by E. Nesbit
This was so, and the deep mystery of the way this room was built was never untwisted.
‘Perhaps a Russian prisoner was kept there,’ said Alice, ‘and they did not want to look too close for fear he would shoot them with his bomb-gun. Poor man! perhaps he caught vodka, or some other of those awful foreign diseases, and died in his hidden confinement.’
It was a most ripping room for games. The key of it was on the bunch labelled ‘Mrs. S.’s room.’ We often wondered who Mrs. S. was.
‘Let’s have a regular round of gaieties,’ said Oswald. ‘Each of us to take it in turns to have the room, and act what they like, and the others look through the bars.’
So next day we did this.
Oswald, of course, dressed up in bath-towels and a sheet as the ghost of Mrs. S., but Noël and H. O. screamed, and would not be calm till he tore off the sheet and showed his knickerbockers and braces as a guarantee of good faith. Alice put her hair up, and got a skirt, and a large handkerchief to cry in, and was a hapless maiden imprisoned in a tower because she would not marry the wicked Baron. Oswald instantly took the part of the wicked Baron, and Dicky was the virtuous lover of low degree, and they had a splendid combat, and Dicky carried off the lady. Of course, that was the proper end to the story, and Oswald had to pretend to be beaten, which was not the case.
Dicky was Louis XVI. watch-making while waiting for the guillotine to happen. So we were the guillotine, and he was executed in the paved yard.
Noël was an imprisoned troubadour dressed in bright antimacassars, and he fired off quite a lot of poetry at us before we could get the door open, which was most unfair.
H. O. was a clown. He had no fancy dress except flour and two Turkish towels pinned on to look like trousers, but he put the flour all over himself, and it took the rest of the day to clean him.
It was when Alice was drying the hair-brushes that she had washed after brushing the flour out of Noël’s hair in the back-garden that Oswald said:
‘I know what that room was made for.’
And everyone said, ‘What?’ which is not manners, but your brothers and sisters do not mind because it saves time.
‘Why, coiners,’ said Oswald. ‘Don’t you see? They kept a sentinel at the door, that is a door, and if anyone approached he whispered “Cave.”’
‘But why have iron bars?’
‘In extra safety,’ said Oswald; ‘and if their nefarious fires were not burning he need not say “Cave” at all. It’s no use saying anything for nothing.’
It is curious, but the others did not seem to see this clear distinguishedness. All people have not the same fine brains.
But all the same the idea rankled in their hearts, and one day father came and took Dicky up to London about that tooth of his, and when Dicky came back he said:
‘Look here, talking of coiners, there was a man in St. Swithin’s Lane to-day selling little bottles of yellow stuff, and he rubbed some of it on a penny, and it turned the penny into a half-crown before your eyes—a new half-crown! It was a penny a bottle, so I bought three bottles.’
‘I always thought the plant for coining was very expensive,’ said Alice.
‘Ah! they tell you that to keep you from doing it, because of its being a crime,’ said Dicky. ‘But now I’ve got this stuff we can begin to be coiners right away. I believe it isn’t really a crime unless you try to buy things with the base coin.’
So that very afternoon, directly after dinner, which had a suet pudding in it that might have weighed down the enterprising spirit of anyone but us, we went over to the Enchanceried House.
We found our good rope ladder among its congealing bed of trusty nettles, and got over into the paved yard, and through the kitchen-door. Oswald always carried the key of this hung round his neck by a bootlace, as if it was a talisman, or the hair of his lost love. Of course, Oswald never had a lost love. He would scorn the action. But some heroes do have. De gustibus something or other, which means, one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
When we got up into the room with the iron-grated door, it all seemed very bare. Three bottles of yellow stuff and tenpence halfpenny in coppers is not much to start a coining enterprise with.
‘We ought to make it look like coining, anyway,’ said Oswald.
‘Coiners have furnaces,’ said Dicky.
Alice said: ‘Wouldn’t a spirit-lamp do? Old nurse has got an old one on the scullery shelf.’
We thought it would.
Then Noël reminded us that coiners have moulds, and Oswald went and bought a pair of wooden lemon squeezers for sevenpence three farthings. In his far-sightedness he remembered that coiners use water, so he bought two enamelled iron bowls at sixpence halfpenny the two. When he came back he noticed the coal-scuttle we had always felt so friendly to, and he filled it with water and brought it up. It did not leak worth mentioning.
‘We ought to have a bench,’ said Dicky; ‘most trades have that—shoemakers and watchmakers, and tailors and lawyers.’
This was difficult, but we did it. There were some planks in the cellar, and a tub and a beer-barrel. Unluckily, the tub and the beer-barrel were not the same height, but we taught them better by getting old nurse’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ and the Wesleyan Magazine, to put on top of the tub; and then it was as high as the barrel, and we laid the boards across, and there was a bench as beautiful as you could wish.
Dicky was allowed to put the stuff on the coins, because he had bought the bottles with his own money. But Alice held them for him to do, because girls are inferior beings, except when you are ill, and you must be kind to them or you need never hope to be a hero. There are drawbacks to every ambition.
She let Noël hold them part of the time.
When she was not helping Dicky, she tried covering pennies with the silver paper off chocolate, but it was not the kind of success that would take anyone in.
H. O. and Noël took it in turns to be sentinel, but they said it was dull, so Oswald took it on. And before he had been there three minutes he cried, ‘Hist! someone approaches!’ and the coining materials were hastily concealed and everyone hid round the corner, like we had agreed we would do if disturbed in our unlawful pursuits.
Of course, there wasn’t anyone really. After this the kids wanted to be sentinels again, but Oswald would not let them.
It was a jolly good game. And there was something about that house that made whatever you played in it seem awfully real. When I was Mrs. S. I felt quite unhappy, and when Dicky was the unfortunate monarch who perished in the French Revolution he told me afterwards he didn’t half like it when it came to the guillotine, though, of course, he knew the knife was only the little sliding-door of the chicken-house.
We played coiners for several days, and all learned to give the alarm, but we were beginning to feel it was time for something new. Noël was saving the hairs out of his comb, and pulling them out of the horsehair sofa in the parlour, to make a hair shirt to be a hermit in, and Oswald had bought a file to get through the bars and be an escaped Bastille prisoner, leaving his life-history concealed in the fireplace, when the great event occurred.
We found the silvered money turned to a dirty black when a few hours had elapsed, and we tried silver paint and gold paint. Our pockets were always full of gold and silver money, and we could jingle it and take it out in handfuls and let people see it—not too near.
Then came the great eventful day.
H. O. had fallen into the water-butt that morning. We dried his holland smock, but it went stiff like paper, so that old nurse noticed it, and thus found out that he was wringing wet underneath. So she put him to bed, for fear of his catching his death of cold, and the inveterate gang of coiners had to go to their fell lair without him. We left all our false money at home, because old nurse had given Alice a piece of trimming, for d
olls, that was all over little imitation silver coins, called sequences, I believe, to imitate the coinage of Turkish regions. We reached our Enchanceried House, got in as usual, and started our desperate work of changing silver sequences into gold half-sovereigns, with gold paint.
Noël was very grumpy: he was odd altogether that day. He was trying to write a poem about a Bastille prisoner. He asked to be sentry, so that he could think about rhymes.
We had not coined more than about four half-sovereigns when we heard Noël say: ‘Hist! Hide the plant!’
We didn’t take any notice, because we wanted to get enough of them done to play a game of misers, which was Alice’s idea.
‘Hist!’ Noël said again. And then suddenly he rushed in and said: ‘It’s a real hist! I tell you there’s someone on the stairs.’
And he shut the wooden-grated door, and Oswald, with rare presence of mind, caught up the bunch of keys and locked the wooden-grated door with the key labelled ‘Mrs. S.’s room.’
Then, breathless and furtive, we all hid in the part of the room near the fireplace, where no one could see us from the door.
We hardly dared to breathe. Alice said afterwards that she could hear Oswald’s heart beating with terror, but the author is almost sure that it was only his watch ticking. It had begun to go that week, after days of unexplained idleness. If we did have to pay for finding the Enchanceried House, this was when we paid.
There were feet on the stairs. We all heard them. And voices. The author distinctly heard the words ‘replete with every modern inconvenience,’ and ‘pleasantly situate ten minutes from tram and rail.’
And Oswald, at least, understood that, somehow or other, our house had got itself disenchanceried, and that the owner was trying to let it.
We held our breaths till they were nearly choked out of us.
The steps came nearer and nearer. They came along the passage, and stopped at the door.
‘This is the nursery,’ said a manly voice. ‘Ah, locked! I quite understood from the agent that the keys were in the hall.’
Of course we had the keys, and this was the moment that Noël chose for dropping them. Why he was fingering them where they lay on the mantelpiece the author does not know, and never will know. There is something about ‘previously demented’ in some Latin chap—Virgil or Lucretius—that seems to hit the nail on the head. The keys fell on the cracked hearthstone with a clang that Oswald, at any rate, will never forget.
There was an awful silence—quite a long one.
Then another voice said:
‘There’s someone in there.’
‘Look at that bench,’ said the other man; ‘it’s coiners’ work, that’s what it is, but there’s nobody there. The keys must have blown down!’
The two voices talked some time, but we could not hear all their conversation. We were all wondering, as it turned out afterwards, what exactly the utmost rigour of the law was. Because, of course, we knew we were trespassers of the very deepest dye, even if we could prove that we were not real coiners.
‘No,’ we heard one of them say, ‘if we go for the police very likely the gang will return and destroy everything. There’s no one here now. Let’s secure the evidence. We can easily break the door down.’
It is a sickening feeling when the evidence against you is going to be secured, and you don’t know what the punishment for coining is, or whether anyone will believe you if you say you were only playing at it.
We exchanged pallid glances.
We could hear the two men shaking the door, and we had no means of knowing just how weak it was, never having seriously tampered with it ourselves.
It was then that Noël suddenly went quite mad. I think it was due to something old nurse had read to us at breakfast that day about a boy of eight who played on the fiddle, and composed pieces of music. Affected young ass!
He darted from us into the middle of the room, where the two intruders could see him, and said:
‘Don’t break down the door! The villains may return any moment and destroy you. Fetch the police!’
The surprised outsiders could find no word but ‘Er?’
‘You are surprised to see me here,’ said Noël, not taking any notice of the furious looks of the rest of us. ‘I am an infant prodigy. I play the violin at concerts; I play it beautifully. They take me to London to play in a closed carriage, so that I can’t tell anyone my woes on the way.’
‘My poor child!’ said one of the outsiders; ‘tell us all about it. We must rescue you.’
‘Born of poor but honest parents,’ said Noël—and this was what nurse had read out to us—‘my musical talent early manifested itself on a toy violin, the gift of a devoted great-aunt. Torn from my home——I say, do fetch the police. If the monsters who live on my violin-playing return and find you here, they will brain you with the tools of their trade, and I shall be lost.’
‘Their trade?’ said one of them. ‘What trade?’
‘They are coiners,’ said Noël, ‘as well as what they do to me to make me play.’
‘But if we leave you?’
‘Oh, they won’t hurt me,’ cried Noël, ‘because I have to play to-night at Exeter Hall. Fly—fly for the police! They may come up behind you any moment and cleave you to the chine.’
And they actually flew. The present author would have known instantly that it was rot that about cleaving chines, but the man who wanted to let the Disenchanteried House and the man who wanted to have it let to him were of other mettle.
We had remained perfectly still and silent. Of course, if the outsiders had attacked Noël, his brothers would have rushed to his rescue.
As soon as the retreating boots of the outsiders grew fainter on the stairs, Noël turned green, and had to be revived by splashings from the brotherly coal-scuttle full of water. He got better directly, and we all scooted home to old nurse’s, leaving our coining plant without a pang. All great generals say that a retreat is best conducted without impediments.
Noël was so ill he had to go to bed and stay there. This was as well, because of the neighbourhood being scoured for the ill-used infant prodigy that had been imprisoned in the Enchanceried House. He got all right again in time to go home when father came up for us. While he was in bed he wrote a long poem in six different coloured chalks, called ‘The Enchanceried Coiners, or the Liar’s Remorse.’ So I know he was sorry for what he had done. He told me he could not think what made him, and of course it was very wrong, but it did save our bacon, and preserve us from the noisome cells and bread and water that I am sure are the real meaning of the ‘utmost rigour of the law.’
Really the worst of it all was that while we were trembling in the coiners’ den, with the two outside gentlemen snorting and whispering on the other side of the gate-door, H. O. had got up out of his bed at home and answered the door. (Old nurse had gone out to get a lettuce and an aerated loaf for tea.) He answered it to a butcher’s bill for fifteen and sevenpence that the butcher’s little girl had brought, and he paid it with six of the pennies that we had disguised as half-crowns, and told the little girl to call for the sevenpence in the morning. I believe many people have been hanged for less. It was lucky for H. O. that old nurse was a friend of the butcher’s, and able to persuade him that it was only a joke. In sterner times, like the French Revolution…but Alice does not like to think what would have happened then. As this is the twentieth century, and not the eighteenth, our all going down to the butcher and saying we were sorry made it all right. But suppose it had been in other dates!
The butcher’s wife gave us cake and ginger wine, and was very jolly. She asked us where we had got the false half-crowns. Oswald said they had been given us. This was true, but when they were given us they were pennies.
Did Oswald tell a lie to the butcher? He has often wondered. He hopes no
t. It is easy to know whether a thing is a lie or not when nothing depends on it. But when events are happening, and the utmost rigour of the law may be the result of your making a mistake, you have to tell the truth as carefully as you can.
No English gentleman tells a lie—Oswald knows that, of course. But an Englishman is not obliged to criminalate himself. The rules of honour and the laws of your country are very puzzling and contradictory.
But the butcher got paid afterwards in real money—a half-sovereign and two half-crowns, and seven unsilvered pennies. So nobody was injured, and the author thinks that is the great thing after all.
All the same, if ever he goes to stay with old nurse again, he thinks he will tell the butcher All in confidence. He does not like to have any doubts about such a serious thing as the honour of a Bastable.