The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories
Page 112
“Yes. How did you know?” he asked quickly; but they did not tell him how they knew. Instead, they found out which way he was going, and went the other way after warm handshakes and hopes on both sides that they would meet again soon.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Gerald, as they watched the tall, broad figure of the bailiff grow smaller across the hot green of the grass slope, “have you got any idea of how we’re going to spend the day? Because I have.”
The others hadn’t.
“We’ll get rid of that Ugly-Wugly—oh, we’ll find a way right enough—and directly we’ve done it we’ll go home and seal up the ring in an envelope so that its teeth’ll be drawn and it’ll be powerless to have unforeseen larks with us. Then we’ll get out on the roof, and have a quiet day—books and apples. I’m about fed up with adventures, so I tell you.”
The others told him the same thing.
“Now, think,” said he—“think as you never thought before—how to get rid of that Ugly-Wugly.”
Everyone thought, but their brains were tired with anxiety and distress, and the thoughts they thought were, as Mabel said, not worth thinking, let alone saying.
“I suppose Jimmy’s all right,” said Kathleen anxiously.
“Oh, he’s all right: he’s got the ring,” said Gerald.
“I hope he won’t go wishing anything rotten,” said Mabel, but Gerald urged her to shut up and let him think.
“I think I think best sitting down,” he said, and sat; “and sometimes you can think best aloud. The Ugly-Wugly’s real—don’t make any mistake about that. And he got made real inside that passage. If we could get him back there he might get changed again, and then we could take the coats and things back.”
“Isn’t there any other way?” Kathleen asked; and Mabel, more candid, said bluntly: “I’m not going into that passage, so there!”
“Afraid! In broad daylight,” Gerald sneered.
“It wouldn’t be broad daylight in there,” said Mabel, and Kathleen shivered.
“If we went to him and suddenly tore his coat off,” said she—“he is only coats—he couldn’t go on being real then.
“Couldn’t he!” said Gerald. “You don’t know what he’s like under the coat.”
Kathleen shivered again. And all this time the sun was shining gaily and the white statues and the green trees and the fountains and terraces looked as cheerfully romantic as a scene in a play.
“Anyway,” said Gerald, “we’ll try to get him back, and shut the door. That’s the most we can hope for. And then apples, and Robinson Crusoe or the Swiss Family, or any book you like that’s got no magic in it. Now, we’ve just got to do it. And he’s not horrid now; really he isn’t. He’s real, you see.”
“I suppose that makes all the difference,” said Mabel, and tried to feel that perhaps it did.
“And it’s broad daylight—just look at the sun,” Gerald insisted. “Come on!”
He took a hand of each, and they walked resolutely towards the bank of rhododendrons behind which Jimmy and the Ugly-Wugly had been told to wait, and as they went Gerald said: “He’s real”—“The sun’s shining”—“It’ll all be over in a minute.” And he said these things again and again, so that there should be no mistake about them.
As they neared the bushes the shining leaves rustled, shivered, and parted, and before the girls had time to begin to hang back Jimmy came blinking out into the sunlight. The boughs closed behind him, and they did not stir or rustle for the appearance of anyone else. Jimmy was alone.
“Where is it?” asked the girls in one breath.
“Walking up and down in a fir-walk,” said Jimmy, “doing sums in a book. He says he’s most frightfully rich, and he’s got to get up to town to the Stocks or something where they change papers into gold if you’re clever, he says. I should like to go to the Stocks-change, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t seem to care very much about changes,” said Gerald. “I’ve had enough. Show us where he is—we must get rid of him.”
“He’s got a motor-car,” Jimmy went on, parting the warm varnished-looking rhododendron leaves, “and a garden with a tennis-court and a lake and a carriage and pair, and he goes to Athens for his holiday sometimes, just like other people go to Margate.”
“The best thing,” said Gerald, following through the bushes, “will be to tell him the shortest way out is through that hotel that he thinks he found last night. Then we get him into the passage, give him a push, fly back, and shut the door.”
“He’ll starve to death in there,” said Kathleen, “if he’s really real.”
“I expect it doesn’t last long, the ring magics don’t—anyway, it’s the only thing I can think of.”
“He’s frightfully rich,” Jimmy went on unheeding amid the cracking of the bushes; “he’s building a public library for the people where he lives, and having his portrait painted to put in it. He thinks they’ll like that.”
The belt of rhododendrons was passed, and the children had reached a smooth grass walk bordered by tall pines and firs of strange different kinds. “He’s just round that corner,” said Jimmy. “He’s simply rolling in money. He doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s been building a horse-trough and drinking fountain with a bust of himself on top. Why doesn’t he build a private swimming-bath close to his bed, so that he can just roll off into it of a morning? I wish I was rich; I’d soon show him—”
“That’s a sensible wish,” said Gerald. “I wonder we didn’t think of doing that. Oh, crikey!” he added, and with reason. For there, in the green shadows of the pine-walk, in the woodland silence, broken only by rustling leaves and the agitated breathing of the three unhappy others, Jimmy got his wish. By quick but perfectly plain-to-be-seen degrees Jimmy became rich. And the horrible thing was that though they could see it happening they did not know what was happening, and could not have stopped it if they had. All they could see was Jimmy, their own Jimmy, whom they had larked with and quarrelled with and made it up with ever since they could remember, Jimmy continuously and horribly growing old. The whole thing was over in a few seconds. Yet in those few seconds they saw him grow to a youth, a young man, a middle-aged man; and then, with a sort of shivering shock, unspeakably horrible and definite, he seemed to settle down into an elderly gentleman, handsomely but rather dowdily dressed, who was looking down at them through spectacles and asking them the nearest way to the railway-station. If they had not seen the change take place, in all its awful details, they would never have guessed that this stout, prosperous, elderly gentleman with the high hat, the frock-coat, and the large red seal dangling from the curve of a portly waistcoat, was their own Jimmy. But, as they had seen it, they knew the dreadful truth.
“Oh, Jimmy, don’t!” cried Mabel desperately.
Gerald said: “This is perfectly beastly,” and Kathleen broke into wild weeping.
“Don’t cry, little girl!” said That-which-had-been Jimmy; “and you, boy, can’t you give a civil answer to a civil question?”
“He doesn’t know us!” wailed Kathleen.
“Who doesn’t know you?” said That-which-had-been impatiently.
“Y-y-you don’t!” Kathleen sobbed.
“I certainly don’t,” returned That-which—“but surely that need not distress you so deeply.”
“Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy!” Kathleen sobbed louder than before.
“He doesn’t know us,” Gerald owned, “or look here, Jimmy, y-you aren’t kidding, are you? Because if you are—it’s simply abject rot—”
“My name is Mr.——” said That-which-had-been-Jimmy, and gave the name correctly. By the way, it will perhaps be shorter to call this elderly stout person who was Jimmy grown rich by some simpler name than I have just used. Let us call him ‘That’—short for ‘That-which-had-been Jimmy.’
“Certainly not,” said That firmly. “You appear to be a very grasping child.”
“But what are you going to do?” Gerald asked in the flat tones of complete hopelessness.
“Your interest is very flattering,” said That. “Will you tell me, or won’t you, the way to the nearest railway station?”
“No,” said Gerald, “we won’t.”
“Then,” said That, still politely, though quite plainly furious, “perhaps you’ll tell me the way to the nearest lunatic asylum?”
“Oh, no, no, no!” cried Kathleen. “You’re not so bad as that.”
“Perhaps not. But you are,” That retorted; “if you’re not lunatics you’re idiots. However, I see a gentleman ahead who is perhaps sane. In fact, I seem to recognize him.” A gentleman, indeed, was now to be seen approaching. It was the elderly Ugly-Wugly.
“Oh! Don’t you remember Jerry?” Kathleen cried, “and Cathy, your own Cathy Puss Cat? Dear, dear Jimmy, don’t be so silly!”
“Little girl,” said That, looking at her crossly through his spectacles, “I am sorry you have not been better brought up.” And he walked stiffly towards the Ugly-Wugly. Two hats were raised, a few words were exchanged, and two elderly figures walked side by side down the green pine-walk, followed by three miserable children, horrified, bewildered, alarmed, and, what is really worse than anything, quite at their wits end.
“He wished to be rich, so of course he is,” said Gerald; “he’ll have money for tickets and everything.
And when the spell breaks—it’s sure to break, isn’t it?—he’ll find himself somewhere awful—perhaps in a really good hotel and not know how he got there.”
“I wonder how long the Ugly-Wuglies lasted,” said Mabel.
“Yes,” Gerald answered, “that reminds me. You two must collect the coats and things. Hide them, anywhere you like, and we’ll carry them home tomorrow—if there is any tomorrow—” he added darkly.
“Oh, don’t!” said Kathleen, once more breathing heavily on the verge of tears: “you wouldn’t think everything could be so awful, and the sun shining like it does.
“Look here,” said Gerald, “of course I must stick to Jimmy. You two must go home to Mademoiselle and tell her Jimmy and I have gone off in the train with a gentleman—say he looked like an uncle. He does—some kind of uncle. There’ll be a beastly row afterwards, but it’s got to be done.
“It all seems thick with lies,” said Kathleen; “you don’t seem to be able to get a word of truth in edgewise hardly.”
“Don’t you worry,” said her brother; “they aren’t lies—they’re as true as anything else in this magic rot we’ve got mixed up in. It’s like telling lies in a dream; you can’t help it.”
“Well, all I know is I wish it would stop.”
“Lot of use your wishing that is,” said Gerald, exasperated. “So long. I’ve got to go, and you’ve got to stay. If it’s any comfort to you, I don’t believe any of it’s real: it can’t be; it’s too thick. Tell Mademoiselle Jimmy and I will be back to tea. If we don’t happen to be I can’t help it. I can’t help anything, except perhaps Jimmy.” He started to run, for the girls had lagged, and the Ugly-Wugly and That (late Jimmy) had quickened their pace.
The girls were left looking after them.
“We’ve got to find these clothes,” said Mabel, “simply got to. I used to want to be a heroine. It’s different when it really comes to being, isn’t it?”
“Yes, very,” said Kathleen. “Where shall we hide the clothes when we’ve got them? Not—not that passage?”
“Never!” said Mabel firmly; “we’ll hide them inside the great stone dinosaurus. He’s hollow.”
“He comes alive—in his stone,” said Kathleen.
“Not in the sunshine he doesn’t,” Mabel told her confidently, “and not without the ring.”
“There won’t be any apples and books today,” said Kathleen.
“No, but we’ll do the babiest thing we can do the minute we get home. We’ll have a dolls’ tea-party. That’ll make us feel as if there wasn’t really any magic.”
“It’ll have to be a very strong tea party, then,” said Kathleen doubtfully.
* * * *
And now we see Gerald, a small but quite determined figure, paddling along in the soft white dust of the sunny road, in the wake of two elderly gentlemen. His hand, in his trousers pocket, buries itself with a feeling of satisfaction in the heavy mixed coinage that is his share of the profits of his conjuring at the fair. His noiseless tennis-shoes bear him to the station, where, unobserved, he listens at the ticket office to the voice of That-which-was-James. “One first London,” it says and Gerald, waiting till That and the Ugly-Wugly have strolled on to the platform, politely conversing of politics and the Kaffir market, takes a third return to London. The train strides in, squeaking and puffing. The watched take their seats in a carriage blue-lined. The watcher springs into a yellow wooden compartment. A whistle sounds, a flag is waved. The train pulls itself together, strains, jerks, and starts.
“I don’t understand,” says Gerald, alone in his third-class carriage, “how railway trains and magic can go on at the same time.”
And yet they do.
* * * *
Mabel and Kathleen, nervously peering among the rhododendron bushes and the bracken and the fancy fir-trees, find six several heaps of coats, hats, skirts, gloves, golf-clubs, hockey-sticks, broom-handles. They carry them, panting and damp, for the mid-day sun is pitiless, up the hill to where the stone dinosaurus looms immense among a forest of larches. The dinosaurus has a hole in his stomach. Kathleen shows Mabel how to “make a back” and climbs up on it into the cold, stony inside of the monster. Mabel hands up the clothes and the sticks.
“There’s lots of room,” says Kathleen; “its tail goes down into the ground. It’s like a secret passage.”
“Suppose something comes out of it and jumps out at you,” says Mabel, and Kathleen hurriedly descends.
The explanations to Mademoiselle promise to be difficult, but, as Kathleen said afterwards, any little thing is enough to take a grown-up’s attention off. A figure passes the window just as they are explaining that it really did look exactly like an uncle that the boys have gone to London with.
“Who’s that?” says Mademoiselle suddenly, pointing, too, which everyone knows is not manners.
It is the bailiff coming back from the doctor’s with antiseptic plaster on that nasty cut that took so long a-bathing this morning. They tell her it is the bailiff at Yalding Towers, and she says, “Ciel!” (Sky!) and asks no more awkward questions about the boys. Lunch—very late—is a silent meal. After lunch Mademoiselle goes out, in a hat with many pink roses, carrying a rose-lined parasol. The girls, in dead silence, organize a dolls tea-party, with real tea. At the second cup Kathleen bursts into tears. Mabel, also weeping, embraces her.
“I wish,” sobs Kathleen, “oh, I do wish I knew where the boys were! It would be such a comfort.”
* * * *
Gerald knew where the boys were, and it was no comfort to him at all. If you come to think of it, he was the only person who could know where they were, because Jimmy didn’t know that he was a boy—and indeed he wasn’t really—and the Ugly-Wugly couldn’t be expected to know anything real, such as where boys were. At the moment when the second cup of dolls tea—very strong, but not strong enough to drown care in—was being poured out by the trembling hand of Kathleen, Gerald was lurking—there really is no other word for it—on the staircase of Aldermanbury Buildings, Old Broad Street. On the floor below him was a door bearing the legend “MR. U. W. UGLI, Stock and Sh
are Broker (and at the Stock Exchange)” and on the floor above was another door, on which was the name of Gerald’s little brother, now grown suddenly rich in so magic and tragic a way. There were no explaining words under Jimmy’s name. Gerald could not guess what walk in life it was to which That (which had been Jimmy) owed its affluence. He had seen, when the door opened to admit his brother, a tangle of clerks and mahogany desks. Evidently That had a large business.
What was Gerald to do? What could he do?
It is almost impossible, especially for one so young as Gerald, to enter a large London office and explain that the elderly and respected head of it is not what he seems, but is really your little brother, who has been suddenly advanced to age and wealth by a tricky wishing ring. If you think it’s a possible thing, try it, that’s all. Nor could he knock at the door of Mr. U. W. Ugli, Stock and Share Broker (and at the Stock Exchange), and inform his clerks that their chief was really nothing but old clothes that had accidentally come alive, and by some magic, which he couldn’t attempt to explain, become real during a night spent at a really good hotel which had no existence.
The situation bristled, as you see, with difficulties. And it was so long past Gerald’s proper dinner-time that his increasing hunger was rapidly growing to seem the most important difficulty of all. It is quite possible to starve to death on the staircase of a London building if the people you are watching for only stay long enough in their offices. The truth of this came home to Gerald more and more painfully.
A boy with hair like a new front door mat came whistling up the stairs. He had a dark blue bag in his hands.
“I’ll give you a tanner for yourself if you’ll get me a tanner’s worth of buns,” said Gerald, with that prompt decision common to all great commanders.
“Show us yer tanners,” the boy rejoined with at least equal promptness. Gerald showed them. “All right; hand over.”
“Payment on delivery,” said Gerald, using words from the drapers which he had never thought to use.