The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories (186 page)

Then Oswald went out of the room and secretly assumed his dark disguise. But when he came in with the beard on, and a hat of Father’s, the others were not struck with admiration and respect, like he meant them to be. They rolled about, roaring with laughter, and when he crept into Miss Blake’s room and turned up the gas a bit, and looked in her long glass, he owned that they were right and that it was no go. He is tall for his age, but that beard made him look like some horrible dwarf; and his hair being so short added to everything. Any idiot could have seen that the beard had not originally flourished where it now was, but had been transplanted from some other place of growth.

And when he laughed, which now became necessary, he really did look most awful. He has read of beards wagging, but he never saw it before.

While he was looking at himself the girls had thought of a new idea.

But Oswald had an inside presentiment that made it some time before he could even consent to listen to it. But at last, when the others reminded him that it was a noble act, and for the good of Albert’s uncle, he let them explain the horrid scheme in all its lurid parts.

It was this: That Oswald should consent to be disguised in women’s raiments and go with Alice to see the Editor.

No man ever wants to be a woman, and it was a bitter thing for Oswald’s pride, but at last he consented. He is glad he is not a girl. You have no idea what it is like to wear petticoats, especially long ones. I wonder that ladies continue to endure their miserable existences. The top parts of the clothes, too, seemed to be too tight and too loose in the wrong places. Oswald’s head, also, was terribly in the way. He had no wandering hairs to fasten transformations on to, even if Miss Blake had had another one, which was not the case. But the girls remembered a governess they had once witnessed whose hair was brief as any boy’s, so they put a large hat, with a very tight elastic behind, on to Oswald’s head, just as it was, and then with a tickly, pussyish, featherish thing round his neck, hanging wobblily down in long ends, he looked more young-lady-like than he will ever feel.

Some courage was needed for the start next day. Things look so different in the daylight.

“Remember Lord Nithsdale coming out of the Tower,” said Alice. “Think of the great cause and be brave,” and she tied his neck up.

“I’m brave all right,” said Oswald, “only I do feel such an ass.”

“I feel rather an ape myself,” Alice owned, “but I’ve got three-penn’orth of peppermints to inspire us with bravery. It is called Dutch courage, I believe.”

Owing to our telling Jane we managed to get out unseen by Blakie.

All the others would come, too, in their natural appearance, except that we made them wash their hands and faces. We happened to be flush of chink, so we let them come.

“But if you do,” Oswald said, “you must surround us in a hollow square of four.”

So they did. And we got down to the station all right. But in the train there were two ladies who stared, and porters and people like that came round the window far more than there could be any need for. Oswald’s boots must have shown as he got in. He had forgotten to borrow a pair of Jane’s, as he had meant to, and the ones he had on were his largest. His ears got hotter and hotter, and it got more and more difficult to manage his feet and hands. He failed to suck any courage, of any nation, from the peppermints.

Owing to the state Oswald’s ears were now in, we agreed to take a cab at Cannon Street. We all crammed in somehow, but Oswald saw the driver wink as he put his boot on the step, and the porter who was opening the cab door winked back, and I am sorry to say Oswald forgot that he was a high-born lady, and he told the porter that he had better jolly well stow his cheek. Then several bystanders began to try and be funny, and Oswald knew exactly what particular sort of fool he was being.

But he bravely silenced the fierce warnings of his ears, and when we got to the Editor’s address we sent Dick up with a large card that we had written on,

“Miss Daisy Dolman

and

The Right Honourable Miss

Etheltruda Bustler.

On urgent business.”

and Oswald kept himself and Alice concealed in the cab till the return of the messenger.

“All right; you’re to go up,” Dicky came back and said; “but the boy grinned who told me so. You’d better be jolly careful.”

We bolted like rabbits across the pavement and up the Editor’s stairs.

He was very polite. He asked us to sit down, and Oswald did. But first he tumbled over the front of his dress because it would get under his boots, and he was afraid to hold it up, not having practised doing this.

“I think I have had letters from you?” said the Editor.

Alice, who looked terrible with the transformation leaning right-ear-ward, said yes, and that we had come to say what a fine, bold conception we thought the Doge’s chapter was. This was what we had settled to say, but she needn’t have burst out with it like that. I suppose she forgot herself. Oswald, in the agitation of his clothes, could say nothing. The elastic of the hat seemed to be very slowly slipping up the back of his head, and he knew that, if it once passed the bump that backs of heads are made with, the hat would spring from his head like an arrow from a bow. And all would be frustrated.

“Yes,” said the Editor; “that chapter seems to have had a great success—a wonderful success. I had no fewer than sixteen letters about it, all praising it in unmeasured terms.” He looked at Oswald’s boots, which Oswald had neglected to cover over with his petticoats. He now did this.

“It is a nice story, you know,” said Alice timidly.

“So it seems,” the gentleman went on. “Fourteen of the sixteen letters bear the Blackheath postmark. The enthusiasm for the chapter would seem to be mainly local.”

Oswald would not look at Alice. He could not trust himself, with her looking like she did. He knew at once that only the piano-tuner and the electric bell man had been faithful to their trust. The others had all posted their letters in the pillar-box just outside our gate. They wanted to get rid of them as quickly as they could, I suppose. Selfishness is a vile quality.

The author cannot deny that Oswald now wished he hadn’t. The elastic was certainly moving, slowly, but too surely. Oswald tried to check its career by swelling out the bump on the back of his head, but he could not think of the right way to do this.

“I am very pleased to see you,” the Editor went on slowly, and there was something about the way he spoke that made Oswald think of a cat playing with a mouse. “Perhaps you can tell me. Are there many spiritualists in Blackheath? Many clairvoyants?”

“Eh?” said Alice, forgetting that that is not the way to behave.

“People who foretell the future?” he said.

“I don’t think so,” said Alice. “Why?”

His eye twinkled. Oswald saw he had wanted her to ask this.

“Because,” said the Editor, more slowly than ever, “I think there must be. How otherwise can we account for that chapter about the ‘Doge’s Home’ being read and admired by sixteen different people before it is even printed. That chapter has not been printed, it has not been published; it will not be published till the May number of the People’s Pageant. Yet in Blackheath sixteen people already appreciate its subtlety and its realism and all the rest of it. How do you account for this, Miss Daisy Dolman?”

“I am the Right Honourable Etheltruda,” said Alice. “At least—oh, it’s no use going on. We are not what we seem.”

“Oddly enough, I inferred that at the very beginning of our interview,” said the Editor.

Then the elastic finished slipping up Oswald’s head at the back, and the hat leapt from his head exactly as he had known it would. He fielded it deftly, however, and it did not touch the ground.

“Concealment,” said Oswald, “is at an end.”

“So it appears,” said the Editor. “Well, I hope next time the author of the ‘Golden Gondola’ will choose his instruments more carefully.”

“He didn’t! We aren’t!” cried Alice, and she instantly told the Editor everything.

Concealment being at an end, Oswald was able to get at his trousers pocket—it did not matter now how many boots he showed—and to get out Albert’s uncle’s letter.

Alice was quite eloquent, especially when the Editor had made her take off the hat with the blue bird, and the transformation and the tail, so that he could see what she really looked like. He was quite decent when he really understood how Albert’s uncle’s threatened marriage must have upset his brain while he was writing that chapter, and pondering on the dark future.

He began to laugh then, and kept it up till the hour of parting.

He advised Alice not to put on the transformation and the tail again to go home in, and she didn’t.

Then he said to me: “Are you in a finished state under Miss Daisy Dolman?” and when Oswald said, “Yes,” the Editor helped him to take off all the womanly accoutrements, and to do them up in brown paper. And he lent him a cap to go home in.

I never saw a man laugh more. He is an excellent sort.

But no slow passage of years, however many, can ever weaken Oswald’s memory of what those petticoats were like to walk in, and how ripping it was to get out of them, and have your own natural legs again.

We parted from that Editor without a strain on anybody’s character.

He must have written to Albert’s uncle, and told him all, for we got a letter next week. It said—

“My dear Kiddies,—Art cannot be forced. Nor can Fame. May I beg you for the future to confine your exertions to blowing my trumpet—or Fame’s—with your natural voices? Editors may be led, but they won’t be druv. The Right Honourable Miss Etheltruda Bustler seems to have aroused a deep pity for me in my Editor’s heart. Let that suffice. And for the future permit me, as firmly as affectionately, to reiterate the assurance and the advice which I have so often breathed in your long young ears, ‘I am not ungrateful; but I do wish you would mind your own business.’”

“That’s just because we were found out,” said Alice. “If we’d succeeded he’d have been sitting on the top of the pinnacle of Fame, and he would have owed it all to us. That would have been making him something like a wedding present.”

What we had really done was to make something very like——but the author is sure he has said enough.

THE FLYING LODGER

Father knows a man called Eustace Sandal. I do not know how to express his inside soul, but I have heard Father say he means well. He is a vegetarian and a Primitive Social Something, and an all-wooler, and things like that, and he is really as good as he can stick, only most awfully dull. I believe he eats bread and milk from choice. Well, he has great magnificent dreams about all the things you can do for other people, and he wants to distill cultivatedness into the sort of people who live in Model Workmen’s Dwellings, and teach them to live up to better things. This is what he says. So he gives concerts in Camberwell, and places like that, and curates come from far and near, to sing about Bold Bandaleros and the Song of the Bow, and people who have escaped being curates give comic recitings, and he is sure that it does every one good, and “gives them glimpses of the Life Beautiful.” He said that. Oswald heard him with his own trustworthy ears. Anyway the people enjoy the concerts no end, and that’s the great thing.

Well, he came one night, with a lot of tickets he wanted to sell, and Father bought some for the servants, and Dora happened to go in to get the gum for a kite we were making, and Mr. Sandal said, “Well, my little maiden, would you not like to come on Thursday evening, and share in the task of raising our poor brothers and sisters to the higher levels of culture?” So of course Dora said she would, very much. Then he explained about the concert, calling her “My little one,” and “dear child,” which Alice never would have borne, but Dora is not of a sensitive nature, and hardly minds what she is called, so long as it is not names, which she does not deem “dear child” and cetera to be, though Oswald would.

Dora was quite excited about it, and the stranger so worked upon her feelings that she accepted the deep responsibility of selling tickets, and for a week there was no bearing her. I believe she did sell nine, to people in Lewisham and New Cross who knew no better. And Father bought tickets for all of us, and when the eventful evening dawned we went to Camberwell by train and tram viâ Miss Blake (that means we shouldn’t have been allowed to go without her).

The tram ride was rather jolly, but when we got out and walked we felt like “Alone in London,” or “Jessica’s First Prayer,” because Camberwell is a devastating region that makes you think of rickety attics with the wind whistling through them, or miserable cellars where forsaken children do wonders by pawning their relations’ clothes and looking after the baby. It was a dampish night, and we walked on greasy mud. And as we walked along Alice kicked against something on the pavement, and it chinked, and when she picked it up it was five bob rolled up in newspaper.

“I expect it’s somebody’s little all,” said Alice, “and the cup was dashed from their lips just when they were going to joyfully spend it. We ought to give it to the police.”

But Miss Blake said no, and that we were late already, so we went on, and Alice held the packet in her muff throughout the concert which ensued. I will not tell you anything about the concert except that it was quite fairly jolly—you must have been to these Self-Raising Concerts in the course of your young lives.

When it was over we reasoned with Miss Blake, and she let us go through the light blue paper door beside the stage and find Mr. Sandal. We thought he might happen to hear who had lost the five bob, and return it to its sorrowing family. He was in a great hurry, but he took the chink and said he’d let us know if anything happened. Then we went home very cheerful, singing bits of the comic songs a bishop’s son had done in the concert, and little thinking what we were taking home with us.

It was only a few days after this, or perhaps a week, that we all began to be rather cross. Alice, usually as near a brick as a girl can go, was the worst of the lot, and if you said what you thought of her she instantly began to snivel. And we all had awful colds, and our handkerchiefs gave out, and then our heads ached. Oswald’s head was particularly hot, I remember, and he wanted to rest it on the backs of chairs or on tables—or anything steady.

But why prolong the painful narrative? What we had brought home from Camberwell was the measles, and as soon as the grown-ups recognised the Grim Intruder for the fell disease it is we all went to bed, and there was an end of active adventure for some time.

Of course, when you begin to get better there are grapes and other luxuries not of everyday occurrences, but while you’re sniffling and fevering in bed, as red as a lobster and blazing hot, you are inclined to think it is a heavy price to pay for any concert, however raising.

Mr. Sandal came to see Father the very day we all marched Bedward. He had found the owner of the five shillings. It was a doctor’s fee, about to be paid by the parent of a thoroughly measly family. And if we had taken it to the police at once Alice would not have held it in her hand all through the concert—but I will not blame Blakie. She was a jolly good nurse, and read aloud to us with unfatiguable industry while we were getting better.

Our having fallen victims to this disgusting complaint ended in our being sent to the seaside. Father could not take us himself, so we went to stay with a sister of Mr. Sandal’s. She was like him, only more so in every way.

The journey was very joyous. Father saw us off at Cannon Street, and we had a carriage to ourselves all the way, and we passed the station where Oswald would not like to be a porter. Rude boys at this station put their heads out of the window and shout, “Who’s a duffer?” and things like that, and the porters have to shout “I am!” because Higham is the name of the station, and porters have seldom any H’s with which to protect themselves from this cruel joke.

It was a glorious moment when the train swooped out of a tunnel and we looked over the downs and saw the grey-blue line that was the sea. We had not seen the sea since before Mother died. I believe we older ones all thought of that, and it made us quieter than the younger ones were. I do not want to forget anything, but it makes you feel empty and stupid when you remember some things.

There was a good drive in a waggonette after we got to our station. There were primroses under some of the hedges, and lots of dog-violets. And at last we got to Miss Sandal’s house. It is before you come to the village, and it is a little square white house. There is a big old windmill at the back of it. It is not used any more for grinding corn, but fishermen keep their nets in it.

Miss Sandal came out of the green gate to meet us. She had a soft, drab dress and a long thin neck, and her hair was drab too, and it was screwed up tight.

She said, “Welcome, one and all!” in a kind voice, but it was too much like Mr. Sandal’s for me. And we went in. She showed us the sitting-rooms, and the rooms where we were to sleep, and then she left us to wash our hands and faces. When we were alone we burst open the doors of our rooms with one consent, and met on the landing with a rush like the great rivers of America.

“Well!” said Oswald, and the others said the same.

“Of all the rummy cribs!” remarked Dicky.

“It’s like a workhouse or a hospital,” said Dora. “I think I like it.”

“It makes me think of bald-headed gentlemen,” said H.O., “it is so bare.”

It was. All the walls were white plaster, the furniture was white deal—what there was of it, which was precious little. There were no carpets—only white matting. And there was not a single ornament in a single room! There was a clock on the dining-room mantel-piece, but that could not be counted as an ornament because of the useful side of its character. There were only about six pictures—all of a brownish colour. One was the blind girl sitting on an orange with a broken fiddle. It is called Hope.

When we were clean Miss Sandal gave us tea. As we sat down she said, “The motto of our little household is ‘Plain living and high thinking.’”

And some of us feared for an instant that this might mean not enough to eat. But fortunately this was not the case. There was plenty, but all of a milky, bunny, fruity, vegetable sort. We soon got used to it, and liked it all right.

Miss Sandal was very kind. She offered to read aloud to us after tea, and, exchanging glances of despair, some of us said that we should like it very much.

It was Oswald who found the manly courage to say very politely—

“Would it be all the same to you if we went and looked at the sea first? Because——”

And she said, “Not at all,” adding something about “Nature, the dear old nurse, taking somebody on her knee,” and let us go.

We asked her which way, and we tore up the road and through the village and on to the sea-wall, and then with six joyous bounds we leaped down on to the sand.

The author will not bother you with a description of the mighty billows of ocean, which you must have read about, if not seen, but he will just say what perhaps you are not aware of—that seagulls eat clams and mussels and cockles, and crack the shells with their beaks. The author has seen this done.

You also know, I suppose, that you can dig in the sand (if you have a spade) and make sand castles, and stay in them till the tide washes you out.

I will say no more, except that when we gazed upon the sea and the sand we felt we did not care tuppence how highly Miss Sandal might think of us or how plainly she might make us live, so long as we had got the briny deep to go down to.

It was too early in the year and too late in the day to bathe, but we paddled, which comes to much the same thing, and you almost always have to change everything afterwards.

When it got dark we had to go back to the White House, and there was supper, and then we found that Miss Sandal did not keep a servant, so of course we offered to help wash up. H.O. only broke two plates.

Nothing worth telling about happened till we had been there over a week, and had got to know the coastguards and a lot of the village people quite well. I do like coastguards. They seem to know everything you want to hear about. Miss Sandal used to read to us out of poetry books, and about a chap called Thoreau, who could tickle fish, and they liked it, and let him. She was kind, but rather like her house—there was something bare and bald about her inside mind, I believe. She was very, very calm, and said that people who lost their tempers were not living the higher life. But one day a telegram came, and then she was not calm at all. She got quite like other people, and quite shoved H.O. for getting in her way when she was looking for her purse to pay for the answer to the telegram.

Then she said to Dora—and she was pale and her eyes red, just like people who live the lower or ordinary life—“My dears, it’s dreadful! My poor brother! He’s had a fall. I must go to him at once.” And she sent Oswald to order the fly from the Old Ship Hotel, and the girls to see if Mrs. Beale would come and take care of us while she was away. Then she kissed us all and went off very unhappy. We heard afterwards that poor, worthy Mr. Sandal had climbed a scaffolding to give a workman a tract about drink, and he didn’t know the proper part of the scaffolding to stand on (the workman did, of course) so he fetched down half a dozen planks and the workman, and if a dust-cart hadn’t happened to be passing just under so that they fell into it their lives would not have been spared. As it was Mr. Sandal broke his arm and his head. The workman escaped unscathed but furious. The workman was a teetotaler.

Mrs. Beale came, and the first thing she did was to buy a leg of mutton and cook it. It was the first meat we had had since arriving at Lymchurch.

“I ‘spect she can’t afford good butcher’s meat,” said Mrs. Beale; “but your pa, I expect he pays for you, and I lay he’d like you to have your fill of something as’ll lay acrost your chesties.” So she made a Yorkshire pudding as well. It was good.

After dinner we sat on the sea-wall, feeling more like after dinner than we had felt for days, and Dora said—

“Poor Miss Sandal! I never thought about her being hard-up, somehow. I wish we could do something to help her.”

“We might go out street-singing,” Noël said. But that was no good, because there is only one street in the village, and the people there are much too poor for one to be able to ask them for anything. And all round it is fields with only sheep, who have nothing to give except their wool, and when it comes to taking that, they are never asked.

Dora thought we might get Father to give her money, but Oswald knew this would never do.

Then suddenly a thought struck some one—I will not say who—and that some one said—

“She ought to let lodgings, like all the other people do in Lymchurch.”

That was the beginning of it. The end—for that day—was our getting the top of a cardboard box and printing on it the following lines in as many different coloured chalks as we happened to have with us.

LODGINGS TO LET.

ENQUIRE INSIDE.

We ruled spaces for the letters to go in, and did it very neatly. When we went to bed we stuck it in our bedroom window with stamp-paper.

In the morning when Oswald drew up his blind there was quite a crowd of kids looking at the card. Mrs. Beale came out and shoo-ed them away as if they were hens. And we did not have to explain the card to her at all. She never said anything about it. I never knew such a woman as Mrs. Beale for minding her own business. She said afterwards she supposed Miss Sandal had told us to put up the card.

Well, two or three days went by, and nothing happened, only we had a letter from Miss Sandal, telling us how the poor sufferer was groaning, and one from Father telling us to be good children, and not get into scrapes. And people who drove by used to look at the card and laugh.

And then one day a carriage came driving up with a gentleman in it, and he saw the rainbow beauty of our chalked card, and he got out and came up the path. He had a pale face, and white hair and very bright eyes that moved about quickly like a bird’s, and he was dressed in a quite new tweed suit that did not fit him very well.

Dora and Alice answered the door before any one had time to knock, and the author has reason to believe their hearts were beating wildly.

“How much?” said the gentleman shortly.

Alice and Dora were so surprised by his suddenness that they could only reply—

“Er—er——”

“Just so,” said the gentleman briskly as Oswald stepped modestly forward and said—

“Won’t you come inside?”

“The very thing,” said he, and came in.

We showed him into the dining-room and asked him to excuse us a minute, and then held a breathless council outside the door.

“It depends how many rooms he wants,” said Dora.

“Let’s say so much a room,” said Dicky, “and extra if he wants Mrs. Beale to wait on him.”

So we decided to do this. We thought a pound a room seemed fair.

And we went back.

“How many rooms do you want?” Oswald asked.

“All the room there is,” said the gentleman.

“They are a pound each,” said Oswald, “and extra for Mrs. Beale.”

“How much altogether?”

Oswald thought a minute and then said “Nine rooms is nine pounds, and two pounds a week for Mrs. Beale, because she is a widow.”

“Done!” said the gentleman. “I’ll go and fetch my portmanteaus.”

He bounced up and out and got into his carriage and drove away. It was not till he was finally gone quite beyond recall that Alice suddenly said—

“But if he has all the rooms where are we to sleep?”

“He must be awfully rich,” said H.O., “wanting all those rooms.”