by E. Nesbit
“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—
“You go back and play, Oswald. I’m tired and I’d like to sit down a bit.”
She got the boy to sit down beside her, and Oswald went back to the others.
Games, however unusually splendid, have to come to an end. And when the games were over and it was tea, and the village children were sent away, and Oswald went to call Dora and the prisoner’s son, he found nothing but Dora, and he saw at once, in his far-sighted way, that she had been crying.
It was one of the A1est days we ever had, and the drive home was good, but Dora was horribly quiet, as though the victim of dark interior thoughts.
And the next day she was but little better.
We were all paddling on the sands, but Dora would not. And presently Alice left us and went back to Dora, and we all saw across the sandy waste that something was up.
And presently Alice came down and said—
“Dry your feet and legs and come to a council. Dora wants to tell you something.”
We dried our pink and sandy toes and we came to the council. Then Alice said: “I don’t think H.O. is wanted at the council, it isn’t anything amusing; you go and enjoy yourself by the sea, and catch the nice little crabs, H.O. dear.”
H.O. said: “You always want me to be out of everything. I can be councils as well as anybody else.”
“Oh, H.O.!” said Alice, in pleading tones, “not if I give you a halfpenny to go and buy bulls-eyes with?”
So then he went, and Dora said—
“I can’t think how I could do it when you’d all trusted me so. And yet I couldn’t help it. I remember Dicky saying when you decided to give it me to take care of—about me being the most trustworthy of all of us. I’m not fit for any one to speak to. But it did seem the really right thing at the time, it really and truly did. And now it all looks different.”
“What has she done?” Dicky asked this, but Oswald almost knew.
“Tell them,” said Dora, turning over on her front and hiding her face partly in her hands, and partly in the sand.
“She’s given all Miss Sandal’s money to that little boy that the father of was in prison,” said Alice.
“It was one pound thirteen and sevenpence halfpenny,” sobbed Dora.
“You ought to have consulted us, I do think, really,” said Dicky. “Of course, I see you’re sorry now, but I do think that.”
“How could I consult you?” said Dora; “you were all playing Cat and Mouse, and he wanted to get home. I only wish you’d heard what he told me—that’s all—about his mother being ill, and nobody letting her do any work because of where his father is, and his baby brother ill, poor little darling, and not enough to eat, and everything as awful as you can possibly think. I’ll save up and pay it all back out of my own money. Only do forgive me, all of you, and say you don’t des
pise me for a forger and embezzlementer. I couldn’t help it.”
“I’m glad you couldn’t,” said the sudden voice of H.O., who had sneaked up on his young stomach unobserved by the council. “You shall have all my money too, Dora, and here’s the bulls-eye halfpenny to begin with.” He crammed it into her hand. “Listen? I should jolly well think I did listen,” H.O. went on. “I’ve just as much right as anybody else to be in at a council, and I think Dora was quite right, and the rest of you are beasts not to say so, too, when you see how she’s blubbing. Suppose it had been your darling baby-brother ill, and nobody hadn’t given you nothing when they’d got pounds and pounds in their silly pockets?”
He now hugged Dora, who responded.
“It wasn’t her own money,” said Dicky.
“If you think you’re our darling baby-brother——” said Oswald.
But Alice and Noël began hugging Dora and H.O., and Dicky and I felt it was no go. Girls have no right and honourable feelings about business, and little boys are the same.
“All right,” said Oswald rather bitterly, “if a majority of the council backs Dora up, we’ll give in. But we must all save up and repay the money, that’s all. We shall all be beastly short for ages.”
“Oh,” said Dora, and now her sobs were beginning to turn into sniffs, “you don’t know how I felt! And I’ve felt most awful ever since, but those poor, poor people——”
At this moment Mrs. Bax came down on to the beach by the wooden steps that lead from the sea-wall where the grass grows between the stones.
“Hullo!” she said, “hurt yourself, my Dora-dove?”
Dora was rather a favourite of hers.
“It’s all right now,” said Dora.
“That’s all right,” said Mrs. Bax, who has learnt in anti-what’s-its-name climes the great art of not asking too many questions. “Mrs. Red House has come to lunch. She went this morning to see that boy’s mother—you know, the boy the others wouldn’t play with?”
We said “Yes.”
“Well, Mrs. Red House has arranged to get the woman some work—like the dear she is—the woman told her that the little lady—and that’s you, Dora—had given the little boy one pound thirteen and sevenpence.”
Mrs. Bax looked straight out to sea through her gold-rimmed spectacles, and went on—
“That must have been about all you had among the lot of you. I don’t want to jaw, but I think you’re a set of little bricks, and I must say so or expire on the sandy spot.”
There was a painful silence.
H.O. looked, “There, what did I tell you?” at the rest of us.
Then Alice said, “We others had nothing to do with it. It was Dora’s doing.” I suppose she said this because we did not mean to tell Mrs. Bax anything about it, and if there was any brickiness in the act we wished Dora to have the consolement of getting the credit of it.
But of course Dora couldn’t stand that. She said—
“Oh, Mrs. Bax, it was very wrong of me. It wasn’t my own money, and I’d no business to, but I was so sorry for the little boy and his mother and his darling baby-brother. The money belonged to some one else.”
“Who?” Mrs. Bax asked ere she had time to remember the excellent Australian rule about not asking questions.
And H.O. blurted out, “It was Miss Sandal’s money—every penny,” before we could stop him.
Once again in our career concealment was at an end. The rule about questions was again unregarded, and the whole thing came out.
It was a long story, and Mrs. Red House came out in the middle, but nobody could mind her hearing things.
When she knew all, from the plain living to the pedlar who hadn’t a license, Mrs. Bax spoke up like a man, and said several kind things that I won’t write down.
She then went on to say that her sister was not poor and needy at all, but that she lived plain and thought high just because she liked it!
We were very disappointed as soon as we had got over our hardly believing any one could—like it, I mean—and then Mrs. Red House said—
“Sir James gave me five pounds for the poor woman, and she sent back thirty of your shillings. She had spent three and sevenpence, and they had a lovely supper of boiled pork and greens last night. So now you’ve only got that to make up, and you can buy a most splendid present for Miss Sandal.”
It is difficult to choose presents for people who live plain and think high because they like it. But at last we decided to get books. They were written by a person called Emerson, and of a dull character, but the backs were very beautiful, and Miss Sandal was most awfully pleased with them when she came down to her cottage with her partially repaired brother, who had fallen off the scaffold when treating a bricklayer to tracts.
This is the end of the things we did when we were at Lymchurch in Miss Sandal’s house.
It is the last story that the present author means ever to be the author of. So goodbye, if you have got as far as this.
Your affectionate author,
Oswald Bastable.
AN OBJECT OF VALUE AND VIRTUE
This happened a very little time after we left our humble home in Lewisham, and went to live at the Blackheath house of our Indian uncle, which was replete with every modern convenience, and had a big garden and a great many greenhouses. We had had a lot of jolly Christmas presents, and one of them was Dicky’s from father, and it was a printing-press. Not one of the eighteenpenny kind that never come off, but a real tip-topper, that you could have printed a whole newspaper out of if you could have been clever enough to make up all the stuff there is in newspapers. I don’t know how people can do it. It’s all about different things, but it is all just the same too. But the author is sorry to find he is not telling things from the beginning, as he has been taught. The printing-press really doesn’t come into the story till quite a long way on. So it is no use your wondering what it was that we did print with the printing-press. It was not a newspaper, anyway, and it wasn’t my young brother’s poetry, though he and the girls did do an awful lot of that. It was something much more far-reaching, as you will see if you wait.
There wasn’t any skating those holidays, because it was what they call nice open weather. That means it was simply muggy, and you could play out of doors without grown-ups fussing about your overcoat, or bringing you to open shame in the streets with knitted comforters, except, of course, the poet Noël, who is young, and equal to having bronchitis if he only looks at a pair of wet boots. But the girls were indoors a good deal, trying to make things for a bazaar which the people our housekeeper’s elder sister lives with were having in the country for the benefit of a poor iron church that was in difficulties. And Noël and H. O. were with them, putting sweets in bags for the bazaar’s lucky-tub. So Dicky and I were out alone together. But we were not angry with the others for their stuffy way of spending a day. Two is not a good number, though, for any game except fives; and the man who ordered the vineries and pineries, and butlers’ pantries and things, never had the sense to tell the builders to make a fives court. Some people never think of the simplest things. So we had been playing catch with a fives ball. It was Dicky’s ball, and Oswald said:
‘I bet you can’t hit it over the house.’
‘What do you bet?’ said Dicky.
And Oswald replied:
‘Anything you like. You couldn’t do it, anyhow.’
Dicky said:
‘Miss Blake says betting is wicked; but I don’t believe it is, if you don’t bet money.’
Oswald reminded him how in ‘Miss Edgeworth’ even that wretched little Rosamond, who is never allowed to do anything she wants to, even lose her own needles, makes a bet with her brother, and none of the grown-ups turn a hair.
‘But I don’t want to bet,’ he said. ‘I know you can’t do it.’
‘I’ll bet you my fives ball I do,’ Dicky rejoindered.
‘Done! I’ll bet you that threepenny ball of string and the cobbler’s wax you were bothering about yesterday.’
So Dicky said ‘Done!’ and then he went and got a tennis racket—when I meant with his hands—and the ball soared up to the top of the house and faded away. But when we went round to look for it we couldn’t find it anywhere. So he said it had gone over and he had won. And Oswald thought it had not gone over, but stayed on the roof, and he hadn’t. And they could not agree about it, though they talked of nothing else till tea time.
It was a few days after that that the big greenhouse began to leak, and something was said at brekker about had any of us been throwing stones. But it happened that we had not. Only after brek Oswald said to Dicky:
‘What price fives balls for knocking holes in greenhouses?’
‘Then you own it went over the house, and I won my bet. Hand over!’ Dicky remarked.
But Oswald did not see this, because it wasn’t proved it was the fives ball. It was only his idea.
Then it rained for two or three days, and the greenhouse leaked much more than just a fives ball, and the grown-ups said the man who put it up had scamped the job, and they sent for him to put it right. And when he was ready he came, and men came with ladders and putty and glass, and a thing to cut it with a real diamond in it that he let us have to look at. It was fine that day, and Dicky and H. O. and I were out most of the time talking to the men. I think the men who come to do things to houses are so interesting to talk to; they seem to know much more about the things that really matter than gentlemen do. I shall try to be like them when I grow up, and not always talk about politics and the way the army is going to the dogs.
The men were very jolly, and let us go up the ladder and look at the top of the greenhouse. Not H. O., of course, because he is very young indeed, and wears socks. When they had gone to dinner, H. O. went in to see if some pies were done that he had made out of a bit of putty the man gave him. He had put the pies in the oven when the cook wasn’t looking. I think something must have been done to him, for he did not return.