by Edith Nesbit
And then the three were in another hansom, and the glitter and dazzle and noise of London streets were rolling away from in front of them like a bewildering, magic tide.
“Don’t you worry about anything,” Claud said soothingly, and broke a longish pause. “We’re going to be such chums as never were; and you’ll tell me all about your relations, and your plans for making your fortune. Oh, don’t deny it. Of course you’ve got some plan of that sort, or you wouldn’t be in Fitzroy Street. We’re all planting ladders against the sky to gather the stars, except the people who’ve gathered all they want and the people who have burned their fingers and don’t want anything any more. And I shall tell you all my great and noble ambitions and all about the girl I’m in love with, and I’ll show you where to go for cold beef, and where not to go for bread, and why you must buy candles at Jones’s, and paraffin at Smith’s; and we shall never cease to bless the day when we met each other. Is it a bargain?”
“I suppose so.” Daphne was relieved by this last speech. As long as this strange, wild, friendly boy was in love with another girl — she did not like the thought that this had answered. It wasn’t to be supposed that every one one met would fall in love with one at first sight like — Besides, this was a London hansom, not a French chestnut tree.
“But,” she went on, “what’s made quickly is broken quickly, isn’t it? If you make mends in such a hurry, does it last?”
“You’ll see,” he said. “Why do you suppose people waste all the time they do in preliminaries instead of swearing friendship the minute they set eyes on each other? It’s just because they aren’t sure, for quite a long time, that the other one’s the right sort. When you’re certain of that, why go on being stuffy and formal, and talking of Shakespeare and the polite arts? I’m quite sure of you. And you’re sure of me — aren’t you?”
She turned a little and met his honest eyes.
“It’s very odd,” she said, “but I am.”
“Then that’s all right. Now here’s a pencil.” He shifted the sleeping child a little — got out an envelope and paper. “You write down all you want, and I’ll go out and do your shopping while you get the dear to bed. Go ahead: Bread, candles, paraffin—”
“A lamp.”
“Butter. Got any knives?”
“No.”
“Knives, spoons.”
“Eggs?” Daphne suggested, timidly.
“Eggs. Tea. Sugar. Is that all? No — soap, of course, and coals and firewood. I’ll get the lamp and the oil first. Ah, here we are. And then there s a basin. Have you got a basin?”
He carried Doris up the three steep flights and Daphne held her while he spread mattress and blankets on the spring lounge.
“You won’t mind being in the dark just for a few minutes, will you? I’ll be back in a jiffy,” he remarked, and his boots sounded on the stairs in loud and swift retreat.
It was a very big, dark, empty room, illumined faintly by the lamps from the street below, and by the yellow diffused light of great London. The cisterns made sudden gurglings, the boards creaked. Daphne sat on the lounge with the child’s head in her lap. She was very tired, but her triumph had not yet worn itself thin.
“Oh,” she thought, as she heard the sound of returning footsteps, “if only Aunt Emily could see us now.”
It was good to rest, not even to offer help, while Claud lit two candles and set them upright in little pools of grease on the mantelpiece; then filled the new lamp, trimmed it, and lighted it.
The room leaped suddenly into light and possible comfort.
“Get her to bed,” said the boy, “and I’ll go and get the other things.”
When he came Sack Daphne had hung up some big shawls, that had been her mother’s, across the three front windows. For the others the night itself would have to serve as curtains, since curtains were among the things she had not remembered to buy. He set down the packets on the table and stood a moment in silence. Then he said, with a shyness that was not at all in the mental picture she made of him:
“I say. I haven’t rushed you, have I? You do want to be friends, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, and truly.
“Yes — you think so to-night. But you’re tired and everything’s new. If you feel different about it to-morrow, it’ll be all right. I shan’t mind — at least, of course I should mind horribly. But I shall understand. And you needn’t be afraid I shall come bothering you. If you want anything, you’ve only got to come down one flight — any time; if I’m out, you could shove a paper under the door. What I mean to say — if you do care to be friends, it’ll be splendid. And if you don’t — well, we’ve had one jolly evening, haven’t we?”
“Thank you,” said Daphne. “Good night. Oh, I do hope your own things have come. I oughtn’t to have kept you dog-dancing about after my errands.”
“Dog-dancing’s my favourite exercise,” he said. “Good night. Sleep well, cousin. You are my cousin, you know, even if you decide that I’m not to be yours.”
“Good night — cousin,” said Daphne, and closed the trap-door softly. She stood quite still for a long time. Yes, this was all very interesting and like real life, but in the morning she would have to go and see Uncle Hamley. She felt in her bones that no uncle who ever lived would approve of such a cousin.
And it was only when she awoke in the grim dawn and looked out on the blackened Bloomsbury roofs that she remembered, with a shock, quickly spreading into transverse ripples of changing feelings, that she did not know Uncle Hamley’s address. It was Something and Hamley, solicitors, but she did not know even the initial of the Something.
She had what was left of the twenty pounds, her jewellery, her clothes, Doris’s clothes — and nothing else in the world but her brave heart and undisciplined courage. She thought as she dressed, and heart and courage did not fail her.
“Wake up, my bird,” she whispered at last in the ear of the sleeping Dormouse. We’re all by our dear lone, and we’re going to have a lovely breakfast with buns in it. You get up and see how many of your clothes you can get on while I run for the milk. And be sure you wash properly.”
She met the postman on the steps as she went out, jug in hand; but he had, naturally, no letter for her.
But at that very moment a thick foreign letter was falling with a thud in the large empty letter box at Laburnum Villa. It was not a house where many letters came.
Aunt Emily fingered the letter, looked at the foreign stamp.
“Jane,” she said, “I wish you would go up to my room and bring me the blue envelope that’s lying about somewhere, or else in the wardrobe.”
And when Jane was gone, “I suppose I ought to read it,” she said, screening her curiosity with the imperative; “it may throw some light on the girl’s extraordinary conduct.”
Uncle Harold suggested waiting a few days. “She may send an address, or go to Uncle Hamley.”
“I should open it now,” said Cousin Henrietta. “You’ll do it in the end, Emily. It’s no use making two bites of a cherry.”
The envelope yielded two foreign sheets, closely written.
“Why, it’s another from that man!” said Aunt Emily; “he’s got someone else to address it.”
“What man?’ Cousin Simpshall asked keenly. “Oh, there have been one or two letters — quite an undesirable sort of man, I should say. Not a word about marriage in any of them. Uncle Harold and I thought it best to say nothing about them.”
“You’ve been opening her other letters?” said Cousin Henrietta.
‘‘Of course — it was our duty as her guardians.” Mrs. Veale opened the letter and read.
“Well!” she said, when she had turned the last page, “she’d better not have been so hasty. I shouldn’t wonder if he was to come to the point in time.”
“Oh, dear,” said Cousin Henrietta, “that’s a pity.”
“Ah,” said Aunt Emily, triumphantly, “she should have thought of that before.”
She folded the letter and put it back in its envelope. “More tea, Henrietta?”
“Look out,” said Uncle Harold. “The urn’s running all over the tray.”
“So it is,” said Aunt Emily, dropping the letter in the little lake. “There, it’s no good now. I may as well burn it.” She threw the letter in the fire.
“Well!” said Cousin Simpshall, “I must say you are thorough, Emily.”
“Who was it from,” Uncle Harold asked; “anybody in particular?”
“English master in a French school,” said Aunt Emily, “signed S. T. Hilary. No definite proposals. Only a lot of twaddle about chestnut trees and princesses. Oh, depend upon it, she’s better without it.”
“Shan’t you ever tell her?” Cousin Henrietta asked curiously.
“That,” said Aunt Emily, “will depend entirely on how she behaves when I find her.”
“I can’t find any blue envelope,” said Cousin Jane, returning,
CHAPTER IX. STRANGER
I’VE washed me all beautiful,” said Doris to Daphne returning milk-laden, “and I do like the basin being on the floor, and I’ve got everything on that will go without having to come off again for everything eke to be stringed and buttoned. And do me up, Daffy dear. And that tree that’s in the fairy prince’s room comes right up here and looks in at me. There it comes!”
The plumes of the great ash rooted in the blackness of the Bloomsbury back-yard swayed in the wind and the sun. Daphne, leaning through the window, saw the slow, happy shivers run from the topmost leaves down slender branches to the very base of the tree-trunk.
“Good morning,” said Daphne to the tree. “It’s very kind of you to come and see us like this. Button own shoes, my Dormouse, before the tree looks in again. Here s milk and buns and eggs and bread and butter. What a breakfast we’re going to have.”
“No nasty aunts to say, ‘Sit up, Doris, and don’t slop your milk and crummle your bread in that disgusting way!” The words were Doris’s but the voice was Aunt Emily’s.
“You mustn’t slop your milk or crummle your bread here, beloved. This is our own house and we must keep it tidy.”
Doris was almost too careful not to crumble her bread, and breakfast was a long meal.
“Isn’t it lovely with no aunts and things?” She breathed a bread-and-buttery sigh. “I think heaven will be just like this, Daffy.”
The large loneliness of the big room, the steady growl of the great city outside, abashed Daphne a little. It made her feel very small, very helpless. But, presently, very brave. All the doors she had tried had opened to her touch: she had led the school, cajoled Madame, outwitted the relations. She was here, free — with Doris. The door that had money on the other side would open if she pushed hard enough. She straightened her shoulders and threw back her head and set her face sternly, a little fiercely.
“What are you going to do?” the child asked anxiously through a mug of milk—”not go and tell aunts what you think they are? Don’t let s, Daffy.” Daphne laughed and began to clear away the breakfast things.. There was plenty to do — the bed to make, the furniture to arrange, the room to sweep. They went out to buy a broom in Googe Street for the purpose, and bought as well a drooping bunch of peonies. By lunch time — it was just like breakfast, Doris said, and so it was — the room looked less forlorn.
“We’ll have a curtain right across that end,” said Daphne, flushed with rapturous responsibilities, “and that’ll be our bedroom; and a curtain across the corner where the sink is, and that’ll be our kitchen. And the rest of the room will be our diningroom and drawing-room and schoolroom and—”
“Why schoolroom?”
“Because Dormice have got to learn.”
“I thought,” said Doris, injured, “that we were in a fairy-tale. With two princes,” she added contentedly. “I would like to see the train one again. Wouldn’t you, Daff?”
“Yes — no — I don’t know. We shan’t anyway,” said Daphne. “Now what does C A T spell?”
“You,” cried Doris, bubbling with the delightful laughter of a child at its own joke. “You — if you make it lessons. Don’t you think holidays now, to get us to forget Laburnum aunts?”
“Well, for to-day. We’ll go and buy curtains. Let’s measure the windows.”
The windows measured, they went and bought curtains. The stuff was only eighteenpence a yard, and Daphne told herself that nothing could be cheaper. Yet when she came to pay the bill it was a five-pound note that was inside the magic ball that was jerked up into a network of overhead lines and rolled away across the shop, delighting Doris; and the ball returned holding only one gold coin, a very little silver, and a thin, gray bill.
But when the curtains came home a week later everyone agreed that they made all the difference. I say everyone, because Doris had a tea-party that day, and her guests helped her to hang the curtains. That is the best of Bohemia. One is not expected to keep the real pleasures of life to oneself. If one buys a new carpet or new curtains all one’s friends crowd round with sympathetic interest. Even a new kettle is an event to which no spectator can really be indifferent.
But the next day, after the house work had been done, a little of the Regent’s Park explored, and dinner eaten and cleared away, the afternoon stretched long and empty ahead. There was no tea-party to look forward to. Daphne had no reason to suppose that there ever would be a tea-party. The excitement of flight, the agitation of the terror of pursuit, had died out. This — the quiet, spacious room with the scattered, insufficient furniture, the ceaseless moan of London underlying its silences — this was the fabric of life to which events, of any kind, would be only decorative embroideries. Daphne perceived that it might be a beautiful fabric —— but she wanted to set bright stitches in it. And materials were lacking. There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a great town. This has been said before, but it is true for all that. She had heard no more of Claud Winston than his boots on the stairs below. She had seen nothing of him at all. He was keeping his promise. He would not come and bother. Well, that was nice of him. The next step in the acquaintance would have to be hers. And she did not choose to take it. Yet she felt a strange sympathy with the child who wanted so very much to go and scratch at the door of the fairy prince’s room.
“And when he opened it I’d play I was panthers. He’d like that.”
But Daphne said, No. The fairy prince was very busy, no doubt, and did not want Dormice, however dear. Life looked a little blank. Daphne was fully confident of her power to conquer the world — but to do that she must come to close quarters with it, and it looked now a prickly, hedgehoggy thing, hard to get hold of. Where ought one to begin? She felt empty — flat — blank, and found herself wishing that Doris had the habit of the afternoon sleep. She wanted to lose herself, to forget herself, to read, to write. And here was the child, talking, exacting. Till now most of Doris’s time had been spent with other people — in classes at school, with the servants, or in the presence of the aunts at Laburnum Villa; and the sisters’ moments together had had the value of the stolen meetings of unaccredited lovers. Now they would be always together.
‘Let’s do something, Daffy,” the child urged, and a little pang shot through the girl. Were they going to be bored — they two? It was like the pang that sometimes pierces the golden hangings in Love’s palace at about, say, the third week of the honeymoon.
She had wished to be always with Doris. Well, now she was going to be always with her.
“What can us do?” Doris said. She had slipped out of her sister’s arm and was wandering aimlessly round the room, looking dully at the furniture that had seemed so interesting when it was in dusty disorder, clamouring for arrangement. Now it was arranged. Everything was neat now, neat with the dreadful neatness that follows a “good tidy-up.”
“Shall I tell you a story?” Daphne asked, but without heart. Doris accepted the offer with crushing alacrity. And the story was very dull. For the first time the tale came with ef
fort; ideas were shy and words hard to find.
“I don’t think,” said the child, when the lame ending was reached, “I don’t think that’s a very nice story. Tell another.”
“I can’t,” said Daphne. “Look here, we’ll play noughts and crosses; and to-morrow we’ll go out and buy a real game in a box.”
Doris wanted to know what game, and Daphne did not know what game. The game at present was to be noughts and crosses.
“But I’m tired of noughts and crosses,” said the child, wrinkling up its face, “ever so dreadfully tired, you can’t think. I wish Cook was here, don’t you? She is so funny.”
At these dreadful words a sudden wave of misery swept over Daphne. This, then, was the end of everything. She had run away with Doris — for the child’s sake — she was prepared to devote her life to the child, she had loved her and taken care of her all her little years, and now, when for the first time the two were alone together for a couple of days, she had lost her power, her charm, and the child wanted—”the cook!”
The cisterns gurgled mockingly.
Her eyes, suddenly pricking, saw the pink, fluffy balls of the peonies that had stiffened their stalks in the water, showing green through the glass jam-jar found by Doris on the landing below; saw them clearly, then distorted and discoloured through the prism of tears that she did not choose to shed. She kept her eyes wide open, and jumped up shaking her lead so that the tears fell on the bare floor. She went to the window and looked out. The ash-tree swayed softly, and its green fingers stroked the window. Beyond, all the windows of those blackfaced houses that went down so deep and up so high, and in every room, no doubt, someone was being unhappy, or had been, or would be. It was an ugly world, very large, very lonely. On the terrace at school at this hour the girls would be walking up and down eating their thick slices of bread, thinly smeared with dark-red jam. Not thinking of her, of course — why should they?