Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  Dickie remembered every word of that speech, and he kept the treasure. There had been another thing with it, tied on with string. But Aunt Maud had found that, and taken it away “to take care of,” and he had never seen it again. It was brassy, with a white stone and some sort of pattern on it. He had the treasure, and he had not the least idea what it was, with its bells that jangled such pretty music, and its white spike so hard and smooth. He did not know — but I know. It was a rattle — a baby’s old-fashioned rattle — or, if you would rather call it that, a “coral and bells.”

  “And we shall ‘ave the fairest flowers of hill and dale,” said Dickie, whispering comfortably in his dirty sheets, “and greensward. Oh! Tinkler dear, ‘twill indeed be a fair scene. The gayest colors of the rainbow amid the Ague Able green of fresh leaves. I do love the Man Next Door. He has indeed a ‘art of gold.”

  That was how Dickie talked to his friend Tinkler. You know how he talked to his aunt and the Man Next Door. I wonder whether you know that most children can speak at least two languages, even if they have never had a foreign nurse or been to foreign climes — or whether you think that you are the only child who can do this.

  Believe me, you are not. Parents and guardians would be surprised to learn that dear little Charlie has a language quite different from the one he uses to them — a language in which he talks to the cook and the housemaid. And yet another language — spoken with the real accent too — in which he converses with the boot-boy and the grooms.

  Dickie, however, had learned his second language from books. The teacher at his school had given him six—”Children of the New Forest,” “Quentin Durward,” “Hereward the Wake,” and three others — all paper-backed. They made a new world for Dickie. And since the people in books talked in this nice, if odd, way, he saw no reason why he should not — to a friend whom he could trust.

  I hope you’re not getting bored with all this.

  You see, I must tell you a little about the kind of boy Dickie was and the kind of way he lived, or you won’t understand his adventures. And he had adventures — no end of adventures — as you will see presently.

  Dickie woke, gay as the spring sun that was trying to look in at him through his grimy windows.

  “Perhaps he’ll do some more to the garden to-day!” he said, and got up very quickly.

  He got up in the dirty, comfortless room and dressed himself. But in the evening he was undressed by kind, clean hands, and washed in a big bath half-full of hot, silvery water, with soap that smelled like the timber-yard at the end of the street. Because, going along to school, with his silly little head full of Artistic Bird Seeds and flowers rainbow-colored, he had let his crutch slip on a banana-skin and had tumbled down, and a butcher’s cart had gone over his poor lame foot. So they took the hurt foot to the hospital, and of course he had to go with it, and the hospital was much more like the heaven he read of in his books than anything he had ever come across before.

  He noticed that the nurses and the doctors spoke in the kind of words that he had found in his books, and in a voice that he had not found anywhere; so when on the second day a round-faced, smiling lady in a white cap said, “Well, Tommy, and how are we to-day?” he replied —

  “My name is far from being Tommy, and I am in Lux Ury and Af Fluence, I thank you, gracious lady.”

  At which the lady laughed and pinched his cheek.

  When she grew to know him better, and found out where he had learned to talk like that, she produced more books. And from them he learned more new words. They were very nice to him at the hospital, but when they sent him home they put his lame foot into a thick boot with a horrid, clumpy sole and iron things that went up his leg.

  His aunt and her friends said, “How kind!” but Dickie hated it. The boys at school made game of it — they had got used to the crutch — and that was worse than being called “Old Dot-and-go-one,” which was what Dickie had got used to — so used that it seemed almost like a pet name.

  And on that first night of his return he found that he had been robbed. They had taken his Tinkler from the safe corner in his bed where the ticking was broken, and there was a soft flock nest for a boy’s best friend.

  He knew better than to ask what had become of it. Instead he searched and searched the house in all its five rooms. But he never found Tinkler.

  Instead he found next day, when his aunt had gone out shopping, a little square of cardboard at the back of the dresser drawer, among the dirty dusters and clothes pegs and string and corks and novelettes.

  It was a pawn-ticket—”Rattle. One shilling.”

  Dickie knew all about pawn-tickets. You, of course, don’t. Well, ask some grown-up person to explain; I haven’t time. I want to get on with the story.

  “‘IT IS A MOONFLOWER, OF COURSE,’ HE SAID”

  Until he had found that ticket he had not been able to think of anything else. He had not even cared to think about his garden and wonder whether the Artistic Bird Seeds had come up parrot-colored. He had been a very long time in the hospital, and it was August now. And the nurses had assured him that the seeds must be up long ago — he would find everything flowering, you see if he didn’t.

  And now he went out to look. There was a tangle of green growth at the end of the garden, and the next garden was full of weeds. For the Man Next Door had gone off to look for work down Ashford way, where the hop-gardens are, and the house was to let.

  A few poor little pink and yellow flowers showed stunted among the green where he had sowed the Artistic Bird Seed. And, towering high above everything else — oh, three times as high as Dickie himself — there was a flower — a great flower like a sunflower, only white.

  “Why,” said Dickie, “it’s as big as a dinner-plate.”

  It was.

  It stood up, beautiful and stately, and turned its cream-white face towards the sun.

  “The stalk’s like a little tree,” said Dickie; and so it was.

  It had great drooping leaves, and a dozen smaller white flowers stood out below it on long stalks, thinner than that needed to support the moonflower itself.

  “It is a moonflower, of course,” he said, “if the other kind’s sunflowers. I love it! I love it! I love it!”

  He did not allow himself much time for loving it, however; for he had business in hand. He had, somehow or other, to get a shilling. Because without a shilling he could not exchange that square of cardboard with “Rattle” on it for his one friend, Tinkler. And with the shilling he could. (This is part of the dismal magic of pawn-tickets which some grown-up will kindly explain to you.)

  “I can’t get money by the sweat of my brow,” said Dickie to himself; “nobody would let me run their errands when they could get a boy with both legs to do them. Not likely. I wish I’d got something I could sell.”

  He looked round the yard — dirtier and nastier than ever now in the parts that the Man Next Door had not had time to dig. There was certainly nothing there that any one would want to buy, especially now the rabbit-hutch was gone. Except . . . why, of course — the moonflowers!

  He got the old worn-down knife out of the bowl on the back kitchen sink, where it nestled among potato peelings like a flower among foliage, and carefully cut half a dozen of the smaller flowers. Then he limped up to New Cross Station, and stood outside, leaning on his crutch, and holding out the flowers to the people who came crowding out of the station after the arrival of each train — thick, black crowds of tired people, in too great a hurry to get home to their teas to care much about him or his flowers. Everybody glanced at them, for they were wonderful flowers, as white as water-lilies, only flat — the real sunflower shape — and their centres were of the purest yellow gold color.

  “Pretty, ain’t they?” one black-coated person would say to another. And the other would reply —

  “No. Yes. I dunno! Hurry up, can’t you?”

  It was no good. Dickie was tired, and the flowers were beginning to droop. He turned to go home,
when a sudden thought brought the blood to his face. He turned again quickly and went straight to the pawnbroker’s. You may be quite sure he had learned the address on the card by heart.

  He went boldly into the shop, which had three handsome gold balls hanging out above its door, and in its window all sorts of pretty things — rings, and chains, and brooches, and watches, and china, and silk handkerchiefs, and concertinas.

  “Well, young man,” said the stout gentleman behind the counter, “what can we do for you?”

  “I want to pawn my moonflowers,” said Dickie.

  The stout gentleman roared with laughter, and slapped a stout leg with a stout hand.

  “Well, that’s a good ‘un!” he said, “as good a one as ever I heard. Why, you little duffer, they’d be dead long before you came back to redeem them, that’s certain.”

  “You’d have them while they were alive, you know,” said Dickie gently.

  “What are they? Don’t seem up to much. Though I don’t know that I ever saw a flower just like them, come to think of it,” said the pawnbroker, who lived in a neat villa at Brockley and went in for gardening in a gentlemanly, you-needn’t-suppose-I-can’t-afford-a-real-gardener-if-I-like sort of way.

  “They’re moonflowers,” said Dickie, “and I want to pawn them and then get something else out with the money.”

  “Got the ticket?” said the gentleman, cleverly seeing that he meant “get out of pawn.”

  “Yes,” said Dickie; “and it’s my own Tinkler that my daddy gave me before he died, and my aunt Missa propagated it when I was in hospital.”

  The man looked carefully at the card.

  “All right,” he said at last; “hand over the flowers. They are not so bad,” he added, more willing to prize them now that they were his (things do look different when they are your own, don’t they?). “Here, Humphreys, put these in a jug of water till I go home. And get this out.”

  “‘HERE, HUMPHREYS, PUT THESE IN A JUG OF WATER TILL I GO HOME’”

  A pale young man in spectacles appeared from a sort of dark cave at the back of the shop, took flowers and ticket, and was swallowed up again in the darkness of the cave.

  “Oh, thank you!” said Dickie fervently. “I shall live but to repay your bounteous gen’rosity.”

  “None of your cheek,” said the pawnbroker, reddening, and there was an awkward pause.

  “It’s not cheek; I meant it,” said Dickie at last, speaking very earnestly. “You’ll see, some of these days. I read an interesting Nar Rataive about a Lion the King of Beasts and a Mouse, that small and Ty Morous animal, which if you have not heard it I will now Pur seed to relite.”

  “You’re a rum little kid, I don’t think,” said the man. “Where do you learn such talk?”

  “It’s the wye they talk in books,” said Dickie, suddenly returning to the language of his aunt. “You bein’ a toff I thought you’d unnerstand. My mistike. No ‘fense.”

  “Mean to say you can talk like a book when you like, and cut it off short like that?”

  “I can Con-vers like Lords and Lydies,” said Dickie, in the accents of the gutter, “and your noble benefacteriness made me seek to express my feelinks with the best words at me Command.”

  “Fond of books?”

  “I believe you,” said Dickie, and there were no more awkward pauses.

  When the pale young man came back with something wrapped in a bit of clean rag, he said a whispered word or two to the pawnbroker, who unrolled the rag and looked closely at the rattle.

  “So it is,” he said, “and it’s a beauty too, let alone anything else.”

  “Isn’t he?” said Dickie, touched by this praise of his treasured Tinkler.

  “I’ve got something else here that’s got the same crest as your rattle.”

  “Crest?” said Dickie; “isn’t that what you wear on your helmet in the heat and press of the Tower Nament?”

  The pawnbroker explained that crests no longer live exclusively on helmets, but on all sorts of odd things. And the queer little animal, drawn in fine scratches on the side of the rattle, was, it seemed, a crest.

  “Here, Humphreys,” he added, “give it a rub up and bring that seal here.”

  The pale young man did something to Tinkler with some pinky powder and a brush and a wash-leather, while his master fitted together the two halves of a broken white cornelian.

  “It came out of a seal,” he said, “and I don’t mind making you a present of it.”

  “Oh!” said Dickie, “you are a real rightern.” And he rested his crutch against the counter expressly to clasp his hands in ecstasy as boys in books did.

  “My young man shall stick it together with cement,” the pawnbroker went on, “and put it in a little box. Don’t you take it out till to-morrow and it’ll be stuck fast. Only don’t go trying to seal with it, or the sealing-wax will melt the cement. It’ll bring you luck, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  (It did; and such luck as the kind pawnbroker never dreamed of. But that comes further on in the story.)

  Dickie left the shop without his moonflowers, indeed, but with his Tinkler now whitely shining, and declared to be “real silver, and mind you take care of it, my lad,” his white cornelian seal carefully packed in a strong little cardboard box with metal corners. Also a broken-backed copy of “Ingoldsby Legends” and one of “Mrs. Markham’s English History,” which had no back at all. “You must go on trying to improve your mind,” said the pawnbroker fussily. He was very pleased with himself for having been so kind. “And come back and see me — say next month.”

  “I will,” said Dickie. “A thousand blessings from a grateful heart. I will come back. I say, you are good! Thank you, thank you — I will come back next month, and tell you everything I have learned from the Perru Sal of your books.”

  “Perusal,” said the pawnbroker—”that’s the way to pernounce it. Good-bye, my man, and next month.”

  But next month found Dickie in a very different place from the pawnbroker’s shop, and with a very different person from the pawnbroker who in his rural retirement at Brockley gardened in such a gentlemanly way.

  Dickie went home — his aunt was still out. His books told him that treasure is best hidden under loose boards, unless of course your house has a secret panel, which his had not. There was a loose board in his room, where the man “saw to” the gas. He got it up, and pushed his treasures as far in as he could — along the rough, crumbly surface of the lath and plaster.

  Not a moment too soon. For before the board was coaxed quite back into its place the voice of the aunt screamed up.

  “Come along down, can’t you? I can hear you pounding about up there. Come along down and fetch me a ha’porth o’ wood — I can’t get the kettle to boil without a fire, can I?”

  When Dickie came down his aunt slightly slapped him, and he took the halfpenny and limped off obediently.

  It was a very long time indeed before he came back. Because before he got to the shop with no window to it, but only shutters that were put up at night, where the wood and coal were sold, he saw a Punch and Judy show. He had never seen one before, and it interested him extremely. He longed to see it unpack itself and display its wonders, and he followed it through more streets than he knew; and when he found that it was not going to unpack at all, but was just going home to its bed in an old coach-house, he remembered the fire-wood; and the halfpenny clutched tight and close in his hand seemed to reproach him warmly.

  He looked about him, and knew that he did not at all know where he was. There was a tall, thin, ragged man lounging against a stable door in the yard where the Punch and Judy show lived. He took his clay pipe out of his mouth to say —

  “What’s up, matey? Lost your way?”

  Dickie explained.

  “It’s Lavender Terrace where I live,” he ended—”Lavender Terrace, Rosemary Street, Deptford.”

  “I’m going that way myself,” said the man, getting away from the wall. “We’ll go back by
the boat if you like. Ever been on the boat?”

  “No,” said Dickie.

  “Like to?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said Dickie.

  It was very pleasant with the steamboat going along in such a hurry, pushing the water out of the way, and puffing and blowing, and something beating inside it like a giant’s heart. The wind blew freshly, and the ragged man found a sheltered corner behind the funnel. It was so sheltered, and the wind had been so strong that Dickie felt sleepy. When he said, “‘Ave I bin asleep?” the steamer was stopping at a pier at a strange place with trees.

  “Here we are!” said the man. “‘Ave you been asleep? Not ‘alf! Stir yourself, my man; we get off here.”

  “Is this Deptford?” Dickie asked. And the people shoving and crushing to get off the steamer laughed when he said it.

  “Not exackly,” said the man, “but it’s all right. This ‘ere’s where we get off. You ain’t had yer tea yet, my boy.”

  It was the most glorious tea Dickie had ever imagined. Fried eggs and bacon — he had one egg and the man had three — bread and butter — and if the bread was thick, so was the butter — and as many cups of tea as you liked to say thank you for. When it was over the man asked Dickie if he could walk a little way, and when Dickie said he could they set out in the most friendly way side by side.

  “I like it very much, and thank you kindly,” said Dickie presently. “And the tea and all. An’ the egg. And this is the prettiest place ever I see. But I ought to be getting ‘ome. I shall catch it a fair treat as it is. She was waitin’ for the wood to boil the kettle when I come out.”