I led the way up the rickety steps.
The barn attic was mostly in shadow except for a great shaft of light breaking through the eastern window, active with powdery life. I showed Diccon the old hammock, the gray roping now brittle and broken. Ancient dolls and toys lay in haphazard heaps on their fragile bed—dolls missing limbs and eyes, their hair mostly fallen out from aged netting, dented tin cars and trucks, a mastless wooden sailboat.
Diccon marveled at the musty childhood relics of my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins.
“Shhh!” he said, and stood quite still. “Listen—the echoes of long-ago children.”
I heard them, too.
I picked up a cloth doll, smoothing the worn checked dress as Diccon wandered across the room. He stood in front of a large bureau with a mirror in a scrolled frame of dark wood. He stared at his own thin face and smoldering eyes; he could see me behind him, watching. He turned abruptly and headed back towards me.
I froze. It’s going to happen; he’s going to touch me. As he moved swiftly towards me I could already feel his hand on my hair, my cheek, my neck. I gripped the doll, unable to move. He’s almost here. . . . For a moment Diccon’s figure was obscured as he stepped through the blinding shaft of light.
“Ah! Let’s take a look at these!”
Diccon walked past me to a shelf against the wall where the old leather books were stacked. He rifled through them briefly.
“Oh, bad luck. I had thought perhaps one of your grannies had left an old Melville or a Hawthorne, but these are all to do with religion. Well, I’ve no use for any of these!”
My face grew hot. I tingled from head to foot. I couldn’t move, yet I felt I might lose my balance. I thought I must look like a madwoman in my mortification, but Diccon didn’t seem to notice a thing. He started to head back downstairs.
“Are you coming, Pamela?”
I lay the doll in the hammock. I walked to the stairwell, the blood still pulsing in my cheeks.
When Diccon left Point Pleasant and sailed home to London, he took with him a stack of sketches I’d made of him, and lots of other pictures.
I would have given him anything he asked for.
I was yearning for so much that I couldn’t articulate. For Diccon, yes, but even more for . . . well, just for everything.
I began to work with an intensity I’d never felt before. Trees beckoned to me when the breezes stirred the leaves, and I had to draw them; I couldn’t leave them alone. I did some pieces in pencil, tempera, ink, oil, gouache. But mostly I was working in an altogether new way.
In the city, Daddy had taken me to the printmaking studio of George Miller, who let me watch as he rolled the etched stones with ink and pulled trial prints. I was fascinated—it seemed such a strong way to make pictures. You may sign it in the stone, or later if you like, Mr. Miller said. You would do a limited edition of course, and the stone would be destroyed. I wandered around looking at prints while Daddy talked about the print runs and sales. We’d want to do quite small editions, not more than thirty, perhaps—each would have a greater value.
I couldn’t wait to try it on my own, and boxed up sheets of grained zinc to bring to Point Pleasant. The tablets were light enough to hold on my lap. I liked the smoothness of the grease crayon in my fingers, the layering of lines on the thin yet substantial surface. I became obsessed with the technique. I did some still lifes, but over and over I returned to the trees—maples, sycamores, copper beeches, balsams. I wanted to transfer their strength, their texture to paper. I wanted to draw the beating heart of every tree. This new method felt to me the best way, and I worked with a sort of passion I hadn’t known before. I felt a curious power as the crayon moved across the zinc.
Diccon wrote to me from Oxford. He said that his friends had made no attempt to hide their jealousy. They were positively pea green with envy when they saw that my walls were covered with drawings by “that famous little Bianco girl”!
Little! Did he really think I was just a little girl?
margery
Earlier, in the city, Pamela and Cecco had asked me if I would read my story to them, but I’d refused. “Not until I’m sure it’s finished,” I’d told them.
But now it was finished. I was ready to mail back the final proof, and so that night after dinner I made my announcement.
“Well, it’s done. It’s finished. I’m sending the final manuscript to London tomorrow.”
Diccon spoke up immediately, “You will read it to us, Margery, before you wrap it up and put it in the post?”
“Of course, yes, I’d be delighted!”
And I was. Now that I was ready, truly ready, I did very much want to read The Velveteen Rabbit.
? ? ?
Darkness draws round us. We are sitting around the dining room table at Old House. Francesco lights a few more candles.
My audience is old for a children’s tale: Cecil and Teddy, Agnes, Diccon, Francesco, Cecco, and Pamela. Shane is asleep on the rug, curled up with his blanket.
I begin.
There was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid. He was fat and bunchy, as a rabbit should be; his coat was spotted brown and white, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were lined with pink sateen. On Christmas morning, when he sat wedged in the top of the Boy’s stocking, with a sprig of holly between his paws, the effect was charming. There were other things in the stocking, nuts and oranges and a toy engine, and chocolate almonds and a clockwork mouse, but the Rabbit was quite the best of all.
I lose myself in the story. Though I’d read my own words a thousand times, rewritten them over and over, now they seem new again. As if I, too, were meeting the Rabbit and the Skin Horse for the first time.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”