by Edith Nesbit
“I’d much rather have you,” said Chloe, smil- smiling ing; and as she smiled I could see how deeply all present fell in love with her on the instant. “I’m sorry I didn’t understand. We won’t interfere any more. You’d like to go on reading your papers. Who wrote them?”
“We’ve each done one,” said the eldest girl — she was a little prim, and not so pretty as the others—”only mine is all out of a book, because it is so difficult to think of things.”
“Do you always wear spectacles?” I asked.
They all laughed. It was a very pleasant sound, this peal of young laughter in our old garden.
“Oh no!” said the prettiest girl, “only to make us look like learned antiquities — antiquaries, I mean. It was an awful bother collecting them all; some of them have no glass in.”
“One more question,” I said. “If you’re not Edward Turnbull, who are you?”
“We’re the Bastables,” the biggest boy said, with a sort of shy pride, as if he were confessing, in his modesty’s despite, to royal lineage. “I’m Oswald, and these are Alice and Dora; Noël’s the one who typed the letter; and this shaver is H.O.; and these are Daisy and Denny Foulkes; and Albert Morrison I told you about before.”
“You’ll have lunch with us, won’t you?” asked Chloe, abruptly, picking up her blue train and fixing her feet in her wooden shoes. “I don’t think there’ll be much, but we can make out with bread and jam—”
“I like you,” said the smallest boy, before the others could answer. “I like you very much, indeed, and I’ll have lunch with you, whatever it is.”
The others murmured thanks, and we left them to their play.
“Aren’t they perfect dears?” said Chloe, when we were out of earshot. “I don’t like the Morrison boy, but the others are lovely. Why aren’t all children nice?”
“They all are — if they have nice grown-ups belonging to them,” I said, enunciating lightly a tremendous dogma. “But, darling and reckless one, do you know that there’s nothing in the house but cold neck of mutton, and even that, if I remember right, is invidiously distinguished as being not the best end?”
“I know,” she said; “but you must go up to Elmhurst and get things: tinned tongue — children always adore tongue — and candied pineapple and tangerine oranges in silver paper, and nuts, and bananas. Oh, I do think children are so nice! I wish these weren’t so big. The smallest boy, the one they call H.O., he’s simply a duck.”
“Oswald for my money,” said I, “and Alice! Make a list of what I’m to get, and I’ll be off. It’s half-past twelve now.”
I left Chloe laying the table for eleven in the white parlor. When I came back the cloth was spread, but Chloe had vanished. I found her in the garden submerged to the shoulders in a wave of children, and she carried nine pairs of spectacles in her hand. We all went in to lunch. I was now a mere outsider. Chloe, by some art unknown to me, had become one of the children, and was the most childlike child of all. The others really were not bad children. I don’t think I ever met any so full of enthusiastic energy. As a permanency, they might have been a little wearing, for, strong in Chloe’s extraordinary assumption of esprit de corps, they now threw away all shyness, and talked to us with simple directness of adventures, of contemporary literature, of the ways of Providence, and their own vital ambitions. They had a very full flow of conversation, and a much larger vocabulary than I remember having at their age. What struck me most was their confident assumption that, now we knew them, we could not help liking them; and the assumption was, I own, justified. This assumption was particularly marked in Oswald. He evidently thought a good deal of himself, but, as I could not but reluctantly acknowledge, with some justice! They were extremely “free in their talk,” as Mary said afterwards, but never vulgar. And they were very much funnier than they meant to be. The lunch, for which Chloe had madly brought out the best green-and-gold table-centre, charmed them. I had not thought that Chloe could be so thoroughly inspired with any menu. When no one could eat any more, the children looked at each other, and Dora, the prim one, said, quite unconscious of the evidence of rehearsal with which her speech bristled,
“Thank you very much for letting us come, and for having us to lunch.”
“And for getting such a jolly lunch,” said the pale boy. “I think it is splendid. If you will give me a piece of paper and a pencil I will write you a piece of poetry about it.”
While I was getting these I heard the prim child say anxiously to Chloe:
“I hope you don’t mind. He will do it. We can’t stop him.”
“It comes of his having bronchitis so often, I think,” said the stout child they called H.O. “It isn’t really his fault.”
There was an awkward pause while the pale child sucked my pencil and rolled his eyes. He made the most shocking grimaces I ever saw, but when Chloe turned anxiously to Oswald, he said,
“It’s all right; he’s not ill; it’s only the poetry working out of him.”
Presently he stopped writing, folded the paper very small, and said suddenly and earnestly,
“Have you got a secret staircase here?”
We owned our indigence in this respect.
“We have at the Moat House,” he said. “Have you explored your house thoroughly?”
“Yes, I think so,” said Chloe, with a glorious inspiration, adding, “but you may explore it if you like. Don’t make too much hay, that’s all! Off you go!”
Noël pressed the paper into Chloe’s hand and they rushed from the room, and as they went I heard the words “jolly good sort.”
I drew a long breath.
“What a whirlwind!” I said.
“Children do make a difference in a house,” said Chloe, wistfully.
“They do,” I said, kissing her ears, “all the difference.”
She gave me a doubtful glance.
“My dear little old wife,” I said, “people might think themselves lucky if their children were half as nice as these.”
“They are dears, great dears,” she said, and then we read Noël’s poem:
TO THE BLUE PRINCESS LADY WITH THE LUNCH
How good you are to give us lunch,
With pineapple and tongue to munch.
It is a generous thing to do,
And we are very pleased with you.
It is a wonderful thing to find
How many people in the world are kind.
If you would let us explore your house,
We would not harm even a mouse,
And perhaps we might find a pot of gold
Too heavy for you to hold.
Then we should have made your fortune. So
Please do let us go.
You will if you are at all wise.
We should like to find the gold
More than you can hold,
Because you are so soft and blue and pretty and nice.
“Two poems in one day,” I said. “Oh, Chloe, beware of vanity.”
“The dear!” she said. “And, Len, it’s not half bad, is it? What extraordinary children!”
I could hear the wave of children surging wildly about the house. I lighted a cigarette, and strove for calm. I seemed to have been living in the embrace of a friendly tornado.
Chloe looked at me anxiously.
“They are dears,” she said, for the fourth time. “I do hope they haven’t worried you!”
“Worry’s not the word,” said I. “They have electrified, bewildered, enlightened. I never saw children with such energetic enthusiasms. The Morrison boy is a muff; but the others, they are very trusting. The world must have been kind to them.”
“Anybody would be,” she said, “and I hope the world always will.”
There was a silence in the house. I went to see whether the exploring party had drowned itself in the rain-water cistern, which is just the sort of thing that kind of child would do. No; Mary said they were exploring the cellars. As she spoke I heard a thunderous report reverbe
rating below. Our cellars are large and vaulted; from recollections of my childhood, I could conceive that they might seem well worth exploring. But I had not all Chloe’s confidence in these strange children. From the little I had seen of them I felt that they were quite capable of organizing a Guy Fawkes play, and carrying it out with scrupulous, enthusiastic fidelity if one of their number should happen, as seemed only too likely, to have any matches and loose gunpowder in his pocket.
Yolande had just come from town, and by a curious coincidence our tenant had come on the same train. I left them talking to Chloe, and went down the cellar steps. Half-way down I was met by an incredibly cobwebby boy.
“I was just coming after you,” he said, eagerly. “Do you know, we’ve found a door behind some beer-barrels, and Oswald and Denny got in from behind under the dining-room floor; they’re hammering on the other side of the door now. There are barrels in front of the door. We rolled one away. Did it make an awful row? They say there’s all sorts of things inside. Did you know it was there? And please can we have a candle and matches? We’ve used all ours.”
One-half at least of my foreboding was justified. I wondered where they had dropped the hot heads of all the matches they had used.
I got some candles and matches, and the cobwebbed child, whose name appeared to be Dickie, led me to a cellar where barrels were piled. Behind them I could just discern the shadowy outline of a door, from which came an intermittent knocking and voices:
“Have you got him?”
“Can you get the barrels away?”
“Can you get the door open, or shall we come back under the floor for the candles? It’s a beastly tight fit, and I’ve split my waistcoat as it is.”
“The last match we lighted we saw some chairs and a mangle.”
There were three boys still in evidence, and the tenant had followed me to see the sport. The girls were as energetic as the boys, and one by one we rolled the barrels away. Curious that Chloe and I had never looked behind those barrels. The door was not fastened. It opened easily, and a shower of dust and cobwebs fell on the heads of the explorers who first pressed forward.
From my soul I congratulated these children. Even to such an adventurous band as this an adventure so exciting could not happen every day.
They were quite right. There was furniture in the inner cellar, odds and ends stowed away, to make room for new stuff, by busy, thrifty hands now long since folded in lavish idleness — hands that, in their life-day, could never bear to destroy or to waste.
We carried the things up-stairs — all but the vast box-mangle and one other thing which I said I would carry up myself later.
We bore into the kitchen, and displayed to the dazzled eyes of Chloe and Yolande, and the con- contemptuous temptuous ones of Mary, a full-sized oak dresser — in four pieces; five chestnut-wood chairs, more or less dilapidated; an oak settle — the seat was broken, but, oh, how our hearts rejoiced in the severe beauty of its panelled back! three ladder-backed chairs — seats gone; a large gate-table; an elm kneading-trough; and the magnificent wreck of a carved four-post bedstead!
The children were as delighted as we were, which is saying a good deal.
“I said we would,” said the poet, triumphantly. “It’s not gold, but it is nice. You have lots of nice things. I like the way you stick up warming-pans and brass candlesticks instead of plush brackets and crinkly ornaments.”
A most discerning child, truly! When the children had been partially cleaned, our tenant invited them all to tea at his cottage. Yolande and Chloe went to help.
When they were gone I went down to the cellar and fetched the thing I said I would carry myself. I bore it up to the loafery and cleaned it, and polished it, and mended it a little, and set it by the hearth, in the glow of the fire; and that evening when Yolande and the tenant were deep in chess, I beckoned Chloe, and took her up to the loafery, and, lighting the candles, bade her look.
“Oh, Len,” she cried, throwing her arms round my neck, “it’s miles better than the one we go to look at in the shop in Great Portland Street!”
“I meant to give you that for a Christmas present,” I said, “but this is better.” She fell on her knees beside it.
“Oh, look at the dear little daisy carving on the sides, and the little strong panelled hood, and the rockers! Oh, Len, it is lovely! Where did it come from?”
“It was in the cellar,” I said. “Do you like it? No; it’s absurd to thank me; thank those outrageous, dear Bastable children.”
“I will,” she said, coming nearer to me. “Len — I’ve said it before, I know, but they are dears — and they shall come and see the cradle they found when — when it’s better worth looking at.”
Presently my wife took me into our room, and, unlocking the corner drawer, showed me all that was in it. Little, little things.
XI. THE ROOM FOR CONFIDENCES
CHRISTMAS in the Red House was charming. It made us feel like pictures on Christmas cards. Chloe and I flatly refused to have anything to do with the decorations. We had had enough of evergreens when we decorated our drawing-room with the loops and swags for the great house-warming party. And rather than we would touch box or yew or laurel or holly again, the Red House should go undecorated. We said so, but our tenant insisted that no decorations at Christmas would be the first step towards the downfall of the British constitution and the death-blow to the naval supremacy of England.
“Let me do it,” he said. “I’ve had my Christmases in such odd, out-of-the-way places — ships and ranches and diamiond-fields — I haven’t put up a sprig of holly since I was a school-boy. Miss Riseborough, you’ll help me, I know.”
“I know I won’t,” said Yolande. “I never do things with my fingers. I’ll inspect and direct and overlook, and earn the wages of superintendence, if you’ll make Mary bake them—”
“Scones, I suppose,” said Chloe. “There are heaps of string in the cellarette, and don’t take my best scissors — the old ones are in the table drawer.”
“How good we are growing,” I said. “Fancy you knowing where anything is.”
“We’re reformed characters,” she answered, gayly. “Where are the pencils and the India rubber?”
I felt a pang. Was it possible that Chloe had any suspicion? Could she possibly guess that it was I, and not Yolande, who finished drawing her pictures for her? No, she certainly could not. And I more than half wanted to tell her my secret. Yet I could not make up my mind to part with it. I had nursed it in my heart till it had grown very dear and precious.
We left Yolande enthroned on the settle, di recting the labors of our tenant, but when the gong summoned us to tea and the wages-of-superintendence-scones, we found our tenant working at one end of the wreath, and Yolande busy at the other. It was not such a very long wreath as to have needed two pairs of hands, either. To do Miss Riseborough justice, she looked very much ashamed of this lapse from the principles of a lifetime.
“My hands are very dirty,” she made haste to say, “and I think that many of the deserving poor would have been glad to add a little to their slender incomes by putting up your grimy evergreens for you; but—”
“Don’t apologize,” I said. “We understand perfectly. We’ve infected you at last. It is nice to do things with one’s hands, isn’t it?”
“Not in the least. It is very tiresome and very fatiguing; but some one had to do it, it seems, and I at least could not sit by and see your tenantry ground down without a word of protest, or the holding out of a helping hand. I hope there are many, many scones, and very, very buttery. We deserve some reward.”
After tea the work was resumed, and the hall, stairs, and white parlor were all hung with shining wreaths before dinner-time.
“Yolande can work,” said Chloe to me, in confidence. “It’s odd that her perverse abstention from really interesting things has not made her clumsy.”
“As if a hand the shape of hers could ever be clumsy,” I said, “any more than a hand
like yours could ever grow coarse.”
“It might have done,” she said, “if you and I had gone on doing all the house-work. We ought to be very grateful to Yolande. She has practically organized the whole of our future for us. We are settled, fixed, planted — yes, that’s it — we grow, ourselves, of course, but she has planted us in the right soil, with exactly the right aspect. Now our dear little characters can develop beautifully, and our hands keep pretty, and no wrinkles come in our nice, smooth foreheads. You’ve been a little I don’t know what about Yolande. But you must own that what she undertakes she does well.”
“Even to the red-branding of suspected fruit-thieves — yes.”
Yolande was spending Christmas at the Red House, and, it being Christmas Eve, the tenant dined with us. We had a merry evening. We had lighted a huge fire in the big, empty drawing-room where the piano was; Chloe played waltzes, and Yolande danced with me and with the tenant. When the dancing was over Chloe and I sat by the fire and the others went out to look at the stars from the balcony.
“Ah, youth, youth!” I sighed.
“They will catch their deaths of cold,” said Chloe, prosaically.
I whispered: “Chloe, in a very short time those people will come through that French window with the announcement of their engagement on their lips. This is the tamest love-affair I have ever witnessed. Everything has gone far too smoothly. Yolande has fallen in love obviously, bluntly, without any of those fine shades and nice feelings which you will remember to have noted in other cases — our own, for instance. She has grown rather dull.”
“Don’t talk so loud,” said Chloe.
“As for him,” I went on, “happiness exudes from him like — like turpentine from the pine-tree, or oil from the skin of the castor, or beaver.”