Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “Mother?”

  “Aunt. Not me real aunt. Only I calls her that.”

  “She any good?”

  “Ain’t bad when she’s in a good temper.”

  “That ain’t what she’ll be in when you gets back. Seems to me you’ve gone and done it, mate. Why, it’s hours and hours since you and me got acquainted. Look! the sun’s just going.”

  It was, over trees more beautiful than anything Dickie had ever seen, for they were now in a country road, with green hedges and green grass growing beside it, in which little round-faced flowers grew — daisies they were — even Dickie knew that.

  “I got to stick it,” said Dickie sadly. “I’d best be getting home.”

  “I wouldn’t go ‘ome, not if I was you,” said the man. “I’d go out and see the world a bit, I would.”

  “What — me?” said Dickie.

  “Why not? Come, I’ll make you a fair offer. Ye come alonger me an’ see life! I’m a-goin’ to tramp as far as Brighton and back, all alongside the sea. Ever seed the sea?”

  “No,” said Dickie. “Oh, no — no, I never.”

  “Well, you come alonger me. I ain’t ‘it yer, have I, like what yer aunt do? I give yer a ride in a pleasure boat, only you went to sleep, and I give you a tea fit for a hemperor. Ain’t I?”

  “You ‘ave that,” said Dickie.

  “Well, that’ll show you the sort of man I am. So now I make you a fair offer. You come longer me, and be my little ‘un, and I’ll be your daddy, and a better dad, I lay, nor if I’d been born so. What do you say, matey?”

  The man’s manner was so kind and hearty, the whole adventure was so wonderful and new. . . .

  “Is it country where you going?” said Dickie, looking at the green hedge.

  “All the way, pretty near,” said the man. “We’ll tramp it, taking it easy, all round the coast, where gents go for their outings. They’ve always got a bit to spare then. I lay you’ll get some color in them cheeks o’ yours. They’re like putty now. Come, now. What you say? Is it a bargain?”

  “HE LAY FACE DOWNWARD ON THE ROAD AND TURNED UP HIS BOOT”

  “It’s very kind of you,” said Dickie, “but what call you got to do it? It’ll cost a lot — my victuals, I mean. What call you got to do it?”

  The man scratched his head and hesitated. Then he looked up at the sky and then down at the road — they were resting on a heap of stones.

  At last he said, “You’re a sharp lad, you are — bloomin’ sharp. Well, I won’t deceive you, matey. I want company. Tramping alone ain’t no beano to me. An’ as I gets my living by the sweat of charitable ladies an’ gents it don’t do no harm to ‘ave a little nipper alongside. They comes down ‘andsomer if there’s a nipper. An’ I like nippers. Some blokes don’t, but I do.”

  Dickie felt that this was true. But—”We’ll be beggars, you mean?” he said doubtfully.

  “Oh, don’t call names,” said the man; “we’ll take the road, and if kind people gives us a helping hand, well, so much the better for all parties, if wot they learned me at Sunday-school’s any good. Well, there it is. Take it or leave it.”

  The sun shot long golden beams through the gaps in the hedge. A bird paused in its flight on a branch quite close and clung there swaying. A real live bird. Dickie thought of the kitchen at home, the lamp that smoked, the dirty table, the fender full of ashes and dirty paper, the dry bread that tasted of mice, and the water out of the broken earthenware cup. That would be his breakfast, when he had gone to bed crying after his aunt had slapped him.

  “I’ll come,” said he, “and thank you kindly.”

  “Mind you,” said the man carefully, “this ain’t no kidnapping. I ain’t ‘ticed you away. You come on your own free wish, eh?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Can you write?”

  “Yes,” said Dickie, “if I got a pen.”

  “I got a pencil — hold on a bit.” He took out of his pocket a new envelope, a new sheet of paper, and a new pencil ready sharpened by machinery. It almost looked, Dickie thought, as though he had brought them out for some special purpose. Perhaps he had.

  “Now,” said the man, “you take an’ write — make it flat agin the sole of me boot.” He lay face downward on the road and turned up his boot, as though boots were the most natural writing-desks in the world.

  “Now write what I say: ‘Mr. Beale. Dear Sir. Will you please take me on tramp with you? I ‘ave no father nor yet mother to be uneasy’ (Can you spell ‘uneasy’? That’s right — you are a scholar!), ‘an’ I asks you let me come alonger you.’ (Got that? All right, I’ll stop a bit till you catch up. Then you say) ‘If you take me along I promise to give you all what I earns or gets anyhow, and be a good boy, and do what you say. And I shall be very glad if you will. Your obedient servant — —’ What’s your name, eh?”

  “Dickie Harding.”

  “Get it wrote down, then. Done? I’m glad I wasn’t born a table to be wrote on. Don’t it make yer legs stiff, neither!”

  He rolled over, took the paper and read it slowly and with difficulty. Then he folded it and put it in his pocket.

  “Now we’re square,” he said. “That’ll stand true and legal in any police-court in England, that will. And don’t you forget it.”

  To the people who live in Rosemary Terrace the words “police-court” are very alarming indeed. Dickie turned a little paler and said, “Why police? I ain’t done nothing wrong writin’ what you telled me?”

  “No, my boy,” said the man, “you ain’t done no wrong; you done right. But there’s bad people in the world — police and such — as might lay it up to me as I took you away against your will. They could put a man away for less than that.”

  “But it ain’t agin my will,” said Dickie; “I want to!”

  “That’s what I say,” said the man cheerfully. “So now we’re agreed upon it, if you’ll step it we’ll see about a doss for to-night; and to-morrow we’ll sleep in the bed with the green curtains.”

  “I see that there in a book,” said Dickie, charmed. “He Reward the Wake, the last of the English, and I wunnered what it stood for.”

  “It stands for laying out,” said the man (and so it does, though that’s not at all what the author of “Hereward” meant it to mean)—”laying out under a ‘edge or a ‘aystack or such and lookin’ up at the stars till you goes by-by. An’ jolly good business, too, fine weather. An’ then you ‘oofs it a bit and resties a bit, and some one gives you something to ‘elp you along the road, and in the evening you ‘as a glass of ale at the Publy Kows, and finds another set o’ green bed curtains. An’ on Saturday you gets in a extra lot of prog, and a Sunday you stays where you be and washes of your shirt.”

  “Do you have adventures?” asked Dick, recognizing in this description a rough sketch of the life of a modern knight-errant.

  “‘Ventures? I believe you!” said the man. “Why, only last month a brute of a dog bit me in the leg, at a back door Sutton way. An’ once I see a elephant.”

  “Wild?” asked Dickie, thrilling.

  “Not azackly wild — with a circus ‘e was. But big! Wild ones ain’t ‘alf the size, I lay! And you meets soldiers, and parties in red coats ridin’ on horses, with spotted dawgs, and motors as run you down and take your ‘ead off afore you know you’re dead if you don’t look alive. Adventures? I should think so!”

  “Ah!” said Dickie, and a full silence fell between them.

  “Tired?” asked Mr. Beale presently.

  “Just a tiddy bit, p’raps,” said Dickie bravely, “but I can stick it.”

  “We’ll get summat with wheels for you to-morrow,” said the man, “if it’s only a sugar-box; an’ I can tie that leg of yours up to make it look like as if it was cut off.”

  “It’s this ‘ere nasty boot as makes me tired,” said Dickie.

  “Hoff with it,” said the man obligingly; “down you sets on them stones and hoff with it! T’other too if you like. You can keep to t
he grass.”

  The dewy grass felt pleasantly cool and clean to Dickie’s tired little foot, and when they crossed the road where a water-cart had dripped it was delicious to feel the cool mud squeeze up between your toes. That was charming; but it was pleasant, too, to wash the mud off on the wet grass. Dickie always remembered that moment. It was the first time in his life that he really enjoyed being clean. In the hospital you were almost too clean; and you didn’t do it yourself. That made all the difference. Yet it was the memory of the hospital that made him say, “I wish I could ‘ave a bath.”

  “So you shall,” said Mr. Beale; “a reg’ler wash all over — this very night. I always like a wash meself. Some blokes think it pays to be dirty. But it don’t. If you’re clean they say ‘Honest Poverty,’ an’ if you’re dirty they say ‘Serve you right.’ We’ll get a pail or something this very night.”

  “You are good,” said Dickie. “I do like you.”

  Mr. Beale looked at him through the deepening twilight — rather queerly, Dickie thought. Also he sighed heavily.

  “Oh, well — all’s well as has no turning; and things don’t always —— What I mean to say, you be a good boy and I’ll do the right thing by you.”

  “I know you will,” said Dickie, with enthusiasm. “I know ‘ow good you are!”

  “Bless me!” said Mr. Beale uncomfortably. “Well, there. Step out, sonny, or we’ll never get there this side Christmas.”

  Now you see that Mr. Beale may be a cruel, wicked man who only wanted to get hold of Dickie so as to make money out of him; and he may be going to be very unkind indeed to Dickie when once he gets him away into the country, and is all alone with him — and his having that paper and envelope and pencil all ready looks odd, doesn’t it? Or he may be a really benevolent person. Well, you’ll know all about it presently.

  “And — here we are,” said Mr. Beale, stopping in a side-street at an open door from which yellow light streamed welcomingly. “Now mind you don’t contradict anything wot I say to people. And don’t you forget you’re my nipper, and you got to call me daddy.”

  “I’ll call you farver,” said Dickie. “I got a daddy of my own, you know.”

  “Why,” said Mr. Beale, stopping suddenly, “you said he was dead.”

  “So he is,” said Dickie; “but ‘e’s my daddy all the same.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Mr. Beale impatiently. And they went in.

  CHAPTER II. BURGLARS

  Dickie fell asleep between clean, coarse sheets in a hard, narrow bed, for which fourpence had been paid.

  “Put yer clobber under yer bolster, likewise yer boots,” was the last instruction of his new friend and “father.”

  There had been a bath — or something equally cleansing — in a pail near a fire where ragged but agreeable people were cooking herrings, sausages, and other delicacies on little gridirons or pans that they unrolled from the strange bundles that were their luggage. One man who had no gridiron cooked a piece of steak on the kitchen tongs. Dickie thought him very clever. A very fat woman asked Dickie to toast a herring for her on a bit of wood; and when he had done it she gave him two green apples.

  He laid in bed and heard jolly voices talking and singing in the kitchen below. And he thought how pleasant it was to be a tramp, and what jolly fellows the tramps were; for it seemed that all these nice people were “on the road,” and this place where the kitchen was, and the good company and the clean bed for fourpence, was a Tramps’ Hotel — one of many that are scattered over the country and called “Common Lodging-Houses.”

  The singing and laughing went on long after he had fallen asleep, and if, later in the evening, there were loud-voiced arguments, or quarrels even, Dickie did not hear them.

  Next morning, quite early, they took the road. From some mysterious source Mr. Beale had obtained an old double perambulator, which must have been made, Dickie thought, for very fat twins, it was so broad and roomy. Artfully piled on the front part was all the furniture needed by travellers who mean to sleep every night at the Inn of the Silver Moon. (That is the inn where they have the beds with the green curtains.)

  “What’s all that there?” Dickie asked, pointing to the odd knobbly bundles of all sorts and shapes tied on to the perambulator’s front.

  “All our truck what we’ll want on the road,” said Beale.

  “And that pillowy bundle on the seat.”

  “That’s our clothes. I’ve bought you a little jacket to put on o’ nights if it’s cold or wet. An’ when you want a lift — why, here’s your carriage, and you can sit up ‘ere and ride like the Lord Mayor, and I’ll be yer horse; the bundles’ll set on yer knee like a fat babby. Tell yer what, mate — looks to me as if I’d took a fancy to you.”

  “I ‘ave to you, I know that,” said Dickie, settling his crutch firmly and putting his hand into Mr. Beale’s. Mr. Beale looked down at the touch.

  “Swelp me!” he said helplessly. Then, “Does it hurt you — walking?”

  “Not like it did ‘fore I went to the orspittle. They said I’d be able to walk to rights if I wore that there beastly boot. But that ‘urts worsen anythink.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Beale, “you sing out when you get tired and I’ll give yer a ride.”

  “Oh, look,” said Dickie—”the flowers!”

  “They’re only weeds,” said Beale. They were, in fact, convolvuluses, little pink ones with their tendrils and leaves laid flat to the dry earth by the wayside, and in a water-meadow below the road level big white ones twining among thick-growing osiers and willows.

  Dickie filled his hands with the pink ones, and Mr. Beale let him.

  “They’ll die directly,” he said.

  “But I shall have them while they’re alive,” said Dickie, as he had said to the pawnbroker about the moonflowers.

  It was a wonderful day. All the country sights and sounds, that you hardly notice because you have known them every year as long as you can remember, were wonderful magic to the little boy from Deptford. The green hedge, the cows looking over them; the tinkle of sheep-bells; the “baa” of the sheep; the black pigs in a sty close to the road, their breathless rooting and grunting and the shiny, blackleaded cylinders that were their bodies; the stubbly fields where barley stood in sheaves — real barley, like the people next door but three gave to their hens; the woodland shadows and the lights of sudden water; shoulders of brown upland pressed against the open sky; the shrill thrill of the skylark’s song, “like canary birds got loose”; the splendor of distance — you never see distance in Deptford; the magpie that perched on a stump and cocked a bright eye at the travellers; the thing that rustled a long length through dead leaves in a beech coppice, and was, it appeared, a real live snake — all these made the journey a royal progress to Dickie of Deptford. He forgot that he was lame, forgot that he had run away — a fact that had cost him a twinge or two of fear or conscience earlier in the morning. He was happy as a prince is happy, new-come to his inheritance, and it was Mr. Beale, after all, who was the first to remember that there was a carriage in which a tired little boy might ride.

  “In you gets,” he said suddenly; “you’ll be fair knocked. You can look about you just as well a-sittin’ down,” he added, laying the crutch across the front of the perambulator. “Never see such a nipper for noticing, neither. Hi! there goes a rabbit. See ‘im? Crost the road there? See him?”

  Dickie saw, and the crown was set on his happiness. A rabbit. Like the ones that his fancy had put in the mouldering hutch at home.

  “It’s got loose,” said Dickie, trying to scramble out of the perambulator; “let’s catch ‘im and take ‘im along.”

  “‘E ain’t loose—’e’s wild,” Mr. Beale explained; “‘e ain’t never bin caught. Lives out ‘ere with ‘is little friendses,” he added after a violent effort of imagination—”in ‘oles in the ground. Gets ‘is own meals and larks about on ‘is own.”

  “How beautiful!” said Dickie, wriggling with delight. This lif
e of the rabbit, as described by Mr. Beale, was the child’s first glimpse of freedom. “I’d like to be a rabbit.”

  “You much better be my little nipper,” said Beale. “Steady on, mate. ‘Ow’m I to wheel the bloomin’ pram if you goes on like as if you was a bag of eels?”

  They camped by a copse for the midday meal, sat on the grass, made a fire of sticks, and cooked herrings in a frying-pan, produced from one of the knobbly bundles.

  “It’s better’n Fiff of November,” said Dickie; “and I do like you. I like you nexter my own daddy and Mr. Baxter next door.”

  “That’s all right,” said Mr. Beale awkwardly.

  It was in the afternoon that, half-way up a hill, they saw coming over the crest a lady and a little girl.

  “Hout yer gets,” said Mr. Beale quickly; “walk as ‘oppy as you can, and if they arsts you you say you ain’t ‘ad nothing to eat since las’ night and then it was a bit o’ dry bread.”

  “Right you are,” said Dickie, enjoying the game.

  “An’ mind you call me father.”

  “Yuss,” said Dickie, exaggerating his lameness in the most spirited way. It was acting, you see, and all children love acting.

  Mr. Beale went more and more slowly, and as the lady and the little girl drew near he stopped altogether and touched his cap. Dickie, quick to imitate, touched his.

  “Could you spare a trifle, mum,” said Beale, very gently and humbly, “to ‘elp us along the road? My little chap, ‘e’s lame like wot you see. It’s a ‘ard life for the likes of ‘im, mum.”

  “He ought to be at home with his mother,” said the lady.

  Beale drew his coat sleeve across his eyes.

  “‘E ain’t got no mother,” he said; “she was took bad sudden — a chill it was, and struck to her innards. She died in the infirmary. Three months ago it was, mum. And us not able even to get a bit of black for her.”

  Dickie sniffed.

  “Poor little man!” said the lady; “you miss your mother, don’t you?”

  “Yuss,” said Dickie sadly; “but farver, ‘e’s very good to me. I couldn’t get on if it wasn’t for farver.”