The Wouldbegoods (3 page)

And the others agreed, and we talked about it till brek was over. The little strangers only said ‘I don’t know’ whenever we said anything to them.

After brekker Oswald beckoned his brothers and sisters mysteriously apart and said –

‘Do you agree to let me be captain today, because I thought of it?’

And they said they would.

Then he said, ‘We’ll play
Jungle Book
, and I shall be Mowgli. The rest of you can be what you like – Mowgli’s father and mother, or any of the beasts.’

‘I don’t suppose they know the book,’ said Noel. ‘They don’t look as if they read anything, except at lesson times.’

‘Then they can go on being beasts all the time,’ Oswald said. ‘Anyone can be a beast.’

So it was settled.

And now Oswald – Albert’s uncle has sometimes said he is clever at arranging things – began to lay his plans for the jungle. The day was indeed well chosen. Our Indian uncle was away; Father was away; Mrs Blake was going away, and the housemaid had an afternoon off. Oswald’s first conscious act was to get rid of the white mice – I mean the little good visitors. He explained to them that there would be a play in the afternoon, and they could be what they liked, and gave them the
Jungle Book
to read the stories he told them to – all the ones
about Mowgli. He led the strangers to a secluded spot among the sea-kale pots in the kitchen garden and left them. Then he went back to the others, and we had a jolly morning under the cedar talking about what we would do when Blakie was gone. She went just after our dinner.

When we asked Denny what he would like to be in the play, it turned out he had not read the stories Oswald told him at all, but only the ‘White Seal’ and ‘Rikki Tikki’.

We then agreed to make the jungle first and dress up for our parts afterwards. Oswald was a little uncomfortable about leaving the strangers alone all the morning, so he said Denny should be his aide-de-camp, and he was really quite useful. He is rather handy with his fingers, and things that he does up do not come untied. Daisy might have come too, but she wanted to go on reading, so we let her, which is the truest manners to a visitor. Of course the shrubbery was to be the jungle, and the lawn under the cedar a forest glade, and then we began to collect the things. The cedar lawn is just nicely out of the way of the windows. It was a jolly hot day – the kind of day when the sunshine is white and the shadows are dark grey, not black like they are in the evening.

We all thought of different things. Of course first we dressed up pillows in the skins of beasts and set them about on the grass to look as natural as we could. And then we got Pincher, and rubbed him all over with powdered slate-pencil, to make him the right colour for Grey Brother. But he shook it all off, and it had taken an awful time to do. Then Alice said –

‘Oh, I know!’ and she ran off to Father’s dressing room, and came back with the tube of
crème d’amande pour la barbe et les mains
, and we squeezed it on Pincher and rubbed it in, and then the slate-pencil stuff stuck all right, and he rolled in the dust-bin of his own accord, which made him just the right colour. He is a very clever dog, but soon after he went off and we did not find him till quite late in the afternoon. Denny helped with Pincher, and with the wild-beast skins, and when Pincher was finished he said –

‘Please, may I make some paper birds to put in the trees? I know how.’

And of course we said ‘Yes’, and he only had red ink and newspapers, and quickly he made quite a lot of large paper birds with red tails. They didn’t look half bad on the edge of the shrubbery.

While he was doing this he suddenly said, or rather screamed, ‘Oh?’

And we looked, and it was a creature with great horns and a fur rug –something like a bull and something like a minotaur – and I don’t wonder Denny was frightened. It was Alice, and it was first-class.

Up to now all was not yet lost beyond recall. It was the stuffed fox that did the mischief – and I am sorry to own it was Oswald who thought of it. He is not ashamed of having
thought
of it. That was rather clever of him. But he knows now that it is better not to take other people’s foxes and things without asking, even if you live in the same house with them.

It was Oswald who undid the back of the glass case in the hall and got out the fox with the green and grey
duck in its mouth, and when the others saw how awfully like life they looked on the lawn, they all rushed off to fetch the other stuffed things. Uncle has a tremendous lot of stuffed things. He shot most of them himself – but not the fox, of course. There was another fox’s mask, too, and we hung that in a bush to look as if the fox was peeping out. And the stuffed birds we fastened on to the trees with string. The duckbill – what’s its name? – looked very well sitting on his tail with the otter snarling at him. Then Dicky had an idea; and though not nearly so much was said about it afterwards as there was about the stuffed things, I think myself it was just as bad, though it was a good idea, too. He just got the hose and put the end over a branch of the cedar tree. Then we got the steps they clean windows with, and let the hose rest on the top of the steps and run. It was to be a waterfall, but it ran between the steps and was only wet and messy; so we got Father’s mackintosh and uncle’s and covered the steps with them, so that the water ran down all right and was glorious, and it ran away in a stream across the grass where we had dug a little channel for it – and the otter and the duckbill-thing were as if in their native haunts. I hope all this is not very dull to read about. I know it was jolly good fun to do. Taking one thing with another, I don’t know that we ever had a better time while it lasted.

We got all the rabbits out of the hutches and put pink paper tails on to them, and hunted them with horns made out of
The Times
. They got away somehow, and before they were caught next day they had eaten a good many lettuces and other things. Oswald is very sorry for this. He rather likes the gardener.

Denny wanted to put paper tails on the guinea pigs, and it was no use our telling him there was nothing to tie the paper on to. He thought we were kidding until we showed him, and then he said, ‘Well, never mind’, and got the girls to give him bits of the blue stuff left over from their dressing gowns.

‘I’ll make them sashes to tie round their little middles,’ he said. And he did, and the bows stuck up on the tops of their backs. One of the guinea pigs was never seen again, and the same with the tortoise when we had done his shell with vermilion paint. He crawled away and returned no more. Perhaps someone collected him and thought he was an expensive kind unknown in these cold latitudes.

The lawn under the cedar was transformed into a dream of beauty, what with the stuffed creatures and the paper-tailed things and the waterfall. And Alice said –

‘I wish the tigers did not look so flat.’ For of course with pillows you can only pretend it is a sleeping tiger getting ready to make a spring out at you. It is difficult to prop up tiger-skins in a life-like manner when there are no bones inside them, only pillows and sofa cushions.

‘What about the beer-stands?’ I said. And we got two out of the cellar. With bolsters and string we fastened insides to the tigers – and they were really fine. The legs of the beer-stands did for tigers’ legs. It was indeed the finishing touch.

Then we boys put on just our bathing drawers and vests – so as to be able to play with the waterfall without hurting our clothes. I think this was thoughtful. The girls only tucked up their frocks and took their shoes and stockings off. H.O. painted his legs and his hands with
Condy’s fluid – to make him brown, so that he might be Mowgli, although Oswald was captain and had plainly said he was going to be Mowgli himself. Of course the others weren’t going to stand that. So Oswald said –

‘Very well. Nobody asked you to brown yourself like that. But now you’ve done it, you’ve simply got to go and be a beaver, and live in the dam under the waterfall till it washes off.’

He said he didn’t want to be beavers. And Noel said –

‘Don’t make him. Let him be the bronze statue in the palace gardens that the fountain plays out of.’

So we let him have the hose and hold it up over his head. It made a lovely fountain, only he remained brown. So then Dicky and Oswald and I did ourselves brown too, and dried H.O. as well as we could with our handkerchiefs, because he was just beginning to snivel. The brown did not come off any of us for days.

Oswald was to be Mowgli, and we were just beginning to arrange the different parts. The rest of the hose that was on the ground was Kaa, the Rock Python, and Pincher was Grey Brother, only we couldn’t find him. And while most of us were talking, Dicky and Noel got messing about with the beer-stand tigers.

And then a really sad event instantly occurred, which was not really our fault, and we did not mean to.

That Daisy girl had been mooning indoors all the afternoon with the Jungle Books, and now she came suddenly out, just as Dicky and Noel had got under the tigers and were shoving them along to fright each other. Of course, this is not in the Mowgli book at all: but they did look jolly like real tigers, and I am very far from
wishing to blame the girl, though she little knew what would be the awful consequence of her rash act. But for her we might have got out of it all much better than we did. What happened was truly horrid.

As soon as Daisy saw the tigers she stopped short, and uttering a shriek like a railway whistle she fell flat on the ground.

‘Fear not, gentle Indian maid,’ Oswald cried, thinking with surprise that perhaps after all she did know how to play, ‘I myself will protect thee.’ And he sprang forward with the native bow and arrows out of uncle’s study.

The gentle Indian maiden did not move.

‘Come hither,’ Dora said, ‘let us take refuge in yonder covert while this good knight does battle for us.’ Dora might have remembered that we were savages, but she did not. And that is Dora all over. And still the Daisy girl did not move.

Then we were truly frightened. Dora and Alice lifted her up, and her mouth was a horrid violet-colour and her eyes half shut. She looked horrid. Not at all like fair fainting damsels, who are always of an interesting pallor. She was green, like a cheap oyster on a stall.

We did what we could, a prey to alarm as we were. We rubbed her hands and let the hose play gently but perseveringly on her unconscious brow. The girls loosened her dress, though it was only the kind that comes down straight without a waist. And we were all doing what we could as hard as we could, when we heard the click of the front gate. There was no mistake about it.

‘I hope whoever it is will go straight to the front door,’ said Alice. But whoever it was did not. There were feet
on the gravel, and there was the uncle’s voice, saying in his hearty manner –

‘This way. This way. On such a day as this we shall find our young barbarians all at play somewhere about the grounds.’

And then, without further warning, the uncle, three other gentlemen and two ladies burst upon the scene.

We had no clothes on to speak of – I mean us boys. We were all wet through. Daisy was in a faint or a fit, or dead, none of us then knew which. And all the stuffed animals were there staring the uncle in the face. Most of them had got a sprinkling, and the otter and the duckbill brute were simply soaked. And three of us were dark brown. Concealment, as so often happens, was impossible.

The quick brain of Oswald saw, in a flash, exactly how it would strike the uncle, and his brave young blood ran cold in his veins. His heart stood still.

‘What’s all this – eh, what?’ said the tones of the wronged uncle.

Oswald spoke up and said it was jungles we were playing, and he didn’t know what was up with Daisy. He explained as well as anyone could, but words were now in vain.

The uncle had a Malacca cane in his hand, and we were but ill prepared to meet the sudden attack. Oswald and H.O. caught it worst. The other boys were under the tigers – and of course my uncle would not strike a girl. Denny was a visitor and so got off.

But it was bread and water for us for the next three days, and our own rooms. I will not tell you how we sought
to vary the monotonousness of imprisonment. Oswald thought of taming a mouse, but he could not find one. The reason of the wretched captives might have given way but for the gutter that you can crawl along from our room to the girls’. But I will not dwell on this because you might try it yourselves, and it really is dangerous. When my father came home we got the talking to, and we said we were sorry – and we really were – especially about Daisy, though she had behaved with muffishness, and then it was settled that we were to go into the country and stay till we had grown into better children.

Albert’s uncle was writing a book in the country; we were to go to his house. We were glad of this – Daisy and Denny too. This we bore nobly. We knew we had deserved it. We were all very sorry for everything, and we resolved that for the future we
would
be good.

I am not sure whether we kept this resolution or not. Oswald thinks now that perhaps we made a mistake in trying so very hard to be good all at once. You should do everything by degrees.

P.S. It turned out Daisy was not really dead at all. It was only fainting – so like a girl.

Appendix. I have not told you half the things we did for the jungle – for instance, about the elephants’ tusks and the horse-hair sofa-cushions, and Uncle’s fishing-boots.

chapter two

the wouldbegoods

When we were sent down into the country to learn to be good we felt it was rather good business, because we knew our being sent there was really only to get us out of the way for a little while, and we knew right enough that it wasn’t a punishment, though Mrs Blake said it was, because we had been punished thoroughly for taking the stuffed animals out and making a jungle on the lawn with them, and the garden hose. And you cannot be punished twice for the same offence. This is the English law; at least I think so. And at any rate no one would punish you three times, and we had had the Malacca cane and the solitary confinement; and the uncle had kindly explained to us that all ill feeling between him and us was wiped out entirely by the bread and water we had endured. And what with the bread and water and being prisoners, and not being able to tame any mice in our prisons, I quite feel that we had suffered it up thoroughly, and now we could start fair.

I think myself that descriptions of places are generally dull, but I have sometimes thought that was because the authors do not tell you what you truly want to know. However, dull or not, here goes – because you won’t
understand anything unless I tell you what the place was like.

The Moat House was the one we went to stay at. There has been a house there since Saxon times. It is a manor, and a manor goes on having a house on it whatever happens. The Moat House was burnt down once or twice in ancient centuries – I don’t remember which – but they always built a new one, and Cromwell’s soldiers smashed it about, but it was patched up again. It is a very odd house: the front door opens straight into the dining room, and there are red curtains and a black-and-white marble floor like a chessboard, and there is a secret staircase, only it is not secret now – only rather rickety. It is not very big, but there is a watery moat all round it with a brick bridge that leads to the front door. Then, on the other side of the moat there is the farm, with barns and oast houses and stables, or things like that. And the other way the garden lawn goes on till it comes to the churchyard. The churchyard is not divided from the garden at all except by a little grass bank. In the front of the house there is more garden, and the big fruit garden is at the back.

The man the house belongs to likes new houses, so he built a big one with conservatories and a stable with a clock in a turret on the top, and he left the Moat House. And Albert’s uncle took it, and my father was to come down sometimes from Saturday to Monday, and Albert’s uncle was to live with us all the time, and he would be writing a book, and we were not to bother him, but he would give an eye to us. I hope all this is plain. I have said it as short as I can.

We got down rather late, but there was still light enough to see the big bell hanging at the top of the house. The rope belonging to it went right down the house, through our bedroom to the dining room. H.O. saw the rope and pulled it while he was washing his hands for supper, and Dicky and I let him, and the bell tolled solemnly. Father shouted to him not to, and we went down to supper.

But presently there were many feet trampling on the gravel, and Father went out to see. When he came back he said – ‘The whole village, or half of it, has come up to see why the bell rang. It’s only rung for fire or burglars. Why can’t you kids let things alone?’

Albert’s uncle said –

‘Bed follows supper as the fruit follows the flower. They’ll do no more mischief tonight, sir. Tomorrow I will point out a few of the things to be avoided in this bucolic retreat.’

So it was bed directly after supper, and that was why we did not see much that night.

But in the morning we were all up rather early, and we seemed to have awakened in a new world rich in surprises beyond the dreams of anybody, as it says in the quotation.

We went everywhere we could in the time, but when it was breakfast time we felt we had not seen half or a quarter. The room we had breakfast in was exactly like in a story – black oak panels and china in corner cupboards with glass doors. These doors were locked. There were green curtains, and honeycomb for breakfast. After brekker my father went back to town,
and Albert’s uncle went too, to see publishers. We saw them to the station, and Father gave us a long list of what we weren’t to do. It began with ‘Don’t pull ropes unless you’re quite sure what will happen at the other end,’ and it finished with ‘For goodness’ sake, try to keep out of mischief till I come down on Saturday.’ There were lots of other things in between.

We all promised we would. And we saw them off and waved till the train was quite out of sight. Then we started to walk home. Daisy was tired so Oswald carried her home on his back. When we got home she said –

‘I do like you, Oswald.’

She is not a bad little kid; and Oswald felt it was his duty to be nice to her because she was a visitor. Then we looked all over everything. It was a glorious place. You did not know where to begin. We were all a little tired before we found the hayloft, but we pulled ourselves together to make a fort with the trusses of hay – great square things – and we were having a jolly good time, all of us, when suddenly a trap-door opened and a head bobbed up with a straw in its mouth. We knew nothing about the country then, and the head really did scare us rather, though, of course, we found out directly that the feet belonging to it were standing on the bar of the loose-box underneath. The head said –

‘Don’t you let the governor catch you a-spoiling of that there hay, that’s all.’ And it spoke thickly because of the straw.

It is strange to think how ignorant you were in the past. We can hardly believe now that once we really
did not know that it spoiled hay to mess about with it. Horses don’t like to eat it afterwards.

Always remember this.

When the head had explained a little more it went away, and we turned the handle of the chaff-cutting machine, and nobody got hurt, though the head
had
said we should cut our fingers off if we touched it.

And then we sat down on the floor, which is dirty with the nice clean dirt that is more than half chopped hay, and those there was room for hung their legs down out of the top door, and we looked down at the farmyard, which is very slushy when you get down into it, but most interesting.

Then Alice said, ‘Now we’re all here, and the boys are tired enough to sit still for a minute, I want to have a council.’

We said what about? And she said, ‘I’ll tell you. H.O., don’t wriggle so; sit on my frock if the straws tickle your legs.’

You see he wears socks, and so he can never be quite as comfortable as anyone else.

‘Promise not to laugh,’ Alice said, getting very red, and looking at Dora, who got red too.

We did, and then she said: ‘Dora and I have talked this over, and Daisy too, and we have written it down because it is easier than saying it. Shall I read it? Or will you, Dora?’

Dora said it didn’t matter; Alice might. So Alice read it, and though she gabbled a bit we all heard it. I copied it afterwards. This is what she read:

‘You know,’ Dora interrupted, ‘when people want to do good things they always make a society. There are thousands – there’s the Missionary Society.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said, ‘and the Society for the Prevention of something or other, and the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Society, and the S.P.G.’

‘What’s S.P.G.?’ Oswald asked.

‘Society for the Propagation of the Jews, of course,’ said Noel, who cannot always spell.

‘No, it isn’t; but do let me go on.’

Alice did go on.

– here Alice read very fast. She told me afterwards Daisy had helped her with that part, and she thought when she came to the wings they sounded rather silly –

Denny was listening carefully. Now he nodded three or four times.

– he said –

This did not sound right, but we let it pass, because an eagle does have wings, and we wanted to hear the rest of what the girls had written. But there was no rest.

‘That’s all,’ said Alice, and Daisy said – ‘Don’t you think it’s a good idea?’

‘That depends,’ Oswald answered, ‘who is president and what you mean by being good.’

Oswald did not care very much for the idea himself,
because being good is not the sort of thing he thinks it is proper to talk about, especially before strangers. But the girls and Denny seemed to like it, so Oswald did not say exactly what he thought, especially as it was Daisy’s idea. This was true politeness.

‘I think it would be nice,’ Noel said, ‘if we made it a sort of play. Let’s do the
Pilgrim’s Progress
.’

We talked about that for some time, but it did not come to anything, because we all wanted to be Mr Greatheart, except H.O., who wanted to be the lions, and you could not have lions in a Society for Goodness.

Dicky said he did not wish to play if it meant reading books about children who die; he really felt just as Oswald did about it, he told me afterwards. But the girls were looking as if they were in Sunday school, and we did not wish to be unkind.

At last Oswald said, ‘Well, let’s draw up the rules of the society, and choose the president and settle the name.’

Dora said Oswald should be president, and he modestly consented. She was secretary, and Denny treasurer if we ever had any money.

Making the rules took us all the afternoon. They were these:

RULES

And when we got as far as that we all began to talk at once. Dora wanted it called the Society for Humane Improvement; Denny said the Society for Reformed Outcast Children; but Dicky said, No, we really were not so bad as all that.

Then H.O. said, ‘Call it the Good Society.’

‘Or the Society for Being Good In,’ said Daisy.

‘Or the Society of Goods,’ said Noel.

‘That’s priggish,’ said Oswald; ‘besides, we don’t know whether we shall be so very.’

‘You see,’ Alice explained, ‘we only said if we
could
we would be good.’

‘Well, then,’ Dicky said, getting up and beginning to dust the chopped hay off himself, ‘call it the Society of the Wouldbegoods and have done with it.’

Oswald thinks Dicky was getting sick of it and wanted to make himself a little disagreeable. If so, he was doomed to disappointment. For everyone else clapped hands and called out, ‘That’s the very thing!’ Then the girls went off to write out the rules, and took H.O. with them, and
Noel went to write some poetry to put in the minute book. That’s what you call the book that a society’s secretary writes what it does in. Denny went with him to help. He knows a lot of poetry. I think he went to a lady’s school where they taught nothing but that. He was rather shy of us, but he took to Noel. I can’t think why. Dicky and Oswald walked round the garden and told each other what they thought of the new society.