the almshouses were swooping down on hats and petticoats. They jerked their arms in and out of coat-sleeves. They jostled one another, flapping and chattering like the seagulls that follow the plough on windy March mornings.
Presently John got tired of the stalls and wandered away by himself, leaving Susan sandwiched between two fat old ladies, who each wanted the same flannel petticoat. She was so interested in their quarrel and in all the other wranglings that she didn’t even hear Emily Goodenough’s cries of ‘Time to go home, Miss Susan!’
But after a while she began to feel rather flattened by all the old ladies, and she wandered off in the direction of the shrubbery.
Now, the vicarage garden was one of those particularly nice ones that are full of little unexpected dents and hollows and square green lawns—each one kept a secret from the other by thick, dark hedges. Susan was just going to push through the laurels that bordered a big circular lawn, when John came towards her.
He was looking as excited as though he had just found a bird’s nest.
‘Gummidge is here!’ whispered John. ‘Come and see, but don’t make a sound, whatever you do!’
He dropped down on to his hands and knees, and began to crawl through the bushes. Susan followed him until only a thick branch of laurel hid her view of the lawn. John put his finger to his lips, and very, very softly pulled the branch back until Susan could see the wide stretch of grass.
Gummidge was there, sitting on a garden-roller. His legs were straddled, and he was making a queer, crooning sound. All round him, covering the grass so thickly that there was hardly a daisy to be seen, were rabbits. There were hundreds of them!
‘Listen!’ whispered John, and Susan kept so still that she could hear the strange, tearing noise of the rabbits all busy nibbling.
Sometimes one of them stopped, and pricked its pinkish ears, and sometimes one tried to hop over the backs of some of the others.
It was the most extraordinary sight that Susan had ever seen.
Every now and then, Gummidge changed the tune of his crooning. When he did this, the rabbits gathered themselves together and lolloped forward. The places they left were bitten close and clean.
‘Ooh!’ said Susan, forgetting to speak in a whisper. At the sound of her voice, one of the smallest rabbits sat up and looked about him. A dozen or so more followed his example; there they sat with their transparent pink ears blown back from their wild faces, while their noses twitched and nuzzled the air.
Gummidge crooned again, and they all began to nibble. The scarecrow stooped down, picked up a middle-aged rabbit, stroked its white stomach, gave its scut a friendly tweak, and plumped it down on the grass again.
‘They’ve very nearly finished now,’ whispered John.
‘I must go and play with them,’ said Susan, and she scrambled to her feet and ran out into the middle of the lawn. She was never quite certain afterwards about what really happened. She may have fallen over a rabbit. In a moment she was lying flat on the grass with John beside her, while baby, and old, and middle-aged rabbits scuttered across her back and over her shoulders. She felt their soft bodies tickling her neck, and she heard the frantic drumming of their feet.
When she stood up again every rabbit was gone, and Gummidge was sitting on the garden roller and whistling a dreary little tune to himself. The grass was as close and smooth as a tablecloth; there was not a blade out of place—not a daisy or buttercup anywhere.
The children felt suddenly shy of Gummidge. Up till then they had thought of him as a queer, silly thing, half scarecrow, half human. But his behaviour with the rabbits showed that he was a kind of wizard as well. They felt afraid.
‘Morning!’ shouted Gummidge, and when he showed his untidy teeth, they didn’t feel shy any longer.
‘How did you manage to cut the grass with rabbits?’ asked John.
‘I didn’t,’ replied Gummidge. ‘I ate it with rabbits. Now, if I was a gardener, I’d be something like a gardener. I’d cut the hedges with cows, so I would, and I’d kill the worms with moles. There’s no need for tools; they’re clumsy things.’
‘But gardeners don’t like moles,’ objected John.
‘That’s only because they aren’t handy with them,’ said Gummidge. ‘Now, even rabbits takes a bit of managing, and as for a mole—’ Here he stopped speaking, got up from the roller and began to move sideways across the lawn.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Susan.
‘Goin’ for my wages of course,’ replied Gummidge. ‘The vicar promised me half a crown to cut his lawn for him. He likes it done early, but he didn’t know how I was going to do it.’
‘Why don’t you walk straight?’ asked John crossly. The scarecrow’s straw boots kept jabbing against his legs and they tickled horribly.
‘If it comes to that, why don’t you walk sideways?’ retorted Gummidge.
‘Why should we?’ asked Susan.
‘Slower!’ said Gummidge. ‘Makes a longer spring of it!’ And as there really seemed to be no reply, the three continued to walk across the lawn.
Presently Susan sighed. ‘I am so tired of the back of your head!’ she said.
‘And I’m tired and sick of your prickly boots,’ said John. ‘And I hate walking with someone who is looking into my ear all the time. I do wish you’d walk straight.’
He seized hold of one of Gummidge’s arms as he spoke, and Susan took the other one. Between them they managed to get the scarecrow into a very nearly straightforward walking position.
‘Talkin’ of spring,’ began Gummidge conversationally. ‘Have you ever heard tell—’ Then, before the children had time to be astonished at his extraordinary behaviour he had jerked his hands free from theirs, and lay in a dead sulk at their feet.
Susan, who had been walking with her head in the air, stumbled over the scarecrow’s arm and fell flat on her face. So she didn’t notice that Farmer Braithwaite, who had walked through one of the openings in the hedge, was staring at them angrily.
‘Hey! How many times am I to tell you to leave that scarecrow alone?’ he asked. ‘Anyone would think you were daft to go dragging that thing over to the vicarage.’
‘We didn’t,’ said Susan as she got up from the grass.
‘Didn’t you take it off the rubbish heap?’
‘Well, sort of!’ agreed Susan. ‘But we didn’t bring him here.’
‘I suppose you’ll tell me he walked,’ went on Farmer Braithewaite in a particularly horrid way.
‘If we say he did, then you’ll say he didn’t,’ said John, who had decided that he simply would not be bullied. The farmer strode towards them, and prodded Gummidge with a stick.
‘Oh, please don’t do that!’ begged Susan. ‘He’s had such a lot of trouble with his inside, already.’
‘What’s that, eh?’ asked the farmer.
‘The sparrows stole it,’ explained John.
‘Hey? The sparrows stole it?’ repeated Farmer Braithewaite. ‘The sparrows stole it, indeed! That is likely, that is! They flew with him and dropped him on to the lawn here, I suppose.’
‘Oh dear!’ said Susan despairingly. ‘Why don’t you even begin to try to understand? The sparrows hadn’t anything to do with this afternoon. They only just—’
She was interrupted by a little cry from John.
‘He’s moving,’ he said squeakily. ‘He’s coming out of his sulk. Look!’
Certainly Gummidge was stirring. Little rustly noises seemed to be coming from inside him. Susan distinctly saw his coat heave, as though he were breathing gently.
Yet his face was very turnipy and his legs and arms looked as stiff as hedge-stakes.
‘Now perhaps you will believe us,’ shouted Susan defiantly.
Farmer Braithewaite backed a few steps, then came nearer and bent over the scarecrow. The rustly noises continued, and the coat moved again.
‘It’s queer!’ muttered the farmer. ‘Ah! I thought so!’ He whisked the corner of Gummidge’s coat aside with his stick, and the children saw the ground stir in the place that had been covered.
‘Mole!’ said Farmer Braithewaite, and so it was. The little hillock of earth heaved for an instant, and two or three tiny streams of dust trickled down into the newly-made cracks. That was all. The stirring of Gummidge had only been caused by some small and probably obstinate mole, who had refused to be disturbed in the middle of his tunnelling.
Farmer Braithewaite made a sound that was partly anger and partly grunt; then he stooped down and swung Gummidge on to his shoulder.
The scarecrow’s head dangled limply down the farmer’s back, flopping rakishly with each step. His ragged coat flapped rather sadly and little gusts of chaff blew out from his sleeves and swirled about in the breeze.
‘It’s lucky he’s being carried pocket-up,’ said Susan. ‘Or I don’t know what would happen to the nest.’
Chapter 7
‘And now he really will be burned!’ said Susan sadly. Then, remembering what Emily so often said, she added, ‘I’m sure it’s a warning to anybody not to sulk.’
But Gummidge was not burned, although he might have been if every stall had not been stripped bare, and if all the old ladies who had bought petticoats were not wishing that they had bought aprons instead. The truth was that all the guests at the vicarage were longing for even more exciting bargains. So when Farmer Braithewaite appeared on the lawn with Gummidge on his back, a shout went up from a group of lads: ‘How much, Mister!’
