The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories

by E. Nesbit

  The scene went very well. The final dance with waving towels was all that there is of charming, Mademoiselle said; and Eliza was so much amused that, as she said, she got quite a nasty stitch along of laughing so hearty.

  You know pretty well what Beauty and the Beast would be like acted by four children who had spent the afternoon in arranging their costumes and so had left no time for rehearsing what they had to say. Yet it delighted them, and it charmed their audience. And what more can any play do, even Shakespeare’s? Mabel, in her Princess clothes, was a resplendent Beauty; and Gerald a Beast who wore the drawing-room hearthrugs with an air of indescribable distinction. If Jimmy was not a talkative merchant, he made it up with a stoutness practically unlimited, and Kathleen surprised and delighted even herself by the quickness with which she changed from one to the other of the minor characters—fairies, servants, and messengers. It was at the end of the second act that Mabel, whose costume, having reached the height of elegance, could not be bettered and therefore did not need to be changed, said to Gerald, sweltering under the weighty magnificence of his beast-skin:

  “I say, you might let us have the ring back.”

  “I’m going to,” said Gerald, who had quite forgotten it. “I’ll give it you in the next scene. Only don’t lose it, or go putting it on. You might go out all together and never be seen again, or you might get seven times as visible as anyone else, so that all the rest of us would look like shadows beside you, you’d be so thick, or—”

  “Ready!” said Kathleen, bustling in, once more a wicked sister.

  Gerald managed to get his hand into his pocket under his hearthrug, and when he rolled his eyes in agonies of sentiment, and said, “Farewell, dear Beauty! Return quickly, for if you remain long absent from your faithful beast he will assuredly perish,” he pressed a ring into her hand and added: “This is a magic ring that will give you anything you wish. When you desire to return to your own disinterested beast, put on the ring and utter your wish. Instantly you will be by my side.”

  Beauty-Mabel took the ring, and it was the ring.

  The curtains closed to warm applause from two pairs of hands.

  The next scene went splendidly. The sisters were almost too natural in their disagreeableness, and Beauty’s annoyance when they splashed her Princess’s dress with real soap and water was considered a miracle of good acting. Even the merchant rose to something more than mere pillows, and the curtain fell on his pathetic assurance that in the absence of his dear Beauty he was wasting away to a shadow. And again two pairs of hands applauded.

  “Here, Mabel, catch hold,” Gerald appealed from under the weight of a towel-horse, the tea-urn, the tea-tray, and the green baize apron of the boot boy, which together with four red geraniums from the landing, the pampas-grass from the drawing-room fireplace, and the india-rubber plants from the drawing-room window were to represent the fountains and garden of the last act. The applause had died away.

  “I wish,” said Mabel, taking on herself the weight of the tea-urn, “I wish those creatures we made were alive. We should get something like applause then.”

  “I’m jolly glad they aren’t,” said Gerald, arranging the baize and the towel-horse. “Brutes! It makes me feel quite silly when I catch their paper eyes.”

  The curtains were drawn back. There lay the hearthrug-coated beast, in flat abandonment among the tropic beauties of the garden, the pampas-grass shrubbery, the india-rubber plant bushes, the geranium-trees and the urn fountain. Beauty was ready to make her great entry in all the thrilling splendour of despair. And then suddenly it all happened.

  Mademoiselle began it: she applauded the garden scene—with hurried little clappings of her quick French hands. Eliza’s fat red palms followed heavily, and then—someone else was clapping, six or seven people, and their clapping made a dull padded sound. Nine faces instead of two were turned towards the stage, and seven out of the nine were painted, pointed paper faces. And every hand and every face was alive. The applause grew louder as Mabel glided forward, and as she paused and looked at the audience her unstudied pose of horror and amazement drew forth applause louder still; but it was not loud enough to drown the shrieks of Mademoiselle and Eliza as they rushed from the room, knocking chairs over and crushing each other in the doorway. Two distant doors banged, Mademoiselle’s door and Eliza’s door.

  “Curtain! Curtain! Quick!” cried Beauty-Mabel, in a voice that wasn’t Mabel’s or the Beauty’s. “Jerry—those things have come alive. Oh, whatever shall we do?”

  Gerald in his hearthrugs leaped to his feet. Again that flat padded applause marked the swish of cloths on clothes-line as Jimmy and Kathleen drew the curtains.

  “What’s up?” they asked as they drew.

  “You’ve done it this time!” said Gerald to the pink, perspiring Mabel. “Oh, bother these strings!”

  “Can’t you burst them? I’ve done it?” retorted Mabel. “I like that!”

  “More than I do,” said Gerald.

  “Oh, it’s all right,” said Mabel. “Come on. We must go and pull the things to pieces—then they can’t go on being alive.”

  “It’s your fault, anyhow,” said Gerald with every possible absence of gallantry. “Don’t you see? It’s turned into a wishing ring. I knew something different was going to happen. Get my knife out of my pocket—this string’s in a knot. Jimmy, Cathy, those Ugly-Wuglies have come alive—because Mabel wished it. Cut out and pull them to pieces.”

  Jimmy and Cathy peeped through the curtain and recoiled with white faces and staring eyes. “Not me!” was the brief rejoinder of Jimmy. Cathy said, “Not much!” And she meant it, anyone could see that.

  And now, as Gerald, almost free of the hearthrugs, broke his thumb-nail on the stiffest blade of his knife, a thick rustling and a sharp, heavy stumping sounded beyond the curtain.

  “They’re going out!” screamed Kathleen “walking out on their umbrella and broomstick legs. You can’t stop them, Jerry, they’re too awful!”

  “Everybody in the town’ll be insane by tomorrow night if we don’t stop them,” cried Gerald. “Here, give me the ring I’ll unwish them.”

  He caught the ring from the unresisting Mabel, cried, “I wish the Uglies weren’t alive,” and tore through the door. He saw, in fancy, Mabel’s wish undone, and the empty hall strewed with limp bolsters, hats, umbrellas, coats and gloves, prone abject properties from which the brief life had gone out for ever. But the hall was crowded with live things, strange things—all horribly short as broom sticks and umbrellas are short. A limp hand gesticulated. A pointed white face with red cheeks looked up at him, and wide red lips said something, he could not tell what. The voice reminded him of the old beggar down by the bridge who had no roof to his mouth. These creatures had no roofs to their mouths, of course—they had no—

  “Aa oo ré o me me oo a oo ho el?” said the voice again. And it had said it four times before Gerald could collect himself sufficiently to understand that this horror—alive, and most likely quite uncontrollable—was saying, with a dreadful calm, polite persistence:

  “Can you recommend me to a good hotel?”

  CHAPTER VII

  “Can you recommend me to a good hotel?” The speaker had no inside to his head. Gerald had the best of reasons for knowing it. The speaker’s coat had no shoulders inside it—only the cross-bar that a jacket is slung on by careful ladies. The hand raised in interrogation was not a hand at all; it was a glove lumpily stuffed with pocket-handkerchiefs; and the arm attached to it was only Kathleen’s school umbrella. Yet the whole thing was alive, and was asking a definite, and for anybody else, anybody who really was a body, a reasonable question.

  With a sensation of inward sinking, Gerald realized that now or never was the time for him to rise to the occasion. And at the thought he inwardly sank more deeply than before. It seemed impossible to r
ise in the very smallest degree.

  “I beg your pardon” was absolutely the best he could do; and the painted, pointed paper face turned to him once more, and once more said: “Aa oo ré o me me oo a oo ho el?”

  “You want a hotel?” Gerald repeated stupidly, “a good hotel?”

  “A oo ho el,” reiterated the painted lips.

  “I’m awfully sorry,” Gerald went on—one can always be polite, of course, whatever happens, and politeness came natural to him— “but all our hotels shut so early—about eight, I think.”

  “Och em er,” said the Ugly-Wugly. Gerald even now does not understand how that practical joke—hastily wrought of hat, overcoat, paper face and limp hands—could have managed, by just being alive, to become perfectly respectable, apparently about fifty years old, and obviously well known and respected in his own suburb—the kind of man who travels first class and smokes expensive cigars. Gerald knew this time, without need of repetition, that the Ugly-Wugly had said: “Knock ’em up.”

  “You can’t,” Gerald explained; “they’re all stone deaf—every single person who keeps a hotel in this town. It’s,” he wildly plunged “it’s a County Council law. Only deaf people are allowed to keep hotels. It’s because of the hops in the beer,” he found himself adding; “you know, hops are so good for ear-ache.”

  “I o wy ollo oo,” said the respectable Ugly-Wugly; and Gerald was not surprised to find that the thing did “not quite follow him.”

  “It is a little difficult at first,” he said. The other Ugly-Wuglies were crowding round. The lady in the poke bonnet said—Gerald found he was getting quite clever at understanding the conversation of those who had no roofs to their mouths:—

  “If not a hotel, a lodging.”

  “My lodging is on the cold ground,” sang itself unbidden and unavailing in Gerald’s ear. Yet stay—was it unavailing?

  “I do know a lodging,” he said slowly, “but—” The tallest of the Ugly-Wuglies pushed forward. He was dressed in the old brown overcoat and top-hat which always hung on the school hat-stand to discourage possible burglars by deluding them into the idea that there was a gentleman-of-the-house, and that he was at home. He had an air at once more sporting and less reserved than that of the first speaker, and anyone could see that he was not quite a gentleman.

  “Wa I wo oo oh,” he began, but the lady Ugly-Wugly in the flower-wreathed hat interrupted him. She spoke more distinctly than the others, owing, as Gerald found afterwards, to the fact that her mouth had been drawn open, and the flap cut from the aperture had been folded back—so that she really had something like a roof to her mouth, though it was only a paper one.

  “What I want to know,” Gerald understood her to say, “is where are the carriages we ordered?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gerald, “but I’ll find out. But we ought to be moving,” he added; “you see, the performance is over, and they want to shut up the house and put the lights out. Let’s be moving.”

  “Eh—ech e oo-ig,” repeated the respectable Ugly-Wugly, and stepped towards the front door.

  “Oo um oo,” said the flower-wreathed one; and Gerald assures me that her vermilion lips stretched in a smile.

  “I shall be delighted,” said Gerald with earnest courtesy, “to do anything, of course. Things do happen so awkwardly when you least expect it. I could go with you, and get you a lodging, if you’d only wait a few moments in the—in the yard. It’s quite a superior sort of yard,” he went on, as a wave of surprised disdain passed over their white paper faces—“not a common yard, you know; the pump,” he added madly, “has just been painted green all over, and the dustbin is enamelled iron.”

  The Ugly-Wuglies turned to each other in consultation, and Gerald gathered that the greenness of the pump and the enamelled character of the dustbin made, in their opinion, all the difference.

  “I’m awfully sorry,” he urged eagerly, “to have to ask you to wait, but you see I’ve got an uncle who’s quite mad, and I have to give him his gruel at half-past nine. He won’t feed out of any hand but mine.” Gerald did not mind what he said. The only people one is allowed to tell lies to are the Ugly-Wuglies; they are all clothes and have no insides, because they are not human beings, but only a sort of very real visions, and therefore cannot be really deceived, though they may seem to be.

  Through the back door that has the blue, yellow, red, and green glass in it, down the iron steps into the yard, Gerald led the way, and the Ugly-Wuglies trooped after him. Some of them had boots, but the ones whose feet were only broomsticks or umbrellas found the open-work iron stairs very awkward.

  “If you wouldn’t mind,” said Gerald, “just waiting under the balcony? My uncle is so very mad. If he were to see—see any strangers I mean, even aristocratic ones—I couldn’t answer for the consequences.”

  “Perhaps,” said the flower-hatted lady nervously, “it would be better for us to try and find a lodging ourselves?”

  “I wouldn’t advise you to,” said Gerald as grimly as he knew how; “the police here arrest all strangers. It’s the new law the Liberals have just made,” he added convincingly, “and you’d get the sort of lodging you wouldn’t care for—I couldn’t bear to think of you in a prison dungeon,” he added tenderly.

  “I ah wi oo er papers,” said the respectable Ugly-Wugly, and added something that sounded like “disgraceful state of things.”

  However, they ranged themselves under the iron balcony. Gerald gave one last look at them and wondered, in his secret heart, why he was not frightened, though in his outside mind he was congratulating himself on his bravery. For the things did look rather horrid. In that light it was hard to believe that they were really only clothes and pillows and sticks—with no insides. As he went up the steps he heard them talking among themselves in that strange language of theirs, all oo’s and ah’s; and he thought he distinguished the voice of the respectable Ugly-Wugly saying, “Most gentlemanly lad,” and the wreathed-hatted lady answering warmly: “Yes, indeed.”

  The coloured-glass door closed behind him. Behind him was the yard, peopled by seven impossible creatures. Before him lay the silent house, peopled, as he knew very well, by five human beings as frightened as human beings could be. You think, perhaps, that Ugly-Wuglies are nothing to be frightened of. That’s only because you have never seen one come alive. You must make one any old suit of your father s, and a hat that he isn’t wearing, a bolster or two, a painted paper face, a few sticks and a pair of boots will do the trick; get your father to lend you a wishing ring, give it back to him when it has done its work, and see how you feel then.

  Of course the reason why Gerald was not afraid was that he had the ring; and, as you have seen, the wearer of that is not frightened by anything unless he touches that thing. But Gerald knew well enough how the others must be feeling. That was why he stopped for a moment in the hall to try and imagine what would have been most soothing to him if he had been as terrified as he knew they were.

  “Cathy! I say! What ho, Jimmy! Mabel ahoy!” he cried in a loud, cheerful voice that sounded very unreal to himself.

  The dining-room door opened a cautious inch.

  “I say—such larks!” Gerald went on, shoving gently at the door with his shoulder. “Look out! what are you keeping the door shut for?”

  “Are you alone?” asked Kathleen in hushed, breathless tones.

  “Yes, of course. Don’t be a duffer!”

  The door opened, revealing three scared faces and the disarranged chairs where that odd audience had sat.

  “Where are they? Have you unwished them? We heard them talking. Horrible!”

  “They’re in the yard,” said Gerald with the best imitation of joyous excitement that he could manage. “It is such fun! They’re just like real people, quite kind and jolly. It’s the most ripping lark. Don’t let on to Mademois
elle and Eliza. I’ll square them. Then Kathleen and Jimmy must go to bed, and I’ll see Mabel home, and as soon as we get outside I must find some sort of lodging for the Ugly-Wuglies—they are such fun though. I do wish you could all go with me.”

  “Fun?” echoed Kathleen dismally and doubting.

  “Perfectly killing,” Gerald asserted resolutely. “Now, you just listen to what I say to Mademoiselle and Eliza, and back me up for all you’re worth.

  “But,” said Mabel, “you can’t mean that you’re going to leave me alone directly we get out, and go off with those horrible creatures. They look like fiends.”

  “You wait till you’ve seen them close,” Gerald advised. “Why, they’re just ordinary—the first thing one of them did was to ask me to recommend it to a good hotel! I couldn’t understand it at first, because it has no roof to its mouth, of course.”

  It was a mistake to say that, Gerald knew it at once.

  Mabel and Kathleen were holding hands in a way that plainly showed how a few moments ago they had been clinging to each other in an agony of terror. Now they clung again. And Jimmy, who was sitting on the edge of what had been the stage, kicking his boots against the pink counterpane, shuddered visibly.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Gerald explained “—about the roofs, I mean; you soon get to understand. I heard them say I was a gentlemanly lad as I was coming away. They wouldn’t have cared to notice a little thing like that if they’d been fiends, you know.”

  “It doesn’t matter how gentlemanly they think you; if you don’t see me home you aren’t, that’s all. Are you going to?” Mabel demanded.

  “Of course I am. We shall have no end of a lark. Now for Mademoiselle.”