Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  I am getting on too fast.

  We had the picnic; we got the tea-basket and cakes and plums and took them in the donkey-cart to the woods, the woodiest woods we knew.

  Here we had tea — it would have been jolly but for the Deed we had come to that dark wood to do. Olive couldn’t eat anything, hardly, but we had to have tea before doing the dark Deed, because we did not want to starve the repelling Madeline as well as... The author does not seem able to help getting along faster than he wants. I want the Deed to come upon you with a great surprise, like it did on the unpopulous Madeline.

  We were very cold with Madeline, and she was beastly grumpy with us. (If she were telling the tale she would put it the other way round. Let us be fair.)

  When tea was over there was a silence.

  Now, when the moment had really come for the Deed, I think we all rather thought perhaps it would be better not. But Madeline sniffed, and her die was cast.

  Clifford had been chosen to make the last speech before the execution. He said:

  “Madeline, you have been a beast to us ever since you came.”

  “Not worse than you’ve been to me,” said Madeline.

  Clifford made no reply, but told her all the things she’d done, from buzzing the plums at Martin to putting worms in the snow-white couch of Clifford. She sniffed, but said nothing.

  “Did you,” Clifford then said, “ever read Hop o’ my Thumb?”

  She owned that she had.

  “Well,” said Clifford, “we’re going for a drive, and you can stay here and think about Hop o’ my Thumb. Because we’re going to leave you here. See? We’ve had jolly well enough of you!”

  Still she made no reply.

  So we put the things in the basket and the basket in the cart. We put the donkey in the cart too.

  Then Madeline said: “Auntie said I ought to play tricks and be jolly and try to be more like you. I thought putting worms in beds was just the sort of trick you’d do yourself.”

  “It’s not the beastly worms,” said Clifford. “You know that that was forgiven. It’s your being such a measly little sneak. Every single thing that happens you go and blab to Mother. You’re a tell-tale-tit, if ever there was one.”

  “Oh, how I hate you!” Madeline then remarked with fury. “I wish you were all dead. I always tell Mother everything. And I’ll tell her about you. You see if I don’t.”

  “You can’t,” said Clifford; “she’s in India.”

  He does really wish he had not said that. He minds having said that more than anything.

  Then we all got into the cart and drove away. Olive had been finishing harnessing the donkey and had not heard our parting words or, as she told us many times afterwards till we were sick of hearing it, she would never have gone.

  We drove off, leaving Madeline alone in her black frock in the green wood. She looked very small and disagreeable. And as we went Alan shouted:

  “You won’t be able to find your way home like Hop o’ my Thumb did!”

  And Martin shouted: “Lost in the wood! Lost in the wood!” till we were out of sight.

  Then we put our noble steed to the gallop and drove off. We were silent after that shouting, and the author has since learned that all the others felt exactly as he did, only none of us liked to say so, because we had all agreed beforehand that being lost in a wood would serve Madeline jolly well right, and be a lesson to her, and we did not like to appear milksops in each other’s eyes. At least, I think that was it. Because now it came to having done the Deed it looked very different; and we went on in an awful silence.

  Quite soon, and much sooner than we had meant, Clifford turned our steed’s head and we went back, to find Madeline and explain that it was only a joke, for her own good.

  “Do drive fast,” Olive said. “Oh, I do wish we hadn’t. Suppose she’s gone mad with terror.”

  “Or drowned herself in the pond,” said Martin.

  “Or been carried off by bears,” said Alan.

  Clifford said, “Don’t talk rot. There aren’t any bears, and we haven’t been gone half an hour! There hasn’t been time for anything to happen.”

  But there had. We got back to the wood, to the place where we had left her. She was not there. We shouted: “Madeline!” And she didn’t answer. So then we tied up the steed and went deeper into the wood to look for her.

  We could not find her.

  We looked all about — among the bracken and hazel and sweet chestnut — and we called, and called. The writer got very hot, and then he got very cold, and all the awful things he had read came back to him, about people lost in woods, and he felt perfectly sick. He got wilder and wilder in his manner, I believe, and ran all over the wood, which is fortunately small, till there wasn’t a bush he hadn’t looked under, and his hair was sticking to his forehead with apprehensiveness. The others have since confessed that it was the same with them. It became evening, then nearly dark, and at last Clifford coo-eed, and we met, a mangled band of malefactors, by the donkey’s brow.

  “Oh,” said Olive, out of breath, “how could we be so awful! Oh, whatever shall we do? Oh, where can she be?”

  “People have been hanged for less, I believe,” said Martin.

  “But nothing can have happened to her,” Alan would keep on saying.

  “Something has,” said Clifford. And then the sudden glorious idea occurred to him.

  “Perhaps she’s gone home!”

  The donkey went back on the wings of the wind instead of in the usual way. I think he was never more surprised in his life.

  We tore into the house like a whirlwind in deep anxiety.

  All was still as a marble mausoleum. The servants were out in the yard talking to the gardener.

  We searched the house. We thought perhaps she was hiding, to frighten us. But she was not hiding there, for that or any other reason.

  Then Mother came home. We do not have supper with her and Father, but in the schoolroom while they have dinner.

  In happier days we hated not having meals with them. Now in our despair we were glad of it. We decided that we must tell when we went in to say goodnight, because then Mother would say “Where’s Madeline?”

  But she never said it, and we were so surprised that we got out of the room without breathing the name of the lost one. I thought Mother looked very odd, somehow, and different.

  We went slowly upstairs. On the big landing where the stuffed foxes are, we stopped and looked at each other.

  “I believe Mother knows,” said Olive.

  “Do you think Madeline...?”

  “If anything has happened to her,” said Martin, “Mother will save us, like a Royalist lady in a book.”

  “If anything has happened they wouldn’t know so soon,” said Alan; “it takes days to drag a pond properly, I believe.”

  Olive said, “Oh, don’t! I don’t care what you say, I’m going to tell Mother.” We refused, of course, to allow this. We were all in it, and we weren’t going to let Olive collar any extra let-off for being the first to own up.

  So we went down — and a whispered council outside the drawing-room door ended in Clifford, who is the eldest, putting his head in at the door and saying:

  “Please, Mother, can we speak to you a minute?”

  And she came out directly, as she always does.

  Then we told her, standing in the shadow of the hat-stand as much as we could.

  I shall not tell you what Mother said. It was said to us and not to anyone else. And, besides, though very awful, it wasn’t any worse than what our inside selves had been saying to us for unending hours and hours.

  And when it was done Olive took hold of Mother and shook her — she did really — and cried out: “Oh, yes, Mother — but never mind all that. What do you think’s happened to her? If anything’s happened to her I’ll go into a convent — yes, I will.” And with that she loudly howled.

  Boys do not howl, however criminal, but I know what we felt like. Mother then p
ut her arm round Olive, and uttered the following rememorable words:

  “There, there! I see you’re sorry. Madeline’s all right!”

  It was then revealed that Mother had found Madeline in the road, crying and kicking her shoes in the dust. Mother saw there had been a worse row than usual, so she took the ill-starred Madeline in the carriage to Maidstone, and left her with Aunt Evelyn.

  “And you never told us, Mother,” we could not help saying.

  “Well, dears,” said Mother, “do you think you deserved to be told — until you asked? But I’ll tell you one thing without your asking. Madeline never told of you. I asked if there had been a quarrel, and she said No — she had just missed you in the wood and couldn’t find you. It wasn’t true, of course, but I don’t think you can call her a sneak after that.”

  * * * * *

  We never have. She came back next day, and the present writer would never have believed he could be so glad to see any sniveller as he was to see Madeline, safe and sound and uninjured by the Deed. The others felt the same.

  I have never said so to Mother or anyone else, and I am very sorry about the Deed in the wood, because it was five to one and most unsportsmanlike, as Father said when it came to his turn to jaw us about it; but I can’t help seeing that what we said and did in that wood instantly made Madeline cease sneaking. Of course I am not quite sure that the speeches would not have been enough without the Deed, but then I am not at all sure that they would.

  In the joy of nothing’s having happened to her we were jollier than before to Madeline, I believe. Mother said this made her jollier to us. But I’m not sure about that either. She certainly was jollier.

  And somehow we get on fairly all right with her now.

  And her sniffs were not intendedness, we have since learned, but hay-fever, which kings themselves have been subject to, and unable to command. Knowing this made us able to bear them better, though still irritating at times.

  But suppose there had never been a Deed? Mightn’t she have gone on being a sneak? And us not being jolly to her? The author concludes with a question from the poets: “Who can tell?”

  * * * * *

  The life of the human race is full of problems that haven’t got any answers, as the late Euclid has so truly said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN. THE MADNESS OF MADELINE

  You know in history the things that happen are kings being born and dying and getting married and wars and pestilences. When you are not in history but in your own life, you do not generally have much to do with kings: but the wars and the pestilences — I mean the rows and the illnesses — go on just the same for the humblest persons outside history. If it were not for these things there would be an awful sameness in most people’s lives.

  I do not mean that I like illnesses and rows, but if you look back on the most exciting events of your life, nice or nasty, you will find that many of them happened just before a row or after an illness. Think it over and you will see that I am right. Perhaps one reason why pestilences — measles and so on — are good for adventures is that the ones of you who haven’t got it, whatever it is, are always sent away to get you out of the way so that you shouldn’t get it. Thus you go to new places and new kinds of adventures come your way. Perhaps — but I won’t go on because what I have written is beginning to look like a prize essay, and it is really a story about what happened to us when the others had the scarlet fever. And it wasn’t exactly an adventure either. More like an event. But I will not anticipate. And I will not say whether it is nasty or nice.

  We went to stay with our Uncle Edward, who is a doctor. And I am sorry to say we did not feel our blessings. Though quite all right when at home the doctor uncle is out more and at odder times than ordinary relations. So that we were rather bored. Some people think that children cannot be bored. They little know. Quite a lot of things that look like being naughty are just from being bored. But a truce to this going on like an essay.

  We were bored. It was our being bored that led to the adventure or event I am now unfolding.

  It was the autumn when it was so wet. It rained for weeks, I think. And you could not play in the garden, and it is difficult to play in the house if it is not your own house and you haven’t got your own things there and you are expected not to make any noise at all. It was a jolly big house with lots of curiosities all over it, and bronze elephants on the dining-room sideboard. And a surgery for making medicines in, very interesting with different coloured bottles, and pestles, and mortars, and scales, and a balance, and a machine for nipping corks, and one for cutting up pills, and pill-boxes, and the round wooden boxes so useful for keeping specimens in. I liked it best of all the rooms, but you aren’t allowed there without a grown-up. I used to think when I was little that grownups spent their time in finding out what you liked and then saying “Don’t.” But I know now that this is not always the case.

  There were only Martin and I there and our cousin Madeline. The others were all at home in scarlet secludedness with the dreadful fever of that name.

  “Going on very well. No danger,” Father told us in a letter that smelt of the wet sheets they hang up outside your door if it is anything catching.

  We were sick of halma, ludo, and all the games we knew. Also of drawing, and writing letters to the wretched sufferers, because of course they were not able to write letters back even if it had been allowed in the catching state they were in.

  Of course Martin and I had more larks with each other than we had with Madeline; and I wish to be quite fair and own that she was a bit out of it. She is such a white mouse of a girl, and after all Martin and I are both boys. So you see it was quite natural.

  There is something about being bored that makes you kick the furniture. This annoys grown-ups very much, even if it doesn’t leave any mark. It was after our uncle had said what he did about our boots that Martin and I decided to go for a long explore and try to find Epping Forest, which someone told us was not so very far away. We did not take Madeline because Mrs. Peard, the housekeeper, said on no account with her cold.

  Madeline sniffed with furious disappointedness, and Martin said:

  “Nonsense; it’s better for only one to be wretched and the other two to be all right, instead of us all being blighted together.” And Clifford said: “Of course it is. Besides, I feel as if I might become like Nero if I don’t get out of this. We might pull your hair or pinch you if we didn’t go, Mads. Cheer up and be a man.”

  But she said she couldn’t and she’d be even with us yet, and we felt perhaps it would be good for her to have to buck up all by herself, and we went out.

  “But suppose I was to get like Nero?” she said the last thing before we went. But we did not think that likely.

  We did not find the forest, only rows and rows and rows of horrid little streets all browny yellow and all just alike. And rain all the time. When we were quite wet through we went back and caught it hot from Mrs. Peard. But we both felt better. Only Madeline didn’t seem to. When Mrs. Peard had finished giving it to us and making us change our things to the bedrock, we found Madeline sitting on the stairs seemingly a prey to wild despair. Her face was very dirty and she sniffed and gulped more than usual.

  “What is the matter?” we did not say, because if you do the sniffs and gulps turn into howls. Instead we prodded her with our indoor shoes’ toes to make her get up, and we all went down into the dining-room and looked out of the window.

  “It’s been raining like this all the time you’ve been away,” said Madeline, as if we didn’t know that a jolly sight better than she did.

  “Aren’t you sorry you didn’t take me?” she said. And we said, “No, we weren’t.”

  “Or stay with me?” she asked. And we said no to that too. And then it was tea-time. After tea we all got books. It is one of those houses where if your uncle is out, every day feels like Sunday afternoon or being in disgrace. Madeline had Hereward the Wake, but I could see she was not reading him. I said:

&
nbsp; “I say, Mads; you’re not stuffy with us for going out, are you?”

  And she replied: “I don’t know what you mean by stuffy. But perhaps if you hadn’t gone out I wouldn’t have done it.” We both put our books down because this sounded interesting. But do you think she’d tell us what she had done? No. Not though we asked and asked, and at last Martin, unable to bear it, offered her his new fountain-pen if she’d tell. She is an aggravating girl, more even than most girls, I mean. She would not take the pen.

  I should not have done it myself because I know what girls are, and you have to put up with them. But if Martin did twist her arm after that to make her tell I am not one to throw stones in my heart — though outwardly I had to tell him home truths about being a sneak and a rotter and all that. So there was a regular row and Mrs. Peard pounced on us and sent us all to bed.

  It must have been very late, quite ten or eleven, when I was awakened by a strange sound, more like a large and very clumsy mouse than anything else.

  I held my breath and listened, and the sound was repeated. It was quite dark, and Clifford owns that he had then wished that he had not been so sure about no nightlight the first evening when Mrs. Peard asked if we wanted any.

  He sat up in bed and said: “Who’s there?” just to show himself that he was not frightened. But he never expected anyone to answer and say who was there, and it was perfectly awful when a voice out of the darkness whispered, “It’s me.”

  He answered nothing, and the mouse-like noise began again. So then he got out of bed — he is a stranger to fear really, except when suddenly alarmed — and he found the matches and lighted the gas and blinked round the room. And there was Madeline with her hair in curl rags standing at the door on which she had been scratching.

  “What on earth?” said Clifford, very cross.

  “I scratched to wake you,” said Madeline.

  “You’d much better have shaken me or buzzed pillows at my head,” said Clifford. “What’s up?”