The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(21)

She looked at her brother and was startled into smiling. She smiled at all her brothers then. She smiled at her husband, too. She said nothing. The flames grew very hot and very high.





FIVE

The Rabbit

There was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid. Later, he was something other than splendid, but this was the beginning, and splendid will do for a start. He was fat and sleek, as a good rabbit should be; his coat was skewbald with deep rust brown patches, he had real thread for whiskers, and the insides of his ears were slick with pink.

It was Christmas, and there were other presents in the boy’s stocking, but the Rabbit was the best of them all. For at least two hours, the boy loved him, and then the family came to dinner in great clumps of aunts and uncles and cousins, and then there was a frantic unwrapping of parcels and papers. In the excitement of looking at all the new presents the Velveteen Rabbit was put aside, and he learned for the first time what it was to be ignored, and he did not forget it.

For a long time he lived in a cupboard with the other unnecessary toys, and no one thought very much about him. As he was made merely of velveteen, and his ears were of georgette, rather than real satin, some of the more expensive toys snubbed him, and he did not forget that either. The mechanical toys were very superior and looked down on everything that neither clacked, nor opened and shut on command, that was not a model of a plane or a boat or a car. Even the model train, which could run only on magnets along the track it was sold with, and could not be pushed along a table or the floor, never missed an opportunity to refer to his engineering in the most technical of terms. The Rabbit could not claim to be a model of anything, for he didn’t know that real rabbits existed; he thought they were all stuffed with sawdust like himself. Sometimes he imagined what the other toys would look like with fistfuls of sawdust jammed into their open eyes and their painted mouths, down into their stomachs. Among them all, the Rabbit was made to feel very insignificant and commonplace, and the only one who was kind to him at all was the Skin Horse.

“Whose skin do you have?” the Rabbit had asked him, and the Skin Horse had shivered to hear the excitement in his voice. “Whose skin did you get?”

“Not like that,” he explained. “Not skin like that.” The Rabbit sat in silence, and the Skin Horse knew he had not liked the answer. The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others, and he was so old that his coat was rubbed bald and most of the threads of his tail had been ripped out. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive and swagger and break their springs and pass away, and he knew they would never turn into anything else. The Rabbit would not be like the mechanical toys, and he would not let himself pass away. The Rabbit would not break for anything.

“What is Real?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side on the nursery floor. “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—the Rabbit, who had quite liked the idea of having something buzzing inside of him, was rather disappointed at this—“but 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 quite so much.” This was a relief to the Rabbit, who was more than a little let down by how dull being Real sounded.

“Can you hurt something else,” asked the Rabbit, “when you become Real?”

“I don’t know,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.

“Can you take someone else’s Real,” he asked, “or are you stuck having to get it brand-new each time on your own?” The Skin Horse looked at the Rabbit then.

“What I mean is,” the Rabbit said carefully, and his voice was a crawling black thing across the floor, “if something else was already Real, could you take it from them, and keep it for yourself?”

“No,” the Skin Horse said. “You can’t take Real from another toy.” A truth, which was no small relief to the Skin Horse, who was no fool and could tell in what direction the conversation was tending. But the Rabbit had not yet finished with his questions.

“Can you take the Real out of a boy, then? Can you take his heart into your own self and leave him stuffed with sawdust on the nursery floor in your place?”

And the Skin Horse did not say anything to that.

“I suppose you are Real?” said the Rabbit, and the Skin Horse was afraid for the first time in a long while.

“Yes,” he said quickly, closing his eyes. “From the boy’s uncle. That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real, you can’t become Unreal again. It lasts for always.”

“I wonder if that’s true,” the Rabbit said.

“It is true,” the Skin Horse said. “It’s very true,” and he kept his eyes closed.

“How did you make him?” the Rabbit, who was no longer lying down, asked with a terrible sort of eagerness. “How did you make him give it to you?”

But the Skin Horse did not move and did not talk again. The walls of the room were old and yellow and painted with late-afternoon shadows, and suddenly the Skin Horse felt he had been Real for too long.