The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories

by E. Nesbit

  “You have to be careful with grown-ups,” said Gerald, “but it isn’t all pretence either. We don’t want to trouble you, and we don’t want you to—”

  “To trouble you. Eh bien! Your parents, they permit these days at woods?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Gerald truthfully.

  “Then I will not be more a dragon than the parents. I will forewarn the cook. Are you content?”

  “Rather!” said Gerald. “Mademoiselle, you are a dear.”

  “A deer?” she repeated “a stag?”

  “No, a—a cherie,” said Gerald “a regular A–1 cherie. And you sha’n’t repent it. Is there anything we can do for you—wind your wool, or find your spectacles, or—?”

  “He thinks me a grandmother!” said Mademoiselle, laughing more than ever. “Go then, and be not more naughty than you must.”

  * * * *

  “Well, what luck?” the others asked.

  “It’s all right,” said Gerald indifferently. “I told you it would be. The ingenuous youth won the regard of the foreign governess, who in her youth had been the beauty of her humble village.”

  “I don’t believe she ever was. She’s too stern,” said Kathleen.

  “Ah!” said Gerald, “that’s only because you don’t know how to manage her. She wasn’t stern with me.”

  “I say, what a humbug you are though, aren’t you?” said Jimmy.

  “No, I’m a dip— What’s its name? Something like an ambassador. Dipsoplomatist that’s what I am. Anyhow, we’ve got our day, and if we don’t find a cave in it, my name’s not Jack Robinson.”

  * * * *

  Mademoiselle, less stern than Kathleen had ever seen her, presided at supper, which was bread and treacle spread several hours before, and now harder and drier than any other food you can think of. Gerald was very polite in handing her butter and cheese and pressing her to taste the bread and treacle.

  “Bah! It is like sand in the mouth of a dryness! Is it possible this pleases you?”

  “No,” said Gerald, “it is not possible, but it is not polite for boys to make remarks about their food!”

  She laughed, but there was no more dried bread and treacle for supper after that.

  “How do you do it?” Kathleen whispered admiringly as they said good night.

  “Oh, it’s quite easy when you’ve once got a grownup to see what you’re after. You’ll see, I shall drive her with a rein of darning cotton after this.”

  * * * *

  Next morning, Gerald got up early and gathered a little bunch of pink carnations from a plant which he found hidden among the marigolds. He tied it up with black cotton and laid it on Mademoiselle’s plate. She smiled and looked quite handsome as she stuck the flowers in her belt.

  “Do you think it’s quite decent,” Jimmy asked later “sort of bribing people to let you do as you like with flowers and things and passing them the salt?”

  “It’s not that,” said Kathleen suddenly. “I know what Gerald means, only I never think of the things in time myself. You see, if you want grown-ups to be nice to you, the least you can do is to be nice to them and think of little things to please them. I never think of any myself. Jerry does; that’s why all the old ladies like him. It’s not bribery. It’s a sort of honesty—like paying for things.”

  “Well, anyway,” said Jimmy, putting away the moral question, “we’ve got a ripping day for the woods.”

  They had.

  The wide High Street, even at the busy morning hour almost as quiet as a dream-street, lay bathed in sunshine; the leaves shone fresh from last night’s rain, but the road was dry, and in the sunshine the very dust of it sparkled like diamonds. The beautiful old houses, standing stout and strong, looked as though they were basking in the sunshine and enjoying it.

  “But are there any woods?” asked Kathleen as they passed the market-place.

  “It doesn’t much matter about woods,” said Gerald dreamily, “we’re sure to find something. One of the chaps told me his father said when he was a boy there used to be a little cave under the bank in a lane near the Salisbury Road; but he said there was an enchanted castle there too, so perhaps the cave isn’t true, either.”

  “If we were to get horns,” said Kathleen, “and to blow them very hard all the way, we might find a magic castle.”

  “If you’ve got the money to throw away on horns…” said Jimmy contemptuously.

  “Well, I have, as it happens, so there!” said Kathleen. And the horns were bought in a tiny shop with a bulging window full of a tangle of toys and sweets and cucumbers and sour apples.

  And the quiet square at the end of the town where the church is, and the houses of the most respectable people, echoed to the sound of horns blown long and loud. But none of the houses turned into enchanted castles. Away they went along the Salisbury Road, which was very hot and dusty, so they agreed to drink one of the bottles of ginger-beer.

  “We might as well carry the ginger-beer inside us as inside the bottle,” said Jimmy, “and we can hide the bottle and call for it as we come back.

  Presently they came to a place where the road, as Gerald said, went two ways at once.

  “That looks like adventures,” said Kathleen; and they took the right-hand road, and the next time they took a turning it was a left-hand one, “so as to be quite fair,” Jimmy said, and then a right-hand one and then a left, and so on, till they were completely lost.

  “Completely,” said Kathleen; “how jolly!”

  And now trees arched overhead, and the banks of the road were high and bushy. The adventurers had long since ceased to blow their horns. It was too tiring to go on doing that, when there was no one to be annoyed by it.

  “Oh, crikey!” observed Jimmy suddenly, “let’s sit down a bit and have some of our dinner. We might call it lunch, you know,” he added persuasively.

  So they sat down in the hedge and ate the ripe red gooseberries that were to have been their dessert.

  And as they sat and rested and wished that their boots did not feel so full of feet, Gerald leaned back against the bushes, and the bushes gave way so that he almost fell over backward. Something had yielded to the pressure of his back, and there was the sound of something heavy that fell.

  “Oh, Jimminy!” he remarked, recovering himself suddenly; “there’s something hollow in there—the stone I was leaning against simply went!”

  “I wish it was a cave,” said Jimmy; “but of course it isn’t.”

  “If we blow the horns, perhaps it will be,” said Kathleen, and hastily blew her own.

  Gerald reached his hand through the bushes. “I can’t feel anything but air,” he said; “it’s just a hole full of emptiness.”

  The other two pulled back the bushes. There certainly was a hole in the bank.

  “I’m going to go in,” observed Gerald.

  “Oh, don’t!” said his sister. “I wish you wouldn’t. Suppose there are snakes!”

  “Not likely,” said Gerald, but he leaned forward and struck a match. “It is a cave!” he cried, and put his knee on the mossy stone he had been sitting on, scrambled over it, and disappeared.

  A breathless pause followed.

  “You all right?” asked Jimmy.

  “Yes; come on. You’d better come feet first—there’s a bit of a drop.”

  “I’ll go next,” said Kathleen, and went feet first, as advised. The feet waved wildly in the air.

  “Look out!” said Gerald in the dark; “you’ll have my eye out. Put your feet down, girl, not up. It’s no use trying to fly here—there’s no room.”

  He helped her by pulling her feet forcibly down and then lifting her under the arms. She felt rustling dry leaves under her boots, and stood ready to receive Jimmy, who came in head first, like one d
iving into an unknown sea.

  “It is a cave,” said Kathleen.

  “The young explorers,” explained Gerald, blocking up the hole of entrance with his shoulders, “dazzled at first by the darkness of the cave, could see nothing.”

  “Darkness doesn’t dazzle,” said Jimmy.

  “I wish we’d got a candle,” said Kathleen.

  “Yes, it does,” Gerald contradicted. “They could see nothing. But their dauntless leader, whose eyes had grown used to the dark while the clumsy forms of the others were bunging up the entrance, had made a discovery.”

  “Oh, what!” Both the others were used to Gerald’s way of telling a story while he acted it, but they did sometimes wish that he didn’t talk quite so long and so like a book in moments of excitement.

  “He did not reveal the dread secret to his faithful followers till one and all had given him their word of honour to be calm.”

  “We’ll be calm all right,” said Jimmy impatiently.

  “Well, then,” said Gerald, ceasing suddenly to be a book and becoming a boy, “there’s a light over there—look behind you!”

  They looked. And there was. A faint greyness on the brown walls of the cave, and a brighter greyness cut off sharply by a dark line, showed that round a turning or angle of the cave there was daylight.

  “Attention!” said Gerald; at least, that was what he meant, though what he said was “’Shun!” as becomes the son of a soldier. The others mechanically obeyed.

  “You will remain at attention till I give the word ‘Slow march!’ on which you will advance cautiously in open order, following your hero leader, taking care not to tread on the dead and wounded.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t!” said Kathleen.

  “There aren’t any,” said Jimmy, feeling for her hand in the dark; “he only means, take care not to tumble over stones and things”

  Here he found her hand, and she screamed.

  “It’s only me,” said Jimmy. “I thought you’d like me to hold it. But you’re just like a girl.”

  Their eyes had now begun to get accustomed to the darkness, and all could see that they were in a rough stone cave that went straight on for about three or four yards and then turned sharply to the right.

  “Death or victory!” remarked Gerald. “Now, then—slow march!”

  He advanced carefully, picking his way among the loose earth and stones that were the floor of the cave. “A sail, a sail!” he cried, as he turned the corner.

  “How splendid!” Kathleen drew a long breath as she came out into the sunshine.

  “I don’t see a sail,” said Jimmy, following.

  The narrow passage ended in a round arch all fringed with ferns and creepers. They passed through the arch into a deep, narrow gully whose banks were of stones, moss-covered; and in the crannies grew more ferns and long grasses. Trees growing on the top of the bank arched across, and the sunlight came through in changing patches of brightness, turning the gully to a roofed corridor of goldy-green. The path, which was of greeny-grey flagstones where heaps of leaves had drifted, sloped steeply down, and at the end of it was another round arch, quite dark inside, above which rose rocks and grass and bushes.

  “It’s like the outside of a railway tunnel,” said James.

  “It’s the entrance to the enchanted castle,” said Kathleen. “Let’s blow the horns.”

  “Dry up!” said Gerald. “The bold Captain, reproving the silly chatter of his subordinates—”

  “I like that!” said Jimmy, indignant.

  “I thought you would,” resumed Gerald— “of his subordinates, bade them advance with caution and in silence, because after all there might be somebody about, and the other arch might be an ice-house or something dangerous.

  “What?” asked Kathleen anxiously.

  “Bears, perhaps,” said Gerald briefly.

  “There aren’t any bears without bars in England, anyway,” said Jimmy. “They call bears bars in America,” he added absently.

  “Quick march!” was Gerald’s only reply.

  And they marched. Under the drifted damp leaves, the path was firm and stony to their shuffling feet. At the dark arch they stopped.

  “There are steps down,” said Jimmy.

  “It is an ice-house,” said Gerald.

  “Don’t let’s,” said Kathleen.

  “Our hero,” said Gerald, “who nothing could dismay, raised the faltering hopes of his abject minions by saying that he was jolly well going on, and they could do as they liked about it.”

  “If you call names,” said Jimmy, “you can go on by yourself.” He added, “So there!”

  “It’s part of the game, silly,” explained Gerald kindly. “You can be Captain tomorrow, so you’d better hold your jaw now and begin to think about what names you’ll call us when it’s your turn.”

  Very slowly and carefully they went down the steps. A vaulted stone arched over their heads. Gerald struck a match when the last step was found to have no edge, and to be, in fact, the beginning of a passage, turning to the left.

  “This,” said Jimmy, “will take us back into the road.”

  “Or under it,” said Gerald. “We’ve come down eleven steps.”

  They went on, following their leader, who went very slowly for fear, as he explained, of steps. The passage was very dark.

  “I don’t half like it!” whispered Jimmy.

  Then came a glimmer of daylight that grew and grew, and presently ended in another arch that looked out over a scene so like a picture out of a book about Italy that everyone’s breath was taken away, and they simply walked forward silent and staring. A short avenue of cypresses led, widening as it went, to a marble terrace that lay broad and white in the sunlight. The children, blinking, leaned their arms on the broad, flat balustrade and gazed.

  Immediately below them was a lake—just like a lake in “The Beauties of Italy”—a lake with swans and an island and weeping willows; beyond it were green slopes dotted with groves of trees, and amid the trees gleamed the white limbs of statues. Against a little hill to the left was a round white building with pillars, and to the right a waterfall came tumbling down among mossy stones to splash into the lake. Steps fed from the terrace to the water, and other steps to the green lawns beside it. Away across the grassy slopes, deer were feeding, and in the distance where the groves of trees thickened into what looked almost a forest were enormous shapes of grey stone, like nothing that the children had ever seen before.

  “That chap at school—” said Gerald.

  “It is an enchanted castle,” said Kathleen.

  “I don’t see any castle,” said Jimmy.

  “What do you call that, then?” Gerald pointed to where, beyond a belt of lime-trees, white towers and turrets broke the blue of the sky.

  “There doesn’t seem to be anyone about,” said Kathleen, “and yet it’s all so tidy. I believe it is magic”

  “Magic mowing machines,” Jimmy suggested.

  “If we were in a book it would be an enchanted castle—certain to be,” said Kathleen.

  “It is an enchanted castle,” said Gerald in hollow tones.

  “But there aren’t any!” Jimmy was quite positive.

  “How do you know? Do you think there’s nothing in the world but what you’ve seen?” His scorn was crushing.

  “I think magic went out when people began to have steam-engines,” Jimmy insisted, “and newspapers, and telephones, and wireless telegraphing.”

  “Wireless is rather like magic when you come to think of it,” said Gerald.

  “Oh, that sort!” Jimmy’s contempt was deep.

  “Perhaps there’s given up being magic because people didn’t believe in it any more,” said Kathleen.

  “Well, don’t let
’s spoil the show with any silly old not believing,” said Gerald with decision. “I’m going to believe in magic as hard as I can. This is an enchanted garden, and that’s an enchanted castle, and I’m jolly well going to explore. The dauntless knight then led the way, leaving his ignorant squires to follow or not, just as they jolly well chose. He rolled off the balustrade and strode firmly down towards the lawn, his boots making, as they went, a clatter full of determination.”

  The others followed. There never was such a garden—out of a picture or a fairy-tale. They passed quite close by the deer, who only raised their pretty heads to look, and did not seem startled at all. And after a long stretch of turf they passed under the heaped-up heavy masses of lime-trees and came into a rose-garden, bordered with thick, close-cut yew hedges, and lying red and pink and green and white in the sun, like a giant’s many-coloured, highly-scented pocket-handkerchief.

  “I know we shall meet a gardener in a minute, and he’ll ask what we re doing here. And then what will you say?” Kathleen asked with her nose in a rose.

  “I shall say we have lost our way, and it will be quite true,” said Gerald.

  But they did not meet a gardener or anybody else, and the feeling of magic got thicker and thicker, till they were almost afraid of the sound of their feet in the great silent place. Beyond the rose garden was a yew hedge with an arch cut in it, and it was the beginning of a maze like the one in Hampton Court.

  “Now,” said Gerald, “you mark my words. In the middle of this maze we shall find the secret enchantment. Draw your swords, my merry men all, and hark forward tallyho in the utmost silence.”

  Which they did.

  It was very hot in the maze, between the close yew hedges, and the way to the maze’s heart was hidden well. Again and again they found themselves at the black yew arch that opened on the rose garden, and they were all glad that they had brought large, clean pocket-handkerchiefs with them.

  It was when they found themselves there for the fourth time that Jimmy suddenly cried, “Oh, I wish—” and then stopped short very suddenly. “Oh!” he added in quite a different voice, “where’s the dinner?” And then in a stricken silence they all remembered that the basket with the dinner had been left at the entrance of the cave. Their thoughts dwelt fondly on the slices of cold mutton, the six tomatoes, the bread and butter, the screwed-up paper of salt, the apple turnovers, and the little thick glass that one drank the ginger-beer out of.