Дом ста дорог

[496] "Why? I didn't get them dirty," Charmain said. She pocketed her letter and stood up. "I'm going into the garden."

[497] "I didn't get them dirty either," Peter said. "And it was your uncle who annoyed the kobolds."

[498] Charmain simply swept past him toward the living room.

[499] "You've got nothing to do with being respectable!" Peter shouted after her. "You're just lazy."

[500] Charmain took no notice and swept onward to the front door. Waif followed her, bustling appealingly around her ankles, but Charmain was too annoyed with Peter to bother with Waif. "Always criticizing!" she said. "He's never stopped once since he got here. As if he was perfect!" she said as she flung open the front door.

[501] She gasped. The kobolds had been busy. Very busy, very quickly. True, they had not cut down the bushes because she had told them not to, but they had cut off every single pink bloom and most of the mauve or white ones. The front path was strewn with pink and lilac umbrellas of hydrangea flowers and she could see more lying among the bushes.

Charmain gave a cry of outrage and rushed forward to pick them up.

[502] "Lazy, am I?" she muttered as she collected hydrangea heads into her skirt. "Oh, poor Great-Uncle William! What a mess. He liked them all colors. Oh, those little blue beasts!"

[503] She went to tip the flowers out of her skirt onto the table outside the study window and discovered a basket by the wall there. She took it with her among the bushes. While Waif scuttled and snorted and sniffed around her, Charmain scooped up snipped-off hydrangea heads by the basket load. She chuckled rather meanly when she discovered that the kobolds had not always been certain which were blue. They had left most of the ones that were greenish and some that were lavender-colored, while there was one bush at which they must have had real trouble, because each flower on each of its umbrellas was pink in the middle and blue on the outside. To judge by the numbers of tiny footprints around this bush, they had held a meeting about it. In the end, they had cut the blooms off one half of the bush and left the rest.

[504] "See? It's not that easy," Charmain said loudly, in case there were any kobolds around listening. "And what it really is is vandalism and I hope you're ashamed." She carried her last basketful back to the table, repeating, "Vandals. Bad behavior. Little beasts," and hoping that Rollo at least was somewhere listening.

[505] Some of the biggest heads had quite long stalks. Charmain collected those into a large pink, mauve, and greenish white bunch and spread the rest out on the table to dry in the sun. She remembered reading somewhere that you could dry hydrangeas and they would stay the same color and make good decorations for winter. Great-Uncle William would enjoy these, she thought.

"So you see it is useful to sit and read a lot!" she announced to the air. By this time, however, she knew she was trying to justify herself to the world—if not to Peter—because she had been rather too impressed with herself for getting a letter from the King. "Oh, well," she said. "Come on, Waif."

[506] Waif followed Charmain into the house but backed away from the kitchen door, trembling. Charmain saw why when she came into the kitchen and Peter looked up from his steaming saucepan. He had found an apron from somewhere and stacked all the crockery in neat heaps along the floor. He gave Charmain a look of righteous pain. "Very ladylike," he said. "I ask you to help me wash up and you pick flowers!"

[507] "No, really," Charmain said. "Those beastly kobolds have cut off all the pink ones."

[508] "They have?" Peter said. "That's too bad! Your uncle's going to be upset when he comes home, isn't he? You could put your flowers in that dish where the eggs are."

[509] Charmain looked at the pie dish full of eggs crammed in beside the big bag of soapflakes among the teapots on the table. "Then where do we put the eggs? Just a moment." She went away to the bathroom and put the hydrangeas in the washbasin. It was rather ominously moist and trickly in there, but Charmain preferred not to think about that. She went back to the kitchen and said, "Now I'm going to nurture the hydrangea bushes by emptying these teapots on them."

[510] "Nice try," Peter said. "That'll take you several hours. Do you think this water is hot yet?"

[511] "Only steaming," Charmain said. "I think it ought to bubble. And it won't take me hours. Watch." She sorted out two largish saucepans and began emptying teapots into them. She was saying, "There are some advantages to being lazy, you know," when she realized that, as soon as she had emptied a teapot and put it back on the table, the teapot disappeared.

[512] "Leave us one," Peter said anxiously. "I'd like a hot drink."

[513] Charmain thought about this and carefully put the last teapot down on the chair. It disappeared too.

"Oh, well," Peter said.