The Wouldbegoods (15 page)

When Denny had scrambled and been hauled ashore, we saw with horror and amaze that his legs were stuck all over with large black, slug-looking things. Denny turned green in the face – and even Oswald felt a bit queer, for he knew in a moment what the black dreadfulnesses were. He had read about them in a book called
Magnet Stories
, where there was a girl called Theodosia, and she could play brilliant trebles on the piano in duets, but the other girl knew all about leeches which is much more useful and golden deedy. Oswald tried to pull the leeches off, but they wouldn’t, and Denny howled so he had to stop trying. He remembered from the
Magnet Stories
how to make the leeches begin biting – the girl did it with cream – but he could not remember how to stop them, and they had not wanted any showing how to begin.

‘Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do? Oh, it does hurt! Oh, oh!’ Denny observed, and Oswald said –

‘Be a man! Buck up! If you won’t let me take them off you’ll just have to walk home in them.’

At this thought the unfortunate youth’s tears fell fast. But Oswald gave him an arm, and carried his boots for him, and he consented to buck up, and the two struggled on towards the others, who were coming back, attracted by Denny’s yells. He did not stop howling for a moment, except to breathe. No one ought to blame him till they have had eleven leeches on their right leg and six on their left, making seventeen in all, as Dicky said, at once.

It was lucky he did yell, as it turned out, because a man on the road – where the telegraph wires were – was interested by his howls, and came across the marsh to us as hard as he could. When he saw Denny’s legs he said –

‘Blest if I didn’t think so,’ and he picked Denny up and carried him under one arm, where Denny went on saying ‘Oh!’ and ‘It does hurt’ as hard as ever.

Our rescuer, who proved to be a fine big young man in the bloom of youth, and a farm-labourer by trade, in corduroys, carried the wretched sufferer to the cottage where he lived with his aged mother; and then Oswald found that what he had forgotten about the leeches was
salt
. The young man in the bloom of youth’s mother put salt on the leeches, and they squirmed off, and fell with sickening, slug-like flops on the brick floor.

Then the young man in corduroys and the bloom, etc., carried Denny home on his back, after his legs had been bandaged up, so that he looked like ‘wounded warriors returning’.

It was not far by the road, though such a long distance by the way the young explorers had come.

He was a good young man, and though, of course, acts of goodness are their own reward, still I was glad he had the two half-crowns Albert’s uncle gave him, as well as his own good act. But I am not sure Alice ought to have put him in the Golden Deed book which was supposed to be reserved for Us.

Perhaps you will think this was the end of the source of the Nile (or North Pole). If you do, it only shows how mistaken the gentlest reader may be.

The wounded explorer was lying with his wounds and bandages on the sofa, and we were all having our tea, with raspberries and white currants, which we richly needed after our torrid adventures, when Mrs Pettigrew, the housekeeper, put her head in at the door and said –

‘Please could I speak to you half a moment, sir?’ to Albert’s uncle. And her voice was the kind that makes you look at each other when the grown-up has gone out, and you are silent, with your bread-and-butter halfway to the next bite, or your teacup in mid flight to your lips.

It was as we suppose. Albert’s uncle did not come back for a long while. We did not keep the bread-and-butter on the wing all that time, of course, and we thought we might as well finish the raspberries and white currants. We kept some for Albert’s uncle, of course, and they were the best ones too but when he came back he did not notice our thoughtful unselfishness.

He came in, and his face wore the look that means bed, and very likely no supper.

He spoke, and it was the calmness of white-hot iron, which is something like the calmness of despair. He said –

‘You have done it again. What on earth possessed you to make a dam?’

‘We were being beavers,’ said H.O., in proud tones. He did not see as we did where Albert’s uncle’s tone pointed to.

‘No doubt,’ said Albert’s uncle, rubbing his hands through his hair. ‘No doubt! no doubt! Well, my beavers, you may go and build dams with your bolsters. Your dam stopped the stream; the clay you took for it left a channel through which it has run down and ruined about seven pounds’ worth of freshly reaped barley. Luckily the farmer found it out in time or you might have spoiled seventy pounds’ worth. And you burned a bridge yesterday.’

We said we were sorry. There was nothing else to say, only Alice added, ‘We didn’t
mean
to be naughty.’

‘Of course not,’ said Albert’s uncle, ‘you never do. Oh, yes, I’ll kiss you – but it’s bed and it’s two hundred lines tomorrow, and the line is – “Beware of Being Beavers and Burning Bridges. Dread Dams.” It will be a capital exercise in capital Bs and Ds.’

We knew by that that, though annoyed, he was not furious; we went to bed.

I got jolly sick of capital Bs and Ds before sunset on the morrow. That night, just as the others were falling asleep, Oswald said –

‘I say.’

‘Well,’ retorted his brother.

‘There is one thing about it,’ Oswald went on, ‘it does show it was a rattling good dam anyhow.’

And filled with this agreeable thought, the weary beavers (or explorers, Polar or otherwise) fell asleep.

chapter eight

the high-born babe

It really was not such a bad baby – for a baby. Its face was round and quite clean, which babies’ faces are not always, as I daresay you know by your own youthful relatives; and Dora said its cape was trimmed with real lace, whatever that may be – I don’t see myself how one kind of lace can be realler than another. It was in a very swagger sort of perambulator when we saw it; and the perambulator was standing quite by itself in the lane that leads to the mill.

‘I wonder whose baby it is,’ Dora said. ‘Isn’t it a darling, Alice?’

Alice agreed to its being one, and said she thought it was most likely the child of noble parents stolen by gypsies.

‘These two, as likely as not,’ Noel said. ‘Can’t you see something crime-like in the very way they’re lying?’

They were two tramps, and they were lying on the grass at the edge of the lane on the shady side fast asleep, only a very little further on than where the Baby was. They were very ragged, and their snores did have a sinister sound.

‘I expect they stole the titled heir at dead of night, and they’ve been travelling hot-foot ever since, so now
they’re sleeping the sleep of exhaustedness,’ Alice said. ‘What a heart-rending scene when the patrician mother wakes in the morning and finds the infant aristocrat isn’t in bed with his mamma.’

The Baby was fast asleep or else the girls would have kissed it. They are strangely fond of kissing. The author never could see anything in it himself.

‘If the gypsies
did
steal it,’ Dora said, ‘perhaps they’d sell it to us. I wonder what they’d take for it.’

‘What could you do with it if you’d got it?’ H.O. asked.

‘Why, adopt it, of course,’ Dora said. ‘I’ve often thought I should enjoy adopting a baby. It would be a golden deed, too. We’ve hardly got any in the book yet.’

‘I should have thought there were enough of us,’ Dicky said.

‘Ah, but you’re none of you babies,’ said Dora.

‘Unless you count H.O. as a baby: he behaves jolly like one sometimes.’

This was because of what had happened that morning when Dicky found H.O. going fishing with a box of worms, and the box was the one Dicky keeps his silver studs in, and the medal he got at school, and what is left of his watch and chain. The box is lined with red velvet and it was not nice afterwards. And then H.O. said Dicky had hurt him, and he was a beastly bully, and he cried. We thought all this had been made up, and were sorry to see it threaten to break out again. So Oswald said –

‘Oh, bother the Baby! Come along, do!’

And the others came.

We were going to the miller’s with a message about some flour that hadn’t come, and about a sack of sharps for the pigs.

After you go down the lane you come to a cloverfield, and then a cornfield, and then another lane, and then it is the mill. It is a jolly fine mill: in fact it is two – water and wind ones – one of each kind – with a house and farm buildings as well. I never saw a mill like it, and I don’t believe you have either.

If we had been in a storybook the miller’s wife would have taken us into the neat sanded kitchen where the old oak settle was black with time and rubbing, and dusted chairs for us – old brown Windsor chairs – and given us each a glass of sweet-scented cowslip wine and a thick slice of rich home-made cake. And there would have been fresh roses in an old china bowl on the table. As it was, she asked us all into the parlour and gave us Eiffel Tower lemonade and Marie biscuits. The chairs in her parlour were ‘bent wood’, and no flowers, except some wax ones under a glass shade, but she was very kind, and we were very much obliged to her. We got out to the miller, though, as soon as we could; only Dora and Daisy stayed with her, and she talked to them about her lodgers and about her relations in London.

The miller is a
man
. He showed us all over the mills – both kinds – and let us go right up into the very top of the windmill, and showed us how the top moved round so that the sails could catch the wind, and the great heaps of corn, some red and some yellow (the red is English wheat), and the heaps slice down a little bit at a time into a square hole and go down to the mill-stones.
The corn makes a rustling soft noise that is very jolly – something like the noise of the sea – and you can hear it through all the other mill noises.

Then the miller let us go all over the watermill. It is fairy palaces inside a mill. Everything is powdered over white, like sugar on pancakes when you are allowed to help yourself. And he opened a door and showed us the great waterwheel working on slow and sure, like some great, round, dripping giant, Noel said, and then he asked us if we fished.

‘Yes,’ was our immediate reply.

‘Then why not try the mill pool?’ he said, and we replied politely; and when he was gone to tell his man something we owned to each other that he was a trump.

He did the thing thoroughly. He took us out and cut us ash saplings for rods; he found us lines and hooks, and several different sorts of bait, including a handsome handful of mealworms, which Oswald put loose in his pocket.

When it came to bait, Alice said she was going home with Dora and Daisy. Girls are strange, mysterious, silly things. Alice always enjoys a rat hunt until the rat is caught, but she hates fishing from beginning to end. We boys have got to like it. We don’t feel now as we did when we turned off the water and stopped the competition of the competing anglers. We had a grand day’s fishing that day. I can’t think what made the miller so kind to us. Perhaps he felt a thrill of fellow-feeling in his manly breast for his fellow sportsmen, for he was a noble fisherman himself.

We had glorious sport – eight roach, six dace, three eels, seven perch, and a young pike, but he was so very
young the miller asked us to put him back, and of course we did. ‘He’ll live to bite another day,’ said the miller.

The miller’s wife gave us bread and cheese and more Eiffel Tower lemonade, and we went home at last, a little damp, but full of successful ambition, with our fish on a string.

It had been a strikingly good time – one of those times that happen in the country quite by themselves. Country people are much more friendly than town people. I suppose they don’t have to spread their friendly feelings out over so many persons, so it’s thicker, like a pound of butter on one loaf is thicker than on a dozen. Friendliness in the country is not scrape, like it is in London. Even Dicky and H.O. forgot the affair of honour that had taken place in the morning. H.O. changed rods with Dicky because H.O.’s was the best rod, and Dicky baited H.O.’s hook for him, just like loving, unselfish brothers in Sunday School magazines.

We were talking fishlikely as we went along down the lane and through the cornfield and the cloverfield, and then we came to the other lane where we had seen the Baby. The tramps were gone, and the perambulator was gone, and, of course, the Baby was gone too.

‘I wonder if those gypsies
had
stolen the Baby?’ Noel said dreamily. He had not fished much, but he had made a piece of poetry. It was this:

‘If they did steal the Baby,’ Noel went on, ‘they will be tracked by the lordly perambulator. You can disguise a baby in rags and walnut juice, but there isn’t any disguise dark enough to conceal a perambulator’s person.’

‘You might disguise it as a wheelbarrow,’ said Dicky.

‘Or cover it with leaves,’ said H.O., ‘like the robins.’

We told him to shut up and not gibber, but afterwards we had to own that even a young brother may sometimes talk sense by accident.

For we took the shortcut home from the lane – it begins with a large gap in the hedge and the grass and weeds trodden down by the hasty feet of persons who were late for church and in too great a hurry to go round by the road. Our house is next to the church, as I think I have said before, some time.

The shortcut leads to a stile at the edge of a bit of wood (the Parson’s Shave, they call it, because it belongs to him). The wood has not been shaved for some time, and it has grown out beyond the stile and here, among the hazels and chestnuts and young dogwood bushes, we saw something white. We felt it was our duty to investigate, even if the white was only the underside of the tail of a dead rabbit caught in a trap.

It was not – it was part of the perambulator. I forget whether I said that the perambulator was enamelled white – not the kind of enamelling you do at home with Aspinall’s and the hairs of the brush come out and it is gritty-looking, but smooth, like the handles of ladies’ very best lace parasols. And whoever had abandoned the helpless perambulator in that lonely spot had done exactly as H.O. said, and covered it with leaves, only they were green and some of them had dropped off.

The others were wild with excitement. Now or never, they thought, was a chance to be real detectives. Oswald alone retained a calm exterior. It was he who would not go straight to the police station.

He said: ‘Let’s try and ferret out something for ourselves before we tell the police. They always have a clue directly they hear about the finding of the body. And besides, we might as well let Alice be in anything there is going. And besides, we haven’t had our dinners yet.’

This argument of Oswald’s was so strong and powerful – his arguments are often that, as I daresay you have noticed – that the others agreed. It was Oswald, too, who showed his artless brothers why they had much better not take the deserted perambulator home with them.

‘The dead body, or whatever the clue is, is always left exactly as it is found,’ he said, ‘till the police have seen it, and the coroner, and the inquest, and the doctor, and the sorrowing relations. Besides, suppose someone saw us with the beastly thing, and thought we had stolen it; then they would say, “What have you done with the Baby?” and then where should we be?’ Oswald’s brothers could not answer this question, but
once more Oswald’s native eloquence and far-seeing discerningness conquered.

‘Anyway,’ Dicky said, ‘let’s shove the derelict a little further under cover.’

So we did.

Then we went on home. Dinner was ready and so were Alice and Daisy, but Dora was not there.

‘She’s got a – well, she’s not coming to dinner anyway,’ Alice said when we asked. ‘She can tell you herself afterwards what it is she’s got.’

Oswald thought it was headache, or pain in the temper, or in the pinafore, so he said no more, but as soon as Mrs Pettigrew had helped us and left the room he began the thrilling tale of the forsaken perambulator. He told it with the greatest thrillingness anyone could have, but Daisy and Alice seemed almost unmoved. Alice said –

‘Yes, very strange,’ and things like that, but both the girls seemed to be thinking of something else. They kept looking at each other and trying not to laugh, so Oswald saw they had got some silly secret and he said –

‘Oh, all right! I don’t care about telling you. I only thought you’d like to be in it. It’s going to be a really big thing, with policemen in it, and perhaps a judge.’

‘In what?’ H.O. said; ‘the perambulator?’

Daisy choked and then tried to drink, and spluttered and got purple, and had to be thumped on the back. But Oswald was not appeased. When Alice said, ‘Do go on, Oswald. I’m sure we all like it very much,’ he said –

‘Oh, no, thank you,’ very politely. ‘As it happens,’ he went on, ‘I’d just as soon go through with this thing without having any girls in it.’

‘In the perambulator?’ said H.O. again.

‘It’s a man’s job,’ Oswald went on, without taking any notice of H.O.

‘Do you really think so,’ said Alice, ‘when there’s a baby in it?’

‘But there isn’t,’ said H.O., ‘if you mean in the perambulator.’

‘Blow you and your perambulator,’ said Oswald, with gloomy forbearance.