The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories (193 page)

THE POOR AND NEEDY

“What shall we do to-day, kiddies?” said Mrs. Bax. We had discovered her true nature but three days ago, and already she had taken us out in a sailing-boat and in a motor car, had given us sweets every day, and taught us eleven new games that we had not known before; and only four of the new games were rotters. How seldom can as much be said for the games of a grown-up, however gifted!

The day was one of cloudless blue perfectness, and we were all basking on the beach. We had all bathed. Mrs. Bax said we might. There are points about having a grown-up with you, if it is the right kind. You can then easily get it to say “Yes” to what you want, and after that, if anything goes wrong it is their fault, and you are pure from blame. But nothing had gone wrong with the bathe, and, so far, we were all alive, and not cold at all, except our fingers and feet.

“What would you like to do?” asked Mrs. Bax. We were far away from human sight along the beach, and Mrs. Bax was smoking cigarettes as usual.

“I don’t know,” we all said politely. But H.O. said—

“What about poor Miss Sandal?”

“Why poor?” asked Mrs. Bax.

“Because she is,” said H.O.

“But how? What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Bax.

“Why, isn’t she?” said H.O.

“Isn’t she what?” said Mrs. Bax.

“What you said why about,” said H.O.

She put her hands to her head. Her short hair was still damp and rumpled from contact with the foaming billows of ocean.

“Let’s have a fresh deal and start fair,” she said; “why do you think my sister is poor?”

“I forgot she was your sister,” said H.O., “or I wouldn’t have said it—honour bright I wouldn’t.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Mrs. Bax, and began throwing stones at a groin in amiable silence.

We were furious with H.O., first because it is such bad manners to throw people’s poverty in their faces, or even in their sisters’ faces, like H.O. had just done, and second because it seemed to have put out of Mrs. Bax’s head what she was beginning to say about what would we like to do.

So Oswald presently remarked, when he had aimed at the stump she was aiming at, and hit it before she did, for though a fair shot for a lady, she takes a long time to get her eye in.

“Mrs. Bax, we should like to do whatever you like to do.” This was real politeness and true too, as it happened, because by this time we could quite trust her not to want to do anything deeply duffing.

“That’s very nice of you,” she replied, “but don’t let me interfere with any plans of yours. My own idea was to pluck a waggonette from the nearest bush. I suppose they grow freely in these parts?”

“There’s one at the ‘Ship,’” said Alice; “it costs seven-and-six to pluck it, just for going to the station.”

“Well, then! And to stuff our waggonette with lunch and drive over to Lynwood Castle, and eat it there.”

“A picnic!” fell in accents of joy from the lips of one and all.

“We’ll also boil the billy in the castle courtyard, and eat buns in the shadow of the keep.”

“Tea as well?” said H.O., “with buns? You can’t be poor and needy any way, whatever your——”

We hastily hushed him, stifling his murmurs with sand.

“I always think,” said Mrs. Bax dreamily, “that ‘the more the merrier,’ is peculiarly true of picnics. So I have arranged—always subject to your approval, of course—to meet your friends, Mr. and Mrs. Red House, there, and——”

We drowned her conclusive remarks with a cheer. And Oswald, always willing to be of use, offered to go to the ‘Ship’ and see about the waggonette. I like horses and stable-yards, and the smell of hay and straw, and talking to ostlers and people like that.

There turned out to be two horses belonging to the best waggonette, or you could have a one-horse one, much smaller, with the blue cloth of the cushions rather frayed, and mended here and there, and green in patches from age and exposition to the weather.

Oswald told Mrs. Bax this, not concealing about how shabby the little one was, and she gloriously said—

“The pair by all means! We don’t kill a pig every day!”

“No, indeed,” said Dora, but if “killing a pig” means having a lark, Mrs. Bax is as good a pig-killer as any I ever knew.

It was splendid to drive (Oswald, on the box beside the driver, who had his best coat with the bright buttons) along the same roads that we had trodden as muddy pedestrinators, or travelled along behind Bates’s donkey.

It was a perfect day, as I said before. We were all clean and had our second-best things on. I think second-bests are much more comfy than first-bests. You feel equivalent to meeting any one, and have “a heart for any fate,” as it says in the poetry-book, and yet you are not starched and booted and stiffened and tightened out of all human feelings.

Lynwood Castle is in a hollow in the hills. It has a moat all round it with water-lily leaves on it. I suppose there are lilies when in season. There is a bridge over the moat—not the draw kind of bridge. And the castle has eight towers—four round and four square ones, and a courtyard in the middle, all green grass, and heaps of stones—stray bits of castle, I suppose they are—and a great white may-tree in the middle that Mrs. Bax said was hundreds of years old.

Mrs. Red House was sitting under the may-tree when we got there, nursing her baby, in a blue dress and looking exactly like a picture on the top of a chocolate-box.

The girls instantly wanted to nurse the baby so we let them. And we explored the castle. We had never happened to explore one thoroughly before. We did not find the deepest dungeon below the castle moat, though we looked everywhere for it, but we found everything else you can think of belonging to castles—even the holes they used to pour boiling lead through into the eyes of besiegers when they tried to squint up to see how strong the garrison was in the keep—and the little slits they shot arrows through, and the mouldering remains of the portcullis. We went up the eight towers, every single one of them, and some parts were jolly dangerous, I can tell you. Dicky and I would not let H.O. and Noël come up the dangerous parts. There was no lasting ill-feeling about this. By the time we had had a thorough good explore lunch was ready.

It was a glorious lunch—not too many meaty things, but all sorts of cakes and sweets, and grapes and figs and nuts.

We gazed at the feast, and Mrs. Bax said—

“There you are, young Copperfield, and a royal spread you’ve got.”

“They had currant wine,” said Noël, who has only just read the book by Mr. Charles Dickens.

“Well, so have you,” said Mrs. Bax. And we had. Two bottles of it.

“I never knew any one like you,” said Noël to Mrs. Red House, dreamily with his mouth full, “for knowing the things people really like to eat, not the things that are good for them, but what they like, and Mrs. Bax is just the same.”

“It was one of the things they taught at our school,” said Mrs. Bax. “Do you remember the Saturday night feasts, Chloe, and how good the cocoanut ice tasted after extra strong peppermints?”

“Fancy you knowing that!” said H.O. “I thought it was us found that out.”

“I really know much more about things to eat than she does,” said Mrs. Bax. “I was quite an old girl when she was a little thing in pinafores. She was such a nice little girl.”

“I shouldn’t wonder if she was always nice,” said Noël, “even when she was a baby!”

Everybody laughed at this, except the existing baby, and it was asleep on the waggonette cushions, under the white may-tree, and perhaps if it had been awake it wouldn’t have laughed, for Oswald himself, though possessing a keen sense of humour, did not see anything to laugh at.

Mr. Red House made a speech after dinner, and said drink to the health of everybody, one after the other, in currant wine, which was done, beginning with Mrs. Bax and ending with H.O.

Then he said—

“Somnus, avaunt! What shall we play at?” and nobody, as so often happens, had any idea ready. Then suddenly Mrs. Red House said—

“Good gracious, look there!” and we looked there, and where we were to look was the lowest piece of the castle wall, just beside the keep that the bridge led over to, and what we were to look at was a strange blobbiness of knobbly bumps along the top, that looked exactly like human heads.

It turned out, when we had talked about cannibals and New Guinea, that human heads were just exactly what they were. Not loose heads, stuck on pikes or things like that, such as there often must have been while the castle stayed in the olden times it was built in and belonged to, but real live heads with their bodies still in attendance on them.

They were, in fact, the village children.

“Poor little Lazaruses!” said Mr. Red House.

“There’s not such a bad slice of Dives’ feast left,” said Mrs. Bax. “Shall we——?”

So Mr. Red House went out by the keep and called the heads in (with the bodies they were connected with, of course), and they came and ate up all that was left of the lunch. Not the buns, of course, for those were sacred to tea-time, but all the other things, even the nuts and figs, and we were quite glad that they should have them—really and truly we were, even H.O.!

They did not seem to be very clever children, or just the sort you would choose for your friends, but I suppose you like to play, however little you are other people’s sort. So, after they had eaten all there was, when Mrs. Red House invited them all to join in games with us we knew we ought to be pleased. But village children are not taught rounders, and though we wondered at first why their teachers had not seen to this, we understood presently. Because it is most awfully difficult to make them understand the very simplest thing.

But they could play all the ring games, and “Nuts and May,” and “There Came Three Knights”—and another one we had never heard of before. The singing part begins:—

“Up and down the green grass,

This and that and thus,

Come along, my pretty maid,

And take a walk with us.

You shall have a duck, my dear,

And you shall have a drake,

And you shall have a handsome man

For your father’s sake.”

I forget the rest, and if anybody who reads this knows it, and will write and tell me, the author will not have laboured in vain.

The grown-ups played with all their heart and soul—I expect it is but seldom they are able to play, and they enjoy the novel excitement. And when we’d been at it some time we saw there was another head looking over the wall.

“Hullo!” said Mrs. Bax, “here’s another of them, run along and ask it to come and join in.”

She spoke to the village children, but nobody ran.

“Here, you go,” she said, pointing at a girl in red plaits tied with dirty sky-blue ribbon.

“Please, miss, I’d leifer not,” replied the red-haired. “Mother says we ain’t to play along of him.”

“Why, what’s the matter with him?” asked Mrs. Red House.

“His father’s in jail, miss, along of snares and night lines, and no one won’t give his mother any work, so my mother says we ain’t to demean ourselves to speak to him.”

“But it’s not the child’s fault,” said Mrs. Red House, “is it now?”

“I don’t know, miss,” said the red-haired.

“But it’s cruel,” said Mrs. Bax. “How would you like it if your father was sent to prison, and nobody would speak to you?”

“Father’s always kep’ hisself respectable,” said the girl with the dirty blue ribbon. “You can’t be sent to gaol, not if you keeps yourself respectable, you can’t, miss.”

“And do none of you speak to him?”

The other children put their fingers in their mouths, and looked silly, showing plainly that they didn’t.

“Don’t you feel sorry for the poor little chap?” said Mrs. Bax.

No answer transpired.

“Can’t you imagine how you’d feel if it was your father?”

“My father always kep’ hisself respectable,” the red-haired girl said again.

“Well, I shall ask him to come and play with us,” said Mrs. Red House. “Little pigs!” she added in low tones only heard by the author and Mr. Red House.

But Mr. Red House said in a whisper that no one overheard except Mrs. R. H. and the present author.

“Don’t, Puss-cat; it’s no good. The poor little pariah wouldn’t like it. And these kids only do what their parents teach them.”

If the author didn’t know what a stainless gentleman Mr. Red House is he would think he heard him mutter a word that gentlemen wouldn’t say.

“Tell off a detachment of consolation,” Mr. Red House went on; “look here, our kids—who’ll go and talk to the poor little chap?”

We all instantly said, “I will!”

The present author was chosen to be the one.

When you think about yourself there is a kind of you that is not what you generally are but that you know you would like to be if only you were good enough. Albert’s uncle says this is called your ideal of yourself. I will call it your best I, for short. Oswald’s “best I” was glad to go and talk to that boy whose father was in prison, but the Oswald that generally exists hated being out of the games. Yet the whole Oswald, both the best and the ordinary, was pleased that he was the one chosen to be a detachment of consolation.

He went out under the great archway, and as he went he heard the games beginning again. This made him feel noble, and yet he was ashamed of feeling it. Your feelings are a beastly nuisance, if once you begin to let yourself think about them. Oswald soon saw the broken boots of the boy whose father was in jail so nobody would play with him, standing on the stones near the top of the wall where it was broken to match the boots.

He climbed up and said, “Hullo!”

To this remark the boy replied, “Hullo!”

Oswald now did not know what to say. The sorrier you are for people the harder it is to tell them so.

But at last he said—

“I’ve just heard about your father being where he is. It’s beastly rough luck. I hope you don’t mind my saying I’m jolly sorry for you.”

The boy had a pale face and watery blue eyes. When Oswald said this his eyes got waterier than ever, and he climbed down to the ground before he said—

“I don’t care so much, but it do upset mother something crool.”

It is awfully difficult to console those in affliction. Oswald thought this, then he said—

“I say; never mind if those beastly kids won’t play with you. It isn’t your fault, you know.”

“Nor it ain’t father’s neither,” the boy said; “he broke his arm a-falling off of a rick, and he hadn’t paid up his club money along of mother’s new baby costing what it did when it come, so there warn’t nothing—and what’s a hare or two, or a partridge? It ain’t as if it was pheasants as is as dear to rear as chicks.”

Oswald did not know what to say, so he got out his new pen-and-pencil-combined and said—

“Look here! You can have this to keep if you like.”

The pale-eyed boy took it and looked at it and said—

“You ain’t foolin’ me?”

And Oswald said no he wasn’t, but he felt most awfully rum and uncomfy, and though he wanted most frightfully to do something for the boy he felt as if he wanted to get away more than anything else, and he never was gladder in his life than when he saw Dora coming along, and she said—