The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories

by E. Nesbit

  “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.

&n
bsp; “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.”

  “Well, he can’t sleep in more than one at once,” said Dicky, “however rich he is. We might wait till he was bedded down and then sleep in the rooms he didn’t want.”

  But Oswald was firm. He knew that if the man paid for the rooms he must have them to himself.

  “He won’t sleep in the kitchen,” said Dora; “couldn’t we sleep there?”

  But we all said we couldn’t and wouldn’t.

  Then Alice suddenly said—

  “I know! The Mill. There are heaps and heaps of fishing-nets there, and we could each take a blanket like Indians and creep over under cover of the night after the Beale has gone, and get back before she comes in the morning.”

  It seemed a sporting thing to do, and we agreed. Only Dora said she thought it would be draughty.

  Of course we went over to the Mill at once to lay our plans and prepare for the silent watches of the night.

  There are three stories to a windmill, besides the ground-floor. The first floor is pretty empty; the next is nearly full of millstones and machinery, and the one above is where the corn runs down from on to the millstones.

  We settled to let the girls have the first floor, which was covered with heaps of nets, and we would pig in with the millstones on the floor above.

  We had just secretly got out the last of the six blankets from the house and got it into the Mill disguised in a clothes-basket, when we heard wheels, and there was the gentleman back again. He had only got one portmanteau after all, and that was a very little one.

  Mrs. Beale was bobbing at him in the doorway when we got up. Of course we had told her he had rented rooms, but we had not said how many, for fear she should ask where we were going to sleep, and we had a feeling that but few grown-ups would like our sleeping in a mill, however much we were living the higher life by sacrificing ourselves to get money for Miss Sandal.

  The gentleman ordered sheep’s-head and trotters for dinner, and when he found he could not have that he said—

  “Gammon and spinach!”

  But there was not any spinach in the village, so he had to fall back on eggs and bacon. Mrs. Beale cooked it, and when he had fallen back on it she washed up and went home. And we were left. We could hear the gentleman singing to himself, something about woulding he was a bird that he might fly to thee.

  Then we got the lanterns that you take when you go “up street” on a dark night, and we crept over to the Mill. It was much darker than we expected.

  We decided to keep our clothes on, partly for warmness and partly in case of any sudden alarm or the fishermen wanting their nets in the middle of the night, which sometimes happens if the tide is favourable.

  We let the girls keep the lantern, and we went up with a bit of candle Dicky had saved, and tried to get comfortable among the millstones and machinery, but it was not easy, and Oswald, for one, was not sorry when he heard the voice of Dora calling in trembling tones from the floor below.

  “Oswald! Dicky!” said the voice, “I wish one of you would come down a sec.”

  Oswald flew to the assistance of his distressed sister.

  “It’s only that we’re a little bit uncomfortable,” she whispered. “I didn’t want to yell it out because of Noël and H.O. I don’t want to frighten them, but I can’t help feeling that if anything popped out of the dark at us I should die. Can’t you all come down here? The nets are quite comfortable, and I do wish you would.”

  Alice said she was not frightened, but suppose there were rats, which are said to infest old buildings, especially mills?

  So we consented to come down, and we told Noël and H.O. to come down because it was more comfy, and it is easier to settle yourself for the night among fishing-nets than among machinery. There was a rustling now and then among the heap of broken chairs and jack-planes and baskets and spades and hoes and bits of the spars of ships at the far end of our sleeping apartment, but Dicky and Oswald resolutely said it was the wind or else jackdaws making their nests, though, of course, they knew this is not done at night.

  Sleeping in a mill was not nearly the fun we had thought it would be—somehow. For one thing, it was horrid not having a pillow, and the fishing-nets were so stiff you could not bunch them up properly to make one. And unless you have been born and bred a Red Indian you do not know how to manage your blanket so as to make it keep out the draughts. And when we had put out the light Oswald more than once felt as though earwigs and spiders were walking on his face in the dark, but when we struck a match there was nothing there.

  And empty mills do creak and rustle and move about in a very odd way. Oswald was not afraid, but he did think we might as well have slept in the kitchen, because the gentleman could not have wanted to use that when he was asleep. You see, we thought then that he would sleep all night like other people.

  We got to sleep at last, and in the night the girls edged up to their bold brothers, so that when the morning sun “shone in bars of dusty gold through the chinks of the aged edifice” and woke us up we were all lying in a snuggly heap like a litter of puppies.

  “Oh, I am so stiff!” said Alice, stretching. “I never slept in my clothes before. It makes me feel as if I had been starched and ironed like a boy’s collar.”

  We all felt pretty much the same. And our faces were tired too, and stiff, which was rum, and the author cannot account for it, unless it really was spiders that walked on us. I believe the ancient Greeks considered them to be venomous, and perhaps that’s how their venom influences their victims.

  “I think mills are merely beastly,” remarked H.O. when we had woke him up. “You can’t wash yourself or brush your hair or anything.”

  “You aren’t always so jolly particular about your hair,” said Dicky.

  “Don’t be so disagreeable,” said Dora.

  And Dicky rejoined, “Disagreeable yourself!”

  There is certainly something about sleeping in your clothes that makes you feel not so kind and polite as usual. I expect this is why tramps are so fierce and knock people down in lonely roads and kick them. Oswald knows he felt just like kicking any one if they had happened to cheek him the least little bit. But by a fortunate accident nobody did.

  The author believes there is a picture called “Hopeless Dawn.” We felt exactly like that. Nothing seemed the least bit of good.

  It was a pitiful band with hands and faces dirtier than any one would believe who had not slept in a mill or witnessed others who had done so, that crossed the wet, green grass between the Mill and the white house.

  “I shan’t ever put morning dew into my poetry again,” Noël said; “it is not nearly so poetical as people make out, and it is as cold as ice, right through your boots.”

  We felt rather better when we had had a good splash in the brick-paved back kitchen that Miss Sandal calls the bath-room. And Alice made a fire and boiled a kettle and we had some tea and eggs. Then we looked at the clock and it was half-past five. So we hastened to get into another part of the house before Mrs. Beale came.

  “I wish we’d tried to live the higher life some less beastly way,” said Dicky as we went along the passage.

/>   “Living the higher life always hurts at the beginning,” Alice said. “I expect it’s like new boots, only when you’ve got used to it you’re glad you bore it at first. Let’s listen at the doors till we find out where he isn’t sleeping.”

  So we listened at all the bedroom doors, but not a snore was heard.

  “Perhaps he was a burglar,” said H.O., “and only pretended to want lodgings so as to get in and bone all the valuables.”

  “There aren’t any valuables,” said Noël, and this was quite true, for Miss Sandal had no silver or jewellery except a brooch of pewter, and the very teaspoons were of wood—very hard to keep clean and having to be scraped.

  “Perhaps he sleeps without snoring,” said Oswald, “some people do.”

  “Not old gentlemen,” said Noël; “think of our Indian uncle—H.O. used to think it was bears at first.”

  “Perhaps he rises with the lark,” said Alice, “and is wondering why brekker isn’t ready.”

  So then we listened at the sitting-room doors, and through the keyhole of the parlour we heard a noise of some one moving, and then in a soft whistle the tune of the “Would I were a bird” song.

  So then we went into the dining-room to sit down. But when we opened the door we almost fell in a heap on the matting, and no one had breath for a word—not even for “Krikey,” which was what we all thought.

  I have read of people who could not believe their eyes; and I have always thought it such rot of them, but now, as the author gazed on the scene, he really could not be quite sure that he was not in a dream, and that the gentleman and the night in the Mill weren’t dreams too.

  “Pull back the curtains,” Alice said, and we did. I wish I could make the reader feel as astonished as we did.

  The last time we had seen the room the walls had been bare and white. Now they were covered with the most splendid drawings you can think of, all done in coloured chalk—I don’t mean mixed up, like we do with our chalks—but one picture was done in green, and another in brown, and another in red, and so on. And the chalk must have been of some fat radiant kind quite unknown to us, for some of the lines were over an inch thick.