It was a simply constructed bed bereft of all of the detail work that distinguished even the plainest of Dingley bedsteads. Newman noticed that there were no finials atop the head and foot posts; indeed, there were no posts at all. Nor did he — the grandson, on his mother’s side, of a topsawyer artisan of the Folkstone Furniture Works — behold a palmette upon the headboard, or a rinceau carving gracing the footboard. The bed’s oddly patterned counterpane assaulted the eye with swirls of brash colour that suggested nothing in the design but formless paint puddles. Every other piece of furniture in the room was strangely-shaped, yet dull and simple in makeup: a dull writing table (and upon it the most curious metallic box with a glass window and an even curiouser board of buttons imprinted with numbers and letters and various forms of punctuation), a dull chair with nothing to commend it in the way of ornamentation upon its legs— not even the simplest suggestion of acanthus leaf or scroll or cockleshell— a low chest-of-drawers without an apron, and a dull wooden nightstand without a cloth. There was no cheval glass to be found anywhere within the room, nor a clotheshorse, nor even a chiffonier or press in which to put clothing. (There was a small closet, and Newman surmised that clothes went there which didn’t go into the chest-of-drawers, but it was all a very peculiar and haphazard, and still rather dull, sort of way to put a bedroom together.)
Newman’s rambling eyes could not help but settle (as they had been settling since he was inducted into the room the previous evening) upon the walls. These were plastered with colourful photographic broadsheets of young ladies so scantily-clad that even the most Bohemian Dinglian soul should blush, and frizzy-haired, bushy-faced young men holding oddlyshaped stringed musical instruments somewhat akin to guitars.
Newman had slept soundly (being quite comfortably cushioned and pillowed) throughout the night, and woke early to dress himself and to study his surroundings with a welter of curiosity, but with, nonetheless, the decided, early-attained opinion that those things in the Terra Incognita that were not prurient or starkly-hued were still inordinately plain and really quite drab.
He had come to the house hungry and bedraggled, wet and somewhat cold; for even though it be June, the night had a sharp, frosty bite to it. He had thought the house a farmstead, and would have been quite satisfied to billet himself within its barn where he might curl up within a warm bed of hay. At break of day Newman would have taken a squirt of two from a cow teat and then perhaps filched himself an egg from the chicken coop. Then he would be on his way. Oliver Twist had made his way to London in just such a manner. Or was it David Copperfield? (Newman often confused the two boys, for he was not a terribly retentive reader.) But Newman Trimmers had no such opportunity to play the tramping vagabond here, for the house was not a farmstead and his hosts, at all events, would not have permitted him to sleep in a barn and steal milk from a cow teat.
It had been a full week since Newman’s gleeful embarkation upon his grand tour of the Terra Incognita. He had providently (and greedily) filled his large leathern knapsack with pilfered food from the Chowser larder, and had sufficiently sustained himself from those stores for nearly the entire length of his time abroad. There had been no opportunities for Newman to hunt or fish for his supper since the boy had spent most of this interval held up in an empty house, which he chanced upon in the wood. The house had apparently been long vacated (there was no food in its pantry save a few stray crumbs upon a shelf) and was visited by no one during his occupancy save a woman whom Newman glimpsed through the peeping crack between the door and its jamb as he secreted himself in a closet to avoid detection.
The woman wore red spectacles and pantaloons and stilted shoes, and her hair was short and starched. She spoke quickly to herself whilst holding a little box to her ear, and if Newman had not been looking at her, he would have wagered that there had been another person wholly present to receive the words, so conversational was her tone. Here is one of the things that the woman said into her box: “If I actually can get twice what this tumbledown is really worth, Century 21 oughta award me ‘Realtor of the Year.’”
Most fascinating to Newman was the fact that the woman arrived and departed in a chariot only marginally similar to the horseless steam fire engine which served the West End of Milltown, being largely a self-propelled box on wheels (and where the steam came out of this Outland vehicle Newman had no earthly idea). It was clearly a horseless conveyance, and every now and then there appeared others like it racing up and down the gravelly road outside the house, making loud and impertinent rumblings and roarings that frightened and excited the boy at the very same time.
It wasn’t until all of his travelling victuals had been eaten and Newman had grown tired of sleeping upon the house’s thinly carpeted floors and had grown unhappy with himself for hiding so long here and suspending his engagement with the world-at-large (which included a possible ride in one of the speeding conveyances) that the hungry, frightened, and now exceedingly bored eleven-year-old Dinglian boy threw his knapsack upon his back and his nomad’s bindle stick over his shoulder and ventured out and away from his craven’s refuge.
In so doing, Newman Trimmers was promptly assaulted by heavy rain and pea-sized hail that doused and pelted him and finally so slickened his tread that in no time at all he had slid directly down a muddy embankment and into a flooded stream. Young Newman would have been swept completely away (as was his knapsack) and been drowned by the strong, tugging current were it not for the rescuing offices of a fast-thinking man by the curious name of Dean Ryersbach and his twelve-year-old son, who was possessed of the equally-curious name of Chad. The two succeeded in dragging the boy up and out of the swollen creek and onto its bank. They waited for him to take breath and rest himself, and then transported his shivering bones by foot to their home, perhaps a quarter mile away.
It was in this room— Chad’s bedchamber — that Newman spent his very first night beneath an Outland roof in the company of tangible, fleshand-blood Outlanders. And now with a knock at the door, he was suddenly being invoked to partake of his first breakfast in their company as well.
“Are you drest?” enquired a maternal voice coming from the other side of the door.
“Yes. Do come in,” replied Newman, who could be quite polite given the proper circumstance.
“I have breakfast on the table,” said the woman, whose head poked into the room from behind the half-opened door.“Do you feel up to joining us?”
Newman nodded. It was a tentative nod, as if he were wondering for the moment if “having breakfast” carried the same meaning outside the Dell as within.
“Let me see how you look in Chad’s clothes. Well, they’re a little big on you, but your own clothes were so filthy, I’m going to have to put them through another cycle. And they’re really very silly looking — like you ran away from a little stage play. Did you run away from a little stage play, Newman?”
Newman shook his head. He had never heard his clothes called silly before, especially by a woman who looked altogether ridiculous in her own Outland morning attire.
At table, all eyes considered the strange boy who had just the previous day been nearly drowned in a rushing brook, and had come into the Ryersbach family manse begrimed with mud, and tired and hungry, and saucereyed and largely uncommunicative, though now he was more willing to speak for himself.You see, Newman was feeling quite relieved to have passed the night unmolested, with his skin retaining its present healthy red hue in contradiction to the oft-told tale of the more mischievous inmates of the Chowser school that Beyonders took especial delight in draining the blood of Dinglian children and quaffing the sanguine liquid in a spiced punch.