“It’s no good,” said Peter, when all of them had thought and thought till their heads felt quite heavy and swollen; “if we can’t think of anything to amuse him, we just can’t, and there’s an end of it. Perhaps something will just happen of its own accord that he’ll like.”
“Things DO happen by themselves sometimes, without your making them,” said Phyllis, rather as though, usually, everything that happened in the world was her doing.
“I wish something would happen,” said Bobbie, dreamily, “something wonderful.”
And something wonderful did happen exactly four days after she had said this. I wish I could say it was three days after, because in fairy tales it is always three days after that things happen. But this is not a fairy story, and besides, it really was four and not three, and I am nothing if not strictly truthful.
They seemed to be hardly Railway children at all in those days, and as the days went on each had an uneasy feeling about this which Phyllis expressed one day.
“I wonder if the Railway misses us,” she said, plaintively. “We never go to see it now.”
“It seems ungrateful,” said Bobbie; “we loved it so when we hadn’t anyone else to play with.”
“Perks is always coming up to ask after Jim,” said Peter, “and the signalman’s little boy is better. He told me so.”
“I didn’t mean the people,” explained Phyllis; “I meant the dear Railway itself.”
“The thing I don’t like,” said Bobbie, on this fourth day, which was a Tuesday, “is our having stopped waving to the 9.15 and sending our love to Father by it.”
“Let’s begin again,” said Phyllis. And they did.
Somehow the change of everything that was made by having servants in the house and Mother not doing any writing, made the time seem extremely long since that strange morning at the beginning of things, when they had got up so early and burnt the bottom out of the kettle and had apple pie for breakfast and first seen the Railway.
It was September now, and the turf on the slope to the Railway was dry and crisp. Little long grass spikes stood up like bits of gold wire, frail blue harebells trembled on their tough, slender stalks, Gipsy roses opened wide and flat their lilac-coloured discs, and the golden stars of St. John’s Wort shone at the edges of the pool that lay halfway to the Railway. Bobbie gathered a generous handful of the flowers and thought how pretty they would look lying on the green-and-pink blanket of silk-waste that now covered Jim’s poor broken leg.
“Hurry up,” said Peter, “or we shall miss the 9.15!”
“I can’t hurry more than I am doing,” said Phyllis. “Oh, bother it! My bootlace has come undone AGAIN!”
“When you’re married,” said Peter, “your bootlace will come undone going up the church aisle, and your man that you’re going to get married to will tumble over it and smash his nose in on the ornamented pavement; and then you’ll say you won’t marry him, and you’ll have to be an old maid.”
“I shan’t,” said Phyllis. “I’d much rather marry a man with his nose smashed in than not marry anybody.”
“It would be horrid to marry a man with a smashed nose, all the same,” went on Bobbie. “He wouldn’t be able to smell the flowers at the wedding. Wouldn’t that be awful!”
“Bother the flowers at the wedding!” cried Peter. “Look! the signal’s down. We must run!”
They ran. And once more they waved their handkerchiefs, without at all minding whether the handkerchiefs were clean or not, to the 9.15.
“Take our love to Father!” cried Bobbie. And the others, too, shouted:—
“Take our love to Father!”
The old gentleman waved from his first-class carriage window. Quite violently he waved. And there was nothing odd in that, for he always had waved. But what was really remarkable was that from every window handkerchiefs fluttered, newspapers signalled, hands waved wildly. The train swept by with a rustle and roar, the little pebbles jumped and danced under it as it passed, and the children were left looking at each other.
“Well!” said Peter.
“WELL!” said Bobbie.
“WELL!“ said Phyllis.
“Whatever on earth does that mean?” asked Peter, but he did not expect any answer.
“I don’t know,” said Bobbie. “Perhaps the old gentleman told the people at his station to look out for us and wave. He knew we should like it!”
Now, curiously enough, this was just what had happened. The old gentleman, who was very well known and respected at his particular station, had got there early that morning, and he had waited at the door where the young man stands holding the interesting machine that clips the tickets, and he had said something to every single passenger who passed through that door. And after nodding to what the old gentleman had said—and the nods expressed every shade of surprise, interest, doubt, cheerful pleasure, and grumpy agreement—each passenger had gone on to the platform and read one certain part of his newspaper. And when the passengers got into the train, they had told the other passengers who were already there what the old gentleman had said, and then the other passengers had also looked at their newspapers and seemed very astonished and, mostly, pleased. Then, when the train passed the fence where the three children were, newspapers and hands and handkerchiefs were waved madly, till all that side of the train was fluttery with white like the pictures of the King’s Coronation in the biograph at Maskelyne and Cook’s. To the children it almost seemed as though the train itself was alive, and was at last responding to the love that they had given it so freely and so long.
“It is most extraordinarily rum!” said Peter.
“Most stronery!” echoed Phyllis.
But Bobbie said, “Don’t you think the old gentleman’s waves seemed more significating than usual?”
“No,” said the others.
“I do,” said Bobbie. “I thought he was trying to explain something to us with his newspaper.”
“Explain what?” asked Peter, not unnaturally.
“I don’t know,” Bobbie answered, “but I do feel most awfully funny. I feel just exactly as if something was going to happen.”
“What is going to happen,” said Peter, “is that Phyllis’s stocking is going to come down.”
This was but too true. The suspender had given way in the agitation of the waves to the 9.15. Bobbie’s handkerchief served as first aid to the injured, and they all went home.
Lessons were more than usually difficult to Bobbie that day. Indeed, she disgraced herself so deeply over a quite simple sum about the division of 48 pounds of meat and 36 pounds of bread among 144 hungry children that Mother looked at her anxiously.
“Don’t you feel quite well, dear?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” was Bobbie’s unexpected answer. “I don’t know how I feel. It isn’t that I’m lazy. Mother, will you let me off lessons to-day? I feel as if I wanted to be quite alone by myself.”
“Yes, of course I’ll let you off,” said Mother; “but—”
Bobbie dropped her slate. It cracked just across the little green mark that is so useful for drawing patterns round, and it was never the same slate again. Without waiting to pick it up she bolted. Mother caught her in the hall feeling blindly among the waterproofs and umbrellas for her garden hat.
“What is it, my sweetheart?” said Mother. “You don’t feel ill, do you?”
“I DON’T know,” Bobbie answered, a little breathlessly, “but I want to be by myself and see if my head really IS all silly and my inside all squirmy-twisty.”
“Hadn’t you better lie down?” Mother said, stroking her hair back from her forehead.
“I’d be more alive in the garden, I think,” said Bobbie.
But she could not stay in the garden. The hollyhocks and the asters and the late roses all seemed to be waiting for something to happen. It was one of those
still, shiny autumn days, when everything does seem to be waiting.
Bobbie could not wait.
“I’ll go down to the station,” she said, “and talk to Perks and ask about the signalman’s little boy.”
So she went down. On the way she passed the old lady from the Post-office, who gave her a kiss and a hug, but, rather to Bobbie’s surprise, no words except:—
“God bless you, love—” and, after a pause, “run along—do.”
The draper’s boy, who had sometimes been a little less than civil and a little more than contemptuous, now touched his cap, and uttered the remarkable words:—
“‘Morning, Miss, I’m sure—”
The blacksmith, coming along with an open newspaper in his hand, was even more strange in his manner. He grinned broadly, though, as a rule, he was a man not given to smiles, and waved the newspaper long before he came up to her. And as he passed her, he said, in answer to her “Good morning”:—
“Good morning to you, Missie, and many of them! I wish you joy, that I do!”
“Oh!” said Bobbie to herself, and her heart quickened its beats, “something IS going to happen! I know it is—everyone is so odd, like people are in dreams.”
The Station Master wrung her hand warmly. In fact he worked it up and down like a pump-handle. But he gave her no reason for this unusually enthusiastic greeting. He only said:—
“The 11.54′s a bit late, Miss—the extra luggage this holiday time,” and went away very quickly into that inner Temple of his into which even Bobbie dared not follow him.
Perks was not to be seen, and Bobbie shared the solitude of the platform with the Station Cat. This tortoiseshell lady, usually of a retiring disposition, came to-day to rub herself against the brown stockings of Bobbie with arched back, waving tail, and reverberating purrs.
“Dear me!” said Bobbie, stooping to stroke her, “how very kind everybody is to-day—even you, Pussy!”
Perks did not appear until the 11.54 was signalled, and then he, like everybody else that morning, had a newspaper in his hand.
“Hullo!” he said, “‘ere you are. Well, if THIS is the train, it’ll be smart work! Well, God bless you, my dear! I see it in the paper, and I don’t think I was ever so glad of anything in all my born days!” He looked at Bobbie a moment, then said, “One I must have, Miss, and no offence, I know, on a day like this ‘ere!” and with that he kissed her, first on one cheek and then on the other.
“You ain’t offended, are you?” he asked anxiously. “I ain’t took too great a liberty? On a day like this, you know—”
“No, no,” said Bobbie, “of course it’s not a liberty, dear Mr. Perks; we love you quite as much as if you were an uncle of ours—but—on a day like WHAT?”
“Like this ‘ere!” said Perks. “Don’t I tell you I see it in the paper?”
“Saw WHAT in the paper?” asked Bobbie, but already the 11.54 was steaming into the station and the Station Master was looking at all the places where Perks was not and ought to have been.
Bobbie was left standing alone, the Station Cat watching her from under the bench with friendly golden eyes.
Of course you know already exactly what was going to happen. Bobbie was not so clever. She had the vague, confused, expectant feeling that comes to one’s heart in dreams. What her heart expected I can’t tell—perhaps the very thing that you and I know was going to happen—but her mind expected nothing; it was almost blank, and felt nothing but tiredness and stupidness and an empty feeling, like your body has when you have been a long walk and it is very far indeed past your proper dinner-time.
Only three people got out of the 11.54. The first was a countryman with two baskety boxes full of live chickens who stuck their russet heads out anxiously through the wicker bars; the second was Miss Peckitt, the grocer’s wife’s cousin, with a tin box and three brown-paper parcels; and the third—
“Oh! my Daddy, my Daddy!” That scream went like a knife into the heart of everyone in the train, and people put their heads out of the windows to see a tall pale man with lips set in a thin close line, and a little girl clinging to him with arms and legs, while his arms went tightly round her.
* * * * * *
“I knew something wonderful was going to happen,” said Bobbie, as they went up the road, “but I didn’t think it was going to be this. Oh, my Daddy, my Daddy!”
“Then didn’t Mother get my letter?” Father asked.
“There weren’t any letters this morning. Oh! Daddy! it IS really you, isn’t it?”
The clasp of a hand she had not forgotten assured her that it was. “You must go in by yourself, Bobbie, and tell Mother quite quietly that it’s all right. They’ve caught the man who did it. Everyone knows now that it wasn’t your Daddy.”
“I always knew it wasn’t,” said Bobbie. “Me and Mother and our old gentleman.”
“Yes,” he said, “it’s all his doing. Mother wrote and told me you had found out. And she told me what you’d been to her. My own little girl!” They stopped a minute then.
And now I see them crossing the field. Bobbie goes into the house, trying to keep her eyes from speaking before her lips have found the right words to “tell Mother quite quietly” that the sorrow and the struggle and the parting are over and done, and that Father has come home.
I see Father walking in the garden, waiting—waiting. He is looking at the flowers, and each flower is a miracle to eyes that all these months of Spring and Summer have seen only flagstones and gravel and a little grudging grass. But his eyes keep turning towards the house. And presently he leaves the garden and goes to stand outside the nearest door. It is the back door, and across the yard the swallows are circling. They are getting ready to fly away from cold winds and keen frost to the land where it is always summer. They are the same swallows that the children built the little clay nests for.
Now the house door opens. Bobbie’s voice calls:—
“Come in, Daddy; come in!”
He goes in and the door is shut. I think we will not open the door or follow him. I think that just now we are not wanted there. I think it will be best for us to go quickly and quietly away. At the end of the field, among the thin gold spikes of grass and the harebells and Gipsy roses and St. John’s Wort, we may just take one last look, over our shoulders, at the white house where neither we nor anyone else is wanted now.
The Enchanted Castle By Edith Nesbit
To Margaret Ostler with love from E. Nesbit
Peggy, you came from the heath and moor,And you brought their airs through my open door;You brought the blossom of youth to blowIn the Latin Quarter of Soho.For the sake of that magic I send you hereA tale of enchantments, Peggy dear, A bit of my work, and a bit of my heart…The bit that you left when we had to part.
Royalty Chambers, Soho, W. 25September 1907
There were three of them Jerry, Jimmy, and Kathleen. Of course, Jerry’s name was Gerald, and not Jeremiah, whatever you may think; and Jimmy’s name was James; and Kathleen was never called by her name at all, but Cathy, or Catty, or Puss Cat, when her brothers were pleased with her, and Scratch Cat when they were not pleased. And they were at school in a little town in the West of England the boys at one school, of course, and the girl at another, because the sensible habit of having boys and girls at the same school is not yet as common as I hope it will be some day. They used to see each other on Saturdays and Sundays at the house of a kind maiden lady; but it was one of those houses where it is impossible to play. You know the kind of house, don’t you? There is a sort of a something about that kind of house that makes you hardly able even to talk to each other when you are left alone, and playing seems unnatural and affected. So they looked forward to the holidays, when they should all go home and be together all day long, in a house where playing was natural and conversation possible, and where the Hampshire forests and fields were full of i
nteresting things to do and see. Their Cousin Betty was to be there too, and there were plans. Betty’s school broke up before theirs, and so she got to the Hampshire home first, and the moment she got there she began to have measles, so that my three couldn’t go home at all. You may imagine their feelings. The thought of seven weeks at Miss Hervey’s was not to be borne, and all three wrote home and said so. This astonished their parents very much, because they had always thought it was so nice for the children to have dear Miss Hervey’s to go to. However, they were “jolly decent about it , as Jerry said, and after a lot of letters and telegrams, it was arranged that the boys should go and stay at Kathleen’s school, where there were now no girls left and no mistresses except the French one.
“It’ll be better than being at Miss Hervey’s,” said Kathleen, when the boys came round to ask Mademoiselle when it would be convenient for them to come; “and, besides, our school’s not half so ugly as yours. We do have tablecloths on the tables and curtains at the windows, and yours is all deal boards, and desks, and inkiness.”
When they had gone to pack their boxes Kathleen made all the rooms as pretty as she could with flowers in jam jars marigolds chiefly, because there was nothing much else in the back garden. There were geraniums in the front garden, and calceolarias and lobelias; of course, the children were not allowed to pick these.
“We ought to have some sort of play to keep us going through the holidays,” said Kathleen, when tea was over, and she had unpacked and arranged the boys clothes in the painted chests of drawers, feeling very grown-up and careful as she neatly laid the different sorts of clothes in tidy little heaps in the drawers. “Suppose we write a book.”
“You couldn’t,” said Jimmy.
“I didn’t mean me, of course,” said Kathleen, a little injured; “I meant us.”
“Too much fag,” said Gerald briefly.
“If we wrote a book,” Kathleen persisted, “about what the insides of schools really are like, people would read it and say how clever we were.”
The Classic Children's Literature Collection: 39 Classic Novels Page 619