Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  There was a brief and ardent conference on the drawbridge; the subject of it, breakfast. Edred wanted to stay; he was curious to see what sort of breakfast people had in the country in James the First’s time, Elfrida wanted to get back to 1908, and the certainty of eggs and bacon.

  “THE STREAM CAME OUT UNDER A ROUGH, LOW ARCH OF STONE.”

  “If we stay here we shall only be dragged into some new adventure,” she urged, “I know we shall. I never in my life knew such a place as history for adventures to happen in. And I’m tired, besides. Oh, Edred, do come along!”

  “I believe it’s ducks,” said Edred, and he sniffed questioningly; “it smells like onion stuffing.”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” said Elfrida; “that’s for dinner, most likely. I expect breakfast for us would be bread and water. You’d find we’d done something wrong, as likely as not. Oh, come along, do, before we get punished for it. Besides, don’t you want to know whether what Cousin Richard said about the cricket was right?”

  “Well, yes,” said Edred, “and we can always come back here, can’t we?”

  “Of course we can,” Elfrida said eagerly. “Oh, come on.”

  So they climbed up to the twisty-twiny, corkscrew staircase, and found the door of the room where they had slept under the wonderful white coverlets that now were coats. Then they stood still and looked at each other, with a sudden shock.

  “How are we to get back?” was the unspoken question that trembled on each lip.

  The magic white coats cuddled close round their necks. There was, somehow, comfort and confidence in the soft, friendly touch of that magic fur. When you are wearing that sort of coat, it is quite impossible to feel that everything will not come perfectly right the moment you really, earnestly, and thoroughly wish that it should come right.

  “Our clothes,” said Elfrida.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said Edred “I was forgetting.”

  “You may as well go on forgetting,” said his sister, “because the clothes aren’t here. They’re the other side of that twisty-twiny, inside-out, upside-down shakiness that turned the attic into the tower. I suppose the tower would turn back into the attic if we could only start that shaky upside-downness going–wrong way before, you know.”

  “I suppose it would,” said Edred, stopping short, with his fingers between the buttons of his doublet. “Hallo! What’s this?”

  He pulled out a folded paper.

  “It’s the thing about cricket that Cousin Richard gave you. Don’t bother about that now. I want to get back. I suppose we ought to make some poetry.”

  But Edred pulled out the paper and unfolded it.

  “It might vanish, you know,” he said, “or get stuck here, and when we got home we should find it gone when we came to look for it. Let’s just see what he says Kent did make.”

  He straightened out the paper, looked at it, looked again, and held it out with a sudden arm’s-length gesture.

  “Look at that,” he said. “If that’s true, Richard has dreamed our times, and no mistake. And, what’s more, he’s brought things back here out of our times.”

  Elfrida took the paper and looked at it, and her mouth dropped open. “If it’s true?” said she. “But it must be true!” The paper almost fell from her hand, for it was a bill from Gamage’s for three ships’ guns, a compass, and a half-dozen flags–and the bill was made out to Mr. R. D. Arden, 117, Laurie Grove, New Cross, London, S.E. On the other side was the pencilled record of the runs made by Kent the previous Thursday.

  “I say,” said Elfrida, and was going on to say I don’t know what clever and interesting things, when she felt the fur coat creep and wriggle all through its soft length, and along its soft width, and no wriggle that ever was wriggled expressed so completely “Danger! danger! danger! You’d better get off while you can–while you can.” A quite violent ruffling of the fur round the neck of her coat said, as plain as it could speak, “Don’t stop to jaw. Go now–now–now!”

  When you say a lady is a “true daughter of Eve” you mean that she is inquisitive. Elfrida was enough Eve’s daughter to scurry to the window and look out.

  A thrill ran right down her backbone and ended in an empty feeling at the ends of her fingers and feet.

  “Soldiers!” she cried. “And they’re after us–I know they are.”

  “‘SOLDIERS,’ SHE CRIED, ‘AND THEY’RE AFTER US!’”

  The fur coat knew it too, if knowledge can be expressed by wriggling.

  “Oh, and they’re pulling up the drawbridge! What for?” said Edred, who had come to the window too, “And, I say, doesn’t the portcullis look guillotinish when it comes down like that?”

  Through the window one looked straight down on to the drawbridge, and as the tower stuck out beyond the gate, its side window gave an excellent view of the slowly descending portcullis.

  “I say,” said Elfrida, “my fluffy coat says ‘Go!’ Doesn’t yours?”

  “It would if I’d listen to it,” said Edred carelessly.

  The soldiers were quite near now–so near that Elfrida could see how fierce they looked. And she knew that they were the same soldiers who had hammered so loud and so hard at the door of Arden House, in Soho. They must have ridden all night. So she screwed her mind up to make poetry, just as you screw your muscles up to jump a gate or run a hundred yards. And almost before she knew that she was screwing it up at all the screw had acted and she had screwed out a piece of Mouldiwarp poetry and was saying it aloud–

  “Dear Mouldiwarp, since Cousin Dick

  Buys his beautiful flags from Gamage’s

  Take us away, and take us quick,

  Before the soldiers do us any damages.”

  And the moment she had said it, the white magic coats grew up and grew down and wrapped the children up as tight and as soft as ever a silkworm wrapped itself when it was tired of being a silkworm and entered into its cocoon, as the first step towards being a person with wings.

  Can you imagine what it would be like to have lovely liquid sleep emptied on you by the warm tubful? That is what it felt like inside the white, wonderful cocoons. The children knew that the tower was turning wrong way up and inside out, but it didn’t matter a bit. Sleep was raining down on them in magic showers–no; it was closing on them, closer and closer, nearer and nearer, soft, delicious layers of warm delight. A soft, humming sound was in their ears, like the sound of bees when you push through a bed of Canterbury bells, and the next thing that happened was that they came out of the past into the present with a sort of snap of light and a twist of sound. It was like coming out of a railway tunnel into daylight.

  The magic coverlet-coat-cocoons had even saved them the trouble of changing into their own clothes, for they found that the stiff, heavy clothes had gone, and they were dressed in the little ordinary things that they had always been used to.

  “And now,” said Elfrida, “let’s have another look at that Gamage paper, if it hasn’t disappeared. I expect it has though.”

  But it hadn’t.

  “I should like to meet Dick again,” said Edred, as they went downstairs. “He was much the jolliest boy I ever met.”

  “Perhaps we shall,” Elfrida said hopefully. “You see he does come into our times. I expect that New Cross time he stayed quite a long while, like we did when we went to Gunpowder Plot times. Or we might go back there, a little later, when the Gunpower Plot has all died away and been forgotten.”

  “It isn’t forgotten yet,” said Edred, “and it’s three hundred years ago. Now let’s develop our films; I’m not at all sure about those films. You see, we took the films with us, and of course we’ve brought them back, but the picture that’s on the films–we didn’t take that with us. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if the films are all blank.”

  “It’s very, very clever of you to think of it,” said Elfrida respectfully; “but I do hope it’s a perfectly silly idea of yours. Let’s ask Mrs. Honeysett if we may use the old room she said used to be the st
ill-room to develop them in. It’ll be a ripping dark-room when the shutters are up.”

  “Course you may,” said Mrs. Honeysett. “Yes; an’ I’ll carry you in a couple of pails of water. The floor’s stone; so it won’t matter if you do slop a bit. You pump, my lord, and I’ll hold the pails.”

  “Why was that part of the house let to go all dirty and cobwebby?” asked Elfrida, when the hoarse voice of the pump had ceased to be heard.

  “It’s always been so,” said Mrs. Honeysett. “I couldn’t take upon me to clear up without Miss Edith’s orders. Not but what my fingers itch to be at it with a broom and a scrubbing brush.”

  “But why?” Elfrida persisted.

  “Oh, it’s one of them old, ancient tales,” said Mrs. Honeysett. “Old Beale could tell you, if any one could.”

  “We’ll go down to old Beale’s,” said Edred decidedly, “as soon as we’ve developed our pictures of the castle–if there are any pictures,” he added.

  “You never can tell with them photo-machines, can you?” said Mrs. Honeysett sympathetically. “My husband’s cousin’s wife was took, with all her family, by her own back door, and when they come to wash out the picture it turned out they’d took the next door people’s water-butt by mistake, owing to their billy goat jogging the young man’s elbow that had got the camera. And it wasn’t a bit like any of them.”

  CHAPTER XI. DEVELOPMENTS

  “COME on,” said Edred, “you measure out the hypo and put the four pie-dishes ready. I’ll get the water.”

  He got it, with Mrs. Honeysett’s help–two brimming pails full.

  “You mustn’t come in for anything, will you, Mrs. Honeysett?” he earnestly urged. “You see, if the door’s open ever so little, all the photographs will be done for.”

  “Law, love a duck!” said Mrs. Honeysett, holding her fat waist with her fat hands. “I shan’t come in; I ain’t got nothing to come in for.”

  “We’ll bolt the door, all the same,” said Edred, when she was gone, “in case she was to think of something,”

  He shot the great wooden bolt.

  “Now it’ll be quite dark,” he said.

  And, of course, it wasn’t. You know the aggravating way rooms have of pretending to be quite dark until you want them to be dark–and then–by no means! This room didn’t even pretend to be dark, to begin with. Its shutters had two heart-shaped holes, high up, through which the light showed quite dazzlingly. Edred had to climb up on to the window-seat and stuff up the holes very tight with crushed newspaper, to get which he had to unbolt the door.

  “MRS. HONEYSETT WAS SITTING IN A LITTLE LOW CHAIR AT THE BACK DOOR PLUCKING A WHITE CHICKEN.”

  “There,” he said, as he pulled and patted the newspaper till it really and darkly filled the heart-shaped holes, “now it will be quite dark.”

  And again it wasn’t! Long, dusty rays of light came through the cracks where the hinges of the shutters were. Newspapers were no good for them. The door had to be unbolted and Mrs. Honeysett found. She was sitting in a little low chair at the back door plucking a white chicken. The sight of the little white feathers floating fluffing about brought wonderful memories to Edred. But he only said–

  “I say, you haven’t any old curtains, have you? Thick ones–or thin, if they were red.”

  Mrs. Honeysett laid the chicken down among his white feathers and went to a chest of drawers that stood in the kitchen.

  “Here you are,” she said, handing out two old red velvet curtains, with which he disappeared. But he was back again quite quickly.

  “You haven’t got a hammer, I suppose?” said he.

  The dresser-drawer yielded a hammer, and Edred took it away, to return almost at once with–

  “I suppose there aren’t any tacks–?”

  “I suppose,” said Mrs. Honeysett, laughing, “there ain’t much sense locking that still-room door on the inside when it ain’t me that keeps all a-popping in, but you that keeps all a-popping out.”

  However, she gave him the tacks–rusty ones, in a damp screw of paper.

  When he had hammered his fingers a good deal and the tacks a little the tacks consented to hold up the curtain, or the curtain condescended to be held up by the tacks.

  “And now,” said Edred, shutting the door, “it really is–”

  Dark, he meant. But of course it wasn’t. There was a gap under the door so wide, as Elfrida said, that you could have almost crawled through it. That meant another appeal to Mrs. Honeysett for another curtain, and this time Mrs. Honeysett told him to go along with him for a little worrit, and threw a handful of downy soft white feathers at him. But she laughed, too, and gave him the curtain.

  And at last it really was dark, and then they had to unbolt the door again, because Elfrida had forgotten where she had put the matches.

  You will readily understand that, after all this preparation, the children were at the last point of impatience, and everything seemed to go slowly. The lamp with the red shade burned up presently, and then the four pie-dishes were filled with water that looked pink in that strange light.

  “One good thing,” said Edred, “the hypo has had time to melt.”

  And now there was careful snipping, and long ribbons of black paper curled unheeded round the legs of the operators.

  “I wish we were born photographers like the man who took Aunt Edith and you on the beach with the donkey,” said Edred nervously, as he began to pass the film in and out of the water in pie-dish Number One.

  “Oh, be sure there are no air-bubbles!” said Elfrida; “you might let me do some of it.”

  “You shall do the next one,” said Edred, almost holding his breath.

  Dear reader, do you recall the agitating moment when you pass the film through the hypo–and hold it up to the light–and nothing happens? Do you remember the painful wonder whether you may have forgotten to set the shutter? Or whether you have got hold of an unexposed film by mistake? Your breath comes with difficulty, your fingers feel awkward, and the film is unnaturally slippery. You dip it into the hypo-bath again, and draw it through and through with the calmness of despair.

  “I don’t believe it’s coming out at all,” you say.

  And then comes the glorious moment when you hold it up again to the red light, and murmur rapturously, “Ah! it is beginning to show!”

  If you will kindly remember all the emotions of those exciting moments–on an occasion, let us say, when you had not had your camera very long–then multiply by seven million, add x–an unknown quantity of an emotion quite different from anything you have ever felt–and you will have some idea of what Edred and Elfrida felt when the first faint, grey, formless patches began to appear on the film.

  But you might multiply till you had used up the multiplication table, and add x’s as long as you could afford them, and yet never imagine the rapture with which the two children saw the perfect development of the six little perfect pictures. For they were perfect. They were perfect pictures of Arden Castle at a time when it, too, was perfect. No broken arches, no crumbling wall, but every part neat and clear-cut as they had seen it when they went into the past that was three hundred years ago.

  They were equally fortunate with the second film. It, too, had its six faultless pictures of Arden Castle three hundred years ago. Only, just before the moment which was the right moment for taking the film out of the hypo-bath and beginning to wash it, a tiny white feather fell out of Edred’s hair into the dish. It was so tiny that in that dim light he did not notice it. And it did not stick to the film or do any of those things which you might have feared if you had seen the little, white thing flutter down. It may have been the feather’s doing; I don’t know. I just tell you the thing as it happened.

  Of course, you know that films have to be pinned up to dry.

  Well, the first film was pinned on the right-hand panel of the door and the second film was pinned on the left-hand panel of the door. And when it came to the third, the one that had had the little
white feather dropped near it, there was nothing wooden left to pin it to–for the walls were of stone–nothing wooden except the shutters. And it was pinned across these.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Edred, “because we needn’t open the shutters till it’s dry.”

  And with that he stuck in four pins at its four corners, and turned to blow out the lamp and unbolt the door. He meant to do this, but the door, as a matter of fact, wasn’t bolted at all, because Edred had forgotten to do it when he came back with the dusters, so he couldn’t have unbolted it anyway.

  But he could blow out the red-sided lamp; and he did.

  And then the wonderful thing happened. Of course the room ought to have been quite dark. I’m sure enough trouble had been taken to make it so. But it wasn’t. The window, the window where the shutters were–the shutters that the film was pinned on–the film on which the little white feather had fallen–the little white feather that had settled on Edred’s hair when Mrs. Honeysett was plucking that chicken at the back door–that window now showed as a broad oblong of light. And in that broad oblong was a sort of shining, a faint sparkling movement, like the movement of the light on the sheet of a cinematograph before the pictures begin to show.

  “Oh!” said Elfrida, catching at Edred’s hand. What she did catch was his hair. She felt her way down his arm, and so caught what she had meant to catch, and held it fast.

  “It’s more magic,” said Edred ungratefully. “I do wish–”

  “Oh, hush!” said Elfrida; “look–oh, look!”

  The light–broad, oblong–suddenly changed from mere light to figures, to movement. It was a living picture–rather like a cinematograph, but much more like something else. The something else that it was more like was life.

  It seemed as though the window had been opened–as though they could see through it into the world of light and sunshine and blue sky–the world where things happen.

  There was the castle, and there were people going across the drawbridge–men with sacks on their backs. And a man with a silver chain round his neck and a tall stick in his hand, was standing under the great gateway telling them where to take the sacks. And a cart drove up, with casks, and they were rolled across the drawbridge and under the tall arch of the gate-tower. The men were dressed. Then something blinked, and the scene changed. It was indoors now–a long room with many pictures on one side of it and many windows on the other; a lady, in a large white collar and beautiful long curls, very like Aunt Edith, was laying fine dresses in a chest. A gentleman, also with long hair, and with a good deal of lace about his collar and cuffs, was putting jugs and plates of gold and silver into another chest; and servants kept bringing more golden grand things, and more and more.