by Edith Nesbit
200
Stories, output and price estimated on past 6 months
160
Illustrations on past 3 months
187
Total
£634
“There’s your yearly income! How’s that for high?” she asked, flashing a glance of triumph at us.
We had known well enough that our income was increasing, that we no longer had, as Chloe said, to look all round every shilling. We had told Yolande, gleefully, the amount of every check we had received. But we had kept no accounts. She had.
We all three fell into each other’s arms, or something very like it.
“You shall have that book of Beardsley drawings for a Christmas present, Len,” said my wife, “and Yolande shall have a gold horseshoe brooch with turkisses in it, as becomes a sporting lady.”
“It wouldn’t become a bailiff and house agent,” said Yolande.
“Never mind. You shall have a bangle with a double dangling heart — ours — and an inscription inside that would get you a situation anywhere. And Chloe shall have—” I stopped.
“What, Len?”
“A very beautiful present, indeed. Something we never thought we’d have. No, I won’t tell you. It’s going to be a surprise.”
Yolande had taken off her veil, folded it very carefully, and driven three little turquoise-headed pins through it. Now she said, “I’m beginning to think that surprises are the best things in life — especially when one surprises one’s self.”
“Have you surprised yourself lately?” Chloe asked, picking up the rabbit by its ears. It had followed her, as usual.
“Very much.” I held my breath. The very cigarette trembled in my dusty fingers. Could it be that already that tenant had taught Yolande to be surprised at herself? A sigh of relief broke from me as she went on: “I am absolutely astounded — and charmed too, of course — at my own cleverness. But all this is a swan-song. I shall have my finger in no more pies — for good or ill. My career of usefulness is at an end. Henceforth I shall be a female fogy; never a pie shall be the worse nor the better for me. I shall cram young geese. No more and no less. Mark my words, I have gone up like the rocket, and like the stick I shall come down — if I have not already.” She took off her hat, and twisted the blue velvet and fur in her hands. “Mine is indeed a dark and terrible lot!” she said, smiling brilliantly at us. Then without more words she withdrew.
Chloe sighed, not sadly: “Poor, dear Yolande! I do really believe she doesn’t know what is the matter with her.”
“And what is?” I ventured.
“Make your own diagnosis.”
“Yours is?”
Silence.
“What is the matter with her?”
“Oh, nothing! Len.”
“Well?”
“I think I’m glad.”
“What of?”
“About her.”
“What about her?”
“Oh, don’t be tiresome!”
“What, do words fail you in a crisis? Mine are at flood.”
“No, don’t! You know what I mean.”
“I understand you to mean that you rejoice to see Othello’s occupation gone. You are glad that your friend has renounced her dearest pastime and will finger her neighbors’ pies no more.”
“Dog in the manger!” said my wife.
“No,” I said, eagerly. “I’m almost sure that I’m not quite sorry.”
“For what?”
“For her.”
“Why should you be?”
“Because I see,” I answered, slowly, “what you mean me to see — whether she knows it or not, she’ll soon be baking her own pies.”
“Yes,” said Chloe; “she’ll understand then.”
“Yes,” said I; “one understands many things when one bakes at home.”
X. THE INVADERS
“UGH-R-R-R!” I remarked, as we sat down to breakfast.
“I suppose it is,” said Chloe, pretending to shiver. “The Bandbox was warmer, certainly, but not much. Why do people make so much fuss about being too cold and too hot? Isn’t it odd that they’ve never found out the great truth — that one has to be cold in the winter and hot in the summer? And if one has to be cold, how much warmer it is to be cold here than in the Bandbox!”
“You mean that great possessions warm the cockles o your heart,” I said; “that’s because you’re all soul. As for me, I must warm my hands in the tea-cozy before I can carve the eggs.”
The white parlor, with its dark-panelled walls, its olive-green curtains, its sparkling brass and silver, and nothing white about it save the ceil- ceiling ing and the table-cloth, was a delightful picture of a breakfast-room. Chloe’s loose gown of turquoise-colored soft stuff with its brown furry trimmings became her to distraction. I told her so.
“But the tip of your pretty nose is pink,” I said. “It was quite white — with rage, I believe — the day you bit me so about my shaving-brush. Do you remember? And then the letter came enclosing the Red House and all our affluence! You had on some muslin thing that day—”
She shivered, almost in earnest this time, and poured out the coffee.
“Don’t talk of muslin!” she said. “Look, isn’t it fairyland? Only it’s a little hard to believe that our green garden has only gone to sleep, and means to wake up again in the spring.”
A light veil of snow lay on our green garden now, and on the thatched roof of the old summer-house and on the sun-dial’s face, whose sentimental expression had decided my wife to decide me to decide to live at the Red House. The snow lay in sheets, like cotton-wool, on the flat tops of the cedars; and the ivy round the windows, the creepers on the old arches, and the leaves of the tall box hedge were all outlined in sparkling white.
“It is a little different,” I said; “that day, when you wore — well, I won’t, then — and we had haddock for breakfast, and the letter came. By-the-way, my hands are warm enough to open letters now.”
There were only two. One was a bill for repairs to the roof — the roof, now spread with snow, where one warm, wet morning we had fought a flood with brooms and a dust-pan; a bill that did not discompose me, for I was used to that roof. No living plumber could make its repairs permanent. The other letter was type-written, and that by a somewhat inexperienced hand. It read thus:
Junior Blackheath Society of Antiquaries & Field Club.
Dear Sir,
At a Meeting of the Committe of thes dg Society it wasagreedt that a field day should.) be held on Dec 20 when the Society proposis to visit the interesting church of (x) Elmhurst andalsotheold Palace they call Kin (gons)Johns. Our president MrAlbert Morris F;J.B,S! has ob and so have the rest of us. tained permission to fo out on that day/ We venture to ask whether you would allowthe members of the Cociety to walk £ through your groundsa nd inspect from without of course your beauriful house, which is as you are doubtless aware of ? great ihstoric interest having been ½ for some years. We feel sure it was the 7; residence of the
celebrated amn you know who I mean. We hope if the frost ohlds you will not mind us skating on yuor moat.
I; am dear Sir, Yours faithfully, Edward Turnbull Hon. Sec.
P%S¼ Please excuse mistakes% ihave not learned the typewriter properyl yet.
Such was the letter. The more obvious orthographical errors had been carefully corrected with blue pencil, but, even so, the document was a remarkable one. Chloe read it, taking absent bites at her buttered toast.
“Mad?” she queried, calmly.
“I don’t know; the letter’s very conventionally worded, except in one or two odd places. Is it possible that a genuine society could possibly employ such a ghastly rough-sketch of a typist?”
“The letter’s not signed,” she remarked. “The secretary’s name is typed as well as the rest.”
“I knew a solemn ass named Turnbull, once,” I reflected, “but I thought he’d got into a bank somewhere in Kent — Tonbridge or Dartford, or something. He used t
o fool around with brass rubbings and dates and archæological bores—”
“I expect it’s the same man,” she said, indifferently. “But we don’t want the nasty society bothering here, do we? Write and tell him there’s nothing to see, and no one really important ever lived here till we did.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I wish I could be sure. Blackheath seems an unlikely place for it. If we were Woolwich, now, that simply bristles with improving societies; but I’ve a sort of idea this is a working-men’s society. If the poor beggars have got a holiday on purpose, and are really interested — or think they are — it seems a bit piggy not to let them, doesn’t it? We can keep a lookout from the loafery window and see that they don’t get into any mischief. They only want to look at the house ‘from the outside.’”
“I suppose they give an address?”
“Yes; Morden House, Blackheath. It sounds decent. I’m almost certain it’s a workman’s club. I’ll write and tell them they can come. You don’t really mind?”
“I’m not wholly a piggy-wig. But that letter’s odd, all the same. Perhaps it’s from a gang of thieves who want to come and see how the shutters are fastened.”
“Well, they can’t see that from the garden. Madam, I am beginning to realize that I am a proud man the day. Think of our position six months ago. Who would have wished to come and inspect, ‘from the outside, of course,’ our late lamented Bandbox? And now we are lords of the manor, holding the power of life and death over the field-days of antiquarian societies.”
“What I don’t like,” she went on, quite unappeased by this feudal picture, “is that about the skating. Why should antiquaries want to skate?”
“Now to me,” I rejoined, “that’s the most convincing touch of all. Of course these workmen don’t often get a holiday, and they want to make the most of it. ‘If the frost holds’ is a charming touch. It’s hardly begun yet.”
It did not hold. I signified to Mr. Edward Turnbull my gracious consent, and from that moment the snow began to melt, and the weather to settle itself down into something quite as warm and sunny as an English April, and far warmer than many an English May. A stray furze-bush or two at the end of our paddock broke into golden flower, and the skylarks sang in the pale blue above the orchard. The 20th was a day of cloudless beauty, and even in the midst of my mental congratulations to the members of the Antiquarian Society on their royal weather, I found room for a pang of sym- sympathy pathy for those among them who might have had their skates ground.
I recurred again that day, I remember, to our old life at the Bandbox. We were sitting in the loafery, now made cosey with curtains and a big wood fire. Chloe sat sewing in her rocking-chair. She had had some verses that morning, and, bad as they were, they had pleased her. There were seven stanzas, I remember. The first two were quite ordinary, and the other five got sillier and sillier, till at the end they were a mere jingle of nonsense — a sort of nursery rhyme, mostly written in the “little language.” The poem — Chloe really did call it a poem — began something like this:
TO CHLOE AT WORK
When Chloe sings
And sews and swings,
Rocked in her guardian angel’s wings;
When with dear, delicate finger-tips
She cuts and measures, sews and snips; —
Silent I worship at a shrine
Lighted for me, and warmed for mine,
By Chloe’s eyes and lips.
For what she knows,
And what she sews,
And all the hope that grows and blows
About her sewing, twine and twist,
And veil her in a rainbow mist;
Until I rub my eyes and say,
“Oh, can it be there was a day
When Chloe was unkissed?”
She liked it all, even the nonsense of the last five stanzas, and she said that she liked it none the less because it happened to be written on the backs of a green-grocer’s bill, the voting-card of a candidate for the school board, and two odd envelopes.
She said: “It is very pretty, Len. I didn’t know you ever noticed whether I was sewing or not.”
“You don’t know my observant nature,” I said, “and after all these years of married life, too.”
“It’s more than one year, anyway,” she said.
“Do you remember the day when you made me decide to leave the dear Bandbox?”
“Shall I ever forget it?”
“And that other dear day when you invented the loafery and we looked at the bars?”
“Let’s look at them now,” she cried, jumping up and dropping scissors, thimble, tapemeasure, and a mass of lace and muslin. When I had picked everything up we went to the window. The creeper’s leaves were gone now, and we stood between dull red curtains and looked out on the misty garden, where the dead leaves lay, patches of wet gold and brown in the faint sunlight, and where a robin on a leafless apple-tree was singing his very best, and pretending to the rooks in the elms that he was a thrush disguised in a scarlet waistcoat.
“Those Antiquarian brutes,” I said, presently, “they’ll be here directly. By Jove! they are here. They look horribly small. Can it be that the Junior Blackheath only admits dwarfs?”
“Those can’t be the Antiquaries,” Chloe cried. “Why, Len, they look like children! Lots and lots of them. What can they want? They look like a slice of a strayed, frayed school treat. And they’ve all got books, and they don’t seem to have got any grown-up people with them. Oh, do go and turn them out!”
“I’ll go and find out what they want—”
“Oh yes, and they’ll say they’re botanizing, or geologizing, or something, and you’ll let them stay, like you did the boys that wanted conquerors off the chestnut-trees, and overran everything. I’ve not forgotten it; I’ll go myself.”
She ran down the stairs, slipped her feet into the wooden sabots that she keeps for sudden winter garden excursions, and stumped off angrily down the path under the cedars. I took a short-cut between Jim’s celery-trenches. Chloe is terrible in her wrath, but if it grows too hot it boils over in tears of rage; and I did not wish Chloe to cry, and I not there.
The invaders were grouped round the sundial. All had their backs to us, and one of them was reading aloud. I caught a few words:
“....told the time when Charles the First was beheaded, and recorded the death-devouring progress of the Great Plague and the Fire of London. There is no doubt the sun often shone even in those devastating occasions, so we may picture—”
Then the reader heard the unmistakable threat in the emphatic stump, stump of Chloe’s wooden shoes, and stopped short. Her eyes were angry, her mouth expressed inhospitable intentions. I thought I heard a murmur of, “Oh, Crikey!” from the reader, but the next moment he had stepped towards my wife and taken off his cap with an oddly graceful flourish. He was a boy; there were other boys, who followed his lead in cap-doffing. There were girls, too, rosy-faced little girls in highwayman coats and scarlet Tam-o’-Shanters. The whole invading company were, as Chloe had said, “children.” And all wore spectacles.
“Do you know that this is a private garden?” said Chloe, severely. “You are trespassing, you know.” Her voice is very pretty, even when she is angry, and she was not nearly so angry as she had been before the boys took their caps off.
“It’s not your garden, is it?” asked the smallest boy of all, goggling at her through his spectacles, and speaking in an off-hand but perfectly agreeable manner. One of the girls shook him gently, and bade him shut up.
“We’re most awfully sorry,” said the boy who had been reading. “We wouldn’t have come if we’d thought you’d mind, but we’ve got a pass, so I thought it was all right. Here, hold my spectacles half a sec., Alice, and I’ll find it.”
The prettiest of the red-capped girls took the spectacles, and the boy felt in several pockets, while I drew near to offer Chloe my moral support.
“Here it is!” he said, at last, disentanglin
g a dingy paper from a mass of string, matches, envelopes, putty, and cobbler’s wax, and, with really a rather nice bow, he handed to Chloe — my letter to the Antiquarian Society!
“But this was not meant for you,” she said. “This is to Mr. Turnbull—”
“That was my fault,” said a younger boy — a thin, pale, anxious-looking child. “We tossed up who should copy out the letter on Albert’s uncle’s type-writer, and I was thinking about something else, so I copied it, name and all.”
Chloe put her hands to her head with a gesture of despair. I said: “Just think a minute. Remember, we’ve no idea what all this is about. Just tell us, right away from the beginning, how you came to be here, and what you want.”
There was a silence. Then the eldest girl said, “Oswald, you tell.”
The boy who had been reading twisted his cap, and stood uneasily on one foot. But almost at once he planted his feet firmly on the ground and began, looking Chloe straight in the eyes with a most disarming frankness.
“First of all, we are very sorry the lady is vexed, and we beg her pardon.”
“That’s all right,” said Chloe, unexpectedly. “Go on.”
“Well — when we were staying in the country some Antiquaries wrote to Albert’s uncle — this is Albert” — he pushed forward a shy boy in velvet knickerbockers—”and asked him to let them come and see his house. And we thought we should be feeling a bit slack in the holidays, so we thought we’d play at being antiquaries. And Albert’s uncle showed us this place once from the train when we were going to Bexley Heath, and he said some great person lived here once, and it was a historic place, and we can’t remember who it was. And he said a clever writer lived here now, and he told us the name. So we wrote to ask leave to come, and you gave it right enough.”
The voice was reproachful.
“Yes,” I said, completely melted by this unexpected recognition of my — or the ghost’s — talent as a writer. “Are you Mr. Edward Turnbull?”
“Rather not” — his tone was somewhat injured. “I was coming to that. We decided to copy out the letter that the real Antiquity secretary sent to Albert’s uncle, and Noël had to do it, because we tossed up about it, and he lost. And he got thinking of a poem he’s writing, and copied it, name and all — and only remembered it after we’d licked the stamp for the letter. So we thought it didn’t matter. And if you’d rather we’d been Mr. Turnbull, you wouldn’t have if you’d seen how thin his legs are, and how he couldn’t laugh because his mouth was so tight.”