Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “You know what colds are like,” said Mavis, “and staying indoors all day, or perhaps bed, and mustard plasters and gruel with butter in it. Oh, come along home, we should never have found the Mermaid. It’s much too bright, and light and everydayish for anything like magic to happen. Come on home, do.”

  “Let’s just go out to the end of the rocks,” Francis urged, “just to see what it’s like where the water gets deep and the seaweed goes swish, swish, all long and lanky and grassy, like in the Sabrina picture.”

  “Half-way then, not more,” said Mavis, firmly, “it’s dangerous-deep outside-Mother said so.”

  And half-way they went, Mavis still cautious, and Francis, after his wetting, almost showing off in his fine carelessness of whether he went in again or not. It was very jolly. You know how soft and squeezy the blobby kind of sea-weed is to walk on, and how satin smooth is the ribbon kind; how sharp are limpets, especially when they are covered with barnacles, and how comparatively bearable to the foot are the pale primrose-coloured hemispheres of the periwinkle.

  “Now,” said Mavis, “come on back. We’ll run all the way as soon as we get our shoes and stockings on for fear of colds.”

  “I almost wish we hadn’t come,” said Francis, turning with a face of gloom.

  “You didn’t really think we should find a Mermaid, did you?” Mavis asked, and laughed, though she was really annoyed with Francis for getting wet and cutting short this exciting morning game. But she was a good sister.

  “It’s all been so silly. Flopping into that pool, and talking and rotting, and just walking out and in again. We ought to have come by moonlight, and been very quiet and serious, and said —

  “Sabrina fair.

  Listen where thou art sitting—”

  “Ow — Hold on a minute. I’ve caught my foot in something.”

  Mavis stopped and took hold of her brother’s arm to steady him; and as she did so both children plainly heard a voice that was not the voice of either of them. It was the sweetest voice in the world they thought, and it said:

  “Save her. We die in captivity.”

  Francis looked down and had a sort of sudden sight of something white and brown and green that moved and went quickly down under the stone on which Mavis was standing. There was nothing now holding his foot.

  “I say,” he said, on a deep breath of awe and wonder, “did you hear that?”

  “Of course, I heard it.”

  “We couldn’t both have fancied it,” he said, “I wish it had told us who to save, and where, and how-”

  “Whose do you think that voice was?” Mavis asked softly.

  “The Mermaid’s,” said Francis, “who else’s could it have been?”

  “Then the magic’s really begun-”

  “Mermaids aren’t magic,” he said, “any more than flying fishes or giraffes are.”

  “But she came when you said ‘Sabrina fair,’” said Mavis.

  “Sabrina wasn’t a Mermaid,” said Francis firmly. “It’s no use trying to join things on when they won’t. Come on, we may as well be getting home.”

  “Mightn’t she be?” suggested Mavis. “A Mermaid, I mean. Like salmon that live in rivers and go down to the sea.”

  “I say, I never thought of that. How simply ripping if it turned out to be really Sabrina — wouldn’t it be? But which do you suppose could be her — the one who spoke to us or the one she’s afraid will die in captivity — the one she wants us to save.”

  They had reached the shore by now and Mavis looked up from turning her brown stockings right way out to say:

  “I suppose we didn’t really both fancy it. Could we have? Isn’t there some sort of scientific magic that makes people think the same things as each other when it’s not true at all, like with Indian mango-tricks? Uncle Fred said so, you know, they call it ‘Tell ee something.’”

  “I’ll tell you something,” said Francis, urgent with shoe-lace, “if we keep on saying things weren’t when we know perfectly well they were, we shall soon dish up any sort of chance of magic we may ever have had. When do you find people in books going on like that? They just say ‘This is magic!’ and behave as if it was. They don’t go pretending they’re not sure. Why, no magic would stand it.”

  “Aunt Dorothea once told me that all magic was like Prince Rupert’s drop,” Mavis owned “if once you broke it there was nothing left but a little dust.”

  “That’s just what I’m saying, isn’t it? We’ve always felt there was magic right enough, haven’t we? Well, now we’ve come across it, don’t let’s be silly and pretend. Let’s believe in it as hard as ever we can. Mavis — shall we, eh? Believing in things makes them stronger. Aunt Dorothea said that too — you remember.”

  They stood up in their shoes.

  “Shall we tell the others?” Mavis asked.

  “We must,” said Francis, “it would be so sneakish not to. But they won’t believe us. We shall have to be like Cassandra and not mind.”

  “I only wish I knew who it is we’ve got to save,” said Mavis.

  Francis had a very strong and perfect feeling that they would know this all in good time. He could not have explained this, but he felt it. All he said was, “Let’s run.”

  And they ran.

  Kathleen and Bernard met them at the gate, dancing with excitement and impatience.

  “Where have you been?” they cried and “What on earth?” and “Why, you’re all wet, France.”

  “Down to the sea — shut up, I know I am-” their elder brother came in and passed up the path to the gate.

  “You might have called us,” said Kathleen in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger sort of voice, “but anyhow you’ve lost something by going out so early without us.”

  “Lost something. What?”

  “Hearing the great news,” said Bernard, and he added, “Aha!”

  “What news?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Bernard was naturally annoyed at having been left out of the first expedition of the holidays. Anyone would have. Even you or I.

  “Out with it,” said Francis, with a hand on Bernard’s ear. There came a yell from Bernard and Mother’s voice from the window, saying, “Children, children.”

  “All right, Mummy. Now, Bear, — don’t be a young rotter. What’s the news?”

  “You’re hurting my ear,” was all Bernard’s rejoinder.

  “All right,” said Francis, “we’ve got some news too. But we won’t tell, will we, Mavis?”

  “Oh don’t,” said Kathleen, “don’t let’s be sneaky, the very first day too. It’s only that they’ve caught the mermaid, and I’m afraid that she’ll die in captivity, like you said. What’s yours?”

  Francis had released Bernard’s ear and now he turned to Mavis.

  “So that’s it” he said slowly—”Who’s got her?”

  “The circus people. What’s your news?” asked Kathleen eagerly.

  “After brek,” said Francis. “Yes mother, half a sec. I apologise about the ear, Bernard. We will tell you all. Oh, it’s quite different from what you think. We meet and discuss the situation in the mill the minute we’re free from brek. Agreed? Right! Yes Mother, coming!”

  “Then there must,” Mavis whispered to Francis “be two mermaids. They can’t both be Sabrina... then which...”

  “We’ve got to save one of them anyhow,” Francis answered with the light of big adventure in his eye, “they die in captivity.”

  CHAPTER III. THE RESCUE

  THE great question, of course, was — Would Mother take them to the circus, or would she, if she wouldn’t herself take them, let them go alone? She had once, in Buckinghamshire, allowed them to go to a travelling menagerie, after exacting from them a promise that they were not to touch any of the animals, and they had seen reason to regret their promise when the showman offered to let them stroke his tame performing wolf, who was so very like a collie. When they had said, “No, thank you,” the showman had said, “Oh, frightened,
are you? Run along home to Mammy then!” and the bystanders had laughed in a most insulting way. At a circus, of course, the horses and things aren’t near enough for you to stroke them, so this time they might not be asked to promise. If Mother came with them her presence, though agreeable, would certainly add to the difficulties, already quite enough — as even Mavis could not but see — of rescuing the Mermaid. But suppose Mother didn’t come with them.

  “Suppose we have to promise we won’t touch any of the animals?” suggested Cathay. “You can’t rescue a person without touching it.”

  “That’s just it,” said Mavis, “a Mermaid isn’t an animal. She’s a person.”

  “But suppose it isn’t that sort of Mermaid,” said Bernard. “Suppose it’s the sort that other people call seals, like it said in the paper.”

  “Well, it isn’t,” said Francis briefly, adding, “so there!”

  They were talking in the front garden, leaning over the green gate while Mother upstairs unpacked the luggage that had been the mound with spades on top only yesterday, at Waterloo.

  “Mavis!” Mother called through the open window. “I can only find — but you’d better come up.”

  “I ought to offer to help Mother unpack,” said Mavis, and went walking slowly.

  She came back after a little while, however, quickly running.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Mother’s going to meet Daddy at the Junction this afternoon and buy us sunbonnets. And we’re to take our spades and go down to the sea till dinner-time — it’s roast rabbit and apple dumps — I asked Mrs Pearce — and we can go to the circus by ourselves, — and she never said a word about promise not to touch the animals.”

  So off they went, down the whe road where the yellow-hammer was talking about himself as usual on the tree just beyond wherever you happened to be walking. And so to the beach.

  Now, it is very difficult to care much about a Mermaid you have never seen or heard or touched. On the other band, when once you have seen one and touched one and heard one speak, you seem to care for very little else. This was why when they got to the shore Kathleen and Bernard began at once to dig the moat of a sand castle, while the elder ones walked up and down, dragging the new spades after them like some new kind of tail, and talking, talking, talking till Kathleen said they might help dig or the tide would be in before the castle was done.

  “You don’t know what a lark sand castles are, France,” she added kindly, “because you’ve never seen the sea before.”

  So then they all dug and piled and patted and made moulds of their pails to stand as towers to the castle and dug out dungeons and tunnels and bridges, only the roof always gave way in the end unless you had beaten the sand very tight beforehand. It was a glorious castle, though not quite finished when the first thin flat wash of the sea reached it. And then every one worked twice as hard trying to keep the sea out till all was hopeless, and then everyone crowded into the castle and the sea washed it away bit by bit till there was only a shapeless island left, and everyone was wet through and had to change every single thing the minute they got home. You will know by that how much they enjoyed themselves.

  After the roast rabbit and the apple dumplings Mother started on the sunbonnet-and-meet-Daddy expedition. Francis went with her to the station and returned a little sad.

  “I had to promise not to touch any of the animals,” he said. “And perhaps a Mermaid is an animal.”

  “Not if she can speak,” said Kathleen. “I say, don’t you think we ought to wear our best things — I do. It’s more respectable to the wonders of the deep. She’d like us to look beautiful.”

  “I’m not going to change for anybody,” said Bernard firmly.

  “All right, Bear,” said Mavis. “Only we will. Remember it’s magic.”

  “I say, France,” he said, “do you think we ought to change?”

  “No, I don’t,” Francis answered. “I don’t believe Mermaids care a bit what you’ve got on. You see, they don’t wear anything but tails and hair and looking-glasses themselves. If there’s any beautifulness to be done they jolly well do it themselves. But I don’t say you wouldn’t be better for washing your hands again, and you might as well try to get some of the sand out of your hair. It looks like the wrong end of a broom as it is.”

  He himself went so far as to put on the blue necktie that Aunt Amy bad given him, and polished his silver watch-chain on the inside of his jacket. This helped to pass the time till the girls were ready. At last this happened though they had put on their best things, and they started.

  The yellow-hammer went on about himself — he was never tired of the subject.

  “It’s just as if that bird was making fun of us,” Bernard said.

  “I daresay it is a wild-goose step we’re taking,” said Kathleen; “but the circus will be jolly, anyhow.”

  There is a piece of waste land just beyond Beachfield on the least agreeable side of that village — the side where the flat-faced shops are and the yellow brick houses. At the nice end of Beachfield the shops have little fat bow windows with greenish glass that you can hardly see through. Here also are gaunt hoardings plastered with tattered, ugly-coloured posters, asking you in red to wear Ramsden’s Really Boots, or to Vote for Wilton Ashby in blue. Some of the corners of the posters are always loose and flap dismally in the wind. There is always a good deal of straw and torn paper and dust at this end of the village, and bits of dirty rag, and old boots and tins are found under the hedges where flowers ought to be. Also there are a great many nettles and barbed wires instead of pleasant-coloured fences. Don’t you sometimes wonder who is to blame for all the uglification of places that might be so pretty, and wish you could have a word with them and ask them not to? Perhaps when these people were little nobody told them how wrong it is to throw orange-peel about, and the bits of paper off chocolate, and the paper bag which once concealed your bun. And it is a dreadful fact that the children who throw these things about are little uglifiers, and they grow up to be perfect monsters of uglification, and build hideous yellow brick cottages, and put up hoardings, and sell Ramaden’s Really Boots (in red), and vote passionately for Wilton Ashby (in blue), and care nothing for the fields that used to be green and the hedges where once flowers used to grow. Some people like this, and see nothing to hate in such ugly waste places as the one, at the wrong end of the town, where the fair was being held on that never-to-be-forgotten day when Francis, Mavis, Bernard and Kathleen set out in their best clothes to rescue the Mermaid because Mermaids “die in captivity.”

  The fair had none of those stalls and booths which old-fashioned fairs used to have, where they sold toys, and gilt gingerbread, and carters’ whips, and cups and saucers, and mutton pies, and dolls, and china dogs, and shell-boxes, and pincushions, and needlecases, and penholders with views of the Isle of Wight and Winchester Cathedral inside that you see so bright and plain when you put your eye close to the little round hole at the top.

  The steam roundabouts were there — but hardly a lean back of their spotted horses was covered by a rider. There were swings, but no one happened to be swinging. There were no shows, no menagerie, no boxing-booth, no marionettes. No penny gaff with the spangled lady and the fat man who beats the drum. Nor were there any stalls. There were pink-and-white paper whips and bags of dust-coloured minced paper — the English substitute for confetti, there were little metal tubes of dirty water to squirt in people’s faces, but except for the sale of these crude instruments for making other people uncomfortable there was not a stall in the fair. I give you my word, there was not a single thing that you could buy — no gingerbread, no sweets, no crockery dogs, not even a halfpenny orange or a bag of nuts. Nor was there anything to drink — not as much as a lemonade counter or a ginger-beer stall. The revellers were no doubt drinking elsewhere. A tomb-like silence reigned — a silence which all the steam roundabout’s hideous hootings only emphasized.

  A very dirty-nosed boy, overhearing a hurried council, vo
lunteered the information that the circus was not yet open.

  “Never mind,” they told each other — and turned to the side-shows. These were, all of one character — the arrangement by which you throw something or roll something at something else, and if you hit the something you get a prize — the sort of prize that is sold in Houndsditch at ninepence a gross.

  Most of these arrangements are so ordered that to get a prize is impossible. For instance, a peculiarly offensive row of masks with open mouths in which pipes are set up. In the golden days of long ago if you hit a pipe it broke, and you got a “prize” worth — I can’t do sums — put it briefly at the hundred and forty-fourth part of ninepence. But the children found that when their wooden ball struck the pipe it didn’t break. They wondered why! Then, looking more closely, they saw that the pipes were not of clay, but of painted wood. They could never be broken — and the whole thing was a cruel mockery of hope.

  The coconut-shy was not what it used to be either. Once one threw sticks, three shies a penny. Now it is a penny a shy, with light wooden balls. You can win a coconut if you happen to hit one that is not glued on to its support. If you really wish to win one of these unkindly fruits it is well to stand and watch a little and not to aim at those coconuts which, when they are hit, fail to fall off the sticks. Are they glued on? One hopes not. But if they are, who can wonder or reprove? It is hard to get a living, anyhow.

  There was one thing, though, that roused the children’s resentment — chiefly, I think, because its owners were clean and did not look half starved, so there was no barrier of pity between them and dislike — a sort of round table sloping up to its centre. On this small objects were arranged. For a penny you received two hoops. If you could throw a hoop over an object that object was yours. None of the rustic visitors to the fair could, it seemed, or cared to. It did not look difficult, however. Nor was it. At the first shot a tiny candlestick was encircled. Between pride and shame Mavis held out a hand.

  “Hard luck,” said one of the two young women, too clean to be pitied. “Has to go flat on-see?”