by Edith Nesbit
“If what you’re saying’s correct, you come along of us to the parson — and you best come quiet,” said the Police.
“Quiet? I should like to know who wouldn’t be after the beano we’ve ‘ad,” the base voice said. “It’ll be a treat to be quiet, that’s what. The casual or the stone jug for me after this, is what I say.”
Then they unlocked the door, and two men came out. They were quite small, not much bigger than Martin. In fact, if you had measured Clifford against the taller of them I know which I think would have made the best show. Just poor little tramps they were, for all the baseness of their voices, and everything they said was true. How different from our coachman, Bilson, who has such a good character, “man and boy.”
It turned out that our cottage wasn’t ours at all. It wasn’t even on Father’s land. It was in the strip of land that goes with the Rectory — the Parson’s Shave, they call it. And the parson being a good old sort, used to let tramps sleep there. He kept two blankets hidden under a board, and none of the tramps, who seem to have been good sorts too, ever stole either of the blankets. He wanted the two Bases to go back and sleep there that night, but they said they’d jolly well had enough and wouldn’t.
The Rector, who is what I said, was most awfully decent about it when we explained, and said we might use the downstairs part for our very own in the daytime, if we cleared out before six and didn’t go there before ten. He came to tea with us, and said:
“Your domestic appointments are magnificent,” and drank four cups, besides cakes and biscuits.
It was Miss Knox who was the tragedy, the unfortunate adventure, and Martin going and fetching everyone — though I am too fair to blame him for it — simply left us a prey to that kind but detestable lady. After that she used to come every day almost, and bring her work and sit in the porch of the cottage and call out every now and then, “I hear you.”
“That’s right, dears, enjoy yourselves!” And she used to bring us chocolate — which was simply awful for us — feeling as we did.
The rest of the holidays turned into a sort of hide-and-seek, trying not to be found at the cottage when she came. But she was much cleverer at the game than we were. I wish to be fair to her, and I wish she had not given us the chocolate. But if I am to speak the truth, and not be like our coachman with the character, all I can say is that Miss Knox is a tragedy. I wonder if it is the same wherever she goes? Olive says it is dreadful to be a tragedy, we ought to be sorry for her; but the rest of us think we have enough to do being sorry for all the other people who haven’t done anything to deserve it, and have got to be the victims of a tragedy like her.
CHAPTER NINE. THE DWELLERS
It was when the parson came to tea with us in our house in the wood, which was really his house, that we first heard all about different kinds of dwellers. Martin told him that we had thought of building our house in a tree, but had given it up because of the broken and embedded saw. So then he told us about tree-dwellers and lake-dwellers and cave-dwellers and villa-dwellers — which are the only kind we know — and all of it was most interesting, though, I believe, perfectly true. They have found the bones of cave-dwellers mixed with bears and mammoths, he said, and they used flint weapons, and drew pictures in dark caves, and it is considered mysterious how they could see to do it — because matches and candles had not yet been thought of.
And the lake-dwellers did not live in the lake, like the cave-dwellers did in the caves, but in houses built on stilts that had their feet in the water — like Clifford had wanted to build in the willow wood that was so damp — and the tree-dwellers just lived in trees, as naturally they would. The parson said he did not think there were any tree-dwellers alive now except our poor relations. He meant the monkeys. But he said people still lived in stilted houses, and also in caves. If you are going to understand this story at all, you will have to attend to what I am now saying, even if I do seem instructive. I give you my word I will not go on being — not a single moment more than is necessary. I do not like it myself.
These different kind of dwellers I have been telling you about were ferocious savages, who sometimes ate their enemies. They were as fierce as they could possibly be, and wore hardly any clothes — only wild beast-skins. They were all like this, except the villa-dwellers, who are quite different and just like other people. That is all the instructive part. We now come to the narrative. Martin and Carlie were having measles and were in bed at the time, and so were wholly out of it. I mean out of the adventure I am now about to relate.
Their measled condition was half the cause of everything that happened. Measles is an infected disease, which means that if you are anywhere about where it is you catch it. It is a painful and snivelling disorder. I wonder Madeline did not catch it. She is always catching hay-fever, and I should have thought one sniffing disease was as easy to catch as another. But Madeline thought otherwise. She often thinks otherwise.
So when the fell plague had become known, and the others were put to bed, Olive and Alan and Madeline and the present author were sent off at once to stay with an uncle at Chislehurst, a spot we had never before visited. He was a newish uncle, having but recently retired from the Army (Artillery), in which and in India he had spent most of his manhood’s prime. Uncles who have been in the Army are more difficult to please than the plain kind of uncle. Accustomed as they are to unquestioning obedience of their regiments, they jump down your throat if you do the least thing. And there are not many books in their houses that you care about reading. At least, this was the case with the uncle on whose hospitable shore we were cast up by the measles. Noise upsets this kind of uncle more than you would think when you remember how noisy drums are, and soldiers’ boots, to say nothing of trumpets and guns, and the clash of battle.
When we had been at his house about forty-eight hours we were as near bursting as I ever wish to be. We seemed to have been holding our breaths ever since we came: and there was no getting away from the uncle. He pounced on you in his stiff military way, in spots you would have thought far out of his beat. But the Artillery motto is Ubique, which means all over the shop, and I suppose he had to practise being it. It was really wonderful how successful he was at it.
It was on the second morning after breakfast, which was porridge, eggs and bacon cold tongue, marmalade and toast, and only speak when you are spoken to, we met together in cautious despair in a summerhouse — very tidy and shiny with green paint, at the bottom of the garden — and Alan said:
“Measles lasts three weeks.”
“More than we shall, if this goes on,” said Clifford.
Madeline said: “I shouldn’t mind it so much if everything was different.”
And Olive said: “Well, everything is different from home. But it’s no use repining.”
“No,” said Clifford, “we’ve jolly well got to stick it.”
“Couldn’t we tame him?” Madeline suggested, as if retired Colonels were mice.
“It isn’t taming he wants, my child,” said Clifford, “he wants warming. It is iced water that flows in his veins — not blood at all.”
“We could easily do something to wake him up,” said Alan cheerfully.
“Let sleeping uncles lie,” said Clifford. “What we’ve got to do is to devise a plan to alleviate our desperate existence. Can’t anyone think of anything?”
Curiously enough no one could. Only at last Madeline said:
“We might take him into a wood and leave him there.”
This was what we had done to her, though very sorry for it afterwards, as you know, and she needn’t have mentioned it again when all had long been forgotten and forgiven. But Madeline is like that.
“I think some noble task would help us most,” said Olive, hurriedly, taking no notice of Madeline. “I shall buy some blue wool and knit him some bed-socks. In two shades.”
“I expect he’d like a nightcap better,” said Madeline. “A knitted helmet, you know, like they have in the Army. And eve
n some mittens. If he hasn’t any blood, like Clifford said, only iced water, he must always be shivering with cold. And I expect that’s what makes him so difficult to get on with. I always feel cross in the cold weather.”
Alan said not to be idiots, or we should never get anything decided, and Madeline said it wasn’t she who was the idiot, and it was some time before all hearts were pacified and at peace again.
“My only comfort,” said Clifford, “is that my collars won’t hold out. Three a day isn’t what they’ve been used to.”
“Well, you won’t be allowed to go home for more,” said Alan. “They’ll just send them along. Mine are pretty well over, too.” It is rare indeed for an uncle to notice what you have got on. Aunts are more observative.
“I suppose it’s being tidy himself,” said Olive. He was tidy, more so than I have ever seen anyone in human shape. No matter where he went he never got dusty. The muddiest day had no power over his boots — he never got blacks on his nose, even in trains. There are few uncles like him in this fair and untidy world. This was why he was always sending Clifford to put on a clean collar, little knowing how near The End of them was.
“But what can we do?” Alan impatiently asked.
“Grin and bear it,” said Clifford.
“I will bear it,” said Madeline, who always thinks what you say is exactly the same thing as you mean; “but grinning is vulgar, and it wasn’t my fault I upset my coffee at breakfast. I expected it to be tea, and it upset me when I found it wasn’t.” Nothing whatever came of this talk. I only tell it you to show you what it was like staying with that uncle.
Up to now the uncle had not punished us — and we had really not done anything deserving such conduct, either. But he had jawed, and that was enough to show us what it would be like when he did begin to punish. And we knew it would be improbable for us to go on doing nothing to excite his just vengeance. We feared the worst, and the worst happened, as it so often does, quite unexpectedly.
Like Minerva out of the head of Jupiter, the worst sprang full armed out of a tea and address to Serious Sergeants. The tea was in the garden with lots of buns and cakes, and the address was not quite fair really, because when once our uncle had got the Serious Sergeants there he loosed a whole pack of addressers on them — all old gentlemen, very long winded and eloquent, and they jawed quite without pause or tiredness. They were good stayers. One was a bishop.
We fled the scene as soon as the buns were over. The time seemed ripe for a game of silent “I Spy,” which we had long thought would be the bow-what-do-you-call-it of excitement. We never thought we should get to do it. But now every one was out in the grounds, even the servants, being addressed like mad — and the large quiet house with two staircases lay waiting our manœuvres. It is rather a fine game really. Clifford invented it. Instead of shouting “I spy!” you exchange meaning glances with the found, and there is always a paralysed period of glare before you start running or he starts catching you. The others have to take their chance. You run as quietly as you can, but somehow your movements are usually heard by the others.
Before beginning the game Clifford thought he would do a kind act for the tidy uncle. There was a bit of string with a knot sticking out from behind a piece of furniture, and Clifford cut it with his new knife and threw it away. Then with a happy something-attempted-something-done sort of feeling he started on “I Spy.”
It was all right till Madeline and Olive were chasing Alan and me and we came down the front stairs, and they came down the back to head us off, and we met at the hat-stand in the hall. We were all going a pretty good lick, and it was like four locomotives meeting at a railway accident. Or, rather five, for the hat-stand took a sudden and spirited part in the game. It waved itself a little in the air, and then down it came, burying us under an avalanche of coats, while high hats thundered around us on the marble floor, like discharges of artillery. There were losses on both sides. The hat-stand lost several pegs, Madeline’s head was bumped, Olive hurt her elbow, and I know I felt the place on my back for weeks. We freed ourselves from the hurtling hat-stand — it turned out afterwards it had always been of a wavering disposition and had to be controlled by string, which was what I had cut — and how was I to know? The uncle was simply frightful to the butler about it afterwards, said it was a living lie, and he ought to have had lead nailed under it if it wouldn’t stand upright by itself.
And when we had got free, and gazed around on the wreckish results the stoutest of us quailed. There was a Chinese jar that a missionary had looted from China and given to the uncle — it must have been a noble smash if only we could have seen it. And a brass tray dented — three umbrellas smashed right through their ribs, looking like broken-winged birds. But the high hats! The others did not seem to know, but Clifford knew, for he is nearly a man. They were bent, and rubbed up, and scratched. The hat-stand had fallen on one, and Olive had sat on another. All poetical dreamers who ever imagine anything must have imagined sitting down hard on a high hat as one of the heights of worldly bliss — but to do it like this without knowing about it at the time is not at all the same thing; it is a wasted joy besides being a devastating accident that no being awfully sorry for can wipe out. And, of course, when we picked up the most firmly sat-on hat we saw the loops of cord and knew it was the bishop’s. It would be. Life is like that.
We looked at each other and at the ruins of that once happy hat and hall and hat-stand. And we heard the Serious Sergeants clapping one of the addressers. We never knew which.
“Oh,” said Madeline, “I can’t bear it. Let’s hide till he’s got over it a little.”
“We ought to face the music,” said Clifford, who wishes to be a conscientious hero.
“We needn’t face it yet,” said Alan. “Wait till the Serious Sergeants have gone.”
“Let’s fly,” said Olive. “We can come back and face it better when our hearts aren’t going it like this, and when we’ve had time to find out exactly where we’re hurt, and how much.”
“We’ll leave a letter, then,” said Clifford, and with fingers that trembled not from fear, but because the hat-stand had trampled on them with its mahogany foot, he wrote on a leaf of his pocket-book:
“We are guilty, and we will come back and suffer for it when the Serious Sergeants are over.”
We signed our names, put the paper amid the ruins of the bishop’s hat, and stealthily lied. Clifford had the sense to conduct the flight by a roundabout route, that did not pass the addressed lawn, and that did happen to go through the pantry. Here the instincts of a born general taught him to provision his men for the march. We took bread and jam tarts, cake, and the departed remains of what was once a large fowl. Also cold sausages, and some stoned raisins we found in a basin. Ready for a pudding, I suppose.
Clifford, at the risk of capture, honestly went back and wrote on the paper: “We have taken some grub: necessity nose no law.” So it was not stealing.
We fled to the fence that is the end of the uncle’s domain. But this did not seem far enough. So we climbed the fence. I don’t know how we got Madeline over, but we did, and the tear in her frock has been mended since and does not show so very much.
“Only a fence, a simple oak fence.” Like they say in books about faded flowers. But what a difference! The uncle’s garden was tidy and gravelly — you couldn’t drop a bit of silver paper off butterscotch or spit out a cherry-stone without its showing. But here all was wildness and adventure. The trees were much taller, the undergrowth was thick and close like in tropical forests, there were ferns and brambles and dried branches and dead leaves, thick, and deep and rustling; and here and there patches of fine green turf, and soft, cushiony, green moss.
“No human eye,” said Clifford, throwing himself down on the green cushioniness, “can mark our proceedings.”
“It is a jolly place,” said Alan, and he sat down too, and so did Olive. But not Madeline. Oh no. She said it was sure to be damp, and she thought the nice dry l
eaves would be much better for us. So she went prowling about looking for an extra-dry place.
Clifford was lying on his injured back looking up into the trees, where it is so light and green, and you would like to nail a house up there and live like the Swiss Family Robinson.
He had just cut off six-foot lengths of nine by two-and-a-half dream-boards with an imaginary saw, to begin making the house, when howls met his ear.
Madeline, a prey as usual to conflicting destiny, was rustling and struggling among the leaves and saying: “Ow! Ow!” with despairing violence. She appeared to be on her knees.
“‘Ware snakes,” said Clifford with calm decision, and we all went — really quite quickly — towards Madeline.
We were nearly there — only the brambles were strong and twisty, because we went the nearest way, and interpeded our advance — when Madeline began to disappear — I saw her head going lower and lower, and if I had not known geography I should have said a boa constrictor had entwined itself about her reluctant form and was dragging her to its fell lair. But of course in Chislehurst this would be far from an everyday occurrence. On the other hand, if not a boa constrictor, what was it?
This was the question we all asked.
“What is it, Mad?” we asked in variating tones. “What is it?”
We now saw Madeline, buried in the leaves up to her elbows, which she was leaning on. “What is it?” we kept on saying. And she answered in the following remarkable remark:
“I have lost my legs,” was what she said. Again the serpent writhed through the fragile brain of Clifford, but was rejected as not likely in the garden of England, which, I believe, Kent is called.
“Lost your legs?” said Olive—”you can’t have.”
“Hold on to me,” said Madeline in accents of great terrifiedness; “if you don’t I shall lose all the rest of myself.”
“Why,” said Clifford, declining the serpent for good and all, “you must have fallen into a hole.” And he caught her by one arm, signing to Alan to catch the other. But Alan was not quick enough. Already the hem of Madeline’s dress was standing up round her in a frill. It looked like the petals of a black rose, which is a silly romantic idea, and it was Olive who thought of it afterwards.