Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “We’ll go on. The river isn’t much further,” said Rupert. “We’ll throw a fly or two till you come.”

  “You’ll soon catch us up,” said Mabel. “Here’s the spade.”

  They gave me the spade and the empty yawning can, and they found a soft-looking place under a lime-tree, with a mole-hill quite near, to sit on if I was tired, and they left me there to dig. Our hero heard them laughing as they went away, and he knew that they were glad to have got rid of him.

  The spade was heavy and the day was hot, and the worms were, as Arthur suggested, shy. Clifford looked at his new silver watch and found that it was fourteen minutes and three-quarters since the others had left him, and he had only found one worm — a large one, it is true — and a small piece of pink string.

  He dug again and, pausing to mop his forehead with one of his new handkerchiefs, perceived that in his struggles with the spade he had kicked over the bait-can, so that it now lay on its side, a position the worm had taken advantage of. Its long red length was almost free of the tin, and a stout blackbird, with its head on one side, was looking at the worm with a more than friendly interest.

  “Hi, stop that!” said our hero to the blackbird, and to the worm he said, “I shall have to tie you up, old chap.”

  Clifford is not really a cruel boy, and I cannot tell you why it seemed to him that it would be amusing to tie the pink string round the middle of the worm and to hang it on a twig. But it did: and he did. And there the worm hung, limp and lonely, and the blackbird sat on another twig and looked at it. Clifford sat down on the mole-hill and looked at both of them. He wondered why there was a piece of pink string in the middle of the wood. It was like the sort of string they tie round jeweller’s boxes. He was dead tired. He wished he didn’t have to dig for worms, but could have stayed at the house and heard more about the burglary. That was much more interesting than fishing. Suddenly the blackbird hopped a twig nearer. The worm did nothing. Clifford wished he had tied the string more carefully.

  “If the bird touches it,” he said, “it will just slip off — it’s only a slipknot.”

  Dear reader, this part will be difficult to believe. But it is true, so you must try. And you will see that in the end I can prove it. Suddenly the blackbird flew towards the worm. Clifford did not see what happened. His attention was suddenly distracted by a frightful pain in his feet. He had hardly time to say “Ow!” when he felt that he was no longer on the ground, but was swinging at the end of a long rope above a limitless gulf.

  “There’s been an earthquake,” he told himself; “the earth has opened under my feet. Oh, my feet!” he screamed, as again the pain took him, and a vast black cloud rushed swiftly by him with a noise of mighty wings. Curiously enough, this calmed him.

  “It can’t be true,” he said, “I must be in bed and dreaming.”

  He tried to pinch himself to see if he was really asleep, but somehow he couldn’t find his hands. Then the black cloud came again and the rushing of wings. And then the awful sensation of falling, falling, falling, and at last the ground, among sharp canes or saplings, and the terrible sense of danger and pursuit.

  “There’s something after me. I must hide,” he told himself, “and I’m different somehow. Oh, what is it? What am I?” And the next moment he found himself eating earth for dear life, and knew that the canes and saplings among which he had fallen were just the grass spears, that the enemy he feared was the blackbird, and that he himself was eating earth faster and more eagerly than he had ever eaten the nicest cake, and, worst of all, that he was not Clifford any more, but the worm.

  “And I suppose he’s me,” Clifford said, as he pulled the last of himself under the ground with a wrench. “That was my boots sticking, I suppose. No, of course he’s got my boots. Well, the blackbird hasn’t got me anyhow. I suppose I’ve got into a fairy-tale, or something like that. I wonder how long I am. I feel very long indeed, longer than that worm was by a lot. I feel as though I’d got an extra tail as well as my all-the-way-down-the-sameishness. I wish I knew which way to go. I suppose it’s all the same underground. I wonder what I’m supposed to do? If it’s to deliver a captive princess I simply can’t, like this. I wonder why it’s happened to me. Oh! for stringing the worm up, I suppose, like Benjy in Beastland. Well, I’m sorry I did, if that’s all. I wouldn’t have if I’d known how beastly it felt.”

  He stopped at that, hoping perhaps that the Power which had changed him to a worm would let him off, now that he had said he was sorry. But nothing happened.

  “I may as well go on,” he said drearily. And ate more dirt. He was just feeling that he couldn’t eat another mouthful, whatever happened, when he found there was no more earth to eat. He had come to the end of it, and the front part of him, which he had been eating with, hung out over a gulf. People will tell you that worms have neither eyes nor ears, and they may be right, but this was not an ordinary worm; it could not have been, of course, or Clifford would not have been it. Other people will tell you that there is no light underground, so that a worm’s eyes would not be any use to him if he had them. These people cannot be right. Because there was light underground, lots of it, a sort of greeny light, like glowworms. A fleeting wonder crossed Clifford’s mind as to whether he might have changed into a glow-worm, but he wriggled all along his endless rings and felt that he was no short, thick glow-worm, but a long, a very long, earthworm sticking out of the side of a large gallery. In that gallery sat an enormous person in a fur coat (very like his Uncle Edward, Clifford thought), and spoke suddenly and crossly:

  “Go away,” it said; “no worms allowed here. Run away and play.”

  “But I’m not an ordinary worm,” our hero pleaded.

  “Ah,” said the furry-coated one, “that’s what you all say. And yet you all are. Very.”

  “Who are you, please?” said Clifford.

  “The mole, of course,” said the furry stranger, “and this is my house. (Jut you go, my lad.”

  “Mayn’t I come through?” Clifford asked. “I think there’s something wrong with the other half of me. I feel as though I couldn’t go back.”

  “Well, make a hole alongside yourself,” said the mole; “there’s quite enough of you sticking out to turn round with. Good thing for you I’m not a hungry bird. Hurry up.” Clifford hurried, but it was difficult, and the part that stretched from one hole to the other felt very bare and unprotected. Suppose some one with a spade...? he had seen such things happen in the garden and had thought nothing of them. Now he shuddered at the thought, shuddered in every one of his rings. It seemed as if he would never be able to eat enough dirt to get all of himself out of the mole’s house.

  And then quite suddenly he came across the other worm. He knew it for one of his own kind directly their sleek sides touched. They were too near to see each other, even if the other worm had eyes, which I am not at all sure of.

  “Are you a real worm?” was Clifford’s first question.

  “Of course I am,” said the other, very much offended; “so are you.”

  “I’m not,” said Clifford, “that’s just it. I was a human boy once, and I got changed into a worm because I hung one of you up by a string.”

  “Fishing?” asked the other in a pained whisper.

  “Not exactly,” said Clifford. “I didn’t really mean to hurt. I did it for fun. Isn’t there anyone down here I can say I am sorry to, and get let off?”

  “No use saying it to me,” said the other, yawning. “And of course you were a human boy creature once. We all were.”

  “And you stop so? For always?”

  I can tell you Clifford felt the full horror of his situation. He was one of thousands of earthworms all of whom were once boys.

  “We stop here, of course, until we stop stopping here.”

  “And you were all boys once?”

  “So some of them say. I think it’s all swank myself Like what you were saying.

  Thank the shadows I was born an earthworm, and
a true-hearted earthworm I’ll live and die. I can’t see what’s the good of pretending you’ve been something else you never were and were never meant to be, and never could have been.”

  “But I was,” said Clifford.

  “You can’t pull my leg,” said the worm.

  “‘Cause why — you haven’t got one,” said Clifford.

  “You know what I mean. I picked that expression up from the mole. They pulled his leg once, in a trap. He says it was terrible. I could never have it done to me.”

  “Is there no way of getting out?” said Clifford in despair.

  “If you go up you get out,” said the worm, “but my own feeling is the deeper the safer. So long!”

  “So long,” said our hero, feeling longer than ever. And so they parted.

  And now the earth got looser and looser, and more and more stony. And the stones were very sharp and painful. Clifford had to twist this way and that to avoid being hurt rather badly. Fortunately the body he occupied was suited for twisting. The stones were of all sizes, some of them enormous, and there was hardly any earth to eat. He had to get along as best he could. He persevered, however, working upward as much as possible, because it had suddenly occurred to him that if he became a boy again, underground, and in such a very stony place, his position might be not only painful but dangerous.

  And then quite suddenly he felt himself held fast by the suffering middle of him. The more he pulled the tighter the hold was. Could it be the mole? He thought not, the mole would have hurt more. Slowly and with much caution he wriggled himself round among the stones to see what was holding him. It was the little piece of pink string! Its end had caught on something, and there he was, a prisoner, perhaps for ever.

  And then in a flash he understood all that prisoners feel, whether they are Reformers in Russian dungeons or worms in a bait-tin.

  “Oh,” said Clifford, “if ever I can get out I’ll never put anything in prison again.

  Not even flies in paper cages. Oh, if only I could get free!”

  He writhed and he pulled, and he thought the string gave a little, as he twisted and wriggled among the strange-shaped stones. It had given a little, for now he could move to a more open space between a wall of silver and a heap of great gleaming crystals. There were other heaps of crystals, too, white and blue and green, and great smooth rocks of silver and gold.

  Clifford thought of gnomes and enchanted mountains. Perhaps he had wormed his way into one of these. If he could only meet a gnome now, instead of these silly, useless worms and moles. Gnomes understood magic. They were usually friendly in spite of their humpy appearance. They could let him out, perhaps, if he could convince them he was sorry and really never would tie strings round worms again as long as he lived. He lay still for a moment striving to take a quick worm’s-eye view of the situation. It would not be waste of time, for if he lay quite still the gnomes might come out.

  So he lay very still. But no gnomes came.

  “I must just go on pulling, then,” he told himself. And then he remembered a dreadful story he had once heard and laughed at — how could he have laughed at it? A story of two hens, each of whom had swallowed one end of a worm.

  “Someone’s got to give way,” said another hen who was looking on. And some one had to. And the one who gave way was the worm, and that gave way in the middle. Horrible — horrible!

  He pulled more fiercely than ever, and, oh, joy! he could feel the string slipping from his waistcoat part down to his knees, or where his knees would have been if worms had knees, and then to his ankles. And then, once again, a fierce pain in his feet, if a worm could have feet.

  He knew now that the other pain in his feet had happened when the bird pecked at the worm when it was hanging. There are no birds underground. What could be pecking at him now? He writhed forward, and now the string no longer held him. He saw daylight. He had eaten his way out of the earth. There was sunshine, and...

  Someone was kicking at his boots and saying:

  “Well, of all the rotten slackers! I believe you’ve been asleep.”

  “I haven’t,” said Clifford, looking down at his boots and hands and his waistcoat buttons, at every part of himself which he could see. Boots, hands, legs, clothes — it all seemed beautiful to him, it was all so unwormlike.

  “What have you been doing, then?” asked Rupert, who had been the kicker.

  “I’ve been — I’ve been—” Clifford saw that it was quite useless to try and explain. He knew now that he had been dreaming, and that he had been lying on his legs in such a way that they were full of pins and needles, but he felt at the same time that it was not an ordinary dream that he had had.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said, and the others all burst out laughing.

  “That’s a good thing to call it,” said Arthur.

  “Yes, I have,” said Clifford, and then in one glorious flash he saw that he had not been a worm for nothing. The detective success that the boy had been aching for had happened to the worm.

  “I’ve been thinking about the burglary. I’ve been worming my way into the secrets of the criminals. No, it’s no use shoving me, any of you, or giving me that spade again. I’m not going to dig worms. I’m not going fishing. I’m going to be the sleuth hound of the law and find the booty abandoned by the ruffians.”

  “All right,” said Rupert kindly; “we may as well play that as anything. I’m not so jolly keen on fishing myself. Only we didn’t know you could play make-up games. We always do when we are by ourselves.”

  “This is no game,” said our hero, now well into his part. “Clifford Octavious, the priceless Sleuth Worm, will now unfold his tale. But, look here,” he suddenly whispered seriously, “we may be watched. They must have buried their booty here because they couldn’t get away with it last night. And of course they’ll conic back for it. And they might come back for it now. Hist, be cautious! Let us sit down and talk of fish, while one of you runs to the house and brings some of the men. This is a dangerous action we are embarked on. Haste! Courage and dispatch! I once caught a salmon that weighed half a ton — with a line,” he said carelessly and in a loud voice.

  “I say, you do do it well,” said Mabel, admiring him.

  “Go it, Clifford, old sleuth worm,” said Arthur.

  Then Clifford said, “Look here,” and showed the blank pages of his new pocket-book as though they were something to read. “Pretend to be reading while I whisper. I’d rather have done it in play, but you don’t seem to see that I mean it. While you were away I found out where the burglars have hidden the things they took last night. But some of the caitiffs may be hanging about, so I’d rather not touch the treasure till we’ve got the grown-ups here. Tell them to bring guns. No, I’m not kidding. Honour bright, I’m not.”

  “You do do it jolly well,” was all he got for an answer.

  “All right, if you don’t believe me. But you just go and tell your father what I said. I’ll stand the row if he makes one. But he won’t. He’ll come, if it’s only to give it me if I was kidding.”

  It took a quarter of an hour to persuade them that he wasn’t. And our hero was right! Their father did come, and for exactly that reason. But in case there should be any other reason he brought two gardeners with him.

  “What’s all this?” the father said crossly.

  Then Clifford said: “Look here, there are footmarks all about here. Men’s. And the earth has been disturbed, and I found a piece of pink string.” Then for the first time the thought came to him that perhaps it was only an ordinary dream, and that those red and blue and white and green jewels and the great silver things of which he had had a worm’s-eye view were not real at all, but only dream treasure. So then he trembled and hesitated, and felt as if he were going to cry and he said:

  “I daresay it’s all nonsense, but I do wish you’d just dig once, to see.” He pointed to the spot of earth underneath the twig where the worm had hung by the pink string.

  “Might as
well, sir,” said the gardener; “the earth have been disturbed here, that’s true enough.”

  So they dug, and Clifford looked anxiously at the bushes, expecting every moment that the burglars would return for their prey. But they didn’t.

  At first the spade only turned up soft brown mould — how well our hero remembered the taste of it — but the seventh spadeful was enriched by a diamond necklace and the ninth by a ruby pendant, and then thick and fast came gems and jewels, plate and ornaments, gold and silver, and the very last thing to be pulled out of the hole was a silver fork with a bit of pink string entangled in its prongs.

  So now our hero was a hero indeed. His host and his hostess and the ladies and gentlemen who had got their things back praised and petted him more than he could bear. It was in vain that he said it was nothing, and he had not done anything.

  “Ah, that’s just his modesty, dear child,” they said.

  And of course it was useless to explain about his dream. He knew they wouldn’t have believed it. I told you it was going to be very difficult to believe. His cousins treated him with enormous respect, and somehow or other it made him just as uncomfortable as being wrongfully considered a muff, like they had thought in the beginning.

  So, although he ceased to be worried about collars, and sitting up straight at meals, and things like that, and though he really did enjoy himself more than he had expected, he was quite glad to go home.

  And when he got home and found that the bank had not been robbed in his absence, and that the others had nobly put off the damming of the Kidbrook until his return, his cup of happiness was full. And somehow it was not at all unpleasant to be thought a hero at home. In the eyes of his family he was indeed covered in glory, and this was very important because it quite cleared up the nonsense about those Lymchurch burglars who were not burglars at all. Clifford had never quite lived that down, but now it was for ever buried in oblivion. The others had to admit that he did know something about detective work after all.