WHICH TELLS OF A KEY-HOLE IN A WALL
Now when Philomène was still quite a little girl she had had some
playfellows whom neither Nurse nor Miss Mills knew anything about, and
these were her green dwarfs and Mrs Handy.
The green dwarfs (there were six of them) lived in the wall beside her
bed; they wore pointed shoes and peaked hats, and they waited upon her
as pages. She could not remember ever having deliberately invented them;
she had gradually come to know them. No sooner had Nurse closed the
bedroom door and sat down to her sewing-machine at the schoolroom table,
than Philomène would knock upon the wall against which her bed was
placed, and the dwarfs would appear, not all together, but one by one,
peaked hats foremost. Then they would keep her amused, generally by
story-telling, till she felt herself growing drowsy, when she would wave
her hand right royally, and back they would disappear into the wall.
Mrs Handy was her companion in the daytime, and she was a most useful
friend, equally good at inventing games and at helping with lessons.
Moreover, strange to say, she always came to live at Sideview when
Godmother was out of town, and as soon as Godmother returned, Mrs Handy
would take a journey to Troy or the Rocky Mountains, or some such place
of interest, promising to re-visit Sideview as soon as Godmother left
London, and to be sure and give Philomène an exciting account of her
adventures abroad.
But as Philomène grew older, she gradually realised with sorrow that
neither the green dwarfs nor Mrs Handy were anything more than a
make-believe, and in her grief at having had to say good-bye to them,
she turned for comfort to the pleasures of story-writing, and to the
thought of the mysterious key-hole in the garden wall.
The garden of Sideview was flanked on three sides by a wall, and on the
fourth by the back of the house. There was a lawn bordered by a path,
and at the end farthest from the house there was a large strawberry bed.
Flower-beds were laid out between the path and the wall, some young
fruit-trees that never seemed to bear any fruit grew near the strawberry
bed, and close to the house an iron staircase, with a pump at the foot
of it, climbed to the level of a garden door that opened out of the
schoolroom.
“I wish a fairy caretaker with a red cloak lived in our garden wall, and
would tell me stories as she did to Mrs Molesworth’s children,” thought
Philomène regretfully, “but then that was in the ‘Enchanted Garden,’ and
I never did see a garden in all my life that looked less enchanted than
ours. It is so flat, and there is no water in it, unless you count the
pump, no pond or fountain, and it isn’t a bit neglected either, with the
man coming twice a week to mow the grass.”
One large flower-bed, about half way down the garden, was Philomène’s
very own. It was divided in two by a tiny path, on either side of which
grew marigolds and London-pride, and her initials in mustard and cress.
The box-bordered path ended abruptly where it ran against the wall, and
it was in this wall that the unaccountable key-hole was to be seen.
Philomène reasoned that where there was a key-hole there must be a key
and a person to turn it, yet she had watched it by the hour, as a cat
watches a mouse-hole, but without result, so that at last she gave up
hope, and went back to her story-writing.
It was an afternoon early in May, tea was over, and Philomène sat in the
red-cushioned rocking-chair, scribbling her latest novel. It was very
quiet in the schoolroom; only the ticking of the cuckoo clock, the click
of Nurse’s knitting-needles, and the scratching of Philomène’s pen were
to be heard.
“There had come to the castle,” Philomène had just written, “an old man
who must have seen the snowdrops herald the Spring some ninety times,
with an aged woman to cook.” She was not altogether pleased with the
sound of this sentence when it was finished, but after making several
vain attempts to alter it, she added a foot-note: “Bad grammar, but
unavoidable.”
“Miss Philomène,” said Nurse, “I wish you would go out into the garden,
like a dear good child. Only look at the fine weather, and it isn’t as
if you were writing anything for Miss Mills neither.” So Philomène rose
reluctantly, after having first written “To be con” at the end of the
page, for she had not as yet made up her mind whether the story was “to
be continued” or “concluded in our next.” Then she fetched her garden
hat, and went to fill her watering-can at the pump.
It was still and sunny in the open, and the hum of insects sounded
louder than the hum of traffic. In the lilac bush a blackbird was
practising his grace-notes, so as to be in good voice for the many
concerts of the on-coming season, and a warm west wind passed through
the garden in long, happy sighs, as though the young summer were drawing
its first deep breaths of lazy contentment. Philomène began watering and
weeding her garden, and from time to time she looked up at the key-hole
in the wall.
“If one is just ordinary oneself,” she said half aloud, “and lives in an
ordinary house, I expect fairy things simply can’t happen. Some day,
though, I must write a book about them, as if they really had happened;
I suppose that is the next best thing.”
At that moment she caught sight of a dandelion about to seed, growing
between her box borders; she stooped to pick the beautiful thing, and at
once began to blow upon the “nursery clock,” so that the seeds took wing
in all directions.