The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [183]
She watched their comings and goings, and learned the rhythm of their gatherings. They danced on a Tuesday, under the highest arch—their music sounded to her like nothing but a whisper and a scratch and a squeak—she could see their fiddle-like instruments, and their straw pipes, but not the string of the bow or the holes for the fingers. They did not go to market every day. They went twice a week, all jostling and—cheeping, like chickens, almost inaudibly. She put a few tiny glass beads around the roots, to see what they would do with them. They avoided them.
She thought how amazed they would be, to move out of their drab, furtive world into the rosy, silky comfort of her doll’s house. She persuaded her mother to buy her a fine butterfly net—with a small diameter for close work—and took it down to the park, with a couple of jam jars, with strings and lids. Then she waited until their dancing was at its liveliest, put the mouth of the net over the arch of the root, and stirred vigorously amongst the dancers with a stick, so that they leapt into the air and dispersed every which way. As she had hoped, a few of them made the mistake of fleeing into the mouth of her net. She scooped them up—she had caught about eight—and carefully decanted them into the jars. She held the jars up to her eye, and peered in. She had three old ladies, two children, a young woman and two men of indeterminate age. They were all flat on their faces, under their cloaks, trying to look like dead insects or fallen leaves. But she knew better.
When she got them home, she opened the mouth of the net to the doll’s house door, and shook the net, so that they would run in. They did not. So she had to prod them with a knitting needle, which looked a bit cruel, but was for their own good. Then they crawled and scrambled into the house and collapsed on the sitting-room floor. Rosy, considerately, drew the little pink silk curtain across the window, so they could recover in shade and privacy. Then she latched the front of the house securely and went away. They would recover, she thought, and settle in, and play with her. When she went back, they had drawn back the curtains, and their beady little faces were pressed against the windows, peering out. When they saw Rosy, they retreated, creeping under the dolls’ beds, and behind the pretty sofas. Rosy put her presents in through the door—tartlets and sponge cakes, icing sugar flowers and hundreds and thousands, a pile of little party dresses and velvet jackets from the dolls’ wardrobes. She noticed, of a sudden, that the little creatures had dragged and heaped the resident dolls into a kind of rubbish heap in one corner of the kitchen. She gave them some dolls’ teapots full of lemonade in case they were thirsty.
They would not play. They were worse than the dolls, for they made sick little screaming sounds if she tried to pick them up and dress them, and one of them bit, or stabbed, her little finger, which developed a nasty sore. They didn’t touch the pretty food, and they tore up the pretty dresses and made a kind of nest of them, on the beds and the sofas. She knew what she should have done, but she was stubborn, and lonely, and meant well, so she sat and whispered into the keyhole, and down the chimney, that she only wanted them to play, to enjoy the nice things in the house, she would give them all sorts of things they hadn’t got, wheelbarrows, chests of drawers, even a little omnibus, if they would play with her. They pretended to be dead. She thought they might be starving, and hit on the idea of giving them dolls’ pans full of