THE ROOM AT THE TOP

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22661, 16 March 1939, Page 8 (Supplement)

THE ROOM AT THE TOP

(By Helen £haw)

"But the duchess is so ugly," Martha told the children. She wasn’t a real duchess, of course. She was a friend of Martha’s mother, and she lived at the far end of a river which flowed and flowed right through the town and under a grey bridge. Along the sides of this bridge people had carved their names; and perhaps, like Martha, they had stood on the bottom bar of the big green gates beyond and had looked up the smooth lawn' terraces of the duchess’s (garden, seeing the four white swans revolving round a statue in the pond. And the statue —it made you forget all about your creaky bicycle- leaning by the bridge; it made you envy the swans for living beside it. You saw the little girl cut out of pale yellow marble riding on the back of a deer and a ring of rabbits round the deer’s feet and in the pool the reflection; each time you saw it you were excited again.

The garden, was so lovely that even before she saw her. Martha was almost certain just how the duchess would 100k —small and dark-eyed and silver haired with perhaps one violet headed pin twisted through a curl and a flutter of violet ribbon flying from a lavender frock. Her voice would be soft and she who had planted banks of cool forget-me-nots for the little ducklings to walk in would sometimes forget her age and throw crusts to the swans and birds and even sing at night to the child Sitting astride the marble deer. Martha’s brothers had seen the duchess, but now they were grown up and they didn’t talk about her and Martha would not ask them. Was it because- she was afraid of destroying the beautiful idea, of violet pins and silver curls? Martha didn’t know; but she used to go often, hoping, to see her, yet half hoping to be'left alone on the terraced lawns with her dream figure which she could send where She

wished like • a puppet that- dances- if you pull the wires. The duchess liyed in i a large three-storeyed house' with three terraces that ran to the river: and on the river lay some boats, a white and a blue rowing boat and a tiny red canoe which was 1 he one that all Martha’s, grown-up brothers had used. Now the paint was faded. The first terrace had a row of poplar trees and a great - many hydrangea bushes. The second was edged with daisies and the third with nasturtiums. When you had moored the canoe you ran up several rock .steps until you reached the daisy terrace where there vyas a hammock; but if you Were Martha you went creeping into the dark musty little boat house because its roof was like a Chinese pagoda and because when you were outside you didn’t quite know what would be inside and when you were inside with ybur hand on the old rusty bolt and a huge fat spider gliding across a web and two or three black brittle coated beetles lying on the window sill, then you could pretend about 20 things in half a minute —what’s on the other side of the door? Tunnels of green dragons? Avenues of cactus? A sea and a ship with a skull, and a pirate? A hill and a hundred Shetland ponies? Then one day Martha opened the door quickly without pretending at all, for she heard someone talking to the gardener. “Now that little red canoe of the children’s. It needs a coat of paint. Garth was the workman, but he s grown up and Martha s always She’d never touch a P3 And P Martha pushed the.bolt and stepped out on to the third terrace, and there was the duchess; and she was so different from-the imagined duchess that you could almost have heard a delicate scraping like birds beaks on sand as the dream figure scuttled back into Martha’s mind “Oh, she’s so ugly!” Her teeth were long and yellow and they seemed to hang from hei gums like autumn catkins.. She wore a black alpaca dress snc brown gardening gloves and f bright pink straw hat. Her han

was untidy, grey, and screwed into a tight, bob, and her eyes were, small and black as boot buttons. She took a step forward, thrusting her gloved hands under Martha’s chin just as she might have pulled at the base of a plump lettuce and said. "You wouldn’t touch one, would you? Sticky paint. You’d hate to drop it on your clean skirt. You’d rather watch my swans than give the canoe a fresh coat.” “And what are you thinking now? Of gold spotted flying-snakes or the kitchen garden’s cabbages? They're just ready for eating. Garth and I were interested in cabbages and ■ hammers. Tony and I read tales of the sea. Timmy was like you. Timmy’s eyes never saw cabbages. Gnomes, gnomes, that was Timmy and he’d open his eyes wide and tell stories about a green gnome or a wicked gnome or a poet gnome.” “Did he?” said Martha. 1 “I didn’t know. Timmy’s grown up. I’m sorry about the canoe not being repainted but, but —” “Oh. the duchess, she’s so ugly but, but—” thought Martha, and walked slowly up the third and the second terrace and then round the pool. “But I like,her all the same,” she whispered to the little yellow girl, and then she went to the first terrace and along neat paths where flowers of portulaca gleamed under her feet like cerise and flame fish caught in a mesh of cobbles. , And there in the sun an aeroplane flew above Martha’s head. She looked up and instead of the aeroplane she saw for the first time a room at the top of the house perched above the bedrooms of the third storey. It had windows on both sides. The curtains were silver grey. , There was a dark, narrow staircase, neither the* front nor the back but an extra one that Timmy had told her about. So Martha opened a low door and shut it, and there she was, with her feet on the first stair, and up she climbed over soft red carpet between high walls where the paper was black and looped with dull gold and sage green swirls, and it seemed to her that hundreds of duchesses were peering out of the walls and always their teeth hung down, yellow as catkins and their eyes glittered

like boot buttons. Up and up. What’s that? Only a sombre portrait of a man with a black beard and a flute on the second landing. And that? A chest that had hobgoblins and flying fish carved on the lid. but frightening when you first saw it. And now it was almost the top, but here the stairs turned a sharp corner. You knew that they must lead to the room. On and on. and-light came through a slit of a window and the red carpet ended. A few bare wooden steps, steep as a ladder, and a door. Martha opened the door.

“And was the duchess really ugly?" they asked. “Did I say she was? Dear no, she was almost beautiful. How she smiled! And she wss chuckling* and her hands, no longer in brown gardening gloves, were small and thin and they moved lightly.” “And what did you say the duchess was doi'ng?” “Well, at first I thought she. was playing with a doll’s house.- No, she was making a dream, she who was so ugly and whose teeth hung between her lips like autumn catkins, was building a dream for herself. She told me afterwards. “She had a box of square and rectangular blocks. Most of these had already been used to build a tall house, the walls cream and the roof scarlet. ’This is the chimney, the duchess cried to me, her hair tumbling round her shoulders. ‘This is the chimney and then the. house is finished.’ ’’ > ,■. ■ '„„ “And what did she make then? they asked, and Martha, her eyes wide open because she could still see within her mind, answered: “Oh, she rolled some small blue bricks on to the floor and before you could stroke a kitten’s ears stood in front of the house a tiny blue horse which she said was to be the hunter of all her dreams. He could gallop much further than she, and bring back what she sent him for. Then she laughed and said I wasn’t the only'dreamer, but the difference was that she liked cutting wood and splashing paint as well —” “And she didn’t look ugly at all, said the children in. a chorus.